The war against educational meritocracy

The New Neo Posted on by

This article is filled with eye-popping statistics on the elite public high schools of New York and their demography over the years.

The uneducated immigrant Chinese and other Asians of New York today do what poor immigrant Jews of New York used to do—work their butts off to give their kids the opportunity to get ahead through hard work of their own, combined with brains. Black and Hispanic families in New York don’t seem to do the same anywhere near as often, and liberals are hopping mad about the whole thing because it gives the lie to many liberal myths, such as the fact that poverty is one of the main culprits.

So they want to change it, and since they can’t seem to change the different ethnic cultures and their attitudes toward education, they will change the way meritocracy works in the specialized schools:

These liberal elites seem particularly troubled by the Asian-American work ethic and the difficult questions that it raises about the role of culture in group success. While the advancement of Asian students has come overwhelmingly at the expense of more affluent whites, it has also had an undeniable impact on black and Latino students, whose foothold at these schools, small to begin with, has all but vanished.

Alarm at this development has triggered a new wave of assaults upon the entrance exam…The complaint does not allege that the exam intentionally discriminates against black and Hispanic students. Instead, citing statistics regarding declining black and Latino enrollment and SHSAT pass rates, the LDF bases its argument entirely on the theory of “disparate impact”””that is, that discrimination should be inferred merely from racial differences in test scores.

The new rules (“screened” schools)—which eliminate or minimize the entrance tests and emphasize other criteria, and increase black and Hispanic enrollment, and reduce the percentage of Asians—seem to have some unintended consequences as well:

A comparison of the eight most selective screened schools with the eight specialized schools shows that the screened schools, while more heavily black and Latino, are also considerably whiter and more affluent””and considerably less Asian. Remember that the specialized [test] schools are 13 percent black and Hispanic, 24 percent white, and 60 percent Asian. The top screened schools are 27 percent black and Hispanic, 46 percent white, and only 26 percent Asian. And while 50 percent of the students at the specialized schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, only 37 percent of the students at the top screened schools do.

So, in a nutshell, when you reduce the number of poor Asian students you get a richer student body composed of more white students as well as more black students. But, anything to get rid of those Asians, I guess, who have never been favored by liberals.

Like the Jews before them:

As Northwestern’s Asian-American studies director put it in a 2012 New York Times op-ed, after noting that whites were three times as likely as Asians with the same scores to be admitted to elite colleges: “Sound familiar? In the 1920s, as high-achieving Jews began to compete with WASP prep schoolers, Ivy League schools started asking about family background and sought vague qualities like ”˜character’ . . . and ”˜leadership’ to cap Jewish enrollment.”

Long, long, long ago, probably around the time I was in college, I realized there was a war going on against education geared to what used to be called “the gifted” when I was in grade school. The exam schools in New York are the crown jewels of the New York City school system, but the “progressive” battle against the meritocracy they represent (and its un-PC ethnic mix) will not stop until they’ve been dismantled and/or rendered meaningless.

What a long strange trip it’s been, from what would seem to be obvious common sense to institutionalized discrimination as policy.

What should SCOTUS rule on the subsidies?

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems altogether clear that SCOTUS will end up ruling in the not-too-distant future on the legality of federal subsidies in states that have declined to establish exchanges. I just predicted that, if only for the sake of not upsetting the whole Obamacare applecart, ultimately the Court will probably allow those subsidies. And that’s true even if the justices have to torture the law to find a way to do it.

And torturing it will be necessary:

“There are specific rules about when and how the IRS can deviate from the plain language of a statute,” Cannon explained to National Review Online, arguing that the subsidies regulation fails to comply with those rules.

The IRS can deviate from “absurd” laws, in theory, but the subsidies language is not absurd. “It might be stupid, but that’s not the test for absurdity,” Cannon says. Similarly, the IRS can deviate in the case of scrivener’s errors ”” typos, basically ”” but this is not a typo, Cannon says, because the language was written into repeated drafts of the law.

“They not only keep that language in there, but they even inserted it, this same phrase again, right before passage while the bill was in [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid’s office,” Cannon says. “So, it’s not a scrivener’s error, either.”

Finally, the IRS could fill in ambiguous gaps in a law. The problem for the IRS, though, is that the subsidies language is not ambiguous…

“The power of executing the laws necessarily includes both authority and responsibility to resolve some questions left open by Congress that arise during the law’s administration. But it does not include a power to revise clear statutory terms that turn out not to work in practice,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an opinion that Roberts joined in full.

The legislative history of Obamacare also shows “that Congress was considering all sorts of proposals that would withhold subsidies from states that didn’t establish exchanges or do other things.” So it is logical to conclude that there was nothing accidental or unintentional about the ACA’s language.

And yet I stand by my prediction about how SCOTUS will end up ruling, even in the face of the evidence. I think the justices, particularly John Roberts, are loathe to turn Obamacare into something unworkable, especially now that it’s been in operation for more than a half a year and people have come to rely on it. That was always the danger of the passage of time, and both sides knew it.

[ADDENDUM: At Ace’s, DrewM gives some reasons he thinks SCOTUS may decline to hear the case, and that it will be decided in favor of Obamacare by the Circuit Court en banc.]

Huge federal court decision on Obamacare—but don’t get too excited

The New Neo Posted on by

This in just a little while ago:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit delivered a huge blow to Obamacare this morning, ruling that the insurance subsidies granted through the federally run health exchange, which covered 36 states for the first open enrollment period, are not allowed by the law.

…The court’s ruling agreed with challengers who argued that the plain language of the law, which in multiple instances limits subsidies and credits to any “Exchange established by the State,” does not allow subsidies to be disbursed in exchanges where a state declined to establish its own exchange and is instead run by the federal government. Basically, the federal government cannot step in and create and run an exchange that is somehow still an exchange established by a state.

So, the court says that the law means what it says rather than the interpretation the Democrats gave it. For a more ordinary law that had been passed in a more ordinary way, at this point its proponents could just go back and fix it. With Obamacare, nothing can be changed. That’s the price you pay for passing a law no one wants through machinations that subvert the legislative process and cannot be successfully repeated because Congress is now determined to undo it.

So other methods will be tried to keep the law functioning as is. That’s why I wrote in the title of this post, “don’t get too excited.” The first approach will probably be to seek en banc review of the judgment, which means having the entire DC Circuit (eleven judges, seven Democrat appointees to four Republican ones*) rule on it, which wouldn’t happen till the fall. You can guess how that would go. And then I’m assuming it’s to the Supreme Court for the final word, and I’m also assuming that probably couldn’t happen till after the 2014 election.

[*NOTE: Remember the end of the filibuster for judicial nominees? That meant that Obama was able recently to change the makeup of the DC Circuit Court, the focus of that fight. At the time of the filibuster’s demise, the Court was still an equally representative body, 4-4. After Obama had subsequently put three more judges on it, it became 7-4 Democratic:

The immediate impact will be to turn the D.C. Circuit ”” often the only check on a president’s executive power ”” into a rubber stamp for Obama’s unilateral rewriting of statutes, his questionable executive orders, his overreaching agency regulations, and his other Nixonian abuses of executive authority.

That is precisely what has happened, if the Court is asked to decide en banc. The Supreme Court is still nominally even between liberals and conservatives, but if anything should happen to any of the conservative justices or the swing justice during Obama’s remaining tenure, that situation is finished, too, and the liberal dominance of the Court will be assured for many many years to come no matter which way the country trends.]

[ADDENDUM: The Obama administration says this will not affect subsidies while the case moves through the court system. It’s not clear on what basis the administration asserts that, but maybe it’s just “because we say so.”]

[ADDENDUM II: And another federal circuit court has just ruled the other way, which virtually guarantees that SCOTUS will take up the cases in order to resolve the disagreement.

And if previous experience is any guide, I will even go so far as to predict SCOTUS will find a way to uphold the subsidies, for the simple reason that they have shied away from dealing a death blow to Obamacare, as being too disruptive.]

Arab lands are starting to become Christianfrei…

The New Neo Posted on by

…just as over half a century ago they became Judenfrei.

Here’s the recipe: take a religious group that’s lived in your country for millennia, longer than Islam has been in existence. Kill some, threaten the rest, and soon you’ll soon have your country to yourself, free of the tainted influence.

Iraq did it to its Jews during the 1940s and 1950s, and now ISIS is doing it to the country’s Christians who have lived there for six thousand years (first as Assyrians, and then as Assyrian Christians at the dawn of Christianity).

The Western world should be proclaiming its outrage far and wide. But the Western world has defanged itself, and sits wasted and weary.

Kerry and the “peace plan”

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a long, long article in TNR that purports to be “The Explosive, Inside Story of How John Kerry Built an Israel-Palestine Peace Plan””and Watched It Crumble.” It’s worth reading, but maybe not for the reasons the author intended it to be (full disclosure: I’ve only read about half of it so far, although I plan to finish it later today).

The problem with the article and so many other treatments of the subject is that its premise is that there’s a peace plan that can be built and that can crumble. And that someone like John Kerry has the smarts to do it, if it were possible to do it.

None is the case; the whole thing is a chimera.

At its conclusion the piece contains a more realistic appraisal of the situation, from Avi Dichter, former head of Israel’s Shin Bet:

The American effort will always be multiplied by the amount of trust between the two leaders. So if Kerry’s pressure represents the number five, and then Obama’s help brings the number to ten, it really doesn’t matter. You’re still multiplying it by zero. The final result will always be zero.

The amount of trust—or distrust—between the two leaders reflects the amount of distrust between the two countries and their peoples. Peace plans sometimes have been entered into by these two groups (or Israel and other Palestinian groups) for temporary tactical reasons, but that’s it. The Palestinian government does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and Hamas is a terrorist group dedicated to its destruction. But for various reasons both have become the darlings of Europe and the Left, and that helps tie Israel’s hands to a certain extent. But “partners for peace” they ain’t.

As for Kerry, I have loathed the man for well-nigh these forty-odd years, and that opinion began back when I was a liberal Democrat. Long before I thought Obama was a narcissistic leftist and a self-serving liar (long before I’d even heard of Obama, actually), I felt pretty much the same way about Kerry.

Here’s a great quote from the article that tells you a lot about Kerry:

[Netanyahu] opened the meeting by playing Kerry a video on one of his favorite topics: Palestinian incitement. It showed Palestinian children in Gaza being taught to glorify martyrdom and seek Israel’s destruction. “This is the true obstacle to peace,” Netanyahu told Kerry.

“It’s a major issue,” Kerry replied. “And nothing justifies incitement. I hate it. I’ve read Abbas the riot act about it. You know I have. But it is worthwhile to try to understand what life looks like from the Palestinian point of view.”

“This has nothing to do with the occupation and the settlements,” said Netanyahu.

Kerry pressed on: “When I fought in Vietnam, I used to look at the faces of the local population and the looks they gave us. I’ll never forget it. It gave me clarity that we saw the situation in completely different ways.”

Kerry went on to add that the situation in Israel “can’t be solved if you can’t see it how they see it.”

This is beyond inane on Kerry’s part. Who cares whether Kerry “hates” incitement, or whether he’s “read Abbas the riot act” about it? Certainly not Abbas. But that’s the way a narcissist like Kerry talks.

What’s more, understanding the Palestinians won’t help or change a single thing, and it’s a travesty that Kerry is saying that it will. I wonder whether he says that to the Palestinians, too; but even if he were to say it, it would be an equally useless statement. Understanding what the Palestinians want, and what they might stand to gain and lose from negotiating or failing to do so, and then what pressure can be brought to bear on them, is much more to the point.

Kerry was in Vietnam for barely four months over forty years ago and went home early, and his time there was spent on a Swift Boat. How many South Vietnamese did he get to encounter, and under what circumstances? And how could he possibly have a clue what they were really thinking when they looked at him (except for the ones he was shooting at), or why, or whether they “saw the situation in completely different ways” from him? How about the ones who fled the country after we left, or those who were killed or re-educated; how did they “see the situation”?

Kerry has long been fond of making sweeping pronouncements on what the South Vietnamese people wanted and didn’t want, and how they “saw the situation.” I guess he was a mind reader then, just as he’s a mind reader now. According to his 1971 Senate testimony on the subject, here’s what they thought:

We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart”¦

So that when we in fact state, let us say, that we will have a ceasefire or have a coalition government, most of the 2 million men you often hear quoted under arms, most of whom are regional popular reconnaissance forces, which is to say militia, and a very poor militia at that, will simply lay down their arms, if they haven’t done so already, and not fight. And I think you will find they will respond to whatever government evolves which answers their needs, and those needs quite simply are to be fed, to bury their dead in plots where their ancestors lived, to be allowed to extend their culture, to try and exist as human beings. And I think that is what will happen”¦

I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.

It’s extraordinary to think that this man is our Secretary of State.

Perry ordering National Guard to border

The New Neo Posted on by

The federal government refuses to take any responsibility for solving the border problem. In fact, we know the Obama administration considers the flood of illegal immigrants a feature, not a bug—except for the fact that it’s been so overwhelming in recent months that it’s actually drawn more attention than was planned. The influx was supposed to come in under the radar.

Meanwhile, Rick Perry continues to be the only person doing what he can to stem the tide at the border. About a month ago Perry announced a surge of state law enforcement officials to guard the border, and now the Guard:

Hinojosa did not have details of the effort, but an internal memo from another state official’s office said the governor planned to call about 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to the Rio Grande Valley ”” at a cost of about $12 million per month.

But neither Perry nor the Guard can change the basics of the situation. They can’t send the newcomers back, they can only apprehend them and hand them over to border guards. That won’t mean that most of the children or families will be going home; we already know that’s highly unlikely. What it does mean is that more drug dealers might be identified and deported rather than slipping through the cracks. And that Texas will be footing the bill.

[ADDENDUM: But you know what? Turns out that Obama still hasn’t done enough for the new arrivals and the illegal immigrants already here. Why, some are even afraid he might deport a few (although I see no evidence that their fears are justified). The most radical—and there are plenty of them—will not rest until fully open borders are achieved.]

A beautiful young Dutch couple, who seemed to have their lives ahead of them…

The New Neo Posted on by

…lie murdered somewhere in Eastern Ukraine.

And their family wants them back, along with the families of all the other Flight 17 victims:

“No words can describe it,” Fredriksz-Hoogzand [the mother of one of the victims] told AP. “Bodies are just lying there for three days in the hot sun. There are people who have this on their conscience. There are families who can never hold the body of a child or a mother.”

She said she sent [her son] Bryce and [his girlfriend] Daisy on vacation to Bali to get over the grief of Daisy’s mother dying two and a half months ago.

“It’s a tragedy on top of a tragedy,” she said.

Asked Sunday night what delay was acceptable in returning bodies to their families, Prime Minister Mark Rutte replied: “Zero. Nothing is acceptable. All this should be done two days ago. But we are working as hard as possible to ensure a quick repatriation.”

Two photos of Bryce Fredriksz-Hoogzand and his girlfriend Daisy Oehlers appear at the link. I haven’t reproduced their photos here because they are too heartbreaking. And those are just two victims of the hundreds that could be written about, each with their own poignant story.

The families are suffering terribly. But perhaps they could be considered fortunate compared to the families of the passengers of Malaysia Flight 370. The families of Malaysia Flight 17 will almost certainly some day get to reclaim the bodies of the loved ones. And in the meantime they know approximately where they are, and even what happened to them, although it’s almost impossible to understand why. Perhaps there is no why.

But they know the when and the where, and some of the details of the how and the who, and soon they will know even more. For the passengers on Malaysia Flight 370, all their families know is the day of their disappearance, a “last-heard-from” location, and a flight manifest.

The rest is silence.

[NOTE: On second thought, maybe the Flight 17 families don’t know where the victims’ bodies are any more. Are all the victims’ bodies on these refrigerated trains, or just some? And where are the trains actually going?]

A few more prognostications from the past (from FredHJr and others)

The New Neo Posted on by

A few weeks ago I was looking at some old comment threads to find some apropos quotes from commenter FredHJr for a post on the fifth anniversary of his death, and I came across a few extra ones that I thought worth highlighting.

The first is from commenter “Hogarth,” who was a regular here for a while but hasn’t been heard from since some time in 2009. In October of 2008 he wrote, addressing another commenter on the thread who expressed the hope that Obama might be “evolving”:

…[Obama’s] answers to even the simplest questions are textbook examples of dissembling, misdirection, Clintonian deniability, and mutually exclusive statements in a single but-ridden sentence. The ”˜uhs’ are telling ”“ he is measuring every word to insure that it says nothing that he can ever be held to.

Evolving? There’s the evolution that brings the maturity and self-sacrifice required in a leader, and then there’s the evolution that becomes a chameleon whose position at any moment is calculated 100% to deliver maximum political expediency and personal gain.

I understand what you think you see in Obama, but I don’t understand how your impression can survive even a cursory glance beyond what he has said he has done and what he has actually done. If the past is any indication of the future, Obama will be an indecisive, thin-skinned, and potentially dangerous president.

Back to FredHJr again. The subject of the thread was attacks on Joe the Plumber after he had asked Obama the question that made Obama look bad:

The ethics of [Obama] and his supporters in the media, and the voters committed to him are very, very important too. They give us a window into HIM and OURSELVES.

This is how despots and their bootlickers behave. They are bound in a thuggish miasma of moral relativism that signify a sickness afoot in the nation.

Of course Obama’s response to Joe was revealing. Obama and his operatives saw a crack open up for McCain to exploit, and they are destroying another human being unjustly in order to advance the socialist revolution.

We have an entire generation of kids, the Baby Boomlet Generation (the one behind GenX) that has fused with the Older Cohort of Baby Boomers, in an alliance to destroy capitalism and lay the West open to predation from abroad. The danger is not just to our Republic and its Constitution. If we fall, so does all of human civilization, and the carcass will be picked over by the stronger polarity in the Unholy Alliance between Western socialists and Islam. My bet is that Islam will win that rumble. Easily. And then the darkness that humanity descends into will be for a very long time.

It is, ultimately, our moral disorder and our intellectual sloth that lays up open to the predators waiting and circling. Obama will be the first one inside the perimeter.

Oh, why not one more from FredHJr, on the same thread:

Joe’s question to the future President Obama was legit. The wrinkles in his life are immaterial to the validity of the question.

He was indeed metaphorically raped by NKVD chekists. His life was trashed by people who did not like the fact that he asked an uncomfortable question and Obama’s answer alarmed a lot of people.

So, a message was sent: If you mess with me by making me look bad, I will burn you so badly you will never recover. I will destroy your life and make the public humiliation so heavy that you might never get out from under that burden. And I will always find people in offices where confidential information is kept and in the media who will gladly help me do this to you.

“Chris White” I’ve gotcha by the throat in an ironclad grip of logic and moral reasoning. You can’t squirm out of it. To try to deflect, change the subject, or change the focus will not work. You cannot avoid the logical ramifications of your choice.

You accuse neo of having an echo chamber, but if we came over into your ”˜hood and posted our opinions over there we would be banned and our opinions deleted. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine. In academia, grad students, undergrad students, faculty, and staff who are conservatives HAVE TO HIDE THEIR VIEWS FOR FEAR OF VERY REAL RETRIBUTION. Yes, you people are Stalinists. The ethics of expediency do obtain among the collectivists.

You can’t hide from the truth forever, however much you want to silence it. And no one knows the socialists like a former Marxist. Those of us who left the Left are utterly despised by former comrades and fellow travelers. For a very good reason. We took the playbooks with us.

Will Elizabeth Warren run in 2016?

The New Neo Posted on by

She says not. But her fellow progressives seem to ♥ Warren even more than they ♥ Hillary.

Take a look a this speech of Warren’s to see how it goes.

One thing I had not realized before, but which Dan McLaughlin at Red State pointed out: Warren is roughly a contemporary of Hillary Clinton’s, which means that if she waits till 2020 to run she’ll be over 70 years old at the time. So 2016 may be her last chance.

Let’s revisit Obama on the topic of Russia…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and recall how snarkily he mocked Romney in 2012.

I’m not sure why I’m going there. After all, there’s nothing to be done about it now. Maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.

But when Russia invaded Ukraine, I thought about that exchange. And now that the Russian-leaning Ukrainian rebels (or separatists or whatever we’re choosing to call them these days) have shot down the Malaysian plane with 298 souls on board, I’ve thought of it again.

Here was Romney’s response to Obama, just to refresh your memory:

What about the experts? They got it wrong, wrong, wrong too. But how many will ever utter a word of apology to Mitt Romney?

I will take a wild stab at it: none. To do so, they’d have to come down hard on themselves. They’d have to abandon their fantasy world in which they were correct to have supported Obama all along.

[NOTE: This is a very reworked version of an older post.]

The asylum racket

The New Neo Posted on by

Those newest illegal entrants to this country from Central America have come with the promise of being able to stay and receive benefits. And sure enough, right on schedule, that permission and those benefits are starting to flow.

Did anyone ever doubt this would be the case? Did anyone think that the phrase “expedited deportation process” had anything to do with actually being forced to leave the country? Exactly as expected—and fully expected by the new arrivals, too—what’s being expedited is the liberal (in several senses of the world) granting of asylum to droves of newcomers [emphasis mine]:

The Judiciary Committee says asylum approval rates have “increased dramatically” under the Obama administration. Overall, according to the committee statement, “Approval rates by asylum officers have increased from 28 percent in 2007 to 46 percent in 2013 and approval rates by immigration judges in affirmative cases have increased from 51 percent in 2007 to 74 percent in 2013.” And that does not count appeals.

“Once individuals are granted asylum,” the report notes, “they have access to all major federal welfare programs.

Anyone who followed the Boston bomber case was already aware of the vast amount of aid those granted asylum can and do regularly receive (even, or especially, under false pretenses, which is not at all unusual). When did it come to this? When did the law begin to take nearly all comers and, instead of giving them an opportunity to work, began to give them rewards and handouts for breaking the law and living off others?