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Charles Lipson: Getting UN help on American civil rights is a great idea I for one would love a lecture on police brutality from Cuba or Venezuela

Posted By on July 17th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/getting-un-help-american-civil-rights-great-idea/

The small-minded people who believe in freedom and democratic self-government have their shorts in a bunch over the Biden administration’s invitation to the United Nations to review our country’s civil-rights record. What a superb idea. Long overdue.

The countries filling the human rights bodies at the UN have the kind of expertise you can’t get by reading books or following the rule of law. You have to get that kind of experience in the streets. Police brutality? All you have to do is ask the leading members of the UN Human Rights Council like Cuba, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Somalia, Sudan and Venezuela. They know a thing or two about protecting civil rights. But why stop there?

Let’s say the US wants to know whether it is imprisoning religious minorities and forcing them to work as slaves. Well, you definitely want to ask China. They have practical, on-the-ground experience. If Chinese observers see us jailing all the Uighur Muslims in Vermont, they are gonna reprimand us right away. Personally, I want to know. I think most red-blooded Americans do. After all, we may be falling short of China’s standards.

As for press freedom, China is not the only country that can help us, although Beijing’s experience shutting down all independent publications in Hong Kong is surely useful. Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran can all pitch in. So can Belarus, Syria, Sudan and Libya. If any regimes understand what a free press really means, it’s them. It would be foolhardy to ignore their expertise.

Important as it is to work closely with these international partners, we should also ask for help from Facebook, Google and Twitter. They have particular experience dealing with stories that might affect election outcomes, such as discussing Hunter Biden’s laptop. They also knew that ‘loose lips sink ships’ in the early months of the COVID pandemic. That’s why they suppressed any mention that the pandemic may have come from a ‘lab leak’ in Wuhan. They knew it was pure disinformation. The more we learn, the more their wisdom shines through.

What about free assembly? Here again, the US is missing out on some great international experience. The United Nations can help by asking local police and their political bosses in Hong Kong, Moscow, Tehran, Caracas, Managua and Havana to review American procedures.

As for racial equity, I think we all stand with Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose scholarly expertise and nuanced knowledge of American history has been so helpful in designing the 1619 Project. In a podcast two years ago, she told Vox’s Ezra Klein, ‘If you want to see the most equal multiracial — it’s not a democracy — the most equal multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba…Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people of any place really in the hemisphere.’

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

FRAU MERKEL’S FAREWELL

Posted By on July 17th, 2021

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/frau-merkels-farewell/91582/

One thing to watch for as Chancellor Angela Merkel makes her various farewells is her famous eye roll. It is the tic that, on occasion, discloses the impatience and exasperation and intelligence that lurks behind her lugubrious visage. It is brilliantly lampooned — immortalized, even — by comedienne Tracey Ullman in a sketch in which, at the mention of Donald Trump, she rolls her eyes so forcefully that she flips over backwards.

We hoped that Frau Merkel’s eye roll might make an appearance in, say, her press conference yesterday with President Biden. We were disappointed. She stood there lugubriously without the eye roll as Mr. Biden shrugged off the fact that Germany had shrugged off America’s objections to Berlin going ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Russia. “Good friends can disagree,” Mr. Biden burbled.

We met Ms. Merkel only once, in 2003, at a small breakfast in Berlin. It was off-the-record, but we don’t think it would be inappropriate to say that she exuded a kind of intelligence that we greatly admire. She is — like the founding president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann — a chemist by training; plus, she grew up in communist East Germany. So she understands the way the world works in both a political and physical way.

At the time we felt that it would be easy to underestimate her. She acceded to the chancellorship in 2005 in an election in which neither her Christian Democrats nor the incumbent Social Democrats won a majority and both claimed victory. Neither was successful in finding a coalition with the small parties. In a move that astonished us, the two major parties agreed to make a government with Frau Merkel as chancellor.

In that government, the outgoing leftists initially held important ministries — including foreign affairs and finance. It would be like, say, President Trump giving major cabinet posts to Hillary Clinton’s camarilla. We figured Frau Merkel wouldn’t last long. In the event, she’s now in her fourth government and will step down later this year as the second-longest serving chancellor in the history of the Federal Republic.

Yet, we found her years in office to be disappointing. Her economic adviser during the campaign was famously for a flat tax. It stirred in us the idea that President Bush could make Steve Forbes, a tribune of the flat tax, his ambassador in Berlin. Frau Merkel, though, shrank from making so radical a stand as the flat tax, and the potential to really change and excite Europe seemed to wane even before she took office.

President George W. Bush clearly has great affection and regard for her, and talked about it — including the shoulder massage — in an interview the other day at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. We thought, though, that Frau Merkel made a mistake in taking so much offense, as she did, at President Trump. He was right on almost every critique he made of Germany and the Europeans, and she bears a portion of the blame for the failure to find a partnership.

HOMELAND SECURITY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Plots to Kidnap Iranian-American Journalist from U.S. Soil Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on July 17th, 2021

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

he Southern District of New York, the acting assistant attorney general for national security and the assistant director of the N.Y. field office of the FBI unsealed an indictment for “kidnapping conspiracy, sanctions violations conspiracy, bank and wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy charges” against four Iranians, and similar charges against a woman in the United States. U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said, “As alleged, four of the defendants monitored and planned to kidnap a U.S. citizen of Iranian origin who has been critical of the regime’s autocracy, and to forcibly take their intended victim to Iran, where the victim’s fate would have been uncertain at best.”

Although the indictments didn’t publicly mention the name of the intended victim, she “outed” herself. Masih Alinejad is an Iranian-born U.S. citizen, a journalist and a vocal critic of the Iranian regime. She is an outspoken advocate of women’s rights—including the right to remove the law-enforced hijab in Iran—as well as a presenter and producer at Voice of America Persian Service and contributor to numerous other media outlets. Much of the material she presents is video and audio from Iranian people desperate to find someone to spread their story in the West.

Dangerous to the regime? Absolutely.

CNN and Politico ran serious news stories about the kidnapping plot. They noted that, despite the fact that Iran has—for the first time—targeted American citizens in America for kidnapping, the indictment will not affect the Biden administration’s interest in pursuing a return to the 2015 nuclear deal. The State Department told CNN that “The Biden Administration will continue to call out and stand up to Iran’s human rights abuses and will support others who do so both here and in Iran.”

“Call out” is such a sporting term; umps call out runners at first base and the game goes on.

The Politico story, equally straightforward, quoted an official who said, “The simple fact is that since the U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA, none of our problems with Iran have gotten better—including the kind of despicable plot the Department of Justice laid out…. Most of our problems with Iran have gotten worse, starting with the now unconstrained advances in their nuclear program.”

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Class—the Word We Dare Not Speak The Left does not wish to admit it has become the party of wealth.  By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/14/class-the-word-we-dare-not-speak/

How often during the last year of woke, have middle- and lower-class Americans listened to multimillionaires of all races and genders lecture them on their various pathologies and oppressions? 

Million-dollar-a year university presidents virtue signal on the cheap their own sort of “unearned white privilege.” 

Multimillionaire Meghan Markle and the Obamas, from their plush estates, indict Americans for their biases. 

Former Black Lives Matter founder and cultural Marxist Patrisse Khan-Cullors Brignac decries the oppressive victimization she and others have suffered—from one of her four newly acquired homes. 

Do we need another performance-art sermon on America’s innate unfairness from a Hollywood billionaire such as Beyoncé, Jay-Z, or Oprah Winfrey—or a multimillion-dollar-per year Delta Airlines or Coca-Cola CEO? 

During the 1980s cultural war, the Left’s mantra was “race, class, and gender.” Occasionally we still hear of that trifecta, but the class part has now increasingly dropped out. 

The neglect of class is ironic given that dozens of recent studies conclude class differences are widening as never before. 

Middle-class incomes among all races have stagnated and family net worth has declined. Far greater percentages of rising incomes go to the already rich. Student debt, mostly a phenomenon of the middle and lower classes, has hit $1.7 trillion dollars. 

States like California have bifurcated into Medieval-style societies. The state’s progressive coastal elite can boast of some of the highest incomes in the nation. But in the more conservative north and central interior nearly a third of the population lives below the poverty line, explaining why one of every three American welfare recipients lives in California. 

California’s heating and cooling, gasoline, and housing—the stuff of life—are the highest in the continental United States. Most of these spiraling costs are attributable to polices embraced by an upper-class elite—in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and marquee universities—whose incomes shield them from the deleterious consequences of their utopian bromides. The poor and middle class have no such insulation. 

So why are we not talking about class? 

First, we are watching historic changes in political alignment. 

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Trump Winds and Biden Whirlwinds The Left is well on its way to incurring a massive pushback, with the potential to make the Tea Party boomerang seem like small stuff.  By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/11/trump-winds-and-biden-whirlwinds/

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

What was common to the media’s deification of the criminally minded Michael Avenatti, and the promotion of a series of abject hoaxes? Do we remember the Steele “dossier,” the supposed authority of Fusion-GPS, the Schiff “report,” and the entire Russian “collusion” yarn? 

Do we recall how the Left invented the Charlottesville construct out of a supposedly racist and unqualified endorsement by the president of the Klan and neo-Nazis? Who has forgotten the charge of “racism” for merely connecting the origins of COVID-19 to a Wuhan, level-4 security, gain-of-function-research, Chinese-military-affiliated virology lab rather than to a chopped-up wet bat or pangolin? 

Do we remember the names of our supposed best and brightest retired intelligence officials who lied shamelessly and on spec for the Biden campaign, claiming that Russian “disinformation” accounted for a supposedly fictitious Hunter Biden’s laptop? And are the fabrications by Joe Biden and the media—that men with guns staged an “armed insurrection” of January 6 and “killed” officer Brian Sicknick—the new standard of truth? 

What ties together the efforts of Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $40 million witch hunt, and the two impeachment proceedings—the last dispensing with witnesses, formal hearings, cross-examinations, a special prosecutor, and the Chief Justice presiding, all in mob-like efforts to try to convict in the Senate now private citizen Donald Trump? Must a Joe Biden, one day as president-emeritus and private citizen, fear that there will be no statutes of limitation to his vulnerability, when the vast trove of Hunter Biden’s laptop is finally accessed and turned over to a future hostile congress or federal prosecutor?

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The National Education Association’s Radical Agenda for Public Education Turning classrooms into indoctrination centers for social activism. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on July 15th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/neas-radical-agenda-public-education-richard-l-cravatts/

One positive aspect of the vigorous current debate over critical race theory (CRT) being taught in public schools is that parents and other interested parties have a new awareness of what is being taught in their children’s classrooms. The criticism has also resulted in educators closing ranks against a questioning of their perceived role in promoting a leftist, radical ideology that many think has no place in public school systems.

In a July 6th speech at an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) meeting, Randi Weingarten, the organization’s left-leaning president, defended the teaching about race and pushed back against critics who questioned the educational and moral validity of CRT being part of a school curriculum.

“Let’s be clear,” Weingarten proclaimed, mendaciously, however, “critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools.” And answering back defiantly to anyone who questioned how the current teaching about race may be divisive rather than educational, she further claimed that “. . . culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as CRT to try to make it toxic. They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”

Weingarten and other educators, including local boards across the country, have been walking back their previous vigorous defense of CRT, claiming instead, as she did, that teaching about race and white supremacy is merely “accurate history,” and not part of a campaign to indoctrinate students with an ideological mishmash of racial justice, activism, white police brutality, social and economic disparities between whites and so-called “people of color,’ and a culture of white supremacy in which the privilege of the majority disadvantages and oppresses black victims.

But Weingarten’s protestation aside, the National Education Association (NEA) — with some 1,680,000 members — and other educators groups are not only actively engaged in promoting CRT but are creating learning environments in which students are bombarded with an increasingly radical set of lesson plans, some taught in conjunction with Black Lives Matter at School Week and some part of regular instruction, that teach children a one-sided view of race, law enforcement, class, family structure, crime, and economics—topics that have not heretofore been a central, or even appropriate, part of K-12 education.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Biden Administration Says Cubans Are Not Welcome. Where’s the Outrage? By David Harsanyi

Posted By on July 15th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/biden-administration-says-cubans-not-welcome-wheres-the-outrage/

It’s impossible to ignore that Cubans often are treated differently.

I n November of 2020, Joe Biden’s Havana-born nominee for Department of Homeland Security secretary, Ali Mayorkas, promised to “oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones.”

Less than a year later, amid a popular uprising in Cuba, Mayorkas made a volte-face, telling those seeking refuge from Haiti and the communist nation, “You will not come to the United States. . . . Again, I repeat, do not risk your life attempting to enter the United States illegally. You will not come to the United States.”

As far as I can tell, there was no performative outrage from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or any of her progressive cohorts over the United States shutting its doors to the downtrodden. There are no overwrought analogies made between U.S. immigration policy and the MS St. Louis by Democrats. There is no grandstanding reading of “The New Colossus” from CNN hosts.

Even as Biden gave his perfunctory statement about the United States standing with the “Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom,” a senior State Department official was framing protests — in which some unfurled American flags and many chanted “We want liberty” — as unhappiness over “rising COVID cases/deaths,” using puerile activist rhetoric about “mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need.” Collectivist-induced shortages are not an outlier. Every neighborhood is in need.

It’s impossible to ignore the fact that Cubans are often treated differently. Perhaps it’s because a sizeable number of them — having first- or secondhand experience with socialism — vote Republican, and progressives are interested only in future Democrat voters.

After all, President Barack Obama not only ended the embargo on Cuba; he overturned the “wet foot, dry foot” policy instituted under President Clinton in 1995, which allowed Cubans refugees who reached U.S. soil to stay and become permanent residents. There is a genuine debate over the morality of policy that incentivizes refugees to put their lives in danger (Cubans deserve to make that choice), and it is also true that the Cuban regime has taken advantage with mass expulsions of people in a bid to retain power, as it did with the Mariel Boatlift. Obama, though, legitimized the regime by visiting Cuba, allowing himself to be filmed underneath a mural of the mass murderer Che Guevara. He took in a baseball game with the dictator Raúl Castro as FARC terrorists cheered in the stands. Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, known as Antúnez, who spent 17 years in Castro’s gulag, called the U.S. policy “a betrayal of the aspiration to freedom of the Cuban people.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dangerous Infrastructure Bill: Flooding America’s Suburbs with High-Density Housing Projects by Gatestone Institute Staff

Posted By on July 15th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17544/dangerous-infrastructure-bill

This proposal… amounts to “abolishing the suburbs” by making them more like cities.

Apartment buildings…. could be built in the middle of any suburban neighborhood, and there is nothing you could do to stop it. A housing project could be built next door to your home. One-acre lots could be subdivided to cram in as many houses as possible.

They claim that cities are undesirable places to live because they are crowded, hot, and lack nature, so it is unfair that people have to live there. Ironically, their solution seems to be to make more of them….

Worse, local governments presumably know what is best for their communities. That is why communities have local governments rather than a federal government deciding everything for everyone. If residents desired different zoning, their officials would have already made those changes on their own…..That is probably why it is being hidden within a massive bill and not talked about.

The federal government has no power to force this change, but the president has floated withholding federal money that towns rely on for things like roads unless the towns comply…. What town can afford to lose all federal transportation dollars — funded with taxes that they pay?..,, Basically, it is not far from extortion.

Most cities, and most low-income people, vote for Democrats. For politicians, this means that if you can make the countryside into cities, in 10 years, everyone will be voting for only one party.

Many counties will find it hard to resist the temptation to take the cash. But in the long-term they are saddling themselves with a huge influx of poverty whose financial effects will outweigh any grants. Of course, they will also completely change the aesthetics and culture of the neighborhood — and irrevocably alter its political makeup.

Interview with Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter with The Daily Wire. He warns of a little-noticed provision in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal that could have major consequences for how people will be forced to live — and for a political power-grab in the country.

Gatestone Institute: President Joe Biden’s “infrastructure” proposal says that money granted to towns and counties will come with a condition: eliminating “prohibitions on multifamily housing” and zoning restrictions such as “minimum lot sizes.” This proposal, it has been said, amounts to “abolishing the suburbs” by making them more like cities.

Rosiak: Yes. Apartment buildings as well as duplexes — essentially carving up suburban homes into multiple apartment units — could be built in the middle of any suburban neighborhood, and there is nothing you could do to stop it. A housing project could be built next door to your home. One-acre lots could be subdivided to cram in as many houses as possible. If you bought into a neighborhood of one-acre lots and enjoy a bit of privacy, your neighbor could soon be able to sell his acre to a real estate developer who could put eight buildings on it.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Another Global Warming Fact Alarmists Want Buried

Posted By on July 15th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/15/another-global-warming-fact-alarmists-want-buried/

The entire climate change movement has been shady from its beginnings. Data have been hidden, truth has been sacrificed to politics, and hypocrisy and personal interests among its “leaders” have produced a giant credibility deficit. The more we learn, the worse the alarmists look.

Take, for instance, a new report that shows greenhouse gas emissions are not an American or Western problem. They are primarily a Chinese problem. A study from Sun Yat-sen University in China found that more than half of the world’s urban greenhouse gas emissions are generated in only 25 big cities, and 23 of them are located in China.

In other words, if the entire developed world cut its greenhouse gas emissions as activists, politicians, journalists, and celebrities have demanded, nothing would change regarding the climate. (This assumes human carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for warming the planet, which is a load of speculation that’s yet to be proved.)

The paper’s findings remind us of the great plastic scare that’s “inspired” lawmakers to outlaw single-use plastic bags, plastic straws, plastic utensils, and other modern products, in a mass pretense of doing something when in reality they’re doing nothing but inconveniencing people.

The data show ​​90% of ocean plastic pours into the sea from “the top 10 rivers with the highest loads” of plastic debris, according to the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. None are in the U.S., which contributes only about 1% percent of all plastic debris found at sea. Eight of them though are in Asia, while two are in Africa.

While it provides useful information, the Sun Yat-sen study isn’t a shocking revelation. We’ve known for at least a decade that while agitators campaigned to force developed economies to eliminate fossil fuel use, China and India have been busy building hundreds of coal plants in an effort to spread the First World prosperity that the climate alarmists have enjoyed their entire lives. Late last year, the Canadian Energy Centre, affiliated with the Alberta government, reported that as of 2020, 350 coal-fired power plants were under construction worldwide. Seven were in South Korea, another 13 in Japan. But China and India were building 184 and 52 plants, respectively. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Research Used to Justify California’s ‘Equity’ Math Doesn’t Add Up By Richard Bernstein

Posted By on July 15th, 2021

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/07/14/research_used_to_justify_californias_racial_equity_math_doesnt_add_up_784966.html

Part 1 of a Series on ‘Social Justice’ Research (Part 2 here)

The push to create “equity” and more “social justice” in public schools in America’s largest state rests on this basic premise: “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents,” declares the current draft of the California Math Framework, which also states that it rejects “the cult of genius.”

Are blacks and girls filtered out of high-end math? Or are students just different?
Katerina Holmes

Informed by that fundamental idea, the 800-page Framework calls for the elimination of accelerated classes and gifted programs for high-achieving students until at least the 11th grade.

It’s a major departure for the Framework, commissioned every seven years by the Department of Education to provide guidance to the state’s 10,315 public schools serving 6 million students. Some California teachers describe it as a misguided “one size fits all” approach to reversing long-standing discrimination against girls and students of color in math instruction.

But the Framework, which could be adopted next year, claims its recommendations are based on the latest, seemingly unimpeachable findings of advanced social science research. Phrases such as “researchers found,” “the research shows” and the “research is clear” are sprinkled through the Framework, which states unequivocally: “The research is clear that all students are capable of becoming powerful mathematics learners and users.” If true, this evidence would provide a powerful rationale for adopting the Framework’s proposals, which, given California’s size and prestige, is commonly seen as a model for other states.