Wednesday: Hili dialogue

November 2, 2022 • 9:22 am

Welcome to a Hump Day, or “Konkor eguna” as they say in Basque: November 2, 2022, and National Deviled Egg Day.

It’s also Eat Smart Day, Cookie Monster Day, All Souls Day, International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, Statehood Day in North Dakota and South Dakota, and a Rastafarian holiday: Coronation of Haile Selassie:

In the U.S., it’s the Day of the Dead, celebrated with this Google Doodle (click to go to the site):

If you’d like to enlighten us about notable events, births, or deaths on this day, go to the November 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Two new rulings from the Supreme Court. First, they ruled, apparently without dissent, that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (SC) must testify in a Georgia inquiry and answer questions about his activities in the wake of the 2020 election.

Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., seeks to question Mr. Graham about calls he made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, about allegations of voting irregularities in November 2020. Mr. Graham’s lawyers said that he was reviewing election-related issues in his role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Lower courts had shielded Mr. Graham from some potential questions, saying that matters related to his legislative responsibilities were protected by the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause. “For any speech or debate in either house,” the clause says of senators and representatives, “they shall not be questioned in any other place.”

That shield is apparently no longer up. In another ruling, this time favoring Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily barred the Treasury Department from turning over Trump’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee. This further stalls a long-running request, one on which Trump is deliberately running out the clock:

Chief Justice Roberts oversees appeals that come out of the District of Columbia Circuit Court. In a terse order, he gave lawyers for the House Ways and Means Committee, which has been seeking the returns since 2019, a deadline of Nov. 10 to file a response to Mr. Trump’s latest move. The setting of a deadline is an indication that the full Supreme Court will rule on the matter.

The Democrats who run the committee are running out of time to obtain Mr. Trump’s tax returns. If Republicans retake control of the House in the midterm elections next week, as polls indicate is likely, they are almost certain to drop the request when the new Congress is seated in January. Mr. Trump has pursued a strategy of using the slow pace of litigation to run out the clock on oversight efforts, which he has done since he was president.

*Megan McArdle, a columnist for the Washington Post who describes herself as a “right-leaning libertarian,” has a new piece called “Why the architecture of affirmative action was always destined to collapse.” She gives three reasons for the impending decision:

As the Supreme Court considers the arguments it heard on Students for Fair Admissions, here are three observations — two obvious, the other perhaps less so.

First, data from Harvard seem to confirm the suspicion that elite schools were effectively capping the number of Asian matriculants. That is racist and un-American, and it should stop.

Second, this practice has apparently given a hostile court the excuse it wanted to end affirmative action as we know it. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in 2007; he is now the leftward flank of the court’s conservative majority.

Third, no matter what you think of this court, we were probably going to eventually end up here. America’s decades-old racial settlement had many cracks, but it was a workable solution to real problems. However, it has gone on for far longer than could have been anticipated, a fact that came up repeatedly during Monday’s oral arguments, and time has deepened the early cracks into gaping fissures. Immigration and demographic change have made all those problems more difficult still, and under those pressures, the old compromises have simply become untenable.

Well, untenable to Republicans. Surely colleges and businesses will find ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling. She concludes:

In the name of making its elite institutions fully representative, America can ask some members of the White majority to step aside in favor of underrepresented minorities with lower grades and test scores. And in the name of procedural fairness, America can ask disappointed White applicants to suck it up when they were outcompeted for university places by overperformingminority groups. But America cannot ask both those things at once — not when the numbers get so big and the stakes so high.

This presumes that affirmative action of any kind will disappear because it’s untenable, but McArdle doesn’t realize how much of the infrastructure of colleges and businesses are invested in affirmative action, to the extent that investment simply can’t disappear. There will be workarounds, and now the readers tell me, citing data, that affirmative action for the socioeconomically deprived (my personal solution to promote fairness and diversity), will actually decrease diversity.

*According to Washington Post, part of Elon Musk’s plans for taking over Twitter involve charging people to use the site. Apparently, though, the charges are only for verification—to get that prized blue checkmark that tells people that you are who you claim to be:

Elon Musk is charging ahead with plans to get more Twitter users to pay for the service, spurring backlash from some of the platform’s most famous users.

Novelist Stephen King lambasted the idea of paying to keep the blue check mark Twitter uses to show it has verified users’ real identity, tweeting to his almost 7 million followers on Monday: “They should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron,” he said, alluding to the energy company that collapsed in scandal and filed for bankruptcy.

Musk responded, suggested that charging for verification would help the site to make a profit and appeared to negotiate with King, tweeting: “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” King didn’t reply.

. . . Right now, Twitter makes most of its money from advertising, and Musk is currently in New York meeting with advertisers to shore up relationships with them, including representatives of the biggest marketing agencies, according to an executive at one of those agencies who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But advertising won’t be enough, Musk has said repeatedly.

*Warnings of an imminent attack by Iran on targets in both Saudi Arabia and Iraq have put both Saudi and U.S. forces on high alert.

Saudi Arabia has shared intelligence with the U.S. warning of an imminent attack from Iran on targets in the kingdom, putting the American military and others in the Middle East on an elevated alert level, said Saudi and U.S. officials

In response to the warning, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and several other neighboring states have raised the level of alert for their military forces, the officials said. They didn’t provide more details on the Saudi intelligence.

Saudi officials said Iran is poised to carry out attacks on both the kingdom and Erbil, Iraq, in an effort to distract attention from domestic protests that have roiled the country since September.

The White House National Security Council said it was concerned about the warnings and ready to respond if Iran carried out an attack.

“We are concerned about the threat picture, and we remain in constant contact through military and intelligence channels with the Saudis,” said a National Security Council spokesperson. “We will not hesitate to act in the defense of our interests and partners in the region.”

Although the attacks are said to be motivated in part by the need to distract attention from Iran’s internal troubles, Iran is in fact blaming its internal troubles on instigation by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel. What a loony country!

*Here’s a provocative op-ed in the NYT involving three discussants and a narrator, “What is the actual value of diversity on campus?”  The intro:

On Monday the Supreme Court revisited the question of race-based affirmative action through two cases challenging admissions policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard College. After oral arguments, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, the host of the Times Opinion podcast “First Person,” sat down with the Times Opinion writer John McWhorter, the New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang and the civil rights attorney Maya Wiley, who is the president and C.E.O. of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund, to discuss whether affirmative action has successfully contributed to diversity on campus and what happens if the court strikes it down.

The discussion hinges largely on what the data say (we’ll assume that “diversity” is “racial diversity”), and here two discussants take opposing positions on that data:

John McWhorter, Times Opinion writer

I think that we have been encouraged to pretend — and I hate to put it that way — but I think for 40 years we’ve been encouraged to pretend that a certain way we talk about diversity is honest, when, really, we’re dealing with a fig leaf.

And what it comes down to is this: We’re supposed to assume that it’s been proven that this diversity — let’s not get into what we mean, let’s assume that we all zero in on a certain common idea — this diversity is key to a good education. But the question is: Is it?

Except for some classes — yes, the occasional discussion class, sure — but with 95 percent of what a college education is — physics, irregular verbs, systolic pressure — what would diversity have to do with it? Is diversity that important?

And then also there have been many, many studies that aren’t brought up — but so many well-intentioned, brilliant people have shown that if you actually try to measure the extent to which diversity improves education on any measure, you find that really it doesn’t.

We say that we want this kind of diversity and we want, for example, Black students to represent the Black experience in class. But then again, anybody who teaches knows that most Black students, including me when I was one, don’t really want the role.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Host of “First Person” podcast

I will say that there have been many studies that also show exactly the opposite — that diversity is actually beneficial in lots of measurable ways. And in fact, many of those studies were shown in court. But Jay, I would like to have your view.

The next assertion about leadership and diversity has no data to back it up, but it sounds good:

Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker staff writer

The thing that I noticed about what I heard today was, similar to John, I thought about “What is the actual value of diversity?” Seth Waxman, who is the attorney arguing for Harvard, he said that basically the fate of the country rests on leaders who have wide exposure to people as diverse as the nation itself. Which is sort of the type of declaration that people make when they argue in favor of diversity — which I am much more inclined to say that that is true.

But the great irony here is that Harvard being an idea of an exemplar of diversity is absurd to me. Like, this is a school where they have almost as many students from the top 0.1 percent — not the top 1 percent — of income earners as they have from the entire bottom 20 percent. Almost everyone at Harvard is wealthy.

I haven’t followed these studies, so I have no dog in this fight.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili brings a gift:

Hili: May I come in?
A: Of course, why do you ask?
Hili: May I come in with a mouse?

 

In Polish:
Hili: Czy mogę wejść?Ja: Oczywiście, czemu pytasz?
Hili: Czy mogę wejść z myszą?

***************

From Nicole:

A holiday gift idea from reader Pliny the in Between’s Far Corner Cafe. The small caption: “Double the knives and I’ll order in bulk.”

From Jesus of the Day:

God has a Twitter exchange with a mortal:

From Masih: more brutality by the Iranian regime:

Keep trying, little one!

From Barry: a kitten invasion. If you read the comments on the thread, you’ll see that they were all adopted:

Crikey, Bari Weiss is founding her own media empire, but it seems to consist largely of podcasts (h/t cesar):

From Simon, who says, “I knew they could swim, but not like this.”  What’s next: synchronized jaguar water ballet?

From the Auschwitz Memorial; prisoners were often killed by phenol injections directly into the heart. A painful way to die, but efficient for the Nazi doctors:

Tweets from Matthew the Cobb. This first one is the most dishonest ad I’ve seen this campaign season. “RNCC” is the Republican National Campaign Committee. Watch both videos in this tweet.

Apparently these are two of the booster rockets from SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy space vehicle, firing their engines to slow down for recovery.

36 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. BIRTHED this day: Ms Annie Laurie Gaylor … …

    ” On this date in 1955, Freedom From Religion Foundation co – president Ms Annie Laurie Gaylor was born in Madison, Wisconsin, along with her twin, Ian Stuart Gaylor. With her mother Ms Anne Gaylor, she co – founded FFRF in 1976 as a college student. Her 1977 complaint halted invocations and prayers at University of Wisconsin – Madison graduation ceremonies, ending a 122 – year abuse. She earned a journalism degree from UW – Madison in 1980.

    Gaylor’s book documenting bible sexism, Woe to the Women: The Bible Tells Me So, first issued in 1981, was reissued in a revised and updated form in 2004. In it Gaylor wrote: ‘ The only true shield standing between women and the bible, that handbook for the subjugation of women, is a secular government. U.S. citizens must wake up to the threat of an encroaching theocracy, and shore up Thomas Jefferson’s ‘ wall of separation between church and state. ‘ ‘

    She edited and published The Feminist Connection, a regional monthly, from 1980 – 84, then became editor of Freethought Today, the Foundation’s newspaper, in 1985. She wrote the first book exposing the clergy sexual abuse scandal, Betrayal of Trust: Clergy Abuse of Children (1988), and is editor of the first anthology of women freethinkers, Women Without Superstition: No Gods – No Masters (1997). She is married to Dan Barker, FFRF co – president, and they have one daughter. ”

    ” The only life that ought to concern any of us is leaving our planet and our descendants a secure and pleasant future. ”

    — Gaylor, quoted in Madison Magazine ( 2007 )

    One may want to also know of the FFRF – initiated The Clergy Project of
    https://clergyproject.org, on social media as well … … with some privacy restrictions.

    Blue

    Reply

  2. First, data from Harvard seem to confirm the suspicion that elite schools were effectively capping the number of Asian matriculants. That is racist and un-American, and it should stop.

    Has anyone disclosed whether the same applies to Jewish matriculants? I’ve heard anecdotally that it is true, but have not seen confirmation.

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  3. The assertion that diversity is beneficial in education is based implicitly on the idea that people of different backgrounds have different experiences and viewpoints. Merely applying racial quotes doesn’t necessarily provide that diversity, though, and the evidence is that colleges today have limited viewpoint diversity. If colleges want diversity, they would do better to look at the geographic and economic backgrounds of their applicants, but, above all, to actually value viewpoint diversity.

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    1. Racial diversity is essential–but Blacks and other minorities need segregated spaces so they don’t have to be with Whites.

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  4. In another ruling, this time favoring Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily barred the Treasury Department from turning over Trump’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee.

    I suspect this reprieve from SCOTUS will be as short-lived as the one following the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision reversing Judge Aileen Cannon and permitting the Justice Department to proceed with its investigation into Trump’s post-presidential purloining of classified documents. Trump has NO plausible argument for keeping his tax returns from the House Ways and Means Committee, since that committee has the express statutory authority to obtain such tax returns.

    I recall during the runup to the 2016 campaign when Trump asseverated that he would release his tax returns (as every presidential candidate since Dick Nixon has) just as soon as the IRS’s “routine audit” of those returns was complete. Seven years on, and no returns have yet been released. This must by the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of routine tax audits — or, for some reason, Trump really, really doesn’t want anyone to see his tax returns.

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  5. I’m starting to think that apologists for affirmative action are using “diversity” to mean something different from the way I do. If I looked out over a first-year classroom of 100 and saw 40 white faces, 20 Filipino, 12 South Asian, 10 Chinese, 10 Middle-Eastern, 2 black, and the rest not readily pigeon-holeable at a glance, I would say, “That’s a pretty diverse-looking class.” It wouldn’t tell me anything about their academic or personal moral characteristics—the large lectures I gave to undergraduates were to BScN nursing students—but I would see evidence from that casual observation that Canada was working in some important social way.

    An American liberal I think, and I beg to be angrily rebutted, would count the black faces in that class and grumble that it wasn’t sufficiently diverse. We count race as people define themselves on the Census, and struggle every decade to do it “right” this time, but nowhere else. We think “black” people are about 5%, drawn from all over the world. None are descendants of slaves in Canada. We don’t keep race-based statistics on anything.else, other than voluntary DEI initiatives. So 2% black in my nursing class is not diverse by that light. The Constitution explicitly permits affirmative action but most Canadians are so uncomfortable with it that it gets used only as a tie-breaker or to fill empty seats in non-selective universities where it isn’t zero-sum. Without affirmative action, I suspect most selective American universities would look much like ours. We call our student bodies diverse. You would say yours would not be if they looked like ours.

    My plea as an outsider is to regard cosmetic skin-tone diversity, to the extent that it matters at all, as the rainbow, not just in terms of how black it is. If you say you want more Blacks for your own historical reasons or to keep social peace or to keep the Democratic coalition in power or whatever, OK, but don’t call that diversity.

    You and I both know that pivoting to affirmative action for poor people will make your colleges less “black”. That does not mean they will be less diverse.

    Reply

    1. Much food for thought in your comment, Leslie, and thanks for the insight into the situation in Canada. I, an old-school liberal, have been in favor of affirmative action in university admissions, but I now think that we’ve aged out of it. I was a student at Northwestern University in the 1970s, and I remember seeing Black students everywhere on campus. Now, I feel that the metrics based on the amount of melanin in the skin no longer obtain. One big reason I feel this way is because I, a Caucasian, am married to an Asian woman, and our children are ostensibly biracial, a term I despise. I also think of two of my cousins, also Caucasians, who are married to Black men. I look at their children, and, yes, one can notice the bronze hue of their skin and the curliness and ruddiness of their hair, but I don’t consider them biracial either. Finally, I look around my neighborhood, a safe, comfortably middle-class community nestled in beautiful environs, and see so much ethnic diversity I call us the United Nations. And this diversity is evident in our elementary and high schools, where many of the children will eventually be attracted to others of different skin hues, marry, and have children who transcend the old color classifications. I agree with this point of McArdle’s: Time to move beyond race-based admissions to higher education.

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    2. “Diverse” simply means more blacks, and fewer whites. Thus the National Basketball Association is the most “diverse” body in the US (despite whites, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans all being under-represented relative to the population).

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      1. Except the NBA not diverse with regards to sex. How many women play for the NBA, rather than the sexually segregated WNBA? People still recognize that diversity includes sex.

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      1. Leslie is inaccurate when he says that there aren’t descendants of slaves in Canada, but I suspect he meant descendants of slaves bought and sold in a Canadian slave trade. Tens of thousands of enslaved blacks escaped to Canada through the underground railroad, and around three thousand others got transportation to Nova Scotia through a British loyalist patriation program during the American Revolution.

        But he’s not wrong that a majority of black Canadians and residents are immigrants. The 2016 census data in this link has only 8.6% of black Canadians being third generation or more.

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      2. Would you not call Caribbean-Canadians descendants of slaves (albeit farther back than in the U.S.?

        Sure. I’d call all human beings today descendants of slaves, whether in Egypt, China, Aboriginal Canadians, or anyone else. You just have to go back far enough.

        Caribbean-Canadians are not descendants of Canadian slavery, but the issue is a bit more muddled, as the British Empire formally renounced slavery (outside of India, anyway) in 1833, and Canada is one of the heirs of the British Empire (in a way that the revolting rebellious United States are not), and there is some legitimacy to the question as to when sovereign debt and collective guilt can be divvied up after the dissolution of a state-like entity.

        Comments on today’s post are taking an unexpected turn. Things seem a bit more PC than usual.

        Reply

        1. Canada wasn’t divvied up. Four colonies were manipulated into becoming a viable self-governing entity that would reduce the expenditures of the Colonial Office and allow the British Army to be brought home. (The Navy stuck around, Canada having no resources to build one.). All obligations of the British government including the Honour of the Crown were either assumed by us or retained by London. Such instruments as the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act of 1774, which were among the “Intolerable Acts” repudiated by the Declaration of Independence, remain binding on our constitutional law to this day. if there had been large numbers of chattel slaves in what is now Canada before 1833, then there would have been a legacy for us to struggle with after 1867. But pre-abolition Empire slavery casts no shadow in Canada.

          ‘Nuff said.

          Reply

          1. > Canada wasn’t divvied up. Four colonies were manipulated…

            I’m not saying that Canada was divvied up, but that the British Empire was. Canada was, what, 30% of the land area of the British Empire, but well under 10% of the total population? I could see the argument that Canada is one of the many legitimate successor states of the British Empire, with the UK itself just being the rump state – just as Kazakhstan is one of the many successor states of the Soviet Union. Obviously, it is more complicated, given how slowly former Empire territories devolved their own power, and possibly more like the Balkanization of the … Balkans, but mutually agreeable like the Velvet Divorce of Czechoslovakia.

            It’s complicated. British North America collectively thrived on the Triangular Trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade

      3. Merilee, the ancestors of black Caribbean- (and Guyanese-) Canadians were never slaves in Canada. They were voluntary immigrants beginning in the 1960s at a time when those former colonies were becoming independent black-ruled black-majority nation-states as they remain today. Their ancestors were brought to the sugar colonies as slaves but whatever irreversible multi-generational stunting was (or wasn’t) inflicted on them has nothing today to do with Canada. Everyone who came to.self-ruling Canada after 1867 made a choice to come here in hopes that this country was the least bad of all the choices they had.

        So no, Caribbean-Canadians are not descendants of slaves as far as Canada’s historical obligations go. Same is true for black United Empire Loyalists who, if they had been enslaved in the 13 Colonies, were given their freedom in British territory in return for having remained loyal to the Crown. Before the 1960s, this was the heritage of most black people in Canada, augmented later by the well-known Underground Railroad after slavery was abolished in the Empire. Before then, plantation slavery was not economically viable in what would become Canada, so there were very few chattel slaves to free. The number wasn’t zero but that is getting into more detail. The decisions were made in Britain, not here, is the main thing.

        I’m confining this follow-on to answering questions raised by you and others. Some Canadians are indeed descended from slavery and other condemnable acts committed everywhere in the world. But we can take responsibility only for things we did as a self-governing nation and slavery was never one of them. Canadians resist the notion that poor school achievement by some black children is somehow our “fault” therefore.

        Appreciate your interest.

        Reply

  6. Some of Iran’s police HQ might find themselves under drone attack. Take those guys out and let the Iraqis take control of their country.

    Also noted: The irony of the Saudis saying that Iran is doing this to distract from domestic dissent, given what they do v. their own domestic dissent.

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  7. The indoctrination video reminds of what happened* when the Pope came to NY. A reporter asked him, ‘Your Holiness. What do you think of the proliferation of brothels in New York?’

    ‘Good heavens! Are there brothels in New York?’, asked the Pope.

    The next morning, the headline read: ‘Pope asks “Are there brothels in New York?”’

    *Did not happen 🙂

    Reply

    1. Before the Disneyfication of 42nd Street west of Times Square (aka “the forty-deuce”), even the Pope wouldn’t’ve needed help finding one. 🙂

      Reply

  9. Elon Musk is charging ahead with plans to get more Twitter users to pay for the service, spurring backlash from some of the platform’s most famous users.

    Musk seems intent on setting his ill-considered $44 billion investment afire. There’s a very good article about it at the tech site The Verge here, and another one about Musk’s plan to charge for Twitter’s blue tick at The New Statesman here.

    Reply

    1. Thanks for The Verge article. Loved this line: This is what you signed up for. It’s way more boring than rockets, cars, and rockets with cars on them.

      And it gets worse when you leave the states. That paragraph alone should scare the shit outta EM.

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  10. God: “Also, what kind of douchebag calls himself an “Alpha Male” in his profile?”

    The same kind of douchebag who takes his twitter handle from Hemingway’s recurring fictional alter ego in short stories like “Big, Two-Hearted River” and “The Killers,” I guess.

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  11. I’m a little confused. Discussions of Affirmative Action I remember generally talked about the benefit for the community, not the school. Our community needs more Black doctors and more Black teachers, is why AA is needed.

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      1. -1: Our community needs to get past race based thinking. I have no problem with a doctor of a different race or sex. Well over half I’ve seen in the last 10 years are.

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          1. It isn’t. It sounds like you think nonwhites are incapable of being good doctors on their merits.

          2. “It isn’t.”

            What’s the basis for your knowledge in this regard, Carl? Do you question all women and minority physicians who treat you whether they were admitted to undergraduate or medical school pursuant to an affirmative-action program?

          3. My only issue with my hijab-wearing (Tulane-educated) Palestinian doctor (who moved away) was that she was almost faint from hunger during Ramadan and admitted that she could hardly think straight. “Religion poisons everything…”

          4. And your experience of the last ten years is likely due to Affirmative Action.

            That’s a big call to make about stranger on the Internet and quite unresponsive to CarlW’s point – on what basis do we need more doctors etc of ethnic/sex group X?

            I am writing from a country – NZ – where affirmative action for training doctors is relatively recent; here’s a list of my GPs going back as far as I remember – early to mid-1950s – for you to speculate on.

            West Indian, English, Indian, Chinese, Chinese – the second Chinese from when I was working overseas – and NZ European.

            In my last visit to a hospital clinic, a skin lesion was cut out and stitched by a Korean (judging by her name) trainee under the supervision of an Indian doctor (New Zealand-raised, judging by his accent) and a Filipino (judging by her accent and name) nurse instructed me on caring for the wound. But is their ethnicity or any relevance to the work?

            I expect many of these people have different and interesting life stories, but is their race sufficiently relevant to their jobs so as to require affirmative action?

    2. This is the main thing for affirmative action — that is it allows under-represented minorities a path to ascend the economic ladder. The other value is more general, I think, which is to give everyone a chance to just interact with people who look different from them. This isn’t something that can be measured on exams. But it’s important.

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  12. re: the giraffe video. When I was a kid, we were watching a documentary on TV that showed a colt being born and learning to stand up shortly after. My mother asked “How does he know that he has legs and can use them to stand on?”

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  13. On the subject of affirmative action, this piece in the NYT is interesting.

    Asian Americans face bias in education, but not in the direction the plaintiffs claim. Research that I and others have done shows that K-12 teachers and schools may actually give Asian Americans a boost based on assumptions about race. Affirmative action policies currently in place in university admissions do not account for the positive bias that Asian Americans may experience before they apply to college. Abandoning race as a consideration in admissions would further obscure this bias.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/affirmative-action-asian-american-bias.html?smid=url-share

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  14. Re the Supreme Court decisions: The Court did not alter the legislative shield. it upheld deposition of Sen. Graham about other issues and allows him to object to questions his lawyers think intrude on the immunity. Justice Roberts placed a short hold on release of Trump’s tax returns, referring the petition to the whole Court. A decision on whether the returns get turned over will come within a couple of weeks.

    Reply

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