Monthly Archives: May 2016

Institutional Racism

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Now our public schools are actively teaching racism to our children.

…administrators at Raoul Wallenberg High School decided last September to forgo the democratic process in student elections and appoint members of the freshman class to most of the seats on the student council.  The freshman president and all student leaders for other grade levels were still elected.

Part of the reasoning behind the change was to “encourage more diversity in our student leadership,” according to Principal Cheryl Foster, who responded to questions from the San Francisco Examiner through a district spokesperson.

Because, like all voters in the eyes of the Left, these students are just too grindingly stupid to know what they must do, and so their Know Betters (at least one of whom was either too afraid, or too contemptuous, of the press to respond directly) must choose for them.

But these worthies gave their game away.

…school officials tried to court her [Christina Martinez] son, James Ortiz, 15, onto the student council because of his surname.

And

Assistant Principal Zaia Vera reportedly told Martinez she wanted Ortiz in office because it would make the student government look more diverse.  Asian girls were the predominant candidates for student office in recent years.

“She said to me, ‘Mrs Martinez, you could understand as a fellow Latina what we’re looking for here,” Martinez, who is not Latina, recalled.  “‘We only have Asian girls run for office and we want the Wallenberg website to show not only Asian girls.'”

Asian girls are the epitome of evil, you see.  But that’s not all of it.  Of course, Vera knew Martinez and her son were not Hispanic; like any competent high school official, Vera knew her students and their parents.  This is just Vera’s and Foster’s stinking racism.

Their racism is doubly damaging: not only does it deny others a fair shot—they’re explicitly held back in this case solely on the basis of their race—or perceived race—it tells the favored minority—Hispanics in the present case—that they’re inherently inferior, with no hope of success without such precious coddling.

If the district officials had any integrity, they would fire Foster and Vera for cause.

Ballistic Missile Defense—Who Needs It?

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No one, according to George Friedman in Geopolitical Futures.  The US has installed and brought on line a ballistic missile defense system site in Romania, but Friedman evidently misunderstands the purpose and the need.

The system is designed to block one or a few (the precise number is likely unknown) missiles targeted toward a large area.  This would be ineffective against Russia, should it wish to launch a nuclear strike against Europe, because the system would be easily saturated by a relatively small number of missiles….

Maybe yes, maybe no.  Russia has already threatened Poland with nuclear attack, and it has already attacked the Baltics with cyber weapons—a useful prelude to a nuclear strike.  It wouldn’t take many missiles to destroy those nations, and even fewer to crush them into surrender.  A BMD system enormously complicates such an attack.

The problem with this is that it is unclear why a country with relatively few missiles would launch a strike at all, and totally unclear why their target would be Europe.

This is his biggest misunderstanding.  He can’t posit a rational reason for a country launching a nuclear strike against a nuclear power, therefor there cannot be a rational reason.  But he’s mistakenly applying his logic system—a typically Western logic system—to an enemy nuclear capable nation that doesn’t subscribe to our rules of logic.

It is always posited that the current enemy doesn’t value human life as we do.  Thus, Iran and North Korea might launch attacks.  Kim Jong Un is clearly enjoying playing God too much to spoil that.  In Iran, the sheer corruption is comforting.  People who love accumulating money are rarely suicidal. The madman theory doesn’t work.

Actually, Iran’s leadership does value human life—they just value the end game differently than we do: the path to Heaven is through martyrdom in this life, and what greater martyrdom than to die for Allah?  Iran’s sheer corruption is at a level below the mullahs.  The mullahs are the ones who will make the decision to strike, not any of those alleged corrupt persons.

Baby Kim does like playing God.  What better way to do that than to visit god-like death and destruction on his enemies?  It may be that he hasn’t yet because he hasn’t yet reliable enough delivery means.

A nuclear attack would be terrible, and however unlikely, it is a threat that must be negated.  …  [However] Ballistic missile defense addresses an apocalypse for which even great novelists could not imagine a convincing origin.  …  The money spent on BMD should have been spent on far more probable threats.

Because gun-free zones are so useful in defending against those with guns.  And there’s that need, again, for a specifically Western rationale for a nuclear attack.

His madman theory is a straw man, offered out of lack of understanding of the new reality.  Friedman may be willing to bet millions of lives on his version of rationality.  I’m glad of the BMD installation; we need to spend the bucks to install more such sites around the world.

Divide and Conquer is Conquering

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Davao City is a major city on the southern island of the Philippines; indeed, it’s on the far side of the Philippines away from the South China Sea.  The mayor of that city, Rodrigo Duterte who’s running for President of the Republic of the Philippines, thinks it’s appropriate to

talk with Beijing and is open to discussing joint exploration of resources in the South China Sea.

It doesn’t matter to him that this plays directly into the PRC’s goal of occupying the Sea, both by military force and by one-on-one “discussions” with the nations rimming the Sea—each one of which is smaller than a province in the PRC, and each one of whose navy is no match for the Chinese navy—even the flotillas currently occupying the Spratly and Paracel Island groups.

Duterte showed his true colors in a campaign speech ahead of this week’s election, though:

[He] pledged to ride a jet-ski to plant a Philippine flag on a disputed atoll now controlled by Beijing.

A publicity stunt for stroking his ego and pumping his election chances.  Never mind the damage done to the Philippines’ interests in the South China Sea.

Divide and conquer has many paths.

Wealth Redistribution

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Now it’s threatening to spread to our education institutions.

Lawmakers have a new solution for the high cost of college: make the wealthiest universities pay for it.

Of course.  Because competition among colleges to bring down costs, or reducing Federal funding for them under [pick an excuse] programs to reduce the non-student population money available to drive up costs just can’t be done.  Too many special interests would be perturbed by such a thing.

Elite US schools have grown richer since the 2008 financial crisis by investing their endowment money in everything from California vineyards to Chinese startups.  State and federal policy makers now want to tax those profits….

Gotta punish that success.  How dare these institutions accrue moneys without a government’s faretheewell?

…or force the wealthiest schools to spend down their endowments—to defray soaring student bills and refill depleted higher-education budgets.

Which governments could do easily by not sending so much taxpayer dollars to these schools.  But…special interests.

Interestingly, Republicans are in on this move.

Congressman Tom Reed (R, NY)…floated a plan late last year that would require endowments bigger than $1 billion to pay out a quarter of their earnings in grants to working-class families or face steep penalties or even the loss of their tax-exempt status.

It isn’t Government’s place to tell these schools—or any other institution—how to spend its money.  It is Government’s place to not send taxpayer dollars to these schools—or to any other institution.

No wonder Conservatives are so angrified.

Sovereign Choices

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Holger Schmieding, London’s Berenberg Bank Chief Economist, is dismayed that the UK might quit the EU.  The subtitle of his op-ed piece in the WSJ fully sums up his concern:

Rules from Brussels can border on the absurd, but what hurts the UK most are the policies its own politicians enact.

It also demonstrates how badly he misses the point of the movement to leave the EU.  It’s certainly true that Parliament is fully capable of enacting, and it often does enact, utterly foolish policies.  But at least they’d be sovereignly done, and not forced on them by a remote, extra-national quasi-government.