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The Mullahs’ Provocations Iran heightens the stakes. Joseph Puder

Posted By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274647/mullahs-provocations-joseph-puder

The U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote in his Twitter account last week that the UN embargo on Iran will expire soon, and he asked the Iranian regime to end its “destabilizing behavior.” He added that the “clock is ticking,” and urged the international community to recognize that it means the Islamic Republic will be able to resume its nuclear weaponization and that its Quds Force (part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) commander Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani will be able to travel freely again and foment trouble and instability worldwide. Pompeo called upon the western powers to continue their support for sanctions on the Iranian regime.

Pompeo charged Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with inciting violence against Israel on the eve of the ninth of Av, a tragic day for Jews, which commemorates the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem. The Ayatollah Khamenei exhorted Muslim pilgrims to Mecca to take an active part in defeating America’s “deceit,” a reference to the U.S. Middle East Peace Plan, also known as the ‘Deal of the Century.’ 

Pompeo tweeted in response that: “It’s sick that on the eve of Tisha (ninth) B-av, a solemn day for the Jewish people, Khamenei calls for violence against the Jewish state.” Pompeo took issue with Khamenei’s hypocritical positioning of Iran as the champion of the Palestinians. He wrote that Khamenei’s “faux concern” for the Palestinian people runs so deep, that under his reign of terror he provided less than $20,000 in aid since 2008, while the U.S. provided $6.3 billion in support to the Palestinians since 1994.” In another tweet, Pompeo wrote that, “Khamenei doesn’t see “progress” as prosperity for the Palestinian people, but for Palestinian terrorists switching from rocks to rockets to kill more Jews.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

When ‘White’ Became an Ideology – and Not a Human Reality How “anti-racists” exploit “whiteness” to feather their own political nest. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274679/when-white-became-ideology-and-not-human-reality-bruce-thornton

Recently, terminal Trumpophobe Max Boot went after chronic Trumpophobe National Review for not being extreme enough in their denunciation of “white grievance politics” and “whining” whites, who “can justify everything from a public temper tantrum to a shooting spree,” and expose their belief “that white supremacy is the natural order of things.” Boot counsels “clueless white people” to “get a grip” and tone down the “sense of outrage that white people feel when they fear losing their privileged position to people of color.”

John Nolte on Brietbart humorously dissects Boot’s racialist drivel and the NeverTrump civil war, and John Hirschauer ably defends NRO’s real point. What I find interesting 50 years after the Civil Rights legislation is the continuing use of empty terms like “white.” Such racial categories are left-overs from early 20th century “scientific racism,” which dressed up irrational and self-serving bigotry in the technical terminology and quantitative procedures of real science. Today, they are the instruments of the progressive project of dismantling the Constitutional order at the expense of freedom.

Back in the heyday of “scientific racism,” the category “white” was an incoherent amalgam of superficial physical characteristics like skull shape and skin-color, with subjectively defined inherited “traits”––including vague qualities like “gumption” or “stick-to-it-ive-ness”––  that in fact reflected cultural differences, different social mores, affluence, and geographic diversity. Soon “white” denoted the Anglo-Norman, Nordic, and Germanic peoples, often compressed into WASPs, who comprised America’s socio-economic, political, and educational elite. That same demographic provided the intellectual and political advocates of “scientific racism” and the eugenics movement, which sought to limit immigrants from southern Italy, eastern Europe, and the Middle East, who by the Darwinian laws of nature were incapable of functioning in a politically free, economically advanced society.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Short-Circuiting the Natural Love of Learning in Young People By David Solway

Posted By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/shortcircuiting_the_natural_love_of_learning_in_young_people.html

There can be little doubt that the majority of today’s students are largely incapable of literate performance. They are also collectively devoid of humility before the majesty of the Great Tradition and the lessons of experience that would allow them to grapple with a strenuous and comprehensive curriculum of study.

They have been deprived of genuine instruction in the academic disciplines, indoctrinated in the political shibboleths of the time, and coddled into a state of self-assured autonomy of judgment. This is common knowledge.

Grasping the rudiments of grammar and style, learning how to write coherently (by which I mean both the cursive of penmanship and the cursive of thought), and reading with comprehension in history, literature, philosophy and politics have become dead letters, quite literally. The state of juvenility and ineptitude in which they loiter bodes ill for the culture.

The default procedure among administrators and teachers is to ignore the obvious, to install largely useless computer instruction in the acquisition of writing skills and language proficiency, insist that “fairness” justifies weakening admission standards at the expense of quality, and that ‘social justice” rather than scholarly achievement and disciplinary merit is the aim of education.  

While these institutional debits and failures remain in place, the crux of the issue lies elsewhere. Nothing can supplant early reading — that is, actual reading and being read to — in the home. This is an advantage that cannot be overestimated. Education, as the adage has it, begins in the home with loving and responsible parents. According to Aristotle in the Politics, a child’s character and potentialities are formed by the age of seven, and there is considerble truth to that. Failing such parental supervision, students enter the education system at a deficit. Reclamation is always difficult though differentially possible, assuming native and untapped inclination in the student, a curriculum stressing the basics and expanding outward, an administration concerned with education rather than entrenchment, and teachers who are themselves well-educated and professionally accountable — a Sisyphean proposition.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

BABY KILLERS: JOAN SWIRSKY

Posted By on August 21st, 2019

https://canadafreepress.com/article/baby-killers

“Thou shalt not kill.” Exodus 20:13

”…I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live:”Deuteronomy 30:19

Remember good ole boy Johnny Edwards—actually North Carolina Democrat Senator John Edwards (1998-2012), VP candidate in 2004, and presidential candidate in 2008? Edwards is hard to forget because he burst upon the national stage as the golden-tongued lawyer who was famous for defending the rights of the unborn.

According to writer Douglas Johnson in National Review, “in 1985, John Edwards stood before a jury and channeled the words of an unborn baby girl. In his closing argument to the jury, Edwards conveyed what the unborn child, Jennifer Campbell, purportedly had been feeling hour-by-hour as her distress grew.

“She speaks to you through me,” Edwards told the jury. “And I have to tell you right now—I didn’t plan to talk about this—right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.”

Edwards won that lawsuit and went on to file at least 20 similar lawsuits in the years following, achieving verdicts and settlements of more than $60 million for his clients.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Solar Energy: Good For Virtue Signaling And Not Much Else

Posted By on August 20th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/20/the-truth-about-solar-power-good-for-virtue-signaling-and-not-much-else/

There’s a great future in solar, the fossil-fuel haters have been telling us for some time. They might be right. One day. But they’ve been saying that for quite a while, and the future continues to be out there … somewhere.

Not so long ago, the French even thought paving their highways with solar panels was a good idea. But “Three Years Later,” says a Popular Mechanics headline from late last week, “the French Solar Road Is a Total Flop.”

How can this be? Solar, we’ve long been told, will save us all.

“It’s too noisy, falling apart, and doesn’t even collect enough solar energy,” says PM.

France’s Sun Road, known locally as the Wattway — what, nobody thought of Voltabahn or Wattastrada? — was an “experiment that seemed ingenious in its simplicity: fill a road with photovoltaic panels and let them passively soak up the rays as cars drive harmlessly above.”

However, its “most optimistic supporters have deemed” it a “failure,” says PM. It couldn’t handle the weight of heavy trucks, the surface made so much racket that the speed limit had to be lowered to 43 mph, and it’s failed to deliver the power that had been promised.

Flaws include poor location (“Normandy is not historically known as a sunny area,” says Popular Mechanics, to which we add, no area is sunny at night); storms (the climate alarmists will blame global warming for their existence); and questionable design (solar panels work when best directed toward the sun, not arranged flat on the ground as a road bed).

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

St Greta of Thunberg

Posted By on August 20th, 2019

https://quadrant

As Greta Thunberg makes her way across the Atlantic in a high-tech racing yacht built of petro-chemical derivatives and guided by banks of power-hungry onboard computers, the sort of people who maintain the UN’s climate powwows are more than opportunities for Third World kleptocrats’ brothers-in-law and professional scaremongers to live large on other people’s money are strewing her foamy progress with the rose petals of adoration.

James Delingpole sees the voyage in a rather different light, not to mention Saint Greta of Thunberg’s appearance on the cover of GQ magazine:

…What kind of man would be remotely interested in buying a mag whose main feature entailed a finger-wagging lecture (one we’ve all heard a gazillion times before) about how, like, totally endangered the planet is and how totally it’s all our fault and how we’ve got to abandon all the things we hold dear — meat; air travel; fast cars; designer threads — in order to stop all the baby polar bears melting?

A lecture, furthermore, from a child who hasn’t finished her schooling, whose frontal lobes haven’t formed, who has no sense of humour, whose every utterance is the second-hand opinion of alarmist grown-ups whose doomsday claims she is completely unequipped to assess?

No kind of man that I know of, that’s for sure. Unless you count tofu-eating, milquetoast, pantywaist, beta, snowflake, self-flagellating, Mom’s-basement-dwelling, environmental science graduates as men….

And that is Delingpole just getting started.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Facebook My independent team of investigators looked into the complaints, and the company has taken action. By Jon Kyl

Posted By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-conservatives-dont-trust-facebook-11566309603

From the Ivy League to Hollywood and the mainstream media, Americans with traditional morals or conservative politics have often felt excluded from the country’s elite, culture-creating institutions. Facebook offered an alternative: a place to express views and share news that you couldn’t find in the New York Times.

Over time, however, many conservatives lost trust in Facebook, believing it discriminated against them. The increasing scale and complexity of Facebook’s content-moderation practices made matters worse. In 2016 Facebook employees were accused of suppressing conservative articles in the news feed’s now-discontinued “trending” section. In April 2018 Congress grilled Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg about anticonservative bias, from blocked content to suspended accounts.

In response to mounting criticism, Facebook asked me to conduct a survey to hear from conservatives directly. Following substantial public interest in the project and in light of policy changes Facebook has recently made, we have decided to share our findings at this time.

Facebook placed no restrictions on how I could conduct the work. My team at the law firm Covington & Burling LLP began conducting interviews in May 2018. We cast a wide net to include as many aspects of conservatism as possible—from organizations focused on Christian values or protecting free expression to those focused on tax policy and small government. We identified individuals, groups and lawmakers who either use, study or could potentially regulate Facebook, and interviewed 133 of them. To encourage them to speak freely, we told interviewees we wouldn’t publish their identities. We presented our preliminary findings to Facebook in early August 2018 and have been discussing them with the company ever since.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Tlaib and Omar expose the Democratic Party for what it has become: the party of Jew-hatred By Patricia McCarthy

Posted By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/tlaib_and_omar_expose_the_democrat_party_for_what_it_has_become_the_party_of_jewhatred.html

The latest campaign of the Left, following the exposure of the Russia-collusion hoax as a fabrication from the outset, is to brand President Trump as a racist and to similarly indict his supporters as racists, too.  This is foolish on its face, but that’s the leftists’ plan, and they are sticking to it.  The NYT is leading this shift in the Left’s propaganda campaign, but nearly every anchor on CNN and MSNBC is on board with the enthusiasm of children at the circus.  Everyone who voted for Trump is a racist.  If we vote for Trump in 2020, we are racists.  Those who attend a Trump rally are racists.  All white men are racists, of course, and dangerous to all.  The foolish words uttered on those two cable outlets are outrageous.

It is the Left as well that is so invested in the “science” of trangenderism.  Leftists willingly promote the notion persons born as male can legitimately become female and compete fairly against girls and women in sports.  They have no problem with them winning over and over and over again.  But in fact, there are still only two sexes yet an abundance of seeming gender dysphoria, gleefully encouraged by the LGBT “community” and the Left’s capitulation to it.

How many young lives are being destroyed by what has become a fad of the “woke” people?  The Left does not care about lives destroyed.  If it did, it would fix the border crisis and save the thousands of young girls being trafficked there.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Why Pelosi is surrendering the Democratic Party to the Jew-haters By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/why_pelosi_is_surrendering_the_democratic_party_to_the_jewhaters.html

“Driven by the personal ambition of a craven politician clinging to power, the Democrats revert to their historic embrace of bigotry, as in their support of slavery and Jim Crow.”

A historic transition of the American political landscape is underway, as the older of our two parties is embracing antisemitism and moving away from support of Israel, driven by the personal ambition of a craven politician clinging to power.  Nancy Pelosi’s desire to remain speaker of the House is why she is surrendering the Democrats’ party to the Jew-haters, with the highly visible, openly antisemitic Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib becoming the real face of her party.

No fewer than seven of Pelosi’s key political allies are facing primary challenges, just as did her close, long-serving ally Joe Crowley in 2018, birthing the political career of a comely former bartender, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  All of these senior Democrats realize that in low-turnout primaries, a highly motivated faction can deliver the nomination to a challenger.  Jennifer Shutt of Roll Call examines the challenges that are scaring Pelosi, staring with Rep. Nita Lowey:

Mondaire Jones, a former Obama administration Justice Department staffer and attorney for Westchester County’s Law Department, [will] challenge Lowey in next June’s primary. The 32-year-old political novice plans to take on the New York Democratic incumbent over her positions on issues ranging from climate change to student debt forgiveness to oversight of the Trump administration.

[One] hopes the same sentiment that propelled young progressives to victory in the last election cycle — with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s defeat of longtime New York Democrat Joseph Crowley the most famous example — will resonate with voters throughout New York’s Rockland and Westchester counties.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Common Core And Screen Overdoses Are Ruining American Kids’ Intelligence By Auguste Meyrat

Posted By on August 20th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/20/common-core-screen-overdoses-ruining-american-kids-intelligence/

Between ineffective teaching methods at school and an overdose of screen time at home, our children are becoming intellectually deficient. We need to reverse the trends.

By every metric (SAT, ACT, and even IQ), the intelligence and aptitude of American students has declined in recent years. As Joy Pullmann documents in an article about the results of using Common Core, student performance on state standardized tests has also gone down — that is, when the scoring isn’t changed to show better results.

Before casting blame on who’s responsible, it’s important to understand what these numbers actually mean. All of these tests attempt to measure higher-order thinking skills as they relate to abstract scenarios, nothing more or less. They do not measure the level of practical skills people might have, their emotional intelligence, or even their actual knowledge of things.

Rather, they assess students’ critical thinking (the ability to analyze), problem solving, and knowledge application. People who have these higher-order thinking skills are generally more adaptable to any kind of learning, particularly the kind of learning that happens in higher education.

Higher-order thinking is also important in a time most activities are computerized and information comes in abstract forms such as images and text. American students who lack these skills will struggle much more when most jobs and other domains in life (communication, management, choosing a lifestyle, etc.) demand this of them.