Joe Nocera: Last Night, College Athletes Lost [when the "Protecting College Sports" act was passed]

I don't know what to think about all this.

I can say: I think college athletes probably deserve to make what they're worth.

And also: I don't like college sports anymore.

I guess the illusion of amateurism was necessary for my enjoyment of them.

I've never cared much about football, actually, but I've absolutely loved college hoops (I went to Carolina for grad school, after all).

I also think that football is too expensive--and I kinda think it's too violent. Hell, I like the UFC...and football's often a bit much for me. So I'm a wimp in that respect. A lot of those hits just seem over the top to me...

But anyway.

Universities aren't what they're supposed to be anymore. They're more like some kind of crazy businesses that I barely understand anymore--despite having spent my life in them.

OTOH, you can argue: by turning them into what they now are, more people are more educated than they would otherwise be...

Though if we go down that road, we sort of need to talk about grade inflation, the general crapification of universities, ideological capture by the left...etc.

Hell, I don't know what to think.

Elon

After the first Falcon 1 rocket exploded 33 seconds after launch in March 2006, Elon Musk did something that his employees did not expect. He personally called the family members of the engineers who had worked on the rocket. Not the engineers. Their families. The engineers were at the launch site. They had watched their work explode in the sky. They were processing the failure in real time with their colleagues. They had each other. Their families were at home. Their spouses and parents had watched on a livestream or heard the news secondhand. They had no colleagues. They had no context. They just knew that the thing their husband or wife or child had spent 3 years building had just been destroyed in 33 seconds and they didn't know if anyone was hurt. Elon called to tell them everyone was safe. That the failure was a known risk. That the team would try again. That their family member had done extraordinary work and the explosion was not a reflection of their ability. One engineer's wife said the call lasted 4 minutes. She said Elon sounded tired but calm. She said he didn't minimize the failure or exaggerate the optimism. He stated the facts and said "your husband is brilliant and we are going to fly again." The engineers learned about the calls later. Several described it as the moment they decided to stay at SpaceX. Not because the CEO called their families. Because the CEO understood that the family at home absorbs the weight of the failure without any of the camaraderie that makes it bearable for the team. The rockets get the headlines. The families hold the weight in the dark. He called the families.

— Race 🕊️ (@multiplanet1) September 30, 2026

Election Time On the Senate Races

Nail-biter:

Alan Dershowitz: "Why I Left the Democratic Party--And Why California Voters Should, Too"

link:

I think the Democratic Party today is the most dangerous party in my lifetime. I lived through McCarthyism, and the latter stages of segregation. But I’ve never lived in a more dangerous time for civil liberties, decency or meritocracy.

I'm a generation behind Dersh, so I didn't live through McCarthyism. But I have seen--since I've been old enough to know what was going on--widespread communist apologism, anti-communist extremism, the rise of the religious right, political correctness, the lie-up to the Iraq war, and Trump...and, yeah, the rise of the Woketarian cult is the most dangerous of the lot, IMO...and that's the problem with the Dems: they capitulated to the lunatic left. And I agree with him that this is the most dangerous time (in the last 50+ years) for civil liberties, decency, and meritocracy...but, more importantly: for sanity and reason.

   Stop me if you've heard this one: it's the Orwellianism of the left that's the biggest threat.

   Trump plays so fast and loose with the truth that you can basically just ignore what he says when he's on one of his rolls...

   But the postpostmodern left has conducted a decades-long campaign to subvert the very ideas of truth and reason, in favor of a kind of cultish, totalitarian politics that subordinates everything to hard-left dogma. They repeat their leading ideas ad nauseam: science is political, the personal is political...everything is political. The latter, in particular, is like a mind virus that people brainlessly repeat having given it exactly no serious thought. It's bad enough that it's laughably false...but it's also the left's excuse for politicizing everything. Criticize them for politicizing the news media, and their response is: everything is political! Get it? They can't be criticized for replacing accurate, objective journalism with leftist propaganda...because that's the way it has to be...there is no alternative. Everything's already political anyway...so all they can do is try to make it reflect the correct politics...i.e. leftist politics...

   What a crock of shit.

   The vast majority of the universe is apolitical. The percentage the is political is so small as to be effectively zero. Zoom in on Earth, and even just on human life, and the percentage that is inherently political is very small indeed--even from the perspective of a politics-obsessed nerd like myself. Most of my life--and almost all of the truly important things in it--are non-political.

   What the leftists respond to this is, basically, that, for almost any x you can name, you can imagine it becoming a matter of political controversy. The trees in my front yard theoretically could, for example. But, of course, that doesn't mean that the trees in my front yard are political. They are not essentially political. Though they could become contingently so. Is science political? Well, the question is ill-formed. Science itself? Inherently? Or have some things about science become embroiled in politics in various ways? The left doesn't even know what it's saying. They're very good at being unclear. Here's the fact: politics should not influence scientific reasoning. It should not influence which conclusions science draws. That's the issue. And it's easily settled.

   Eh, I gotta get to work. I don't have time to ridicule this stupid bullshit to the degree it deserves.

[But anyway:

   Trump's a loose cannon, the Pubs are doing nothing to control him, it's a giant mess...but his administration continues to produce good policy and to undertake long-overdo initiatives...and the Dems remain in the thrall of the Orwellian left...and now the socialists, too. One of the best things Trump did was give us a good SCOTUS. But Thomas and Alito are old. We absolutely cannot afford to lose the Senate now. Imagine a court with two more Sotomayors...or, saints preserve us, KBJs...

   The best thing we can do right now is minimize the power of the left--which means minimizing the power of the Dems.

   I still expect the Dems to return to sanity someday...but not any day soon....]

WSJ: The U.S. Economy is Accelerating (?)

I have no understanding of any of this.

Cornell Alleged Gang Rape Case

This is the sort of allegation that--when I was young and naive--I simply assumed was veridical.

   Being older and having more experience with such reports, I now incline to expect them to turn out to be bogus.

   Sounds an awful lot like the UVA fraternity gang-rape hoax.

  However, apparently there's a record of these guys sending out messages to other fratboys inviting them to join in...

   OTOH, I've heard that in some kind of interview she gave pretty immediately after the incident, the girl claimed that it was unequivocally consensual...

   And finally: later she claimed it was unequivocally rape.

   Of course I don't have any rooting interest in this. It should be kind of a tough case for the left, because they adamantly defend the kinkiest, dirtiest, perviest sex...and their principles (such as they are) entail that You Go Girl if she did just feel like pulling a train that night...

   And, actually, I'm with the left on that one.

   People like a lot of kinky stuff.

   Given the opportunity to have sex with multiple women in one night, college me would have been down like a clown, Charlie Brown...

   Of course there's a bit of an asymmetry there...I'm just sayin'...

   Forced to bet money, I'd bet that it was most likely consensual, but, then, ashamed, the girl changed her mind. And, if it's true that she first claimed it was consensual, I'd be disinclined to convict the guys.

   Though: having sex with a woman right after another guy did: totally gay.

   Just so we're clear.

   Not that there's anything wrong with that...

   As goes without saying, all rapists should burn in the fiery pits of hell.

   And: if the girl was so intoxicated that there was any question of her consent...also the hell thing.

   But I'm skeptical that's what we're actually dealing with here.

   But, to be clear again: we'll know a lot more as more information comes out.

The Bee on the Mass Lesbian Bar Drama

link

Wilfred Reilly: Dems Can't Shake Their DSA Problem / The Party That's Not Crazy First Could Be In Power For 30 Years

Right on the latter point.

Somewhat right on the former.

   As I've said myself many times, just about all one of our major parties has to do to win is not be crazy.

   But neither can seem to pull it off.

   The biggest difference, though, IMO, is that the crazy on the left is pervasive, multi-leveled, and gives every sign that it will be persistent--even if the Dems try to conceal it when elections roll around.

   And, as for the first point in the title above goes: it's not the DSA that's the problem. Again: it's pervasive, persistent, etc. The Dem's problem is that they capitulated to the cult of Woketarianism. The DSA is just saying the same things the whole left has been saying for a decade--they're just a little more radical and a little more up-front about it all. Oh, well: they're also socialists. But the predominant form of crazy on the left is Woketarianism--a cultural view, not an economic one.

   Now, the GOP's current form of crazy is Trump. It's a pretty localized form of lunacy--and when Trump's gone, it will almost certainly be gone, too. 

   Also: Trump is a double-edged sword. Sure, he says and does all kinds of loony shit that we absolutely cannot have a President saying and doing...but he's basically sane about the issues, and he's done far more good than harm. And the good he has done has largely been about rolling back the genuinely crazy and destructive shit the Dems have done.

   Note: not all of it has been about rolling back Woketarianism. Some very important things he's done have involved rolling back crazy shit the old-school regular Democrats have done. E.g. they've been moving toward wide-open borders for a quarter century. And their massive taxpayer-funded fraud/funding apparatus through NGOs, USAID, et al.  We can't blame the woketards for those...

   BUT: as I've also been saying--well, lots of people have--Trump is getting worse and worse, and closing the crazy gap with the Dems.

   So things are getting really spicy in American politics...

   If the Pubs could have managed to nominate, say, DeSantis (who I supported)...well, he's sane...and he seems to be every bit as dedicated to thwarting Woketarianism as Trump.

   But Trump is a force of nature, and they couldn't pull it off.

   I think we're in a position now such that people are less-alarmed about the Wokes--they're old news and kind of on the run. But Trump is a clear and present danger...

   Anyway: I agree with Reilly about what I'd say is the main point: the first party that can start acting sane will win big.

   Unfortunately, before that happens, I fear that the Dems will win big. Probably in November, and in '28.

   Then we'll be largely back where we were in the Biden years...at least for awhile...

White Paint is Racist blah blah Exclusion blah blah Power blah blah

This is the kind of pseudointellectual Continental bullshit that has ruined so much of academia...and escaped containment during the Great Woketarian Freakout.

With these people you always know what they're going to say and you never know what they're going to say--it's always the same set of bullshit obsessions...but applied in ever more ridiculous ways.

BCP: The Crazy Massachusetts Lesbian Bar Freakout

The real thermonuclear cray-cray kicks in around 5:00:

The Return of Rachel Dolezal

Believing in "transgenderism" became obligatory...believing in transracialism, however...VERBOTEN!

Dolezal's case came out soon after the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner case...but the left decided that they were COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, BIGOT!!!111 Dolezal is, of course, exactly as full of shit as Jenner, no more, no less... But the Woketarian left is rarely constrained by white supremacist notions like consistency, coherence, and factual accuracy...

Turley on Vance and Obamacare "Straight-Up Fraud"

This doesn't seem like Turley's area of specialization to me, but I tend to trust him:

Lindsey Granger may well be right about Trump commuting sentences of Medicare fraudsters--I don't know what's going on there. I think this is one of the guys she's talking about. But, like Robbie S., I want all the fraudsters caught and prosecuted. I'm not interested in defending Trump. I'm interested in stopping all the fraud. Her consistency point isn't entirely irrelevant--but it doesn't show that they shouldn't be stopping the other fraud, too. Also, she keeps saying that they are going after these people only because they haven't used their benefits--which doesn't seem to be true. What Vance and Oz were saying is that they have several different reasons for thinking there's fraud in these cases--including that the alleged people in question were signed up by "brokers," that they have never used their benefits, and that they've been unable to contact them though they've tried in several different ways:

Jeffrey Blehar: Red Harvest: Preparing for the Worst in the Senate Elections

This seems about right to me--but I don't know anything more about elections and polling than any other politics-obsessed American boy...

I'll say this much:

Trump did it before and he can do it again!...

...lose us the Senate, that is.

I don't know anything much about Texas politics...but I find it hard to believe that any reliably blue state would elect James Talarico.

And, of course, we know that polls are almost always blue-tinted.

Anyway--I think a 50/50 split is a pretty decent guess, FWIW.

Campus Lefties vs. Civility

That's the long and short of it re: this organization called "Uncivil."

They seem to think that it's a big problem that many campus organizations promoting civil dialog are funded by "right wing and pro-Israel" (heaven forfend!) individuals and groups.

   But, really, the left has been bitching about civil discourse for at least a decade. Civility, you see, is a [insert bad things here] white supremacy / razizt, / bourgeois...it's "respectability politics"...not even making that up...

   Whatever other reasons the left has against rational inquiry and civil discussion, one is: the leftist vanguard just doesn't believe in such things. Since it doesn't believe in objectivity, it can't. It believes that all such things are mere fronts for "power." Reason is an illusion. All that matters is ideological victory. This view is all over the left--though the more center-left tends to motte-and-bailey it as convenient.

   A friend of mine and I held a conference back in '20 (just as rumors of COVID began to circulate on civility and rational discourse...can't remember the exact name/title right now... (I mean we just missed COVID hysteria... A week or two later it wouldn't have come off.) We had four interesting panelists, and the whole thing was built around them. Just two days, maybe 100 people involved tops. But anyway, after the first speaker's talk, the very first comment was "I can't help but notice that you're all white men..." This bullshit is a fucking cancer on universities. A throw-away, veiled ad hominem (because whites: bad; men: bad). What was funny was the speaker said "Well, I'm actually half-(East)-Indian" (I think it was Indian.) Another speaker said "Well, I'm Jewish." The third said that he, too, was of some sort of mixed heritage. The fourth speaker was like Guilty as charged--I'm white. I managed to hold my toungue for once, not wanting to blow it all up after one hour... Then the other guy who put the conference said: The first person we tried to get was such-and-such, a woman, but she couldn't make it... 

   Goddamned retarded bullshit. Pseudo-reasoning. This is what people learn in the weaker regions of the humanities and social "sciences": just shriek white! male! REEEE! at everything.

AJW: Robbie Suave vs. Lindsey Granger on The Austin ICE Shooting

Robbie and AJW are right.

Lindsey and the left are completely wrong:

First, AJW makes a great point: when an illegal alien (or other preferred demographic group) is shot by the authorities, Lindsey &co. pick the most innocuous thing he was doing at the time and pretend that's why he was shot. Oh, he was just respiring at the time and ICE SHOT HIM FOR IT...

AJW also points to one of the many things that bugs the shit out of me about this: Lindsey waves around poll numbers suggesting that 60% of Americans are "uncomfortable" about ICE enforcement...but, among other problems with such an appeal: that comes after almost a decade of hard-core, tearjerking propaganda by the left. (In addition to the fact that it just makes no goddamned sense at all... The left is basically arguing that criminals shouldn't be arrested if they resist. Morons.)

As done as I am with Trump, lefties keep reminding me that the alternative is much, much crazier.

McCarthy: Only Congress Can Intervene in Trump's Truth Social Profiteering

I'm sick to death of this guy.

He's done great things...perhaps more than any President of my lifetime (maybe except Reagan)...

But he just can't stop doing and saying stupid, sleazy, shitty things, too.

I also continue to think that the fact that no one in his administration seems to be able to talk sense to him is one of the more worrisome things about him.

As I've said, I do think he's got some justification for trying to accrue more money--it's obvious that the Blues will go after him and his family when he leaves office. They may never know peace. So there may be something of an excuse.

But it doesn't excuse him enough--not even close.