The Sad Irony Of Affirmative Action

Introduction

Author of “The Sad Irony of Affirmative Action”, Gail Heriot, is a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law. She has also been a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights since 2007. She is the author of numerous academic and professional papers, and over thirty of them have been featured on the Social Science Research Network. She also is a columnist for National Review Magazine.

In “The Sad Irony of Affirmative Action”, Heriot delves into the consequences and shortcomings of Affirmative Action, specifically in the college admissions process.

Summary

Introducing her argument, Heriot states a few facts showing the apparent ineffectiveness of affirmative action– “If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors…

Carbon Dioxide Scrubber

Ross McKitrick says Jeff Bezos has put enough money on the table to vanish climate change concerns, except for those who won’t let go. He writes at Financial Post: It’s never enough with climate activists — even a staggering $10 billion from Jeff Bezos. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Observers might conclude activists don’t care about the climate per se but instead want to impose a big-government central planning regime

Jeff Bezos, the mega-billionaire founder/owner of Amazon, just announced he will give US$10 billion to “fight climate change.” According to CNN, this followed immense pressure from his employees to take action. And, as is inevitable with this issue, as soon as he made the announcement his activist employees declared it wasn’t enough.

“We applaud Jeff Bezos’s philanthropy, but one hand cannot give what the other is taking away,” their group sniffed. “Will Jeff Bezos show us…

They are up against it. Governments are now finding themselves increasingly boxed in by their own climate ideology. From the report below:
Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said it is “highly unlikely” that the Netherlands will rise to the challenge, saying a [extra] 10% emissions reduction by the end of 2020 would “require shutting down a substantial part of the economy”.

But what options are there? Nuclear power is unpopular and can’t be built quickly anyway, while wind and solar power are part-time, intermittent, and relatively expensive. No viable ‘off-the-shelf’ way exists to store electricity on a massive scale. Awkward.
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The Netherlands is under pressure to slash emissions in sectors such as power generation and agriculture in 2020 after a ruling by a top court made the government a reluctant ‘test case’ for tougher global climate policies, says…

Virtue signalling with heavily subsidised and hopelessly intermittent wind and solar power comes with a staggering cost. Ask a virtue signalling victim from Germany, Denmark or South Australia where wind and solar obsessions have left them paying world’s highest power prices.

Like the aforementioned, Ontario is another place where ideologues destroyed a perfectly reliable and thoroughly affordable electricity supply; the economic consequences have been an unmitigated disaster.

Ontario’s Liberal government under Kathleen Wynne took the wind and solar obsession to extremes, driving power prices into orbit and well-paid manufacturing jobs offshore.

Wynne and her band of acolytes were shown the door, after an electoral drubbing at the hands of Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives in June 2019. However, as Parker Gallant details below, Wynne’s dismal legacy will haunt her compatriots for generations to come.

Ontario electricity ratepayers paid up big-time to reduce emissions
Energy Perspectives
Parker Gallant
10 February…

Cronkite in Vietnam, 1968

Fifty-two years ago tonight, CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite presented a prime-time report about the war in Vietnam and declared in closing that the U.S. military effort was “mired in stalemate” and that negotiations might eventually offer a way out.

It was a tepid analysis, hardly novel. But over the years, Cronkite’s assessment has swelled in importance, taking on the aura of a vital, media-inspired turning point. It is so singularly important in American journalism that it has come to be called the “Cronkite Moment.”

In reality it is a moment steeped in media myth.

Notable among the myths of the “Cronkite Moment” is that President Lyndon B. Johnson watched the program and, upon hearing the anchorman’s comment about “stalemate,” snapped off the television and told an aide or aides something to this effect:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle…

As I’ve frequently noted, the misuse of RCP8.5 is pervasive. While there are some legitimate uses of high forcing levels in exploratory research, that is not what I am referring to here. Below, an example of RCP8.5 being put to use in a consulting sales pitch, which then finds its way to a Reuters news story about the real world, taking the misuse of RCP8.5-as-BAU into broader circulation. Posted here just so I have it …