EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academic Freedom Alliance On a new initiative to protect freedom of expression on college campuses.

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/4/academic-freedom-alliance

Booker T. Washington would have liked the Academic Freedom Alliance, a newly announced group of college faculty dedicated to protecting freedom of expression on campus. The group, conceived at Princeton last summer, has quickly scaled up into a nationwide network. Although one of its main founders is Robert P. George, himself a conservative professor at Princeton, the alliance is determinedly nonpartisan and includes liberals and progressives as well as conservatives. The actions of the intolerant mob threaten everyone, regardless of political coloration. As a tribe, academics are not conspicuous for their courage. They tend to look the other way when colleagues are attacked for expressing opinions that do not pass muster with the wardens of wokeness. The afa hopes to change that, encouraging its members to act like elephants, not zebras: when hunted by lions, George noted in an interview, herds of zebras “fly off in a million directions, and the targeted member is easily taken down and destroyed and eaten.” Elephants, he said, behave differently. They “circle around the vulnerable elephant” and protect it. Academics need to do likewise and offer support—legal as well as moral—when one of their numbers falls victim to the mob.

We welcome the Academic Freedom Alliance. Like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (fire), it may well become a beacon of sanity in the stultifying and tenebrous atmosphere that prevails in American academia today. You can find out more about the alliance, and donate to support its activities, at its website, academicfreedom.org.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Crony capitalism and professional sports by James Piereson

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/crony-capitalism-and-professional-sports

On public funding for professional athletic arenas.

Professional athletic leagues have traditionally steered clear of politics in order to emphasize the purity of their entertainment and to avoid dividing fans over partisan controversies. That has changed in the last year. Players in the National Football League have “taken the knee” during playing of the national anthem as a protest against police practices; the National Basketball Association has embraced Black Lives Matter, also as a protest against the police; and now Major League Baseball has taken this year’s All-Star game out of Atlanta as a protest against Georgia’s new voting law, though baseball executives do not appear to have studied that law. Through these gestures, formerly non-political organizations have allied themselves with explicitly political causes.

These steps are unusual and unprecedented. Business corporations generally prefer to serve inclusive markets while avoiding controversies that might divide customers for or against them. The new corporate alliance with liberals and the Democratic Party is not only new – it is also dangerous. It will politicize the country along new lines, introduce political controversies into the internal operations of corporations, encourage boycotts and assaults on all sides, and much more. Some of this is already happening. As a strategy for dividing America, this one would be hard to beat.

Professional sports leagues, while mostly operating as for-profit enterprises, nevertheless receive generous subsidies from federal, state, and local sources to build and maintain modern stadiums and arenas. Importantly, these subsidies assume that the enterprises are non-political and non-partisan in nature, otherwise they would not be granted. Are professional sports franchises violating the bargains they made with taxpayers and public authorities?

Up until the 1950s, professional stadiums were constructed with private funds provided by owners. Fenway Park in Boston was built in 1913 by the franchise itself, as was Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (1913), Yankee Stadium in New York (1923), Wrigley Field in Chicago (1913), and nearly every other professional ballpark and stadium built in that era. Many professional football franchises leased these stadiums to stage their games. It did not occur to the owners that the public might pay for their facilities. That mindset disappeared in the 1950s when owners began to ask cities and states to pay for their stadiums.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

HUGE DEVELOPMENT: Hand Recount Finds Dominion Owned Voting Machines Shorted EVERY REPUBLICAN Candidate in Windham, New Hampshire, 300 Votes! Jim Hoft

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/02/huge-development-hand-recount-finds-dominion-voting-machines-shorted-every-republican-windham-new-hampshire-300-votes/

Here we go.
More proof of election fraud by Dominion Voting Machines.

A recent hand recount in the Rockingham District 7 NH House Race in Windham, New Hampshire, found that the Dominion-owned voting machines shorted EVERY REPUBLICAN by roughly 300 votes.

Via Facebook

The Dominion machine counted results were wrong for all 4 Republicans by almost exactly 300 votes.

Granite Grok reported:

The Town of Windham used Dominion machines to count paper ballots and upon a believable hand recount, it was confirmed each Republican was machine-cheated out of roughly 300 votes.

You would think this would have been solved by the Dominion machine company, the Secretary of State, the Elections Unit of the AG’s Office, or the laughable Ballot Law Commission. (Kathy Sullivan, d (Term expires July 1, 2024)

Nope.

Just like every other state that used machines that alter ballot counts in favor of one political party over another – here we are.

Dominion Voting Systems owns the intellectual property of the AccuVote machines used in New Hampshire.

KRD NEWS Comments turned off

AMERICA’S TRUE BELIEVERS AND THEIR GUTLESS ENABLERS BY PETER SAVODNIK

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

ttps://mailchi.mp/59ad38187d03/krd-news-americas-true-believers-and-their-gutles

The mountain of witches is piling up. At the top of the heap is Sharon Osbourne, the Captain Underpants guy, the Bachelor host, or whatever C-list celebrity failed to condemn “Gone with the Wind” on Instagram with sufficient fervor. But by the time you read this they’ll surely be eclipsed by another faux-outrage pieced together by the microaggression-hunters poring over old text messages or yellowing screen-shots of Halloween parties past.

Most of these disappearances won’t matter much, because the disappeared are already known. Even if their contract isn’t renewed or their agent indignantly — and very publicly — cuts ties with them, they’ll be fine. They’ll resurface.

The people who won’t are the countless, less visible who have lost jobs, lost businesses, lost reputations, lost friends. The schlubs. The cautionary tales. Those who have been cautioned, made to comply, squeezed into the Procrustean Bed of identitarian absolutism.

We know who’s to blame for this surreality: the True Believers. The children of Park Slope and Echo Park with their graphic tattoos and nut allergies and an odd inability to form complete sentences. The neurotic, anxious twentysomethings who went to college to be told that “truth” is a white male construct, who seem devoid of poetry or irony, who believe mean words, words with which they disagree, are like ICBMs. Those whose lives are circumscribed by galactic reservoirs of ignorance — about the past, the culture, themselves, about why they believe what they know to be good and indisputable. Those who know only how to perform, and who rely on acronyms and slogans and logical fallacies when asked: how can you be sure of that?

But children are children. They can only be blamed so much. 

The real wrongdoers are the Enablers. The so-called adults. The tech founders and college presidents and newspaper editors and museum directors and bank CEOs who pretend that the fight for “justice” is just. Who pretend that the “equity” crusade is about fairness and not about defending the grotesque inequality between those who have been trained to think correctly and those who have not.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Beijing Accelerating Timeline for Possible Invasion of Taiwan, Expert Warns By Frank Fang

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/beijing-accelerating-timeline-for-possible-invasion-of-taiwan-expert-

TAIPEI, Taiwan—The Chinese communist regime is accelerating its plans to invade Taiwan, an expert warns, as Beijing ratchets up military maneuvers against the island.

Twenty Chinese military aircraft—including four nuclear-capable H-6K bombers, 10 J-16 fighter jets, two Y-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft, and a KJ-500 airborne early warning and control aircraft—entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) on March 26, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense. It was the largest incursion ever reported by the ministry.

Taiwan’s ADIZ, located adjacent to the island’s territorial airspace, is an area where incoming planes must identify themselves to the island’s air traffic controller.

The incursion caps off a significant increase in hostility by Beijing against Taiwan since 2020. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, re-elected last January, has taken a hard line against threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while the island has deepened its cooperation with the United States—prompting the regime to escalate its warmongering towards the island.

The CCP sees Taiwan as a part of its territory and has threatened war to bring the island under its fold. The self-ruled island is in reality a de-facto independent country with its own democratically-elected government, military, constitution, and currency.

The Republic of China (ROC)—Taiwan’s official name—overthrew China’s Qing Dynasty emperor in 1911. After the ROC retreated to Taiwan upon being defeated by the CCP during the Chinese Civil War, the CCP established a communist state called the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, while Taiwan gradually transitioned to become a democracy. But to this day, the Chinese regime has refused to recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty.

Last year, the Chinese air force flew about 380 sorties into Taiwan’s ADIZ, the highest number in a given year since 1996. So far this year, the Chinese military has been sending aircraft into the ADIZ on a near-daily basis.

The island’s coast guard on April 1 announced that Beijing has been flying unmanned drones near Taiwan’s Dongsha Island, located in the northern part of the South China Sea. The authority said it could not rule out that Beijing was using the drones to carry out reconnaissance.

Alongside military actions, the regime has sharpened its rhetoric towards the island. Earlier this year, a Chinese defense spokesperson threatened war against Taiwan if it declared independence.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Jordan’s Volatility Alerts the USA to Middle East Reality Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://bit.ly/3sSvn1O  Jordan’s domestic vulnerability

Jordan’s domestic upheaval involved some Arab countries, members of the royal Jordanian family and other prominent Bedouins, who were arrested and charged with an attempted regime change.

A regime-change in Jordan could transform the strategically-located country – between Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Israel – into another haven for Palestinian and Islamic terrorism. It would threaten the existence of the current regimes in Saudi Arabia, all other pro-US Gulf states and Egypt, advancing the interests of Iran’s Ayatollahs, Turkey’s Erdogan, the Muslim Brotherhood, China and Russia, while traumatizing regional stability and with dire Western and Israeli national security and economic consequences.  

Jordan’s inherent political and ideological vulnerability has been fueled by intra-Bedouin fragmentation and conflicts, dating back to 1921, when the Hashemite Bedouin family was imported to Jordan – from Hejaz in western Saudi Arabia – by the British Empire, and imposed upon the indigenous Bedouins of (mostly southern) Jordan.  Furthermore, Jordan’s Bedouins are deeply divided, geographically, tribally, culturally, ideologically and religiously, with some of the southern tribes considering the Hashemites “carpetbaggers” from the Arabian Peninsula, Westernized and straying away from Islam and pan-Arabism by concluding a peace treaty with the “infidel” Jewish State.

Moreover, 70% of Jordan’s population are Palestinians, while Palestinian leaders (e.g., the PLO, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas) view Jordan as an artificial entity, the eastern (78%) part of Palestine. Hence, Palestinian active involvement in subversion and terrorism in Jordan and occasional attempts to topple the Hashemite regime, such as the civil war in September 1970 and the 1989 wave of terrorism.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The totalitarians’ Covid con unintentionally explained by CNN public health ‘expert’ Thomas LIfson

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/the_totalitarians_covid_con_unintentionally_explained_by_cnn_public_health_expert.html

Too much freedom is a bad thing because it limits the ability of the state to coerce its subjects (“citizens” seems almost archaic as the Great Reset looms) into behavior they otherwise would resist. That’s the basic message explained to Chris Cuomo by a professor of public health policy that CNN favors with its airtime.

We lost an incredible amount of the freedom we formerly took for granted when Covid-19 leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China, and was greeted by world leaders as a pandemic justifying the radical curtailment of liberty and enhancement of their own power. Now, they and their lackeys in the academic and medical establishment see the restoration of those liberties as a threat. George Washington University Public Health Policy Professor Laura Wen said it out loud – a classic Kinsley gaffe of accidentally telling the truth about something that politicians would rather the public not understand. A lot of people noticed, including Ace of Spades, Legal Insurrection, and Instapundit. This tweet with 38 seconds of video has gotten almost 4 million views: WATCH HERE.  :

It’s clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket to pre-pandemic life….and the window to do that is really narrowing. You were mentioning, Chris, about how all these states were reopening. They are reopening at 100 percent….and we have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status.

Because, otherwise, if everything is reopen, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things…here’s all these freedoms that you have.” Because, otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy those freedoms anyway.” [emphasis added]

You can’t have people enjoying freedoms before the government forces them all to take a experimental drugs, some of which act on their genetic makeup. One that has caused severe reactions in some, including a number of deaths.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE UNASKED QUESTION

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

My family Passover was a jolly event of family reunion after lock-down separations and the artifice of ZOOM.
The traditional four questions were asked but a fifth hangs in alarm and doubt:
“Wherefore is overt anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel so mainstream in the academies, the media and even in the corridors of Congress?”
The ancient hatred’s fig leaf is so called “tough love” of Israel. Now it is manifested in global harassment, beating and murder of Jewish citizens and slander equating Zionism and Israel with every violation of human rights.

Much is rightly bruited about hate crimes against Asians. Perhaps we should glom on to that since Israel is an Asian nation of Asian nationals. Look at the map….
rsk

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Arabs’ Real Enemies: Iran and Turkey by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17168/arabs-enemies-turkey-iran

The Arabs are warning the world that Turkey and Iran are funding and arming terrorists, that they a major threat to security and stability in the Middle East, and that they keep meddling in the internal affairs of Arab countries.

The Arabs are also telling the world that the only way to deal with Turkey and Iran is by increasing political and economic pressure on them and holding them to account for their malign actions.

Turkey and Iran, in other words, are telling the Arabs that they can go to hell. They are also telling the Arabs that Turkey and Iran will continue to occupy Arab countries, meddle in their internal affairs, and unleash terrorist attacks to undermine their stability and security.

Veteran Saudi columnist Abdulrahman Al-Rashed warned that Iran’s continued “military activities” in the region will likely lead to more chaos that will be increasingly difficult to control.

Al-Rashed also pointed out that the Houthi militia increased its missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia after the Biden administration revoked its designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

[T]he latest Arab warning concerning the Turkish and Iranian threats has gone almost unnoticed by the international community and media. They only pay a great deal of attention to the resolutions of the Arab League foreign ministers when they include — as they frequently do — a condemnation of Israel.

After decades of portraying Israel as their mortal enemy, the Arabs have finally woken up to the fact that it is two Islamic countries, Turkey and Iran, that are actually threatening their security and stability.

The Arabs are now seeking to draw the world’s attention to these Turkish and Iranian threats.

The Arabs are warning the world that Turkey and Iran are funding and arming terrorists, that they a major threat to stability in the Middle East, and that they keep meddling in the affairs of Arab countries.

They are also telling the world — in message directed mainly to the Biden Administration — that the only way to deal with Turkey and Iran is by increasing political and economic pressure on them and holding them to account for their malign actions.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Donald J. Trump: Joe Biden’s Best Friend By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/04/donald-j-trump-joe-bidens-best-friend/

The myth of Biden the healer, and Trump the cruel divider, got Biden elected. But the fantasy that Biden had the answers to problems that Trump created is a far greater—and more dangerous—delusion.

The Pavlovian “Trump did it!” sums up Joe Biden’s fallback excuse when faced with any embarrassment.  

His own completely optional, self-created, illegal immigration disaster? Trump somehow caused it, despite leaving office with a stable and secure border.  

Vaccination rates soaring? There would be even more if not for Trump’s mere 1-million-a-day vaccination rate, mere weeks after the rollout of the “experimental” vaccinations that supposedly would take “years” to develop. 

Chinese aggressiveness? Trump’s provocations again due to all his paranoid talk of travel bans, and a lab-escaped virus. 

European unwillingness to confront the Chinese? Yep, Trump’s the cause again, with jawboning our friends into paying $100 million more for their own defense.  

In truth, Trump’s atmospherics were chaotic, but not just due to his incessant tweeting and candid ad hoc outbursts—or even media hatred that led to 90 percent negative coverage by the networks, newspapers, and online social media. (Notice how few, Left or Right, use any more the adjective “left-wing” or “liberal,” since to do so is a redundancy: “the media” is now accepted as a synonym for “left-wing media.”)