Category Archives: Education

Updated: 'Jim Crow Liberalism'

Affirmative Action, Education, Pseudoscience, Race, Racism

“We’re looking at the test because they don’t like the results,” fumed Pat Buchanan over the latest affirmative action case to wend its way to the Supreme Court, “Ricci v. DeStefano. The issue: reverse discrimination against white firemen.”

Fiery Pat: “All these white guys won. Just as all the black athletes win the trial heats for the 100 or 200 meter dash. Did they discriminate against white guys? Of course not. Maybe Frank Ricci should not have the job because he’s the wrong color. Maybe new sins of discrimination are fine if they’re done to undo old ones.”

Steve Sailer: “[o]ur society needs to hire and promote competent firemen, because they keep buildings from burning down and citizens from dying horrible deaths. And firefighting now requires not just bravery but also a wide variety of technical expertise—that is, ultimately, intelligence.”

In the Ricci v. DeStefano case, however, the Obama Administration is intervening on the side of incompetence. As David G. Savage reported in the Los Angeles Times:

‘The Obama administration, taking its first stand on race and civil rights, sided with the city officials and said they were justified in dropping the test if it had ‘gross exclusionary effects on minorities.’

The test New Haven city officials didn’t like?

“The promotion exam Ricci aced was no off-the-rack quiz. New Haven paid a reported $100,000 to I/O Solutions to devise a nondiscriminatory test. It wound up being 60 percent written, 40 percent oral. To judge the candidates’ oral responses, New Haven paid to bring in 30 veteran fire department managers from around the country, two-thirds of them minority.”

The solution? Void the test and the promotion.

Update: “The Winning Issue for GOP”:

“How does it win back the Reagan Democrats who went home disgusted?

Become again the party of Frank Ricci.

And who is Frank Ricci?

He is a fireman in New Haven, Conn., with 11 years in the department, who suffers from dyslexia, but nonetheless has pursued his dream of becoming a lieutenant and a captain.

Six months before the promotion test, Ricci quit his second job. He bought $1,000 worth of the textbooks he was told to study, had a friend read them onto tapes to compensate for his dyslexia, studied every spare hour he got, and sat for the test, to compete for one of eight lieutenant slots open.

Frank made it. Frank Ricci came in sixth.

It was after the results of the test were made known that the problems arose. For, of the officers who had made the cut, all were white, except for one Latino.

Concluding the test results would, if used by the department, have an “adverse impact” on the black community, New Haven tossed out the results and called for new exams to ensure a “fair” outcome.

Thus, because he is a white man whose people came from Italy, Frank Ricci is to be denied a promotion he worked for and won, and be robbed of his American dream by the liberal bigots who run New Haven.”

Pat Buchanan, who else?

Updated: ‘Jim Crow Liberalism’

Affirmative Action, Education, Pseudoscience, Race, Racism

“We’re looking at the test because they don’t like the results,” fumed Pat Buchanan over the latest affirmative action case to wend its way to the Supreme Court, “Ricci v. DeStefano. The issue: reverse discrimination against white firemen.”

Fiery Pat: “All these white guys won. Just as all the black athletes win the trial heats for the 100 or 200 meter dash. Did they discriminate against white guys? Of course not. Maybe Frank Ricci should not have the job because he’s the wrong color. Maybe new sins of discrimination are fine if they’re done to undo old ones.”

Steve Sailer: “[o]ur society needs to hire and promote competent firemen, because they keep buildings from burning down and citizens from dying horrible deaths. And firefighting now requires not just bravery but also a wide variety of technical expertise—that is, ultimately, intelligence.”

In the Ricci v. DeStefano case, however, the Obama Administration is intervening on the side of incompetence. As David G. Savage reported in the Los Angeles Times:

‘The Obama administration, taking its first stand on race and civil rights, sided with the city officials and said they were justified in dropping the test if it had ‘gross exclusionary effects on minorities.’

The test New Haven city officials didn’t like?

“The promotion exam Ricci aced was no off-the-rack quiz. New Haven paid a reported $100,000 to I/O Solutions to devise a nondiscriminatory test. It wound up being 60 percent written, 40 percent oral. To judge the candidates’ oral responses, New Haven paid to bring in 30 veteran fire department managers from around the country, two-thirds of them minority.”

The solution? Void the test and the promotion.

Update: “The Winning Issue for GOP”:

“How does it win back the Reagan Democrats who went home disgusted?

Become again the party of Frank Ricci.

And who is Frank Ricci?

He is a fireman in New Haven, Conn., with 11 years in the department, who suffers from dyslexia, but nonetheless has pursued his dream of becoming a lieutenant and a captain.

Six months before the promotion test, Ricci quit his second job. He bought $1,000 worth of the textbooks he was told to study, had a friend read them onto tapes to compensate for his dyslexia, studied every spare hour he got, and sat for the test, to compete for one of eight lieutenant slots open.

Frank made it. Frank Ricci came in sixth.

It was after the results of the test were made known that the problems arose. For, of the officers who had made the cut, all were white, except for one Latino.

Concluding the test results would, if used by the department, have an “adverse impact” on the black community, New Haven tossed out the results and called for new exams to ensure a “fair” outcome.

Thus, because he is a white man whose people came from Italy, Frank Ricci is to be denied a promotion he worked for and won, and be robbed of his American dream by the liberal bigots who run New Haven.”

Pat Buchanan, who else?

Me, Myself And I = Michelle O

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Britain, Education, Etiquette, Feminism, Race, The Zeitgeist

“Being smart is cooler than anything in the world,” America’s first lady told a gaggle of squealing, high-fiving, weeping girls at a North London school. And Michelle Obama should know, no?

“If you want to know the reason why I am standing here, it’s because of education,” she told them.

“I never cut class. I loved getting As, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler [should be “was cooler”] than anything in the world. You, too, with these values, can control your own destiny. You, too, can pave the way.” She urged them to believe in their dreams.

“For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady [There she goes again]. I was not raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of. I was raised on the South Side of Chicago — that’s the real part of Chicago.”

Cut the cr-p.

Michelle Obama was raised in a country where affirmative action saw to it that mediocrities like herself usurped the real meritocracy. That pesky detail the first wife forgot.

I read Michelle’s university thesis; it’s the product of a banal, third-rate mind. I grant that her meteoric rise had to do with some hard work and pushy grit, but, more than anything, Michelle is a product of affirmative action—a product of a society where, as Joseph Farah put it “black [is] the new color of privilege.”

Updated: Looking To Children To Lead

Conservatism, Education, Family, Intellectualism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pop-Culture, Private Property, Republicans

Speaking of spooky children, the hallmark of a progressive or left-liberal is a philosophical adulation of The Child. The Child is said to possess uncanny prescience; a primordial, pristine, un-spoilt wisdom. The same awe is accorded to the Nobel Savage, and to the natural world.

This explains why Republicans often have a “wunderkind” in the wings to parade and look up to. These days, it’s the barely-out-of short pants CPAC star, Jonathan Krohn, who’s precocious and off-putting. Krohn is an author no less. The treatise is “Define Conservatism.” From the mouth of the babe himself, the book sounds childish and simplistic in tone and in metaphor. Just what Boobus loves.

Understandably, left-liberals have been slobbering over Krohn as well. To their credit, they’ve not produced a prototype of their own yet.

It’s a repulsive specter. It’s not new. I commented on it in a three-pronged column, in 2002. The column is “The Importance Of Boundaries.” The sub-heading is “Crossover Kids”:

“Permissive liberals and people who need Braille to understand a well-aimed barb will fume at the words of author Florence King: ‘…children have no business expressing opinions on anything except, ‘Do you have enough room in the toes?’ But true-blue cultural conservatism puts a premium on the proper boundaries between children and adults. Such boundaries are essential to the moral hygiene of a society. It is from the progressive, libertine parent that we would expect a child of such narcissism and precocity that he or she thinks of adults as his peers, and takes to preaching to his elders.”

“But no, some of the most hubris-stricken kids are emerging as commentators from so-called conservative quarters. The real cultural conservative knows that even in the unlikely case that the child is the new H.L. Mencken, and is smarter than all the adults around him, respect necessitates that he bide his time. Even the intellectually gifted take years to synthesize intellectual material and make it their own. This process is a culmination of insight, life experience, humility, and authentic intelligence.”

“The cultural conservative adult who lets a kid be a pal and peer is a liberal. He cannot claim to be a cultural conservative. He must, moreover, own up to being mired in self-contradiction. Writing on the topic of Western Civilization, historian Alan Charles Kors reminds us that avoiding self-contradiction is the touchstone of truth—being mired in self-contradiction, the touchstone of error. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in self-contradiction was to be ‘less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.'”

Update (Feb. 28): I just can’t win, can I? The reader hereunder vows to seek out the kid’s coloring-in book in the library. Lost is my meta-argument against the process of looking to a kid for answers, however endowed in IQ he might be.

Seeking sagacity in a child’s words is perverted, unconservative.
The whole point of this post is that you NOT be piqued by a child; that you not be proud of such precocity. Look to real philosopher Kings for eternal truths. Take the time to rediscover The Federalist or Anti-Federalist papers. So long as you have not read the the words of real sages, you have no business looking for kicks in the kibitzing of kids.
Of course, you have every right to, but little reason to.

THEY MUST BE HOMESCHOOLED. Blogger John was alluding to this delightful clip (I’m posting it hereunder), making the rounds on YouTube. Two precious, fiscally conservative cuties hear that they owe $800 billion. The little boy is especially eager to tease out the details, and is outraged when he gets the goods. Unlike creepy, adult-emulating Krohn, these babes act their age, and are absolutely natural. There is nothing put-on or fake about their conduct. These are kids getting some bad news about a stolen piggy bank.

I would agree that children are naturally acquisitive and, like all normal people before entering the public school, guard what is rightfully theirs.

But there’s more to it. What you have here is an example of decent parenting. In fact, this clip very clearly exemplifies the boundary argument made in this post. The adult is teaching the children a lesson about private property and its theft.

I would further argue that the parent eliciting the little people’s outrage by telling them of the $800 billion they are about to be robbed of—he is the good guy in all this. He probably home schools the two tots. This is clearly a man who, while not indoctrinating his kids, does instill in them right from wrong.

Pay attention to the disparaging comments the filming father gets from YouTubers. Addled by psychobabble, posters protest the emotional harm done to the children; the sentiment shared on the chatboard is that upsetting children is wrong.

Well, the clip has been removed. My guess is that the dad who posted it thought Obama’s New New Deal outrageous, and his kids’ outburst appropriate. The cretins watching it disapproved and disagreed with dad. Maybe father feared Big Brother would removed his kids. … Not that it has happened before.