PAUL MIRENGOFF: “Chai Feldblum Is Finally Out at the EEOC.”

I know Chai Feldblum a bit. She is a nice, upbeat woman who has kindly agreed to debate conservatives at Federalist Society events on a number of occasions. For that, I thank her. It isn’t easy to get Progressives to debate race and sex issues at Federalist Society events.

Nevertheless, I agree with Paul that her parting shot on twitter illustrates why Sen. Lee, Sen. Lankford and others were right to oppose her reappointment. She wrote:

Today at noon my commission on the EEOC expires. What a wonderful almost nine-year run I have had! TY to all who worked so hard on my confirmation. We certainly gave it our best shot. Now we must fight even harder for diversity, safety, and equity. There is no other way!

Her job at the EEOC was not to fight for diversity, safety, and equity. It was to enforce the law as written—a task she and her Progressive colleagues strayed from too often. Alas, the EEOC has become renowned for exceeding the law as written. Here, for example, is an amicus brief that discusses the EEOC’s wrongheaded policy on hiring job applicants with criminal records.

It is also worth pointing out that the Trump Administration’s efforts to appoint a non-lawyer to the EEOC position was a mistake. Chai Feldblum would have run circles around a non-lawyer, even a very smart one. The position calls for someone who knows the law in that area. I nominate Paul Mirengoff.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: My 2006 article exposing Elizabeth Warren’s bogus research on bankruptcy made SSRN’s Top Ten for last week.

FORD’S BETTER IDEA: On this day in 1914, Henry Ford announced that the Ford Motor Company would essentially double wages to $5 a day.

Worker turnover had been high at Ford; in 1913 it had hired 52,000 men for 14,000 jobs. The $5 wage was intended to sharply reduce turnover and the delays, training costs, and employee errors that stemmed from high turnover.  The plan worked (at least at first). Once an employee got a $5 job at Ford, he was unlikely to want to let it go.

But the raise came with a number of strings. Workers had to abstain from alcohol, not physically abuse their families, keep their homes clean, and save part of their paychecks. Ford believed that problems at home, including money problems, led to problems on the job and to absenteeism.

It is frequently said that Ford raised his workers’ pay in order to induce them to buy Ford automobiles and hence raise profits for the company. But Ford wasn’t that math-challenged. There is no way in heaven that 100% of that money would make it back to the company. That said, he probably did sell more cars to his workforce than he otherwise would have. And I am sure he wasn’t against that.

THAT’S DISGRACEFUL!: Attention Southern Californians: On Friday, January 11^th and Saturday, January 12^th, the National Association of Scholars is sponsoring a conference entitled “Disgrace: Shame, Punishment and Redemption in American Higher Education” at Chapman University in Orange, California. The theme of the conference is as follows:

At this conference, the National Association of Scholars intends to discuss “disgrace” in two ways: disgrace as a tactic of the progressive left, and the real disgrace that falls on colleges and universities that countenance such tactics. These tactics include attempting to destroy people through false accusation loudly repeated, and to shame people into resignation while using success at this to intimidate everyone else into silent, self-censoring conformity.

The Keynote Speaker will be by Heather Mac Donald. Other speakers include Peter Wood, Jay Nordlinger, John Tooby, Daniel Sznycer, Darel E. Paul, Edward Erwin, John Beahrs, James E. Enstrom, Christine Rosen, Keith Whitaker, Mark Bauerlein, Bruce Gilley, Rachel Fulton Brown, Matt Peterson, and Helen Andrews.

I hope to be there. (I’m on the NAS Board of Directors.)

You should come too if you can. You can register here.

“GRADING AIN’T JUST GRADING” SAYS AU: American University is sponsoring a seminar urging writing teachers emphasize antiracism when grading student writing, rather than actual writing skills. The seminar leader “will discuss the ways that White language supremacy is perpetuated in college classrooms despite the better intentions of faculty, particularly through the practices of grading writing.” The College Fix reports.

Somebody needs to point out to minority students at AU that the university doesn’t give a damn about improving their writing skills and that they would be better off taking their tuition dollars to a school that does.

ELIZABETH WARREN FOR PRESIDENT?: Yikes. This article exposing her bogus research on bankruptcy should have been enough to sink her political ambitions back in 2006. But it wasn’t.

I would say that she doesn’t have a chance. But I said that about Barack Obama and Donald Trump, so I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of American politics.

CHIUNE SUGIHARA SAVED THOUSANDS OF LIVES: Today is the 119^th anniversary of his birth.

WAPO TRUMPETS—“MSNBC IS SURGING”: That wouldn’t be surprising in our increasingly polarized time.   I’d be a little surprised if there weren’t at least a “surgelette.” But Exhibit 1 for the surge is this: During the week of Dec. 17, MSNBC beat Fox News for the first time in 17 years. The problem is that Sean Hannity was on vacation that week, and MSNBC beat Fox News only during the five-day work week. If all seven days of the week are considered, Fox News bested MSNBC. Consequently, I’m not sure this is quite as newsworthy as WAPO’s “media critic” thinks it is. His excitement may be another case of “Perceptions of Newsworthiness Are Contaminated by Political Usefulness Bias.”

IS WEST VIRGINIA UNCONSTITUTIONAL?: At the start of the Civil War, most of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s northwestern region were not keen on the Confederacy and wanted to remain with the Union. On this day in 1862, therefore, Abraham Lincoln signed into law an Act admitting West Virginia as our 35^th state, thus dividing Virginia in two.

But did the United States comply with all the Constitutional requirements for creating a new state out of an old one? The answer is arguably no. There is a Constitutional requirement that a state give its permission before a region can secede and became a separate state. In this case, permission came only from a rump government-in-exile session of the Virginia legislature consisting of members from the seceding region. Times being what they were Lincoln accepted it.  Still, as nice as it is to have West Virginia as a state (hey, 50 is a nice round number), we might not want to wave that around as a precedent.

Vasan Kesavan and Michael Stokes Paulsen discussed this burning Constitutional question at length a few years back.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I talk about this very precedent, in the context of splitting California, in my state secession paper, forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review.

EDUCATION SECRETARY BETSY DeVOS IS ON THE RIGHT TRACK: I am so pleased that the U.S. Department of Education has withdrawn the Obama Administration’s controversial Dear Colleague Letter applying disparate impact analysis to school discipline. It is worth pointing out that I am not the only one who is pleased. As I detail in my article, there were a lot of teachers, across the country, upset over the Obama Administration’s policy. And then there is this polling data:

In 2015, Education Next-Program on Education Policy and Governance conducted a survey of teachers. The question on school discipline asked: “Do you support or oppose federal policies that prevent schools from expelling or suspending black and Hispanic students at higher rates than other students?”

A healthy majority of teachers—59%–reported that they opposed the policy. Only 23% supported it (with 18% answering that they neither support nor oppose). Interestingly, most of the teachers who opposed the policy were not the least wishy-washy in their opposition. Of the 59% who opposed the policy, 34% said that “completely oppose the policy” while only 25% “somewhat oppose.” Supporters on the other hand were more lukewarm. Of the 23%, 16% said they “somewhat support” the policy, while only 7% “completely support the policy.”

Members of the general public responded similarly. A majority (51%) opposed the policy, while only 21% supported (with the 29% answering that they neither support nor oppose). The same pattern of strong opposition and weak support emerged.

But even though rank and file teachers as well as local union leaders opposed the Obama Administration’s policy, the national teachers unions sided with the Obama Administration.   It is one more example of the huge distance between union members and their national leaders.

SECOND GREAT FIRE OF LONDON: The night of December 29, 1940 was the worst night of blitz. More than 100,000 incendiary bombs were dropped over London. Fires—1500 of them—burned all over town.

That night London lost 160 of its citizens, 31 of its guild halls, 19 of its churches, and much more. But, thanks to the heroic efforts of its fire fighters, it did not lose St. Paul’s Cathedral.

X-RAY VISION: On this day in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923), a mechanical engineer and physicist, published “On a New Kind of Rays.” His Röntgen rays (X-rays) allowed doctors to see things that previously were hidden, changing the way medical conditions are detected and diagnosed forever.

For weeks prior to the publication, he had been working feverishly in his lab. The first “X-ray” of a human body part was of his wife Anna’s hand. When she saw the macabre image, she is said to have shuddered, “I have seen my death!” (No worries.  She lived another 24 years before dying in 1919 at the age of 80.)

Experimenting with X-rays became fashionable in the years immediately after Röntgen’s discovery. It took a while before it became clear X-rays could be lethal. One of Thomas Edison’s assistants, Clarence Dally, was an early casualty. In the long run, of course, X-rays have extended far more lives than they have shortened.

Röntgen received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery.

NEW REPORT OF THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS:  Last Thursday, the Commission released a report entitled “Broken Promises:  Continuing Federal Funding Shortfall for Native Americans.”  As the title suggests, its main theme is that Native American tribes should receive more money.

Both Commissioner Peter Kirsanow and I dissented.  My dissent deals mainly with the Commission’s strange insertion of an endorsement of the proposed Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act in the report.  The Commission had taken no evidence on the issue.  As far as anyone can tell, the six-member majority just threw the endorsement in for the pure hell of it.  Kirsanow’s dissent (which can be found in the report) makes the point that throwing more money at tribal entities hasn’t done much to solve the problems of Native Americans in the past, and it really isn’t likely to do so in the future.

LOUIS PASTEUR WAS BORN THIS DAY IN 1822: He was popularly known as the “father of micro-biology.” Among other things, he developed the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. He also developed the process used for stopping bacterial contamination in wine, milk and beer known as … wait for it … pasteurization.

THANK YOU, JEFF SESSIONS:  He was right to curtail Obama-Era efforts to control local police departments through consent orders.

THE ART OF THE LEGISLATIVE DEAL: Here is an explanation of how the compromise involved in passing the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 was itself compromised. The Democrats wanted a law that would allow easy registration. The Republicans wanted a law that would require states to keep their voting rolls clean and up to date. They both thought they had gotten what they asked for. But a deal like that unravels when the Department of Justices works a lot harder to enforce one part of the deal than it does the other.

Nobody likes to be a chump.  Unraveled deals have the effect of making future legislative deals harder to make. Legislatures become ineffective.

MAO ZEDONG WAS BORN 125 YEARS AGO TODAY: Of course, as an earnest member of the Instateam, I should try to be fair and balanced in my evaluation of the late Chinese leader. So let me give you both the pros and the cons:

First the CONs:

1. Tens of millions of deaths can be attributed to his murderous regime. Really … tens of millions … from the executions of counter-revolutionaries in the period directly after the regime’s acquisition of power to the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. Whether one credits the high estimates or the low ones, it was human suffering on an almost unimaginable scale.
2. Mao’s personal physician reports that Mao never bathed or even washed his face or hands. He never brushed his teeth, which were covered in a green patina. And his breath … yikes.
3. According to that same physician, Mao, green teeth and all, was a horny goat who took hundreds of young women to his bed over the years. And he apparently gave a number of these women a nasty dose of trichomoniasis. When offered antibiotics to cure him and hence prevent him from infecting more women, he declined, since he himself (like many men) was symptomless.  Trichomoniasis was their problem.

And now the PROs:

1. He is said to have had a talent for calligraphy.

I will let you draw your own conclusions.

A FRIEND ASKED ME WHY I HAVEN’T POSTED ANYTHING YET ON LAST FRIDAY’S ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION THAT IT IS RESCINDING THE NOTORIOUS OBAMA-ERA SCHOOL DISCIPLINE GUIDANCE: Well … I meant to. But I wanted first to take a moment or two to celebrate.

I suspect many teachers and principals are celebrating too. Polls showed the guidance, which applied disparate impact liability to school discipline, was unpopular with teachers.  Rescinding it will make their classrooms more orderly, and it will also ensure that  students—of all races—will be treated more fairly. When teachers and principals are in control of discipline, the decisions they make will be a lot more sensible than when distant bureaucrats are telling them what they have to do.

Doubtless there will be more pushback in the media about this. Even before the guidance was rescinded, the New York Times was already defending the Obama Administration’s policies by saying they were “adopted after strong evidence emerged that minority students were receiving more suspensions and tougher punishments than white students for the same or lesser offenses ….”

This actual evidence of discrimination is astonishingly thin. It’s true that African American students are disciplined more often than white students (and that white students are disciplined more often than Asian students). But upon thorough examination it turns out that the teachers who refer students for discipline are not flaming racists who make up out of thin air offenses by minority students. Rather, it’s a question of which students are misbehaving.

I have been working on getting this policy reversed for over eight years. (Yes, even before the rescinded guidance went into effect, the Obama Department of Education was going after schools whose policies led them to discipline African American students at disproportionate rates. I had the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigate.)

I’ve posted it before, but if you want to understand the issue, read The Department of Education’s Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline: Wrong For Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law .

“WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD MEN STOP MENTORING WOMEN POST #METOO?”:  Yes, I am five months late in posting this, but it’s remarkable how naive the writer is.

THE EGGNOG RIOT:  One hundred ninety two years ago today, West Point cadets were behaving badly.  As hard as it might be to believe, too much eggnog is not necessarily a great thing.

“WHICH BOXES TO CHECK? COLLEGE HOPEFULS WEIGH RACE, IDENTITY AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION”: Steve Sailer annotates the WAPO article.

Steve is right that ambitious students shouldn’t check the “Cuban” box. I’ve personally seen cases where Cubans were held to be ineligible for a preference for Hispanics, because … well … because they are Cuban.

Here’s another one: In the late 1980s/early 1990s, law schools (but not other parts of universities) were giving preferences to Asian students. But an Evangelical Christian Korean immigrant (on at least one occasion to which I was privy) was classified for that reason as “not really Asian.” “Real” Asians are apparently non-religious.

As far as I can tell, the underlying rule is, “if the student is from a group that votes Republican, we’re really not into them.”

Related (From Ed): At Power Line, John Hinderaker comments on Sailer’s post: Checking the Racial Box. “Given our increasingly complicated racial landscape, the entire corrupt and irrational edifice of affirmative action seems destined to collapse. It can’t happen too soon.”

Read the whole thing.

B IS FOR BERIA (AND BERING STRAIT):  On this day in 1953, LAVRENTIY BERIA met his end. Stalin himself had died nine months earlier, and his chief henchmen were turning against each other. Beria, Stalin’s chief of the secret police (NKVD), was arrested on charges of treason and tried in secret.  And then shot.

It’s not easy to work up sympathy for such a bloodthirsty killer. But the rest of the story is truly bizarre. Less than a month later, the Soviet Encyclopedia sent a notice to subscribers enclosing new pages.  In translation, it said the following:

The State Scientific Publishing House of the large Soviet Encyclopedia recommends that pages 21, 22, 23, and 24 be removed from Volume 5 as well as the portrait [of Beria] between pages 22 and 23 to replace which the pages of the new text are enclosed.

The aforementioned pages should be cut out with scissors or blade, leaving inside a margin on which the new pages can be pasted.

The substitute pages were an article on the otherwise obscure Friedrich Wilhelm von Bergholtz and pictures of the Bering Strait.

Subscribers dutifully cut Beria out of the encyclopedia.  Failing to do so would be dangerous.

A HEROINE OF THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE HAS DIED:  May she rest in peace.

ON THE DAY IN 1869, EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON WAS BORN IN LINCOLN COUNTY, MAINE: (That’s where my mom was born too and where half my gene pool comes from.) Robinson’s poem Miniver Cheevy is really swell:

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

I love that poem. But it’s the only Robinson poem that I’ve read that is comic.

*Among Mainers of my mother’s age and older, “on the town” meant on welfare, since public relief was provided by townships and not by the county, state or federal government.

ON THIS DAY IN 1803, FRANCE OFFICIALLY TURNED OVER LOUISIANA TO THE UNITED STATES AT A FLAG-RAISING CEREMONY IN NEW ORLEANS: The Louisiana Purchase added 828,000 square miles to the United States as well as control of the Mississippi River (which made already-existing territories in Mississippi and Ohio River watersheds that much more valuable). We got it for the bargain price of 50 million francs plus the cancellation of debts worth 18 million francs. At the time, that would have been $15 million–a bargain, even then, for such a vast territory.

The whole thing took President Jefferson a bit by surprise. He had wanted negotiate the sale of New Orleans and its environs. But on April 11^, 1803, Foreign Minister Talleyrand told the American minister to France Robert Livingston that Napoleon was willing to sell all of the Louisiana Territory. Truth be told, Napoleon had abandoned his earlier plans for North America and needed to raise some money quickly for his other activities.

Jefferson worried that as President he did not have the authority to commit to such a deal. But his advisors told him he’d be crazy to turn it down. So he took it. The rest is history.