I haven't written much on energy topics recently, and a I have a lingering two part series that's related to this that I have yet to finish, but a couple of recent events bring this topic back to the forefront, so on this Wednesday, when I usually feature something to do with the topic of work, I'll bring this back up.
Neither are really good developments for Wyoming's economy.
The first is that a Federal District Court judge of the District of Columbia ruled on March 19, in a sixty page opinion, that the BLM had failed to comply with Federal environmental laws by failing ot have taken into account climate change in issuing certain Federal leases in Wyoming.
This hasn't been really well reported on. The ruling does nothing about current oil and gas drilling, as some seemed to think. Rather, it holds up issued and existing leases that were part of a specific set of issued leases. Having said that, it isn't an insignificant number of leases. Turning to the decision:
BLM issued 282 leases through the Wyoming Lease Sales, encompassing approximately
303,000 acres of federal land across multiple BLM planning areas. Pls. Mem. at 1. The leased
parcels are managed by ten different BLM field offices—which are responsible for drafting and
9
implementing the resource management plans and EISs governing the parcels—overseen by
three district offices.
6
See Fed. Defs.’ Cross-Mot. Summ. J. & Opp’n Pls. Mem. (“BLM Mem.”)
at 7, ECF No. 63. Those three district offices conducted the lease sales at issue here in May,
August, and November 2015, and May and August 2016.7
Id. at 7–8.8
For each lease sale, each
district office involved prepared (1) an EA tiered to the relevant resources management plans and
EISs issued by field offices at the land use planning stage; and (2) a FONSI disavowing the need
for a new, leasing stage EIS. In total, therefore, the record contains nine EA9
/FONSI10
combinations, tiered to nineteen resource management plan/EIS combinations, including
resource management plan amendments. Id. WildEarth participated in the comment and protest
periods for each of the challenged lease sales
282 leases over 303,000 acres is a lot of leases.
This decision remanded the matter to the BLM, from which it came, with instructions that the BLM complete the environmental assessments that the Court felt were required but lacking.
Okay, so what does this do?
Well, it's hard to say, but at least right now the Court in D.C. is on record that climate change needs to be considered by the Federal lease issuing entities. It's likely that the decision will be appealed, but appeals aren't super speedy. So these leases will be held up for some time, probably, on appeal.
I feel that this decision is unlikely to hold up on appeal, but I also had wondered for a long time when this approach in this court would be taken. It's a really obvious legal strategy and that it took somebody so long to attempt it is the surprising thing. The challenger in this instance isn't alone, however, as just a couple of months ago I read of a similar approach being taken by a teenage plaintiff. With this ruling on record, it won't be easy to dump her case as lacking merit on its face. Ultimately, therefore, resolution at the appellate level will be critical. Whichever side looses, and I'd guess it would be those supporting this decision, will appeal it to the United States Supreme Court, but my further guess is that unless one of the Circuit Court of Appeals takes the same approach, the United States Supreme Court is unlikely to take it up.
The Court of money, i.e., the stock exchange, took up the topic of coal's viability to an extent when the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading on Cloud Peak Energy's stocks. The coal company has been in financial trouble, but coal itself has been so this isn't that surprising of a development.
We note this story as well as the latter certainly is one that is significant to a state in which the majority of the funding for education comes from coal severance taxes. The recent ups and downs of the extractive industries have continued on into this year, when there was a lot of hope they would not, and now there's some added dimensions to those stories.
She'd been laid down in 1903 as a commercial fishing vessel. Submarine depredations caused the Navy to take her into service in August, 1918, but with that task complete, she was struck from the Navy's rolls and sold that following November.
Why put this obscure ship in here?
Well, this blog explores trends and changes. 1919 wasn't all that long ago, at least not the way historians think of time, and therefore it wasn't that long ago when commercial operations, and even the Navy, regarded sail as still a viable means of propulsion.
There was big local news.
Mary Pickford was coming to the Irish Theatre in Casper on Sunday.
Mary Pickford in 1916.
Pickford was a huge deal in 1919, and frankly she always would be. One of the really big early stars of early movies, the Toronto born actress was at that time as big of movie star as anyone could imagine.
Her life wasn't really a happy one. Married three times, she became a recluse in later years and would only receive Lilian Gish as a personal visitor. This week in 1919, however, she'd be Casper's visitor.
Casper was also declaring war on vice, the paper proclaimed. If it was, it wasn't very successful at it. It wasn't until after World War Two when the strong streak of vice running through Casper would be cleaned up, and the Sandbar district remained all the way into the 1970s.
There's a little thing going on in this photograph, but a lot, including a lot of unknowns, behind it.
This photo shows an American soldier giving minor first aid of some sort (but apparently significant enough that it's actually being done, to a White Russian Cossack, probably in the far north of Russia.
The Cossack is traditional attire. It was probably taken in the Spring of 1919. He's well equipped.
In 1919 the White position in the far North was getting imperiled, but the Whites were advancing rapidly in the East. The Reds were prevailing in the West and were now threatening Poland and even Germany. Soon that would reverse, however, and the Poles would advance, before retreating once again.
What happened to the people in this photograph? I really wonder, and indeed, I often wonder about things like that. The American probably came home and went about his life. Almost certainly. What about the Cossack? Did he survive the war? If he did, did he survive the peace?
I never catch them live, as I have other things to do on Sunday mornings. But I usually do catch them the following week.
But as they were released prior to the news coming out that there was no collusion by Trump with the Russians, they'll be obsolete. Later this week, hopefully, more details will come out, including whether or not Attorney Mueller felt that there was collusion, maybe, but not of a type sufficient to levy indictments for, maybe. My predictions are that will be cleared up later this week.
My further predictions are that parties in the Democratic left that were howling that the report would surely lead to an impeachment will turn on somebody and howl all week that Mueller ought to be run out of D.C. on a rail because he's a bady, now that the hoped for result isn't coming in. And I also predict that parties in the GOP right will howl how this demonstrates a benighted sense of duty on the part of the President who should now be given all credit on everything.
We'll have to wait to next Sunday to get the better punditry analysis, maybe.
It does create cause for concern, however, regarding the impending decision in a case involving Tribal hunting rights and off reservation, inter state, hunting by tribal members.
How can it be harmful, people have used it for generations (even if they really didn't, or if in earlier eras, in some examples, scarcity of resources meant they used it rarely)?
It can't be harmful. .. . I'm using it (even if a confirmation of that type means nothing).
The old order changeth yielding place to new And
God fulfills himself in many ways Lest one good custom should corrupt
the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me I have lived my life
and that which I have done May he within himself make pure but thou If
thou shouldst never see my face again Pray for my soul. More things are
wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.
Tennyson, Morte d'Arthur.
I'm not a hugely sentimental person, or at least not a maudlin one if I am. Still, there's been a sense of some passing recently and they've been in my mind a lot.
This weekend saw a couple of those, and I find that I have mixed feelings about them. Both of them serve a necessary purpose. One of them was inevitable and waited for actually for some time, a little under a year. The other was not, and there's the chance that it may find some future expression perhaps, but likely not.
A passing of time, circumstances and obligations in operation.
I don't really believe in the burning bridges analogy.
That is, the burning bridges analogy doesn't actually make historical sense and it's a poor analogy.
There are few rivers so deep that, if you need to, you can't back over them at some ford, or cross them if you need to. All burning a bridge really does, either in historical fact or in metaphor, is slow down getting back across a river you want to.
Of course, if you want to get back across a river in a hurry, that's one thing. But if you have time and can expend the effort, you usually can. All the major armies of the Second World War managed to get over major rivers when they wanted to, even if they were delayed. You'll get back across them. . . usually.
It's distance from that bridge that really matters. The further you are from it, the less likely you will be to cross back over. And at some point, you can't get back there.
Maybe.
Sometimes it winds back around, and you cross it up stream or down.
Sometimes you always can get back to it.
But things do change with time and we need on occasion to acknowledge that. Time creates new duties and we need to rise to them, and sometimes let the old ones go.
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Shakespeare; As You Like It. We need to be careful on that however.
I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and all of them were baptized into Moses
in the cloud and in the sea.
All ate the same spiritual food,
and all drank the same spiritual drink,
for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them,
and the rock was the Christ.
Yet God was not pleased with most of them,
for they were struck down in the desert.
These things happened as examples for us,
so that we might not desire evil things, as they did.
Do not grumble as some of them did,
and suffered death by the destroyer.
These things happened to them as an example,
and they have been written down as a warning to us,
upon whom the end of the ages has come.
Therefore, whoever thinks he is standing secure
should take care not to fall.
Saint Paul to the Corinthians
Sometimes, however, to some extent, there's a sense of comfortable fading away in that, or at least we should not be discomforted too much.
Old soldiers never die,
Never die, never die,
Old soldiers never die
They just fade away.
Privates they love their beer, 'most every day.
Corporals, they love their stripes, that's what they say.
Sergeants they love to drill. Guess them bastards always will
So we drill and drill until we fade away.
Old soldiers never die,
Never die, never die,
Old soldiers never die
They just fade away.
Things fade, but that fading isn't the same as ending really. Things don't really end in my view, the pass on to something else. Everyone and everything is connected. And as those experiencing the fading appreciate it, if they do, they realize in some odd way that those who faded before come back into focus, not really gone.
Does this mean that everyone must now love Trump? Nope. But as a report that everyone was looking towards, and from an investigation which the Trump Administration repeatedly criticized itself, it should be respected.
Which doesn't mean that people who don't like Trump need to start liking him. And it doesn't even mean that all of the questions about the election are really satisfied. And frankly, given developments over time, I'm surprised by the results. But respect them we should.
Which puts everyone back at the prior position of, well, politics. Politics may be a dirty word in contemporary society, but folks who don't like the Administration still have Congress and the 2020 elections. And so do people who do like it.
Which would appear to be the best result the nation could have really hoped for, really.
This is St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Seward Alaska. It was built in 1906. The architectural style is apparently called "Bungalow/Craftsman", the first church so identified as such here in this blog.
I suppose that Mueller turning his report in on a Friday is a mere coincidence. Perhaps his assistant finished proof reading it that morning, they printed it out, he got out his vintage Shaeffer military fountain pen, inked it in blue ink, and then pickup up his hat and coat and on his way out the door told the runner to run it over to Congress on her afternoon errands. And then maybe he took the bus home, ate a Chick-Fil-A fish sandwich with waffle fries, avoided watching the news, turned off the cell phone, and popped his copy of The Third Man in the blueray after pouring himself a glass of Scotch.
Maybe.
But what a guaranteed way to leave folks hanging over the weekend.
And hanging they are. Trump supporters were already chanting taunts about there apparently being no more indictments, one liberal news personality had a on air fit, and so on.
But nobody really knows what it says. And just because you turn in your work on Friday doesn't mean that indictments, if there will be any more (and I doubt there will be) won't come on a Monday.
Hopefully the whole thing is released. That won't end this story, but after all of this, it needs to occur.
On this day in 1919, President and Mrs. Wilson toured the former front, taking in a gun emplacement that had been occupied by the Paris Gun.
As readers here will recall, the Germans were supposed to destroy the huge artillery pieces but instead they carted them off, where they disappeared into chaotic post war Germany.
Readers of the New York newspaper The Sun saw a photo of Princess Patricia of Connaught's wedding party.
The princess had a huge US and Canadian following, in part because she had travelled in Canada in her youth. Canada honored her by placing her image on a one dollar bank note in 1917 and then again in 1918 when Canada contributed Alexander Hamilton Gault's privately raised and equipped Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry to the Great War in 1918. The unit, in which she was an honorary colonel in chief, was the British Empire's last privately raised unit, and the fact that it was successfully raised when the Irish Canadian Rangers really weren't, even though both were raised from Montreal, says something in and of itself. In February 1919 she married Royal Navy Commander Alexander Ramsey, who was of royal blood. He would live until 1972, she until 1974. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Cap badge of the Princess Pat's. The unit still exists.
Roads to the Great War: Thanks, CIA. . .: for the great articles on espionage before, during and after the Great War. Here are some of the articles the agency has made available a...
I'm not a huge fan of the New York Times. Indeed, over time, I've come to see its adopted editorial policy, in which its headlines tend to reflect a political view and its editorials speak of an imagined self importance that the paper and the city that it is located in hasn't had for years and years, as nearly emblematic of the dense way that some large city elites view the entire rest of the country. When newspapers like the Times cry about a fellow New Yorker they detest as President, they ought to realize that it was views like theirs that helped put him there.
Among the NYT columnist I generally am not impressed with is Paul Krugman.
Krugman was published in the NYT the other day with this editorial:
All of this really symbolizes the thick nature of urban analysis combined with the thick nature of American economic thought in general.
Lets start with the second to last paragraph. Eastern Germany, that part of Germany that used to be the German Democratic Republic (the DDR), the Communist satellite state set up by the Soviet Union shortly after World War Two, isn't generally rural and therefore doesn't provide any sort of useful analogy at all. Communism itself never figured out how to deal with rural populations and rural people at all, which is why is general approach to rural topics was to industrialize and wipe them out, or simply wipe them out if that approach wasn't successful.
East Germany was an economic backwater, to be sure, but that was due to Communism itself, which did a pretty good job of making almost every region it held sway in, after an initial outburst of forced industrialization, an economic backwater. Communism, it might be noted, was hostile to rural life. Indeed, Marx, who thought up his nifty ideas while taking up seating space in British libraries rather than going out and actually working, grew so frustrated with rural people that he declared rural life "idiocy", which probably nicely reflects that in most rural communities some guy who showed up in the library every day and showed no sign of working would probably be asked to go do something else.
Indeed, the rural hallmark of the introduction of Communism in rural Russia was to halt an evolving transfer of the land to the rural residents and terrorize the most successful individual farmers with famine being the predictable result. Farming in Germany in general was doing well enough throughout the 20th Century prior to 1945 to the extent that the Nazis didn't really touch it that much during their horrific reign as they were somewhat afraid of doing so and rural Germans never embraced the Nazis, unlike their urban fellows. While Nazi economic policies would have created long term disaster for German farming and real horrors for rural areas, including farmers, for the rest of Europe, had the Allied victory not ended them, the introduction of Communism in the East certainly didn't' create economic bliss of any type.
Not that the approach in the Western world has been a lot better, but analysis like by Krugman are so dense to the economy that they can't be expected to grasp that.
Indeed, that's long been the case with American economic pundits and economists in general. The United States has long had, and all of the Western World now has, a Corporate Capitalist economy.
That's not a free market economy, even though we think it is. As a Corporate Capitalist economy we have long had state intervention in favor of business consolation which favors large entities in central locations over small ones that are decentralized. We don't have to have that sort of economy, we simply do as long ago we determined that this is the economy we wanted as it very much favors the increase and consolidation of wealth and that's what our leadership has always viewed as a desirable thing, irrespective of whether it is or not.
Save for a minority of Millennials who think they have suddenly embraced the rotting stinking corpse of Socialism, there's hardly anyone who will consider anything else or even recognize that anything else exists. The entire economic world boils down to Capitalism and Socialism, in our narrow minded view, and even economic pundits and economist themselves see it that way. And they all also assume that Capitalism equates with a free market, when in fact an economic system that requires state intervention in order to simply exist must also by implication favor some businesses over others and not really feature a free market.
Simply put, if there's a rural crisis, it's because we planned it that way.
Indeed, an honest look at Krugman's topic would, first of all, ask if there's an actual rural decline, or, rather, a decline in general.
The better evidence is the latter, and distinctly.
The decaying American rust belt, which isn't rural, and an American urban economic environment so bleak that the darling of the new American left in Congress declares herself to be a Socialist and maintains that Capitalism must be destroyed would suggest that the problem isn't rural at all, but rather simply economic. Something in the American economy isn't working.
For that matter, yellow vests protests in Europe, which are rural centered, would suggest that something in the Capitalist system everywhere isn't working very well, as we've addressed here before.
And if that something has featured a long running population depletion from some, but only some rural areas, it's also featured an economic decline from manufacturing areas and an economic backwater in some of the United State's oldest cities.
While that's gone on, the decay of the intellect and sense in reality in those more benighted classes in cities has lead to a very real and ongoing decay in American and western society in general. In the 1970s this expressed itself with a desperate effort of those in those cities and in that economic class to stone themselves into numbness, something previously really only a feature of the lives of the desperately poor in urban areas. This has never really abated and now its gone so far that marijuana, the drug of the pre World War Two ethnic and urban underclass has evolved to legality so that the monied middle class may more easily stone itself and escape reality. In other areas, people who previously were concerned with making do in life have reduced their identity to their sexual appetites and want to be known by them so that they define their existence. All over in the same class personal standards have declined to where features of former working class life that actually conveyed a message, such as tattoos, have become standard in a desperate effort for identity and people change their appearance in all sorts of ways nearly weekly.
Things are so bleak that the USA Today recently ran this headline:
U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began
And the niftiness of our present economic direction was looked at by the Atlantic in an article published under this headline:
Fascism, which Paul alludes to, and its identical cousin Communism, don't come out of rural areas either. Rater, politics in rural areas tends to be defined by a distinct "leave me alone" attitude that the current "validate me and my beliefs" ethos of the urban white middle class simply can't stand.
About the only thing that Paul got right in his missive is that there has indeed been a long term, indeed very long term, shift of the rural population to urban areas and its technology based.
And its based in that alone. Nothing about large cities is otherwise enviable or really a long term draw to anything. The reason that it happens is economic and political. It's not, as people like Paul would seem to assume, simply natural.
This has everything to do with a system that encourages consolidation over everything else. Even while we fret over this, lawmakers do everything to make it easier and easier.
Legal roadblocks in the form of licensing that at one time partially arrested such things have been removed, thereby shifting the provision of all sorts of services, both professional and otherwise, to city centers and large entities. Consolidation of retail through the use of the corporate business form, combined with the total decay of local statutory forms on such things as land use and zoning, has operated to wipe out local retail through state fiat. Funding of transportation systems, which are always taxed based in some fashion, has encouraged and then practically required the movement of everything into the dense city center. Statutory provisions that would address some of this have failed to pass, as in the example of the the Big Box tax that failed in the Legislature recently, or have gone unused, as in the case of the seemingly dormant Sherman Anti Trust Act.
It's happened not because we tried so many things and they failed, it's happened as we value money over everything else on earth and believe that buys us happiness, even though the long record has shown this isn't the case.
Indeed, that's been shown to so much be the case, that people who really succeed, and acquire wealth, use that to move to rural areas, albeit often sanitized ones where the realities of rural life, or just reality in general, have been removed.
So, Paul, it's not that we looked for solutions and they failed. We just didn't look. And now the long existing problems associated with the big cities are being ignored as well. So soon, indeed now, you'll be able to look much closer to home.
From Chesterton.
So, Paul, I agree. People, including yourself, should get real about rural America. But that would require getting real about economics in a really large sense itself, which few are willing to do, and which I don't expect the New York Times to do anytime soon.
Cpt. S. A. Mitchell, American Red Cross, demonstrates the can opener he invented to open jam cans for canteens. Ostensibly, Red Cross volunteers, mostly women, staffing the canteens were cutting their hands opening the cans which were opened at a prodigious rates due to servicemen's fondness for jam.
Cpt. S. A. Mitchell of the American Red Cross was photographed on this day with the can opener he invented for Red Cross canteens.
American servicemen visiting the canteens consumed jam at a prodigious amount. Indeed, servicemen in general did, and the uniformity, in terms of offerings, of jam in the British Army was a frequent source of jokes. At any rate, the Red Cross staff of canteens, mostly women, reportedly cut their hands frequently trying to open them, and Cpt. Miller put his inventive mind to work on the problem.
Bela Kun put his inventive mind to work and came out on top, briefly, in a struggle in Hungary that saw the Hungarian People's Republic become the Hungarian Soviet Republic and then seek aid from the Soviet Union against the French and others.
The Hungarian Soviet Republic was a dangerous development but not a large one. It controlled only 23% of the country whereas the rest of it was either under Allied occupation or under control of other entities. It occupied a region of large cities and therefore not surprisingly it had a lot of Socialist under its jurisdiction.
The Socialist in fact had caused the change in government to come about when they merged, without their leader's knowledge, with the Communist party in a move that they thought would increase their strength. It did not. The leader of the Communist, Bela Kun, was a mere tool of Lenin's and Lenin effectively ran the new state from afar and by way of radio contact with Kun. One of its first moves was to purge the Socialist. The government was hugely unpopular in the countryside where resistance to it was massive and in turn it utilized increasingly brutal measure to try to enforce its will.
The Hungarian Soviet Republic existed only for 133 days and only for that long as it at first had the support of Hungarian nationalist as it promised to restore Hungary's borders, which were decreasing due to post war adjustments. It attacked areas in the north that had been given to Czechoslovakia but then its formation of a new Czech soviet republic caused it to lose nationalist support as it was realized that the governments only goals were Communist. A war against Romania went badly and the government fell to armed opposition.
Kun fled to the USSR and lost his life in Stalin's purges, a victim of the evil system whose stooge he was.
Flag of the Organisation International de la Francophonie.
And that's not a typo. It's Fraconphonie.
Roughly speaking, that the countries and cultures that speak French, and this is their international organization's day. There are 88 entities in the organization, reflecting the heritage from the day when the lingua franca really was the language of the Francs.
Some of the members are surprising, not because the French weren't there and left their language, but because the post World War Two history of French departure from their colonial lands wasn't really a very happy one. People must have gotten over it, however, as, for example, Vietnam is a member. Most of France's former colonies are. Algeria, however, is not.
Greece is, which would suggest that membership may be a bit broader than language alone.
Smoking strong pot daily increases psychosis risk, study finds
No kidding.
That this headline is self evident isn't news. Nor is it that people who were campaigning for the legalization of one more mind numbing drug in a society that's drugging itself into a stupor ignored this, and no doubt will deny it.
Oh well, not to fear, sooner or later the class actions and individual suits will begin, and we benighted benefactors of all social folly will profit. And then the world, or at least the profits, will be as they should be.
King Albert and Queen Victoria of Belgium visited Gen. Pershing on this day in 1919.
In Mexico, Poncho Villa, who had taken a part of Mormon figures prisoner a few days prior, let them go. The released prisoners were residents of Colnia Dublan and still had a ways to go to get home, as he didn't return them to their town.
And news arrived that the 148th Field Artillery was soon to sail home.
The same news was printed in Cheyenne, along with a photo that appeared here sometime ago of a teenage plowgirl.
Both papers printed distressing news that the Soviets appeared set to invade Germany. That news was not merely a rumor. As the fronts swung wildly in the Russian Civil War it seems that those who saw the Russian Revolution as a global revolution to occur immediately were indeed planning just that.
From the vantage point of a century later, that goal seems insane, and there were those with in the Soviet power circles who disagreed with it then, such as one Josef Stalin. Those who backed it, such as Trotsky, were not without their own logic however.
The Reds were in fact gaining in the far north and were about to push the Allied mission in Northern Russia out of the country. At the same time, however, the White offensive in the east was meeting with huge success and observed from there, there were reasons to hope that the Whites would prevail. In the west, however, the Soviets were now fighting the Poles, who were doing well, but who also formed a wall between Red Russia and a Germany which seemed to be on the brink of falling into the hands of German Communists any day.
The really amazing thing, in retrospect, is that the Allies were rushing home their forces in Europe in the face of all of this. A Red victory in Germany, which was a possibility at the time, would have resulted in the spread of Communism throughout Europe fairly rapidly, with other countries teetering on the brink of Communist revolution. Even seemingly stable countries, such as the UK, were having some problems at this point.
Of course, long term, the Reds would prevail in Russia but not in Poland, although they nearly did. Their failure to win there meant that they were not able to proceed into Germany. It also meant that Stalin's star rose while Trotsky's fell.
News recently broke, and the media was accordingly astonished, that people have been passing large sums of money to big name universities to grease the admissions skids for their kids.
Oh really?
This is news in the same fashion that the Americans don't want to be ruled by the British is news, or that dogs bark is news, or that Justin Trudeau doesn't really have any qualifications for his job is news.
It isn't.
2 Stanford Students File Suit Over University Admissions
ScandalBy Ross
ToddLawyers for Stanford
students Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods claim that the value of their education
has been tarnished by the scandal. Their lawyers are also pursuing class claims
on behalf of applicants who were rejected by schools caught up in the scandal.
M'eh
I'm actually stunned that this is a surprise, or that there's been a big news outcry about it. Indeed, it's only been a very recent innovation that using influence to get into certain universities wasn't the absolute norm.
This of course has come up as it's been discovered that USC was involved in this, at least to the extent that an actress associated with a popular but second rate old sit com apparently passed a lot of cash to get her daughter into the institution. USC is a private university, and so once again I'm not sure why its supposed to be a surprise. Private means private cash.
Of course, part of this has to do with the American belief that everything in the world has to be perfectly fair all the time, which includes the world being so fair that people with a lot of cash don't use it for their own aims. Well, they do.
In USC's case this may have been compounded a bit by the name of the school, the University of Southern California. It sounds like it's a state school, but it isn't.
Now, state schools should have absolutely fair admissions policies, more or less. In truth they don't fully, but there's a reason for that. As state schools, they cater to the education needs of their states, which means that they weight admissions toward residents, and they very well should do that. Most people accept that.
But in our modern era universities, including private ones, have tended to go as far as they can in public pronunciations of extreme fairness that they actually operate unfairly. Efforts to balance out admissions have become so strained that they now operate to keep people out who in former years would have fairly gotten in. That encourages bad behavior to a degree.
Beyond that, let's be honest. The American association of some sort of super niftyness with private schools has lead to the demand that they let everyone in while at the same time their cache has grown. At one time graduating from a school like Harvard or Yale would have indicated that a person's parents had a lot of money, and it might not actually have meant much beyond that. Sure, the education was generally pretty good in almost every Ivy League school, but they were not all MIT.
Indeed, if you look at the degrees conferred they very often tended to be in the liberal arts and weighted towards educating individuals in a broad sense who would be entering a monied broad life. Most people didn't enter such a life and their educational focus would have accordingly been much different. Professional schools in these institutions did offer a professional education, but it must be noted that in a very real sense going to one of the former big private schools tended to indicate that you were of a certain class, more than anything else.
The confusion of class with education in the US, and the liberalizing effect of everything during the 1960s and 1970s, really opened these up, but at their core, that's what they were and there's an element of that which must remain. The focus on them, however, has become absurd. The United States Supreme Court, for example, is now an all Ivy League institution, and it shouldn't be.
At any rate, it's always been the case that parents paid big money to get their kids into big name schools. The fact that this still goes on isn't really news. If it didn't, that would be news.
