RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Harvard Graduate School of Education 14th Annual Alumni of Color Conference will be held from Thursday, March 3 to Saturday, March 5, 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The conference will be organized around three anti-American themes: Designing a New Blueprint for Democracy; Embracing the Mosaic as Muse; and Building Capacity for Sustainable Engagement. These three themes are defined in almost wholly negative ways. The conference organizers reject the melting pot concept, refuse to explicitly identify with non-violence (Gandhian satyagraha), and do not hesitate to depict the black minority as oppressed and dehumanized (presumably even that elite group that are Harvard alumni of color). The conference’s “search for new strategies” is thus being erected on negative premises, without any expressed love of country or one’s fellow man.

Designing a New Blueprint For Democracy. Guidelines for submissions states the following: “Our steering committee acknowledges that the foundation for democracy in this nation carries a legacy of intentional exclusion, oppression, disenfranchisement, and dehumanization that has disproportionately affected communities of color. The successful future of American democracy requires understanding and analyzing the origins and development of social and political systems designed to prevent persons of color from fully participating in the democratic process.”

Did it not occur to the organizers of this conference that the very existence of the conference with its attack on American democracy as “exclusionary” is a testimony to freedom of speech and inclusionary values? The bitter spirit in the conference’s call for a “new blueprint” sounds like an intense replay of the venom heard in the 1960s from the likes of H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. In the light of advances in civil rights since the 1950s, it seems to this writer that the black community should be capable of a more balanced view of history. The steering committee should remember that over 300,000 mostly white soldiers died in the Civil War to end slavery. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed to assure the right of participation in the political process to African-Americans. All kinds of black run groups have formed since 1865 to promote the advancement of people of color in various venues. Some of those “activists” have been extremely intemperate in their rhetoric, and educated persons of all ethnicities should be wise enough and kind enough to eschew their methods. The Armed Forces was finally desegregated after WWII. Schools throughout the South were desegregated, and the SATs were established to discover minority talent that might otherwise be hidden from view. Affirmative Action laws which increased black educational and employment opportunities came into effect, and are still in effect.

A Kansas University professor who used the n-word during a class discussion about race is on leave while the university investigates a discrimination complaint against her.

Thus begins an article about one Andrea Quenette, a thirty-three year-old assistant professor of communications, whose career has just been permanently blemished, if not ended, because a small group of KU graduate students decided to “expose” her use of language they allegedly found personally offensive.

The outrage occurred during a November 12 graduate class discussion of the relation between black undergraduate retention rates and systemic racism. Addressing the issue of systemic racism at KU, Quenette noted that although “I don’t experience racial discrimination so it’s hard for me to understand the challenges that other people face,” she nevertheless had to admit that “I haven’t seen those things happen, I haven’t seen that word spray-painted on our campus, I haven’t seen students physically assaulted.”

According to all concerned, no student objected openly to her politically incorrect language violation at the time. After class, however, the students (plus another graduate student who was not in the class) signed a letter calling for Quenette’s termination. I assume they are asking only for the termination of her employment, though I sincerely doubt any of them would hesitate to demand the termination of a professor’s life, if they thought such a demand would stand up in the kangaroo court of academic review. (Give it a few years, kids; we’ll get there yet.)

While students from Yale University in Connecticut to Claremont McKenna in California are protesting, demanding more cultural sensitivity, safe spaces and trigger warnings, some students at Princeton University in New Jersey are fighting back.

In response to a sit-in of the university president’s office by 200 members of the Black Justice League, over 1,300 members of the university community signed a petition to ensure that Princeton “maintains its commitment to free speech and open dialogue and condemns political correctness to the extent that it infringes upon those fundamental academic values.”
As signatures on the petition climbed, students formed the Princeton Open Campus Coalition. They wrote to Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber and asked to meet with him to discuss preserving the freedom of speech and civil debate that are the hallmarks of a classical education. Evan Draim, a Princeton senior and one of the group’s founders, told me in an email: “We hope that our peers at other colleges gain inspiration from what we are doing at Princeton.”

The Black Justice League’s demands include a dorm for those who want to celebrate black affinity; mandatory diversity training; and a requirement that students take a course on so-called marginalized peoples. They also want the renaming of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the removal of a mural of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, who graduated from Princeton in 1879 and who served as the university’s president from 1902 until 1910, formally segregated the federal workforce.
Campus protests are the latest in many students’ efforts to be protected from situations that they find difficult.

Eisgruber has agreed to set aside four rooms on campus for the use of students of different cultures, and to consult with faculty and the board of trustees on other demands.
Asanni York, a junior who helped organize the protests, said the university was not doing enough to address racial problems on campus, and that “black students on this campus feel uncomfortable every day.” York told me: “I’m focused less on how President Eisgruber resolved the sit-in and more on how campus will change in the next two semesters.”
Wilson was a racist by today’s standards, but he was hardly a reactionary figure in his time. As university president, he tried unsuccessfully to disband Princeton’s now-famous eating clubs on the grounds that they were elitist, and he pioneered the idea that Princeton should be a university “in the nation’s service.” As America’s president, Wilson substantially expanded the size and scope of the federal government including such institutions as the Federal Reserve Board.

Joining John Kerry and Bernie Sanders, Prince Charles became the latest to blame the Syrian civil war on global warming.

In a half-hour interview that aired tonight on Sky News, Prince Charles said man’s impact on the climate spurs violence and conflict, specifically the civil war in Syria.

“There is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land because water ran out, their crops failed,” Prince Charles said. “Increasingly, they came into the cities already full of Iraqi refugees from that horrible crisis. This combined created a very difficult situation.”

“It is bad enough now with refugees, but think what it will be like if we do not deal with the problem which is actually helping to cause it because the conflict often comes from movement of people as a result of not being able to survive,” he continued.

Of the many intellectual perversions currently taking root on college campuses, perhaps none is more contradictory to what should be one of higher education’s core values than the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barraged with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service to the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.

This is the tragic and inevitable result of decades of grievance-based victimism by self-designated groups who frame their rights and demands on identity politics. Those who see themselves as perennial victims also feel very comfortable, when they express their feelings of being oppressed, in projecting that same victimization outward on their oppressors.

Of course, the issue that most regularly energizes the moral narcissism of campus ideologues is the Israeli/Palestinian debate, and recent events have confirmed that, if anything, activists have been emboldened by the fact that their misbehavior is rarely addressed by administrations in the same way, for instance, that university officials are so quick to do when minority students feel “unsafe” on the University of Minnesota campus in a drive-by racist rant by an anonymous sociopath.

The rumpus over perceived racism at American universities, with its demands for “trigger warnings” against possibly hurtful statements, “safe spaces” to protect minority students against felt hostility, and “speech codes” which forbid statements that might offend self-styled victims, has turned into something of a circus. A black female official at Yale provoked demonstrations when she refused to intervene against possibly offensive Halloween costumes, even though no such offensive costume yet had appeared. A University of Kansas professor is suspended after simply using the “n-word” to characterize racism.

Prof. Andrea Quenette merely said, ““As a white woman I just never have seen the racism. It’s not like I see ‘n****r’ spray painted on walls.” Every student in her class signed a petition demanding her termination. It began last month at the University of Missouri, where racial slurs yelled at a black student leader from an unidentified man in a pickup truck led to a strike by the football team, campus demonstrations, and the resignations of the university’s two top officials–for insufficient deal in suppressing racism. The targets are university administrators and faculty who without exception are commited liberals and professed enemies of racism, but who are insufficiently vigilant against “casual, everyday slights and insensitivities,” as a US News commentary noted. It is one thing to revile the student protesters as “college crybullies,” as my friend Roger Kimball did recently at the Wall Street Journal, and another to talk about rope in the house of the hanged

Global warming and Keynesian theory are natural bedmates, each built on the notion that only harm can come of trusting market forces. As both aim to suppress individual freedom, those who fancy themselves best equipped to regulate the world’s affairs tolerate neither naysayers nor contradictory evidence.
Let me state at the start where this is heading, since it may not be apparent from the way it begins. Two of the great intellectual disasters of our age are Keynesian economics and anthropogenic global warming (AGW). For both there is a theory which most of the specialists in each area take to be an unshakeable truth. For Keynesians, it is the belief that aggregate demand is the single most important factor determining the level of output and employment. For those who accept AGW, there is the so-called “settled science” that greenhouse gases will over the next half-century lead to an upwards movement in global temperatures with a series of ecological calamities to follow.

Both theories have had a single diagram that has provided the conceptual framework on which millions have built their understanding of what’s involved. In economics, it has been what is known as the Keynesian-cross diagram that relates aggregate demand to the level of current production. For AGW it has been what has become known as “the hockey stick”, which shows temperatures more or less flat for the past thousand years until the beginning of the twentieth century, after which they rise dramatically with no peak in sight.

More “Syrian doctors” showing up on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Five more “Syrians” have showed up at the border crossing at Laredo:

Five more Syrians have been stopped at a Laredo port of entry on Friday. This brings the total number of Syrians seeking to enter the US through our city this week up to 13.

According to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security, five Syrian nationals presented themselves at the Gateway to the Americas Bridge. A family consisting of a man, woman and child, and two other men were taken into custody by Customs and Border Protection — a standard procedure.

The statement reads that CBP “checked their identities against numerous law enforcement and national security related databases. Records checks revealed no derogatory information about the individuals. CBP turned them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for further processing and placement in an ICE facility.”

As you may recall, a group of eight Syrians were also taken by CBP at a Laredo port of entry on Tuesday.

I didn’t recall, but hey — when the president of the United States throws open the country’s borders, leaving it essentially defenseless in the face of a growing Islamic threat — who’s counting?

Further — last time I checked a map it showed a wide ocean between “Syria” and America, which means these “migrants” didn’t walk, unless they can walk on water. So who’s paying for this?

Sometimes a mother has to take control.

When your kids are coming home on the bus from school every day accompanied by the blaring of emergency vehicle sirens, when stabbings, rammings and shootings have become a regular occurrence in the one quarter mile stretch of highway directly outside your community, when a majority of the children are suffering from some version of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and your neighbors have become numb to the grotesque situation, a mother has to act.

And that is why a mild-mannered, piano lesson-giving mother of five from the suburb of Alon Shvut, in the Gush Etzion neighborhood of southern Jerusalem, acted.

Rivka Epstein Hattin decided it was time for the mothers to unite.

Hattin began calling, emailing and texting friends and neighbors, many of whom have been struggling to find an answer which will stop the terrorism making their children’s lives miserable.

Kay Wilson Kay Wilson is a British-born Israeli tour guide, jazz musician and cartoonist. She is the survivor of a brutal terror attack that occurred while she was guiding in December 2010. Since the attack, she is in a demand as a motivational speaker and also speaks to audiences on issues of human rights and justice for victims of terrorism. She is a lecturer for StandWithUs, OneFamily Together, MDA and is registered at the Israel Speakers’ Agency.

“While the blood of innocents was being mopped up off a theater floor in France, a video titled, “A father and son have the most precious conversation,” goes viral. In the clip the boy tells his father, “We should leave Paris because Les Mechants (the villains) have guns and they will come to shoot us.” The father reassures his son that although the villains have guns, they (the French) have flowers and candles. “Do the flowers and candles protect us?” asks the son. When the father answers in the affirmative, the boy protests, “but flowers don’t do anything!” He is given a reassuring hug by his father and the clip is concluded by the interviewer asking the child if he “feels better,” to which the boy nods and breaks into a smile.

This video was “shared” and “liked” millions of times. Indeed, who can fail to be moved by Western virtues of life over death, culture over barbarity and goodness over evil? In an act of defiance, civilized people who refuse to hate, expel the stench of murder and savagery with fragrant flowers and scented candles, because civilized people believe that hate “will give the terrorists what they want.”