RUTHFULLY YOURS

Western Civilization Heritage Israel Program (C.H.I.P) provides mainly non-Jewish middle-school-age children in the community the opportunity to gain direct knowledge of their heritage through tours to the State of Israel, affording them a deeper understanding of the origin of the monotheistic faiths, solidifying for them an ever-lasting impression of the Holy Land, and creating a special bond between them and the modern State of Israel.

Website: http://chipeducationaltours.org/

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CHIP4Israel

Fundraising Campaign link: https://www.gofundme.com/C-H-I-P

Whitwell Middle School students & teachers: WHY any young person should go on C.H.I.P Program to Israel (3:00 minutes)

https://youtu.be/ZHYXpCYy9sY

It’s a problem. With so many anti-Israel events, professors and organizations on campuses, even American students who want to stand up for Israel far too often find themselves unable to do it.

Part of the problem is that the anti-Israel forces are buttressed by the mainstream media. Plus, the few professors who are not on the anti-Israel side are often unwilling or unable to devote the kind of energy spent by the other side.

And sadly, it is perceived as more hip to attack Israel and instead support the Palestinian Arabs who are always portrayed, willingly, as victims. All of this has led to misinformation replacing the truth as the primary narrative about the Middle East conflict. It seems overwhelming.

But the truth is that every single concerned student, parent and grandparent can make a huge difference in the current anti-Israel campus climate. And that difference can and should start by utilizing a special tool when the students are in high school and middle school, or even earlier.

Plus, that tool is absolutely free and completely accessible.

It’s called the Jewish Virtual Library. It’s vast, it’s constantly updating and expanding, and it has just about everything you could possibly want to know about – and know well – waiting right there for your fingertips to guide you.

Before getting into the details and background, here’s a real-life example of the way in which the JVL makes all the difference.

Is the “knife intifada” beginning to run out of steam? Some observers say so. Yet this Friday, April 1, marks an impressive half-year since the launch of the current wave of Palestinian violence. Characterized largely by stabbings carried out by youngsters, generally acting alone or in pairs, this round of attacks has already claimed the lives of 29 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean asylum seeker, and a Palestinian bystander, and caused more than 400 injuries.

During this time, according to official Israeli sources, there have been over 200 stabbings or attempted stabbings at an average pace greater than one per day, as well as 40 car-ramming assaults and 80 shootings. Though perpetrated almost exclusively by Palestinians living in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and focused largely on these areas, the attacks have also reached Israel’s coastal cities, most notably Tel Aviv. And though not yet nearly so long-running as the first (1987-1991) or second (2000-2004) intifadas, the current wave, given that it appears to be driven by individual initiative rather than by organized militant groups like Hamas or Fatah, has shown remarkable staying power.

What explains its endurance? One reason may be that the perpetrators both reflect and are largely motivated by Palestinian public opinion—a subject to which I devoted a comprehensive essayin Mosaic last November. Here I want to explore what has changed over the last six months in how Palestinians see their conflict with Israel, and especially the desirability and efficacy of resorting to violence. In doing so, I’ll rely principally on polls conducted during this period by three of the leading Palestinian polling institutes whose published results reliably indicate what Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza think.

K.C.JOHNSONhttps://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/new-dark-ages-campus/

As last fall’s wave of student protests arrived in Durham, North Carolina, a self-described “group of unaffiliated and concerned students” presented the “Demands of Black Voices.” The Duke University activists wanted “bias and diversity training” for many segments of the Duke community, a new university policy “concerning hate speech” toward “students of color,” a new administrator to address the complaints of students of color only, and permission for students of color to miss classes by citing “mental health trauma” from “racial incidents on campus.”

One demand stood out. “Professors,” the students wrote, “will be in danger of losing their jobs, and non-tenure track [sic] faculty will lose tenure status if they perpetuate hate speech that threatens the safety of students of color. They will also be liable if the discriminatory attitudes behind the speech could potentially harm the academic achievements of students of color.”

A university that dismisses professors whose “attitudes” could “potentially harm” the exam performance of preferred undergraduates has abandoned all pretense of academic freedom. Given how zealously professors normally defend the concept, one might have expected that Duke faculty members would have unanimously condemned the proposal. Instead, the only public reaction came via a statement signed by 23 Duke professors that hailed the students for “forcing us all to learn out loud.” The protesters’ incivility had overcome the “muting of sharply articulated criticism of white supremacy.” And the professors had a message for the students who recommended the dismissal of an unspecified number of their colleagues: “Thank you.”

Little in the professional experiences of the faculty signatories suggested a culture of “white supremacy” at Duke (or, for that matter, at any other contemporary college campus). The faculty statement was hosted on the website of Professor Mark Anthony Neal—who, in a fawning 2006 interview in the university’s official magazine, described his “intellectual alter ego” as “thugniggaintellectual,” who “comes into intellectual spaces like a thug, who literally is fearful and menacing,” producing “some real kind of ‘gangster’ scholarship…hard-core intellectual thuggery.” Signatures for the statement were solicited by Professor Wahneema Lubiano—who came to Duke, with a lifetime position, more than 15 years ago, touting two allegedly “forthcoming” books. To date, neither of these books, nor any other Lubiano manuscript, has appeared in print.

As it turns out, the students could have stayed home. In the name of promoting appropriate thinking on matters related to “diversity,” Duke had effectively implemented the protesters’ plan. Dean Valerie Ashby announced at a November 2015 forum that department chairs would be held “accountable” for inculcating the administration’s “values” among faculty in their departments. And “at every stage of their evaluation,” Ashby revealed, untenured professors learned “how we feel” on questions of race and gender. The message these faculty members received: “You can’t be a great scholar and be intolerant. You have to go.”

An activist group at Stanford University is demanding that white people — as well as men of any race who are not transgender — be forbidden from being appointed as the school’s next president or provost.

“We demand that the next appointment to the position of president and provost of the University break both the legacy of white leadership and cisgender male leadership,” states a document that the group, called the “Who’s Teaching Us Coalition,” released on Tuesday.

Note that the students are demanding that “both” of these leadership legacies be dismantled — which means that neither a cis, black gay man nor a transgender white person would technically be “diverse” enough to qualify.

Among the other demands? “The development of recurring and comprehensive identity and cultural humility training to be instated as a requirement for all faculty in all departments by September 21st, 2017,” a “dedicated, responsive platform for reporting and tracking microaggressions from faculty” and “the hiring of at least 10 additional tenure-track ethnic studies professors and a commitment to the retention of these professors, prioritizing underrepresented groups within the ethnic studies programs.”

Oh, and of course, “adequate staffing and funding to achieve all of the aforementioned demands.”

According to an article in Campus Reform, the group released its demands after a draft of them was leaked by The Stanford Review, the school’s conservative newspaper.

In any case, it’s certainly a good thing that WTU released them sooner rather than later, because the document also demands “that the Administration immediately accept the aforementioned demands and that a statement of acceptance, a timetable of implementation of each demand, and an administrative point person for each demand, be presented to WTU at 3 pm on Friday April, 8th in open forum at the Native American Cultural Center.”

That’s next week, folks!

Welp. I guess they’d better get crackin!

Sixteen attorneys general have banded together to go after oil companies and utilities who they claim have committed fraud by downplaying the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. They are going to investigate claims that ExxonMobile and other fossile fuel companies knew about the dangerous effects of global warming and hid the facts from the public.

The urge by Democrats to criminalize certain political opinions is nothing new, as we’ve seen in the abortion debate and gay marriage laws.

Washington Times:

Standing beside former Vice President Al Gore, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said the state officials are committed to “working together on key climate-related initiatives,” including queries into whether fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil have committed fraud by deceiving the public and shareholders about the impact of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

Two states — California and New York — already have launched probes into ExxonMobil, while attorneys general from Massachusetts and the Virgin Islands indicated Tuesday that they would follow suit. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, an independent, is the only non-Democrat involved in the campaign, called AGs United for Clean Power.

“The bottom line is simple: Climate change is real; it is a threat to all the people we represent,” Mr. Schneiderman said. “If there are companies, whether they’re utilities, whether they’re fossil fuel companies, committing fraud in an effort to maximize their short-term profits at the expense of the people we represent, we want to find out about it. We want to expose it and want to pursue them to the fullest extent of the law.”

Mr. Schneiderman also announced that 20 attorneys general representing 18 states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands filed a brief Tuesday in support of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan rule, which has been challenged by attorneys general in 25 mostly red states.

The campaign was spurred by articles last year alleging Exxon hid research conducted by its own scientists linking fossil fuel emissions and global warming. Exxon officials have denied the claims and countered that the investigation was conducted by journalism entities that receive funding from foundations known for their climate change activism.

Suzanne McCarron, Exxon’s vice president for public and government affairs, said Tuesday in a statement that the accusations are meritless.

Until they are stopped, the Greens will use regulatory stealth to stymie growth and throttle industries they want to see brought down. The Illegal Logging Prohibition Act is one of their nastiest and handiest tools, so why hasn’t the Coalition done away with it?
While there has probably never been a stronger sentiment in the Liberal National Party (LNP) government that environmental policy is off the rails, little has been done in its two years in office to repeal or amend the raft of legal constraints which now purport to protect the environment. Reversal of excessive restrictions on agricultural chemicals levels is about all the LNP Government has achieved.

On the policy front, provisions to promote renewable energy were introduced and justified as a less costly way – than imposition of a carbon tax – to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. There was no international legal obligation to do this. Restrictions imposed by Labor on access to water in the Murray Darling basin, where agricultural production has shrunk, also remain unaddressed.

Following LNP backbench agitation, a parliamentary enquiry into tax exemption privileges of environmental groups is underway. While backers think it will help curb green rorts (why should Greenpeace have that privilege when part of its modus operandi is to damage property and assets?) it does not strike at the heart of the problem. The activists have a far more formidable strategy. That has to be tackled.

They and the Greens have perceived something which parliamentarians in the mainstream parties disregard, some wilfully, but most by default. The formal duty of parliamentarians is to legislate. Under the Constitution the Senate is supposed to be a house of review. In practice it isn’t. Regulations are rarely scrutinized. It’s a Greens hunting ground.

As well, wily politicians can and do slip new laws into Parliament and delay the tabling of regulations. Sometimes regulations are never produced. Both sides of politics have done this. The regulations are all-important. They define how laws are to be interpreted. The Greens know this.

They love regulation. It can be used to create legal hurdles to delay and increase the costs of projects to which they object. They also understand the most powerful environmental tool is to arm a regulator with the widest discretion to rule compliance. It sits alongside vague law. The looser its terms, the wider is the scope for the regulator to rule.

They work relentlessly to put this broad scope into law where they can. The Federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, for example, gives the Environment Minister very wide discretion. This is little understood. Policies can be rejected if the Minister considers there is a “risk” for which no criteria are set. No wonder WWF rate it the best environmental regulation in the world.

Yet even that looks half reasonable when set against what is possibly the most ridiculous piece of supposedly environmental legislation ever adopted by Parliament. This is the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act. It makes it an offence to import a timber product unless the importer has records demonstrating laborious and costly efforts to ascertain in the country of origin if the product is not or does not contain illegally logged timber. Yet there is no record illegal timber has ever entered Australia.

Grant-gobbling catastropharian fabulist Ed Maibach’s plan to survey TV meteorologists must have seemed a good idea at the time, the object being to pump out fresh PR releases lambasting sceptics. Alas, like the climate itself, the results confound warmist expectations
Of course, as we have so often been assured, 97% of scientists believe in dangerous global warming, mostly caused by human activities’ CO2 emissions. Except that the 97% claim is hokum. A survey of members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) was published last week detailing their support — or rather, lack of it — for the alleged consensus. There were 4092 of 7682 members who responded and of the 4092, only 67% endorsed the consensus.

That is, one-third of the respondents, who include many hundreds of academically credentialed TV weathercasters and other weather communicators, don’t buy the party line on global warming. Twenty-seven percent don’t believe humans are mostly responsible and 6% are don’t-knows.

The scientific community, we’ve been told, is virtually unanimous about CO2-caused warming. That alleged consensus justifies the trillion-dollar spending on windmills and solar farms, as opposed to, say, Third World electrification, clean water, the eradication of malaria and other health scourges now damning billions to poverty and despair.

The reality is that the CO2 emissions dogma is now so shaky – especially given the 21st century’s pause or halt to warming – that peer-reviewed papers sceptical of the orthodoxy are flooding into scientific journals. Kenneth Richard has been tabulating these papers and lists more than 660 published in just the past 27 months – including 133 since the start of 2016 and 282 last year. The mainstream media ignores them, ditto the IPCC whose remit is to look exclusively for evidence of human-induced, rather than natural, climate change.[1]

Returning to the AMS survey, its members are well qualified in science generally and weather in particular. Most respondents had a Bachelor (32%) or Masters (30%) science degree, or PhD in meteorology or atmospheric science (33%). More than a third rated themselves ‘expert’ in climate science, whatever either term may mean. The discovery of one-third sceptics in AMS ranks undoubtedly understates the real level of scepticism in the organisation. The key issue concerns the 3592 non-respondents. In fact 3,364 of them didn’t even open the emails, despite being reminded up to five times.

A plausible reason for a sceptic not to respond was that the survey was run by Dr Ed Maibach, of George Mason University, a communications specialist. Maibach is has been bluntly described in the sceptic blogosphere as a ‘slimebag’ because he was second signatory on the “RICO20” petition to President Obama last September, calling for sceptics to be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organisations Act. Thus any sceptic AMS member getting an email from Maibach asking, among other things, whether they are sceptics, could suspect that Maibach might misuse such information to threaten, sue and blacklist them.[2] As Anthony Watts put it, “The man asking the questions might flag you for criminal prosecution for having an opinion he doesn’t like.”

Earlier this month, students for the first time took a new, and allegedly improved, SAT. The test’s developer included more-contemporary vocabulary and removed penalties for guessing the wrong answer. The changes came with a predictable outcry—complaints, for instance, that too many word problems in the math sections disadvantage some students. There was also a familiar refrain from parents: Why do we have this exam at all? Why do colleges put so much stock in the results? And why-oh-why do our kids have to take so many tests?

It might seem unfair that admissions officers place almost as much weight on a one-morning test as they do on grades from four years of high school, as a 2011 survey from the National Association for College Admissions Counseling showed. But there’s a simple reason for this emphasis on testing: Policy makers and educators have effectively eliminated all the other ways of quantifying student performance.

Classroom grades have become meaningless. Last year a public-school district in northern California decided to score on an “equal interval scale”—meaning every letter grade is assigned a 20-point range. Students who score above 80% get an A. Only those below 20% will be given an F. This is only part of a larger trend.

Figures from the Education Department show that between 1990 and 2009, high-school graduates’ mean GPA rose 0.33 points for women and 0.31 points for men—even while their ACT and SAT scores remained the same. Most of that increase occurred on the lower end of the spectrum, which isn’t surprising. Since high schools are often rewarded for increasing their graduation rates, teachers are fairly reluctant to give out D’s and F’s.

It is possible that beneficiaries of grade inflation are fooling their parents, but they’re probably not fooling their professors. Between 28% and 40% of college freshmen need at least one remedial class, according to research from the National Council of State Legislatures.

College is where grade inflation really takes off. According to a study recently published on Gradeinflation.com, a website run by Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University professor, and Christopher Healy, a Furman University professor, more than 42% of the grades awarded at two-year and four-year colleges are A’s. At four-year schools, the number of A’s has been going up five to six percentage points per decade. CONTINUE AT SITE

Personally, I think he should have been in a jail in Gaza which he gave away to terrorists….rsk

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is getting in closer touch with his Judaism while in jail, the Hebrew news site Walla reported on Thursday.

According to an anonymous inmate at the minimum-security Maasiyahu Prison, where Olmert has been incarcerated since early February — and where he is to serve a 19-month term after being convicted of bribery and obstruction of justice — he has begun donning tefillin (phylacteries), participating in afternoon and evening prayers and studying Torah and halacha, Jewish law. This, said the inmate, the former premier, Jerusalem mayor, government minister and Knesset member has been doing with real estate developer Meir Rabin, who is a serving a five-year sentence for his part in the same affair, surrounding the Holyland apartment complex in Jerusalem.

A lawyer by profession, Olmert never made a secret of his secularism, though he – like most Israeli politicians – always professed respect for religious Jews.

Sources close to a number of inmates at Maasiyahu told Walla that Olmert resides in a wing of the prison with 10 other inmates, which makes up a minyan – a quorum required for public worship in Judaism.

One of these sources said, “They still have trouble conducting morning prayers as a minyan, because each has his own activities in the morning, other than on Shabbat. But during afternoon and evening prayers, Olmert takes part with the others.”

According to these sources, Olmert is sharing a cell with former Bank Hapoalim Chairman of the Board Danny Dankner (convicted of bribery and money-laundering) and former Jerusalem city engineer Uri Shitrit. Rabin, who became friendly with Olmert, shares a cell with former Jerusalem deputy mayor Eli Simhayoff. “Each one has a job in the wing,” one source told Walla. “Dankner, for example, is the cook.”