EDUCATION Comments turned off

Jews Don’t Count When talking about diversity and inclusion, Jews are not part of the discussion, Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on January 14th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/jews-dont-count-richard-l-cravatts/

In 1978, the significant Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case brought the term “diversity” into the lexicon of higher education. Although the Court found that the medical school at the University of California at Davis had used an unconstitutional quota system in denying Alan Bakke admission, Justice Lewis Powell made his now-famous observation that, notwithstanding the inherent defect of such a quota system, universities could likely enhance the quality of their enrollments by striving to create a “diverse student body” engaging in “a robust exchange of ideas,” and that there was “a compelling state interest” in trying to achieve such a goal and in promoting the inclusion of historically underrepresented groups on campus.

Rather than helping students adapt to the real diversity of society outside the campus walls, however, the campaign to increase diversity has served to create balkanized campuses where victims of the moment segregate themselves into distinct and inward-looking racial and cultural groups—exactly the opposite intention of the university diversocrats and their bloated fiefdoms with which they promote this theology of victimization, racial justice, and inclusion.

It seems, though, that not all ethnic groups warrant the concern of woke campus social justice warriors. Jews, a tiny but highly visible and influential minority group, are regularly ignored when victim groups compete for recognition on the sensitivity scale. More than that, the very individuals whose role it is to ensure that all people are recognized and all groups protected have been shown to harbor a particular animus towards Jews and the Jewish state, Israel.

In the rarified atmosphere of racial equity and discussion about oppression and victimhood, Jews are now considered to be white and enjoy “white privilege,” that even though they have long been a maligned and hated minority, Jews are now excluded from victim classification and have themselves become targets for condemnation, criticism, and censure—even from those diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) professionals whose primary role it is to create campus environments free from bigotry, hatred, and bias.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Woke Racism John H. McWhorter reveals how a new religion has betrayed Black America. Danusha V. Goska

Posted By on January 14th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/woke-racism-danusha-v-goska/

John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He has also published in numerous prestigious outlets, and he is currently an op-ed columnist at the New York Times. McWhorter is the son of a college administrator father and a professor mother. He attended Friends Select School, a private, a 189-year-old college-preparatory institution. In short, McWhorter is a highly accomplished member of the American elite. He is black. A man should never be reduced to a skin color. But we live in, as the apocryphal Chinese curse is alleged to say, “interesting times,” and, so, yes, every mention of McWhorter’s new book Woke Racism may skip his many accomplishments, and focus on his color.

“I know quite well,” he writes, “that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when they’re written by a black person, and I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book … A version of this book written by a white writer would be blithely dismissed as racist.” As McWhorter notes, he is accused of being “not really black.”

McWhorter responds by reminding our Woke overlords, whom he calls “The Elect,” that their very ideology insists that every black man in America is living under the oppressive boot of white supremacy. The New York Times published at least one op-ed by a black professor who insisted that being a professor is no escape from America’s pervasive racism. Chris Lebron’s June 16, 2020 op-ed was entitled, “White America Wants Me to Conform. I Won’t Do It. Even at Elite Universities, I Was Exposed to the Disease that Has Endangered Black Lives for So Long.” So, yes, as McWhorter points out, by the Elect’s own value system, he is indeed “black enough.”

McWhorter has been producing necessary prose for decades; he should be required reading for American students. His essay entitled “Explaining the Black Education Gap” in Wilson Quarterly’s summer, 2000 issue, is one of the boldest pieces about education I’ve ever read. I wish I could require every one of our Woke overlords to read McWhorter’s June 11, 2020 piece in Quillette “Racist Police Violence Reconsidered.” 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Supreme Court Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate for Private Employers Thank you, Mr. Trump. Robert Spencer

Posted By on January 14th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/supreme-court-blocks-bidens-vaccine-mandate-robert-spencer/

The Trump Supreme Court finally worked exactly the way it was designed to work on Thursday, when it struck a massive blow for freedom in ordering a stay on Joe Biden’s handlers’ authoritarian and destructive vaccine mandate for private employers with more than 100 employees. The Court, again oddly inconsistent as it has often been since Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett took their seats, at the same time upheld the mandate for health care workers. Still, the high court’s refusal to rubber-stamp Biden’s mandate for employers is yet another failure for this disastrous administration, and a major victory for the defenders of individual freedom who have been fighting the mandates from the beginning.

The private employer mandate, which was imposed through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), was rejected on a 6-3 vote, with Trump’s three new justices forming the margin of victory. The Court’s order stated with admirable common sense and restraint that “although COVID-19 is a risk that occurs in many workplaces, it is not an OCCUPATIONAL hazard in most. COVID-19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather. That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases. Permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life – simply because most Americans have jobs and face those same risks while on the clock – would significantly expand OSHA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization.”

That is absolutely true, and is a refreshing departure from the seemingly inexorable advance of government power over the lives of Americans. It is a sharp rebuke to the nanny state mentality that has been dominant far too long, and that looks to government to take care of all our needs and wants, and to protect us from all dangers.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Robert D.Kaplan: Russia, China and the Bid for Empire The U.S. must hold the line against their imperial ambitions in Ukraine, Taiwan and elsewhere.

Posted By on January 14th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-china-bid-empire-colonialism-ukraine-taiwan-imperial-invasion-qing-dynasty-soviet-union-romanov-11642111334?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Intellectuals can’t stop denouncing the West for its legacy of imperialism. But the imperialism on the march today is in the East. Russia and China are determined to consume Ukraine and Taiwan, legacies of the Romanov and Qing dynasties respectively, into the latest versions of their historical empires. Technology has intensified this struggle for imperial geography. Great-power war has become entirely imaginable because of the reduced emphasis on thermonuclear bombs in an era of hypersonic missiles, automated weapons systems, and information warfare. Russia and China demonstrate that the struggle for empire has rarely had such nerve-racking stakes.

The notion that we can play Russia off against China—as the Nixon administration played China off against the Soviet Union—is a fantasy. President Biden’s reward for giving up opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany has been the advance of nearly 100,000 Russian troops to the Ukrainian border area. National security adviser Henry Kissinger’s secret 1971 visit to Beijing occurred in the context of dramatic military tensions on the Chinese-Soviet frontier. China was in desperate need of U.S. help. Russia today has no such need.

True, the Chinese are making large-scale economic advances in formerly Soviet Central Asia, as well as providing security assistance to the Muslim republics there. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has calculated that China, a fellow authoritarian regime, isn’t a threat to his rule in the way the West is. (Indeed, Mr. Putin easily moved antiriot police into Kazakhstan, a place that the Russian empire settled with peasants from Russia and Ukraine in the 19th and early 20th centuries.) He has little need to line up with the West to balance against China.

Rather the reverse: Mr. Putin needs China to balance against the West. Since it is the West, in his view, that has helped install a hostile regime in Ukraine, whose border is less than 300 miles from Moscow, and would like to install a similarly hostile and democratic regime in Belarus, also relatively close to the Russian capital. What we see as potential or fledgling democratic states, Mr. Putin sees as vital parts of the former Soviet Union, a great power whose sprawling territory was based on czarist imperial conquests. While Ukraine was the birthplace of Kyivan Rus, it was also forcibly absorbed inside the czarist empire in the late 18th century, only to declare independence in 1918, before the Soviet conquest.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Yeshiva University, the Jewish College Basketball Powerhouse The NBA cheers the Maccabees after their 50-game win streak.By Ari Berman

Posted By on January 14th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yeshiva-university-the-jewish-college-basketball-powerhouse-sports-teamwork-nba-division-iii-11642112193?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

The Jewish people can take pride in collective accomplishments across a range of human endeavors. I never imagined that basketball would be one of them, but it’s not the only thing that’s taken me by surprise since I became president of Yeshiva University four years ago.

As 2021 came to an end, so did our Division III basketball team’s remarkable 50-game winning streak. The Yeshiva University Maccabees had not lost a game since Nov. 9, 2019, when they fell to Illinois Wesleyan on Dec. 30. The accomplishment still was notable enough for the National Basketball Association to tweet congratulations, and I’ve spent some time reflecting on what it all means.

When I took this job, I anticipated celebrating student success in rabbinics, law, the humanities, business, tech and science. I never expected the energy and excitement of presiding over a sports powerhouse. For the past few years, I have watched game after game in which young men with great Jewish pride score basket after basket. It is beautiful and breathtaking to see their graceful play and teamwork in action.

Many have asked me if I think these wins are an act of divine intervention. This is the wrong question. As a rabbi—as a Jew, for that matter—I believe that everything in life involves divine intervention coupled with human agency. Even losing. The right question is: How could a small research university produce such a team?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why We Saw a Split Decision on the Biden Vaccine Mandates By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on January 14th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/why-we-saw-a-split-decision-on-the-biden-vaccine-mandates/

It’s about separation of powers: The executive may not exercise powers Congress has not given.

I ’m sure the thing you most desire at the moment must be more analysis from the guy who, after carefully studying the Biden mandate cases for a couple of weeks, just got finished telling you we probably wouldn’t get a decision for another week or three. Yes, yes, I know: The ink was not yet dry on my post when the Supreme Court issued its two rulings.

But at least I was half right, and, though off on the timing, I did not misguide you on the important thing — the substance. We got the split decision that, a couple of days ago, I warned we might get: The Court torpedoed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) mandate in a 6–3 ruling, but by a bare 5–4 margin upheld the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate (involving 15 categories of entities that do business with CMS — HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services).

Still, I am not going up in a balloon about that. The Constitution was my basis for thinking the Court could split on the mandates: OSHA is rooted in the Commerce Clause; HHS is rooted in Congress’s power to spend in furtherance of the general welfare.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Professor Ehud Qimron: “Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure”

Posted By on January 14th, 2022

https://swprs.org/professor-ehud-qimron-ministry-of-health-its-time-to-admit-failure/

Professor Ehud Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University and one of the leading Israeli immunologists, has written an open letter sharply criticizing the Israeli – and indeed global – management of the coronavirus pandemic.

Original letter in Hebrew : N12 News (January 6, 2022); translated by Google / SPR. See also: Professor Qimron’s prediction from August 2020: “History will judge the hysteria” (INN).

∗∗

Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure

In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so.

Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame .

You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.

You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007”, p. 26).

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

On the filibuster, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin came through in the crunch By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 14th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/on_the_filibuster_kyrsten_sinema_and_joe_manchin_came_through_in_the_crunch.html

Almost a year ago, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell agreed with majority leader Chuck Schumer to an equal power-sharing agreement for the upcoming session, reflecting the 50-50 split between the parties (with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote). In exchange, McConnell agreed to allow the question of the filibuster’s continued existence to be brought up to a vote. He did so because Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema promised not to end the filibuster. That was an incredible gamble but, on Thursday, Manchin and Sinema came through on a filibuster vote. A furious Biden started hollering about the horrors of life without federalizing American elections and made it clear Democrats will keep coming back.

I must admit that I was dubious that either Manchin or Sinema would keep the promise to protect the filibuster. I was certain that they’d find a reason to go back on their word and end the 216-year-old procedural device that blocks a minute majority (such as the Democrats’ majority thanks only to Harris’s vote) from running away with legislation. But they didn’t. If I were in the room with them, I’d apologize for doubting them.

After explaining why she supports the “For The People Act” (and she’s completely wrong on that, as I discuss briefly, below), Sinema elegantly explained why she would not vote to end the filibuster:

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

If the U.S. and Russia are Implacable Foes, Then All Lines of Inquiry Lead to NATO By Alexander Markovsky and Ted Belman

Posted By on January 14th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/if_the_us_and_russia_are_implacable_foes_then_all_lines_of_inquiry_lead_to_nato.html

In 1961, as a young academic Henry Kissinger had an opportunity to interview President Harry Truman. He asked the former president what in his presidency had made him most proud.

Truman replied, “That we totally defeated our enemies and then brought them back to the community of nations.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. chose not to emulate Truman’s achievement in the years that followed. With the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, the military threat to Western Europe had ended, but NATO alliance did not disband itself. Mission accomplished was not good news for the military alliance — it needed new enemies and a new mission for self-preservation.

Indeed, NATO had no difficulty adjusting to the emerging world order. A new enemy was invented — Russia was to be treated as a descendant of the “evil empire.” The concept of an alliance was quietly converted into a doctrine of collective security.  The difference is that while alliances are aimed at a specific threat and define the obligation of each partner in case of belligerency, collective security is an ambiguous concept that defines no specific threat and is designed to resist any aggression anywhere in the world. In this new mission, NATO equated peace and security with expanding democratic gains and the proliferation of American values.

In conformance with a new disposition, in the exultant atmosphere of the end of the Cold War, when Russia’s executive power was in a state of paralysis and its military in a state of despair, NATO hastily extended membership to the countries of former Soviet satellite orbit. The projection of a hostile military alliance eastward to within several hundred miles of Moscow could not be long tolerated by Russia irrespective invocations of goodwill.

After the restoration of her economy and years of heavy investment into the modernization of its armed forces, Russia feels strong enough to confront what she considers a serious threat to her security.

Putin proclaimed his strategy, which was akin to a Russified Monroe Doctrine. It aimed to reassert Russian hegemony around its perimeter, or what Russia has long called its “near abroad.” 

Russia’s fear is not unfounded. “If you know a country’s geography, you can understand and predict its foreign policy,” said Napoleon.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Is Out Of Touch With Reality On Inflation

Posted By on January 14th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/14/biden-is-out-of-touch-with-reality-on-inflation/

These days, when President Joe Biden isn’t lying about being arrested during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, he’s telling equally large fibs about “making progress” on inflation and the economy. Truth is, in the space of less than a year, he’s turned a recovering economy into dross.

Thursday brought yet more disastrous news about the “transitory” upsurge in inflation the media shills and Biden administration economic advisers talk about.

After Wednesday’s consumer price data showed a 7% rise in consumer prices for 2021, the highest since 1982, came worse news for producer prices: They rose a record 9.7% last year, as supply-chain issues and a massive burst of money printing by the Fed created a classic case of too much money chasing too few goods.

Yet, in a statement Wednesday, Biden claimed “we are making progress in slowing the rate of price increases.”

“Progress?” Really? As the New York Post helpfully points out: “Although Biden claimed food prices were falling, the new Consumer Price Index data indicate that food prices actually increased by 0.5% from November to December, up in total 6.3% over 12 months. The monthly rate of increase slowed from 0.7% in November.”

The supply-chain disruption and resulting shortages are also putting pressure on prices. Biden seems to want to simply declare victory and go home, saying just before Christmas: “The much-predicted crisis didn’t occur. Packages are moving. Gifts are being delivered. Shelves are not empty.”

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain took it a step further, describing the supply-chain chaos as “an overhyped narrative.”

Recall, it was a mere six months ago that Biden poo-poohed the very idea of inflation, claiming that “no serious economist” believed there was a problem.