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August 2018

EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Justin Campbell Suffer the Little Children

By on August 16th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/08/suffer-little-children/

The Left conquered and colonised our universities long ago, but the long march didn’t stop there. In kindergartens across the country, while taxpayers and parents pay through the nose, kids not much more than tots are getting a full grounding in the politically correct gospel.

Last week, while organising an event on Eventbrite, I stumbled across an event organised by Inclusion Support Queensland (a recent newsletter can be read here), a key architect of Australia’s childcare industry’s National Quality Framework and Standards. Targeted at early childhood teachers and titled ‘National Quality Standard: Inclusion in Practice’, the event promised to ‘explore how inclusion underpins the National Quality Standard.’

The term “inclusion” is problematic in the context of the childcare industry’s National Quality Standards, since it refers to both disability access and cultural inclusion. While there’s a general expectation that the industry complies with anti-discrimination law in ensuring accessibility and inclusiveness of all children regardless of their cultural background or disabilities, the “inclusion” imperative can become a multi-headed hydra, used to impose narrower and more ideologically driven cultural inclusion policies that many parents may find problematic.

With the reforms to the Federal government’s childcare subsidy I was already researching the childcare industry. I was curious why an industry so heavily subsidised by the taxpayer still costs parents so much of their after tax income. How could an industry that’s notorious for the low pay of its workers receive so much public money and yet deliver such an expensive service? The money certainly isn’t being spent on the workers. Early this year childcare workers represented by the industry’s trade union United Voice walked off the job protesting the low pay in the industry.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Andrew Cuomo and American Exceptionalism The country that never stopped being great. James Freeman

By on August 16th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/andrew-cuomo-and-american-exceptionalism-1534451407

A potential contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President appears to have just disqualified himself. If he hasn’t, it suggests that the U.S. educational system is in worse shape than many Americans realize.

Politico reports:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo blasted Donald Trump during a bill-signing ceremony on Wednesday, twisting the president’s signature slogan as he made a point about the need for greater women’s equality.

“We’re not going to make America great again — it was never that great,” said Cuomo, a Democrat seeking a third term. “We have not reached greatness. We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged. We will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping against women — 51 percent of our population — is gone and every woman’s full potential is realized and unleashed.”

Mr. Cuomo’s press secretary Dani Lever attempts to clarify in a press release:

The Governor believes America is great and that her full greatness will be fully realized when every man, woman, and child has full equality. America has not yet reached its maximum potential.

As Ms. Lever elaborates, her message seems to sound more and more like her boss’ original statement:

When the President speaks about making America great again – going back in time – he ignores the pain so many endured and that we suffered from slavery, discrimination, segregation, sexism and marginalized women’s contributions.

The New York Times for its part notes the irony in Mr. Cuomo’s attack on the President’s signature campaign slogan:

In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo, who is facing a primary challenge from his Democratic rival, Cynthia Nixon, explained that he saw Mr. Trump’s slogan as backward looking.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Protecting Taiwan From Chinese Aggression By Brandon J. Weichert

By on August 16th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/16/protecting-taiwan-from-chinese

The Chinese want to regain Taiwan as much as Abraham Lincoln desired to keep the southern states in the Union. Since the day that Taiwan became home of Chiang Kai-shek and his displaced Chinese Nationalist forces, the United States has vowed to uphold Taiwan’s place as an independent country. China views Taiwan as a breakaway province. The United States sees Taiwan as a democracy besieged by a larger, bullying neighbor. Taiwan simply wants to be free and sovereign.

A Complex Relationship: China, Taiwan, and the United States
For its part, the United States strives to maintain a posture of strategic ambiguity. At first, the United States unequivocally stood behind Taiwan as a counterweight to Red China in the Cold War. During the Nixon Administration, however, U.S. policy toward China fundamentally changed. Nixon went to Mao and the two leaders opened up their countries to each other.

Later, as part of the Carter Administration’s diplomatic efforts with China, the United States no longer recognized its long-time ally of Taiwan as the legitimate government of China.Until then, Washington had only recognized Taiwan’s government as the government of China. But under Carter, Washington conceded the “one China, two systems” model that there is only one Chinese government—and that government is in Beijing, not Taipei.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mueller v. Manafort: Is It about Gates — or a Mountain of Documents? By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on August 16th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/paul-manafort-trial-mueller-team-focuses-on-documents/The prosecution wants the jury to focus on Manafort’s document trail.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the star witness in this case is the documents.” That is the theme prosecutor Greg Andres hammered home in his summation at Paul Manafort’s bank- and tax-fraud trial in an Alexandria, Va., federal court.

It is a theme that much of the media coverage has glossed over, though it is unlikely to have been overlooked by the jury of six men and six women that sat through the case presented by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

So will jurors stay focused on the documents — the financial records that prove tens of millions of dollars in income that Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, stashed in overseas accounts, failing to report the accounts or the income to the IRS?

The defense, of course, has a strategy to help the jury overlook the documents. The strategy even has a name: Rick Gates. The idea is to portray Mueller’s case as rising or falling on Manafort’s longtime business partner and accomplice.

Gates was the trial’s most prominent witness, and he is a scoundrel. Indeed, the only fraud that has been proved so far is Gates’s prodigious embezzlement from Manafort — during the time prosecutors allege that they were both cheating the government. According to the defense, embezzlement just scratches the surface of Gates’s loathsomeness, which also includes extramarital flings and other betrayals. Gates, then, is the star witness, according to Richard Westling, the lawyer who summed up on Manafort’s behalf. If the jury sees him as a fallen star, he just might take the prosecution’s case down with him.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Trump and Media Group-Think By Carl M. Cannon

By on August 16th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/08/16/trump_and_media_group-think.html

oday is the day that some 300 U.S. newspapers heeded the Boston Globe’s call for an organized demonstration against President Trump. The protest consists of editorials and columns denouncing the president for his frequent characterizations that the “fake media” is the “enemy of the American people.”

The problems with this scheme — one is tempted to use the word “collusion” — are so manifest it’s almost too easy to point them out. The most obvious is that it plays directly into the president’s hands, making the press look overtly partisan, while underscoring Trump’s basic point, which is that the media hates him so much we don’t follow our normal rules of behavior. When is the last time the Fourth Estate ran what amounts to a coordinated campaign?

A second concern is what we might call the Calvin Coolidge problem. When informed in 1933 that the famously taciturn former president had died, famed wit Dorothy Parker quipped, “How can they tell?” My point is that if 300 newspaper opinion writers decide to kick Donald Trump in the fanny, how are their readers expected to distinguish this day from any other?

My own objection to this organized effort can be found in the words to a Bruce Springsteen song, and a Howard Fast vignette from 70 summers ago, at a 1948 political convention in Philadelphia.

Many journalists of my generation venerate Bruce Springsteen. We love his music, parse his lyrics while contemplating our lives, and, truth be told, identify with his progressive politics. As is the case with all great art, however, his best songs have a universal application to the human condition, and such messages don’t always fit neatly into the paradigms of partisan politics.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Bruce Ohr Could Implicate High-Ranking Obama Officials In Spygate Reporting on Bruce Ohr suggests DOJ and FBI employees operated outside the chain of command and concealed evidence from congressional oversight committees.By Margot Cleveland

By on August 16th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/15/bruce-ohr-implicate-high-ranking-obama-officials-spygate/

Investigative reporter John Solomon broke news last week of texts and emails between former associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr and Trump dossier author Christopher Steele regarding the Russia investigation, and revealed the content of notes Ohr took during a December meeting with Steele’s boss at Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson.

Solomon’s reporting confirmed the FBI used Ohr to continue gathering information from Steele, even after the former British spy was terminated as a source by the bureau because he leaked word of the investigation to the press. Ohr’s role as a conduit allowed the FBI to continue to use Steele as an indirect source, even after Trump was elected and inaugurated.

Ohr lost his high-ranking slot at the Department of Justice in December 2017, when the Trump administration learned of his connection to Steele, and with it his office just doors away from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. He briefly retained a high-ranking position as the director of Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, but was demoted a second time in January 2018. He still works for the DOJ, but no longer holds a top leadership position.

Rep. Devin Nunes, who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), said last week Ohr “is going to become more and more important” to the investigation into the DOJ’s use of Steele’s dossier on Trump to obtain permission to spy on his former campaign advisor, Carter Page. That’s the understatement of the year.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Social Justice’ Spreads over the University of Texas By George Leef

By on August 16th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/texas-university-social-justice/

If you think that universities are immunized against the “social justice” plague because they’re located in conservative states, well, think again. They’re not. Once “progressive” thinking administrators get their hands on the school — and very few people who climb the academic ladder are not progressive — the contagion is sure to get in.

In today’s Martin Center article, attorney Mark Pulliam gives us Exhibit A, the University of Texas. He writes,

The latest racket in higher education, evident at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, is the disturbing proliferation of ‘social justice’ as a degree program, a course topic, an academic emphasis, and even as a prerequisite in campus job descriptions.

Consider, for example , UT’s Social Justice Institute. Pulliam gives us the flavor of this institute’s contributions:

The Institute hosts monthly programs (the Social Justice Conversation Series) on selected readings related to social justice and diversity. Topics have included “ableism, sexism, religious oppression, ageism, adultism, heterosexism, transgender oppression, racism and classism.” For each session, cohort leaders “help the conversation flow from a social justice perspective.”

That’s isn’t education; it’s propaganda for statism.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Teacher’s Lament, Then and Now By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on August 16th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/a_teachers_lament_then_and_now.html

In his 1962 essay titled “A Dog in Brooklyn, a Girl in Detroit: A Life among the Humanities,” from The Age of Happy Problems, Herbert Gold recounts how “neither glory nor pleasure nor power, and certainly not wisdom, provided the goal of [the] students” he attempted to instruct.

Attempting to teach a college-level humanities course, Gold “could classify [his] students in three general groups, intelligent, mediocre, and stupid, allowing for the confusions of three general factors – background, capacity, and interest.”

Reminiscing about his attempt to motivate young people, Gold admits that he “often failed at inspiring [his] students to do the assigned reading. Many of them had part-time jobs in the automobile industry or its annexes.” Thus, the plaintive “I couldn’t read the book this week, I have to work” reverberated in the classroom with “its implied reproach for a scholar’s leisure.” Continuing to describe the paradoxes of teaching in a university, Gold finds little common ground between himself and his students.

When he attempted to explain Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte” and the “importance of … pointillism to students who only wanted to see life clear and true, see it comfortably,” he encountered students who asserted that “this kind of painting hurt [their] eyes.” In addition, students clamored that “there was too much reading for one course – ‘piling it on. This isn’t the only course we take.'”

Then, in the middle of his essay, Gold details how, in front of the school building, a skidding truck sideswiped a taxi, and the cab “was smashed like a cruller.” From the door of his cab, the driver emerged, stumbling holding his head. There was blood on his head and hands. He was in confusion and in shock – “[d]rivers turned their heads upon him … but did not get involved.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

In Islam, Jerusalem is not Mecca by A. Z. Mohamed

By on August 16th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12844/islam-jerusalem-mecca

When the time for the Muslim prayer came, Omar declined the invitation by Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, to pray inside the Church and instead prayed outside. Omar’s fear was that that Muslims who would come after him might establish a mosque in place of the church if he would pray at the site. Omar, then, was conscious of what belonged to the Muslims and what belonged to the Christians.

Naming the Jerusalem mosque Al-Aqsa was an attempt to say that the Dome of the Rock was the very spot from which Mohammed ascended to heaven, thus connecting Jerusalem to divine revelation in Islamic belief. The problem however, is that Mohammed died in the year 632, which was 73 years before the first construction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque was completed.

Intriguingly, only when non-Muslims are in control of Jerusalem do Muslims seem to remember the city. Otherwise, as history shows, Muslims have never attached real significance to it. They never claimed Jerusalem as the capital of any country or empire. In fact, Muhammad instructed his people not to pray toward Jerusalem, as they had done previously, but to Mecca:

“And We did not make the qiblah which you used to face except that We might make evident who would follow the Messenger from who would turn back on his heels. And indeed, it is difficult except for those whom Allah has guided. And never would Allah have caused you to lose your faith.” — Quran 2:143, Sahih International.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France: The Rise and Fall of Emmanuel Macron by Guy Millière

By on August 16th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12850/emmanuel-macron-rise-fall

France’s Justice Department is not independent of the government; no judge will seek to know more about Macron’s scandal. No thorough and deep investigation will take place. The French media are largely subsidized by the government and no more independent of the government than the Justice Department is.

Even the French media that are not funded by the state self-censor what they report, because they are supported by businesses that depend on government contracts. No French journalist will try to discover a thing.

The economist Charles Gave recently used statistical data to demonstrate that if nothing changes, the non-Muslim population of France could be a minority in 40 years. He added: “What happened to Spain or Asia Minor in the 10th and 11th centuries will happen to Europe in the 21st century, that is a certainty.”

When Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France in May 2017, he was portrayed as a reformer who was going to change everything in France and beyond.

Fourteen months later, illusions are gone. The reforms carried out have been essentially cosmetic and failed to slow France’s sclerotic decline. Economic growth is close to zero: 0.2 per cent in the second quarter of 2018. Unemployment, at around 8.9%, remains high. French public spending as a percent of GDP is, at 56.4%, still the highest in Europe. The country is still frequently paralyzed by public transportation strikes. No-go zones continue to spread, and Macron himself recently admitted his helplessness by asking for a “general mobilization” of the population. Riots are frequent; large-scale public events lead to looting and arson. The night after the French team’s victory at the soccer World Cup, hundreds of thugs mingling with the crowds broke windows, vandalized banks and ATMs, destroyed street signs and torched cars.

As most economic activity in France stops in July and August, Macron might have thought he could enjoy a summer break. He could not.

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