In Frigid Texas, Desperate Families Take Risks to Stay Warm

Very, very dangerous risks, as it turns out.

At WSJ, "Parents resort to gas stoves or build fires inside their homes during power outages, with no relief in sight":  

AUSTIN, Texas—The children played in front of four lighted gas burners in East Austin on Tuesday night as their family tried to warm up during days of subfreezing temperatures, no power, and no relief on the horizon.

One-year-old Alex Johnson Jr. toddled, his brother Gabriel Brewster, 3, played with a toy, and their cousin Desiah Fisher, 6, hugged them close, as eight other family members huddled around the light of a single candle. Charlene Brewster, the mother of the boys and a 4-month-old daughter, said she knows how dangerous it is to try to heat an apartment with a gas stove. She had no option but to try it for a little while, she said.

“I know carbon monoxide poisoning, but what else can we do?” said Ms. Brewster, a city of Austin crossing guard. “Is anyone going to help us? I have a baby in here.”

t was a level of desperation many others in Texas had reached, days into a power grid shutdown during one of the coldest weeks in a generation. Like others across the state, Ms. Brewster’s family lost electricity—and, with it, heat—late Sunday night, before a snowstorm closed most of the city and temperatures plunged to single digits. As of midday Wednesday, officials had no estimate of when power might return.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the power grid in the state, ordered blackouts to prevent damage to the electricity system after frozen power plants and a shortfall of natural gas required to run the plants limited power production.

In the public-housing complex where Ms. Brewster lives, help seemed far away. Those who risked driving were likely to meet blocked roadways or iced-over hills that many drivers couldn’t traverse. Those who called the city’s help line for transportation to an emergency warming shelter met only busy phone lines, they said. Many said they had no water or had run out of food. Most businesses had been closed all week.

Daylan Cook, 18, said he had built a fire inside a ceramic pot in his apartment living room, aided by hand sanitizer and gasoline. LaShay Thomas, 34, said she had developed a migraine headache from fumes and had begged neighbors to turn gas burners off, despite the vicious cold.

City officials urged residents not to resort to dangerous measures for heat. The Austin Fire Department reported responding to fires at several houses that likely began in fireplaces and to several toxic-exposure calls from residents using charcoal in their homes. The local emergency medical services department said it had responded to 63 carbon monoxide exposure calls in 2 1/2 days. In Houston, the local public health authority said the city was seeing record numbers of carbon monoxide poisonings, including at least two deaths.

Sharice Owens and Tosha Henderson, who are sisters, said they had tried to build a fire in Ms. Henderson’s home, but it quickly got too smoky for Ms. Owens’s three young children. They huddled instead under blankets in Ms. Owens’s apartment, where the kids, ages 4, 5, and 13, begged for warmth and food that the family had no way to cook.

“There’s only so much heat you can generate,” Ms. Henderson said. “It was 10 degrees. There’s only so many covers you can use. We were told there were supposed to be power rotations.”

This seems, how do you say? Criminal? 

I mean, Texas is a G.O.P. state, and the leadership there can't keep the lights on (or homes warm). 

And this related story is practically killing me, "Texas mayor resigns after telling residents without power ‘only the strong will survive’."

I get it: Buckle up, pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, blah, blah. I think the mayor might need a lesson in conservative principles: Government is supposed to be there when all else fails, as the protector of citizens who, through no fault of their own, are left literally powerless, hungry, and in some cases dead. 

Again, if this ain't criminality, I don't know what is. Save the "rugged individualism" for the days when the state government hasn't f*cked over the population so horribly.

Ray Allen Billington, America's Frontier Heritage

*BUMPED.*

I picked up a copy, to continue my study of the American frontier and the Native American experience.

At Amazon, Ray Allen Billington, America's Frontier Heritage.

Education Gap Between Rich and Poor Is Growing Wider

But what about all that hopey-changey stuff?

At the New York Times:

The wounds of segregation were still raw in the 1970s. With only rare exceptions, African-American children had nowhere near the same educational opportunities as whites.

The civil rights movement, school desegregation and the War on Poverty helped bring a measure of equity to the playing field. Today, despite some setbacks along the way, racial disparities in education have narrowed significantly. By 2012, the test-score deficit of black 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds in reading and math had been reduced as much as 50 percent compared with what it was 30 to 40 years before.

Achievements like these breathe hope into our belief in the Land of Opportunity. They build trust in education as a leveling force powering economic mobility. “We do have a track record of reducing these inequalities,” said Jane Waldfogel, a professor of social work at Columbia University.

But the question remains: Why did we stop there?

For all the progress in improving educational outcomes among African-American children, the achievement gaps between more affluent and less privileged children is wider than ever, notes Sean Reardon of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford. Racial disparities are still a stain on American society, but they are no longer the main divider. Today the biggest threat to the American dream is class.

Education is today more critical than ever. College has become virtually a precondition for upward mobility. Men with only a high school diploma earn about a fifth less than they did 35 years ago. The gap between the earnings of students with a college degree and those without one is bigger than ever.

And yet American higher education is increasingly the preserve of the elite. The sons and daughters of college-educated parents are more than twice as likely to go to college as the children of high school graduates and seven times as likely as those of high school dropouts.

Only 5 percent of Americans ages 25 to 34 whose parents didn’t finish high school have a college degree. By comparison, the average across 20 rich countries in an analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is almost 20 percent.

The problem, of course, doesn’t start in college.

Earlier this week, Professor Waldfogel and colleagues from Australia, Canada and Britain published a new book titled “Too Many Children Left Behind” (Russell Sage). It traces the story of America’s educational disparities across the life cycle of its children, from the day they enter kindergarten to eighth grade.

Their story goes sour very early, and it gets worse as it goes along. On the day they start kindergarten, children from families of low socioeconomic status are already more than a year behind the children of college graduates in their grasp of both reading and math.

And despite the efforts deployed by the American public education system, nine years later the achievement gap, on average, will have widened by somewhere from one-half to two-thirds.

Even the best performers from disadvantaged backgrounds, who enter kindergarten reading as well as the smartest rich kids, fall behind over the course of their schooling.

The challenges such children face compared to their more fortunate peers are enormous. Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds are seven times more likely to have been born to a teenage mother. Only half live with both parents, compared with 83 percent of the children of college graduates.

The children of less educated parents suffer higher obesity rates, have more social and emotional problems and are more likely to report poor or fair health. And because they are much poorer, they are less likely to afford private preschool or the many enrichment opportunities — extra lessons, tutors, music and art, elite sports teams — that richer, better-educated parents lavish on their children.

When they enter the public education system, they are shortchanged again...

Keep reading.

More funding and additional education reforms will have only a marginal impact on improving student achievement, and hence reducing inequality. The most significant gains are likely to come from changes in the culture, especially the strengthening of the family in minority communities. It would help, too, if public schools were freed from the tyrannical and debilitating control of the Democrat-left and the corrupt teachers unions, which will do nothing to improve educational performance if such reforms weaken their power.

Frankly, if the Obama administration would just start a minority education voucher program so that poor families could afford to send their kids to schools like Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., then we'd be a lot better off.

Woman Earns Several Job Offers After Handing Out Her Resume on the Street

This is great.

American individualism at work.

At People, "Buffalo Woman Hands Out Résumés on Street, Earns Over a Dozen Offers."

One woman earned several offers after handing her resumé out on the street http://t.co/a7lDMawpNz pic.twitter.com/1D9qX0MyS5

— People magazine (@people) August 23, 2015

Why Do Leftists Hate Asian-Americans?

Well, I posted on this last week or so, "Leftist Racial Bias Against Asian-Americans in College Admissions."

And now here comes Michael Walsh, at Pajamas, sounding the tocsin on the left's despicable racism. See, "Why Do Democrats Hate Asian-Americans? Because They’re Smart and Successful":

This piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times recently, and it deserves a lot more notice from conservatives than it’s received so far. It’s not that it doesn’t tell us things we didn’t already know — it’s that the Left is so blatant about its prejudices, and so determined to tear down any semblance of meritocracy regarding college admissions. And, mostly, it reminds us that Asian-Americans need to recognize who their enemies are...

Leftist Racial Bias Against Asian-Americans in College Admissions

At LAT, "For Asian Americans, a changing landscape on college admissions":

In a windowless classroom at an Arcadia tutoring center, parents crammed into child-sized desks and dug through their pockets and purses for pens as Ann Lee launches a PowerPoint presentation.

Her primer on college admissions begins with the basics: application deadlines, the relative virtues of the SAT versus the ACT and how many Advanced Placement tests to take.

Then she eases into a potentially incendiary topic — one that many counselors like her have learned they cannot avoid.

“Let's talk about Asians,” she says.

Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.

African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.

She points to the second column.

“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”

The last column draws gasps.

Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.

“Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says.

“Zenme keyi,” one mother hisses in Chinese. How can this be possible?

College admission season ignites deep anxieties for Asian American families, who spend more than any other demographic on education. At elite universities across the U.S., Asian Americans form a larger share of the student body than they do of the population as a whole. And increasingly they have turned against affirmative action policies that could alter those ratios, and accuse admissions committees of discriminating against Asian American applicants.

That perspective has pitted them against advocates for diversity: More college berths for Asian American students mean fewer for black and Latino students, who are statistically underrepresented at top universities.

But in the San Gabriel Valley's hyper-competitive ethnic Asian communities, arguments for diversity can sometimes fall on deaf ears. For immigrant parents raised in Asia's all-or-nothing test cultures, a good education is not just a measure of success — it's a matter of survival. They see academic achievement as a moral virtue, and families organize their lives around their child's education, moving to the best school districts and paying for tutoring and tennis lessons. An acceptance letter from a prestigious college is often the only acceptable return on an investment that stretches over decades.

Lee is the co-founder of HS2 Academy, a college prep business that assumes that racial bias is a fact of college admissions and counsels students accordingly. At 10 centers across the state, the academy's counselors teach countermeasures to Asian American applicants. The goal, Lee says, is to help prospective college students avoid coming off like another “cookie-cutter Asian.”

“Everyone is in orchestra and plays piano,” Lee says. “Everyone plays tennis. Everyone wants to be a doctor, and write about immigrating to America. You can't get in with these cliche applications.”

Like a lot of students at Arcadia High School, Yue Liang plans to apply to University of California campuses and major in engineering — or if her mother wins that argument, pre-med. She excels at math, takes multiple AP courses and volunteers, as does nearly everyone she knows.

Being of Asian descent, the junior says, is “a disadvantage.” The problem, she says, is in the numbers.

Asian families flock to the San Gabriel Valley's school districts because they have some of the highest Academic Performance Index scores in the state. But with hundreds of top-performing students at each high school, focusing on a small set of elite institutions, it's easy to get lost in the crowd.

Of the school's 4,000 students, nearly 3,000 are of Asian descent, and like Yue are willing to do whatever it takes to gain entrance to a prestigious university. They will study until they can't remember how to have fun and stuff their schedules with extracurriculars. But there's an important part of their college applications that they can't improve as easily as an SAT score: their ethnicity.

In the San Gabriel Valley, where aspirationally named tutoring centers such as Little Harvard and Ivy League cluster within walking distance of high schools, many of them priced more cheaply than a baby-sitter, it didn't take long for some centers to respond to students' and parents' fears of being edged out of a top school because of some intangible missing quality.

Helping Asian American students, many of whom lead similar lives, requires the embrace of some stereotypes, says Crystal Zell, HS2's assistant director of counseling. They are good at math and bad at writing and aspire to be doctors, engineers or bankers, according to the cliches. She works with her students to identify what's unique about them — and most of the time, that's not their career ambitions or their ethnicity.

“Everyone comes in wanting the same thing,” Zell said. “But that's because they don't know about anything else.”

More.

This is kinda depressing, and doubly so in that the discrimination is so widespread. And remember, this is left-wing collectivist discrimination through radical left-wing affirmative action social engineering. That is, left-wing Democrat Party racism.

Disgusting. Sickening. But completely representative of the American left's monstrous rape of basic decency.

RELATED: At the Wall Street Journal, "Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians at Elite Schools? School Standards Are Probed Even as Enrollment Increases; A Bias Claim at Princeton":

Princeton, where Asian-Americans constitute about 13% of the student body, faces such a challenge. A spokesman for the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights said it is investigating a complaint filed by Jian Li, now a 17-year-old freshman at Yale University. Despite racking up the maximum 2400 score on the SAT and 2390 -- 10 points below the ceiling -- on SAT2 subject tests in physics, chemistry and calculus, Mr. Li was spurned by three Ivy League universities, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Office for Civil Rights initially rejected Mr. Li's complaint due to "insufficient" evidence. Mr. Li appealed, citing a white high-school classmate admitted to Princeton despite lower test scores and grades. The office notified him late last month that it would look into the case.

His complaint seeks to suspend federal financial assistance to Princeton until the university "discontinues discrimination against Asian-Americans in all forms by eliminating race preferences, legacy preferences, and athlete preferences." Legacy preference is the edge most elite colleges, including Princeton, give to alumni children. The Office for Civil Rights has the power to terminate such financial aid but usually works with colleges to resolve cases rather than taking enforcement action.

Mr. Li, who emigrated to the U.S. from China as a 4-year-old and graduated from a public high school in Livingston, N.J., said he hopes his action will set a precedent for other Asian-American students. He wants to "send a message to the admissions committee to be more cognizant of possible bias, and that the way they're conducting admissions is not really equitable," he said.

Princeton spokeswoman Cass Cliatt said the university is aware of the complaint and will provide the Office for Civil Rights with information it has requested. Princeton has said in the past that it considers applicants as individuals and doesn't discriminate against Asian-Americans.

When elite colleges began practicing affirmative action in the late 1960s and 1970s, they gave an admissions boost to Asian-American applicants as well as blacks and Hispanics. As the percentage of Asian-Americans in elite schools quickly overtook their slice of the U.S. population, many colleges stopped giving them preference -- and in some cases may have leaned the other way.

In 1990, a federal investigation concluded that Harvard University admitted Asian-American applicants at a lower rate than white students despite the Asians' slightly stronger test scores and grades. Federal investigators also found that Harvard admissions staff had stereotyped Asian-American candidates as quiet, shy and oriented toward math and science. The government didn't bring charges because it concluded it was Harvard's preferences for athletes and alumni children -- few of whom were Asian -- that accounted for the admissions gap.

The University of California came under similar scrutiny at about the same time...

More.

Free People, Free Markets

I love the Journal, but as I always say, they're a little loose with their open-borders advocacy.

At the Wall Street Journal, "The lessons from 125 years show how to revive American prosperity":

The first issue of The Wall Street Journal was four pages, for two cents. http://t.co/kAj8Bcl85I #WSJ125 pic.twitter.com/xJNLhas9ap

— Gerard Baker (@gerardtbaker) July 7, 2014

The answer to our current slow growth and self-doubt isn't a set of magical "new ideas" or some unknown orator from the provinces. The answer is to rediscover the eternal truths that have helped America escape malaise and turmoil in the past.

These lessons include that markets—the mind of free millions—allocate scarce resources more efficiently and fairly than do committees in Congress; that the collusion of government with either big business or big labor stifles competition and leads to political cynicism; that government will be respected more when it does a few things well rather than too many poorly; and that innovation and human progress spring not from bureaucratic elites but from the genius of individuals.

Above all, the lesson of 125 years is that whatever our periodic blunders Americans have always used the blessings of liberty to restore prosperity and national confidence. A free people have their fate in their own hands.

Reading Books Is Fundamental

From black leftist Charles Blow, at the New York Times:

The first thing I can remember buying for myself, aside from candy, of course, was not a toy. It was a book.

It was a religious picture book about Job from the Bible, bought at Kmart.

It was on one of the rare occasions when my mother had enough money to give my brothers and me each a few dollars so that we could buy whatever we wanted.

We all made a beeline for the toy aisle, but that path led through the section of greeting cards and books. As I raced past the children’s books, they stopped me. Books to me were things most special. Magical. Ideas eternalized.

Books were the things my brothers brought home from school before I was old enough to attend, the things that engrossed them late into the night as they did their homework. They were the things my mother brought home from her evening classes, which she attended after work, to earn her degree and teaching certificate.

Books, to me, were powerful and transformational.

So there, in the greeting card section of the store, I flipped through children’s books until I found the one that I wanted, the one about Job. I thought the book fascinating in part because it was a tale of hardship, to which I could closely relate, and in part because it contained the first drawing I’d even seen of God, who in those pages was a white man with a white beard and a long robe that looked like one of my mother’s nightgowns.

I picked up the book, held it close to my chest and walked proudly to the checkout. I never made it to the toy aisle.

That was the beginning of a lifelong journey in which books would shape and change me, making me who I was to become.

That's a beautiful story.

Keep reading.

Blow was inspired to write about books from Jordan Weissmann, at the Atlantic, "The Decline of the American Book Lover." Yet, while the overall numbers on book reading are down (the average number of books read per year per person, for example), the numbers aren't all that bleak. There's lots of reading going on, even in this day and age. Indeed, Weismann argues that, 10 years after the introduction of Facebook, the decline in book reading may have bottomed out. As for Charles Blow, he needs to be spreading his gospel of book reading to the black community, especially to the kind of the inner city black thugs who dominate the news. Seriously. Go into the neighborhoods and extol the virtues of books. Bring James Baldwin to the brothers and sisters and have them shake their indifference and ignorance. That, as a long-term project, along with strengthening families, will do more to alleviate the inequality gap than all the social programs the White House wants to ram down the throats of the American people. In other words, reverse the cultural decline and you'll turn around the social disorganization from which Charles Blow was able to avoid.

Google Hegemony

At the New York Times, "Google's Road Map to Global Domination":

Fifty-five miles and three days down the Colorado River from the put-in at Lee’s Ferry, near the Utah-Arizona border, the two rafts in our little flotilla suddenly encountered a storm. It sneaked up from behind, preceded by only a cool breeze. With the canyon walls squeezing the sky to a ribbon of blue, we didn’t see the thunderhead until it was nearly on top of us.

I was seated in the front of the lead raft. Pole position meant taking a dunk through the rapids, but it also put me next to Luc Vincent, the expedition’s leader. Vincent is the man responsible for all the imagery in Google’s online maps. He’s in charge of everything from choosing satellite pictures to deploying Google’s planes around the world to sending its camera-equipped cars down every road to even this, a float through the Grand Canyon. The raft trip was a mapping expedition that was also serving as a celebration: Google Maps had just introduced a major redesign, and the outing was a way of rewarding some of the team’s members.

Vincent wore a black T-shirt with the eagle-globe-and-anchor insignia of the United States Marine Corps on his chest and the slogan “Pain is weakness leaving the body” across his back. Though short in stature, he has the upper-body strength of an avid rock climber. He chose to get his Ph.D. in computer vision, he told me, because the lab happened to be close to Fontainebleau — the famous climbing spot in France. While completing his postdoc at the Harvard Robotics Lab, he led a successful expedition up Denali, the highest peak in North America.

A Frenchman who has lived half his 49 years in the United States, Vincent was never in the Marines. But he is a leader in a new great game: the Internet land grab, which can be reduced to three key battles over three key conceptual territories. What came first, conquered by Google’s superior search algorithms. Who was next, and Facebook was the victor. But where, arguably the biggest prize of all, has yet to be completely won.

Where-type questions — the kind that result in a little map popping up on the search-results page — account for some 20 percent of all Google queries done from the desktop. But ultimately more important by far is location-awareness, the sort of geographical information that our phones and other mobile devices already require in order to function. In the future, such location-awareness will be built into more than just phones. All of our stuff will know where it is — and that awareness will imbue the real world with some of the power of the virtual. Your house keys will tell you that they’re still on your desk at work. Your tools will remind you that they were lent to a friend. And your car will be able to drive itself on an errand to retrieve both your keys and your tools.

While no one can say exactly how we will get from the current moment to that Jetsonian future, one thing for sure can be said about location-awareness: maps are required. Tomorrow’s map, integrally connected to everything that moves (the keys, the tools, the car), will be so fundamental to their operation that the map will, in effect, be their operating system. A map is to location-awareness as Windows is to a P.C. And as the history of Microsoft makes clear, a company that controls the operating system controls just about everything. So the competition to make the best maps, the thinking goes, is more than a struggle over who dominates the trillion-dollar smartphone market; it’s a contest over the future itself.

Fascinating.

RTWT, at the link.

And ICYMI, the interview with Google's Sebastien Thrun, "'I think anybody who believes that we are in a period of decline or stagnation probably hasn’t been paying attention...'"

'I think anybody who believes that we are in a period of decline or stagnation probably hasn’t been paying attention...'

That's Sebastian Thrun, Google's top research scientist, at Foreign Affairs, "Google's Original X-Man: A Conversation With Sebastian Thrun."

A phenomenal interview:

There are people who feel that the prospects of life are diminishing and that the next generation is not going to have a better life than the previous one. Do you think your child’s life will be more interesting and exciting and filled with larger prospects than yours?

If you look at history, the fear that the next generation would be worse off than the previous one has been around for many centuries. It’s not a new fear. And it’s often due to the lack of imagination of people in understanding how innovation is moving forward. But if you graph progress and quality of life over time, and you zoom out a little and look at the centuries, it’s gotten better and better and better and better.

Our ability to be at peace with each other has grown. Our ability to have cultural interchanges has improved. We have more global languages, we have faster travel, we have better communication, we have better health. I think these trends will be sustained going forward, absolutely no question. If you look at the type of things that are happening right now in leading research labs, I see so many great new technologies coming out in the next ten to 20 years. It ought to be great.

So you disagree with the notion that innovation is dead, or that we’re in a great stagnation, or a period of decline?

I think anybody who believes that we are in a period of decline or stagnation probably hasn’t been paying attention. If you look at the way society has transformed itself in the last 20 years, it’s more fundamental than the 50 years before and maybe even bigger than the 200 years before.

I’ll give an example. With the advent of digital information, the recording, storage, and dissemination of information has become practically free. The previous time there was such a significant change in the cost structure for the dissemination of information was when the book became popular. Printing was invented in the fifteenth century, became popular a few centuries later, and had a huge impact in that we were able to move cultural knowledge from the human brain into a printed form. We have the same sort of revolution happening right now, on steroids, and it is affecting every dimension of human life.

A century or two ago, you had innovations such as steam, electricity, railroads, the internal combustion engine, the telegraph and telephone and radio. Those things had ramifications that fundamentally changed the structure of society, the structure of political organization. Is the information technology revolution going to have that kind of impact?
I think the impact will be greater. I don't want to belittle any innovation. I think the steam engine, the car, television, all the examples you mentioned are landmarks of history. But if you zoom out a little bit, most of these inventions come from the last 150 to 200 years. Very few are a thousand years old or older, and given that humanity is much older than that, you could say that almost all inventions are recent. I believe the full potential of the Internet has not been realized yet, and we're not very used to it. But a hundred years from now, we will conclude this was one of the biggest revolutions ever.

I believe we live in an age where most interesting inventions have not been made, where there are enormous opportunities to move society forward. I'm excited to live right now. But I would rather live 20 years from now or 50 years from now than live today. It's going to be better and better.

Supreme Court Punts in Fisher v. University of Texas

Recent analyses of the Court have stressed Chief Justice John Roberts' efforts to position the Court as a restrained judicial institution, and not an activist political one.

That said, this ruling may be more significant than meets the eye.

Background at the New York Times, "Justices Send Affirmative Action Case to Lower Court":

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered lower courts to take a fresh look, under a more demanding standard, at the race-conscious admissions policy used to admit students to the University of Texas. The 7-to-1 decision was simultaneously modest and significant, and its recalibration of how courts review the constitutionality of affirmative action programs is likely to give rise to a wave of challenges to admissions programs at colleges and universities nationwide.

The brief decision, issued eight months after the case was argued, was almost surely the product of intense negotation among the justices. The compromise they reached was at least a reprieve for affirmative action in higher education, and civil rights groups that had feared for the future of race-conscious admission programs breathed a sigh of relief.

For now, the Texas program and other affirmative action programs can continue without changes.

The decision did not disturb the Supreme Court’s general approach to affirmative action in admissions decisions, saying that educational diversity is a government interest sufficient to overcome the general ban on racial classifications by the government. But the court added that public institutions must have good reasons to use the particular means they use to achieve that goal.

That requirement could endanger the Texas program when it is reconsidered by the federal appeals court in New Orleans. The program admits most students under race-neutral criteria, accepting all students in the state who graduate near the top of their high school classes. But the university also uses a race-conscious system as a supplement.

“Strict scrutiny,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, “does not permit a court to accept a school’s assertion that its admissions process uses race in a permissible way without closely examining how the process works in practice.”

Courts reviewing affirmative action programs must, he wrote, “verify that it is necessary for a university to use race to achieve the educational benefits of diversity.” That requires, he said, “a careful judicial inquiry into whether a university could achieve sufficient diversity without using racial classifications.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who announced her lone dissent from the bench, said the race-neutral part of the Texas program worked only because of “de facto racial segregation in Texas’s neighborhoods and schools.” She said she would have upheld the appeals court decision endorsing the entire admissions program.

The remaining justices, including ones friendly and hostile to affirmative action, agreed on a middle ground, though Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas each issued dissents indicating that they would vote to strike down race-conscious admission plans in a future case.

RTWT.

Sandra Day O'Connor and John Paul Stephens were in the courtroom today. Interesting.

More at Memeorandum.

And William Jacobson has a roundup, "Supreme Court Affirmative Action Decision," and Ilya Somin, at Volokh, "Competing Interpretations of Fisher." (That's a must read.)

Also, Amy Howe at SCOTUS Blog, "Finally! The Fisher decision in Plain English."

Plus lots at Althouse, "'It offends me that the court failed to exert any kind of leadership with this decision'," and "'There is disagreement about whether Grutter was consistent with the principles of equal protection.... But the parties here do not ask the Court to revisit that aspect of Grutter’s holding'."

More from Althouse, "The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities'," and "'If you think that you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind'."

Here's a whiny piece, from S. Mitra Kalita analysis at Quartz, "The Supreme Court sent the Fisher case back, but make no mistake: Affirmative action is dead." And from Richard Kahlenberg, at Slate, "The Next Affirmative Action?"

'Why I Got My CCW Permit and Why You Should Too'

This is an essay from Mr. Mac at the Survivalist:

Over the last few months I have given it quite a bit of thought. Am I really that concerned about crime…we live in a pretty low-incident area. Was I on some ego trip? Was I trying to prove my masculinity? All of these may have had some minor influence, but, as I probed, I found that there were other, more significant motivations that sprung more from who I am as a man, and reflected certain core values that comprise my person. I’d like to put those down on paper.

1) I am both disturbed and frustrated by much of what I see in this country’s politics these days, and am often left wondering how to properly respond. It occurs to me that, as just one man, I have very little impact on this nation, just one voice out of 280,000 million. Yet, this country means a great deal to me. I lost my father to the Korean Conflict, all my uncles served in WWII, and I have studied and understand what unique and precious rights are afforded the citizens of this country I am privileged to live in.

Additionally, I hold as a strong value the opinion that every man and woman has the God-given right to be responsible for his or her own personal safety, that no one is obligated to be a victim, and that this right is not a privilege bestowed on me by some governmental entity. I also believe that, if a person of good character is willing to do the work necessary and takes the responsibility, then that person has the basic right to carry a defensive weapon. However, it seems that there are those in this country who disagree with me, who fear that I, and others like me, are a danger to society; that this freedom which is so basic to natural law and so thoroughly entrenched in the Constitution, must be taken from us.

These usurpers are even now furiously working to legislate that right out of existence. Mistakenly believing that this issue is “guns”, they feel quite comfortable trampling on my freedom. And so, it is to the anti-gun fascist, those who would deny me my rights as a free man and an American citizen that I am responding. It is in the spirit of those American’s before me who cried out “give me liberty, or give me death,” “damn the torpedoes,” and “let’s roll” that I acted. As a political statement, as an act of patriotism, as my way of hoisting the flag, and my finger, in enraged defiance of those despots who say I can’t, I got my permit to carry a gun; it was my patriotic duty.

That's an amazing essay that taps into the exact feelings I was having early this year when the gun control debate was peaking.

But read it all at the link (via Instapundit).

Marxist Melissa Harris-Perry Strikes Again!

At Weasel Zippers, "MSNBC Marxist Melissa Harris-Perry: “We Need To Impinge On Individual Freedoms” For “The Common Good”…"

Walter Russell Mead on Joseph Stiglitz and Higher Education Reform

I mentioned Joseph Stiglitz's recent NYT commentary at my essay the other day on fatherhood at the Jordan Downs housing project.

Well it turns out Walter Russell Mead has some additional thoughts, "Blues Missing the Mark on Higher Ed Reform":

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has a wide-ranging piece in the New York Times addressing the problem of income inequality in America, arguing that the U.S. is actually falling behind the rest of the developing world when it comes to social mobility. The piece touches on many issues, but the most interesting parts to us are his comments about how skyrocketing higher-ed costs are depressing upward mobility for the nation’s poor:

Unless current trends in education are reversed, the situation is likely to get even worse. In some cases it seems as if policy has actually been designed to reduce opportunity: government support for many state schools has been steadily gutted over the last few decades—and especially in the last few years. Meanwhile, students are crushed by giant student loan debts that are almost impossible to discharge, even in bankruptcy. This is happening at the same time that a college education is more important than ever for getting a good job.

Young people from families of modest means face a Catch-22: without a college education, they are condemned to a life of poor prospects; with a college education, they may be condemned to a lifetime of living at the brink. And increasingly even a college degree isn’t enough; one needs either a graduate degree or a series of (often unpaid) internships. Those at the top have the connections and social capital to get those opportunities. Those in the middle and bottom don’t. The point is that no one makes it on his or her own. And those at the top get more help from their families than do those lower down on the ladder. Government should help to level the playing field.

As time goes on, we’re seeing a growing consensus of the left, right and center that something is seriously wrong with our higher education system. But while Stiglitz gets the problem right, his solution, that government should be responsible for “leveling the playing field,” leaves much to be desired.

Continue reading.

Recall though that while Mead focuses on other problems at issue besides funding, I'm concerned about improvements in higher education that begin at the level of the family. Our problems are largely cultural. Sure, the state-led bureaucratization of education is enormously wasteful and ineffective, but that doesn't mean that even with moderate reforms it can't be made to lift and improve the lives of more people. Until we work on restoring a culture of learning in society, along with strengthening the centrality of traditional families in the economy, we'll continue to flail away on college success and higher education reform.

BONUS: My good friend Norm has some additional comments on Stiglitz, at the link.

Jordan Downs' Project Fatherhood

When I read Joseph Stiglitz's piece at the New York Times, "Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth," I thought, "Okay, I agree. We have these enormous problems. It might not be as bad as you say --- where's the comparative historical data for advancement, for example? --- but no doubt we have problems. But does more government expansion --- so much more --- always have to be the answer? What about helping to change the cultures of poverty that prevent social mobility?"

Then a later I read this piece at the Los Angeles Times, and thought, "Okay, if only we had more of this, a lot more?" See, "REMAKING JORDAN DOWNS: The father of all support groups":

It started in 2009 on a patch of grass outside the Jordan Downs gym. A group of ex-Crips gave haircuts and grilled hamburgers, hoping families and fathers would show up, relax and begin to talk.

"Growing up the way we did, during the time we did, a lot of the dads might as well have been in some other world," says Andre "Low Down" Christian, one of the leaders. "It's a big reason why things ended up as rough as they did here."

He tells of getting into a fight and tracking down his father for advice. His father gave him brass knuckles and a sawed-off shotgun.

"There had to be a better way of looking at being a dad," he says. "That's what we wanted people to think about."

Those initial weeks in front of the gym, five people came. The local fire station donated steaks and a barbecue. Time passed. Twenty arrived. Then 25.

John King, the Los Angeles Housing Authority official who oversees the community center, was already trying to change the culture in Jordan Downs as preparations were made to rebuild the 700-unit apartment complex. He offered his support and told the men to use his conference room.

By the summer of 2011, backed by a $50,000 grant from the nonprofit Children's Institute, the loose amalgamation of men became something more formal. Now they had a name, Project Fatherhood, and were part of a regional network of meetings the institute sponsored, focusing on men and their kids.

The Watts group has the feel of an urban barbershop: full of jokes and jealousy, grace and anger. Early on, two street toughs entered the room as the men spoke. Wearing trench coats, not saying a word, they walked around the oval of tables, suspiciously checking out the scene.

"They were wondering what exactly was going on with these older dudes," says the UCLA professor, Jorja Leap, who, assuming the toughs were carrying shotguns, followed the fathers' lead and didn't say a word. "They had to see for themselves what this meeting was about. Was it a threat to them? When they found out what we were doing, they gave their OK."

Project Fatherhood became part of the fabric of Jordan Downs. As the Wednesdays piled up, the men grew comfortable talking about their problems. They "were carrying deep troubles, questions and fears about being dads," Leap says. "Problem was, they didn't have many examples of good fathering, so they were coming up with answers from scratch."

RTWT.

But in the public community colleges, I see first hand the kind of investments the state is making in public education. I'm sure we could do more, but it all costs, and the economy can't support increasing "investment." On the other hand, when students are attending classes, they're not bringing anywhere near the needed social requisites for success in college education. And they come to us without those skills, from the K-12 system. More government spending isn't the solution to all of the problems Stiglitz identifies. But he's a big government progressive. Talking about the culture for people like that is "racist." In turn that consigns generations of Americans to poverty. Start changing the culture --- combined with making equal opportunity truly available --- and you'll see more upward mobility. We should be talking about it. From the president on down, we should be talking about it.

Life of Emily

From Dan Mitchell, "You’ve Met Julia the Moocher, Now Meet Emily." (Via Instapundit.)

Added: There's now a Memeorandum thread and a post on Emily at Hot Air.

Why Progressivism Should Scare the **** Out of You

Both my wife and I attended public schools, and our children attend public schools. Home schooling isn't really an option for us --- but the more I think about it, that makes me very sad. For one thing I'm sick to my stomach at the multiculturalism and "diversity" ideologies that dominate the public schools. But even more is that I'm around progressive administrators everyday at my college. I'm convinced that their values are 100 percent opposed to what I believe in. The scariest thing of all is that in my experience people like this are not smart --- honestly, they are just not smart people. In my dealings with people in the administration at my college, I'm seeing more and more that progressives can't reason through basic issues in a way that is rational and just. Ideology blinds reason. It's truly frightening, especially so since progressives think they know what is best for you.

So this brings me to the homeschooling issue. I think you just have to read this essay by Dana Goldstein to believe it --- and you need to be sitting down, seriously. I can't recall reading a more honestly totalitarian argument in a long time. See: "Liberals, Don’t Homeschool Your Kids: Why Teaching Children at Home Violates Progressive Values." It's not so much the civil rights argument that comes across there --- that poor children won't have access to social advancement without the public schools (I think that may be true, in fact). It's the idea that the state knows best, and that families have an obligation to serve their children to the needs of the state. In sum, statism as an ideology over individualism and the family. That is totalitarian and un-American, and frightening in a way that I can't even describe. The word nausea comes to mind when I think about this. I've looked again for a concise paragraph to quote, but I can't do justice by lifting sections of the piece. Just go read it.

See also the comments at Vox Popoli (via Memeorandum).

And while I'm thinking about it, folks should be reading Marybeth Hicks', Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom. I put it down to read some other books but picked it up again just this week --- and will be reading more today in light of the Goldstein piece. Progressivism should scare the **** out of you.

Oops! MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Spews Hatred of American Exceptionalism: Racist Attack Blogger Walter James Casper III Caught Lying Again!

Newsbusters has the story, "Rachel Maddow Sniffs in Disdain at Belief in America as 'Shining' City on a Hill."

I've been avoiding the racist anti-Semitic hate-blogger Walter James Casper III, but he and his progressive attack posse continue to stalk this blog --- and the comments at the American Nihilist shithole are filled with deranged screeds demononizing yours truly. And since I've been carefully documenting Casper's racist, hate-Israel pro-Occupy agenda, it's worthwhile to further expose his classic anti-Americanism and bankrupt lies about America's founding culture of American exceptionalism.

Recall first that I posted on Callista Gingrich's paean to American exceptionalism last week. Walter James Casper's hate-addled commenters freaked out over that (see the top Google result here). These nihilist goons were especially pissed about my comparison to First Lady Michelle Obama, who in 2008 admitted that "for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country." That got Casper all lathered up like a mule, and he writes:

Like too many republicans, mrs newt #3 is trying to sell a meme about the left that is a lie. I agree with 99% of everything she says in that video. There is no "great debate" about what American exceptionalism" means except in a few folk's divisive, partisan, fevered imaginations.

Whether one believes man was endowed with inalienable rights by a Christian God or by human nature, the end result--the form of government that makes America exceptional--is the same. It is our American ideals that make us unique in the world, and it is our desire and ability to sell our ideals to others--both immigrants who come here to seek a better life and become a part of this country, and to a lesser extent, those foreign nations who have incorporated some of our American ideals into their governments--that make we Americans unique.

Too often, however, there IS a certain degree of arrogance when talking about American exceptionalism. There are too any who believe that America was a nation chosen by God from among all (or most) others, and that we Americans are a chosen people. They are often nativists who don't want to share and expand American exceptionalism. Immigrants and other groups are demonized and deemed unworthy. "All men are created equal." Except Muslims (American or otherwise.) Except gay folks. Except liberals. That kind of American exceptionalism isn't worth the breath with which it's spoken...

I believe in American exceptionalism... But unlike too many on the right I'm not particularly threatened if the citizens of some other country feel the same about their ideals and way of life (though I do think they're wrong.)

This is classic denialism and dishonesty from epic hate-blogger Walter James Casper III.

First, actually, there is a "great debate" about American exceptionalism, and it's perfectly encapsulated by the contrast between Callista Gingrich and Rachel Maddow. And as is true with any other examples of the left's socialist program, Walter James Casper III is confronted with facts that are simply too difficult to acknowledge. So he lies about them. He's a pathological liar.

Here's Maddow at the video above:

Chris, I have to, I have to put it to you because you're the only person I know in the world to whom I can complain about this, but the city on the hill does not shine. The city upon a hill with the eyes of the world, with the, with the, right, the eyes of all people upon us, the city on the hill never shined. I don't understand why it always has to be shining.

One can't be more clear than that. Maddow's statement is a complete and total rejection of the historical vision of America as a light unto the nations. Progressives can't stand that, because they want to bring America down. Progressive ideology posits racist imperialism and implacable oppression as the hideous marks of an nation allegedly founded upon genocidal conquest. Thus for Maddow, "the city on the hill never shined." And when progressives are called out for such anti-Americanism, they simply deny the essential goodness of America's founding, and they revise the historical narrative to fit their collectivist agenda. We see that with Walter James Casper's dismissal of American exceptionalism as not "worth the breath with which it's spoken."

Now, secondly, Walter James Casper idolizes Rachel Maddow --- he's a huge fan of her poorly-rated show and he tweets regularly that he's tuning in to the program. And now --- rubbing hands together with hilarious glee! --- we have Maddow's own words proving --- beyond a shadow of  doubt! --- that Walter James Casper's a despicable liar. It's pretty rich.

Some time back, President Obama dissed American exceptionalism, announcing that "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." Picking up on that and more, Victor Davis Hanson responded to left's attacks on America last Fourth of July, at the New York Post, "What makes America exceptional":

 ...there has never been any nation even remotely similar to America. Here's why. Most revolutions seek to destroy the existing class order and use all-powerful government to mandate an equality of result rather than of opportunity -- in the manner of the French Revolution's slogan of "liberty, equality and fraternity" or the Russian Revolution's "peace, land and bread."

In contrast, our revolutionaries shouted "Don't tread on me!" and "Give me liberty or give me death!" The Founders were convinced that constitutionally protected freedom would allow the individual to create wealth apart from government. Such enlightened self-interest would then enrich society at large far more effectively than could an all-powerful state....

Individual freedom in America manifests itself in ways most of the world can hardly fathom -- whether our unique tradition of the right to gun ownership, the near impossibility of proving libel in US courts, or the singular custom of multimillion-dollar philanthropic institutions, foundations and private endowments. Herding, silencing or enfeebling Americans is almost impossible -- and will remain so as long as well-protected citizens can say what they want and do as they please with their hard-earned money.

Race, tribe or religion often defines a nation's character, either through loose confederations of ethnic or religious blocs as in Rwanda, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, or by equating a citizenry with a shared appearance as reflected in the German word "volk" or the Spanish "raza." While America was originally crafted largely by white males who improved upon Anglo-Saxon customs and the European Enlightenment, the Founders set in place an "all men are created equal" system that quite logically evolved into the racially blind society of today....

The Founders' notion of the rule of law, coupled with freedom of the individual, explains why America runs on merit, not tribal affinities or birth. Most elsewhere, being a first cousin of a government official, or having a prestigious name, ensures special treatment from the state. Yet in America, nepotism is never assured. End that notion of American merit and replace it with racial tribalism, cronyism or aristocratic privilege, and America itself would vanish as we know it...

And note something about "all men are created equal." The Declaration of Independence sets forth the ideal that all of those born, under God, are endowed with equality of opportunity and with basic natural rights, that among these, is the right to pursue happiness. American equality is equality of birth, not equality of outcome --- not the forced equality of the socialist state. See Ralph Benko, at Forbes, "Gingrich vs. Obama: American Exceptionalism vs. The Reconquest of America By Europe":

America — rooted in Democratic Capitalism — defines itself by equality of opportunity. Europe — rooted in Social Democracy— defines itself by equality of results. One of [Newt] Gingrich’s three key tenets is American exceptionalism. The 2012 election likely will determine whether America remains exceptional or, finally, is, culturally, reconquered by Europe.

Exactly.

Simply put, progressives hate American exceptionalism, and when confronted by proud assertions by conservatives about America's goodness, they react with visceral demonology. Rachel Maddow can't stand the country as it is, so she promotes an entirely different model --- the unexpectional collectivist welfare state of the kind now dragging the European democracy into purgatory.

And Walter James Casper III hates America too. His classic play is to attack conservatives who stand up for fairness and moral right as bigots and racists. The truth, however, is that Walter James Casper's a vile racist and Israel-basher, and when called out on it he lies and distorts reality in a never-ending attempt to hide from the facts. But as we see with his creepy idolatry of Rachel Maddow, Walter James Casper can't stand America. He's a liar and a stump of a man. His ideology has driven him to destroy others, with attacks, harassment and threats against the safety of his enemies.

What a disgrace.

PREVIOUSLY:

* "Walter James 'Occupy' Casper Continues Campaign of Lies: Childishly Whines About 'McCarthyism' While Endorsing Anarchists and Anti-Semitic Communists."

* "Racist Walter James Casper III Doubles-Down on Endorsement of Revolutionary Anti-Semitic Occupy Wall Street."

* "Hate-Blogger Walter James Casper III and Progressive Evil: Denial of Israel-Hatred Enables Exterminationist Anti-Semitism."

* "Manifesto: Occupy for the Revolution."

UPDATE: Stalking hate-blogger Walter James Casper III, who is banned from commenting at this blog, nevertheless commented at a different post because comments are closed at this entry explicitly TO PREVENT THIS KIND OF HARASSMENT.

Racist Walter James Casper III writes:

1 comments:

repsac3 said...

Sorry, Donald... but your "american exceptionalism" attack is nonsense. I never said that exceptionalism was not worth the breath with which it was spoken; I said there are those who use it as an excuse for nativism and divisiveness, and it is those excuses that are unworthy... Even your readers will be able to see the difference, Donald...

As for Rachel, I don't really know what she was trying to say (unless it was that America isn't perfect, maybe), but your guilt by association attack, as though I agree with or have to answer for every word the woman speaks, is pretty lame. I said my piece... Attack that... Don't just call it denialism and dishonesty... Show that it is either of them...

I feel bad for you Donald... Your need to lash out at others makes you a pathetic excuse for a man.

But thanks for "stalking" my blog and Twitter stream enough to launch this kind of ridiculousness... It shows how much of a hypocrite you really are...

January 27, 2012 1:52 PM

Racist Walter James Casper continues to harass this blog. He can't stand being called out for his anti-Americanism so he simply ignores the argument (progressives hate exceptionalism), ignores the evidence (undeniable and substantiated), ignorantly waves away Maddow's statement in dishonest non-acknowledgement of her America-bashing (the city on a hill "never shined"), and continues his lies and derangement.

In fact, contrary to stupid f-king racist asshat Walter James Casper, there is indeed a debate over exceptionalism. Seriously, stupid liar Walter James Casper perfectly represents it with his own claims that, "There are too [m]any who believe that America was a nation chosen by God from among all (or most) others, and that we Americans are a chosen people. They are often nativists who don't want to share and expand American exceptionalism."

Well hello progressive asshat!

That IS American exceptionalism. AMERICA IS A NATION CHOSEN BY GOD AMONG ALL (OR MOST) OTHERS.

Duh, if God didn't choose America as a light unto others we wouldn't be exceptional.

AND THEY ARE NOT "NATIVISTS WHO DON'T WANT TO SHARE" IT BECAUSE EXCEPTIONALISM HOLDS THAT ALL PEOPLE ARE BORN WITH NATURAL RIGHTS THAT CANNOT BE DENIED.

RACIST WALTER JAMES CASPER IS AGAIN LASHING OUT WITH ATTACKS AGAINST CONSERVATIVES AS "RACIST" IF THEY DON'T KNUCKLE UNDER TO THE LEFT'S POSTMODERN SOCIALIST AGENDA.

The stupidity! The denial! It burns!

America was chosen by God and that IS what Callista Gingrich affirms at her video. And that IS what John Winthrop declared in 1630, that the United States IS a city on a hill. And that IS what Rachel Maddow denounced as "never shining."

Racist Walter James Casper is beaten, beaten badly. What an epic loser and piece of shit progressive tool.

And racist hate-blogger Walter James Casper is now in likely violation of Google's terms of use. He is banned from commenting here and he is abusing his Google privileges. I am now approving all of hate-blogger Walter James Casper's comments and submitting them to Google as a record of the harassment.

The Collapse of the Work Ethic Among Young Americans?

I've never studied the data, so this seems a little incredible to me, but with so much youth support for Occupy Wall Street, I'm sure we could find some larger empirical patterns with research.

An interesting clip, via Kenneth Davenport.

Who Killed Horatio Alger?

From Luigi Zingales, at City Journal:

The title character of Horatio Alger’s 1867 novel Ragged Dick is an illiterate New York bootblack who, bolstered by his optimism, honesty, industriousness, and desire to “grow up ’spectable,” raises himself into the middle class. Alger’s novels are frequently misunderstood as mere rags-to-riches tales. In fact, they recount their protagonists’ journeys from rags to respectability, celebrating American capitalism and suggesting that the American dream is within everyone’s reach. The novels were idealized, of course; even in America, virtue alone never guaranteed success, and American capitalism during Alger’s time was far from perfect. Nevertheless, the stories were close enough to the truth that they became bestsellers, while America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous. In a word, it was a meritocracy.

To this day, Americans are unusually supportive of meritocracy, and their support goes a long way toward explaining their embrace of American-style capitalism. According to one recent study, just 40 percent of Americans attribute higher incomes primarily to luck rather than hard work—compared with 54 percent of Germans, 66 percent of Danes, and 75 percent of Brazilians. But perception cannot survive for long when it is distant from reality, and recent trends seem to indicate that America is drifting away from its meritocratic ideals. If the drifting continues, the result could be a breakdown of popular support for free markets and the demise of America’s unique version of capitalism.

Continue reading.

RELATED: I dealt with some similar issues here: "Decline of American Exceptionalism?"