Yep…finally got to the tank bar, following some neighborhood New Years receptions. All I can say is pictures do not do it justice. Definitely getting one for the retirement hacienda. Thanks @PatDonahoeArmy for the hospitality. pic.twitter.com/A5I45FTQIT
So what do people think of France’s new mandatory service law?:
The mandatory part of national service will last a month, while the second, longer phase will be more closely focused on defence and security
The French government has introduced a plan to bring back national service for all 16-year-olds.
It was an idea put forward by Emmanuel Macron in his presidential campaign, to promote a sense of civic duty and national unity among French youth.
But some remain unconvinced of the benefits.
The new national service will cover all 16-year-olds, girls as well as boys, and will be divided into two distinct phases.
National service in two parts
The first phase is a mandatory one-month placement with a focus on civic culture, which the government says will “enable young people to create new relationships and develop their role in society”.
Voluntary teaching and working with charities are among the options being looked at, alongside traditional military preparation with the police, fire service or army.
The second phase is a voluntary placement of at least three months and up to a year, in which young people will be encouraged to serve “in an area linked to defence and security” – but again, they could opt to carry out volunteer work linked to heritage, the environment or social care. [BBC]
You can read more at the link, but it seems this more like a long summer camp than national service. I guess it is better than nothing. It will be interesting to see how this turns out because I assume there will be legal challenges to it.
In honor of the 17th anniversary of 9/11, below is the best article I have read to commemorate the day from the always insightful Mike Rowe:
You’ve been very quiet about the Kaepernick PR disaster at Nike. Any thoughts? – Sam Wilder
Hi Sam. Nike’s free to celebrate whomever they wish, and Kaepernick is entitled to his opinion – kneeling, standing, or lying down. But if I was going to put someone’s face on a billboard – someone who epitomized bravery and sacrifice – I might have gone another way, especially this time of year. I might have gone with this guy – Tom Burnett.
Tom’s last act on earth was one of the most courageous things imaginable. And his last words to his wife, Deena, are among the most inspiring I’ve ever heard. Those exact words are at the top of this page, and the bottom. They were spoken seventeen years ago, under conditions I hope to never experience. I’ll never forget Tom’s last words. I hope you won’t either. [Mike Rowe]
You can read the whole transcript from Tom Burnett’s phone call at the link.
Even on the American Independence Day there are those in the American left that can’t spend at least one day without trashing the country:
This July 4, let’s not mince words: American independence in 1776 was a monumental mistake. We should be mourning the fact that we left the United Kingdom, not cheering it.
Of course, evaluating the wisdom of the American Revolution means dealing with counterfactuals. As any historian would tell you, this is a messy business. We obviously can’t be entirely sure how America would have fared if it had stayed in the British Empire longer, perhaps gaining independence a century or so later, along with Canada.
But I’m reasonably confident a world in which the revolution never happened would be better than the one we live in now, for three main reasons: Slavery would’ve been abolished earlier, American Indians would’ve faced rampant persecution but not the outright ethnic cleansing Andrew Jackson and other American leaders perpetrated, and America would have a parliamentary system of government that makes policymaking easier and lessens the risk of democratic collapse. [Vox]
You can read the rest at the link, but be warned the article makes some major assumptions to support its thesis. For example if the British did try to end slavery sooner in the American colonies does anyone think the South would not have revolted?
That sound you hear is the shattering of a cherished Democratic orthodoxy: race-based preferences in education.
Mr. Adams is an African-American who serves as Brooklyn’s borough president and aspires to run for mayor. On almost any issue, he lands where you would expect a big-city black Democrat to land. But when he cheered Mr. de Blasio’s bid to replace the Specialized High School Admissions Test with criteria meant to sneak in a racial rebalancing, he suddenly had a rebellion on his hands.
Asian-American moms and dads made their displeasure known. So after hastily convening a meeting with angry constituents (and, according to the New York Post, threats from Chinese-American donors), Mr. Adams announced that he wasn’t with the mayor after all.
He’s not alone. Every elected Asian-American in New York City politics has now blasted Mr. de Blasio’s plans. At the City Council, Peter Koo and Margaret Chin are against it; in the state Assembly, Ron Kim and Yuh-Line Niou are opposed; and in Congress, Grace Meng —a graduate of Stuyvesant, one of the affected schools—says she’s “disappointed” by the mayor’s proposal and was particularly “insulted” by the way his schools chancellor framed the issue. What makes this drama so unusual is that every last one of these pols is a Democrat, part of a larger community that overwhelmingly votes Democratic.
Whites have traditionally been the losers from affirmative action. Proponents sometimes justify this as the price to be paid for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Whatever the merits of this argument, the Asian-American experience is hard to squeeze into the box of racial privilege.
In the 19th century, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first U.S. law to deny immigration and naturalization based on race. In the 20th century, during World War II, Japanese-American citizens were confined in internment camps. To this list the 21st century adds racial discrimination at our most elite universities, which, as they did with Jews a century ago, limit the number of Asian-Americans they admit. (……)
As Ms. Chin points out, even if you are an Asian-American with little education, work as a manual laborer, and have no political connections, you understand that an objective exam represents opportunity and upward mobility. You also understand that if merit is replaced by softer (“holistic”) criteria designed to tilt the racial balance (e.g., Harvard has given Asian-American applicants lower “personality” ratings), it will be your children who pay the price. In other words, Democrats are now dealing with an Asian-American community that doesn’t buy the argument that racial justice requires discriminating against a racial minority. [Wall Street Journal]
You can read more at the link, but yet despite all the discrimination that Asian-Americans have faced in the past and even now by affirmative action policies in colleges, they have still been able to have by far the highest per capita household income of any race, even higher than whites.
I have long been following this lawsuit here at the ROK Drop and now the lawsuit has forced Harvard to release how they select their applicants. The way the admissions process is set up it makes it harder for Asian-Americans to be accepted to the prestigious university:
In an intense legal battle over the role of race in Harvard University’s admissions policies, a group that is suing the school says Harvard lowers the rankings of Asian-American applicants in a way that is unconstitutional.
Harvard says that its admissions process is legal — and it notes that the plaintiff group, the Students for Fair Admissions, is backed by the same activist who previously challenged the University of Texas’ affirmative action policy.
The SFFA says Harvard uses “racial balancing” as part of its formula for admitting students and that the practice is illegal. In response, Harvard says the group is misinterpreting data that the highly competitive school shared about how it chooses students.
Citing a 2013 analysis by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research, the SFFA said in a federal court filing on Friday that if academics were the only criterion, Asian-American students would have made up more than 43 percent of students who were admitted, rather than the actual 18.7 percent.
Even if other criteria — such as legacy students, athletic recruiting and extracurricular and personal attributes — are included, the plaintiffs say, the number of Asian-Americans at Harvard would still have risen to more than 26 percent.
Saying that the admission rate for whites outpaced that of Asian-Americans over a 10-year period — despite outperforming them in only the “personal” ratings — the plaintiffs allege that “being Asian American actually decreases the chances of admissions.” [NPR]
So how does Harvard justify not admitting Asian-Americans based on their academic performance? By penalizing them for their “personalities”:
Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.
Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found. [New York Times]
I am not sure how an admission personnel can make an accurate determination about someones “courage” or “liability” from an application packet. I think it is arguable that the personality scores are being used as a way to manipulate the stupid body to reflect what the university wants it to look like.
Could you imagine what the uproar would be if a university for example in the South was using personality scores to limit the number of African-American students? I do find it interesting that since it is Asian-Americans being affected by Harvard’s policies that the usual race hustlers we see in the spotlight for issues like this are no where to be found.
