Monthly Archives: September 2025

Ya Think?

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The Just the News headline says it:

UN-backed Gaza City famine determination may be flawed by reliance on incomplete data

This fleshing out:

While the world is bombarded with heart-wrenching images—many of them fake or staged—of starving children, a review of the data shows that the IPC appears to have relied on incomplete survey results for the month of July to make its claim [of famine].

It also turns out that the UN’s IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) used carefully selected “sample” data from Gaza with which to manufacture its claim.

The IPC relied on a sample of 7,519 subjects in the Gaza Governorate to calculate the malnutrition rates.

However:

Nutrition Cluster published the full health data from the Gaza Governorate in July, which showed a sample size of 15,749 subjects.

This dishonesty was exacerbated by the intrinsically dishonest press’ bruiting about those inaccurate, incomplete, and openly falsified “data” as though they were factual and told the whole story.

Israel and its IDF is fighting a three-front war, not just the terrorists in Gaza.

Correct Move

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A DoJ paralegal flipped off a National Guard soldier while the paralegal was enroute to her office work. Then she bragged about it to a DoJ security guard on her way into the building. When word got to Attorney General Pam Bondi, her response was prompt and direct. Bondi’s memo to the paralegal said, in part:

Based on your inappropriate conduct towards National Guard service members, your employment with the Department of Justice is hereby terminated, and you are removed from federal service effective immediately[.]

This has two correct moves in the same sentence. The first is the prompt termination of the misbehaving paralegal. The second is especially important: the paralegal is not going to be reassigned somewhere else in the Federal government; she’s barred from Federal employment altogether.

The woman might have gotten away with her reprehensible behavior, even though she would have deserved to be fired, had she not bragged about it. The lack of judgment she showed by bragging about her misbehavior, though, conclusively demonstrates she’s unfit for Federal employment regardless of any specific act of misbehavior.

Bondi’s memo can be read here.

What is their Value, Really?

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What is their Value, Really?

In a Sunday Wall Street Journal article on universities’ penchant for investing their endowments in private equity (as opposed to instruments bought and sold on public exchanges, these are bought and sold in private deals between the university and one or another private (i.e., not traded on an exchange) entity, or rarely a private deal to which a publicly traded entity might also agree.

A few exceptionally talented, or lucky, endowment managers seemingly did very well in this environment. Yale’s late David Swensen got an annualized return of 13% over the course of his management.

But how valuable are those investments, really? The WSJ‘s subheadline reads

Universities and other institutions have built up large private-equity holdings, but they are now lagging behind the S&P 500 and aren’t easy to shed

And this:

And much of what those funds earned for their investors in that time was on paper; endowments and other institutions were getting less and less cash that they could put to work in the booming stock market.

And this [emphasis added]:

…making it hard for managers to get the prices they want for the companies in their portfolios. Meanwhile, institutions have struggled to find investments that hedge against stocks and private equity without further eroding returns—and the problem has gotten worse with the stock market’s latest rally.

The value of any investment is what someone is willing to pay to get it. The initial value of those private equity investments in these endowments is what the endowment managers paid to get the private entity or a piece of it. Now they’re moving to sell some/most/all of these privately held pieces, but there are few to no buyers at those initial prices or anywhere near those prices.

This is Yale’s continued position:

Yale said in a statement that it remains committed to its private-markets strategy. “We trust that sophisticated investors, especially our partners who know us best, understand this,” the school said.

That sounds like the typical arrogance of Know Betters.

What is, in the end, the true value of those privately held pieces? It’s still whatever a buyer is willing to pay for them. And that calls into question two things: an accurate valuation of those entities and the wisdom of relying so heavily on non-publicly traded entities for endowment investments.

Former Yale endowment private-equity manager Tim Sullivan:

One of the reasons we hire these guys is because they know when’s the right time to sell an asset[.]

The problem here is that a potential buyer won’t necessarily agree that it’s the right time to buy that asset.

It’s tough to grow, or even just to maintain the value of, an endowment based on phantom valuations of its holdings.

When You Don’t Know the Difference between Man and Woman

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Be loud and proud about it. Minnesota Progressive-Democratic Party Senator Amy Klobuchar referred to the Minneapolis Annunciation Catholic School mass shooter as “he” in her remarks about the event. On this, Klobuchar was entirely correct.

Court records show [the shooter] legally changed names from Robert to Robin in 2019. A court form, filled by a person believed to be the shooter’s mother, Mary Grace Westman, said, “Minor child [redacted] identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”

That’s not stopping NPR from pushing its ignorance at the top of its lungs. NPR host Ailsa Chang:

And just a point of clarification, Senator Klobuchar referenced the shooter as “he.” Although police have identified a suspect, it’s still unclear at this time what that person’s gender is or how they identify.

The shooter is male because that’s how he started life, and that’s how his genetics identify him. Choosing to self-identify otherwise changes nothing about his biology; it affects only his chosen life style.

A side note, too, since Chang apparently has forgotten her grade school American English grammar lessons. There’s only one shooter in the present case. The grammatically correct pronoun here is not the plural “they,” but the singular “he.”

There’s a reason NPR is losing its Federal funding.

The Core of the Progressive-Democratic Party

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It’s moving ever closer to Party’s grass roots. The face of that core is Progressive-Democratic Party New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his parallel membership in Democratic Socialists of America. DSA’s core position is

“dismantle and move beyond” America’s capitalist society and create a “wholesale socialist transformation of our national and global economy.”

DSA’s platform is specific, too, including such nakedly socialist things as these:

  • city-run grocery stores
  • free bus rides
  • increased public funding for hormone therapy and surgery for transgender people
  • rent freeze, not just rent control
  • ending “all misdemeanor offenses”

It’s not just Mamdani, either. The Progressive-Democratic Party selected its own socialist candidate for mayor of Minneapolis, Omar Fateh, who is a carbon copy of Mamdani. It’s true enough that Party then unendorsed (leaving him on the ballot) Fateh, but only on a technicality regarding their convention nominating process and only in response to some opprobrium. But here, Party spoke their truth in selecting Fateh and now only is covering its political behind.

In the end, the two, these most public two, are simply concretizing prior Party commitments: then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s brag just prior to his first election that he was just “days away from fundamentally transforming” our nation, and then-Progressive-Democratic Party President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address saying that he intended to “fundamentally change” our nation’s economy.

This is Party initially acting at the national level and now trying to move down into our cities.