EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Failed Experiment with Ending Standardized Testing

Posted By on April 17th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/the-failed-experiment-with-ending-standardized-testing/

When Columbia University announced in March of 2023 that it would become the latest Ivy League school to no longer require applicants to submit SAT/ACT scores for admission, the editors of National Review criticized a move that not only seemed designed explicitly to skirt the Supreme Court’s anticipated decisions banning racial discrimination in college admissions, but threatened the academic quality of the institution as well.

We have been emphatically confirmed in our position by the subsequent course of events. Harvard University announced last Thursday that it would be reversing its “standardized testing-optional” policy for applicants to the Class of 2029. This change in course — Harvard dropped the SAT/ACT requirement for applicants four years ago — comes on the heels of announcements by fellow Ivy League schools Dartmouth and Yale in February that they would be doing the same. We hail Harvard’s decision as one long overdue, and note that — given their influence on elite academic trends as a whole — it represents a setback for the continuing effort by left-wing academics to redirect higher education away from the pursuit of excellence and toward the pursuit of an ideological agenda.

The trend is unmistakable and the timing extremely telling: Unlike Columbia — which only acted last year — Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth all dropped their testing requirements in June of 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 crisis. For each school, the proffered logic was identical, and facially plausible: The chaos and national variation in Covid-19 lockdown protocols made it incredibly difficult (and in certain lockdown-happy states functionally impossible) for high-school students to sit for these tests. The problem was that the testing-optional policy remained in place long after Covid had faded away, which suggested that the pandemic was a pretextual excuse, and ideological considerations rather than epidemiological ones had driven it all along. (The fact that Columbia jumped onto this bandwagon years later and without any Covid rationale underlines the point rather demonstratively.)

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Kidneys Don’t See Color Meritocratic medicine scores another triumph with a genetically modified pig kidney—but the STEM diversity crusade threatens to replace discovery with identity-driven mediocrity. Heather MacDonald

Posted By on April 17th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/kidneys-dont-see-color

On March 16, 2024, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a 62-year-old man suffering from end-stage kidney disease. The groundbreaking operation was, among much else, a refutation of the STEM diversity crusade, which threatens the medical progress that lay behind the landmark procedure.

Transplant recipient Richard Slayman had endured the usual debilitating effects of kidney failure for years. Healthy kidneys filter toxins and excess fluids from blood and excrete those waste products as urine. When kidneys fail, if no donated human kidney is available to replace them, patients spend hours a week hooked up to a dialysis machine that filters their blood mechanically. Slayman had already spent seven years on dialysis before receiving a human kidney in 2018. That transplanted kidney itself faltered, however, and by 2023, Slayman was back on dialysis. This time, though, he required biweekly visits to the hospital to keep his blood vessels open. He developed congestive heart failure. And he rejoined the more than 100,000 Americans waiting, often futilely and fatally, for a human kidney.

If Slayman’s new pig kidney continues to function, the capacity to transplant animal organs successfully into humans (a process known as xenotransplantation) will be as significant as curing cancer, says nephrologist Stanley Goldfarb. Getting to this point required 125 years of scientific creativity and an ever more complex understanding of molecular biology. None of that development had anything to do with racial identity.

Slayman’s genetically modified pig kidney represents a return of sorts to the origins of transplant science. When surgeons started contemplating organ transplants in the early twentieth century, they initially focused on organs from other mammals, since harvesting human organs was considered problematic at best. The French surgeon Alexis Carrel began a series of transplant experiments on dogs after discovering how to connect arteries to arteries and how to widen narrowed vessels—prerequisites to organ transplantation. For the next several decades, surgeons in France, Germany, Russia, and the U.S. transplanted goat, sheep, and monkey kidneys into dying human patients, but the organs (and patients) quickly failed. It would take the evolution of another branch of medical science—immunology—to understand why.

MEDIA Comments turned off

In True Journalistic Fashion, NPR Can’t Take What It Dishes Out

Posted By on April 17th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/17/in-true-journalistic-fashion-npr-cant-take-what-it-dishes-out/

Has there ever been a more hypocritically thin-skinned occupation than journalism?

Day after day these relatively uneducated writers piously dish out opprobrium on those they don’t like and then respond like whiny spoiled brats when anyone dares to criticize them.

The latest example of this involves Uri Berliner, a senior editor at National Public Radio who we learned on Tuesday was suspended without pay for having the temerity to complain that this taxpayer-supported enterprise had become hopelessly agenda-driven.

Berliner has worked at NPR for a quarter century and describes himself as a Sarah Lawrence College-educated child of a “lesbian peace activist mother” whose Spotify “listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.”

In other words, he’s a solid liberal. So, it’s worth listening to what he has to say.

“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent,” he writes, “but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed.”

That culture no longer exists, he says, a transformation that started in earnest in 2016.

“What began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency,” he writes. He goes on to describe how the network’s ideological blinders caused it to swallow the Russia-hoax story whole, mishandle the COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop stories, and how woke dogma infects everything NPR covers.

BOOKS Comments turned off

CHAPTER 14: Changing Hearts and Minds Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [forthcoming release May 2024] Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on April 17th, 2024

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27717/chapter-14-changing-hearts-and-minds

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

On October 30, 2008, in Columbia, Missouri, candidate Barack Hussein Obama declared to an unsuspecting public, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America.” It was the promise of a radical leftist to change the culture of America and move the nation from constitutional republic to socialism. John Dewey’s destruction of American minds through progressive education had a partner in Obama and the Culture War president Obama unleashed on America.

To move our constitutional republic to socialism and beyond, globalism’s leftist progressive movement adopted the binary victim/oppressor social structure of cultural Marxism. Classical Marxism identifies the oppressors as the bourgeoisie (owners of production) who exploit the proletariat (workers). The metric of classical Marxism is economics. Cultural Marxism re-labels the participants and defines culture, not economics, as the metric of exploitation. It is one species of the genus Marxism as described by James Lindsay in Chapter 11. In cultural Marxism, white males are the identified oppressors and everyone else is their victim.

Both classical and cultural Marxism seek to replace the existing order with collectivism, each selling its own idealized form of a secular heaven on Earth. Today’s social justice warriors who sign onto this leftist lunacy are ignorant of history, arrogant, and too childish to examine the objective reality of the offer. Leftist ideologues actually believe the fantasy of a Marxist Utopia, and don’t realize that the paradise they advocate is the powerless state of infantile dependence, the opposite of individual freedom. When infantile dependence is advanced into adulthood, it awards the state total control.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Iran’s attack was a cassus belli, not a ‘retaliation’ Ruthie Blum

Posted By on April 17th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/irans-attack-was-a-casus-belli-not-a-retaliation/

Following the April 1 strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, threats of retaliation against Israel—widely assumed to have been behind the attack—promptly emerged from Tehran. Seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed in the bombing that reportedly destroyed the building that housed them next to the embassy compound.

Among the dead were Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and his deputy, Mohammad Haj Rahimi. Zahedi was a top commander in the IRGC’s Quds Force, designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization, who oversaw all terrorist operations against Israel from Syria, Lebanon and Palestinian-run territories.

Dubbing their headquarters in Syria a “diplomatic mission,” therefore, is like calling Shifa in Gaza a hospital. Indeed, according to international law: “Any object that serves a military purpose, even if used for both military and civilian activities, is a legitimate target.”

Despite this, or because of it, most analysts were skeptical about the likelihood of a counter-offensive from the soil of the foremost state sponsor of terrorism. After all, the ayatollah-led regime has spent decades cultivating proxies to do its dirty work around the world.

And at this very moment, some of those surrogates are actively engaged in their sponsor’s aim to wipe the Jewish state off the map, while others are sporadically contributing to the effort.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are fighting Israeli troops and holding hostage 133 mostly Israeli civilians in Gaza, while targeting Israel with rockets; Hamas and PIJ are fighting soldiers and civilians in Judea and Samaria; Hezbollah missiles have caused the evacuation of citizens in northern Israel; and the Yemen-based Houthis occasionally join in the multi-front assault through UAVs launched at Eilat.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Rise of the Civil Rights Constitution By Jesse Merriam, Tom Klingenstein

Posted By on April 17th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-rise-of-the-civil-rights-constitution/

Editor’s Note: We cannot forget that the group quota regime is just that: not merely an ideology but a proper regime, a civilizational and constitutional rival to the American regime. It has its own legal and organizing principles, which directly challenge those of our own Constitution. These operating principles of the group quota regime have long been taking hold in our society and in our governing institutions.

Jesse Merriam, a legal and political philosopher, recently joined Tom Klingenstein to discuss that quiet revolution: its roots, its current state, and the possibility for reform. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

TK: Welcome Jesse Merriam. Jesse is an associate professor of government at Patrick Henry College and a research fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. Jesse holds a J.D. from George Washington University Law School and a Ph.D. in judicial politics and legal philosophy from Johns Hopkins University.

JM: It’s good to be with you.

TK: Jesse, you are a man of controversy. Among your controversial opinions are: 

The legal conservative movement has been much less successful than most conservatives believe.
Diversity and anti-discrimination are the twin pillars of today’s Constitution which makes it fair to say that today America operates under the Civil Rights Constitution. 
We should revive, to a degree, freedom of association, which you believe to be a right necessary for self-governance. 
The Federalist Society, despite notable successes, has not provided what the legal conservative movement needs to be successful.
Originalism has not, as intended, advanced a distinctly conservative agenda.
The recent Supreme Court affirmative action decisions are not likely to reduce affirmative action by very much. 
Harvard and Affirmative Action

TK: Let’s take the last claim first. My impression is that most analysts think that the recent UNC and Harvard affirmative action decisions will have a much greater impact than you do. Why are you so skeptical?

JM: My skepticism boils down to three reasons. One reason has to do with the unique status of affirmative action. We can understand this uniqueness in terms of both law and policy. Affirmative action law is unique in the sense that, since the civil rights revolution, affirmative action is the only type of governmental discrimination based on race that the Supreme Court has permitted. Affirmative action is also unique in American policy in that it is the only public program in all of American history—to my knowledge at least—that has expanded in breadth and strengthened in force in the face of growing resistance from the American people, state legislatures, and federal courts. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Law-School Rot Hits Berkeley Dean Close to Home — Literally Tal Fortgang

Posted By on April 16th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/law-school-rot-hits-berkeley-dean-close-to-home-literally/

When students turned a party into a protest, Erwin Chemerinsky learned the hard way that coddling activists won’t save you when they become the mob.

The moral and behavioral rot at our elite law schools has hit close to home — literally — for the dean of Berkeley Law, Erwin Chemerinsky. On April 9, about 60 third-year students gathered in the dean’s backyard for a pre-graduation dinner. A few of the students co-opted the occasion to rant about their school’s supposed support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and Chemerinsky’s avowed Zionism. Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, repeatedly pleaded with these students to leave. When Fisk tried to wrest a microphone from the student leading the demonstration, the student accused Fisk of assault and refused to move, insisting that she had a First Amendment right to continue.

In the days before the dinner, posters had gone up around campus that depicted the dean wielding a bloody knife and fork, with the message, “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.”

In his short official statement following the unsettling evening at his home, Chemerinsky used the words “sad” or “sadness” four times. He was “sad to hear” that students wanted him to cancel the dinner, as proclaimed on the posters, and that if he did not acquiesce, they would protest. And he was “enormously sad” that students would be “so rude” as to “use the social occasion for their political agenda.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Fundamental Unraveling of America This year’s election is our final wake-up call. By Albin Sadar

Posted By on April 16th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/16/the-fundamental-unraveling-of-america/

By now, it must be overwhelmingly apparent to every American citizen that what candidate Barack Obama promised on the campaign trail back in 2008 has come to pass. Obama touted a “fundamental transformation of America” if elected president and, once elected, he proceeded to accomplish that one huge goal.

It can certainly be argued that the country experienced a slow boiling of the frog during the eight years of Obama’s presidency and that, during that period, the pot neither got to boil too long nor did the frog feel the heat intensely enough to hop out. Hillary Clinton was anointed by the Democrats to follow Obama to continue the unraveling of America’s constitutional republic, replacing it with their own interpretation of a “democracy.”

But somehow, out of nowhere, a wrecking ball named Donald J. Trump collided with the original fundamental-transformation plan. However, that, as we all experienced, was only a temporary setback. Once the 2020 election was successfully rigged and stolen and a hand-puppet-Biden government was installed, Obama and his global handlers continued stirring and reheating the pot to the required boiling point.

As it turned out, this time around, turning up the heat also necessitated putting a lid on the pot because there was a real chance that the frog might finally catch on and attempt to jump out.

So, where are we now?

The pot continues to frantically boil, with the frog finally awakening to its fate—but trapped inside the pot. And the only one capable of removing the lid is that same old why-won’t-he-just-go-away-already Trump. Even with the onslaught of tactics straight out of the Jussie Smollett playbook (i.e., if you can’t find a crime, make one up), resulting in New York- and DC-style “fair” trials and verdicts, Trump continues to generate his own heat, resulting in the heads of Democrats boiling—and sometimes even exploding.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Reality of Migrant Crime A catastrophic – and lethal – mess. by Byron York

Posted By on April 16th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-reality-of-migrant-crime/

There’s been an ongoing political debate lately about crimes committed by migrants who entered the United States illegally. Actually, there’s not much to debate about their first unlawful act — entering the United States without authorization — but much disagreement about how many illegal border crossers commit crimes after that.

In recent weeks, Republicans have publicized the murder of Laken Riley, the Georgia nursing student who police say was abducted and killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan migrant who entered the United States illegally in September 2022, only to be quickly released into the country. Ibarra was one of millions of illegal crossers who rushed into the United States after the implementation of virtually open-border policies by President Joe Biden. In response to Republicans highlighting the murder, some Democrats argued that the “immigrant crime narrative is racist,” in the words of California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia.

The issue popped up in the State of the Union address, when some Republicans tried to goad Biden into saying Riley’s name. Biden did say the name — although he got it wrong — and then referred to the alleged killer, Ibarra, as an “illegal.” Democratic activist groups reacted in anger, not at the murder but at the use of the word “illegal” to describe an illegal immigrant. Biden swiftly apologized, saying he should have called Ibarra “undocumented” instead.

Now there is another migrant crime in the news, this time in New York City. Last week police raided a house in the Bronx that had been taken over by migrant squatters who had entered the U.S. illegally. In addition to arresting eight of them, police confiscated several firearms, extended magazines, ammunition, plus the drugs ketamine and cocaine. The cops moved in, the New York Post reported, after one of the migrants “allegedly flashed a pistol at someone on the property March 27, leading to a 911 call and the discovery of the squatter gang.”

In true New York fashion, a judge quickly freed most of the suspects without bail. At that point, the Enforcement and Removal Operations office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested three of them. How did they do that? Officers just went back to the house in the Bronx, where the suspects had returned to keep doing what they were doing before their arrests. Now, it appears four others have also been picked up by ICE.

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Monsters on the Loose: Israel is the Canary As goes the Jewish state, so goes the West. by J. Christian Adams

Posted By on April 16th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/monsters-on-the-loose-israel-is-the-canary/

Not long ago, the monsters were kept sealed up tight somewhere. Just a few decades ago, western values maintained the international order. But when the monsters escape, as they did on October 7, the monsters go after Jews.

Western values that governed international and domestic norms are being replaced by chaos and authoritarianism around the world, as well as here at home.

First Israel. What makes October 7 so sinister is that the monsters went after Jews in their place of ultimate sanctuary – Israel. They dragged them from their homes and murdered them in Israel instead of Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, the long vanished Jewish quarter, or any of the sites of other pogroms across history.

October 7 was different and illustrated how precarious Israel’s existence is.

The monsters seem to be on the loose around the globe, even in Europe. In eastern Europe the postwar international order is under attack, where even recognized international borders are meaningless.

Perhaps the very term “postwar” no longer has currency. Perhaps we are so far removed from that war which governed so much about the last eight decades – including Israel’s right to exist – that the term “postwar” is obsolete.

The West seems to have forgotten the lessons of 1914 or 1939. Land for peace is back in vogue, despite always being a fool’s gambit – whether in the West Bank, Sudetenland or Donetsk.

Few in the West seem to understand how close to the cliff we are. Too many are too busy staring at their phones.

The only western-style democracy in the middle east is in an existential fight for survival. Meanwhile, domestic anti-Semites are raiding private homes of noted Jewish law professors and bullying students on campus who support Israel’s right to exist.

Initially firmly supporting Israel, since October 7 the radicals who staff this administration – whether at the State Department, White House or Department of Defense – have asserted their influence. Support for Israel in the executive branch is withering.