WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Warns Gulf Arabs Not to Join Security Pact with Israel A standoff – and unwise threats. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/iran-warns-gulf-arabs-not-join-security-pact-hugh-fitzgerald/

As Israel and Gulf Arab states – Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Bahrain – are discussing a NATO-like defense pact, Iran is predictably attempting to prevent it. The warning to the Arab states by Iran’s former Defense Minister is reported on here: “Iran hopes Saudis, UAE, Bahrain ‘not foolish enough’ to strike defense pact with Israel, Israel Hayom, March 4, 2021:

Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are “unlikely foolish enough” to enter a defense pact with Israel, Iran’s former Defense Minister and Expediency Council member Brig. Gen. Ahmed Wahidi told Russian outlet RT channel on Wednesday.

 The statement followed a Reuters report that cited Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz as saying Israel “intends to develop a special security arrangement” with Gulf Arab allies. Wahidi was the first Iranian official to comment on it.

Wahidi, who is the head of Iran’s Supreme National Defense University, said that the “Zionist entity” was facing multiple crises, including a political one, which forced it to hold four elections in two years.

Let’s see. Israel is “facing multiple crises”? Israel’s economy is booming. It is expected to. grow by 4.2% this year; by comparison, the EU expects to grow only by 3%. Nearly every week there is news of a billion-dollar purchase of an Israeli start-up by an American company, of billions invested in the Israeli economy by Americans, Europeans, and now, as well, by those Arabs with whom Israel has normalized ties.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Race to the Bottom in Language Standards In a society of victims, knowledge and facts and reason no longer apply. Richard L. Cravatts *****

Posted By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/race-bottom-language-standards-richard-l-cravatts/

When the prescient George Orwell observed that “There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language” he may not have been anticipating what is taking place with educators who have allowed their obsession with racial justice to influence how they maintain standards in their teaching methods and pedagogy.

Last July, for example, as the country was embroiled in race-motivated riots and social unrest over the death of George Floyd and others, The Conference on College Composition and Communication (an affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English) released a set of demands to achieve what they termed “Black Linguistic Justice.” The document had the curious name “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” but the message was clear: that the purported violence against Black people by police on the streets of America reflected the same alleged racist situation in schools. “As language and literacy researchers and educators,” the demand document read, “we acknowledge that the same anti-Black violence toward Black people in the streets across the United States mirrors the anti-Black violence that is going down in these academic streets.”

Not content to have a single standard by which the English language is taught, these social justice charlatans demanded, first, that “teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm . . . .” Why is that? Because standard English, something that should be and is color blind, in the minds of these activist educators “reflects White Mainstream English!,” presumably a situation that is untenable. Black students should not have to choose between Black linguistics and standard English usage, they contend, something they refer to as “code-switching,” because “this is linguistically violent to the humanity and spirit of Black Language speakers.” Instead of having all students learn one standard of English usage, these activists wish Black students to think of conforming to standards as something that is inherently racist, and the educators demand that Black students be constantly reminded of their victim status, that “we must teach Black students about anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy!”

EDUCATION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

California Ethnic Studies Curriculum Has Students Pray to Aztec God Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/03/california-ethnic-studies-curriculum-has-students-daniel-greenfield/

There really needs to be a separation of woke church and state.

While liberals wage a relentless war against any sign of traditional Judeo-Christian religion in schools or voucher programs that allow people to use the taxes they already pay to fund actual functioning religious schools, they’re happy enough to have Islam and Aztec human sacrifice in schools.

This City Journal story from Christopher Rufo is about the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum, which has already been the subject of protests by Jews and Koreans, among others, over its rampant racism, but there’s also some human sacrifice for social justice.

This religious concept is fleshed out in the model curriculum’s official “ethnic studies community chant.” The curriculum recommends that teachers lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appeals directly to the Aztec gods. Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Livelihoods And The Congressional Thieves Who Want To Steal Them

Posted By on March 12th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/11/livelihoods-and-the-congressional-thieves-who-want-to-steal-them/

If there were any doubts that today’s Democratic Party is a corrupt and malevolent force, they were fully removed Tuesday when the House approved the PRO Act, a bill that will steal the livelihood from millions of Americans should it become law. Democrats care about nothing but consolidating their power and making their own lives more comfortable, even if it means creating hardships for others.

The legislation, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, is both a gift to labor union bosses and a burglar’s tool for aiding the outright theft of working Americans’ incomes. It was passed 225-206, with five Republicans voting for it (Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Pa.; Don Young, Alaska; John Katko, N.Y.; Chris Smith, N.J.; Jefferson Van Drew, N.J.) and one Democrat (Rep. Henry Cuellar, Texas) against it.

In addition to stripping states of their right-to-work laws, which allow workers to be employed at unionized businesses without being forced to join the union, it also in effect outlaws independent contract work through its ABC test. Adopted by the California (of course) Supreme Court, the test is used to classify workers as either hired employees or independent contractors (freelancers and gig workers). The test was codified into law in California (of course) in 2019 through Assembly Bill 5.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Blatant Fraud Behind The New $1.9 Tril ‘COVID Relief’ Law

Posted By on March 12th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/12/the-blatant-fraud-behind-the-new-1-9-tril-covid-relief-law/

With the COVID-19 relief bill now signed into law, it can’t be any clearer that Americans have had the wool pulled over their eyes on what this really was all about. Far from “COVID relief,” the mantra of the far-left Democrats, it was really all about “Blue State” relief.

That’s right, in case you haven’t been paying attention, the bill that many Americans thought would bring them fat checks and some reprieve from their government-induced lockdown woes has turned into a giant Christmas tree surrounded by goodies for Democrat-run Blue States and their Big Labor allies.

As we’ve pointed out here, here, here and elsewhere in recent weeks, the $1.9 trillion virus relief bill wasn’t even needed. The economy has already been bouncing back sharply, while most states actually weathered last year’s downturn nicely. Some 22 states actually reported higher tax revenues during the pandemic than in the same period in 2019.

So why was it passed? Democrats knew it wasn’t needed, so they used this crisis — remember, their unofficial party motto is “never let a crisis go to waste” — for an unparalleled expansion of the size and scope of government.

Looked at another way, the $1,400 checks handed out to Americans were merely bribes. Democrats could have asked for much more for struggling families and those truly in need, but didn’t.

Why? They really don’t care about them, as the bill plainly shows.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pfizer vaccine blocks 94 per cent of asymptomatic cases, study finds

Posted By on March 12th, 2021

https://news.yahoo.com/pfizer-vaccine-blocks-94-per-183448165.html

The Pfizer vaccine blocks 94 per cent of asymptomatic cases, an Israli study has shown, reigniting hopes herd immunity can be reached.

The Israeli ministry of health found that the Pfizer vaccine has an efficacy of 97 per cent against disease and death and 94 per cent against infection without symptoms.

The figures, which have not yet been peer-reviewed by scientists, were welcomed by scientists as they will help the UK reach herd immunity and eventually relax social distancing rules.

Israel is the first country to have vaccinated more than half its population, which it has done with Pfizer/BioNTech.

As of Wednesday, 55 per cent of its nine million population had been given at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine, and 43 per cent had received a second dose.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Iran Deal’s Inevitable Sequel Barack Obama’s plan was never about stopping Iran from obtaining a bomb. It was about realigning American interests in the Middle East in order to remake the Democratic Party at home. Lee Smith

Posted By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/iran-deal-inevitable-sequel

Joe Biden’s commitment to reenter the Iran nuclear deal from which Donald Trump withdrew might strike observers as bizarre. After all, Barack Obama’s July 2015 agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was an expensive and comprehensive failure whose underlying premises have been shown over the past six years to be false. By contrast, Trump’s policy of returning to traditional regional alliance structures—boosting allies and deterring enemies—was a success. The United States entered no new Middle East wars and Iran didn’t build a bomb, despite supposedly being “months” or “weeks” away from a nuclear breakout during Obama’s second term in the White House.

But facts- and results-based analysis misses the main purpose of the JCPOA, which had nothing to do with preventing Iran from building nuclear weapons. Rather, the agreement guaranteed Iran the money and technology it needs to build a bomb while putting Iran’s nuclear program under the protective umbrella of an international agreement guaranteed by the United States. The purpose of the JCPOA, in other words, was to put the nuclear issue in brackets by giving the Iranians a bomb that they were manifestly unable to build on their own—and, in doing so, to remove the obstacle that prevented Obama from realigning American regional interests with those of the revolutionary regime.

None of this should be remotely surprising to anyone who has read the plain text of the deal, and who understands it in its regional context rather than in the context of America’s domestic political wars. What I learned over the course of nearly a decade reporting on the deal, its causes and its effects was that all the elaborate technical talk that was endlessly bandied about by “experts”—centrifuge arrays and stockpiles of enriched uranium, etc.—was simple persiflage, intended to distract attention from the underlying purpose of these arrangements, which was to dump America’s current Middle East allies in favor of Iran.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Here Come Climate Reparations Democrats create a fund to offset the damage from their policies.

Posted By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/here-come-climate-reparations-11615506577?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Believe it or not, some Western Democrats are starting to push back against the Biden Administration’s climate assault on their constituents.

“We write to follow up on President Biden’s Executive Order 14008 addressing the climate crisis,” New Mexico Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján wrote last week to White House climate czar Gina McCarthy. That’s Mr. Biden’s order in January suspending new oil and gas leases on federal lands.

Although a short-term leasing “pause is fully appropriate in the new Biden administration, an extended and indefinite suspension would have significant impacts on our workforce and state funding for education,” the Senators explain, noting that oil and gas generate over $3 billon annually in revenue for their state and 40% of its budget.

The Democratic Senators urged the Biden Administration to resume leasing and, in a separate letter to Interior Acting Secretary Scott de la Vega, for career officials to be allowed to continue approving routine permits. They also asked that “states like New Mexico receive robust federal assistance in the ongoing transition to a zero-carbon economy.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lessons of the Long Covid Year Lockdowns made the pandemic suffering far worse than necessary.

Posted By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-of-the-long-covid-year-11615506819?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“The pandemic is now easing thanks largely to the ingenuity of American drug and biotech companies. The Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed made the inspired decision last year to invest $20 billion developing six vaccine candidates. This is the best decision government made. Vaccines typically take a decade to develop, but years of private investment and innovation have paid off in advanced technologies that have cut the time to a year.”

When a SARS-like virus was reported spreading in Wuhan in late 2019, most Americans never imagined their own government would soon close schools, churches and businesses, order people to stay home, and spend more than $5 trillion to offset the damage. Yet a year later, here we are.

The anniversary is a moment to consider what the pandemic has wrought and how well the U.S. has responded. Healthcare workers have been courageous, drug companies ingenious, and average Americans resilient. The political class and health experts? Not so much.

*Start with China and the World Health Organization, which is supposed to patrol for global health threats. China lied and the WHO played along. After censoring doctors, Beijing denied there was evidence of human-to-human transmission until shortly before it locked down Hubei province with 60 million people. Many Chinese had already left the country for Lunar New Year.

EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The U.K.’s Academic-Freedom Czar By Douglas Murray

Posted By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/03/22/the-u-k-s-academic-freedom-czar/?utm_source=recirc-

A new official will try to keep campus debates unfettered

Conservative governments in the West so rarely do anything actually conservative that, when they do, it is rightly considered headline news. So it was this past month when the U.K. government announced that it wanted to “strengthen freedom of speech and academic freedom in higher education.” In recent years Britain, like the United States, has had a spate of no-platforming incidents that have highlighted the increasingly leftward groupthink in the British higher-education sector. Nor has this halted during the era in which nobody can have an actual platform. In February the distinguished American professor of economics Gregory Clark had a virtual lecture canceled at the University of Glasgow because the proposed title of his talk made reference to Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s 1994 book The Bell Curve. To cancel a lecture over an allusion to the title of another person’s book seemed to many observers a new low.

What the British government announced in February was that it proposes to legislate to “widen and enhance academic freedom protections,” including the establishment of a “Free Speech and Academic Freedom Champion” who will have the right to “investigate infringements of free speech in higher education and recommend redress.” Other moves would include “the power to impose sanctions for breaches,” raising the pleasant image of embargoes on some of our more woke universities and their desperate efforts to sue for peace.

Of course, media reporting on the announcement was careful to confuse offensive and counteroffensive. “Plan for campus free speech post prompts autonomy warning” was the BBC’s alarming headline. The BBC went on to quote the always radical-left National Union of Students as saying that there is “no evidence” of a free-speech crisis on campus. Uninvited speakers such as Germaine Greer and fired academics such as Cambridge University’s Noah Carl might beg to differ. But the BBC did not linger over such facts. From much of the press coverage of the government’s new proposals, you might form the impression that British universities had hitherto been fair-playing grounds in which ideas and arguments could be aired without inhibition, only for the shadow of government legislation to now hover over them.