NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Texas Neanderthals were right Texas ditched the mask mandate and opened up – and it’s all fine. Sean Collins

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/04/01/the-texas-neanderthals-were-right/

In early March, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced he was ending the state’s mandate for people to wear masks, and reopening businesses at full capacity. Media outlets went into overdrive to denounce him and predict catastrophe. CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza called Abbott’s decision ‘head-scratching, anti-science’. ‘Model projections for Texas show worst-case scenario without mask mandate’, warned an ABC TV station in Houston. Abbott’s move was part of a ‘bold plan to kill another 500,000 Americans’, screamed Vanity Fair.

Politicians also rushed to criticise Abbott. Former representative and failed presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke called his decision a ‘death warrant for Texans’. California governor Gavin Newsom said Texas was ‘absolutely reckless’ for lifting its Covid rules.

No less than President Joe Biden felt obliged to speak out and condemn Abbott. ‘The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine – take off your mask, forget it. It still matters.’

Well, it appears the Neanderthals in Texas got it right, and Biden is the one whose thinking is caveman-like. Now, three weeks after Abbott’s order to lift the mask mandate went into effect, the Covid situation has improved in Texas. New cases are down, to their lowest level since June. Hospitalisations have fallen to their lowest level since autumn. Death rates have plummeted. Furthermore, the outlook for vaccinations in the state appears bright, with a record daily number of people receiving shots. Adults of all ages are now eligible for a vaccine jab, a faster pace than many other states.

Have Biden and the media apologised for slandering Texas? And have they learned that lifting mandates on mask-wearing and removing other restrictions does not lead to Covid-spreading? Of course not.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Appeasing Cuba’s Regime Didn’t Work The Biden administration should learn from the failures of the Obama administration. by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX-10) and Rep.Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL-25)

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/appeasing-cubas-regime-didnt-work-11617400699?mod=opinion_major_pos5

For more than 60 years, a dictatorship has imposed a violently oppressive system on the Cuban people. Its human-rights abuses grew worse under the appeasement policy of the Obama-Biden administration. Amid the “thaw” in relations, documented political detentions rose to 9,940 in 2016 from 8,616 in 2015. The Castro regime lined its pockets and expanded its machinery of repression.

The malignancy has spread beyond the island. After revamping the Venezuelan military and intelligence services, Cuba led efforts to sustain the illegitimate Nicolás Maduro regime and supported its abuses, which mirrored those carried out against the Cuban people. The 2020 State Department report on Venezuela highlights torture, arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings—abuses that “amounted to crimes against humanity,” U.N.-appointed investigators found.

The Cuban dictatorship also worked with Hezbollah, a terrorist proxy of Iran, to prop up the Maduro regime. In Cuba, terrorists find a haven. The regime refused Colombia’s extradition requests following a 2019 bombing that killed 22. The Cuban regime reportedly also harbors American fugitives such as terrorist cop-killer Joanne Chesimard, hijacker-murderer Ishmail Muslim Ali and terrorist bomb-maker William Morales. Inexplicably, the Obama administration delisted Cuba as a state sponsor of terror in 2015. This January, the Trump administration corrected that error.

Let’s not forget that the attacks in 2016 and 2017 against U.S. diplomats in Havana remain unsolved. Many U.S. personnel and their families suffered debilitating brain injuries.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Inconvenient Facts for the War on Testing College admission based on personal essays helps affluent students.

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inconvenient-facts-for-the-war-on-testing-11617563017?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Among the “emergency” progressive policy changes likely to persist after the Covid-19 pandemic is the abandonment of standardized testing in college admissions. Anti-testing activists had been winning the argument for years by claiming the tests favor privileged students. After social distancing disrupted test taking in 2020, the future scope of the SAT and ACT is uncertain.

But college admissions based on “soft” rather than numerical criteria won’t be more equitable or progressive. Privileged students are likely to gain the most. A new paper from Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis shows that “essay content”—that is, the quality of admissions essays—“is more strongly associated with household income than is SAT score.”

It’s true that high-income students, who are more likely to have highly educated parents, score better on the SAT, on average. But testing critics never explain what would be a fairer metric. That’s because the same resources and academic preparation that enable students to score well on the SAT also enable them to get better grades, pad their resumes, and write polished admissions essays.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Mirror Mirror on the Wall By Richard Fernandez

Posted By on April 4th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2021/04/04/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-5-n1437169

“Future historians may tell us whether the Nov 2020 has triggered some ghastly overreach by America’s enemies or some march of folly by Washington’s ruling elite.”

The new administration started off using virtue signaling as an important component of foreign and domestic policy. But now even the “only adults in the room” suddenly suspect that  Woke garlic doesn’t repel vampires. Russia and China continue to defy the rules of the Biden-Harris administration despite their expectation that the world would return to its pre-2016 order. Pundits are starting to accept something has gone wrong in the calculations.

Russia and China — not to mention North Korea and Iran — are all on the move and don’t seem deterred by Washington. If disaster overtakes the Biden Harris restoration future historians will conclude that organized self delusion played a leading part. The cultural and political establishment belief in the Great Reset after Trump sputtered and instead of the predicted return to normal the global world has continued its descent into crisis. Perhaps the status quo overattributed the problems of the old global world to populist unrest and failed to address the basic weaknesses which caused them. They thought they could pick up where they left off and couldn’t.

Joe Biden’s focus on ensuring populism never rises again in America through the institutionalization of mail-in voting, social media deplatforming, gun control, and Curleyism may have to compete with challenges from the global world. The Democratic Party has “near enemies” but it also has “far enemies.”…

There are three main challenges to the restoration of the status quo ante:

The slow emergence of the Third World from the Covid pandemic;
The disruption of the global supply chain by lockdowns; and
The direct challenge to Joe Biden by Xi Jinping for leadership of the international system.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

IS DEREK CHAUVIN A RACIST MURDERER OR JUST A MURDERER? I suspect the latter: the data just don’t support that cops murder out of racism. Few will attend to that – but maybe progress can happen regardless. John McWhorter

Posted By on April 4th, 2021

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-derek-chauvin-a-racist-murderer

I am neither a criminologist nor pathologist nor coroner nor police officer. However, from what it would seem to me, Derek Chauvin should spend a good deal of the rest of his life in prison for the murder of George Floyd. However much fentanyl or meth Floyd had in him that night, no one will seriously argue that Floyd was about to keel over that night on his own.

Furthermore I hope Chauvin serves as a harbinger of change. It is gruesome that a person can end up at the mercy of a police officer and be killed in a flash, by someone who almost always walks away innocent, let off according to legal niceties that allow that cops may do hideous things under pressure but that’s just the way it goes.

However, the good-thinking consensus here is that I am leaving something out.

I am supposed to be deeply aggrieved that George Floyd died because he was black. Chauvin, I am supposed to think, murdered Floyd at least partly out a disregard for black lives – or, to use the term of art these days, bodies. This is supposed to be about race.

It is perhaps the most heretical belief I hold these days that I don’t think so. However, I use the term heretical with some irony.

* * *

The cops kill hundreds and hundreds of people every year. Of them, white people are the majority by a good margin. For every incident we hear of where cops kill a black person, there are multiple others where cops killed a white person and we did not hear about it.

Black people, however, are killed more than what our proportion of the population would predict in itself. Specifically, black people are killed at a rate two and a half times our representation in the population.

The good word is that this “proves” that racism is behind the killings of black people. Presumably racist bias, even subconscious, makes cops pull the trigger in tense situations.

This is an understandable approach, but not truth incarnate, and it leaves something out.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How to Tell the Difference Between Real Education and Propaganda By Annie Holmquist

Posted By on April 4th, 2021

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/how-to-tell-the-difference-between-real-educati

The other day I ran across a passage from That Hideous Strength which seems oddly applicable to our time. A dystopian novel written by C. S. Lewis at the close of World War II, That Hideous Strength finds one of its main characters, Mark Studdock, working for N.I.C.E., an organization which pulls the strings in a controlling, totalitarian society.

Studdock is assigned to write propaganda articles for N.I.C.E., an assignment which he objects to when he receives it from his boss, Miss Hardcastle. Studdock argues that it won’t work because  newspapers “are read by educated people” too smart to be taken in by propaganda. The story continues:

‘That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘Haven’t you yet realized that it’s the other way round?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.’

Reading this, I couldn’t help but ponder how much of the American public thinks like Studdock. We are convinced that education is the panacea for all ills, and that if the masses could simply achieve one more grade level or degree, we wouldn’t have so many problems to sort through.

But what if that education is, as Miss Hardcastle implies in the passage above, the very thing blinding the eyes of the general public? Or perhaps we should say, what we call education.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

British court sentences Holocaust denier to prison time for ‘baiting Jews’

Posted By on April 4th, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/british-court-sentences-holocaust-denier-to-prison-tim

Alison Chabloz is expected to serve nine weeks in prison for promoting anti-Semitic rhetoric in two interviews with far-right online sites.

A woman in Britain said to be a virulent anti-Semite has been found guilty of spreading offensive messages and material over the Internet and was sentenced to 18 weeks in prison by a magistrate court there.

Reports say that Alison Chabloz, 57, who is known for promoting Holocaust denial, is expected to serve nine weeks in prison for violating the country’s communications act after she promoted anti-Semitic rhetoric and ideas on the GAB social-media service in two interviews she did with far-right online sites.

GAB has been under fire for being utilized by far-right extremists.

“Today’s verdict and sentence finally give the Jewish community justice and protection from someone who has made a vocation out of denying the Holocaust and baiting Jews. It also sends a clear message to those who might be tempted to go down the same path,” said Stephen Silverman, director of investigations and enforcement at Campaign Against Antisemitism, in a statement. “This is not the end. Ms. Chabloz now faces even more serious charges on other matters that we have brought to the attention of the police. We will not rest until all anti-Semites like Alison Chabloz are behind bars, where they belong.”

In 2018, Chabloz received a suspended sentence for singing songs that claimed the Holocaust was a “bunch of lies.”

According to the Daily Mail, in issuing his ruling, District Judge Michael Snow told Chabloz: “I’m not sentencing you on the basis that you are anti-Semitic, I’m not sentencing you on the basis that you are a Holocaust denier. I’m sentencing you on the basis that on two separate occasions whilst subject to a suspended sentence, you participated in a radio program where you made grossly offensive comments.

“The grossly offensive contributions by the defendant to both programs are insulting to members of a vulnerable community,” continued Snow. “The need to protect that community from such gross offense is a pressing social need.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New York teens launch attack on Jewish man, one bites policeman By Batya Jerenberg

Posted By on April 4th, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/new-york-teens-launch-attack-on-jewish-man-one-bites-policeman/?utm_source=

This incident follows a much more serious attack on Wednesday, when an ex-convict knifed a young hasidic couple and their baby in broad daylight.

A teen with two younger friends spat and threw garbage at a Jewish man in Brooklyn, New York Thursday evening, with the leader of the pack arrested after biting the policeman who confronted them.

The three got into an argument with the man, the police said, and reacted with violence. The authorities caught up to them quickly after being called, and the 13-year-old ringleader caused the officer minor injuries when challenged. Her younger companions were not taken into custody.

This incident follows a much more serious attack Wednesday, when an ex-convict knifed a young hasidic couple and their baby in broad daylight in lower Manhattan.

On Friday, New York Police Commissioner Dermot Shea told CNN that the man, who had just been paroled a month ago after serving time for attempted murder, actually targeted the toddler after passing the visibly Jewish family on the sidewalk.

“Stop and listen to this slowly: He slashes the mom, slashes the dad and then intentionally stabs a child, a 1-year-old girl in a stroller,” Shea said. “Where’s the outrage? Something is clearly broken here. It’s a crisis.”

The family, visiting from Belgium, all suffered cuts to the head and face, some of which needed stitching. The alleged attacker, 30-year-old Darryl Jones, is being held without bail on several charges, including attempted murder, assault, and drug possession.

Even though he uttered nothing anti-Semitic during the attack, the mother told the New York Daily News that she was sure of his motive.

“This was a horrible hate crime,” she said. “There were more people in that park, but he came to attack us because we are Jewish.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Big Tech’s Greatest Threat “They leave no paper trail for authorities to trace. They are the perfect weapon for changing… the outcome of elections” by Robert Epstein

Posted By on April 4th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17218/big-tech-threat

“Ephemeral experiences”: You might never have heard this phrase, but it’s a very important concept. These are brief experiences you have online in which content appears briefly and then disappears, leaving no trace. Those are the kinds of experiences we have been preserving in our election monitoring projects. You can’t see the search results that Google was showing you last month. They’re not stored anywhere, so they leave no paper trail for authorities to trace. Ephemeral experiences are, it turns out, quite a powerful tool of manipulation.

Are people at companies like Google aware of the power they have? Absolutely…

In a national study we conducted in 2013, in one demographic group — moderate Republicans — we got a shift of 80% after just one search, so some people are especially trusting of search results, and Google knows this. The company can easily manipulate undecided voters using techniques like this….

We have shown in controlled experiments that biased search suggestions can turn a 50‑50 split among undecided voters into a 90‑10 split, with no one having the slightest idea they have been manipulated.

Unfortunately, people mistakenly believe that computer output must be impartial and objective. People especially trust Google to give them accurate results…. They have no idea that they may have been driven to that web page by highly biased search results that favor the candidate Google is supporting.

Dwight D. Eisenhower did not talk about his accomplishments in his famous farewell speech of 1961. Instead, he warned us about the rise of a “technological elite” who could control public policy without anyone knowing. He warned us about a future in which democracy would be meaningless. What I have to tell you is this: The technological elite are now in control. You just don’t know it. Big Tech had the ability to shift 15 million votes in 2020 without anyone knowing that they did so and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace. Our calculations suggest that they actually shifted at least six million votes to President Biden without people knowing. This makes the free-and-fair election — a cornerstone of democracy — an illusion.

I am not a conservative, so I should be thrilled about what these companies are doing. But no one should be thrilled, no matter what one’s politics. No private company should have this kind of power, even if, at the moment, they happen to be supporting your side.

Do these companies think they are in charge? Are they planning a future that only they know for all of us? Unfortunately, there are many indications that the answers to these questions are yes.

One of the items that leaked from Google in 2018 was an eight‑minute video called “The Selfish Ledger.” This video was never meant to be seen outside of Google, and it is about the power that Google has to reshape humanity, to create computer software that “not only tracks our behavior but offers direction towards a desired result.”

How do we protect ourselves from companies like this?… You might have heard the phrase “regulatory capture” — an old practice in which a large company that is facing punishment from the government works with the government to come up with a regulatory plan that suits the company.

When you are talking about, for example, “breaking up” Google, all this means is that we will force them to sell off a couple of the hundreds of companies they have bought…. the major shareholders are enriched by billions of dollars, and the company still has the same power and poses the same threats it does today….

[W]e were, in effect, doing the same thing to them that they do to us and our children 24 hours a day. Imagine that we were, in effect, looking over the shoulders of thousands of real people (with their permission), just as the Nielsen Company does with its network of families to monitor their television watching.

Imagine if these tech companies knew that they were being monitored — that even the answers they are giving people… were being monitored. Do you think they would risk sending out targeted vote reminders to members of just one political party? I doubt it very much, because we would catch them immediately and report their manipulation to authorities and the media.

What can we do? In my opinion, the solution to almost all the problems these companies present is to set up large‑scale monitoring systems and to make them permanent — not just in the United States, but around the world. Because monitoring is technology, it can keep up with whatever the new tech companies are throwing at us, and however they are threatening us, we can get them to stop.

I am envisioning a new nonprofit organization that specializes in monitoring what the tech companies are showing to voters, families, and children — protecting democracy and the autonomy and independence of all citizens. There might also be a for‑profit spinoff that could serve as a permanent funding source for the nonprofit. The for‑profit spinoff could provide commercial services to campaigns, law firms, candidates, researchers, and many others.

And there’s another way to completely eliminate the threats that Google poses to democracy and humanity…. our government could quickly end Google’s monopoly on search by declaring that the database Google uses to generate search results is a “public commons,” accessible to all. It is a very old legal concept, and it is a light-touch form of regulation. It would rapidly lead to the creation of thousands of competing search platforms, each appealing to different audiences.

“Ephemeral experiences”: You might never have heard this phrase, but it’s a very important concept. These are brief experiences you have online in which content appears briefly and then disappears, leaving no trace. Those are the kinds of experiences we have been preserving in our election monitoring projects. You can’t see the search results that Google was showing you last month. They’re not stored anywhere, so they leave no paper trail for authorities to trace. Ephemeral experiences are, it turns out, quite a powerful tool of manipulation.

Are people at companies like Google aware of the power they have? Absolutely… In emails leaked from Google to the Wall Street Journal in 2018, one employee says to others, “How can we use ephemeral experiences to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban?” There is that phrase, “ephemeral experiences.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Between Despair and Presumption a Reporter’s Dilemma by Amir Taheri

Posted By on April 4th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17245/bangladesh-despair-presumption

Sheikh Mujib, as everyone called him, sent a battered Studebaker, vintage 1951, to fetch me to his home. This was a fairly modest villa by most standards, but at that moment looked like an oasis of tranquility and, because of a garden full of flowers, even of beauty. After endless cups of tea and half a dozen delicious but unidentifiable sweets, I concluded that far from being a troublemaker, Sheikh Mujib was a fantasist, for he spoke of his people’s desire to assume control of their destiny which meant splitting Pakistan.

The energy that Mujib generated was truly amazing. The masses of the “walking skeletons” that I had seen were suddenly transformed into sizzling balls of fire. Yet, I had a feeling that all that was going to end in tragedy. And it did. Mujib won a majority in the Pakistan-wide election but was refused the right to form the government for a united Pakistan. The Pakistani leadership decided on a crackdown, which included prison for Mujib and martial law in East Pakistan.

Like most “developing nations,” it is inflicted by corruption, mismanagement and injustice. But it is feeding its people and, having enjoyed growth rates of over 6 percent since 2005, its economy is now 40 percent larger than that of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. (It was 42 percent smaller before independence.) In fact, Bangladesh is one of only 20 “developing nations” in which all seven indices of human welfare, though still below the global average, are now positive.

“Don’t get emotionally involved!” This is one of the first lessons I was told to learn when, as a young reporter in the 1970s, I was sent to cover “events” in distant lands.

The euphemism covered wars, revolutions, ethnic-cleansing operations, famines, and in their less harmful version, military coups bringing jackboots with sunglasses to power. One of the first such “events” was the general election in what was then a united Pakistan. I arrived in Dhaka one early evening and was whisked to a hotel on the outskirts of the sprawling capital of what was then East Pakistan. After a brief shower, I came down to the lobby and asked for a taxi to take me to the city. My inquiry caused a sensation. I was told it was “perhaps inadvisable” to visit the city after sunset and that waiting until tomorrow was the best option.

In any case, hotel taxis didn’t operate after evening prayers. My verbal to-and-fro with hotel personnel was interrupted by a tall thin man who offered to give me a ride in his ramshackle rickshaw. That was good enough for me and we set out. As we approached the city, I felt as if I were being sucked into a different world. This was a scene of absolute chaos with countless number of people, mostly half-naked, barefoot and obviously undernourished milling around amid rickshaws, tricycles, beasts of burden, beggars, children on the loose and men in sundry military or police uniforms, often dirty.

A couple of hours of that spectacle was enough to make me physically sick and to beat the retreat back to the luxury hotel, which now looked like a big lie hiding the truth. I felt as if my youthful optimism about the future of mankind was evaporating. I had thought that even the most abject poverty could be defeated either by technology or by ideology. My first incursion into the heart of Dhaka had punctured that optimism. In a cowardly mood, I contemplated taking the next plane out. Then I remembered that two days later, I had an appointment with one Sheikh Mujib ar-Rahman, a man described by East Pakistani leaders I had interviewed a few days earlier as “a dangerous troublemaker.”