http://swtotd.blogspot.com/
Yesterday was “National Equal Pay Day,” one of those silly appellations that are applied to an increasing number of otherwise blameless days. In this case, responsibility goes to the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE). The concern is the gap between pay for women and that of men for “similar” work. Besides the difficulty in defining “similar,” there are also the questions of performance, risks and hours worked that any employer must consider when thinking about pay. Nevertheless, the commemoration of days such as this are celebrated more for the political good they afford needy politicians than for the betterment of society.
Democrats up for re-election are particularly needy as they face what could be a gray November. The economy is limping along. ObamaCare may have signed up 7.1 million people, but 6 million lost coverage in the process, so net sign-ups are not very impressive. (As an aside, it would be interesting to know what we taxpayers spent in software and advertising expenses to sign up a net of 1.1 million people.) Overseas, we have created a mess, from the Middle East to Ukraine to the East China Sea. We have apparently abandoned the principles of the Monroe Doctrine. “Without the United States in the lead,” as Victor Davis Hanson wrote recently, “the world cannot remain the world as we have known it since 1946.” Scandals have rocked this Administration, bringing comparisons of “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” Obama to “I’m not a crook” Nixon.
So what is Mr. Obama to do? As they face re-election, no candidate wants him by their side. So the President resorts to familiar and proven issues, those that poll well and serve to fire-up Democrats’ base – same-sex marriage, pre-school, child care, family leave and pay equity.
The original Equal Pay Act was signed into law in 1963 by President Kennedy, but that proved inadequate to politicians who consider having to pay for birth control to be a violation of a woman’s rights. So in 1996 “National Equal Pay Day” was born. It comes on a Tuesday, because it represents how far into the work week women must work in the next week to earn what men made the previous week. Yesterday, Mr. Obama signed an executive order barring federal contractors from penalizing employees who discuss their compensation. (Will that EO apply to union leaders from docking a member who complains about using his dues to pay for politicians antithetical to his beliefs?) The President also signed a memorandum that will require contractors to release salary summary reports broken down by race and gender. Quality of work performed, to this White House, is obviously of less importance than measurements of equality.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304640104579487444112949138?mod=Opinion_newsreel_3
Thousands of Arabs are Dying in Syria and South Sudan. Where’s the Outrage on behalf of those truly suffering?
Provoked by the predictable collapse of the farcical negotiations forced by Secretary of State John Kerry on the Palestinians and the Israelis, I wish to make a confession: I have no sympathy—none—for the Palestinians. Furthermore, I do not believe they deserve any.
This, of course, puts me at daggers drawn with the enlightened opinion that goes forth from the familiar triumvirate of the universities, the mainstream media and the entertainment industry. For everyone in that world is so busy weeping over the allegedly incomparable sufferings of the Palestinians that hardly a tear is left for the tribulations of other peoples. And so all-consuming is the universal rage over the supposedly monumental injustice that has been done to the Palestinians that virtually no indignation is available for any other claimant to unwarranted mistreatment.
In my unenlightened opinion, this picture of the Palestinian plight is nothing short of grotesquely disproportionate. Let me leave aside the Palestinians who live in Israel as Israeli citizens and who enjoy the same political rights as Israeli Jews (which is far more than can be said of Palestinians who live in any Arab country), and let me concentrate on those living under Israeli occupation on the West Bank.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304512504579491773676739210?mg=reno64-wsj
The annals of academic political submission have a new honoree in the form of Brandeis president Frederick Lawrence, who on Tuesday revoked the honorary doctorate the university planned to confer on Ayaan Hirsi Ali at its graduation.
By choosing to recognize Ms. Hirsi Ali, an advocate for women and girls in Muslim societies, Mr. Lawrence and his trustees perhaps figured they run the school. Student and faculty activists and pressure groups like the Council of American-Islamic Relations corrected that misimpression in eight days.
In an unsigned statement (we’d also hide if we were Mr. Lawrence), Brandeis called Ms. Hirsi Ali “compelling” but added, “That said, we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values. For all concerned, we regret that we were not aware of these statements earlier.”
Ms. Hirsi Ali is a well known controversialist and lives under death threats because she does not conceal her convictions, especially about the ties between violence and fundamentalist Islamism. If Ms. Hirsi Ali’s critics support the practices she has either experienced or dedicated her life to erasing, such as forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honor killings, or Shariah Law, then they should say so.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14817#.U0ZfbFeCUtV
Do not blame the Islamist students for what happened at Brandeis University. In winning the withdrawal of Ayaan Hirsi Ali from an honorary degree they were only doing what comes naturally – boycotting. But where was the chivalry from Jewish students, administrators and faculty?
Was there no counter-protest? Was there no one to come to the aid of a lady in distress, or for a First Amendment in jeopardy?
We only know that once again Jews in America took it on the chin. They did not fight back.
A thug who beat up a Jewish kid in Brooklyn said he did so for no reason except that “Jews are cowards.”
We know Israel. So we know that’s not the truth. Right, kids?
But that’s the reputation around these parts, and your inaction at Brandeis only makes it worse.
http://www.barenakedislam.com/2014/04/09/ayann-hirsi-ali-hits-back-at-brandeis-university/
Ayaan Hirsi Ali released the following statement in response to Brandeis University’s sudden decision to rescind its offer of an honorary degree.
See Ayaan tonight on The Kelly File on FOX News at 9PM EST
Breitbart “Yesterday Brandeis University decided to withdraw an honorary degree they were to confer upon me next month during their Commencement exercises. I wish to dissociate myself from the university’s statement, which implies that I was in any way consulted about this decision. On the contrary, I was completely shocked when President Frederick Lawrence called me—just a few hours before issuing a public statement—to say that such a decision had been made.
“When Brandeis approached me with the offer of an honorary degree, I accepted partly because of the institution’s distinguished history; it was founded in 1948, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, as a co-educational, nonsectarian university at a time when many American universities still imposed rigid admission quotas on Jewish students. I assumed that Brandeis intended to honor me for my work as a defender of the rights of women against abuses that are often religious in origin. For over a decade, I have spoken out against such practices as female genital mutilation, so-called ‘honor killings,’ and applications of Sharia Law that justify such forms of domestic abuse as wife beating or child beating. Part of my work has been to question the role of Islam in legitimizing such abhorrent practices. So I was not surprised when my usual critics, notably the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), protested against my being honored in this way.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/seeking-nuclear-roadmaps?f=puball
For more than the past two decades, the United States has adopted a conventional wisdom that our nuclear deterrent enterprise was not as important as it was during the Cold War. As USAF General Garret Harencak has correctly argued, we went on both a procurement and philosophical holiday after the breakup of the Soviet Union. We failed to replace and sustain key elements in our nuclear deterrent force, and we neglected to put together a coherent and well thought out framework for going forward with our nuclear deterrent in a different but still challenging world.
Some former high ranking defense officials argued nuclear deterrence no longer mattered. Others said we could substitute conventional weaponry for our nuclear deterrent, while others argued to slash spending for our deterrent way below levels needed to sustain even minimum force levels. We did what Washington excels at-we kicked the can down the road year after year.
Particularly troubling has been the problems facing the National Nuclear Security Administration which handles the nation’s nuclear labs, our warhead and nuclear material production facilities and the dismantlement of weapons and their storage and safety.
Although nominated in September 2013, the chosen new Director of NNSA, Lt Gen Frank Klotz (Ret) has not been approved by the full Senate and thus NNSA does not have the long term leadership it needs to get its work done correctly. NNSA has been left without its top two administrators for far too long. In addition, retirements are growing (warned about since at least the Chiles Commission report) yet no serious recruiting has been undertaken at the lower ranks. At some point this becomes unsustainable.
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/04/enemies-create/
The shrieking, howling, shout-you-down left likes to present itself as motivated only by the yearning to right injustice and make life more fair for all. ‘Fair’, especially, for second-raters whose instinct is to smash what they could never build themselves
Being on the left is in part a fashion statement for our elites so it’s interesting to see how this is coming back to bite amongst the techno geeks in San Francisco. This really is a story about the cultural mayhem overtaking the US where once upon a time achievement was actually admired. Kevin Rose has been a successful funder of start-ups so now he finds that anti-tech protesters are telling Kevin Rose’s neighbors that he’s A “parasite”. Here’s the leaflet being distributed outside his home:
ape letter
Kevin is, of course, amongst the one percent — the point-one percent — but that is the nature of achievement. It brings its rewards, and if he is going to be drinking coffee someone else will have to serve it to him. What Kevin Rose does is demonstrate most definitively that some people are actually better at things, smarter, more gifted, harder-working. Others are less so of each, and possibly all of these, and therefore do not receive the material and social rewards that seem to accrue to Kevin.
Envy, resentment, dissatisfaction all accrue instead, and those sentiments represent the majority of Obama’s constituency. You can tell those people all you like that their own good fortune relative to every past civilisation is a result of the efforts of Kevin Rose and those like him but they could not care less. They wish only to destroy not what they cannot have themselves, but what they cannot be themselves. It is an existential recognition that others are better than them and, therefore, the promise of fairness and equality is exposed, so far as they are concerned, in all its emptiness. These are people of the deepest hatreds. Nothing can be done to make those hatreds go away.
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2014/04/climate-catastrophism-kiddies/
Get ’em young and fill their heads with warmist propaganda — that seems to the unofficial motto of Britain’s education establishment, which has just been warned by the Home Secretary that peddling propaganda as fact is a punishable offence
Alarming climate and eco-activist messages are saturating the British school system, according to a report by noted UK bloggers Andrew Montford and John Shade. On the same day of the report’s publication, April 8, the response of UK Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove was to warn teachers they are breaking the law if they fail to provide balanced coverage of climate change and similar issues.
The affair suggests a similar independent inquiry into “climate teaching” in Australian schools would be worthwhile. Anecdotal accounts of brainwashing by activists masquerading as teachers in our primary and secondary schools are legion.
Montford runs the Bishop Hill climate blog and authored the earlier forensic study, The Hockey Stick Illusion. Shade is a retired statistician and physicist who focuses on climate indoctrination in schools worldwide. The report was sponsored by The Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Gove’s spokesman said, “The Secretary of State read this report with concern. Ministers are clear that the new national curriculum must equip young people with the core knowledge they need to understand the weather, climate, the earth’s atmosphere, physical geography and the interaction between nature and the environment.
“That means in both science and geography, pupils must learn the facts and processes which underpin public discussion of climate change. They must be equipped with the scientific knowledge to make their own judgments about political responses. They must not be directed towards a particular campaigning agenda.
“Schools should not teach that a particular political or ideological point of view is right – indeed it is against the law for them to do so. Great care should be exercised to make sure information provided to students is scientifically rigorous. It is important that any material used in the classroom is rooted in science, not driven by the aims of a campaign.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/gender-gap-fraud-backfires-on-obama/print/
Yesterday, a president apparently oblivious to his own hypocrisy teamed up with a Democratic Party eager to push the lie repeated often enough it becomes the truth.
On the progressive-labeled ”National Equal Pay Day,” that ostensibly represents the additional time it takes women to earn the same amount of money men made the previous year, Obama signed an executive order mandating that federal contractors publish wage data by gender and race to ensure they are in compliance with already existing equal pay laws. The order also prohibits employers from retaliating against workers who divulge their salaries to their fellow workers.
Senior White House advisor Valerie Jarrett inadvertently revealed what this order was really all about in an appearance on MSNBC. “Employers also should welcome these new tools that they’ll have available so they can avoid lawsuits, because they’ll have the statistics to be able to correct pay discrepancies before it ever gets to litigation,” Jarrett said.
One is left to wonder how many man-hours employers will be forced to waste compiling data to serve their government masters, despite the reality wage discrimination has been banned by law since 1963, and the so-called wage gap that engendered the order has been thoroughly debunked.
Nonetheless, in keeping with his fellow Democrats, Obama was more than willing to promote the same lie he did during his State of the Union address. “Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns,” he declared. “For African American women, Latinas, it’s even less. And in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-rise-of-fakectivism/print/
What do the forced departure of Brendan Eich from Mozilla and #CancelColbert have in common? They are both examples of Fakectivism.
Fakectivism is social media activism by small numbers of people that is integrated into the news cycle because it matches the media’s political agenda.
Every Tea Party member knows that media coverage of actual protests is unequal. Twenty students, most of them volunteers at an environmental non-profit, protesting Keystone will get media coverage that a thousand Tea Party members protesting ObamaCare won’t receive.
The same is true of online protests.
Many of the real life protests covered by the media are fake. For example, unions hire non-union protesters to protest on their behalf, a fact that the media organizations covering the protests rarely point out. (That same privilege wouldn’t be extended to Tea Party members who hired professional protesters to yell at the cameras for them.) Other protests pretend to be grass roots when they actually consist of members or even paid employees of a single organization.
Fakectivism online multiplies the problems with media coverage of left-wing activism by completely distorting the number of people participating in a protest and their credibility in representing anyone except themselves.
In real life protests, the media routinely reported higher turnout for left-wing protests and lower turnout for conservative protests. Online, Fakectivism dispenses with head counts. If it’s a trending topic, then it’s news. And sometimes it’s news, even if it isn’t.
Fakectivism begins with left-wing agitprop sites selectively collecting tweets in support or against something. The handful of tweets are described in collective terms as “The Internet” being outraged about something. The use of the collective “Internet” is a staple of Fakectivism because it conflates a manufactured story with the opinions of billions of people.
Successful Fakectivism moves up the ladder to higher end left-wing websites searching for teachable controversies. These websites have enough status that they are monitored by producers and editors from the mainstream media looking for stories.
