They don’t make ’em like they used to:
The triumph of DEI at UCLA medical school
Everything falls before the almighty DEI deity. It’s more important that doctors fit the proper woke demographics than that they be competent, although I don’t think the public was consulted on the question:
Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).
Sounds good. But that’s the median. This is the reality:
In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.
[Since the advent in 2020 of Dean of Admissions Jennifer Lucero] Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a “failed medical school,” said one former member of the admissions staff. “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.”
This story is based on written correspondence between UCLA officials, internal data on student performance, and interviews with eight professors at the medical school—six of whom have worked with or under Lucero on medical student and residency admissions.
I find over and over that year 2020 keeps coming up in terms of the explosion of DEI domination in so many institutions, universities prominent among them, although the trend had been going on already for many years, of course.
In the article, Lucero is quoted as saying, during the admissions process involving a black female candidate whose grades were substandard: “Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” and that therefore “we need people like this in the medical school.”
That sort of thinking reduces everything to group identity. If black women’s health is particularly compromised, what they really need i is a black woman doctor even if she’s inferior as a doctor. Everything is race and sex and groups, and meritocracy is a bad word. However, I bet if Lucero did a survey of black women and asked them which they’d prefer, the best doctor or a doctor that might not be so good but who would match them in race and sex, they’d answer they wanted the best doctor.
What’s more, are black women dying at a higher rate than everyone else? Of course not. See Figure 2, the chart there on death rates , race, and sex, and you immediately see that the death rate for black males is the highest. I’m going to assume that violent death is a big part of that. Black females have death rates that are significantly lower, and in fact their rates of death are lower than that of white males. Hmmm; I doubt Lucero will be advocating for more white males in medical school as a result.
And then there’s this:
UCLA medical school hired a new dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, In 2020. Since then, the number of students failing their shelf exams—standardized tests taken after each clinical rotation—has exploded, rising as much as tenfold in some subjects.
That wasn't a coincidence. pic.twitter.com/tLJZCqZAQf
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) May 23, 2024
Portland, Oregon has had enough of its Soros-backed DA
Good news – Portland, Oregon has decided anarchy isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, even for leftists:
“It’s official: Portland got the Schmidt kicked out of it!” Portland-based journalist Andy Ngo wrote. “Soros-funded [Schmidt] has finally conceded after the surge of last-minute ballots failed to help him overcome his gap against centrist challenger Nathan Vasquez. Antifa now have a new target.”
Prosecutor Nathan Vasquez defeated Schmidt — a progressive DA who took office amid the George Floyd protests and whose campaign has received contributions from groups linked to liberal billionaire George Soros — by a margin of 55.7% to 43.8%, according to the National Review. It is a major victory in one of the most dependably blue regions in the country.
Vasquez plans on stopping “open air drug dealing and drug use while helping connect individuals to treatment,” he told Fox News Digital in a statement after beating Schmidt, his former boss. …
As part of his campaign pitch, Vasquez argued that Schmidt neglected to enforce the law and prosecute criminals.
Oops, just a little oversight. Actually, of course, it was deliberate.
I hope this sort of thing spreads to voters in other cities who previously had been taken in by Soros-backed DAs. I wish it would also translate to an awakening about the wisdom of voting left versus right in general, but I somehow doubt it.
Good news from Nigeria: Bring back our girls
Remember ten years ago when Boko Haram kidnapped many girls from a school in Nigeria? It was disturbing front-page news everywhere. Michelle Obama got into the act with a “Bring back our girls” campaign online.
Well, a couple of days ago we got some very good news related to all of this, but not many news outlets even reported it. I don’t see anything from Michelle Obama, either (I checked her “X” page). I guess over the years much of the virtue-signaling world has stopped caring about “our” girls.
They haven’t been forgotten in Nigeria, though; take a look [emphasis mine]:
Hundreds of hostages, mostly children and women, who were held captive for months or years by Boko Haram extremists in northeastern Nigeria have been rescued from a forest enclave and handed over to authorities, the army said.
The 350 hostages had been held in the Sambisa Forest, a hideout for the extremist group which launched an insurgency in 2009, Maj. Gen. Ken Chigbu, a senior Nigerian army officer, said late Monday while presenting them to authorities in Borno, where the forest is.
The 209 children, 135 women and six men appeared exhausted in their worn-out clothes. Some of the girls had babies believed to have been born from forced marriages, as is often the case with female victims who are either raped or forced to marry the militants while in captivity.
Note the use of the word “extremists” rather than “terrorists.” And I don’t know why the word “either” is in there; in such cases, marriage is rape.
More:
The army said the hostages were rescued during a dayslong military operation in Sambisa Forest, which was once a bustling forest reserve that stretches along the border with Cameroon and Niger, but now serves as an enclave from where Boko Haram and its breakaway factions carry out attacks that also target people and security forces in neighboring countries.
Some extremists were killed during the rescue operation and their makeshift houses were destroyed, the army said.
So the hostages were apparently being guarded and there was some sort of battle.
Finally the article gets around to explaining the Muslim jihadi origins of the group:
Boko Haram, Nigeria’s homegrown jihadi rebels, launched its insurgency in 2009 to establish Islamic Shariah law in the country. At least 35,000 people have been killed and 2.1 million people displaced as a result of the extremist violence, according to U.N. agencies in Nigeria.
The US campuses seem notably silent on the matter. They’re too busy championing other jihadi terrorists kidnapping and raping and killing other young women.
Here’s a reference to the kidnapped group that sparked the “Bring back our girls” campaign [emphasis mine]:
The majority of those rescued were women and children, many of whom had been abducted a decade ago.
Acting General Officer Commanding … Haruna revealed that the rescue operation was part of a 10-day endeavor named ‘Operation Desert Sanity 111’, aimed at eliminating terrorist remnants from Sambisa forest while offering surrender opportunities to willing insurgents.
… [In] the infamous Chibok schoolgirls abduction in 2014 … approximately 276 girls were forcefully taken from their school dormitory.
While some managed to escape captivity, others were rescued by troops during clearance operations, with the latest rescue occurring in April 2024.
Despite these efforts, approximately 90 of the Chibok girls remain unaccounted for, raising hopes that some may be among those recently rescued from Sambisa forest.
Let us hope so. This is really good news, in a time when we haven’t gotten too much of it, especially about raped and kidnapped woman taken into sexual slavery by jihadis.
Note also that the articles don’t mention the word “Christian,” but in the case of the Chibok kidnapping (and probably the others, as well, although I’m not 100% sure of that) the targeted girls were Christian. More:
Boko Haram has used the [Chibok] girls as negotiating pawns in prisoner exchanges, offering to release some girls in exchange for some of their captured commanders in jail.
Sound familiar?
The girls kidnapped in Chibok in 2014 are only a small percentage of the total number of people abducted by Boko Haram. Amnesty International estimated in 2015 that at least 2,000 women and girls had been abducted by the group since 2014, many of whom had been forced into sexual slavery.
Nigeria is a country that’s about half Muslim and half Christian, and in much of the country there isn’t much tension between the two groups. But in the north – which is predominantly Muslim – Boko Haram is very active and has wreaked havoc, especially with the Christian population in that area.
Open thread 5/23/24
What I’m learning about self-publishing
One aspect of my efforts to publish Gerard’s book is that prior to this I knew next to nothing about book publishing except that self-publishing existed. Now I know a lot about it, and it’s quite a learning curve.
Early on I made the decision to have mostly paperback hard copies, and that print-on-demand was way too expensive and the quality not as good. So I have focused on having a small print run, to be expanded later if necessary. At this point I’ve ordered samples of the books printed by various printing companies that make hard copies for self-publishers. It turns out that’s a very thriving business with a dizzying array of contenders.
And the sample books they’ve sent me are complicated. So many choices of paper and cover types, including thickness and finish and lamination and embossing and on and on, each with a different price. And because my book has color pictures, which raises the price and makes good reproduction more challenging, it’s even more daunting to make a choice.
To top it all off, I often think how much Gerard would have enjoyed this part of the process. Not the nitpicky copy-editing, which he might have farmed out, but the aesthetic decisions relating to how the book looks and feels.
Not my forte. Printing was his forte. He’d been a magazine editors and book editor and agent for most of his working life, and he noticed things like print and fonts and arrangements on the page far more than I ever did. I have some aesthetic sense, but I just never paid a particle of attention to those things. My blog is visually plain, too, and I like it that way. Gerard used to tease me about that.
So it’s very ironic that I’m the one making these decisions.
Blood libel redux: the UN and Gaza death statistics
Recently the UN backpedaled on its Gazan death statistics for women and children, the numbers they got from Gaza/Hamas in the first place and have been spreading far and wide for months. The blamed the fog of war for their error.
And then they backpedaled a bit on the backpedaling and pointed out that the totals are probably the same, it’s just the number of women and children that is much reduced.
What tools the UN officials are. And I mean that literally: they are terrorist tools, useful instruments for getting terrorist propaganda out to the world and giving it the stamp of approval. Because the truth is that the “fog of war” generally makes it hard to know until much later, and the Palestinians and Hamas have historically been proven liars over and over again on such subjects. This war started with a huge lie about the deaths in a hospital bombing claimed to be 500 and in fact just a few dozen, with a hospital supposedly destroyed and yet not damaged, and supposedly at the hands of Israelis and yet actually accomplished by the mechanism of a Hamas bomb aimed at Israel and falling short.
The UN knows that Hamas is completely unreliable. But they want to discredit Israel, so they report the false statistics and only correct them a little if at all, and much later after their hands are forced by statisticians proving the figures are bogus.
I recently found a new writer – new to me, that is – and he has written what I believe is the best article on these blood libels againt Israel in the recent war. Here it is – his Substack is called Bastiat’s Window – and here’s an excerpt:
Consider the Bastiat’s Window reader’s claim that, “The IDF has now killed 1.5% of the population of Gaza … .” The population of Gaza is around 2.5 million, and that would would indicate 37,500 Gazans killed since October 7. While the number could prove to be another example of inflated Hamas fabrications, let’s suppose not, for the sake of argument.
On October 7, Hamas launched an unprovoked sneak attack on Israel, killing perhaps 1,400 people—including some of the hostages. By Hamas’s numbers, Israel’s retaliation has killed 37,500 Gazans—27 Gazans killed for every Israeli killed in the initial attack (but not including IDF forces killed since then). Now consider a parallel situation. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched an unprovoked sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans. Retaliation by America and its allies resulted in the deaths of perhaps 3,000,000 Japanese citizens—1,248 Japanese killed for every American killed at Pearl Harbor. By this crude measure, then, America’s post-December 7 response was 46 times as “disproportionate” as Israel’s post-October 7 response. Even more telling, America contributed mightily to millions of German deaths, even though Nazi Germany had not even attacked the U.S. when America declared war.
In the 1940s, the singular goal of the Allies was to crush the capacity of Japan’s and Germany’s murderous regimes to make war. Israel’s sole purpose in Gaza is to similarly neuter Hamas. Israel’s campaign is as morally upright as America’s efforts against the Axis Powers, and Israel has a long way to go before its response is more lethal than America’s response between 1941 and 1945. …
When I offered this Israel-in-2024-to-America-in-1941 comparison, the Bastiat’s Window reader/commenter said:
“You compare the Gaza war to WWII. I don’t think the comparison is on point …”
I said he was absolutely right in that respect:
“You are correct in arguing that Imperial Japan’s December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor is not directly comparable to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. [As a proportion of population], Hamas killed seven times as many Israelis as Japan did Americans. Hamas has always promised to murder every Jew on earth, whereas Japan never made any such threat against Americans. Japan attacked a military target, whereas Hamas attacked only defenseless civilians—raping young girls and old women, slaughtering babies in front of their parents, kidnapping small children, engaging in necrophilia, sending photos and films of their depravities to the victims’ loved ones—and promising endless future rounds of the same. Imperial Japan could only attack a small, remote outpost of the U.S. and posed little or no physical threat to the vast majority of Americans; in contrast, Hamas and its fellow Iranian puppets stand within tactical range of every Israeli.”
Excellent points.
Covering the Trump trial: Dershowitz and others
Unlike most states, New York forbids courtroom cameras except for a few meaningless exceptions. Therefore our news of the historic Trump trial – and in this case the word “historic” is apropos – gets filtered to the public by the MSM, which hates Trump. So it’s not just the trial itself which is unjust, it’s the coverage.
How very convenient for the left. They can spin it any way they want, and it is difficult to counter what they’re saying. Transcripts are available, but few people will be seeking them out. To top it all off, there’s a gag order against Trump, who is barred from speaking about many aspects of the trial.
The power of this New York court to railroad – and try to silence – a former president and the current leading candidate and probable nominee of the GOP is extraordinary. Not only that, look at how the MSM is covering the efforts of others to get the word out. This NBC article, for example, is titled “Trump increasingly relies on allies to deliver the attack lines the gag order bars him from uttering: Legal experts say it might be challenging for the prosecution to try to argue that Trump is responsible for criticism by others.”
It might be hard to blame him for what other people say? Ya think? Ya think? It might be hard to bar the entire right from criticizing “witnesses, prosecutors, jurors or court staff members, as well the families of those people and of the judge presiding over the case”? So Michael Cohen can lie and lie and lie and Trump faces penalties if he calls him out, but the left would like to stop Trump supporters from doing so.
It’s not enough that the left controls the trial and almost the entire MSM and have gagged Trump, they would like to control every aspect of the messaging on this trial.
That’s why someone like Alan Dershowitz – who is not a Trump supporter but who actually believes he and everyone else should get a fair trial, and who is very familiar with courtroom proceedings – is vital as an observer and commenter on the goings-on. Dershowitz is very incensed at the travesty the trial has become. Watch the following video:
If you don’t have time to watch, read this:
HANNITY: I’ve got to imagine in all the years you practice law, have you ever seen anything like this?
DERSHOWITZ: No, I never have. I sat in the front row, literally just feet away from where all the action occurred. I rolled my eyes when the judge made some rulings that were absurd. Any first-year evidence student would understand that he was making biased rulings in favor of one side.
I stared him down, but Costello didn’t. He acted like a normal witness and the judge went berserk. The judge violated Trump’s constitutional right to a public trial by kicking the media out of the courtroom. I don’t know why I wasn’t kicked out, and I heard him lecture Costello… “What you did was contemptuous. You looked at me contemptuously…”
…it reminded me of Mae West when a judge said, you’re showing contempt for the court and Mae West said no, Your Honor, I’m trying my best to hide my contempt for the court.
I’m sure Costello was trying to hide his contempt for the court, but the judge had such a thin skin that he threatened him. He said he would strike the testimony and hold him in contempt if he rolled his eyes again. You have a constitutional right to roll your eyes and to stare at anybody. It was absurd!
In particular – and what especially drew Dershowitz’s ire in the video I posted – was that the judge threatened to strike the testimony of Costello, which means that the jury would be instructed to disregard it. This is really unprecedented, especially for eye-rolling. It makes a further travesty of a trial that is already a tremendous travesty. And Dershowitz also points out the because the judge dismissed the press and jury while he had his tantrum, the idea was that no one would see it except the trial participants. Perhaps Judge Merchan was unaware of who Dershowitz is, because he was one of the few people allowed to stay in the room.
It occurred to me a day or two ago that Americans would benefit from a dramatic reading of the trial testimony, and today to my surprise I discovered that such a thing exists. I haven’t listened yet, but here’s a link to an article explaining how this came to be, and here’s the reading:
NOTE: It also occurs to me that for many young people with little knowledge of law and little experience of how strange all of this is, it seems ordinary and fitting. Their main concern would be whether the trial will be successful in getting Trump rather than whether it is fair. It also occurs to me that such ignorance and/or “ends justify the means” mentality is hardly limited to the young, although I’m assuming it’s more common in that group.
Open thread 5/22/24
Men and women – not the same:
The donation drive is over – and a great big Thank You!!
Once again, I offer a huge “thank you!” to every single person who has contributed so far, and to all those who contribute at other times of year. I am so very grateful to you all, and to all the readers and commenters here.
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The Ignatius report on the war in Rafah: will Israel scale back?
Today there’s a WaPo article by David Ignatius on the war in Gaza:
I’ve seen other articles reporting on what Ignatius wrote; for example, this, entitled: “Report: Israel opts for limited Rafah action with Biden’s blessing: the IDF won’t engage in a full-scale assault on the last Hamas stronghold in southern Gaza.” Excerpt [emphasis mine]:
In an opinion piece published on Monday citing sources familiar with the matter, the newspaper’s senior commentator wrote that the framework for eventually ending the Gaza war became more clear after a just-wrapped trip to Saudi Arabia and Israel by U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, the U.S. National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa.
“Israeli leaders have reached a consensus about a final assault on Hamas’s four remaining battalions in Rafah. Instead of the heavy attack with two divisions that Israel contemplated several weeks ago, government and military leaders foresee a more limited assault that U.S. officials think will result in fewer civilian casualties and, for that reason, Biden won’t oppose,” said Ignatius.
“At least 800,000 of the roughly 1.5 million Palestinians who had gathered in Rafah have left, U.S. officials believe,” he added.
Ignatius also wrote that Israeli defense officials have agreed on a strategy for “the day after” Hamas is defeated, with Ramallah playing a role. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is against Palestinian Authority involvement in governing Gaza given its support for terrorism, a stance Ignatius acknowledges.
The post-Hamas Gaza “will include a Palestinian security force drawn in part from the Palestinian Authority’s administrative payroll in Gaza. This Palestinian force will be overseen by a governing council of Palestinian notables, backed by moderate Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia,” he said.
So, what does all this mean? Trying to read Ignatius in the WaPo and understand the backstory is like reading Pravda and Kremlin tealeaves in Soviet days, but I’ll give it a go.
First let me say that Ignatius is the usual Democrat hack (I’ve written about him before, here as well as here). But that doesn’t mean he’s not correct. It means we certainly can’t assume that he is, or that this is straightforward reporting.
I also want to call your attention to phrases such as “eventually” ending the war and “more limited” assault. They are both unclear both as to time and scale.
Various possibilities come to mind in explaining the article. Ignatius’ sources – probably either Sullivan, McGurk, or their aides – may be trying to say something like, “See, President Biden is doing great and has gotten peace in our times underway, having convinced the nasty old Israelis not to bomb Rafah into the Stone Age.” There may be no agreement at all, merely talks about it, and this Ignatius story might be a form of pressure on Israel. Or, there might be an agreement of sorts, in which the Israelis go somewhat easier in exchange for Biden and company not stabbing them in the back in the ICC, and in exchange for some sort of vague support for the war’s aftermath in controlling Gaza and educating the Gazans in the notion that Israelis are not devils incarnate after all.
As for that business of the “governing council of Palestinian notables,” it would be fascinating to get the names of these stellar leaders and hear about their wonderful accomplishments. And I’d be curious whether Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are in fact onboard with this, and if so how they see their roles. They do have an interest in keeping the Gazans from attacking Israel again, but they also have an extreme antipathy to dealing with the Palestinians at all, as the latter and their allies have tried to disrupt the stabilty of other Arab countries and on the whole have been bad, bad news.
I haven’t yet seen any announcement from the Israeli government about any of this. And I wonder how the Ignatius report can be reconciled with this:
As the military operation in Hamas-held stronghold of Rafah entered its second week, the IDF is expanding its control over the city. The military was advancing “into Rafah, one area after another and gradually expanding,” the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS reported Tuesday.
If the Ignatius report is correct, however, it may be that Israeli leaders think that they cannot eliminate all the terrorists anyway, that world opinion is isolating them further and further, that the Biden administration is willing to cut off their armaments and their own supply can’t last forever, and that the best solution may lie in the more moderate Arab nations gaining some control of the area if they’re willing to do so in exchange for an Israeli pullback of sorts.
Time will tell.
The defense rests in the NY Trump trial
The Trump trial in New York was a travesty from the start: the change in the statute of limitations, the elevating of a misdemeanor into a felony by means of the implication that there was some unspecified other crime connected with the misdemeanor, the compromised status of the judge in terms of his daughter’s work, the fact that Bragg had campaigned on getting Trump, the choice of venue, and of course the fact that the bar for indicting a leading presidential candidate should be high rather than so low even a worm couldn’t slither under it.
But slither they did.
Judge Merchan should have either recused himself or thrown the case out of court before it began. And/or later he should have ruled for a directed verdict. But instead, he seems determined to make sure Trump is found guilty and who cares about reversal on appeal; the latter would only be happening after the election, after the damage is done. And inflicting damage on Trump is the aim of the entire enterprise.
It doesn’t matter that the other crime – the one that supposedly makes the case a felony – has neither been stated, defined, nor proven. It doesn’t matter that the evidence rests on the shaky shoulders of one Michael Cohen: perjurer and thief. It doesn’t matter – and if it ends up mattering, if at least one juror says “no” to this railroading of Trump, I will be both pleased and very surprised.
But I’m not at all surprised that Trump didn’t take the stand. Nothing he could say would change anything to help him with this judge and jury, and in general it is advised that defendants can only hurt themselves by testifying. What’s more, there’s no case. What is there to rebut? The jury will do what it will do at this point.
This courtroom proceeding and the background to it have made a number of things crystal clear – not that they were murky before, but they’re even more clear now. The first is that the left will stop at nothing to destroy Trump and the right in general. The second is that the road to lawfare against the right is to try the person in a deep blue venue, and it’s virtually a certainty that – no matter how weak or even corrupt the case may be – you will get your conviction (again, if that turns out to be untrue here, I will be very pleasantly surprised). The third is that the left’s willingness to be so open about its willingness to upend the legal system and any other system in further of gaining more and more power indicates that the left has zero reluctance to use fraud at the ballot box. And the fourth is that the MSM will cover and spin just about anything the left does, the better to engineer the re-election of a confused, destructive, mendacious, stupid, vicious tool named Joe Biden.