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Unclear on the concept.

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A who’s who of famous names, from actresses to CEOs, have been arrested as part of a national college admissions cheating scam, according to court records unsealed in Boston Tuesday.

Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are among the more than 40 people arrested for paying bribes to get their children into elite schools, including Georgetown, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale.

The scam, said prosecutors, arranged for children to be recruited as athletes, regardless of their athletic abilities. Academic officials, including the former women’s soccer coach at Yale University are also facing charges.

Prediction: All of the kids are white or Asian, and would have gotten in had it not been for the various preferences give to black, Latino, and other Fashionable Minority kids.

UPDATE: Feds Arrest Dozens, Including Actresses and Ex-Pimco CEO, In “Largest College Admissions Scam Ever Prosecuted”

UPDATE: How to Buy Your Way into the Ivies  The old way was less dangerous.

Tell me I’m wrong….

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The automatic reaction of the Left to disagreement is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!

Ace of Spades follows this stuff so that you don’t have to.

I sure do like the Three Little Pigs meme, though.

The Other McCain shows you how.

They have two standards — one for them, and one for everybody else.

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Of course Apple won’t provide a reason for taking it down other than some bland boilerplate about ‘not meeting our standards’ because if they gave an honest reason they could get sued.

Joel Kotkin turns over a rock.

The people who build our homes increasingly can no longer afford them. As the state elite and their academic cheering crew celebrate our progressive boom, even the most skilled, unionized construction workers, notes an upcoming study, cannot afford to live anywhere close to the state’s major job centers.

In fact, notes the study, soon to be published by Chapman University, not a single unionized construction worker can afford a median-priced house in any of the major coastal counties, including Orange, Los Angeles, San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Diego, Alameda, Sonoma and Napa. Even with incomes averaging over $73,000 annually, notes author and economist Dr. John Husing, most can afford median-priced homes only in the further reaches of the Central Valley or the Inland Empire, requiring huge commutes.

Read it.

Peggy Noonan advises us to “get ready for the coming struggle session.” What’s a struggle session? The term comes from Communist China’s cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Read it.

All it takes is a sniff of blood and the jackals are upon you.

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I recall the Soviet empire having the same problem. But surely rich people can hire the right kind of lawyers. And I’m sure a hefty campaign donation or two would smooth the waters.

Of course, if it gets bad enough that it would be cheaper to have some NY state functionaries whacked, well, there’s plenty of local talent for that, too.

Read it.

Pretty sad when a chancre like Maher calls you a cancer.

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An analysis of progressivism as a modern form of classic Puritanism.

Today’s intolerant divorce themselves from the intolerance of their political ancestors by imagining them as the political ancestors of their political opponents. So, eugenics, prohibition, and so much else enthusiastically supported by progressives become, in the telling of modern progressives, the work of reactionaries. This enables followers of an intellectual tradition to not learn from past mistakes.

Margaret Sanger, for example, started Planned Parenthood because there were too many black babies being born.

William Blaxton, the city’s first settler who dwelled alone on Boston Common, invited the Puritans to settle on the Shawmut. They soon encouraged him to leave. “I have come from England because I did not like the Lord Bishops,” the first Bostonian lamented. “I cannot join you because I would not be under the lord brethren.”

In the next generation, the Puritans, who depicted themselves as paragons of religious freedom (a bit of propaganda so effective that most fall for it today), executed four on Boston Common for the crime of Quakerism.

Read it.

Perhaps it’s time to send her to her room. Perhaps without supper.

Quick work for a former bartender. Even Jesse Jackson Jr. didn’t work that fast.

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The totalitarianism inherent in the proglodyte world-view is starting to come out.

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In addition to being sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, the Left Coast is becoming a sanctuary for drug cartels.

A combination of ideal growing weather and proximity to tens of millions of potential customers has always made northern California a great place to grow dope. California was the first to permit medical marijuana, in 1996, and this past November, residents voted “yes” on Prop 64, making California the fifth state to legalize recreational pot. Almost two-thirds of the country’s total legal harvest comes from the Golden State. The crop brought in $2.8 billion in 2015, putting it somewhere between lettuce and grapes, and some estimates project the state’s “green gold rush” could become a $6.5 billion market by 2020.

Even as California embraces the booming legal marijuana market, though, it is also seeing an explosion in illegal cultivation, much of it on the state’s vast and remote stretches of public land. National forests and even national parks have seen a surge in large-scale illegal “trespass grows,” some with tens of thousands of plants spread across dozens of acres. As much as 80 percent of illegal pot eradicated in California is grown on federal lands, and that’s just the fraction that authorities find. (Trespass grows occur in other states in the American West, and even in remote areas back east, but at nowhere near the scale of California.)

…

The lethal poisons growers use to protect their crops and campsites from pests are annihilating wildlife, polluting pristine public lands, and maybe even turning up in your next bong hit.

Read it.

In the U.S., socialism is for the privileged.

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This is abnormal. There’s never been an offensive so vast against a president by his rival party. It took only two committees — one in the Senate, one in the House — to look into the Watergate scandal and drive President Nixon out of the White House in 1974. But Trump is more popular today than Nixon was, and Democrats are taking no chances he might escape their grasp.

Take a look.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

For years, the sharing economy was pitched as an altruistic form of capitalism?—?an answer to consumption run amok. Why own your own car or power tools or copies of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up if each sat idle for most of its life? The sharing economy would let strangers around the world maximize the utility of every possession to the benefit of all.

Uh-huh. That works about as well as you think that it might.

Read it.

Automation is often presented as an inexorably advancing force, whether it’s ushering in a threat to jobs or a promise of increased leisure or larger profits. We’re made to imagine the robots rising, increasingly mechanized systems of production, more streamlined modes of everyday living. But the truth is that automation technology and automated systems very often fail. And even when they do, they nonetheless frequently wind up stranded in our lives.

For every automated appliance or system that actually makes performing a task easier—dishwashers, ATMs, robotic factory arms, say—there seems to be another one—self-checkout kiosks, automated phone menus, mass email marketing—that actively makes our lives worse.

I hate these things, and will not usr them. I’ll actually go buy stuff somewhere else.

Read it.

I remember when Arnie pretended to be a Republican.

I guess there’s no more money to be made that way.

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And that’s a big problem.

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This madness, which long ago infected university campuses, is now seeping into HR departments of large employers. The result is the rise of the woke corporation, and it might affect the way you work. Certainly, no one should assume that their own company, however sensible-seeming, is immune.

Crackpot ideas that used to be confined to neo-Marxist professors in grievance studies departments have been enthusiastically embraced by the giants of capitalism. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola are all on board and anyone who publicly challenges this new orthodoxy is not merely endangering their chances of promotion, but at risk of being fired.

Read it.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have held up California’s new, error-plagued automatic voter registration program as a model for the nation, and are now pushing for a nationalized version of the program in a bill called the “For the People Act.”

The bill would require all states to implement automatic voter registration systems, which advocates claim would improve the accuracy of voter registration rolls, prevent ineligible people from registering, help election officials do less work to keep voter registration records accurate, and make it easier for eligible voters to register or update their registration records.

Yet since California started its own automatic voter registration program last April, exactly the opposite has happened.

Read it.

I think that they ought to raise it back to 21. The pathetic excuse used to lower it to 18, that there was a draft and that people who could be called on to die for their county ought to be able to vote, no longer applies.

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Hey, if a trick works, you use it again.

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The coalition of the fringes is starting to unravel.

Maybe he could wear blackface. There seems to be a lot of that going around.

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Education schools have long been notorious for two mutually reinforcing characteristics: ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. As early as 1969, Theodore Sizer and Walter Powell hoped that “ruthless honesty” would do some good when they complained that at far too many ed schools, the prevailing climate was “hardly conducive to open inquiry.” “Study, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence,” they continued. “Un-intellectualism—not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice—is all too prevalent.” Sizer and Powell ought to have known: At the time they were dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

When the worst education you can get is as an education major, things are only going to get worse.

Read it.

Damn that Western colonialism! Oh, wait….

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The coalition of the fringes is beginning to unravel.

Apparently feminists draw the line at political fantasies that mean they wind up losing.

Audacious Epigone runs the numbers.

One curious aspect of hate crime, which we are told is on the rise in Trump’s America, is how it is predominantly a blue state phenomenon. The inverse correlation between Trump’s share of the vote and the rate of reported hate crime incidents is .60.

Read it.

Talkin’ ’bout my g-g-generation….

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I am not making this up.

Political Correctness is gradually excluding all the adults from managerial positions in our culture.

This will not end well.

Read it.

A sad tale, which just goes to show that, proglodyte fantasies to the contrary notwithstanding, not all change leads to progress.

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Poor Bernie. Too pale, too male, too stale.

Being socialist just isn’t enough any more.

Read it.

If you look through the slideshow, you’ll notice that only one of the 21 victims was ‘white’ (British of British descent).

You will also notice that nobody mentions this, or seems to think that it might be significant.

You will also notice that nobody has any idea what said ‘effective strategy’ might be, other than the broad hint by the police that they need to … hire more police.

‘Austerity’, for those who don’t follow the British news, is a code-word for ‘budget cuts because we can’t afford all of the spending that people want us to do’. Critics of ‘austerity’ usually fall back on the Occasional-Cortex meme of ‘just pay for it’.

Read it.

I would never use AirBnB because I just don’t trust people I don’t know — sometimes I don’t even trust people I do know.

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How about that GREAT government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

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Well, I guess that banning guns really worked, didn’t it?

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It is still early days. But it already seems likely that future historians will look upon the events of 2016 as marking the beginning of a new cycle in international history. The bad news for anguished liberals is that these cycles can last quite a long time — 30 years seems to be about average.

From the Financial Times, no friend of Trump.

Read it.

I guess they’re running out of English people to come to their services.

Wonder how the Iranians, most of whom are Muslims, like the idea of a woman priest. Most Iranian Christians are either Orthodox or Nestorian, and they wouldn’t attend an Anglican service anyway. I suspect that the number of Iranian Anglicans is pretty miniscule.

Read it.

Jeff Bezos open letter to NYC: Sorry, guys. You elected that crazy bitch to Congress. I wish you the joy of it.

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There’s nothing like living in a Communist dictatorship to bring home what living in a Communist dictatorship is like.

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Most U.S. institutions of higher learning that received significant Chinese funding failed to report the foreign contracts in violation of the law, and many signed contracts that included secrecy provisions that prevent their terms from being known by students and the public, according to the report.

That, to me, sounds like guilty consciences.

Steven Hayward of Powerline raises a hand about the India-Pakistan situation.

I’m guessing some of our media’s lack of interest in this current crisis is that they haven’t figured out how to blame it on Trump yet. Plus they’d have to do some actual work to report the story. Ben Rhodes was right: most journalists today are so ignorant they probably can’t find Kashmir on a map (maybe the map to the Kashmir sweater department at Bergdorf-Goodman), let alone tell you anything about the background of the conflict.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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This is why I don’t use PayPal, which had a shady reputation for screwing its customers even before this.

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And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

John Hinderaker at Powerline investigates.

For some people these days, every single thing is about race. This article in Vox, a web site for low-information young people, reads like a parody. But I am pretty sure it is serious. The topic? “The knitting community is reckoning with racism.” Personally, I didn’t even know there was a “knitting community.”

Oh, believe me, there is.