WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China, Russia, Iran rise in Latin America as US retreats By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/440348-china-russia-iran-rise-in-latin-america-as-us-retreats

In Latin America, a U.S. retreat that began under President Barack Obama has accelerated under President Donald Trump, creating a vacuum that China, Russia, and Iran are moving to fill.

The most fruitful opportunity for those U.S. adversaries lies in the socialism-ravaged state of Venezuela, where each of them is jockeying for position, but opportunities abound elsewhere as well.

It’s just one more example – though a particularly noteworthy one, coming in America’s own backyard – of how the U.S. withdrawal from its post-war global leadership is creating opportunities for authoritarian powers with anti-American designs to expand their influence far and wide.

“The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, declared in late 2013, renouncing a doctrine of 190 years through which the United States made clear that it would not tolerate interference by outside powers in the Western Hemisphere.

Kerry’s words reflected Obama’s refusal to address outside inference in Latin America, by (1) Iran, as it nourished economic and military ties to the anti-American “Bolivarian alliance” of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua and (2) Hezbollah, Iran’s key terrorist client, as it conducted activities from its regional headquarters at the crossroads of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

It was a far cry from the spirit of President Kennedy’s inaugural address in which, after promoting his Alliance for Progress for the region, he renewed the Monroe Doctrine with this clarion call: “[L]et every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Professor Spoke the Truth, He Still Pays the Price By David French

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/professor-samuel-abrams-spoke-the-truth-he-still-pays-the-price/

Dissenters from campus orthodoxy often need a rare kind of personal fortitude.

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias — in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things — a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. “Liberal staff members,” he wrote, “outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most left-leaning group on campus.”

At the conclusion of his piece, Abrams made an argument that rang true to my more than 20 years of litigation experience — “ideological imbalance, coupled with [administrators’] agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas.”

This is exactly right. Administrators draft and enforce speech codes. Administrators are responsible for creating campus kangaroo courts. Administrators kick Christian student groups off campus, and administrators often take the lead in designing campus programming that features overwhelmingly progressive voices. While conservative media often focus their ire on random radical professors, administrators are busy engaging in the overwhelming majority of campus censorship.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Justices Seem Ready to Ok Asking Citizenship on Census . By Mark Sherman

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/04/24/justices_seem_ready_to_ok_asking_citizenship_on_census_140145.html

Despite evidence that millions of Hispanics and immigrants could go uncounted, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready Tuesday to uphold the Trump administration’s plan to inquire about U.S. citizenship on the 2020 census in a case that could affect American elections for the next decade.

There appeared to be a clear divide between the court’s liberal and conservative justices in arguments in a case that could affect how many seats states have in the House of Representatives and their share of federal dollars over the next 10 years. States with a large number of immigrants tend to vote Democratic.

Three lower courts have so far blocked the plan to ask every U.S. resident about citizenship in the census, finding that the question would discourage many immigrants from being counted. Two of the three judges also ruled that asking if people are citizens would violate the provision of the Constitution that calls for a count of the population, regardless of citizenship status, every 10 years. The last time the question was included on the census form sent to every American household was 1950.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Choosing Real Diversity on College Campuses J. Frank Bullitt

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/24/choosing-real-diversity/

“Schools and universities desperately need diversity – but diversity of thought and opinion, not a contrived structure that conditions, divides, and ultimately shuts down exposure to views that don’t line up with the current narrative.”

This nation’s most influential opinion-shapers tell us diversity is an unalloyed good, so self-evidently virtuous that it cannot be questioned. It’s simply a given that every decent person has to support diversity and even the slightest departure from the orthodoxy is heretical.

Universities have become the temples of diversity. They are so committed to the idea that they hand out millions in salaries every year to administrators charged with promoting inclusivity, equity, academic access, and a “welcoming environment” on school grounds. At the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, the 2017 payroll for its five diversity offices was $3.2 million, according to Campus Reform. Diversity administrators at the University of California, Berkeley, were paid $2.3 million that same year. The diversity-focused employees at the University of California, San Francisco, make more than $2 million a year.

Meanwhile, several schools in the University of California system are requiring math professor candidates to include a “diversity statement” in their applications, listing “past and/or potential contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

To wonder in 2019 why so much effort is being expended on programs that have zero academic value is to be a subversive. Still, it’s a fair question.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Unemployment Claims Lowest Since 1969 Despite Workforce Twice the Size As Trump Economy Roars Ahead By Rick Manning

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/24/unemployment-claims-lowest-since-1969-despite-workforce-twice-the-size-as-trump-economy-roars-ahead/

The U.S. Labor Department reports that for the third week in a row, unemployment claims have hit low levels not seen since September of 1969 and that the less volatile four-week moving average has reached lows last achieved in November of 1969. What makes this milestone stunning is that the unemployment claims number is not adjusted for how many people are in the labor force, and today there are almost twice the number of people in the workforce as in 1969.

That’s right. We have twice the workforce size and the same number of people claiming unemployment, a sure-fire sign that the economy is robust. Based upon our nation’s economic history, the economy would be in good shape even if 50 percent more people were filing unemployment claims each week.

Yet, on the retail side of the equation, the transition from brick and mortar retail shops to cyber-shopping is having an impact. Sears is gone. Toys ‘R’ Us is gone. Payless is gone.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

CBO Report: 1.4 Million Lost Health Insurance Since 2016 — And Obamacare Is To Blame John Merline

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/24/cbo-report-1-4-million-lost-health-insurance-since-2016-and-obamacare-is-to-blame/

The number of uninsured climbed by 1.4 million from 2016 to 2018, according to a report out last week from the Congressional Budget Office. Naturally, this led those on the left to blame the Trump administration for its Obamacare “sabotage.”

But the data in that report — which was released on the same day the Mueller report came out and largely ignored — tells an entirely different story.

All of the increase in the uninsured over the past two years — all of it — is the result of the massive rate increases Obamacare’s mandates and regulations caused. According to the Health and Human Services Dept., premiums in the individual insurance market doubled from 2013 to 2017. They shot up again in 2018.

For those eligible for Obamacare subsidies, the rate increases were meaningless. The amount they had to pay didn’t change much, and in many cases went down.

BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Huge Cost of Climate Hysteria Alan Moran

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/04/the-huge-cost-of-climate-hysteria/

Mark Lawson comes from a journalistic tradition which attempted to assess factual information without interpreting it within an ideological framework.

His book, Climate Hysteria, draws on publicly available information, details that information, and analyses its interpretation and projections as offered by climate “experts”. It is highly readable, pulling together the both history of the climate debate and the present situation by comparing the careerists’ doom-laden forecasts against reality.His book, as its title suggests, analyses the development of what he calls “climate hysteria” which,  coupled with conferences of nations represented by their environmental agencies, has led to international agreements limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other the greenhouse gases, the latest being the Paris Agreement of 2016.

Trouble is, the climate is failing to behave the way scientific analysis, as reported at planetary conferences, indicates it should. Not only have the various milestones indicating apocalyptic tipping points on the road to irretrievable disaster failed to occur, but even the minor prophecies haven’t materialised.

Consider:# there has been no increase in wildfires, whereas more of these were claimed to be imminent in the IPCC papers# there has been no change in global precipitation — not even locally, as is evident from the on-going, irregular-but-trendless rainfall data assembled for Australia

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Islam Viewed from ‘The House of War’ Frank Pledge

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/04/101269/

It is nearly twenty years since 9/11, and yet the media coverage of the events of a few weeks ago in Christchurch, and now in Sri Lanka, suggests journalists and politicians still have little to no understanding of Islam and what it is all about. Politicians, I can understand, but it would appear that journalism courses no longer extend to basic research. On that basis I have felt compelled to write a brief introduction to Islam which I present here. My apologies to long term Quadrant readers, who probably would have picked all all this up in around 2001.

To really understand Islam it is only necessary to understand three things.

Firstly

Muslims openly — go Google it, it’s no secret — divide the world into the Dar al Islam and the Dar al Harb. “Dar al Islam” translates as “The region under Islamic control”, or more literally since “Islam” translates as “submission”, “the region that has submitted (to Islam).” “Dar al Harb” translates literally as “The region of war”, that is, the region that has yet to submit to Islam. It is the duty of every Muslim to advance the cause of Islam, that is, advance the cause of submission in the Dar al Harb. Australia is part of the Dar al Har, and so, to those who take their creed as seriously as the sacred texts urge, Islam is quite openly, and quite literally, “at war” with Australia and will remain so until it too “submits” and becomes part of the Dar al Islam. Verse (ayat) 29 from the Sura 9 (Repentance) of the Qur’an pretty much spells that out:

MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

“Reporting” on the Sri Lanka Jihadist Massacres If possible, it’s even worse in Norway than in the U.S. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273568/reporting-sri-lanka-jihadist-massacres-bruce-bawer

If you think the mainstream media in America are shameless in their devotion to leftist orthodoxy – well, of course you’re right. But there are exceptions: at least some major outlets in the U.S. don’t march in ideological lockstep. Even the New York Times has a good, honest reporter or two. In any event, you don’t have to pay to read these people’s claptrap if you don’t want to.

Imagine, by contrast, living in Norway, where the political left has a total lock on the mainstream news media, and the country’s five million people are forced to pay big time for their non-stop propaganda. TV and radio news are dominated by government-run NRK, to which the sheeple shell out $500 million per annum in compulsory license fees for the privilege of being brainwashed.

Then there’s the print press. In addition to scores of local papers, Norway has about a dozen national dailies, several of which receive generous taxpayer support – supposedly in order to ensure diversity of thought, even though they’re all left-wing. For example, Dagsavisen, a former Labor Party organ that’s now a gaunt rag consisting largely of far-left editorials and columns, sells only 20,000 copies a year while raking in $5 million in state subsidies.

One is constantly reminded that this is a country whose first-ever professor of journalism, Sigurd Allern – brought on board by the University of Oslo in 2002 – was the first chairman of the Workers’ Communist Party of Norway and longtime editor-in-chief of the Communist daily Klassekampen.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Palestinian Leaders Encourage Terrorism by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14134/palestinian-leaders-encourage-terrorism

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s remarks at the Arab League gathering in Cairo demonstrate his preference for the well-being of terrorists over the ability of hard-working employees to put bread on the table for their families. These payments to terrorists and their families lie at the heart of Palestinian incitement to terror that drives the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If anyone is collectively punishing the Palestinians, it is Abbas himself. He is depriving tens of thousands of families of full salaries, thus preventing them from purchasing food for their children or paying various fees, including rent and university tuition. A Palestinian civil service employee who sends his son to university does not get a full salary. A Palestinian whose son sets out to murder a Jew is entitled to a full salary and earns more respect from Palestinian leaders.

What message is Abbas sending to his people? That those who wish to eat had better turn to terror. The families of the public employees who are now unable to pay their grocery bill and rent are now looking at the families of the terrorists with envy. They must be saying to themselves: “We are suckers because we didn’t send our children to stab a Jew!” This is the education that the Palestinians leaders have been providing since 1965.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas recently reaffirmed his longstanding commitment to pay families of Palestinians who were imprisoned for or killed during terrorist attacks against Israelis. “We have been paying the families of the prisoners and martyrs since 1965,” Abbas told Arab League Foreign Ministers during an emergency meeting in Cairo on April 21.

Abbas’s insistence on paying millions of dollars to families of Palestinians who murder or attempt to murder Jews, has cost the Palestinians a heavy price. In the past two months, Abbas’s government has been unable to pay full salaries to its 200,000 employees. The reason? Israel has begun deducting, from the tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinians, the same amount the PA government pays each month to the families of the prisoners and “martyrs.”