Category Archives: Education

Affirmative Action

The sad irony:

The biggest change since Grutter, though, has nothing to do with Court membership. It is the mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good — even for their supposed beneficiaries. If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.

As do many “progressive” policies. And it’s sometimes not clear what the real intentions were.

Want To Reduce Mass Shootings?

Stop abandoning and abusing boys:

For boys, the road to successful manhood has crumbled. In many boys’ journey from a fatherless family to an almost all-female staff elementary school such as Sandy Hook, there is no constructive male role model.

Adam Lanza is reported to have gone downhill when divorce separated him from his dad. Children of divorce without enough father contact are prone to have poor social skills; to struggle with the five D’s (depression, drugs, drinking, discipline and delinquency); be suicidal; be less able to concentrate; and to be aggressive but not assertive. Perhaps most important, these boys are less empathetic.

When I mentioned after the shooting that it might have been prevented with more male teachers and school employees, it wasn’t just about whether or not they’d be better able to defend — it was also about the terrible atmosphere and war on boys in the schools, in which the mostly-female education establishment tries to make them act like girls, to the point of drugging them to change their behavior. Particularly if you have a son, it seems that more and more, sending kids to public schools is a form of child abuse.

I’m willing to bet that this issue won’t even be discussed in Biden’s post-Newtown recommendations, though. Doesn’t fit the anti-gun narrative.

To Those Who Oppose The Constitution

A response:

…there always have been American Tories—people who chafe at restraints on central power and would prefer a British-style government. In recent years, as political “progressives” have gradually lost the scholarly battle over constitutional interpretation, some have stopped pretending the Constitution means whatever they want it to, and have begun to trash the document itself.

But the source of the claim is more shocking, because it comes from one who has taught constitutional law for 40 years. And who should know better.

Did the Constitution cause our present “fiscal chaos?” Quite the contrary. The crisis has arisen not because we followed the Constitution, but because we have allowed federal officials to ignore it. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court announced that it would stop enforcing the Constitution’s limits on federal spending programs. Without meaningful spending restraint, Congress became an auction house where lobbyists could acquire new money streams for almost anything—a redundant health care program; a subsidy for an uneconomic product; or a modern art museum in Indiana.

It is hard to believe there would be a fiscal crisis today if federal spending had remained within the Constitution’s generous but limited boundaries.

…Although it is true, as Professor Seidman states, that politicians have violated the Constitution, it is rarely true that we have been better off for it. The breaches have included incarceration of innocent citizens during World War II, ill-advised attempts to micro-manage the economy through monetary and regulatory policy, and unrestricted spending. We have lived to rue them all.

The thought of limited government is anathema to would-be tyrants. Read the whole thing, which demolishes the ad hominem arguments put forth by those who want to ignore our founding document.