Affirmative Action/Minority Preferences

Vibrant Verse: British Poetry as Occupied Territory

/49 Comments/in , /by

The British Isles have given more than their share to science, literature and philosophy. But in other ways they have done less well, as the great Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) noted in one of his short stories. This is a German woman talking to the English spy Ashenden:

“You English, you cannot paint, you cannot model, you cannot write music.”
“Some of us can at times write pleasing verses,” said Ashenden,
[and], he did not know why, two lines occurring to him he said them: “Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding, Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West?”
“Yes,” said Mrs Caypor, with a strange gesture, “you can write
poetry. I wonder why.”
And to Ashenden’s surprise she went on, in her guttural English, to recite the next two lines of the poem he had quoted. (“The Traitor,” 1928)

Mrs Caypor was right. The British Isles have never produced a composer to compare with Beethoven or an artist to compare with Michelangelo. They haven’t even come close. But Milton compares with Dante and other great poets have graced these islands, from Burns and Yeats in Scotland and Ireland to Wordsworth and Thomas in England and Wales, from the home-grown Chaucer to the adopted T.S. Eliot. Britain has a golden poetic tradition. You can say that without hyperbole or irony. Read more

“Courageous Conversation” on Diversity

/16 Comments/in /by

Television programming isn’t exactly something I enjoy, so the amount of time I spend aimlessly gawking at the propaganda machine is limited.  However, the perpetual frigid weather of late found me with remote in hand searching for the local forecast. As fate would have it, I tuned in just in time to view KOLR’s “Courageous Conversations: Schools Foster Diversity Engagement.”  From what I gathered, the premise behind this “courageous conversation” was the excitement over the recently increased amount of “diversity” (i.e. fewer White students) within the Springfield, MO public school system.  As Lawrence Anderson, Springfield’s “Public Schools Manager of Diversity and Inclusion” says:

There are statistical trends showing our students of color are slightly increasing year after year. We are almost at a percent increasing students of color since last year.”  Anderson goes on to say, “We are at about 20 percent but nationally, things tell you that will continue to change. When I was looking and applied for the job it was at around 16 percent and that was only about three years ago.

The article makes comparisons with other public school systems in the geographic region, like Tulsa and Des Moines:

While the percentage of students who are not White continues to grow, data still shows that number is smaller than in similar cities. Read more

The End of the Story: Reversing Reality at the National Security Agency

/in /by

Taking Blacks out of STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics – would be like taking pygmies out of basketball. You wouldn’t notice much difference. However, if you took White males out of STEM, the field would collapse. But that’s reality and what does reality matter in modern America? Here is an advert for the NSA, or National Security Agency, America’s premier practitioners of mass surveillance:

NSA advert

NSA advert (see full pdf)

Can you spot any White males? Me neither. The NSA is committed to defending modern American values, which are based on fantasy, not reality. The fantasy is that Blacks and women are held back from high achievement in STEM by the prejudice of White males. The reality is that Blacks and women are biologically unsuited to the field. Some can do well there, but their representation falls as the cognitive load rises. NSA, like all other arms of government in modern America, is committed to reversing this unpalatable reality and to punishing White males for something that isn’t their responsibility. Read more

Some observations on the end of the university as we know it

/208 Comments/in /by

A while back I was watching a news report about some Black guy who had completed college in DC. He had a dual major in Women’s Studies and Black Studies, had something like $89,000 in student loan debt, and could not find a job commensurate with his great learning. He was, of course, an idiot.

A lot of people disagree with me but I think students loans are a dreadful way to pay for education and there should be a forgiveness program on such loans as a part of a national educational policy. So if you get a masters in molecular biology or aerospace engineering, the loans should be forgiven.

If you are $100,000 in student loan debt and you have a degree in Madonna Studies, go back to Occupy, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 dollars.

The failure of the university system in all its diverse glory has been publicly catalogued by the Occupy Movement. At many Occupy gatherings lists of people’s student loans appeared in the early days: $100,000, $80,000, etc.: thats a lot of pizza, beer and Facebook whining.  Read more

Discrimination against Whites in Federal Employment

/106 Comments/in , /by

Pat Buchanan’s recent column (“Black America versus Obama?“) has some amazing stats on Black employment by the federal government:

Though 10 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force, African-Americans are 18 percent of U.S. government workers. They are 25 percent of the employees at Treasury and Veterans Affairs, 31 percent of the State Department, 37 percent of Department of Education employees and 38 percent of Housing and Urban Development. They are 42 percent of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., 55 percent of the employees at the Government Printing Office and 82 percent at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency.

When the Obama administration suggested shutting down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants whose losses of $150 billion have had to be made up by taxpayers, The Washington Post warned, in a story headlined, “Winding Down Fannie and Freddie Could Put Minority Careers at Risk,” that 44 percent of Fannie employees and 50 percent of Freddie’s were persons of color.

There is no way that these percentages for Black employment could not happen without discrimination against Whites. I should think a lawsuit would be in order. Read more

Whites Feel Discriminated Against

/126 Comments/in , , , , , /by

A recent  psychology paper suggests a bit of trouble on the road to our glorious multicultural future. The title says it all: “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing” by Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers (Perspectives on Psychological Science 6(3), 215-218, 2011). The paper documents “an emerging belief in anti-White prejudice” — the belief   “that Whites have replaced Blacks as the primary victims of discrimination.” Participants were asked about their perceptions of discrimination against Blacks and against Whites in each decade going back to the 1950s. Here are the results:

The claim by Norton and Somers that Whites view discrimination as a zero sum game is based solely on the fact that the lines in the above chart cross:  perceptions of Black discrimination against Whites have risen as perceptions of White discrimination against Blacks have fallen.  But to say that this implies that Whites see discrimination as a zero sum game is a non-sequitur, since the curves could be going in opposite directions for quite different reasons. (As all first-year psychology students are aware, correlation does not imply causality.) As indicated below, there are very real reasons why Whites feel discriminated against increasingly in recent decades, and this is likely independent of the reality that there is demonstrably less discrimination against Blacks.

A paper like this published in a first rate academic journal has to follow certain ground rules. The authors imply that Whites’ belief in anti-White discrimination is irrational because “by nearly any metric—from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education—statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for Black than White Americans.” This comment fits well with the general the general tenor of the comments by several academics (including Norton and Somers) invited by the NYTimes: Yes indeed there is discrimination against Whites via well-publicized affirmative action cases, but Whites are still dramatically better off than Blacks, so get over it. Read more

Review of Jared Taylor’s “White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century”

/84 Comments/in , , /by

Jared Taylor, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century (Oakton, Va.: New Century Books, 2011)

Some time in late 1992 or early 1993, a friend mentioned he was reading Jared Taylor’s new book Paved With Good Intentions. He praised the book for its solid debunking of the racism-made-me-do-it “root cause” of sociopathic Black behavior. It seemed too good to be true. In the back of my mind during our brief conversation I wondered: Jared Who?

The next day I walked a few blocks from my office near the White House and purchased a copy of Paved With Good Intentions at Sidney Kramer Books — the premiere bookstore that catered to D.C.-based policy wonks until it went out of business in the late 1990s. Taylor’s book was prominently displayed as a new release. This well-articulated, iconoclastic view of race relations — a rare surprise from a commercial publisher — remains unsurpassed in dissecting liberal shibboleths on race, civil rights, crime, and affirmative action.

Taylor’s book astutely summarized the problems associated with “diverse” urban districts, which any one familiar with our nation’s capital would acknowledge: higher crime rates, dangerous, underperforming public schools, widespread loitering, the stress and strain of working elbow-to-elbow with affirmative action hires (carrying the workload of incompetent co-workers), and the daily toll of exhausting commutes (50–60 miles one way) in order to reap the benefits of good schools, low crime, affordable homes, and pleasant neighbors. Read more