Displaying posts published in

June 2018

Discrimination and Deceit at Harvard

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/harvard-discrimination-against-asian-american-students-obvious/

For decades, the population of Asian-American students at Harvard University has remained suspiciously stagnant, even as the general population of Asian Americans has exploded. Asian Americans tend to have higher rates of academic achievement — standardized-test scores, GPAs — than other racial groups. While the Asian-American undergraduate population at elite universities that do not take race into account in admissions has soared since the 1990s, it has hovered around 20 percent at Ivy League schools, which do consider race. Against the notion that Asian Americans are a monolith of high achievers, it should be noted that the term denotes a heterogeneous collection of people from all sorts of backgrounds. But the substance of this issue is not complicated: If not for discrimination on the basis of race, there would be far more Asian undergraduates at elite universities than there currently are.

Now a group called Students for Fair Admissions is suing Harvard, alleging that it engages in unconstitutional racial discrimination against Asians in its admissions process. Last week, the plaintiffs released devastating evidence to support their claim, including an analysis of the data of 160,000 applicants conducted by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono as well as a university review of the admissions process from 2013 that had been buried by the Harvard administration. The plaintiffs deserve to prevail in court; the grim state of affairs at Harvard is a direct consequence of the affirmative-action regime that reigns in this country.

Evidence shows the discrimination happens along two lines. First, Harvard evaluates applicants according to a “holistic” process that considers, in addition to their academic, extracurricular, and athletic achievements, “personal” qualities: whether they have demonstrated “humor, sensitivity, grit, leadership,” etc. Asian Americans consistently rank below others on the personality metric, despite the fact that admissions officials never meet most applicants. The internal review showed that Asian Americans were the only demographic group to suffer negative effects from the subjective portion of the evaluation. Second, even after the subjective criteria are taken into account, the university tips the scales further by adjusting for “demographics.” The specifics of this adjustment have been redacted by the university, but the review found that the share of admitted Asian students fell from 26 percent to 18 percent after it was made.

Proposed Legislation For DACA Aliens Spurs Stampede “Separation of alien families” is an emotional artifice concocted by globalists. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270492/proposed-legislation-daca-aliens-spurs-stampede-michael-cutler
President Trump made border security and the effective enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws the centerpiece of his successful campaign for the presidency.

This has enraged globalist politicians from both political parties who see in America’s borders impediments to their wealth and the wealth of their campaign contributors.

Prior administrations have refused to take immigration law enforcement seriously and our nation has, as a direct consequence, paid one hell of a price.

The 9/11 Commission made it clear, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were made possible by multiple failures of the immigration system that enabled the terrorists to enter the United States and embed themselves.

The preface of the official report, 9/11 and Terrorist Travel begins with the following paragraph:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

That report went on to note:

Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.

MAJOR GENERAL AMOS YADLIN:TRUMP MOVES MAY LEAD IRAN TO GO FOR NUKES SEE NOTE PLEASE

Major General Amos Yadlin is a former general in the Israeli Air Force, Israel Defense Forces military attaché to Washington, D.C. and was head of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate. He and Gen. David Petraeus prove here that military men are often fools when it comes to politics and policy. rsk
EX-IDF INTEL CHIEF: TRUMP MOVES MAY LEAD IRAN TO GO FOR NUKES

US President Donald Trump’s recent foreign policy moves make it more likely that Iran will attempt to make a nuclear bomb and bring Israel closer to war, former IDF intelligence chief Amos Yadlin said on Sunday.

Speaking at a Tel Aviv University conference on national security and cyber issues, Yadlin said the North Korea summit will push Iran to renew its uranium enrichment and eventually pursue a nuclear bomb.
He said the same thing about Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal.Yadlin said he hoped Iran will wilt under the pressure of renewed US sanctions, saying, “We do not know if new sanctions will be as effective as in 2013. If they are not effective, we achieve nothing. Let’s hope the sanctions will be crippling… [maybe] Iran will need to choose between regime collapse or… come back to the negotiating table.”

The Press Will Stop at Nothing to Get Scott Pruitt By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/19/the-press-will-stop-at-nothing

When reporters work too hard to earn a Pulitzer Prize for orchestrating the political assassination of one of the president’s most effective cabinet members, sometimes, in their zeal, they can make a big mistake.

That is exactly what happened over the weekend when the New York Times was forced to post a lengthy correction to its latest hit piece on Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s EPA administrator. While the correction itself reveals a major blunder, it obfuscates the real outrage about the original story: The reporters went after Pruitt’s daughter.

The June 15 front-page article documented a laundry list of imaginary crimes at the EPA, such as staffers trying to score coveted sports tickets for the boss and arranging his meetings with former donors or industry pals—otherwise known as standard operating procedure in D.C. and every political power center in the nation. The Times reporters raged that Pruitt “had no hesitation in leveraging his stature as a cabinet member to solicit favors himself.” Last July, Pruitt allegedly asked an aide to negotiate “access” for him to attend the Washington Nationals’ batting practice. Oh, the horror! The piece was another installment in the paper’s relentless campaign against Pruitt, a top-tier target of the anti-Trump mob.

But in their eagerness to inflict another bruise on the much-abused EPA administrator, they hit his daughter, McKenna, a graduate student at the University of Virginia.

The Times accused Pruitt of using his post at the top of the EPA to obtain a letter of recommendation from a former Virginia lawmaker to help his daughter get into the prestigious UVA law school. To support its claim, the paper reported that the lawmaker even appeared on Pruitt’s official EPA calendar.

A Comedy of Corruption? Or a Bureaucratic Horror Show? By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/19/a-comedy-of-corruption-or-a-bureau

If the stakes were not so high, the 568-page report issued last week by the Justice Department Office of the Inspector General (“A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election”) might be seen as a species of comedy, something out of Plautus, perhaps (starring Peter Strzok as the Miles Gloriosus and Lisa Page as Philocomasium), or Dickens’s Little Dorrit with its Office of Circumlocution.

Item: The report “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed.” Ha, ha, ha.

As Andrew Klavan observed, that is simply inspector-generalese for, “No one confessed or left a paper trail.”

No, Kimberly Strassel was right in her recent column for the Wall Street Journal: the IG report is dripping with evidence of political bias. It’s just that it deploys the evidence like a troupe of players on the stage and then tells you that the burglary you just saw enacted might have been the innocent parson out for a stroll.

Item: After discussing some of the thousands of text messages between Peter Strzok—the top FBI honcho who ran both the pretend investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials and the first phases of Trump-Russia fantasy—and his lover Lisa Page (then counsel to Andrew McCabe, who was the FBI’s deputy director at the time), the report concludes that Strzok’s decision to focus on the counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign rather than the Clinton email criminal investigation “led us to conclude that we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision was free from bias.”

The IG Report: They’re Guilty, but It’s Okay By Tom Trinko

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_ig_report_theyre_guilty_but_its_okay.html

The IG report is really Comey 2.0. Comey spent a long time describing how Hillary had broken the law but then concluded that it was okay. Similarly, the IG report lists example after example of political bias but declares that it had no impact on the Hillary email whitewash.

The IG report on the Clinton email investigation is proof positive that the entire DC justice establishment is corrupt; that they view themselves a rulers not public servants.

First we were told that Comey was a straight shooter whom we could trust. Then we were told the same about Mueller, Rosenstein, and now the IG. Yet in every case we’ve discovered that they are biased political actors who put the interests of the Deep State and the Democratic Party ahead of their sworn duty to uphold the law. It’s time for all conservatives to acknowledge that there are few if any honest people at the top levels of the FBI or the DoJ.

Not surprisingly highly biased people will resort to big lies to protect their power and the big government ideology they embrace.

The big lie in the Comey report was that because Hillary supposedly had no intent to mishandle classified data there was no crime. Yet a Navy seaman who demonstrated no intent to mishandle classified data was sent to prison. Further, the law says that intent is not a requirement.

There are many laws that can be broken even if the person lacks intent. Take manslaughter — if person A kills person B accidently because person A was very careless, then person A is guilty even though they never intended to kill person B.

Why Italy Dares to Turn Away Refugees Rome is reacting to a rising problem, but to EU elites such ideas remain unthinkable.By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-italy-dares-to-turn-away-refugees-1529363157

Italy’s new populist government signals a major challenge to the European status quo, but not in the way most observers initially expected. The governing coalition has put its challenge to euro policy on hold. Instead it is turning to a subject on which the European establishment is more vulnerable: migration. The force behind the shift is Matteo Salvini, Italy’s new minister of the interior. He is also the leader of the League, the smaller and more right-wing of Italy’s two ruling parties.

Mr. Salvini shocked Brussels last week by denying Italian entry to the MS Aquarius, a rescue ship that had plucked 629 drowning would-be migrants from the seas off Libya. As human-rights activists reacted with anger, Mr. Salvini doubled down, banning all migrant rescue ships from all Italian ports.

French President Emmanuel Macron denounced Mr. Salvini for abandoning refugees; Mr. Salvini torched the French for hypocritically leaving Italy alone to bear the burden of helping them. Roiling matters further, German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, the head of Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union and an essential partner in Angela Merkel’s national coalition, gave Mr. Salvini a congratulatory phone call and asked to meet with him.

For many Italians, starved for a national show of strength after years of marginalization, the standoff was almost as gratifying as a World Cup victory. As interior minister of a weak debtor nation, Mr. Salvini had done what Britain’s euroskeptics can only dream of: smack down France and split the German establishment against itself. According to the polling firm Ipsos, about 60% of Italians backed Mr. Salvini’s stance. Those who dissented, perhaps following Pope Francis, were swept aside in a surge of patriotic and anti-immigrant sentiment.

Harvard Is Too Discriminating A lawsuit may eventually give the Supreme Court a chance to clarify its view of racial preferences. By Ilya Shapiro

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-is-too-discriminating-1529363694

The U.S. Supreme Court may soon have an opportunity to clarify its muddled jurisprudence regarding racial preferences in college admissions. Unlike the high court’s past cases on the question, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard involves a private university—but the same legal principles apply under federal civil-rights laws to any institution that accepts public funds.

In Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), the justices ruled 7-1 that the use of race in university admissions was permissible only if it was narrowly tailored to achieve “the educational benefits of diversity” and administrators had made a good-faith effort to consider race-neutral alternatives. In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, the court ruled in favor of the university in another appeal from the same case. Seemingly exhausted by the topic, the justices held 4-3 that Texas’ idiosyncratic admissions program satisfied the test. Fisher II was the first and only time Justice Anthony Kennedy has approved a use of racial preferences in college admissions. His opinion made clear that the key to surviving judicial scrutiny was “holistic” individualized review rather than quotas or other group-based screens.

Yet holistic review can facilitate discrimination by concealing a process that amounts to a quota. That’s what Harvard did when it devised this method to cap the number of Jews it admitted in the 1920s and ’30s. The university is now credibly accused of doing the same thing to Asian-Americans.

The lawsuit was filed in 2014, but paused as Fisher played out. It picked up steam in August 2017, when the Justice Department opened its own investigation into Harvard’s use of race. This past April, after the department filed a “notice of interest” that cited the need to allow public access to the lawsuit’s filings, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that most of the evidence the plaintiffs had obtained in discovery could be made public. It was last Friday, in legal papers filed with a motion for summary judgment—a request that the judge rule against Harvard without a trial, based on facts not in dispute.

The plaintiffs argue that Harvard intentionally discriminates. “An Asian-American applicant with a 25% chance of admission,” the plaintiffs’ motion summarizes, “would have a 35% chance if he were white, 75% if he were Hispanic, and 95% chance if he were African-American.”

That’s not because Asians are weak in areas other than academics that might legitimately be considered in admissions decisions. Harvard’s own documents show that Asians have higher extracurricular and alumni-interview scores than any other racial group, and scores from teachers and guidance counselors nearly identical to whites (and higher than African-Americans and Hispanics). Yet admissions officers assigned them the lowest “personal” rating—an assessment of “positive personality,” character traits like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “courage,” and “kindness,” and whether the applicant has good “human qualities.” It’s reminiscent of the old stereotype that Jews weren’t “clubbable.”

The plaintiffs’ motion asserts that Harvard officials’ testimony “amounts to a confession” of racial balancing. Statistical analysis of public data by Duke economist Peter S. Arcidiacono, whom the plaintiffs hired as an expert witness, reinforces the suspicion that the school manipulates subjective criteria to maintain the same student-body composition regardless of shifts in the pool of qualified applicants. If the admissions office admits what it deems to be “too many” or “too few” students of any race it reshapes the next class as a remedy. The plaintiffs conclude that “Harvard has a desired racial balance and aims for that target”—an approach the Supreme Court has consistently said is improper since it first approved the limited use of race in admissions in 1978.

When shown evidence of this legerdemain at her deposition in this case, the director of college counseling at New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School (where Mayor Bill de Blasio has been trying to reduce Asian enrollment) broke down in tears over Harvard’s treatment of “my kids.” She rejected the notion that “the Asian kids are less well rounded than the white kid” and agreed with the plaintiffs’ lawyer that “it’s hard to think of anything other than discrimination that could account for this.”

Nor is Harvard’s use of race narrowly tailored to achieve any particular measure of diversity. The idea of “critical mass” of minority enrollment played a central role in Fisher, and in a pair of landmark 2003 cases involving the University of Michigan. But Harvard officials’ depositions show that, as the plaintiffs put it, “Harvard concedes that it has no interest in achieving critical mass and has never given the concept serious thought.” Citing redacted testimony from the dean of admissions, the plaintiffs conclude that “Harvard is adamant that racial preferences are indispensable to its mission—and always will be.” In other words, race isn’t just a “plus factor,” which would be acceptable under the Michigan precedents, but often the dominant consideration—which again the Supreme Court has held to violate the law. CONTINUE AT SITE

A neocon Senate coup against Trump’s foreign policy? David Goldman

http://www.atimes.com/tag/spengler/
The US president’s opponents in the the upper chamber aim to overturn his carefully constructed compromise with Beijing over the Chinese telecom giant ZTE

The bright line that separates Donald Trump’s foreign policy from his predecessors is the question of regime change. Between the collapse of communism in 1989 and the departure of the Obama Administration, the American foreign policy establishment embraced the “end of history” premise that liberal democracy would replace all the autocracies of the past, and that the goal of American foreign policy was to hasten the inevitable march of history. Trump, by contrast, puts American interests first and will make deals that reinforce the position of the Chinese, Russian, or North Korean regimes if the outcome is in America’s interest.

Now Trump’s opponents in the Republican Party – the neo-conservative caucus including Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) – have thrown a monkey wrench into the works, in the form of legislation that would overturn Trump’s carefully-constructed compromise with China over the Chinese telecom giant ZTE.

American diplomacy achieved a landmark result in Trump’s Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un, offering the repugnant North Korean leader legitimacy and the prospect of regime continuity in return for his nuclear weapons program. The president’s “Art of the Deal” negotiating style had less to do with the constructive outcome than old-fashioned diplomacy under the skillful guidance of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: Consultation with allies, back-channel exchanges with the other side, and a proposal that both sides could live with. Asia Times published on June 10 former South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-Kwan’s guide to getting a “yes” from Pyongyang, and a Pompeo adviser told me that South Korean insights were incorporated into the American initiative.

What is local media in the UK saying about Tommy Robinson’s transfer from a relatively safe prison to one with a large population of violent Muslim inmates?

It has been confirmed that Tommy Robinson, who was incarcerated at HMP Hull in a secure and safe wing, has been moved to HMP Onley in Warwickshire, where there are a preponderance of violent Muslim inmates, who have already threatened to murder him.
Leicestershire times According to information published on the Tommy Robinson official Facebook page, during the transfer, all the information in his file that mentioned that he was a high-risk prisoner had been removed. It is believed the intention was to transfer him to I wing, reportedly the only wing in the prison without cameras.
When Tommy protested that his life would be in danger, in a prison with a population where 1 in 3 of the inmates are Muslims in a facility a prison inspector deemed it unsafe, the response from the Governor was ‘Your name is downs as Lennon on the prison system, so you will be fine as no one will know who you are!’ (But most people in the UK already do know his real name)
However, inmates had apparently been informed by the prison imam the day before that Tommy was being transferred to Onley. How did the imam know?
Far from being safe and incognito, the first night Tommy spent in HMP Olney, he was housed next to a Muslim inmate who spent the entire night smashing things at the wall telling him that he will murder him in the morning.
The only reason he was not seriously injured, or worse, was that one officer decided to go against the orders from above and took him from his cell to the punishment block for his own protection.
Tommy is now being treated as a punished prison solitary confinement. Isolation cells to punish prisoners are meant to be a short-term measure, more than 30 days in isolation can have serious impacts on inmates mental health.