DIDN'T PARTICULARY FEEL LIKE BLOGGING TODAY, BUT A POSTING INSPIRED...
This probably won't be the final words said about the Larry Summers affair at Harvard, but Kelso liked Flopper-Of-the-Nuts Harvey's comment so much, he wants to repeat it in its entirety in the main blog. Then we'll go on to some other stuff.
Harvey said...
As Christopher Caldwell has pointed out, Larry Summers fell because he had the wrong idea that Harvard was a place for "intellectual curiosity" where everything is fair game, instead of a finishing school for society's future leaders, which is what it really is. The kids at Harvard already have 150 IQ's, and it matters little whether they study Shakespeare, film noir, or rap and mass culture; but what they do in fact need is polishing. It has been thus for 150 years.
Harvard's admission process is desgined to blend the Summerses together with people from a range of geographical backgrounds, ethnicities, and economic classes, so long as they all dazzle with their brains, leadership and personal qualities. And Harvard has discovered that these dazzling people -- not the nerds like Larry, who will join academia -- will in fact become the CEO's, political leaders, etc. of America and will give back to alma mater and burnish her image 10 times over.
Pinnacle Sports was offering -2.60/+2.40 that the UAE ports deal would fail. As usual, real money always predicts events better than polls or "common sense" (except in the strange-and-unusual-and-bizarre case of John Kerry. Kelso as recently as last night was mulling a large bet taking the +2.40 that the deal would go because while it wasn't the prettiest thing from a PR standpoint, it was a Bush crony deal that wouldn't have meant shit materially. As Kelso said in a previous blog entry it would be the same local folks minding the bills of lading and the liquor bonding. It sure was effective in stoking up anti-Arab sentiment across the board, though, didn't it? Every American politician feels like a fucking angel right now while Carlyle and Monkey Nuts and the Maktoums and Sheik Mohammed are sharing an "oh, well...too bad" cask-strength single malt. Let's see if the Department Of Fatherland Insecurity can come up with something better. Fat chance. In the end, Kelso figured that it would't be a REAL good idea to bet AGAINST American xenophobia especially bi-partisan American xenophobia, so he passed. A penny saved is a penny earned!
Go on, attack Kelso all you like, but he is some kind of missing Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay. Bad, bad dudes to be sure, but always able to the anti-gambling shit stuck in committee and Kelso has a funny feeling the two of them were responsible for Roe V Wade lasting as long as it has so far. So, to Jack Abramoff for Vanity Fair interview: go on, my son! Unless you get the unlikely Bush pardon, it's curtains. An acquaintance of Kelso's said that after he got bored with watching videos, he hit the library, read a few classics and then made it his project to memorize the most current Almanac And Book Of Facts. Boy certainly kicked Kelso's ass on the 3000-hit club and the table of weights and measures. Best Kelso could do against him was a perfect draw on US state capitols.
To Tom Delay, congrats on big primary win; Kelso's hoping you get a whuppin by the Democrat in the general election, do a couple of years as the guest of the state of Texas or the USA and come back at least as a libertarian and ACLU guy.
On to less provocative stuff...baseball. Kind of glad that the USA has a shot of getting knocked out in the round-of-16 in the World Baseball tournament. Just because. Well, because it's a bad idea to begin with and it's interfering with spring training and baseball's not an Olympic medal sport anymore (boo-hoo). Let's get psyched up for what promises to be a great 2006 season.
Kelso puts the Sawx and Rudy Giuliani's Girls dead-even with a big margin ahead of the next best teams, Baltimore and Toronto, so we should have an AL nail-biter like last year. AL Central will be amazing with Minnesota and Detroit (!) joining the White Sox and Cleveland in what looks like a 4-team race with very little to separate them. Oakland looks like a runaway in the AL West. Good fight looming in the NL East with our beloved Mets in a fight with the Braves and Phillies. Caridnals again look like runaway winners in NL Central. Cubs much improved, everybody else just under even 78-80 wins expected. That is, of course, assuming Rocket doesn't come back to Houston in May. If so, Cards still win but only by about 4 or 5 over Cubs and 'Stros. The NL West hangs essentially on the broad shoulders of Barry Bonds. The Los Angeles Dodgers look like the best team if Bonds is only good to go for 1/2 a season. If Bonds plays for the Giants for the whole season, it looks like LA and SF to the wire.
It's looking very much to Kelso like a Red Sox/Cardinals redux in the series, though Oakland/Dodgers wouldn't be crazy.
Some awards guesses:
ROOKIE-OF-THE-YEAR AL: SCOTT BAKER (RHP-MIN)
ROOKIE-OF-THE-YEAR NL: JOSH WILLINGHAM (C/1B/OF-FLA)
MVP AL: MARK TEIXEIRA (1B-TEX)
MVP NL: ALBERT PUJOLS (1B-STL)
CY YOUNG AL: JOHAN SANTANA (LHP-MIN)
CY YOUNG NL: JAKE PEAVY (RHP-SD)
FIRST MANAGER FIRED OR RESIGNING AL: (JON GIBBONS-TOR)
FIRST MANAGER FIRED OR RESIGNING NL: (PHIL GARNER-HOU)
COMEBACK-PLAYER-OF-THE-YEAR AL: (BOBBY CROSBY SS-OAK)
COMEBACK-PLAYER-OF-THE-YEAR NL: (OLIVER PEREZ LHP-PIT)
Out of respect for the patriotic souls of fine Americans like John McCain, Jon Kyl, Bob Goodlatte and Jim Leach (strong supporters of everything War), please, NO WAGERING.
Kelso's Nuts love you.
9 comments:
Kelso,
I read with interest Harvey's take on Harvard.
I know little about Harvard other than what I've gleaned from some of the people I've met over the years who graduated from that lofty institution. Obviously I do not hang with the elites, so my sample is a tad skewed. And I will admit to over generalizing here. Stereotyping even. But I have not once met a person who graduated from Harvard who had anything very interesting to say. Or had an opinion that was in any way provocative. Nor has anyone I've met who was a Harvard grad had much of a sense of humor or a sense of irony, something that has always surprised me because I always thought that SNL got a lot of their young talent from Harvard. Harvard people seem to me to be highly narcissistic and self-conscious, with this air of "knowing a lot" but not really knowing a whole lot. Their "aww shucks I went to Harvard" routine also gets tiring.
Anyway, I guess my question is, where are these people with 150 IQ's? I think they are at MIT, Stanford, and Yale (and any other number of really good schools), but not Harvard.
Just curious about a world about which I admittedly know little.
Anita:
We've had this discussion before, and I agree with you up to a point -- I'm glad HBS didn't take me because their method of teaching is for shit and the attitude of the students is worse.
I am sure that we got more out of our MBAs from the best public school in CA (me) and the best public school in NY (you) than we would have at Harvard because it's more about Harvard than it is about business and finance. This supports Harvey's point also, I think.
I've known a great many Harvard grads and they are a mixed bag of elitists just like at Stanford, MIT, Chicago, etc. Some love that H-bomb, some hate it; for some it was officer training; for some it was the next logical step in a distinguished academic career to age 18 (or older considering the grad schools). Some even played in the NHL! You really can't generalize.
If Kelso, Jr., gets into Harvard, you won't see Kelso crying.
Well, I was speaking semi-facetiously about the "dazzling" Harvard grads -- but still, would you doubt that they are disproportionately represented in our country's business, journalistic and political leadership? If so, I'd like to introduce you to Eliot Spitzer, Jeff Zucker, Al Gore, etc etc...
I went to Harvard Law at the apogee of the politically correct CLS movement, and all I can say is these social terrorists helped me out in the long run by "polishing" away my unfortunate tendency to speak my mind freely. I came in an obnoxious boy and left a man who knew how to keep his inner obnoxious boy on a leash. For that I am grateful.
"these social terrorists helped me out in the long run by 'polishing' away my unfortunate tendy to speak my mind freely"
Now I ask you, Kelso and Harvey, does 'reality bite' or what?
Seriously though, Harvey and Kelso, thanks for your thoughts on this matter.
The "Dude(s)" abide.
;)
Dunno, Anita. Harvey's going to have to enlighten you on Harvard Law. Kelso's understanding is that most of the law schools save Virginia, Duke and Vanderbilt are or were pretty much in the Harvard mold and that meant and means PC is the order of the day. Or maybe that just means politeness is.
I know in 2 years of B-School at a place whose dean, Clay LaForce, Jr., was very tight with David Horowitz, I heard plenty of vicious arguments over the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and the Warren Buffett Paradox but nothing racist, sexist or homophobic. Moreover, LaForce knew I had been a professional gambler in an earlier life and as such had no love of law enforcement but it didn't stop him from putting me on some curriculum committee or other. He based that decision on my grades and a vote of my classmates. I give him credit for that. B-School is a whole different thing, anyway, as you know. The work is harder, there are more exams, but way less reading and writing. You're there to pick up some skills and have a few laughs, not debate the pressing issues of the day. I avoided James Q. Wilson's courses because I knew I'd just get pissed off. I think the 1992 school presidential poll went 70-30 Clinton. I went in an obnoxious man and came out an obnoxious man who could unwind a swap, and there isn't a White or Black or Male or Female way to do that, thankfully. Fairly sure the same would have been true at Berkeley, Stanford, Northwestern, MIT or Wharton. HBS? Who the fuck knows? Chapel Hill, Dartmouth, Duke or Virginia? Rife with "angry white guys" who are not shy about sharing their opinions on religion and politics.
I have no particular thoughts. Higher education is a good thing -- ipso facto.
RED Sox Cardinals ???? NO way...
Otherwise- great post...stumbled over from Anita's ...I think I will lurk about for a bit....
hope you don't mind ;-)
( and about Summers..well...hmm, I hope he finds himself a new job...)
Welcome to Kelso's Nuts, enigma4ever!
Lurk as long as you like and thank you very much for a little SPORTS commentary. Kelso's folks seem to forget sometimes that this is as much as sports and gambling site as it is a vitriolic left-libertarian-anarchist site. Kelso certainly hopes that Anne Coutler is wrong and that only Republicans like baseball!
We generally do NCAA & NFL football selections against the spread and money during the fall. We'll be doing some college hoops if Kelso's boy "Country" gets his Mississippi ass out of that fancy literary magazine he edits and starts doing what he was meant to do -- small college hoops handicapping.
When Kelso remembers he offers a "Dude" and "Dweeb" of the week -- a conceit he shamelessly stole from Bob Raissman at The New York Daily News. And often we do a little culture. We're standin' by our claim that EMIMEM IS THE WALT WHITMAN OF OUR GENERATION but we're all too caught up in the moment to notice.
As for Peter Jennings, well...Regular Floppers Of The Nuts know how we feel about folks cashing in on the so-called "Greatest Generation." We believe in change not charity and certainly not the elite media. Kelso would have preferred to see Andy Goodman, Robert Schwerner and James Chaney's names on that list instead of Peter Jennings' but this is a democracy after all and you NEVER get everything you want.
We never offer ANY constructive solutions to the world's problems. We spew vitriol and criticize things we don't know about. Sometimes we take off after unexpected villains, e.g., Hillary Clinton, and as in this posting we find some sliver of good in such real villians as Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff.
You know, Kelso, my cousin went to Harvard MBA out of Smith and she is now working for "the company that was created to manage the Harvard endowment in the 1970s", which now places money for the sort of people who hang around at Harvard trustee. 5 offices worldwide and she is CFO. I don't think they drive the endowment boat anymore.
She's not the type to hang around at blogs. I wrote her a nice descriptive entertaining letter about a friend of mine whose father had a top 20 brokerage on Wall Street, mostly due to the fact that I hadn't spoken to her in years and wanted to be so very clear about my basic positivity in general, due to the fact that the greater McTrixie family is not known for getting along together, sort of like early 70s A's as opposed to late 70s We Are Family Buckos. I had to make clear that I wasn't jocking her, is what I am trying to say here.
So of course "etiquette" kicked in because it has been a year with no answer, I'm not going to write her 'til she writes me and I am sure that might never happen. Considering the letter I wrote her, its her loss. At any rate, the big McTrixie family situation is extremely chilled out now, which it wasn't before I came back to Mass from LA. Said chill resulting from liberal use of Confucian Partying Techniques. These life techniques involve being so smart about Asian BS that parent and child don't end up jocking each other.
Did you know, for example, that real Buddhist get-togethers are normally followed by a trip to the beer store and the cigarette machine? I wouldn't try to sell this basic truth to an American buddhist. I don't know what this has to do with Harvard, but Buddhist fasting is very lax, so that people will actually do it all the time, as opposed to catholic or christian fasting, which is some big deal if you don't fast right. The first lesson of Buddhist fasting is that there is no guilt involved. Fasts have a beginning, middle and an end, in other words. Again, American buddhists without the training I have had will live in a fabricated cloud of weakness to their own anger. Et cetera.
Harvard I think doesn't really understand that part of the New Buddhism.
Buddhism is a religion for a nation addicted to pork, alcohol and working. Asia Incorporated, in other words.
Check that; I checked that and the Harvard endowment is one of their clients. I think this company arose from the same milieu that created that park in Berkeley, in that movie, the same milieu that created Sesame Street and those bogus Houston Astros sunset uniforms.
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