RUTHFULLY YOURS

In classrooms across the country, high school students are taught the scientific method. It consists of constructing a doubtful hypothesis and designing a series of experiments to test the hypothesis with the observable facts. After a number of tests prove positive. The student can then take the facts and reach a conclusion. When a conclusion is constantly verified, it is enshrined in what might be called “established” science.

There is a second kind of science that uses methods very different from those of “established” science. In fact, this science, if indeed it might be called such, uses the exact opposite method. It consists of constructing a conclusion and then testing that conclusion with a hypothesis that is repeated over and over again using doubtful data to back it up.

The “logic” of this particular scientific method is that the truth of the conclusion is determined by the number of times the hypothesis is affirmed. With enough repetition, even the data starts to take on the appearance of the truth. The secret is to get as many people and media as possible to parrot the great discovery. At a certain point, the conclusion can be enshrined in a special pantheon that might be called “settled” science, and woe betide any “denier” who dare question it.

Like its cousin “settled” law, “settled” science can be useful even outside its field. It can be employed to silence opposition, impose laws and promote political agendas. It respects no rank or positions. August researchers and famous professors can be toppled from their positions if they express the slightest doubts about a “settled” position. Even the strongest evidence is ignored with disdain and disbelief. Meanwhile the hypothesis mantra is just repeated over and over again.

“Settled” science cases abound in today’s politically-correct times. The most obvious one is the dogma of “global warming.” Many old-school scientists have suffered persecution for calling into question the faulty computer models and fudged data associated with this doctrine. They have even shown that the globe is not warming. Flexible “settled” scientists immediately tweaked the hypothesis to speak of “climate change,” and thus cover both sides.

Language about Islamic history in school textbooks is spurring battles across the nation, with some parents’ groups and lawmakers objecting to what they see as an overly benign portrayal of the religion’s spread and its teachings.

Following recent attacks in the U.S. and abroad by terrorists who claim to espouse Islamic beliefs, more American parent groups have turned attention to what children are taught about the religion. Muslims and their supporters say the opposition to the textbooks amounts to fear-mongering and presents a distorted view of their faith.

Kristen Amundson, executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education, which represents U.S. state and territorial education boards, said she expects to see more parents pushing to change textbooks and curriculum this year.

“We will see a raft of it,” she said. “It is going to be coming before local boards, state boards and legislatures.”

A bill in Tennessee, backed by a leading Republican legislator, is expected to be the focus of heated debate in that state’s legislative session, which started this past week. The bill, introduced by Rep. Sheila Butt, seeks to exclude any “religious doctrine,” not just Islam, from middle-school textbooks.

Ms. Butt, an author of Christian books, said in an email that she wrote the bill after complaints from “constituents who realized that some religions were more heavily weighted in the standards and that doctrine was being taught to Junior High students.” Republican Gov. Bill Haslam has said the bill is too broad, but Candice McQueen, the state’s education commissioner, has sped up reviews of social-studies standards following the criticism.

Similar battles have gone before state education boards in Texas and Alabama, and there were calls throughout 2015 to revise textbooks in school districts in states including California, Wisconsin and Massachusetts. A group called Truth in Texas Textbooks Coalition won substantial changes—many of them regarding descriptions of Islam—from that state’s board of education in 2014, according to the group’s chairman, Roy White.

Over the past several weeks, we have learned that the Obama administration believes it is at war with Israel. The war is not a shooting war, but a political war. Its goal is to bring the government to its knees to the point where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu loses power or begs Obama and his advisers to shepherd Israel through a “peace process” in which Israel will renounce its rights to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

One component of this war is espionage. Last month The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel is a top target for American espionage.

The other component of the administration’s war against Israel is political subversion. Over the past week, the administration has campaigned against the NGO bill sponsored by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. If the bill, which was approved by the government, becomes law, it will require political NGOs that are principally financed by foreign governments to identify as foreign agents in their official communications and interactions.

Last week, State Department spokesman James Kirby lambasted the bill at an official briefing. Among other things, Kirby rejected Shaked’s claim that her bill is less restrictive than the US’s own Foreign Agents Registration Act. Kirby offered no substantiation of his claim.

College campuses nationwide are treating fat people as a new protected class, launching “fat studies” courses that teach that being fat isn’t unhealthy and awareness groups that fight so-called “fatphobia” and “weightism.”
Yes — “fatphobia” and “weightism” are apparently things now. And it’s apparently a big (sorry) deal.

The University of New Hampshire now has a student organization called “People Opposing Weightism (POW!)” that “will create events that will help people to think about weightism and fatphobia.” There are countless pictures of clearly obese people posted on what appears to be the group’s page.

What’s more: Actual, for-credit courses on fatness are becoming a trend — and as Peter Hasson of The Daily Caller points out, they “typically advocate against the position that obesity is unhealthy or undesirable” and treat the issue as a social-justice problem instead of a health one. After all, we all know that sensitivity is more important than science!

For example, Oregon State University currently has a “Fat Studies” course that “frames weight-based oppression as a social justice issue, exploring forms of activism used to counter weightism” and “examines” fatness “as an area of human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression.”

This is really happening.

A mandatory online course at the University of Southern California (USC) asks students to disclose the number of sexual encounters they have had over the past three months and teaches students to ask for consent by saying “how far would you be comfortable going?” and “would you like to try this with me?”

In an email obtained by Campus Reform, students were told they must complete the Title IX training in order to register for courses in the spring.

“This course is mandatory, and you must complete it by February 9, 2016. If you do not complete the training by this date you will receive a registration hold until the training is complete,” the email stated.

Well, scratch that off the list of places I would like my daughter to go to school (kidding, it’s in downtown L.A., I never wanted her to go there).

Worry not, incoming students, the old creepers who created the curriculum assure us it’s like totally groovy and stuff:

Despite some students being uncomfortable with the content of the course, the campus-wide email assured students they would “enjoy the assignment.”

“We believe you’ll enjoy the assignment, and that this training is in line with our shared belief that Trojans care for Trojans. It is an innovative, engaging, and informative online course, created with students for students,” the email stated.

One in six American men will develop prostate cancer. It is the most common cancer after skin cancer, and the second biggest cancer killer for men. Two Israeli scientists at the Weizmann Institute in Israel promise an almost miraculous cure, now in clinical trials at New York’s Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. It is the culmination of 20 years of basic research by plant scientist Avigdor Scherz and cancer researcher Yoram Saloman.

Professor Scherz took a naturally occurring form of chlorophyll from aquatic bacteria:

…chemically modified by Prof. Scherz’s lab at Weizmann to fit the team’s pharmaceutical needs. Once the photosensitized drug is injected, it meets up with the second crucial element in this therapy—light—at the targeted tumor site… from highly focused fiber-optic lasers that have been inserted near the tumor. As the chlorophyll absorbs the light, it can then interact with the third component in the process—oxygen—to produce oxygen radicals. This interaction initiates a fast cascade of pathophysiological events that cause instantaneous closing of the blood vessels leading to the tumor, followed by oxygen and nutrient deprivation at the tumor site, as well as other active processes that kill tumor cells. In 24 to 48 hours, the tumor undergoes complete necrosis.

The treatment, called vascular-targeted photodynamic therapy or VTP is a one-time 20 to 30-minute procedure. There have been no side effects in urination or sexual function.

The Israeli team foresees applications for breast, ovary, lung and pancreas tumors. The latter has no effective treatment to date and has been a tragic death sentence.

The United Methodist Church has approved a motion to divest its pension interests from Israel.

The pension board of the United Methodist Church — one of the largest Protestant denominations in the United States, with more than seven million members — has placed five Israeli banks on a list of companies that it will not invest in for human rights reasons, the board said in a statement on Tuesday.

It appeared to be the first time that a pension fund of a large American church had taken such a step regarding the Israeli banks, which help finance settlement construction in what most of the world considers illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

There are no illegally occupied Palestinian territories, because the area in question was once part of Jordan, never part of an independent nation. Jews have lived there since biblical times, though there were fewer before 1948 because the “Palestinians” kept massacring them in pogroms.

Historians this Saturday, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, resoundingly rejected an anti-Israel resolution. The final vote was 111-51 against the resolution which, among other things, would have committed the AHA to “monitoring Israeli actions restricting the right to education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

The proposal that an association of American academics devoted to the study and promotion of history and historical thinking would monitor the actions of a sovereign state in the Middle East gives one an idea of the arrogance of the crafters of the resolution. What next? Shall they constitute themselves as a peacekeeping force? Another piece of the resolution, a call for the “reversal of Israeli policies that restrict the freedom of movement,” without any regard for Israeli security needs, gives one an idea of the moral and intellectual seriousness of the resolution. But I will not dwell on the resolution’s defects because they have been so well covered by the Alliance for Academic Freedom, by the historian Jeffrey Herf and by the blogger William Jacobson.

Instead, let me focus on what can be learned from this important win.

First, there is still an audience for the view that the integrity of scholarly organizations demands that they avoid becoming vehicles for political activism. As Herf put it last year, after a similar resolution failed a crucial procedural vote:

To health and martyrdom

On Sunday, I reported for The Algemeiner on the Palestinian Authority’s honoring of the Tel Aviv pub terrorist.

The story, more precisely, was that the PA Health Ministry initially placed Nashat Milhem — who was killed Friday during a gun battle with Israeli security forces after a weeklong manhunt — on its official list of “martyrs” and shortly thereafter removed his name.

Jerusalem Post Palestinian affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh, who broke the story, told me that the probable reason for the deletion was that the PA figured paying such respect to the infamous shooter would not look good in the international arena.

This was merely an assessment. But what followed was fact.

Outrage promptly erupted on Arabic social media, with the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of Palestinians calling the PA to task for not giving Milhem his proper due. Hashtags were created; Hamas and Fatah supporters alike chimed in on behalf of the 29-year-old from northern Israel who went on a shooting spree against innocent people and then escaped, leaving the residents of Tel Aviv fearing he might turn up at any moment to pull a repeat performance.

This month, to relatively little outrage or public notice, Oregon State University is holding segregated “diversity” sessions for students, staff, and faculty. At “retreats,” students and faculty will learn about identity and micro-agressions (for example: expressing a belief in merit, wearing an offensive Halloween costume, or having someone feel like she does not belong).

The Daily Caller reports that a total of four workshops will be held: one for non-white students, another for white students (to educate them about their “white privilege”), one for multi-racial students, and one for white faculty and staff called “Examining White Identity.”

The testimonials at the university’s website indicate that the sessions are sure to foster more “cry-bullies,” as we saw on campuses across the country in 2015. And it seems that among Oregon State’s 30,000 students, none raised significant objections to funding being spent on segregated sessions.

This same outrage almost happened in 2013 at Hamilton College, too. But that proposed segregated “dialogue” never went forward, thanks to students affiliated with the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI).

In 2013, from the lavishly funded on-campus Days-Massolo Center (ironically founded “to embrace the importance of supporting a diverse and inclusive community”), an email was sent inviting students to participate in a “dialogue about internalized racism.” The “dialogue,” however, was for “people of color” only. Another dialogue for white students and faculty was promised for the following semester, and the program would have culminated in a non-segregated session.

AHI students, led by senior Dean Ball, got the administration to back down.