Get your own Free Home PageYou want to know how nutty this country has become? City University of New York just voted to exclude students who can't read, write or do math from its four-year college programs. And the move is controversial.
Heavens, how bigoted to expect college students to know how to read or write. A hodge-podge of minority groups is screaming discrimination. Now let me make sure that I understand their position.
If you require a person desiring a college degree to know how to read, write and do basic math, you are discriminating against minorities. Does that mean minorities are dumb? Or is the argument that reading, writing and math are some difficult white man's supersecret code that you can't break without certain genetic characteristics?
I don't know which is more nutty -- people who say that having to know how to read and write is discrimination or City University admitting students who can't read or write to their degree programs for the past 18 years.
The basis for alleging discrimination is that more blacks and Hispanics flunk the basic tests than do white students. In saner days, all that would have meant was that blacks and Hispanics need to work harder. That is, after all, the normal response when we don't do something as well as we would like.
If you finish last at a track meet, you don't say you're a victim of discrimination. You train harder. Same with the bookish stuff. The bar is on the same level for everyone. If you can't clear it, you have to work harder.
A university, of course, ought to discriminate against people unqualified to do college-level work. People who can't do college-level work don't belong in college, just as people who can't play football don't belong on the football team. College degrees handed out to functional illiterates are worthless.
It is a hopeful sign, however, that City University -- once a proud and distinguished institution -- is recovering from the madness of the 1960s and 1970s, when leftists politicized everything and demanded and got open admissions regardless of qualifications.
The substitution of group politics for individual achievement is a dangerous and ultimately self-defeating proposition. It institutionalizes incompetence and immorality (it's immmoral to demand what one knows one has not earned). Who the devil wants to have open-heart surgery with a surgeon who has a political degree?
It's discrimination when somebody says you can't come in, because they don't like people with black skin or Spanish accents. It is not discrimination when someone says, ``Here's the test. Pass it and you're in. Flunk it and you're out.''
Understanding that difference does not, it seems to me, require a genius intelligence quotient. Imposing racial and other minority quotas on the job market and institutions is just politics that is both corrupt and hypocritical. If you applied a racial quota to the National Basketball Association, only 12 percent of the players could be black.
If merit-based hiring is OK for the NBA, it's OK for college admissions, the private job market and public-service jobs. There should, in fact, be nothing in America but merit-based admissions, hiring and promotions.
What distinguishes us is that we were traditionally a nation of individuals, with individual rights and individual opportunities. The assigning by the government of group rights and group opportunities is as foreign to the American ideal as communism or aristocracy.
It should cease forthwith.
Within the past two weeks, four law-enforcement officers in Florida have been killed by people who should have been in jail. Another officer died in New York City at the hands of another man who should have been in jail. If you count the people in Springfield, Ore., killed, police say, by a 15-year-old boy who was arrested but released, that's nine innocent lives lost to a failed and flawed criminal-justice system.
And those are only the ones I know about. God knows how many Americans die each year at the hands of people who should be in jail. This nonsense has to stop and stop now.
Crime is one of the more simple problems we have to deal with. Laws do not and cannot prevent human behavior. If they could, the crime rate would be zero. Therefore it is stupid to pile law on top of law, as legislators love to do. That's just demagoguery.
To make America safe, you have to identify the criminal, then confine him or kill him. Law enforcement does its part of the job -- it's very good at identifying and capturing criminals. The system falls apart with the judges, probation and parole.
The solution is to purge the criminal-justice system completely of the liberal social-worker mentality that has ruined the system in the past 40 years. Rehabilitation is a failed concept. ``Corrections facilities'' don't correct a darn thing. To make America safe, we have to return to reality.
Abolish probation and parole completely. Every person convicted of a crime should serve every single day of his or her sentence without exception. Getting rid of the parole-and-probation bureaucracy would free more than enough money to build any additional jail cells needed.
For so-called minor offenses, substitute short jail sentences for probation, both for juveniles and adults. Five days and nights in a real jail would have more effect on a would-be bad kid than a year's probation -- which kids consider to be nothing. And, yes, you can put juveniles into an adult jail. All you have to do is set aside a few cells and lock them down 24 hours a day so they will be segregated from the adult population.
Eliminate time off for good behavior. Substitute additional time for bad behavior.
And stop calling jails and prisons corrections facilities, and jailers and guards corrections officers. This is a heifer-dust, social-worker euphemism dreamed up by education bureaucrats trying to justify another useless college-degree program.
Forget rehabilitation. It does not work. Punish. What criminals hate most is discipline and hard work, so every prison inmate should be subjected to iron discipline and hard labor every waking hour of his or her life. Eliminate the televisions, air conditioning, gymnasiums, basketball courts and educational programs.
If a convict wants an education, he can get it after he gets out, as honest folks do -- on his own time and at his own expense.
Make the justice system just. Stop this nonsense of special treatment of the rich, the famous and the well-connected. Americans seem to have forgotten that for the law to be just, it must be blind. This nonsense of giving Hollywood movie stars special treatment for crimes that cost ordinary folks hard time is unacceptable.
And conviction of a third felony should mean death within prison walls. That's either execution or life with no parole. ``Lifers'' should be isolated from the general population and locked down in their cells around the clock. Cells for lifers should contain an I-bolt in the roof, 6 feet of rope and a short stool.
That way, anytime they decide they prefer death to slow rot, they can kill themselves and save us the cost of cornbread and beans.
This is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Robert Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population. Perhaps no writer in history has ever had more people with a vested interest in proving him wrong, though, in fact, Malthus was right.
Malthus' basic hypothesis that the number of people this planet can feed is limited while population increase is not is correct. Because he was operating with the knowledge available to him in 1798, his timing was off. Both the development of North and South American continents plus later technological and scientific advances pushed the crisis farther into the future than he anticipated.
But, while there are about 6 billion people today, 2 billion of them live in the dire misery Malthus predicted. And for most of that 2 billion, their only hope is somehow to find their way to the industrially developed countries. Those folks are coming to dinner. Better not put all the farmers out of business.
What several categories of people most vehemently object to in Malthus is the idea that the human being, like the squirrel and the deer, is subject to the iron laws of nature.
Capitalists love the idea of perpetual growth and are loathe to admit that there are any natural limits that might curb their greed for profits.
The social determinists hate the very idea that biology imposes any limits on human beings. Their whole racket depends on the false hypothesis that humans are equal and that only social environment creates inequality. That, of course, is stuff and nonsense. The determinists include a whole gaggle of people from socialists to nonideological, redistributionist fans to the folks who just have a cash interest in the huge welfare industry, both public and private. Their jobs depend on the fantasy that humans are infinitely malleable people who can be resurrected from bum to sterling citizen with the right social program. That's rubbish, of course.
Finally, there are the superstitious. Because nature programs people to believe in mystery, when people chuck belief in God as too restrictive, they inevitably end up with blind faith in some ideology or in science and technology.
Oh, no matter what, they believe blindly, science and technology, like the cavalry in the Hollywood movies, will always ride to the rescue. That, too, is rubbish. You might ask the survivors of Hiroshima or all the dying cancer patients what they think of science and technology.
There are no more continents to develop. The oceans, once thought to hold limitless resources, are increasingly polluted and overexploited. People in the seafood business told me 15 years ago that seafood was going to become scarce and expensive, and they were exactly right. It has become both.
As for the foolish notion that there's always space, the nearest star around which there may or may not be any habitable planets is 24 trillion miles away. Forget it. No way are humans going to devise a machine that could achieve the velocity necessary to travel beyond our solar system. Earth is our birthplace and our graveyard.
We'd better not screw it up to the point that it becomes uninhabitable, but we're moving in that direction.
We have to change our thinking. We have to drop this one-dimensional, special-interest style of thinking that amounts really to advocacy of a narrow point of view and ad hominem attacks on everyone who disagrees.
Somehow, without tearing each other's throats out, we have to find a way to live within the limits imposed by nature.
And it pays to remember that nature is merciless.
A resident of a trailer park -- excuse me, a manufactured-home development -- not long ago observed a strange sight. He saw a man pedaling furiously down the street on a bicycle. A van pulled alongside; the door flew open; and four strong arms reached out and grabbed the guy off the bicycle. Neither the van nor the then-riderless bicycle stopped.
The resident called the sheriff's office, but it was the Orange County Sheriff's Office -- specifically the Fugitive Unit -- that had snatched the guy. He had several outstanding warrants from various states for sexual assault on children.
I'm not in the business of giving advice to fugitives, but if I were, I would say stay out of Orange County. Sheriff Kevin Beary's Fugitive Unit is hands-down the best in the state and probably in the country. On a recent ``sweep night,'' it made 117 arrests, beating its old record of 92. That averaged out to one arrest every 3.6 minutes. That's an amazing accomplishment. After word leaked out, it received calls from cops all over the state. ``How'd you do that? Can we send somebody down to observe your operations?''
Lt. Bill Sullivan's Fugitive Unit is divided into two squads -- the East Squad led by Gil McDaniel and the West Squad led by Will Sloper. Each squad has nine detectives. I spent one night riding with McDaniel's squad on a sweep. But a lot of work goes before the sweep.
At any given time, you may be surprised to know, that there are 65,000 or so fugitives in Orange County -- those are people with outstanding warrants signed by a judge. About 60 percent are felonies. These are people who either committed the crime in Orange County or committed it somewhere else and are thought to be in Orange County.
The Fugitive Unit works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The detectives in each squad ``live by the beeper.'' If their network of informants tells them a wanted man is somewhere at 2 a.m., they go. In the meantime, day in and day out, they are prioritizing and tracking down fugitives. It's a real hunt that involves computer work, informants, stake-outs, contacts and scams. In addition to the sweep night, the Fugitive Unit detectives will average three arrests a day per man.
It is not, as it is in some departments, a ``retirees unit.'' These are seasoned but vigorous men who love the hunt. McDaniel, who could outlast the battery bunny, has created a highly trained group with a lot of esprit de corps.
Unlike the television cops who scream and holler, these guys were firm, polite and extremely professional. All of the arrests I observed came off without a hitch.
That particular night there was a heavy thunderstorm, but it didn't stop them from pursuing their quarry, often in neighborhoods most of us have never seen and wouldn't care to visit. They know all the seamy underside of Orange County, including ``heroin alley,'' which I won't further describe.
McDaniel said it is common to encounter a gun nearly every day, and they prefer surprise and ambush. The arrest is usually the climax of a long hunt.
Some neighborhoods are so crook-oriented that stakeouts are not possible, because as soon as the cops arrive, the people will start tapping their horns or shouting, ``Twelve, Twelve.'' That's the code for cops in the hood.
Fortunately, a lot of fugitives are dumb. One man, wanted for murder, was scammed with a phone call. He was told he had won a Rolex watch and a Saturn automobile. He could get the Rolex, but he had to agree to appear in a commercial to get the Saturn. The guy agreed. When he opened the Rolex box, inside was the warrant. On the way to jail, he asked, ``Do I still get the car?''
There seem to be three main reasons why reforming public education is such a failure: the lack of will to enforce discipline in the classroom, no definition of success other than a score on an essentially academic test and refusal to recognize differences in intelligence.
The matter of discipline is obvious. Administrators fail to enforce it because of fear of lawsuits, because many bad parents prefer to make charges of racism or discrimination than admit their children's bad behavior, and general timidity.
The problem with the test as the only standard is that we now know that people have different ``intelligences.'' We used to call it talents. But someone, for example, may be dumb when it comes to dealing with language but a genius when it comes to dealing with music, art or mechanics -- or vice versa. (In my case, it is definitely vice versa.)
Unfortunately, the current bureaucracy is geared to pronounce those with musical, art or mechanical talents as failures if they don't measure up to tests of language and numbers. More tragic, many of these children labeled failures may never know just how ``smart'' they are in music, art or mechanics.
Finally, it is stupid to pretend that some magic system or program is going to make children with a general intelligence quotient (IQ) of 90 perform as well as those with IQs of 120 or more. Yet we give both the same tests and pronounce those with the lower IQs failures even though they may, in fact, be people of sterling quality.
There's no need to argue over the question of whether IQ is hereditary or environmental. It is enough to realize that there are variations. It is as dumb to hold all to the same academic standard as it would be to expect that you could tinker with a 286 computer processor and make it perform on a par with a Pentium.
Institutionalization invariably breeds standardization, but humans don't come in a standard model. The variations in IQ, health, family background, energy levels, motivation and talents are practically infinite. To dump all those variables into one classroom and expect one teacher to succeed with one standardized curriculum is probably a mistake in itself. Teachers deserve to be designated heroes just for trying.
The original error was the decision to educate everybody for the same length of time. Much of the current educational model is more political orthodoxy than education. The idea, for example, that students must not drop out is political orthodoxy. Why shouldn't they drop out if the institution is not providing them with any useful skills or knowledge? Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and has done quite well. Many famous Americans are dropouts.
For one thing, we have allowed the bureaucrats to extend artificially the length of education. We should rethink the whole process. Children not bound for college should probably finish at 15 or 16 and enter the world of work. Those going to college should be out by 20. As it is today, ``childhood'' has been extended practically to the age of 30. Many of the most productive years of a human life are wasted sitting in institutions.
As with most things, end results are forgotten, and everyone gets bogged down in the process. The means become the ends. The end result of education ought to be to equip a young man or woman with the knowledge and skills necessary to pursue his or her particular brand of happiness. That means that education has to be tailored to life after education. Today, the political orthodoxy is that education must be lifelong.
If you can afford it, you would do well to abandon public education, because it will be lifetimes before it is changed for the better. It is, don't forget, a political institution.
What is the difference in Pakistan and India developing nuclear weapons and in Israel developing nuclear weapons?
When Israel went nuclear, the U.S. government adopted the posture of the three monkeys -- it didn't see anything, hear anything or say anything. When India and Pakistan went nuclear, the United States went ballistic and imposed sanctions and rhetoric on both countries.
It is not enough to say that the U.S. government likes Israel and doesn't like Pakistan and India. Governments are not supposed to act like elementary-school kids.
The issue is America's national interests, and it is not in our interest for our government to be so blatantly hypocritical and its foreign policy so riddled with double standards. One consequence of the U.S. government's hypocrisy and double-standards is a loss of influence. To put it in the vernacular, our government's word is no good. And fewer and fewer governments will pay any attention to it.
Why should the government leaders of India and Pakistan pay any attention to the words of U.S. government officials? The people in South Asia know full well that the United States acts and speaks only on the basis of domestic politics and is, consequently, a world-class hypocrite.
President Clinton is so kissy-smoochy with the Chinese government for financial and business reasons that China's blatant human-rights abuses, the genocide it practices in Tibet and its own nuclear-arms buildup get the old three-monkeys treatment.
So, can India rely on the United States to protect it from China's nuclear weapons? No. It has to rely on itself. Can Pakistan rely on U.S. protection against India? No. It has to rely on itself.
Look at Rep. Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and his disgusting performance in Israel. As someone suggested, we should refer to Gingrich henceforth as Madame Gingrich because he presides over a House of Whores.
Gingrich in his lust for Jewish votes and Jewish campaign contributions blunders into the middle of the nearly dead peace process and blatantly advises the Israeli prime minister to disregard the president of the United States. Don't worry, Mr. Prime Minister, the House of Whores will back your play, Madame Gingrich advises.
Imagine if the Democratic speaker of the House had gone to Iraq, right after its invasion of Kuwait, and told Saddam Hussein, ``Oh, disregard anything President Bush says. Congress will back your play.'' And the Democrat probably would have done just that if there had been a huge Iraqi lobby in the United States, able to generate millions of dollars in campaign contributions.
And what, after all, is the difference between Iraq invading Kuwait and Israel invading Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza? What is the difference between Iraq defying a United Nations resolution and Israel defying 69 U.N. resolutions?
Campaign money, Israeli lobby propaganda and domestic politics. The downside is the loss of American prestige and influence, the endangerment of American citizens, an increase in the risk of war, the emasculation of the United Nations as a force for peace and general disrespect for the rule of law.
A nation's foreign policy should be both moral and just. Justice requires the same standards and one set of rules for dealing with all countries. If we don't replace the whores with statesmen, bad things are going to happen.
Jefferson Davis, the last American president to preside over a constitutional republic (the Confederate States of America) had this to say about the Constitution and the Union.
``I love the Union and the Constitution,'' he said, ``but I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it.''
I would guess many Americans have no idea what Davis meant, because they have no idea what the original intent of the Constitution was. Many today, I suspect, think that the Constitution is what allows people to burn flags and dance naked in bars. In fact, the Founding Fathers had a rather more serious purpose in mind.
The first step in understanding the original intent is to recall that Colonial America existed for about 169 years before the American Revolution. These colonies existed separately and independent of each other. When they seceded from the British Empire, they did so separately and independently.
The Declaration of Independence is clear on this point. It states, ``We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, ... solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States'' (note the plural) ``... and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all the other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do ... .''
They called themselves the United States because of the Articles of Confederation. Article II of that document states, ``Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.''
Many people today seem to think that the federal government created the states when it was the reverse. The states created the federal government as a stronger form of confederation by delegating certain of their powers to it. Thus, the purpose of the Constitution of 1787, like the Articles of Confederation, was to create a voluntary union to accomplish specific purposes, mainly to ensure a domestic free market, to provide for the common defense of the states and to deal with foreign countries with one voice.
In the original Constitution, people were not American citizens per se but were instead citizens of their respective states. The Constitution stipulated that each state would grant to the citizens of other states the rights and privileges it granted to its own. It's difficult to understand the War Between the States without understanding the loyalty Americans -- North and South -- felt for their respective states.
But what is relevant for us today is that the people in the American Republic (1787-1860) understand that the powers of the federal government were strictly limited to those spelled out in the Constitution and that the Constitution would be interpreted literally and narrowly. And, most important, that the states themselves would be the final judge of the federal government's actions.
In the North, however, there arose new feelings of nationalism and a belief that a strong central government should provide economic benefits -- protective tariffs and infrastructure, for example. Southerners disagreed; hence the split. Because the North prevailed and amended the Constitution to expand the powers of the federal government, that's what we live under today.
But Davis also said that questions that are settled by force and violence remain forever unsettled and will arise again. And so, today, we are seeing more and more people object to an unlimited central government. It seems sometimes that human ``progress'' travels in a circle rather than a straight line.
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