#USC Berkeley

[godofglitter]

i need some place to document all the very cool things daily life throws my way so hey i'm back.

Image: Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru's address to a throng of UC Berkeley and USC students, October 1949. Credit: Truman Library

This picture was taken at the historical William Randolph Hearst Greek Theatre, and the stage is the same stage I walked when I graduated this May from Cal. Even after four years amongst Nobel Laureates and inventors and revolutionaries I will never stop being amazed by the true extent of Berkeley's place in history. Go Bears. Jai Hind.

[sheswaynat]

Cal vs USC 🏈

[memecucker]

So people protested on the field of a Berkeley vs USC game and it turns out has nothing to do with Palestine (like many assumed) but is instead was about students protesting to reinstate a Berkeley professor who repeatedly stalked and harassed a UC Davis professor (including leaving graffiti at his mothers house) and it’s just so.. bizarre? Like this professor seems to literally have a cult following like she’s doing the generic “I was hacked” excuse and there’s students that just believe her bc they like her?

In an interview with KQED, del Valle acknowledged some of the behavior described in the investigative reports, including keying Clover’s car, vandalizing the area outside his apartment door, contacting his friends, posting an image of his partner online and leaving messages outside the home of his mother. Those messages included one that said “I raised a psychopath,” according to the university’s investigative reports. She has also acknowledged in the report calling Clover’s office phone line at least ten times within 90 minutes.

Throughout each official investigation, del Valle maintains that her actions were the result of being hacked, and that she was not receiving the support she needed.

“I did write outside his door, ‘Here lives a pervert.’ I did that. And again, I’m not proud,” del Valle said. “If I had the opportunity to do things differently, I would do them differently.”

Del Valle said that she regretted visiting the mother’s home, but disagreed that the message towards Clover’s mother was a threat or that any of her behavior was sexual harassment.

Throughout each official investigation, del Valle maintains that her actions were the result of being hacked, and that she was not receiving the support she needed.

She hasn’t even been fired?!? She is choosing to not accept an 18 month suspension and thus would prefer to be fired?? Literally just don’t stalk, harass and vandalize someone’s stuff?

Del Valle said since the suspension in the fall of 2021, she has not been teaching at UC Berkeley and has been living out of two suitcases because of the uncertainty around her future. She said she could accept an 18-month suspension UC Berkeley offered as a settlement, but has no plans to do so. If she doesn’t accept that outcome, the case could instead be brought before the university’s Privilege and Tenure Committee, and she could lose her tenure and be fired.

“My life is completely destroyed,” del Valle said. “I don’t want UC Berkeley to think that they can do this to a minority woman in order to protect a white, senior professor. It’s not acceptable.”

[mightyflamethrower]

Over 25,000 acres are ablaze in Los Angeles in the Pacific Palisades fire, a veritable living hell.

Some 12,000-plus structures were incinerated. More than 250,000 souls have been evacuated and are in need of shelter.

No one has really taken charge yet. And now even the woke culprits for the catastrophe are blame-gaming each other to determine who was the more incompetent, which in this case translates to the most woke.

No one knows how many have died; all know the number will escalate in the next few days.

The eventual price tag of the ruin will exceed $200-300 billion and outstrip the billions of dollars given to Ukraine.

And there are still some fires that are completely uncontained.

The Los Angeles apocalypse was a multisystem, green-woke collapse—and a disastrous reminder that when Soviet-style, anti-meritocratic ideology permeates all aspects of modern life in California, disaster is inevitable.

First, note that the culprit of the catastrophe is not climate change; it is not Donald Trump. Those are excuses for arrogant incompetency and disdain for the public. And it is not racism or homophobia to fault those who paraded and virtue signaled their tribal identities so extraneous to their actual responsibilities for public safety.

Note that all California statewide officeholders are left-wing. The California left holds supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only 17 percent of California’s huge congressional delegation of 52 seats is Republican. California’s judiciary is the most left-wing in the country. There is not a single Republican on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council.

Add it all up, and the woke socialist state has been eagerly deindustrializing, decivilizing, and retribalizing its way into what is now a veritable peacetime Dresden on the Pacific.

Again, there is no one else to blame, because California is one of those rare states in which Republicans have de facto zero political power. All the state media, the legacy newspapers, the Silicon Valley daily online news sites, the Bay Area-based Apple, Google, and Facebook monopolies, and the local news outlets are parrots of the woke-green mindset.

To the degree that anything still works in California, it predates 2000. The core of the ossified Central Valley Water Project and the California Water Project remain—though they are in need of massive maintenance, like almost all the infrastructure the current generation of politicians inherited and largely ignored.

Now crowded and obsolete highways that were once the nation’s best still function—but barely. And there are a few remnants of sanity in what is left of the pre-woke and once-great universities of Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford, UCLA, and USC, founded by a now despised but far wiser and more competent long-dead generation of visionaries.

The Real ‘Basket of Deplorables’

Los Angeles brags about its new $50 billion budget and trumpets how it expanded “Care First” programs. Indeed, the mayor’s budget claims it created a new “451 positions”—highlighting its investments in “growing the department of youth development.”

It boasts it is adding positions to the “Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department,” “reducing our jail population,” and expanding “voting solutions for all people.” There is not much about fire, policing, or water—apparently now the low priorities that prior sexist, racist, and homophobic generations once worried about.

The role of DEI? Mayor Karen Bass was warned of the current danger of dry hillsides of chaparral buffeted by record-high, 100-mph Santa Ana winds. Her response?

She went junketing a continent away to the inauguration festivities of the president of Ghana—a strange way to prepare for a possible inferno to come. Does Ghana have firefighting expertise to share with Bass? In damage-control mode, Bass flew back only to be confronted at the airport by a now rare honest—and thus foreign—reporter.

He asked her why she cut over $17.6 million from the LA fire service budget—itself just 65% of the city’s homelessness expenditures. (She had planned to cut millions of dollars more). And why, he asked, was she in Africa at all in her city’s hour of need?

Bass stood mute—shamed into silence.

I think Los Angelenos needed no answer since it was obvious to them: she went to Ghana because she could and wanted to—since identity chauvinism is what ensured she was elected, reelected, and immune from criticism. Look at her appointments and budget, and it is clear public safety, fires, and water are most certainly not her priorities.

Bass was confident that if LA went up in smoke as she pursued her African agendas, the woke megaphones would silence critics as “racist” or “homophobic” or “sexist” in the way Soviet commissars used to send to Siberia any “ideological enemies of the state” who complained that the farms, industries, and trains of Russia no longer worked. And on spec, we now hear it is now racist to criticize a black woman incompetent mayor.

How about the Bass-appointed DEI “deputy mayor for safety,” Brian Williams?

Surely, he stepped up in the mayor’s absence, given his purview of the city’s “safety?” Nope.

You see, he is currently under suspension for suspicion of phoning in a bomb threat to Los Angeles City Hall.

Well, how about the DEI- and the much-acclaimed “first Latina” director of Los Angeles’s vast waterworks? Bass recruited such talent by nearly doubling the job’s normal salary to $750,000 per year.

What did she accomplish on her over $2,000-a-day salary? Did Janisse Quiñones, “the new Chief Executive Officer and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) and the “first Latina woman to lead the organization,” leap into action?

Well, the water very quickly ran out in Pacific Palisades, and the hydrants went dry—as many had been for months prior.

Quiñones claimed that “three million gallons” in tanks above the suburb were mysteriously not up to the task of quenching the LA Dresden. You think?

She apparently gauges disaster preparation by the number of gallons of water available in tanks, not the number of gallons needed to save thousands of homes and lives. And she forgot to tell the public that in fact there is a 117-million-gallon water reservoir atop Pacific Palisades built for some purpose unknown to her.

Yet it was empty and “under repair” for months because of a mere damaged cover. Consider that: a dry autumn, the onset of the usual Santa Ana winds, a recent plague of hilltop wildfires, and Quiñones shuts down the linchpin of a prior generation’s plan to save the Palisades.

Note Quiñones was supposed to be the professional replacement for a retired director of water and power, who himself had been a replacement for another director who was found guilty of bribery and is currently in federal prison.

So goes the agency created by water wizard William Mulholland, who once created the 18-million-person Los Angeles megapolis by tapping every river and reservoir he could to feed the city’s unquenchable thirst for water.

How about fire chief Kristen Crowley? She now blames the mayor for dry hydrants. But in doing so, she pleaded that her job starts only after water flows out of them—as if their inert condition is not really her concern.

The self-celebrity, nonbinary fire chief Kristen Crowley has talked nonstop for the last two years about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and the “LGBTQ community.” Less was said about the need to ensure the most meritocratic force possible, unmatched equipment, and long preplanned measures to prevent conflagrations—and screaming to high heaven that fire hydrants were either being stolen or bone dry.

Instead, like Bass, Crowley was mostly mute about the lack of preparation or the absence of sufficient warning to those about to be engulfed.

How about her deputy Kristine Lawson, who claimed people in need want to see fire officers arrive who look like they do? And if they don’t?

She is also on record with this: “Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out.” Consider that helpful LAFD logic: So, if you are a man who suffers cardiac arrest and collapses on your kitchen floor, it is your fault that you died without medical attention, not Kristine’s, who apparently either would not or could not carry you out the door.

How about morally bankrupt politicians?

The speaker of the California Assembly, Robert Rivas, along with Governor Gavin Newsom, had just called a special session of the legislature to “Trump-proof” California. He wished to allot millions of dollars in state funds—in a year of massive deficits—to sue and impede the federal government.

Will Rivas’s Trump “resistance” session include canceling California’s simultaneous request for hundreds of billions of federal dollars for Los Angeles from the Trump administration? When asked whether it was wise to borrow millions to sue Trump while Los Angeles was burning, Rivas mumbled, stuttered, and revealed himself to be little more than a caricature of an incompetent.

Governor Gavin “Nero” Newsom made his usual performance art, virtual-signaling appearance. When asked why the hydrants were dry, he batted it off as a “local problem.” He now uses his own campaign website, linked to Democratic fundraising efforts, to warn the fire-struck public about supposed “misinformation.”

But what could Newsom do or say? His entire tenure is synonymous with too many catastrophic forest fires and too little water.

He did nothing after the catastrophic Aspen and Paradise fires to revive the timber industry to glean and clean the forests. He never allowed much new grazing on fuel-rich hills or sent crews in to cut back the chaparral.

He never reconsidered his policies of diverting precious snowmelt from the Sacramento River tributaries to flow into the sea to help the delta smelt rather than to ensure that farmers could irrigate their crops or that Los Angeles County reservoirs were fully banked.

Despite an approved 2014 $7.5 billion bond to build three huge dams and reservoirs, Newsom ensured that we built none: not the easily constructed Sites reservoir, not Temperance Flat, and not Los Banos Grandes, all tertiary foothill reservoirs that could have given California by now nearly five million additional acre-feet of storage.

Or is it worse than that?

Governor Dam-Buster still brags about how he greenlit blowing up four dams on the Klamath River—the largest dam removal in American history. The dams provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power, farmers with irrigation water, and the public with recreation and flood control.

Instead of following the voters’ bond to build reservoirs and dams, Newsom preferred to dynamite them. The ensuing muddy deluge wiped out the surrounding riparian ecosystem.

Joe Biden, now in the last days of his disastrous tenure, was in the LA area by chance to boast that he had put thousands of valuable federal square miles off limits.

Instead, he mumbled about his new great-grandson and relief that his kid’s house was saved, as the fire was engulfing 12,000 homes of others. Then Biden unceremoniously left, heartbroken that his last junket to Italy might have to be canceled as Los Angeles continued to burn. Later he too grumbled about “misinformation,” which is his synonym for telling the truth about the Los Angeles green woke bomb.

Kamala Harris? Was the vice president perhaps marshaling federal money and assets to stop the fires in her last weeks in office? After all, we remember from her 2024 campaign Harris’s frenzied efforts to help out during national disasters, as she scolded the capable Florida governor Ron DeSantis that he was not partnering enough with her to mitigate the effects of flooding.

She too proved invisible other than remarking the fire was “apocalyptic.” Instead, Harris was too busy planning a multimillion-dollar junket in her last week in office and of free royal travel.

Insurance? Is there some plan to rebuild these suburbs as they were, to ensure there are some $300 billion to pay out claims? Well, no again. The state is broke and is driving out insurance companies, not enticing them in. Its public “Fair” unfair insurance plan of last resort is underfunded and will go insolvent once a week or two of claims flows in.

California’s failure to effectively prevent and put out fires—along with hyper-regulation and failure to combat an epidemic of insurance fraud—has destroyed the state’s insurance industry. Given the prior inability of homeowners to buy credible fire insurance at any cost, there are thousands of now-homeless who had no insurance at all.

How about the region’s large homeless population that camps out on the streets and in the tinderbox chaparral above the suburbs? Did the city investigate arson or detain, arrest, charge, and jail those rounded up with incendiary devices or seen lighting fires? Of course not. They vetoed any notion long ago of an anti-camping ordinance.

Collective Suicide

Add it all up. The California nihilist green ethos and the left-wing politicians who run the madhouse ensured there is no effort to glean the forests and hills of combustible fuel.

There is not enough water for hydrants, not enough to deliver to Los Angeles, and when it arrives, there is too much incompetence to know how to use it.

There were no real warnings to residents that they had mere minutes to flee for their lives. Or was it worse still? As the fires wore on, continuous false alarms of new fires sparked unnecessary and dangerous mass evacuations citywide, destroying what, if any, trust was left in the fire department.

There is no reason to believe that such derelict politicians during the next fire will not again be AWOL on DEI junkets, boasting of their genders, their race, and their sexual orientation, but not of their duties to those whose lives they are sworn to protect.

The final tragic irony?

California’s DEI “humanism” and Green New Deal environmentalism ensured the cruelest imaginable treatment of thousands of people and unrivaled destruction of the natural ecosystem.

No one in the government dares to guess about what might have caused the fires, even as they cry “climate change”—as if to do so would expose their own incompetency or confirm rumors of sporadic homeless arsonists.

The California green utopians, by their very ideological zealotry, ensured their fires likely will have released into the atmosphere several weeks’ worth of the entire state’s collective auto emissions.

The fires will have wiped out thousands of protected flora and fauna, will have released toxic fumes into the air, and will have destroyed the lives of thousands of Los Angeles residents for years to come.

To paraphrase a 1960s California left-wing slogan—green-woke is not healthy for children and other living things.

[bearterritory]

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) Kayla Williams scored 21 points and California handed No. 19 Alabama its first loss 69-65 in the ACC/SEC Challenge on Thursday night.   Ionna Krimili, who had 19 points, made three free throws in the last half minute to seal the win for the Golden Bears (8-1), who never led by more than six, when Krimili made two free throws with 26.6 seconds to play.   Christabel Ezumah then made 1 of 2 from the line for Alabama, making it 68-63 with 19.1 seconds left but Krimili, who came in 25 of 28 from the line for the season, missed two free throws. Zaay Green scored inside for the Tide before Krimili missed her third straight free throw before icing the game with six seconds remaining.   Marta Suarez added 16 points and six assists for Cal, which picked up its fourth win against a 2024 NCAA Tournament team and the highest-ranked win since beating #13 Arizona on March 1, 2020. The win is also the first against a ranked opponent since the Bears defeated #15 USC on Feb. 15, 2023 and gives Cal its best start to a season under head coach Charmin Smith.   Green led Alabama (9-1) with 28 points, Essence Cody added 13 and Karly Weathers had 12.   Cal was up 14-13 at the end of the first quarter but a 15-2 run put Alabama on top late in the second. Cody scored six points and Green had five. But the Bears scored the next eight points and trailed 32-25 at the half. Green and Cody both had 13 points.

Alabama was up 41-36 after Sarah Ashlee Baker's three-point play almost three minutes into the third quarter but then the Golden Bears reeled off 11 straight. Krimili had a 3-pointer to tie it and Suárez followed with a 3 for the lead. Williams scored the last seven points of the quarter for Cal for a 54-50 lead heading into the fourth quarter. With the Bears up by four with 1:32 left in the game, Jayda Noble made a key block to hold the Tide off.   "This is a huge win for our program and what we have been fighting for," Smith said. "To have this opportunity in the SEC/ACC Challenge means a lot. It was a great game for Marta on both ends of the floor. And then Kayla making plays, hitting dagger threes and responding. These guys didn't hang their heads and they responded. That's the true sign of winners."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Students are massed peacefully on campus, making politically charged demands on university presidents. The police are summoned, leading to mass arrests and even to violence — and to the collapse of confidence in the administration. You may see the punchline coming: This picture isn’t drawn from USC and Columbia University of the present day, but Berkeley in 1964. The lessons should be obvious. Bringing police onto a college campus on the pretext of preserving or restoring “order” invariably makes things worse. It’s almost always inspired not by conditions on campus, but by partisan pressure on university administrators to act. Often it results in the ouster of the university presidents who condoned the police incursions, and sometimes even in the departure of the politicians whose fingerprints were on the orders. In other words, nobody wins. Perhaps in recognition of the astonishing ignorance of college administrators of their own responsibilities, the American Civil Liberties Union last week issued a succinct guide on how to fulfill their “legal obligations to combat discrimination and ... maintain order” without sacrificing the “principles of academic freedom and free speech that are core to the educational mission.” [...] The ACLU cautions that “inviting armed police into a campus protest environment, even a volatile one, can create unacceptable risks for all students and staff.” Its statement points to the history of excessive force wielded by law enforcement units against “communities of color, including Black, Brown, and immigrant students.... Arresting peaceful protestors is also likely to escalate, not calm, the tensions on campus — as events of the past week have made abundantly clear.” [...] The history of campus protests suggests that they generally appear more threatening and disruptive on the spot than they prove to be over time. Strong, “decisive” responses almost always backfire. [...] They don’t care a hoot about the “safety” of students, or about the rise of antisemitism nationally, or about hurtful rhetoric emanating from the tent colonies on campus, which they claim to be their concerns. Instead, they’re trying to exploit what appears to be a violent situation to pursue their larger campaign to demonize higher education — in fact, education generally — by softening it up for the imposition of right-wing, reactionary ideologies.

Michael Hiltzik at Los Angeles Times on the nationwide suppression of protests against Israel's genocide campaign on Gaza on college campuses by calling the cops to break them up (04.29.2024).

Michael Hiltzik's Los Angeles Times editorial on the campus protests against the Gaza Genocide is spot-on.

This quote is right-on: "Bringing police onto a college campus on the pretext of preserving or restoring “order” invariably makes things worse. It’s almost always inspired not by conditions on campus, but by partisan pressure on university administrators to act."

[homo-sex-shoe-whale]

Shut up you dumb whore, we have no respect for you at all, you're just a dumb cunt that sells nudes, why would we respect you ? Tell me why we should respect you when you clearly have no respect for yourself. If you put yourself out there you better be ready for the backlash.

I don’t sell nudes. I’ve never taken a single nude picture of myself. But even if I did, there’s nothing wrong with selling nudes. Sex workers are people too, and they deserve respect. If you like porn, respect the people who make it for you.

I’m not dumb. I’m a chemistry student at UCLA. I got scholarships to USC and UC Berkeley. I have many bad qualities (see: conceited, stubborn, argumentative, impatient, jealous, apathetic, sadistic, etc etc) but dumb just isn’t one of them. If you’re going to insult me, at least pick an accurate insult?

I do respect myself. I respect myself a lot. In fact, I think of myself almost as a goddess. I think I’m worthy of being worshipped. I’m one of the most self-obsessed people I know. I’m so self-absorbed that when I have manic episodes some people don’t even notice the difference.

Y’all are free to insult me as much as you want, but at least throw insults that are TRUE.

[max--phillips]

Anyway I just saw a post saying that the protests here in the US are “taking away attention” from what’s actually happening in Gaza and “LARPing oppression” as if 1) the whole point of the protests is to put attention on Gaza and call for a ceasefire and 1.5) shows they’re exclusively getting their news from mainstream cable networks and 2) it’s not the fuckin media’s own fault they’re more interested in covering protests than the actual genocide, and 3) the students are somehow not facing oppression ???????

For one, what’s the solution here? Tell these students who feel very strongly (and rightfully so!) about this issue to just give up and go home? Who exactly does that benefit? Oh, right, the universities who are benefiting from this genocide, as well as the federal government. Good plan.

For two, I realize that the university at the center of this is an Ivy League school, and that the students who are there are privileged in many ways. However, that does not change the fact they are facing violence from the university and from police. That does not change the fact many of these students are Palestinian, Jewish, or other minorities. Beyond that, Columbia is not the only school where protests are happening. Emerson, USC, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Cal Poly Humboldt, NYU, Vanderbilt, Brown, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, Emory, Indiana University, Purdue, George Washington University, UCLA, Northeastern, Ohio State, UT Austin, Arizona State, Washington University St Louis, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, University of Georgia Athens, Sonoma State, San Francisco State, Sacramento State, University of Washington, Virginia Tech, Princeton, University of Minnesota, UConn, USC, University of Illinois, University of Utah, McGill, Portland State, UNC Chapel Hill, Tulane, University of Florida Gainesville, University of Colorado Denver, Case Western Reserve, City College of New York, Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland College Park, Barnard College, Pomona College, DePaul, Georgetown, University of Delaware, University of Arizona, University of New Mexico, University of Wisconsin, Virginia Commonwealth University, Oberlin, UC San Diego, University of San Diego, and I’m sure many others have or are currently participating in protests. Many of these schools are not elite universities only the best of the best (or the most money) get in. For crying out loud, my ass got into Indiana University.

That begs another question as well. Yes, these students at Ivy League schools have privilege. How else would you prefer they use it? When one has privilege, it is imperative to utilize it for the benefit of those one has privilege over.

Anyway. Free Palestine. Defund the police.

“Taking away attention from what’s actually going on” this is like saying the university protests against the Vietnam War were taking away attention from what’s actually going on in Vietnam. (Which I’m realizing now was probably an actual talking point at the time, but sounds ridiculous now.)

[royal-confessions]

“If Ingrid Alexandra goes to US for university, I can see her going to UC Berkeley, like her father, or the other UCs and maybe USC, just cause she loves to surf. But I think Columbia and Brown are the universities I see her going to the most, based solely on my perception of her personality LOL.” - Submitted by Anonymous

[edwordsmyth]

Columbia, Yale, NYU, USC, UC Berkeley, MIT, Emerson, Tufts, The New School, Vanderbilt, UNC - Chapel Hill, UMich, Swarthmore, UMD, Cal Poly Humboldt, UMN - Twin Cities, Harvard, GWU, CUNY, Emory, UPenn, OSU, Princeton, IU Bloomington, Cornell, Northwestern, WashU, Brown, UCLA, FSU, CCNY, FIT, MSU, Rochester, UD, UNC - Charlotte, Rice, Pitt…

[beardedmrbean]

Before this column ends, we’ll get to the unmissable fact that anti-Israel, often antisemitic, protests are proliferating at what we amusingly choose to call our most “selective” universities—Columbia, Yale, New York University, Stanford, Berkeley. For the moment, add these North Face tent protests on $75,000-a-year campus quads to the sense among the American public that their country is running off the rails.

A list of the phenomena laying us low includes: wokeness, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), defund the police (a depressing subset of wokeness), conspiracy theories, head-in-the-sand isolationism and a self-centered political polarization typified—from left to right—by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.

Ironically this time of year is associated with hope, amid spring and college graduations—except at the University of Southern California, which, fearing trouble, canceled its commencement speakers and told honorary-degree recipients not to show up.

Setting silenced USC aside, a hopeful note one hears at college commencements is that the American system is self-correcting, that despite recurrent stress, it always rights itself. Opinion polls suggest few believe this anymore but—happy spring—it looks as if we may be on the brink of a real counter-revolt against the craziness.

Last week in the hopelessly gridlocked House, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson, facing threats to his job from the chaos caucus, cast his lot with the enough-is-enough caucus. The House passed bills to sustain allies in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Congress isn’t dead—yet.

Blue states and cities that looked willing to collapse rather than defend their citizens have begun to push back against progressives’ pro-criminal and antipolice movements.

At the urging of Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York’s just-passed state budget includes measures to crack down on shoplifting. Assaulting a retail worker will be a felony. Larceny charges can be based on the total goods stolen from different stores. Progressives in the state’s Legislature opposed the measures. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, elected in January on restoring law and order (yes, it can be a Democratic issue), last week announced a plan to support policing in the most crime- and drug-plagued neighborhoods.

March seemed to be a tipping point. The hyperprogressive Council of the District of Columbia, in a city that had become an embarrassing carjacking hellhole, passed an array of anticrime measures. Oregon’s Legislature voted to reverse the state’s catastrophic three-year experiment with drug decriminalization. San Francisco voters approved two measures proposed by, of all people, Mayor London Breed, to ease restrictions on policing and require drug screening for welfare recipients. The results in Los Angeles County’s primary for district attorney strongly suggest progressive George Gascón will be voted out in November.

In all these places, the reversals by elected officials are driven by the prospect of voters’ turning them out of office. That is the U.S. political system trying to right itself.

In California, a safety coalition has collected about 900,000 signatures to reverse parts of Proposition 47, the state’s now-notorious 2014 decision to reduce some theft felonies to misdemeanors. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared sympathetic to overturning a Ninth Circuit decision that bars cities and towns from enforcing vagrancy laws. Though the case emerged from Grants Pass, Ore., which is trying to ban homeless encampments, about three dozen elected officials and organizations in California filed briefs arguing that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling made cleaning up the streets almost impossible.

News stories since the start of the year have noted that many private companies are rethinking policies on DEI, partly under legal pressure, such as the Supreme Court’s decision last year to strike down the use of race in college admissions.

Some in the corporate DEI movement thought they were immune to restraints. No longer. Companies are rediscovering that the constituency most needing inclusion is their customers. The loudest shot across the bow came last week, when Google fired 28 employees after some staged sit-in protests at its New York and California offices over a contract with Israel’s government. Google’s firing statement describes “completely unacceptable behavior.” No one saw that coming.

All this adds up to a nascent counter-revolt against America’s lurch toward self-destruction. The exception is elite U.S. universities. Their leadership has seen itself as answerable to no one and politically immune.

Robert Kraft, a Columbia grad and owner of the New England Patriots, said this week he will no longer give the school money “until corrective action is taken.”

If big donors ever regain control of these so-called selective schools, a suggestion: Firing the president won’t close the barn door. Instead, fire the admissions office. What a tragedy to think how many serious high-school students were rejected by Columbia, Yale and NYU, edged out by nonuseful idiots whose chosen major is the political structure of re-education camps.

Someone has to be a lagging indicator, and these schools are it.

Non-paywall link

[eopederson2]

RIP Pacific 12!

Upper photo Sather Tower, University of California, Berkeley taken in 1969; lower entrance to Red Square with statue of George Washington, University of Washington, Seattle, 2016.

While I am not a sports fan, having strong personal (Washington, Cal and UCLA) and familial (WSU where my great-grandmother was one of the first graduates, my sister and her husband both graduated, and my niece earned her Ph.D.) ties to four of the schools in the conference, I am saddened to learn that the Pacific 12 has effectively disbanded. It was "the conference of champions," and far western intraregional competition, especially between the PNW and California, was a source of local pride and affiliation. The Rose Bowl was the culmination with the best team from the Pac 12 (earlier Pac 8) playing the best of the Big 10 resulting in matches like Washington against Michigan. When the Pac 12 won it was the highlight of the sports year. Of course in those years Seattle and Portland had no pro teams, and the pay rates for college coaches were much lower.

With UCLA, USC, Washington and Oregon joining the Big 10, that conference will extend coast to coast and include a large fraction of the big money college athletic programs. It includes a mixed bag of programs ranging from ones virtually always in the top positions in revenue sports to others of somewhat dubious prospects (as examples Rutgers or Northwestern). Whatever the cash value, there is likely to be little regional enthusiasm, at either end, for match ups like Oregon vs Maryland.

Academically the enlarged league is a mixed bag with second-rate state universities like Maryland and Rutgers against some of the best in the country. Left behind in the rump of the PAC 12 are two of the best universities in the country, Cal and Leland Stanford Junior University.

Among Marx's projections was the devolution of all human activity into realms of money and finance under the logic of monopoly capitalism. Tradition, sentiment and regional affiliation give way to cash as the value of everything becomes something measured only in money. The demise of the Pac 12 and the expansion of the more financially dominant Big 10 illustrates that perfectly.

[lboogie1906]

Miki Turner (January 3, 1958) is a professor and photojournalist and the first regularly featured African American female sports columnist at a major metropolitan daily newspaper, the Oakland Tribune.

She grew up in Wyoming, Ohio where her family was among the first residents. She is the daughter of William and Dorothy Turner. She has three brothers. She participated in the band and drama department. As a child, she was very interested in art, photography, music, movies, television, and cooking. She attended Hampton University, majoring in Mass Media Arts. She hosted the popular radio show Miki’s Mellow Minutes and was president of Women in Communications, Inc., intramural athletics and photographer for the school yearbook. She was Miss Girls Athletic Association; and Miss Women in Communication. She received her MCG from USC, her BA from Hampton, her MS in Photojournalism from Boston University, and was a Maynard Institute for Journalism Education fellow at UC Berkeley.

Her journalism career began as an intern at The Kentucky Enquirer. She accepted a position as public relations director for the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association. She covered pro and college teams for the Orange County Register. She covered entertainment for several outlets including Satellite Orbit/Satellite Direct, TV Online, The Ft. Worth-Star Telegram, Essence, Ebony, and JET. She has worked for ESPN.com and as a producer at ESPN Hollywood. She is an associate professor of professional practice at USC and the curator of a Lee Crum photography collection.

Journey To The Woman I’ve Come To Love, her first book.

She has won many awards including the USC Black Alumni Association Barbara Solomon Staff & Faculty Award; National Association of Black Journalists Educator of the Year; USC Mentoring Award; BBehind the Lens award from Black Women Film Network; Florence Biennale Award (photography); Woman of Excellence, Wiley College; Hampton University Alumni Legacy Award; NABJ award; DAISY from the Girl Scouts; Kodak International Newspaper Snapshot Award.

She is a member of the TV Critics Association. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #alphakappaalpha

[mightyflamethrower]

Firebombing on the Pacific

Over 25,000 acres are ablaze in Los Angeles in the Pacific Palisades fire, a veritable living hell.

Some 12,000-plus structures were incinerated. More than 250,000 souls have been evacuated and are in need of shelter.

No one has really taken charge yet. And now even the woke culprits for the catastrophe are blame-gaming each other to determine who was the more incompetent, which in this case translates to the most woke.

No one knows how many have died; all know the number will escalate in the next few days.

The eventual price tag of the ruin will exceed $200-300 billion and outstrip the billions of dollars given to Ukraine.

And there are still some fires that are completely uncontained.

The Los Angeles apocalypse was a multisystem, green-woke collapse—and a disastrous reminder that when Soviet-style, anti-meritocratic ideology permeates all aspects of modern life in California, disaster is inevitable.

First, note that the culprit of the catastrophe is not climate change; it is not Donald Trump. Those are excuses for arrogant incompetency and disdain for the public. And it is not racism or homophobia to fault those who paraded and virtue signaled their tribal identities so extraneous to their actual responsibilities for public safety.

Note that all California statewide officeholders are left-wing. The California left holds supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only 17 percent of California’s huge congressional delegation of 52 seats is Republican. California’s judiciary is the most left-wing in the country. There is not a single Republican on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council.

Add it all up, and the woke socialist state has been eagerly deindustrializing, decivilizing, and retribalizing its way into what is now a veritable peacetime Dresden on the Pacific.

Again, there is no one else to blame, because California is one of those rare states in which Republicans have de facto zero political power. All the state media, the legacy newspapers, the Silicon Valley daily online news sites, the Bay Area-based Apple, Google, and Facebook monopolies, and the local news outlets are parrots of the woke-green mindset.

To the degree that anything still works in California, it predates 2000. The core of the ossified Central Valley Water Project and the California Water Project remain—though they are in need of massive maintenance, like almost all the infrastructure the current generation of politicians inherited and largely ignored.

Now crowded and obsolete highways that were once the nation’s best still function—but barely. And there are a few remnants of sanity in what is left of the pre-woke and once-great universities of Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford, UCLA, and USC, founded by a now despised but far wiser and more competent long-dead generation of visionaries.

The Real ‘Basket of Deplorables’

Los Angeles brags about its new $50 billion budget and trumpets how it expanded “Care First” programs. Indeed, the mayor’s budget claims it created a new “451 positions”—highlighting its investments in “growing the department of youth development.”

It boasts it is adding positions to the “Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department,” “reducing our jail population,” and expanding “voting solutions for all people.” There is not much about fire, policing, or water—apparently now the low priorities that prior sexist, racist, and homophobic generations once worried about.

The role of DEI? Mayor Karen Bass was warned of the current danger of dry hillsides of chaparral buffeted by record-high, 100-mph Santa Ana winds. Her response?

She went junketing a continent away to the inauguration festivities of the president of Ghana—a strange way to prepare for a possible inferno to come. Does Ghana have firefighting expertise to share with Bass? In damage-control mode, Bass flew back only to be confronted at the airport by a now rare honest—and thus foreign—reporter.

He asked her why she cut over $17.6 million from the LA fire service budget—itself just 65% of the city’s homelessness expenditures. (She had planned to cut millions of dollars more). And why, he asked, was she in Africa at all in her city’s hour of need?

Bass stood mute—shamed into silence.

I think Los Angelenos needed no answer since it was obvious to them: she went to Ghana because she could and wanted to—since identity chauvinism is what ensured she was elected, reelected, and immune from criticism. Look at her appointments and budget, and it is clear public safety, fires, and water are most certainly not her priorities.

Bass was confident that if LA went up in smoke as she pursued her African agendas, the woke megaphones would silence critics as “racist” or “homophobic” or “sexist” in the way Soviet commissars used to send to Siberia any “ideological enemies of the state” who complained that the farms, industries, and trains of Russia no longer worked. And on spec, we now hear it is now racist to criticize a black woman incompetent mayor.

How about the Bass-appointed DEI “deputy mayor for safety,” Brian Williams?

Surely, he stepped up in the mayor’s absence, given his purview of the city’s “safety?” Nope.

You see, he is currently under suspension for suspicion of phoning in a bomb threat to Los Angeles City Hall.

Well, how about the DEI- and the much-acclaimed “first Latina” director of Los Angeles’s vast waterworks? Bass recruited such talent by nearly doubling the job’s normal salary to $750,000 per year.

What did she accomplish on her over $2,000-a-day salary? Did Janisse Quiñones, “the new Chief Executive Officer and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) and the “first Latina woman to lead the organization,” leap into action?

Well, the water very quickly ran out in Pacific Palisades, and the hydrants went dry—as many had been for months prior.

Quiñones claimed that “three million gallons” in tanks above the suburb were mysteriously not up to the task of quenching the LA Dresden. You think?

She apparently gauges disaster preparation by the number of gallons of water available in tanks, not the number of gallons needed to save thousands of homes and lives. And she forgot to tell the public that in fact there is a 117-million-gallon water reservoir atop Pacific Palisades built for some purpose unknown to her.

Yet it was empty and “under repair” for months because of a mere damaged cover. Consider that: a dry autumn, the onset of the usual Santa Ana winds, a recent plague of hilltop wildfires, and Quiñones shuts down the linchpin of a prior generation’s plan to save the Palisades.

Note Quiñones was supposed to be the professional replacement for a retired director of water and power, who himself had been a replacement for another director who was found guilty of bribery and is currently in federal prison.

So goes the agency created by water wizard William Mulholland, who once created the 18-million-person Los Angeles megapolis by tapping every river and reservoir he could to feed the city’s unquenchable thirst for water.

How about fire chief Kristen Crowley? She now blames the mayor for dry hydrants. But in doing so, she pleaded that her job starts only after water flows out of them—as if their inert condition is not really her concern.

The self-celebrity, nonbinary fire chief Kristen Crowley has talked nonstop for the last two years about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and the “LGBTQ community.” Less was said about the need to ensure the most meritocratic force possible, unmatched equipment, and long preplanned measures to prevent conflagrations—and screaming to high heaven that fire hydrants were either being stolen or bone dry.

Instead, like Bass, Crowley was mostly mute about the lack of preparation or the absence of sufficient warning to those about to be engulfed.

How about her deputy Kristine Lawson, who claimed people in need want to see fire officers arrive who look like they do? And if they don’t?

She is also on record with this: “Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out.” Consider that helpful LAFD logic: So, if you are a man who suffers cardiac arrest and collapses on your kitchen floor, it is your fault that you died without medical attention, not Kristine’s, who apparently either would not or could not carry you out the door.

How about morally bankrupt politicians?

The speaker of the California Assembly, Robert Rivas, along with Governor Gavin Newsom, had just called a special session of the legislature to “Trump-proof” California. He wished to allot millions of dollars in state funds—in a year of massive deficits—to sue and impede the federal government.

Will Rivas’s Trump “resistance” session include canceling California’s simultaneous request for hundreds of billions of federal dollars for Los Angeles from the Trump administration? When asked whether it was wise to borrow millions to sue Trump while Los Angeles was burning, Rivas mumbled, stuttered, and revealed himself to be little more than a caricature of an incompetent.

Governor Gavin “Nero” Newsom made his usual performance art, virtual-signaling appearance. When asked why the hydrants were dry, he batted it off as a “local problem.” He now uses his own campaign website, linked to Democratic fundraising efforts, to warn the fire-struck public about supposed “misinformation.”

But what could Newsom do or say? His entire tenure is synonymous with too many catastrophic forest fires and too little water.

He did nothing after the catastrophic Aspen and Paradise fires to revive the timber industry to glean and clean the forests. He never allowed much new grazing on fuel-rich hills or sent crews in to cut back the chaparral.

He never reconsidered his policies of diverting precious snowmelt from the Sacramento River tributaries to flow into the sea to help the delta smelt rather than to ensure that farmers could irrigate their crops or that Los Angeles County reservoirs were fully banked.

Despite an approved 2014 $7.5 billion bond to build three huge dams and reservoirs, Newsom ensured that we built none: not the easily constructed Sites reservoir, not Temperance Flat, and not Los Banos Grandes, all tertiary foothill reservoirs that could have given California by now nearly five million additional acre-feet of storage.

Or is it worse than that?

Governor Dam-Buster still brags about how he greenlit blowing up four dams on the Klamath River—the largest dam removal in American history. The dams provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power, farmers with irrigation water, and the public with recreation and flood control.

Instead of following the voters’ bond to build reservoirs and dams, Newsom preferred to dynamite them. The ensuing muddy deluge wiped out the surrounding riparian ecosystem.

Joe Biden, now in the last days of his disastrous tenure, was in the LA area by chance to boast that he had put thousands of valuable federal square miles off limits.

Instead, he mumbled about his new great-grandson and relief that his kid’s house was saved, as the fire was engulfing 12,000 homes of others. Then Biden unceremoniously left, heartbroken that his last junket to Italy might have to be canceled as Los Angeles continued to burn. Later he too grumbled about “misinformation,” which is his synonym for telling the truth about the Los Angeles green woke bomb.

Kamala Harris? Was the vice president perhaps marshaling federal money and assets to stop the fires in her last weeks in office? After all, we remember from her 2024 campaign Harris’s frenzied efforts to help out during national disasters, as she scolded the capable Florida governor Ron DeSantis that he was not partnering enough with her to mitigate the effects of flooding.

She too proved invisible other than remarking the fire was “apocalyptic.” Instead, Harris was too busy planning a multimillion-dollar junket in her last week in office and of free royal travel.

Insurance? Is there some plan to rebuild these suburbs as they were, to ensure there are some $300 billion to pay out claims? Well, no again. The state is broke and is driving out insurance companies, not enticing them in. Its public “Fair” unfair insurance plan of last resort is underfunded and will go insolvent once a week or two of claims flows in.

California’s failure to effectively prevent and put out fires—along with hyper-regulation and failure to combat an epidemic of insurance fraud—has destroyed the state’s insurance industry. Given the prior inability of homeowners to buy credible fire insurance at any cost, there are thousands of now-homeless who had no insurance at all.

How about the region’s large homeless population that camps out on the streets and in the tinderbox chaparral above the suburbs? Did the city investigate arson or detain, arrest, charge, and jail those rounded up with incendiary devices or seen lighting fires? Of course not. They vetoed any notion long ago of an anti-camping ordinance.

Collective Suicide

Add it all up. The California nihilist green ethos and the left-wing politicians who run the madhouse ensured there is no effort to glean the forests and hills of combustible fuel.

There is not enough water for hydrants, not enough to deliver to Los Angeles, and when it arrives, there is too much incompetence to know how to use it.

There were no real warnings to residents that they had mere minutes to flee for their lives. Or was it worse still? As the fires wore on, continuous false alarms of new fires sparked unnecessary and dangerous mass evacuations citywide, destroying what, if any, trust was left in the fire department.

There is no reason to believe that such derelict politicians during the next fire will not again be AWOL on DEI junkets, boasting of their genders, their race, and their sexual orientation, but not of their duties to those whose lives they are sworn to protect.

The final tragic irony?

California’s DEI “humanism” and Green New Deal environmentalism ensured the cruelest imaginable treatment of thousands of people and unrivaled destruction of the natural ecosystem.

No one in the government dares to guess about what might have caused the fires, even as they cry “climate change”—as if to do so would expose their own incompetency or confirm rumors of sporadic homeless arsonists.

The California green utopians, by their very ideological zealotry, ensured their fires likely will have released into the atmosphere several weeks’ worth of the entire state’s collective auto emissions.

The fires will have wiped out thousands of protected flora and fauna, will have released toxic fumes into the air, and will have destroyed the lives of thousands of Los Angeles residents for years to come.

To paraphrase a 1960s California left-wing slogan—green-woke is not healthy for children and other living things.

[bearterritory]

#10 Cal Ousts #8 UCLA

Golden Bears Reach Pac-12 Final

OJAI – The 10th-ranked California women's tennis team overcame some adversity to defeat eighth-ranked UCLA 4-2 in Friday's Pac-12 Championship semifinal round, with Jessica Alsola clinching the victory over the conference's regular-season champion at Weil Tennis Academy. By eliminating the top seed, the Golden Bears (18-5) advanced to the final to play the winner of the Stanford - USC semifinal. UCLA (18-5) exits from the Pac-12 tournament, which they had been favored to win. Friday's semifinal was a rematch of a regular-season clash between the Bears and Bruins in which Cal prevailed 4-3 in Berkeley. Since then, UCLA went on to claim the Pac-12 Championship's top seed, while Cal, dealing with multiple injuries on the team and dropping three out of their last four matches, had slipped to fourth in the Pac-12. Cal trailed 1-0 after doubles, with UCLA clinching the point when Ahmani Guichard and Sasha Vagramaov edged Berta Passola Folch and Katja Wiersholm, 7-6(3), on court three. The Bears faced another challenge when the 44th-ranked Wiersholm – who clinched the regular-season win over the Bruins – became unavailable for singles.

But Cal didn't back down from having to win four times in singles to beat UCLA. The Bears won four of six first sets including on court one, at which the 52nd-ranked Valentina Ivanov topped the 25th-ranked Kimmi Hance 6-0, 6-2 to momentarily tie the match 1-1. The tie was short lived as Cal's 41st-ranked Hannah Viller Moeller fell to the 35th-ranked Tian Fangran 6-1, 6-1 on court one, giving UCLA a 2-1 advantage. Two of the younger Bears then stepped up, with sophomore Berta Passola Folch – who moved into the singles lineup with Wiersholm absent – topping Ahmani Guichard 6-3, 6-2 to knot the match at 2-2. Freshman Mao Mushika gave Cal a 3-2 lead when she beat Elise Wagle 6-4, 6-3.

The last two matches were both three-setters, and Alsola and Lan Mi each had chances to clinch the win for Cal. Ultimately Alsola triumphed first over Fernandez 3-6, 6-4, 6-2 to book Cal's spot in the final.

"It was a really good team victory just like yesterday," said Cal head coach Amanda Augustus, referencing Cal's 5-0 win over Arizona State in the Pac-12 quarterfinals. "We have trust in all of the players on the team, and everybody is committed to our goals. We're excited for the opportunity to play in the final. I'm especially proud today because doubles didn't go as we'd hoped. But everyone dug in on their courts in singles, and the Bears supported each other very well. We knew UCLA would compete very hard, and we rose to the occasion. "I'm excited this group will play in Libbey Park in the final Pac-12 championship match as we know it. We still have more to go in the postseason, but they've earned the right to play in this final." Added Alsola, "It doesn't matter who we play. We'll be just as ready tomorrow as we have been the past two days. We're just really excited and honored to play in the last final of the Pac-12 tournament." The final is slated for 2 p.m. PT on Saturday at Libbey Park, with the Pac-12 Network airing the match. Pac-12 Championship – Semifinal Round [4] No. 10 California (18-5) defeats [1] No. 8 UCLA (18-5), 4-2 April 26, 2024, in Ojai, Calif. Weil Tennis Academy

Doubles 1. No. 14 Tian Fangran/Elise Wagle (UCLA) vs. No. 18 Hannah Viller Moeller/Mao Mushika (Cal), 6-5 UNF 2. No. 50 Kimmi Hance/Anne-Christine Lutkemeyer (UCLA) def. No. 56 Jessica Alsola/Valentina Ivanov (Cal), 6-3 3. Ahmani Guichard/Sasha Vagramaov (UCLA) def. Berta Passola Folch/Katja Wiersholm (Cal), 7-6(3)*

Order of finish: 2, 3 *Clinched the doubles point for UCLA Singles 1. No. 35 Tian Fangran (UCLA) def. No. 41 Hannah Viller Moeller (Cal), 6-1, 6-1 2. No. 52 Valentina Ivanov (Cal) def. No. 25 Kimmi Hance (UCLA), 6-0, 6-2 3. No. 82 Jessica Alsola (Cal) def. No. 65 Bianca Fernandez (UCLA), 3-6, 6-4, 6-2 4. Mao Mushika (Cal) def. Elise Wagle (UCLA), 6-4, 6-3 5. Lan Mi (Cal) vs. Anne-Christine Lutkemeyer (UCLA), 6-2, 0-6, 5-5 UNF 6. Berta Passola Folch (Cal) def. Ahmani Guichard (UCLA), 6-3, 6-2 Order of finish: 2, 1, 6, 4, 3^ ^Clinched Cal's overall win

[soileddovesandotheradventurers]

The Morning After

Mandy woke just after six, she tried rolling over, but needed to pee badly, so she got up. After peeing and showering, she made coffee, checked her phone and texted her bestie to confirm breakfast at nine-thirty.

Sitting on her bed she took the money from her purse and counted it again, before folding one bill and putting it in her wallet. She feared using one hundred dollar bills as walking around money would draw too much attention, so she decided to use one for groceries, load a couple on to a debit card and deposit the rest in the bank.

Her Thursday was busy, besides breakfast and grocery shopping, she had a piano lesson to give in Tribeca and then come back for a guitar student at a studio on campus. After that she had a standing Thursday night gig at a piano bar on the upper west side.

Megan, her girlfriend was waiting for her when she arrived at the café. They hugged and found a sidewalk table and exchanged a few minutes of small talk, till her friend mischievously said, "I want to hear about last night, everything, and I do me everything," drawing out the everything for effect.

Mandy blushed, looked around and in a soft voice told of the events of the previous evening. What she wore, showing up at the King Cole Bar, Kevin standing her up, barking at Richard and how she decided she would fuck him before he asked. Leaving out the money discussion, she gave Megan a word for word rendition of the proposition, which both women giggled over. More in allusion than detail, Mandy described the sex and the events in his suite. "Is he married," Megan asked with a raised eyebrow. Mandy nodded affirmatively and Megan, said "Oh you slut," with a smile on her face, "a man your father's age and married."

Then, being serious, Megan asked if she would see him again. Mandy paused before answering looking out into the street and then lowering her eyes to avoid Megan's gaze, she whispered, "yes, I plan to if he calls."

On her way back to the apartment, Mandy stopped for a few groceries, some bread, fruits and vegetables, along with a chicken breast. After putting it away she noted the time and knew she needed to hurry if she was going to be on time for her lesson.

Her gig at the piano bar went well, the bar was crowed and a bit rowdy with a larger than normal crowd hanging around the piano and joining her in song. Tip wise, she had a good night taking home just over three hundred dollars, to which she added a Benjamin from her lingerie drawer.

During the subway ride home, alone with her thoughts, Mandy began ruminating about her financial situation. While in school, her parents had been paying her rent, but this summer Mandy decided to stay in NYC rather than go home to Philadelphia, as her parents expected/demanded and they refused to pay her rent for the summer. Mandy paid the rent, nearly twelve thousand dollars for the summer session, adding it to her student loan. But now they were threatening not to pay her rent during her final two semesters. If that were the case, she could own nearly two hundred, thousand dollars after graduation.

Since she was twelve, Mandy had been engaged in a intermittent rebellion with her parents who were very conservative and religious. They believed that daughters should live at home till they are married and that the parents should have a large say in choosing the husband. Unlike her sister, who simply nodded, said yes mom and dad and then did as she pleased. Mandy would argue and fight with them before doing as she pleased. Of course the rebellion had them watching her like a hawk and she got caught for more often than her sister.

Mostly she lost, not scoring a victory till it came time to choose a college. Her parents demanded that she choose a school in Philadelphia and live at home, her sister having chosen Penn. Mandy said no, she was going to either USC, Berkeley or Stanford. They told that they'd refuse to pay for it and Mandy said fine, then she wouldn't go to college, but would get a job after high school and move out. They relented, asking only that she choose a school in the northeast, which is how she ended up at NYU.

Home again, Mandy doffed her dress and bra, putting on long tee-shirt and after filling a tumbler with gin and tonic, she went up on the roof of her building and watched the city's lights.

Yes, she'd continue to see Richard as long as he was interested, hopefully, he consider keeping her as a mistress. If that ended she'd seek a different sugar daddy or even escort. Her gigging and teaching was enough for her expenses, except for housing and tuition, she knew she needed another, larger source of income. She thought of her Aunt Esme, now a successful and respected business woman that survived financially during her post college years, as a gentleman's companion, which is how she decribed herself. If Esme could do it, Mandy told herself that she could as well.