A Horror Story from the Affirmative Action Front

Our friends in the mainstream media love a human interest story. They love to put up a helpless victim on the nightly news and show how more government intervention and spending is needed. People have needs. Needs must be met.

Here’s a story that won’t make the nightly news, or a multi-part story in The New York Times. It’s a story about ordinary, routine corruption at a community college, a story about government bureaucrats in the diversity office blatantly violating the rules to get their buddy a job. You can read all about it here.

It tells you “What’s the Matter With Kansas,” and why so many New Deal Democrats are now Republicans.

Robert Allgeyer’s parents were children of the Depression, high school dropouts. But he went to the local state college.

In 1998 after selling his business he was teaching part-time at a community college just after Prop 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, had passed. The one and only full-time instructor in his department was retiring and so he applied for his job.

But the powers-that-be had something else in mind.

[A] faculty member in another department had caused a stir. He expressed his belief that I had been originally hired, and retained, by the "white old-boy network."

...

Let me tell you something about that outspoken faculty member: he was black. But not just any African-American! He was the son of a Ph. D. from the University of Michigan. His father was on the faculty of a Midwestern private college. Junior had gone to a prep school, then to dad's private college for his undergraduate work (in the same department where dad taught), then to dad's graduate school, UMich. Can you say "legacy"?

So Allgeyer’s application was essentially blackballed. But guess who eventually got hired?

The recommended candidate was a white male, who had gone to the same private university as two members of the committee. I'm sure he was a fine man. But with or without Proposition 209, there had been several violations of state regulations or internal rules, in the review of applications. Each of them involved an "affirmative action" rule that had been written for the advancement of women and minorities. No matter; rules are rules. The violation of those rules had the direct effect of subjecting my own application to unlawful non-review.

Robert Allgeyer recommends to the people of Michigan that they pass the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative this November. Whatever they may think that affirmative action and preferences does for them, the chances are that it will allow government hiring managers to hire someone from their “old-boy network,” and it will screw ordinary people without connections.

The Gathering Storm of Extremism in Europe

As Mark Steyn’s new book

America Alone
climbs up the bestseller lists, with its message of demographic collapse for our European friends we had better pay attention to the other side of the story.

It is the rise of right-wing parties in Europe.

We all tut-tutted when Jean-Marie Le Pen beat the socialist candidate to advance to the runoff in the last French presidential election. But nationalist parties are gaining strength elsewhere.

In local elections in Belgium on October 8, according to Emanuele Ottolenghi, “the Vlams Belang won 20 percent of the overall national vote, reaching almost 33 percent in the city of Antwerp and even more in smaller communes.”
The Vlams Belang is a far-right Flemish nationalist party.

The reason for the explosion in the far-right vote is not hard to figure out. Voters are afraid of the rapid increase in Muslims in their countries and they are angry that the center parties have done nothing about it.

For many Europeans, the multiplying list of outrages where an intolerant, aggressive, violent, and retrograde Islam openly challenges liberal values such as freedom of speech and gender equality is a sign that a strong response is in high order. If they vote for the extremists, it is not necessarily because they have become extreme, but because the parties at the political center, which should best interpret this anxiety and give it concrete political expression, are paralyzed by political correctness, fear of antagonizing a growing Muslim electorate, or simply too naïve to understand what is at stake.

It is ironic that the Left, which believes in giving no quarter to extremism on the right, is relaxed about Muslim extremism.

When confronted with Islamic extremism, they make the claim that by talking to them and engaging them, the Muslim extremists will gain a stake in the political process and thus become more moderate — the exact opposite policy they advocate for right-wing extremism.

The Hard Left, of course, sees the Muslims as a new revolutionary class that they can lead against the Great Capitalist Satan, the United States.

Stay tuned. This problem is going to get worse before it gets better. And that assumes, pace Mark Steyn, that Europe will actually be around demographically in the years to come.

They Fined Newt Gingrich For Teaching a College Course

Yeah! Remember when they gang-tackled Newt for—get this—teaching a college course? And made him pay a $300,000 fine?

The folks at Investor’s Business Daily take us on a little political review as the feeding frenzy on Sen Harry Reid’s obscene real-estate profits fails to spread to the mainstream media.

We remember the feeding frenzy over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's alleged violation of federal tax law in using tax-exempt funds to fund his allegedly political college course, "Renewing American Civilization."

After a 3 1/2-year ordeal, and a $300,000 fine paid to the House Ethics Committee, the IRS finally ruled that the sponsoring organization, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, "did not serve the private interests of Mr. Gingrich" and was both apolitical and completely legal.

Oh good. Now of course, there is no doubt that Harry Reid’s real estate deals in Las Vegas have nothing to do with private profit, as I argue here. Oh no. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is just helping the people of Las Vegas by getting more raw land available for development and using his power and influence to get politicians and bureaucrats to surrender their little hoards up to the people. So that they can find a place to live and work and raise a family.

Still, if dear old Newt had to be sentenced first and investigated second—for the heinous crime of teaching a college course—why can’t we apply the same rules to Dingy Harry?

Even if Sen. Reid is a Democrat and therefore pure as the driven snow.

How About That Precautionary Principle Now?

Some years ago environmentalists set up the Precautionary Principle as a dodge to stop economic development. You shouldn’t do anything, they insist, unless you are pretty certain that it is safe.

Now they argue that, since everyone agrees that global warming will melt the glaciers on Greenland and inundate the low lying areas of the world that we should cut back on greenhouse gas production in coal and hydrocarbon burning. It is the precautionary thing to do.

But what about the new research that links cosmic ray intensity with cloud cover? According to Steven Milloy two Danish researchers, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, have established an experimental link between the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the earth and low-level cloud cover.

Their hypothesis was based on a strong correlation between levels of cosmic radiation and cloud cover -- that is, the greater the cosmic radiation, the greater the cloud cover. Clouds cool the Earth's climate by reflecting about 20 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space.



The hypothesis was potentially significant because during the 20th century, the influx of cosmic rays was reduced by a doubling of the Sun's magnetic field, which shields the Earth from cosmic rays.

A hypothesis is fine, but does it check out? Thank you, Mr Vice-President, I’m glad you asked, because I know you will be anxious to update your documentary An Inconvenient Truth with the latest science.

Svensmark published a paper last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in which he claimed that his team “had experimentally verified the physical mechanism by which cosmic rays affect cloud cover.”

Here is the press release announcing the experimental results. It shows that cosmic rays do indeed form minute aerosols of sulphuric acid as hypothesized.

But at RealClimate they are having none of it. They list five “missing steps” between establishing that cosmic rays create “ultra-small aerosol particles” and that cloud cover is controlled by the combination of cosmic rays and variations in the sun’s magnetic field.

The chaps at Junk Science are quite excited. They aren’t as vested in the “enhanced greenhouse hypothesis” as the chaps at RealClimate.

So the controversy continues.

Of course, whatever the science says the question is: what should we do about climate change? What is the precautionary thing to do?

Should we try to reverse anthropic changes like the increase in greenhouse gages over the last century? Or should we adapt to any changes in climate and sea level as they occur?

And anyway, how do anthropogenic changes play out against natural fluctuations such as earth orbit oscillations, solar radiation fluctuations, and anything else going on that we haven’t even noticed yet?

Mr President, are we safe?

Sunnis Worry About Shi'ite Power

Back in the first Bush Administration I remember a Bush administration official explaining the Iraq strategy, and I paraphrase. With the current set up we are screwed, he said, so we are going to toss everything in the air and hope that the result turns out better.

Well, at least we don’t have Saddam to worry about any more. But we do have a lot of worried Sunnis, as Terence P. Jeffrey makes clear in a report of Secretary of State Rice’s recent visit to the Middle East.

Now, it is an ironic fact that among those who ought to be praying most fervently for the success of the teetering U.S. experiment in democracy in Iraq are the non-democratic leaders of nearby Sunni Arab regimes.

...

Her agenda included the efforts to restore stability in Iraq and to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.



Sunni Arab leaders now see these causes as intimately linked -- because they see themselves sinking into a Cold War, or worse, with a Shi'ite Iran that is exploiting the unrest in Shi'ite-majority Iraq.

So the net effect of the U.S. adventure in Iraq has been to change the worry from Saddam’s aggression to Iran’s aggression.

But the Sunnis are not helpless. They could help stabilize Iraq.

If the Sunni Arab regimes want to avert the catastrophe they envision, they should use every means possible to pressure their Sunni co-religionists in Iraq to shut down their insurgency -- before it's too late -- and cut a deal with the coalition government.

Do you think it is doable?

Racial Discrimination at the University of Michigan

In Michigan this November the voters are deciding whether to pass the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (Proposal 2 on the ballot). As the ballot language says, it is

A proposal to amend the state constitution to ban affirmation action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes.

Only time will tell what the voters of the State of Michigan will decide, but one thing is for sure. There is plenty of preferential treatment going on at the University of Michigan. Writes Roger Clegg,

Severe discrimination favoring black applicants over white and Asian applicants was found at all three schools [undergraduate, law school, and medical school] in all four years for which data were received... Hispanics were also favored, but by less; frequently whites were given preferences over Asians, although to a still smaller extent.

The full report on racial discrimination at the University of Michigan is given here(pdf).

In Michigan the voters have a choice. They can vote to continue the current system under which, for 2005,

the median black admittee’s SAT score was 1160, versus 1260 for Hispanics, 1350 for whites, and 1400 for Asians.

(Boy, you sure have to be smart to get into the University of Michigan if you are an Asian.)

On the other hand, voters can vote to judge candidates for university on the basis of their test scores and the content of their character.

The Long Tail in Education

Back in the nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann promised that centralized, professional, government schooling would work wonders. He said:

Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities... and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete.

Fortunately, he didn’t say when.

Mann was inspired by the Prussian state education system that had been designed to help create an army that could beat the French. He didn’t explain how the Prussian situation applied to the United States.

Ever since education has been centralized, politicized, and run on Prussian lines by the government and its functionaries. In the United States in the early nineteenth century, before the advent of the common school, literacy stood at about 90 percent. It is no higher today.

But there is hope. With the rise of the Internet the vast government education monopolies are facing competition. And people can experiment, try new ideas out, and find other people with similar needs and ideas.

There are even education bloggers like Mr. Chalk who are busy spilling the beans on the nightmare in the inner city schools.

Here’s a education site that’s recently joined the conversation. Whole Teaching is a project of teacher and parent Teresa Piddington of Seattle. Teresa is developing the site to provide information and resources related to the use of Creative Systems Theory in child education. The theory, she writes, appreciates and enhances

what is unique about each child while simultaneously supporting every student as he or she engages in the formative process of learning.

In her article Temperament and The Writing Process with Young Children Piddington writes about her experience in applying the Creative Systems Personality Typology developed by Charles M. Johnston MD.

[The typology] correlates temperament type to particular stages in creative, formative processes... For example, in formative processes such as learning, teaching, and writing there is an early (inspiration) stage, a middle (perspiration) stage, and a late (finishing and polishing) stage.

Piddington describes how this typology helped her to respond to the different needs of her students in a second grade project to create cloth-bound books. It helped her to identify strengths and problem areas for each child and develop strategies that responded to the individual strengths and anxieties of each child.

Understanding that "earlies" need creative freedom within structure, "middles", timely feedback and affirmation, and "lates" ample time to embellish their work has strengthened my ability to differentiate and respond to the individual needs of my students.

Projects like Whole Teaching help us to realize that there is a whole new world out there. We are all so used to the top-down hierarchy of the education system that we fail to see what is staring us in the face. Education is an obvious area where the Internet can help teachers, parents,and students get together to solve problems from the bottom up. In fact Google has already stepped in with Google for Educators to help get things going.

Then there is Chris Anderson’s idea of

The Long Tail.

So far people have tended to think only of its potential in business where a host of small niche firms can thrive alongside the behemoth market leaders.

But why shouldn’t the Long Tail be just as powerful in education? If the Internet can bring together buyers and sellers why can’t it bring together teachers and students? Nowhere is the need more urgent than in the area of child education, perhaps the most regulated and cartelized area of American life.

It is now 160 years since Horace Mann gave us the government “common school.” Alas, nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code are nowhere close to obsolete.

Perhaps we are already have the solution in our hands.