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August 2022

The faulty towers of higher education The college system is broken — can it be fixed?

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/faulty-towers-education-will-bunch/

One of the few issues about which the American left and right agree is that higher education is, as Orwell would say, in a bad way. But even in that source of agreement lurk countless points of dispute, regarding the sources of dysfunction (corporate greed, grade inflation, libezoomers?) and possible solutions (ending tenure, forgiving debt, creating safe spaces?).

In After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — and How to Fix It, Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, argues that the cause of the higher-education crisis is conceptual: we see higher education as a personal privilege rather than a public good, something to be earned rather than a right that is owed. Bunch sees a straight line connecting the increase in college tuition and student debt to America’s growing social, cultural and political divisions.

To make his case, Bunch interviews people from various demographics (almost all from his home state of Pennsylvania) as illustrations of the different ways higher education — or its lack — affects everyday Americans. He also provides a history of American higher education from the end of World War Two to the present day. This history begins with the idealism of the G.I. Bill and President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education in the 1940s, both of which expressed optimism about the role of college in strengthening American democracy. But in the 1960s, students realized the flaws in this democracy — the ways that America fell short of its ideals — and pro- tested accordingly.

Europe’s Twilight: Christianity Declines, Islam Rises by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18786/europe-christianity-islam

Comparing only the weekly frequency of Friday prayers in the mosque and Sunday Mass in the church, the future is clear: 65% of practicing Catholics are over 50 years old. By contrast, 73% of practicing Muslims are under the age of 50.

In an essay on L’Incorrect Frédéric Saint Clair, political scientist and analyst, explains that “the milestone of 10,000 mosques, at the current rate, will be reached around 2100”. Will we have 10,000 full mosques and 10,000 practically empty churches?

“[A] mosque is erected every fortnight in France, while a Christian building is being destroyed at the same rate.” — Edouard de Lamaze, president of the Observatory of Religious Heritage in Paris; Catholic News Agency, May 4, 2021.

“During my first trips to the Middle East, in the early 1980s, I did not see veiled women and gradually the veil spread everywhere. It is the sign of the re-Islamization of Muslim societies and, in this sense, it takes on a political and geopolitical dimension. It is part of a conquest strategy. France is in a state of self-dhimmitude…. a legal and political status applicable to non-Muslim citizens in a state governed by Islam according to a prescription of the Koran (9:29). [Dhimmis] do not enjoy equal citizenship with the ‘true believers,’ who are Muslims.” — Annie Laurent, essayist and scholar author of several books on Islam, Boulevard Voltaire, May 19, 2022.

“…France, due to a colonial complex and a sense of guilt, anticipates a legal and political situation that is not (yet) imposed on it but which could be a day in which Islam it will be a majority and therefore able to govern our country…. [T]he situation is really worrying. Before it becomes dramatic, it is urgent to put an end to the concessions we are multiplying to Islamism by hiding behind our values. Because by doing so we erase our own civilization”. — Annie Laurent, Boulevard Voltaire, May 19, 2022.

Christianity in Germany “seems stable, but in reality it is on the verge of collapse. Pastors and bishops, but also many actively involved lay people, see landscapes in bloom where in reality there is nothing but the desert “. — Markus Günther, essayist, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 29, 2014.

“Muslims, the winners of demographic change,” headlined Die Welt. “US researchers predict that for the first time in history there will be more Muslims than Christians. Societies change. Even Germany’s”.

In Trier, Germany, where Karl Marx was born, the diocese announced an unprecedented cut in the number of parishes which, in the next few years, will be reduced from 900 to 35.

L’Echo, the main Belgian economic newspaper, says: “Brussels was at the forefront of secularization before confronting an active Muslim minority. The first religion in Brussels today is Islam”…. Belgian anthropologist Olivier Servais confirmed a Muslim presence in Brussels at 33.5 percent, predicting a majority in 2030.

French writer André Malraux said it: “A civilization is everything that gathers around a religion”. And when one religion declines, another takes its place.

Sarcelles, Saint-Denis, Mulhouse, Nantes, Chambéry, Strasbourg, La Rochelle… The impressive images of stadiums full of Muslim faithful, who arrived from all over France for the feast of Eid Al Kabir, seventy days after the end of Ramadan. In Saint-Denis, the city where the kings of France rest; in Nantes, the city of the Dukes of Brittany; in Strasbourg, the city of the cathedral and seat of the European Parliament, in Mulhouse, in the heart of Alsace.

Retired FBI boss disassembles Trump search warrant: Feds ‘going to regret this’ Retired Assistant Director Kevin Brock says FBI didn’t exhaust other means or appear to have established probable cause for search.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/fbis-former-intel-chief-raid-trump-home-i-think-they-are-going

The FBI’s former intelligence chief declared Friday the agency should not have criminalized the records dispute between Donald Trump and the National Archives and that the bureau appears to have failed to meet the probable cause standard for the invasive search of the former president’s Florida estate.

“I think they’re going to regret this,” retired Assistant Director Kevin Brock told the “Just the News, Not Noise” television show after reviewing a heavily redacted affidavit the FBI used to persuade a judge to allow the Aug. 8 search at Mar-a-Lago.

Brock, ordinarily an ardent defender of his former agency, has raised concerns for several days that the bureau did not exhaust other means to resolve the dispute over presidential and alleged classified records Trump kept. He said he did not believe the FBI adequately considered the possibility that Trump had wide latitude to declassify records and declare them personal.

He said Friday his concerns were only heightened by the court-ordered release of the search warrant affidavit, which he noted was still heavily redacted.

“I will caveat all of this by saying we can only see what we can see, but the first thing that jumped out to me is that the probable cause statement focuses on the nature of the documents, and where they are,” said Brock, a respected three-decade agent who rose to become the bureau’s first intelligence chief under Director Robert Mueller. “But it doesn’t, at least in the unredacted portion, address the main element of the criminal federal statutes that they cite.

The Success Sequence — An Alternative To Radical School Indoctrination Steven Mosley

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/26/the-success-sequence-an-alternative-to-radical-school-indoctrination/

Do you know what’s being taught in the sex education program at your child’s school? It’s unlikely that it’s “The Success Sequence.” And that’s unfortunate – because it should be.

In 2019, I ran for school board in Fairfax County, Virginia – one of the nation’s most infamous battlegrounds when it comes to woke public education. I ran on a platform of school choice, listening to parents and reforming the school’s sex ed program to align with community values. Key to my platform was promoting The Success Sequence.

I like to call the Success Sequence the greatest poverty-breaking tool known to man. Unlike most government programs that might cost thousands – if not millions – of dollars per school district to implement with sketchy results, the Success Sequence costs nothing but perseverance and self-discipline.

It teaches that the best way to move up from poverty to the middle class and beyond is to do the following things in sequential order:

Graduate from high school.
Get a full-time job. 
Get married before having kids.

According to an American Enterprise Institute study, “97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the ‘success sequence’ are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years.” This is in comparison to over half of the poor young adults who were found to have not followed the sequence. And it is abundantly clear that not following The Success Sequence is even more disastrous for those in poor or black and Hispanic communities.

Federal Court Blocks Biden Admin from Forcing Doctors to Perform Gender Transitions By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/federal-court-blocks-biden-admin-from-forcing-doctors-to-perform-gender-transitions/

A federal appeals court blocked a Biden administration plan Friday that would coerce doctors to perform gender-transition medical procedures and abortions that violate their conscience or medical judgment.

The plaintiffs, a religious hospital and group of over 20,000 health-care professionals, launched the lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services in August 2016 after the federal government mandated that most health-care providers perform and provide insurance coverage for such procedures.

The district court had determined that HHS could not interpret or enforce Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits health-care programs that receive federal funds from discriminating against patients on the basis of sex, to compel Franciscan Alliance to insure gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions, according to the court filing. In May 2016, HHS expanded Section 1557’s definition of sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of “termination of pregnancy” and “gender identity.” Secretary of HHS Xavier Becerra appealed the district court’s ruling.

While Becerra’s appeal was pending, the Biden administration issued a “Notice and Guidance on Gender Affirming Care,” doubling down on its reasoning, which Judge Don Willett found on Friday to be flawed, that Obamacare mandates that hospitals perform gender-reassignment surgeries and abortions.

On Friday, circuit judges Jennifer Walker Elrod, Willett, and Kurt Engelhardt affirmed the decision of the district court that granted Franciscan Alliance a permanent injunction, barring the HHS from forcing it to provide gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions against its religious beliefs.

Earlier this month, Luke Goodrich, attorney with the Becket Fund who has been working on the case since the Obama-era rule was first issued, said in a call with reporters that if the plaintiffs had lost, the Biden administration would have declared “open season” on religious hospitals that object to gender transitions.

Drain the Academic Swamp If conservatives actually want to win the culture war, we must stop diagnosing our fallen republic’s ills by symptoms alone. We must address root causes. By Michael Robillard and Timothy Gordon

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/27/drain-the-academic-swamp/

Recently, a number of medical schools have joined the anti-European, anti-Christian, pro-Marxist woke bandwagon. According to physicist Lawrence Krauss, “the American Association of Medical Colleges has approved a Diversity-Equity-Inclusion based curriculum, which the AAMC Council of Deans Chair says is as important as teaching the latest scientific breakthroughs.”

Meanwhile, our military leadership continues to push incoherent gender ideology upon a captive audience of young soldiers, sailors, and airmen.And justices at the heights of our judiciary system, because of political correctness, dare not even define the word woman.

In response to these instances and instances like them within the present culture war, conservatives have offered much-needed criticism within the domains of news media, entertainment, government, and law. While these battles are necessary, of course, they have been largely impotent against the omnipresent spread of leftist ideas. This is so because conservatives consistently miss the mark when it comes acknowledging the true root cause of such radicalism: the ivory tower.

For some time now, American patriots have committed the grave mistake of overlooking the extreme aggregated impact of subversive, far-Left academics; individual rogue neurons in the cultural nerve center who have produced so much suffering in our body politic. The hypothetical, one-sided thought-experiments and hot-air pseudo-philosophies cooked up at run-of-the-mill liberal arts colleges across the nation have achieved the desired effect on all the cultural institutions downstream from the academy: complete destabilization and disintegration. From law and medicine to religion, government, media, and even to language itself (ze? zir?), the bottom has fallen out and the center cannot hold.

Conservatives can no longer afford to shrug off academy-bred, society-wide intellectual sepsis, as if what happens in academia stays in academia. It’s not true; the effete eccentrics and dangerous, sandal-clad subversives at the fringes of the sociology and lit crit departments have exercised maximum influence over our shared institutions and overall culture, and all for the negative. Conservative nonchalance in the face of intellectually weaponized neuropathy has now come home to roost.

Tehran Debates the Bomb by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18840/tehran-debates-the-bomb

Interestingly, none of the problems that nation-states might have with one another, problems such as border disputes, competition for sources of raw materials and markets, water-sharing disputes, irredentism, maltreatment of kith-and-kin, and bitter historic memories, exist between Iran and Israel.

No Iranian leader, even under the present regime, could rationally explain why Israel should be regarded as Iran’s enemy.

The danger is that the mullahs might regard the bomb as a status symbol, using Biden’s weakness as an opportunity to humiliate the “Great Satan.”

After more than three decades, a debate that started during the Iran-Iraq war seems to be making a comeback in Tehran: Should the Islamic Republic take the final steps towards building a nuclear arsenal?

The original debate that took place behind the scenes was prompted by the revelation that, with French help, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had been trying to build a nuclear capacity around Osirak, a nuclear power station and research center which was wiped out in a surprise attack by the Israeli Air Force.

Biden’s Debt Transference and Enforcement Arm Work hard. Save your money. Pay your debts. Then get saddled with someone else’s debts because you didn’t have the foresight to be improvident at the opportune moment.  By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/27/bidens-debt-transference-and-enforcement-arm/

I have two subjects for you today: debt “forgiveness” and, once again, the raid on Mar-a-Lago by Biden’s secret police.

Let’s do the student debt wheeze first. “Forgiveness” without absolution: I think that just about sums up the Biden Administration’s latest publicity gambit, videlicet, the offer to “forgive” from $10,000 to $20,000 of the debt students have contracted. Note the scare quotes around “forgive.”

It is pointless to go into the details of the program because nobody knows what the details are. Tens of millions of Americans (whoever they are in Biden’s America) are apparently eligible. You are supposed to make less than $125,000 a year to be eligible, but who’s checking? The government agency handling the program, studentaid.gov, has been inundated with inquiries, since the announcement of “free stuff!,” as usual, has acted like a handful of fresh meat tossed into a pool of piranhas. How much will it cost? Who knows?

“The White House doesn’t know exactly how many eligible borrowers will actually end up applying for loan forgiveness,” one news source reported, “or how much it will cost.” According to a study from the Wharton School, however, the total tab might exceed $1 trillion. That is 1,000,000,000,000. It’s important to appreciate the number of zeros involved. 

I am not sure the Biden Administration has admitted yet whether the economy is in recession, but it is. And it is certainly suffering from inflation—or “Bidenflation” as some wags denominate it—the worst, we’re told, in 40 years. Gas prices have moderated a bit from their highs in May and early June, but they are still more than twice what they were when Biden took office, i.e., when Donald Trump was president, and everyone thinks prices will climb again this winter. 

So, prices are rising, your money is worth less, and, oh, by the way, you have less of it. On Friday, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average lost just over 1,000 points, wiping out billions in value. And if the “Prosperity Reduction Act” (the real name of the inflationary “Inflation Reduction Act”) weren’t enough of a blow—raising taxes and weaponizing the tax farmers of the IRS—Biden has delivered another sharp jab to the solar plexus of the American taxpayer with his hare-brained student loan “forgiveness” scheme. 

True, from time immemorial, the promise of debt forgiveness has been a powerful political gesture. But as has often been pointed out since the student loan subsidy was announced, Biden’s program is not really debt forgiveness. Rather, it is debt transference. That is, the debt doesn’t go away. It is just dropped in someone else’s lap. And that someone, Dear Reader, is you. 

Translating ‘fascism’ from leftist-speak into the real world By D. Parker

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/translating_fascism_from_leftistspeak_into_the_real_world.html

With “President” Biden dropping yet another version of the political “F-bomb,” it’s time to break everything down to basic terminology and clarify the issue for everyone.

Was anyone surprised that the august head of the party of projection said the MAGA movement is “like semi-fascism”?  It was even more amusing when his media flack on CNN’s Don Lemon Tonight was unable to explain just what he meant by that pejorative. That is par for the course when they engage in the practice of accusing others of what they are doing.

Breaking things down into their constituent parts is the only way to figure out what is going on with certain issues. We’ve already proven, along with a number of others, that the anti-liberty left is fascist.  We’ve found that’s becoming easier than Biden falling off his bicycle.  As they become more fascistic by the day, the stark comparisons between regimes of the past and what they are doing now are stacking up like cordwood.

Since this is such a common practice on their part, we’re going to provide an explanation of the two sides based on the fundamental principles that will be Kryptonite to those making the usual nonsensical accusations that depend on complexity that simply doesn’t exist.

The hard truth is there are just two primary political ideologies: individualism and collectivism

Biden couldn’t be bothered to talk to Israel’s prime minister By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/biden_couldnt_be_bothered_to_talk_to_israels_prime_minister.html

Because he was “on vacation.” And yes, that’s the excuse his people gave

According to reports in Israeli media, Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid’s urgent request to hold an emergency telephone conversation with U.S. President Joe Biden to discuss the looming nuclear deal with Iran was rebuffed — with the excuse that the American president was “on vacation.”

According to Israel’s Channel 13, Lapid sought to speak with Biden in an attempt to prevent a return to the 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) nuclear pact, but U.S. officials denied the request, simply informing Lapid that Biden “is on vacation.”  End of story, I guess.  But this makes it difficult for the poor souls who, for whatever reason, need to speak to the current American commander-in-chief, as Biden is almost always “on vacation.”

Is this the right way to treat arguably your closest ally and the only representative democracy in the Middle East?  This administration has a history of feting our enemies and non-citizens while screwing over our allies and natural citizens.  Weird…and one would think counterintuitive to anyone hoping to remain in office.

I wonder how the White House phone message tree is set up now, what messages and prompts various incoming calls receive.  Perhaps:

*”Press 1 if you’d like to speak to ‘The Big Guy.'”  BEEP.  “Sorry, the president is on vacation.  Good-bye.

*”Press 2 if your nation is about to be attacked by Russia or Iran.”  BEEP.  “We’re sorry, but President Biden is away from his desk right now.  He may be back in a week or two.  Please press the pound sign to leave a message.”

*”Press 3 if you are inquiring about Hunter.”  BEEP.  “He’s the smartest guy we know, so go take a long walk off a short pier, loser.”