Oddly, there is other news than Paul Manafort’s sentencing and the college admissions scandal. In a rare move Boeing grounded its 737 Max 8 model plane. It’s not unheard of. There have been a half dozen previous groundings of entire models, including the 787 Dreamliner and the DC-10. The most important revelation is that the Federal Aviation Administration does not think its role is to protect you from faulty aircraft designs.

The Federal Aviation Administration was created in 1958, the successor to the old Civil Aeronautics Administration, at the urging of the aircraft industry, to promote safety standards and instill confidence in flying. It has clearly failed, a victim of regulatory capture, i.e. being controlled by the industry it was intended to regulate.

Time for a major overhaul in the FAA.

When I entered college my alma mater required nude posture photos of all coeds as part of their admissions packets. Not the men; just the women. This was allegedly for scientific purposes but I think it was to weed out unwanted applicants.

My college wasn’t alone. All of the Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools plus Swarthmore did the same thing as well.

Hard to imagine, isn’t it?

In his reaction piece at Bloomberg to the unfolding scandal I mentioned earlier this morning, Tyler Cowen has some interesting observations. First, college is too easy:

First, these bribes only mattered because college itself has become too easy, with a few exceptions. If the bribes allowed for the admission of unqualified students, then those students would find it difficult to finish their degrees. Yet most top schools tolerate rampant grade inflation and gently shepherd their students toward graduation. That’s because they realize that today’s students (and their parents) are future donors (and potential complainers on social media). It is easier for professors and administrators not to rock the boat. What does that say about standards at these august institutions of higher learning?

Alternatively, you might think it is rather arbitrary who is admitted to any given university, and that many of those denied admission could get through the program competently, even if classes and grading were made harder. I agree with you. But what does that say about our understanding of these institutions as meritocracies? Parents pay illegal bribes, in part, because many of these institutions just don’t give enough students a fair chance to get in. It is even worse for the many poorer students whose parents are not in a position to offer either bribes or significant donations.

but this point is even more telling:

My second worry is that the number of bribery cases suggests that many wealthy Americans perceive higher education to be an ethics-free, law-free zone where the only restraint on your behavior is whatever you can get away with.

It ain’t just higher education. It’s business, religious institutions, and politics, too. That is something that should concern us greatly.

In my view that is a consequence of our post-Christian culture. We are making a transition from being a guilt culture in which individuals are motivated to act (or not to act) by internal restraints, i.e. conscience otherwise to be thought of as God knows what you are doing and will punish evil acts, to a shame culture in which the only barrier to bad conduct is the fear of being caught and exposed.

I don’t think that our freeish, relatively lightly-enforced system of laws is compatible with a shame culture. If you think the direction in which we’re heading is benign, imagine China or Ceausescu’s Romania or East Germany in which there were informers on every block. I think that conscience is better.

Today must be the day for alarm in DC-Land. Presumably, tomorrow will be Anything Can Happen Day. In his Washington Post column David Ignatius expresses alarm at the political upheaval in both political parties. He’s concerned about a political realignment:

Political systems can be like scientific theories. Sometimes there emerge so many anomalous elements that don’t fit the existing structure that the theory collapses, and a new one arises. In science, that means, for example, that the theory that the sun revolves around the Earth loses its explanatory power, and evidence proves the opposite is the case. In politics, new parties emerge, or the existing ones develop new identities.

We may be entering such a period. The definition of a winning Democrat may be that, in response to Trump’s rambling circus of self-aggrandizement, he or she could create a genuinely coherent new political order.

He expresses longing for a “youthful version of Joe Biden”, surely a contradiction in terms. Why not a live Hubert Humphrey or Adlai Stevenson? Straining as he does to force Kamala Harris or Beto O’Rourke into that mold would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Got it. He wants an old-time liberal who’s been a senator for 35 years.

The realignment about which Democrats should be concerned is that they’ll drive away just enough Jewish or black voters to lose elections they would have won otherwise. They don’t need to lose all of them and they don’t need to become Republicans. All that needs to happen is for some of them to stay home.

In his latest New York Times column Thomas Friedman expresses alarm at how woefully unprepared to wield the primary powers of the presidency as commander-in-chief and head diplomat the announced candidates for the presidency are:

Great-power conflict is in, but U.S. democracy promotion is out. We need allies more than ever, and we have fewer than ever. And some guy in Moldova with a cellphone and a few cyber tools can now shut off the power grid in Montana.

No wonder no one wants to boast being the best person to answer the White House crisis line at 3 a.m. They all prefer to let it ring and hope that it’s a wrong number.

As the late Mayor Daley would have said, let’s look at the record. Since 1900 only the following presidents have been prepared to wield those powers on their inauguration days:

Truman
Eisenhower
Nixon
George H. W. Bush

and that’s only if you think that Cactus Jack Garner was wrong. If you exclude former vice presidents, it’s only Ike. And maybe George H. W. Bush by virtue of having been the head of the CIA.

But there’s another passage in the column on which I wanted to comment:

The post-post-Cold War era, which has been slowly unfolding since the early 2000s, requires a president to manage and juggle three huge geopolitical trends — and the interactions between them — all at once.

The first is the resurgence of three big regional powers: Russia, China and Iran. Each is seeking to dominate its home region and is willing to use force for that purpose. This trend is compellingly described in a new book by Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins emeritus professor of U.S. foreign policy, titled “The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth.”

As Mandelbuam notes, in Europe, Russia has occupied part of Ukraine. In East Asia, China has claimed most of the Western Pacific as its own territory, contrary to international law; has built artificial islands there; and has placed military installations on them. In the Middle East, Iran has trained and funded proxy forces in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen and has pursued nuclear weapons.

None of which represents anything new. Ukraine was part of Russia from the 17th century until the 1950s when Ukrainian native Nikita Khrushchev made it in “independent” Soviet republic. China has been the 500 lb. gorilla in most of East Asia for much of the last two millennia. A century is just a blink of an eye from that perspective.

Iran has been a major if not the major Middle Eastern power for even longer.

I’ll leave the processes that put Russia, China, and Iran on the paths that led them to becoming regional powers again to the interested student. You’ll notice an interesting pattern.

Since so many people have commented on the story that broke yesterday of indictments and arrests of various people in connection with a college admissions bribery case, I may as well get into the act and put in my two cents. I have two points to make.

First, I’ve read the FBI affidavit. It’s remarkably vague on precisely what federal laws have been broken. As far as I can tell the actual violations involved are tax fraud and wire fraud. Practically nothing in the actual material of the case may be against federal law. As usual the real scandal is what’s legal.

Second, the dozens of people involved in this case are probably only the tip of the iceberg. “Legacies”, individuals who are admitted to elite institutions of higher learning on the basis of family connections, and rich kids who are admitted based on Daddy’s contributions have been around for generations. Former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was an example of the former; President John F. Kennedy of the latter.

Justice is frequently represented in art as being blind. When who you are matters more than what you have done, there can be no justice and that’s as true in college admissions as in a court of law.

We do not have a meritocracy. We have a plutocracy. As long as “elite” institutions exist, their admissions policies are private, and they are known to admit people for reasons other than merit, any notion of meritocracy will be a lie and it is a lie that injures all of us.

Footnote

In case you’re curious, when I took the SATs and ACTs the industry of tutors, etc. was in its infancy. I didn’t receive any tutoring. Whatever scores I got, I got on my own. I attended an elite high school but I was admitted purely on the basis of merit and received a full scholarship. Admission to the school was by competitive examination and I learned, after graduating, that I had the highest score on the admissions test in my year. My dad wouldn’t have paid for me to attend a high school on philosophical grounds. I was admitted to an elite college based on scores, grades, and notable extracurricular activites, which I worked for. It was paid for partly based on an academic scholarship and partly because I worked a 40 hour week all the way through college.

Has losing your only statewide election ever been thought of as a credential for being elected to the presidency before now? Desperate times call for desperate measures.

This piece at Atlantic made me think. What’s the best movie sequel? To answer the question you need to answer two others: what’s a sequel and what’s “best”?

It’s easier to define a sequel by what it isn’t than by what it is. A reboot, a reimagining, or a television adaptation is not a sequel. So, for example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television show) is not a sequel to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie). It’s all three of the above (reboot, reimagining, adaptation). It’s not a sequel no matter how much better the television show was than the movie.

Then what is meant by best? From an artistic standpoint The Godfather, Part II is probably the best movie sequel. However, from the standpoint of box office Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow, Part II would be hard to beat. Not only was its worldwide box office bigger than Part I, it was bigger than the first movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone. It’s the rare sequel that out-grosses the original.

So, what’s the best movie sequel?

Conor Friederdorf makes a good point about Mark Zuckerberg’s recent declamation about Facebook’s newly-discovered commitment to privacy in his most recent column at Atlantic:

The impression is a CEO forthrightly owning a flaw. On reflection, however, one realizes that Facebook’s reputation is merely how others perceive it. Zuckerberg writes as though how Facebook is seen is the crux of the matter, rather than how it is. A more forthright CEO would acknowledge that skepticism of Facebook’s is rooted in its actions. The company repeatedly compromised user privacy to advance its interests.

Those transgressions are what rendered it untrustworthy.

which is closely allied to the point I made in my post on the subject. I don’t think he takes his criticism to its logical conclusion. Facebook’s problem is its business model. Its business model is imcompatible with privacy.