EDUCATION Comments turned off

I’ve Been Fired. If You Value Academic Freedom, That Should Worry You by Bo Weingarten

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://quillette.com/2020/03/06/ive-been-fired-if-you-value-academic-freedom-that-should-worry-you/

“I followed all of the protocols of academia. I published articles in peer-reviewed journals. I shared my ideas, always politely, on Twitter, and I encouraged people to debate me and to criticize my ideas. And I was fired. If it can happen to me, then it can happen to any academic who challenges the prevailing views of their discipline. You may disagree with everything I believe, say, and write, but it is in everyone’s interests that you support my freedom to believe, say, and write it.”

…….Until a week ago, I was a tenure-track assistant professor at a small college. Then I was fired. And although I am but one professor at one small college in one small town, I want to persuade you that, if you care about free speech and free inquiry in academia, you should be alarmed by my termination. My troubles began in October 2019 when I was invited to address an evolutionary group at the University of Alabama. I had decided that I would discuss human population variation, the hypothesis that human biological differences are at least partially produced by different environments selecting for different physical and psychological traits in their populations over time. I planned to defend this view as most consistent with a Darwinian understanding of the world.

My first day in Tuscaloosa was uneventful. On the second day, I visited a class and had an enjoyable discussion with students about various topics, including human evolution and social signaling. I was then supposed to meet professors and students for lunch, but instead my guide delivered me to an empty room where I received a number of texts from my host: The professors had found my RationalWiki entry, which accuses me—inter alia—of writing “racist bullshit for the right-wing online magazine Quillette.”

Notwithstanding its name, which indicates a commitment to thought and reason, RationalWiki is a highly partisan and tendentious site which its authors use to mock and defame their political opponents.

POLITICS Comments turned off

DNC Changes Debate Rules After Tulsi Gabbard Reaches Previous Requirement

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/06/dnc-changes-debate-rules-after-tulsi-

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Friday announced its updated debate guidelines, which essentially eliminate the chance of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) participating in the upcoming CNN/Univision debate.

In order to participate in the March 15 debate, a candidate must have earned at least 20 percent of the pledged delegates allotted up to that point. That effectively eliminates the chance of Gabbard, who remains in the race, participating, as she currently stands with two delegates.

The previous debate requirement allowed a candidate to participate if he or she had a single pledged delegate. If the DNC stuck to the previous rules, Gabbard, who did not qualify for any of the debates ahead of the caucuses in Iowa and Nevada or the primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina, would have been able to participate.

Joe Biden (D), as of Friday, held the lion’s share of delegates — 664. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) easily surpasses the 20 percent threshold as well, with 573 delegates. According to Politico, “Biden had earned 48 percent of delegates awarded thus far, while Sanders had 41 percent. (Some delegates have not yet been awarded from states that held primaries this week on Super Tuesday.)

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Sydney M. Williams-” Intemperance of the Left

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Just this past week, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) Spoke outside the Supreme Court to protestors, while the Court was hearing a case that would require doctors in Louisiana who operate at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Senator Schumer, standing on the courthouse steps and speaking to protestors, called out Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by name, threatening them: “ I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” When called out by others, including Chief Justice John Roberts, some Republican Senators and a few in the media, Senator Schumer claimed to regret his choice of words. Yet everything he says is predetermined and politically motivated. He is not stupid but has had no real-world experience. Since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1974, he has spent his entire career (forty-five years) in public service. He parses his words carefully.

This is not to absolve the Right, but vitriol among the sanctimonious left who feel a God-granted right to dictate to “deplorables” and others has become ubiquitous. Progressivism has become a religion in that it claims a moral code of wokeness, political correctness, identity politics, victimization and intolerance, the glue of shared values and mythologies. They clamor for diversity, as long as there is conformity in thought.

Nastiness and incivility have long been present on the political scene and always most venomous during political campaigns. There have always been fringe elements on both sides of the political divide who urge violence and recrimination against those with whom they disagree. However, incivility was generally limited to those on the political stage and to a few commentators whose bigotry is their success. Reporters and the general public were once more restrained in their observations. In our age of better educated citizens who have more free time to think about candidates and politics, unadulterated hatred should have given way to reflection and perspective. It hasn’t. Hatred, on the part of the left, has gone mainstream. Consider a few selections: White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family were asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky by the co-owner, because of her ties to the “inhumane and unethical” Trump Administration. Senior White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller was accosted in a Washington, D.C. restaurant and called a “real-life fascist.” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson was forced to leave another restaurant when fifteen protestors showed up shouting “Shame!” Such acts were encouraged by the establishment. In June 2018, Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) told attendees at an event to continue publicly harassing members of President Trump’s Cabinet.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Wyoming Public School Salaries Finally Posted Online – Payrolls Cost Taxpayers $1 Billion Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/03/06/wyoming-public-school-salaries-finally-posted-online–payrolls-cost-taxpayers-1-billion/#4c061b522f60

Transparency Victory in Wyoming!
It was a three-year fight to open the books on the entire payroll of the Wyoming public schools — and we’ve officially won! 

Finally, the salaries of every educator, administrator, staffer, and employee have been posted online. 

It was a three year fight to open the books on the entire payroll of the Wyoming public schools. Finally, the salaries of every educator, administrator, and staffer have been posted online.

Starting in 2017, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com filed open records requests with the 48 public school districts. Some districts wanted to charge us fees up to $3,600. Only 18 of the districts produced a responsive record of their payrolls – the rest of the districts arguably violated transparency law.

Enter Tom James a new state senator. He learned that the Superintendent of Public Instruction compiled the records each year. So James filed his request and successfully captured three years of data. Then, our organization requested a copy as well.

“Public school employees are paid by taxpayers and therefore taxpayers get to see where their dollars are going. For the first time in history, I made sure the books were open to the public.”

Hon. Tom James, Wyoming State Senator

The new data shows that there are 16,306 full-time employees making $816.5 million in cash compensation. Adding the cost of benefits such as paid time off and pensions, taxpayer costs are estimated to exceed $1 billion.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, POLITICS Comments turned off

Democrats’ Endless Virtue-Signaling Over Diversity Now Transitions to White Grumpy Old Men Dov Fischer

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://spectator.org/democrats-endless-virtue-signaling-over-diversity-now-transitions-to-white-grumpy-old-men/

Was it all that long ago that the nation was told that Brett M. Kavanaugh was unacceptable for the United States Supreme Court based on a perjurer’s allegations? The allegations against him were horrible lies and defamations, but the Democrats pulled out their Robert Bork/Clarence Thomas character-assassination playbook anyway. One liar spoke in a fry about how she had to put a second front door into her million-dollar house in her exclusive neighborhood because of Kavanaugh-related phobias. Then we found out the extra door was installed to bypass zoning restrictions. She said she no longer could fly, so could not attend a Washington, D.C. hearing. Only we soon after discovered that she flew the world. She could not remember a thing about what she claimed had happened to her — not where, not the date, not how she got home. Others whom she named would not verify her story. Then came the next liar and the next. It was not long before Michael Avenatti showed up at the circus with his clown.

Yet we were told by Democrat Morality Police that the assault and rape claims of a woman — any woman —always must be believed. There is no “He Said/She Said.” Rather, there is only “He Raped/She Survived.” Suddenly, the term “Survivor” that had been arrogated by CBS for a contestant program — but that had been reserved hitherto primarily for Jews, Roma (“Gypsies”), and homosexuals who had made it out alive from Dachau, Buchenwald, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, Majdanek, Auschwitz, and the others — now applied to any woman who ever had made a claim against any man. It did not matter how dubious her past, how preposterous her narrative, her record of false claims, or the obviousness of her lie.

In time, however, that New Left Morality soon was exposed as baloney when a professional Black woman academic accused a Black Lieutenant Governor of having raped her.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why I’m taking the coronavirus hype with a pinch of salt Simon Jenkins

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-hype-crisis-predictions-sars-swine-flu-panics

We’ve been here before, and the direst predictions have not come to pass

EXCERPT

When hysteria is rife, we might try some history. In 1997 we were told that bird flu could kill millions worldwide. Thankfully, it did not. In 1999 European Union scientists warned that BSE “could kill 500,000 people”. In total, 177 Britons died of vCJD. The first Sars outbreak of 2003 was reported by as having “a 25% chance of killings tens of millions” and being “worse than Aids”. In 2006, another bout of bird flu was declared “the first pandemic of the 21st century”, the scares in 2003, 2004 and 2005 having failed to meet their body counts.

Then, in 2009, pigs replaced birds. The BBC announced that swine flu “could really explode”. The chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, declared that “65,000 could die”. He spent £560m on a Tamiflu and Relenza stockpile, which soon deteriorated. The Council of Europe’s health committee chairman described the hyping of the 2009 pandemic as “one of the great medical scandals of the century”. These scenarios could have all come to pass of course – but they represent the direr end of the scale of predictions. Should public life really be conducted on a worst-case basis?

Both Hancock and Britain’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, have struggled to contain the alarm. The government’s action plan pointed out that the virus is highly contagious, but the “great majority” of those who develop symptoms will experience only a “mild-to-moderate but self-limiting illness”. Every medical expert I have heard on the subject is reasonable and calm.

Not so politicians and the media. They love playing to the gallery, as they do after every health scare and terrorist incident. Front pages are outrageous. No BBC presenter seems able to avoid the subject. Wash hands to save the nation. The BBC must be sponsored by the soap industry.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Warren of Lies: The Forked Tongue of a Very Red ‘Indian’-James Allan

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/03/warren-of-lies-the-forked-tongue-of-a-very-red-indian/

“President Trump is another example of the non-cookie cutter politician. He’s an archetype, in fact.  Has anyone noticed that, more than any other politician I can think of in my lifetime, Trump has delivered on his promises.  At least he’s done so to the extent Congress has permitted.  He’s appointed only solid, non-activist, interpretively conservative judges off the very list he promised he’d use.  (Maybe the Liberals here in Australia, who have a truly terrible record on judicial appointments, might learn something. )  He has cut taxes massively, not a tiny bit (like here), that won’t even keep up with bracket creep.  Trump has deregulated more than any President, including Reagan.  He’s doing everything he can to get a functioning border in place.  He’s completely jettisoned Obama’s foreign policy.  As I said, he’s basically gone down the list of his election promises and tried to deliver on them.  It’s so startling that you realise ‘he must not be a career politician’, for such is the novelty of any public figure actually treating ‘a promise made as a debt unpaid’.

My basic attitude to people who want to enter the democratic fray as candidates for elected office is ‘good on ya’.  I’m something of a sceptic of the modern world’s embrace of massively over-powerful judges who, to varying degrees, have left behind old-fashioned judging and, under the guise of ‘human rights’, entered the arena of social policy-making.  Judges, and the lawyerly caste as a whole, are today’s aristocracy.  And they’re getting more powerful by the day.

So I’m nothing if not a fan of those prepared to try to get elected and enter the hurly-burly of the give-and-take of electoral politics.  Some of these people will hold political views I agree with.  Some won’t.  Some will seem competent. Some won’t.  Some will have charisma.  Some will be blander than a loaf of white bread.  On the whole, though, I like the fact that people go into politics.  Sure, I wish that in Australia we drew from a wider pool of backgrounds – far too many of our elected MPs follow the cookie-cutter route of being ministerial aides out of university, or think-tank types, or union officials. And then, having built up contacts, go on to win a pre-selection and all too often a seat in Parliament.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Understanding and Misunderstanding China Wolfgang Kasper

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/03/understanding-and-misunderstanding-china/

The Hong Kong protesters should demonstrate to us once and for all that the Chinese are not genetically conditioned, compliant and quietist “yellow ants”, as many in the West still assume. Nor must we forget 1989 when young freedom protesters surrounded a Statue of Liberty on Tiananmen Square. About one million Beijing residents from all walks of life, including numerous party and union officials, demonstrated for reform and greater freedom. Most remarkably, Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Communist Party of China after a long career in the Party elite, addressed the crowds on the square. He advocated freedom of the press and freedom of association, free markets and parliamentary democracy. Could a leader like that again one day emerge from the bosom of the CPC?

Of course, earlier generations of Chinese had to knuckle under to survive, buy a decent apartment and give their children a good education. Many still do. But many of their children and grandchildren now have attained middle-class living standards or better, together with the education and knowledge which come with that. More and more Chinese—in the PRC and the diaspora, including in Australia—now aspire to civic, economic and political rights. And they are prepared to stand up for their liberties.

During my visits to the PRC over the past forty years, I have seen a pervasive shift from unquestioning compliance and the pursuit of narrow material aspirations to demands for individual freedoms. Many Chinese now complain about the oppressors in Beijing and the surveillance state. “It takes the authorities a mere seventeen minutes to know exactly where everyone is at the moment,” they joke. “China is so poor at soccer because the national team consists of players with money to bribe the selectors,” you are told. Ordinary folk one meets decry openly the blocking of Google, Wikipedia and YouTube by online censorship—and show you how to circumvent the ban. America-based, Mandarin-speaking bloggers, whose political comments are critical and often well-informed, have hundreds of thousands of tech-savvy, VPN-enabled followers in the PRC. Their blogs often attract a hundred times the number of viewers that the PRC’s main broadcaster gets.

The professors and students of Shanghai’s Fudan University, whose charter contains the motto “freedom of thought”, but who have been officially instructed to drop it, now defiantly sing their campus anthem daily, extolling “freedom of thought and academic independence”. Many in the rapidly growing middle class speak admiringly of the individual freedoms they have observed in the West during holiday trips or semesters of study.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coming Migrant Wave Set to Exact Consequences in Europe Niccolo Soldo

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/06/coming-migrant-wave-set-to-exact-consequences-in-europe/

The Obama era, it is often falsely suggested, was one of “no corruption” and a “strong multilateralism” on the international stage where Atlanticism held sway and challenges to U.S.-led western liberal democratic order were easily neutralized. Then, we were assured, the policymakers at the U.S. State Department and their like-minded allies at Langley had everything under control.

This is the impression left by a horribly biased media on both sides of the pond, still raging at the audacity of hoi polloi who dared not only to elect the unpalatable Donald Trump as president of the United States, but who also saw to it that Brexit be seen through to the end.

Upon closer inspection, one will note that Afghanistan continues to be a raging quagmire, with the Taliban threatening what little is left of the U.S.-backed Afghan National Army. Presidential candidate Joe Biden promised everyone way back in 2012 that U.S. forces were on the way out within months. This is America’s longest historical conflict, soon to break the two-decade milestone should current peace talks collapse (a very safe bet).

Libya, where the United States “led from behind” (as per President Obama), continues to be ravaged by civil war between various tribal and jihadi factions. Muammar Gaddafi’s removal was sold as an easy “pick off” but Obama’s legacy (and to be fair, the legacies of the UK’s David Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy) is one of modern-day slave markets, a destroyed economy, an annihilated society, and a continuing migrant crisis for which Europe continues to foot the bill.

And as they are paying the price for Obama’s Libya policy, Europe is still paying the price for his Russia policy. Wrenching Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit has been presented as a victory for liberal democracy and the Western-led global order against an “authoritarian” and “revanchist” Russia.

What could have been the biggest strategic victory of Obama’s foreign policy instead descended into a stalemate whereby a horribly corrupt rump Ukraine has exposed all sorts of shady practices and practitioners, ranging from Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort to the clearly corrupt Hunter Biden. The steadily increasing sanctions regime leveled at Moscow and key Russians by the United States had the added effect of harming European business interests, leading to resentment among both German and French manufacturers. Ukraine’s conflict continues to fester as an open wound, with resolution still far off in the distance.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Bernie v. Biden: Brand Identity Triumphs Over Identity Politics Bob Maistros

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/07/bernie-v-biden-brand-identity-trumps-identity-politics/

Like, wow. The Democratic presidential field has shrunk from the most diverse ever – in race, gender, age, background and even sexual orientation – to two old white guys duking it out.

Even, and perhaps especially, in the age of “woke,” brand identity is triumphing over identity politics.

That was the very point of the first (second, if you count JFK) great political “brand:” Barack Obama. His carefully crafted image was described as “post-political,” “post-racial,” and yes, “beyond identity politics.”

Youthful, irresistibly “cool,” and for many, an ideological blank slate, Obama would be The One ushering in “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” His rising sun logo and the independently designed “Hope” poster emerged as iconic brand symbols – equal parts aspirational and soothing in a time of social and economic turmoil.

Brand power ascended again in 2016, when a casino mogul and reality show host – whose real business was marketing one of America’s most recognized names – leveraged his notoriety to smash political norms to smithereens.