Displaying the most recent of 90901 posts written by

Ruth King

Dealing with the School Staff Shortage By Keri D. Ingraham

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/dealing_with_the_school_staff_shortage.html

K-12 public schools throughout the U.S. are facing staff shortages so severe that school days are being canceled. Seattle, Boulder, and Portland, Oregon are just a few examples of districts without adequate staff to maintain daily operations following Veteran’s Day. Claiming exhaustion, hundreds of teachers in these cities opted to take the day off in order to have a four-day weekend. Denver Public Schools’ situation is even more dire. The district moved to remote learning for three days in mid-November, canceled school on November 19 as a mental health day, and took a full week off for Thanksgiving.

The school staff shortages and well-being crisis of both teachers and students can be traced to the left-wing priorities and policies of the teacher unions and politicians who run these cities. Most egregious was the shuttering of schools closed for more than one calendar year, which kept teachers pinned behind screens and distanced from their students. It not only took the passion out of teaching for many teachers, but it also overwhelmed many educators whose limited technical skills were insufficient for the remote learning environment.

Fearmongering by teacher unions and Democrat political leaders also caused many employees distress regarding returning to school and triggered some to quit. Despite the harm they personally experienced and witnessed in their students, many teachers supported keeping schools closed due to an exaggerated fear of COVID and loyalty to their union and political leaders. Furthermore, despite seeing their students slip behind academically (especially those of minority ethnic groups and low-income families), they played puppet to political narratives that often clashed with the data and even common sense. The unwarranted duration of public-school closures during the 2020-2021 school year — which occurred even while private schools operated fully — was detrimental to students, despite the public rhetoric of Democrat leaders and teacher unions about how much they cared.

The Middle East Studies Association’s Shameful Betrayal of Academic Freedom An obsessive hatred of the Jewish state.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/mesas-shameful-betrayal-academic-freedom-richard-l-cravatts/

Unsurprisingly for an organization whose membership has been perennially hostile to Israel, members of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) voted at their recent annual meeting to advance a resolution endorsing an academic boycott of Israeli academics to a full membership vote in 2022.

The sententious language of the MESA boycott resolution, which ironically purports to protect academic freedom, asserts that there is evidence of “successive Israeli governments’ systematic violations of the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli direct or indirect control” and that these so-called “systemic violations include restricting freedom of movement for Palestinians; isolating, undermining, or otherwise attacking Palestinian educational institutions; harassing Palestinian professors, teachers, and students . . ; and maintaining inequality in educational resources between Palestinians and Israelis.”

But MESA’s notion that Israeli universities are “imbricated in these systematic violations” is flawed in at least two respects. It, first, exonerates academics in any country other than Israel for any misdeeds committed by their own governments, for which, by the same standard that the boycotters apply to Israel, they as concerned citizens and scholars should have to answer. The notion that Israeli academics should, or could, be held responsible for the actions of their own government was at best hypocritical, and at worst yet another example of how, where Israel is concerned, the standards applied in measuring its actions are impossibly high.

Secondly, making Israeli academics complicit in the actions of their government ignores the reality that, as is the case on European, Canadian, and American campuses, many Israeli professors veer to the Left politically and many, incredibly, share the same virulent anti-Israel, anti-Zionism sentiments so proudly touted by the boycott supporters.

In fact, MESA President Dina Rizk Khoury ludicrously claimed that the boycott would not only help Palestinian scholars whose rights are allegedly denied by Israel but would also help insulate anti-Israel Israeli academics, too, academics she contends face imaginary “attacks” from their peers within Israel. “Today’s vote clears a path for our full membership to collectively determine how we can do our part to support the academic freedom and education rights of Palestinian scholars and students,” Khoury proclaimed, “not to mention Israeli scholars facing attacks from their own government for criticizing its policies.”

How Obama Sabotaged the American Military Obama fundamentally transformed the military the way that he did the country. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/how-obama-sabotaged-american-military-daniel-greenfield/

By the time Barack Obama left office, every branch of the military was smaller than it had been on September 11. But the change in size concealed the true impact of America’s most left-wing president in undermining our national security and weakening us in the face of our enemies.

 “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” Obama famously boasted. He used the pen to unleash a blizzard of executive orders and memorandums. Some led to outraged protests, but some of his most devastating penned assaults on our nation’s military flew under the radar.

One of those took place during the end of his last year in office. His memorandum, “Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the National Security Workforce”, created the woke military of the Biden administration by putting identity politics, diversity quotas, and political indoctrination at the heart of the military’s mission.

Obama had always resented the military. Even former General McChrystal, an Obama loyalist fired for describing his boss a little too aptly in the presence of a Rolling Stone reporter, described him as “uncomfortable and intimidated” by generals. But Obama’s parting shot at the military cut the generals down to size by transforming them into community organizers.

His order redefined diversity as the military’s “greatest asset” and reinvented national security as a system for maximizing employment diversity by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and every identity politics metric, but not the military metrics that truly mattered, readiness, competence, and a willingness to wage war in defense of the homeland.

Along with transforming the military into another quota-based federal employment agency in which skills and capability mattered much less than being a disabled transgender Eskimo, the order also demanded that national security agencies should make “implicit or unconscious bias” training mandatory for “senior leadership and management positions”. Divisions that didn’t earn sufficiently high IQ (Inclusion Quotient) scores would also be hit with bias training.

Temple Emanu-El Silences a Pro-Israel and Amplifies an Anti-Israel Voice by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18009/dershowitz-temple-emanu-el

[T]his is exactly how McCarthyism worked back in the 1950s. The institutions that banned people accused of being communists did not necessarily believe the accusations or think that they justified the ban, but they feared being tainted even by false accusations. So, they went along with the ban, just to be safe.

When I was first falsely accused of having had sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre in Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, his island and other specified locations, I stated categorically that I have documentary records that conclusively prove I could not have been in those locations during the relevant time periods. I produced cell-phone records, American Express charges, travel documents, recorded TV appearances, teaching schedules, calendars, court appearances and other documents that persuaded Giuffre’s own lawyers that it was “not possible” for her account to be true, and that—in her lawyer’s own words—she was “wrong … simply wrong” in accusing me.

We later found several “smoking gun” emails that proved she never met me or even heard of me. She had to be told by a journalist friend that I was a famous lawyer and that my name “was a good name for your [book] pitch,” even though there was “no proof” I had done anything wrong. Giuffre then followed the journalist’s advice and included my name in her book manuscript, but as a person she had seen, but never met, and certainly never had any relations with.

She told her best friend that she didn’t want to accuse me but “felt pressure” from her lawyers to do so. She also told her best friend’s husband that she never had sex with me. I have recordings confirming this.

We learned that at the same time Giuffre publicly accused me, her lawyers privately accused Wexner of nearly identical sexual misconduct and demanded a meeting to resolve her “claims” against him. Both Wexner’s wife and lawyer told me it was a “shakedown” (the word is recorded on a tape). It seems obvious that I was being used as a stalking horse to send the unmistakable message to Wexner that if he didn’t want to happen to him what happened to me—namely, a very public accusation—there are ways of resolving the matter.

When employment records proved she was 17, which is above the age of consent in New York and other states, she admitted she had been “mistaken.” She also admitted that she was “mistaken” when she said she had dinner with Al and Tipper Gore on Epstein’s island.

[H]er own lawyer has said on TV that based on his 11-year investigation, he does not believe that “any high-profile people” had sex with Giuffre. All of these high-profile people have categorically denied her accusations.

If her own lawyers don’t believe her sworn accusation—and they have said they do not—how can others credit them? That is probably why the U.S. Attorney’s office that indicted Epstein and Maxwell deliberately omitted Giuffre as a witness.

Nobody who has seen the evidence believes Giuffre, yet Temple Emanu-El nonetheless canceled me.

I offered to speak on how to combat these dangers [anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish attitudes in universities and among the hard left], but [t]he synagogue preferred to hear from Peter Beinart, who advocates the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and who supports boycotts against Israelis. At the same time that I was canceled, Beinart received a substantial speaker’s fee from the synagogue to make his case against Israel.

Silence is not the option in the face of unjustified McCarthyite censorship by a synagogue that claims to be a house of study, open-mindedness and Jewish values of dialogue and dissent. So, I will not quietly accept temple Emanu-El’s hypocrisy and cowardice. Nor should you.

Germany’s Multicultural Suicide by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17971/germany-multicultural-suicide

“I will continue to take a critical stance against those… who use the liberal structure and tolerance of the constitution to impose totalitarian views of the state and who undermine the rules of the rule of law, using anti-Western indoctrination…. I will not adapt my vision of freedom of expression to… ‘Everyone has the right to freely express their opinion in a way that is not contrary to Sharia law'”. — Ralph Giordano, FAZ.net.

Once a dam breaks, there is only a competition to see who gives way faster.

The city is also changing the name of its squares…. The new name of a square in Aachen is “Moscheeplatz” (“Mosque Place”), a name desired by the Mayor Marcel Philipp, in agreement with the Turkish [Department of Religious Affairs] …

Then there is the question of demographics: 70% of Raunheim’s population are migrants. “Here we have more Muslims than Christians”. — Mayor Thomas Jühe, Social Democrats, Die Welt, November 16, 2021.

Despite this, they say that the “Great Replacement” and the Islamization of Europe are just conspiracy theories. Have we really understood what the Europe of tomorrow will be like?

“Western hegemony is over,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently. “It lasted centuries, but it is over”.

At the same time, the mosques of Cologne, the fourth-largest city in Germany, obtained permission to broadcast the call to prayer every Friday over minaret loudspeakers.

Congressional Report Details ‘Inhumane’ Conditions of January 6 Inmates

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/07/congressional-report-details-inhumane-conditions-of-january-6-inmates/

A new report published by U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) office details “atrocious,” “cramped,” and “inhumane” conditions at the Washington, D.C., jail where January 6 defendants are being held ahead of trial. The congressional delegation had been turned away by jail officials in July and again initially in November, before they were given access.

The report, “Unusually Cruel,” was released by Greene’s office on Tuesday. It recounts a three-and-a-half-hour tour on November 4 of two Washington, D.C. jails by Greene along with Rep. Louie Gohmert and members of their staff. The purpose of the visit, according to the report, was to inspect the conditions of jails, “specifically the treatment of inmates held in the [Central Treatment Facility] in relation to the events of January 6, 2001.”

According to Greene’s office, “cells in the January 6 wing of the CTF were extremely small, composed of a single toilet, sink, and a small bed cot. The walls of the rooms had residue of human feces, bodily fluids, blood, dirt, and mold. The community showers were recently scrubbed of black mold—some of which remained. The interior walls of the common area were also freshly painted.”

“According to the inmates,” the report continues, “the U.S. Marshals had recently visited the area just days before, which caused a flurry of activity by guards to clean up the January 6 area while the U.S. Marshals were inspecting another area.”

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in October held D.C. Department of Corrections Director Quincy Booth and warden Wanda Patten in contempt and ordered the Justice Department to investigate the CTF for possible civil rights violations after jail officials failed to provide treatment for a January 6 defendant in need of surgery. A November 2 report by the U.S. Marshals Service concluded the CTF failed to meet “minimum standards of confinement” and determined 400 inmates should be transferred to a different facility in Pennsylvania.

Read the entire report below.

A “Mini-Ice Age” Could Hit Earth By 2030, Scientists Warn

https://www.sciencenatures.com/2021/12/a-mini-ice-age-could-hit-earth-by-2030.html

Amid rising concerns over the effects of global warming, a group of scientists has claimed that the Earth could in a little over a decade be hit by a “mini ice age” that would freeze major rivers. The startling prediction is based on a mathematical model of the Sun’s magnetic energy which also suggests that Earth’s temperature will start dropping in 2021.

The plummeting temperature will then lead to something called the “Maunder minimum”, which is referred to a previous mini ice age that occurred between 1646 and 1715, turning London’s Thames into a frozen river, scientists claimed. The latest research, led by maths professor Valentina Zharkova at Northumbria University, is built on a previous research that predicts the movements of two magnetic waves produced by the Sun. It also foretells rapidly decreasing magnetic waves for three solar cycles that will begin in 2021, and last for as many as 33 years.

According to the model, the two magnetic waves will become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022. During Cycle 26 between 2030 and 2040, the waves will become out of sync, causing reduction in solar activity by as much as 60 percent.

 “In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other — peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun,” Zharkova reportedly said in 2015 while conducting a previous research on the phenomenon. “Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other. We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum’.”

Pearl Harbor 80th anniversary brings memories, tributes – and a lesson Lesson of Pearl Harbor is to be vigilant not only for the unexpected but also the expected By Walter R. Borneman

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/pearl-harbor-80th-anniversary-memories-tributes-lesson-walter-borneman
“As we honor those who gave their all 80 years ago, the need to adapt before the next attack remains the greatest lesson of Pearl Harbor. The aircraft carriers and air power that changed warfare in 1941 are still key components of American military might, but our enemies employ other weapons. Terrorism on unprecedented levels brought about the devastation of 9/11. Digital attacks on infrastructure and networks are evidence that keyboards more so than aircraft carriers are already fighting the next wars.”

The attack on the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, 80 years ago today, remains one of the most traumatic events in American history. The date is a generational landmark comparable to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the horrors of Sept. 11. America changed overnight.  

Eighty years later, the Pearl Harbor tragedy is still highly personal. It continues to touch the families of the 2,403 servicemen who lost their lives and the many more who survived that Sunday morning. At a national level, the legacy of a country first surprised but then remarkably united still resounds. 

Many at Pearl Harbor found themselves on the front lines not out of patriotic pride or personal desire to see the world, but out of economic necessity. They were children of the Depression and the $5 or $10 most sent home out of monthly incomes of $36 for a seaman recruit helped to feed younger siblings. Less concerned with national strategies, their personal goals were a few dollars in their pockets, more letters from girlfriends and living to see another sunrise. 

Of a crew of 1,500 on the battleship Arizona, 1,177 sailors and Marines, including a rear admiral and the newest recruit, perished. Among the 78 men with a brother aboard, only 15 survived the attack – a staggering 80% casualty rate. The lucky ones lived with enormous personal grief and sometimes, profound survivor’s guilt. 

Clueless Joe Biden Can’t Grasp Any Of The Crises He’s Created

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/08/clueless-joe-biden-cant-grasp-any-of-the-crises-hes-created/

Has any administration been caught off guard on so many fronts as the Biden administration?

It was shocked by the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan. It was surprised by the surge in energy costs, the spike in inflation, and the depth of the supply chain crises. It hadn’t planned on a massive flood of illegal immigrants. It didn’t think COVID would still be around. It expected job growth and the economy to be stronger than it is. It didn’t foresee the sharp rise in crime.

Judson Berger of National Review Online had it right when he quipped that “the Biden administration sure is ‘surprised’ a lot.”

Just yesterday, the head of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, Cecilia Rouse, admitted that the White House didn’t expect a prolonged supply chain crisis. The administration “just didn’t fully appreciate that the supply system, the supply chain, wouldn’t be able to process through the elevated demand for durable goods,” she said.

These are just the surprises that team Biden has publicly admitted to.

What’s even more troubling is that Biden’s policies are (at least partly) to blame for every one of these crises. Worse still is the fact that Biden and his Keystone Cops cabinet are clueless about how to deal with any of them.

Take the nation’s ongoing supply chain crisis. Today, the Los Angeles ports are as clogged as they were before Biden announced his “solution.” The Marine Exchange of Southern California reports a backlog of 94 container ships as of Tuesday – right about where it was before Biden stepped in.

De Blasio’s Vaccine Mandate Looks Unlawful The Supreme Court has approved only far milder measures. By Eugene Kontorovich

https://www.wsj.com/articles/de-blasio-vaccine-mandate-looks-unlawful-shots-covid-19-private-employees-new-york-bill-11638916746?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio this week announced that all private-sector employees in the city will be required to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by the end of the month. The mayor calls his plan “Key to New York,” and its function is to lock hundreds of thousands of residents out.

The constitutionality of Mr. de Blasio’s mandate will turn primarily on Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), in which the Supreme Court upheld a smallpox vaccination law. The justices held that state governments have the power to exercise “self-defense” against infectious disease on behalf of the community, so long as the measures were “reasonable” and not “arbitrary.” But Mr. de Blasio’s measure goes far beyond the holding or reasoning of the precedent, to say nothing of the past century of constitutional doctrine.

Jacobson involved smallpox, which before its eradication was one of the most fearsome diseases known to man. It killed 30% of those infected. It disproportionately affected children and commonly left them disfigured by lesions. Covid-19 is serious, but it’s in a different league.

The town of Cambridge imposed a one-time fine of $5 (equivalent of roughly $160 today) on those who refused vaccination. The details of Mr. de Blasio’s scheme haven’t been announced—he promises “guidance” next week. But if it resembles President Biden’s federal mandates, it will impose mounting, ruinous fines. It isn’t the mild inducement the court upheld in Jacobson—it is pure coercion.