EDUCATION Comments turned off

How to get ‘higher education’ without getting a college degree By Mike VanOuse

Posted By on December 1st, 2016

Although I don’t have a college degree, I did attend college for a couple years. An associate’s degree in machine tool technology was requisite for an experimental position at my workplace. Halfway through my schooling, the experiment fizzled, and with that, my academic career. Although I was working at the factory seven days a week and teaching the Bible twice a week at one of the bigger churches in town, I maintained a 4.0 GPA. For contrast, I graduated high school with a 1.75 GPA.

But I was striving for a position, not a piece of paper. When the position evaporated, so did my academic stint.

AT carried an article on Wednesday, November 30, 2016, titled, “The Decline and Fall of Higher Education,” by Michael Thau, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy for 13 years, in which he lamented both what college students are not learning and what they are learning: poor work ethic, low goals, and prioritizing partying over performance.

Anyone can throw rocks at what academia is producing. It bears weight when the hurler is an academic. It’s an excellent read.

I love reading American Thinker. I strongly suspect that I get more education here than I did while in college – or at least the information is more valuable.

I’d like to compare the GDP of academia to the GDP of the blue-collar arena. The orchestrators in academia are the faculty. They set the standards. In the sweaty-stinky world, the standards are set by the parents, foremen (managers), and commanders (military).

My manager at the factory is an excellent example of doing it right. He falls into that rare category of managers who, even though they invest 60-plus hours a week doing their job, spend their off-time coaching their kids’ softball/football/soccer/etc. team. Sports coaches understand congenitally that success requires excellence.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Prisoner of the Revolution A beloved son of the regime is jailed for disclosing its crimes.

Posted By on December 1st, 2016

An Iranian revolutionary court on Sunday sentenced Ahmad Montazeri to 21 years in prison on a range of national-security charges. The 60-year-old cleric will serve a mere six years by Iranian justice standards, owing to his age and his family’s special status in Iranian revolutionary history. But his sentence is a reminder that the regime remains as brutal as ever, even as it reaps the economic benefits of its nuclear deal with the West.

Mr. Montazeri’s crime was to release tapes that capture his father, the Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, denouncing the regime’s repression during its first decade in power. The elder Montazeri, who died in 2009, was one of the regime’s founders with Ayatollah Khomeini. Tapped to succeed Khomeini as supreme leader, Montazeri grew increasingly disillusioned with the theocracy he had established.

The final break came in 1988 when the regime executed thousands of leftists and supporters of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) opposition group. The MEK had helped Khomeini topple the Shah in 1979. But after the revolution the new supreme leader set out to consolidate power and liquidate his erstwhile allies.

Montazeri denounced the executions at the time, accusing senior security apparatchiks in the 1988 recording of committing the “biggest crime in the Islamic Republic, for which the history will condemn us.” He added: “Beware of 50 years from now, when people will pass judgment on the leader [Khomeini] and will say he was a bloodthirsty, brutal and murderous leader.”

For his dissent, Montazeri was sidelined and spent much of the rest of his life under house arrest. Among the men he addressed in the tape was Mostafa Pourmohammadi, who is now Justice Minister in the “moderate” government that negotiated the nuclear deal.

Confronted with the recording this summer, Mr. Pourmohammadi said, “We take pride in executing God’s commandment with respect to the hypocrites,” using the regime’s epithet for the MEK. This episode about the nature of the Tehran regime is worth keeping in mind as Donald Trump becomes the seventh U.S. President to confront the Iranian threat.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France: Islamists Target Transportation Companies by Yves Mamou

Posted By on December 1st, 2016

The affair at France’s huge state-owned transport company, RATP, is the story of failed integration. The company, tired of seeing its buses stoned and burned regularly in some Paris suburbs, began to hire as drivers young Muslims who were living in the suburbs. The result of this hiring policy is that buses continue to be stoned in the suburbs, but Islamist ideology is now spreading within the company.

At France’s national railway (SNCF), as at RATP and Air France, similar problems are arising: mainstream unions are losing ground to religion. Unions have to accept infiltration by Islamists, or they lose elections.

In daily life, the company tries to cope with the fact that prayer comes first, before serving the public. Trains can be delayed because of a driver’s prayers, changing rooms become prayer rooms, men refuse to shake the hand of female colleagues, and intolerance of homosexuals is spreading.

French companies try to cope with Islamism in its two modes: the soft one — veils spreading throughout every office, an increase in lawsuits against employers on religious grounds; and the hard one — terrorism and threats of Islamic terrorism.

According to the French satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchaîné, in October, 40 Air France plane fuel hatches were covered in graffiti stating: “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is Greatest”). Citing anti-terror police, the magazine reported that airplane functions had been deliberately tampered with and that the pilots’ communications and engine control from the cockpit kept failing.

This repeated sabotage of several planes was spotted thanks to standardized safety checks. A quick police investigation identified an employee of Air France to be the responsible party. The problem: this French convert to Islam, knowing he was under suspicion, already left the country. He is now said to “be a refugee in Yemen, while his wife continues to lead an Islamic school near Orly [another airport close to Paris].” Added to this, Air France computer systems were hacked: Last Christmas, security announcements on a Paris-Amsterdam flight were programmed to be automatically delivered in Arabic. A computer bug, Air France said.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Keith Ellison – The Wrong Man at the Wrong Time by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on December 1st, 2016

What should a political party that has just lost its white working-class, blue-collar base to a “make America great again” nationalist do to try to regain these voters? Why not appoint as the new head of the party a radical left-wing ideologue who has a long history of supporting an anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam racist? Such an appointment will surely bring back rust-belt voters who have lost their jobs to globalization and free trade! Is this really the thinking of those Democratic leaders who are pushing for Keith Ellison to head the Democratic National Committee?

Keith Ellison is, by all accounts, a decent guy, who is well liked by his congressional colleagues. But it is hard to imagine a worse candidate to take over the DNC at this time. Ellison represents the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, just when the party — if it is to win again — must move to the center in order to bring back the voters it lost to Trump. The Democrats didn’t lose because their candidates weren’t left enough. They won the votes of liberals. The radical voters they lost to Jill Stein were small in number and are not likely to be influenced by the appointment of Ellison. The centrist voters they lost to Trump will only be further alienated by the appointment of a left-wing ideologue, who seems to care more about global issues than jobs in Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan. Ellison’s selection certainly wouldn’t help among Jewish voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania or pro-Israel Christian voters around the country.

Ellison’s sordid past associations with Louis Farrakhan — the long time leader of the Nation of Islam — will hurt him in Middle America, which has little appetite for Farrakhan’s anti-American ravings. Recently, Farrakhan made headlines for visiting Iran on the 35th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution where he berated the United States, while refusing to criticize Iran’s human rights violations. Farrakhan also appeared as a special guest speaker of the Iranian president at a rally, which featured the unveiling of a float reenacting Iran’s detention of 10 U.S. Navy sailors in the Persian Gulf.

In addition to embracing American enemies abroad, Farrakhan has exhibited a penchant for lacing his sermons with anti-Semitic hate speech. Around the time that Ellison was working with the Nation of Islam, for example, Farrakhan was delivering speeches attacking “the synagogue as Satan.” He described Jews as “wicked deceivers of the American people” that have “wrapped [their] tentacles around the U.S. government” and are “deceiving and sending this nation to hell.” Long after Jesse Jackson disavowed Farrakhan in 1984 as “reprehensible and morally indefensible” for describing Judaism as a “gutter religion,” Ellison was defending Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam in 1995 as a role model for African-Americans, calling him “a tireless public servant of Black people, who constantly teaches self-reliance and self-examination to the Black community.”

EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tony Thomas Teach ‘em Green, Raise ‘em Stupid

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

According to the latest international comparison, Australian kids are falling further behind, despite ever-larger sums of taxpayer cash being poured into the Chalk-Industrial Complex. One reason we’re raising another generation of dolts: propaganda passed off as wisdom.
Green/Left lobby Cool Australia, backed by Labor’s teacher unions and Bendigo Bank, is achieving massive success in brainwashing school students about the inhumanity of the federal government’s asylum-seeker policies, the evils of capitalism, and our imminent climate peril. The Cool Australia’s teaching templates are now being used by 52,540 teachers in 6,676 primary and high schools (71% of total schools). The courses have impacted just over a million students via 140,000 lessons downloaded for classes this year alone. Students’ uptake of Cool Australia materials has doubled in the past three years.

Teachers are mostly flummoxed about how to prioritise “sustainability” throughout their primary and secondary school lessons, as required by the national curriculum.[1] Cool Australia has marshaled a team of 19 professional curriculum writers who offer teachers and pupils easy templates for lessons that include the sustainability mantra along with green and anti-government propaganda.

Teachers have grasped at the organisation’s labor-saving advantages. As one teacher enthused, “I love the fact they take some of the leg work out of my lessons and allow me to spend more time working on the outdoor gardens etc.” A coordinator (hopefully not of English courses) wrote that the lessons gave her “piece of mind”.

Much of the Cool material, such as lessons advocating recycling and energy-saving, is largely harmless, even beneficial. But material on hot-button political topics is designed to turn students into green activists and anti-conservative bigots.

On asylum seekers, the basic “text” is the film “Chasing Asylum” by activist Eva Orner, whose intention is to shame Australia and mobilise international pressure against the Pacific solution. At least eleven different lessons for Years 9-10 feature her cinematic agitprop, billed as a “documentary”. The film hardly conforms to the professed “apolitical” nature of Cool Australia courses. The film’s descriptor reads:

Chasing Asylum exposes the real impact of Australia’s offshore detention policies and explores how ‘The Lucky Country’ became a country where leaders choose detention over compassion and governments deprive the desperate of their basic human rights. The film features never before seen footage from inside Australia’s offshore detention camps, revealing the personal impact of sending those in search of a safe home to languish in limbo. Chasing Asylum explores the mental, physical and fiscal consequences of Australia’s decision to lock away families in unsanitary conditions hidden from media scrutiny, destroying their lives under the pretext of saving them.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

David Singer: Carter Threatens Chaos for Obama, Trump and US Foreign Policy

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

* betray another former President – George Bush,
* destroy America’s reputation for integrity and trustworthiness and
* thwart President-elect Donald Trump in attempting to resolve the 100 years old conflict between Arabs and Jews

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times Carter has proffered the following advice to Obama as his eight year term of office is ending:

“The simple but vital step this administration must take before its term expires on Jan. 20 is to grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, as 137 countries have already done, and help it achieve full United Nations membership.”

The following calamitous consequences for American foreign policy would ensue should Obama accept Carter’s irresponsible advice:

1. President Bush’s 2003 Roadmap and 13 years of American diplomacy would be trashed.

Endorsed by the United Nations, European Union and Russia and accepted by Israel (with14 reservations) and the then Palestinian Authority (since disbanded on 3 January 2013) – the Roadmap provides for:

“A settlement, negotiated between the parties,” that “will result in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors”

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The science of hating Zionists, why most anti-Zionism is antisemitic David Collier

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

Some pieces are easy to write. I go to an event and hear people suggest that the Zionists were responsible for the holocaust, or witness mention of Jewish power. If it is a speech by Max Blumenthal or Tom Suarez, I will hear tales of Jewish conspiracy. I return home, analyse the recordings, research, and write. It is an easy process to follow.http://david-collier.com/?p=2460

The more difficult pieces are those that challenge the narratives. The message is not a simple ‘one-liner’. There can be discomfort in internally challenging deeply held beliefs, an inability to ‘cross the divide’. People are even uncertain sometimes ‘which side’ the piece is on.

This is one of those items. To make the journey with me, you need to let go of some of your beliefs. Ignore statements that challenge your history and set aside all you know about the creation of the conflict between 1917 and 1967.

I am going to ask you to immerse yourself inside the Palestinian narrative. I am doing so because I am going to use their narrative, not just to show that Zionism is a movement of national liberation but to forcefully drive home the idea that the Balfour apology campaign, anti-Zionism and the entire settler colonial paradigm are all knee deep in antisemitic thought.
An alternate universe

The Arab narrative suggests that the British had written a letter as a nation of empire and handed a land that was not theirs over to a rich and powerful European sect. The British then spent 30 years facilitating this movement. Eventually, in 1948, the Palestinians were brutally expelled from their land by these invading racist white Europeans.

Today, millions of the descendants of the victims of this ‘Nakba’ are scattered. Many live as refugees in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Others have gone further afield, and you can find them in nations across the globe. Waiting with their deeds and their keys until they, or their children, or their grandchildren, can eventually return.

That return is described as a movement for national liberation. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. ‘Fatah’, the largest faction of the PLO, was originally called the ‘Palestinian National Liberation Movement’.
Return

Central to the liberation movement is the return of the refugees. Those that were ‘scattered’:

“the “right of return” for the descendants to their land and homes in “Palestine” will be valid for all eternity, it is not subject to negotiation, and is both a group and personal “right” that cannot be cancelled.” (Palestinian Diaspora in Europe” conference 2015)

The same message is repeated here:

“Palestinians have repeatedly said that the right of return enshrined in various United Nations resolutions is non-negotiable and does not have an expiry date.”

The Palestinian right of return. An inalienable right. A hereditary condition, with Palestinian ‘nationhood’ passing from parent to child.

In this manner, 70 years later, the struggle, even the violent struggle, is framed as a movement of National liberation rather than a struggle for personal freedoms. The Arab who was born in Lebanon, whose parents were born in Lebanon, does not strive for freedom in Lebanon, but rather to experience the liberation of his ‘homeland’. A land neither he nor his parents ever trod. This movement of national liberation has full time support from a long list of anti-Zionist activists.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Britain’s Muslim Brotherhood Whitewash A parliamentary inquiry into the group played down the group’s radical ideology and activities. By Con Coughlin

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

Ever since Britain joined the Obama administration in 2011 to demand the removal of Hosni Mubarak, the British government has faced a difficult dilemma about how to handle the Muslim Brotherhood, the party that took over following the Egyptian president’s downfall.

Moderate, pro-Western Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have long regarded the Muslim Brotherhood as a radical Islamist organization. Under pressure to ban the movement, David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister at the time, in 2014 authorized a government inquiry into Muslim Brotherhood activities.

John Jenkins, one of Britain’s leading Arabists and a former ambassador to Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria, was appointed to head the inquiry. But despite a thorough review, the inquiry’s conclusions were ambivalent over allegations that the Muslim Brotherhood was directly involved in terrorist activity.

When the government finally announced the “main findings” of the review last year, it called membership in the Muslim Brotherhood merely a “possible indicator of extremism” and the group a “rite of passage” to violence for some members. This whitewashing is baffling. Even the review went so far as to identify the Muslim Brotherhood’s connection with Hamas, which Britain has designated a terrorist organization.

In early November, the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs said the report’s ambivalent conclusions had undermined confidence in Britain’s dealings with the Arab world. For example, the report seems to have ignored the fact that shortly after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi took power in 2012, hardline Salafists emerged and launched a campaign of terror against secular-minded Egyptians. Women were regularly harassed to wear the veil, and Coptic Christians were attacked and killed.

The Morsi government also sought to deepen its ties with Hamas and initiated a rapprochement between Cairo and Tehran. Iranian warships were soon granted passage through the Suez Canal for the first time since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

This worrying precedent hasn’t been repeated since Mr. Morsi was overthrown in 2013 by Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the former defense minister and now Egypt’s president. Mr. Morsi and other leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile, have been convicted of treason and terrorism, though Mr. Morsi’s death sentence has since been overturned and a retrial ordered.

The governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have all outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror organization and want Whitehall to ban the Muslim Brotherhood’s ability to operate in Britain. These Arab countries insist that Muslim Brotherhood activists are taking advantage of Britain’s tolerant attitude toward Islamist groups to plot terror attacks in the Arab world, allegations that the Muslim Brotherhood denies, claiming that it is opposed to terrorism and violence. Pro-Western Arab states also still resent Britain and America’s involvement in supporting the removal of Mr. Mubarak, who had been a loyal ally of Western policy in the region, dating back at least to the First Gulf War.

The review’s failure to come out strongly against the Muslim Brotherhood is now causing the British government some major headaches. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have reportedly threatened to cancel lucrative trade deals with Britain in retaliation for the inquiry. Meanwhile, the British government has been heavily criticized by the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs as well as highly vocal pro-Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Britain, who claim the review failed to take into account the brutal repression Muslim Brotherhood supporters suffered at the hands of the Egyptian security authorities after President Sisi came to power. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Gingrich Commission on Government Newt is looking for a role, and this would fit his evangelism.

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

From the drama over Donald Trump’s cabinet you’d think the only position in government is Secretary of State. Yet Mr. Trump will need advice elsewhere, not least in taming the regulatory state. Newt Gingrich said he won’t serve in a Trump cabinet but would like to contribute. How about tapping the former House Speaker to lead a Gingrich Commission to modernize and shrink the federal government?

The models for this project would be the Hoover Commissions of the 1940s and early 1950s. President Harry Truman appointed former President Herbert Hoover to look for ways to streamline government in 1947, and Dwight Eisenhower did it again in 1953, and about 70% of the proposals were adopted in the two Administrations. Congress combined several agencies into what is now the General Services Administration, which reduced paperwork and federal procurement costs.

There’s also the 1980s Grace Commission, which made nearly 2,500 recommendations on everything from farm-credit rules to Pentagon hardware. The Grace Commission accomplished less than its predecessors thanks to a Democratic Congress, but it provoked a public debate about the role of government.

A Gingrich Commission would have an opening for greater progress with a GOP White House and Congress. There’s always a chance that the effervescent Mr. Gingrich would careen off course by proposing a military base on the moon. But he talks all the time about updating government for the 21st century, and he published a book on “winning the future” that covers everything from education to balancing the federal budget. This would be a chance to do it.

The feds over the decades have piled program atop program regardless of results, and a commission could highlight failures and duplications. Unlike previous eras, much of the work has already been done by think tanks or other commissions. The commission could work fairly rapidly, perhaps in a few months.

For example: Speaker Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda has identified some 80 welfare programs run by 13 federal agencies, and inevitably many overlap in benefits and eligibility. That seems ripe for a closer look. President-elect Trump has singled out civil-service reform as a priority, and Paul Light of New York University has suggested ideas on these pages that the Gingrich Commission could review.

Over the next year Congress and the new Administration will be preoccupied with daily squalls and the rough and tumble of passing legislation. There’s no time for research. A Gingrich Commission could do that work and serve up ideas to plug into the budget over the next two years and beyond. Government is at its lowest standing with Americans in decades, so even progressives should support an effort that might improve its functioning and lay the basis for more public confidence.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s A-Team The president-elect is assembling a who’s who of conservatives for his cabinet.Dan Henninger

Posted By on November 30th, 2016

The day before Thanksgiving in New York, I bumped into a Trump adviser who actually knows what is going on inside Trump Tower, as opposed to rumors inhabiting the media such as this Tuesday headline: “Trump’s Team Frays Over Romney.” The message I got was different: “It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be just fine.”

In the seven days since Thanksgiving, President-elect Trump has named the respected schools reformer Betsy DeVos from Michigan as Secretary of Education. Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a committed reformer of ObamaCare, is Secretary of Health and Human Services. Elaine Chao, who was George W. Bush’s reformist Labor Secretary for eight years, is the new Secretary of Transportation.

Two businessmen will enter the cabinet. Former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin is Treasury Secretary and Wilbur Ross, an investor in distressed industries, will be Commerce Secretary.

Going deeper into the policy weeds, Mr. Trump selected Indiana Medicaid reformer Seema Verma to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. The main Supreme Court adviser visiting Trump Tower has been Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society.

Bob Woodson, one of this generation’s smartest and most productive black conservatives, has been in to discuss with Mr. Trump how to make good on his campaign promise to champion the inner cities.

If instead of these individuals, the visitors to Trump Tower had been the alt-right activists of so many progressive night sweats, it would have been reported across the New York Times’ front page and on CNN round the clock, as if Godzilla and Mothra were trundling up Fifth Avenue.

Instead, the Trump transition has been talking to and appointing some of the most accomplished and serious individuals in Republican and conservative politics. Donald Trump isn’t pulling rabbits out of a hat. Somebody at team Trump has a first-rate Rolodex.