Putin’s Game

Dealing with Vladimir Putin reminds me of dealing with peers growing up who had a decidedly different take on the games we played.  We all recall them, those kids that played by a different set of rules, seeking to get ahead, to win at everything even when there appeared to be nothing to win.  Just playing basketball for fun with the neighborhood kids in the driveway, nobody keeping score, yet there was always that one guy who always knew what the score was, and was throwing elbows in the paint. The family gathered around the scrabble board, having a few drinks and just trying to come up with some interesting and clever words.  But there’s always that one participant, usually an in-law, who puts the S on the end of your 10-letter masterpiece on the double word square, taking advantage of the game’s loophole in the rules.  Yeah, it’s legal, but like the NFL overtime rules, it’s still not cricket. And then there’s the guy at team practice looking to climb into the starting line-up.  Pity the starter who unknowingly has a bull’s-eye on his back and will be the victim of the blind side hit, the errant elbow to the ribs, or the cleated stomp to the ankle courtesy of his supposed teammate.  Different goals, different game.

 

Such is the way of Mr. Putin.  While the world seeks to get along and is happily playing checkers, Vlad is playing chess.  He does nothing that isn’t self-serving, nothing that isn’t for leverage.  Call Trump what you will, but the businessman in him saw the Nordstream Pipeline for what is was; Putin’s effort to control the spigot to Europe’s energy supply.  Sure, Biden may have “looked [Putin] in the eye” and suspected they had an understanding of one another, but what Putin understood was Biden’s weakness and he knew he had a dupe.  Nothing Biden has done since on the international stage, from the Afghanistan withdrawal to his reaction to Chinese aggression and North Korean missiles has changed that.  And Biden’s plummeting approval at home is making him weaker and more impulsive.  C’mon, man.  With Europe in the throes of climate change hysteria, Germany in the process of shutting down all their nuclear power plants (why exactly?), and the US deciding that energy independence and becoming a net energy exporter wasn’t in keeping with the radical left’s green agenda, fumbling, bumbling Joe Biden gifted Russia with 40% of Europe’s gas imports.  Genius.  And how did Vlad thank Joe for the gift?  Why, by massing forces on the Ukraine border in the dead of winter, that’s how.  And why would he do that?  Because he can.  Because Putin wants to extend his sphere of influence, reconstitute as much of the former Soviet Union as possible, and keep NATO away from his borders.  And the West has conveniently given him the tools to do it, shooting ourselves in the foot in our race to a green energy future. As the Wall Street Journal succinctly put it, “Can we count on Germany?  Nein.”  Not when Germany is freezing through a cold winter with Russia crimping the energy hose just as gas prices are soaring. And this occurring amidst a reduction in energy from sources such as coal, nuclear, solar and wind.  The perfect storm.  And if Joe suspects that he can shut down the pipeline to punish Putin, that tactic is already blunted by our inability to consistently supply Europe with Natural Gas to compensate, the Arab’s reluctance to increase supply, and China’s willingness to buy the gas through pipelines that are already under construction.  

 

In the same manner that Texas discovered the fickle nature of renewable energy sources when Mother Nature comes to call, Europe is now experiencing the impact of their move toward green energy and the implementation of punitive cap-and-trade programs.  Americans take note: these same green energy initiatives lurk within the Build Back Betterdisaster that thankfully stalled in Congress, hung up by a thread of sanity.  The world order is changing as we become preoccupied with social constructs and the woke agenda, things that don’t really matter to our detractors.  It would be best if we played the same game, if we started playing chess.

The SAT Lowers the Bar

The College Board, the non-profit organization that administers the SAT examination, has announced that the exam will go digital and will be “easier to take, easier to give, and more relevant”.  Relevant to what, you ask?  Well, that may indeed be the most difficult question SAT-takers will have to answer.  

 

As reported in the WSJ, greater than 76% of colleges no longer mandate an entrance examination, making the test optional. Apparently woke higher education has predictably decided that the tests are biased against lower income students and students of color. You know by now the way this plays out; the conclusion is that the test naturally favors white people of privilege.  Yeah, you people. All this despite statistics that show Asians, regardless of their wealth, inconveniently appear to be unaffected by their socio-economic status or their color, and consistently outperform their white-skinned counterparts.  Just ask Harvard. And this reduction in using this time honored yardstick is according to FairTest, yet another non-profit organization that has been pushing for a “more limited use of standardized tests”.  Interestingly, the WSJ reported that Bob Schaeffer, the executive director of FairTest, called this change to the SAT “nothing more than a marketing ploy” that “wouldn’t make the test more fair or valid for assessing college readiness.” Uh-huh. So what exactly would make the test fair or valid, Bob?  Or are standardized tests to be abolished completely?  And if so, how exactly are students going to be evaluated for admission to university?  Is this new test indeed a marketing strategy to compete against the ACT, or is this simply a dumbing down of the examination to make it more inclusive?  And by inclusive, I mean to satisfy the new requirement that equality is not enough, but equity must be satisfied.  Recall the distinction: equality implies equal opportunity and access to become qualified, whereas equity implies equal results, regardless of qualification.  An important distinction and a dangerous proposition.  

 

Well, to answer that, consider first the explanation of changes to the SAT from Priscilla Rodriguez, vice-president of College Readiness Assessments at the College Board.  Really, that’s a thing. Again to the WSJ:  “the new test will take about two hours, down from three.  Reading passages will be shorter and will be followed by a single question, and math problems will be less wordy. Calculators will be allowed for all math questions.”  You’ve got to be kidding.  Is this test specifically designed to bring up the scores of kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?  Is this in response to our remote-educated, Covid-cloistered generation, unable to sit still long enough to take an exam, unable to focus on a simple paragraph well enough to answer more than one question, unable to cope with a complex word problem and completely devoid of basic math skills? Is this a test for college admission or to be a cashier at WalMart? It’s embarrassing. 

 

Is this perhaps another attempt by the left to guarantee equal outcomes for all? Equity versus equality. A friend of mine, a surgeon, related this story to me about his experience with the equity discussion, I will allow him to tell it: 

“I once had the pleasure of spending time with enlisted men in our armed services at a training facility down south.  I was, at the time still completing my schooling.  In a clerical error, I was assigned to a dorm room with two enlisted men when I was supposed to be assigned to officer’s quarters.  I didn’t know, and having been a student used to dormitories, I thought nothing of it. We weren’t separated by color, but our socio-economic gap was wide.  I was from the middle-class northeast, university educated.  They were both mechanics, with high school educations, white boys, from poor rural America, the deep South.  They had enlisted right out of high school. They were my age, bright, remarkably astute, and despite one of them having a virtually unintelligible southern drawl, we got along handsomely. One evening after consuming far too much beer, one of them opined: “you know, if I grew up where you did, I could be a doctor.”  

“Maybe” I answered, “did you ever try? 

“I never really thought about college and I wasn’t much of a student”, he answered, “I was always good with my hands.” 

“Never too late”, I answered. 

“Naw, I just didn’t have the opportunity,” he said.  

But was it opportunity, or commitment, or a matter of ambition? Was it his family not instilling that in him, or no one to point the way?  We mulled over that for a while.  

“And some of it may just be talent that got me here”, he finally suggested, “I was always a good mechanic, and you must’ve been good at science.”  

“That may have a lot to do with it, getting channeled into what you’re good at”, I said.  “For example, I don’t think I could do your job as well as you.  I like to think I could grasp it intellectually, but I don’t have that mechanical aptitude.”  

“I never really thought of it that way”, he said.  

I continued, “Its interesting that people would like toconsider everyone to be intellectually equal, yet readily acknowledge that there are stark differences between us physically. I could have access to all the training and facilities of an Olympic sprinter, but I do not have the physical attributes to ever become one, no matter how hard I try.  Further, I may not have the drive, the commitment, the mental toughness to ever reach that level of achievement.  Why isn’t it considered the same for intellect?”

We thought about that for a while.  And so it was that two slightly inebriated twenty-somethings from two vastly different backgrounds had come to a consensus. You can be whatever you want to be in America, but there has to be some way of making an assessment, of figuring out if you have the potential and the ability to succeed at something.And that goes for both the student and the admissions committee. The SAT has been that standard, flawed as it may be, for college admissions.  What possibly can replace it?  Surely not race based admissions.  And socio-economic indicators are equally as absurd.  This fascination with race as a determinant has reached all the way to the White House where Biden has proclaimed the qualifications for the next Supreme Court justice to be female and Black above all. And is this good for America, good for our future?  Of course not.  Do you want your surgeon to have been chosen by their race or their talent in the health sciences?  Do you want the engineer responsible for the safety systems on your aircraft to be chosen because of their diversity or their excellence in their field?  Do you want your children’s teachers selected on the basis of their woke ideology or their academic excellence?  Do you want your President chosen…….oh, never mind. 

 

If anyone is even questioning whether China will overtake us in the new world order, I think the SAT just answered the question for you.  With the teacher’s union running our schools like their own personal fiefdom, academics overshadowed by Covid restrictions, trans-gender bathrooms, personal pronouns, critical race theory, and a rigorous curriculum supplanted by the convenience of remote learning, we are producing perhaps the most ill-prepared generation in our history to cope with an increasingly complex world.  And when these pampered,intellectually stunted children come of age, will we be ableto separate the wheat from the chaff? Not with these testing standards. They will be selected for higher education based not on their merit but some squishy algorithm of community and likeability coupled with the color of their skin and a warped definition of what constitutes privilege.  They will be selected to be the doctors of tomorrow, the CEOs, the supposed innovators, the engineers, chosen not by their technological prowess but by some bizarre social construct.  Have the Chinese shortened their school days or the length of a school year?  Do they take summers off and send their students home without homework on the weekends?  Are they concerned with new definitions of gender and diversity or are they more concerned with providing their students with a solid foundation in STEM and the ability to critically read and write?  You already know the answer to that. Let’s hope those are the questions on the new SAT.

Qualification Be Damned

So this is how we choose Supreme Court justices now, by ticking off racial boxes to satisfy a quota?  “African-American women are underrepresented,” says the dementia-in-chief. Yet so are Native Americans, Asian Americans, disabled Americans, transgender-Americans, Arab Americans, and Americans of Icelandic descent. Need we expand the court to satisfy every hyphenated American so that they may be adequately represented? It’s absurd. And Biden’s statement is nothing more than pandering and politically self-serving from a floundering administration that wants nothing more than a distracting headline to soothe their base. Supreme Court justices should not be appointed to represent any particular tribe; rather, they represent the laws of the land and the constitution. Period. 

Beyond My Comprehension

The most recent RealClearPolitics poll numbers, sighting the statistics Joe Biden apparently doesn’t believe in, show his job approval rating at 41%. And this on the heels of two disastrous public appearances in which he compared his detractors to racists and offered Putin a slice of Ukraine without consequence, among numerous other blunders.  What I find particularly disturbing in this poll is the fact that although 41% approve of his job performance, only 53% disapprove, suggesting that, in fact, 47% do not disapprove, although 6% are on the fence. So when you come right down to it, this poll advises the country remains almost equally divided, a fact reflected in the composition of our dysfunctional Senate. The real disturbing conclusion that can be drawn, aside from the die-hard delusional progressives, what is wrong with that 47% that they are incapable of recognizing an incompetent, floundering administration? In closing I note, RealClearPolotics is an oxymoron!

A Cry In The Darkness

It's hard to believe our President, Speaker of the House, and Majority Leader of the Senate, judging by their actions, antics, and rhetoric, have the best interests of our nation and society at heart. Under their tenure, our country and its citizenry are floundering in disarray and confusion, unable to surmount our antagonist and detractor's deconstructing of the founding principles of our Federal Republic. Politicians unabated have flouted the laws of the land to suit their political agenda, irreparably damaging our reputation as a nation and our society. The checks and balances assuring in our constitution-driven governance for adherence to those founding principles have been politicized to the point of being near irrelevant. A one-party Democrat administration bent on fundamentally changing the United States as we have known it has wrested the destiny of our country from the hands of its people to that of its government. And, If you listened to our president's press conference yesterday, his distorted portrayal of what has happened and what did not happen in his first year in office is frightening! He came off as delusional, confused, and impotent.

Best we Americans sense our peril and respond accordingly come the Mid-Terms, or all is lost!

Deception Unbridled

I made the mistake of tuning in on Face the Nation recently, concluding Host Margaret Brennan is a pinched, leftist, partisan shill. She was interviewing Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland. She constantly interrupted him to push the narrative that our hospitals are overwhelmed with Covid admissions, pediatric wards are filled to capacity, and how virtual learning should be the rule of the land. All this despite his reporting statistics that pediatric Covid cases are incidental to admissions for other causes and that virtual learning had been an abstract failure, negatively impacting both the education and health of students. Hospital staff is overwhelmed due to a backlog of patients who avoided care for other ailments at the height of the pandemic and who are now seeking care when hospital staff has been depleted by vaccine mandates. Witness California has suddenly reversed course and required Covid positive healthcare workers to return to work. This has become a politically expedient pandemic of the left, who continue to push a false narrative based not on science but the promise of political gain. And it’s maddening how the media is aiding and abetting the prevailing of that false narrative.  

Will This Ever End!

This Covid craze is sending the “Covidiots” into overdrive. With readily available home tests everybody has been testing for the most minimal symptoms and no surprise near everybody is testing positive! Why would you do that? If you are vaccinated and without pre-existing conditions, you will likely get the sniffles. No ER visit, no ventilator, no need for monoclonal antibodies. To date I believe there has been one reported death from Omicron and that was in an unvaccinated patient with the aforementioned PECs. What a waste of time and resources fueled by an inept government and a complicit media. This is bordering on mass hysteria! 

It Isn't What I Saw

Happy Insurrection Day. A blatant distortion being used to wallpaper over the democrats attempt to dismantle the filibuster and, once again, move the goalposts. And this whole narrative of “threats to our democracy” that is currently the democrats’ go-to talking point is just more smoke and mirrors to hide the incompetence of the current administration. The biggest threats to our democracy are Chuck and Nancy and their obedient partisan minions.