Does That Really Mean Schools Are Failing

Also from City Journal:

Carranza made it clear before he arrived that his principal interest is ethnic equilibrium in the nation’s largest public school system, not achieving positive, across-the-board performance outcomes. The system has some bright spots—they’re moving center stage as the chancellor’s obsession with “integration” unfolds—but New York’s schools in general are a mess. As recently as two years ago, 420 of the city’s 525 high schools had prepared fewer than half of their graduates for college or a career.

I'm not going to get into the "ethnic equilibrium" part of quote but I was surprised that the usually critical people at City-Journal wrote about "fewer than half" their graduates as if that is necessarily a problem. It probably is NOT.

The public school system is required by law to enroll every and all students regardless of ability. Private schools may pick and choose who they may enroll. Often these schools have IQ tests called "entrance exams". This allows them to enroll students with above average intelligence which is a prerequisite to performing at a level that is required for college.

Since public schools cannot skim the "cream" of students and often have the cream of the student population removed from their populations, they have less students who have the necessary intelligence to qualify for college than that of private schools.

Anyone familiar with the bell curve distribution of intelligence knows that half the population falls below 100 and generally for college one should be at 105 or so. The hard sciences usually require something closer to 110 and often go above as you head into the nether regions. Only about 25% of the population actually meets this requirement. knowing this, is the fact that half the students from the NYS public school system, which is comprised largely of students from populations with statistically low average IQ's do not graduate able to do college level work? And we're not talking about the multiplying remedial classes that are offered in colleges.

Perhaps what we should be doing is focusing on alternate paths for people who simply are not college material and stop glorifying college as the end all and be all for everybody. People's value to society should not be based on whether they have a college degree and we certainly have use for people who work with their hands and backs more than their fingers. Oh and stop diluting the significance of a college degree by handing them out to unqualified students given inflated grades and junk degrees for "reasons".

Rethinking Medicare For All

I've long been a supporter of single payer healthcare. I believe(d) that the proposals to simply extend medicare to all citizens was the best way to do this. The idea being that it was the least disruptive proposal. It already met constitutional muster and the institutions needed to run it already existed even if there was a need for expansion. Also, this would relieve private businesses from paying for and administrating health insurance plans, which makes up a significant portion of employee "salaries and benefits". This would be, in effect, a tax cut for businesses. I did propose that corp taxes should go up a bit to cover the cost of expansion, but not to the extent that it wiped out the cost savings of no longer being responsible for healthcare for it's employees.

Yesterday I read an article in City-Journal that has me rethinking this.

First, I had no idea how medicare actually worked. I suspect most people who are not retired don't either:

hospitalization in Medicare Part A includes a $1,340 deductible for each benefit period. It imposes no coinsurance on the first 60 days of hospitalization, but a charge of $335 per day between 61 and 90 days in the hospital, and a charge of $670 per day over 90 days. Part B, the medical part of Medicare, includes a $183 yearly deducible and requires the patient to pay 20 percent of the Medicare-approved amount.

Part A, hospitalization, has no monthly cost, but Parts B and D, the medical and drug portions, demand monthly premiums just like any private insurance program. The monthly amount varies with income: retirees today pay $134 a month, on average. But with no copays or deductibles, plus the added benefits that Sanders’s bill seeks, those monthly premiums would surely rise, not least because working people have higher incomes than retirees. It is guesswork to put a figure on how much these costs would go up, though the current Medicare premium for those who want it—but have paid into the system for less than seven-and-a-half years—is $422 a month. And that’s for Medicare as it presently exists, not for the proposed luxury version

Well, that's not "free healthcare, is it"? Also:

Medicare presently covers some 58 million people in one or more of its plans. The government last year spent $597 billion on these beneficiaries, representing about 14 percent of all government spending, and generating 3 percent of economic activity. Had the country extended coverage to all 323 million Americans in 2017, it would have cost Washington more than $2.6 trillion, almost 65 percent of the total budget, and over 75 percent of government revenues for the year.

Oh.

Clearly there is no way to "tax the rich" to pay for this. No seriously. There is no way to pay for this by "taxing the rich". If you tax the rich to the point that they are no longer "rich", then there goes your government income.

Of course the next juicy target would be the military. Good luck getting any huge military budget cut through congress. So for those of us who do believe that a single payer system would be good would do well to bone up on the numbers.

The Cohen Plea: Will It Be The Basis of Impeachment?

At a glance the Cohen plea looks bad for Trump. For one thing it *officially* makes him a liar. Cohen says, under threat of perjury, that he paid off two women to not come forward during the 2016 campaign. He says he did so upon the request of someone called "individual 1" who was associated with the Trump campaign. Now, we officially have no idea (as of this writing) who "Individual 1" is, but we'll guess it's Trump and we assume for the rest of this piece that it is Trump.

One thing this shows is that Giuliani is and was absolutely correct to advise his client to not speak to Mueller. You never talk to the prosecutor unless you are forced to. Period. Lawyering 101.

So lets assume for a minute that the campaign finance law was broken not only by Cohen but by "Individual 1" who we assume to be Trump. The bar for impeachment is: High Crimes and Misdemeanors. Clearly that bar would have been cleared. It doesn't matter if Trump can pardon Cohen (who Trump probably considers a rat bastard of the Mafia kind) once the judgement is in, it's in.

Trump would have to show that payments made to Cohen for "Services rendered" were not campaign contributions even though they benefited the candidate. I'll leave it to better minds than mine to determine how possible that is.

However; the next hurdle would be fraud. Cohen is admitting to committing bank fraud. The next question will be whether "individual 1" knew and collaborated to commit this fraud. That would be conspiracy to commit fraud. Again, grounds for impeachment.

This was and is, in my opinion, the true reason for the "Russia probe". Just like Whitewater and Clinton. They just needed to find a lie or someone close who did something, anything. Cohen is Trump's something and anything. And here's the thing, he's disappointed enough of his base (no wall, no real movement on sanctuary cities, Sessions going for civil forfeiture, Not calling out Antifa, etc.) that unlike Clinton who was extremely popular, Trump may well find himself a one (or half) term president.

We shall see how this develops. If "Individual 1" is not Trump then a lot of other doors open in favor of Trump.

Colorado Continues to Harass Cake Artist

Ricochet is reporting on the state of Colorado continuing to harass the owners of Masterpiece Cakeshop:

On June 26, 2017, the same day that the Supreme Court agreed to take up Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, an attorney asked Phillips to create a cake designed pink on the inside and blue on the outside, which the attorney said was to celebrate a gender transition from male to female. Phillips declined the request because the custom cake would have expressed messages about sex and gender identity that conflict with his religious beliefs. Less than a month after the Supreme Court ruled for Phillips in his first case, the state surprised him by finding probable cause to believe that Colorado law requires him to create the requested gender-transition cake.

Firstly I believe this was a total setup. No one who has not been under a rock and sleeping like Rip Van Winkle didn't know what and who Masterpiece Cakeshop was and what they were not down with. Particularly if said person was in Colorado. I believe, 100% that this person went there with the intention of creating a litigious situation. I also believe that they were sent there by a member or members of the commission.

Secondly I believe that the reason the commission went after Masterpiece again is because of the softer than jello reasoning that made up the majority decision by the SCOTUS. The majority decision against the state of Colorado was based on the fact that transcripts showed that the commissioners had been prejudicial to the religion of the owners of Masterpiece. It DID NOT rule based on the free speech and free exercise of religion; which it should have.

This left the door open for the Colorado commission to harass Masterpiece so long as they "watched their mouths" during the proceedings so that an appeals court could not rule that they were being discriminatory. I wrote about this:

Indeed, it appears that had the state commissioners not been on their SJW warpath and were professionals, they may have prevailed. People put under the state gun should be sure to note any and all arguments that are presented to them. This case shows that SJW type of talk that is regularly found on social media and even MSM can be used in court. This is a very good thing.

The downside of this decision is that it failed, spectacularly to support the idea that enumerated rights trump these so called "protected classes" and the privileges they are afforded. Clarence Thomas discusses this in his concurring opinion.

And Justice Thomas agreed saying:

Court of Appeals concluded that Phillips’ conduct was not expressive and was not protected speech. It reasoned that an outside observer would think that Phillips was merely complying with Colorado’s public-accommodations law, not expressing a message, and that Phillips could post a disclaimer to that effect. This reasoning flouts bedrock principles of our free-speech jurisprudence and would justify virtually any law that compels individuals to speak. It should not pass without comment

And his comment, in order to refresh the memories:

States cannot punish protected speech because some group finds it offensive, hurtful, stigmatic, unreasonable, or undignified. “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”Johnson,supra, at 414....If the only reason a public-accommodations law regulates speech is “to produce a society free of . . . biases” against the protected groups, that purpose is “decidedly fatal” to the law’s constitutionality, “for it amounts to nothing less than a proposal to limit speech in the service of orthodox expression.”

The New High Water Mark of Left Censorship

Yesterday, in an act of "collusion", Apple, YouTube and Facebook all decided to de-platform InfoWars. This surprises no one who has been paying attention. Almost a year ago today I wrote:

Having lost what little decency the left had left, when Trump won the election the [tech] powers that be decided that free speech and free expression of ideas (that don't directly incite violence) could no longer be accepted. In fact, the left made a great leap into censorship when it came to the subject of illegal immigration and the fake refugee conspiracy being used to ethnically cleanse various European nation states. And that's what it is: ethnic cleansing of Europe. Google/Youtube has just raised the ante on this behavior:

Remember that the Left (and bullies in general) use what we'll call the Test Technique. That is, they will do something provocative and see how you react. If the reaction is "strong" but not fatal (in that there are serious consequences) then the the bully will wait and then push again. Hence what we see here is the next step. When YouTube, etc. decided to "shadow ban", de-monetize, etc. certain types of video, it was a test. When the response was simply a lot of hand waving and shouting, YouTube knew that conservatives (the main target of these actions) were the paper tigers of Chinese lore.

I said some time ago when Target essentially told it's non-liberal customers to fuck off when they announced their new changing and bathroom policy, that if those opposed could not cause empty parking lots in Target stores across the nation then they would be seen as a non threat for more "onerous" policies. Empty parking lots did not happen and more onerous actions have appeared as expected.

So one of the big lessons here is that non-left people (including moderates) have been boxed in. The left played a very long game and have gotten themselves into pivotal and powerful positions within private as well as public entities and are now showing their true faces (and asses). With the decimation of "mom and pop" stores, large corporations can essentially control the purchasing power and ability to earn of larger and larger swaths of the public. You can thank Republicans for that too. When a non-left objects to a corporate policy, the corporation can simply say "So where else are you going to go?" If you depend on Facebook for your business and Facebook bans you. Bye bye business. If you depend on Apple Inc. for your business and Apple Inc. decides not to do business with "haters", well good luck with Linux. If you make your living off YouTube and YouTube decides to ban you, well...Bitchute?

Oh you want to see just how far this rabbit hole goes?

If MasterCard, Visa and Discover decide that they are not going to do business with "haters", how exactly do you plan to do financial transactions? PayPal has already de-platformed "haters" and gets away with it because it's business is not considered a "financial transaction".

Oh you are going to get your own domain pay for hosting? Well what if the registrar refuses to do business with "haters"? No Domain registration means no DNS entry and therefore no website. Game over.

Oh and if an ISP decides that it won't do business with haters and therefore refuses to give you internet service.

That's how far this goes. Don't think that because MasterCard, etc. are considered financial entities that they cannot be allowed by law to not service "haters". Right now in NYS, governor Cuomo is using the power of the state to pressure private businesses to not do business with a legal entity, the NRA, which has committed no crimes nor is under any investigation for crimes. The power of the state is being used against the NRA simply because the head of that state dislikes the political philosophy of that organization. Once the state decides who (or what) is a "persona non-grata", then all protections are off. Which leads to the real problem.

Let's all be clear here. The First Amendment is a prohibition against government censorship. It does nothing to prevent private entities from censoring. Hence, it is not my argument that the actions of Apple, etc. are somehow illegal. Nor should it be your argument. What YouTube (TheirTube), etc. actions are symbolic of is a fundamental shift in the customs and mores of the general population. I had often read on what would be considered "far right" publications that America would not survive the changing demographics because the political enterprise that has been America was the outgrowth of the people who created said country. If you replaced the founding population with one that does not share the same customs and mores then inevitably the country itself changes. So for example, if the country is founded be people who are highly suspicious of government power and therefore create a limited and restrained government, is then populated by those characterized by belief that government should be *very* powerful, then you have a problem for the founding population (well their descendants).

America until very recently was characterized in part by the idea of free speech. Embedded in the sovereign document, this concept is understood that offensive speech was just as protected as "complementary speech". That is, you cannot have free speech if speech cannot offend, insult, etc. And because of this understanding, it was understood by all (or the vast vast majority) that we suffered "the fools" in order to protect this vital freedom. This was a political as well as cultural understanding. The very few exceptions were direct incitement to violence and things like yelling "fire" in a crowded room. This common understanding of free speech is no longer applicable in America. What changed?

We have to go back 50 years to get at the genesis of the change. When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, it changed a very fundamental concept in America: Freedom of association (and dissociation). For the first time, the government could punish private entities for not "serving" citizens. Of course if you were black in Jim Crow America, this was a good thing (at least on one level). But this change planted the seed of what we are seeing today. Once the government was able to legally tell a private business what it could not do the precedent was set.

The next thing was a creation of "protected class" of citizens. The 14th clearly states:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The concept of "protected class" is in direct contradiction to the provisions of the 14th Amendment. "Protected classes" means that there are two classes of citizens: "Protected" and "Not Protected". Again, this may have been done with "good intention" but the fallout is now clear for all to see. Understand that under strict reading, being white is protected. That is, the text doesn't say "black". However in practice the "race" protected class is generally understood to be "not-white and not heterosexual".

You might be thinking: What does an employment law have to do with censorship? Well follow me.

We have what I'll call the "Discrimination Complex" which is the network of so called "Civil Rights Organizations", lawyers and government agencies who make a living finding and making money off of discrimination. This complex which got the government to accept "disparate impact" and vague concepts of "hostile work places" meant that if an employee of any firm felt that the company was being discriminatory or the magic creating a hostile work environment then the employer was on the hook with the feds who had gained power over private companies.

So we saw that Brendan Eich was tossed from Mozilla because he donated in favor of a political issue that an employee disagreed with. All that (or those) employees had to do was say that they "felt unsafe" or some other permutation and the company was on notice for "a discriminatory climate". Mozilla got away with this firing. Blood was in the water.

More recently in a huge step up Damore got the axe from Google for discussing known sex differences in a public forum. Once again, employees, asserting their "protected status", made claim that they felt "discriminated against" and that there was a "hostile work environment" created by allowing Damore's speech to go unpunished. Never mind that Damore's text was:

1) Scientifically sound.
2) Not threatening to anyone.
3) Did not discriminate against anyone.

What mattered was that the new class of super citizens had been offended and such offense is enough to support a claim of "hostile work environment" which spells legal problems for their employers.

Once it was established among the power brokers that "wrong think" and "wrong speak" can be regulated on the grounds of "protecting 'victim' classes" the foundation for corporate censorship was laid. Censorship became OK because "victim classes" had to be protected. Failure to protect "victim classes" could become costly both legally and supposedly commercially. I say supposedly because there has been no concrete evidence that the people and organizations that do the most complaining actually have an impact on the bottom line of the many companies they target. However; since corporations avoid bad press by any means necessary they bend to these campaigns. This is why YouTube, FaceBook et-al discuss their actions in terms of "safety" and "harm" and the like. Who could be against "safe"? Who can be against stopping "harm"?

When combined with the ideology that "victim classes" cannot be victimizers, an ideology that is a direct outgrowth of the misunderstood concepts discussed in The Isis Papers and it's foundational text The Textbook For Victims of White Supremacy, you get a super class of citizens who are immune from the very same laws that get the lower class of citizens in financial and legal trouble.

This Super and Lower Citizen is why Alex Jones is persona-non-grata while Sarah Jeong got a job at the prestigious New York Times in spite of writing material that if targeted at any group would have been an automatic disqualification for even mail room duty. Jeong is a part of the super citizen class. There are no consequences for the NYT's actions just as there will be zero consequences for Apple, YouTube or FaceBook. Trust and believe that Apple will continue to be a trillion or near trillion dollar company tomorrow. YouTube will continue to have new uploads and FaceBook will continue to get page views. Where else are they going to go?

And this is a serious question. Alex Jones supposedly had millions of subscribers across platforms. How many of those subscribers quit the platforms? I know that quite a few of his supporters are still on this platforms. So aside from a lot of complaining what has been the actual consequence?

Not a damn thing.

And this "zero consequences" is why this will escalate. A bully continues to harass his victim because the victim is unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to stop the bully. The victim lives in fear of continued bullying and hopes that today they manage to not be picked on. But the real solution to the bully is:

If non-left people are actually serious about consequences for YouTube, then they should go to other platforms. There are other video sharing platforms out there. Disappear the entire content on YouTube and repost to these platforms. Same for the other social platforms. The only way to "win" is total disengagement. To-tal. These companies will not change tactics if they continue to make money off the same people who are complaining (short of legal changes). We need to recall the lesson of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

It worked because the buses looked like that. Empty. It became VERY expensive to treat certain citizens badly.