RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/blog/asians-derail-affirmative-action-in-california/?print=1

The express train hurtling to return racial preference admissions to California — in the form of State Constitutional Amendment 5 [1], which if placed on the ballot and approved by voters would have overturned Prop. 209 —has just been derailed [2] by an outburst of opposition from Asian Americans.

The eruption of opposition caught SCA 5’s Democratic sponsors by surprise and caused a crucial three Asian American senators to withdraw their support, depriving the measure of the two thirds senate majority required to place an initiative on the ballot. “Prior to the vote on SCA 5 in the Senate,” Senators Ted Lieu of Torrance, Carol Liu of La Canada Flintridge, and Leland Yee of San Francisco wrote [2] Assembly Speaker and lead sponsor John A. Pérez, “we heard no opposition to the bill. However, in the past few weeks, we have heard from thousands of people throughout California voicing their concerns about the potential impacts…. As lifelong advocates for the Asian American and other communities,” they added, “we would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact our children.” (Or at least never again, a skeptic might observe.)

The three changed their minds, the San Francisco Chronicle reports [3], ”when they started hearing from Asian American constituents who feared that giving preferences to African American and Latino students would make it harder for their children to get into competitive University of California campuses.”

Feared? That’s rather like saying Jewish parents in the early 20th century feared that Jewish quotas would make it harder for their children to be admitted to Ivy League schools. Of course lowering admission standards for some students based on race or ethnicity inevitably raises the barrier for those of unpreferred races and ethnicities. And in fact, not just in logic, the passage of Prop. 209 prohibiting racial and ethnic preferential treatment produced a dramatic surge in the admission of Asians to selective California campuses.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/our-psychodramatic-campuses/?print=1

Dartmouth College students recently staged an overnight sit-in the office of their president Philip Hanlon. They had over seventy demands. Apparently, they grew out of their alleged suffering at the hands of “racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, trans-homophobic, xenophobic, and ablest structures.”

Translating into English, the students elaborated [1], “Our bodies are already on the line, in danger, and under attack” — suggesting conditions similar to the teen-aged Marines who stormed Fallujah in November 2004, or perhaps the iron-workers who tip-toe on girders 1,000 feet above Manhattan, or an acquaintance of mine whose work clothes reveal that he pumps out quite messy rural cesspools. As redress for their suffering, the oppressed students issued Orwellian calls to ban particularly hurtful vocabulary, to create new faculty positions based entirely on race, and to ensure gender-neutral student housing.

Most of the students represent the .01% of American society. They can enjoy their four- to five-year hiatus from the American rat race, either due to wealthy parents or to charity in the forms of grants that allow them to pay the $60,000 per year plus in room, board, and tuition. Again, most Americans either do not have such money or access to such money to afford the quarter-million-dollar “under attack” Dartmouth experience.

President Hanlon apparently felt the students’ pain of what they had called “micro-aggressions,” [2] or the day-to-day psychodramatic angst that these young elites feel that are their own versions of the world of the Wal-Mart checker, the roofer in Delano who nails in 105 degree August heat, or the tractor driver who has disked half-mile long rows day in and day out on the farm. If you have never done such things, and you have $60,000 a year to spend on Dartmouth, then I suppose you could conceivably dream up a micro-aggression of being tortured to read woman for womyn, or having to use either the boys’ or girls’ bathroom.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=16867

WATCH: Will Israel’s flag fly on the moon in 2015?

Israel Hayom Insider panelists Ruthie Blum and Steve Ganot talk about SpaceIL, the Israeli entry to Google’s Lunar X Prize competition • Will the Israeli initiative succeed in landing a robot on the moon by the end of next year?

Israeli non-profit organization SpaceIL aims to land Israel’s first robot on the moon as part of Google’s Lunar X Prize competition.

The robot is to be the size of a washing machine and to travel on lunar surface using Israeli nanotechnology.

Is this just a feel-good story or will it have a ripple effect on Israeli students and schools?

As Jews convene around the Seder table this week, perhaps we should say, “Next year on the moon.”

Deadly Virus’s Spread Raises Alarms in Mideast Saudis Defend Approach to MERS Outbreak, Even as Cases Increase http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303887804579499831393801054?mod=trending_now_1 Saudi Arabia on Sunday confirmed a surge of cases of a deadly virus in the kingdom over the past two weeks, even as it tried to counter criticism that it wasn’t doing enough to contain the outbreak. […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304058204579495892859564688?mg=reno64-wsj

In the Arab world throwing a shoe is considered an insult, and George W. Bush famously had one hurled at him during a Baghdad press conference in 2008. Less explicable was the pump thrown at Hillary Clinton last week during a speech at a Las Vegas casino.

“Is that somebody throwing something at me? Is that part of Cirque du Soleil?” Mrs. Clinton quipped after dodging the projectile. “My goodness, I didn’t know that solid waste management was so controversial.”

Mrs. Clinton ought to pay a visit to New Jersey, but—hold on: solid waste management? Yes, Mrs. Clinton was speaking at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries convention. According to the trade group’s ller Coaster, she told the crowd that “#recycling can stimulate the economy/ offering real value/ helping economic recovery.”

This insight cost the recyclers north of $200,000 or $250,000, Mrs. Clinton’s reported per-gig speaking fee. The speech was part of a whirlwind West Coast jaunt last week that included talks at the Marketing Nation Summit and the Western Health Care Leadership Academy, the annual confab of the California medical provider lobbies.

Speaking tours are routine for politicians looking to build a personal fortune by cashing in on their celebrity—and in the honest-living department, patronizing trade associations beats her husband’s doings with Ron Burkle and the Riadys of Indonesia. Since leaving the State Department, Mrs. Clinton has also spoken in front of clients of Goldman Sachs,

yeoldecrabb.com

Belatedly in this instance, in our search to solve the mystery of the Obama Administration’s policy formulation process, highly touted The New Yorker extended interviews by David Remnick are found wanting. A little more Obama, a little less Remnick should have been the order of the day! But there must be anecdotal origins to these quotes. In fact, for the most part they hardly seem “quotable” and suggest having gone through the mill of the White House speechwriters.

Still, as with reading during the 2008 presidential primary the President’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, one looks for the kernel which set off Remnick’s ubiquitous fawning..

The question posed is whether the motivation behind the Obama Administration’s disasters is ideological or sheer lack of knowledge/executive experience?.

If anyone had any doubt about the complexity of such an inquiry, that question was thrown into bold relief by the passage and attempted implementation of Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. [Note the shortcut to passage of a measure to order one sixth of the economy without a single Republican vote, speaking of lack of inter-Party cooperation.]

Obamacare, according to sources close to the President was conceived as the historic legacy of this presidency, and it is likely to be its only one, for better or for worse. It is the quintessential example of our problem: what government-subsidized National Public Radio recently called “difficulties” of the website rollout is still inconceivable. In an era when modest startup businesses can hire IT expertise for a song, how could the U.S. government fail so spectacularly with a $93-million budget — a minimal estimate by its advocates? [We may never know how much was actually spent on the original and the continuing attempts at rescue.] How could our late unlamented Secretary of Health and Human Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have presided over such a disaster? [Maybe there is something “wrong in Kansas” if she could have not only held the governorship but eight years as the state’s insurance commission!]

Corruption/incompetence? The incredible costs suggest that possibility. Or do we have to go to conspiracy theories, i.e., that since the President and most of his coterie of health care advisers have always expressed preference for total federal government control [let’s skip the euphemism “single payer”], did they intend just such a catastrophe so that, ultimately, the country would throw up its hands and out of sheer frustration collapse into that equally disastrous U.K. template?

Gavin Boby’s Fight Against Muslim Rape Gangs in the U.K. — on The Glazov Gang
A courageous lawyer confronts a barbaric strain of jihad terrorizing his country.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/gavin-bobys-fight-against-muslim-rape-gangs-in-the-u-k-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4262/islam-czech-republic

Critics say the project’s underlying objective is to convert non-Muslim children to Islam by bringing proselytizing messages into public schools under the guise of promoting multiculturalism and fighting “Islamophobia.”

The group recently ran an advertisement promising to pay 250 Czech korunas ($13 dollars) to any student aged 15 to 18 years who would attend a two hour presentation about Islam.

More recently, Muslims in the Czech Republic have tried to ban a book they say is Islamophobic, and have filed a ten-page criminal complaint against its formerly-Muslim author.

The Czech government has approved a new project aimed at promoting Islam in public elementary and secondary schools across the country.

The project—Muslims in the Eyes of Czech Schoolchildren—is being spearheaded by a Muslim advocacy group and is being financed by American taxpayers through a grant from the US Embassy in Prague. (The US State Department is also promoting Islam in other European countries.)

The group says the Czech Ministry of Education has authorized it to organize lectures and seminars aimed at “teaching Czech schoolchildren about Islamic beliefs and practices” and at “fighting stereotypes and prejudices about Muslims.”

But critics—there are many—say the project’s underlying objective is to convert non-Muslim children to Islam by bringing proselytizing messages into public schools under the guise of promoting multiculturalism and fighting “Islamophobia.”

Image source: Website of “Muslims in the Eyes of Czech Schoolchildren”.

The group’s website says the first phase of the project involves “analyzing the accuracy of the information about Islam in Czech textbooks on history, geography and social sciences, and mapping the level of teaching about Islam in Czech grammar schools and other secondary schools.”

http://freebeacon.com/culture/getting-greens-wrong/?print=1#Print

Patrick Allitt has written a book no one will like. Neither environmentalists nor those he calls counterenvironmentalists. He’ll be tempted to flatter himself with the tattered response of those criticized from both sides: “I must be doing something right.” He’ll be wrong.

The purpose of the book, in Allitt’s words, is “to explain the history of American environmental controversies since World War II and to encourage an optimistic attitude toward the environmental future.” But it reads more like an environmental “he said, she said.” On issue after issue, Allitt presents one side, then the other, making for a seesaw of a read.

Allitt misses the central role of ideology in these controversies. He treats the sales pitch of an environmental organization as if it were its main object. But “safety” issues are the gloss green groups apply to mask deeper agendas.

Take, for example, Allitt’s treatment of Amory Lovins, to whom he devotes a respectful section. Allitt describes Lovins as “a brilliant and hardheaded polymath” who is “fully aware, as we all should be, that successful handling of energy and the environment depends more on weighing many issues together than by clinging to single causes and solutions. Among these issues are cost, cleanliness, conservation, public trust, and democratic responsiveness.”

These anodyne comments are amazing if one knows something about Amory Lovins, who rose to prominence as an opponent of large-energy power sources, including coal and nuclear, even complex solar. These “hard path” technologies, Lovins argued, meant dependence on “alien, remote, and perhaps humiliatingly uncontrollable technology run by a faraway, bureaucratized, technical elite who have probably never heard of you.” How many people actually feel humiliated when they flip on a light-switch because they don’t have a personal relationship with their power station?

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-fray-The-magnate-and-the-mullah-A-Friedman-fantasy-348235
Tom Friedman’s anti-Adelson diatribe shows how intellectually corrupted the discourse on the Israel-Palestinian issue has become.

Truth be told, Tom Friedman can be a pretty astute and articulate journalist – except when he writes about Israel.

Then his work degenerates from the astute to the inane and from the articulate to the incoherent.

But even by his usual misleading sub-standards, his recent piece, “Sheldon: Iran’s Best Friend” (The New York Times, April 5), was a doozy.

Full Disclosure

In it he makes a puerile attempt to draw a parallel between the danger that the rabid anti-Israel mullah Ali Khamenei and the avid pro-Israel magnate Sheldon Adelson pose for the Jewish state.

Full disclosure: In the past I have applied to Adelson’s Foundation for financial support for my own nonprofit entity – The Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. But sadly, to date, not only I have not received a bent penny, I have not had any acknowledgment of my request being received.

So I have very little allegiance to Adelson that might induce me to write in his defense against Friedman’s frivolous attack, although malicious souls will doubtless imply that I do. Quite the opposite is true. If anything I should feel a little resentful at having been so ignobly ignored.

I have a completely different rationale for penning this week’s column. My reason for doing so is to use Friedman’s article to show how intellectually corrupted the discourse on the Israel-Palestinian issue has become, and how self-contradictory and disingenuous the increasingly desperate arguments of two-state proponents have become.

These elements are all starkly illustrated in Friedman’s anti-Sheldon rant and vividly underscore just how bankrupt the two-staters’ case has become.

‘Toxic tycoons’?

Accordingly, I do not want to dwell too long on Friedman’s childish chagrin that Adelson is using his self-amassed fortune to advance causes he believes in, and to support politicians he feels would be likely to promote them.

But some brief reference is unavoidable.

Friedman alleges: “Adelson personifies everything that is poisoning our democracy and Israel’s today — swaggering oligarchs, using huge sums of money to try to bend each system to their will.”

But after even the most cursory perusal of his anti-Sheldon diatribe, any fair-minded reader might be excused for concluding that what really bothers Friedman is not the toxicity of the democratic system in the US or Israel, nor the power plutocrats per se have in affecting the outcomes it produces.

Indeed, I have a strong suspicion that if Adelson were funding the same political causes and/or organizations as, say, George Soros, he would not have come in for censure.