Categories
education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Nondiscrimination as Discriminatory 

Two parts gall, three parts random irrationality; eye of newt, toe of frog. 

That’s how you cook up the latest leftist madness.

According to the wizards running Columbia University, deliberately race-​neutral policies are discriminatory if they have a “disproportionate impact.”

Columbia has updated its antidiscrimination policy about bad things you can do on campus that might get you investigated and sanctioned. The revised policy declares that one bad thing is “having a neutral policy or practice that has a disproportionate and unjustified adverse impact on actual and/​or perceived members or associates of one Protected Class more than others.” 

This, the policy asserts, “constitutes Discrimination” — with a capital D.

Those “protected classes” make up a formidable list. If the idea is that treating another person abusively subjects one to penalties, why not just say this? Then no groups need be listed.

But Columbia University seems to find focusing on discriminatory nondiscrimination a more productive way to spend its time than coping with unambiguous racial and ethnic hatred on campus.

Columbia is among the schools that has responded to vicious harassment of Jewish students with little more than pro forma protest. Even as a Columbia representative tells USA Today that “calls for violence have no place at Columbia,” anti-​Israel and anti-​Jewish students keep calling for violence. Will they be kicked out?

Eliana Goldin, a Jewish student at the school, says that the administration is well aware of “the credible threat to Jewish students, and they’re still playing both-sideism.”

Which strikes me as Discrimination with a Capital D.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling general freedom

Kamala Harris’s Attack on Parents

Among the skeletons rattling around in presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s closet is her support — while San Francisco’s district attorney and while running for state attorney general — for a law to punish parents for their children’s absences from school.

The story, reported by Huffpost, NPR, and others several years ago, has more recently been publicized by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Harris supported the harass-​parents truancy program when it was conceived in the state legislature, saying that “a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.” Under the program, which still exists, a school can refer persistent truancy to a district attorney’s office, which can then threaten to prosecute parents.

One victim was Cheree Peoples, who was arrested and handcuffed in 2013 while still in her pajamas. “You would swear I had killed somebody.” Her daughter Shayla had missed twenty days of school in the current school year. Cheree faced a possible penalty of $2,500 or a year in jail. 

Shayla has sickle cell anemia and required frequent hospitalization. 

Shayla’s mother fought the charges for a long time. Eventually, they were dropped.

Harris bragged about the truancy program while being inaugurated as attorney general. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

Today, Harris says the harass-​parents law she championed has been abused by others. But isn’t the law itself the abuse?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
regulation too much government

Wait, What?

The Federal Aviation Administration wants to fine Elon Musk’s spacefaring firm SpaceX $633,000 for various alleged infractions of FAA regulations. In response, Musk says he’s suing the agency for “regulatory overreach.”

One set of fines pertains to using an “unapproved control room” and failure to “conduct the required T‑2 hour poll” during a June 2023 launch: 350,000 smackers.

Another set, totaling $283,000, is for using an “unapproved rocket propellant farm,” i.e., tanks for storing fuel until it’s pumped into the ships, back in July 2023.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has sued SpaceX for hiring “only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents” (wait, what?) and failing to take into account currently prevailing political winds. Perhaps the FAA should sue the Justice Department for expecting SpaceX to focus on anything but its missions.

The initial reporting doesn’t make clear whether there’s any merit to the FAA’s complaints — wrong specs for fuel tanks or whatever. The mere deviation from some regulation is meaningless if what SpaceX did instead is as safe or safer than what the bureaucrats stipulated.

Large enterprises must navigate an infinite number of regulations, and federal agencies are certainly selective enforcers. If you’re Boeing, it seems you can get away with shoddy practices for years, at least until the fit hits the shan.

I’ll wait to hear more, but I suspect that the FAA’s attempt to grab hundreds of thousands of dollars from Musk is indeed a symptom of regulatory overreach.

And just possibly motivated by … politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies regulation subsidy too much government

Stay Puft America

“It was perhaps just a matter of time before issues of health — not policies over health-​care provision but actual human health — would enter into our politics,” surmises Jeffrey A. Tucker in The Epoch Times. “We look at pictures of people in cities or at the beach in the 1970s and compare them with today and the results are shocking. We have changed as people and for the worse.”

Jeff Tucker is trying to explain the background for a big policy-​interest shift, as a result of the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., endorsement of Donald J. Trump. Kennedy’s big issue is health, and Trump’s gone along with it, willing to make it a part of his agenda.

In “How Did Health Become a Political Issue?” Tucker focuses first on the COVID debacle, moving on to the real culprit: government.

Or, technically, government and industry, combined into one huge Stay Puft Marshmallow of Destruction. For behind our changing eating patterns and food habits are government tariffs, subsidies, researchstrategies, diet crazes, and much, much more. 

Perhaps even bigger than Big Pharma is Big Agribiz, a conglomerate of companies pushing lab-​created additives and worse on a trusting public, or, as Tucker puts it, “many decades of heavy government subsidies for the worst food, and so much in the way of corn, soy, and wheat are produced that we’ve invented new ways to use it.”

But it’s not really “we’ve.” The Standard American Diet (SAD) wouldn’t have existed were it not for the USDA and the FDA and a whole alphabet soup of bureaus captured by the industries they were assigned to regulate, working together in a Big Biz/​Gov partnership to create a Big Problem in the general population.

Somehow, though, when asked about the government causes of SAD, RFKj said he wouldn’t abolish anything. He merely wants “better regulations.”

Someone needs a fast …from Big Government.

That someone? Kennedy. 

And America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Sobering Up After DEI

Some universities and companies have been retreating from their obnoxious DEI policies. We can now add Jack Daniel’s to the list.

One of the lamentable ideological fads of recent years, DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) programs are a vicious form of race-​based and sex-​based affirmative action.

All such policies subordinate merit to irrelevant but politically preferred physical characteristics.

So far as I know, old-​style affirmative action at least was not normally accompanied by mandatory indoctrination and mandatory testimony by applicants about how they would cherish and uphold the ideology of compensatory racial and sexual discrimination. But such indoctrination and litmus tests are standard features of many contemporary DEI regimes.

Which are now minus one, thankfully, as Jack Daniel’s announces that it will be ending DEI initiatives, such as a social credit system and “quantitative workforce and supplier diversity ambitions.”

The Dallas Express says that the whiskey distiller is decoupling from DEI because it is “facing backlash.” Specifically, thanks to the impending attention of Robby Starbuck, “an activist known for successfully putting a spotlight on companies like Harley-​Davidson and John Deere” for their DEI policies.

Starbuck said on Twitter that he had been “set to expose” Jack Daniel’s, which perhaps was tipped off by his visiting of employee LinkedIn pages. “We are winning and one by one we will bring sanity back to corporate America.”

He adds that if you want your own workplace’s DEI policies exposed, you can email “tips and evidence” to him at EliminateDEI@​protonmail.​com.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
property rights regulation

The Developer’s Lot

If you’re going to own things, don’t own them in New York City.

This town is an epicenter of official looting, as, for instance, what the city’s Parks Department is doing to “perplexed plaintiff” Theodore Trachtenberg.

Trachtenberg owns a lot in New York, on which he hopes to build housing. Before he could proceed, he had to remove a tree from the lot.

“Therefore,” the city — the Parks Department, the city, it’s all the same gang — is fining him $230,000.

Why? Well, they want money is why. If you can invest in NYC housing, this means you have money. 

If a little girl without money were to pluck a dandelion in her back yard, Parks would fine her only a quarter, maybe.

Trachtenberg is suing. The filing says: “Parks did not plant the tree, has never performed any work on, nor took care of the tree, nor has even registered it on its online resource called NYC Tree Map.”

The insanity is slightly complicated by a claim that two small trees on a nearby sidewalk were damaged by the work.

“The ownership of those two trees is not being contested, but the damage is,” says Mikhail Sheynker, Trachtenberg’s lawyer. Sheynker says he hasn’t observed the damage that the city describes.

But he has observed that in the 1990s, “the Parks Department didn’t really issue fines over trees. But they figured out this is a moneymaker.”

Trachtenberg should have developed a tract in some other burg.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts