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Ruth King

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How to Tell the Difference Between Real Education and Propaganda By Annie Holmquist

By on April 4th, 2021

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/how-to-tell-the-difference-between-real-educati

The other day I ran across a passage from That Hideous Strength which seems oddly applicable to our time. A dystopian novel written by C. S. Lewis at the close of World War II, That Hideous Strength finds one of its main characters, Mark Studdock, working for N.I.C.E., an organization which pulls the strings in a controlling, totalitarian society.

Studdock is assigned to write propaganda articles for N.I.C.E., an assignment which he objects to when he receives it from his boss, Miss Hardcastle. Studdock argues that it won’t work because  newspapers “are read by educated people” too smart to be taken in by propaganda. The story continues:

‘That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘Haven’t you yet realized that it’s the other way round?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.’

Reading this, I couldn’t help but ponder how much of the American public thinks like Studdock. We are convinced that education is the panacea for all ills, and that if the masses could simply achieve one more grade level or degree, we wouldn’t have so many problems to sort through.

But what if that education is, as Miss Hardcastle implies in the passage above, the very thing blinding the eyes of the general public? Or perhaps we should say, what we call education.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

British court sentences Holocaust denier to prison time for ‘baiting Jews’

By on April 4th, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/british-court-sentences-holocaust-denier-to-prison-tim

Alison Chabloz is expected to serve nine weeks in prison for promoting anti-Semitic rhetoric in two interviews with far-right online sites.

A woman in Britain said to be a virulent anti-Semite has been found guilty of spreading offensive messages and material over the Internet and was sentenced to 18 weeks in prison by a magistrate court there.

Reports say that Alison Chabloz, 57, who is known for promoting Holocaust denial, is expected to serve nine weeks in prison for violating the country’s communications act after she promoted anti-Semitic rhetoric and ideas on the GAB social-media service in two interviews she did with far-right online sites.

GAB has been under fire for being utilized by far-right extremists.

“Today’s verdict and sentence finally give the Jewish community justice and protection from someone who has made a vocation out of denying the Holocaust and baiting Jews. It also sends a clear message to those who might be tempted to go down the same path,” said Stephen Silverman, director of investigations and enforcement at Campaign Against Antisemitism, in a statement. “This is not the end. Ms. Chabloz now faces even more serious charges on other matters that we have brought to the attention of the police. We will not rest until all anti-Semites like Alison Chabloz are behind bars, where they belong.”

In 2018, Chabloz received a suspended sentence for singing songs that claimed the Holocaust was a “bunch of lies.”

According to the Daily Mail, in issuing his ruling, District Judge Michael Snow told Chabloz: “I’m not sentencing you on the basis that you are anti-Semitic, I’m not sentencing you on the basis that you are a Holocaust denier. I’m sentencing you on the basis that on two separate occasions whilst subject to a suspended sentence, you participated in a radio program where you made grossly offensive comments.

“The grossly offensive contributions by the defendant to both programs are insulting to members of a vulnerable community,” continued Snow. “The need to protect that community from such gross offense is a pressing social need.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New York teens launch attack on Jewish man, one bites policeman By Batya Jerenberg

By on April 4th, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/new-york-teens-launch-attack-on-jewish-man-one-bites-policeman/?utm_source=

This incident follows a much more serious attack on Wednesday, when an ex-convict knifed a young hasidic couple and their baby in broad daylight.

A teen with two younger friends spat and threw garbage at a Jewish man in Brooklyn, New York Thursday evening, with the leader of the pack arrested after biting the policeman who confronted them.

The three got into an argument with the man, the police said, and reacted with violence. The authorities caught up to them quickly after being called, and the 13-year-old ringleader caused the officer minor injuries when challenged. Her younger companions were not taken into custody.

This incident follows a much more serious attack Wednesday, when an ex-convict knifed a young hasidic couple and their baby in broad daylight in lower Manhattan.

On Friday, New York Police Commissioner Dermot Shea told CNN that the man, who had just been paroled a month ago after serving time for attempted murder, actually targeted the toddler after passing the visibly Jewish family on the sidewalk.

“Stop and listen to this slowly: He slashes the mom, slashes the dad and then intentionally stabs a child, a 1-year-old girl in a stroller,” Shea said. “Where’s the outrage? Something is clearly broken here. It’s a crisis.”

The family, visiting from Belgium, all suffered cuts to the head and face, some of which needed stitching. The alleged attacker, 30-year-old Darryl Jones, is being held without bail on several charges, including attempted murder, assault, and drug possession.

Even though he uttered nothing anti-Semitic during the attack, the mother told the New York Daily News that she was sure of his motive.

“This was a horrible hate crime,” she said. “There were more people in that park, but he came to attack us because we are Jewish.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Big Tech’s Greatest Threat “They leave no paper trail for authorities to trace. They are the perfect weapon for changing… the outcome of elections” by Robert Epstein

By on April 4th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17218/big-tech-threat

“Ephemeral experiences”: You might never have heard this phrase, but it’s a very important concept. These are brief experiences you have online in which content appears briefly and then disappears, leaving no trace. Those are the kinds of experiences we have been preserving in our election monitoring projects. You can’t see the search results that Google was showing you last month. They’re not stored anywhere, so they leave no paper trail for authorities to trace. Ephemeral experiences are, it turns out, quite a powerful tool of manipulation.

Are people at companies like Google aware of the power they have? Absolutely…

In a national study we conducted in 2013, in one demographic group — moderate Republicans — we got a shift of 80% after just one search, so some people are especially trusting of search results, and Google knows this. The company can easily manipulate undecided voters using techniques like this….

We have shown in controlled experiments that biased search suggestions can turn a 50‑50 split among undecided voters into a 90‑10 split, with no one having the slightest idea they have been manipulated.

Unfortunately, people mistakenly believe that computer output must be impartial and objective. People especially trust Google to give them accurate results…. They have no idea that they may have been driven to that web page by highly biased search results that favor the candidate Google is supporting.

Dwight D. Eisenhower did not talk about his accomplishments in his famous farewell speech of 1961. Instead, he warned us about the rise of a “technological elite” who could control public policy without anyone knowing. He warned us about a future in which democracy would be meaningless. What I have to tell you is this: The technological elite are now in control. You just don’t know it. Big Tech had the ability to shift 15 million votes in 2020 without anyone knowing that they did so and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace. Our calculations suggest that they actually shifted at least six million votes to President Biden without people knowing. This makes the free-and-fair election — a cornerstone of democracy — an illusion.

I am not a conservative, so I should be thrilled about what these companies are doing. But no one should be thrilled, no matter what one’s politics. No private company should have this kind of power, even if, at the moment, they happen to be supporting your side.

Do these companies think they are in charge? Are they planning a future that only they know for all of us? Unfortunately, there are many indications that the answers to these questions are yes.

One of the items that leaked from Google in 2018 was an eight‑minute video called “The Selfish Ledger.” This video was never meant to be seen outside of Google, and it is about the power that Google has to reshape humanity, to create computer software that “not only tracks our behavior but offers direction towards a desired result.”

How do we protect ourselves from companies like this?… You might have heard the phrase “regulatory capture” — an old practice in which a large company that is facing punishment from the government works with the government to come up with a regulatory plan that suits the company.

When you are talking about, for example, “breaking up” Google, all this means is that we will force them to sell off a couple of the hundreds of companies they have bought…. the major shareholders are enriched by billions of dollars, and the company still has the same power and poses the same threats it does today….

[W]e were, in effect, doing the same thing to them that they do to us and our children 24 hours a day. Imagine that we were, in effect, looking over the shoulders of thousands of real people (with their permission), just as the Nielsen Company does with its network of families to monitor their television watching.

Imagine if these tech companies knew that they were being monitored — that even the answers they are giving people… were being monitored. Do you think they would risk sending out targeted vote reminders to members of just one political party? I doubt it very much, because we would catch them immediately and report their manipulation to authorities and the media.

What can we do? In my opinion, the solution to almost all the problems these companies present is to set up large‑scale monitoring systems and to make them permanent — not just in the United States, but around the world. Because monitoring is technology, it can keep up with whatever the new tech companies are throwing at us, and however they are threatening us, we can get them to stop.

I am envisioning a new nonprofit organization that specializes in monitoring what the tech companies are showing to voters, families, and children — protecting democracy and the autonomy and independence of all citizens. There might also be a for‑profit spinoff that could serve as a permanent funding source for the nonprofit. The for‑profit spinoff could provide commercial services to campaigns, law firms, candidates, researchers, and many others.

And there’s another way to completely eliminate the threats that Google poses to democracy and humanity…. our government could quickly end Google’s monopoly on search by declaring that the database Google uses to generate search results is a “public commons,” accessible to all. It is a very old legal concept, and it is a light-touch form of regulation. It would rapidly lead to the creation of thousands of competing search platforms, each appealing to different audiences.

“Ephemeral experiences”: You might never have heard this phrase, but it’s a very important concept. These are brief experiences you have online in which content appears briefly and then disappears, leaving no trace. Those are the kinds of experiences we have been preserving in our election monitoring projects. You can’t see the search results that Google was showing you last month. They’re not stored anywhere, so they leave no paper trail for authorities to trace. Ephemeral experiences are, it turns out, quite a powerful tool of manipulation.

Are people at companies like Google aware of the power they have? Absolutely… In emails leaked from Google to the Wall Street Journal in 2018, one employee says to others, “How can we use ephemeral experiences to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban?” There is that phrase, “ephemeral experiences.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Between Despair and Presumption a Reporter’s Dilemma by Amir Taheri

By on April 4th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17245/bangladesh-despair-presumption

Sheikh Mujib, as everyone called him, sent a battered Studebaker, vintage 1951, to fetch me to his home. This was a fairly modest villa by most standards, but at that moment looked like an oasis of tranquility and, because of a garden full of flowers, even of beauty. After endless cups of tea and half a dozen delicious but unidentifiable sweets, I concluded that far from being a troublemaker, Sheikh Mujib was a fantasist, for he spoke of his people’s desire to assume control of their destiny which meant splitting Pakistan.

The energy that Mujib generated was truly amazing. The masses of the “walking skeletons” that I had seen were suddenly transformed into sizzling balls of fire. Yet, I had a feeling that all that was going to end in tragedy. And it did. Mujib won a majority in the Pakistan-wide election but was refused the right to form the government for a united Pakistan. The Pakistani leadership decided on a crackdown, which included prison for Mujib and martial law in East Pakistan.

Like most “developing nations,” it is inflicted by corruption, mismanagement and injustice. But it is feeding its people and, having enjoyed growth rates of over 6 percent since 2005, its economy is now 40 percent larger than that of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. (It was 42 percent smaller before independence.) In fact, Bangladesh is one of only 20 “developing nations” in which all seven indices of human welfare, though still below the global average, are now positive.

“Don’t get emotionally involved!” This is one of the first lessons I was told to learn when, as a young reporter in the 1970s, I was sent to cover “events” in distant lands.

The euphemism covered wars, revolutions, ethnic-cleansing operations, famines, and in their less harmful version, military coups bringing jackboots with sunglasses to power. One of the first such “events” was the general election in what was then a united Pakistan. I arrived in Dhaka one early evening and was whisked to a hotel on the outskirts of the sprawling capital of what was then East Pakistan. After a brief shower, I came down to the lobby and asked for a taxi to take me to the city. My inquiry caused a sensation. I was told it was “perhaps inadvisable” to visit the city after sunset and that waiting until tomorrow was the best option.

In any case, hotel taxis didn’t operate after evening prayers. My verbal to-and-fro with hotel personnel was interrupted by a tall thin man who offered to give me a ride in his ramshackle rickshaw. That was good enough for me and we set out. As we approached the city, I felt as if I were being sucked into a different world. This was a scene of absolute chaos with countless number of people, mostly half-naked, barefoot and obviously undernourished milling around amid rickshaws, tricycles, beasts of burden, beggars, children on the loose and men in sundry military or police uniforms, often dirty.

A couple of hours of that spectacle was enough to make me physically sick and to beat the retreat back to the luxury hotel, which now looked like a big lie hiding the truth. I felt as if my youthful optimism about the future of mankind was evaporating. I had thought that even the most abject poverty could be defeated either by technology or by ideology. My first incursion into the heart of Dhaka had punctured that optimism. In a cowardly mood, I contemplated taking the next plane out. Then I remembered that two days later, I had an appointment with one Sheikh Mujib ar-Rahman, a man described by East Pakistani leaders I had interviewed a few days earlier as “a dangerous troublemaker.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Communist and Black Nationalist Angela Davis Speaks to K-12 Students, Calls on Them to ‘Dismantle Capitalism’ By Eric Lendrum

By on April 4th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/02/communist-and-black-nationalist-angela-davis-speaks-to-k-12-students-calls-on-them-to-dismantle-capitalism/

On Wednesday, former Communist Party activist and black nationalist Angela Davis spoke at a webinar for an elite California prep school, where she told the K-12 students watching online that it was incumbent upon them to “dismantle capitalism,” as reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

The “diversity and inclusion”-themed webinar, titled the CommunityEd Series, was hosted by the Heads-Royce School, a prep school that costs just over $47,000 a year in tuition.

“Ultimately, I think we’re going to have to dismantle capitalism if we really want to move in a progressive direction,” Davis said to the impressionable students on the final day of the webinar. “If we want our children and children’s children and their children to begin to move along a trajectory that is described by freedom.”

Davis went on to bash the United States and voice her support for globalism, saying “I think that we have to struggle against this notion that this is the best country in the world, that we are always the ones to give leadership even when we’re talking about social justice struggles. We have to take internationalism into consideration.”

Davis’s appearance received backlash for her history of radicalism and violence. A former member of the Communist Party, she is a supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and also supported the Soviet Union’s suppression of Jewish dissidents. She received the USSR’s International Lenin Peace Prize in 1979, and in her acceptance speech praised Vladimir Lenin as “glorious” and “great.” She purchased several guns that were used in an armed attempt to break three murderers out of a California prison in 1970, serving 18 months in jail.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Appeal of the New Totalitarians It’s easy to understand and reject the horrors of totalitarianism. It is much less easy to grasp its inexorable logic or its seemingly implacable attractions. By Roger Kimball

By on April 4th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/03/the-appeal-of-the-new-totalitarians/

I am not a follower or a fan of baseball. But I understand that it is, or has been, an important national pastime, beloved by many, not least, as Andrew McCarthy observes in a recent column, because it offered its acolytes a respite or oasis from politics, an arena where our differences of opinion could be redeemed or at least temporarily forgotten in the benign if intense partisanship of fandom. 

It is for this reason that, impervious though I am to the charms of the sport, I regard with disdain the decision on the part of the woke commissars who run Major League Baseball to abandon Atlanta, Georgia. The reason they gave was that Georgia had passed new voter rights legislation requiring, among other things, that voters present valid identification in order to be eligible to vote. They called that a violation of “fair access to voting” when in fact it is legislation, very similar to that in effect in many other states, whose chief effect will be to make elections fairer. You need an ID to board a plane, check into a hotel, enter most urban businesses, but not to vote? 

I see that Delta Airlines has also joined the woke brigade by taking a public stand against the Georgia legislation. How will the airline respond if you refuse to show a valid identification before boarding? (After Delta finished with its woke high horse, American Airlines borrowed it to present its own little exhibition of politically correct grandstanding with respect to similar legislation in Texas.) 

This is all just business as usual in what more and more seems like the twilight of the republic. The cultural critic Stephen Soukup has anatomized the phenomenon in a new book that we just published at Encounter called The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business. Quite apart from its illuminating historical analysis, the book is a plea to turn away from the politicization of everything that stands behind such phenomena as sports concessions and airlines—to say nothing of Hollywood, the media, and the fount of it all, academia—insinuating politics into every dimension of life. “The choice here,” Soukup writes in his conclusion, “is simple.”

If we, as a civilization allow even the spirit of capitalism to become part of “the political” and part of the total state, then we will have order—for however long that lasts. If we resist the politicization of business and of capital markets, however; if we determine for ourselves that disorder and depoliticization are the preferable options, then we not only preserve liberty but also preserve the spirit of innovation and expression that harnesses liberty to create wealth and prosperity.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Freshman Republicans Fight Democrats, Big Tech, and the Media to Restore Conservative Principles in Congress By Bryan Preston

By on April 4th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/columns/bryan-preston/2021/04/03/freshman-republicans-fight-democrats-big-tech-and-the-media-to-restore-conservative-principles-in-congress-n1437194

Ulysses S. Grant wasn’t at the top of his West Point class. He wasn’t a very successful businessman. When the nation was in peril, no one saw him as the leader who would save the day. But history records that Grant won key victories and when other failed generals, the media, and Copperhead Democrats questioned him, President Lincoln waved the naysayers away. “I cannot spare this man,” Lincoln said. “He fights!”

I can’t help but think of this when looking at what’s likely to play out over the next few, crucial years. 

Much has been written about the future of the Republican Party in recent months, but one authoritative source believes its future is bright. 

In a recent interview, former President Donald Trump shared his thoughts on the next generation of up-and-coming leaders within the party, noting that “we have a lot of young, good people” and that “the Republican party is stacked.” While he singled out notable conservatives such as Ron DeSantis and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a group of up-and-coming freshmen in the House of Representatives is worth watching as they promise to stand strong in the capitol. They will face enormous criticism and pressure, and they know it. 

Members of Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Madison Cawthorn, and Lauren Boebert will continue the work of draining the swamp that President Trump started four years ago. Unlike establishment Republicans who tend to look out for special interests and still think corporate America is their friend, these new leaders reflect the true spirit of the American people and represent the next generation of conservative leadership.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden “Infrastructure” Plan Spends More On Electric Cars Than Repairing Roads

By on April 4th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/biden-infrastructure-plan-spends-more-electric-daniel-greenfield/

Biden and Buttigieg have been trying to sell their “infrastructure” plan by talking about all the roads, and bridges they want to repair. Much the same as Obama claimed that he wanted to repair all the roads and bridges.

Oddly, or not so oddly, the roads and bridges never get repaired. Maybe that’s because that amounts to only about 5% of Biden’s $2 trillion whopper.

Just $115 billion, or roughly 5.6% of total spending, would go toward modernizing 20,000 miles of highways, roads and main streets that are “in most critical need of repair,” as well as repairing the most “economic significant large bridges” and roughly 10,000 smaller bridges, according to a fact sheet released by the White House. 

Meanwhile, a whole lot more is going to the electric car industry. Specifically, $174 billion.

Biden’s infrastructure plan spends a whole lot more on lefty electric car industries than on fixing all the roads he claims to want to repair.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Undying Glory of The Ten Commandments By Kyle Smith

By on April 4th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-undying-glory-of-the-ten-commandments/

Why does Cecil B. DeMille’s retelling of the Moses saga still hold our attention 65 years later?

There are three stages of watching Cecil B. DeMille’s epic of all epics The Ten Commandments.

As a kid I watched it just because it was on. Sprawled out on the floor in front of the TV, I’d always fall asleep before Moses found his way out of the desert. Never once did I make it to the parting of the Red Sea.

As a young adult, I found the movie a bit . . . cringe. Is the double-crossing Hebrew Dathan (Edward G. Robinson) from the Canarsie section of Cairo? Is there a worse actress than Anne Baxter as Nefretiri? Could they have found a less Jewish actor than Charlton Heston to play the Deliverer of the Hebrews? Why is God turning Moses’s staff into a cobra that devours two other snakes, anyway? That sounds more like a Satan kind of thing. And those special effects, which were cutting-edge when the film was released, came to look ridiculous over time.

Still, though: I always liked Yul Brynner’s Rameses, the epitome of an antagonist who inspires respect because he sticks to his sense of honor. “Better to die in battle with a God than live in shame,” he says, as demanding of himself as of others. Baxter’s acting may be campy (“Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!”) but she makes for one of the era’s classic bitchy vixens. As for that desert scene I never got to the end of as a little kid, it reaches a powerful climax when Moses silently contemplates a lamb who serves as the herald of a life-saving oasis. Is this the holy Lamb of God we all heard of in so many church services? It’s a beautiful, simple image of salvation.

Charlton Heston may have made a preposterously Gentile Jew, but his oaken style of acting grew on me over the years. He’s playing Moses; he’s not supposed to be hip or loose. He shouldn’t come across as a self-questioning, internally tormented Marlon Brando type. He is the Lawgiver, one of the all-time heroes, and he is there to personify fortitude and leadership. Heston is stately, manly, commanding.

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