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The Streets of San Francisco By Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on October 4th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-streets-of-san-francisco-11570143083

The city made a choice to tolerate vagrancy and encourage drug use, with dire consequences.

This city has been conducting a three-decade experiment in what happens when society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. It has done so in the name of compassion for the homeless. The result: Street squalor and misery have increased, while government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles guiding city policy remain inviolate: Homelessness is a housing problem, it is involuntary, and it persists because of inadequate public spending. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.

“Everyone’s on drugs here . . . and stealing,” an ex-convict named Shaku explains from an encampment of tents, trash and bicycles across from Glide Memorial Church in the heart of the Tenderloin district. A formerly homeless woman living in a city-subsidized hotel, asked if she does drugs, replies: “Is that a trick question?” Jeff, 50, slumps over his coffee cup at 7:30 a.m. A half-eaten muffin sits next to him on a filthy blanket. “I use drugs, alcohol, all of it,” he tells me, his eyes closed. “The whole Tenderloin is for drugs.”

The city sends the message relentlessly that drug use is not only acceptable but expected. The Health Department distributes 4.5 million syringes a year, along with alcohol swabs, vitamin C to dissolve heroin and crack, and instructions on how to tie one’s arm for a hit. Officials have installed 17 needle-disposal boxes and kiosks throughout the city, signaling to children that drug use is a normal part of adult life.

Only 60% of the city’s free needles are returned; the rest end up on the sidewalks or in the sewers. Users dig for veins in plain view. At the corner of Hyde Street and Golden Gate Avenue, steps away from the UC Hastings College of the Law, I was easily able to purchase a 2-gram pellet of fentanyl for $16, a new-customer discount.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Charter Schools Ace Another Test Minority students do better overall as charters gain market share.

Posted By on October 4th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/charter-schools-ace-another-test-11570143771

Is the success of charter schools an illusion? Critics claim charters merely skim the best students, whose parents care enough to apply, while pushing out troublemakers. So it’s worth noting a new study showing that often test scores improve for all students when charters increase their market share.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute examined 21 urban school districts with at least 2,500 black students per grade from 2009-2015. As the “black charter market share” rises in the study to 50% from zero, the associated educational gain is 0.8 grade level in English and 0.7 in math. This bump is for all black students in the district, whether they attend a charter or not.

Results are similar for the 27 urban districts with at least 2,500 Hispanic students per grade. As the “Hispanic charter market share” rises to 35% from zero, it’s associated with a gain of 0.7 grade level in English and 0.7 in math. For comparison, the overall racial achievement gap is roughly “two to three grade levels,” the study says.

Other results in the paper aren’t as dramatic. After adding more than 200 smaller urban districts, those with at least 100 minority students per class, the gains are 0.3 or 0.4 grade level, although Hispanics show no bump in English. In large suburban districts, the data show mostly null results for minority pupils.

Also noteworthy: “There is no evidence that higher charter market share is associated with achievement gains for white students.” There are even some declines as charters build market share. The largest drop, about 0.4 grade level, is in white suburban math scores. The reasons aren’t obvious. Maybe suburban charters are more likely to be Montessori or Waldorf schools less focused on testing. In any case, most of these students turn out fine. But for students in poor urban districts, solid English and math scores can be a ticket to the middle class.

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Schiff’s Shifty Timeline What did the House Intel Committee chairman know and when did he know it? By Kimberley A. Strassel

Posted By on October 4th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffs-shifty-timeline-11570143046

If the latest impeachment push continues to backfire, Democrats can thank their duplicitous House Intelligence chairman, Adam Schiff.

The New York Times reported this week that the “whistleblower” who set off the latest inquisition provided an “early warning” to Mr. Schiff’s committee that he or she was filing a complaint over Donald Trump’s July 25 call to Ukraine’s president. The media is now at pains to stress that whistleblowers do sometimes reach out to Congress, that all “procedures” were followed, and that what really matters is the accusation that Mr. Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

Actually, it matters a great deal that Mr. Schiff knew about this early and withheld it deliberately from both the public and his House colleagues. He used his advance information to lay the groundwork steadily for later exploitation of the issue. He went so far as to charge the White House with a coverup—of a complaint he already knew about. The timeline of this orchestrated campaign is another knock to the legitimacy of the so-called impeachment inquiry. If the public can’t trust Mr. Schiff to be honest about the origins of his information, why should they trust his claim that the information itself is serious?

Mr. Schiff on Sept. 13, a Friday night, issued the explosive news that he had been alerted a few days earlier by the intelligence community’s inspector general of an “urgent” yet unspecified whistleblower complaint. But the complaint is dated Aug. 12, and news reports now say the whistleblower interacted with Mr. Schiff’s staff prior to then. So Mr. Schiff knew about the topic of the complaint for more than a month—while the public did not. It is now clear why the intelligence chairman in that month suddenly developed an interest in all things Ukrainian, and began aggressively previewing his impeachment mantra.

On Aug. 23, for instance, Mr. Schiff tweeted that Mr. Trump tried to “get dirt on a political opponent” via personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s interaction with the office of the Ukrainian president. On Aug. 28, the chairman tweeted his newfound concern that Mr. Trump was “withholding vital military aid to Ukraine.” And on Sept. 9, Mr. Schiff suddenly announced his committee would launch a full-fledged investigation into whether Mr. Trump was trying to “pressure Ukraine to help the President’s re-election campaign.” All this was priming the public and the media for what was to come—the better to take full advantage of the whistleblower “news.”

Yet even after news broke of the complaint, Mr. Schiff played dumb. On Sept. 17, he flatly (and falsely) stated on MSNBC: “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower.” Two days later, he thanked the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, without whom “we might not have even known there was a whistleblower complaint.” Really? Mr. Schiff wanted to make it sound as if the Trump administration was muzzling the complainant, when in fact the process was working and Mr. Schiff knew all about it. CONTINUE AT SITE

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Scholars Disappointed by Decision Upholding Harvard Discrimination Press Release from National Association of Scholars

Posted By on October 4th, 2019

New York, NY (October 3, 2019) — The National Association of Scholars (NAS) reacted with disappointment to the decision by a United States District Court upholding racial discrimination in admissions by Harvard University. NAS had previously filed an amicus brief in the case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in favor of the plaintiff. We noted that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process discriminates against Asian applicants in order to achieve racial balancing.

 
“Racial discrimination is wrong,” said NAS President Peter Wood. “Unfortunately, Judge Allison D. Burroughs engaged in mental gymnastics to find Harvard’s behavior legal. Burroughs acknowledged that Harvard considers race ‘as a positive attribute’ for some races, but refused to admit that this results in intentionally negative outcomes for non-favored races.”
 
Wood continued, “Race should play no role in college admissions. Colleges and universities should concern themselves with life of the mind, not the color of their students’ skin. Academic achievement, proven ability, ambition, and commitment to learning should form the basis for college admissions decisions.”

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Forced to Kiss the Shoes of a Muslim Classmate, Called A ‘Dirty Jew’: Antisemitic Bullying Exposed at Australian Schools by Ben Cohen

Posted By on October 4th, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/10/03/forced-to-kiss-the-shoes-of-a-muslim-classmate-called-a-dirty-jew-antisemitic-bullying-exposed-at-australian-schools/?utm_content=news1&utm_medium=daily_email&utm_campaign=email&utm_source=internal/

Shocking accounts of antisemitic bullying at two schools in the Australian state of Victoria over the past year have led to calls for more assertive action by educational authorities to protect Jewish students.

The two cases — one involving a 5-year-old boy at a junior school, the other a 12-year-old boy in high school — revealed a pattern of dehumanizing language and violent behavior on the part of the bullies, alongside a disturbing indifference from officials at both schools when the abuse was brought to light by the parents of the children.

In an interview with the Melbourne-based Age newspaper on Thursday, the mother of the 5-year-old disclosed that her son was repeatedly taunted and laughed at over his circumcised penis — to the point where he began to wet himself in class rather than go to the toilet.

Other insults faced by the little boy at Melbourne’s Hawthorne West Primary School included epithets like “you dirty Jew” and “Jewish cockroach.” His parents began investigating whether there was a problem after the child began wetting his bed at home and complained about going to school. One morning, he reportedly told his mother, “‘Mummy, you shouldn’t love me. I’m a worthless, Jewish rodent. I’m vermin,” while she was making his breakfast.

“I grew up with Holocaust survivors, I used to go to synagogue with my uncle who was a Holocaust survivor and those were the words, literally, he was taunted with when he was five,” his mother told The Age.

The 12-year-old boy, meanwhile, was subjected to several months of antisemitic abuse that began with an incident in which he was forced to kiss the shoes of a Muslim fellow-student.

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The Humanitarian Hoax of Eternal Childhood: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 50 by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on October 4th, 2019

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/23319/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-eternal-childhood

   http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The humanitarian hoax of eternal childhood is a deliberate political strategy to destroy America from within by regressing its chronological adults to emotional children unable to think and behave as rational adults. It is a sinister psychological operation (PSYOPS) designed to invert the growth process and deny Americans the emotional maturity required to support ordered liberty and a free society.

The United States of America is the greatest experiment in individual freedom the world has ever known. Our Founding Fathers drafted a Constitution that rejected monarchy, oligarchy, theocracy, and any form of statism that deprived individual citizens of their individual rights. The United States of America celebrates individualism in a socio-economic structure that demands the adult attitudes of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and willingness to compete in a system of free market capitalism.

Freedom is an adult enterprise. Individual rights that support freedom require the individual responsibility of rational adult maturity. A society of emotional children cannot sustain itself. This is the key to understanding the insidious scheme to destroy America from within. Does this surprise you? It surprised me.

The 50th and concluding article in the Humanitarian Hoax series brings me back to its beginnings.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Gerald A. Honigman Of Prophets and Politics

Posted By on October 4th, 2019

http://q4j-middle-east.com

As of September 3rd, with the failure of talks between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel Beitenu’s Avigdor Liberman to form a national unity government, Israel’s fate is still anyone’s guess. 

Possibly the only good news is that the give-away-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Left, which repeatedly has prostrated itself to Arabs who won’t accept a viable Jewish State in the neighborhood whether it’s nine or nine hundred miles wide, has been so horrendously discredited by the murderous rejectionist violence by the very Arabs whose derrieres they’ve kissed, is that no suicidal, Lefty government is on the horizon. The willingness, however, of some Jewish parties to ally themselves with Israeli Arab parties which call for the destruction of the Jewish State themselves, and support other non-Israeli Arabs who actively murder Jews, is yet another headache.

Given all of this, perhaps it’s time to turn the clock back–way back–and rethink what politics in the reborn nation of the Jews should be all about. 

Let’s begin…

“And it came to pass that when (the Hebrew Prophet) Samuel was old, he made his sons Judges over all of Israel…And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, took bribes, and perverted justice…So all the Elders of Israel came together in Ramah and said to Samuel, ‘appoint a king over us so that we can be like other nations’ [Note: Ramah is located in the area of the 20th century C.E.’s renamed , formerly known as Judea and Samaria… 

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The EU’s hypocritical, patronizing attitude toward Israel By Alan Baker

Posted By on October 4th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-EUs-hypocritical-patronizing-attitude-toward-Israel-603650

Alan Baker served as legal adviser to Israel’s Foreign Ministry and as Israel’s ambassador to Canada.

One wonders why the EU did not view the recent declarations by the Palestinian leadership canceling the territorial division between areas A, B and C in a similar light.The curious article in The Jerusalem Post (“Peace needs international law and political will,” September 21), by European Union Special Representative for the Middle East Peace Process Susanna Terstal, is indicative of a serious and worrying lack of awareness as well as considerable possible ignorance by the EU as to the legal and political realities inherent in the peace process.

The EU representative evidently believes that incessant repetition of the phrase “two-state solution” adds some element of legitimacy and feasibility to the idea. But the two-state solution has never been agreed-upon between Israel and the Palestinians, and does not figure in any of the agreements between them. It is nothing more than an expression of wishful thinking within the UN and the EU. 

To the contrary, the Oslo Accords, to which the EU itself is a signatory, clearly leaves the issue of the permanent status of the territories to be decided in negotiations. The accords do not predetermine the outcome of the negotiations. Thus, whether the outcome will be one, two or three states, or a federation or confederation, remains on the negotiating table. This cannot be dictated by the EU, however much they might be enamored with the idea of a two-state solution.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Right from Wrong: Owing Israel an apology By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on October 4th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-Owing-Israel-an-apology-603662

The week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur might be described as a cheerful lead-up to the holiest and most solemn of Judaism’s High Holy Days.

Every year at this time, the Israeli public is treated to tips on how to get through the 25-hour fast with minimal suffering. Pointers from medical experts interviewed in print and over the airways include the healthiest methods for avoiding feeling faint from hunger and thirst, and the best ways to prevent caffeine withdrawal.In addition, people on the street begin wishing one another an “easy fast,” and bidding them a gmar hatima tova – that the sealing of their fate in the Book of Life for the coming year may be a good one.

It is a particularly odd social convention, considering that the purpose of fasting is precisely to create the optimal conditions for undertaking the toughest spiritual task there is: atoning for sins against God and man.

Theoretically, then, the process of abstinence is not meant to be easy; it is geared towards maximizing the effect of prayer and confession. In practice, however, it translates into a focus on food. We Israelis are Jews, after all.

Another thing we are, like all human beings, is hypocritical.

INDEED, NO SOONER does Yom Kippur end than the very people who spent days apologizing to their friends and family members for any wrongdoing they may have committed – and hours upon hours in synagogue beating their breasts before God – promptly resume mistreating their fellow man without the slightest twinge of remorse.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Paris Knife Attacker Converted to Islam 18 Months Before Attack: Report By Tobias Hoonhout

Posted By on October 3rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/paris-knife-attacker-converted-to-islam-18-months-before-attack-report/

The French police employee who killed four of his colleagues at the Paris police headquarters on Thursday was a recent convert to Islam, according to French television BFM TV.

The 45-year-old attacker killed three police officers and an administrative worker, three men and one woman, before being shot and killed by police. Officials so far have not publicly released a motive, and are trying to discover if there was a terrorism link. The man’s wife has been taken in custody.

  

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo took to Twitter to offer her condolences to the victim’s families.

“During the Paris Council, we will pay tribute to the victims and will salute the unfailing commitment of police forces serving the security of Parisians. We know what we owe them,” she wrote.