Not-Quite-Random Columbus Day Musings

Who were the most geopolitically significant individuals in world history? Columbus is the first obvious example, given the holiday. He served as the catalyst for the Western migration to the Americas. Who else ranks up there? The first three names that come to mind are Jesus, Mohammed, and Karl Marx, the founders of Western civilization, Islamic civilization, and world Communism, respectively. Communism is relatively new compared too many past civilizations, but the scale of its global impact far exceeds that of the greatest individual empires. Any other nominations?

A Canadian October Surprise?

So you know Kamala’s campaign is in trouble when you start seeing the media throwing more Hail Marys than the UNM football team.

Some are more obvious than others.

I saw on CNN this morning an Anderson Cooper special that covered her past 3 ½ years as Vice President. She looked fantastic with plenty of footage of her with world leaders, in the White House Situation Room. She looked poised, confident, the epitome of a leader…. of course that perception was probably helped by the fact that the sound was off.

Then there are others which are more curious.

Headline in today’s Washington Post: “These Five Tumultuous Years in Montreal shaped Kamala Harris.”

I have been waiting more than five years for this story to drop. Long story short, her divorced mother took a job at the prestigious McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal and a young Kamala and her sister moved from sunny California to a foreign land of snow and poutine.

You would think a story like that would be worth something, if not to her campaign in 2019 which crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, then to her as a Vice President trying to cut an image on the international stage. You could have spun it as giving her an international perspective and some heft, she could have used it.

Yet to my knowledge no American media outlet has picked it up, only a passing reference to her friend Wanda Kagan who she met while in Montreal. Even her biography published for her first presidential campaign, “The Truth We Hold,” barely gave it a page. Hold that thought for a minute…

The Post article is full of choice nuggets pushing an angle of that racism and turmoil that Kamala had to endure.

There are the allegations, based on one witness and a lot of loose speculation, of the sexism and racism her mother faced both at the University of California and then in trying to find another job. No word in the article that McGill had a world-class med school and that life in Montreal, while cold five months of the year and juiced with money that looks like it came from a Monopoly game, is actually quite pleasant. However, that would provide a chaff cloud of reality that would deflect from a good story about a young woman’s heroic coming of age in a racist, sexist world.

Toward the end of the article Kamala’s school-age friend, Wanda Kagan, left Montreal:

“Ward felt the city ‘was just too racially divided’ and she returned to her native New York City.”

As for Kamala, after a year at Cégep she attended Howard University in DC where for her:

“The Washington campus was a world away from the racial, ethnic and cultural divisions she had seen so often in Quebec.

“As she settled into a seat at Cramton Auditorium for an orientation in 1982, Harris recalled in her memoir, she realized that everyone looked like her. ‘This is heaven!’ she wrote.”

So both Kamala and Kagan found New York City, and Washington, DC, less of a racial hellhole than a Canadian city? That sort of muddies the water about the narrative of racism. Not to mention that DC, to this day, remains a heavily segregated city. Of course Kamala was writing specifically about her experience at Howard and how she thought it was heaven that everyone looked like her. Hmmm.

So why did this article drop now, and why was it given top of the page treatment by the mouthpiece of the DC swamp? Let’s cover the facts.

We’re little more than 3 weeks before an election that the Left has breathlessly told us (ad nauseam) will determine the future of “our democracy.” We’re also in that critical part of the campaign when we start seeing the “October Surprise.”

At this critical juncture of the campaign, a vital part of Kamala’s media praetorian guard just happens to decide to run a 3000+ word investigative piece covering five years of her life that both she and the rest of the media have deliberately ignored for the past five years.

She spent those five years living not just in another country, but in a distinctly different culture. You would think that for someone desperately trying to establish her bona fides as someone who wasn’t an intellectual lightweight, this would have been something she would wanted to have brought front and center during the past 3 ½ years.

So when a media outlet does finally write about her Montreal experience, it focuses on the racism she encountered in a country that the Left favorably compares to the United States. I never thought I would see the American media report that people had to leave Canada and move to the US for its better racial climate.

Something doesn’t fit. Kamala’s campaign is collapsing and the Washington Post dedicates valuable real estate at the most critical part of the campaign to finally getting around to her time in Montreal?

Is the Washington Post trying to get ahead of something? What exactly happened in Montreal that Kamala and the media (until now) don’t want to talk about?

Ackman’s Choice

Bill Ackman, founder/CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, has written a long and thoughtful piece (at X)  on his reasons for supporting Donald Trump in the upcoming election. This piece, which may be the first of several, focuses on what Ackman sees as the actions and policies of the Biden/Harris administration and Democratic Party that were the catalysts for his losing total confidence in the administration and the Party.  Since there are many people who are not on X,  I am reproducing his entire post below the break.

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Random Thoughts (2) : Education Edition

1) Richard Fernandez:

“The actual purpose of much that is called education is not to teach a trade, or take you stumbling to the limits of the undiscovered but to put you in a position to laugh at people.”

2) From Thomas Sowell’s Ever Wonder Why?

Anyone who is serious about wanting to help minority young people must know that the place to start is at precisely the other end of the educational process. That means beginning in the earliest grades teaching reading, math and other mental skills on which their future depends. But that would mean clashing with the teachers’ unions and their own busybody agenda of propaganda and psychological manipulation in the classrooms.

“The path of least resistance is to give minority youngsters a lousy education and then admit them to college by quotas. With a decent education, they wouldn’t need the quotas.”

3) From the Brookings Institution’s SAT Math Scores Mirror and Maintain Racial Inequity

“Relying on a three-digit number to assess a student’s math ability clouds their drive, their resilience, and may impact their confidence in pursuing postsecondary education….

“…..In 2019, the SAT developed an adversity score to contextualize students’ scores to their school and neighborhood. Under pressure, the College Board then abandoned the single statistic in favor of an Environmental Context Dashboard, which provides information like the portion of students at a high school receiving free and reduced lunch, median family income, and advanced-placement enrollment.

“Colleges are starting to consider socioeconomic status in a more systematic way, and the College Board is too. This is vitally important, given how far achievement has already splintered along racial and class lines by the time students are about to graduate high school.”

I will add that at the end of the Brookings article the authors do detail ways of boosting disadvantaged students’ actual pre-college performance. That’s what is called in the trade as CYA, but ask yourself which is more likely to happen in the post-Fair Admissions v. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard world? Hiding affirmative action programs under some version of an “Environmental Context Dashboard” or actually breaking the rice bowls of the K-12 establishment?

More vouchers please.

They Have Their Exits

I’ve been following the various social media over the last week, reading and watching various reports of how local volunteer efforts are handling disaster recovery in the mountainous areas blasted by Hurricane Helene. FEMA and various other federal departments are helping – sort of – or hindering, interfering, preventing access or flat-out confiscating donations, according to some rather irate reports, which reports are indignantly condemned as rumors by all the established media sources and FEMA’s own public affairs representatives. No smoke without a fire, as the saying goes, and hacks – err, that is “reporters” for the established media certainly don’t appear to be venturing deep into the Appalachian weeds to report on such matters first-hand. Although, recalling the dog’s breakfast that the national establishment media made of covering Hurricane Katrina, that might be all to the good in the long run.

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