EDUCATION Comments turned off

Mediocrity Is Now Mandatory From stimulus to school admissions, leaders act as if ease is the only worthy goal. By Andy Kessler

Posted By on February 8th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mediocrity-is-now-mandatory-11612724198?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Has an era of American mediocrity begun? In January the College Board announced it would eliminate the essay portion of the SAT, as well as all of the separate SAT subject tests. Their stated purpose was “reducing and simplifying demands on students.” Such a burden.

One high school near me just dropped freshman advanced-standing (honors) English “to combat the effects of academic ‘tracking” because it “ultimately separates students of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds.” It turns out that middle schools from lower-income areas aren’t adequately preparing their students for high school. So rather than fix that problem, they dumbed down high school.

Then again, when the University of California system did away with racial preferences in 1996, it moved to holistic admissions. What does holistic mean? Anything you want. The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities defines it as “assessing an applicant’s unique experiences alongside traditional measures of academic readiness.” Grades are only a suggestion—and SAT scores are biased, supposedly. And here you thought smart students got into good colleges. Yes, mediocrity has crept into our self-proclaimed elite colleges. Job recruiters understand this.

Virtually all universities and now many companies have D&I departments, for diversity and inclusion. Sounds worthy. But as far as I can tell, the No. 1 job of a D&I department is to hire more people into the D&I department. No one ever mentions excellence.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jonathan Turley: Impeaching Trump – House threatens to trash this core principle to ensure conviction The statement of House manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., last week was breathtaking

Posted By on February 8th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/impeaching-trump-house-threatens-core-principle-jonathan-turley

Over the last four years, we have seen an alarming trend of law professors and legal experts discarding constitutional and due process commitments to support theories for the prosecution or impeachment of Donald Trump or his family. 

Legal experts who long defended criminal defense rights have suddenly become advocates of the most sweeping interpretations of criminal or constitutional provisions while discarding basic due process  and fairness concerns. Even theories that have been clearly rejected by the Supreme Court have been claimed to be valid in columns. No principle seems inviolate when it stands in the way of a Trump prosecution.

Yet, the statement of House manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., last week was breathtaking. A former law professor, Raskin declared that the decision of Trump not to testify in the Senate could be cited or used by House managers as an inference of his guilt – a statement that contradicts not just our constitutional principles but centuries of legal writing.

Yet, it appears a signature of this team of House managers. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., insisted in the last impeachment that the failure of then-President Trump to turn over documents by citing privilege or other defenses should be cited as evidence of guilt on any underlying claims.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Reichstag Fire of the Democrats A pretext for political terror. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 8th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/reichstag-fire-democrats-daniel-greenfield/

There are thousands of soldiers outside Congress and political terror inside its halls. That political terror isn’t coming from a QAnon Shaman who only eats organic food, but from the Democrats who are using a manufactured state of emergency to purge the opposition.

Democrats deployed 26,000 troops to Washington D.C. at a cost of $500 million. Thousands of soldiers, authorized to use deadly force as they were forbidden to do either at the border or during the Black Lives Matter assault on the White House, will stay to fight an imaginary threat.

While walls, razor wire, and military encampments rise outside the halls of government, inside them the Democrats have unleashed a true coup. Protesters have “stormed” Congress before, from both the Left and the Right, which cannot be called overthrowing the government. But Democrats began their own overthrow by launching an unconstitutional post-office impeachment of President Trump for speaking at a peaceful protest and a push to remove Senate members who objected to the stolen election by abusing the 14th Amendment.

The fake emergency has been extended to March. The FBI continues falsely claiming that there is some sort of threat that requires 7,500 soldiers to conduct a military occupation of the nation’s capital. The FBI’s claims that this threat would occur during “First Amendment-protected protests” has a massive credibility problem because there have been no protests in D.C.

Even though these protests have yet to emerge for over a month, the occupation goes on.

HISTORY Comments turned off

‘The Queen’s Gambit’: The Accelerated Polgár Variation Joe Dolce

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/01/the-queens-gambit-the-accelerated-polgar-variation/

EXCERPTS

When Walter Tevis’s novel The Queen’s Gambit came out in 1983, it slipped past the mainstream media, but everyone I knew in the Melbourne chess world was familiar with it. Little did anyone at the time suspect that Tevis’s fantasy about a female chess prodigy would be incarnated in the true story of the three Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, who emerged in the mid-1980s, the eldest, Susan, becoming in 1986 the first woman to qualify for the World Championship.

The closest the world of chess has come to the tale in The Queen’s Gambit is in the true story of the Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, Susan, Sofia and Judit, who were raised from birth as chess prodigies by their father, Laszlo Polgár. Polgár’s father survived Auschwitz but his father’s first wife and five children were murdered there. Laszlo Polgár believed that geniuses were made, not born, and that if children were taught a single intellectual activity from early childhood, they would master it. He used his three daughters, and chess, as his grand experiment in child-rearing psychology.

Polgár and his wife Klára were both teachers. They home-schooled the girls, developing a regime of early morning sports, including high-velocity ping-pong, for the girls’ physical stamina, before six to eight hours a day of chess training, lasting until well after dark.

Polgár created a card catalogue system, assembled from chess magazine clippings, with over 200,000 games cut and pasted onto index cards, the “cartotech”, for the girls to use during their study. This was the biggest chess archive outside the USSR.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

‘Time’ Returns to the Scene of the Crime Tony Thomas

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2021/02/like-a-criminal-time-returns-to-the-scene-of-the-crime/

Many scammers have been done in because they couldn’t resist boasting. In regard  to Joe Biden’s dubious but now officially endorsed ‘victory’ in November’s US presidential election, this time the boasting takes the form of a giant, 7000-words piece in Time magazine, an impeccably progressive and anti-Trump journal.

Its scoop is headed, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, with the chief byline belonging to reporter Molly Ball, who was backed by a team of junior scribblers. Over months they sleuthed out the names and modus operandi of powerful cabals that conspired to ensure that Trump would not, could not, win. From Time’s point of view, the conspirators “saved democracy” from Trump. The participants are heroes, in the fading news magazine’s view, with Ms Ball laying out chapter and verse how the assault on a democratic election was planned, mounted and succeeded.

“They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it,” Time claims, playing semantic games while rewarding the conspirators with attention and, albeit unintentionally, exposing their methods and alliances.

An ominous conclusion — passed off by Time as a good thing —  is that since these cabals succeeded while Trump was in power, their own power will be enormously magnified under the aegis of the Biden presidency. One can be certain America’s “fortified” future elections will be welcomed with official endorsement and all the resources, overt and covert, that the Democrat ruling establishment and “the swamp”can muster.

Ironies abound. Trumpers have been relentlessly mocked for conspiratorial thinking. But Time doesn’t just admit the existence of such a conspiracy, it gloatingly reveals how its architects and participants made sure he could not carry the day on November 3. All this was perfectly justified, according to Time, because Trump was an incipient dictator preparing to launch “an assault on democracy”. As it sings hosannas with the Left choir, the magazine feels no need to provide  evidence for that assertion.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Black Lives Matter, Antifa March Through DC, Chant ‘Burn It Down’ By Jack Phillips

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/black-lives-matter-antifa-march-through-dc-chant-burn-it-down_3688149.html

Black Lives Matter protesters and Antifa agitators marched through Washington D.C. on Saturday and threatened people as they ate dinner, according to video footage and reports.

“Burn it down” is what the demonstrators said. “We are here tonight because black lives matter,” members of the far-left group also said. “Despite black lives mattering, black people are still dying at the hands of the police paid for by our tax dollars.”

Other video footage uploaded by independent journalists on the scene showed Antifa types fighting with police officers, who were trying to keep them away from restaurants. Some, who were clad in all black, could be seen holding the red-and-black Antifa flag.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

A New ‘War on Terror’ on Americans Lee Smith Lee Smith

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-new-war-on-terror-on-americans_3685342.html

The campaign to define supporters of opposition leader Donald Trump as “domestic terrorists” took a new turn this week when a center-right publication argued that American citizens should be treated like the Islamic extremists responsible for the 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. “We defeated al Qaeda and can do the same to the fascist thugs who attacked our democracy last month,” former CIA officer Kevin Carroll wrote in the Washington Examiner. “But only if we take similar hard measures against the enemy within.”

The Jan. 6 protest, which saw sporadic violence, has been used by left-wing media organizations, segments of the national security establishment, and other Democratic Party institutions as a pretext to send federal law enforcement after the more than 74 million Americans who did not vote for Joe Biden. The ghoulish campaign is nakedly partisan, or the same institutions would have pushed to define as domestic terror groups the Black Lives Matter and Antifa networks responsible for the spring and summer’s nationwide George Floyd riots that led to hundreds of felonies, including arson, theft, assault, and murder. But those two organizations are aligned with parts of the Democratic Party. BLM, according to its own website, is a Democratic Party fundraising mechanism.

That’s where the Washington Examiner comes in: By reinforcing from the right the false narrative about the events of Jan. 6, the conservative publication legitimized the Democratic Party’s campaign to use law enforcement to target the right.

Carroll is a former CIA officer and affiliated with the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump organization whose co-founder reportedly attempted to groom underage boys for sex. Among other methods that might be used to break Americans, Carroll recommends: bringing “the heaviest felony charges possible on as many participants” in the Jan. 6 protests; using internet chatrooms to entrap American citizens; and compelling fire and police departments to require loyalty oaths of their employees. “We ruthlessly hunted down foreign terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” argues Carroll, “and must do the same to their domestic equivalents.”

BOOKS, MEDIA Comments turned off

New tell-all book by network TV news producer exposes disgusting private behavior of many lefty ‘talented TV a–holes’ By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/new_tellall_book_by_network_tv_news_producer_exposes_disgusting_private_behavior_of_many_lefty_talented_tv_aholes.html

It turns out that lots of AT readers and I despise a number of lefty TV news readers for excellent reasons beyond their bias. Mike and Chris Wallace, Diane Sawyer, Chris Cuomo, Katie Couric, and others are exposed for being miserable human beings in the new memoir by former 60 Minutes and ABC News producer Ira Rosen, titled, Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes. Mary Kay Linge, writing in the New York Post, dishes a lot of gossip taken from the book, which is due out on February 16. From what she excerpts, the biggest a-hole sounds like Mike Wallace, but that may be a function of the years author Ira Rosen spent working as a producer at 60 Minutes. Here are some highlights, but if your taste runs to reveling in evidence that your disgust at certain TV figures is abundantly justified, read the whole thing. One of the least acceptable but common abuses of the rich and famous media divas is their tendency to indulge in tantrums toward their less powerful underlings. After a guest unexpectedly cancelled a pending interview with the senior Wallace, Rosen recounts that Wallace flew into a rage while being driven in.

“Mike went crazy,” Rosen writes, grabbing fistfuls of documents from Maraynes’ [another 60 Minutes producer] briefcase and hurling them into his face as he struggled to keep the vehicle on the road. 

“Wallace cursed Allan, told him that he was a failure as a producer, and that he would be demoted as soon as we returned to New York. It was the most astonishing verbal abuse I had ever witnessed.” 

 Before #MeToo, misbehavior toward females was pretty much standard operating procedure.

MEDIA Comments turned off

No, really, why did Fox fire Lou Dobbs?

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2021/02/06/no-really-fox-fire-lou-dobbs/

“Lou Dobbs retweets attacks on Fox News. “Fox is Finished.” “Fox is in a race with itself to the bottom.”

Cashiering the most ardently pro-Trump host on American television makes no sense in that context. If anything, you would think they’d have wanted Dobbs to do an extra hour of “greatest president ever” propaganda every night — or even switch him over from Fox Business to MacCallum’s old slot on Fox News. Remember, Dobbs isn’t just a star of Trumpist media, he’s so tight with the former president that Trump reportedly would patch him through on speakerphone during White House meetings to offer his take. “John Kelly once told me that he learned to watch Lou Dobbs to understand what the president might think or say about a topic,” said WaPo reporter Josh Dawsey this morning.

You don’t shed a guy like that lightly. Even Fox Business staffers were surprised by his cancellation, according to the Post.

The universal suspicion is that Fox dropped the hammer in response to the defamation suit Smartmatic filed against Fox and Dobbs on Thursday, but that doesn’t fully add up. If Fox were in the process of dumping all of its anchors who’d entertained theories about Smartmatic’s machines being rigged, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo would be gone too. In reality, Bartiromo is getting a tryout in MacCallum’s former 7 p.m. slot on FNC and Pirro just launched a new show (about castles in America, of all things) on Fox’s streaming platform. Fox doesn’t seem poised to dump either of them; on the contrary, it’s giving them more work.

Plus, as a matter of basic PR, it would look exceptionally weak for Fox to flush Dobbs within 24 hours of Smartmatic’s suit being filed. As John said, it feels like an admission of wrongdoing in context: “The bad man did a little slander, fine, but we’ve gotten rid of him now so we shouldn’t have to pay.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Are you ready for the climate lockdowns? It’s only a matter of time by Stephen L. Miller

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://spectator.us/topic/ready-climate-lockdowns-environment/?utm_source=Spectator+USA+Email+Signup&utm_campaign=

Last week President Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords. This was a mostly symbolic gesture, as the same alarmism being pushed prior to the agreement in 2016 is still being pushed now while nation-states like China are still ignoring it. Now Biden administration climate envoy John Kerry, under fire for boarding a private jet to Iceland to accept a climate award, is telling the United States and the world that the conditions of the Paris agreement are ‘inadequate’.

As the global climate elite push eating bugs and staying home to save the Earth on the masses, it’s worth posing the question: what will be adequate? With the Global Economic Forum in Davos approaching in April, we’re going to start hearing terms such ‘Climate Equity’ and ‘Climate Reset’ (a play on the WEF’s Great Reset) more frequently. We’ll probably also start to hear calls for climate lockdowns. I know, right now that sounds completely preposterous, but don’t these kooky ideas always find a way to bleed into the mainstream? Fifteen Days to Slow the Sun!

The possibility of climate lockdowns is already being floated by some of our greatest thinkers. They see a confluence of global crises as an opportunity. The perfect storm caused by COVID-19 and the resulting global economic meltdown offers a chance to take what they see as bold and dramatic action to save the planet. The Biden administration will certainly use the consequences of COVID to push through some green legislation, but just as before, it will not be enough in the eyes of progressives. There must always be more.