EDUCATION Comments turned off

Elite Colleges Reconsidering SAT Score Requirements By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on February 17th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/16/elite-colleges-reconsidering-sat-score-requirements/

Several elite universities are considering reversing recent decisions to reduce or even eliminate requirements for application that include standardized test scores such as the SAT exams.

According to Axios, multiple colleges used the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to weaken the importance of SAT and ACT test scores in most student applications. But in recent weeks, several schools have reversed course; Yale is considering repealing its prior policy of making SAT/ACT requirements optional, with Dartmouth already reinstating the requirements earlier this month. MIT reversed a similar policy back in 2022.

Other schools that have eliminated SAT/ACT requirements include Harvard and Columbia. Harvard, along with Cornell and Princeton, have extended their policy of making the scores optional, while Columbia’s policy remains permanent.

One of the motivating factors behind the reversal is ongoing research showing a clear correlation between students’ standardized test scores, and their subsequent academic performance and graduation rates in college. Some schools had previously opposed the test requirements for reasons of “diversity,” baselessly accusing the tests of being “racist” and against minority students.

Dartmouth pointed to a study that had been commissioned by the university’s president, which “confirms that standardized testing — when assessed using the local norms at a student’s high school” is crucial in evaluating an applicant’s potential.

In a statement, Yale’s undergraduate office said that they “expect to announce a decision on its long-term testing policy in the next few weeks.” In the meantime, students applying for the Fall of 2024 will still fall under the “not optional” category when it comes to standardized tests.

Brown University is currently awaiting a committee’s recommendations on how to move forward with standardized testing, as well as other practices such as legacy admissions and early decisions. The committee is expected to finish its report in the next few months.

There are still over 2,000 schools in the country which remain either optional or completely free of standardized test requirements ahead of the 2024-2025 academic year. Meanwhile, the National Education Association (NEA) has demanded that all colleges eliminate testing requirements, with NEA president Becky Pringle declaring in a statement that “All students deserve and have the ability to demonstrate knowledge in many ways that are measurable by those who know them best: Their educators.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Want to Stop Iran’s Regime? Hit the IRGC Assets by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on February 17th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20397/stop-iran-hit-irgc

“No one ever said it better than Osama bin Laden: When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they are attracted to the strong horse.” — Thomas Friedman, newyorker.com, July 5, 2010.

Especially in the Middle East, leaders are looking for who will protect them.

The Biden administration’s passive response to Iranian aggression is imperiling the region, the United States and the Free World. Iran, along with Qatar, have brought all the mayhem to the Middle East. When Iran achieves nuclear weapons capability, as it appears on the verge of doing, just think of what mayhem it will be able to bring then. Stop Iran now.

The Biden administration’s approach to dealing with Iran has been marked by a series of delayed responses, ineffective actions, and cosmetic sanctions that have clearly failed to deter the Islamic Republic’s aggressive behavior. This passive stance not only bolsters the Iranian regime but also jeopardizes the safety and security of Americans and their allies. A thorough reassessment of strategy and a commitment to assertive diplomacy would seem necessary to say the least.

When Iranian assets have been targeted, or even when a serious intent to do so was conveyed, Iranian leaders have relented from launching attacks on other countries, including the US and its allies. The most recent example occurred last month when Iran launched a missile strike into Pakistan. Pakistan, maintaining diplomatic relations with Iran, responded swiftly by launching multiple strikes into Iran shortly after the attack — in contrast to the delayed responses often observed from the Biden administration. Pakistan’s retaliatory strikes resulted in casualties; Iran has appeared to reconsider its aggressive stance. Iran adopted a softer tone; its foreign ministry issued statements expressing a commitment to fostering good neighborly relations with Pakistan.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pushed’ Missouri’s GOP Elections Chief, But You Won’t Hear It From Big Media BY: Shawn Fleetwood

Posted By on February 17th, 2024

https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/14/leftists-shoved-and-pushed-missouris-gop-elections-chief-but-you-wont-hear-it-from-big-media/

A leftist agitator was arrested last week for physically harassing Missouri Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft.

Corporate media regularly run dishonest articles hyping concerns about the safety of election officials throughout the country. So, why haven’t they reported on Missouri’s leading election official getting accosted by leftist agitators last week?

The incident in question occurred on Feb. 6, when Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft was attempting to enter a venue hosted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Held at a local business in Jefferson City, the event took place following remarks by Israeli Consul General Maor Elbaz-Starinsky before the Missouri General Assembly.

According to KOMU, a local NBC affiliate, anti-Israel demonstrators were already in the area and blocking traffic prior to Ashcroft’s arrival. Despite being asked by the Jefferson City Police Department (JCPD) to “clear the roadway,” the agitators “began blocking access to several local businesses, including the private event.” One such demonstrator, who has been identified as 20-year-old Ainslee Harkins, was arrested for trespassing after she “allegedly entered the private event and would not leave.”

Video footage of the incident shows Ashcroft walking by the protesters — who had lined up to block entrance to the facility — upon arriving at the private venue. After reaching the entrance to the building, Ashcroft attempted to open the door but was accosted by some of the demonstrators.

“There’s a lot of yelling and screaming but as I was just walking along the sidewalk, it was fine until I turned left to actually head into the doorway,” Ashcroft told The Federalist. “That’s when they … collapsed around me and [started] shoving me and pushing me.”

Despite being jostled, Ashcroft kept attempting to enter the facility. As he was reaching for the doorhandle, Ashcroft said one agitator — who video footage appears to show grabbed the secretary — told him he was going to “throw me to the ground.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

A Hundred Days after Gaza’s October 7 (Part 4 of 4) How Does This End? Regionally and Globally. by Gwythian Prins

Posted By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20396/gaza-october-7-regionally-globally

Israel’s cause is the cause of the Free World as is Ukraine’s and Taiwan’s.

Domestic supporters of Hamas, trying to constrain Israel by “lawfare” and by noisy street and media politics, are therefore a fifth column for our enemies and should be treated as such.

Unsuccessful “lawfare” at the International Court of Justice served to narrow and make harder the road out of Gaza for all local parties. The biggest losers are those Arabs who are neither Islamists nor anti-Semites: for their territorial hopes have been written out of history at present by Hamas and Iran. Prosperity and tranquillity for them will only return with resumption of the Abraham Accords…. Netanyahu is surely correct in stating that any attempt to push for a two-state solution at this moment would endanger Israel.

Globally, in the context of a developing worldwide multi-theatre and multi modal contest between the Free World and the dictatorships, the most humane and swiftest route to peace is controlled escalation on our terms which reaches out and helps Iranians to end the shaky and bloodstained regime of the Iranian ayatollahs.

The right sort of war – meaning war on Western terms, in which we and not our enemies have escalation dominance — is sometimes the most peace-friendly option….

There are always dire consequences when the two strands of the double helix of “history as facts” and “history as beliefs” are torn too far apart. Chaos ensues. Dark forces are liberated.

Just this has happened for Israel and its neighbourhood since Hamas perpetrated the pogrom of 7/10. In the hundred days until the world turned upside down with the South African led attempt to weaponise the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) to tar the victim of a transparently genocidal attack with charges of genocide — an attempt which failed, but only just — all routes out of the dark chaos have steadily narrowed. After the ICJ’s vexatious ruling which tried but was unable to declare Israel to have committed genocide, even moreso.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Axis of Evil The Nazi-Soviet pact now playing out in America. by Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/axis-of-evil/

“In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany, the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.”

That was Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian father and German mother, in  Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. British author Paul Johnson didn’t grow up in Nazi Germany, but his landmark Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, takes up the “virtually indistinguishable” theme in considerable detail.

By the dawn of the 1930s, “Stalin had already begun to perfect the dramaturgy of terror.” The decision to collectivize by force, “was taken suddenly, without any kind of public debate” and Stalin set out to “smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class.” This was “the green light for a policy of extermination, more than three years before Hitler came to power, twelve years before the ordering of the ‘Final Solution.’”

The Thirties was “the age of the heroic lie,” Johnson writes, and “the competition to deceive became more fierce when Stalinism acquired a moral rival in Hitler’s Germany.” Stalin’s agents “were always quick to learn anything the Gestapo and SS had to teach. But the instruction was mutual.”

The Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939 was the “culmination of a series of contacts between Soviet and German governments.” For two decades “this evil stream of exchanges had flowed underground. Now at last it broke to the surface.” During the Pact, Stalin handed Jewish communists directly to Hitler’s Gestapo. At the height of the SS extermination program in 1942-45, “there were many more Soviet camps, most of them larger than the Nazi ones.” Early in 1941, Johnson notes, “Stalin began quietly to accumulate military reserves of his own, the Stavka, which he commanded personally.”

As in all totalitarian systems, Johnson explains, “a false vernacular had to be created to conceal the concrete horrors of moral relativism.” The SS terms for murder included “special treatment,” “resettlement,” and above all “sending East.” Before Hitler died, “he had largely committed the greatest single crime in history, the extermination of the European Jews.”

As Johnson shows, Stalin’s Soviet Union “was in essentials as anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been.” After WWII, “the tale was resumed where it had left off when Stalin and Hitler signed the pact of August 1939, and Soviet Russia represented the acquisitive totalitarian principle on the world stage.”

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The arbitrary tyranny of woke censorship Why were racist jokes on a WhatsApp group punished more harshly than the public glorification of Hamas? Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/14/the-arbitrary-tyranny-of-woke-censorship/

So in Britain in the 2020s, you can be sentenced to jail for making a racist joke about Meghan Markle in private, but you’ll only get a slap on the wrist if you publicly celebrate the racist monsters of Hamas.

That’s the takeaway from yesterday’s judgement in the case of the three young women charged with celebrating Hamas’s barbarism by wearing images of paragliders on a demo shortly after the 7 October pogrom. I have ‘decided not to punish’ you, said Judge Tan Ikram as he handed the women a 12-month conditional discharge. This is the same judge who just a few weeks ago decided he would punish – severely – six retired police officers who had shared racist gags about Markle and others in a private WhatsApp group. He gave them prison sentences, mercifully suspended.

So there you have it. Slur a duchess and you get jail. Big up Hamas and you get a telling off. Rarely has the arbitrary rule of woke censorship been so starkly revealed.

The three women were convicted under the Terrorism Act at Westminster Magistrates’ Court yesterday. They were found to have displayed articles that might arouse suspicion that they are supporters of a proscribed organisation – Hamas. The articles were printouts of stock images of paragliders. On a ‘pro-Palestine’ march in London on 14 October, just a week after Hamas carried out its anti-Semitic rampage, two of the women had paraglider pics taped to their backs and the other had one stuck to her placard.

It wasn’t hard to work out what the pics were a nod to – the Hamas pogromists who got into Israel by air, on paragliders, on 7 October. The Crown Prosecution Service said the display of such images amounted to a ‘glorification of the actions’ of Hamas. The women were found guilty, but Judge Ikram seemed in a forgiving mood. ‘You crossed the line, but it would have been fair to say that emotions ran very high on this issue’, he said. Hence, he ‘decided not to punish’ them. Their conditional discharge means they’ll receive no sentence.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Joel Kotkin: Unhinged progressives are a gift to Trump The woke zealotry of the Biden administration is turning vast numbers of Americans into reluctant Trumpers.

Posted By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/11/unhinged-progressives-are-a-gift-to-trump/

In 1931, the slogan of the German Communist Party became: ‘After Hitler, our turn.’ This kind of wishful thinking is making a comeback in contemporary America. Prominent Democrats and the ‘progressive’ apparat of the Biden administration see the nomination of Donald Trump – their version of Hitler – as the best way to mobilise their shaky coalition and to keep hold of power.

Biden’s supporters believe Trump is so odious that the American people will accept anyone – even someone as obviously mediocre as Joe Biden – to keep him out of power. This worked back in 2020, when Trump’s bungling of Covid-19, his chaotic management style and his consistently vile – though clearly not fascist – persona allowed Biden to gain the White House.

This assumption also proved correct in the 2022 Midterms. Democrats bankrolled numerous unelectable Trumpistas in congressional and state races, a cynical gambit they are repeating again this year. This helped them dodge a potential wipeout at the polls. The seemingly inevitable nomination of Trump by the Republicans looks perfectly suited to a repeat performance in the 2024 presidential election.

Yet as the German Communists learned in 1933, sometimes getting what you want does not always work out so well. Biden might be heralded as the second coming of FDR in the mainstream press, but most Americans have clearly had enough of him. A recent poll puts him at a dismal 37 per cent. As things stand, he is now slated to lose to Trump, particularly in key swing states. Some surveys suggest Trump is even gaining among independents and is pulling some suburban professionals back into his camp. As former presidential candidate Andrew Yang puts it, Biden’s shaky performance could be about to deliver ‘Trump, the sequel’.

So why is Biden so unpopular? This is partly down to inflation – undoubtedly made worse by Biden’s economic agenda. But it is also due to his pandering to the so-called progressives on just about everything – from the border and climate change to LGBT issues. According to longtime Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira, Biden seems incapable of shifting to where the voters are. For Democratic senator Joe Manchin, much of the problem stems from the fact that the president has surrounded himself with ‘far, far-left liberals’.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tucker Carlson Is Wrong About Moscow David Harsanyi

Posted By on February 16th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/davidhasanyi/2024/02/16/tucker-carlson-is-wrong-about-moscow-n4926486

At the World Government Summit, Tucker Carlson told a gathering of world leaders that Moscow was “so much nicer than any city” in the United States. “It’s radicalizing for an American to go to Moscow,” Carlson went on. “I didn’t know that. I’ve learned it this week, to Singapore, to Tokyo, to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, because these cities, no matter how we’re told they’re run and on what principles they’re run, are wonderful places to live that don’t have rampant inflation.”

If you’re wealthy, I imagine, Moscow is pretty great. This is true of most European cities. When you’re an American tourist, you tend to stay in clean and beautiful city centers, eat at the best spots and wander around the most attractive areas of town. In Europe, you get to see onion domes that were built by serfs dotting the skyline. I’m sure it’s neat.

It is also true that if you’re an average person, Moscow is awful. The average Muscovite is most likely to live in some grim outlying apartment complex, many of which were built during the Soviet era. That’s if they’re lucky. Many Russians live in Novosibirsk, Ekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk and Ufa. Russia’s per capita yearly GDP is around $13,000. In the United States, it is around $83,000. It’s around $46,000 in Mississippi, our poorest state. Most Russians are living in what most Americans would consider poverty.

There probably isn’t a single quantifiable economic measure in which Russia bests the United States. None of this is even to mention that Russia is an extraordinarily corrupt place, the price of which is embedded into virtually every business transaction. I’m not sure Americans appreciate how little graft they deal with in their everyday lives. Then again, Russia ranks in the vicinity of Uganda and Togo on the corruption indexes.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Verdict Against Mark Steyn Effectively Stifles Speech In America By Huck Davenport

Posted By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/the_verdict_against_mark_steyn_effectively_stifles_speech_in_america.html

In 1925, John Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution. He lost. It was called the trial of the century and captured the nation’s attention. For Americans, assaults on free speech are intolerable. Speech is the lifeblood of freedom. It is the hill we will die on because, instinctively, we know that without it, it would also mean death. At least, we used to know.

Last week, the 21st century’s trial of the century came to a similarly ignoble end, but nearly without coverage, without interest, without outrage. Polymath Mark Steyn, appearing pro se, lost a defamation suit (ironically) defending against Michael Mann when a DC jury ordered Steyn to pay damages of $1 but imposed staggering punitive damages of $1 million.

Some background: Michael Mann co-wrote a paper in 1999 using tree-ring data as a proxy for temperature (thicker rings, warmer temperatures) to show that over the last 1000 years, temperatures declined slightly until 1960 when they dramatically spiked up—the shape of what would infamously be called the “Hockey Stick.”

The IPCC featured Mann’s work prominently in their 2001 report. It catapulted Mann to stardom and ignited the radical climate-industrial-political complex. The resulting Green agenda has consumed trillions and turned everyone’s life upside down.

The problem was that hundreds of scientists were highly critical of Mann’s work. Stephen McIntyre, for one, an Oxford-educated PhD in mathematics, published several papers, one in the same journal that published Mann’s original paper, concluding Mann’s result “lacks statistically significance,” and worse, he showed that Mann’s data manipulation “is so strong that a hockey-stick … is nearly always generated from (trendless) red noise.”

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Zone of Interest 2023 A masterpiece from a TV commercial director. by Danusha V. Goska

Posted By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-zone-of-interest-2023/

Friend, please do something for me. Put this article aside and find the nearest theater showing The Zone of Interest. Walk into the theater knowing as little as possible about it. Then return to this article so we can exchange notes. I need to talk about this movie with others.

The Zone of Interest is going to generate a great deal of talk. There will be debates and podcasts. There will be university courses and peer-reviewed scholarly articles. There will be a backlash industry pooh-poohing every accolade the film receives. If you wait too long, your chance to have your own experience of the film may slip out of your hands. You may feel, “The Zone of Interest is its own industry. Seeing it would be too much like homework. I’d prefer the latest superhero movie.”

You may be thinking, “Another Holocaust film. They’re just are fishing for an Academy Award! Why can’t we have movies about other atrocities? And I don’t like watching people being tortured.”

First, there is no torture, and almost no violence, in this movie. I cry at movies and I didn’t cry while watching Zone. Days later, while merely thinking about it, I cried. I had nightmares. Even in my nightmares, there was no blood. There were merely well-groomed, clean people behaving in accord with their value system, their character, and their mental defenses. And we need Holocaust movies because the Holocaust was a big deal. And we can have movies about other atrocities, too, like Twelve Years a Slave and Killers of the Flower Moon.

Zone is universal and timeless, like W. H. Auden’s poem “Shield of Achilles,” which uses Jesus’ crucifixion and Achilles’ shield to discuss twentieth-century atrocity. Both Auden’s poem and Zone say as much about slavery or the Cambodian Killing Fields or the Gulag as films directly addressing those topics.