Category Archives: Affirmative Action

Sycophants’ Supper, 2015 & Cecily Weak

Affirmative Action, Celebrity, Ethics, Journalism, Media

The nitworks have been all guffaws and genuflection in anticipation of their correspondent’ participation in what I call the “Sycophant’s Supper.” Other than to reproduce my annual post distilling the essence of the event, I’m pleased to report that “the un-watchful dogs of the media” have at last begun to ask whether they indeed have any business frolicking with the president and his minions. Here’s how the dolled up twits at CNN are parsing their craven, journalistic co-optation, annually, at the event, and all year round:

Should the press party with those they cover?

Something along those lines.

Barely A Blog’s annual Sycophant’s Supper post reminds our readers of the following:

Almost all—your favorite opinionators, too—attend the annual Sycophant’s Supper, where they cozy up to Kim Kardashian and Beyoncé Knowles. (Kudos to the few, such as former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, who’ve excoriated the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or who’ve refused to attend, irrespective of the political affiliation of the man ensconced in the White House.)

The annual White House Sycophants’ Dinner is where the most pretentious people in the country—in politics, journalism and entertainment—convene to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us in Rome’s provinces. Those gathered at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or its Christmas party, are not the country’s natural aristocracy, but its authentic Idiocracy.

The events and the invited say a great deal about the press, its ethics and code of conduct. Like nothing else, the Sycophant’s Supper is a mark of a corrupt politics and press, as the un-watchful dogs of the media have no business frolicking with the president and his minions. This co-optation, however, is the hallmark of the celebrity press, in general. The days following these glitzy events, the Gilded Ones spend genuflecting to … themselves.

As for this affirmative action stand-up comic: WTF!!!!!!!! And I thought Jimmie Fallon’s Millenial humor was weak. Fallon is Jay Leno compared to this bleating bimbo.

And The Co-Conspirator In The Case Of Latest American Jihadi Is…

Affirmative Action, Jihad, Labor, Regulation, The State

The US government, of course. It always is.

It took the Kuwaitis to fire an alleged American Jihadi from a position he held in their country, as an airplane mechanic, in December 2014. It took the Turks to deny him entry into their country. And it took the Egyptians to deport him to the U.S.

Could these backward and benighted countries be looking out for their own better than the US does?

US Army veteran Tairod Nathan Webster Pugh was stopped—why, oh why? “keep jihadis OUT, not in”!—attempting to cross over into Syria, presumably not for the purpose of touring the ruins.

This avid Bin Laden supported was a former U.S. Air Force mechanic and had worked as a mechanic for American Airlines. And that was perfectly fine. So long as Pugh was endangering Americans stateside, he was safe from the American authorities (whose, constitutional duty it is to protect Americans).

Here in the US, labor and civil rights legislation guarantee that business can’t risk discrimination lawsuits should they fire bad people. They’d rather risk the lives of good people.

UPDATED: The Ferguson Report: The Best Of Pseudoscience (‘Disparate Impact Gambit’)

Affirmative Action, Crime, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Race, Racism

If, as TAWE (The Ass With Ears) would have it, and the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report “evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement”—then, by logical extension, the Civil Rights Movement was spawned by not much at all. Since we know this to be untrue, what do you suppose is missing from the Ferguson report, according to which there exists “‘a pattern or practice of’ racial bias in both policing and the court system, searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and interference with the free expression rights of all peaceful protesters”?

“African Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system,” the report asserts.

Here’s what’s going on: To advance propaganda, pseudoscience must be deployed. After all, the Idiocracy will be none the wiser. Yes, black are more likely to be stopped by law enforcement than whites. But the Ferguson report fails to control for the fact that there are differences in rates of offense between blacks and whites (and Asian, by the way, who’re conveniently omitted from the “disparate impact” formula used by our racism-spotters).

Via InvestorsBusinessDaily:

“The Justice Department’s research arm, the National Institute of Justice, explains that differences in traffic stops can simply be attributed to ‘differences in offending.'”

But federal data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that blacks violate traffic laws at higher rates than whites in every offense, including driving with an invalid license.
Yet Holder makes it sound as if Ferguson police target blacks at random for stops for no other reason than “driving while black,” and then pile on the tickets. …

It is one thing to demand that traffic and other laws be repealed because blacks are more likely to fall foul of them. (I certainly think drug laws should be repealed together with all unjust laws, irrespective.) But it is quite another thing to shout racism when blacks are stopped more frequently, because cops are obliged to enforce laws against offenders. People are sick of it.

UPDATE: The brilliant Heather Mac Donald on “The Disparate Impact Gambit”:

… Disparate-impact analysis obviates the need to find intentional discrimination in a civil-rights case; a policy or practice can be wholly color-blind, but if, in its application, it falls more heavily on a particular racial group, it is illegal under certain federal regulations. A job requirement that employees have a high-school degree is a classic example of a policy that has a disparate impact, if the high-school-degree requirement disqualifies more blacks than whites for the job. Never mind that the employer applies his job threshold without racial bias, he can be held liable for racial discrimination anyway if he is unable to justify the high-school requirement as a business necessity.

The Obama administration’s aggressive use of disparate-impact theory against schools for their disciplinary practices has been a disaster for classroom safety and order. That school-discipline crusade has meant that schools cannot remove unruly black students from the classroom under neutral behavioral codes without triggering potential legal liability, simply because more black students violate those codes. But as destructive as the application of disparate-impact theory to school authority has been, applying it broadly to law enforcement is a recipe for anarchy. There are few criminal laws that do not have a disparate impact on blacks, because the black crime rate is more elevated than the white crime rate.

MORE Mac Donald.

Academic Disintegration From Homer To Homo

Affirmative Action, Education

By Myron Robert Pauli

President Obama has proposed making college education free for everybody. It used to be considered that college education was for people with IQ in excess of 110 – e.g. 20% of the population; however, the solution to that problem is, of course, to dumb down college. Apparently, college reading levels are now at the 7th grade level [1]. It is interesting to see what was required for completion of 8th grade in “lowly” Kentucky with the modern curriculum [2]. I would hardly be surprised if Masters Students were reading “Run Spot Run” in 2015.

There are still a few isolated spots of higher education left. I have admiration for serious students of “fine arts” who wish to be next Vladimir Horowitz or Enrico Caruso. Aside from the Church of Global Warming, political correctness has often left the hard sciences and engineering alone. Here is a sample of the 61 graduate students studying Materials Science at Columbia University [3]: Cao, Chang, Chen, Chen, Chen, Chuang, Duan, Gao, …, Li, Li, Li, Liang, Liao, Lin, Lin, 3 Lius! , Lu, Lu, Luan, … ,7 Wangs!, Wong, Xu, Xu, Yang, Yang, Ye, Yue, Zhang, Zhang, Zhao, Zhen, Zhen, Zheng, Zhong, Zhou. Those damn Xu’s are running things! Affirmative action means that for every 2 students from Shanghai, one is chosen from Beijing!

Arguably, many of our enlightenment-era leaders such as Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton received a thorough “liberal arts” education which included history, philosophy, the sciences, geography, logic, and literature classics such as Homer and Shakespeare. But a few blocks away from the Chens and Wangs working on understanding nature and producing products, Columbia is also teaching English [4]. Check out the link to find that in our “top 10 University”, the kids/parents/taxpayers shelling out over $200,000 are paying for courses in LGBT Lit (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender), “Clarissa”, “Frankenstein”, “Postmodern Poetries”, and “Medieval Women Adventurers” (and G-d knows what junk is even in the normal-sounding offerings?).

Remember that the English Department is a “classical” department. How about Ivy League University of Pennsylvania’s course offerings in the “Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies [5]? I guess you can first earn a Bachelors in Bitchery and rise higher with a Masters in Male-Hating and a Doctorate of Dyking.

Here is what passes for advanced Social Sciences “Research” at elite Cornell University: “Network Evolution and the Beauty Advantage”, “Innovation Through Imitation”, and “Failing to See or Failing to Seize Opportunities to Build Social Capital? The Role of Neuroticism” [6]. I’m NOT making phony Ivy League websites!!!! No sense picking on the “second rate” schools who merely follow in the footsteps of the elite.

Recently, there was an academic “scandal” involving the football and basketball players at the (30th ranked nationally) University of North Carolina [7]. The “scandal” is that talented players like Julius Peppers did not actually “attend the classes” of moronic phony parasitical blowhards like faux-Injun Ward Churchill [8]. In other words, guys like Michael Jordan did not sit and watch Lone Ranger and Tonto re-runs. Can anyone seriously tell me that ATTENDING seminars in “White People Really Really Suck” is a productive use of anyone’s time? Failing to attend is a “scandal”?!!

Sure, send EVERYONE to college [9]! Why not??! Here is a one minute advanced look at an elite American university education in the 22nd Century. When I was 11, I read “Planet of the Apes” by Pierre Boule mistaking it for fiction instead of prophesy. And I am talking about white Americans also – they are merely following in the politically correct footsteps as their minority brothers and sisters.

REFERENCES

[1] http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/19867-education-expert-says-college-freshmen-read-at-7th-grade-level
[2] http://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html
[3] http://matsci.columbia.edu/materials-science-engineering-graduate-students_6653
[4] http://english.columbia.edu/files/english/content/Spring%202015%20Course%20Distribution%20Vrs%202.4.pdf
[5] http://www.sas.upenn.edu/gsws/pc/term/2015A/GSWS
[6] http://sdl.soc.cornell.edu/research
[7] http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/acc/2012/12/20/north-carolina-basketball-football-julius-peppers/1782113/
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonzo_Goes_to_College

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.