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John Fund writes on the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.
… There are sound reasons that so many Americans resist a regime of racial entitlements. Schools now put a race-conscious fist on the admissions scale rather than a thumb and clearly admit students based on race. They aren’t doing these students a favor. Affirmative-action students are 50 to 75 percent more likely to drop out of a science program than are regular admits. At law schools, they are two or three times more likely to fail the bar exam. But students who attend a school where their entering credentials are similar to those of their fellow students are more likely to finish and fulfill their work and life ambitions. We almost certainly now have fewer black doctors, lawyers, and business chiefs than we would have had under race-neutral admissions policies.
In Wounds That Will not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide, Princeton professor Russell Nieli wrote: “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that racial-preference policies have lulled substantial segments of the black middle class into complacency and half-hearted performance in our increasingly education-focused world.” That isn’t the outcome that supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hoped for or promised. It’s time to return to the original vision of civil rights that principled liberals such as Hubert Humphrey and William O. Douglas supported.
Roger Simon posts on the crossroads faced by the country.
America is at a crossroads — we always seem to be, but this time we really are.
We are living under the administration of a president that is now the least popular since World War II. A full one-third of those polled by Quinnipiac rate Barack Obama the worst president since 1945. (Reagan is rated the best.)
What accounts for this? There are dozens of reasons that have been detailed on these pages and many others. The man has lied to us multiple times — and to himself as well, no doubt — and many people now apparently sense this. But I think the deepest reason, the motivating cause, stems from a time Barack Obama actually didn’t lie, but told an important truth.
Back on July 27, 2004, a then obscure Illinois senator made himself famous by standing in front of the Democratic National Convention and speaking these words: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is a United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”
Did he believe those words? Maybe. Once upon a time. But evidently not very deeply. The fact is he betrayed them completely and almost everything he has done wrong has stemmed from that betrayal. He has acted in the most partisan and deceitful manner, surrounding himself with a tiny group of yes-women and yes-men, making a mockery of his self-proclaimed transparency, shamelessly exploiting interest groups in a way that could only divide our society while diminishing America’s place in the world, and allowing evil forces to grow across the globe. …
Kevin Williamson says the problem with science is . . .
The problem is that scientific prestige accompanies scientists well outside their fields of expertise. That’s true when they wander into other scientific fields — as I noted in my essay, Carl Sagan authored scientific illiteracies based on long-discredited ideas in the course of arguing for abortion — but the problem is most acute when it comes to the matter of politics. A relatively recent and intensely annoying example of this comes from my alma mater, the University of Texas, which is proud to employ the physicist Steven Weinberg, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1979. Professor Weinberg is not short of opinions — evangelizing for causes ranging from atheism to Zionism — and is unsurprisingly interested in the question of government funding for scientific research, a subject he explores in his compact essay “The Crisis in Big Science,” recently republished in The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2013. (Yes, I am a little behind on my reading; I also have 54,000 unread e-mails.) Professor Weinberg’s essay is remarkably simple-minded, though it is admirably modest: Offering a potted history of the Standard Model, he mentions the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces but not the fact that he is one of the men who did that.
I do not get the impression that Professor Weinberg is the grasping sort, but it is worth noting that the man arguing that we need to spend more money not only on science but on most everything government does — he endorses a general increase in tax rates and an equally general expansion of the state — is a 1 percenter among public dependents. More than that: He was, as of 2012, the ninth most highly paid professor ($536,000) in these United States, annually taking home the equivalent of Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett’s salary plus Morningstar CEO Joe Mansueto’s salary. His wife is paid an additional quarter-million a year as a tenured professor at the University of Texas law school (the reputation of which is in dramatic decline of late). Some years ago, an administrator at the University of Texas described Professor Weinberg’s professional responsibilities to me in approximately these words: “He has a Nobel prize; he does what he wants.” The Weinberg household is a very significant net recipient of tax dollars. That being written, he seems to be a very productive man, and UT has spent a great deal more money on much less admirable investments: Mack Brown, who led the Longhorns to mediocrity on the gridiron, was paid approximately ten times what Professor Weinberg is.
The Financial Times writes on the antibiotic problem.
There is a mischievous Punch cartoon that depicts a woman and five men sitting round a conference table. The caption reads: “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.”
Dame Sally Davies must feel like a modern-day Miss Triggs. More than a year ago the chief medical officer for England warned that antibiotic resistance should be ranked alongside terrorism as a national threat. Failing to keep up the medicinal arms race against superbugs, she said, would fling us back to the dark days of the 19th century when a cut finger could lead to a festering death.
Her apocalyptic vision was not much reported – unlike David Cameron’s strikingly similar pronouncement this week that we are entering a post-antibiotics era which will see us “cast back into the dark ages of medicine where treatable infections and injuries will kill once again”. The prime minister has ordered a review by economist Jim O’Neill, co-funded by the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s biggest medical research foundation, into why industry has failed to deliver any new antibiotics for decades.
The battalions of bacteria have meanwhile marched on, relentlessly replicating and evolving and spewing out new generations of randomly mutated daughters. Some of these will have genetic mutations that allow them to survive medicinal onslaught, and replicate in ever greater numbers. …
Ann Coulter has a second part to her soccer slam. Part Deux she calls it.
PARIS — Soccer fans have decided to prove me wrong about soccer being a fruity sport by spending the last week throwing hissy fits. This, in defense of a “sport” where the losing players cry on camera.
The massive and hysterical response to my jovial sports piece proves how right I was. Nothing explains the uniform, Borg-like caterwauling, but that soccer is a game for beret-wearers. Most of the articles attacking me are verbless strings of obscenities, their subject matter identified only in the title
Consequently, I’ve decided to emulate The New York Times, which runs the exact same column, year after year, “Soccer Catches On, Take 27,” by re-running mine on how excruciatingly boring soccer is.
This past week has allowed me to add several new items to my list of grievances.
Further proof that soccer is a game for girls: Since my column came out, a guy from the Paraguay team (Uruguay? Who cares?) was caught biting an opponent in a match. Not punching. Not a cross-body block. BITING! How long can it be until we see hair-pulling in soccer? …