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A Call to Quills for Writers Everywhere By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on September 14th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/a_call_to_quills_for_writers_everywhere.html

From time to time, someone asks me for advice on writing.  I want to encourage people to write because this is a crucial time in history.  As the scourge of censorship takes hold across the West, we do not know whether the platforms of communication available to us today will be around tomorrow.  The days of handwritten samizdat may well return, and for this reason, it is important that freethinkers spend time recording their thoughts so that others may learn and do the same.

Writing is good exercise for the brain, and through trial and error, even non-writers will become writers quickly.  Most of what I know comes from reading the words of others — which is a testament to the power of writing.

The most important thing to know about writing is this: always write without fear.  The word “essay” actually means “an attempt.”  Our current understanding of the word as a form of written composition comes from the great sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne, who recorded his thoughts in a collection of “attempts” (essays) during the French Renaissance.  Writing is not about producing perfection; it is about pursuing perfection.

Michelangelo said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”  When I sit down to write, I look for that statue and start to chip away at the rock the best I can.  I begin with an idea of what perfection might look like.  Invariably, I never achieve a perfect result, but sometimes I am a little closer to the ideal in my mind.  Everything I write is an “attempt” to reach this ideal.

Writing should be fun.  “I only write when inspiration strikes,” William Faulkner said before adding, “Fortunately it strikes at nine every morning.”  Although I have found the early morning hours a particularly rich time to write, I hardly ever write until my head is nearly bursting with ideas.  I let thoughts collect and percolate until my brain feels as if it might explode, and only then do I sit down and attempt to sculpt those ideas into something worth saying.

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Overcoming the False Presumption of Jewish Evil and Collective Guilt Confront the lies and fortifying ourselves. by Vanessa Jones

Posted By on September 14th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/overcoming-the-false-presumption-of-jewish-evil-and-collective-guilt/

A Jewish college student recently visited a local food court with some fellow students whom he believed were his friends.  He had previously confided his grandmother’s history as a prisoner in Auschwitz to one of the other boys.  He also had indicated his support for Israel.  While the group was seated at the table with their food, one of the boys suddenly decided to advise his Jewish “friend” to “go bake in a gas chamber.”  Immediately, the others began to spew antisemitic epithets while throwing food and other objects at their Jewish companion. There were many witnesses, but the people in the mall confined themselves to videotaping the spectacle.  No one intervened on behalf of the Jewish student.  Thus, the Jewish boy experienced the sudden and surprise transformation of his companions from so-called friends to undisguised enemies in the presence of an amused audience.  In the end, he responded by pouring a carton of juice over the head of the perceived ringleader for which the Jewish student received an immediate suspension from his college.

The attack on him and the swift punishment from the school constituted a painful wakeup call.  He had been the victim of a calculated and well-coordinated ambush.

If he could have anticipated it far in advance, would he have been more circumspect about his Jewish identity?  Would he have kept quiet about his Holocaust survivor grandmother?  Would he have hidden his support for Israel?  In short, would he have sought a way to avoid the pain, the humiliation, the rejection before any of it could have occurred?  After the fact, was he weakened in his Jewish identity, or did he become more determined to uphold it?  It would be understandable if he had decided to jump ship and join the majority.  In this case, he did not.

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Oslo at 30 Israel still bleeds from its self-inflicted wound. by Kenneth Levin *****

Posted By on September 14th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/oslo-at-30/

The formal initiation of the Oslo process on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, was supposed to herald an era of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But that hope was based on Israeli delusions.

The truth was readily evident. On the evening of the White House ceremony, Yasir Arafat broadcast a speech on Jordanian television assuring Palestinians that they should understand Oslo in terms of the Palestine National Council’s 1974 decision. This was a reference to the so-called “plan of phases,” according to which the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) would acquire whatever territory it could by negotiations, then use that land as a base for pursuing Israel’s annihilation.

Why did Oslo’s supporters insist peace was at hand? The Arab siege of Israel had been underway for nearly half a century, since the Jewish State’s founding. Invariably under conditions of chronic besiegement – whether involving minorities marginalized and victimized by the surrounding majority or small states whose neighbors seek their destruction – elements of the population under assault will shun reality. They will fool themselves into believing that sufficient self-reform and concessions will win relief. They do so out of desperate longing for respite and despite evidence in the rhetoric and actions of their attackers that their formulations are fantasies.

The promoters of Oslo were drawn overwhelmingly from the nation’s academic, cultural and media elites and elements of the political elite. Their sense of their own infallibility was captured and endorsed by Mordechai Bar-On in his 1996 text on the Israeli peace movement: “Higher learning, it is believed, exposes individuals to a wider variety of opinions, trains them in new analytical and flexible modes of thought, and enables them to relate to issues in a less emotional and more self-critical way, which leads to greater tolerance and understanding of the ‘other’ and of the complexity of the issues.” Oslo’s opponents, in contrast, those who took seriously Arafat’s words and actions, were uneducated and lacked such sophisticated understanding.

To advance Oslo, its proponents mounted an assault on the nation’s history and its people’s attachment to the Zionist project. The so-called New Historians rewrote the history to render Israel more culpable. Not only did they produce fiction in place of history but they set the overarching fact of the conflict on its head: The reality was, and is, that the end of the conflict will come on the Arabs’ timetable, not Israel’s. The Arab world is the dominant actor. The New Historians reversed this, depicting Arab decision-making as two-dimensional, a straightforward response to Israeli decisions. Therefore, if the siege persisted, it was Israel’s fault. Meanwhile, Israeli educators, from grade school to the universities, worked to distance their students from their nation’s history and, again, from attachment to the Zionist project; to ease the path to popular acceptance of dangerous concessions.

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Demonizing the Defense Industry The dire threat to our national security and interests. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 14th, 2023

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Recently JFK biographer Ira Stoll argued against the knee-jerk demonization of the defense industry. He described an event at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government at which an executive from defense contractor Raytheon spoke, sparking protests and chants against “warmongers, imperialists and Zionists” who foment unnecessary wars to make money and advance their oppressive ideologies.

This verbal trifecta of ancient leftist clichés and villains reminds us just how old, simplistic, and dangerous our foreign policy idealism is in a world of ambitious state predators.

This idealistic narrative reflects several bad ideas about how we should defend our security and interests, and deal with aggressors. For over a century now, what British historian Corelli Barnett called “moralizing internationalism,” and we call the “rules-based international order,” has assumed that rather than a tragic constant of interstate relations, war is an anomaly to be corrected.

Supposedly, our advances in understanding human nature and motivation can replace war with non-lethal policies for adjudicating conflict. Multinational treaties and covenants, transnational institutions, and international diplomacy can manage interstate conflict and avoid war’s horrors and destruction.

Only the wicked keep this peaceful settling of conflict from stopping war. One villain frequently blamed for wars after World War I is the arms manufacturers, what became known as the “merchants of death,” today one of our sturdiest and most tired clichés. The animus against armament businesses fed the antiwar sentiments of the interwar periods, and promoted pacifism, disarmament, and the reliance on non-lethal methods for settling conflict.

But as George Orwell pointed out in 1940, the horrors of the industrialized carnage of the Great War promoted the question-begging “meaningless slaughter” take on World War I. Even “to have any knowledge of or interest in military matters . . . was suspected in ‘enlightened circles.’” These attitudes contributed to the growth of pacifism, cutbacks in defense budgets, and a preference for multilateral covenants and institutions, all of which contributed to the disastrous policies of appeasement that culminated in Munich.

Yet despite that epochal failure, the antimilitarism, naïve non-violent approaches to resolving conflict, and the moral hazard created by the projection of weakness such polices create, have become the received wisdom of our foreign policy establishment. Just consider the Biden administration’s disastrous attempts to restart the Iran nuclear deal. Under cover of “diplomatic engagement,” we have not just made the mullahs’ path to nuclear weapons easier, but also financed the regime’s malign aggression.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

History Matters A restoration of history, in all its complexity, is critical to escaping the polarized, rigid, and often insane political environment we now inhabit. Joel Kotkin

Posted By on September 14th, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/09/14/history-matters/

“Rediscovering our history of achievement and seeking to improve upon it are critical if that history is to inform new generations, just as it did in Italy nearly a millennium ago. Recovering and embracing the past in all its complexity is our special gift to posterity.”

History has moved to the front line of social conflict, but rarely has it been so poorly understood and sketchily taught. After decades of declining interest, only 13 percent of eighth graders achieve proficiency in the subject today. The New York Times reports that “about 40 percent of eighth graders scored ‘below basic’ in U.S. history last year, compared with 34 percent in 2018 and 29 percent in 2014.” This phenomenon can be seen across the West. The study of and interest in the past, noted the Economist in 2019, has largely disappeared in the UK. Study of the 19th century, meanwhile, seems to be vanishing from European classrooms. “We are in danger of mass amnesia, being cut off from knowledge of our own cultural history,” noted the late Jane Jacobs in her 2004 book, Dark Age Ahead. When I show my students a picture of Lenin, barely one-in-ten of them recognize it.

Universities should be beacons of dispassionate learning, so it is particularly unfortunate that they have also been increasingly complicit in obliterating much that is valuable to historical instruction and understanding. In a 2013 article for the Guardian, Ashley Thorne lamented that university curricula were largely ignoring the literary classics. At many US colleges, Thorne noted, books written before 1990 are considered “inaccessible” to students. This breaks a vital link with the past that allows students to identify with their ancestors as part of an ongoing human story, rather than simply dismissing their thoughts and actions as alien, unintelligible, or even intrinsically evil.

The problem is further exacerbated by the much-discussed decline in academic viewpoint diversity, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. The history profession was once famously disputatious, but over the last generation or so, a diminishing number of conservative or even centrist historians has produced monocultural groupthink. A national survey of faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities, conducted in 2005, found that liberals were already seven times more numerous across history departments than conservatives. Without the cut-and-thrust of lively historical debate, history risks becoming an ideological discipline, as was the case in the Soviet Union or China today, taught by rote and incapable of generating excitement and interest.

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The Bluster and Demise of Sanctuary Cities By Milt Harris

Posted By on September 14th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/miltharris/2023/09/12/the-bluster-and-demise-of-sanctuary-cities-n1726403

There is a huge difference between true caring and indignant self-righteousness, a fact that the mayors of many sanctuary cities are now learning. It’s one thing to climb up on your soap box and declare that immigration makes communities stronger when you have no idea what you’re talking about. The truth is that these cities never had any intention of being sanctuaries for anyone. They never dreamed that the overflow would reach them. So they smugly smirked and ridiculed the governors and mayors of border cities and states, dismissing the immigration mess and open borders as someone else’s problem.

Now their holier-than-thou attitudes have dissipated into whining. Their smugness has been replaced with poor me syndrome, as they begin to understand the full weight of the issue.

Two shining examples of rhetoric over reality are, of course, New York and Chicago.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams trumpeted the fact that NYC would welcome and shelter immigrants. That was until both Texas and Florida began to send buses and planeloads of illegal aliens to his city. Soon — within weeks, actually — Adams was bemoaning his city’s fate. He went crying to the White House for financial help and threatened legal action against non-sanctuary cities if they wouldn’t help him by accepting some of the city’s overflow.

At a recent town hall, Adams was singing an entirely different tune while proving he was still a liberal by blaming everyone else. He whined that the raging migrant crisis would destroy New York City and even criticized Biden for ignoring his pleas for financial help. He accused Biden of providing no support for the thousands of asylum seekers arriving every month.

Adams went on to say, “I’m gonna tell you something, New Yorkers, never in my life have I had a problem that I didn’t see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.”

He then blasted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for having the nerve to send illegal aliens to a sanctuary city. “Go item-for-item on what Eric Adams ran for as a candidate and look at what we accomplished in twenty months: We turned this city around in twenty months, and then what happened? Started with a madman down in Texas who decided he wanted to bus people up to New York City.”

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Joshua T. Katz College-Ranking Whiplash Elite private universities maintain their dominance in traditional college rankings, but an assessment of free speech on campus tells a different story.

Posted By on September 14th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ranking-colleges-by-free-speech-commitment

It’s September, students and teachers are returning to classes, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), in partnership with the survey research and analytics company College Pulse, has released its 2024 College Free Speech Rankings. The statistics are as disheartening as ever. Of the 248 colleges and universities surveyed (plus six “warning colleges”)—up from 55 in 2020 and 203 (plus five) last year—only four are ranked “Good”: Michigan Technological University, Auburn, the University of New Hampshire, and Oregon State.

These rankings are “based on a composite score of 13 components, six of which assess student perceptions of different aspects of the speech climate on their campus” and the “other seven assess[ing] behavior by administrators, faculty, and students regarding free expression on campus.” For example, students were asked to say how easy or hard it is to have open and honest conversations about such issues as abortion, climate change, and the war in Ukraine. As for administrators, FIRE devised a set of metrics that penalizes an institution for sanctioning its scholars while rewarding it for supporting scholars, students, or student groups involved in a free-speech controversy.

Even at the five institutions that FIRE rates most highly (the four ranked “Good” plus Florida State), an awful lot of students find outrageous conduct acceptable: only 45 percent of students say that it is “never acceptable” to shout down a speaker on campus, only 54 percent say this about blocking other students from attending a campus speech, and only 79 percent say this about using violence to stop such a speech. You can probably imagine the situation at the bottom five institutions: Fordham (the lowest of the sixteen that FIRE ranks as “Poor”); Georgetown, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Pennsylvania (all “Very Poor”); and Harvard (“Abysmal”). But in case you don’t want to imagine, here are the statistics: 27 percent say it’s “never acceptable” to shout down a speaker, 46 percent say this about blocking other students, and 68 percent say this about using violence.

Let’s talk about Harvard. The nation’s oldest and most prestigious university was given a score of zero out of 99. To put this in context, Michigan Technological University scored 78.01, while the second-worst institution for free speech, Penn, scored 11.13. And even that does not describe just how abysmal Harvard is these days. To quote from the report: “0.00 is generous” since Harvard’s “actual score is -10.69, more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below” Penn’s.

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Impeach Joe Biden (September 26. 2019)

Posted By on September 14th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/13/impeach-joe-biden-3/

Editor’s Note: This editorial originally ran on September 26, 2019. Now that the House has announced plans to begin an impeachment inquiry into Biden, we reprint it here just to show how far ahead of the curve we were and how diligently the mainstream press has buried this story for the past four years.

Until the transcript of President Donald Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky emerged on Wednesday, Democrats were in a mad fury with accusations that Trump had bribed a foreign government to investigate the business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The claim, based on a whistleblower’s second-hand account, which none of them had seen, alleged that Trump withheld aid to Ukraine on the condition that it open an investigation on Biden.

Circumstantially at least, there seemed to be some crumbs to back this up. Aside from the mysterious whistleblower claim, the administration had held up an aid package shortly before the call. And then, statements made by Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, seemed to confirm some elements of the story.

When the transcript of the call came out, however, the story fell apart. There was no discussion of aid. Trump did not cajole or pressure Zelensky.

Of course, since the impeachment train had already left the station, Democrats couldn’t suddenly shrug their shoulders and say “never mind.” So the mere fact that Trump brought up the topic of the Biden investigation is now grounds for impeachment.

But if that’s all there is to it, why isn’t Biden under the impeachment cloud?

After all, no one disputes the fact that he pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by telling officials there, in no uncertain terms, that if they didn’t, they’d lose out on $1 billion in aid.

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Drone Swarms to the Rescue The Pentagon’s latest idea is no substitute for a bigger Navy.

Posted By on September 14th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/replicator-drones-pentagon-u-s-military-china-kathleen-hicks-9f585dce?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The Pentagon said last week that the U.S. will build thousands of drones to counter China, and a 24-month timeline fits the urgency of the Pacific military threat. But beware the idea that nascent technology can patch growing U.S. vulnerabilities on the cheap.

The Pentagon is rolling out an initiative called Replicator that aims to speed up the “shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap and many,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks in a recent speech. The Chinese Communist Party “has spent the last 20 years building a modern military carefully crafted to blunt the operational advantages we’ve enjoyed for decades.”

Ukraine has deployed cheap drones to great effect, from reconnaissance to apparent sea explosives cobbled together with jet-ski parts. Drone swarms could help the U.S. jam or distract enemy radars and surface-to-air missiles. Armed seacraft could offer more offensive missile power at lower risk to U.S. troops.

Ms. Hicks says new systems will “help us overcome the PRC’s advantage in mass: More ships, more missiles, more forces.” The new drones, styled as “all-domain, attritable autonomous systems,” will help defeat the Chinese plan to push U.S. forces out of the Pacific.

Innovation is welcome, but so is caution about thinking that the U.S. can use better technology to make up for a smaller military, as the U.S. Navy looks set to shrink to 285 ships in the coming years. Ms. Hicks invoked the Cold War example of offsetting Soviet advantage in forces with precision weapons. But Ronald Reagan also built a 600-ship Navy and rejected a false choice between better tech and more ships and ammo. The U.S. won the Cold War with both.

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The Census Exposes Bidenomics Its annual report shows how inflation has gutted real household incomes.

Posted By on September 14th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/census-data-income-inflation-joe-biden-economy-social-welfare-spending-3897dbed?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

You almost have to admire the brass of the Biden White House. The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that Americans are poorer under Bidenomics, and the President quickly changed the subject to blame Republicans for rising child poverty on his watch. As usual, too many in the press corps bought the spin.

Mr. Biden is trying to avoid the real story, which is that the Census Bureau says median household income adjusted for inflation fell last year by $1,750 to $74,580. It is down $3,670 from 2019. Households in the fourth income quintile—those making $94,000 to $153,000—lost $4,600 in 2022 and $6,700 since 2019. Middle-class Americans who think they’re losing ground are right.***

The reason is that inflation has outpaced the earnings growth from work. Real median earnings for full-time workers last year fell $3,620 for men and $2,880 for women despite a tight labor market that had companies paying more to attract and keep workers. The female-to-male earnings gap declined to 16% from 18% in 2019, but mainly because inflation has eroded men’s wages more than women’s. Wages in industries with more female workers such as healthcare and hospitality rose faster than those with more male workers such as manufacturing. But neither men nor women kept pace with the cost of living.

By most statistical measures, income inequality also declined last year. Even when excluding capital gains, higher earners saw a bigger drop in real incomes than Americans at the lower end. One reason is the latter group includes many seniors whose Social Security checks are adjusted for inflation.