The new numbers came out last week, and they are beyond harsh: Asians won 54 percent of this year’s freshman class seats; whites, 28 percent; Hispanics, 5 percent and African-Americans, 4 percent. Whereupon Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter demanded an end to test-based admissions — because “It’s far past time for our students to be …
Author Archives: Richard Fernandez
Jordan’s Prince Hamzah bin Hussein ‘under house arrest’ – BBC News
Game of thrones In a video passed to the BBC by his lawyer, Prince Hamzah bin Hussein, the half-brother of King Abdullah, accuses the country’s leaders of corruption, incompetence and harassment. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56626370
The secret garden
Someone asked me why so many polymaths were Eastern Europeans and seemed to thrive in conspiratorial environments, sometimes actual secret cities in the old USSR, the initiates of mysteries under hierophants.
The struggle for the GOP
Events in Texas raise the question of whether the alleged Biden strategy of being the stealth progressive hitman is really working. Maybe the voters can see through it and are flocking to the Trump banner in response. An antipathy to Biden will manifest itself as sympathy for Trump. Voters in a Texas House district chose …
The human birthright
New at the Belmont Club. The siren song of consensus science versus the urgency of finding a real solution.
Where is everyone?
There are two measures of a civilization. The first is the physical expanse of its possessions. The second is the vitality and robustness of its spirit. Sohrab Amari’s sense of desolation and depression in New York suggests a fragility at odds with the solid steel and stone.
Ex Obama official arrested for allegedly stealing school money, accused of faking Woke
The Left’s post victory plans
New at the Belmont Club. Are progressives planning a trip to a future that’s gone?
The lost schoolyear
The full cost of the lockdown strategy is now coming in. From economic slowdowns, slower vaccination manufacturing, a spike in depression and drug use to a lost school year for millions of students. It’s called “covid learning loss”. But it’s really political learning loss. The question that will be asked in coming years is whether …
A civilization of willful blindness
New at the Belmont Club. The subordination of rationality to ideology. When you’re so sure you’re right there’s no need to look out the windshield.
The Ten Ships Revisited
As Joe Biden plans to end the deployment to Afghanistan it needs to be remembered that it was once the Obama administration’s “war of necessity” as opposed to the deployment in Iraq, which they ended. The Belmont Club piece “The Ten Ships” posted on May 14, 2010 critiquing the strategy of ‘ending the war on …
Root Causes
The Dems thought the public loved them. Now it can be revealed their own polls showed a deep disillusion with establishment institutions.
Green vs Open Borders
As the drafters of NEPA recognized, population growth has significant environmental impacts. In its complaint, the AGO argues that DHS and other federal officials did not provide environmental impact statements or environmental assessments when DHS abruptly halted ongoing border wall construction
The viral variants force a detour
New at the Belmont Club. No government plan survives contact with nature.
The era of the executive order
The progressive project to water down the Second Amendment, enact hate speech laws, change the voting rules, open the border and expand the Supreme Court are paradoxically a sign of weakness, not strength. It is frank admission that the old elites can no longer govern by the former rules and need new ones to maintain …
Rule by virtuous lie
I used to think there were subjects so important that public officials would never lie about them. Nuclear war for instance or an earth-wide pandemic. Then gradually it became clear that no one, not even politicians at the highest levels, consciously makes decisions about whether to tell the truth however important the matter.
Victory Unseen
New at the Belmont Club. Seabed warfare vs the Great Underwater Wall of China. Robots beneath the waves.
Human capital vs the virus
When the large scale history of the 2020 pandemic is written the key factor for success will turn out to be how well individual societies mobilized their human capital, not how ruthlessly they shut it down.
Fatal contradiction
New at the Belmont Club. The relationship between Washington’s desire for global leadership and the progressive project to reinterpret America.
The limits to canned answers
A Harvard study shows that meeting the Covid-19 pandemic required more than following conventional wisdom.