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November 2018

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Those Hoax Papers Tell Us A Lot about Declining Academic Standards By George Leef

By on November 28th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/those-hoax-papers-tell-us-a-lot-about-declining-academic-standards/

Back in 1996, Professor Alan Sokol pulled off a dazzling stunt in getting an academic journal to publish a paper he’d written that was pure baloney. (He argued that gravity was merely a “social construct” but by using trendy academic jargon, the editors fell for it.) His point was that some journals will publish anything so long as it sounds right to leftist ears.

This summer, a trio of academics bettered Sokol by getting a whole batch of nonsense papers accepted. In today’s Martin Center article, historian Phil Magness explains why he thinks this is important — it speaks volumes about the decline of academic standards.

Magness writes:

While identity politics have dominated the fallout discussions, the real lesson of the hoax is what it revealed about the crisis of rigor afflicting academic publishing. The fabricated articles only advanced to publication because decades of lax standards have made academically fashionable nonsense—including other forms of fraudulent work—the norm for celebrated scholarship in several of the humanities and social sciences.

Supposedly reputable academic journals published the silly hoax papers, but they have also published serious ones that are just as nonsensical, such as a paper that was nothing more than a juvenile, expletive-laden tirade against neoliberalism.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tax Cut Working Better Than Advertised The latest GDP estimate shows higher business investment.

By on November 28th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tax-cut-working-better-than-advertised-1543446448

Despite concerns over trade disputes and a slowing global economy, the corporate tax rate cut enacted in December of 2017 continues to encourage the business investment that leads to higher productivity and higher wages for American workers. Today the government reported that such investment was higher than it initially reported for the third quarter of the year.

Last month your humble correspondent noted:

The country has lately been so prosperous that we’ve had the luxury of being disappointed in some of the underlying data in Friday’s report of robust 3.5% economic growth for the third quarter. This column was as disappointed as anyone that business investment didn’t show another sharp increase after the stellar numbers posted in previous quarters.

But the overall growth reported by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis was strong. And former Bush economist Larry Lindsey’s consulting firm Lindsey Group argues in a recent note to clients that it’s bound to look even stronger as the data becomes more refined…

In that note Mr. Lindsay told his clients that it “seems quite reasonable that there will be an upward revision in equipment investment (and possibly other investment as well) in the post-election report for the third quarter.”

This column observed “it is extremely reasonable to assume that America’s new competitive corporate tax system will continue to attract investment to the United States.”

That assumption looks even better today, now that the Commerce Department has reported that non-residential fixed investment rose 2.5% at an annual rate in the three months ending in September, up from 0.8% in the earlier estimate. Within this overall category of business investment, spending on equipment was revised to estimated growth of 3.5%, up sharply from an earlier 0.4% estimate.

As for the overall economy, it is on track to hit the White House target of 3% growth for the year. And Mr. Lindsey sees more of the same on the horizon, telling this column via email, “My guess is high twos for fourth quarter and an average of 3 for 2019.”

Get ready for more speeches featuring America’s 44th President asserting ownership of the growth breakout that never managed to arrive during his eight years in the White House. Today Jack Crowe at National Review writes:

Former President Barack Obama claimed credit Tuesday for the recent boom in U.S. oil production immediately after praising the Paris Climate Accords, which committed the U.S. to dramatically reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

“I was extraordinarily proud of the Paris accords because — you know, I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy, and by the way, American energy production,” Obama told the audience gathered at Rice University’s Baker Institute on Tuesday night. “You wouldn’t always know it but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas — that was me, people.”

While U.S. oil production surged by nearly 100 percent over the course of Obama’s two-term presidency, the vast majority of that oil was extracted from state and private lands as the Obama administration took steps to curtail oil production on federal lands.

This column thinks that America’s prosperity revival has room to run, but prudent investors should always be on the lookout for the end of the Trump bump. We’ll know it’s really over when the former President stops pretending it’s his economy. CONTINUE AT SITE

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EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Education and Anti-Semitism Too many young Europeans know little about their brutal past.

By on November 28th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/education-and-anti-semitism-1543450010?mod=article_inline

Americans rightly complain that their public schools teach too little history, and two new surveys in Europe show the results of such failures.

A poll by ComRes for CNN finds that awareness of the Holocaust is starting to fade among younger Europeans. While only about 4% of respondents overall reported they had never heard of the Holocaust, the figure is 20% of French aged 18-34. And 30% of all respondents said they know “only a little” about this defining event in recent European history.

Ugly stereotypes about Jews also persist. Some 20% of respondents believe Jews exercise too much influence over global media and politics, and nearly 30% believe Jews exercise too much influence over global finance.

Some 35% of respondents strongly or tend to agree that “Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its actions.” This false equivalence between Nazis and Israel is a trope on the left, where anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism elide. As Britain’s Labour Party has shown under Jeremy Corbyn, these attitudes encourage abuse of Jews and politicians who support Israel.

A separate survey of Jewish community leaders by the Joint Distribution Committee’s International Centre for Community Development shows where such attitudes lead. The proportion of leaders who expect anti-Semitism to increase has grown to 66% this year from 54% a decade ago. The percentage who feel “very safe” as Jews in their city fell to 20% from 36%, while the proportion who feel “rather unsafe” has risen to 13% from 6%.

This survey found that Jews now feel safer in countries of the former Soviet bloc than in Western Europe. One explanation may be immigration, since Western Europe has accepted and then failed to assimilate large numbers of Muslim migrants while Eastern Europe has not. Radical Islamists are responsible for most recent high-profile attacks against Jews in Europe, and CNN found that 15% of Muslims in Europe had never heard of the Holocaust.

Civilizations that fail to teach the lessons of their own brutal history to the young are, well, you know.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Baroness Trumpington Former Bletchley Park cipher clerk who became a much-loved institution in the House of Lords

By on November 28th, 2018

https://digitaledition.telegraph.co.uk/editions/edition_YJ2uq_2018-11-28/data/580436/index.html?share=1&
Thanks to e-pal Fred M……An obituary of a Great Dame of the British realm…..rsk

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON, who has died aged 96, was a former mayor of Cambridge and became the oldest and second longest-serving member of John Major’s administration; she was also by far the most popular.

Built to last, forthright and formidable, Jean Trumpington made up for any lack of intellectual brilliance with a capacity for hard work combined with down-to-earth common sense and an engaging habit of telling jokes against herself.

First recruited into Government ranks in 1983 as a Lords whip, her first job was to act as “keeper of the gate” by placing her imposing form next to the most popular exit to persuade errant Conservative peers to vote. But in fact she became far more effective in this role as a government minister; the prospect of a vintage performance by Jean Trumpington was usually enough to pack the chamber.

In 1987, as a minister at the Department of Health and Social Security, in answer to a question about whether Aids could be transmitted by insects, she replied: “I have replies to questions on bed bugs and monkeys, but I regret that I do not have fleas.”

In 1992, as an agriculture minister, she gave an answer to a question in which she referred to “the Commission’s proposals for reforming the CAP would replace existing support arrangements by a system of compensatory aid, linked directly or indirectly to the cultivated area or the number of animals kept by each farmer,” ending with: “And if you understand that, you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.”

In October 1993, shortly after her appointment as a spokesman at the Department of National Heritage, she confessed to finding it difficult to master her brief and during one flustering question session she admitted: “I had been worried I might get my knickers in a twist,” she admitted.

The following year, wearing a stout woollen suit that evoked her career in naval intelligence, she struck an incongruous figure as the department’s representative at rock music awards: “I am here to collect autographs for my secretary,” she announced. “Is Elton John here?”

“I seem fated,” she protested unconvincingly. “When I’m trying very hard to be dignified, something always goes hideously wrong.”

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BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

EXPOSING ITALIAN CRIMES Simon Levis Sullam reveals how Italian citizens were actively complicit in the extermination of Jews – and got away with it. By Janet Levy

By on November 28th, 2018

https://www.jpost.com/

Contrary to the prevalent view that Italians were primarily among the so-called “righteous gentiles” who saved Jews during the Holocaust, Italy played a significant role in the genocide of its Jewish citizens. Italians advanced blood libels, instituted persecutory racial laws, and later actively participated in the arrest and deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. In The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews in Italy, modern history professor Simon Levis Sullam explodes the myth of the “good Italians” promulgated after the war and exposes, for the first time, the cover-up of Italian responsibility.

As early as 1938, under the centralized authority of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), Italy introduced racial laws for its Jewish citizens that limited their economic activities, demonized them as inferior and enemies of the country, and persecuted them in employment, education and property ownership. The Ministry of Popular Culture set up local centers to study the Jewish problem and crank out antisemitic propaganda for the media. A telling sentiment expressed on Radio Roma was the hope that “the Jews be burnt, one by one, and their ashes scattered in the wind.” All of this ultimately paved the way for Jewish annihilation.
Five years before any roundups began, Levis Sullam reveals, the Italian government conducted a complete census of the Jewish population and established an efficient bureaucracy to surveil and persecute this “disease of humanity.”

False and dehumanizing accusations about Jews, many promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church, were rampant.

Jews were viewed as deserving of segregation and persecution based on race alone. Officers in the Fascist National Republican Guard under Mussolini were well briefed in spiritual and biological racism theories.

From 1943 to 1945, a network of collaborators – police, militia members, customs officials and more – hunted Jews in their homes. They arrested, imprisoned and handed Jews over to the Germans for deportation to death camps. Jewish property and belongings were ransacked and stolen, often with impunity. Audaciously, Jewish victims of theft were charged an administrative fee for this confiscation of their assets, the book recounts.

To illustrate the depth of action undertaken by the complicit Italian population, the author describes the actions and involvement of three prominent community members. He shows how the sentiments of these people of note were representative of the general populace, helped create widespread hatred of Jews in the period leading to World War II and helped facilitate genocide.
Giovanni Preziosi, an RSI legislator, spearheaded the General Inspectorate of Race. He was responsible for identifying “racial status,” studying “racial questions,” disseminating antisemitic propaganda and devising solutions to the Jewish problem with full knowledge of the “final solution” adopted by the Germans. He was a willing and enthusiastic party to the joint Italian-German undertaking to perpetrate genocide. He was responsible for supervising the confiscation of Jewish property and infusing the educational system with antisemitic propaganda.

Giovanni Martelloni, a writer on the “Jewish question” and head of the Office of Jewish Affairs in Florence, joined the Inspectorate of Race in 1944 and carried out arrests and confiscations. An antisemitic writer who defined a “Jewish problem” that had plagued the world for 2,000 years, he was put in charge of coordinating anti-Jewish activities in Florence.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pretender pulls ahead in crucial hustings to decide Angela Merkel’s successor Jorg Luyken,

By on November 28th, 2018

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/28/pretender-pulls-ahead-crucial-hustings-decide-angela-merkels/

The pretender came out fighting on Wednesday night at the most important hustings in the race to succeed Angela Merkel. Friedrich Merz, an old rival of the German chancellor, is vying to make a remarkable comeback by replacing her as leader of her Christian Democrat party (CDU).

And he didn’t hesitate to attack her record as leader, claiming she has abandoned the party’s conservative profile.

“You don’t need to copy every single Social Democrat policy, that just doesn’t have to happen,” he said, referring to the Germany’s main centre-Left party.

By the time Mr Merz had finished a speech in which he appealed for more funding for the Germany military, several audience members leapt up in a standing ovation.

Wednesday’s hustings in Düsseldorf was make-or-break for Mr Merz, who retired from politics in 2009 after losing to Mrs Merkel in a battle for control of the party.

He is locked in a three-way race to take over as CDU leader when Mrs Merkel stands down next month and, if polling is to be believed, he is neck-and-neck with Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the current party chairman and a Merkel loyalist.

The third candidate, Jens Spahn, is lagging far behind.

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The Bafflegab of the West’s ‘Dhimmi Wits’ Peter Smith

By on November 28th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-bafflegab-of-the-wests-dhimmi-wits/

The West is almost completely saturated with “Dhimmi Wits.” This term is self-explanatory, I think. Unfortunately, I can’t claim authorship. I need to confess to flagrantly purloining it from the brilliant Religion of Peace website. It is too good and apt to be confined. Incidentally, do visit the site. Among heaps of information and statistics about the religion of supremacism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, discord, hate and war it contains this gem:

Finally, please don’t send us a death threat unless you’re serious about carrying it out. The editor is tired of hearing from wimps who are all talk. In the event that you do want to submit a death threat, we have a special form for that.

The Australian gave more space last week to someone who seems to be on the right side of the argument yet inevitably fails at the final hurdle and joins the inglorious order of Dhimmi Wits. This time it was Jason Thomas who teaches risk management at the Swinburne University of Technology. His emphasis was on dealing with violent terrorism. Fair enough. And I thought at one point that he’d got it. Listen to this:

The only way this [terrorism] can occur is for a web of supporters and sympathisers to continue to believe that the non-violent dimension of Islam is compatible with Western democratic values. It is not. As T E Lawrence said: “Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active force and 98 per cent passively sympathetic.”

Then we get to his remedy and everything falls apart in a blither of jargon. I will spare you the full account and summarise. Basically, we have to conduct Einstein-like thought experiments on what the borderless Islamic threat looks like and to employ “asymmetric tactics…to deeply penetrate and destroy the movement from within.” Hardly believable? That’s exactly right. Academic bafflegab at its most iconic.

Terror comes out of Islamism, but Islamism is a product of Islam. Islam has 1.8 billion Muslim adherents and rising. Penetrate that if you can. Sure, you can cut one head off but given time it will grow again and, in the meantime, there are plenty more. Hydra doesn’t do it justice and, when I look around, I can’t see Hercules in the wings.

Consider all the hype that surrounded ISIS, as though it defined the problem. Get rid of ISIS, vintage 2013, and all will be well. Never mind the fourteen uninterrupted centuries of Islamic conquests, incursions and terrorism that went before. But you must see the trick.

The Dhimmi Wits, making up almost all of the political and media class, liked to focus exclusively on ISIS. That way they attempted to blinker you and me from focusing on the religion of 1.8 billion, which will forever continue to seed mayhem. Find a Muslim majority society which has internal harmony and prosperity and which doesn’t trouble its neighbours. Hard, isn’t it?

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Bongino’s Spygate: Exposing the Obama/Clinton Deep State Criminality By Frank Hawkins

By on November 28th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/bonginos_emspygateem_exposing_the_obamaclinton_deep_state_criminality.html

Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino’s explosive new book (with D.C. McAllister), Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump, spotlights the left’s broken trust with the American people and the blatant criminality of the Obama/Clinton Deep State. Since the moment Donald J. Trump and his wife Melania glided down the Trump Tower escalator into history, the Democrats and the allies in the Deep State have been committed to crushing him.

For Trump, it was obvious that draining the swamp was never going to be easy because everything possible would be done to disguise and protect the illegal activities of the Obama/Clinton administration. But who thought they would go this far?

Bongino has painted a highly detailed account of how the Obama administration criminalized our intelligence communities as well as other government agencies to stop Trump, and when that didn’t work to try and bring down the president of the United States.

The book relies heavily on left-leaning news outlets CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters, CBS News, The Hill, London-based The Guardian and numerous others. All of this is carefully footnoted in the book. In a recent speech, Bongino said,

“The reason I wrote the book, is because of this whole spy scandal, this debacle, this atrocious disgrace of a scandal that happened to our president. We deliberately did not use footnotes from right-leaning resources. I used (the mainstream media) because anyone who tells you oh, this didn’t happen, just go to the footnotes and say, did you read this article? It happened, folks. The President of the United States had the intelligence community and the law enforcement community of the United States, at the highest levels, weaponized against him.” [emphasis added]

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Hillary Clinton: Conservatives Were Right on Mass Migration Progressives melt down after the Democratic doyenne denounces open borders here and in Europe. By James P. Pinkerton

By on November 28th, 2018

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/hillary-clinton-conservatives-were-right-on-mass-migration/?utm_source=ntnlreview&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=amconswap

Amidst the hurly-burly of politics these days, it can be hard to notice when your side has won a victory. Yet that’s what’s just happened for conservatives on immigration: they’ve won. Okay, it’s not a final victory, nor even a crushing victory, but, even so, it’s a win.

We know this because Hillary Clinton, arguably still the biggest name in Democratic politics, has just said that conservatives were right. She has conceded the essence of the rightist—and, by the way, centrist—critique of the open-borders approach to immigration.

On November 22, Clinton said in an interview with The Guardian, “I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame.” Continuing in that vein, she damned German Chancellor Angela Merkel with faint praise: “I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message—‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’—because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.” In other words, when Merkel opened the German border in 2015, she was being nice, but misguided. Of course, Clinton is no doubt aware that the global backlash against Merkelism was felt in America, too, contributing to her own defeat in 2016.

To be sure, Clinton is no convert to Trumpism. Indeed, lest anyone think she was, she also told The Guardian that the president has “a strong streak of racism…the whole package of bigotry.”

Yet of course, the fact that Clinton doesn’t like Trump is not news. What is news is that she has shifted her stance on immigration in a Trumpian direction—or, if one prefers, to the familiar rule-of-law position embraced even by the Bernie Sanders left until recently.

Yet the immediate reaction to Clinton’s words was cautious incredulity. As The New York Times put it later that day, “Mrs. Clinton’s remarks to The Guardian drew criticism and a dose of surprise from an array of scholars, immigration advocates and pundits on both the left and the right, some of whom were so perplexed by the comments that they wondered aloud whether Mrs. Clinton had perhaps misspoken.” After all, as the Times observed, “Mrs. Clinton, many said, has a long history of supporting refugees—a track record seemingly at odds with her recent remarks. Her immigration platform in the 2016 presidential election boasted that ‘we embrace immigrants, not denigrate them.’”

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The Ugly Departure of Max Boot By Jonah Goldberg

By on November 28th, 2018

Since Max Boot was reborn in the age of Trump, he’s decided that conservatism — pretty much all of it — was corrupt from the start.

Max Boot and I agree on quite a few things with regard to Donald Trump and even a couple of things about today’s GOP. So I understand — and empathize with — his account of how the rise of Trump could cause him to take a rigorous personal inventory and prompt him to embark on his “ideological journey.” But I find the spectacle of it quite ugly.

I have many problems with Max’s approach, but I will focus on two. First, he essentially admits — in his book and in interviews — that he didn’t do much firsthand analysis of conservatism and many conservative positions. The election of Donald Trump caused him to question the conservative movement he’d aligned himself with since he was a teenager, and:

Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. I disagree with progressives who argue that these disfigurations define the totality of conservatism; conservatives have also espoused high-minded principles that I still believe in, and the bigotry on the right appeared to be ameliorating in recent decades. But there has always been a dark underside to conservatism that I chose for most of my life to ignore. It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!

On most public controversies, he outsourced his convictions to those on the right he trusted or to conservative conventional wisdom and merely focused on his core issues. His adherence to a conservative party line was “a process of indoctrination — largely self-indoctrination, I should add — that took decades and that I am only now escaping.”

On one level, I don’t have a huge problem with Boot’s reliance on others. Every columnist, on both the right and the left, relies on experts, authorities, and colleagues they trust to do some of the heavy lifting for them. Whenever I write about guns, I always try to talk to someone like Charlie Cooke. When I write about North Korea, I make sure to talk to or read Nick Eberstadt. I don’t see this as “indoctrination” but education — and argumentation — because I will try to listen to the other side as well.

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