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

Our Lost Liberties Cal Thomas

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/04/13/our-lost-liberties/?u

If one can say the pandemic has had any positive side effect, it has been to help us focus on what the loss of liberties looks like. Such losses do not occur immediately but erode over time as people become increasingly comfortable with government claiming to know what is best for us.

The Biden administration is proceeding on a downward spiral that has ended in lost liberties in nations of the past by seizing increasing amounts of power for itself through a slew of executive orders, without the consent of the people, or Congress.

When announcing his gun control executive orders last week, President Joe Biden referenced the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms. He claimed his orders do not infringe on that right, but added, “No amendment is absolute.” That is concerning.

He also announced the appointment of a Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. A White House press release sought to obscure its real goal—court-packing:

The Commission’s purpose is to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals. The topics it will examine include the genesis of the reform debate; the Court’s role in the Constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Georgetown Affair: New Levels Of Progressive Reality Denial  Francis Menton

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-4-13-the-georgetown-affair-new-levels-of-progressive-reality-denial

Just a few months ago (December 2020) I declared that the “essence of progressivism is refusal to deal with reality.” I had some pretty good examples in that post, but none of them can top the current convulsions that are upending Georgetown Law School. At Georgetown recently, a teacher made the mistake of uttering a small dose of reality while speaking to a colleague. This occurred after a recorded class had concluded and everyone else had signed out, but while the recording of the class was still running. Needless to say, the recording of the teacher’s remarks promptly hit Twitter. Thereupon, all hell broke loose.

The subject of the reality that must not be spoken is of course the current all-consuming obsession of academia, namely race. The question I pose is, are Georgetown, and for that matter all of academia, taking this obsession so far as to fully undermine their principal mission?

Probably, you are familiar with how this started. The after-class discussion took place in early March between Georgetown teachers Sandra Sellers and David Batson. Here is video of the key portion of the discussion. The offending words came from Sellers, referring to the performance of students in her class:

“I hate to say this, I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, oh come on. It’s some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom, it drives me crazy.” 

Before getting to the reaction to that remark, let me discuss how the reality of affirmative action plays out for a law school like Georgetown.

The Law School Admission Test is taken by nearly all aspiring law students who want to attend a high-ranked school. The LSAT is specifically designed to predict success in law school. Like all such tests, it is far from perfect, and any individual student may far over-perform or under-perform his or her LSAT results. But averaged over the full range of the test takers, the LSAT is reasonably accurate. I have found it difficult to locate LSAT results by race, but in this article last fall in the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald came up with a racial breakdown of LSAT results for the year 2004, which she sources to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Opinion: Call it the ‘Anti-Israel Prize’ By David Isaac

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-call-it-the-anti-israel-prize/

Israel has a bad habit of making the worst choices for its best prizes.

This goes especially for its most prestigious prize – the Israel Prize – its highest cultural honor.

The latest cringeworthy awardee is Oded Goldreich, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Israel’s Weizmann Institute.

Goldreich’s pastime appears to be signing BDS petitions. He signed one in 2019 urging Germany to scotch a resolution equating BDS with anti-Semitism. In March of this year, he signed another calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions in Judea and Samaria, notably Ariel University. (There’s actually a right-left consensus in Israel not to give up Ariel University, making Goldreich a truly exceptional leftist.)

The Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement has long been recognized as an anti-Semitic movement whose goal is the destruction of Israel. Last year, the co-founder of the BDS movement said as much.

A selection committee chooses the winners of the Israel Prize. In what is usually a formality, Israel’s Education Minister signs off on its decision. Last month, the current minister, Yoav Galant, got wind of the committee’s plans to give it to Goldreich. He told the committee to revisit its decision, which is his privilege according to the prize rules.

“Someone for whom the State of Israel and its laws are not dear to their heart is not worthy of the Israel Prize,” Galant said.

The committee didn’t like being second guessed and petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court. What role does the Supreme Court have in this? Absolutely none. But in Israel everything is justiciable, so the Court jumped in. Though it leans (more like screams) left, the Court sided with Galant. This was partly thanks to the pro-Zionist group “Im Tirtzu,” which revealed that Goldreich had signed onto the recent anti-Ariel University petition, a fact that hadn’t been known.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Secretary Blinken Is Wrong on Israel’s Demography Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://bit.ly/3mMyTZ8

Secretary of State Antony Blinken keeps advising Israel to retreat from the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), lest it loses its Jewish majority.

Secretary Blinken is wrong, relying on highly-inflated, erroneous Palestinian Authority numbers, ignoring the dramatic Westernization of Arab demography, and overlooking the unprecedent Jewish demographic tailwind in Israel, as documented by the following data.  

Jewish demography bolstered

*The number of Israeli Jewish births in 2020 (134,866) was 68% higher than 1995 (80,400), while the number of Israeli Arab births in 2020 was 16% higher (42,435) than 1995 (36,500), as reported by the March 2021 Monthly Bulletin of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS).

* In 2020, Jewish births were 76% of total births, compared to 69% in 1995.

*The fertility rate (number of births per woman) of Israeli secular Jewish women has trended upward during the last 25 years, while ultra-orthodox women have experienced a slight decline.  

*Israeli Jewish women – who are second only to Iceland in joining the job market – are unique in experiencing a rise of fertility rate, along with expanded urbanization, education, standard of living, integration into the job market and a rise of wedding age, while these phenomena have lowered the fertility rate in all other countries.  

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Back to Iran’s Nuclear Future Israel defends itself as Biden courts Tehran to return to the flawed Obama deal.

Posted By on April 14th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/back-to-irans-nuclear-future-11618354043?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

‘America is back” has been a mantra of the early Biden Presidency, and back how is the question. So far regarding Iran it seems to mean back to the future of 2015-2016 and another bad nuclear deal.

The U.S. on Wednesday will resume talks in Vienna to revive the nuclear agreement, but the bigger news is the explosion over the weekend at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. No one has taken credit, but Israel has been notably public in saying it will do whatever it must to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Unlike past cyber attacks, the U.S. was quick to say it had nothing to do with the Natanz attack. A fair conclusion is that Israel feels it must act because it sees President Biden rushing back to a deal that clearly hasn’t stopped Iran from continuing to make progress toward a nuclear breakout.

Washington and Tehran are so far speaking through European intermediaries, but the focus of the talks is also back to the Obama future. The Iranians, who outmaneuvered the same American negotiators six years ago, are demanding the removal of all sanctions as the price for a return to the deal. Donald Trump’s sanctions have increased domestic economic pressure on the mullahs, who want access to global oil markets and investment.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Have Elites Abandoned Merit?By Richard J. Shinder

Posted By on April 14th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/13/why-have-elites-abandoned-merit/

If you’re just a grubby striver, firm in your conviction that you deserve to succeed or fail based upon your own abilities and efforts, know well that elite institutions are now arrayed against you.

Surveying several recent news items, one could not be faulted for believing that the notion of merit has been significantly downgraded in American life.

United Airlines tweeted last week that it “plan(s) for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.” While perhaps a worthy goal, left unmentioned are the relevance of gender or race to piloting a jet safely, and any support for the assertion that such groups previously had been excluded from consideration).

In higher education, two Ivy League academic institutions, Harvard and Yale, have been in the crosshairs of legal actions for disfavoring Asian Americans in college admissions, these applicants’ credentials notwithstanding (and this during a time when hate crimes against Americans of Asian heritage are on the rise). More broadly within higher education, this past year’s “test-optional” approach to admissions due to COVID-19 may be here to stay.

While few will give direct voice to the sentiment that “merit no longer matters,” our elites and institutions appear to have moved honest achievement well down the list of what is celebrated and are increasingly hostile to its promotion—a significant reversal of past practice.

The ideals of advancing one’s station through ability and hard work, and society rewarding legitimate achievement, have been on an upward trajectory since the advent of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, which provided the brains and brawn for self-actualization and economic advancement, respectively. What caused our elites, who embraced merit after having signally failed to prevent its advance at the expense of entrenched privilege, to later turn against it with such force?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The U.S.-Israeli Honeymoon Ends A new administration places Iran and Palestinians on par with the Jewish State. Joseph Puder

Posted By on April 14th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/us-israeli-honeymoon-over-joseph-puder/

It seems that the Trump era ‘honeymoon’ in US – Israeli relations is over under the new administration of Joe Biden. The US is now prepared to go back to previous policies of so-called ‘evenhandedness’ between Israel and the Palestinians. Furthermore, the Biden administration appears to return to the Obama administration policy of appeasing the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken briefed Israel’s Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi about the Biden administration’s plan for the indirect talks with the Iranians in Vienna. He said that he did not believe the meeting would bear fruit. The New York Times reported (April 6, 2021) that, “The United States and Iran agreed through intermediaries on Tuesday to establish two working groups to try to get both countries back into compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.” At the moment there is a battle of wills. The Iranian officials claim that they can return to compliance fairly quickly, but demand that the US must first lift the sanctions. The US wants the Iranians to move first to return to compliance before sanctions are eased. The Iranians, it should be said, refused to deal directly with the Americans.

The Iranian economy is in shambles as the result of the Trump administration sanctions, and it would seem that the Iranians are in a weak position in the upcoming bargaining. In the meantime, however, US officials estimated that Iran’s ‘breakout time’ to a nuclear bomb is down to a few months. That might be the ostensible reason why the Biden administration is so eager to engage with Iran’s radical regime. The Iranian’s, on their part, know how eager Biden is to reverse Trump’s actions vis-à-vis Iran. The operative question is simply this: are US officials wrong about the ‘breakout time,’ and are the Iranians, in order to strengthen their bargaining position, are exaggerating their progress. Conversely, the Iranians may already have the bomb, and have most certainly the ‘know how’ to assemble a bomb. In whatever the case may be, it is unlikely that Iran would be flexible enough to agree to the US requests for modifications to the 2015 nuclear deal, such as extending the expiration time. The Ayatollahs have already announced that they are opposed to any change. That means that the US and the western powers would have to relent on Iran’s development of long-range missiles that could carry nuclear payloads. Tehran would certainly oppose the US demand that it ends its nefarious terrorist behavior in the Middle East region and beyond.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Sticks it to a Prostrate America Joe Biden puts the Communist regime in a triumphal mood. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on April 14th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/china-sticks-it-prostrate-america-lloyd-billingsley/

Last month in Anchorage, Chinese diplomats Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi subjected Biden’s secretary of state Anthony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan to lengthy verbal barrage. For all its fury, China’s triumphalist rhetoric was only the sequel to an even deeper humiliation.

In February, China subjected U.S. diplomats in the PRC to “anal swab tests.” In this routine, a Chinese doctor sticks a swab two inches into the rectum and rotates it several times, an invasive procedure to say the least. Chinese Dr. Li Tongzeng claims the anal swab is a more effective test for Covid-19, but UCLA microbiology professor Omai Garner says the respiratory test is the “gold standard.”

Dr. Gary Procop, director of  molecular microbiology, virology, mycology and parasitology at the Cleveland Clinic, told Healthline that “at least one early study supports respiratory specimens as superior to the other end of the alimentary canal.” The American diplomats duly lodged a protest with China’s foreign ministry, which claimed the tests were done in error and later denied that China ever “asked” the U.S. diplomats to undergo the anal swab in the first place.

In similar style, the Chinese regime claims that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had nothing to do with the spread of Covid-19, even though the WIV received shipments of deadly viruses stolen from a lab in Canada. These included the Nipah virus, transmittable from animals to humans and also able to jump between humans.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Biden White House: A Diversity of Racists and Anti-Semites They may look like America – but they don’t think like Americans. David Horowitz and John Perazzo

Posted By on April 14th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/david-horowitzandjohn-perazzo/2021/04/13/bidens-team-of-racists-and-anti-semites-an-anti-american-coalition-in-the-heart-of-the-white-house-n1439724

Formally introducing his cabinet to the public, Joe Biden proudly declared: “This is the first [time] in American history that the Cabinet looks like America.” Looking at the actual appointments and not just the gender, skin color and ethnic origins of the Biden team, it is a team that may look like America but doesn’t think like America. In fact, it is a team whose outlook is anti-American.

Take Biden’s Vice Presidential choice, Kamala Harris, whose antipathy for America oozes from her every pore. At a February 2019 presidential campaign stop, for example she said Columbus Day should be replaced with “Indigenous People’s Day” because “we are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country.”  This is an accurate summary of the way the Biden White House views its native land, and it is a view encapsulating three big lies.

What America did with the slave system it inherited from the British was end it. America’s abolition campaign began with its revolutionary proclamation that all men are created equal and have a God given right to liberty. America began implementing this right in 1787, the first year of its existence, with the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, outlawing slavery in a territory the size of the original 13 colonies.  Within twenty years slavery was abolished in all the northern states. As for the “original sin” of enslaving the black Africans brought to this country that properly is the achievement of the Africans themselves who then sold their brothers and sisters to Europeans at slave auctions in Ghana and Benin.

All forms of institutional and systemic racism including Jim Crow were outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In one of his first statements as president Biden claimed that “systemic racism” has been built into every aspect of our system.” This is a bald-faced lie. The opposite is the truth. Under the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, systemic racism is outlawed in America. With the exception of affirmative action policies sanctioned by the Supreme Court, there is no systemic racism in America,. If there were systemic racism, there would be a tsunami of legal suits to punish those who practiced it. There is no such tsunami because the claim is a baseless lie.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

On Iran, Biden Administration Ready to Undo Former Administration’s Work, whether It is Good for the World or Not? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on April 14th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17273/iran-biden-administration

A basic rule in negotiations is to keep or gain leverage against the other party. The Biden administration, mystifyingly, is doing exactly the opposite in its negotiations with the regime of Iran.

Iran enriching uranium at any level — it is a negligibly small step to enrich uranium from “acceptable levels” to “nuclear” levels — puts the world at risk, especially as other countries in the region might well feel compelled launch their nuclear programs as a deterrent.

The US and the UN Security Council also would do well to impose sanctions on Tehran for its violation of Resolution 2231, which “calls upon Iran not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”

A basic rule in negotiations is to keep or gain leverage against the other party. The Biden administration, mystifyingly, is doing exactly the opposite in its negotiations with the regime of Iran.

Right before heading to Vienna to negotiate rejoining the disastrous 2015 nuclear deal, which, incidentally, Iran never signed, US State Department spokesman Ned Price dropped a bombshell when he told reporters that the US is prepared to lift sanctions against Iran:

“We are prepared to take the steps necessary to return to compliance with the JCPOA, including by lifting sanctions that are inconsistent with the JCPOA. I am not in a position here to give you chapter and verse on what those might be”.

Why on earth would the administration tell the Iranian leaders before negotiations that it is ready to lift sanctions while it has not yet received anything in return from the mullahs? The Iranian regime, of course, immediately scented weakness and desperation and began increasing its demands. The Biden administration then offered $1 billion to the mullahs in exchange for the regime freezing its production of 20% uranium enrichment. No, Iran wants more. Its leaders demanded $30 billion for one month of freeze.

Presumably to gain additional leverage and extort more concessions, the regime announced during those negotiations that it had begun testing its newest advanced nuclear centrifuges.

The Biden administration does not seem to understand that it is the Iranian regime that is desperate for the nuclear deal, not the US.