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NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF SCHOLARS : THE TYRANNY OF PRONOUNS *****

Posted By on June 4th, 2020

New York, NY, June 4, 2020 — Can university officials force their professors to call male students by feminine titles and pronouns? That’s the issue in the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals case of Meriwether v. Francesca Hartop and other officials at Ohio’s Shawnee State University. Professor Meriwether appealed after the federal district court ruled that his using masculine pronouns for a male student was not “speech” protected by the First Amendment.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) disagrees and filed an amicus curiae brief supporting the professor on Wednesday, June 3, 2020.

NAS President Peter Wood explains, “This isn’t just about a pronoun, it’s about what that pronoun means. It’s about endorsing an ideology. Forcing the use of a pronoun based on gender perceptions rather than sex is forcing the professor to endorse the idea that he rejects—the idea that individuals decide for themselves what sex or gender they are. And this is happening in a philosophy class, where adults should be able to freely and vigorously debate hot-button topics like gender identity.”

The NAS is a leading non-profit advocate of more than 3,000 scholars for intellectual freedom in American higher education. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill De Blasio Is A Cowardly Tyrant Fueling New York’s Demise By Ben Weingarten

Posted By on June 4th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/04/bill-de-blasio-is-a-cowardly-tyrant-fueling-new-yorks-demise/

In Bill de Blasio’s world, during a pandemic, rioters have a right to non-peaceable assembly, but law-abiding religious believers have no right to meet peacefully.

The grave injustice inflicted upon one person is now being compounded into a grave injustice for millions of New Yorkers.

It took decades to bring New York City back from the brink — facing crime, squalor, and bankruptcy — to the peace and prosperity that has marked it since Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s tenure. Today, Mayor Bill de Blasio seems intent on sending the city back to the bad old days, threatening to undo decades of progress while operating under the banner of “progressivism.”

The twin crises of the Chinese coronavirus and the present rioting and looting have created the perfect storm for the city’s demise. In response to the Wuhan virus, New York City committed willful economic suicide, and in response to the current lawlessness, NYC called for curfews it failed to impose, encouraging its descent into chaos.

While the crippling coronavirus shutdown can perhaps best be attributed to incompetence, there is no such excuse for permitting New York’s streets to become a war zone. The latter represents a failure of the most basic duty of our elected officials to protect our lives, liberty, and property.

The Mayor Has Failed His Most Basic Tasks

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Need to Discuss Black-on-Black Crime By Barry Latzer

Posted By on June 4th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/22/the-need-to-discuss-black-on-black-crime/?utm_

In defense of a term

Thomas Abt’s book Bleeding Out (2019) has garnered a fair amount of attention for its proposals to deal with gun violence in mainly black urban neighborhoods. The entire focus of the book is on interventions in high-crime locations to stem the violence, including: hot-spots policing, working with young males at high risk of engaging in violence by offering carrots (“we’re here to help you”) and sticks (“we’ll stop you if you don’t let us help”), and locking up known violent offenders.

Lest you think this book is not about black crime, Abt states quite explicitly that “race matters when it comes to urban violence.” He points out that homicide-victimization rates for black men were 3.9 times the national average and that 52 percent of all known homicide victims were black (2017 data). He might have added that the perpetrators of these crimes were overwhelmingly African Americans. In 2018, where the homicide victim was black, the suspected killer also was 88 percent of the time. And this is not an exceptional situation. From 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by other African Americans. In fact, as I will demonstrate, high rates of black-on-black killing have been the norm for well over a century. But this is not an issue Abt wants to address.

To the contrary, Abt abjures the phrase “black on black.” He calls it “deeply misleading” and says it “perpetuates deeply harmful stereotypes about African Americans.” So Abt has written an entire book addressing the problem, but he and everyone else must refrain from calling it what it is: a black-on-black phenomenon. Why?

Abt offers three reasons. First, violent crime is commonly intraracial, i.e., whites kill whites, Hispanics kill Hispanics, and so on. But, Abt says, we don’t talk about white-on-white violence. Well, that’s simply not true. Many analysts, myself included, discuss white violence, especially where it had a major impact on crime in the United States. This was the case with southern whites especially from the 18th through the 20th centuries, a situation studied extensively by crime historians and criminologists.

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New Floyd Murder Charges Will Be Tough to Prove and May Imperil Good Cops By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on June 4th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/new-floyd-murder-charges-will-be-tough-to-prove-and-may-imperil-good-cops/

In a politically charged case, it is more important, not less, to get the charges right.

Prosecutors in Minnesota have filed an amended complaint against Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, adding a second-degree “felony murder” charge. This dangerously flawed theory could be used to portray any police restraint of a resistant suspect as criminal assault.

The amended complaint against Chauvin also re-alleges the two homicide charges originally filed last week: third-degree “depraved indifference” murder and second-degree manslaughter, both of which better fit the facts of the case while posing no risk of criminalizing the legitimate use of force by good cops.

Separately, the other three fired Minneapolis police officers involved in the killing have been charged, after a week of demands by the Floyd family, as well as intense anti-police rhetoric (and worse) by Black Lives Matter activists and protesters.

Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane are charged with aiding and abetting both second-degree murder (the new charge against Chauvin) and manslaughter. Weirdly, under the circumstances, the three are not charged with the “depraved indifference” murder count; nor are they accused of committing manslaughter as principals — they are charged only as aiders and abettors, a theory that does not jibe with a negligence charge such as second-degree manslaughter (which is negligent homicide under Minnesota law).

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Covid vs. Climate Modeling: Cloudy With a Chance of Politics By Eric Felten

Posted By on June 4th, 2020

COVID-19 has proved to be a crisis not only for public health but for public policy. As credentialed experts, media commentators, and elected officials have insisted that ordinary men and women heed “the science,” the statistical models cited by scientists to predict the spread of contagion and justify the lockdown of the national economy have proven to be far off-base.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York complained this week about the “guessing business” experts had presented to him dressed up as scientific fact: “All the early national experts [said]: Here’s my projection model. Here’s my projection model,” Cuomo said. “They were all wrong. They were all wrong.”

Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, whose computer modeling of the coronavirus predicted up to 2.2 million U.S. deaths. He has since resigned.

A computer model produced by statisticians at Imperial College London had an outsized effect on government policy, predicting up to 2.2 million American deaths from the new coronavirus and as many as 9.6 million people requiring hospitalization. Instead, emergency rooms and hospital beds in all but the few hardest hit cities remained empty; rather than being overwhelmed by cases, many doctors and nurses found themselves out of work.

As the staggering social and economic costs of shutdown have become painfully clear, the failure of the models to accurately anticipate what would happen is raising questions about their use to justify life-altering public policies.

If computer models projecting the near-term future of an epidemic were so wrong, what does that mean for the far more complicated computer models predicting the far-off future of the entire planet?

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Isn’t Letting a Pandemic Go to Waste By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 4th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/coronavirus-pandemic-china-beijing-becoming-authentically-belligerent/#slide-1

No more nice-guy façade.

George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis last week when a police officer used brutally excessive force to arrest him. It was the latest in a string of high-profile cases nationwide in which citizens, most of them African Americans, died from reckless police force. Once again, protests over police brutality turned violent and rioting ensued.

The U.S. is torn apart over the national mass quarantine. Liberal blue states accused red opened-up states of recklessly endangering national health by allowing their populations to go back to work before the virus has left.

Red states countered that blue states were hypocritical in wanting federal money to subsidize their locked-down residents while expecting other states to generate needed federal revenue. They also contended that there was no longer scientific evidence to justify the lockdown.

The nationwide protests and rioting have inadvertently adjudicated the issue: States cannot jail the law-abiding barber who wears a mask at work but allow the arsonist without a mask to roam the streets, burning with impunity.

There is mounting evidence that an array of federal officials had plotted to disrupt Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and his presidential transition, leaving Trump supporters furious.

Meanwhile, likely Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is sequestered in his basement. He often appears confused. Yet Biden seems content that the more people do not see or hear him, the more they like the idea of him as president. Indeed, the more inert Biden has become, the higher his poll numbers have risen against Trump and his tweeting.

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Why Some Tiananmen Protesters Support Trump By Rong Xiaoqing

Posted By on June 4th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/united-states-china-relations-some-tiananmen-protesters-support-president-trump/#slide-1

‘Many American politicians are too close to Beijing. Finally, we got Trump, who is vehemently anti-the Communist Party.’

 L ast March, I attended a Chinese Trump supporters’ gathering at a karaoke bar in Flushing, N.Y., for a story I was writing. Two participants really grabbed my attention. Before pouring out their admiration for Trump, they revealed their involvement in the Tiananmen democracy movement in China in 1989.

One of them, Cai Guihua, was a leader of the Shanghai workers’ protests back then; the other, Chen Liqun, was a mobilizer of supporters for the movement in Hangzhou. Both paid a high price after the bloodshed on and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4 that year.

Cai was jailed for nearly two years, and Chen fled the authorities and wandered across China for 17 months before things calmed down. Both were involved in the founding of the dissident Democracy Party of China in 1998 and came to the U.S. not long after, amid a brutal crackdown.

Now they are cheering for Trump with the same passion they devoted to China’s democracy movement.

Conservatism has been rising among Chinese immigrants in recent years. The Chinese community in the U.S. is no longer locked into voting Democrat. Still, discovering a whole slew of Trump supporters among Tiananmen-era protesters surprised me.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Advice from a Professor for College-Bound Freshmen in 2020 Ten things students should consider before enrolling in college this fall. By Adam Ellwanger

Posted By on June 4th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/03/advice-from-a-professor-for-college-bound-freshmen-2020/

If you’re starting college this fall, you probably just finished high school. Congrats! If you will begin attending a college or university in the fall, you have some major changes on the horizon. I have enormous sympathy for all of you who graduated high school this year. You got screwed: screwed out of what was supposed to be the most carefree period of high school, screwed out of prom, screwed out of graduation. Let me join all the other adults you know in saying that I’m sorry for what you’ve lost from COVID-19.

But I’m not only sad for your class—I’m worried about you.

Academically speaking, college will demand much more from you than high school did. High school seniors often don’t give their full effort in the final year, but all of you have been “going” to school online for the last two months, and I’m concerned that this will make your college transition even more difficult (if we are able to get back to in-person class meetings by the fall). 

You should begin mentally preparing yourselves now for the work of your freshman year. Most of your professors will be eager to help you succeed. I’m a 42-year-old professor and I’ve been working or studying at a college or university since I was 18. Below is some bold advice. I know you didn’t ask for any advice, but please don’t hit me with the “OK, Boomer” thing. As a young member of Generation X, it wasn’t that long ago that I was a student. I hope the suggestions below help you make a smooth transition.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s New Terror Network in Latin America by Con Coughlin

Posted By on June 4th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16085/iran-venezuela-terrorism

The recent upsurge in Iranian activity in Venezuela certainly needs to be taken seriously by the Trump administration if Tehran is to be prevented from strengthening its terrorist activities on America’s southern flank.

To date Mr Trump, having last year threatened to launch military action in support of Juan Guaido, the country’s charismatic opposition leader, now appears to have backed away from any further entanglement with Caracas, a move that might explain Washington’s disinclination to act over Iran’s recent oil shipments.

But that could change if, as now seems likely, the White House comes to realise that Iran’s real intention is to expand its terrorist network in Latin America rather than simply offering economic help to another rogue regime.

The arrival in Venezuela this week of the last of five Iranian tankers carrying gasoline to the oil-starved socialist state is not just about Iran seeking to help a fellow nation stricken by the effects of U.S. sanctions.

It is all about strengthening Tehran’s long-standing terrorist infrastructure in Latin America so that it can be used to expand Iran’s terror operations throughout the globe.

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India to Lead Efforts to Cure the World Health Organization by Jagdish N. Singh

Posted By on June 4th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16061/india-world-health-organization

Fortunately, India’s Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, a physician, is the new chairman of the 34-member World Health Organization Executive Board. He and his colleagues on the board could prevail upon the WHO Director General to take steps aimed at implementing the resolution of the World Health Assembly.

One, however, is not sure if and when [WHO Director General] Tedros will pay attention to implementing this resolution. He does not seem enthusiastic about the probe. He would, he said in his opening remarks at the WHA, “initiate an independent evaluation at the earliest appropriate moment.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping said at the WHA any inquiry should wait until the virus was contained — an outcome that could, of course, take years, if ever. Xi also pledged $2 billion over two years to the WHO, to control the spread of Covid-19, presumably including control of the WHO along with it.

Vardhan and others in the WHO executive board cannot procrastinate. All serious allegations against China and the WHO must be investigated and made transparent to the world without delay.

It is heartening to note the 73rd session of the World Health Assembly (May 18-19, 2020) approved a resolution calling for an independent inquiry into the current pandemic outbreak and the World Health Organization’s role in responding to it.

The resolution — brought forward by the European Union, moved by Australia and supported by more than 116 nations — including India and Japan — demands that WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population…” The resolution also calls for an impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation into the WHO-coordinated international health response to the pandemic.