Category Archives: morality

Racial Discrimination and College Admission

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Racial discrimination—racism—is enthusiastically practiced in a broad number of American colleges and universities, including in particular Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, whose racial discrimination in admission has been hauled before the Supreme Court.

Edward Blum, Founder and President of Students for Fair Admissions, made a sound argument against those two schools’ racism in admissions in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The common element in each lawsuit is the claim that both schools racially gerrymander their freshman classes by illegally raising the bar for certain racial and ethnic groups and lowering the bar for others.

I say the matter is broader than that, though. Racial discrimination everywhere and always is an immoral discrimination. The immorality doesn’t make it illegal, but it should inform Americans considering whether two support these two institutions in any form. It’s also wholly illegal under the 14th Amendment of our Constitution, which states in pertinent part

…nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

UNC is a public institution, and so is plainly bound by our Constitution. Harvard is a private institution, but stands in blatant violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s also plainly a public accommodation within the spirit of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and so still cannot discriminate on the basis of race.

Progressive-Democrat Lies

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These two are especially egregious in this final runup to voting in two weeks.

The first is by Joe Biden, our Progressive-Democrat President:

The most common price of gas in America is $3.39, down from over five dollars when I took office[.]

No, the most common price of gas in America as of the week ending January 25, 2021, the week Biden was inaugurated, was $2.39 [hit the full history XLS link for “U.S. Regular Gasoline Prices*(dollars per gallon)”, and select Data 3 in the resulting spreadsheet]. (Lots of good data on the US Energy Information Administration site.) Biden knows the actual price of gasoline, both then and now.

The second is by Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Progressive-Democrat Governor. In last Tuesday’s debate with Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, Dixon said Whitmer kept Michigan schools closed longer than any other State. Whitmer claimed

That’s just not true…. Kids were out for three months.

Whitmer made that claim even knowing that tens of thousands of Michigan’s students still can’t get in-person/in-school learning in the present school year, which has been in progress for two months.

In fact, Whitmer didn’t even recommend, much less require, schools open for in-person learning until March 2021, a year after she ordered schools closed in March 2020. In March 2021, also,

23% of Michigan schools were fully in person, compared with 47% in Ohio, 54% in Wisconsin, and 76% in Indiana.

Those three surrounding States were reopening, strongly, for in-school learning. Whitmer knew this at the time she made her claim, even as she tried after the debate to weasel-word her answer:

[Whitmer] referred only to her or her Health Department’s orders in making the “three months” statement.

Never mind that she took no overt countervailing action for that subsequent year and more.

A Question

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Pope Francis has renewed an…agreement…between the Vatican and the People’s Republic of China that allows appointment of Catholic Bishops in the PRC, so long as the PRC’s government men approve of the candidates and their appointment. Nominally, the Pope has veto authority over the nominations, but it’s the PRC government men who nominate. Since 2018—when the agreement was signed—there have been six bishops ordained, and 40 dioceses still have no bishop. That’s how well this arrangement is working.

Despite that, the Holy See Press Office had this:

The Vatican Party is committed to continuing a respectful and constructive dialogue with the Chinese Party for a productive implementation of the Accord and further development of bilateral relations, with a view to fostering the mission of the Catholic Church and the good of the Chinese people[.]

Furthermore, Pope Francis views [the agreement] as a necessary compromise to keep Chinese Catholics united. But how is treating Chinese Catholics differently from all other Catholics in any way unifying? How does that continued separation of Chinese Catholics from the Universal Church in any way support either the Church’s mission or the spiritual welfare of ordinary Chinese?

Revisionist History

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Karl Rove, in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, identified a number of Progressive-Democratic Party candidates running for office in the current mid-terms who deny their own words in the nearby past.

Those politicians are Robert Francis O’Rourke, who denies his words favoring defunding—even dismantling—police and police departments; John Fetterman, who calls reminders that he said we could reduce our prison population by a third and not make anyone less safe just lies; Mandela Barnes, who called critiques of his wanting to defund the police just lies; and Raphael Warnock, who called criticisms of his Ebenezer Baptist Church’s attempts to evict tenants who were late on their rent payments due to the straits the Wuhan Virus situation put them into—you guessed it—just lies.

Fetterman’s “memory failure” could well be an outcome of his stroke, which makes his medical fitness for office highly questionable.

O’Rourke, Barnes, and Warnock do not have that excuse. They’re just lying, and with their lies, they’re insulting the intelligence of us average Americans. And by that are unfit for office.

Why We Can’t Trust the CDC

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s primary advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has voted unanimously to recommend routine Wuhan Virus (my term) vaccinations for children via the Vaccines for Children program, which pays for ACIP-recommended vaccines for children in low-income families. This likely will lead to green-lighting schools—especially teachers union-controlled schools—to require the vaccinations as a condition of enrolling.

It doesn’t matter that the vaccines aren’t FDA-approved for children under 12.

It doesn’t matter that children well into junior high age aren’t at risk from the virus beyond—perhaps—getting mildly ill and recovering in a day or two.

It doesn’t matter that the risk from the virus is extremely tiny for any healthy person up through adulthood and into old age.

Here are some hard numbers illustrating the degree of “risk” from the virus, based on work by John Ioannidis, who has routinely studied Wuhan Virus infection fatality rates (IFR) since early in the pandemic:

…median IFRs of 0.0003% for 0-19 years, 0.003% for 20-29 and 0.011% for 30-39, according to the preprint, which has not been peer-reviewed.
The IFR jumps substantially between ages 50-59 (0.129%) and 60-69 (0.501%).

Even that “substantial jump” is from a risk of nearly zero to a level still right next door to zero.

But the CDC takes seriously an advisory panel that insists on vaccination because…”we say so.”

The CDC could walk well down the path back toward trustworthiness if it rejects the ACIP’s recommendation and then gets rid of the ACIP altogether.