Dawn

Dawn

Monday, March 18, 2019

Tbnoughts from Galicia, Spain: 18.3.19

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
            Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain
  • A bit more on the astonishing Fallas. Sorry, a lot more.
  • Also from Eye on Spain - The country's 10 best Miradores, or look-outs. Some of them are spectacular. I would add Santa Tecla, overlooking the estuary of the river Miño/Minho. And  North Portugal.
Local News
  • As far as I'm aware, Pontevedra has only one factory - a Portuguese owned place which converts eucalyptus trees - smellingy - into cellulose. It's said to be the city's biggest employer, assuming you exclude the municipal and provincial bureaucrats. Which makes it all the more strange that the local left-wing mayor has been trying for 20 years to get it closed down. I should be aware of his reasons but aren't. Anyway, it's all been in the courts for years and the latest news is that some senior court outside Galicia has put the mockers on a move until as late as 2073. 
  • The sea waters off the Rías Baixas area of southern Galicia have been found to contain traces of 'various drugs and anti-depressives'. There's a surprise.
Brexit, the UK and the EU.
  • As the week begins, we wait to see on what terms the EU will agree to an extension of the Brexit deadline from 29 March and for how long. Not so much in the lap of the gods as in the lap of unelected technocrats. There is still no certainty that whatever they dictate will avoid a Hard (no deal) Brexit. Indeed, they might well precipitate it.
The USA
  • The reality is that meritocracy as an ideal is fatally flawed. Nepotism will always find a way through, no matter how tough the tests. See the first article below on this.
The World
  • I wonder how many people outside the country in question know that in 1923 there was a civil war in Finland which saw the deaths of 36,000 people.
Social Media
  • The EU, the USA and the UK have all produced detailed plans for checking the power of big tech – a trend that may in the end prove more consequential than the concurrent sea change happening around privacy. Yet the three blocs are also divided on what is wrong and what precisely should be done about it.
  • Donald Trump’s army of new judges keeps him sitting pretty. See the 2nd article below.
English
  • Odd old phrase of the Day: Planet-struck: 'Epilepsy, paralysis, lunacy, etc. were attributed to the malignant aspects of the planets. Horses were said to be planet-struck when they were stupefied, for whatever reason.'
Finally . . .
  • I'm a tad confused . . . On a BBC podcast, I heard of 'Generation K also known as iGens', said to be those born 1996 to 2015 and thus the successors to 'Generation Y', also known as the 'millennials'. I was confused, as I thought I'd determined the former were Generation Z. So I searched and found this: The most common name for this [1996 and after] group is, Gen Z; I call them Generation K, after Katniss Everdeen, the determined heroine of the Hunger Games. To make things even more confusing, the members of Generation Z/K are also known as the Smartphone generation. As well as the i-Generation.  Not to mention snowflakes. Hope you've got that. Here's an article by the person at least partly responsible for this confusion, as it was her on the podcast . . .
  • Someone has said that he law of unintended consequences is history’s only law. It might be the same cynic who said that the result of every major reform was the exact opposite of that which was intended.
THE ARTICLES

1. In US colleges, fake-it sometimes beats merit. A university admissions scandal reveals that nepotism will never die: Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.  The Times

Americans believe in meritocracy in principle. Polls show that significant majorities — between 67% and 70% since Gallup began asking the question in 2003 — believe that, when it comes to university admissions, “applicants should be admitted solely on the basis of merit”.

The most successful Broadway show in living memory, Hamilton, is an exuberant celebration of a self-made man — the first US Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, who was born into poverty (“a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman”) but indefatigably read, wrote and fought his way to the top.

Unlike his wealthy rival Aaron Burr, Hamilton isn’t admitted to Princeton and has to settle for King’s College (now Columbia University). It doesn’t matter. Hamilton gets “a lot farther by working a lot harder / By being a lot smarter / By being a self-starter”. Nothing can stop this young, scrappy, hungry prodigy from “rising up”.

Yet in practice Americans don’t believe in meritocracy at all. Plenty of wealthy Americans have no problem with the idea of hereditary privilege, as long as they are spared the social obligations of traditional aristocracy. At the same time many educated Americans support and practise systematic racial discrimination — even if they justify today’s “affirmative action” as a form of redress for past discrimination. The result is the corrupt and inequitable system of undergraduate admissions at the elite universities.

Last week the Department of Justice accused 50 people in six states of a “racketeering conspiracy” to get patently undeserving candidates into colleges including Yale, Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California (USC). Among the parents charged were the actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, the fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli.

At the heart of the racket was William Singer, the founder of the “Edge College & Career Network”, also known as “the Key”. Wealthy parents paid Singer to help their talentless and/or idle offspring cheat on standardised tests or fake athletic prowess. He bribed test administrators and college coaches. He also falsified students’ family histories and biographies to take advantage of quotas for racial minorities.

“There is a front door of getting in [to college] where a student just does it on their own,” Singer explained in court last Tuesday, “and then there’s a back door where people go to institutional advancement and make large donations, but they’re not guaranteed in . . . I created a side door that guaranteed families to get in.”

Loughlin and her husband allegedly paid $500,000 (£380,000) to get their two daughters, Olivia and Isabella, accepted as recruits for the USC rowing team, even though neither had ever knowingly held an oar. If shamelessness were a varsity sport, Olivia would have deserved a full scholarship. A well-known social media “influencer”, who plugs fancy footwear and dental aligners on Instagram and YouTube, she had the gall to admit in a video that she was going to college solely for “game days, partying”, because “I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know”.

Welcome to the fake-it-ocracy. Remember, this side door came into existence because the back door of a fat donation — like the $2.5m paid by Jared Kushner’s father to Harvard — just isn’t 100% reliable.

It took me a while to figure the system out after I moved from British to American academia. At Cambridge and Oxford I had been directly involved in undergraduate admissions. I and my colleagues read the application forms, the sample essays and the answers to what remained of the old entrance examination. We spent long days interviewing the candidates.

The Oxbridge system has long been criticised for admitting too few pupils from state schools or ethnic minorities, but I did not regard my role as that of a social engineer. My goal was to pick the cleverest students, regardless of all other criteria, and my main preoccupation was to separate the truly bright from the well coached. I did not care if they could row or tap-dance. I wanted intelligence, because I would have to teach these people for three years and the last thing I wanted was to spend hours of my life with dunderheads.

Harvard was different. At first, naively, I couldn’t understand why a substantial proportion of my new students were there, as — to judge by their mid-term exam papers — they wouldn’t have stood a chance of an interview at Oxford, never mind a place. It was explained to me that a substantial chunk of undergraduates were “legacies” — there because their parents were alumni, especially generous alumni — and another chunk were the beneficiaries of affirmative action or athletics programmes. The admissions system was managed by professional administrators, not professors.

Later, when I saw evidence that Harvard and other colleges were discriminating against Asian applicants — whose share of the total undergraduate body ought to have been rising on the basis of their numbers and superior performance in standardised tests — I wrote an essay lamenting the decline of meritocracy in America.

This, too, was naive. For the reality is that meritocracy as an ideal is fatally flawed. Nepotism will always find a way through, no matter how tough the tests. There have been times when even I have been tempted to pull a string or improve an essay for my own children. Admirably, they have spurned such offers.

The social scientist Charles Murray has argued that a cognitive elite has emerged in America because smart women meet smart men at places such as Harvard, get married and have smart children. But if not everyone at Harvard is smart, the theory is weakened. There’s also the biological reality that smart parents don’t necessarily have smart children. Even if they do, parental wealth corrupts offspring, eroding their work ethic. Sooner or later, money starts to override merit. Outright racketeering is remarkable only because there are so many legal ways to get mediocre students into the Ivy League.

The law of unintended consequences is history’s only law. The more the admissions criteria to elite colleges have been distorted, the faster the ideology of “intersectionality” has spread across campuses, with highly disruptive results. Last week students at Sarah Lawrence College held an occupation to demand (among other things) that a professor, Samuel Abrams, have his position “reviewed” — by them. His crime? He wrote an article in The New York Times pointing out that university administrators are overwhelmingly liberal or progressive in their politics.

This is not to predict that Olivia Giannulli will go from fake to woke. But she would do well to consider it. The best form of protection from the social justice warriors is to become one. And, guys, just imagine all those new followers on Instagram!

1. Donald Trump’s army of new judges keeps him sitting pretty.  Josh Glancy, The Times.

On Wednesday, Paul Manafort, former chairman of the Trump campaign and veteran Republican strategist, received his second prison sentence. A Washington judge, Amy Berman Jackson, sentenced the 69-year-old Manafort to 7½ years. It is a remarkable fall from grace for a one-time senior presidential adviser.

Yet it was arguably not the most important judicial news of the day. That happened across town, when Judge Neomi Rao was confirmed by the Senate to the influential Washington appellate court, taking up the seat left open by Brett Kavanaugh, the new Supreme Court justice.

For if and when Manafort emerges blinking into the light, Rao, 45, a controversial and strongly conservative nominee, will probably still be on the appeals court — and for decades after that, too, since appointments are for life. She is one of 36 conservative judges to be appointed to the appeals courts during the Trump era, a historically fast judicial conveyor belt that could change the face of American law and politics.

Masterminded by the Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, and backed by the president, this is a quiet judicial revolution that is likely to be the most enduring legacy of the Trump administration. America will still be feeling its impact long after Trump has retired to spend more time with his Twitter account.

Most of the attention and emotion has been heaped on the two Trump Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch and particularly Kavanaugh, who have the potential to shift the balance of the court and therefore the country on key issues such as abortion, environmental regulations and affirmative action.

But only a small percentage of cases reach the Supreme Court. Many are decided by powerful district and appellate courts, and one in five appeal court judges have been appointed by Trump. With those spots mostly filled, Republicans are now focusing on filling some 129 lower-level district court vacancies.

These judicial appointments are the bedrock of Trump’s political support. Some conservatives have mixed feelings about Trump, both as a person and a president. But his judicial appointments have been rock solid conservative, mostly drawn from a list created by the Federalist Society, a dominant right-wing legal interest group.

“If it weren’t for his appointments, he would be toast — it’s that simple,” said David French, a legal scholar and senior writer at National Review. “Lots of people aren’t fired up about his tax reform. They aren’t thrilled about tariffs. His stance on immigration is divisive even in the Republican Party. There’s no broad consensus on his foreign policy. But when it comes to the judiciary, everyone, from the most sceptical Never Trumpers to the most Maga-hat-wearing loyalists, likes his appointments.”

During his 2016 election campaign, Trump shrewdly signed up to the Federalist Society’s list of approved judges, which included Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. The influential group gave him its full-throated support, and he has stuck to his word.

Like most judges appointed by Trump, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are young and likely to wield influence for decades to come — many conservatives hope they will start to unwind what they see as decades of judicial overreach since Roe v Wade was passed and abortion legalised in 1973.

If Trump wins again in 2020, it will be his record on judges above anything else that carries him through. “If he deviated from this at all, gave a signal he was unreliable in appointing good judges, he wouldn’t have enough support to win a re-election campaign,” said French. “It’s absolutely indispensable to him.”

Although it is common for a president, particularly if his party has control of the Senate, to ram through as many judicial appointments as possible, the scale and speed of the Trump-McConnell revolution has shocked many on the left. The Democrats are planning to strike back in this judicial arms race, if they can regain control of the White House and Senate in 2020.

“The left hasn’t put nearly enough effort into thinking about judges,” said Caroline Fredrickson, president of the American Constitution Society, the closest equivalent liberals have to the Federalist Society. “They’ve been much more engaged with electoral politics. And when they do engage on judges, it tends to be at the Supreme Court level, not so much with the lower courts.”

That may be changing. “What we’re going to see is the Democrats rip a page from Mitch McConnell’s playbook, and do whatever they can as fast as they can when they are next in power,” said Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a law professor at Pomona College in California and author of a book about the Federalist Society.

She added: “It’s going to take a lot of focus for the Democrats to emulate what McConnell has done, but there’s a growing sense that they have to do it, too.”

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