NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Omicron and On and On… Another Covid variant, another federal effort to combat it. James Freeman

Posted By on December 15th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-and-on-and-on-11639523755?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The chair of the South African Medical Association, who helped alert the world to Covid’s Omicron variant, is still trying to persuade the British government not to panic about it. Dr. Angelique Coetzee writes this week in the Daily Mail:

As a general practitioner for more than 33 years, I am one of the foot soldiers who sees patients first. We clinicians deal day-to-day with real people, not statistical projections, and I can reassure you that the symptoms presenting in those with Omicron are very, very mild compared with those we see with the far more dangerous Delta variant…
In the part of South Africa where I work, there haven’t been many patients admitted to hospital with Omicron, and most have been treated at home, using anti-inflammatories, such as ibuprofen, and low doses of cortisone.
Bear in mind, too, that most of those who contract Omicron here are unvaccinated (only 26 per cent of South Africans are fully vaccinated). While this is certainly not an argument against vaccination — I cannot stress the importance of that enough — it’s reassuring to know that even unprotected bodies fight off this variant much more easily than Delta. Current data indicates that the majority of cases admitted to ICUs are unvaccinated people.

Meanwhile in Washington, government medical authorities are sounding especially fearful again. The Washington Post’s Lena Sun, Joel Achenbach, Laurie McGinley and Tyler Pager report today:

Top federal health officials warned in a briefing Tuesday morning that the omicron variant is rapidly spreading in the United States and could peak in a massive wave of infections as soon as January, according to new modeling from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

New York Schools With de Blasio Out of the Way Mayor-elect Eric Adams makes a promising choice to run New York City’s public education system. Jason Riley

Posted By on December 15th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-schools-without-de-blasio-education-gap-chancellor-banks-charter-mayor-adams-11639518269?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

New York’s departing mayor, Bill de Blasio, has spent eight years at loggerheads with law enforcement and school reformers. When he wasn’t siding with Black Lives Matter demonstrators at antipolice protests, the mayor was busy thwarting the expansion of high-performing charter schools, attacking gifted-and-talented middle-school programs and denouncing public high schools that admit students based on a standardized test score.

This was all done in the name of racial equity, but New Yorkers apparently have tired of wokeness-driven governance. Last month, voters opted to replace Mr. de Blasio with a former police officer, Eric Adams, who in turn has tapped education innovator David Banks to be the city’s next schools chancellor. Mr. Banks is a former teacher and principal who founded the six-school Eagle Academy network, which serves low-income black and Hispanic boys in New York City and Newark, N.J. Eagle Academy is a network of public schools that, like charter schools, operates mostly outside the strictures of the traditional public-school system, which Mr. Banks believes has long ill-served minority communities.

Unlike Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Banks has not called for dumbing down the admissions standards of the city’s elite public high schools to produce more racial balance. He wants to expand gifted-and-talented programs rather than phase them out. He is refreshingly outspoken about the city’s bloated and unaccountable school bureaucracy, which operates as though public education were, first and foremost, a jobs program for adults. That 65% of black and Hispanic students in New York never reach proficiency on standardized tests is “a betrayal” of those kids, he said last week, joking that “if everybody in the Department of Education went home and all the kids went to school, you could get those same results.” Or maybe he wasn’t joking.

The United Federation of Teachers, the city’s 800-pound public-education gorilla, did not endorse Mr. Adams in the Democratic primary. Michael Mulgrew, the UFT’s president, was conspicuously absent from the news conference announcing Mr. Banks’s appointment. That chilly reception from the teachers union is one reason education reformers tell me they are cautiously optimistic about the Adams administration. One early test of the new mayor’s resolve will be how hard he fights to lift the cap on charter schools in the city, where no new ones can open even though more than 163,000 children are on waiting lists, according to the school-choice advocacy group StudentsFirstNY.

A related test will be whether Mr. Adams can find locations for any new charter schools that get approved. In New York, where space is at a premium, charter schools often seek to co-locate in buildings where traditional public schools are operating below capacity. Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, was a champion of charters and accelerated their expansion though this co-location process. One of the ways that Mr. de Blasio kept charter growth in check was by denying operators space in underused public-school buildings. A 2018 report by the Manhattan Institute noted that “in the last five years of the Bloomberg administration, 150 co-locations were approved, an average of 30 per year. In the first five years of the de Blasio administration, 59 co-locations were approved, an average of 12 per year.”

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Obsessed’ Biden administration put settlements on par with Iran nukes Blinken insisted on the devotion of equal time to Iran and settlements in his meeting with Gantz. By Lahav Harkov

Posted By on December 15th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/obsessed-biden-administration-put-settlements-on-par-with-iran-nukes-688721

The Biden administration has put the issue of settlements on the same level as the Iranian nuclear threat in its discussions with Israeli officials, multiple Israeli diplomatic sources said in recent days.

“The Americans bring up ‘settler violence’ all the time, obsessively,” a senior diplomatic source in Jerusalem lamented.

When Defense Minister Benny Gantz was in Washington last week to implore the Americans to take a tougher stance against the Iranian nuclear threat, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted they devote equal time to discussing settlements as they did to Iran, which Israeli diplomatic sources found baffling.

Blinken told Gantz that the Israeli government’s settlement activity is “destroying the chance of a two-state solution.”

Another Israeli source involved in Gantz’s visit to Washington said the description of the meeting is “inaccurate and the meeting with the secretary of state was friendly and mostly dealt with the Iranian matter.

“Other topics, such as the Palestinian issue, were discussed but were not the focus of the meeting,” the source added. 

Gantz’s meetings with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin went more smoothly, the sources said. US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is coming to Israel next Wednesday to discuss Iran.

Talk of the American “obsession” came after Public Security Minister Omer Bar Lev came under fire from Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and others on the Right for speaking of settler violence with Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, making no mention of Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

Bar Lev tweeted a photo of his meeting with Nuland, explaining that she was “interested, among other things, in settler violence and a way to reduce regional tensions and strengthen the Palestinian Authority.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Build Back Better Lie Revealed: $5 Tril Isn’t ‘Zero’

Posted By on December 15th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/15/bidens-build-back-better-lie-revealed-5-tril-isnt-zero/

President Joe Biden and other Democrats have smugly responded “zero” or “nothing” when asked what the massive Build Back Better plan will ultimately cost. Not to be rude, but this is an outright lie, as a new government analysis clearly shows.

“My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars,” Biden tweeted on Sept. 25 from his White House account. “Instead of wasting money on tax breaks, loopholes and tax evasion for big corporations and the wealthy, we can make a once-in-a-generation investment in working America. And it adds zero dollars to the national debt.”

In the ensuing weeks, that lie got repeated by others. That includes White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who told gullible leftists in the mainstream media that the bill would cost nothing, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who added the novel twist that the massive bill is “fully paid for.”

Since the lie went out over official social media, it wasn’t a slip of the tongue or the accidental hyperbole of a man in obvious age-related mental decline. It was an official White House policy statement, one that makes Biden’s whole administration look profoundly foolish, dishonest and deceitful.

No person with any schooling in basic math, economics, statistics or, alternatively, simply having plain common sense, would believe that spending trillions of dollars on nonproductive programs would actually result in zero net costs without massive added tax hikes. It’s simply not real.

That’s where the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) enters the picture. As it turns out, estimates for Biden’s plan from the CBO, the nonpartisan congressional think tank that officially “scores” new legislation for what it would cost the U.S. Treasury, show it would be the largest spending program ever undertaken by the U.S. And no, its costs aren’t zero.

The CBO concludes that the Build Back Better bonanza would add $3 trillion to U.S. deficits by 2031, an amount most would agree is a bit north of “zero.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Compendium Of Hate Crime Hoaxes: Jussie Smollett’s Was Just The Tip Of The Iceberg Armando Simón

Posted By on December 15th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/14/a-compendium-of-hate-crime-hoaxes-jussie-smolletts-was-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/

There are opinions, announcements and news events that the media hivemind suppresses through news blackouts believing that if a news event is not reported then it is not news, and people will not know, similar to the philosophical conundrum of, if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear, has it made a noise? One of these taboo topics is hate crime hoaxes, since it jars with the media hivemind’s goal of convincing people, particularly blacks, of the idea of “systemic racism” in our society as a means of promoting a race war and peddling CRT.

Over recent years, I have cataloged a large number of hate crime hoaxes involving Muslims, gays, and blacks (I have also compiled a long list of fraudulent accusations of rape, but that is a topic for another time). The reason I have done so stems from my research background: I prefer data (i.e., facts) as opposed to verbosity. If I write an eloquent essay stating that hoaxes are common, a leftist can counter with an equally eloquent essay stating that they are rare (this has occurred in other topics with sophists writing that the media hivemind is impartial and that there is no censorship in universities). But, if I cite facts, a leftist’s verbal diarrhea is ineffective.

Here, then, are some of the participants in the Oppression Olympics:

At Emory University, a black employee vandalized vending machines and wrote racist graffiti and swastikas before being discovered. The university did not disclose the race of the employee.

A black woman pretended to be a 6-foot-tall white Klansman and sent death threats to her neighbors.

A black student at East Carolina University posted a racist invitation to a fraternity party that read, “No blacks.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Avigdor Lieberman’s crass admonition to a sector decimated by COVID closures Ruthie Blum

Posted By on December 15th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/avigdor-liebermans-crass-admonition-to-a-sector-decimated-by-covid-closures/

Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman is famous for many things, but tact isn’t one of them. And this week, he outdid himself, displaying a marked lack of sympathy for all the people in one of the country’s key industries—tourism.

It’s pretty rich, so to speak, for the honcho charged with safeguarding and growing the economy to be dismissive of such an instrumental sector. Then again, the former Moldovan’s imitation of Kremlin-like power-wielding is as solid as his rejection of Soviet-style fiscal policies.

Though he subsequently claimed to regret his “wording,” what Lieberman had said during Sunday’s Cabinet meeting was that anyone in the tourism business affected by what is emerging as a new set of draconian coronavirus restrictions—due to panic over the Omicron variant of COVID-19—should “find another job.”

This was after announcing that the government wouldn’t be compensating them for their plight, which he asserted wasn’t going to be ending any time soon. Tough luck.

The outcry that ensued was understandable. Even Israelis who generally oppose nanny-state politics were incensed, mainly because it is the government that decided to close the borders to non-citizens. It is the government as well that keeps coming up with plans—often silly, ineffective or unenforceable—to prevent the spread of what it is incomprehensibly referring to as a “fifth wave” of the pandemic.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Dissident Voice at Cornell By George Leef

Posted By on December 14th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-dissident-voice-at-cornell/?itm_source=parsely-api

The administration at Cornell University has gone absolutely mad with its “antiracism” crusade. Critical race theory education becomes mandatory, and it even appears to think it can compel people to accept the curriculum.

Law professor Bill Jacobson is speaking out against this astounding perversion of academic values. He explains what has been going on at Cornell in this Legal Insurrection article:

Here is a slice from his statement in opposition to the administration’s reeducation mandates:

Proposal F starts with the compulsion that “Faculty must understand structural racism and the forces of systemic bias and privilege” (emphasis added). Later, Proposal F “requires” that faculty accept that “structural racism, colonialism, and injustice, and their current manifestations have a historical and relational basis.” That CRT worldview, which in its current incarnation is often misleadingly referred to as “antiracism,” is off the table for debate under this proposal. Rather, CRT becomes the official ideology of the University. The rest of the proposal dictates how that mandate will be implemented, including dictating “a framework for interacting with other faculty, with students, with members of the staff, and the broader community” with the faculty “educational requirement . . . to support the faculty in this effort.” Why such compulsion? This campus already is awash in CRT-driven programs, courses, events, workshops, and faculty and student activism, and the separately proposed Center will further the breadth of CRT-based education.

If I were a Cornell grad, I’d let the school know that I would never donate another dollar to them and would try to convince as many Cornellians that the place is no longer worth supporting.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

There Is No ‘Conservative Case for CRT’ By Nate Hochman

Posted By on December 14th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/there-is-no-conservative-case-for-crt/

The Washington Post published a piece this morning by contributing columnist Gary Abernathy, ostensibly one of the Post’s right-leaning voices, arguing that “there’s a lot for conservatives to embrace in critical race theory.” It’s the latest in the budding subgenre of “the conservative case for [insert X left-wing policy here] think pieces: “the conservative case for the Democratic Party,” “the conservative case for Roe v. Wade,” “the conservative case for ditching the Electoral College,” and so on. But it is in a league of its own when it comes to the sheer absurdity of its line of argument, which operates off of a surprisingly shallow understanding of both CRT and conservatism. (Note: The Post capitalizes “white” and “black”; quotations from Abernathy here will duplicate this style for the sake of accuracy in quoting, not to endorse it.)

Abernathy argues that “conservatives should consider that maybe [the Left] has a point” about CRT because “many conservatives pride themselves on being grounded in logic rather than emotion,” and “logic dictates that something as historically obvious as the impact of slave labor on the success of our nation should be acknowledged and more comprehensively taught, along with the fact that our legal, governmental and economic institutions were crafted, intentionally or otherwise, to favor White people.” He does not elaborate on which of today’s American institutions unfairly favor whites, or by what standard he’s judging the unfair privileges they bestow. He simply asserts that “logic dictates” it is so.

Certainly, many on the left would agree with that assessment. But many on the right don’t; conservatives tend to be skeptical of claims that disparate outcomes — the social-justice Left’s favorite metric to cite as proof of discrimination — are inherent evidence of injustice. Abernathy frames his argument as addressed to the Right, but makes no attempt to actually engage with these conservative critiques of CRT. Nor does he even make any reference to basic conservative principles beyond the fact that “many conservatives pride themselves on being grounded in logic rather than emotion.” In other words, it’s not entirely clear why Abernathy thinks conservatives should support CRT, beyond the fact that he wants them to.

There are many reasons to object to CRT from a conservative perspective. It is a corrosive racialist ideology that undermines American institutions, it teaches citizens to categorize one another on the basis of race, and it presents a dark and twisted view of U.S. history.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Poverty, Economic Turmoil Shaking Erdoğan’s Throne by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on December 14th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18008/turkey-poverty-economy

Erdoğan’s biggest political rival ahead of the 2023 presidential elections seems to be — poverty.

The first decade of Erdoğan’s rule actually brought relative prosperity to Turks. Per capita GDP rose sharply from $3,688 in 2002 to $11,796 in 2012… Since 2013, however, reckless nepotism, increasing authoritarianism, corruption and economic mismanagement have boosted interest-rates, inflation and unemployment, bringing per capita GDP down to an estimated $7,500.

Nearly half of Turkish workers are minimum wage earners, meaning that millions of families must survive on $233 a month

Unfortunately, since early 2018, the lira has been on a downward slide due to constant geopolitical tensions with the West, widening current account deficits, shrinking foreign currency reserves and mounting public debt.

As the lira crashes to insane historic lows, local salaries are also severely devalued.

Erdoğan is heading fast to becoming the victim of his own miscalculations: a dramatically mismanaged economy and geostrategic challenges that went beyond Turkey’s political and military might.

Perhaps these missteps will be the beginning of the end of Erdoğan’s ugly populism — his neo-Ottoman ambitions that have caused major damage to Turkey’s economy as well as the country’s international isolation.

A punishing economic crisis in 2000-2001, the worst ever in modern Turkish history, pushed millions of Turks below the poverty line. In 2002, Turks went to the ballot box to punish a ruling coalition of mainstream parties and elected as prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. By a simple twist of fate, nearly two decades later, Erdoğan’s biggest political rival ahead of the 2023 presidential elections seems to be — poverty.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

National Debt Essay Contest challenges youngsters who will pay the bill A $100,000 national contest program asks students to confront America’s multi-trillion deficit before it craters the nation’s future

Posted By on December 14th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18032/national-debt-essay-contest

(New York, New York) – Warning that the devastating impact of a multi-trillion dollar debt increase now being created by the Biden budget will fall squarely on the shoulders of a generation of Americans blithely unaware of the fate that awaits them, philanthropist, national real estate investor, and Gatestone Institute Board member Lawrence Kadish and the Gatestone Institute have launched a $100,000 national educational essay contest that challenges young students to share their understanding of the looming Biden debt, the role of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and how their generation intends to pay down their share of the deficit.

Entitled, “The Gatestone Institute’s Student Contest on America’s National Debt,” selected essay winners will be provided with up to $10,000 cash, (if there are ten winners at $10,000 each), or as provided for in the rules of the contest, determined by a panel of judges selected by Gatestone, and chaired by Larry Kudlow, former Director of the National Economic Council.