The Odyssey

We went and saw The Odyssey last night. It was a watershed moment for me.

During that interminable movie, I decided I just don't have to pretend to be a part of the Hollywood cult. The movie felt, in many ways, not like a movie at all, but like a chorus of everyone on the film crew chanting their creed over and over and over for 3 hours. You know the one - men are pigs, women are oppressed, trans men are men and, most loudly of all, the Greeks were black, the Samurai were black, Cleopatra was black, King Arthur was black, the Eskimos were black, the Tsar was black and the Mayans were black.

I just don't have to do that and I'm not a racist for not playing along.

Hollywood's rules say that every film has to have a certain percentage of oppressed peoples (read: non-white, non-Jewish) in order to be considered for an Oscar. Presumably, no one from the A-list of actors or film crew talent would work on, say, a retelling of Le Morte D'Arthur that was 100% white. They'd lose access to future work and be howled out of Hollywood for being racists.

Well, I don't work in Hollywood. My job isn't threatened by this and I think it's all not just ridiculous but off-putting and wrecks the film. Ellen Page, who looks like a 10 year old boy, shows up early in the film and is used by Odysseus as a decoy guarding the Trojan Horse. The little idiot gets skewered right away, but her death is comic and not tragic. She's clearly a girl and would never have been given that job. She's there because Hollywood is a cult and casting a mentally ill woman who thinks she's a man is part of the movie's background chant of the progressive creed.

It's a bad movie that gets worse from there.

Short review: Imagine sitting for 3 hours and watching a video of a bunch of grown men yelling at each other in a foreign language while they work vigorously in a butcher shop. That's the movie. There's no variation of mood or pace, it's just 3 hours of sausage-making, beef shredding, hams going through slicing machines and chickens being shot out of cannons into Cuisinarts where they are pureed, all while burly men shout at each other in, what, Greek? No, not Greek. There aren't any Greeks in the movie. How about a mix of Russian and Bantu.

There's a black person in nearly every shot. They aren't explained at all, they're just there, all the time, everywhere. It looks a lot like this.

Djimon Hounsou as Sir Bedivere in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

Like I said, I am not going to pretend this is improving the movie any more. It just isn't. Movies like this have a constant background hum of that bloody creed being chanted over and over and over.

A little more about the black people cast in the film. At the beginning of the movie, I think the first person we meet is Travis Scott. He's a bard, you see. He's also a rapper. His song about Odysseus the hero is terrible. I'm not going to pretend any more. It's just horrible.

He's a bard. If you don't think he's a really good bard, you're a bigot.

Finally, there's Helen of Troy. She's played by Lupita Nyongo for reasons that make all the sense in the world to the cult.

The face that launched a thousand ships.

I'd never seen her before, but I knew she was in the movie. Was she going to be pretty?

No. Not even close. When we first meet her, she's with her husband Meneleus, having been brought back from Troy. On her absolutely best day ever, this girl is a 3. She's not filmed on her best day. She's not the face that launched a thousand ships, she's just a particularly loud round of the progs' chorus.

I'd made my decision about Hollywood long before she showed up so having some nasty, ugly DEI chick shoved in my face as Helen was exasperating, but not terminally so. The patient was already dead.

As for the movie aside from those mortal failings, I didn't like anyone except Anne Hathaway's Penelope and Charlize Theron's Calypso. Those I could relate to. Everyone else was despicable or dismissible. I had no idea at any time why anyone was doing anything. I like Matt Damon, but his Odysseus was just kind of a semi-loser. He's trying to get back home, but everything he does goes sideways. He would have been a sympathetic character in a different movie. In this one, he's just another guy slicing, blending and grinding meat while shouting in Urdu at all the other men.

The biggest problem with the film was that there was nothing for Odysseus at the end of his voyage. Because nearly every scene was encrusted with gore and violence, it wasn't like Odysseus was traveling to find peace and tranquility and beauty. There wasn't any in the whole film. It was an unrelenting grind.

Finally, the ending was comical, reminiscent of a scene from the Marx Brother's Monkey Business. In that scene, which I can't find on YouTube, the Marx brothers are trying to get off an ocean liner where they've been stowaways. To avoid getting caught, Groucho steals some clothes from a doctor who is asleep on a deck chair. He shows up in the gangplank exit line right after another passenger has passed out, yelling about how he can't take another moment on this ship and is having a nervous breakdown and he'll die if he spends another day at sea. Groucho pushes his way to the front of the line, makes like he's examining the man and then writes a prescription on a pad and hands it to the officer managing the exit saying, "His nerves are shot! What this man needs is an ocean voyage!"

If you've seen The Odyssey, you'll know what I mean.

It wasn't a good movie and I'm pretty turned off on Hollywood in general these days. I'm just not going to be part of their cult. Well, not until they cast a Hispanic dude as Nelson Mandela.

Hey, diversity is their strength.

Marmot Dark Romance

During some downtime yesterday, I engaged in one of my favorite current hobbies: discussing fiction writing with AI (read: ChatGPT). I'd heard Andrew Klavan and others talk about the scourge of dark romance novels and, being a fuddy-duddy conservative man well past my prime, I really didn't know what that genre was.

Dark romance, as I understand it now, is erotica for women with libidos that have been strangled by our modern culture. That is, in order to get their rocks off, the romance has to involve power and control and moral depravity and probably a good deal of BDSM. We have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to enjoy sex for its own sake and the culture has managed to pour ice water over that fire in the name of feminism, social justice and equality.

Dark romance is what you read after coming home from a day under fluorescent lights working on Excel spreadsheets and answering emails in an office of perfectly adequate husband material that is too timid to approach you for a date.

I suppose dark romance is best read while slightly looped on SSRIs, boxed wine and while wearing a dog collar and perhaps a ball gag. It's about as erotic as that.

Common tropes in the romance novel world are the billionaire, the pirate, the duke and the vampire. I had a brief foray into exploring just why an 800-year-old man with supernatural powers and no soul would find anything even vaguely interesting in a hot high school senior and was told that in the Twilight stories, for example, the author used tempora-ex-machina to get out of that problem. The vampire stopped emotionally maturing 782 years ago and has lived his entire life with an 18-year-old boy in his head.

Hurrah.

We then turned to introduce one of my favorite topics into these stories. Marmots.

I think marmots are funny. They are fat rodents who look like furry dinner plates. Everything about them is comical. They are proof that God has a sense of humor.

In my dark romance stories, then, the plot isn't about finding a way to force the hero to put out his cigarette on this butt cheek instead of that one as an act of dominance over him. No, the plot is about perfecting the management of marmot colonies. There is no sex. None at all. No one even mentions it. Oh, everyone still has the exact same characteristics and temperaments, but they are obsessed with marmots.

Social Dynamics

I started wondering what it would be like for the social queens in high society where these stories take place. Imagine you're the wife of a real estate mogul or the heiress to a breakfast cereal fortune and you're planning a dinner party. You certainly don't invite the lunatic theoretical mathematician you saw laughing hysterically to himself at the beach, no, you invite people who will make you look fabulous to the other society dames.

If you know of a billionaire or a duke or a pirate or a guy with semi-translucent skin who talks like Bela Lugosi and seemingly has infinite amounts of money, you'd certainly put them near the top of your guest list. Just imagine the conversations! They must be fascinating!

A fatal mistake.

AI has gotten really, really good at patter dialog comedy. I laughed so hard yesterday at what we came up with that there were times when I had to close the browser window halfway through the conversation and walk away because I couldn't breathe.

Here was one of the chats about the dinner parties. Enjoy.

The marmot obsession is the horrible secret hidden beneath an objectively fascinating person. Everyone keeps believing that if they can just steer the conversation away from marmots, they will finally reach the pirate/vampire/billionaire/duke underneath.

They never do.

John Pembroke is an actual pirate. Not “likes sailing.” A pirate. He has boarded ships, escaped naval patrols, buried things on islands and presumably knows where several bodies are.

So when the hostess says:

“John Pembroke is coming Saturday.”

Everyone is thrilled.

“The John Pembroke?”

“Yes.”

“The pirate?”

“Yes!”

“Oh, you simply must seat me beside him.”

Thirty minutes after dinner begins, the woman who fought for that seat is contemplating whether she can convincingly fake a stroke.

“So, Mr. Pembroke, I simply have to ask—what was it like boarding your first ship?”

“Yarr, remarkably similar to approaching a marmot colony.”

Her smile falters.

“Really?”

“Arr yes. Wind direction be everything.”

“I suppose.”

“You never approach from upwind.”

“The ship?”

“The marmots.”

“Ah.”

“Now, Marmota flaviventris—”

She looks desperately across the table.

Nobody will make eye contact.

That's the joke. Everyone knows there is a vastly more interesting conversation imprisoned somewhere inside this man, but the marmots guard every entrance.

The vampire version is even worse.

Count Smackula is coming.

From Transylvania.

Nobody knows exactly how old he is. He speaks eleven languages. There are rumors that the family has occupied the same castle since the thirteenth century. His complexion is peculiar. He never attends luncheons. Nobody has ever seen him eat.

The entire social circle is beside itself.

At cocktails, a realtor finally gets him alone.

“Count, I've always wanted to visit Transylvania.”

“You should.”

“Oh! What is it like?”

“Mountainous.”

“How beautiful.”

“Excellent marmot habitat.”

Oh no.

“Really?”

“Especially above 1,500 meters.”

“I was actually wondering about the castles—”

“Castles create serious problems.”

“Because of their history?”

“Drainage.”

The realtor's face falls.

“Drainage?”

“For marmots.”

Twenty-eight minutes to go until she can plausibly leave.

The billionaire is perhaps the cruelest version

Because everybody wants to talk to the billionaire for professional reasons.

John Connor has $14 billion.

The local business executive has spent three weeks preparing for this dinner.

He has an idea.

A genuinely excellent idea.

If he can get fifteen minutes with Connor, it could change his company.

He finally corners him beside the fireplace.

“Mr. Connor, I'm fascinated by your approach to capital allocation.”

“Are you?”

“Very much.”

“Then you'll appreciate this.”

Here we go.

Connor pulls out his phone.

The executive leans closer.

It's a photograph of dirt.

“Loam.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

Connor enlarges it.

“Look here.”

The executive looks.

He sees dirt.

“This patch has a clay fraction of nearly twenty-seven percent.”

“Fascinating.”

“The marmots hate it.”

The executive's billion-dollar opportunity is dying before his eyes.

“Now, if you'll notice—”

Connor swipes.

Another photograph of dirt.

The duke creates an especially delicious trap

Because the women are fascinated by him.

His Grace is handsome, unmarried, owns 70,000 acres and lives in a house with 140 rooms.

Every eligible woman in the county wants to meet him.

And he is perfectly charming.

That's important.

He's not socially awkward. He's witty. Attentive. Beautiful manners. Wonderful voice.

For approximately six minutes.

A lovely heiress asks:

“Your estate must be extraordinary.”

“Oh, parts of it are quite beautiful.”

“I've heard the gardens are magnificent.”

“The western gardens particularly.”

“I adore gardens.”

Fatal error.

“So do the marmots.”

Her soul leaves her body.

“The...marmots?”

“Twenty-three at last count.”

“How lovely.”

“Twenty-four originally.”

She realizes with horror that she has just created a follow-up question.

“What happened to the other one?”

His expression becomes grave.

“Gerald.”

There follows a forty-minute account of Gerald's relocation, including a lengthy digression on preferred burrow depth.

By the end, the heiress has mentally married a dentist from Cleveland.

The best part is that the marmoteers never understand why this keeps happening

Because they're enormously popular.

Everybody invites them everywhere.

The invitations never stop.

And therefore the obvious conclusion is:

People find marmots fascinating.

Driving home:

“Lovely people.”

“Very.”

“I had a wonderful conversation with that realtor.”

“What did you discuss?”

“Burrow ventilation.”

“Really? She's interested?”

“Deeply. She kept looking at the clock because she apparently wanted to know how long marmots remain underground.”

Meanwhile the realtor is still at the party:

“I invited them. This is my fault.”

“You couldn't have known.”

“I knew about the marmots.”

“We all knew.”

“I thought it was a hobby.”

Someone pours her another drink.

“So did we.”

That's the essential Marmot Romance running gag: every protagonist possesses something that would make him the most fascinating person at any normal dinner party, and it is completely inaccessible because his brain contains 94% marmot.

The pirate will discuss marmots.

The vampire will discuss marmots.

The billionaire will discuss marmots.

The duke will discuss marmots.

And every ancillary character begins the evening thinking:

Surely I can get him onto another subject.

That optimism lasts about thirty minutes.

Then the fancy soirée quietly transforms into The Poseidon Adventure, with ordinary wealthy people forming desperate little groups and discussing possible routes to safety.

Software Development With AI

 ... is enormously productive, within limits.

Among other things at work, I develop Groovy-coded customizations for a large Jira instance. Jira is the world's top project tracking tool. Groovy is a Java derivative that is used by a Jira plugin called ScriptRunner which allows you to access Jira's API and do anything you want. I don't have a development environment, so I work directly on the live production system. I have hundreds of users, tens of thousands of live tickets and a 10-figure gross budget worth of work riding on the use of Jira.

I joke that working on the live production system while people are using it is like fixing a car as its being driven down the freeway without the driver or passengers knowing. I've been doing it this way for years because my employers don't want to spend the money to get me an apprentice, much less pay for a development system and all that it entails.

C'est la vie. I rather enjoy it.

I have been using AI, read: ChatGPT, for almost as long as it's been around to help me with my coding. Being an old man, I didn't want to learn Groovy. I never learned Java and the whole thing sounded like a lot of work. As a result, I ask AI the same basic syntax and coding questions over and over until I learn by osmosis. I'm a perfectly adequate Groovy developer now.

I don't use AI to do system design. While not a real software professional, I have done enough large scale software design to see the picture of interdependencies in my mind's eye. I don't trust anyone or anything to modify it. An apprentice will change all that, after he gets a year or so of development under his belt.

As a result, AI works at the function level, within a class structure in Groovy. I use it all day every day by feeding it my source code and whatever error I might be seeing. I'd say it has at least doubled my output. Customers are getting features in half the time because of AI and because I don't ask it to do anything large scale that I don't understand, I maintain control over the design.

If I let it run wild and it made a mistake, I could end up with a database mass casualty event. Everyone's week would be ruined and my reputation irreparably harmed.

AI At Catican Bayou

At my river house in Alabama, my backhaul is Starlink. Mostly farm country, Baldwin County's fiber is sparse and data rates to the houses are DSL speeds. That's unsatisfactory for a VRBO. On rainy days, the guests will want to pacify their tiny tots with streamed episodes of Paw Patrol, particularly the ones where the puppy team cooperates with ICE agents and pepper sprays a pack of Democratic Socialists during a protest. A DSL connection would result in toddler tantrums and 1-star reviews.

A look at the river in Alabama as of the writing of this post.

Starlink does fine, giving me about 80-100 MBps throughput. I'm not anticipating hosting an OnlyFans site or downloading NOAA's complete data set, so 80 MBps is plenty. All I need is the ability to stream 1-3 videos simultaneously.

My internal network is a mesh system made up of 3 Netgear Orbi WiFi nodes. I use this at home and the mesh allows me much greater reach than a single WiFi router. I imagine I'm paying a throughput price for this, but it does the most important job, giving me a lot-sized footprint of good 802.11 coverage.

At the river, I installed a Raspberry Pi, affectionately known as Riverpi, to act as my controller. I added it to my small Tailscale network which includes my home Linux server, my laptop and desktop PCs and my phone. If you haven't heard of Tailscale, it allows you to create a VPN between remote systems. It's awesome.

Unlike my Jira installation at work, I allowed AI to write absolutely everything I needed on the Riverpi. I don't bother to read anything it writes. I think it's called vibe coding. I give it loose specs and then it treats me like a child and walks me through what needs to be done. When I encounter errors, I cut and paste the errors into my AI chat session and it works me through the necessary corrections.

As a result, with only a few hours of work, I now have a remotely accessible system that captures images from my ReoLink camera at the end of the boat house, serves up a page of weather data taken from some free Internet source, tells me the status of all the devices on my network by gathering information from my Orbi primary node and hosts a page telling me the status of the Riverpi.

At no time did I bother to understand what it was doing any deeper than absolutely necessary. I had AI walk me through setting up the Riverpi as a drive on my PC and laptop so I can access the files in /var/www/html from File Explorer. I open the sources in Dreamweaver and dutifully paste in whatever inscrutable nonsense AI gives me.

It might be good code. It might be a tangled mess. I don't know and haven't bothered to look. What it does is work.

Assessment

I would never, never do this at work. There is way too much riding on the success of that project. When customers find bugs, I can't trust anyone but myself to fix them. If the design ever got away from me, and right now, there are parts that are at the very limits of my ability to remember all I've done, I'd be cooked.

At the river house, who cares? If the thing blows up because AI told me to CTRL-A delete and I went along with it, I can just wait for my next visit, do a factory reset and start over.

From time to time, I ask AI to teach me this or that in Groovy and it always does a good job. Despite my best efforts, I'm learning the language and enjoying it.

I think that's the sweet spot for AI at work. Have it solve very small, bounded problems on a system you understand down to the nuts and bolts. Ask it to teach you small lessons you need to learn. 

Large-scale vibe coding is for hobby-level work only.

Arday Was Just A Catalyst

 ... or maybe he was an indicator. I'll leave it to you to come up with the right descriptive word.

Dig this. The professor who pursued the Arday story and brought his fraud and fabulism to light, Nathan Cofnas, used to teach at Cambridge, but was hounded out of the university for uncovering Arday's deceptions and the university's willing compliance. From there, he went to Ghent University in Belgium. Ghent is no slouch, ranking as the second best university in Belgium and in the top 100 globally.

Ghent just suspended Cofnas.

Ghent University in Belgium announces it is taking “appropriate action” …against the academic who *exposed* the Arday plagiarism.

The rectors says they attach great importance to academic freedom, but it “may be restricted to protect the rights of others.”

Cofnas is convinced he's about to be fired.

I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me.

The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party.

 Who is Petra De Sutter? Well, he is the Rector of Ghent. He's also convinced he's a woman.

Rector Paul De Sutter, who goes by 'Petra' nowadays (shielding him from criticism), is an insult to science itself.

He hates real scientists and truth. Paul even denies the existence of binary biological sex. When I had a debate with him on national television about transgenderism, he lost badly and tried to get me kicked out of university out of spite.

Paul, leading member of the far-left Green Party, is also extremely incompetent. During his four year tenure as minister responsible for state companies, our two biggest state companies Bpost (postal services) and Proximus (telecom services) lost respectively 80% and 65% of their market value.

Take the claims about the debate by Dries Van Langenhove with a grain of salt until you've seen it for yourself. I haven't and I haven't even looked for it. I found sufficient corroborating evidence to believe "Petra" is indeed a loon who thinks he's a woman.

And so here we are. Jason Arday, a man who was clearly mentally ill, was vaulted into one of the most prestigious positions in one of the greatest universities on Earth by a pack of moral perverts and now supported by an autogynephilic man in a similarly prestigious university, himself holding a position of great consequence after having demolished a pair of large, state-run enterprises.

Matt Walsh's pithy take on the whole thing might be the best summation of what has happened to our top schools.

This Is A Fetish

Dig this.

When Jason Arday was named Cambridge's youngest black professor, the BBC made at least 5 documentaries about him and gave him his own radio series.

This is a fetish. It's gross. I feel like I've been given a view into a guy's bedroom where he likes to dress up in a French maid costume. 

It's not just Cambridge, it's all of them plus the newsmedia.

Arday Or Arday Not?

Apparently, the answer is Arday not.

That's some black humor, dark pun intended, after Jason Arday committed suicide following his public unmasking as a complete fraud and fabulist and his dismissal from Cambridge.

Well of course he did. Anyone listening to him spin his tall tales for even 10 minutes would have seen that he was a mentally ill compulsive liar. What was it, 30 marathons in 35 days, the last 5 on a broken leg? My goodness, any of his stories would have been enough to convince someone with even an ounce of sense that this guy should be seeing a psychiatrist, not the inside of the Cambridge faculty lounge.

And yet, there he was.

Arday was a pitiful person worthy of compassion, not censure. Yes, he had a habit of tarring accusers as racists and took steps to have them face court proceedings any time he was threatened, but what of that? Of course he did. The entire, rotten education, entertainment and news industries filled his head with twaddle about white supremacists and racial justice. The problem was never with Arday, it was always with Cambridge and its ilk.

You can substitute the names "Claudine Gay" and "Harvard" and save for the suicide, the story would be the same.

Our education system is very, very ill.

It was at that moment that Professor Wilson realized that his equations for diversity, affirmation and success gave him an unsolvable set of contradictory inputs.

Bonus Cambridgery

Arday is just the tip of the iceberg. From this X post comes the content below. Cambridge is hiring these people on purpose. 

Extracts from 11 Aug article in Spectator by Andrew Gilligan:

After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University.

We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday.

Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, ‘how education shapes individuals and society.’

Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. 

During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’.

She attacks schools’ ‘attempts to integrate Muslim children’ as seeking to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam… if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.’

Worst of all, ‘religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education’, meaning that ‘Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.’

Science is a problem too, because in the ‘teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam’. And in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together.

Gay? Arday? No Way!

By now, you've probably heard about Cambridge's very own Baron Munchausen, Jason Arday. His meteoric rise through the ranks of academia was originally assumed to be due to his brilliant achievements, but in the end, it was discovered it was due to his possession of one crucial characteristic that all upper-echelon universities crave: he's black.

If you haven't been following the story, it's really simple. He is a pathological liar and fabulist as well as a plagiarist. The leadership at one university after another fell over themselves to recruit and promote him until he ended up the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge.

If you haven't been following the story, it's worth some digging. I'm not kidding about the Baron Munchausen thing. In addition to stealing other peoples' work and taking it for himself, the guy claimed all manner of perfectly preposterous accomplishments including running several ultra-marathons in a single month. The more you read, the more pathetic ... Arday? No, not him ... Cambridge? Yes, that's it ... Cambridge becomes.

You can substitute Claudine Gay from Harvard in here and get the same results. The Daily Wire crew recently did some investigative journalism, something that disqualifies their staff from ever landing jobs at any of our prestigious newspapers, and discovered that Heidi M. Anderson, president of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, was also a massive plagiarist and her tenure as president is shot through with accusations of anti-white racism. She's black, you understand.

Any condemnation of Gay, Arday or Anderson is met with shrill cries of "Racism!" That's the tell.

What the desperate leaders at all of these universities are fighting is not white supremacy, but the very real possibility that the mountains of racial IQ data might be correct. They've tied themselves to the railroad tracks of racial interchangeability, if not white inferiority and now they're trying to keep from being run over by the train labeled "Reality." 

I'm not saying the data is correct or that it isn't the result of cultural forces. I don't really care either way. Genesis 1:27 tells me how to treat each person whether that's a white tweaker sitting next to me at a Waffle House in Arkansas or a black theoretical math student in class with me at UCSD back in the day. Like the evolution debate, I don't have a dog in that fight.

That leaves me free to speculate. If the average IQ for blacks is 90, say, and Harvard accepted only people with an IQ of 130 or above, then given the demographics of the US, you'd expect for the student population (6,700 or so) to have about 200 blacks in it. That's roughly 1 in 33.

Using that as a baseline, you might expect the faculty of the top shelf universities to have the same ratio.

They don't. Not only do they not have that ratio, they're positively obsessed with getting black representation as high as possible.

If the IQ data is true, then the only way to do that would be to hire lots of people like Jason Arday and Claudine Gay and Heidi Anderson, which is what we're seeing.

You can't blame Arday and Co. They're just playing by the rules and rationally taking the opportunities offered to them. It's easy to point the finger at the plagiarists and yarn-spinners, but the moral universe the progressives have created has told them to ignore Commandment 9, the one about bearing false witness, when it comes to finding employment.

Can you blame them for doing what they did?