Five Easy Pieces

Say it ain't so, Shohei. Ronna, we barely knew ye. What were once vices are now habits. The southern border: Crisis? What crisis? Squatters, and other observations.

Francesca Gino: Illustration by The Chronicle; image from TedXTrentoStudio, YouTube

This week: five spectacular contributions to the potential future demise of our own Pax Romana.

One

On this week’s Monday Musings, I opined that no one should be surprised that DEI, which deems merit a weapon of oppression, should produce poor outcomes in government and academia, where it has recently grown like kudzu. I cited, as my favorite example, Jo Boaler, a math-ed professor at Stanford, who’s in trouble for research misconduct in a study that was subsequently used to ban algebra in 8th grade throughout public schools in San Francisco for a decade.

If you want a good definition of entitlement, I suggest that you take a look at Boaler’s faculty page at Stanford.

But it took less than three days for me to discover my new most favorite academic fail, this time in the form of Harvard Business School “dishonesty researcher,” professor Francesca Gino. It turns out that Gino has been suspended from Harvard after data manipulation was discovered in four papers she co-authored about, wait for it, honesty and ethics. Gino has since sued Harvard and the sleuths who uncovered her alleged misconduct.

With these, the line of elite university screw-ups is getting pretty long. And even at private schools, like Stanford and those in the Ivy League, much of the misconduct is subsidized with taxpayer dollars through federal grants.

It gets better. The same general cohort, the DEI-flavored academic left, has decided, among all things, to embrace one of the most illiberal political organizations in the world, Hamas, as their current cause célèbre.

Do any of the female, LGBTQ+, or non-Muslim liberals who are currently engaged in shouting down and sometimes physically attacking Jewish students, faculty, and speakers (who are representatives of one of the world’s most inclusive and tolerant societies) understand that their lifespan in any majority Muslim society would likely be about a millisecond longer than it took to retrieve the trusty old Saif off the wall?

To imagine Hamas as wholly innocent victims of the oppressor Israel in the ongoing conflict—which started with a terror attack by Hamas against Jewish civilians on October 7, 2023—takes a Big Gulp-sized slug of knucklehead. The fact that Hamas is all the rage among the far left is as good of an argument for mandatory world history courses in secondary education as I can come up with. Of course, the curriculum would have to be developed by pre-DEI authors, or we’d probably end up encouraging high school students to cluelessly occupy campus offices in support of North Korea.

Two

The LA Dodgers have had a big week. Not only did they open the 2024 MLB season in Seoul, South Korea, with two games against the Padres, but they got to introduce the biggest chunk of their current $1.35 billion in contract commitments, superstar Shohei Ohtani, with a press conference explaining the $4.5 million gambling scandal in which he’s embroiled.

I’m all for the presumption of innocence, so Ohtani gets the benefit of doubt with me—for now. But his explanation that it was all theft by his interpreter smacks of the dog ate my homework. We’ll just have to see.

The bigger issue is how anyone imagined that the marriage between collegiate/professional sports and gambling interests that was rushed to the altar immediately after the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) back in 2018 was ultimately going to pan out other than badly?

What did anyone expect when advertisements for betting became ubiquitous in sports coverage? You cannot watch any type of sporting event anymore without a come-on from gambling interests. ESPN even has its own sportsbook, ESPN BET. And it’s now possible to place bets on the performance of individual players in games.

What could possibly go wrong?

Did we learn nothing from the Black Sox scandal, various college basketball scandals through the decades, or the saga of Peter Edward Rose? Evidently. And Shohei, along with a handful of college basketball players and programs that have recently been flagged for suspicious activity, are very likely just the tip of the iceberg. This will not end well.

Three

In the second part of what were once vices are now habits, even very liberal places like Portland, Oregon, have finally concluded that legalizing drugs, at least by itself, does not solve an epidemic of drug abuse. It just makes it worse. The fact that the powers that be in Portland, of all places, now understand that this is, in fact, a fairly stunning indictment of the laissez-faire approach to law enforcement despite being currently en vogue with the far left.

Next, let’s hope that the same social justice warriors running liberal dystopias get a clue that the epidemic of squatting in places like the West Coast, New York, and Atlanta is doing them no favors, and put the clamps on legal bottom feeders like the King County Bar Association Housing Justice Project in Seattle, which represents squatters against homeowners.

Pro tip: Clean up the squatting, homeless camps, rampant theft, drug abuse, and disrespect for the law and law-abiding citizens and businesses, and some of your tax base might return.

Four

Speaking of illegal drugs, one of the biggest drivers of the current fentanyl crisis in this country is the open southern border. Yeah, I know, the left argues that nearly all of the fentanyl (and other drugs) that come into the country come through legal border crossings. This is, of course, an absurd argument since you don’t know what you don’t know, i.e., how many drugs are not interdicted during massive waves of illegal border crossings.

It’s the same with crimes committed by illegals in this country. Progressives like to vigorously claim that illegal immigrants commit crimes at a lesser rate than citizens. Not only is this prima facie absurd, since they are committing a crime by being here illegally in the first place, but it still doesn’t pass the smell test if you factor that out. Again, you don’t know what you don’t know. Since its difficult to keep track of illegals, and since many crimes are now unreported in large cities where illegal immigrants tend to congregate, how does anyone really know at what rate illegal immigrants commit crimes?

It’s professional malpractice to claim ownership of good facts concerning crimes committed by illegals since there don’t appear to be any. One thing that is certain, however, is that every crime committed by an illegal immigrant, such as murdering a college student out for a run, is a crime that would not have happened if immigration laws were enforced.

Five

The media’s spectacular fail continues.

My quote of the week in the media is courtesy of Matt Taibbi and Racket News in a great piece concerning the whining, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that occurs among the cadre of journalists who participate in the disinformation industrial complex when they get called out for censorship (almost always directed at the right) as opposed to, say, journalism. The quote: “If Collins” (the target of Taibbi’s ire) “doesn’t love journalism, or feels like it doesn’t love him back enough, that is sad. I hope he finds fulfillment, maybe toothbrushing racehorse anuses or duration-testing vanity mirrors.”

You gotta love Taibbi.

But the big media faceplant this week was the hiring and subsequent firing, in less than three days, of former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, by NBC. McDaniel is the latest in a long line of political color commentators hired by various television news outlets to make sure that viewers get their dose of Survivor along with the news. The rub, this time, was that McDaniel was deemed too “Trumpy” for various wags at NBC and especially MSNBC.

To be clear, I think that Ronna McDaniel was a terrible RNC chair and probably is capable of very little insight in which I’d have more than a passing interest. But this is the same network that hired the likes of Jen Psaki, who negotiated her deal with MSNBC while still serving as the White House press secretary in the Biden administration. I don’t much value her insight either.

And there’s the matter of long-time commentator Al Sharpton, a race hustler who just might be one of the worst people in the world. None of the tantrum-throwing children at NBC/MSNBC seem to have any problems with Sharpton, among many others.

One thing is for sure: given McDaniels brief tenure at NBC and her high salary, along with the potential windfall from a hostile work environment lawsuit that I’d file if I were her, McDaniels airtime at NBC will go down as the most expensive in history, somewhere north of $500 a minute. Good money, if you can get it.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.