Archive for 2018

OPEN THREAD: Discuss the news of the day, or whatever else strikes your fancy.

CHANGE: An Asian-American Awakening: A racial minority fights discrimination from elite schools and universities.

Have progressives poked a sleeping giant? A thousand New Yorkers showed up Sunday at City Hall to protest Mayor Bill de Blasio’s bid to substitute de facto racial quotas for a merit-based admission test at the city’s elite public schools.

Two things make the protest striking. First, the protesters were Asian-American. Second, the big local dailies, save for the New York Post, didn’t cover it.

New York is not the only place where Asian-Americans are revolting against racial preferences as a tool to help minorities. Four years ago, a backlash by Asian-American lawmakers in California helped defeat a proposed constitutional amendment that would have repealed a state prohibition against considering race in education and other government functions. Meanwhile, a lawsuit accuses Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“For years Asian-Americans have been viewed as the ‘model minority’—you know, quiet and well-behaved,” says Chunyan Li, a professor of accounting at New York’s Pace University. “But when we see the effects of social engineering on the future of our children, we can get nasty against the politicians too.”

It wasn’t supposed to work like this. In theory, only the white patriarchy loses from affirmative action, and all people of color share the same interests, regardless of their history or socioeconomic status or achievement.

But affirmative action as practiced today by the American education establishment is blowing a big hole in these assumptions. As Ms. Li notes, many Asian-American families now see that one minority’s floor is another’s ceiling—and that the effect of race-based admissions is to set one group against another. It is all the more galling for the signal it sends, which is that if you happen to be the wrong minority, you will be penalized for your hard work and achievement.

Related: Asians Get The Ivy League’s Jewish Treatment.

ANARCHY IN THE UK: “Less than one in 20 street robberies and burglaries are being solved in the UK, shocking new figures have revealed.

Official police data shows that just four per cent of robberies and three per cent of burglaries were solved in England and Wales in 2017.”

In 2011, Victor Davis Hanson warned of “The Bloomberg Syndrome:” “Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.”

Last week, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, having solved all of England’s theft, stabbing, and terrorism problems, pivoted to tackling the truly vexing issues: Closing Wikipedia’s super-ultra-highly problematic ‘gender page gap.’

CHANGE: More men are seeking plastic surgery. “Younger men are more likely choosing body enhancement, while older men are turning to minimally-invasive procedures for a more youthful look. Those procedures are up 99% among men since 2000.”

THOSE “OLD SCHOOL DADS” ARE MORE VIP TODAY THAN EVER: LifeZette’s Deirdre Reilly has a moving tribute to her great father. Do not miss the video compilation of classic TV Dads giving good advice to their kids. And speaking of, Happy Father’s Day to the best father I know these days, my amazing son, Marcus McFarland Tapscott, who, with Morgan, has given me and Claudia the two most wonderful grandsons, Tyler and Brooks, and grandaughter, Beckett, ever. By the way, they had to go all the way to China to get little Beckett!