Presumptuousness, Adolescence at Hunter College High School and Thomas Sowell’s Review

“A graduating senior at Hunter College High School in New York gave a speech that brought a standing ovation from his teachers and got his picture in the New York Times. I hope it doesn’t go to his head, because what he said was so illogical that it was an indictment of the mush that is being taught at even our elite educational institutions.

Young Justin Hudson, described as “black and Hispanic,” opened by saying how much he appreciated reaching his graduation day at this very select public high school. Then he said, “I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do you.” The reason? He and his classmates were there because of “luck and circumstances.”

Since Hunter College High School selects its applicants from the whole city on the basis of their test scores, “luck” seems a strange way to characterize why some students are admitted and many others are not. If you can’t tell the difference between luck and performance, what has your education given you, except the rhetoric to conceal your confusion from others and perhaps from yourself?

Young Mr. Hudson’s concern, apparently, is about what he referred to as the “demographics” of the school– 41 percent white and 47 percent Asian, with blacks, Hispanics and others obviously far behind. “I refuse to accept” that “the distribution of intelligence in this city” varies by neighborhood, he said.

Native intelligence may indeed not vary by neighborhood but actual performance– whether in schools, on the job or elsewhere– involves far more than native intelligence. Wasted intelligence does nothing for an individual or society.

The reason a surgeon can operate on your heart, while someone of equal intelligence who is not a surgeon cannot, is because of what different people actually did with their intelligence. That has always varied, not only from individual to individual but from group to group– and not only in this country, but in countries around the world and across the centuries of human history.

One of the biggest fallacies of our time is the notion that, if all groups are not proportionally represented in institutions, professions or income levels, that shows something wrong with society. The very possibility that people make their own choices, and that those choices have consequences– for themselves and for others– is ignored. Society is the universal scapegoat.

If “luck” is involved, it is the luck to be born into families and communities whose values and choices turn out to be productive for themselves and for others who benefit from the skills they acquire. Observers who blame tests or other criteria for the demographic imbalances which are the rule– not the exception– around the world, are blaming whatever conveys differences for creating those differences.

They blame the messenger who brings bad news.

If test scores are not the same for people from different backgrounds, that is no proof that there is something wrong with the tests. Tests do not exist to show what your potential was when you entered the world but to measure what you have actually accomplished since then, as a guide to what you are likely to continue to do in the future. Tests convey a difference that tests did not create. But the messenger gets blamed for the bad news.

Similarly, if prices are higher in high-crime neighborhoods, that is often blamed on those who charge those prices, rather than on those who create the higher costs of higher rates of shoplifting, robbery, vandalism and riots, which are passed on to those who shop in those neighborhoods. The prices convey a reality that the prices did not create. If these prices represent simply “greed” for higher profits, then why do most profit-seeking businesses avoid high-crime neighborhoods like the plague?

It is painful that people with lower incomes often have to pay higher prices, even though most people are not criminals, even in a high-crime neighborhood. But misconstruing the reasons is not going to help anybody, except race hustlers and politicians.

One of the many disservices done to young people by our schools and colleges is giving them the puffed up notion that they are in a position to pass sweeping judgments on a world that they have barely begun to experience. A standing ovation for childish remarks may produce “self-esteem” but promoting presumptuousness is unlikely to benefit either this student or society.”

Comment:  It is amazing how much so-called educators in America adulate nearly everything  and anything no matter how inane rather than recognize the importance in study and work to achieve ones goals……as if they are driven to divest one and all of one of the basic human masculine gifts, the instinct to  problem solve.

Racist Bomb Planted at Rand Paul Rally and at Harvard Law School

To manufacture racism is  to sabotage the democratic processes.   Such racism has been the bread and butter politic for Democrats for nearly 40 years.  Remember, the Marxist left is a religion in which many will do anything to advance.

The following article is by John Hinderaker at PowerLine…..”Dirty Democrat Tricks”

“The Democrats endlessly play the race card. What frustrates them is that conservatives basically don’t care about race, so it is hard to impugn them as “racist” without flat-out lying. Thus, we have dirty trick operatives like this supporter of Democrat Jack Conway, who infiltrated a pro-Rand Paul, tea party-type rally with the intention of making racist comments, etc., to provide fodder for the Democratic Party’s effort to smear Paul and his supporters. Unfortunately for him, he was busted.

That’s despicable, of course. But how different is it from Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow accusing Senate Republicans of racism in an op-ed in the Boston Globe? Minow noted that some Republican Senators questioned Elena Kagan’s adherence to the judicial philosophy of Thurgood Marshall, which Minow thinks is out of bounds and can only indicate racial animus, since Marshall was a “saint.”

Many members of the Judiciary Committee criticized Kagan for her admiration of Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked.

Let’s pause there. It is common for law clerks to admire the judges for whom they work; no one questioned whether Kagan should admire Marshall. Some Senate Republicans did ask, however, whether she agreed with his expansive view of federal powers and his flexible–to put it kindly–view of the Constitution. Minow continues:

Invoking Justice Marshall now, some want to appeal to and perhaps feed anxieties of some whites about desegregation — and about black men in power.

Really, isn’t Minow even more contemptible than the goofball who tried to infiltrate the Rand Paul rally? She is well aware that Senate Republicans who asked Kagan about Marshall’s judicial philosophy never mentioned, and had no interest in, his race. The argument here is about fidelity to the Constitution, an argument in which Minow has no intention of engaging. She is just another drive-by Democratic Party dirty trickster, but a better-paid one than the Rand Paul infiltrator.”

Dennis Prager: “Black Murders Eight Whites. Media Blames Whites!

This occurence happened the other day in Connecticut and in the media ever since.  Read the following column by Dennis found at his Website:

“The title of this column seems unbelievable, but it is in fact what happened in America this past week. And almost no one has noticed.

After 50 years of being inundated with stories of white racism, and being taught in college that in this white-dominated society, only a white can be a racist, the American public has been properly brainwashed into accepting the otherwise incredible: A black man murdered eight white people at his place of work because they were white, and the media story is about the murderer’s alleged experiences of racism.

Here’s the Associated Press Report from Aug. 7, four days after the murders. It was reprinted in The Washington Post and throughout America:

“To those closest to him, Omar Thornton was caring, quiet and soft-spoken … But underneath, Thornton seethed with a sense of racial injustice for years that culminated in a shooting rampage Tuesday in which the Connecticut man killed eight and wounded two others at his job at Hartford Distributors in Manchester before killing himself.

“‘I know what pushed him over the edge was all the racial stuff that was happening at work,’ said his girlfriend, Kristi Hannah.

“‘He always felt like he was being discriminated (against) because he was black,’ said Jessica Anne Brocuglio, his former girlfriend. ‘Basically they wouldn’t give him pay raises. He never felt like they accepted him as a hard working person.’

“‘Thornton changed jobs a few times because he was not getting raises, Brocuglio said.”

The New York Times Aug. 3 headline read: “Troubles Preceded Connecticut Workplace Killing,” and in the second paragraph, the Times reported:

“He might also have had cause to be angry: he had complained to his girlfriend of being racially harassed at work, the woman’s mother said, and lamented that his grievances had gone unaddressed.”

On Aug. 7, 2010, The Washington Post headline read, “Beer warehouse shooter long complained of racism.”

Of course, Thornton was fired for stealing beer, and there was video proof of him doing so. But this fact — the one indisputable and most pertinent pre-murder fact — got lost within the larger context of Thornton’s claims of being a victim of whites.

Those preoccupied with Thornton’s charges of workplace racism might wish to reflect on this: Racist and other bigotry-based murderers always blame their victims. Medieval Christians who murdered Jews blamed the Jews for poisoning wells, baking Christian children’s blood in their matzo or some other terrible crime. Whites who lynched blacks blamed those blacks for rape or some other crime. Nothing is new about the Thornton racist murders except that the society in which in it occurred concentrated on the racist’s excuses rather than on his murders.

Just as leading liberals would not ascribe Islamist motives — until there was no possibility of denying them — to recent Muslim attacks on Americans, the liberal media, i.e., almost all news media in America, does not brand these Connecticut murders for what they are: racist. That is why Thornton told the 9-1-1 operator, “I wish I could have gotten more of the people (i.e., whites).”

We are repeatedly told by liberal whites and blacks that America needs an honest dialogue on race. Needless to say, they don’t mean it because the moment a white or black says anything critical of black behavior, he is labeled racist or Uncle Tom. So most non-liberal whites and blacks just keep quiet.

One result is this morally upside-down reporting of the murders in Connecticut.

Another example is the liberal narrative on blacks in prison — “there are more black men in prison than in college.” Every decent American regards this fact as a major tragedy. But most Americans believe that the fault lies primarily with the black criminals, not with a racist society. Most Americans believe that blacks who mug, rape, rob or murder commit those crimes for the same reason whites do — they lack a sufficiently strong moral conscience.

But the dominant liberal narrative is that while white criminals are criminals, black criminals are largely victims.

Another example was the liberal narrative of the 1992 “Rodney King” riots in Los Angeles. It was perfectly expressed by the major newspaper of that city, the Los Angeles Times. During the riots, in which innocent Koreans, whites and others were beaten, maimed and killed, and innocent businesses burned to the ground, the daily special section on the riots in the Los Angeles Times was titled “Understanding the Rage.” When blacks riot, whites are the reason. When a black murders eight whites in Connecticut, whites are the reason.

One terrible consequence of this liberal attitude toward black violent crime is that too many blacks come to believe that less is expected of them morally than from whites. And the truth is that most Americans on the left do expect less from blacks.

But saying any of this gets us nowhere because it is simply labeled racism. If you don’t believe me, check leftist reactions to this column on the internet.

Most liberal leaders want an honest dialogue about race as much as they want to honestly describe the murders in Connecticut.”

Comment:  I think it more likely that most liberal leaders remain silent about American black cultural dysfunction  in the same manner most Muslim non-jihadist leaders remain silent about jihadists.   There is so much both black and white America can rail about matters of the mass BLACK culture in this country, if honesty were to be tolerated.   But the left does not tolerate honesty.  And there is little honesty about black racism taught at university.

Obama, Sherrod and a Ripoff at the USDA! Corruption, Obama Style, on the March

 Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal in July, 2010, entitled, Our Divisive President:

 ”Andrew Breitbart is a media genius.
He proved it originally with his brilliant handling of the ACORN ‘hooker’ scandal which he skillfully manipulated so that the corrupt media was forced, against its will, to broadcast corruption in one of Obama’s most powerful political support groups.  But Breitbart’s handing of that affair is nothing compared to his brilliant manipulation of the Shirley Sherrod ‘white farmer’ scandal.

It all began last Monday, July 22, 2010.  As the country watched in horror, Breitbart released a snippet of a tape on his “Big Government” site which showed an obscure black female official of the Dept. of Agriculture laughing
to a roomful of NAACP members about how she’d discriminated against a destitute white farmer and refused to give him the financial aid he desperately needed.
As she smirked to the room, she’d sent him instead to a white lawyer – ‘one of his own kind’ – for help.
The black woman was Shirley Sherrod – and almost immediately she became the center of a firestorm of controversy which exploded throughout the country.
Within a day of the release of that infamous tape, the head of the Dept. of Agriculture, spurred on by Obama, demanded – and received – Sherrod’s resignation.
Breitbart had won.

But then seemingly Breitbart’s actions began to explode in his face.
As Sherrod screamed in protest, FOX News released the entire text of her speech last March to the NAACP.
And there on tape Sherrod was shown supposedly repenting of her racism against a white farmer and instead championing his fight to win funds to keep his farm afloat.
Within hours of that entire tape being revealed, the entire world turned against Andrew Breitbart.
Conservatives throughout the country were enraged that he’d endangered their reputations by releasing a ‘doctored’ tape.
Breitbart, they thundered, had dealt a fatal blow to the conservative media.

I confess that I also was horrified at what I saw as the clumsiness and stupidity of Breitbart in ‘doctoring’ a tape to make a supposedly innocent woman look guilty. But now I discover I have been as guilty of haste to judgment of Breitbart as the Dept. of Agriculture was of Ms. Sherrod.

Only now am I realizing the real purpose for Breitbart’s release of that tape snippet. It was to allow him to cunningly trick the media into exposing one of the most shocking examples of corruption in the federal government – a little known legal case called “Pigford v. Glickman”.”
Check it yourself at:
http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2010/07/27/pigford-v-glickman-86000-claims-from-39697-total-farmers/?singlepage=true

“In 1997, 400 African-American farmers sued the United States Department of Agriculture, alleging that they had been unfairly denied USDA loans due to racial discrimination during the period 1983 to 1997.”
The case was entitled “Pigford v. Glickman” and in 1999, the black farmers won their case.
The government agreed to pay each of them as much as $50,000 to settle their claims.

    In total silence, the USDA agreed to release more funds to “Pigford”.
The amount was a staggering……$1,250,000.000……  This was because the original number of plaintiffs – 400 black farmers – had now…. swollen in a class action suit to include a total of 86,000 black farmers throughout America .

 

It appears that Ms. Sherrod had just unwittingly exposed herself as the perpetrator of one of the biggest fraud claims in the United States – a fraud enabled solely because she screamed racism
at the government and cowed them into submission.  And it gets even more interesting.

Ms. Sherrod has also exposed the person who aided and abetted her in this race fraud. As it turns out, the original judgment of “Pigford v. Glickman” in 1999 only applied to a total of about 16,000 black farmers.
 

 

 

    In 2008 the Junior U.S. Senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama got a law passed in Washington, D.C. to reopen the case an let in more black “farmers” to share the profit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why the Left Calls the Rest of Us Americans “Bigots”!

Are Americans Bigots? the   William McGurn article in the Wall Street Journal asks.  He writes:

“When in 1983 Ronald Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” the reaction from his betters was swift.  Writing in the New York Times, Anthony Lewis called  it “primitive” – and wondered (naturally) what the Europeans would think.  A headline in Time referred derisively to “The Right Rev. Ronald Reagan.”  All agreed on one thing, this kind of black-and-white moralizing had no place in american politics.

Now cut to today, where moralizing about the ugly motives of the American people has become common.  Whether it’s a federal judge declaring there exists no rational opposition to same-sex marriage, a mayor railing against those who would like a mosque moved a few blocks from Ground Zero, a Speaker of the House effectively likening the majority of her countrymen who did not want her healthcare bill to Nazis, or a State Department official who brings up the Arizona law on immigration in a human-rights discussion with a Chinese delegation, the chorus is the same:  You can’t trust ordinary Americans.

In his ruling on California’s Proposition 8, federal district court Judge Vaughn Walker gives us the most dressed-up version.  Not only does he find the state initiative upholding traditional marriage unconstitutional, his opinion maintains that those who disagree-the majority of California voters-can be motivated only by bigotry.  Among his many findings of  ”fact” are gems such as these:  “Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.”    “The evidence shows beyond debate that allowing same-sex couples to marry has at least a neutral, if not a positive, effect on the institution of marriage.”    “The evidence shows conclusively that moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples.”

At least when Ronald Reagan invoked the evil empire, he was talking about a totalitarian system.  He also took pains to distinguish between the Soviet system which thought irredeemable, and the Russian peopls, whom he believed wanted the same things we did.

Judge Walker, of course, is not alone.  In New York City we have a mayor who preens how an Islamic Center built close to Ground Zero is exclusively a test of religious liberty.  Surely it is possible to respect religious liberty and nonetheless believe that with a bit of neighborly solicitude, we might reach a workable accomodation by moving the center a few blocks.  But Mayor Michael Bloomberg prefers to see the 61% of New York residents who disagree with him as people who ought to be “ashamed of themselves.”

Are there these feelings on the right?  And are some Americans bigots or racists?  No doubt.  Yet it is striking that the language and examples here do not emanate from the activist fringe.  They come from those representing some of our leading institutions.

When asked about the legitimacy of grass-roots opposition to the health-care bill, for example, Nancy Pelosi dismissed protestors as people “carrying swastikas”.    Her counterpart in the Senate called them “evil mongers”.  How convenient. If turning up to protest a health-care bill makes someone a Nazi or an evil monger, there’s no point to having a real debate, is there?

These kind of remarks  moreover, tend to be amplified by a press corps that seems to share many of the same prejudices.  Look at Internet listserv JournoList .  In this group, participants felt free to urge various outrages-notably, manufacturing a charge of racism for purely political purposes. 
They did so, mkoreover, comfortable that no one would find such suggestions beyond the pale.

Take the Washington Post.  When the JournoList emails hit, we learned that the reporter assigned to cover conservatives actively loathed them.  Sometimes it spilled out, as when he tweeted that opponents of same-sex marriage are bigots.  (He later offered a limited apology.)  Does it not say something when the hometown paper of our nation’s capital cannot seem to find a reporter who can control his contempt for beliefs held by millions of ordinary Americans?

……..As the controversy over the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero escalates, we have had many secular sermons on the need to recognize that the vast majority of Muslims should not be confused with the terrorists.  No argument there.  But how much more fruitful our own debates might be if the Judge Walkers, Mayor Bloombergs and Speaker Pelosis could extend that same presumption of decency to the American people.

Comment:  Answer is, they cannot extend that same decency to  the American people.    These folks are precursors to the great new religion of Marxism they are introducing to the country.    They learn their dogma at the American universities.  Their principal enemy is America’s traditional religion, Christianity, and therefore America itself.

In the Marxism they profess they have learned to set aside all of the restraints their Old American Religion, Chrisianity, had taught them as tyrannical and out of date.   They, at university, know the higher truth, that Marxism learned at unversity can best lead the world to utopia……forcing folks to be equal….except for the Marxist leadership….these Pelosis, Bloombergs, and Walkers, Obamas, etc, and etc. who know better about knowing better.

The university elites are  contemptuous of the streetside and residential  American.  It is an essential chapter and verse in their view of the order of things that our population should  do what they are told to do.