Tag: family

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education and schooling ideological culture

Asian Privilege?

Seventy-three.

That’s the number that stood out to me in George Will’s Sunday column, “Anti-Asian racism disguises itself as ‘diversity.’”

Seventy-three percent of the smart students at Thomas Jefferson High School happen to be Asian. TJHS is a highly-rated STEM magnet school in Virginia’s Washington, D.C. suburbs, where entry had, until recently, been based on an admissions exam. 

That’s more than three times the percentage of Asian Americans among Fairfax County, Virginia, public school students. 

European-American students make up the largest racial block at 38 percent, but account for only 18 percent of attendees at this elite high school. Hispanics represent 27 percent of all students and African Americans 10 percent, but garnered, respectively, 3 and 1 percent of the coveted slots.

Are educators specifically advantaging Asian kids? 

Well, more than 80 percent of Fairfax County teachers are white, 7 percent black and only 5 percent Asian, says a separate Post report. Asian privilege seems unlikely.

So . . . what are Asian American students doing differently?

Studying? 

Will recounts complaints by the county superintendent about Asian American parents spending too much on test preparation and the Virginia Secretary of Education compared such studying to using “performance enhancing drugs” in sports.

Another factor in having “crazy” parents who obsess about their children doing well in school could be doubling the odds by having not one, but two parents — not to mention an extended family structure. Among blacks, Hispanics and whites, out-of-wedlock births account for 69, 52 and 28 percent of all births, respectively. But for Asian Americans, out-of-wedlock births are under 12 percent.

One can jigger the rules for getting into TJ High. Sure. 

Jiggering the rules for getting ahead in life? Much harder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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family / mind / JG

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free trade & free markets

Negative Logic

savings bond, family, interest rates, economics, savings,

“The idea that negative interest rates will produce loans and generate growth,” concludes Richard Rahn in a Washington Times op-ed, “is not supported by the evidence to date.”

Citing current markets for Danish and Swiss bonds, Rahn states that “approximately 30 percent of the global government bond issues are now trading in negative territory.”

Bonds used to seem the best investment. Government is the biggest, most reliable consumer, as J.B. Say and Destutt de Tracy (the latter being Thomas Jefferson’s favorite economist) argued, making the bond market the surest form of consumer credit. Governments last, weathering storms. So people loan them money not merely to earn interest, but to not risk their principal investment. 

Government bonds during America’s Great Depression were about the only form of investing going on: everything else was shaky. 

Which seems to be happening again. 

“In theory, as the interest rate falls, businesses and individuals should borrow and invest more,” Rahn explains. “In fact, as can be easily seen in Japan, as the interest rate falls, many save more — increasing the supply of savings and putting downward pressure on interest rates — in order to ensure they will have adequate funds for retirement. So, a low or negative interest rate policy becomes self-defeating.”

Could the logic of modern economic policy be . . . illogical?

Keynesian fiscal policy has always struck me as based on . . . evasions, the most obvious being that actual, real-world Keynesian politicians somehow never insist that deficits be turned into surpluses in good times, as John Maynard Keynes’ original program stated. 

Modern monetary policy also seems . . . well, if not evasive, at least . . . desperate.

Which I would be, too, were I riding on a growing debt as big as the federal government’s. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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savings bond, family, interest rates, economics, savings,

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ideological culture

Not Your Mother’s How-To Manual

communism, socialism, freedom, capitalism, motherhood, family,

“Want to Dismantle Capitalism?” asks The Nation headline for a recent interview with feminist Sophie Lewis, immediately answering: “Abolish the Family.”

In a world of YouTube videos on how to do almost everything, apparently the progressive publication noticed something missing: There is no reliable guide for going full commie.

Rosemarie Ho prefaces her discussion with Ms. Lewis, author of “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” by observing that “the most infamous demand of The Communist Manifesto is the ‘abolition of the family.’”

“The family, Marx and Engels noted, was where patriarchy and capitalism worked in tandem to produce willing, alienated workers,” writes Ho, “where women became little more than ‘instruments of production’ for the men who lorded over them.”

Ah, “little more” — how depressingly reductionist.

Ho applauds that Lewis “takes up this forgotten struggle” and “gives us an account of the material conditions — the biological and societal violence — that gestators, or people who are carrying fetuses, have to bear.”

“Mothers nurture,” acknowledges Lewis, “but they also kill and abuse their wards. That’s why it’s so valuable to denaturalize the mother-child bond. To do anything otherwise is to devalue that work. That’s the horizon that I think opens up the space for a revolutionary politics.”

Through 2,000 words of jargon, we learn that “motherhood is a very powerful ideological edifice,” as Lewis attacks “the idea that babies belong to anyone — the idea that the product of gestational labor gets transferred as property to a set of people.” After all, she informs that we should “think about babies as made by many people.”

Gestators of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our sanity!

Oh . . . and the family. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

communism, socialism, freedom, capitalism, motherhood, family,

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crime and punishment general freedom insider corruption

Puppycide

dogs, puppycide, police, shooting, drug war, abuse, family

The cost of the War on Drugs is not to be reckoned just in dollars. Or in that more serious accounting index: lost lives. The hit to our civil liberties has been enormous, too, and instrumental in setting up the modern Surveillance State.

But beyond these, there is a stranger result: the War on Drugs is also, de facto, a War on Dogs.

“Detroit police officers shot 54 dogs last year, according to public records obtained by Reason,” writes C.J. Ciaramella. “That’s a marked increase over the number reported by the department in 2016 and 2015, and more than twice as many as Chicago, a city with roughly 2 million more people.”

Reason magazine has been covering the War on Dogs by police forces across the country — identified in Ciaramella’s article as “puppycide” — for years, and I’ve mentioned it here on Common Sense, too. The problem is not dogs shot because they are wild, or have rabies, or the like. One expects that sort of thing.

What is problematic is that a third of the Detroit shootings took place in the course of no-knock raids and other common police actions entailed by contraband interdiction. The Detroit number turns out to be “more animal shootings than the entire Los Angeles Police Department performed — 14 total — in 2016,” Ciaramella relates.

Excessive shooting of dogs is costly to cities, of course — to taxpayers, to be precise — in terms of civil lawsuits filed and settled. And to families, some of them quite innocent of any crime, who lose their pets. 

It is a sign of a police culture corrupted by . . . the War on Drugs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy too much government

Good Pot, Bad Law

Brill, family, marijuana, pot, prohibition, seizures, epileptic, goFundMe

Should you let your son suffer, perhaps even die, if the medicine he needs — the only medicine that helps — is illegal to administer?

The question answers itself. It’s the answer that Matthew and Suzeanna Brill acted on when they let their 15-year-old son David smoke marijuana to help control his epileptic seizures. Nothing else was doing the job.

“For 71 days our son rode his bike, woke up, went to school, played with friends, played outside; and the terror for his life that gripped our hearts and souls began to lift,” says Suzeanna. “We were breaking the law. We saved our son.”

But because the Brills did what they did — and because a thoughtless therapist tattled on them — Georgia’s Family and Children Services took David away, with the help of the sheriff’s office of Twiggs County. So David has been living in a group home, forcibly separated from his parents and presumably from any effective treatment for his life-threatening seizures.

“Whatever the law is, it’s my job to enforce it,” says Sheriff Darren Mitchum in rationalizing his deplorable conduct. (Whatever the law is?) After all, “somebody’s got to stand up for the child’s welfare.” Because, as everyone knows, preventing destructive seizures could not possibly be in the best interest of the person suffering from those seizures . . . right?

Fighting to get their son back, the Brills are raising money for the legal costs through a GoFundMe campaign.

Let’s help them succeed. Fast.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture media and media people

In the Black

Christmas, Black Friday, family, values, trample, hypocrisy

“Black Friday,” reads a meme making the social media rounds. “Because only in America [do] people trample each other for sales one day after being thankful for what they already have.”

Thankfulness is vital, I agree. But I’ve been up at the crack of dawn to “cash in” on Black Friday sales, and I’ve never witnessed any violence of any kind. Not a smidgeon. Not that it doesn’t happen — we’ve all seen the videos. It just isn’t the usual experience.

In fact, the camaraderie of strangers is one of the endearing aspects of standing in line waiting for a big box store to open at some forsaken hour.

Trust me, I’m decidedly not an enthusiastic shopper, so participating in Black Friday wasn’t my idea. My youngest daughter wanted to experience it. And taking a businesslike approach to Christmas shopping, she needed the savings. I liked her interest and initiative and so I said, yes, to getting up at 5:00 am.

But after staying up late talking with friends and relatives, that early alarm hit hard.

What I liked, in order, were: being with my daughter, our sleep-deprived sense of humor, the rush of doing something new, and a comforting visit to Starbucks.

For years, I rode this father-daughter Black Friday fast lane. But not this year. At age 17 (her, not me), with her social life and work, she’s got better things to do than partake in dawn shopping raids.

Still, if she ever asks me to go with her on Black Friday, I’ll be up and at ’em, thrilled for the opportunity.

Why? I know what I’m thankful for. What really matters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Christmas, Black Friday, family, values, trample, hypocrisy