EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Krugman-Led Mob Comes for Academic Freedom By David Harsanyi

Posted By on June 12th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/the-krugman-led-mob-comes-for-academic-freedom/

The Left seems increasingly incapable of living by neutral principles.

The long march through the institutions ends in the university economics department. The digital mob, led by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Michigan professor Justin Wolfers, has arrived at the University of Chicago, where it is pressuring the school to remove Professor Harald Uhlig from his position as editor of Journal of Political Economy, after he criticized Black Lives Matter.

The left-wing economists were triggered (or, more likely, are pretending to be triggered) by an Uhlig tweet contending that BLM “just torpedoed itself” by supporting “defund the police.” Uhlig went on to argue that it was time “for sensible adults to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest, respectful conversations about it all.”

The horror!

It is almost surely the case that Krugman and his followers see an opportunity to appropriate and weaponize a cause to undermine those in the University of Chicago economics department who still cling to heterodox positions.

Wolfers, who demands academics talk about racial inequality in the manner he prescribes, says, “I don’t think it’s just or fair that Uhlig, as an editor at the @JPolEcon is an important gatekeeper for economists trying to make their mark. I don’t think the profession’s resolve to look more deeply into racial justice will get a fair hearing under his editorship.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Police and Race: Hard Problems and Hard Truths By Charles Lipson

Posted By on June 11th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/11/police_and_race_hard_problems_and_hard_truths_143422.html

In the midst of head-spinning talk about defunding police or abolishing them entirely, it’s important to step back and take a sober look at the debate. The racial dimension of policing is vexing because the racial dimension of American life is vexing. It is the deepest scar in our history. We treated it indecisively in forming our new nation and finally confronted it, at gruesome cost, in a great Civil War. We confronted it again a century later, after the failure of Reconstruction and decades of Jim Crow laws, during the Civil Rights Movement.

Despite those efforts and significant progress over the past half century, we never eliminated racism completely. We are facing it again today. The laws of the mid-1960s ensured de jure equality. Since then, the struggle has been to create a more equal society in practice. It’s difficult to even agree on the meaning of that term, much less achieve it. For some, equality refers to outcomes; for others, opportunities. Whatever the meaning, it must mean equal treatment by police. There’s no disagreement about that fundamental point.

For those who experienced the racial upheavals of the 1960s, it should be obvious that racism is far less prevalent in all aspects of American life today. That includes policing. It may not seem that way, though, because our time horizons are too short. Most Americans alive today didn’t live through that era, so they haven’t witnessed the gradual but unmistakable improvement. 

POLITICS Comments turned off

Biden: ‘This President Is Going to Try to Steal This Election’ By Rick Moran

Posted By on June 11th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/election/rick-moran/2020/06/11/biden-this-president-is-going-to-try-to-steal-this-election-n517426

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden told Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah that Donald Trump will try to “steal” the 2020 presidential election.

Saying that on a comedy show was quite appropriate.

Indeed, Biden picked up on a familiar Democratic narrative—that the GOP will try to steal the election by “suppressing” the vote. Now, logic would dictate that many votes that Trump and the Republicans would supposedly be “suppressing” would actually be cast for the GOP.

So, Republicans and Trump want to suppress their own vote? A novel notion, but not logical. It’s not even sane.

MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN Commentator Wants All Washington And Jefferson Statues Removed By Jordan Davidson

Posted By on June 11th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/11/cnn-commentator-wants-all-washington-and-jefferson-statues-removed/

Where did protestors around the nation get the idea to deface, behead, and pull down statues, even some of America’s most prominent abolitionists? Talking points spouted by CNN commentators are just one source of influence.

In a segment on CNN in 2017, Impact Strategies CEO and frequent commentator on the network Angela Rye announced her belief that statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other slave owners need to be removed.

“Whether we think they were protecting American freedom or not, [Washington] wasn’t protecting my freedoms,” she said.

Rye’s comments were in response to an argument proposed by Daily Beast Editor John Avlon suggesting that “Washington spent his life trying to unite the nation.” According to her, Avlon’s perspective is incorrect. 

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Be Courageous And Stand Firm, America—We Do Not Kneel By Joshua Lawson

Posted By on June 11th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/08/be-courageous-stand-firm-america-we-do-not-kneel/

Americans didn’t kneel to British tyranny, Nazi fascism, or Soviet communism. We won’t kneel for a collective guilt movement that’s gone off the rails.

Those who live in the far north in author George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels live by one principle: “We do not kneel.” They call themselves the “Free Folk.”

That used to be a label that was proudly worn by all Americans. But a still-too-unquestioned movement pushing guilt-by-associated-skin-tone has begun to undo one of this nation’s bedrock ideals.

The kneeling phenomenon demanded by the radical left in the wake of George Floyd’s death—and embraced by those guilted into submission—creates a two-tiered social stratification of “kneelers” and “those who refuse to bend the knee” that’s wholly un-American.

Mobs resulting from years of citizens saturated in “critical race theory” and grievance studies have pressured far too many into believing they bear guilt for the past sins of others. Now they kneel in fealty to that false reality or are exiled from society.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum: Intersectional protests strengthen Netanyahu’s push for sovereignty Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is probably the only person in the country who benefited from the disgusting show of insurrection.

Posted By on June 11th, 2020

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/intersectional-protests-strengthen-netanyahus-push-for-sovereignty-631168

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is able to make good on his vow to begin extending Israeli sovereignty to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria on July 1, he will owe a debt of gratitude to his enemies.

Foes abroad include extremists of all stripes. Some of these openly pray for the Jewish state’s elimination, without regard to its leadership at a given time. Others cloak a similar desire in hatred for Netanyahu specifically. Still others profess to take issue solely with Israeli “policies,” using this as a ploy and an excuse to delegitimize the country in every international forum.

Had any of the above been slightly less anti-Zionist, they would have been able to hoodwink all unsuspecting Western liberals, not just manipulate those with a mea culpa complex. Indeed, the more radical that Israel’s defamers become – through terrorism, UN resolutions or university lectures – the less sympathy they garner from people with half a brain and a pair of eyes.

The same applies to Israel’s homegrown critics of Zionism. Like their counterparts abroad, these local paragons of virtue-signaling fit into a few related categories. While all loathe Netanyahu in particular, they are none too fond of his predecessors either.

This includes the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination by right-wing fanatic Yigal Amir elevated him to the kind of saintly status that leftists never attached to him when he was alive. It was only when he signed the disastrous Oslo Accords with arch-terrorist and PLO chief Yasser Arafat that they gave him a little grace.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

The COVID Skeptics Were Right George Neumayr

Posted By on June 11th, 2020

https://spectator.org/covid-skeptics-right-coronavirus-lockdown/

When Alex Berenson, the former New York Times reporter, said that people will look back on the coronavirus lockdown as a “colossal mistake,” many scoffed. But with each passing day, as the failures of government at every level become clearer, Berenson and other COVID skeptics look increasingly perceptive. The governmental cure was worse than the disease.

“What I think is that people took a very, very aggressive action a month ago without necessarily thinking through what the economic or societal consequences were going to be,” Berenson said to the press in April. “Now more and more evidence is coming out that we responded too harshly, that maybe we should have taken smaller steps and seen what happened before we went to the place we went. And it seems to me very, very hard, both for politicians and for the public health establishment, to acknowledge this and to walk us back in a reasonable way.”

The predictions about the virus were wildly wrong, said Berenson: “I’ve been watching this like a hawk and I’ve been watching the models, both the Imperial College and now more recently, the major U.S. model, which is the University of Washington model, fail on a daily basis, fail to predict what is happening now, what is going to happen in months or years or even in a week…. I think most scientists agree it is more dangerous than the flu, but it doesn’t seem to be 10 or 20 or 30 times as dangerous as the flu. It’s on the spectrum of the flu. That’s what the data is now suggesting.”

The sheer arbitrariness of the lockdown, during which pols, drunk on their new powers, deemed services essential or nonessential depending on their ideological preferences, has been punctuated by the riots and protests, where all the COVID rules suddenly disappeared. We see nanny-state liberals, formerly so censorious of clustered gatherings, marching arm and arm with Black Lives Matter.

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

Why do younger black voters like Trump more than elders? UCLA study explains Carrie Sheffield

Posted By on June 11th, 2020

http://stupidfrogs.org/articles/why_do_younger_black_voters_like_trump_more_than_elders_ucla_study_explains.html

UCLA data collected just prior to the protests about the death of African-American George Floyd show younger black Americans have been holding more favorable views of President Trump than their parents and grandparents.

The data collected from April 2-May 13 by the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, an initiative that conducted weekly surveys of thousands of potential voters for nearly a year, found that 29% of percent of black voters ages 30-44 and 21% ages 18-29 have a “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” view of President Trump. This compares to just 14% of black voters 45-64 and 9% of those 65 and older.

“Trump symbolizes a much broader understanding than just his personality, what he represents,” veteran black empowerment activist Bob Woodson told Just the News. “I think that our younger people are realizing how they have been taken for granted by the Democratic Party and Democratic philosophy, and therefore are really open to alternatives.”

Woodson cited as evidence of this new trend the 2018 Florida gubernatorial race, where white Republican Ron DeSantis won by only 32,000 votes over the black Democrat in the race, Andrew Gillum. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Should Non-Profit U.S. Food Bank Executives Earn Nearly $1 Million Per Year? Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on June 11th, 2020

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/06/11/should-non-profit-us-food-bank-executives-earn-up-to-11-million-per-year/#3d83ace1d5ba

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a record 44 million Americans lost their jobs and filed for unemployment. Many turned to their local non-profit, charitable food banks for hunger relief.

Based in Chicago, Feeding America is the largest food bank in the country with revenues of $2.9 billion (2019). Primarily a pass-through organization, it makes grants and donations to local food banks across the country.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reviewed Feeding America’s payroll disclosures and found Diana Aviv, CEO, made $1.1 million (2019). This amount included $347,209 from a previous employer and rolled into a new 457B plan which was distributed to her when she left the organization that year.

In the previous year, Feeding America paid Aviv compensation of $860,909.

In 2019, other executives at the organization also made a lot of money: President Matthew Knott ($561,842, up $89,224), Treasurer Paul Henrys ($412,105, up $15,162), and Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Catherine Davis ($344,166, up $17,161). Chief Supply Chain Officer William Thomas made nearly $600,000 between 2018 and 2019 before leaving the organization.            

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

“Joe Biden” is simply an avatar for Obama’s third term: Lee Smith

Posted By on June 11th, 2020

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/obama-to-the-rescue

No one really expected a million people in Washington, D.C., Saturday night for the ongoing George Floyd protests. But according to some estimates, 200,000 did show up—more than enough to try to overrun the helmeted Secret Service agents standing guard in front of the White House. Instead, they spray-painted “Defund the Police” on 16th Street. So what happened?

For three years, Resistance Media and a set of political operatives who tag-team with their allies inside the federal bureaucracy have laid siege to the American public through their proxy war against the president they hate—and the country elected. What the resistance yearned for was the kind of imagery that galvanizes resistance movements from Latin America to the Middle East: a spectacular act of martyrdom that would crown their campaign of new age political warfare, which began with the Russiagate conspiracy theory, which was followed by a fraudulent impeachment process staged by the same political operatives, CIA officers, and media personalities who pushed “collusion” into the public sphere, to the three-month-long coronavirus lockdowns that were portrayed as matters of life and death only to be magically lifted to combat racism, after leaving nearly 20 million Americans jobless. The successive failures of the campaign to destroy Donald Trump and undo the 2016 election have only made the American left angrier and more willing to take desperate measures.                  

 

 It is precisely because no one in America believes that George Floyd deserved to die with a knee on the back of his neck that the protests have burned with such orgiastic intensity. If the real issue is systemic racism, as Al Sharpton along with the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world say it is, then the problem is the system itself. Logically, the system has to be collapsed.