RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/still-not-learning-from-history/

From its beginning 2400 years ago in ancient Greece, the purpose of history has been to counsel the present by documenting the mistakes of the past. Thucydides explicitly made this goal the purpose of his History of the Peloponnesian War: to memorialize “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”  At the violent end of the Roman Republic, the historian Livy similarly explains his intent: to shows us “what to imitate,” and “mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.”

Yet here we are, two millennia later, despite our wealth, technological advances, and much vaster knowledge, still repeating the mistakes and follies not just of the distant past, but of the last half-century. The four years of the Biden administration’s failing foreign policy are the consequence of bad ideas and practices that we have already witnessed over and over.

Until we pay attention to the blunders of the past, and acknowledge the tragic nature of human affairs, we will continue to let misplaced idealism, electoral politics, ideological mantras, and sheer laziness endanger our national security and interests.

The conflict ignited by Hamas’ war crimes on October 7 features another lesson our foreign policy and national security mavens have failed to learn.  U.S. forces in the region have been attacked 170 times by Iranian proxies, with scores of U.S. troops wounded, some critically, and three killed. Yet during that time, the Biden administration has responded with telegraphed and limited missile attacks on proxy assets in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the Red Sea. Yet the aggression against our forces and international shipping has persisted.

https://tomklingenstein.com/woke-equality-is-a-myth/

Editor’s Note: The woke regime, or the group quota regime, is defined by its pursuit of group outcome equality: a leveling of social and economic results across racial categories, irrespective of actual differences and the realities of the individual. Yet credible social science, especially the work of Thomas Sowell, suggests that such outcome equality is not just undesirable — a threat to the republic of liberty and merit established by the Constitution — but impossible. Variation in outcomes stems from human nature and from reality, social and otherwise. A society that ensures group outcome equality cannot possibly be one that respects human liberty.

This central insight of Sowell’s work explains, in part, the stunning radicalism the group quota regime has exhibited in recent years: Driven toward a virtually unattainable goal, the woke set themselves up in direct opposition to the natural law — and seek ever more power in hopes of overcoming its influence on American society and the American regime. That quest for power has ignited a cold civil war between the partisans of this revolution and those who still believe in the free society  — even a free society marked by disparate outcomes.

This essay was originally published in the Summer 2018 issue of the Claremont Review of Books under the title “Thomas Sowell’s Inconvenient Truths.”

New York City’s vast public school system enrolls 1.1 million students, some 18,000 of whom attend nine “specialized” high schools, where the curriculum is particularly rigorous and admission is both widely sought and highly competitive. Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech are the oldest, largest, and most famous such institutions. Eight of these schools base admission decisions solely on applicants’ scores on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), developed by an education assessment company under contract to the New York school system, which began using it in 1971. (The ninth concentrates on art, music, and the performing arts. It admits students on the basis of portfolios or auditions, since no standardized test can reliably identify those 13-year-olds who will, over the ensuing four years, turn out to be the most annoying.)

In June, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called for his city’s schools to replace SHSAT with an admissions process relying on two measures: middle-school class rank, and scores on a test taken by every student in New York state. Using SHSAT is a “monumental injustice,” he contended, because blacks and Hispanics account for two thirds of all New York City public school students but only one tenth of those enrolled in the specialized high schools. For de Blasio, this gap shows that using SHSAT denies students “an equal chance to get into one of their city’s best high schools.” Under the admissions procedure the mayor has proposed, which cannot be implemented without the New York state legislature’s approval, the specialized high schools will “start looking like New York City.” Black and Hispanic students, that is, would account for about 45% of enrollment, much higher than the current figure, though still only two thirds of their numbers in New York’s entire school system.

Tellingly, de Blasio treats SHSAT’s unrepresentative outcome as proof that its use constitutes an unfair process. His reasoning applies to a specific situation the general principle recently expressed by Ibram X. Kendi: “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism.” Kendi, a historian who directs the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University, is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won a National Book Award in 2016. He recently wrote in the New York Times that “many racist Americans” resort to what he considers the only alternative explanation for racial disparities: “black inferiority.” In the same spirit, de Blasio writes that objections that his admissions proposals will “lower the standard” at the specialized schools are based on a “narrative” that not only “traps students in a grossly unfair environment,” but “actually blames them for it.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/bidens-disastrous-press-conference

“My memory is fine!” insisted a defensive President Joe Biden at a hastily convened press conference last Thursday, at which he identified Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico and blanked on the name of the cathedral where he received a rosary upon the death of his son Beau. For much of the press conference, Biden, 81, resorted to indignation to bat away questions about his mental acuity from an unusually insistent White House press corps.

Just before the press conference was called, Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur released what should have been welcome news for the Biden administration: a 345-page report concluding that the president should face no criminal charges over his improper storage of top-secret government documents and sharing of top-secret information with a ghost writer who held no security clearance. Hur’s report, however, also found that Biden displayed significant memory lapses during the investigation, including an inability to state when he had served as vice president or the year in which his son died. Biden, Hur concluded, is an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

Were it not for Biden’s ill-advised press conference, the main topic of discussion might have been the legal implications of Hur’s report. Biden and his supporters could have claimed vindication, while his opponents might have carped about prosecutorial double standards in light of Donald Trump’s federal indictment for broadly similar alleged offenses. But after Biden left the podium, the desperation was like blood in the water for the beltway sharks, who closed in to feed on a public relations catastrophe—a “nightmare,” according to an anonymous Democratic congressman interviewed by NBC News.

Doubts about Biden’s mental competency can no longer be ignored in any serious analysis of American electoral politics. As long ago as May 2023, a Washington Post/ABC poll found that only 32 percent of Americans believed Biden had the “mental sharpness” to serve as president, against a majority that thought so only three years earlier, when candidate Biden led the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. By last September, however, a CNN poll found that 73 percent of Americans were seriously concerned about Biden’s physical and mental competence, and that 67 percent of Democrats favored another nominee for their party in 2024. Four days before this week’s press conference, an NBC poll registered Biden’s lowest approval rating ever, 37 percent. More than three-quarters of those surveyed said that they have “major” or “moderate” concerns about Biden’s health in a second term, which would end in his 86th year, with the “major” category accounting for 62 percent. Only 11 percent registered no concern.