RUTHFULLY YOURS

Meet Alfonso Flores, the decorated former Green Beret who is rallying Los Angeles parents to fight the unions and reform the worst public schools, one school at a time.

Anaheim, Calif.

When most people think of this quintessential California suburb, the Angels baseball team or Disneyland probably comes to mind. But a five-minute drive from the “happiest place on earth” takes you to Palm Lane Elementary, ground zero in a fight between teachers unions and parents who are trying to fix California’s broken public schools. The conflict—as so often in American education—boils down to unionized teachers trying to stop minority children from attending charter schools.

Ninety percent of Palm Lane students come from low-income families. About 85% are Latino, and more than half aren’t native English speakers. Palm Lane has been on the California Education Department’s list of underperforming schools since 2003. In 2013 a mere 38% of students scored proficient or better in English on state tests. And Palm Lane is hardly an exception in the area: Four other elementary schools in Anaheim rank even lower on the state’s Academic Performance Index.

But Alfonso Flores is leading a grass-roots insurgency against the union-controlled regime at Palm Lane. The former teacher and father of four kids who attend public schools in Hesperia has used the state’s “parent trigger” law, passed in 2010, to force changes at a half-dozen schools in California. The law stipulates that if a majority of parents at a struggling school sign a petition, they can compel changes in school management or personnel. Sometimes, the parents contract with a charter-school operator. In one case, they hired a new principal. Parents have also used the law as a negotiating tool to force the district to make improvements like adding more staff.

As the new school year was getting started, Mr. Flores sat down with me in the park next to Park Lane that has served as a meeting place and training ground for parents in the trigger campaign. The 45-year-old decorated Gulf War veteran has plenty of stories to tell about doing battle with teachers unions that bring heavy artillery to every fight.

“It’s grass-roots,” he says of parent-trigger efforts, “and that’s what scares the teachers unions.”

Mr. Flores, a self-described “anchor baby” of Mexican immigrants, knows firsthand the value of escaping bad schools. As a child in the 1970s, he spent three hours daily on a bus trekking to and from a school in the San Fernando Valley under the Los Angeles Unified School District’s desegregation plan. Busing to achieve racial integration is hardly optimal, but Mr. Flores says it did allow him to avoid the horrendous schools in the Los Angeles inner city.

It helped ensure the posterity of the ever quotable Samuel Johnson.

The world’s greatest biography was composed by a depressive, a heavy drinker, an inconstant husband and a neglectful father who suffered at least 17 bouts of gonorrhea. That biography is, of course, James Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” Nothing like it came before in form and content, and nothing like it has appeared since. Biography we call it, but in some ways it also qualifies as an autobiography of its author, who regularly obtrudes in its pages and may even be said to be its secondary subject.

Adam Sisman ends his excellent book “Boswell’s Presumptuous Task” by noting that “never again will there be such a combination of subject, author, and opportunity.” Boswell was 22 years old and Johnson 54 when they met in 1763. Johnson was widowed from his beloved, roughly 20-years-older wife, Tetty; Boswell was the unanchored and still disappointing oldest son of the Scottish laird and magistrate Lord Auchinleck. Famous both as a talker and as the author of the Rambler, “Rasselas” and his Dictionary, Johnson was already recognized as a great man. Upon meeting him, Boswell must have sensed that this large, strange, twitch- and tic-ridden man was his passage to a permanent place in literary history.

Boswell saw not merely a great subject in Samuel Johnson, but an exemplar, a teacher, a reality instructor, for the two men were vastly different in outlook, stability and, above all, good sense. Johnson came to love Boswell without ever quite treating him as an equal. “You are longer a boy than others,” he told him when Boswell was in his mid-30s. In Johnson’s eyes, he would remain a boy, always in need of straightening out, through their 21-year relationship, which ended with Johnson’s death in 1784 at 75.

Why it takes six years to build a road in America. And how to do it faster.

Anyone who rattled down highways replete with moon craters while traveling on Labor Day weekend knows: The government doesn’t excel at managing roads. A major improvement would be bulldozing a permitting process that delays new public-works projects for up to a decade, and a new report from the nonpartisan group Common Good offers a road map.

In 2009 the Obama Administration air-dropped $800 billion of taxpayer cash known as the stimulus package, but as of last year a piddling $30 billion had been spent on transportation infrastructure. One reason the projects proved not as “shovel ready” as promised is that proposals must undergo extensive environmental and permitting reviews, which leave no tedium behind in part to avoid litigation.

No single official oversees the process, and agency turf wars are the norm. A project must comply with every federal, state and local outfit that declares itself relevant—Fish and Wildlife, the town fire department. A desalination plant in San Diego, for example, kicked off a permitting adventure in 2003 that lasted nine years and endured 14 legal challenges, which makes California’s failure at drought relief less of a mystery.

The Syrian refugee disaster is a result of the Middle East’s failure to grapple with modernity and Europe’s failure to defend its ideals.

The migration crisis enveloping Europe and much of the Middle East today is one of the worst humanitarian disasters since the 1940s. Millions of desperate people are on the march: Sunni refugees driven out by the barbarity of the Assad regime in Syria, Christians and Yazidis fleeing the pornographic violence of Islamic State, millions more of all faiths and no faith fleeing poverty and oppression without end. Parents are entrusting their lives and the lives of their young children to rickety boats and unscrupulous criminal syndicates along the Mediterranean coast, professionals and business people are giving up their livelihoods and investments, farmers are abandoning their land, and from North Africa to Syria, the sick and the old are on the road, carrying a few treasured belongings on a new trail of tears.
It is the first migration crisis of the 21st century, but it is unlikely to be the last. The rise of identity politics across the Middle East and much of sub-Saharan Africa is setting off waves of violence like those that tore apart the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. The hatreds and rivalries driving endangered communities to exile and destruction have a long history. They probably have a long future as well.

In two prior postings (here and here), I listed flaws in the constitutional arguments of opponents of birthright citizenship for children of aliens living here illegally.

For children to be American citizens by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment, they must be born within American territory and they (or rather their parents) must be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Those opposing birthright citizenship hurt their own case by basing it principally on the claim that visiting foreigners never qualify as “subject to the jurisdiction.”

The problems with that claim are:

The congressional debates cited to support it represent only weak evidence of meaning and are ambiguous on the subject, at best.
Before adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, many (probably most, perhaps all) African-American were legally foreigners, so the Amendment had to include foreigners to achieve its purpose of extending citizenship to them.
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided twice that the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction” is governed by the English common law doctrine of allegiance. That doctrine grants local citizenship to the children of most visiting foreigners.

I do not have a dog in this hunt. But if I were legal counsel for opponents of birthright citizenship, I would take their legal argument in an entirely different direction. And I would try to square my case with precedent instead of arguing that precedent should be disregarded.

You’ve heard of “redistribution of wealth.” We are now watching in Europe something even more ghastly take shape.

It’s a phrase I’d never heard of before this week (although we suffer from the syndrome, too): the “redistribution of refugees.” It is even worse than the redistribution of wealth because it makes you a stranger in your own land.

I have seen this before on my travels in Europe. There is vast pyscholgical and spiritual dislocation. There is permanent destruction of the cultural home. Such costs, such losses are gigantic, incalculable, but never considered — at least not by our leaders.

Meanwhile, the masses of foreigners, to use the old-fashioned word, coming to Europe (or the US) from the Islamic world, from Africa (from South America), will always be able to “go home again.” Their homes, their cities, their countryside remain unchanged. Leave an 98 percent Islamic country? Return to a 98 percent Islamic country (maybe 99 percent). That Islam now dominates sectors of many of Europe’s once Christian town and cities, from Rotherham to Amsterdam, is fact. After decades of Islamic immigration — the demographic jihad of the “hijrah” — so many neighborhoods and communities are already strange, and dangerously so, to their natives. And now?

Europe is rightly regarded as one of the more prosperous, free, and safe regions in a world that is still largely unfree, contaminated by war, and scarred by serious poverty in areas. It seems to follow from this that Europe is well governed by global standards. So it is mysterious that the continent should be experiencing social turmoil and economic hardship on a massive scale as a result of two of its most carefully thought-out decisions. These are Europe’s common migration policy and the creation of the European single currency, the euro.

The woes of the euro have been so thoroughly canvassed here in recent months that all we need do at present is note in passing that the Greek government has announced that it will not achieve its target for privatizing state concerns this year, a move that was supposed to help finance its latest bailout (while confidently predicting that it will do so next year). Europe’s common policy on migration, however, has been covered by media more fitfully. When a boat ferrying refugees from Libya to Italy or Spain has sunk, drowning its passengers, the tragedy has rightly been an important news story. But it is only in recent weeks that media have noticed that most migrants enter Europe not by the dangerous sea route but by rail and road through Europe’s southeast borders.

After so much footage of desperate migrants clinging to sinking ships in the Mediterranean, the scenes in the railway stations of Budapest in Central Europe —where angry migrants without travel documents rioted to demand passage to Germany — have shown the full chaotic effects of Europe’s migration policy on land and sea. Some commentators seem to believe that the decision angering the migrants was taken by Viktor Orban, Hungary’s “hardline” prime minister, as he is always described, as part of some “authoritarian” crackdown. In fact Hungary is under attack for obeying the EU rule that migrants have to be registered in their first EU country of arrival and can travel on only to countries where they have a substantial hope of asylum.

Government fears brain drain could leave the country deprived of future business leaders and investors.

HAIFA, Israel—When French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron visited Technion, the Israel Institute for Technology, this past week he asked a group of students originally from France if they would ever consider returning home.

“For the holidays,” one student quipped. Another, a computer-science major, questioned whether France was doing enough to address a recent spate of anti-Semitic attacks.

The remarks point to an uncomfortable reality for the French government. Israel has become a nesting ground for precisely the kind of talent the eurozone’s second-largest economy needs: budding tech entrepreneurs.

“Improve the living conditions of the Palestinian refugees. Allow them to settle down. Give them citizenship so that they can live as human beings.” — Dr. Ahmad Abu Matar, an Oslo-based Palestinian academic, blasting Arab the world for its continued mistreatment of Palestinians.

The Arabs do not care about the Palestinians and want them to remain Israel’s problem. Countries such as Lebanon and Syria would rather see Palestinians living as “animals in the jungle” than grant them basic rights such as employment, education and citizenship.

It is no surprise that refugees fleeing Syria have no ambitions to settle in any Arab country. They know that their fate in the Arab world will be no better than that of Palestinians living in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and other Arab countries.

The two white beams memorializing the lost towers cut diagonally across the sky. On the empty white panel of a broken phone booth someone has scrawled “Free Kim Davis”. And on another one and another one following someone’s zigzag route through the East Village’s maze of hipster joints.
This is the America we live in now.

We will spend 9/11 debating the merits of letting a terror state that helped the 9/11 hijackers go nuclear. #PeaceWins #LoveWins. The heat and humidity is broken by a thunderstorm. The faint lights vanish behind the clouds.
History must have grown tired of repeating itself because no one talks about it. That old kind of news has become a formality. Our news is a crazed jumble of Kardashians, pet videos and social justice outrages. Media is an ADD lifestyle section where all the outrages that matter are petty.

The big stuff, wars, moon landings, civilizations, doesn’t matter. Everything has been reduced to the lowest common denominator of personal insecurities masquerading as politics and entertainment reduced to fame for fame’s sake celebrities. All of it is calculated to match the workday routine of a twenty-something female college graduate working in media. Because that is mostly who writes it.