EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo Copy and Paste Another Harvard racial-justice scholar is accused of plagiarism.

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/christina-cross-plagiarism-accusations

Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article title “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”

Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.

According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”

I have obtained a copy of the complaint, which documents a pattern of misappropriation in Cross’s dissertation and one other academic paper. The complaint begins with a dozen allegations of plagiarism related to the dissertation that range in severity from small bits of “duplicative language,” which may not constitute an offense, to multiple passages heavily plagiarized from other sources without proper attribution. (Cross did not respond to a request for comment.)

The most serious allegation is that Cross lifted an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Stacey Bosick and Paula Fomby titled “Family Instability in Childhood and Criminal Offending During the Transition Into Adulthood” without citing the source or placing verbatim language in quotations. Here is the paragraph from Bosick and Fomby:

We use data from the PSID and two of its supplemental studies, the Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS). PSID began in 1968 as a nationally representative sample of approximately 4,800 households. Original respondents and their descendants have been followed annually until 1997 and biennially since then. To maintain population representativeness, a sample refresher in 1997 added approximately 500 households headed by immigrants who had entered the United States since 1968. At each wave, the household head or the spouse or cohabiting partner of the head reports on family household composition, employment, earned and unearned income, assets, debt, educational attainment, expenditures, housing characteristics, and health and health care in the household. In 2015 (the most recent wave available), the study collected information on almost 25,000 individuals in approximately 9,000 households.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Gaza War: The Real Problem With Friends Like Chuck Schumer, Who Needs Enemies? by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20507/gaza-war-israel-schumer

Rather than taking tangible steps towards peace, [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas has done nothing but bypass and evade bilateral negotiations with Israel, while taking extremely tangible steps toward terrorism – from rewarding terrorists, or the families of those who murder Jews, with “$345-$1200” a month for life, to repeating that terrorist murderers are “heroes” — all the while admitting that Palestinians are not the indigenous people there.

As for Schumer’s “two-state solution,” 64% of Palestinians said they are opposed to the idea. Those polled would like a one-state solution: a Palestinian state with no “Israel” anywhere in sight. More than 60% also expressed support for an “armed struggle” against Israel.

“[T]he only thing we should be focused on is changing the regime in Gaza, bringing down the terrorist regime of Hamas, and not the duly elected government of Israel.” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Fox News, March 17, 2024,

The reason [the Palestinians] just keep “saying no” is because they do not want a Palestinian State next to Israel, they want a Palestinian State instead of Israel.

Schumer, by signaling to Hamas and other terrorists that the Americans are on their side against Netanyahu and the Israeli government, has painstakingly emboldened them.

Many Arabs understand — unlike Schumer and many in the Biden administration — that the real problem is the Iranian regime and its terror proxies.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Regime Actively Seeking to Overthrow Israeli Government to Save Hamas by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20490/biden-regime-actively-seeking-to-overthrow

One Israeli expert frequently consulted by American officials says, “I have been asked by a serious administration figure what it is that will force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse. They were interested in the mechanics, what can we demand which will collapse his coalition.”

[O]ur intelligence apparatus is rotted through with Islamic terror supporters and sympathizers.

The 2024 ODNI treats Netanyahu like a leader to be overthrown and suggests that this would be a good outcome. It’s a hostile act from a hostile administration that is doing everything it can to save Islamic terrorists.

Since Oct 7, the Biden administration pivoted from backing Israel’s effort to remove Hamas, to backing the effort by Hamas allies from Dearborn to Qatar to overthrow the Israeli government in order to save Hamas.

One Israeli expert frequently consulted by American officials says, “I have been asked by a serious administration figure what it is that will force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse. They were interested in the mechanics, what can we demand which will collapse his coalition.”

“What can we demand which will collapse his coalition” is revealing as hell. The Obama administration was infamous for trying to use pressure on Israel to create splits inside its coalition government. Biden’s people are trying to do the same thing.

The report comes from Noga Tarnopolsky and calling her biased and hostile is an understatement, but this stuff is now showing up in intelligence reports.

The 2024 ODNI claims that, “Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy. Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections. A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time — Part XXXII (Sea Level Rise Edition) Francis Menton

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-3-18-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxxii-sea-level-rise-edition

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud by which government functionaries alter data collected and previously reported in official data bases in order to support a narrative of impending catastrophic global warming. No other scientific fraud in world history comes close to this one in scope or significance. While prior frauds may have scored a crooked scientist some funding or maybe some temporary fame, this one drives trillions of dollars of worldwide government spending and seeks to transform the entire world economy. The prior 31 posts in this series are all collected for your reading enjoyment at this link. (They are in groups of six posts each, beginning with the most recent. After each six, you must go to the bottom and click the “NEXT” button to get the next six posts.)

Those prior 31 posts have all concerned alteration of one particular sort of data, namely temperature records. The posts document how, at station after station, previously-reported data have been altered to make earlier temperatures cooler and later ones warmer, and thus to show an enhanced warming trend (or in many cases to replace a cooling trend with a warming trend). The altered temperatures then form the basis for hockey-stick shaped charts of world temperatures, showing rapid recent warming, and for claims from NASA and NOAA and the media that the most recent year or month was the “warmest ever.”

But why should we really care that the earth’s atmosphere is getting a little warmer? The UN has supposedly set some kind of Maginot Line at a 1.5 deg C temperature increase from 20th century levels — an amount so small that you can barely feel it when it occurs each day. The 1.5 deg mark is just not that all that scary. So the bureaucrats and leftists need a Plan B to scare the bejeezus out of the people. Plan B is sea level rise.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Max Eden, Josh Hammer Dismantling Leftist Indoctrination on Campus How a conservative administration could use civil rights law to reshape American universities

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dismantling-leftist-indoctrination-on-campus

Americans rightly see former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as an intellectual lightweight who ascended to her position because academia now values identity over merit. Gay was the avatar for the governing ideology of American higher education. Until Gay’s downfall began with the now-infamous congressional hearing in December 2023, campus diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) commissars saw their positions as morally and administratively unassailable. Even after her ouster, Gay’s colleagues have every right to feel secure in their posts. Sure, Americans, acting through their elected representatives, can exert enough pressure to get Harvard’s president replaced. But with so many anti-Semitic ideologues inside and outside DEI bureaucracies, whacking a mole or two won’t make a systemic difference, right?

Wrong. Americans can decide in 2024 whether to allow our universities to remain structurally anti-Semitic. Consider the case of Middlebury College. Last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that shortly after Hamas murdered more than 1,000 Israelis, raped an untold number of women, and beheaded babies on October 7, 2023, Jewish students at Middlebury asked the college to host a vigil for the victims. Shockingly, Middlebury refused to permit the students to hold the event in the campus chapel, refused to provide police protection, asked them not to display Israeli flags, and insisted that they not identify the victims as Jewish. All in the name of “inclusivity.” (The vigil ended up being held outside.)

Shortly thereafter, Middlebury provided access to the chapel and police protection for an event titled, “Vigil for Palestine.” It began with a sectarian Islamic prayer and featured remarks from Middlebury’s vice president of equity and inclusion, Khuram Hussain, who conveniently did not attend the Jewish vigil. The director of StandWithUs’s Center for Legal Justice, the legal arm of the well-known Jewish advocacy organization, told the Free Beacon that “the Middlebury administration seems to think they’re off the radar and can get away with the disparate treatment of Jewish students because everyone is focused on Harvard.” The center filed a federal Title VI civil rights complaint, arguing that “there’s not just a hostile environment for Jewish students; the administration also seems to be directly complicit.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu returns ‘friendly’ fire The Israeli prime minister’s equanimity has its limits in the face of potshots from Washington.By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/netanyahu-returns-friendly-fire/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu’s angry response to recent comments emanating from Washington is as welcome as it was long in coming. For obvious reasons relating to the need for American ammo—and stemming from his deference to his country’s most important ally—Bibi has been careful to keep all discourse from his end dignified.

Despite being subjected to repeated digs from Democrats over his “extremist” coalition and renewed calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state, he has taken every opportunity to thank the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden for its support.

He has managed to keep his cool when admonished by “backers” about his execution of the war against Hamas. Rather than voicing outrage in the face of professed tough-love warnings over potential violations of international law, he has rebutted by describing the care taken by the Israel Defense Forces to avoid civilian casualties.  

He has countered accusations of causing famine in Gaza by pointing to the massive amounts of humanitarian goods entering the Strip and Israel’s efforts to prevent Hamas from stealing and selling it. He has also explained to those admonishing him not to enter Rafah why doing so is necessary, and promised that plans are underway to evacuate non-combatant residents from the area.

But even Bibi’s equanimity, no matter how tactical, has its limits. These were tested on Thursday by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose jaw-dropping chutzpah came on the heels of comparable gall spewed by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

In a lengthy speech on the Senate floor, Schumer asserted that Netanyahu “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into a mental health industry that is harming, not healing, American children

In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?

In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:

Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
“Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge

Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to bolster America’s kids have backfired—and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Fatah is right – Hamas is to blame for the war in Gaza It’s time we called out the woke left’s neo-imperial belief that Israel is to blame for everything. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/18/fatah-is-right-hamas-is-to-blame-for-the-war-in-gaza/

So, there you have it: Fatah is now taking a more grown-up line on the Gaza war than most of the woke left. Where Western radicals are still running around damning Israel as a uniquely barbaric state that is carrying out a genocidal pillage of Gaza, Fatah says that, actually, a certain terror army called Hamas bears vast moral responsibility for this calamity. It was Hamas’s ‘adventure’ of 7 October that lit the fire of this war, this ‘horrific and crueller [Nakba] than the Nakba of 1948’, Fatah says. It’s true – so why can so few in the West see it?

Fatah is the party of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank. It has rarely seen eye to eye with Hamas. In fact, they have a bloody history of rivalry. Now they’re at it again. Abbas has appointed a new prime minister, Mohammad Mustafa, and this has ticked off both Hamas and Islamic Jihad. We weren’t consulted, they wail. In a stinging reply, Fatah said: ‘Did Hamas consult the Palestinian leadership… when it made its decision to carry out the “adventure” of last 7 October, which led to a catastrophe more horrific and crueller than the Nakba of 1948?’

Ouch. And it gets harsher. ‘Those who were responsible for the return of the occupation to the Gaza Strip and [who] caused the Nakba which our Palestinian people live… have no right to dictate national priorities’, Fatah fumed. There it is, the R-word – Hamas is responsible for the present disaster in Gaza. It’s a significant moment. As the Jerusalem Post says, this marks the ‘first time in which a formal Palestinian voice has blamed Hamas for the disastrous outcomes of the 7 October massacre’.

What’s hilarious – or horrifying – is that if a Fatah official were to say any of this on a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo in London or LA, he’d be rounded on by the mob, possibly punched, and denounced as an apologist for Israel and a Zio-cuck. This isn’t a hypothetical. Counter-protesters who have correctly branded Hamas as terrorists or damned them for bringing war to Gaza have been insulted and even assaulted by these hate marchers masquerading as peace activists. It seems it’s safer to criticise Hamas in Palestine than in Westminster or Brooklyn. What’s going on?

It has been a chief aim of the West’s ‘pro-Palestine’ set to absolve Hamas of responsibility for the war in Gaza. Everything is Israel’s fault, apparently. Even Hamas’s own pogrom. As those overeducated radicals at Harvard infamously said on 7 October, the day of the anti-Semitic slaughter, Israel is ‘the only one to blame’ for the violence (my emphasis). Israel is ‘entirely responsible’ for what’s happening, said the Ivy League midwits. Such craven absolution of Hamas was widespread in the days after the pogrom. All violence is ‘a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime’, said the Democratic Socialists of America.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Berkeley Is a Safe Space for Hate Thuggish intimidation of Jewish students and teachers is the new normal as leftist brownshirts topple once-heralded free speech bastion by Daniel Solomon

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/berkeley-safe-space-for-hate

If graduate school has any function, it is as a preserve of a serious clash of ideas. But the UC Berkeley campus is the stage for a confrontation of a different kind. Last month, ahead of a lecture by Ran Bar-Yoshafat, a reserve combat officer in the Israel Defense Forces and a regular on the lecture circuit, Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine promised a reprise of the Hamas pogrom, hanging from the campus’ main entrance a pledge to “Flood Sather Gate”—a reference to “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the code name for Hamas’ rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

On the night of the lecture, the group’s undergraduate fellow travelers, Bears for Palestine, made good on that vow, disrupting a pro-Israel event in a protest and quickly escalating into a riot. The mob smashed windows, shouted antisemitic chants, and sent at least one student to urgent care. The attendees, this author included, had to be evacuated, ironically, via a tunnel. We, the Jewish students, had forfeited our right to security after coming to hear Bar-Yoshafat’s lecture. The university had assured the campus Jewish organizations behind the event that police officers would fend off disruptive protest and uphold our First Amendment rights. The administration did little to protect the safety of the speaker and audience, and even less to protect their free speech rights.

The antisemitic riot capped months of harassment, terror apologia, and occasional outbursts of violence from the campus “Free Palestine” movement. The university’s response has been consistently craven. Meanwhile, some faculty members, such as in the history department, where I am a Ph.D. student, have justified and covered for this behavior. My department has been a microcosm of a larger institutional failure, in which “equity” and “anti-colonialism” act as shields for rank antisemitism.

Leading a coterie of Ph.D. students in the UC Berkeley history department is professor Ussama Makdisi, the chapter president of what Harold Bloom labeled the school of resentment. Makdisi wrote his first books on sectarianism in the late Ottoman Empire, and his latest volume rhapsodizes about a 19th-century convivencia in the Levant that Zionism supposedly ruined. Even before the Hamas pogrom, he told a lecture hall full of students that Jews should have founded their state in postwar Germany. The university press office rewarded him for this in an article in which he was lauded, including by Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and inclusion, for creating a “learning space” that exemplifies “what’s possible when we imagine, create and actualize the conditions that support thriving for every member of our campus community.”

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Long Tyranny A Greater Threat Than Long COVID

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/19/long-tyranny-a-greater-threat-than-long-covid/

The policy response to the coronavirus outbreak was as deadly as the disease.

Not to downplay the damage done by COVID, but we’re still dealing with a far worse disease and will be for some time. It has no medical name but if it did, we’d call it the tyrannococcus.

From the top we acknowledge that the novel coronavirus killed millions around the world. This is not a statistic but a procession of tragedies, and they happened despite the policy responses from those who claimed to be our guardians. Now, four years later, the experts are telling us to treat the disease similar to the way we treat the flu. The much-feared “long COVID appears to manifest as a post-viral syndrome indistinguishable from seasonal influenza and other respiratory illnesses,” says Medical Xpress.

Yet the damage wrought by governments, spread by the tyrannococcus machine, will continue well beyond 2024. “We will be dealing with the harm done for decades,” says Martin Kulldorf, the biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist who was fired from his Harvard faculty position because he objected to COVID vaccine mandates.

Rather than respond in any sort of reasonable way, elected and unelected officials acted as tyrants, closing businesses, restricting our freedom to move about, limiting the number of people who could gather in private homes, requiring mask use and mandating vaccinations. “There was very little oversight or limitation on the powers conferred to” the agencies that made those decisions, says the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They simply gave themselves power they should have never wielded.