BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Minds Wide Shut’ Review: Dogma, Division and Distrust Can an academic world aiming for moral purity be redirected to the spirit of inquiry and toleration?By Michael S. Roth

Posted By on March 29th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/minds-wide-shut-review-dogma-division-and-distrust-11616795028?mod=opinion_major_pos12

Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us” is a plea for moderate, open-minded liberalism in an age of self-righteous certainty. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro are professors of literature and economics, respectively, at Northwestern University, where Mr. Schapiro is also the president. The two have taught and written together, and this book is a sequel to their “Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From the Humanities.” That, too, was a plea to take the blinders off, especially aimed at economists who often tend not to pay much attention to fields other than their own.

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are academics who have spent a good deal of their lives on university campuses, and they know that things ain’t like they used to be. Their works return us to well-trodden paths of moderation and conversation, bidding us stay back from the slippery slopes that lead to dangerous dogmatisms. In this volume, literature professors are frequently taken to task, either for not realizing the greatness of the books they are privileged to teach or because they aim for moral purity and theoretical certainty.

Minds Wide Shut

By Gary Saul Morson & Morton Schapiro
Princeton, 307 pages, $29.95

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are worried not only about the fate of parochial academic disciplines; they are concerned about the development of a culture that undermines the possibility of democratic disagreement. “We need to cultivate the skills of self-questioning, recognizing our own limitations, and attentive listening to those who differ,” they write, “all of which are necessary for respectful, productive dialogue.” The authors claim that too many faculty, students and citizens today believe in theories or take moral stances that claim to provide complete certainty about a vast domain of human experience. This commitment creates new fundamentalisms, making open-minded learning all but impossible. The fundamentalist spirit eliminates the consideration of important questions because it doesn’t tolerate the possibility that in some matters ambiguity or partial answers are the best we can do. Certainty shuts one’s mind.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Victor Davis Hanson: China’s contempt for US – they seek global hegemony and this is how we’re helping them China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/china-contempt-usglobal-hegemony-victor-davis-hanson

Two weeks ago in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the broadsides.  

Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a Communist government.   

China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal. Nor are they aimed only at our high officials. 

New York University students at a satellite campus in Shanghai were manhandled and jailed by Chinese authorities in two separate incidents earlier this month. Some U.S. diplomats in China were recently subjected to anal swab testing for COVID-19 – supposedly “in error.” 

These examples of humiliation and harassment could be multiplied. China has engaged in the insidious and systematic theft of U.S. patents and copyrights. It brazenly violates trade agreements, manipulates its currency, dumps products below cost on world markets, engages in cyberwarfare, expropriates Western technology, and stonewalls accurate information on the origins of COVID-19.  

If China gives out money, it believes it owns the recipient. In the last five years, New York University has received some $47 million in gifts from China. The U.S. Department of Education recently cited Stanford University for failing to report more than $64 million in donations from Chinese sources since 2010. It’s no surprise that China recently sent a visiting researcher to Stanford who turned out to be connected with the Chinese military.  

Hollywood claims that it is woke. But a recent study revealed that some directors had selected lighter-skinned actors, bowing to the preferences of Chinese movie-goers and the lucrative Chinese film market, slated to become the world’s largest in 2021.  

BOOKS Comments turned off

THE MORAL SOCIETY BY RACHAEL KOHN *****

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/03/the-moral-society/

This book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, by one of the contemporary world’s most accomplished proponents of religion, ethics and philosophy, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died on November 7, 2020, is both ambitious in scope and richly rewarding on a topic that in the third millennium could not be more fraught.

Morality is a word that had almost vanished from the lingua franca of the swinging 1960s when Jonathan Sacks, then a student at Cambridge, enrolled in his first course on the Moral Sciences. By then the idea of morality as an objective reality was considered a quaint remnant of a previous era and the young Sacks was left bewildered by the prevailing mood of unbridled personal freedom that championed “feelings” over responsibilities. Linked with religion in the popular mind, morality already had had the stuffing kicked out of it by the cult anarchist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who proclaimed, “God is dead … We have killed him … Do we not hear the noise of the gravediggers burying God?” On April 8, 1966, Time Magazine was less subtle: on a black front cover glared the question, “Is God Dead?”

To the man who would become the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom for twenty-two years, knighted for his inter-faith work in 2005, a member of the House of Lords in 2009, and a prolific author of books on the essential role of religion in public life, we can presume the answer was a resounding No. But the surrounding culture reverberated with Nietzsche’s conviction that the Judeo-Christian era was at an end, along with its moral heritage. The French postmodernists, following Descartes’s radical scepticism, declared morality to be a matter of interpretation, leaving us with the relativisation of values. In America, the “Me Generation” put personal satisfaction and self-actualisation—the “I”—at the centre of existence, leaving the “We” of shared community values, commitments and responsibilities on a one-way descent to oblivion.

Sacks cautions that his book, which was fated to be his last, is not a work of cultural pessimism. However, in chapter after chapter, citing a now formidable corpus of literature on the decline of Western civilisation, he outlines the signposts of that cultural descent, beginning with the “outsourcing” of moral responsibility to government bodies in highly secularised democracies, to the monetisation of “happiness” in cultures driven by consumerism in an amoral free-market economy. No longer personally responsible for one’s neighbours, the individual is set adrift. Social capital diminishes and brings in its wake an epidemic of frantic materialism and profound loneliness. Self-medication and suicide rates spike in an attempt to assuage the malaise, but even the 2.41 billion active users of Facebook (as of June 2019) cannot stem the tide. “Unsocial media” actually feeds the condition of anomie (the loss of communal structures and shared values), by removing individuals from the face-to-face encounters that test those values on which society depends. The French Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim, who came to similar conclusions in the late nineteenth century when commenting on the social dislocations of the newly industrialised cities, remains relevant.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden Official Asked GOP Senators to Delete Photos of Border Facilities, Senator Says By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-official-asked-gop-senators-to-delete-photos-of-border-facilities-senator-says/

Senator Mike Braun (R., Ind.) on Saturday said a Biden official asked a group of Republican senators who visited the southern border to delete photos they had taken of the overcrowded conditions at a migrant processing and holding center they toured one day earlier in Donna, Texas.

“There was one of Biden’s representatives. I felt sorry for the lady because she actually talked to me about deleting a picture, but by the time she got to me, all those other pictures were taken, and that shows you the hypocrisy,” Braun told the Washington Examiner. 

“None of us would have gone down there if we were going to be muzzled,” Braun said, adding that Border Patrol instructed them not to take photos, though “they were telling us that because they had to.”

Braun visited the facility, which is at 700 percent capacity, with a group of 18 other Republican lawmakers. Photos reveal children sleeping on the ground on mats and migrants crowded into enclosed pods.

The Indiana Republican told the paper that the group ran into so-called “coyotes,” who guide migrants across the border for money, during a stop at the edge of the Rio Grande with border agents.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Peddles Obama’s Sham Vision of the Middle East He continues a radical transformation of the Democrat Party’s views on Israel. by Shmuel Klatzkin

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://spectator.org/biden-israel-middle-east-obama/

In an article in Tablet in early March, Lee Smith showed how Barack Obama’s degrading of America’s alliance with Israel and his wooing of Iran were motivated essentially by a plan to transform the Democrat Party. To that end, foreign policy was subordinated. The party of Truman, the three Kennedy brothers, and Skip Jackson had consistently moved American policy towards a strong alliance with Israel out of a basic sympathy with its cause and with that of the Jewish people still suffering persecution around the world (think of Jackson’s powerful support of the cause of Soviet Jewry).

Truman’s choice to recognize immediately the newborn state of Israel was a decision that came from his deepest sense of right. He overrode not only his State Department functionaries, whom he dismissed as the “striped-pants boys,” but also the man he respected above all others in government — George Marshall.

Marshall was the architect of victory in World War II and the visionary savior of the freedom of western Europe after the war. His opposition to Jewish statehood was his anticipation that the fledgling Jewish state would not stand a chance against the combined forces of all the Arab states united against them. He foresaw the bloodbath and desolation that so many in the Arab world boasted would happen and did not want to see the Holocaust continued. He staked his career on this, for the best of reasons, saying to not follow his advice would lead to his resignation. Indeed it did, though Marshall waited to leave so as not to embarrass his boss or discredit the government of the country he served so well and so selflessly.

What was true for Truman became mainstream when, gradually, the magnitude of the evil of anti-Semitism was revealed in its utter horror as the Holocaust sank into civilization’s consciousness. It was not a question of left or right, but of basic moral sobriety and plain human decency, that the kind of ideology and government that thrives on such hatred must be opposed, whether it is Hitlerism, Stalinism, or Khomeinism.

This was firmly established in the power structure of the Democrat Party, where so many Jews felt at home. And, Smith points out, this is what Obama came to transform radically.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Everything Biden and his top people are saying about the border is a bald-faced lie

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://nypost.com/2021/03/27/everything-biden-administration-says-about-border-is-a-bald-faced-lie/

From President Joe Biden on down, the administration is telling nonstop, bald-faced lies about the border crisis — while trying to stop the media from reporting the truth.

Biden insists the surge is normal, when it’s setting records. He insists it’s not because of his words and policies, when common sense, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the migrants themselves say the opposite. He also pretends it’s all his predecessor’s fault, with yet more lies about what President Donald Trump did.

And he claims most illegal crossers are being turned back, when officials on the ground report the reverse.

Oh, and he calls his approach compassionate, when it in fact brings suffering through the long trip north and then in this country, with children stuck in horribly overcrowded facilities while released adults swarm overwhelmed border towns. A 9-year-old girl drowned in the Rio Grande last week because of the message Biden is sending: If you get into the US, you can stay.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insists the US-Mexico border is “closed” for everyone except migrant children seeking to enter the country alone. Solo minors are indeed accepted without question, but the recent immigrant surge, the worst border “challenge” in 20 years, goes far beyond that. Sheriff J.E. Guerra of a Texas border town told The Post that so many agents are being transferred from patrol duty to processing stations that “basically, the border’s open” to anyone.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden administration fires most Homeland Security Advisory Council members Maria Sacchetti

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration-fires-most-homeland-security-advisory-council-members/ar-BB1f0Dig?li=BBnb7Kz

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas fired most members of the department’s independent advisory council on Friday, a purge that included several allies of former president Donald Trump and veteran officials who served under both parties.

Former Department of Homeland Security officials and advisory board members who worked under Democratic and Republican administrations said they could not remember so many members being dismissed at once, as the general practice of past administrations was to allow appointees to serve out their terms before replacing them.

The council is unpaid and includes leaders from state and local government, law enforcement, the private sector and academia who advise the agency on issues such as immigration, terrorism, crime and national disasters. Members serve one- to three-year terms and meet about four times a year.

The removal of more than 30 board members comes as the Biden administration tries to rid the department of Trump-era policies and practices, especially on immigration, and as it has struggled to shelter and care for an unprecedented number of migrant children and teenagers who have arrived at the southwest border without their parents.

DHS officials said Mayorkas would conduct an assessment of the council and reconstitute it with bipartisan members who better reflect the diversity of the United States and the people DHS serves. Mayorkas said he plans to retain Chairman William Bratton, the former police commissioner in New York and police chief in Los Angeles, and Vice Chair Karen P. Tandy, a retired administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. William H. Webster, former director of the FBI and the CIA, will remain the council’s chair emeritus.

But everyone else is out.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, MEDIA Comments turned off

When The Powerful Say Truth Is A Lie And Lies Are The Truth, No One Will Stand Up For America But You Christopher Bedford

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/26/when-the-powerful-say-truth-is-a-lie-and-lies-are-the-truth-no-one-will-stand-up-for-america-but-you/

Open The New York Times’ politics page Thursday morning and the top headline reads, “Democrats Begin Push For Biggest Expansion In Voting Since 1960s.” It’s a story about the most important election power-grab in modern legislative history, with a slim, partisan majority of senators seeking to wrest control of elections away from state governments to ensure Democrat control for decades to come.

For starters, H.R. 1 will ban voter ID requirements, mandate early voting windows, allow outside activist groups to deliver votes for counting, do away with notarized absentee ballots, force states to accept absentees for 10 days after an election is over, narrow the Federal Election Commission by one member to allow for partisan control, mandate counting illegal aliens in voting districts, allow the IRS to investigate non-profits’ political ideas, and make it nearly impossible to sue over the new rules.

In short, it’s a story about Democrats aiming to seize massive power over how elections are run. Of course, you wouldn’t get any of that information from The New York Times headline or copy. In fact, funny enough, the second story on The New York Times’ politics page Thursday morning was the one headlined, “Republicans Aim To Seize More Power Over How Elections Are Run.”

That one’s a story about Republicans working to pull control of the elections back from judges and officials’ extra-legislative “emergency rules” and rulings. The moves, the story reports with a straight face, are “threatening the fairness that is the bedrock of American democracy.”

MORE HEADLINES Comments turned off

MORE HEADLINES MARCH 28, 2021

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/

1.Cancel Culture and The Salem Witch Hunts Devin Sper This is not America’s first brush with cancel culture, but we can bring it to a better, quicker end if we show courage now rather than hoping it burns itself out.

2.Learning the Lessons of Jewish History Carrie Lynn Caoili As Jews ready themselves for Passover, the world’s approach to the COVID pandemic has taken on ominous undertones.

3.The transgender movement comes for children March 28, 2021 Ironically, this progressive book pushes gender stereotypes harder even than books in the 1950s did.

https://pjmedia.com/

Cancel Culture Comes to MedicineBy Rick Moranhttps://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/03/27/cancel-culture-comes-to-medicine-n1435402

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

PoonFang Pushover Eric Swalwell Still on Intel Committee Unlike the Soviet Union, China has no need for the Communist Party USA. The Democratic Party functions as China’s wholly owned subsidiary. By Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/27/poonfang-pushover-eric-swalwell-still-on-intel-committee/

Democrats last week tabled a GOP resolution to remove Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from the House Intelligence Committee. Republicans have been pushing for Swalwell’s removal since Axios exposed the Democrat’s capers with Fang Fang, also known as Christine Fang, a spy from Communist China.

As Debra Saunders noted, Fang raised money for Swalwell’s 2014 reelection campaign and also helped place at least one intern in Swalwell’s House office. That was actual collusion, from someone who falsely accused Trump of collusion with the Kremlin. Swalwell suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, but there’s more to the California Democrat who fell for the honey trap, the oldest espionage trick in the book. 

Swalwell faithfully repeated Chinese Communist propaganda practically word for word, and it’s hard to find a case where Swalwell disagrees with China or criticizes their human rights record. The PRC is in fact a genocidal Stalinist dictatorship, a reality Democrats and Republicans alike these days tend to ignore. 

Swalwell blamed the Axios report on President Trump, and that was not his first shot in the blame game. The former prosecutor, who ran for president of the United States, specializes in guilt by accusation. 

In a March 26, 2019 appearance on Fox News, Martha MacCallum asked Swalwell if he had any second thoughts about things he had said in the two years before the release of the Mueller report that found no evidence of collusion. Swalwell drew a blank. MacCallum pressed the case of the infamous Steele dossier. Swalwell turned the tables and asked what in the dossier had been found false.

For Swalwell, Trump’s firing of FBI boss James Comey was prima facie evidence of the president’s guilt. Mueller found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy, and no guilt. Swalwell made repeated claims of substantive evidence he failed to produce and, like the establishment media, he has no second thoughts. 

The California Democrat was the biggest haul in Fang Fang’s operations between 2011 and 2015. That year the FBI warned Swalwell, who supposedly was unaware, that Fang worked for Beijing. The case is strong that Swalwell should not hold office, let alone occupy a place on the intelligence committee, where he is privy to the most sensitive information.