EDUCATION Comments turned off

Statement of Prof. William A. Jacobson Opposing Cornell Faculty Senate Proposed Critical Race Mandates

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/04/statement-of-prof-william-a-jacobson-opposing-cornell-faculty-senate-proposed-critical-race-mandates/

The Cornell University Faculty Senate is considering today three proposals developed in the aftermath of a July 16, 2020 “anti-racism” initiative launched by the President of the University. An online Faculty Senate vote will be held at some later date in the near future.

I have written about this initiative, and how it has gone off the rails under faculty and student activism, in the following posts:

I also wrote an Op-Ed at Real Clear Politics about the initiative as it worked its way through the Faculty Senate Working Group process, Higher Ed Approaches the Antiracism Training Abyss:

The cumulative effect of these initiatives is coercive not educational, tying academic and professional performance to a deceptive concept of “antiracism” that in reality is neo-racist and endangers free expression. Dissent will be silenced when grades, evaluations, continued employment and professional advancement are tied to meeting top-down mandates, creating an environment of compelled activism and compliance in which opposition is defined as inherently racist.

Cornell already ranks low in protecting student free expression. Like so many institutions of higher education, it is also now putting at risk its ability to protect academic freedom for its students and faculty. Hopefully, the Cornell senior administration will pull the campus back from this brink.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Media vs. Climate Science The good news is that scientists themselves have started to correct the record. by Holman Jenkins Jr.

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-media-vs-climate-science-11618355224?mod=opinion_featst_pos3

Joe Biden has put a presidential imprimatur on climate change being an existential threat, and he doesn’t mean in the Jean-Paul Sartre sense of man’s search for meaning in an uncomforting universe.

He means the end of humanity, a claim nowhere found in climate science.

This is odd because the real news today is elsewhere. Its movement may be ocean-liner-like, the news may be five years old before the New York Times notices it, but the climate community has been backing away from a worst-case scenario peddled to the public for years as “business as usual.”

A drumroll moment was Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peter’s 2020 article in the journal Nature partly headlined: “Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome.”

This followed the 2017 paper by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi asking why climate scenarios posit implausible increases in coal burning a century from now. And I could go on. Roger Pielke Jr. and colleagues show how the RCP 8.5 scenario was born to give modelers a high-emissions scenario to play with, and how it came to be embraced despite being at odds with every real-world indicator concerning the expected course of future emissions.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Without a Jewish State Alex Grobman

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25202

Jews, particularly in the West, now enjoy an unparalleled degree of security and cultural freedom in part because of the connection the Jews feel toward Israel, and the recognition that the country is committed to their protection and well- being.

Without a Jewish state, asserted Ruth Gavison, professor of Human Rights at the Faculty of Law at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Jews would become a cultural minority again, which would most likely involve living in continuous fear of antisemitism, persecution and genocide. Relinquishing a state would be similar to “national suicide.”

Jews have endured for two millennia without a homeland, but at times at great personal risk. Jews, particularly in the West, now enjoy an unparalleled degree of security and cultural freedom in part because of the connection the Jews feel toward Israel, and the recognition that the country is committed to their protection and well- being.

The Strongest Jewish Community in the World

In less than 60 years Gavison noted, Israel has become the strongest Jewish community in the world. The country has the right and obligation to “promote and strengthen” the Jewish character of the state as this is based on the concept of national self-determination.

This idea does not mean that every citizen in the country must belong to a particular national or ethnic group. But the state has the right to protect itself physically and culturally against assimilation or attempts to attack and destroy it. The claim of self-determination “is not a matter of abstract rights talk. Rather, such claims must be addressed according to demographic, societal and political realities that prevail both in the Middle East and in other parts of the world.”

The state also has a responsibility to safeguard the rights of non-Jewish minorities. They should be treated fairly, with respect, and their safety and well-being should be ensured. These obligations do not require, however, the termination of the Jewish character of the state.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Kamala’s Theory of Everything The VP identifies Central America’s big problem: climate.

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kamalas-theory-of-everything-11618440600?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

President Biden has handed Vice President Kamala Harris the job of fixing the mess at the U.S.-Mexico border, and she’s no fool. Rather than taking charge of the actual border, she is at pains to say she has been tapped for something far more grand (and vague): to be the Administration’s point person for addressing the “root causes” of emigration from these countries and providing “hope” for the region.

And so on Wednesday she brought together experts on the Northern Triangle nations of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the home countries of so many migrants. Here’s how the Vice President summed up the issue before her discussion:

“We are looking at issues that have been a long time in the making.  We are looking at issues that relate to the need for economic development, a need for resilience around extreme climate; looking at the fact that this is, in large part—these Northern Triangle countries—a large part of their economic base was agriculture, and then what the severe climate experiences have done in dampening and really harming their ability to have that economic driver in their countries.”

If we understand this word salad, Ms. Harris seems to be saying that the development problem in these countries is that climate change is making agriculture impossible. This in turn is one of the root causes sending people to our Southern border.

Climate has become this Administration’s theory of everything.

BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Censorship Competition Heats Up Can upstart Bookshop.com outdo mighty Amazon in suppressing ideas that may cause discomfort? Roger Kimball

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/censorship-competition-heats-up-11618416448?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

By now it is clear that wokeness is a contagious malady. Amazon.com made headlines in February when it suddenly delisted Ryan Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” a thoughtful, humane and deeply researched investigation of a controverted subject of public debate.

As the publisher of that 2018 bestseller, I was taken aback by reports that Mr. Anderson’s book was unavailable at “the world’s largest bookstore.” At first, I wondered whether there was some mistake.

But no. It was a deliberate act of censorship. Moreover, like the earl of Strafford, Amazon’s motto was “Thorough.” They didn’t just stop selling the book. They pushed it into the digital oubliette, erasing all trace of it from the Amazon website. They did the same thing at their subsidiaries Audible, which sells audiobooks, and AbeBooks, which sells secondhand books.

Now it turns out that Bookshop.org, which bills itself a scrappy alternative to the Bezos Behemoth, is up to the same game. A couple of weeks ago, a reader alerted us that Mr. Anderson’s book had gone missing from the Bookshop.org website.

The organization never responded to our queries. But on Friday we learned from our distributor that Bookshop had deep-sixed the book. “We did remove this title based on our policies,” Bookshop wrote to our distributor—without, however, explaining what those “policies” might be. “We had multiple complaints and concerns from customers, affiliates, and employees about the title.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Radicalized Political Ingratitude David Lewis Schaefer

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://lawliberty.org/radicalized-political-ingratitude/

“Gratitude for the privileges that American citizenship bestows, and for those who made those privileges and their extension possible is in short supply.”

On February 25, a New York Times front-page story exposed a specious incident of alleged racial harassment at Smith College. In July 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a black student who had grown up in Manhattan but whose parents came from Mali, claimed to have experienced a near-“meltdown” because both a janitor and a campus police officer asked what she was doing in a dormitory lounge as she lunched there. She viewed their interruption of her meal as an “outrageous” sign that some Smith personnel questioned her presence at the College, and indeed her very “existence overall as a woman of color.” She also disclosed her terror at the possibility that the police officer might have been carrying “a lethal weapon.”

Not surprisingly, given the recent political environment on American campuses, Smith’s president Kathleen McCartney immediately issued an apology for the incident and put the janitor on paid leave, remarking—prior to any investigation—that the incident served as a painful reminder of “the ongoing legacy of racism and bias … in which people of color are targeted while simply going about their daily business.”

As the Times recounts, a report issued three months later by a law firm hired by Smith to investigate the episode drew little attention. This report found no evidence of bias, and instead determined that Ms. Kanoute had been eating in a dorm that was closed for the summer. The janitor had been encouraged to notify campus security if he saw any unauthorized people there, and the security officer who followed up on the report was (like all Smith College police) unarmed.

In the meantime, Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee who had reminded Kanoute that students weren’t allowed to be eating in the vacant room, was targeted by Kanoute on Facebook as a “racist,” along with a janitor who’d been employed at Smith for 21 years and wasn’t even on campus at the time of the incident. Blair, who received threatening notes and phone calls as a consequence of the accusation, had to be hospitalized when the threats generated an outbreak of her lupus. The janitor resigned his position after Kanoute posted his photo on social media, charging him with “racist cowardly behavior.”

The 2018 incident recently returned to the headlines thanks to a letter of resignation issued by Jodi Shaw, a former student support coordinator at Smith, in response to the lasting effect that the College administration’s treatment of the Kanoute affair and its offshoots had on the Smith community, and on her job in particular.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Press Is Infrastructure for Biden Tim Graham

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2021/04/14/the-press-is-infrastructure-for-biden-n258786

Sen. John Cornyn came under blistering attack from Washington Post scribe Aaron Blake for having wondered whether President Joe Biden is really in charge, since he’s kept an extremely low profile with the press. Blake took after the senator for implying the Trump spin that old Joe has lost a few mental gears and is something of a “Manchurian Candidate.” “It’s a baseless and ugly bit of innuendo,” Blake wrote.

On Twitter, Cornyn linked to a Politico story in which writer Eugene Daniels noted: “The president is not doing cable news interviews. Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional. The public comments are largely scripted. Biden has opted for fewer sit down interviews with mainstream outlets and reporters.” He’s had one press conference during his 84 days in office.

One obvious explanation for the Biden strategy is his tendency to insert his foot in his mouth. But it’s also obvious that he has zero fear of his low availability to the press being a problem with “mainstream” reporters, since about 99.96% of them surely voted for him in November.

Most Americans are relieved that the president’s tweets are “unimaginably conventional.” But the press slid back to its Obama-era tone, championing sappy Biden tweets about his love for his wife, “Jilly,” and Jilly’s buying treats at black-owned bakeries. White House chief of staff Ron Klain routinely retweets the “mainstream” reporters, implying that he endorses their helpful pro-Biden spin.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Our Lost Liberties Cal Thomas

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/04/13/our-lost-liberties/?u

If one can say the pandemic has had any positive side effect, it has been to help us focus on what the loss of liberties looks like. Such losses do not occur immediately but erode over time as people become increasingly comfortable with government claiming to know what is best for us.

The Biden administration is proceeding on a downward spiral that has ended in lost liberties in nations of the past by seizing increasing amounts of power for itself through a slew of executive orders, without the consent of the people, or Congress.

When announcing his gun control executive orders last week, President Joe Biden referenced the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms. He claimed his orders do not infringe on that right, but added, “No amendment is absolute.” That is concerning.

He also announced the appointment of a Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. A White House press release sought to obscure its real goal—court-packing:

The Commission’s purpose is to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals. The topics it will examine include the genesis of the reform debate; the Court’s role in the Constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Georgetown Affair: New Levels Of Progressive Reality Denial  Francis Menton

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-4-13-the-georgetown-affair-new-levels-of-progressive-reality-denial

Just a few months ago (December 2020) I declared that the “essence of progressivism is refusal to deal with reality.” I had some pretty good examples in that post, but none of them can top the current convulsions that are upending Georgetown Law School. At Georgetown recently, a teacher made the mistake of uttering a small dose of reality while speaking to a colleague. This occurred after a recorded class had concluded and everyone else had signed out, but while the recording of the class was still running. Needless to say, the recording of the teacher’s remarks promptly hit Twitter. Thereupon, all hell broke loose.

The subject of the reality that must not be spoken is of course the current all-consuming obsession of academia, namely race. The question I pose is, are Georgetown, and for that matter all of academia, taking this obsession so far as to fully undermine their principal mission?

Probably, you are familiar with how this started. The after-class discussion took place in early March between Georgetown teachers Sandra Sellers and David Batson. Here is video of the key portion of the discussion. The offending words came from Sellers, referring to the performance of students in her class:

“I hate to say this, I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, oh come on. It’s some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom, it drives me crazy.” 

Before getting to the reaction to that remark, let me discuss how the reality of affirmative action plays out for a law school like Georgetown.

The Law School Admission Test is taken by nearly all aspiring law students who want to attend a high-ranked school. The LSAT is specifically designed to predict success in law school. Like all such tests, it is far from perfect, and any individual student may far over-perform or under-perform his or her LSAT results. But averaged over the full range of the test takers, the LSAT is reasonably accurate. I have found it difficult to locate LSAT results by race, but in this article last fall in the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald came up with a racial breakdown of LSAT results for the year 2004, which she sources to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Opinion: Call it the ‘Anti-Israel Prize’ By David Isaac

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-call-it-the-anti-israel-prize/

Israel has a bad habit of making the worst choices for its best prizes.

This goes especially for its most prestigious prize – the Israel Prize – its highest cultural honor.

The latest cringeworthy awardee is Oded Goldreich, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Israel’s Weizmann Institute.

Goldreich’s pastime appears to be signing BDS petitions. He signed one in 2019 urging Germany to scotch a resolution equating BDS with anti-Semitism. In March of this year, he signed another calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions in Judea and Samaria, notably Ariel University. (There’s actually a right-left consensus in Israel not to give up Ariel University, making Goldreich a truly exceptional leftist.)

The Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement has long been recognized as an anti-Semitic movement whose goal is the destruction of Israel. Last year, the co-founder of the BDS movement said as much.

A selection committee chooses the winners of the Israel Prize. In what is usually a formality, Israel’s Education Minister signs off on its decision. Last month, the current minister, Yoav Galant, got wind of the committee’s plans to give it to Goldreich. He told the committee to revisit its decision, which is his privilege according to the prize rules.

“Someone for whom the State of Israel and its laws are not dear to their heart is not worthy of the Israel Prize,” Galant said.

The committee didn’t like being second guessed and petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court. What role does the Supreme Court have in this? Absolutely none. But in Israel everything is justiciable, so the Court jumped in. Though it leans (more like screams) left, the Court sided with Galant. This was partly thanks to the pro-Zionist group “Im Tirtzu,” which revealed that Goldreich had signed onto the recent anti-Ariel University petition, a fact that hadn’t been known.