Monthly Archives: May 2026

Excuses

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Here, in higher education, or what passes for higher education. There were two letters in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section with excuses for American pupils in higher education, or even just getting into a higher education institution.

One lamented, using rowing as his example, the dearth of foreign students on his college’s rowing teams compared with today’s dearth of American students on those same teams. The rollover, he wrote, was due colleges actively recruiting winning athletes world wide and how that global recruitment squeezed out those American wannabe athletes, which in turn deprived those American wannabes their college educations. Even with his excuses, he’s on the right track with his concluding questions:

Is it not US universities’ main charter to educate productive citizens? What’s the purpose of collegiate sports in America?

Then there’s the other letter-writer.

When colleges take applications from other countries, the talent pool becomes the world. This affects American teenagers, who are squeezed out of the competition. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point into the most competitive schools in the same way top forehands and serves are no longer an entry point onto the tennis team … It gives us a chance to reflect on what we owe young Americans versus the importance of going for the absolute “best product” on the court or in the classroom.

This one hinted at the source of the problem, but it’s unclear to me that he understood his hinting. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point…. There are two areas of responsibility here. One is with the teachers unions dominating public high schools. Those unions are more interested union perks than they are in doing something about the well-documented years of decline and collapse of their student products as demonstrated by those students’ test scores. These are students who have no business even applying to any college or university: their union teachers have left them totally unprepared for a rigorous college/university education, or even for life in the real world earning their own way in any sort of job.

The other is with those students themselves, and their status consciousness and notorious lack of work ethic. Work hard and get ahead is the American middle class mantra, and it’s a Truth. What’s lacking in too many of today’s high school student population, though, is any understanding of that “work hard” part.

For example, our farmers are complaining about a lack of farm workers to help them get their crops planted and then harvested. Ranchers have spoken of the same lack in handling their cattle ranches, feed lots, and dairy facilities. How many of today’s teenagers spend their summers detasseling corn, picking lettuce, mounting up and herding cattle, shoveling feed or operating the feeders on those feed lots, milking dairy cows or operating the milking machines? And, by the way, earning some college money along the way.

The competition in life for American children has gone global. So what. Those children need to work hard so they can compete globally. And one more thing: today’s parents need to lose their self-focus and work with their children, helping them, encouraging them to work hard enough during the school year and during the summer to be able to compete globally.

Complaining about competition gone global is a loser’s game.

An Additional Reason

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors took notice of President Donald Trump’s (R) waiver of the Jones Act, which mandates sea shipments of goods between American ports be done by American-built, -owned, and -crewed ships. The waiver has been a resounding success during the disruptions of the Iran war and Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. From this, the editors suggested that

if the Trump Administration thinks its waiver is helping oil supply during the Hormuz crisis, why not make that success permanent by repealing the Jones Act?

That’s an excellent suggestion, and it’s bolstered by a much more cogent rationale, as well, peripherally touched on by the editors. The purpose of the Jones Act when it was enacted was to stimulate American shipbuilding. It’s only necessary to observe Trump’s lately effort to push a hard acceleration in building dual use cargo ships to both expand our commercial shipping fleet in competition with the People’s Republic of China’s burgeoning commercial fleets and to facilitate the Navy’s ability to move supplies, equipment, and reinforcements around the world into combat areas. In all those years since this law was passed, there has been zero growth in our shipbuilding capability.

It’s past time to rescind the Jones Act.

He’s Right

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But not in the way he thinks. Joe Calvello, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdami’s Press Secretary, said this:

That does not negate the fact, however, that our tax system is fundamentally broken.

“That” was referring to Ken Griffin, his high-value secondary home in New York City, and his supposed failure to pay a deliberately, cynically undefined “fair share” of taxes. After all, Calvello says that the tax system “rewards extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink….”

“The tax system,” the city’s, the State’s, and the nation’s are, indeed, broken. The fix, though, is not to constantly raise taxes on those Evil Rich like Griffin. The fix is something so inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats, including Mamdani, that they can’t even say the words: lower tax rates on the middle class and poor, and more broadly, restructure the tax system and its taxing targets so that those middle class and poor pay the same low tax rates on the same things as the Evil Rich do.

Pick One, Ace

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D) had this to say on the Supreme Court’s nearly total elimination of racist racial gerrymandering with its Louisiana v Callais ruling:

Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities. And it serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.

Our voting rules can explicitly favor one group of American voters over other groups of American voters, which favoring can come only at the direct expense of those others, explicitly deprecating those voters’ votes as such favoritism does.

Or our voting rules can, finally, recognize that all American voters are just that—American voters—and so entirely equal under law, even voting law.

As Obama said as the Democratic Party’s keynote speaker at its 2004 National Convention,

[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

That includes voters in America.

This sort of duplicity is all too typical of today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

The PRC’s Economic Arsenal

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The People’s Republic of China is stepping up its economic war on us, adding additional weapons to its arsenal. Those weapons include

a blacklist for foreign firms it deems hostile, a law authorizing punishment of any company that helps enforce U.S. sanctions on Chinese targets, a rule ordering Chinese parties to ignore those sanctions outright, and expanded powers for its antitrust regulators to kill cross-border merger deals on national-security grounds.

Two responses come to mind. One is that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s boss and controlling shareholder, should simply ignore the PRC’s order to unwind its acquisition of Manus. Meta should, instead, proceed with what it has already collected via Manus. The unwinding is strictly a matter between Manus and its government masters. To the extent the PRC then takes economic or legal action against Meta, that should finally demonstrate even to Zuckerberg the lack of utility in doing any sort of business within the PRC.

The other response is that all the players should proceed as though the PRC’s threat to sue or its actual suing have no effect. Such suits, occurring as they will within PRC courts, can have no effect outside the PRC’s borders. In the event the PRC then acts against those intermediate businesses with operations inside the PRC, see above.