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August 2024

Allison Schrager Demystify the Ivies A loss of trust and stature could be just what our elite universities need in order to fix themselves.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/demystify-the-ivies

Long before Hamas’s attack on Israel last fall, Americans had grown skeptical of their elite universities. The safe spaces, the academic-speak elevating inane ideas, and the cancellations of nonprogressive arguments all suggested institutions adrift. Events on campuses since October 7 destroyed any lingering illusions. The anti-Israel (and often anti-American) frenzies seemed tolerated, if not supported, by university administrations and even encouraged by some faculty. It has been a disgraceful spectacle.

Have we finally hit bottom? If so, things may start getting better. A loss of trust and stature could be just what our elite universities need in order to fix themselves.

America’s elite universities remain the envy of the world, with unrivaled academic talent and Nobel Prize–winning research. They still attract talented students and produce leaders in government and industry worldwide, commanding a status that few other schools can match. But their stature has fallen. Some federal judges say that they won’t hire law clerks from Columbia University. One survey found that 33 percent of hiring managers are less likely to hire Ivy League graduates now than five years ago. Employers can’t be blamed, argues Nate Silver, when they assume that many applicants were admitted for dubious reasons, were coddled academically with inflated grades, and are likely to bring divisive politics into the office.

Several trends led to this point. As the American economy transitioned to knowledge-based industries, the returns on college education increased, and elite universities became more important. They also became more desirable globally, enhancing the reputation of undergraduate and professional degrees. More people attended college, placing a higher premium on slots at elite schools. Attendance at such schools was presumed to ensure a job on the fast track. (On average, however, graduates of these universities don’t earn much more compared with similar students from other schools.)

Oprah vs. Hulk What the aesthetics of the DNC and RNC reveal about our politics. Christopher F. Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/article/oprah-vs-hulk

Political conventions are a form of theater. The stage, the lights, the confetti; the personalities, who, from the rostrum, make the case for their party; and the driving ambition: to rally the base, demoralize the enemy, and win.

In most years, the oratory supports the agenda. The parties select their nominees, assemble a platform, and focus their rhetoric on how their policies will improve the life of the nation. But this year, the agenda took a back seat to aesthetics.

Donald Trump’s policy proposals—control the border, cut taxes, and achieve peace through strength—have been the same for a decade. Kamala Harris’s have been carefully hidden. She has distanced herself from her previous positions and presented emotion, most notably, “joy,” in lieu of concrete policies. Given this situation, let’s set aside substance for a moment and focus on style.

The two conventions this year, the DNC in Chicago and the RNC in Milwaukee, featured two speakers who captured their respective parties’ aesthetics: television host Oprah Winfrey, for the Democrats, and professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, for the Republicans.  

The Democrats selected Oprah for an obvious reason. She is a star—and a star-maker. For decades, Oprah has curated her image as a compassionate friend, generous hostess, and moral voice. She appears in public immaculately dressed, coiffed, lighted, and staged.

Where’s Kamala’s Convention Bounce?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/28/wheres-kamalas-convention-bounce/

Two days ago, Nate Silver, the media’s favorite polling “expert” who on election day in 2016 gave Hillary Clinton a 71% chance of winning, said polls had Kamala Harris 5 points ahead of Donald Trump and that “our best guess is that her lead will increase further, especially given that almost none of the polling was done after her strong acceptance speech on Thursday.”

Of course, Silver was hardly alone. The leftist media was fully expecting a big bounce in Harris’ poll numbers.

So, where is Kamala’s big convention bounce?

The Morning Consult found Harris’ lead over Trump unchanged since last Thursday.

A Yahoo/YouGov poll, which was also conducted after the convention, found that “if Harris got a ‘bounce’ from the DNC, it was a very small one — too small to alter the fundamentally deadlocked nature of the 2024 contest.”

The RealClearPolitics average had Harris at 48.3% last Monday. It is currently at 48.4%. But her lead over Trump actually shrank slightly, from 1.6 points last Monday to the current 1.5.

The FiveThirtyEight average had Harris at 46.7% last Monday, and 47.1% this Monday. It also shows that her lead over Trump has declined since the convention ended last Thursday, going from 3.7 on Aug. 23 to 3.4 now.

And, Harris’ odds of winning went from 51% chance on Aug. 19 to 49% today, according to Polymarket. Trump’s went from 47% to 50%.

Iran: ‘Most Aggressive Foreign Election Threat to U.S.’by Robert Williams

The Biden-Harris administration has not lifted a finger against Iran for a reported 200 attacks on US troops in the Middle East, which include firing on US Navy ships, closing the Suez Canal, launching a Hamas-Hezbollah-Houthi War against Israel, not to mention the atrocities Iran’s regime commits every day against its own people. By ignoring sanctions against Iran and presenting no deterrence, the administration has, in fact, set up Iran to do all of that.

The US could probably close down Iran’s election-interference activities, but [m]ore to the point, the administration has the same goal as the Iranian regime: it does not want Trump elected, either.

These Iranian efforts include fraudulent websites posing as news sites, and the impersonation of social and political activist groups “to stoke chaos, undermine trust in authorities, and sow doubt about election integrity.” — Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, August 9, 2024

[T]here can be no doubt that a Trump presidency poses a genuine threat to Iran. Meanwhile, the lavish gifts, accommodations and appeasement that the Biden administration continues to shower upon the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, ensures the Islamic regime’s survival.

The Kamala Harris campaign has previously said it had no indication it was hacked. Of course, why would Iran seek to harm Harris’s campaign in any way, when her presidency would guarantee the continuation of appeasement and accommodation that has been the norm for the Democratic party ever since Barack Hussein Obama was president?

The million-dollar question is what the Biden-Harris administration is doing to deter, discourage and hold accountable Iran’s Islamist regime for seeking to influence, destabilize, and hack the US elections? The answer appears to be: nothing

The Biden-Harris administration itself, after all, has been infiltrated by Iranian agents, as an investigation by Semafor showed last fall, with at least three Iranian agents working directly under U.S. Special Representative for Iran Rob Malley.

One of the agents, Ariane Tabatabai…. has been allowed to keep not only her job at the Pentagon, but her security clearance as well.

In the end, the Biden-Harris administration itself is the most important shill for Iran…. Why would the Biden-Harris administration want to deter Iran from anything?

Important New Poll Reveals Most Americans Know China Is Funding the Fentanyl Murder of More than 100,000 Americans Each Year by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20907/china-funding-fentanyl-murders

In a recent national poll, more than half of responding Americans believe that China is deliberately exporting fentanyl to the United States for the purpose of harming, or even destabilizing our nation.

Were that true, some might reasonably describe that strategy as an act of war.

For China, it would be historic payback time.

Having lost a generation, a nation, and an empire to opium introduced by Imperial Britain during the 1800s, no one knows better than the Chinese that a drug scourge can bring a country literally to its knees.

So, it should not surprise anyone that they have become a center of illicit fentanyl manufacturing, with drug traffickers exporting the killing chemical to the one nation China must strategically injure if they are to make good on their intent to dominate the rest of the 21st Century: the United States. More than simply turning a blind eye to those who are creating the drugs, the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party reported this spring that China is directly supporting the creation of fentanyl and other drugs by offering “tax rebates and other financial benefits” to those manufacturers, as long as those drugs are sold outside of China:

“According to the report, Chinese officials encourage production of precursor chemicals by giving ‘monetary grants and awards to companies openly trafficking illicit fentanyl materials.'”

One does not have to be a CIA analyst to appreciate the “why” behind such an action.

The cause and effect have not been lost on the American public. That recent poll, undertaken by the nationally respected polling company McLaughlin & Associates, revealed that a stunning 52.4 percent of Americans suspect that the Chinese are exporting the deadly drug for the specific purpose of destabilizing our society. Some 19.4% disagreed and 28.3% did not have an opinion.

AI in the Writing Classroom: Professor, Beware By Michael Dowding

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/08/ai-in-the-writing-classroom-professor-beware/

Generative artificial intelligence has no role in the walled garden of teaching a student how to write.

For nearly three decades, I’ve had the privilege of teaching media writing to generations of undergraduate and graduate students at Boston University’s College of Communication, helping them week after week to steadily acquire the skills they need to embark on successful careers. However, two years after the arrival and wider use of generative AI, it’s inarguably clear that, at every level of education, these tools represent nothing short of an existential threat to the writing classroom — undercutting the very way we formulate, develop, and express our intelligence.

Although I needn’t rehearse all of the many statistics describing the obvious decline of writing and literacy in our society, the temptation is too great. Last fall, Joseph Pisani grimly noted in the Wall Street Journal, “the average score on the ACT dropped to a new 30-year low, indicating fewer high-school seniors are ready for college.” That lamentable decline aligns with other research showing the number of teenagers who read for pleasure dropping steadily over the past 40 years, while the number of teens who rarely or never read for fun climbed from 8 to 29 percent.

Since writing instructors can confirm that the best way to learn writing is to read voraciously, it’s clear that we instructors already face a steep climb, competing with distractions ranging from TikTok and Snapchat to Netflix and the latest smartphone games. We already have a generation that refuses or is unable to read. Do we now want them unable to write, as well?

Ask virtually any college writing instructor today and you’ll get some variation of issues about student performance: an inexplicable unwillingness to read (either compulsorily or voluntarily), an inability to properly compose sentences that rise above the most pedestrian of structures (at best), or a crippling overreliance on writing and grammar tools whose scope only increases. Those concerns are now exponentially magnified.

With the arrival of gen AI in late 2022, my colleagues and I have been facing a game-changing inflection point: the increasing inability to accurately assess an individual student’s writing talent — their ability to create, develop, and express original thoughts in clear, compelling, audience-centric ways. Even in the face of clear policies prohibiting the use of gen AI in our classes, we now face an onslaught of prefab essays brazenly churned out in seconds by time-pressed, shortcut-seeking students eager to get their tickets punched before moving down the path to their degrees.

The Middle East: A Story of Journalistic Failure by Nils A. Haug

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20871/middle-east-journalistic-failure

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.” — Zoheir Mohsen, Trouw, March 31, 1977.

“The founding of the PLO, now known as Fatah had nothing to do with the desire for statehood, throughout the charter it states, again and again, its sole goal is the destruction of Israel, nothing more, thus started the Palestinian Narrative, they needed a story behind their need.” — Timothy Benton, February 14, 2019.

Arabs who fled during the fighting had likely assumed, based on broadcasts they were hearing, that leaving the area would make it easier for the Arab armies to kill the Jews. The plan presumably was to return soon to collect the spoils and take possession of a swiftly-conquered land.

When the Arab armies were defeated, and some of the people who had fled tried to return, they were told they had not been loyal and were refused admittance. It is the Arabs who fled, and their descendants, who now call themselves Palestinians. They are simply Arabs who fled Israel at the time and were not allowed back.

Neither the Palestinian Authority in the West bank nor Hamas in the Gaza Strip nor the Palestinians in general are seeking a two-state solution. They are quite openly seeking a one-state solution: displacing Israel.

Comparisons to England and Ireland fall way wide of the mark: even at the height of Ireland’s “Troubles”, no one ever claimed that England belonged to Ireland and that everyone who was not a Roman Catholic should leave.

The land that comprises Jordan, according the Balfour Declaration, was officially pledged as “a national home of the Jewish people.” Jordan, therefore, is rightfully Occupied Israel.

The Gaza pier debacle: it’s worse By Mike McDaniel

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/the_gaza_pier_debacle_it_s_worse.html

On July 14th, in The pier to nowhere is going away, I wrote:

When what’s left of the pier is finally removed and probably, scrapped, we can be certain, just as with the withdrawal debacle in Afghanistan, the MMPA will declare it a brilliant success and an example of the military acumen and inspired leadership of Joe Biden. Interestingly, at his recent NATO conference, Biden sort of allowed the pier wasn’t as successful as it could have been.  And like that disaster, we’ll never know the true financial and human cost.

The horror of it is Israel has ports that could have been used far more safely to offload supplies, but then the MMPA couldn’t brag about their stunningly successful relief efforts. As always, our troops suffer to enable feckless political stunts, but at least Joe got his photo ops.

Graphic: X Screenshot

Since then, the media, and the Harris/Biden Administration–Joe Biden, vanishing POTUS—have ignored the unfolding debacle. The pier, badly damaged and sort of repaired, supposedly has been dismantled, and multiple US Army(?) ships are in little better shape. Earlier reports indicated those ships had substantial difficulty, so poor was their mechanical condition, even getting to the Middle East. Now it appears they’re no longer able to return to America under their own power. 

Roughly seven months after setting sail for the US military’s troubled temporary pier mission off the Gaza coast, three US Army boats are expected to have to be hauled back to the US by contracted civilian vessels behind schedule, raising more concern about the state of the Army watercraft at the center of a major effort to bring humanitarian aid into war-torn Gaza.

Interest free, no down payment home loans for illegals? By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/interest_free_no_down_payment_home_loans_for_illegals.html

California Democrat assemblymember Joaquin Arambula recently introduced Assembly Bill 1840, a piece of legislation that would extend a first-time homebuyer loan program to illegal aliens. Should the bill become law, illegal aliens would be eligible for a new program that would offer them a loan worth 20% of the purchase price of the property… with no monthly payments. And no interest would accrue on the loan. Ever. Instead, the loan would be paid back when the borrower either refinances or sells the property. Can’t happen, you opine? Assembly Bill 1840 was approved by a key senate committee just this week. Yes, California is now one step closer to giving illegal aliens interest-free home loans with zero down payment. And preposterously generous repayment terms.

40+% of Americans approve of the job Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did in running the country. 40+% of Americans in many states repeatedly vote for candidates (and ballot propositions) that demonstrably hurt them. Are 40+% of Americans raging masochists? Or are they just that ignorant, stupid, brainwashed, or naïve? Citizens struggle to afford a home, especially in California, yet somehow illegals — not citizens — may soon get nothing down, no interest loans not payable until sale of the property?!

American citizens voting for Democrats in 2024 is akin to Jews supporting the Nazi Party in WWII. Or as if the antebellum slave population fought en masse for the South. It is insane! Speaking of insanity, maybe there was something in the COVID-19 non-vaccines that altered people’s perception and critical thinking skills. How else can one explain the insanity taking place today?

CHAPTER 33: Weaponizing Children: The Gospel of Yuval Harari Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is*

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27999/chapter-33-weaponizing-children-the-gospel

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Klaus Schwab and fellow members of the World Economic Forum (WEF) embrace a vision for the future that is difficult to fully grasp, but it is essential that people attempt to do just that. Yuval Harari, Israeli historian, professor, and darling of the WEF, provides a glimpse of that future and of Humanity 2.0 in his books and lectures.

Schwab and Harari embrace globalism’s supremacist replacement ideology as an evolutionary inevitability, in the same way Marx and Engels believed it was a historical inevitability that a socialist revolution would overturn and replace capitalism.

The term historical inevitability was introduced by philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his lecture “Historical Inevitability,”[i]delivered on May 12, 1953, at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Berlin argued against historical inevitability because the view that “the world has a direction” requires deterministic laws. Berlin considered determinism implausible because it requires radical changes in people’s “moral and psychological categories.”

Berlin’s view does not dissuade the humanitarian hucksters at the WEF from hawking globalism’s Unistate and Humanity 2.0, the artificial expediting of the evolutionary process, as historical and evolutionary inevitabilities. In their arrogance, globalist supremacists insist that their ideology is superior to any other ideology or social infrastructure, and will inevitably dominate the world. It is a very convenient philosophy of life for megalomaniacs and sociopaths.