http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/civilization-and-the-knockout-game/ The Jewish part of Crown Heights is a narrow island a handful of blocks in length and width. Walk one block out of the way and you’re suddenly in a dangerous neighborhood The names, Empire Boulevard, President Street, Eastern Parkway, Montgomery Street, reflect an old vanished grandeur. The men in top hats and tails […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/state-dept-undermines-us-doctrine/?print=1 On Monday, the State Department called on China to withdraw the rules it imposed when announcing its East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone. “The fact that China’s announcement has caused confusion and increased the risk of accidents only further underscores the validity of concerns and the need for China to rescind the procedures,” […]
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/12/03/common-core-assignment-makes-parents-identify-whether-they-are-liberal-or-conservative/?print=1
Common Core Assignment Makes Parents Identify Whether They Are ‘Liberal’ or ‘Conservative’
AND…creepier.
An assignment sent home from an Oak Forest, IL high school government class is raising eyebrows among parents who are shocked by the questionnaire they and their children are required to fill out. The questionnaire (below) has the parents identify their positions on a number of highly-charged issues, and then places them on a “political spectrum”.
The survey is part of Oak Forest High School’s Common Core curriculum, which according to the school district’s website is to …”provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them.”
There is a screenshot of the questionnaire at the link, as well as the lesson’s purported objectives, all of which could ostensibly be taught without hitting the parents with what looks like a political party fundraising survey.
It’s not a stretch to believe that the agenda here from the Common Core overlords is insidiously political when you remember that these are the people who used sentences like “Government officials’ commands must be obeyed by all” in an English lesson.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/chinese-power-play/
China’s establishment of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over most of the East China Sea on November 23 erases any doubt about the international community and the U.S.’s long-standing efforts to persuade China to become a “stakeholder” in the international order. These efforts have failed at a major juncture of what constitutes international order: the right of innocent passage through international waters and airspace.
China has been contesting territorial claims of various of its neighbors in the South and East China Seas for years now — with Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan, to name a few. But China’s newly declared ADIZ should not be confused with an attempt to increase security. It is, rather, a power play aimed at establishing the subordination of neighboring states, extending China’s territorial reach in other disputed areas, and the narrowing of legitimate South Korean and Japanese Air Defense Identification Zones which are now intersected by China’s, and about which no previous dispute existed.
The contest with Japan over the Senkaku Islands, located in the East China Sea, is a proximate cause of China’s most recent action. The newly announced Chinese Air Defense Identification Zone is a polygonal shape that extends eastwards from a point north of Shanghai deep into the East China Sea and parallels the Chinese coast at a distance of about 400 miles closing back toward the mainland just north of Taiwan. China will require aircraft that pass through this zone to identify themselves or face what government spokesman Qin Gang said was “an appropriate response according to the different circumstances and the threat level that it might face.” This is a not-so-veiled warning that China may use military force to assert its claim. The Chinese have no legal basis to make this demand of aircraft that transit international waters. It is as though the U.S. were to extend the limit of North American airspace by several hundred miles and demand that aircraft — including commercial aviation — that pass through it identify themselves or risk being forced to land, or more dire consequences.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/grooming_gangs_and_sharia.html Muslims groups around the world are crying Islamophobia and playing the victim card as horrific Islamic-motivated crimes, such as grooming and rape-gangs, rage on with impunity throughout the Western world, especially in Europe. Rape or grooming gangs, which are almost entirely Muslim, are committing a crime that is religiously mandated in Islamic doctrine. Muslim […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/365404/print Bob Fu’s new book, God’s Double Agent, tells of his fight for Christians’ freedom in China. Pondering the plight of the people of China, one’s head can start spinning. The stories of oppression — including imprisonment and executions; citizens simply “disappearing”; dissidents undergoing torture, beatings, and intimidation; and absolute control of just about every aspect of everyday life — seem […]
“But Mr. Hannan shouldn’t be faulted for his optimism—particularly given the gravity of his book’s central argument: that the survival of democratic self-governance, individual rights and economic freedom depends largely on the choices made today by the world’s English-speaking cousins.’
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303789604579200063693919116?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecondBucket
I am reading this wonderful book…Daniel Hannan could write about 50 ways of cooking kale and it would be delightful….rsk
Years ago, when I was an American student in Edinburgh, I had a long conversation about British foreign affairs with another student—an Italian—and remember finding it slightly amusing that he kept referring to the British as “your cousins.” I had never thought much about the political and cultural ties binding the U.S. and Great Britain and was at the time more keenly aware of the differences between the two peoples than of their essential sameness. But as Daniel Hannan observes in “Inventing Freedom,” his history of the principles and institutions that have defined English-speaking nations, non-English speakers much oftener think of the U.S. and Britain as a single entity than as two countries. When French political commentators and European Union officials complain about “Anglo-Saxon” values—liberalized labor markets, low taxes—they are coming closer to the truth than Americans and Britons typically realize.
Mr. Hannan’s book is more than intellectual history; it’s also an argument and a plea. The principles of representative democracy, individual liberty and property rights aren’t the products of some general European phenomenon called “capitalism,” he says, and any belief that they are owes more to Karl Marx than to the historical record. These principles originated in pre-Norman England, were realized fully in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and spread as English speakers left the British Isles to colonize the New World, India, East Asia and Australia.
Maybe Eric Schmidt can get Merrill Newman out of Pyongyang. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304854804579236150756070232?mod=Opinion_newsreel_4 Thinking of taking a holiday in forbidden North Korea so that you can one-up your friends who spent two weeks in exotic Bhutan? The best advice: Don’t. That’s a lesson being learned the hard way by Merrill Newman, a retired executive from California who […]
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303670804579234550517363202?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
If Ronald Reagan was not a conservative, there is no modern American conservatism. But if Yuval Levin’s provocative new book, “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right,” is correct, Reagan was anything but a conservative on what Mr. Levin regards as the most fundamental division between left and right—Burke’s and Paine’s rival conceptions of political change.
In his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine famously proclaimed that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Burke, whom Mr. Levin regards as the progenitor of conservatism, saw the future as inextricably linked to the past and present. Abrupt or revolutionary change begins with social destruction and ends in self-destruction. Change that improves the world is rooted in respect for the tacit wisdom of the present. A true patriot and wise politician, Burke wrote, “always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country,” a thought that Mr. Levin summarizes as “we do not have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
This brings us to Ronald Reagan, whose attitude toward change was more like Paine’s than Burke’s. Reagan often quoted Paine’s “we have it in our power” affirmation and did so in one of the most systematic statements of his creed—his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican convention.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/dec/3/obamacare-lotteryand-you-lose-sucker/ It is becoming increasingly obvious that some Americans will benefit from Obamacare, but most of us will lose our doctors, our hospitals, in fact our entire heath care plans because, in horseplayer parlance, there’s a sucker born every minute, and suckers are us! We gambled on the wrong man. The wrong man came up […]
