P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Culturally Responsive Training By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

http://politicalmavens.com/

If New York City taxpayers want to know how their money is spent by the Dept of Education, they can consider the program to train computer science teachers to help students see this subject connected to their own lives. You might guess that ordinary inducements such as doing better in school, doing better in an increasingly computerized job market, earning more money – all of which apply to all races and ethnicities – would be reason enough to be grateful for having computer science courses available in school. You might imagine that by the time a Muslim student is in school, it is no longer essential to capture his attention by the fact that he can make a 3 D symbol of Allah’s name in Arabic script. You would hope that infantilization would not be so rampant that a teacher would boast of making up a song similar to “the head bone connected to the neck bone” in order to stimulate interest in computers. These examples are from an article in today’s WSJ and make us wonder whether school is synonymous with Sesame Street and whether all we are really doing is encouraging the soft bigotry of diminished expectations (WSJ NYC Teachers Get ‘Culturally Responsive’ Training, 8/14)

The fact remains that the whole issue of racial and cultural sensitivity has been captured by Black and Hispanic groups looking for outside answers to inside problems. Asian and Indian students seem to have no trouble meeting the criteria of NYC public schools and do not demand more Chinese teachers or more examples of Japanese food in their math problems or Indian folk legends in our literature. They have no trouble passing standardized tests in English and Math whereas only a third of Black and Hispanic students manage this basic requirement. The notion that what’s holding them back is the insufficient depiction of people of color in our curricula is as preposterous as the suggestion that Black children should be excused from the rules of decorum because their home lives have different standards of acceptability. Children of all ages must understand that school and home are vastly different and the way to adjust to this is not by talking down to them or showing them more selfies.

We are already living in an overly narcissistic culture with people consumed with posting pictures of themselves and checking their facebook pages and demanding “safe spaces” when they are not in 100% familiar territory. At the same time, we are obsessed with stressing the need for ever more diversity which seems to leave some people of color too uncomfortable to even listen to American history or see a statue on the street. In the WSJ article, a teacher summed up the issue that warranted this program for culturally responsive training: “I want to learn computer science; I’m not here for political mumbo jumbo.” The sooner our educational administrators apply this to students as well, the greater the chance for seeing real achievement.

HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

DR. ALEX GROBMAN:A WAR OF WORDS SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT…..PART 2

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

The Mufti’s meeting with Hitler in Berlin

As German historian Peter Longerich explained, when Hitler met the Grand Mufti on November 28, 1941 at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Hitler informed him that Germany was “resolved to urge one European nation after the other, step by step, to contribute to the solution of the Jewish problem, and when the time comes to non- European peoples with a similar appeal.”  He would “carry on the fight until the total destruction of the Jewish-Communist European,” and in the “not too distant future” his army would reach the southern tip of the Caucasus and into the Middle East after defeating the Russians.

Hitler assured the mufti, who from 1941 to 1945 lived in Berlin as an honored guest of the Third Reich, Germany had no imperial designs in the Arab world. The country’s only goal was to liberate the Arabs. “The German objective would be solely the destruction of Jews residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.” Although this declaration should be viewed from a pragmatic military perspective, Longerich noted that it demonstrates that Hitler’s vison of extermination of the Jews at this point already went beyond Europe.

Hitler viewed the mufti as a “sly old fox,” and ascribed his “quite exceptional wisdom” to the likelihood of “Aryan” blood according to Israeli historian Robert Wistrich. “With his blond hair and blue eyes,” Hitler speculated, “he gives the impression that he is, in spite of his sharp and mouse-like countenance, a man with more than one Aryan among his ancestors and one who may well be descended from the best Roman stock.” (See Haaretz: Never-before-seen Photos of Palestinian Mufti With Hitler Ties Visiting Nazi Germany)

Special Office Established for the Mufti to Transmit Arabic-language Broadcasts

HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

A WAR OF WORDS :SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: PART ONE DR. ALEX GROBMAN

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24259

Part I  A War of Words–setting the record straight 

The unending war between the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews is fought on a number of levels. One on the military front; another in the propaganda arena.

As part of this war of words, the Israelis use the Arabs own writings, including the Hamas Covenant and the Palestinian National Charter, their calls for violence against Israel and glorification of Palestinian Arab terrorists found in the media, broadcast on television, preached in the mosques and found in school curricula, as proof the Arabs in Israel refuse to accept the existence of the state of Israel.

The Palestine Authority policy of paying stipends to Palestinian-Arab prisoners and to families of terrorists who have been wounded or killed further demonstrates their commitment to make the country Judenrein. The terrorists know that whether they are killed in combat or imprisoned in Israeli jails, their families will be compensated by the PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and/or other Palestinian-Arab terror organizations.  In 2019, ignoring otherwise ordinary measures of inflation, the PA increased salaries to terrorist prisoners by 11.8%, according Palestinian Media Watch. They doubled the monthly payment being made to the terrorist mastermind behind the 2014 kidnapping and murder of Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach and Naftali Frenkel.

With the aid of the Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI, Israel documents how terrorists are revered in their society by honoring homicide bombers, bomb makers, hijackers, and organizers of terror attacks, who have public squares, streets, schools and youth centers named after them. A number of the vilest terrorists have been honored on multiple occasions.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

J. Frank Bullitt :Stop The Madness Before It Drives Us All Crazy

Posted By on August 14th, 2019

:https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/12/stop-the-madness-before-it-drives-us-all-crazy/

Each week the world produces news that irritates, stuns and infuriates, and on occasion makes us question our collective sanity, leaving us, for example, wondering just how the likes of Joe Biden has been able to reach lofty positions from which he has been able to affect policies that impact our lives.

Here are a few stories from the last week that confirm suspicions we are living in foolish times:

While the Democrats fight to see who can build the biggest welfare state and promise voters that if they just gave them the power, they would make sure everyone has health care, in Great Britain — where everyone has health care — 4.4 million in a country of 66 million are waiting on surgery.

According to the United Press International, “new statistics posted by the National Health Service also showed a 16% increase of patients who’d waited for more than 18 weeks for non-emergency operations, such as hip or knee replacements.

“The NHS figures showed 233,000 Britons had waited for more than six months and 37,000 more than nine months.”

In America, Medicare for All promises free and easy health coverage, but the reality is it “would outlaw all private insurance,” makes sharp cuts in provider payments, which will lead to physician shortages and government rationing of care, and means higher taxes and Americans losing the coverage they have now.

Sen. Bernie Sanders is no longer unhinged — the door that once a barrier between his raging mind and the real world outside has completely fallen off.

On Saturday, Sanders, the Democrat or Socialist or just plain crazy uncle from Vermont, tweeted that “Donald Trump believes climate change is a hoax. Donald Trump is an idiot.” We don’t think the global warming scare is a hoax. Maybe a fraud. Perhaps a spreading swamp fever. Possibly just a big mistake. But not a hoax. We don’t believe Trump is an idiot, either. But quite a few on Twitter think Sanders is. Look at some of the responses:

“Bernie Sanders believes bread lines are good. Bernie Sanders is a communist idiot.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Bolton In London Lauds Brexit On National Security Grounds by Thomas McArdle

Posted By on August 14th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/14/bolton-

he British love their chips, but they’d best be careful not to let them get fishy. The most provocative thing U.S. national security adviser John Bolton said during his visit to No. 10 Downing Street this week was that the British don’t want their “telecommunications system in the 5G world to be compromised by the ‘Manchurian chip phenomenon’ any more than we do” — referring to the dangers posed by the Chinese 5G telecom pioneer Huawei.

I&I outlined the Huawai threat in some detail in May. Its hardware and future software upgrades could be used by Beijing for espionage, or even to attack the military and civilian computer resources of the countries using it.

Even liberal Democrats recognize the threat. “Allowing Huawei’s inclusion in our 5G infrastructure could seriously jeopardize our national security and put critical supply chains at risk,” Senate Intelligence Committee top Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia wrote in March. “Software reviews of existing Huawei products are not sufficient to preclude the possibility of a vendor pushing a malicious update that enables surveillance in the future. Any supposedly safe Chinese product is one firmware update away from being an insecure Chinese product.”

Bolton said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new government was “looking really from square one on the Huawei issue” — which some British officials claimed was an inaccurate account of Bolton’s meetings — and Bolton offered to arrange briefings on the U.S. findings on Huawei.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Can Nuclear Power Be Saved? By Jonathan Lesser

Posted By on August 14th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/nuclear-power-clean-reliable-energy-us-should-embrace/

It’s a clean, reliable source of energy that the U.S. would do well to embrace.

Whither nuclear power? That question has become more important as energy policies evolve to emphasize emissions-free “green” energy and an increased electrification of the U.S. economy. Some environmentalists consider nuclear power to be crucial to reducing carbon emissions; others continue to vehemently oppose nuclear power and believe that our energy must come solely from renewable sources.  The public, encouraged into hysteria by dramatizations of nuclear-plant accidents such as the film The China Syndrome and HBO’s Chernobyl, is split.

Meanwhile, the nuclear-power industry itself is in a parlous state for a variety of tangled reasons. In a recent Manhattan Institute report, I broke them down into four categories: (i) decades of construction cost overruns and plant delays because of poor designs, lack of manufacturing expertise, and changing regulations; (ii) political squabbling over spent-nuclear-fuel disposal; (iii) energy policies, including renewable-energy subsidies and mandates, that have distorted electric-power markets and made it harder for nuclear plants to compete; and (iv) lower natural-gas prices and more efficient gas-fired generators. In the past few years, threatened plant closures have led state policymakers to award subsidies to eleven existing plants. More such subsidies are likely forthcoming, if for no other reason than some nuclear-plant owners wanting their share of the subsidy pie. “Nice plant you got there,” they seem to be saying to local economic stakeholders. “Be a shame if something happened to it.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hillary Ruins the Plan By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on August 14th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/ball-of-collusion-book-excerpt-hillary-clinton-ruins-the-plan/

Plan A was to exonerate her and get her elected. Plan B, the failsafe, was an ‘insurance policy’ meant to destroy Trump.

Editor’s note: Andrew C. McCarthy’s new book is Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. This is the first in a series of excerpts.

 There really was a collusion plot. It really did target our election system. It absolutely sought to usurp our capacity for self-determination. It was just not the collusion you’ve been told about for nearly three years. It was not “Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia.”

Here is the real collusion scheme: In 2016, the incumbent Democratic administration of President Barack Obama put the awesome powers of the United States government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, the Democratic party, and the progressive Beltway establishment. This scheme had two parts: Plan A, the objective; and Plan B, a fail-safe strategy in case Plan A imploded — which all the smartest people were supremely confident would never, ever happen . . . which is why you could bet the ranch that it would.

Plan A was to get Mrs. Clinton elected president of the United States. This required exonerating her, at least ostensibly, from well-founded allegations of her felonious and politically disqualifying actions.

Plan B was the insurance policy: an investigation that Donald Trump, in the highly unlikely event he was elected, would be powerless to shut down. An investigation that would simultaneously monitor and taint him. An investigation that internalized Clinton-campaign-generated opposition research, limning Trump and his campaign as complicit in Russian espionage. An investigation that would hunt for a crime under the guise of counterintelligence, build an impeachment case under the guise of hunting for a crime, and seek to make Trump un-reelectable under the guise of building an impeachment case.

MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

Max Boot’s Dishonesty By Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted By on August 14th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/max-boots-dishonesty/

Max Boot is a narcissistic, dishonest, calculating, manipulative writer who engages in the same willfully dishonorable conduct he claims to disdain in others.He intentionally misconstrues what others write and then lies about it, knowing that no one will bother to uncover his distortion.

Before yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot was political in nature. As I wrote in a recent book review, I found it regrettable that Boot’s opposition to the president had not prevented him from “succumbing reactively to Trump’s cult of personality, or from making Trump the origin of every graph onto which he plots himself.” As of yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot is that he is a narcissistic, dishonest, calculating, manipulative writer who is prone to engaging in precisely the sort of willfully dishonorable conduct that he claims to disdain in others.

Having purposively libeled one of our Buckley Fellows after he had the temerity to argue that one does not fight racism by making lazy racial generalizations, Boot has now moved on to libeling Dan McLaughlin, one of the most thoughtful writers in America, and to making peculiar charges about National Review as a whole. As Oscar Wilde might have said: To lie about one writer may be regarded as a misfortune; to lie about two looks like carelessness.

Or worse.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Coming Migration out of Sub-Saharan Africa By Christopher Caldwell

Posted By on August 14th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/08/26/the-coming-migration-out-of-sub-saharan-africa/

It could send millions to Europe

Almost the entire population of Italy, it seems, spent the last week of June watching a boat arrive from across the Mediterranean. It was the Sea-Watch 3, a Netherlands-registered ship funded by progressive philanthropists and captained by Carola Rackete, a 31-year-old German climate-change activist. Rackete radioed that she was carrying 42 African refugees rescued at sea who were in desperate health. Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini holds that such ships rendezvous with traffickers just off the Libyan coast, and are really less interested in rescuing sailors than in transporting illegal immigrants to Europe en masse. “Taxis,” he has called them. And indeed, Rackete had been doodling about at the edge of Italy’s territorial waters for several days, charting a course less consistent with any health emergency than with a wish to land her human cargo in the European Union, where it is easy to apply for political asylum and where even those whose applications are rejected are almost never deported. Since his Lega party began sharing power in a populist coalition a year ago, Salvini’s decision to close Italy’s ports to such ships has made him the country’s most popular politician by a mile — and arguably, though he is still only a cabinet minister, the leader of the Western European political Right.

This time Salvini failed. Rackete broke through a line of Coast Guard ships in the pre-dawn hours of June 29 and made port on the island of Lampedusa, allegedly ramming a customs ship in the process, a maneuver for which she was arrested. Italians were riveted to their smartphones and TV sets. A good number of Lampedusans even lined the docks in the middle of the night to holler their wish that she be prosecuted — and worse. But when “Carola,” as she was increasingly known to the public, was released in early July, a crowd of supporters waved signs with handmade hearts. She still faces criminal charges. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s foreign minister, the Social Democrat Heiko Maas, backed Rackete against the Italian authorities. “Saving human lives is no crime,” he said. 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

It’s not racist to screen out migrants who’ll be a burden Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on August 14th, 2019

https://nypost.com/2019/08/12/sorry-but-its-not-racist-to-screen-out-migrants-wholl-be-a-burden/

Last week’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, has sent public discourse about immigration off the rails.

It has allowed radicals to frame as racist normal law enforcement activities and immigration rules. We saw this in New York recently, with anti-ICE protesters stopping traffic on the West Side Highway and holding sit-ins at an Amazon store to protest the company’s compliance with immigration rules.

In the left’s telling — and it’s increasingly hard to distinguish the hard left from the soft — the administration and those who support it are no better than the insane white nationalist who committed the El Paso atrocity.

Similar hysteria has greeted a new Trump administration regulation governing legal immigrants’ access to public welfare. The New York Times depicted the new rule as part of an effort by the president and his hard-line immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, to “shift” the demographic makeup of newcomers to the country.

Under the new rule, those who are in the country legally will have a more difficult time obtaining green cards or gaining citizenship if they received food stamps, housing assistance, Medicare or other public benefits.