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Ruth King

Educational Freedom Is on the Move And, ironically, much of the incredible rising support for educational freedom can be attributed to School Choice Enemy No. 1: the teachers’ unions. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/06/educational-freedom-is-on-the-move/

I wrote early last month that COVID-related lockdowns were leading many states to implement or advance already existing school choice measures. Just a few weeks later, it is happening at breakneck speed.

Legislators and parents have become fed up, and are doing what they can to regain control of the educational lives of children. They have watched as private schools flourish, while many of the government-run variety—typically at the behest of the teachers’ unions—have been shuttered. Also, because of forced online learning, parents have been given a Zoom-view as to just what teachers are—and are not—teaching.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, 50 school choice bills have been introduced in 30 states this year. Kentucky voted in a tax-credit-funded education savings account, its very first school choice legislation. As Lindsey Burke, director of the Heritage Foundation Center for Education Policy, explains, “Students from families with incomes below 175 percent of the federal poverty line will have access to education savings accounts. The program is available to students living in counties with more than 90,000 residents, and will initially be capped at $25 million.”

In North Carolina, House Bill 32 is currently working its way through the legislative process. If passed, the “Equity in Opportunity Act” will increase funding for the existing voucher program and allow more students to apply for scholarships.

Perhaps the most interesting state to advance educational freedom is West Virginia, which on March 29 passed the most expansive school choice program in the country. Under the new law, all parents have unrestrained options. If parents choose a private school for their kids, they will receive 100 percent of their state education dollars—$4,600 annually—to help defray expenses. In addition to private school tuition, parents can use the funding to homeschool or for other education expenses.

Man Behind Alleged Gaetz Extortion Scheme Admits Wanting $25 Million By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/04/06/man-behind-alleged-gaetz-extortion-scheme-admits-wanting-25-million-n1437915

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has claimed that the sexual misconduct allegations made against him were part of an extortion scheme, and Bob Kent, one of the men allegedly involved in the scheme, all but confirmed in an interview on “The Michael Smerconish Program” on SiriusXM radio on Monday that he had asked Gaetz’s father for $25 million—but insists it was not extortion.

Kent says he needed the money to help find FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in March 2007 and is presumed to be dead by his family, but Kent claims he’s seen video evidence that Levinson is alive in Iran.

“Matt Gaetz is in need of good publicity, and I’m in need of $25 million to rescue Robert Levinson,” Kent said on the show, and acknowledged that he asked Gaetz’s father for the money.

“At first he started laughing and he said, ‘You know we get these extortion attempts all the time,’ And I said whoa, stop. This is not an extortion attempt. I’m not trying to extort him, I’m not, you know, that’s not what we’re doing here.”

But according to a report from the Washington Examiner, Gaetz, “possesses text message screenshots, an email, and a typed document that purportedly support his claims that a federal investigation into his relationship with a 17-year-old is related to an extortion scheme against him.” According to screenshots provided to the Washington Examiner, Rep. Gaetz’s father, Don Gaetz, a former Florida state Senate president, received a text message from Kent on March 16 proposing “a plan that can make [Matt Gaetz’s] future legal and political problems go away.”

Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing.

Milwaukee Black Panthers racially harass and force shutdown of Asian nail salon as media avert their eyes By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/milwaukee_black_panthers_racially_harass_and_force_shutdown_of_asian_nail_salon_as_media_avert_their_eyes.html

“You do not disrespect black women from our community…. You do not disrespect Black Lives Matter…. You ever disrespect a black woman again, we’re going to shut you down.”

With these and other words, a group of 10 Milwaukee Black Panthers invaded an Asian-owned nail salon and threatened it.

Later, they returned, and police arrived.  Instead of protecting the Asian owner, a female officer spoke cordially with the Panthers, addressing their leader as “General” and left the store saying, “All right, I’m sure that he got your message, sir, thank you so much.  We really appreciate you coming down.  Thank you though.”

All of this is on video recordings, boastfully posted to Facebook by the leader of the Panthers, who styles himself “King Rick” and who refers to Black female customers as “queens.”  We know this only thanks to Jim Piwowarczyk of Wisconsin Right Now, who notes that the leader of the group is:

“Darryl King Rick Farmer II,” whose Facebook page proclaims him as, “LEADER AND BLACK GENERAL OF THE ORIGINAL BLACK PANTHERS NATIONWIDE AND OTHER COUNTRIES!”

Following these confrontations, the nail salon has been shut down, its retail space vacated, a business (and jobs) no longer in existence.

China’s Exploitation of Western Academia by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17074/china-western-academia

“In many cases, these UK universities are unintentionally generating research that is sponsored by and may be of use to China’s military conglomerates, including those with activities in the production of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as well as hypersonic missiles, in which China is involved in a new arms race and seeks ‘massively destabilising’ weaponry”. — “Inadvertently Arming China? The Chinese military complex and its potential exploitation of scientific research at UK universities,” a report by the British think tank Civitas, February 7, 2021.

“This report illustrates how 15 of the 24 Russell Group universities and many other UK academic bodies have productive research relationships with Chinese military-linked manufacturers and universities. Much of the research at the university centres and laboratories is also being sponsored by the UK taxpayer….” — “Inadvertently Arming China? The Chinese military complex and its potential exploitation of scientific research at UK universities,” a report by the British think tank Civitas, February 7, 2021.

Australian analyst Alex Joske, in a submission to the Australian Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, “The Chinese Communist Party’s Talent Recruitment Efforts in Australia,” identified at least 325 participants from Australian research institutions, including government institutions, in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) talent-recruitment programs, with as many as up to 600 academics possibly being involved…. Joske estimated that CCP talent recruitment activity in Australia may be associated with as much as AUD $280 million (USD $217 million) in grant fraud over the past two decades.

According to official statistics, China’s talent-recruitment programs drew in almost 60,000 overseas professionals between 2008 and 2016,” Joske wrote in his August 2020 report, “Hunting the phoenix – The Chinese Communist Party’s global search for technology and talent”. “These efforts lack transparency; are widely associated with misconduct, intellectual property theft or espionage; contribute to the People’s Liberation Army’s modernisation; and facilitate human rights abuses….. Over the long term, China’s recruitment of overseas talent could shift the balance of power between it and countries such as the US.”

China continues generously to fund Western universities. In the UK, for instance, the Chinese company Tencent funded post-doctoral research in the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University…. According to the CIA, Tencent was founded with financing from China’s Ministry of State Security.

Oxford University has also received a generous donation from Tencent. Its prestigious Wykeham chair of physics, which was established in 1900, will now be known as the Tencent-Wykeham chair, in honor of the Chinese software giant’s donation of £700,000 to the university.

Much of Chinese influence on British universities comes from the CCP’s Confucius Institutes, of which there are at least 29 in the UK, according to a February 2019 report on the topic by the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission.

The Most Tragic Story Never Told: The Muslim Persecution of Christians Will Christian lives ever matter? Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/most-tragic-story-never-told-muslim-persecution-raymond-ibrahim/

Few phenomena are as horrifically widespread as they are virtually unknown—at least in the West—as the Muslim persecution of Christians.

The general facts are undeniable and have been and continue to be documented in a number of reports issued by a variety of human rights organizations around the world.  According to one of the most recent compilations, Open Doors’ “World Wide List, 2021”—which was published in January 2021 and which annually ranks the top 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted for their faith—13 Christians are killed for their faith every day around the world; 12 are illegally arrested or imprisoned; 5 are abducted; and 12 churches or other Christian buildings are attacked.

About 309 million of these Christians “suffer very high or extreme levels” of persecution.  “That’s one in 8 worldwide, 1 in 6 in Africa, 2 out of 5 in Asia, and 1 in 12 in Latin America.”  More specifically and for the reporting period covered (Oct. 2019 – Sept. 2020), “4,761 Christians were killed for their faith”; an additional 4,277 Christians were unjustly arrested, detained, or imprisoned; 1,710 were abducted for faith-related reasons; and 4,488 Churches or Christian buildings were attacked.

The worst category, “extreme persecution”—the harassing, beating, imprisoning, raping, and/or slaughtering of Christians on sight—occurs in 12 of the 50 nations.  Nine of these top 12 worst persecutors are Muslim: Afghanistan (#2), Somalia (#3), Libya (#4), Pakistan (#5), Yemen (#7), Iran (#8), Nigeria (#9), Iraq (#11), and Syria (#12).  (That these nations are racially, culturally, politically, and economically very different—Arab, Asian, Iranian, sub-Saharan African, etc.—should be indicative that something else accounts for their commonality towards Christians.)

Over all, the persecution Christians experience in 39 of the 50 nations making the list is also either from “Islamic oppression” or is occurring in Muslim majority nations.  This means nearly 80 percent of the Christian persecution around the world—including of those 13 Christians killed for their faith every day—is committed by Muslims.

While the above numbers are important, including in displaying the magnitude of the problem, one should not lose sight that they represent real people; what they experience, when read in detail—girls chained and gang raped; Christians burned alive for supposedly “blaspheming” Muhammad; Muslim husbands and wives stabbing and poisoning each other whenever one apostatizes to Christ; another 30 having their heads sawn off just for the heck of it—is tragic if not bloodcurdling.

The following, for example, are among the most recent incidents to occur as of this writing (excerpted from the February, 2021 edition of the monthly “Muslim Persecution of Christians” reports):

Justice Breyer Joins RBG In Warning Dems Against Court Packing Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/justice-breyer-joins-rbg-warning-dems-against-daniel-greenfield/

It wasn’t all that long ago that the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) were as fired up about packing the Supreme Court (and destroying its legitimacy utterly) as they currently are about rigging all the elections through HR 1 and eliminating the filibuster. The matter had gone far enough that the dictionaries were being revised as the media loudly insisted that “court-packing” was just a term that Republicans had recently made up.

Then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the patron saint of Democrats, warned them it was a terrible idea.

“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” Ginsburg said, speaking to NPR.

“I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court,” Ginsburg noted.

Funny how RBG referred to court-packing and not judicial reform, or whatever euphemism the lefty media had settled on.

Anyway, back to remind the Democrats that court-packing is a terrible idea is the oldest surviving Democrat on the court.

 Justice Stephen Breyer on Tuesday said liberal advocates of big changes at the Supreme Court, including expanding the number of justices, should think “long and hard” about what they’re proposing.

His talk, Breyer said, “seeks to make those whose initial instincts may favor important structural (or other similar institutional) changes, such as forms of ‘court-packing,’ think long and hard before embodying those changes in law.”

The Higher Superstition The fallacy that lies behind “follow the science” fundamentalism. Bruce Thornton ****

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/higher-superstition-bruce-thornton/

More and more frequently we so-called advanced moderns believe things to be true that an illiterate farmer in 1800 would have known to be false. As every year passes, the self-proclaimed progressive “brights”–– those who “follow the science” rigorously, they claim, when making and supporting public policies–– endorse as proven facts beliefs and policies that are driven by ideological or venal self-interest rather than truth.

If they continue, the consequences will be the bankruptcy of our culture, economy, and political freedom.

Take this statement from CNN, a loud champion of “science”: “It is not possible to know a person’s ‘gender identity’ at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.” Such a statement back in 1800 would have been dismissed as the ravings of a crank or the sales-pitch for some patent snake-oil. The sex of a child, with the exception of some rare birth defects, is obvious at the moment of birth, both empirically and by medical science.

But the current fad of believing that transient psychological states are what create sex identity has led to harmful outcomes, from the physical and psychological trauma caused by hormone therapy and physical mutilation, to the impact on female athletes that follows from allowing  biological males to compete against females, to the risks to women from admitting biological males into homeless or battered women shelters, or public rest-rooms and school showers.

Our economy is hostage to the same fetishizing of “science,” leading to dubious economic proposals that ignore the real science of mathematics. The first problem is thinking that economics is a science, rather than a species of philosophy that uses numerical data in its theoretical and speculative research. Any discipline that takes into account human behavior cannot be a true science able to correctly predict similar outcomes from the same methods and evidence.

U.S., Iran Begin Indirect Talks to Revive 2015 Nuclear Deal Western and Iranian officials kick off negotiations in Vienna on reviving the accord, with myriad challenges ahead by Sune Rasmussen

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-iran-begin-indirect-talks-to-revive-2015-nuclear-deal-1161770628

VIENNA—Western and Iranian officials kicked off talks on Tuesday on reviving the embattled 2015 nuclear accord, amid the challenge of bitter relations between Washington and Tehran, punishing U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic and moves by Iran to accelerate its nuclear activity.

The parties to the 2015 nuclear agreement, which placed limits on Iran’s nuclear activity in exchange for lifting international sanctions on the country, had said on Friday that they would gather in Vienna for talks. The Trump administration withdrew from the deal in May 2018 and placed sanctions on Iran. In return, Iran has taken steps to breach the agreement and resume nuclear activity.

The goal of the Vienna meeting is to produce a road map for the U.S. and Iran to return simultaneously to compliance with the deal.

The parties agreed to continue talking in the coming days in two parallel expert meetings, one focused on how the U.S. is to lift sanctions on Iran, the other on how Iran will roll back its nuclear activities to comply with the deal.

The Peace of Trump The former president’s legacy overseas may outlast the domestic effort to silence him. by James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-peace-of-trump-11617740860?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

U.S. social media companies like Twitter that suppressed negative stories about Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign are still preventing former President Donald Trump from speaking on their platforms. But the impact of Trump policies may be much harder to suppress. The historic peace agreements Mr. Trump brokered last year between Israel and its regional neighbors have lately been yielding some striking results.

Joshua Marks writes in the Times of Israel:

Over Passover I did something that was unthinkable before last September’s signing at the White House of the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
I took a direct flight of just under three hours through Saudi Arabian airspace from Israel to the UAE on a Dubai-owned airline as an Israeli citizen to celebrate the holiday with the Jewish community there…
Boarding the flydubai Boeing 737-800 at Ben Gurion Airport the reality of the Abraham Accords started to set in for me. Here was an Arab airline with an Arabic-speaking cabin crew announcing our departure from Tel Aviv to Dubai like it was the most normal thing in the world…

Before returning to Israel Mr. Marks participated in a Passover event with local Emiratis and reports:

It felt like a new beginning of a warm friendship between Jews and Israelis and Arabs and Emiratis but also felt like the rekindling of an ancient relationship of “cousins” who were separated for thousands of years and are now finding our way through the darkness back into the light of a shared future of peace and prosperity for the peoples of the Middle East.

Vaccine Passports Prolong Lockdowns What looks like an easing of restrictions is actually a coercive scheme.By Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccine-passports-prolong-lockdowns-11617726629?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
Mr. Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya, a physician and economist, is a professor at Stanford Medical School.

As tens of millions are inoculated against Covid-19, officials in places as diverse as New York state, Israel and China have introduced “vaccine passports,” and there’s talk of making them universal. The idea is simple: Once you’ve received your shots, you get a document or phone app, which you flash to gain entry to previously locked-down venues—restaurants, theaters, sports arenas, offices, schools.

It sounds like a way of easing coercive lockdown restrictions, but it’s the opposite. To see why, consider dining. Restaurants in most parts of the U.S. have already reopened, at limited capacity in some places. A vaccine passport would prohibit entry by potential customers who haven’t received their shots. It would restrict the freedom even of those who have: If you’re vaccinated but your spouse isn’t, forget about dining out as a couple.

Planes and trains, which have continued to operate throughout the pandemic, would suddenly be off-limits to the unvaccinated. The only places where restrictions would be relatively eased would be those still fully locked down, such as many live-event venues and schools. Yet even there, the passport idea depends on keeping the underlying restrictions in place—giving officials an incentive to do so for much longer as leverage to overcome vaccine resistance.

The vaccine passport should therefore be understood not as an easing of restrictions but as a coercive scheme to encourage vaccination. Such measures can be legitimate: Many schools require immunization against common childhood illnesses, and visitors to some African countries must be vaccinated against yellow fever. But Covid vaccine passports would harm, not benefit, public health.