Displaying the most recent of 90914 posts written by

Ruth King

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Austria May Ban Four-Fingered MB Salute by John Rossomando •

By on October 3rd, 2018

http://www.investigativeproject.org/

The Austrian government is considering outlawing a four-fingered salute representing support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan popularized it and began using it after Egypt’s military toppled the Brotherhood in 2013.

Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers around the world use the image on websites, posters and literature. If the ban is approved, anyone in Austria who flashes the salute could be fined $4,600.

It also has been used by Muslim Brotherhood supporters in the United States, including members of Egyptian Americans for Freedom and Justice (EAFJ) and former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Mohamed Elibiary.

Erdogan’s role in popularizing the gesture seems to be driving the Austrian ban. It also would outlaw a wolf-head like salute used by the pro-Erdogan Turkish fascist group the Grey Wolves. Its most infamous member, Mehmet Ali Agca, tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981. The Wolves have become some of Erdogan’s greatest non-Islamist supporters and aim to unify all Turkic peoples in Turkey across and throughout Central Asia into a single nation.

It was the only group besides Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) that backed constitutional changes allowing him to consolidate power.

So far Turkey hasn’t responded.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Walter Starck Climate Science: Have Stats, Will Doctor

By on October 3rd, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/10/climate-science-stats-will-doctor/

We now have a whole generation of academics whose careers are steeped in the lucrative notion that catastrophic climate change is a genuine peril. What’s needed is an appropriately resourced science court to police malpractice, of which there is much, and no more grants for the guilty.

Occasional eruptions of mass delusion are a recurrent feature of human social behaviour. It is also characterised by a notable propensity to overstate certainty and reject any possibility of error regardless of conflicting evidence. This pattern prevails across all major areas of endeavour save one. By formally recognising uncertainty and actively seeking to uncover error, science has ironically become the most certain and least error prone of all our understanding.

Development of the internet has facilitated the propagation of delusions to a global scale with the threat of climate change being among the first of such events; and, unlikely to be the last. As a mass delusion climate change has a lot going for it. It claims to be scientifically certain, but only by ignoring or dismissing all opposing science. Regardless of actual academic credentials, it affords an open invitation for any third-rate academic of no distinction to publish something supporting the “threat” and thus be accorded immediate recognition as an expert (with ready access to generous funding for research).

Then, beyond this frontline of academic hustlers, the legions of righteousness have gathered in the form of politicians and self-appointed activists to whom CC provides a prominent platform for no-risk, low-cost virtue signalling. Following these are the ranks of empire building bureaucrats and a vast array of camp followers drawn by the scent of power and profits. It’s a heady mix and hard to resist.

As all this began to develop, the media found it a rich font of dramatic stories and joined in with hype and the lending of an indiscriminate aura of importance and credibility for even the most trivial and uncertain of speculation supporting the threat. As the consummate global bureaucracy, the UN also saw the potential for power, funding and a useful façade for sundry other agendas.

From its founding, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created to promote the idea of climate change as an existential threat that urgently requires generous funding and unprecedented authority for which they will be the peak administrator. For IPCC purposes, science was employed to provide an unquestionable basis for their authority. To assure that it supported their aims their various Summaries for Policymakers were decided line-for-line by their own administrative procedures and preliminary unpublished scientific summaries, inevitably edited to support the policies.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Fit to Serve? Perhaps it’s time to consider cognitive and psychological testing of politicians. Henry I. Miller

By on October 3rd, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/cognitive-and-psychological-testing-of-politicians-16209.html

Congress continues to rank dead-last in the most recent Gallup poll of public confidence in institutions. It’s no surprise: when representatives and senators aren’t squabbling, posturing, and at one another’s throats, such as during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, they’re saying and doing things that strain credulity. It’s no coincidence that insulting the intelligence of members of Congress is such a staple of American folk wisdom. “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself,” quipped Mark Twain. “When Congress makes a joke it’s a law, and when they make a law, it’s a joke,” said Will Rogers.

Too often, though, the joke is on us. A friend of mine was seated at a banquet table with the family of a then-congressman from Kansas. Family members expressed relief at the congressman’s career in politics because none of them thought that he was smart enough to enter the family business—processing scrap metal. “When I was debating what became the 2008 Farm Bill,” said Colorado congressman John Salazar, “I had a member of the Agriculture Committee actually ask me if chocolate milk really comes from brown cows. I asked if he was joking and he assured me he wasn’t.” That’s in the same category as the concern of Representative Hank Johnson that stationing 8,000 U.S. military personnel on Guam would cause the island to “become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas once proclaimed that the U.S. Constitution was 400 years old. And as a member of the House Science Committee, Lee, during a visit to the Mars Pathfinder Operations Center, asked a NASA scientist whether the Pathfinder probe had photographed the flag that astronaut Neil Armstrong left behind in 1969. Armstrong had, of course, left the flag on the moon. In 2010, Lee proclaimed on the House floor that “victory had been achieved” by the United States in the Vietnam War and that “today, we have two Vietnams: side-by-side, north and south, exchanging and working.” Lee was a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee when she made that statement.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Merkel era ends in angst and anger Jeffrey Gedmin

By on October 3rd, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/dispatches-november-2018-jeffrey-gedmin-chemnitz

Recently, I sat in my hotel a few steps away from the Gedächtniskirche — West Berlin’s iconic “church of remembrance,” left in ruin at the end of World War II to remind Germans of the horror of their aggression — preparing for a meeting with Reiner Haseloff, minister president of the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The 64-year-old Haseloff is a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Like the Chancellor, Haseloff grew up on the country’s communist side, in the so-called German Democratic Republic. He, too, was trained as a scientist. Merkel holds a PhD in quantum chemistry; Haseloff’s doctorate is in physics.

I wanted to speak with Haseloff about the growing tensions between East and West Germans, three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall; about the country’s shifting political landscape, about social cohesion and security, and Germany’s migration policies, the last being a subject where Haseloff and Merkel part ways. Haseloff has distanced himself from the Chancellor’s liberal migration policy; in 2015, Germany permitted some one million refugees from mostly Muslim majority countries to enter the country.

At the last minute my meeting with Haseloff was cancelled. The minister president was on his way to Köthen where a fight at a playground between two young Afghan men and a 22-year-old German man resulted in the German suffering a fatal heart attack. In Köthen, the mood was tense. Two weeks earlier, on August 26, violent protests had erupted in the east German city of Chemnitz where a 35-year-old German man was stabbed to death at a festival celebrating the city’s founding. A 22-year-old Iraqi and a 23-year-old Syrian were arrested for murder. If that were not enough, the same Sunday afternoon of the death in Köthen, September 9, a killing occurred in Neukölln, a Berlin neighbourhood where Turks and hipsters rub shoulder. In this case, a 36-year-old Lebanese-born man was shot to death, with five men fleeing the scene by car. Authorities suspect a clan dispute. Police estimate that 20 large families of foreign extraction in Berlin are involved in drug running, prostitution, and other organised crime. After Neukölln, Chemnitz, and Köthen a senior Berlin official said to me, with resignation, “People will have to accept some of this violence as the new normal.”

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

In Corbyn’s mind, there is no place for the Jews David Abulafia

By on October 3rd, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/features-november-2018-david-abulafia-antisemitism-labour-party-jeremy-corbyn

J’accuse . . . It may seem impudent to use Émile Zola’s famous opening to his defence of Alfred Dreyfus. And yet, as on that occasion, the issue of anti-Semitism has become intertwined with wider political questions, in this case a party leader who consorts with terrorists in Ireland and the Middle East and admires repressive regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, and a party whose members (including Members of Parliament) are being intimidated by extremists whose loathing for Israel has spilled over into contempt for Jews. This crisis has developed without much more than a murmur from the man at the top, although many, not just those on the Left, were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that his blindness to anti-Semitism within the Labour Party was another example of the chaotic management of his party that characterised the first year of his reign. But more recent revelations have shown clearly that Jeremy Corbyn is very much part of the problem; he passionately believes what Ken Livingstone or indeed George Galloway believes: that the history of Zionism and of Israel proves his case, and he is happy to keep the company of the Iranians and others who propose to wipe Israel off the map.

His silence was not indolence, incompetence or stupidity, but the silence of one who is content to look the other way and cannily let things develop in the direction he has always wanted. Hence his own lack of fury at what are quite astonishing statements repeated again and again in the press and by public figures that he, the Leader of her Majesty’s Opposition, is an anti-Semite, statements that with any other senior politician would be countered by angry, vigorous, firm denial, a dose of righteous (or unrighteous) indignation, and maybe even recourse to the courts. He should also be aflame with rage at the extraordinary threats and slurs that those professing to be his supporters have flung into the ether by way of social media, some of the most revolting of which are now under investigation by the police for racist incitement. Indeed, it is now reported that the Labour Party itself is under police investigation for sitting on stomach-turning comments about the Holocaust and about exterminating Jews that were apparently supplied by its own members.

Of course, his way of thinking should have been obvious from the moment that he installed Shami Chakrabarti and her colleagues on his commission to examine the presence of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The most significant feature of their conclusions was the way references to anti-Semitism were wrapped up alongside other forms of racism — in other words, it was always being relativised, shown to be inherently implausible because it was inconceivable that a party committed to anti-racism and the fight against Islamophobia would be hostile to Jews. Far from generating action, the report was seen as an opportunity to declare that action had been taken.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Let’s Drop Common Core And Let All Families Truly Choose Their Schools Centralized mandates have neutered school choice by imposing one kind of education on all schools, thereby actually reducing families’ education choices, finds a new paper. Jenni White

By on October 3rd, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/03/new-paper-lets-drop-common-core-let-families-choose-schools/

For years after Common Core was adopted into the Oklahoma state law books, a group of us saw the writing on the wall and tried to derail the process. It was clear to us after much study that most arguments for Common Core were not grounded in reality, but more a cotton candy confection of wishes that would eventually disintegrate and send the whole notion, like so many previous education trends, into the dustbin of history.

Although Common Core was repealed from state law in 2014, the new “Oklahoma” math standards adopted in 2015 are surprisingly Common Core-like. Unsurprisingly, like many Common Core states in the nation, national math scores for both Oklahoma fourth and eighth graders fell again for 2017.

For years we’ve been warned by various education policy experts that Common Core would not produce the results its acolytes promised, yet Common Core converts have persisted, outlasting many weary parents who have finally thrown up their hands in exhaustion.

“Common Core, School Choice and Rethinking Standards-Based Reform,” a new, thorough Pioneer Institute paper, did a great job explaining the failures of Common Core math and Common Core in general. I sought out the co-authors, Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and Theodor Rebarber, CEO of AccountabilityWorks, to help explain their work.
What Does Common Core Actually Do?

The authors don’t lay the fault of falling test scores solely at the feet of Common Core, but they do immediately point out several important contradictions in CC math that could lead anyone to wonder at its effectiveness, including:

Although proponents promised Common Core would make U.S. students more internationally competitive by “benchmarking” the standards to those of higher-performing countries, CC actually delays mastery of several mathematical procedures—like multiplication and long division—for years after students from leading countries like Singapore have mastered them.
Consistent with progressive teaching beliefs, CC doesn’t so much teach kids how to solve problems as to think about how to solve them. The authors report that higher-performing countries such as Singapore, Finland, and Japan instead devote approximately 75 percent of their math standards to having students work math problems, while CC devotes only 38 percent to practice, and the rest having kids explain how to work the problem.
Although constantly told CC is just a set of standards that do not “drive” instruction, CC-aligned tests give higher points for explaining how best to perform the math problem and fewer points for solving the problem correctly, essentially causing teachers to teach the method gaining the most points. This has another side effect of converting math tests into English tests.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Foreign Terrorist Funders Get U.S. Public Schools To Teach Anti-Jew Propaganda Using teacher training programs to indoctrinate U.S. children in Massachusetts shows just a sliver of the Arab theocracies’ larger influence operations within the American K-12 system. Ilya Feoktistov

By on October 3rd, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/03/foreign-terrorist-funders-get-u-s-public-schools-teach-anti-jew-propaganda/

The ruling dynasty of Qatar, the house of Al Thani, invests its massive fossil fuel profits to promote its political and theological agenda around the world. It invests in major Western properties, Hollywood studios like Miramax, global news broadcasters like Al Jazeera, terror organizations like ISIS and Hamas, and, most curiously, in American K-12 education.

The Qataris, according to the Wall Street Journal, are spending millions to influence what American educators teach in their classrooms; and it has recently emerged that one of their investments is behind a roiling controversy in the Boston suburb of Newton.

For more than six years, parents and citizens in Newton have been complaining that their city’s high school world history curriculum is biased against Israel to the point of being anti-Semitic. Newton Superintendent of Schools David Fleishman promised the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of New England last year that he would remove and replace the bigoted curriculum with vetted scholarly materials, but public records requests revealed that biased, anti-Semitic, and false materials continued to be taught.

Since Fleishman’s broken promise, the biased teaching at Newton schools has gotten worse. In August, The Federalist broke the story of how a Newton history teacher, David Bedar, plotted with fellow teachers over email to harass, bully, and “call out” conservative students in the classroom, admitting to acting as a “liberal propagandist” in the classroom. Further public records requests show that Bedar is also quite literally a trained propagandist for Qatar. He is working on behalf of a foreign petro-theocracy to teach anti-Semitic lies to American children.
A Qatari-Funded U.S. Teacher Influence Fund

Last year, Bedar attended a five-day summer teacher training course on how to teach about “the dynamics of the Middle East,” provided by a Massachusetts-based organization called Primary Source. Primary Source claims to work “to advance global and cultural learning in schools,” and has partnerships with more than 50 schools and school districts in New England.

It is funded by four foundations. Two are Massachusetts government agencies, the Mass Cultural Council and Mass Humanities. The third, the Cummings Foundation, is one of the largest private foundations in New England. The fourth is Qatar Foundation International (QFI), an arm of the Qatari ruling family’s Qatar Foundation. Through QFI since 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal, Qatar’s Al Thanis have given more than $30 million directly to American K-12 public schools, and an untold amount to teacher training outfits like Primary Source.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Georgetown Prof: White Male GOP Senators Deserve ‘Miserable Deaths,’ Castration By Katherine Timpf

By on October 3rd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/georgetown-professor-white-male-gop-senators-deserve-miserable-deaths-castration/

A professor at Georgetown University has stated that the “entitled white” Republican senators who are defending Judge Kavanaugh deserve to die “miserable deaths” and be castrated.

On Saturday, Christine Fair — an associate professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service — tweeted:

Look at thus chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement.

All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.

The tweet appears to have since been deleted, but not before it received coverage from outlets including Fox News and The College Fix.

This is far from Fair’s first brush with controversy. As The Fix notes, Fair has previously called German police officers Nazis and harassed a Trump-supporting colleague. What’s more, Fox News reports that she had also referred to the GOP as “filthy swine” and a “f***ing death cult” in a tweetstorm the week prior.

A university spokesperson told Fox News that Fair’s comments are within the bounds of the school’s speech policy.

“Our policy does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable,” the spokesperson stated. “While faculty members may exercise freedom of speech, we expect that their classrooms and interaction with students be free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ford’s Lawyers Withhold Information Requested by Senate Pending FBI Interview By Mairead McArdle

By on October 3rd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/christine-blasey-ford-lawyers-withhold-information-pending-fbi-interview/

Lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to sexually assault her, are refusing to turn over to Congress certain pieces of evidence she has cited to the Senate until she has been interviewed by the FBI, which is investigating the allegations.

Notes from Ford’s therapy sessions that mention the assault as well as the results of a polygraph test she took will be turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee only after the FBI interviews her, her attorneys said in a letter to Committee chairman Chuck Grassley.

“Dr. Ford is prepared to provide those documents to the FBI when she is interviewed,” the letter said. “We have not yet heard from the FBI about scheduling an interview with her.”

The California psychology professor says Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her at a party when they were both in high school, pinning her to a bed, covering her mouth, and trying to undress her before she managed to escape. She testified to Congress on Thursday about the alleged assault, and Kavanaugh afterwards presented the Committee with an emotional defense, categorically denying all accusations against him.

Grassley requested the documents Tuesday evening in a letter to Ford’s attorneys.

A sworn statement from an ex boyfriend of Ford’s suggested that she may have perjured herself and raised “specific concerns about the reliability of her polygraph examination results,” the Iowa Republican warned. “The Senate therefore needs this information,” he wrote.rassley said Wednesday that a cloture vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination could come as soon as Friday.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats’ Complaints about the FBI Investigation Are Absurd By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on October 3rd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/democrats-complain-brett-kavanaugh-fbi-investigation/

It’s unnecessary to begin with, and is not a criminal probe.

The Delay, Delay, Delay strategy to stop Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court is taking the predictable course. Once they got Republicans to agree to the one-week delay, Democrats immediately started complaining that the time limit was arbitrary — that the FBI should have whatever time is necessary “to get the job done.”

Therein lies the issue, which Democrats have obfuscated from the start. “The job” is not the FBI’s job, it is the Senate’s; and the job is not to conduct a criminal investigation, it is to develop enough information that the Senate can responsibly exercise its constitutional advice-and-consent duty.

Thus understood, “the job” is already done. The Senate has more information about this nominee than it has had about any judicial nominee in history. It has vetted him before, approving his nomination to the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the ensuing dozen years, Kavanaugh has issued hundreds of opinions, many of which are influential in the Supreme Court and the lower courts. He has, moreover, interacted with colleagues and litigants who give him high grades for collegiality and temperament. He has hired and mentored an impressive and diverse stable of law clerks, who think the world of him and are coveted for distinguished positions in the legal profession, including Supreme Court clerkships.

Furthermore, this nomination is the occasion for the seventh FBI background check of Kavanaugh’s career. The number is high because he has held positions of high responsibility, including national-security duties. Consequently, he has been carefully examined and found fit for access to the nation’s most closely held defense secrets.

Continue reading →