Category Archives: Education

Update III: Badass In America (Fighting Race Baiters)

Barack Obama, Crime, Education, Intellectualism, libertarianism, Media, Race, Racism

While out on a run one day, our alarm system was triggered. Not the full foghorn, mind you, but a sensor, which went off at the security company’s headquarters. As we were entering the home, two police officers were walking down the driveway and up the stairs. They were extremely polite, but stern. They told us they had received a report of an alarm going off at this address. Were we the owners of the abode, they wanted to know. “Yes,” we replied. They asked to see ID. We complied. Then they left. We were impressed with their professionalism and glad for the vigilance.

A similar thing happened to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. But he was not as pleased with the boys in blue as Sean and I were.

The case of Gates was catapulted to the headlines, first by the “Black In America” cable channel, CNN. Then by the mother ship docked at the White House. “Obama,” reports Fox News, “who is friends with the professor and documentary filmmaker, told reporters at a Wednesday night press conference that … ‘the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.'”

The fact that Gates was in the home is no proof he owned or resided in that home. More material: Obama was anything but impartial. His was the full-throated reaction of the president of Black America. Obama was ready with a bag of tricks that would have done the Sharpton-Jackson race baiters proud.

But back to Gates. He and his cabby had forced the front door, and it appears that Gates refused to produce an ID or any other information, calling Sgt. James Crowley a racist for requesting identification.

“According to the report, Gates then yelled, ‘This is what happens to black men in America.’ When Crowley tried to calm him down, Gates shouted, ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with.'” And, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.”

Classy.

At this stage, I think the officer ought to have walked away. Just done the gentlemanly thing and bowed out. But when Gates followed Crowley out cussing, pulling rank and threatening him, the officer cuffed the professor for disorderly conduct. At this point, the officer, who so far had done his duty, lost it and gave in to oneupmanship.

Before commenting, do read the Disorderly Conduct Report, written by both Sergeant James Crowley and Officer James Figueroa (courtesy of “The Smoking Gun”).

Update I (July 24): THE AFRICAN ARISTOTLE. Soft sobriquets such as “PC” and “elitist” don’t come close to capturing the essence of Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.

Let me do the honors. Gates is a man who has risen to the pinnacle of a society he hates. His stature he owes to the creation of bogus fields of specialty by a stupid, self-immolating WASP society. Described as “scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual,” among other effusions, Gates’ scholarship is in … drum roll … the “study of black culture,” a BS pursuit created to appease; to allow the intellectually undeserving to delude themselves and others that they’ve scaled considerable intellectual heights.

I’m appalled that no one has been remotely critical of the treatment this man is receiving as the crème de la crème of American intelligentsia; a man whose Wikipedia entry perfectly seriously lauds his skills at combining of “literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions.” Jacques Derrida at least was an educated deconstructionist. Ditto Michel Foucault.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, of the “Black In America” lamentations, had a frothing fit when trying to express her outrage at the treatment of this African Aristotle. O’Brien boasted about taking classes at Harvard with Gates the intellectual giant, and struggled to find the words with which to do justice to his towering achievements, not least of which is his gritty, terribly original role as an “outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon.” What you can’t best, you can at least trash.

Update II (July 25): Steve Sailer on Obama’s ingrained racism. Sailer also brings up a point I’ve hammered again and again on this blog and in my columns: The importance of Ricci, the white firefighter, refusing to go gently into the good night.

Obama’s comments at his news conference on the “stupidity” of the Cambridge Police Department were, despite all his lawyerly stipulations, a textbook example of racial prejudice in action. He had prejudged these specific events based on his deeply held views on the general racial situation in America.

As in Ricci, we see the value of civil servant unions in standing up to racialized politicians. Crowley’s cop union stood shoulder to shoulder with him and helped him face down the Governor and the President. Government employee unions are expensive, but they do have an interest in standing up for civil service rules in fighting the new racial spoils system perpetrated under the guise of “civil rights.”

Another lesson is that as the Establishment has ratcheted up Racism into the worst sin imaginable in the history of the world, it has not correspondingly ratcheted up the seriousness of the consequences of falsely accusing somebody of “racism.” It was clear from even Dr. Gates’s self-serving account that his accusations of racism against Officer Crowley were the product not of evidence but of his understandably tired, overexcited brain intersecting with his business interests as a prestige media race man. Crowley refused to buckle under to extraordinary pressure, going all the way up to the President, thus setting a new standard for how to respond to false charges.

It’s time to pressure Obama to publicly call on his friend Skip Gates to withdraw his charges of racism against Officer Crowley on the grounds that the epidemic of false charges of racism must be halted.

Now, that would be a Teachable Moment!

Update III (July 27): FIGHTING THE RACE BAITERS. On MSNBC, Eugene Robinson, the mediocre, mundane mind that has landed a lucrative post at the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize, smirked over the allegation that Gates had cussed. “He’s a superstar, one of the best-known and most highly acclaimed faculty members at the nation’s most prestigious university.” Such people don’t cuss. “C’mon,” Robinson jocularly intimated; Sgt. James Crowley is likely the liar.

Look, I hope you get that this fracas is never about the non-aggression principle: The libertarian law is the easy part; the no-brainer. As the libertarian law goes, Crowley was in the wrong. But there’s more to society than the skeletal non-aggression axiom. The real achievement here is Crowley’s; the Sgt. got the race hucksters to back down, and that includes The President of Black America. Is the WASP fed up to the back teeth? Will he fight for his rights? That’s to be seen.

Sonia Sotomayor Versed In Classics … Kiddie Classics

Affirmative Action, Education, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Law, The Courts

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SotoSetAsides Mayor, whose confirmation hearing starts on Monday—and who’ll be confirmed—is bound to be a judicial wrecking ball. Or, she may prove to be just the dim liberal bulb the doctor ordered.

In case you’re still looking to the Republicans to make a principled stand on anything, CNN reports that they “have promised a fair but thorough hearing … [only] A few have said they intend to vote against her nomination when it reaches the full Senate.”

As always, national treasure Pat Buchanan puts things into perspective by exposing the fraudulent “Ivy-League” institutions that have disgorged Soto So-and-So:

“By her own admission, Sonia Sotomayor is an ‘affirmative action baby.’

Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance – No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review – her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that, to get up to speed on her English skills at Princeton, Sotomayor was advised to read children’s classics and study basic grammar books during her summers. How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer reading consists of ‘Chicken Little’ and ‘The Troll Under the Bridge’?

In video clips dating back 25 years, and now provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sotomayor, according to the Times, even calls herself an ‘affirmative action product.'”

Update II: Too Pale To Stay?

Education, IMMIGRATION, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Multiculturalism, Race, Racism, The State

Somehow I think that if this little girl’s name were GARCIA, MARTINEZ, ALVAREZ, RODRIGUEZ, ROMERO, LOPEZ, FERNANDEZ, HERNANDEZ, GONZALES—she’d be allowed to stay in the US of A. Read the story of the impending deportation to Poland of 11-year-old Ewelina Bledniak. (And where-oh-where are the churches and the ACLU?)

If only my own sister were a poor, illiterate, Hispanic scofflaw, sucking at the state’s teat.

Update I (June 11): I’m not sure I can agree entirely with Robert. To an extent he is right: errors and injustices are a function of a lumbering bureaucracy. I think he’ll find, however, that because so many of the bureaucrats are affirmative, or plain illegal, appointees, they often enact their preferences. It is misguided to deny: 1) the tremendous powers of the bureaucracy. 2) That said organ doesn’t exercise these powers energetically. We live under an unrepresentative, managerial state, the kind James Burnham (if I’m correct) wrote about, and certainly our friend Paul Gottfried has covered extensively.

My personal experience: “My daughter was … stripped of her [green card] on a debatable technicality when entering the US from Canada. This took a heroic show of force from the brave, U.S. citizenship and immigration law enforcers at the border. Moral: U.S. immigration law is enforced against people who obey the law. No doubt her hard-won green card was needed urgently for a real Bandido.”

Update II (June 11): So far, I’ve being vindicated. Readers have put down Bledniak’s neglect to nothing more than a “lumbering bureaucracy.” But as I contended, if Bledniak were Banderas, she’d have had CNN’s THELMA GUTIERREZ’s full support.

Tonight, GUTIERREZ went to bat for a “brilliant girl”—so brilliant, she has an “A” in “Race and Gender”—who cannot get you and me to pay for her Harvard degree in Education (worth nothing, clearly), because… wait for it: she’s illegal. However, unlike the Polish cherub, Nancy the Hispanic is not being deported.

The transcripts are here. Just as I surmised in the initial post, Nancy’s equally “brilliant” Harvard professors are LATINAS.

The “matric”—high-school finals—I sat for in Israel was harder than anything this “genius” has done at university. These students graduate from high school without math in the syllabus. Unheard of in my days, if you wanted a university entrance matric. And yes, I will (a little later) inflict on you the kind of core curriculum I was compelled to undertake for the first-rate academic matric I earned in Israel, back in the day.
This Nancy would be relegated to the sewing class—we were streamed into different paths in accordance with academic aptitude in those days. With the kind of nonacademic subjects “Nancy” has taken, GUTIERREZ’s protege would not have qualified to sit the academic finals in my old high-school. But then things have changed in Israel since then too.

Geithner Gives Chinese Students The Giggles

America, China, Debt, Economy, Education, Inflation, Israel

There is something quaint and good-natured about laughing at the ludicrous Geithner’s claims of American solvency, instead of getting angry or being rude, as less-inhibited Westerners might, when faced with a bald-faced lie. The Chinese response is definitely culturally distinct.

Were American students capable of grasping how bad the U.S. Treasury Secretary’s policies are, and how dire the debt and the deficits, they might grow testy. Alas, no point dealing in hypotheticals. The chances are slim that an audience of students on a typical American campus would allow facts, the laws of economics and reason to get in the way of Obamadualtion and general Keynesian credulity (a proxy for economic illiteracy).

It happened in China (via Reuters):

“China is the biggest foreign owner of U.S. Treasury bonds. U.S. data shows that it held $768 billion in Treasuries as of March, but some analysts believe China’s total U.S. dollar-denominated investments could be twice as high.

‘Chinese assets are very safe,’ Geithner said in response to a question after a speech at Peking University, where he studied Chinese as a student in the 1980s.

His answer drew loud laughter from his student audience, reflecting scepticism in China about the wisdom of a developing country accumulating a vast stockpile of foreign reserves instead of spending the money to raise living standards at home.”