NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Dem’s FTX Scandal Is Only Just Beginning

Posted By on November 18th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/18/the-dems-ftx-scandal-is-only-just-beginning/

Not only was crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s company, FTX, allegedly a fraud, but it spent huge sums on recent elections to get Democrats into office. Was this a case of massive election fraud? If so, it isn’t just Bankman-Fried who should be punished.

In case you’re not caught up on all this, FTX, a futures exchange for crypto-currencies including its own, exploded into the public’s attention just after the election. That’s when it was revealed that FTX had questionably transferred or “loaned” some $10 billion to its sister company, Alameda Research, to “fund risky bets,” a highly questionable move seemingly to shore up Alameda’s finances.

And yes, FTX was a big deal. It’s name is on an NBA arena. Its commercials featured NFL GOAT Tom Brady, as well as “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” creator Larry David.

That brought media reports about some of the money, around $1 billion, simply “disappearing.” That was followed by a host of regulatory agencies and prosecutors launching investigations of the company.

FTX has filed for bankruptcy, and its 30-year-old founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has resigned.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Yale and Harvard Law Unrank Themselves The schools may be adapting ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on the use of race in admissions.

Posted By on November 18th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yale-and-harvard-law-schools-unrank-themselves-u-s-news-and-world-report-rankings-college-heather-gerken-11668726298?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Yale and Harvard law schools said this week they will no longer participate in the annual law-school rankings published by U.S. News & World Report. Readers may see no one to root for in a showdown between elite schools and the higher-ed ratings complex, but there’s a point to be made about what appears to be a flight from merit and transparency at these schoo

Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken in a statement this week called the U.S. News rankings, which have long influenced the perception of prestige, “profoundly flawed.” Yale has “reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession. As a result, we will no longer participate.” Harvard Law School quickly followed, and on Thursday UC-Berkeley Law pulled out.

The U.S. News rankings have plenty of shortcomings, though being run by a “for-profit magazine,” as Yale swiped in its statement, isn’t one of them. Dean Gerken says the U.S. News methodology penalizes law schools that send students into public-interest fellowships, and that its metrics on student debt don’t account properly for loan-forgiveness programs. Berkeley also noted a per student expenditure rating that pushes tuition prices up and is not a proxy for an excellent legal education.

But Dean Gerken gave away the game when she wrote: “Today, 20% of a law school’s overall ranking is median LSAT/GRE scores and GPAs. While academic scores are an important tool, they don’t always capture the full measure of an applicant. This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford expensive test preparation courses.”

This sounds like cover for a desire by Yale to be free to admit students with lower test scores in service to diversity, but without taking a hit to its exclusive reputation. Yale has long been No. 1 in the U.S. News rankings.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Resistance Is Necessary Craig Trainor

Posted By on November 18th, 2022

https://americanmind.org/salvo/resistance-is-necessary/

Parents must do everything they can to stop CRT.

The teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in classrooms across America has raised the ire of parents—and for good reason. CRT’s principal claim is that America is systemically racist and incapable of racial justice. It is a wholesale ideological assault on the American experiment and rejects our founding principles—namely, that “all men are created equal” and should be treated as such under the law. Its ubiquity concerns parents, specifically, and citizens, generally, who object to this vision.    

The standard response by CRT apologists to parental pushback is to dissemble. They claim CRT is not really what its critics say it is, and that even if it is, CRT is not being taught in schools. But, even if it is being taught in schools, CRT is a necessary means to understand and interpret America’s racial past, present, and future. This strategy of obfuscation has been successful, because evidence of CRT’s spread in American schools has been largely anecdotal. Until now.   

A new Manhattan Institute study gives the lie to this narrative. The study asked “a nationally representative sample of 1,505 18- to 20-year-old Americans” whether they have been taught CRT and related concepts. The answers are troubling. Sixty-two percent of students report being taught that America is a “systemically racist country”; 57 percent report learning that “white people have conscious biases that negatively affect non-white people”; and 67 percent report hearing that “America is built on stolen land.” Among the students surveyed, 82.4 percent attend public schools.   

Ideologically, CRT is uniquely subversive, because it corrupts our future citizens. Its dissemination in public schools threatens the survival of the American regime.   

Preparing Students for Citizenship

The U.S. Supreme Court has explained that the “role and purpose of the American public school system” is to “prepare pupils for citizenship in the Republic.” The public school system, the Court has reasoned, is essential to “the preparation of individuals for participation as citizens, and in the preservation of the values on which our society rests.”

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A Movie for the Post #MeToo Moment Tár is unsettling, pretentious, and too long. Go see it immediately.Freddie deBoer

Posted By on November 18th, 2022

https://www.commonsense.news/p/a-movie-for-the-post-metoo-moment

Todd Field’s new, immensely ambitious film Tár begins with a neat trick: it puts the credits at the beginning. Like a film from the golden age of cinema, Tár runs its list of primary contributors upfront. I’m sure the internet is filled with theories about this stylistic choice. Me, I figure that the point is to underline that the film is about artistic creation, not as an abstraction but as an actual, corporeal, human activity. What better way to highlight the fact that art is made by (fallible, unsteady, selfish) humans than to put the humans that made the film first? One way or another, Tár is the first movie I can remember where the catering department is credited before the first line of dialogue.

Tár is the story of Lydia Tár, a brilliant conductor and composer played by a riveting Cate Blanchett. Lydia is celebrated, almost to the point of absurdity—she’s got an EGOT, she guest teaches at Juilliard, her tony Berlin apartment is festooned with awards, her upcoming book is called “Tár on Tár.” 

The first thing Tár gets right (and this is essential) is capturing the world of elite orchestral music. This is a movie that is very at home with gourmet musical tastes, and I will say up front that you have to have a stomach for a particular artistic world that many people find unbearably pretentious—there is certainly some critique of that culture to be found in the film, but the movie also luxuriates in the complexities of classical music and the people who create it at the highest levels. I frequently wished I knew a little bit more about the ins and outs of symphony orchestras while watching the film. There’s a lot of talk about adagios and Mahler. 

But Tár is ultimately a kind of cancellation story, a #MeToo tale. Lydia stands accused of misconduct—misconduct, namely sexual grooming, that is gradually revealed to us in bits and pieces as we settle into her life.

Lydia has, at times, been in the position to mentor younger people, such as in the previously mentioned classes at Juilliard—during a guest lecture she reams a self-proclaimed “BIPOC pangender” student who refuses to play Bach, given that he was a misogynist and a dead white guy—and as she is an immensely celebrated artiste in the chosen profession of these people, she holds power over them.

The questions Tár poses is, one, whether she’s guilty of abusing that position, and two, whether her obvious artistic genius complicates the question of her guilt.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Can Netanyahu stop Biden from strengthening a tottering Iranian regime? Jonathan Tobin and Guest Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 18th, 2022

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC24cdDLzkNJf2_CNNzdI-UQ

“Top Story” with Jonathan Tobin and guest Ruthie Blum, Ep. 70.
November 17, 2022 / JNS) Israelis are ready for a new Netanyahu government. But the American midterm election results will mean that Israel’s leader will have a difficult path to navigate as he attempts to stop the Biden administration from appeasing Iran. In the latest episode of “Top Story,” JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin sums up the results of the elections in the two democracies and what they may mean for the Jewish state.

Discussing the prospective new Israeli government with him is JNS columnist Ruthie Blum. According to Blum, the upsurge in Palestinian terrorism and other crime on the watch of interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s coalition has left Israelis seeking a different, more aggressive approach. This, she argues, is why there isn’t much resistance to controversial Religious Zionist Party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir becoming the internal security minister.
Another pressing need is the reforming of Israel’s judiciary, she says, arguing that, contrary to the claims of the left, the new government would be upholding democracy by giving power back to the Knesset, not undermining it.
As for Netanyahu’s prospects as he returns to office, Blum says, “It’s no accident that he’s the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history. He is also a genius at long-term strategy.”

The columnist believes that Netanyahu will take action against Iran, especially as there seems little chance that the United States will turn away from a policy of appeasement. She believes that there is a good chance that the protest movement in Iran is succeeding. Israel and the United States should help this movement, not the tottering Islamist regime as Biden seems to want to do, she emphasizes.

Turning to U.S. politics, the two discuss former President Donald Trump’s plans to run in 2024.
While Israelis are deeply grateful for Trump’s historic support for the Jewish state, his behavior during the midterms and attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis were “childish and foolish,” she says. Gratitude “doesn’t mean that now we should watch him destroy the remnants of the Republican Party” with his “crazy ego.”
“Top Story” also airs on JBS-TV.

KRD NEWS Comments turned off

The Burning of Witches Will Continue Americans who once venerated self-reliance are building a church of conformity, whose chief means of worship is destroying heretics. Elon Musk should tell the priesthood to shove it Matt Taibbi

Posted By on November 17th, 2022

https://mailchi.mp/2425ff92cc33/krd-news-the-burning-of-witches-will-continue-a-must-read?e=9365a7c638

The parochial snobbery of these people was partly responsible for their failure to convert the Indians… Very few Indians were converted, and the Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil’s last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his final stand. To the best of their knowledge the American forest was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God.
— Arthur Miller, The Crucible
 
We burn witches in America. When heathens won’t convert, when the crop is bad, we still burn the village freethinker.

The Federal Trade Commission last week told The Hill it was “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern,” adding, “no CEO… is above the law,” clearly referring to the company’s despised new owner, billionaire Elon Musk.

Musk is the new bête noire of the American consensus. He is the Negative Current Thing, a role mostly played by Donald Trump since summer 2015, with occasional fill-ins (in no particular order, Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson, Novak Djokovic, J.K. Rowling, Jeremy Corbyn, Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, whatever they call Kanye West these days, and others have manned the slot). The coverage playbook for these heel-of-the-hour stories is rigid. Certain elements are always present.

Criminal investigations are instigated. Advocacy organizations issue denunciations (some combination of the Anti-Defamation League and the ACLU’s Chase Strangio is found in nearly all cases). News organizations demand the person’s muffling. Unions, guilds, and associations threaten walkouts. Even if the villain leans left, he or she begins to be described as “right wing,” a term with little political meaning left, that’s just code for heresy now.

It’s different from cancel culture. Cancelations start with a transgression, or at least an accusation of one. The other story type starts with a broader offense called thinking for yourself, which triggers denouncers to work backward in search of wrongdoing. Musk is the paradigmatic example. He’s achieved round-the-clock denunciation despite total confusion as to his core offense.

It was weird enough last week when Joe Biden said it was “worth looking into” whether Musk is a “national security threat” due to his “cooperations” and “relationships” with other countries, as if it were obvious how either translates to wrongdoing. For those who believe Biden just fumbled a surprise question, the issue had long before been leaked to Bloomberg, which in late October reported anonymous officials in the “intelligence community” were “weighing what tools, if any,” were available to stop Musk. The leakers not only seemed uncertain of what bureaucratic weaponry they could use on Musk, but what excuse they could put forward. The groping was so clumsy they claimed to be concerned about the presence of “foreign investors,” despite the fact that the previous Twitter regime had been taking money from the same foreigners.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left Cashes In On The Real Red Wave By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on November 17th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_left_cashes_in_on_the_real_red_wave.html

Indeed, there was a red wave but not the one conservatives had hoped for. It was, however, the continuation of the leftists’, Marxists’, and communists’ eternal obsession to destroy America and obliterate her values—and Ayn Rand predicted it in her 1965 seminal book titled The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

Frighteningly prescient, Rand understood the beginnings of the “intellectual disintegration” that is now front and center in most colleges. Fifty-seven years later, the Left is “cashing in” on its quest for ultimate power.

Ground Zero was the “so-called student ‘rebellion’” that started at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. Billed as a Free Speech Movement, it was anything but. William Peterson, a professor of sociology at the time, wrote:

The first fact one must know about the Free Speech Movement is that it has little or nothing to do with free speech . . . . If not free speech, what then is the issue? In fact, preposterous as this may seem, the real issue is the seizure of power.

Now living in a woke United States, it is no longer preposterous at all as we realize that “the Free Speech Movement is reminiscent of the Communist fronts of the 1930s” wherein “the key feature [was] that [of] a radical core that uses legitimate issues ambiguously [emphasis mine] in order to manipulate a large mass.”

Thus, we see students from Ivy League schools overwhelm vacillating university administrators who cave to their demands and dis-invite speakers or cancel professors. We watch students whose wanton destruction is met with no resistance whatsoever, thus setting the stage in which “each provocation and subsequent victory [leads] to the next.”

Consider that the riots in 2020 were not met with absolute pushback but instead destroyed entire communities.

As students dismantled university buildings, where were the administrators firmly stating that “there can be no such thing as the right to an unrestricted freedom of speech or of action on someone else’s property”? In fact, “[t]he owners of a state university are the voters and taxpayers of that state.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

It Is Time for NATO to Confront Iran by Con Coughlin

Posted By on November 17th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19125/nato-ukraine-iran

For decades Tehran has consistently lied about the true extent of its nuclear ambitions, so it should come as no surprise that Iran’s instinctive response when confronted about its military support for Russia has been to issue a denial.

Iran’s belated admission that it is actively supporting the Russian war effort is certainly an alarming development, one that completely destroys the argument that Iran’s malign activities are solely confined to the Middle East.

The implications of Iran’s deepening involvement in the Ukraine conflict can no longer be ignored, as they now constitute a direct threat to European security, a development that Nato leaders need to take on board as a matter of urgency.

Nato has already demonstrated a welcome display of unity in providing vital military support for Ukraine in its battle to defeat Russian aggression. Nato leaders must now take similar measures to support all those states, whether they are in Europe or the Middle East, that want to protect themselves against Iran’s intimidating conduct.

Iran’s belated admission that it has provided Russia with sophisticated drones to boost its war effort in Ukraine should serve as a wake up call to all those Western policymakers who claim the threat posed by Tehran’s aggressive regime is only limited to the Middle East region.

Despite credible reports that Russian forces have been deploying Iranian-made drones to launch attacks against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, inflicting electricity and water shortages on the country’s civilian population, Tehran has consistently denied the weapons originated from Iran.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Man in the Arena Ron DeSantis shows conservatives how to fight the “culture war as public policy.” Christopher F. Rufo

Posted By on November 17th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/how-did-ron-desantis-outperform-the-gop

The consensus is that, amid generally disappointing results for conservatives, Florida governor Ron DeSantis won the midterms. He defeated his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, by a 19-point margin and turned the state, which was once considered a battleground, deep red. He won everywhere, notching impressive victories with Hispanic and urban voters in formerly Democratic strongholds like Miami-Dade County.

How did DeSantis outperform the rest of the GOP? The answer, I believe, is that he has created a new model for “culture war as public policy,” which combines popular media combat with competent, effective governance.

DeSantis has built his profile by engaging in controversial cultural fights on critical race theory, gender ideology, and other “woke” issues. In his election night victory speech, DeSantis framed himself as a culture-war champion. “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations,” he said. “We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

But DeSantis is not merely blustering. He has advanced a substantive agenda to rein in left-wing ideologies in Florida’s institutions, passing significant higher education reforms, new curriculum guidance for K–12 schools, a ban on gender theory in grades K–3, and the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which restricts critical race theory-style racial scapegoating in large institutions, including corporations. Most notably, DeSantis picked a fight with the Walt Disney Company, which had previously been untouchable in Florida politics—and won.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Cape Cod Decides to Boost Its Crime Rate As the second-home owners in Martha’s Vineyard saw recently when a plane load of illegal aliens arrived, living with the results of their politics is far different from just virtue-signaling them. By Brian Lonergan

Posted By on November 17th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/16/cape-cod-decides-to-boost-its-crime-rate/

Like many places in America today, Massachusetts is not what it used to be. Known in political mythology as the home of the center-Left, tax-cutting Cold Warrior John F. Kennedy, the commonwealth has become increasingly fringe since the days of Camelot. The excesses of Ted Kennedy led to Mike Dukakis, which has led to the bonkers wokeism of Elizabeth Warren and Ayanna Pressley. Those Bay Staters who still cling to pragmatism must feel like orphans by now.

After the recent midterm election, the situation appears even more grim. In Cape Cod’s Barnstable County, voters replaced retiring Sheriff James Cummings with Donna Buckley, who previously worked as general counsel in the sheriff’s office. Despite her time in Cummings’ office, Buckley’s election represents a sea change in how the county protects its citizens, and that’s bad news for residents who value their safety and property.

Cummings spent nearly 50 years in law enforcement and completed four terms as county sheriff. He stood out in Massachusetts as one of only a few sheriffs in the state who participated in the 287(g) program, in which local law enforcement cooperates with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to transfer custody of criminal illegal aliens to the federal agency for arrest and deportation proceedings.

The program seemed to work well in Barnstable County, as crime rates have been below the national average. Despite Massachusetts’ status as a sanctuary state, the county’s assembly of delegates even rejected a resolution in 2018 to oppose Cummings’ participation in the program.

Perhaps because of its effectiveness, 287(g) has been in the crosshairs of the anti-borders Left for several years. The result has been a string of sheriff candidates across the country who have campaigned on a promise to rescind cooperation with ICE. Buckley was one of them.

What can residents of Barnstable County expect now that they have voted for such a dramatic shift in law enforcement posture? The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) earlier this year investigated a similar change in Georgia’s Gwinnett County. Newly elected Sheriff Keybo Taylor ended the county’s participation in the 287(g) program his first day in office in 2020.