DAVID'S SLINGSHOT DPS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Over 850 Harvard Affiliates Denounce Antisemitism, ‘Demonization’ of Israel By Dion J. Pierre

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/06/11/over-850-harvard-affiliates-denounce-antisemitism-demonization-of-israel/

Over 850 students, faculty and other affiliates of Harvard University have signed a statement in support of Israel’s “right to self-defense” and the “right of the Jewish people to self-determination,” which also criticized what it called the rise of anti-Israel activism on campus.

The letter comes amid a nationwide spike in antisemitism that included two recent acts of vandalism involving the Harvard Hillel building.

“As members of the Harvard community we stand by the State of Israel in its right to self-defense and by the right of the Jewish people to self-determination,” the letter said.

Circulated on May 28 by the campus group the Harvard Israel Initiative (HII) — and signed by Harvard affiliates such as literature scholar Ruth Wisse, economist Kenneth Rogoff, and Harvard Chaplain and Executive Director of Harvard Hillel Jonah Steinberg — it denounced a rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes and encouraged “civil discourse” when discussing Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Other signatories included social psychologist Jennifer Lerner, attorney Alan Dershowitz, historian Niall Ferguson, and physician Jerome Groopman.

“We are tremendously saddened by the events of the last two weeks, starting with the tragic loss of innocent Israeli and Palestinian life, followed by a frightening spike in reported antisemitic attacks across the country and the globe, including cities such as New York and Los Angeles,” the letter said.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Effect of Communist China on America’s Clean Energy Plan by Judith Bergman

Posted By on June 11th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17335/china-rare-earth-materials

“[I]t is as if the Middle East not only sat on most of the world’s oil but also, almost exclusively, refined it and then made products out of it,” wrote The Economist in 2019.

It is not that rare earth materials do not exist outside of China, although it sits on the largest quantity: approximately 30-40% of all known rare earth deposits. Rather, extracting the materials is a difficult and highly polluting process that China was willing to take on…. “making it practically impossible for competing companies outside China to get a foothold,” according to the Danish Institute for International Studies.

China’s de facto monopoly forms an acute problem: international reliance on them could hamper vital industries and national security at a time of maximum competition between China and the US.

In February, the Financial Times reported that China was looking into export curbs on rare earth materials that are key to the US defense industry, such as the F-35. “The government wants to know if the US may have trouble making F-35 fighter jets if China imposes an export ban.” — Chinese government adviser to the Financial Times.

On April 16, however, after elections that were de facto a referendum on the Chinese plans to mine not just for rare earth materials, but also for uranium, a new Greenland government came to power, which vowed that it “will do everything we can to stop the Kvanefjeld project.” Greenland’s new government may impact not only China’s hopes for mining there, but also those of other countries hoping to break free of the rare earth dependency on China.

The London-based Polar Research and Policy Initiative, recommended in March that the “Five Eyes” alliance, an intelligence-sharing group comprised of Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, set its sights on Greenland’s rare earths.

Wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles all rely on rare earth materials and China has a head start that can be measured in decades, when it comes to producing the various products of which they form a crucial part: More than 60% of the world’s solar panels… are made in China….

There is also a human rights aspect to the issue: Polysilicon is produced in Xinjiang, where China is accused of using forced labor in the production chains, because — ironically — heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius is required to make the material, and Xinjiang has an abundance of cheap coal power.

“It will cost us more than the Chinese to produce solar cells,” said Tom Duesterberg, former Commerce Department assistant secretary under President George H.W. Bush. “We could agree to pay that price, but it will be more expensive and take a long time. If tensions get bad with China, they’ve proven in the past that they are willing to cut off supplies.”

China is also the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. “China is projected to produce around 13 million battery electric vehicles… by 2023, more than any other nation in the world. China’s estimated production level is also anticipated to exceed the combined output of other large markets, including the United States…. Biden’s plan could therefore end up boosting China’s green energy industry even more.

“The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”, Deng Xiaoping said in 1992. Nearly three decades later, the world is almost completely dependent on China for rare earth materials. They constitute key elements in large swaths of modern technology from consumer electronics to military equipment and green technology: Mobile phones, computers, fighter jets, guided missiles, solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles, among others. While demand is soaring, China is virtually their worldwide exclusive producer. “To extend Mr Deng’s comparison, it is as if the Middle East not only sat on most of the world’s oil but also, almost exclusively, refined it and then made products out of it,” wrote The Economist in 2019.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Letters from a D.C. Jail The rule of law for anyone involved in the events of January 6 has been flipped on its head by the U.S. justice system; defendants are presumed guilty before proven innocent. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on June 11th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/10/letters-from-a-d-c-jail/

This week, five Republican senators sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland regarding his office’s handling of January 6 protesters. The letter revealed the senators are aware that several Capitol defendants charged with mostly nonviolent crimes are being held in solitary confinement conditions in a D.C. jail used exclusively to house Capitol detainees.

Joe Biden’s Justice Department routinely requests—and partisan Beltway federal judges routinely approve—pre-trial detention for Americans arrested for their involvement in the January 6 protest. This includes everyone from an 18-year-old high school senior from Georgia to a 70-year-old Virginia farmer with no criminal record.

It is important to emphasize that the accused have languished for months in prison before their trials even have begun. Judges are keeping defendants behind bars largely based on clips selectively produced by the government from a trove of video footage under protective seal and unavailable to defense lawyers and the public—and for the thoughtcrime of doubting the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

The rule of law for anyone involved in the events of January 6 has been flipped on its head by the U.S. justice system; defendants are presumed guilty before proven innocent. The right to a speedy trial and the right to participate in one’s own defense are ignored, as are other constitutional protections.

Prosecutors insist the alleged crimes committed by Capitol protesters—unlike similar or more egregious crimes committed by leftist protesters last year—are exceptionally heinous because the acts resulted in an “attack on our democracy” and interrupted the official business of the U.S. Congress.

The Justice Department and federal judges also continue to lie in court about the number of fatalities from January 6 in order to make the event seem far worse than it actually was. A Senate report issued this week also repeated the falsehood that “seven individuals, including three law enforcement officers, lost their lives.”

But federal prosecutors and Beltway judges—many of whom were involved in the nonstop criminal hunt against President Trump and his associates for four years—are wasting no time doling out severe punishment for those who dared to challenge the incoming Biden regime.

Take, for example, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge who refused to dismiss the case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn even though both parties sought to do so. Sullivan is presiding over a handful of Capitol breach cases. Last month, he denied a request made by Jonathan Mellis, behind bars in the D.C. jail since February awaiting trial, to attend his father’s funeral in Virginia. Mellis faces several charges including allegations he attempted to strike a police officer with a stick. (Again, this is based only on evidence presented by the government. Nothing has been contested in court.)

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Cyber-Follies at Homeland Security By Robert L. Maginnis

Posted By on June 11th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/cyberfollies_at_homeland_security.html

Russia, China, and the balance of the world’s bad cyber-actors won’t stop attacking American commercial and infrastructure targets like the Colonial Pipeline and JBS, the world’s largest meat-processing company, until we make them pay an unacceptable price.  Unfortunately, Congress and the federal government accept that grave risk.

America is a sitting duck to cyber-criminals and state actors, who easily harvest our intellectual property, degrade our communications, create false information that influences our politics, and erode our national will from keyboards abroad.

Yes, cyberspace operations are the new nuclear weapons and can be scaled from pinpricks up to attacks that cripple entire countries.  The threat is so serious that it ought to capture the attention of every American.

The tip of the threat is cyber-crime, which costs the world perhaps $6 trillion annually, but more worrisome are state-sponsored cyber-attacks.  After all, cyber is an invisible weapon to impose a cost and consume resources.  No wonder our enemies in Moscow and Beijing host significant offensive cyber-armies and a variety of cyber-proxies that sow discontent and keep America tied down — an effective strategy.

President Joe Biden’s promise to put Russian president Vladimir Putin on notice for harboring cyber-criminals is an empty threat.  Putin knows that America offers easy cyber-targets, such as last month’s ransomware attack, which locked up Colonial Pipeline’s computers, leaving East Coast gas tanks empty for more than a week.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

A Bird By Any Other Name is a Thought Crime Elite birdwatchers are purging American natural history. Danusha Goska

Posted By on June 11th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/bird-any-other-name-thought-crime-danusha-goska/

The Black Lives Matter movement and Critical Race Theory are powerful, seductive, and glamorous. They generate abundant capital, financial and social. As Americans secularize, walking away from organized religion, race ideology provides a ritualized seal of spiritual superiority. This new religion promises a cleansing purge. America will be razed to the ground, literally or culturally. Cities will burn; statues will topple. Language itself will swallow old, bad words and speak only the righteous lexicon. This shining new vocabulary will not be selected by the messy process of raucous human tongues trying out what works best to speak the heart, the mind, the groin, with other busy, sloppy, greedy, horny, hearing-impaired humans, over the course of eons. No. New, holy syllables will be hand-forged by our betters, people who know what is good for us. A glorious tomorrow will emerge. A superior elite will educate, and, failing that, dominate the polluted masses.

Corporations and individuals have struggled to jump on the bandwagon and to share race ideology’s reflected glow. Coca-Cola told employees to “be less white.” America, the Jesuit magazine, urged Catholics to be “Woke.” Indoctrination in Critical Race Theory is required in schools, despite objections from parents, students, and teachers.

Race ideology is especially dominant in academia, sports, and entertainment. This is ironic because all three are elitist. These elites announce themselves as the representative of poor blacks. They do so while demonizing black conservatives who disagree with CRT and BLM.

Elite birders, aka birdwatchers, have harkened to the siren song of race ideology. These birders insist that birdwatching is a colonialist, white supremacist exercise.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

How to Unwoke Your School Board The ideological pandemic invading classrooms nationwide. Joy Overbeck

Posted By on June 11th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/how-unwoke-your-school-board-joy-overbeck/

There’s a vicious pandemic that no vaccine will cure, and it’s called Critical Race Theory (CRT.) This is “wokeness” and it is invading school districts and classrooms nationwide, infecting the minds of America’s progeny from preschool through college. It’s a relentless illness, spreading racial division and distrust with a deterministic dogma that defines all whites as programmed to be oppressors and all minorities as doomed victims of that white oppression.  

This is the story of what happened when this pandemic suddenly struck the Douglas County, Colorado, School District, which serves 63,000 students. Only 1 percent of those students are black, and black residents only make up 1.1 percent of the county population (with Hispanics at about 7 percent according to the 2010 census , the most recent available.) So Douglas County is simply not as diverse and “inclusive” as many woke left-leaners would like it to be. Still, somehow the county always rates at the top of those nationwide “great places to live” surveys. It’s full of leafy, affluent neighborhoods with friendly people and lots of dogs. The dogs and their owners’ ride of choice is a Ford 150 pickup or a domestic SUV. The predominantly white and Republican electorate is one of the most well-educated populations in the nation. The county has been untroubled by the Antifa and BLM burning and lootings afflicting the radical left hotbeds of the nation. Though a few anemic BLM marches were organized, mostly by whites from other counties, these were outdone in enthusiasm and frequency by the hundreds of Trump supporters  who all last summer and fall flocked several times a week to sidewalk honk and wave events and Trumpster car parades.  No violence or racial incidents occurred, and the fall elections produced decisive victories for all the local and state Republican candidates, as usual.  

t should be noted that for the last two years, the District’s Superintendent, Chief Academic Officer, and Chief Technology Officer have all been African-Americans.  Yet the three departed their jobs at the end of 2020. The Superintendent was placed on administrative leave following a formal workplace complaint of gender discrimination; he was ultimately cleared. Nevertheless he resigned, having previously told the Board he had another job offer. Although the Chief Academic Officer said “she experienced “microaggressions and passive-aggressive racism” almost daily, none of the three district officials had any specific complaints.     

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Beijing’s Lies Matter Chinese communists nurture BLM to destabilize America. Joseph Hippolito

Posted By on June 11th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/beijings-lies-matter-joseph-hippolito/

One year after George Floyd died in the custody of Minneapolis police, one year after riots ravaged the nation in his name, the founder of Black Lives Matter’s chapter in nearby St. Paul quit.

“After a year on the inside, I learned they had little concern for rebuilding black families, and they cared even less about improving the quality of education for students in Minneapolis,” Rashard Turner said in a video May 26. One week later, Turner provided specifics in an interview with Fox News.

“When you call for a moratorium on charter schools, that is a direct attack on black families, on black children,” Turner said. “We know that charter schools are creating opportunities. Anyone who is in opposition to school choice, charter schools, I would say they’re racist.

“I was an insider in Black Lives Matter, and I learned the ugly truth.”

That ugly truth goes beyond BLM’s professional hypocrisy. It extends to an even uglier truth: BLM knowingly plays a pivotal role in China’s quest to attain geopolitical and ideological supremacy by destabilizing the United States.

BLM’s role is so pivotal that many of the group’s leaders and affiliated bodies have relationships with organizations that are connected to China through fronts or diplomatic contacts.

“Black Lives Matter is a Communist organization 100 percent, tied to foreign Communists and directly to the Communist Party of China,” said Trevor Loudon, an author and filmmaker from New Zealand who has studied Marxist movements for more than 30 years.

BLM embodies Mao Zedong’s quest to foment revolution through race, as he succinctly stated:

“The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and thrived with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people.”

Mao took that approach because China had neither an industrialized working class nor an organized labor movement.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Resisting Racial Demagoguery Tulsa Opera stands up to composer Daniel Bernard Roumain—and its concert commemorating the city’s massacre shines in his absence. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on June 11th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/tulsa-opera-daniel-bernard-roumain

Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain has made a good career leveraging his skin color. He writes pieces with titles like “i am a white person who ____ Black people.” He argues that orchestras should “focus on BLACK artists exclusively” [punctuation in the original]. He has solicited funding for a work written “EXCLUSIVELY for BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] members of ANY orchestra.”

When a percussionist on Roumain’s Facebook page suggested that such a work would be divisive, Roumain told him to “speak less and try to listen and learn and understand more.” BIPOC musicians “FACE racism everyday” from their white orchestral colleagues, Roumain added. In fact, Roumain argues, white musicians’ contracts should be term-limited as reparations for “decades of benefitting from orchestral racism.”

Roumain’s racial-justice profile has earned him a seat on the boards of the League of American Orchestras and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, as well as a faculty position at Arizona State University. He has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall and is working on film, TV, and opera scores.

He likely seemed a natural choice, then, to write a piece to commemorate the centennial of a race riot in Tulsa. That explosion of violence, from May 31, 1921, to June 1, 1921, followed a still-undetermined incident between a 19-year-old black male and a 17-year-old white female. Tulsa officials tried to protect the male from a possible lynching; armed black residents circled the jail where the teen was being held as another line of defense. Gunfire broke out around the jail, killing 10 whites and two blacks. In retaliation, white rampagers looted and set fire to hundreds of homes and businesses in the black section of Tulsa called Greenwood. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to ashes, leaving thousands homeless. A 2001 report by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission confirmed 26 black and 13 white deaths from the riots; unofficial estimates put the death toll at several hundred. Many more were wounded.

Tulsa Opera planned a concert called Greenwood Overcomes as part of the city’s riot centennial events. Eight black opera singers, accompanied on the piano by Metropolitan Opera assistant conductor Howard Watkins, would perform the works of 23 living black composers, as well as traditional songs and spirituals. Tulsa Opera commissioned four new works for the concert, the first commissions in its history.

Roumain received one of those commissions, and it was a peach: writing a short aria for mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. Graves’s Metropolitan Opera debut as Carmen in 1995 received rousing acclaim, drawing international attention to her full-bodied vocal tone and smoldering stage presence. She would be the biggest star of the Tulsa concert; any composer would jump to have her perform his work.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Bonkers on the Bay Educational leadership in San Francisco has all the gravity of a Marx Brothers film. Larry Sand

Posted By on June 11th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-bonkers-educrats

Once known for its scenic beauty and cultural attractions, San Francisco in recent years has acquired a less picturesque image as a mecca for the homeless and drug addicts, whose used syringes and feces plague city sidewalks. And now the City by the Bay can add another item to its ugly list: the public school system.

First off, there’s the achievement gap. While 70 percent of the city’s white students are proficient in math, just 12 percent of black students are, according to statistics released last year. One would think that public officials in such a bastion of progressive politics would jump at the chance to rectify this dismal disparity, but the city’s education establishment has other priorities. On January 26, the school board decided to rename 44 public schools because their namesakes were presumably more evil than Satan—or perhaps even than Donald Trump. Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, and assorted other historical miscreants were guilty of anti-woke crimes. Malcolm X got a pass, however; the elementary school bearing his name will not undergo a change. Why would a one-time drug dealer, thief, and pimp be exempted? Because the school board said that he should be “judged by the entirety of his life”—a courtesy it declined to extend to Lincoln and the others. Facing a lawsuit, the board has since decided to put a hold on the renaming campaign.

In early February, the art department of the San Francisco School District decided that acronyms are “a symptom of white supremacy.” Around the same time, the city took the unprecedented step of suing its own school board in an effort to get kids out of virtual learning mode and back into classrooms. In March, it came to light that San Francisco school board vice president Allison Collins had made some nasty comments about Asian-Americans on Twitter in 2016, accusing them, among other things, of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” The school board had to do something, of course. But it didn’t fire her or dock any of her six-figure salary; it merely removed her as vice president and stripped her of committee assignments. Collins then sued the school district for $87 million, alleging that the demotion had caused her a significant loss of reputation, severe mental and emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, humiliation, and “spiritual injury to her soul.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

COVID-19 Vaccines Will Not Be Enough. We Also Need Effective Treatments by Henry Miller

Posted By on June 11th, 2021

https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/06/10/covid-19-vaccines-will-not-be-enough-we-also-need-effective-treatments-15596

The COVID-19 vaccines have been nothing short of miraculous. Life is returning to normal in many places. But ACSH advisor Dr. Henry Miller argues that we will still need effective medical treatments for COVID-19.

COVID-19 vaccines are the miracle that has significantly suppressed the pandemic in a number of countries, including the United States, where the current seven-day moving averages of cases and deaths are at levels not seen since March of 2020.  With continued aggressive vaccination, we can further suppress the numbers – getting us closer to pre-pandemic “normality.”

However, for several reasons, vaccines alone won’t be the whole solution.

First, in spite of the overwhelming and growing evidence of the importance, safety, and efficacy of the vaccines, there remains a core of the population who will refuse them.  

Second, millions of Americans are taking immunosuppressive drugs — for cancer or autoimmune diseases, for example — that may attenuate the effect of the COVID-19 vaccines.  A study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine of more than 650 organ recipients — who take drugs to suppress their immune system to prevent rejection of their transplanted organs – found that 46 percent had no antibody response after two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.  In another study, a large group of academic researchers found that patients with conditions such as lupus, psoriasis and inflammatory bowel disease who were taking two types of drugs — glucocorticoids and B cell depleting agents — had a substantially impaired immune response to the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

Third, the proliferation of “variants of concern” – mutants of the original Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2 that are highly transmissible and may exhibit immune evasiveness in vaccinated subjects — in the future will likely compromise to some degree the efficacy of the currently available vaccines.  Increasing the likelihood of this outcome are the continuing significant outbreaks of COVID-19 in many of the world’s low- and middle-income countries, which provide opportunities for new, opportunistic mutants to emerge.

Fourth, in view of the above, the best-case scenario is probably that COVID-19 will not in the foreseeable future completely disappear but will become endemic like influenza virus and the coronaviruses that can cause the common cold. In order to save lives and modulate the severity of future COVID-19 infections, it will be critical to develop safe and effective treatments in addition to vaccines.