ISRAEL Comments turned off

A tale of two traffic jams: Ruthie Blum

Posted By on May 20th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/a-tale-of-two-traffic-jams/

Hours before his daughter Shani’s funeral on Sunday afternoon, Nissim Louk warned viewers of Channel 14’s “This Morning in Israel” program about the likelihood of massive traffic on the way to the burial site near the family home in Srigim. Since tens of thousands of people were expected to arrive to pay their respects, he realized that the roads would be seriously congested.

Asked whether he was recommending a smaller turnout, the bereaved parent answered that it was a matter of personal choice. His reply was gracious.

Since Friday, when it was announced that Shani was among the three (which turned out later to be four) dead hostages retrieved from Gaza in a joint Israel Defense Forces-Shin Bet operation, he’d been urging the public to attend the ceremony. The request was unnecessary.

The beautiful 23-year-old became an international household name in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre. The young woman rose to unwitting fame due to a photo of her twisted, half-naked body being hauled off to Gaza on a pickup truck filled with gleeful Hamas terrorists.

Though the Louks were informed months ago that Shani was already dead in that vile picture—which would come to win a prestigious award—her return from Hamas captivity provided some solace. And it gave them the opportunity to lay her properly to rest in their vicinity.

Still, Nissim’s empathy with the plight of drivers was behind his mentioning the probability of blocked highways in the lead-up to the highly publicized event. This isn’t surprising, given his unfathomably honorable behavior during the 230 days that have elapsed since the Black Sabbath when monsters snuffed out his child’s life and kidnapped her corpse for sport—and leverage.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Report: Medical Schools Secretly Defying Supreme Court’s Ruling on Affirmative Action By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on May 19th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/17/report-medical-schools-secretly-defying-supreme-courts-ruling-on-affirmative-action/

A coalition of medical professionals revealed the methods by which medical schools across the country are circumventing the Supreme Court’s ruling outlawing the practice of affirmative action, and employing such race-based policies anyway.

According to Fox News, the group Do No Harm released new research this week revealing that “many in the healthcare establishment nevertheless remain ideologically committed to the principle of racial favoritism and reject the virtue of race blindness.” This comes despite the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last year in the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which determined that affirmative action, the practice of admitting students or hiring staff based solely on their race, was unconstitutional.

The study, titled “Skirting SCOTUS: How medical schools will continue to practice racially conscious admissions,” states that “efforts to game admissions with an eye toward bolstering racial diversity commonly occur under the moniker of ‘holistic admissions.’”

“In theory, holistic admissions should mean de-emphasizing the metrics that primarily determine admission to medical school (e.g., GPA and MCAT scores) and placing greater focus on other academic qualifications, personality traits, or professional accolades,” the report continues. But “in practice, ‘holistic’ admissions often represent a rebranding or workaround of affirmative action.”

Do No Harm also pointed to the official statements of numerous medical organizations and groups which condemned the Court’s ruling, including the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Following the ruling, AAMC issued a statement saying that “the AAMC believes that a diverse and inclusive biomedical research workforce with individuals from historically excluded and underrepresented groups in biomedical research is critical to gathering the range of perspectives needed to identify and solve the complex scientific problems of today and tomorrow.”

The AAMC even explicitly vowed to defy the court, admitting that “we will work together to adapt following today’s court decision without compromising these goals.”

“They feel that diversity is such an important value in health care that they need to ignore the Supreme Court and go their own way,” said Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the board of Do No Harm. “There’s really no justification of this. Their responsibility is to the patients, to create the most qualified workforce that they can possibly create.”

The Supreme Court’s 6-2 ruling in Harvard, alongside the parallel case Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, ended 45 years of affirmative action being legal nationwide, as originally determined in the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bidenflation Soars To 19.2%, Eroding Americans’ Purchasing Power There’s no end in sight.

Posted By on May 19th, 2024

https://tippinsights.com/bidenflation-soars-to-19-2-eroding-americans-purchasing-power/

President Biden, a seasoned politician, has failed miserably in tackling inflation, and it is nearly certain that he can’t wave a magic wand and tame the beast before November. So, he has embarked on an alternate strategy to pin it on Trump. The President, famous for his tales about the “bad dude” Corn Pop, calling a voter at a campaign stop a “lying dog-faced pony soldier,” the death of his uncle Finnegan due to ‘cannibalism’ in Papua New Guinea, and how the xenophobia of Indians and Japanese impede progress, keeps claiming that inflation was nine percent when he took office, even though it was 1.4%.

When President Biden first made the claim, we dismissed it like Special Counsel Robert Hur as coming from a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He has now repeated the claim several times, and we wonder why none of his economic advisors or Nobel Laureate economist friends have corrected him.

Americans know the truth, and the claim comes across as malarkey in plain Biden speak.

The dark reality of Bidenomics is 19.2% inflation under the President’s watch, which is 5.9% annually. When he took office, inflation was at just 1.4%. Since March 2021, it has stayed above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target (38 consecutive months.).

Under Biden, the federal debt has increased by $6.9 trillion. The Federal Reserve printed money out of nothing to finance his spending spree. The increased money supply without a corresponding increase in goods and services reduced the value of each dollar, causing prices to rise quickly and leading to high inflation, effectively acting as a hidden tax on everyone.

BOOKS Comments turned off

CHAPTER 19: From Sex Education to Sexuality Education Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is (forthcoming release June 2024) by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on May 19th, 2024

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27793/chapter-19-from-sex-education-to-sexuality

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, is a specialized agency of the United Nations and a member of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG), a coalition of thirty-six UN funds, programs, specialized agencies, departments, and offices aimed at fulfilling UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The SDG is defined as “a collection of seventeen interlinked objectives designed to serve as a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.”

Let’s look at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Sustainable Development website and examine the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN planetary 2030 Agenda. The UNSDG mission headline is Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.[i] The 17 Goals are item number 59 on the 91 listed items in the UNSDG Declaration.

Sustainable Development Goals

Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Goal 6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Goal 7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries
Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts*
Goal 14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
Goal 15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Goal 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

* Acknowledging that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the primary international, intergovernmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The new anti-Americanism Although written in the abstract language of the graduate seminar, Empire has an ominously pragmatic aim: to undermine faith in the liberal institutions that inform American democracy. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on May 19th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/19/the-new-anti-americanism/

I wonder if Empire—the nearly 500-page reader-proof tome by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—is about to make a comeback. The book has long-since disappeared into well-deserved oblivion.

But when it was first published some twenty years ago, it took the world—at least the gullible world of academia and adjacent media middens—by storm.

The venerable literary Marxist Fredric Jameson opined that it was “the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium.” The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek—a plausible replacement for Jameson as the world’s trendiest academic Marxist—declared that it is “nothing less than a rewriting of the The Communist Manifesto for our time.”

Further down the intellectual food chain, Emily Eakin, a journalist for The New York Times, delivered herself of an ecstatic summary, simultaneously certifying and increasing the book’s prestige. Perhaps, she speculated, it is the “Next Big Idea,” the successor to structuralism and deconstruction in the halls of literary academia. It is too soon to say for sure, she cautioned, but, possessed as it is of “the formal trappings of a master theory in the old European tradition,” the book “is filling a void in the humanities.”

Neither blurb writers nor cultural journalists write under oath, of course. But even with all of the appropriate discounts, this is an exceptional outpouring. At the time, Hardt was a thirty-something associate professor in the literature program at Duke. His co-author, Antonio Negri (1933-2023), was  an Italian political philosopher in his late sixties who is described on the book’s dust jacket as “an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome.” I will say more about Negri below.

Empire’s combination of owlish scholarly pretentiousness, on the one hand, and bristling Communist militancy, on the other, more or less guaranteed it at least a respectful audience in the academy.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Lessons from COVID Totalitarianism By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on May 19th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/lessons_from_covid_totalitarianism.html

The COVID police state revealed Western governments’ zeal for totalitarianism.  Forced masking, forced experimental injections, forced school and business closures, forced isolation, and forced compliance provided Western citizens an opportunity to see the tyrannical inclinations hiding just beneath the surface of their supposedly beneficent “democracies.”

None of it was pretty.  Mass propaganda disguised as medical expertise (remember when Joe Biden and his CDC army of Goebbels clones demanded that we wear three or more masks outside?) and mass censorship of social media conversations (because, we were frequently told, disinformation kills!) proved that — when push comes to shove — Western governments will quickly dispense with protections for free speech.  Wannabe dictators (intent on protecting “democracy” by being authoritarian) embraced their true “Do as we say!” dispositions and branded the public’s rights and liberties as “enemies of the State.”

Officials summarily punished anyone who resisted COVID’s descending Iron Curtain.  Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau seized the bank accounts and property titles of Freedom Convoy protesters.  Videos from Australia and New Zealand showing police forces blocking roads, securing quarantine camps, and pushing citizens back into their homes looked like scenes from a Mad Max movie.  California Democrats buried skateparks in sand, cordoned off jungle-gyms with yellow crime tape, and arrested lone surfers paddling in the ocean.  Abandoning moderation and constitutional constraints, Western totalitarians embraced intimidation, coercion, and surveillance on a wide scale.  

Throughout the West, governments prohibited places of worship from conducting religious services, recorded license plate numbers of congregants, and issued excessive fines to clergy.  Those same governments prevented families from comforting hospitalized loved-ones and forced spouses, parents, and grandparents to die heartbroken and alone.  In other words, Western officials tore families apart, inflicted tremendous emotional pain upon the most vulnerable, and denied the anguished any access to spiritual refuge.  It is no surprise that such intentional government malice produced skyrocketing rates of alcohol and drug addiction, lifelong psychological traumas, and a burgeoning epidemic of suicide.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

James Piereson, Naomi Schaefer Riley A Dangerous Road Elite universities may come to regret considering “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” proposals for their endowments.

Posted By on May 19th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/for-universities-bds-is-a-dangerous-road

In January, writing for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman lamented that a high percentage of giving in the U.S. goes to wealthy, elite colleges and universities, often at the expense of programs aiding the poor. But donors don’t need to choose between giving to wealthy institutions and giving to areas of the “highest need,” he advised. Instead, they can take a “yes, and” approach. “If donors make a gift to their alma mater, they should pair it with an equally large gift to a program that makes online textbooks free to all college students. Or they could pair a gift to a research institution in a wealthy country with a gift to fund research on infectious diseases that primarily affect poor people in developing countries.”

In a subsequent article, Benjamin Soskis of the Urban Institute added that colleges themselves could facilitate this “pairing” of donations—acting as philanthropic “sommeliers”—by advising donors on how to give elsewhere, too. Schools truly committed to this idea, writes Soskis, could “make such pairings a condition of major gifts—those who want to give a million dollars or more to Yale would need to also donate to one of the university’s equity partners.”

The level of chutzpah such an arrangement would require might challenge even the boldest development officer. But the philanthropic sommelier idea is a possible solution to a dilemma that elite universities confront today. College administrators want to keep raising piles of money from wealthy donors, while at the same time signaling that they are truly concerned about the poor and oppressed. And they want to earn the approbation of leftists on campus without antagonizing donors. In that circumstance, they might take the money, while advising donors how they might “launder” it via gifts to other charities.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Sinwar in Exchange for Rafah Why is the Biden administration dangling the Hamas chief in exchange for stopping the Gaza war? Because the terror group’s survival is key to the administration’s larger project in the Middle East. By Lee Smith

Posted By on May 19th, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/sinwar-exchange-rafah-biden-gaza

The Biden team’s offer to trade Yahya Sinwar, the man believed to be the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, for guarantees that the Israeli military stay out of Rafah points to two disturbing truths about the current conflict in the Middle East. The first is that the U.S. knows plenty about what the Hamas terror group is doing and has done. The second is that Washington has been keeping key information—like the terror leader’s whereabouts—from the Israelis, thereby prolonging the war that it claims to decry.

The implications of the administration’s offer, relayed in a recent Washington Post article, has Israelis and U.S. pro-Israel activists livid. Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, for instance, posted on X, “I am shocked and sickened by reports that the U.S. is withholding from Israel vital information on the whereabouts of senior Hamas leaders in Gaza. Is the administration still our ally?”

The Biden administration is making the offer because all its efforts to end Israel’s war have failed and if Rafah falls, Hamas is likely to fall, too. It seems there’s no other way to preserve a pillar of what the White House calls “regional integration”—a euphemism for the U.S.-Iran alliance system that Barack Obama has tried to impose on the Middle East for the last decade.

Leaks that the Biden administration is withholding actionable intelligence on Hamas’ paramount leader in Gaza confirm that, as Tablet reported shortly after the Oct. 7 massacre, the administration had a wealth of intelligence on the terror group and its plans. If U.S. intelligence agencies are confident that they know where Sinwar is squirreled away now, in the chaos of wartime, they also knew what he was doing in the lead-up to the massive attack.

Biden and his aides have formulated their scenario: Hamas ‘technocrats’ will constitute the Iranian-backed component in a unity government with the U.S.-backed faction that now rules the West Bank. Hamas is a pillar of the U.S.-Iran condominium.

EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Western Universities: A Double Invasion by Amir Taheri

Posted By on May 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20655/western-universities-double-invasion

They introduce themselves as university students, young scholars who are supposedly training to become the nation’s political guides and mentors.

However, you soon found out that their understanding of political issues, including the current war in Gaza, is a reflection more of street politics than academic methods. In other words, the street, and its politique de la rue in French, have invaded the university or at least part of it that wears the label of “humanities”, a witches’ brew of once academic subjects corrupted by ideology.

The crisis in Western universities is further complicated by the advent of wokeism, a corrupted secular version of the seminarian’s sympathy for the innocent scapegoat, a sympathy extended to all real or imagined victims of injustice. While the seminary is chiefly interested in the text, faculty ought to be equally interested in the context. In many “humanities” departments in Western universities, however, the text comes from propagandist pamphlets written by polemicist professors, while the context is regarded as a mere diversion from the truth.

Shakespeare said it best: “Now confusion has made its masterpiece!”

If you visit Paris these days, you may run into solemn-looking youths distributing a tract that’s says: “Palestine is fighting for all of us!” or tagging this message on the walls: “Stop Genocide in Palestine!”

They introduce themselves as university students, young scholars who are supposedly training to become the nation’s political guides and mentors.

However, you soon found out that their understanding of political issues, including the current war in Gaza, is a reflection more of street politics than academic methods. In other words, the street, and its politique de la rue in French, have invaded the university or at least part of it that wears the label of “humanities”, a witches’ brew of once academic subjects corrupted by ideology.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Desperate Biden must debate to win — but there are risks

Posted By on May 18th, 2024

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4670330-biden-trump-debate-cnn-2024-desperate-risks

Kudos to Team Biden for successfully landing the first punch in the presidential free-for-all (aka, the campaign). By challenging Donald Trump to a debate and dictating the terms of play, President Biden left his opponent with two impossible choices: decline the opportunity to face off against Biden on national TV and be declared a coward, or agree to the meet, even knowing the playing field is tilted in favor of the incumbent.  

Will it matter that the Trump campaign got snookered? Almost certainly not. For the same reason that the absurd 14-second video in which the president dares Trump to “make my day” required five “cuts” to get it right, 81-year-old Biden is still likely to lose round 2.   

Not that it’s a slam-dunk for former President Trump. Biden is correct; Trump did lose the 2020 debates. He had apparently been coached to be combative, in hopes that Biden would overreact and reveal his “angry old man” persona. The tactic backfired spectacularly; Trump came across as unlikeable. If Biden or the moderators goad the former president on his January 6 behavior or reference his many legal troubles, Trump could again get angry. That disastrous encounter cost him the election; it could happen again. 

Expectations will be incredibly low for his opponent, as they were for this year’s State of the Union address. After that speech in February, critics described Biden as being hopped up on stimulants; the president spoke in an unnatural, rapid-fire manner that nonetheless got the job done. Worried that Biden will get a similar boost to endure a two-hour debate, some on the right — including Trump — have called for drug testing before the debates; that won’t happen.  

Biden’s handlers are doing everything possible to give the president an edge.