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Saturday, November 23, 2013

Higher education is wasted on sugarbabies

Instapundit links to a young woman who is leaning towards accepting an offer to prostitute her way through college. I left a comment on the implications of the sugardaddy-scholarship [links added]:
Regardless of what anyone thinks about it, this is happening at a substantial and rapidly growing rate, contributing to the female-heavy nature of college. On the anecdotal side, I recently saw a couple of very pretty co-eds at the coffee shop looking at pictures of a 70-ish white-haired beau. I thought they looked high school age but apparently they were college girls, since the sugarbaby described her sugardaddy as a college professor. They talked about how he was still kind of cute, making the case to each other that this was a good way to go. 
Not for society. Highly educated females for the most part do not support families the way educated men do. They either don't have children or they have children with highly educated and/or big earning men who provide the support while the woman's earning potential goes largely unused. [It's called "hypergamy." High earning women show a marked preference for still higher earning men, while high earning men are glad to support lower earning women.]
Luckily our present college system is going to collapse, hopefully sooner rather than later, under the weight of its own needless cost, to be replaced by a system where the only credentials are test scores in various areas of knowledge. Together with free or inexpensive online education the result will be a genuine meritocracy, in contrast to our present faux-meritocracy, limited to those who are wealthy enough, or dumb enough, to take on a house-mortgage worth of debt. Until then our majority-female colleges will become ever more female, and ever more heavily stocked with the most corrupt gold-digging type of female, the least likely people in the world to ever support a family. A worse misdirection of resources is hard to imagine. 
[Sugarbabies are the most instinctively hypergamous of all females. Almost all women find alpha-male qualities like financial success and social status to be attractive when they see it, but here we have very young women actively prostituting themselves in search of these qualities. They are hyper-hypergamous, making it a virtual certainty that they will remain hypergamous, and highly averse to supporting a family, for the rest of their lives.]  
Like the rest of the blue-state Obama-world it is all going to go away. As our host likes to remind us: "Something that can’t go on forever won’t."   But unsustainability only brings about an ending when it smashes into the ground. Before things get better they are first going to get much worse.
I'm not against women taking advantage of their sexual desirability however they see fit. With the coming economic collapse everyone is going to be struggling to find a way to survive and it is not at all a bad thing that there is an "old fashioned way" that many women will be able to manage this: by finding men who are able and willing to take care of them. If only all women could find this most longstanding of human relationships, ideally the respectable way, but that is going to be rarer and rarer going forward, with fewer and fewer men able to provide support, together with feminist-era marriage laws that establish extreme disincentives to male participation, making semi-respectable the best that many women will be able to find.

It's all part of the downward slope we have been on since the radical stinking left-wing liberty-haters managed to get control of our institutions. They socialized retirement (undermining childbearing by replacing personal savings and investment with a massive system of transfer payments from the wealth-poor young to the wealth-rich old); they are socializing a full sixth of the economy with Obamacare (not only designed from the beginning to destroy private health insurance, but like social security, Obamacare is also anti-natalist, transferring resources from healthy young people who are wealth poor to unhealthy old people who are wealth-rich); they are intentionally forcing energy prices up ("under my plan" said Obama in 2008, energy prices will "necessarily skyrocket"); and they are regulating the economy to death while imposing every employer mandate they can think of.

We are going all the way down baby. There's no avoiding the crash landing. Just hope that in the aftermath we can get our Constitution back and re-establish a society that protects and fosters liberty.

That's why sooner is better than later. The faster that illiberal institutions like Obamacare implode the less damage they have a chance to do, increasing the chance that we will be able to recover.  Faster is also better demographically. All of these anti-natalist forces  (Social Security, Obamacare, the wasting of higher education on hyper-hypergamous sugarbabies) are chopping our society off at the roots. They cannot end too soon.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Capitol Police Board confirms "stand down" order during Navy Yard slaughter

House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving, speaking for the Capitol Police Board's review of this September's mass shooting incident at the Navy Yard, confirmed yesterday that Capitol Police superiors did in fact order CP's fully geared-up SWAT team (CERT) to retreat from the scene of the ongoing slaughter. From Roll Call's Hannah Hess:
“The facts are clear that the CERT was initially directed to the incident command post, and the facts are clear that they did not make it to the incident command post,” Irving said. “We also have radio transmissions from a Capitol Police unit at the command post that reflected they would be unable to make it due to heavy traffic congestion”
Irving tries to present the order to proceed to the command post as an order to proceed towards the Navy Yard, where the command post would presumably be set up, but it is an established fact that the CERT team was already at the scene of the ongoing slaughter before any order from superiors was received, making the order to proceed to the incident command post an order to retreat from the scene of the shooting.

Here is what we know about the situation at the time that the CERT team first contacted their superiors (from the BBC, 9/18/13). The CERT team, which had coincidentally been near the Navy Yard, heard directly about the active shooter situation and had already gotten itself in position to intercede when superiors were first contacted:
Multiple sources in the Capitol Police department have told the BBC that its highly trained and heavily armed four-man Containment and Emergency Response Team (Cert) was near the Navy Yard when the initial report of an active shooter came in about 8:20 local time.
The officers, wearing full tactical gear and armed with HK-416 assault weapons, arrived outside Building 197 a few minutes later, an official with knowledge of the incident told the BBC.
According to a Capitol Police source, an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), Washington DC's main municipal force, told the Capitol Cert officers they were the only police on the site equipped with long guns and requested their help stopping the gunman. 
When the Capitol Police team radioed their superiors, they were told by a watch commander to leave the scene, the BBC was told.
In a bizarre twist the Roll Call report does not provide this context, allowing Irving to get away with his pretense that the order to proceed to the incident command post was an order to advance rather than an order to retreat (or "stand down"). The title of Hess' article refers to the "stand down" controversy ("Congress Unlikely to Intervene in 'Stand Down' Controversy"), but the article itself never addresses whether the CERT team was told to stand down. 

Hess must simply be ignorant of the most basic facts of the story she is supposed to be covering. Why else would she fail to report the biggest scoop a young reporter is ever likely to have dropped in her lap? It's not like this is a partisan issue where our Democrat-dominated media has a strong interest in presenting the police as helpless to protect the public from active shooters. This slaughter could have been stopped by the police and confirmation of that fact would seem to be a plus for the Democratic Party's anti-gun position that we should all be willing to trust the police for our defense without feeling any need to be prepared (by bearing arms) to defend ourselves.

In any case, Hess has left this story unbroken, leaving the opportunity for others to break it, as I for one am glad to do. So thank you Mr. Irving for providing us with the content of that communication between the CERT team at the active shooting scene and their superiors: they were told to retreat to the "incident command post," which at that point would have been back at headquarters, since no forward command post would yet have been established. And thanks to Hannah Hess for accepting Irving's ludicrous spin that the CERT team was blocked by traffic from reaching the shooting scene that they were calling from, allowing me to break what should have been her scoop.

As for the CERT team's failure to complete its retreat to the not-yet-existent "command post," supposedly because of "traffic," the real story isn't hard to figure. They never made it to their designated retreat point, not because of traffic, but because they would have been beside themselves with anger and shame. They should have disobeyed the stand down order and risked being fired rather than allowing the slaughter of innocents to proceed. It is not surprising that they would accept any excuse (traffic) to not return to the masters who ordered this betrayal of their purpose and their trust.

According to Fox News the murderer arrived on the scene at 8:15 and was not killed until after 9. If he had been engaged at 8:20 when the CERT team arrived it is hard to disagree with the Capitol Police source who suggested at the time that: "some lives may have been saved if we were allowed to intervene."


UPDATE:  It seems there was an already established "incident command post" when CERT received its order from Capitol Police superiors to retreat there. This advance post must have been created by the District's municipal police, not the Capitol Police, and is presumably where the CERT team was told that they had the only long guns on site and were asked by the municipal police to help stop the shooter (as reported by the BBC above). They say that they arrived immediately at the command center and only moved aside while awaiting orders from Capitol Police headquarters. From Hess' report: 
The union disputes that claim [that they never reached the incident command center], saying that the CERT officers arrived at the incident command post within minutes of the first call for assistance but relocated to ensure other first responders could reach the incident while they awaited further instructions from the Capitol Police.
Sorry for getting this wrong in my initial write-up, but the only change in the interpretation is that it makes Irving out to be a bold-faced liar. He said that the CERT team never got to the command post when they clearly did, supposing that is where they were asked to help stop the shooter. But he is still admitting to the stand down order. The ordered retreat is just now a shorter retreat, back to the nearby command post, but it had to have been an order not to engage the shooter or the team would obviously not have left the scene.

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