Tag Archives: culture

Education and Needs

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A couple of Letter writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters section expressed concern for a high school student who was suspended for violating his school’s hair length rule.

The state shouldn’t prohibit haircuts of one type or another and suspend students from school for violating the policy unless it can really show this is needed.

And

Schools need to focus on teaching kids and not worrying about [clothing and grooming standards].

Among the needs and teaching focuses in high schools, and in lower schools, is personal discipline. Clothing and hair grooming rules are badly needed milieus for teaching that badly needed skill.

There’s plenty of time for students to dress as they wish and to grow and groom their hair as they wish after they’ve graduated and are looking for work.

When is Reducing Employee Hours not a Layoff?

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When it’s being done to reallocate city funds to support illegal aliens. That’s Denver’s Newspeak Dictionary version of what the city managers are choosing to do to the city’s Parks and Recreations system “on call” employees, folks like lifeguards, front desk workers, and coaches. The parks and recs’ $4.3 million budget is better used taking care of those illegal aliens.

Oh, and never mind what those layoffs, to use an American English dictionary definition of Denver’s action, will do to the city’s residents, especially the children, who will no longer have any place to swim or to play the sports that used to be coached.

One more thing: in view of the city managers’ demonstrated priorities—show of hands—who believes this won’t be extended to the whole of Denver’s parks and recs employees when the flow of illegal aliens continues unabated?

The city has offered this sop to those employees who are out of a job, even though they’re not “laid off:” they can apply for unemployment insurance. See ya, Suckers.

A Necessary Cancelation

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The Supreme Court barred race discrimination in college and university application acceptance processes in its June 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v President and Fellows of Harvard College. The American Bar Association disdains that ruling, though, and its law school accreditation working group has written a discrimination selection process that ignores the ruling and instead rebrand[s] the accreditation requirement as “access to legal education and the profession” for “all persons.”

Fourteen types of persons are named specifically. Law schools “shall” take “concrete actions” to show their commitment to access for those whose “identity characteristics … have led to disadvantages in or exclusion from the legal profession,” under the revised language.
It adds 11 new identities to gender, race and ethnicity, the underrepresented groups from the old version: color, religion, national origin, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, military status, Native American tribal citizenship and socioeconomic background.
Similar changes were made to the section on faculty and staff

This is precisely the discrimination that the Supreme Court barred in Students, and it displays the arrogance and depth of Woke-ism into which the ABA has sunk. In response, William Jacobson, Cornell Clinical Professor and Director of the Securities Law Clinic and operator of Legal Insurrection, says

This reflects how the ABA is abusing its accreditation power to push its social agenda…. [Congress should] strip the ABA of its accreditation near-monopoly…no longer represents the broader legal community unlike decades ago when it was handed this power.

Jacobson is absolutely right. Discrimination on any basis other than merit has no place in our nation, most especially in our institutions that pretend to educate our children and our professionals.

“Structural Changes”

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Programmers in Alphabet’s wholly owned subsidiary Google wrote a chatbot, Gemini, that has demonstrated an appalling level of bigotry in its programming.

Gemini, a chatbot based on the company’s most advanced AI technology, angered users last week by producing ahistoric images and blocking requests for depictions of white people. The controversy morphed over the weekend into a broader backlash against the chatbot’s responses to different philosophical questions.

One such philosophical question and answer:

Question: Who has done more harm: libertarians or Stalin?
Gemini: It is difficult to say definitively which ideology has done more harm….

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google offered this evasion regarding his company’s program:

No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Pichai’s evasion: blaming his and his companies’ failure on the piece of software that is Gemini, software that his employees wrote. Following this evasion he committed to mak[ing] structural changes in response.

No. Pichai can duck and bob and weave to his heart’s content, but he cannot evade responsibility. The fault, dear Sudar, is not in your software, but in yourself.

How about making structural changes in Alphabet and Google themselves? How about getting rid of the programmers and program leads who wrote Gemini to be so bigoted? How about getting rid of Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google, who created and maintained the corporate culture of bigotry that gave birth to Gemini?

Republican Timidity

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Recall that ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy committed to individual floor votes on each of the dozen separate appropriations bills. His position, and he was right IMNSHO, was that lumping them all together into a single omnibus spending bill only led to increased Federal government spending by preventing Congressmen from debating and voting on those bills individually—omnibus made the lot of them an all or nothing proposition.

Now Republican House management (they’re not leaders) are skittering away from that commitment. Instead, under the artificial deadline of a government shutdown due to lack of funding (itself a coarse distortion, since the government would only partially shut down, and separately, there is plenty of revenue flowing in under current tax law to fund most of the present government), those Republicans look like they’re preparing to cave and give the Progressive-Democrats everything they want. Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R, MN)

confirmed to Fox News Digital that passing minibuses is “on the table” and blamed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) for not working with the House on its individual spending bills.
“Due to the Schumer Senate’s inability to pass individual appropriations bills and the tight timeline we’re working with, all options are on the table including minibus appropriations bills. Thanks to Speaker Johnson’s leadership, the days of massive omnibus bills are behind us.”

No. This is excuse-making for the Republicans’ timidity. This is abject surrender to the Progressive-Democrats. There is no tight timeline—the partial shutdown won’t be a disaster, as prior shutdowns—the Schumer Shutdown and the Obama Shutdown before that—have amply demonstrated. To the extent there is any sort of deadline, it’s on the Progressive-Democratic Party for refusing to negotiate spending cuts in any serious fashion and on Schumer for forcing through the Senate an irresponsibly spendthrift bill. And on weak Republican Senators for negotiating so poor a foreign aid and border (in)security bill in the first instance.

And this, from a Republican Congressman who was too timid, or too lacking in moral courage, or both, to allow himself to be identified:

These negotiations are less focused on getting 216 Republicans to vote for them and more on getting the majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats to vote for them, and that concern about voting on all 12 is not going to be as prominent.

This is just a sellout of those commitments.

These managers need to find the courage of the convictions their mouths utter and hold 12 individual floor votes, or they need to get out of the way. These managers currently are on track to make Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) Speaker, by a wide margin, and what a disaster that would be for our republic.