The Lesson of an Affirmative Action President (from American Thinker)

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January 28, 2010

The Lesson of an Affirmative Action President

By James Lewis

You don't pick brain surgeons by the color of their skin. You pick them by competence only. Same thing with airplane pilots. But we have allowed the profoundly irrational liberal media to persuade the American public that we are supposed to pick a U.S. president by affirmative action. Obama was elected to universal Hosannas because he is black. It wasn't a secret. That's why the Left around the world went into ecstasies when Obama ran and got elected.

We've been using affirmative action to hire and promote teachers and cops and to popularize movie stars and media heroes. We've had a generation of affirmative action agitprop, 24/7/365. Hillary Clinton was going to dictate racial and gender preferences for medical school admissions under HillaryCare. You can bet that reverse-racism is all over the 2,200 pages of ObamaCare. It's reverse-racism forever! 

In America today, competence is suspect, and incompetence gets all the attention. Yet competence is what keeps us alive.

Affirmative action was allowed by the Supreme Court as a temporary exception to the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution until blacks had the same opportunities others did. It has now been about forty years, and the goal posts have just moved farther and farther Left. Today it's not just blacks -- it's women, homosexuals, and illegal aliens. And it's no longer equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome, which was the goal of Communism for seventy years in the Soviet Union, until the whole Soviet Empire crumbled as a result.

In the Soviet Union, everything was politicized. Incompetent people ran agriculture along Stalinist lines. Everything turned into a lie, and lies accelerated as they propagated through the system, in exactly the way the Climategate lies get worse and worse as they get passed along by politically correct bureaucrats and scientists. When political loyalty controls the outcomes, honesty and competence are driven out at every level of society. Nobody can point to Obama's anti-terrorist policies and say that's wildly incompetent -- without fearing they will be accused of racism.

From a temporary policy to give black people a better chance in life, we have now arrived at a Marxist goal of universal equality for everyone -- except for white, male, heterosexual, and excessively normal people. We have reversed racism, but guess what? Reverse-racism is still racism. As a direct result, corruption now pervades the big cities and Washington, D.C. That's because race, gender, and victim status have taken over as the criteria for all the benefits society has to offer.

Obama's election to the nation's most powerful office is the direct outcome of racial reasoning. It was race that put him over the top against Hillary, in a thousand media endorsements, and finally, against John McCain, who was old, male and white. Three strikes against McCain, who for all his faults is vastly more experienced and knowledgeable than the Obamessiah.

Meanwhile, blacks are still suffering from the pervasive social pathology of the inner city -- almost all self-inflicted, with the help of the welfare state. Europe shows exactly the same results, except that the victims of welfarism aren't black, but mostly white and Muslim immigrants. American blacks today are more bitter and more racially enraged than ever before, after forty years of affirmative action. Affirmative action hasn't helped women, who now have to work two jobs, one at home and one for income, especially because so many men have walked away from their families under liberal cultural values. Reverse-racism has actively hurt generations of children, who have grown up in broken homes as a direct result of pernicious social policies which Obama has actually tried to make worse. One of the first things he did was to reverse Clinton's welfare reform so that social pathology in the black community can spread its poison even wider and deeper. Obama isn't good for black people -- but then, blacks consistently vote for those who do them the most harm.

Reverse-racism has hurt Asian-Americans, who don't usually count as disadvantaged non-whites, but who by dint of talent and hard work are now among the largest ethnic groups in many colleges and universities and a majority at Berkeley and UCLA, where race engineering is banned by a California law passed by voters over the objection of the political establishment.

Any time a Muslim tries to explode a bomb on an airplane, Obama sticks his nose in the air and pretends he doesn't know what's up. But he knows, he knows. The next time an airplane blows up in flight, Obama will be history, but he will never blame himself for his own truly stupid and perverse policies. On the contrary, Obama will be around for the next forty years blaming White America for his own folly.

We've now been taught by the media to hire and elect people by the color of their skin, or by gender, or by sexual preferences -- including, in the case of Kevin Jenkins, their ability to peddle gay sexuality to kids and teachers for the Queering of the Elementary Schools.  

Is it any surprise that a president who ran as the historic first black -- that is, on affirmative action grounds -- is not just incompetent, but perverse, so that we deliberately don't check the passenger lists for young Muslim males who were brought up in radicalized cultures, even if they are already in the terror database, even if they buy a one-way ticket with untraceable cash and don't check any luggage at all on their one-way flights from Nigeria to Detroit?

Obama's anti-terror policies are not just incompetent. They are suicidal.

They are exactly like all the other social policies that are supposed to help the poor, the disadvantaged, the black, females, homosexuals -- all of which invariably end up punishing and degrading the very people they are supposed to help. Who do you suppose is in the teachers' unions that are keeping black kids from escaping the inner city ghettos? Yes, it's black and liberal teachers. Who do you suppose is actively importing Muslim radicals into Europe and the United States? Who do you suppose has done more to spread HIV? Yes, it is the very Leftists who are always telling us how much compassion they feel for those very people.

The vote in 2008 was even crazier than picking your brain surgeon by the color of his skin. If the knife slips in the surgeon's hand, you might die, but the nation as a whole doesn't. But if the president has a nervous breakdown in the Oval Office, the whole world is at risk. It's a mad, mad, mad idea to elect people on the basis of race or gender.

We have been so PC-whipped as a nation that Obama's election as a black man -- not as a competent black man, not as an experienced and well-qualified black man -- was celebrated by liberals and Leftists around the world. It is the victory of brain-dead ideology over common sense. The guy in the White House today is potentially the most dangerous, mentally fixated, and irresponsible demagogue we have ever known. Those wacky ideas are once again on the rise, not just in the schools and colleges, but even at the very centers of power. The election of Obama was by far the screwiest thing American voters have ever done. It throws doubt on the whole American experiment, because we have inflicted this disaster on ourselves.

The lesson of the Obama presidency  is exactly the opposite of what our stuck-on-stupid media are telling us. It is that we must never, ever hire, promote, or elect somebody to a position of power and responsibility merely because of his race. Abraham Lincoln would not have been surprised. Neither would Martin Luther King, Jr. Even the editors of the New York Times choose schools for their kids not by race, but by educational competence. Somehow the American people have forgotten their common sense while Obama was rifling their wallets.

The captain is drunk in the deckhouse, and the ship of state is heading for the rocks. Our enemies are trying to take advantage of our failure to elect even sensible leadership. If you don't think al-Qaeda, Ahmadinejad, and the Russians will try to screw us royally under this perverse and incompetent leadership, just wait a month or two. The Chinese have taken the measure of this guy. So have the other jackals prowling around the small campfire of civilization. They know he's a pushover, and they will act accordingly. The only question is how badly we'll get burned.

The Left have advocated suicidal policies, and now they have found their way to power. But ultimately this is a failure of the American people, of our pathetic excuse for a media, and of the anti-American hatred that pervades the Left.

Yes, God protects orphans, widows, and the United States. But you can rely on pure dumb luck for only a little while before the ship of state comes to grief on that unforgiving iceberg.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/the_lesson_of_an_affirmative_a.html at January 28, 2010 - 07:12:10 AM CST

Muslims, Jews and the Nobel Prize From the Jerusalem Post

Muslims, Jews and the Nobel Prize
Jerusalem Post ^ | 11-3-09 | URIYA SHAVIT

Posted on Tuesday, November 03, 2009 8:26:23 AM by SJackson

Next month, Prof. Ada Yonath will be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, becoming the fifth Israeli scientist to win this award. This has sharpened, once again, the grim statistics regarding the scarcity of Nobel laureates in the Muslim and Arab worlds. While Jews, who are only around 0.2 percent of the world population, have won a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded in the sciences, Muslims, who are one quarter of the world population, have won only a handful, even by the most generous accounts. And while relative to its size, Israel's tiny academia has been the world's leading Nobel power over the past decade, Arab universities have yet to produce their first Nobel laureate.

Ada Yonath from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. Photo: AP [file] Israelis and Jews worldwide consider these awards a source of pride - and rightly so. It's always nice to be on a winning team. Muslims and Arabs view these numbers as a source of shame and even soul-searching. Even Muslim religious scholars who portray Western political systems, social foundations and cultural achievements as manifestations of infidel entities in decay recognize that the West's huge scientific and technological edge must be narrowed. Some openly discuss Israel's scientific achievements to encourage their followers to become more academically competitive.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM offers a conventional explanation for the disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes in science awarded to Jews and Israelis: the "Jewish genius," whereas Muslims and Arabs fail because they live under dictatorships. This explanation is not completely detached from reality, but is, nevertheless, not sufficient.

The truth is that a certain type of Jew has won Nobel Prizes. These Jewish laureates drew on a Jewish heritage that dedicates itself to learning, reveres scholars and places intellectual demands on its young people. But these laureates were also modern Jews, open to modern sciences and rational thinking, and keen on making their way in the greater world that exists beyond their communities. Remove one part of this equation - heritage or modernity - and the "Jewish genius" vanishes.

This particular type of Jew is a nearly extinct species. Secular Jews, especially secular Israelis, are increasingly detached from the heritage of giving primacy to education and scholarship. They are inundated by a culture that reveres instant celebrity, shameless greed and utter stupidity. Observant Jews, especially observant Israelis, are increasingly facing trends that are hostile toward rationality, suspicious of modernity and indifferent to the merits of scientific experimentation.

Many lament the reduction in funds earmarked for sciences in Israel. But this is the symptom, not the disease. Where scientists receive no respect, they also receive little or no money. To continue winning Nobel Prizes, the Jewish world in general (and the State of Israel in particular) need more than financial resources. They need to defend and cultivate the particular kind of Jew who has been awarded one out of every four Nobel Prizes. And they must do so without caving in to political correctness or cultural relativism.

The case of the Muslim and Arab worlds also evokes a discussion. It is a historical fact that authoritarian regimes and dictatorships have produced inferior scientific achievements in comparison to liberal, open societies. Until its collapse, the Soviet Union lagged scientifically and technologically behind the United States; the gap increasingly widened and eventually led to the breakdown of the communist empire. However, the Soviet Union did excel in some sciences and produced many brilliant academics. The same holds for other non-democratic regimes.

Today, Stalinist North Korea sells technology to Stalinist Syria, not the other way round. Thus, the lack of political pluralism accounts for part of the Muslim and Arab scientific failures. But it does not explain why they are so absolute.

Another explanation is the lack of religious and intellectual freedom in most Muslim societies, where religious scholars have monopolized the spiritual and the metaphysical in a way that disrupts scientific progress. What does a monopoly of the spiritual and the metaphysical have to do with the study of chemistry or physics? Everything. Science can only flourish in a culture that does not recognize any taboos and constantly doubts creeds of all sorts. Nobel laureates cannot grow from cultures that raise kids from an early age to never question a certain conceptualization of reality.

This does not imply that science and religion are not commensurable; some of the world's greatest scientists have been deeply religious. But it is almost impossible for great scientific minds to exhaust their potential in societies where the clergy have ultimate control over intellectual quests.

IN THE late 19th century, a reform movement emerged in the Muslim world. It recognized that for Muslims to embark on an age of renaissance, modern sciences must be embraced. Reformists endeavored to convince Muslims that modern sciences do not contradict Islam - and were quite successful in doing so. This school, developed by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, is often mistakenly described as liberal; in fact, its primary goal was to defend Islam against Western hegemony. It aspired to offer a theological framework that would allow Muslims to be part of modernity without compromising their belief in the comprehensive essence of Islam.

The one thing these reformers never intended to do was to release society from the shackles of religious scriptures monopolized by religious establishments. And ironically enough, it is exactly because Afghani and Abduh's relatively modern and relatively tolerant school of thought became so influential - appeasing the minds of so many Muslims that religion can indeed encompass every aspect of modernity - that the Arab intellectual world is still locked in a spirit of taboo and fear.

Some 100 years ago, it was possible, although risky, for an Arab to doubt whether the Koran was a divine text. Any Arab who does so today would be signing his own death warrant. Sadly enough, many contemporary Western intellectuals also think twice before discussing Muslim creed. Where particular aspects of life, such as religion, cannot be openly debated, thorough scientific investigation is impossible.

Contemporary Arab religious scholars commonly offer apologias that attribute Western scientific achievements to the intellectual legacy an ungrateful West inherited from the Muslim world. By doing so, they shut their eyes to the deep historical context of Western renaissance. Contemporary leading Arab universities produce books and essays that depict Darwin, Freud, Marx and other brilliant modern minds as part of a Jewish conspiracy to bring about the downfall of humanity. By doing so, they distract their audiences from entire fields of scientific study.

Despite whatever racists imply, there is nothing essential about Muslims or Arabs that prevents them from winning Nobel Prizes. But for a scientific revolution to occur in these regions, more than political reform is needed. Rather, true intellectual freedom must be established. Since this is nowhere in sight, my hope - in fact, my guess - is that the first Muslim affiliated with a Middle Eastern university to win a Nobel Prize will be an Arab-Israeli. And he or she will teach Jews and Muslims alike a very valuable lesson.

The writer is director of Programs in Democracy at the Adelson Institute. This article was first published by the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, at the Shalem Center, www.adelsoninstitute.org

NASA Caught in Climate Data Manipulation; New Revelations Headlined on KUSI-TV Climate Special

NASA Caught in Climate Data Manipulation; New Revelations Headlined on KUSI-TV Climate Special

PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Thursday, January 14, 2010
Source: KUSI-TV

Climate researchers have discovered that NASA researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2005 as "THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD." KUSI-TV meteorologist

 

, Weather Channel founder, and iconic weatherman John Coleman will present these findings in a one-hour special airing on KUSI-TV on Jan.14 at 9 p.m. A related report will be made available on the Internet at 6 p.m. EST on January 14th at www.kusi.com.
In a new report, computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo discovered extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the U.S. Government's two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Ashville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. Smith and D'Aleo accuse these centers of manipulating temperature data to give the appearance of warmer temperatures than actually occurred by trimming the number and location of weather observation stations. The report is available online at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf.
The report reveals that there were no actual temperatures left in the computer database when NASA/NCDC proclaimed 2005 as "THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD." The NCDC deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it changed to a system of global grid points, each of which is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more adjacent weather observation stations. So the NCDC grid map contains only averaged, not real temperatures, giving rise to significant doubt that the result is a valid representation of Earth temperatures.
The number of actual weather observation points used as a starting point for world average temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,000 now. "That leaves much of the world unaccounted for," says D'Aleo.
The NCDC data are regularly used by the National Weather Service to declare a given month or year as setting a record for warmth. Such pronouncements are typically made in support of the global warming alarmism agenda. Researchers who support the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

 

(IPCC) also regularly use the NASA/NCDC data, including researchers associated with the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that is now at the center of the "Climategate" controversy.
This problem is only the tip of the iceberg with NCDC data. "For one thing, it is clear that comparing data from previous years, when the final figure was produced by averaging a large number of temperatures, with those of later years, produced from a small temperature base and the grid method, is like comparing apples and oranges," says Smith. "When the differences between the warmest year in history and the tenth warmest year is less than three quarters of a degree, it becomes silly to rely on such comparisons," added D'Aleo who asserts that the data manipulation is "scientific travesty" that was committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.
Smith and D'Aleo are both interviewed as part of a report on this study on the television special, "Global Warming: The Other Side" seen at 9 PM on January 14th on KUSI-TV, channel 9/51, San Diego, California. That program can now be viewed via computer at the website http://www.kusi.com/. The detailed report is available at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf.
For more information, contact:
E. Michael Smith
E-mail: pub4all@aol.com
Blog: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/gistemp/
For Joseph D'Aleo
Telephone: 603-689-5646
E-mail: Jsdaleo6331@aol.com
Web: http://www.icecap.us/
For call KUSI TV
Telephone: 858-571-5151, ask for the News Director
E-mail: news@kusi.com
Web: http://kusi.com/
Source: KUSI-TV
CONTACT: E. Michael Smith, pub4all@aol.com; Joseph D'Aleo,
+1-603-689-5646, Jsdaleo6331@aol.com; KUSI TV, +1-858-571-5151, ask for the
News Director, news@kusi.com
Web Site: http://www.kusi.com/

A Great Example of Banking Policy from MyFreePress.COM

Easily Understandable Explanation of Derivative Markets

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit . She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit .

By providing her customers' freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded on international security markets. Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar. He so informs Heidi.

Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since, Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the banks liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Heidi's bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms' pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-billion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from their cronies in Government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Heidi's bar.

Now, do you understand?

Canada’s Anti-Suzuki

Do you have a problem with this?

It's OK to profile for Affirmative Action programs.

It's OK to profile for Diversity programs.

It's OK to profile with the Census.

You can't profile for National Security.