Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene

Thomas Sowell is one of my all-time favorite writers and thinkers. Here are a few of his latest random thoughts:

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Some people think they have bad luck when the real problem is that they took bad chances.

Parents who are both conscientious and realistic discover sooner or later that they cannot do the job to their own complete satisfaction, much less to their children's complete satisfaction.

In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.

Does it tell you something about our times when a representative of the Taliban is welcome on the Yale University campus but representatives of our own military forces are not?

President Bush says that it is "unrealistic" to think that we can deport 12 million illegal immigrants. It is also unrealistic to think that we can catch all murderers, but does that mean that we should de-criminalize murder? Or turn loose the murderers we do catch?

How can people who say we don't have enough troops in Iraq advocate that we intervene militarily in Darfur?

Many of the same people who claim that mental tests are not valid for college admissions decisions, or for employment decisions, nevertheless consider these tests valid for deciding that a murderer cannot be executed when he scores low on such tests — even though he has no incentive to score high.

People who go ballistic over the high pay of some CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation seldom bother to figure out whether, if that CEO agreed to work for nothing, that would be enough to bring the price of a one-dollar product down to 99 cents.

A number of the nation's leading colleges — including Harvard, Amherst, the University of Chicago and the Naval Academy — will admit students who have not finished high school. Many outstanding students would do well to get out of high schools that are wasting their time and go straight into college.

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