Author Archives: eehines

Short-Sighted and Narrow-Viewed

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The good editors at The Wall Street Journal opined on the leaked-to-the-press Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. They’ve missed on a couple of their points.

Where the compact goes too far is with its demand that schools freeze tuition for five years….

The editors noted that Mitch Daniels succeeded in this for more than just five years, and they insist that the matter should be left to the schools. The editors missed the simple fact that the matter is still left to the schools: they still can set their own tuition rates; they don’t have to sign the Compact, which is an entirely voluntary thing. They’ll still have access to Federal funding, too; they just won’t get preferential treatment.

…cap the enrollment of international students at 15%.

The editors worried about where that threshold came from, since they couldn’t understand it. The short answer, and the long answer, is Who cares? It’s a cutoff point easily achievable that leaves predictable room for (qualified) American students. As this graph shows, there are plenty of schools that would create that room were they to similarly cap their international enrollment:

The only serious question here is whether international enrollment should be capped at all, not quibbling over limits.

The editors’ rationalization for their beefs are that

Limiting tuition and international students at the same time could leave schools with a budget shortfall.

This would be just silly if the editors hadn’t tacitly accepted the Left’s penchant for spending as sacrosanct. The schools always can reallocate their spending, and they always can reduce their spending to fit the revenues coming in. There’s nothing in the proposed Compact to prevent that exercise in fiscal responsibility.

And this:

Well-intentioned but hard to implement is the compact’s effort to combat grade inflation. The compact demands that schools “commit to grade integrity and the use of defensible standards for whether students are achieving their goals.” Good luck trying to figure that out. Will a fleet of auditors investigate if slackers really deserved an A- in Econ 101?

What, then, is the editors’ solution? Just roll over and give up on solving a difficult problem? Their silence on this speaks volumes. It also demonstrates that their comfort zone is up on the porch, whence they can yap in complete safety.

Mamdani’s Procrustean Education Bed

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The Progressive-Democratic Party’s proudly Socialist candidate for New City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced that he wants to truncate children under the age of 5 years to shorten them to fit his short Education bed.

Zohran Mamdani said late last week he wants to end the gifted and talented program for kindergartners in New York’s public schools. News reports say he’d allow this accelerated instruction only beginning in grade 3, with a campaign spokesman arguing 5-year-olds shouldn’t be “subjected” to a policy that “unfairly separates them right at the beginning of their public school education.”

The only equality that socialists will allow is the equality of outcome, which guarantees equality at the lowest level. They cannot tolerate equality of opportunity, an equality that acknowledges all Americans’ right to achieve their full potential in life, an equality that respects all Americans, including those whose full potential might be less than that of others.

Socialism, instead, demonstrates its contempt for Americans by saying none of us can compete on our own, so government must eliminate competition.

Chicago Police Management Confesses

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When ICE agents last week, in the course of their duties were rammed in their vehicles and then trapped and surrounded by 10 violent protesters’ vehicles—violent not least because ICE agents, in the course of this incident, were forced to shoot an armed woman who was threatening them—called the Chicago PD for assistance, the Chicago PD Chief of Patrol ordered his officers to decline to respond with assistance.

Now that city police management team is responding, sort of. The management team’s statement, released over the weekend:

To clarify misinformation currently circulating, CPD officers did in fact respond to the shooting scene involving federal authorities on Saturday to maintain public safety and traffic control[.]

This is management’s confession of their refusal to let the officers render assistance in that lethally dangerous situation. Management ordered its officers to maintain public safety and control the traffic. Not to affirmatively assist the ICE agents—which would have maximized public safety and flowed traffic much better.

It Isn’t Only False Charges of Violence…

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…that encourage further violence.

The SPLC labeled my organization [Kristen Waggoner’s Alliance Defending Freedoma hate group in 2016, around the time we asked the Supreme Court to hear our case on behalf of Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakeshop. These designations encourage violence: My car window was shot out shortly after I argued Masterpiece Cakeshop before the justices, and we see a spike in death threats whenever we receive fresh mention in the media.
The threats reached a fever pitch after Kirk’s assassination…. On Tuesday, we deliver oral arguments in Chiles v Salazar.… For the first time in our history, there won’t be an accompanying rally outside the court. Security professionals warned us that the threats of violence at an outdoor event were too great.

It’s a grave mistake to not hold the rally because of these threats and the overt murderous actions of others on the Left. Surrendering to threats of violence and actual violence only encourages more violence, not just threats of it, by those of the Left who are bent on destroying—physically, if possible—those of whom they disapprove.

Better to meet the threats head on, have the conspirators, attempted murderers, and the few who succeed tried, convicted, and jailed or executed as the case may be in the first instance. That would mitigate greatly, if not obviate the second and subsequent instances. That’s the only way to obviate the second and subsequent instances.

This is a better answer:

But we won’t be cowed. When our cases in defense of women’s sports are argued at the Supreme Court in January, we expect to be back with the biggest rally yet—this time with the security apparatus needed to defend our speakers.

Hopefully the DC police will be up to the task and—finally—allowed to do their job and arrest the violence inflictors, followed by—hopefully—a vigorous prosecution and conviction, concluded by—hopefully—serious jail sentences.

Physical Fitness vs Technical Prowess

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That’s the dichotomy—the mutually exclusive brace of choices—that many claim our military faces, and too many folks who should know better think the choice should be made in favor of technical prowess. Here’s former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall:

Modern warfare, particularly against a peer competitor, will be much more about skillfully applying cutting-edge technology and managing complex weapon systems under stress than about physical strength. We need the nation’s best brains as much if not far more than we need people who can do push-ups.

It’s good that Kendall is former SecAF. The two are not at all mutually exclusive criteria; on the contrary, they’re strongly synergistic. Physical fitness helps keep the mind clear—or at least less cloudy—under any sort of stress, especially that of combat.

Then, as the barbarian invasion of Ukraine is demonstrating, physical fitness is every bit as important as tech prowess and the use of (rapidly) evolving tech weapons in a war that is both technological and grindingly physical.

Closer to home, our bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been achievable if the bomber, refueler, and escort pilots were not physically fit. Soft, out of shape personnel could not have stood the rigors of 30 hours straight in the air, or the sequence of tankers refueling the bombers and fighters, or the fighter escorts in the emotional and potentially high g-force escort environment.