Saturday Miscellany

First, a word from Brown University Professor Glenn Loury, about diversity programs:

How do I feel about racial preferences being institutionalized as the means for securing racial diversity in the elite academy? I hate it. I'm moved to say, "Get your hands off of my dignity!" 

"Don't patronize me, god damn it!" The Supreme Court got this one right last summer.

Second, writing on his Substack Loury expanded on his views:

On the one hand, African Americans in any field who meet and exceed the standards of that field will have to deal with condescension and undeserved suspicion regarding “how they got here.” That is insulting, and it casts a pall of illegitimacy over their achievements. It compromises how their integrity is perceived, and through no fault of their own. Indeed, affirmative action actually penalizes high-achieving African American, since everyone knows that all black people at the elite level in the US benefit from affirmative action, whether they want it or not.

On the other hand, African Americans who might not be up to snuff but who are nevertheless elevated within their fields may never actually know they’re being condescended to. It’s not as though a hiring committee will tell them, “Well, you’re not the best candidate, but we like your skin color.” These beneficiaries walk around believing their peers regard them as equals, when, in reality, everyone else can see they’re below par. Maybe the hiree will realize what’s happened or maybe he won’t. Either way, he won’t be regarded as a true equal.

Third, in the meantime, over in Portland, Oregon there is a fentanyl crisis. Tyler Durden explains it clearly and concisely on the Zero Hedge blog:

The idiots running Portland, Oregon have declared a 90-day state of emergency over an ongoing fentanyl crisis, just three years after decriminalizing possession of all drugs.

Fourth, on the sanity front, the Premier of Alberta Province in Canada took a stand against transmania. Billboard Chris reports:

Massive, breaking news! Alberta Premier @ABDanielleSmith is banning puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children under 16. She’s also stopping all sex change surgeries for children, which are almost always mastectomies done on girls.

Naturally, she has been widely denounced for being transphobic and for promoting suicide.

Fifth, also on the transmania front, the state of Connecticut has mandated that boys’ high school locker rooms must have tampon dispensers. 

The New York Post reports on what happened when they installed one in one high school:

A state-mandated tampon dispenser inside a boys’ bathroom at a Connecticut high school was ripped down 20 minutes after it was installed this month, according to the building’s “disgusted” principal.

The dispenser was placed in the Brookfield High School boys’ bathroom at 9:30 a.m. last Wednesday, but by 9:52 a.m., it was torn from the wall, leaving tampons littering the floor, the school’s principal, Marc Balanda, said in an email to students and staff obtained by CT Insider reported.

Naturally, the school principal was appalled. He has promised dire punishment for those responsible. Defiling tampons is clearly a crime against humanity. Disrespecting the imbeciles who enacted this policy is even worse.

Sixth, also on the transmania front, the government of the state of Montana has stolen a child because the child’s parents did not want to go along with her transition.

Maureen Callahan explains in The Daily Mail:

In an apparent and horrifying act of governmental overreach, a troubled teenager has been removed from her home after Child Protective Services determined that she needed to transition.

The parents in question don't seem to be neglectful bigots.

They simply think, as many rational people do, that irreversibly medicalizing a teenager might cause more harm than good.

These parents say they listened when their daughter, aged 13, said she thought she might be a boy. They agreed to send her to a therapist — not to change her mind, but to further explore her confusion.

Of course, the magic bullet is the threat of suicide. A child who has learned from activists to threaten to commit suicide will be allowed all manner of mutilation. 

The Republican governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte said that there was nothing he could do. Time to recall Gianforte, don’t you think.

Seventh, over at The Free Press, Nellie Bowles opens her excellent TGIF column with an effort to channel the wit and wisdom of Sun Tzu, the famed author of The Art of War. How better to understand the Biden foreign policy team:

This week, an Iran-backed militia launched a drone strike against America’s soldiers and killed three—William Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, GA; Kennedy Sanders, 24, of Waycross, GA; and Breonna Moffett, 23, of Savannah, GA. First, the American response was to make it clear that it was kind of our fault: there were two drones coming in, and one was our friendly drone and one was Iran’s murder drone, and in the confusion we let the murder drone kill instead of taking down the murder drone. See, Iran didn’t mean it, it’s our bad, really. Biden took a few days to mull what to do and then the administration released their response: “U.S. officials have confirmed to CBS News that plans have been approved for a series of strikes over a number of days against targets—including Iranian personnel and facilities—inside Iraq and Syria.”

The key to military strategy is to announce it loudly and clearly a week or two ahead of time, that’s what it said in The Art of War, I’m pretty sure. Soon, several empty buildings are about to be shown what America is all about. Within days, a random drone left on the desert floor is going to see into the blinking red light of a state-of-the-art weapon and know why we don’t have free healthcare. Several strong, terrorist-affiliated long-eared hedgehogs are going to be obliterated. Iran will never strike again! Mission—I can’t believe we’re back here—Accomplished. 

Now, the key question is this: if Nellie Bowles, who is not a seasoned military strategist, can figure this out, how come the commanding generals of the Biden administration seem to be completely lost.

Eighth, on the courtly love front, newly married Iowa teacher Cassidy Kraus, age 24, decided to celebrate her wedding by bedding a couple of high school boys, aged 13 and 14.

She is now facing 33 years behind bars.

This used to be called courtly love. Now, it’s a felony.

Ninth, what can you do for an encore, Randi Weingarten? Daniel Greenfield explains that the teachers’ unions have now joined other labor unions in supporting Hamas:

After destroying the education of a generation of students and boosting teenage suicide rates so its members could work from home with its school lockdowns, The American Federation of Teachers was understandably lost for a sequel.

How do you top something so selfish and evil?

The answer is to come out for Hamas.

The leftist campaign to demand an end to Israeli attacks on Hamas under the guise of a ceasefire during which, as before, the Islamic terror group will be able to kill Jews, but Israel won’t be allowed to fight back, has scored with leftist unions.

The new narrowly elected DSA socialist leadership at the UAW got the autoworkers union to demand an end to Israeli attacks on Hamas. SEIU’s inclusion on the list was easy enough. And the AFT teachers’ union is among the most leftist unions around. 

AFT does have more Jewish members than the other unions on the list, but Jews are still very much a minority.

Tenth, if you recall yesterday’s essay on the new Biden administration plan for Middle Eastern peace, you will be happy to learn that Fred Fleitz, a man with more foreign policy credentials than I have, has reacted to the Tom Friedman column, drawing the same conclusion that I did. Readers of my musings stay ahead of the game.

The so-called Biden Doctrine is for domestic consumption. It is a grandiose plan that Biden administration media allies like Thomas Friedman, CNN, and MSNBC will use to praise President Biden as an effective and decisive world leader and blame Prime Minister Netanyahu for obstructing Biden’s peace efforts. If implemented, this cynical plan will be a step backward for Middle East peace and will embolden Iran and its terrorist proxies to expand their attacks.

If the Biden administration moves forward with the Biden Doctrine, it will further isolate Israel and damage its global standing. This is a shoddy way for America to treat one of its closest and most important allies, but President Biden has put his animosity toward Prime Minister Netanyahu, radical left views of the Israel-Palestine dispute, and presidential politics ahead of standing with Israel at this desperate time in its history.

All Americans should speak out against the so-called Biden Doctrine as a perverse politicization of American foreign policy that could significantly harm a close U.S. ally. Because this proposal violates the pro-Israeli views of most Members of Congress, a strong bipartisan congressional majority must insist that Biden officials kill this betrayal of Israel ASAP.

Excellent points, even if I wrote about them yesterday.

Eleventh, another point that I have often made, namely, that the academic war against merit is producing a generation of students who cannot do the work needed for the future.

George Will has the story in his Washington Post column:

Writing in National Review, Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute explains “the political consequences of campus sloth.” Idleness breeds extremism and “performative rebellion” among students who, “basting in a progressive hothouse,” are “increasingly exempted from meaningful expectations of rigor.” This is partly because campuses have burgeoning therapeutic bureaucracies that manufacture fragility by fretting about students’ serenity.

The domestic supply of college graduates with advanced scientific skills — which are acquired in “quantitative” courses, not “studies” — cannot begin to meet the nation’s need for economic vitality and military preparedness. Lemov cites the Economist’s estimate that by 2030 the U.S. high-tech sector will face a shortage of 1.4 million qualified workers, while each year only 70,000 students on U.S. campuses complete undergraduate engineering degrees. America depends on other nations’ high schools and colleges for the foreign students who in 2016-2017 earned 54 percent of U.S. master’s degrees and 44 percent of U.S. doctoral degrees in STEM fields.

Twelfth, you are more than familiar with the crime story from New York City. A gang of illegal migrants beat down a couple of New York City police officers. Given that we have a pro-crime District Attorney in one Alvin Bragg, they were released without bail.

The state’s governor, one Kathy Hochul, a woman who should not be governor, declared that the perpetrators of the outrage ought to be deported. Naturally, she will do nothing about it.

Now, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has found the solution. Gov. Hochul should fire DA Bragg:

“The governor may remove any elective sheriff, county clerk, district attorney or register,” the New York state constitution says, “but before so doing the governor shall give to such officer a copy of the charges against him or her and an opportunity of being heard in his or her defense.”

The assault of the NYPD officers happened at about 8:30 in the evening near the lights of Times Square, not in the dead of night in some far-flung corner of the city. The New York Post talked to locals and visitors around the migrant shelter there. “There’s drug dealing almost all day long,” one worker said. “Tables with watches set up. You see stolen clothes coming in. At night you see fights going on in the street.”

Or here’s more testimony. “It’s a joke,” said the manager of a building nearby. “There’s no incentive for cops to make arrests because these guys don’t go to jail and there’s no incentive for these guys to stop selling drugs.” Mr. Bragg has a progressive ideological mental block, but the people of New York understand the problem, which isn’t all that complicated. Whose side is Ms. Hochul on?

Of course, the governor of Florida has been known to fire prosecutors who were too lenient on crime. Where is Ron DeSantis now that we need him?

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