Monthly Archives: October 2015

The Obama Administration and Racism

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[Ally Financial Inc] agreed to pay borrowers at least $80 million to settle allegations of racial or ethnic discrimination….

This is the settlement that Obama’s CFPB and DoJ browbeat Ally into accepting. There’s a catch, though:

the lender is prohibited by law from collecting data on the race or ethnicity of its borrowers.

But never mind. Obama and his Executive Branch minions cried racism, and so it must exist, regardless of actual data.

Unfortunately, though, Obama isn’t alone in this sorry charade. Ally management shares shame in this tragedy: they cravenly agreed to a penalty for something they didn’t do, or at least the government persecutors had no hope of demonstrating.

Teaching Arithmetic and Common Core

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Teaching arithmetic under Common Core Standards—teaching arithmetic at all—requires the teacher first to understand arithmetic. Teaching any subject requires the teacher first to understand that subject, come to that, but in this article, I’m interested in arithmetic.

Below is an image from a Fox News Insider piece about a third-grader’s math problem: solve the problem “5 x 3 = ?.” The student wrote his answer in pencil; the teacher marked the answer wrong and wrote his version of the correct answer in red.CommonCoreMath_Crop

Of course, anyone with an actual third grade education knows that both versions are correct. What’s the problem here?

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics has this suggestion for teaching a third-grade multiplication problem:

1.  Interpret products of whole numbers, e.g., interpret 5 × 7 as the total number of objects in 5 groups of 7 objects each.

Thus, 5 x 3 might be interpreted as five groups of three objects each, as our student’s teacher has written. Except that by marking the student’s representation of three groups of five objects each as wrong, the teacher has shown he’s interpreting Common Core’s suggestion as a requirement, as the only right way to solve the problem.

The fault here is not in Common Core Standards; those are just setting a performance standard and suggesting a mechanism for achieving it.  No, the failure here is in the shocking arithmetic illiteracy—innumeracy—of this person presuming to “teach” third-graders their numbers.

Snapback

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The nuclear weapons deal President Barack Obama signed with Iran provided for snapback of sanctions on Iran if Iran violated the terms of the agreement. One of those terms was to abide by UN requirements. One of those requirements was to accept the UN’s embargo on arms shipments by or for Iran.

Russia has helped Iran deliver weapons into Syria twice a day over the past 10 days, western intelligence sources tell Fox News.

Those sources say Russian cargo planes transported the weapons. The planes were spotted earlier this month on the tarmac at the Russian air base in Latakia, Syria’s primary port city.

The flights are not registered….

That last puts Russia in violation of the arms embargo, also.

Yet Obama—and his ex-Secretary of State and current Democratic Party Presidential candidate—support the nuclear weapons agreement, and they both trust Russia. What is it, exactly, that has or will be snapped back?

Hmm….

Sovereignty

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Regarding the People’s Republic of China’s attempted seizure of the East, and in particular, the South China Sea and the associated PRC seizure of seabed minerals, below the seabed oil and gas deposits, and surface fishing rights,

The US said it doesn’t take a position on sovereignty over the South China Sea but insists on freedom of navigation and overflight. About 30 percent of global trade passes through the South China Sea, which also has rich fishing grounds and a potential wealth of undersea mineral deposits.

We need to take a position on sovereignty over the South China Sea, exactly for sovereignty, that international trade, those fishing rights, and those minerals and oil and gas deposits.

We say we’re for freedom of the seas, but that begins with recognition of what are international waters and what are not. The South China Sea, and the East China Sea, are international waters, not internal lakes of this or that country.

Various nations’ Exclusive Economic Zones extend far into the Seas. Various nations have far more legitimate territorial claims to a number of the islands in those Seas.

We should be working with those nations—Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, et al.—to help them resolve their disagreements over whose territory those islands are, we should be working with those nations to help them resolve their disputes over Economic Zone overlaps.

Given the PRC’s open lawlessness regarding those waters and those islands, we should be working these dispute resolutions with the explicit exclusion of the PRC in those talks.

Threats and Returns

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Poland, prior to the recently concluded elections, agreed under EU pressure to accept 4,500 Syrian refugees as its quota, even though the Polish people didn’t want that. The Law and Justice Party, a populist political party, was swept into power in those elections (the refugee item actually was a relatively minor factor in the PiS’ (the acronym for the Polish language name of the party) strong mandate), and they have said Poland will accept no refugees from “war-torn countries such as Syria.”

Eurogroup Chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem is objecting.

Dijsselbloem said that Poland should show something in return for Europe’s largesse. “And if not, we could take a part of the EU’s budget that flows to countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in the form of subsidies….”

Here are three things Poland does show in return for Europe’s largesse:

  • a growing economy, which is more than southern European countries are showing
  • respect for national sovereignty, which is more than the Know Betters of Brussels (including the Eurogroup) are showing
  • the courage to stand up to Russian threats and outright aggression, which is more than even the powers of the EU—France and Germany—are showing.