https://www.wsj.com/articles/has-america-been-overtaken-by-creeping-credentialism-college-jobs-requirements-11635282885?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
Editor’s note: In this Future View, students debate “credentialism,” the ever-expanding requirement of college degrees. Very interesting responses….read them all…..rsk
https://www.wsj.com/articles/about-those-domestic-terrorists-national-school-boards-association-merrick-garland-memo-fbi-11635285900?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
It took a few weeks, but the National School Boards Association has apologized for sending a letter to President Biden suggesting that “threats and acts of violence” at school board meetings might be “domestic terrorism.” The NSBA now admits there was “no justification for some of the language included in the letter,” which could have parents investigated under the Patriot Act for trying to influence what their children are taught.
The retraction comes after tremendous blow-back. First came parents at school board meetings with T-shirts saying “Parents are not domestic terrorists.” Then 21 state school board associations distanced themselves from the letter. The Ohio, Missouri and Pennsylvania state associations cut ties altogether.
It turns out that when Chip Slaven, the NSBA interim executive director and CEO, and president Viola Garcia sent the letter, they did so without consulting their own board. But according to one of Mr. Slaven’s emails, they did work with White House staff.
The NSBA has owned up to its mistake, but what about the Biden Administration? Days after the NSBA letter was sent, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to intervene—without spelling out the federal authority or hard evidence for what the AG called a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence.” This directive still stands.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/greenpeace-co-founder-joins-climate-change-skeptics
Polar bears would not exist today without climate change, and they may even be thriving because of current climate trends. That’s what the co-founder of Greenpeace told scientists, economists, and academics who took part in an international conference challenging alarmist claims about global warming.
Patrick Moore, a Canadian environmentalist who previously served as president of Greenpeace Canada and director of Greenpeace International, was one of several speakers featured as part of the Heartland Institute’s conference on the topic held this month.
During his talk, Moore described some of the events that helped gain notoriety for Greenpeace, such as the campaigns directed against nuclear testing and whale hunting dating back to the 1970s. He eventually felt compelled to leave Greenpeace when activists began to lose sight of their humanitarian mission while engaging in campaigns that were not rooted in sound science, he explained.
“At a philosophical level, Greenpeace had started with a strong humanitarian orientation to save human civilization from nuclear war,” Moore said. “That meant we actually liked people. That’s the peace in Greenpeace. The green, of course, was the environment. … I decided to fashion myself a sensible environmentalist basing my positions on science and logic rather than sensationalism, misinformation, and fear.”
Moore is now a director for the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit group that includes scientists devoted to highlighting the benefits of carbon dioxide. He is also the author of a new book titled Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, which takes aim at what Moore described as “scare stories” that cannot be justified on the basis of scientific observation and verification.
This is where the polar bears come into play. While environmental activist groups continue to circulate information based on the idea that “human-caused climate change” is a threat to the species, Moore sees a natural, dynamic evolutionary process at work.
https://spectator.org/john-durhams-salad-shooter/
This is the sixth in a series of articles analyzing the federal grand jury indictment charging lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a materially false statement to the FBI’s General Counsel. The indictment spelled out Sussmann’s involvement in a thus-far uncharged conspiracy to create a false narrative that was calculated to demonstrate a secret channel of internet communications between the Trump Organization and the Russian Alfa-Bank.
Recently Sussmann’s lawyers moved for a bill of particulars alleging that the indictment lacks sufficient detail and clarity for their client to prepare his defense.
Special Counsel John Durham’s brief in opposition pointed out that the 27-page indictment amply satisfies the legal requirement that it need only include a plain, concise, and definitive written statement of the essential facts constituting the offense charged. Moreover, Durham’s opposing brief also points out that the prosecution has already provided the defense with ample clarification by way of expansive and massive discovery.
According to Durham, on October 7, the government “made its first production of discovery to the defense” which “included more than 6,000 documents, comprising approximately 81,000 pages.” The documents were “received in response to grand jury subpoenas issued to fifteen separate individuals, entities, and organizations — including among others, political organizations, a university, university researchers, an investigative firm, and numerous companies.”
The prosecution is also “working expeditiously to declassify large volumes of materials” which it expects to provide to the defense “[w]ithin approximately two weeks” which will include, “among other things,” the following:
More than 30 declassified reports of interviews conducted in the course of Durham’s investigation;
Emails and other documents shown to witnesses during the interviews;
Investigators’ notes taken during the interviews;
Transcripts of grand jury testimony for multiple witnesses;
The majority of the FBI’s electronic “case file” pertaining to its investigation of the now discredited Trump-Alfa Bank allegations which Sussmann is accused of presenting to the FBI’s General Counsel;
Emails, memoranda, reports, and other records obtained from “Agency-2” (identified elsewhere as the CIA), including “write-ups” of Sussmann’s meetings with CIA personnel in which Sussmann is accused of providing the false Trump-Alfa Bank allegations.
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/slippery-semantics-anthony-fauci-gain-function-coronavirus/
“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again: the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded ‘gain-of-function’ research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
That was Dr Anthony Fauci during a May 2021 congressional hearing. It kicked off a months-long national media effort to frame questions around gain-of-function research and US-taxpayer-funded virus manipulation as a Royal Rumble between Fauci and Senator Rand Paul.
When he testifies or sits for friendly network interviews, Fauci depends on semantics. He relies on the naivety of the interviewer and the audience, employing terminology and definitions he believes only he understands.
But like the ponytailed Chad in Good Will Hunting attempting to flex his big brain, Fauci’s arguments fall apart in front of the initiated.
Last week, Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director of the NIH, sent a letter to Congress saying that EcoHealth Alliance failed to report certain aspects of the experimental work it had been conducting in China on bats and bat-borne viruses. Tabak pledged that the NIH and Fauci’s NIAID would take administrative action, but not much more than that.
So Fauci’s absolutist answer from May has proven to be false. At the very least, the doctor needs to answer directly why he chose to deflect questions on gain-of-function research, something his own agency is claiming it had no idea was happening. How could have Fauci have denied back in May something so “categorically” if EcoHealth Alliance, run by Fauci ally Peter Daszak, had failed to report the full extent of their experiments?
When Fauci sat for a cozy Sunday interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, he once again deployed his semantic game on the interviewer. Stephanopoulos framed the revealing letter from Tabak as “critics pouncing”:
“Some critics and analysts have seized on that to say you and others have misled the public about US funding of this so-called gain-of-function research. The NIH says that’s false.”
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-your-body-is-someone-elses-haunted
Tomorrow marks three years since the massacre at Tree of Life, the most lethal attack on Jews in American history and a watershed event in the lives of so many I love.
I find myself pulled back to that time. To the shock I felt. To the sense I had immediately that the country I thought I lived in was changing in radical ways, even if I didn’t yet fully understand them.
One of the people who helped me make sense of it all — who helped me see that the fate of Jews and the fate of liberty are intertwined; who helped me grasp that an assault on Jews was an assault on the very notion of difference — was Dara Horn.
Dara is a novelist and an essayist whose writings on Jewish history, culture politics has shaped my own thinking. Her new book is called “People Love Dead Jews.”
This is a book deeply relevant to everyone who cares about the future of America, not just the future of American Jews.
………Sometimes your body is someone else’s haunted house. Other people look at you and can only see the dead.
I first discovered this at the age of seventeen in the most trivial of moments, at an academic quiz bowl tournament in Nashville, Tennessee—where, as the only girl from my New Jersey high school, I shared a hotel room with two girls from Mississippi. We were strangers and competitors pretending to be friends. One night we stayed up late chatting about our favorite childhood TV shows, about how we had each believed that Mr. Rogers was personally addressing us through the screen. We laughed together until one girl said, “It’s like Jesus. Even if he didn’t know my name when he was dying on the cross, I still know he loved me, and if he knew my name, he would have loved me too.” The other girl squealed, “I know, right? It’s just like Jesus!” Then the two of them, full of messianic joy, looked at me.
I said nothing—a very loud nothing. The girls waited, uncomfortable, until one braved the silence. “It seems like people up north are much less religious,” she tried. “How often do you go to church?”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17892/schools-indoctrination
Every expert who came in indicated that the most important thing in a child’s learning was the presence of a caring adult in that child’s life. We learned that schools most connected to their community were most likely to be successful. And that schools that focused on the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic achieved the best results.
Hillary Clinton once famously said it takes a village to raise a child. It is hard to disagree with that statement on its face until you realize the village Clinton had in mind is the government and not the parents and families who make it up.
While the media may portray this as a battle about COVID mandates, American history, or the teaching of sexuality, those are just the scrimmages that we are witnessing. The real battle is for who the teacher will be in our children’s lives — parents and loving local individuals who know our children’s names, or faceless government bureaucrats hell-bent on indoctrinating our children with their particular worldview.
McAuliffe, Garland, and the NSBA would have you believe that parents are domestic terrorists, but it is time for them to realize how their way of thinking poses a real threat to American rights. Put me in the category of those that believe parents are the ones who should be raising our kids.
The discontent at school board meetings across America is hard to miss. It is showing up in the news and social media feeds that people are watching and reading in their homes. Many people, however, are missing the major driver of this discontent — the major transformation that the White House, National School Boards Association (NSBA) and others are trying to impose on our government schools.
The recent debate statements by Terry McAuliffe, the Democrats’ Virginia gubernatorial candidate, and actions by Attorney General Merrick Garland following a letter from the NSBA clearly signal they believe that government schools are a tool to be used to indoctrinate children. They also believe the force of the federal government should be used to back them up.
https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-bigger-picture-behind-the-narrow-gantz-ngo-controversy/
When Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced on Friday that he is listing six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist groups, all hell broke loose on the left. The outcry, which emanated not only from Washington and Brussels, but from the halls of the Knesset in Jerusalem and Muqata in Ramallah, could have been anticipated.
There’s no sacred cow as holy as a self-described “humanitarian organization,” especially when it’s associated with and financed by equally untouchable foundations. Thus, though the impetus behind Gantz’s move was perfectly reasonable, he was promptly attacked, including from within the government of which he is a prominent member.
The groups in question—Al-Haq, Addameer, Defense for Children International-Palestine, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees—have, according to Gantz, been “active under the cover of civil-society organizations, but in practice belong to and constitute an arm of the [PFLP] … the main activity of which is the liberation of Palestine and destruction of Israel.”
Most of Gantz’s critics don’t dispute that the Iran-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a terrorist organization. In fact, it is officially designated as such by the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Israel. Naturally, the thugs in the Palestinian Authority have a different view, as they consider the indiscriminate murder of Jews and enemies of other stripes to be a legitimate form of political, ideological and religious protest.
The controversy, then, has focused not on the PFLP, but rather on a number of different issues, each more disingenuous (and revealing) than the next.
Let’s start with U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price’s stern reaction to the news, telling reporters that Israel hadn’t given America “advance warning,” and stating that the administration “will be requesting more information regarding the basis for these designations.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17876/poland-sovereignty-european-union
Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal has ruled that Polish law takes precedence over European Union law.
The power struggle has angered European federalists, who are seeking to turn the 27-member EU into a European superstate — a United States of Europe — and who do not take kindly to those who challenge their authority.
“We ought to be anxious about the gradual transformation of the European Union into an entity that would cease to be an alliance of free, equal and sovereign states, and instead become a single, centrally managed organism, run by institutions deprived of democratic control by the citizens of European countries.” — Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, in an October 18 letter to EU leaders.
“Today’s judgment of the Constitutional Tribunal is an appeal to the EU bodies to stop violating the treaties by trying to obtain through usurpation and blackmail competences that have not been obtained in the treaties.” — Polish Deputy Justice Minister Sebastian Kaleta.
“The call for the ‘Polexit’ could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The European Union is committing suicide in its drive for unity.” — Commentator Marco Gallina, Tichys Einblick.
“It is not the truth that is at stake here but the EU seeking to get rid of the inconvenient government in Warsaw. According to the EU, Europe is to be progressive, open, liberal, tolerant and uniform. Anyone who does not like it has no place in the EU.” — Commentator Aleksandra Rybińska, writing for the Polish media group Wpolityce.
Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal has ruled that Polish law takes precedence over European Union law. The landmark ruling, which seeks to reassert national sovereignty over certain judicial matters, has called into question the legitimacy of the EU’s supranational legal and political order.
The power struggle has angered European federalists, who are seeking to turn the 27-member EU into a European superstate — a United States of Europe — and who do not take kindly to those who challenge their authority.
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/scranton-joe-bogus-biden-inauthentic-presidency/
During the 2020 election, Joe Biden positioned himself as the Democrat who could win the working class from President Donald Trump. “Joe from Scranton,” as the media affectionately calls him, was bringing normalcy back to the White House.
I wrote last September that this characterization of the Syracuse law grad and lifelong politician was a sham: “Biden has built his career on being dishonest to working-class Americans,” I warned.
Ten months into his presidency, and this has proven true. Trump may love a good show —”stay tuned!” — but it is Joe Biden who oversees the most inauthentic administration, one that is shockingly divorced from the lives of everyday Americans.
The country is currently facing a massive breakdown in the global supply chain, leading to shortages of goods and increased prices for consumers. My local grocery store boasted large gaps on food shelves Thursday morning. A friend of mine was unable to buy a simple coffee from Starbucks. Others have stumbled across even worse examples of the burgeoning crisis.
Inflation and shortages are no joke for working class families, who spend a larger percentage of their paycheck trying to keep their pantries stocked. The White House’s response, however, has been to deflect from how to fix the breakdown and instead mock Americans who are concerned that Santa may not be stuffing himself down the chimney this Christmas.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki snarked during a briefing this week that the supply chain chaos can be summed up by “the tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.” Chief of staff Ron Klain asserted on Twitter that inflation and shortages are “high class problems.” Psaki previously insisted that families aren’t comparing the cost of goods to pre-pandemic prices, saying, “We all understand the American people are not looking at cost-to-cost comparisons from this year to two years ago; they’re looking at cost-to-cost comparisons to their checkbooks from eight months ago or 12 months ago.” She made a patently false claim that gas prices are “well in line” with recent decades.
Then there was the defensiveness with which the administration responded to backlash over transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg taking two months of “paternity leave” with his newly adopted children while ports are backed up with shipping containers. Those who rightfully pointed out that Buttigieg either should have come back to work early or that the White House should have installed a temporary replacement were accused of not supporting paid parental leave or of being homophobic.
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