Can you trust your doctor, lawyer and pilot?

Starting in 2020, airlines panicked and did two insanely stupid things. They forced a generation of their most experienced pilots into early retirement, blaming the pandemic. Then, when they realized they’d triggered a catastrophic pilot shortage, they massively increased hiring. Unfortunately, it was 2020 so the new George Floyd rules were in effect. Airline after airline caved to the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” commissars and committed to new race-based hiring rules. 

“Over the next decade, United will train 5,000 pilots who will be guaranteed a job with United, after they complete the requirements of the Aviate program — and our plan is for half of them to be women and people of color,” said United CEO Scott Kirby. 

You may not be surprised to learn that it was newly trained United pilots who accidentally put a plane into a dive toward the ocean this year, coming a few hundred feet from turning the passengers into fish food.

Meanwhile, the last 12 months have delivered the highest number of near-collisions and narrowly averted disasters in modern aviation history. 

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.  The ABA and American legal education in general ... have abandoned their roles as disinterested educators of the nation’s future attorneys to become partisan actors in the effort to impose progressive dogma on the American people through our system of justice, writes Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars.
 

This relatively recent ideological overlay has displaced the “practice readiness” that law firms once expected law schools to inculcate among their graduates. Law firms these days routinely complain that they, not law schools, must educate new JDs on how to practice law. Students may spend three years and tens of thousands of dollars in law school for little more than a superficial understanding of the law coupled with indoctrination in social justice theory.

David French, a constitutional lawyer, was on the faculty of the Cornell Law School and sat on the admissions committee. He writes: 
 

Few people understand how dramatic the boost is for favored minority groups. If students were black or the “right” kind of Latino, they would often receive admissions offers with test scores 20 or 30 percentile points lower than those of white or Asian students. When I expressed concern about an admissions offer to a black student with test scores in the 70th percentile — after we’d passed over white and Asian students with scores in the 98th percentile and far higher grades — I was told that we had to offer admission or we’d surely lose him to our Ivy League rivals.

So if you're on trial and facing a life sentence or the death penalty what lawyer would you prefer?

I have some good news and some bad news.  Vijay Jojo Chokal Ingam, ethnically an Indian, got admitted to the St. Louis University School of Medicine by posing as a black man, despite having a pitifully low GPA. He writes:
 

If the medical schools accept less qualified Hispanic and black applicants because of affirmative action, those students will in general perform worse on the USMLE, because MCAT scores are a strong predictor of USMLE performance. More of these minority medical students will become physicians because the medical schools have concurrently reduced their physician licensure requirements. The population of minority physicians will be in general less qualified than the population of nonminority physicians. The patient who encounters these less qualified minority physicians may make the assertion that in general minority physicians are less qualified than nonminority physicians. Statistically speaking, the patient would be correct. This is how affirmative action perpetuates negative stereotypes about minority physicians.

Affirmative action aficionados consciously elevate race above merit. What are we to do? Well, we can look for pilots, lawyers and doctors of a certain age, meaning they might have gone through their schooling before all this happened.

Or we can just take a chance.
 

~ MacUspaig