EDUCATION Comments turned off

Teacher Pay: Myths, Reality and Union Shenanigans That teachers are underpaid and that teachers’ unions are beneficial for educators are enduring fables that need to be debunked. By Larry Sand

Posted By on September 18th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/18/teacher-pay-myths-reality-and-union-shenanigans/

Teacher pay

Chad Aldeman, a leading researcher who focuses on school finance, the teacher labor market, and assessment and accountability policy, recently wrote, “Wrong Ideas about Teacher Pay, Happiness May Keep Students from the Profession.”

The essence of the piece is that teachers generally like teaching and stay in the profession for about as long as accountants or social workers stay in theirs. “Teachers may not get rich, but they live comfortably middle-class lives. Plus, teachers get to retire a couple of years earlier than other workers.”

He then delves into the common misconception that teachers don’t earn a decent wage. “In 2021, Education Next asked a random sample of Americans to guess how much the average teacher earned in their state. Those guesses weren’t just wrong; they were consistently too low—by about 50%, or about $22,000. According to the latest data from the National Education Association, the average teacher salary in 2021-22 was $66,745.”

Just Facts takes the data one step further and adds that in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher also received another $34,090 in benefits (such as health insurance, paid leave, and pensions), which brings the total annual compensation to over $100,000. Additionally, full-time public school teachers work an average of 1,490 hours per year, which includes time spent on lesson preparation, test construction, and grading, providing extra help to students, coaching, and other activities, while their counterparts in private industry work an average of 2,045 hours per year, or about 37% more than public school teachers.

The great purveyors of the underpaid teacher myth are the nation’s teachers’ unions, which continually drill into teachers, legislators, and the general public that educators are paid a peon’s wage and need the unions to raise their salaries.

Actually, the opposite is true. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute has dug deeper, claiming collective bargaining agreements (CBA) hurt the bottom line of all teachers. “Teachers in non-collective bargaining districts actually earn more than their union-protected peers—$64,500 on average versus $57,500.” Petrilli’s study was conducted in 2011, and research by Michael Lovenheim in 2009 and Andrew Coulson in 2010 bore similar results. Also, University of California San Diego professor Augustina Pagalayan reported in 2018 that CBAs do not improve teacher pay.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The UN’s Desire to Get Rid of the State of Israel Can a decent country be a part of this effort? by Alan Joseph Bauer

Posted By on September 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-uns-desire-to-get-rid-of-the-state-of-israel/

The UN has a three-point program to turn Israel into an international pariah and eventually make it disappear.

When I was a kid, my mother would tell me never to put money into a UNICEF collection box. She said that they don’t give anything to Israel. At the time, I was around six years old, so I did not understand much beyond cookies and baseball cards. But years later, I learned that this “aid” organization, as well as others such as Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, actively discriminates against Israel in their activities.

The United Nations represents the pinnacle in the failed effort to create transnational governance. The UN is generally associated with scandal, failed missions, bloated budgets, and despicable countries like Iran, Cuba, and Syria sitting on human rights or women’s rights committees. The UN has taken a keen interest in Israel, with more resolutions directed against this country than pretty much all others combined. The UN has a three-point program to get rid of Israel as a nation-state:

1. Inflate the number of Palestinian refugees to overwhelm the number of Jews living in Israel.

2. Provide all forms of support to Palestinian terror groups to help them inflict destruction on Israelis.

3. Rally the countries of the world against the Jewish state.

As I have written previously, the UN, through its criminal UNRWA organization, has performed an extraordinary demographic sleight of hand. Of the millions of refugees who have had to leave their homelands in the past century, only those who actually left were classified as refugees. My grandparents and parents were refugees from Nazi Germany, and the former received some level of restitution from the post-war Federal Republic of Germany. I am not a refugee, and however hard I might try, nobody would accept my trying to be called or treated as one. Not so with the Palestinians. Of the 720,000 Palestinian Arabs who left their homes either due to the encouragement of the approaching Arab armies or under threat from the winning Israelis, there may be 10,000 left alive today. But not according to UNRWA. They count all descendants of those refugees as refugees themselves. So, a Palestinian grandchild born in Beverly Hills is considered a refugee, though he has never physically been to “Palestine” and has no interest in moving there.

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Another assassination attempt shows the Dems’ hostile playbook – blame the victim if it’s Trump By Michael Goodwin

Posted By on September 18th, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/09/17/opinion/democrats-always-point-the-blame-on-donald-trump-as-he-survives-another-assassination-attempt/
He had it coming. It’s his own fault. Don’t blame us. 

That sums up how leading Democrats and their media handmaidens are reacting to the second attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Remorse and concern about him or even the perils of the rising tide of everyday violence are in short supply.

Early voting has started, and they weren’t going to waste a day expressing anything other than hostility for the opponent they love to hate. 

And so the chorus of Dems and their propagandists are fending off every charge that they bear any responsibility for the repeated attempts to kill the leader of the Republican Party. 

Just because they compare him to Hitler and Mussolini doesn’t mean they actually want him dead. 

And a Dem congressman wasn’t to be taken literally when he said Trump had to be “eliminated.” 

The blanket denials are also aimed at making sure Trump doesn’t get any political benefit from being the target of another gunman.

To grant him even an iota of sympathy would be to give sympathy to the devil. 

Leave it to Hillary Clinton to be the first to reach the bottom of the barrel.

Here’s what we know about the assassination attempt on Trump in Florida:
Former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach on Sept. 15, 2024.
Trump sent out a statement to supporters soon after to report that he was “SAFE AND WELL.”
The suspect — identified as Ryan Routh, 58, of Hawaii — was able to get within 300 to 500 yards of Trump at a chain link fence on the edge of the course, where he had an AK-47 and a GoPro camera set up, apparently to record the planned shooting.
Routh has a history of supporting progressive causes online and has made 19 donations to Democratic candidates since 2019.

A Secret Service agent spotted and opened fire on Routh as he put his gun through the fence. The suspect fled and was arrested on I-95 a short time later.
According to Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, Trump’s security detail was lighter because he isn’t a sitting president — despite the previous attempt on his life in July.
News photographers have used the gaps in foliage at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club to take pictures of him — a security gap gunman Ryan Routh exploited.

Trying to hock yet another book about herself — isn’t everything about her? — she complained on MSNBC that the media aren’t tough enough on Trump — the day after the assassination attempt! 

“The press is still not able to cover Trump the way that they should,” Clinton told Rachel ­Maddow. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Harris wants to grow our broken government. With Elon Musk, Trump is thinking outside the box

Posted By on September 18th, 2024

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/harris-wants-grow-our-broken-government-elon-musk-trump-thinking-outside-box

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris wants to hike taxes by trillions of dollars, which will without a doubt crush our sputtering economy. 

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has a better idea: lower taxes and take a machete to government spending. The former president, speaking recently at the Economics Club in New York, promised that if he wins in November, he will create a government efficiency commission to root out “fraud and improper payments” and that Elon Musk has agreed to head up the effort. Asking the smartest man on the planet to streamline our bloated, inefficient and unaccountable federal government – slated to spend $7 trillion next year – is the kind of out-of-the-box idea that helped Trump win in 2016 and could sway voters again this November. 

Two-thirds of Americans think they pay too much in taxes. If they knew how much of their tax money was wasted or outright stolen, they might revolt.  In 2022, some $47 billion of Medicare payments were found to be “improper,” while Congress has determined that as much as half a trillion dollars of COVID relief money was likely stolen.  Billions are misspent each year on community grants that end up in wealthy communities, maintaining thousands of empty buildings owned by Uncle Sam or funding duplicative and useless federal programs.  

There are currently, for instance, 43 job training programs across 9 federal agencies that cost taxpayers almost $20 billion per year. One study conducted in 2022 by the Department of Labor concluded that the programs provided zero benefit to workers. Unfortunately, legislators win credit for starting up new programs; no one is applauded for shutting one down. 

A watchdog group called Citizens Against Government Waste has identified 543 specific expenditures across the federal bureaucracy that could be reduced or eliminated to save taxpayers “$402.3 billion in the first year and $4 trillion over five years.” There is, in short, plenty of low-hanging fruit. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

4000 Hezbollah terrorists injured, 200 critical, 11 killed by exploding pagers; no comment from Israel By Akiva Van Koningsveld, JNS

Posted By on September 18th, 2024

https://worldisraelnews.com/4000-hezbollah-terrorists-injured-nine-killed-by-exploding-pagers/

A Reuters journalist saw 10 terrorists bleeding from injuries in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiya, a main stronghold of Hezbollah.

More than 4,000 Hezbollah terrorists were wounded and at least eleven were killed across Lebanon on Tuesday when their communication devices exploded, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad confirmed.

Approximately 200 Hezbollah terrorists were in critical condition in 100 different hospitals, Beirut’s health minister announced about three hours after the explosions were first reported at 3.30 p.m. local time.

A Reuters journalist saw 10 terrorists bleeding from injuries in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiya, which is the main stronghold of Hezbollah. A security source told Qatar’s Al Jazeera that explosions occurred across Lebanon—not only in Beirut but also in the Beqaa Valley and the south.

Senior Hezbollah officials were said to have been wounded in the blasts. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was also wounded in one of the explosions, Tehran’s semi-official Mehr outlet reported.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The issue that isn’t being addressed in the campaign The woke takeover of the academy, culture and government is the driving force behind the surge in antisemitism and the war on the West. Rolling it back is imperative. Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on September 18th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/the-issue-that-isnt-being-addressed-in-the-campaign/?_sc=NTAyMDI0NiM0Mzc2OQ%3D%3D&utm_

It didn’t make it into either presidential debate conducted this year. Nor is it on any of the top 10 lists of issues most important to Americans in 2024, such as the one produced by the Pew Research Center. But those who think that woke ideologies, which have captured so much of America’s education system, as well as the government bureaucracy and even the arts, pose only a minor threat to America’s future are mistaken. 

As much as any other topic, the fate of this wildly successful movement will determine what kind of country Americans live in for decades to come. And as fateful as the decision will be for the entire electorate as to whether the government should take the initiative in rolling back the woke tide, it will be especially important for American Jewry.

If there is one thing glaringly apparent since Oct. 7, it is the surge in antisemitism, primarily fueled by the political left’s widespread belief that Israel is a “settler/colonial” and “apartheid” state. Added to that is the ultimate expression of “white” supremacy—a label that has been extended to cover all Jews who support it and even those who don’t. 

The reason for this enthusiasm for radical movements that see Zionism as a form of racism is the way it fits neatly into the mindset of critical race theory and intersectionality, which divide all of humanity into two eternally warring groups: people of color who can only be victims, and “whites” who are always oppressors.

This same set of beliefs has inspired the widespread adoption of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) rules throughout the education system and virtually every other sector of American society. Moreover, this woke catechism was officially incorporated into every government department and agency by President Joe Biden on his first day in office in January 2021. That means that along with all the other woke commissars dominating admissions and discipline in higher education, as well as much of corporate America, and casting and programming choices in arts organizations, they are now also present throughout the federal bureaucracy.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

But No Boycotts on Russia, China or Iran: The Staggering Hypocrisy of Starmer, Trudeau and Scholz by Robert Williams

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20945/but-no-boycotts-on-russia-china-or-iran

[T]he UK government announced that it is imposing an “immediate” weapons embargo against Israel. The statement followed almost a year of relentless attacks on Israel, not only by Iran’s proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — but by Iran itself, and probably several tons of unverified propaganda by Hamas that Israel is supposedly committing “war crimes.”

Even South Africa is seeking to extend the deadline for presenting evidence against Israel at the International Court of Justice, for lack of evidence of its allegations of genocide. So far, all evidence points to Israel being “the world’s most moral army.” Meanwhile, the same cannot be said for the entities attacking it.

The UK suspended “around 30 licences for items used in the current conflict in Gaza which go to the IDF, from a total of approximately 350 licences to Israel” allegedly because of Hamas-induced fear that they “might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.” [emphasis added]

Hamas, on the other hand, continues to receive Britain’s support: Although UNRWA has proven itself to be identical with Hamas, with roughly 10% of its members proven to have been terrorists or with ties to terror groups, and having used its entire Gaza infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, for the purpose of facilitating terror and missile attacks against Israel and its civilians…

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, in his announcement of the weapons embargo to the House of Commons, said, “in July, I told this House that this government’s priority in the region would be to advance the cause of peace” — apparently because nothing spells peace more than emboldening terrorists.

The UK government worries about Red Cross access to terrorists who participated in the most gruesome crimes, while the ICRC’s blatant lack of interest in the Israeli hostages held by Hamas did not even merit a mention by Lammy.

The UK’s arms embargo appears to represent nothing so much as pure racist perfidy. Lammy completely ignores the extreme lengths to which Israel has gone to avoid civilian casualties, as well as the huge amounts of humanitarian aid it has facilitated into the Gaza Strip.

Spain has also suspended arms export licenses to Israel since October 7. Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said the Gaza war “made us realize the importance of a fair and lasting solution” to the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Fair and lasting, evidently, means siding with terrorists. It is particularly unbecoming of Spain, after 60 years of having combated the terrorist group ETA, to throw the first stone.

By contrast, Germany is massively arming Qatar, which, alongside Iran, is the most significant backer of Hamas, and effectively every other Islamic terrorist group.

What will be the result of the embargoes? Western leaders claim to want de-escalation, but placing Israel under arms embargo only serves to strengthen and empower Qatar, Iran and Iran’s terrorist proxies — which in turn can lead only to further destabilizing the Middle East, particularly after Iran regime succeeds in acquiring nuclear

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Islamists and the woke left are the enemies of civilization’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the calls to criminalize ‘Islamophobia’.

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/16/islamists-and-the-woke-left-are-the-enemies-of-civilisation/

The new UK Labour government has declared war on free speech. Within weeks of gaining power, it scrapped a law upholding free speech in universities. In early August, following rioting across England, it announced plans to tighten the regulations on online speech. Perhaps most troubling of all, Keir Starmer is also considering writing a broad definition of ‘Islamophobia’ into law, which would make it almost impossible to criticise Islam and even Islamic extremism.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali – writer, activist and author of Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss the importance of free speech in the battle against Islamist extremism. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Why do you think politicians – even those who would define themselves as ‘liberal’ – are so willing to adopt a phrase like Islamophobia?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I think it has to do with guilt about the past. When it comes to the Jews, many European countries did not protect them from Nazi persecution, so there’s definitely a sense that we don’t want to do the same to our Muslim minorities. When I was living in the Netherlands, this was a very potent argument. The Dutch felt extremely guilty about the fact that, in proportion to the Dutch population, more Jews were removed from their homes and sent to concentration camps, than in any other country in Europe. So there’s definitely a sense of ‘let’s not repeat history’. But this is also what makes me so angry, because the Islamists – and to a certain extent, the leftists – will exploit this. They will exploit what is essentially the goodness of human beings, a desire to ‘do right this time round’, in order to do wrong.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We need to talk about the violent hatred for Donald Trump Two assassination attempts in two months? This is a crisis of civilised norms. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/16/we-need-to-talk-about-the-violent-hatred-for-donald-trump/

The BBC says the latest suspected attempt on the life of Donald Trump is proof that ‘political violence’ is the ‘new norm’ in America. It’s half right. There does seem to be a ‘new normal’ over there, but it’s not some abstract thing called ‘political violence’. It’s not some broad-strokes brutish contempt for all rulers of society. It’s more targeted than that. It has one politician in particular in its crosshairs. If there’s a new normal in America, it would appear to be a new normal of an increasingly militant culture of grievance against the 45th President of the United States, now aspiring to be the 47th: Donald Trump.

There’s a palpable reluctance in the MSM today to discuss the Trump-specific nature of recent acts of political terror. Many would rather wring their hands over ‘gun culture’. ‘The secret service didn’t fail Trump on Sunday’, says MSNBC of the latest suspected assassination attempt: ‘America’s gun culture did.’ Commentators agonise over the fact that the alleged would-be assassin involved in yesterday’s fracas was in possession of an AK-47. That’s the crazy thing, they say. Others focus on the poison of ‘polarisation’. The Beeb says it’s a mix of a ‘coarsened’ national discourse and an ‘epidemic of gun violence’ that has made attacks like yesterday’s ‘inevitable’.

Of course, questions can be asked about the easy availability of lethal weapons in the US. Even supporters of the Second Amendment feel iffy that fruitloops can purchase Soviet-invented assault rifles and rock up to a Florida golf course with one in the car. And public life is increasingly frazzled at the moment. Politics feels like a screaming match between opposing poles stone deaf to one another’s concerns. And yet, today’s focus on ‘gun culture’ and ‘polarisation’ feels like a displacement activity: a focus on the method of the violence (guns) and the backdrop to the violence (polarisation) in an effort to avoid looking into the eye of the violence: the strange, swirling contempt for Trump.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Seth Cropsey & Harry Halem: The Coming World Crisis

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/10/the-coming-world-crisis/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

The U.S. faces a choice between courage and cowardice

The 31-year-long apparent peace that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse ended on February 24, 2022, when territorial conquest once again became an instrument of the revisionist powers. Yet history, particularly that of the globe-spanning violence that preceded World War II, reminds us that once crises begin to cluster, they tend to worsen and become a worldwide eruption of violence.

In this respect, democracies today are in a situation similar to that of the 1930s. The folly of the century preceding the ’30s was not precisely appeasement — the strategy that grants an aggressive adversary limited, albeit significant, gains to satiate its appetite for expansion — but rather a lack of recognition of the systemic inevitability of contestation and conflict. The threat today, similarly, is not appeasement but the avoidance by democratic political leaders of strategic reality. War is coming, sooner or later. Democracies must prepare for a long-term struggle. And much as in the 1930s, we do not have the luxury of time or a head start.

It is more helpful to speak of a world crisis than of a world war, given the linguistic vagaries of “warfare,” a word that has a legal as well as a moral-political definition. The idea of world war is restrictive. What we term the First World War saw combat in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia. But the conflict’s focal point was Europe, with relevant but limited skirmishing in the Middle East and Africa and almost no military activity in Asia after early 1915 because of the limited resources Germany could deploy beyond Europe. Was the First World War, then, not properly a world war? It involved every major power at the time. It was, moreover, the first modern conflict in which two major-power participants — the U.S. and Japan — were not European. Thus we might term the conflict a world war despite its focus in Europe.

This, however, raises a more important question of definition — that of time. The First World War stemmed from what may be termed the First World Crisis. Prior to the mid 19th century, international politics was nearly synonymous with European politics for the simple reason that technological, political, and military advances in Europe made the European powers incontestably dominant over any major actor elsewhere. The European wars that occurred between the 15th and 19th centuries, culminating in Napoleon’s bid for continental dominance, had global implications. The grand strategy of Napoleonic France included, at minimum, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia: France’s objective was to stress Britain’s link with its invaluable imperial possession, India, an end that it never achieved. Yet the central issue of the Napoleonic Wars — the structure of European and, by implication at the time, world order — was settled on European battlefields, in the European littoral, and at negotiating tables with dozens of European diplomats hashing out the details after the fighting was done. By the early 20th century, changes in the international power distribution could transform a European crisis into a world crisis.