EDUCATION Comments turned off

Column: Harvard bows to political correctness Jenna Robinson

Posted By on March 6th, 2018

Harvard, like many elite universities, has become increasingly intolerant.

It has sought, through a series of administrative decisions, to substitute its own values for the individual moral consciences of its students and to punish those who stray from the university’s narrow dogma. Most recently, Harvard moved to ban all exclusive social clubs, including fraternities and sororities, by 2022.

Despite Harvard’s promises that student rights are of primary importance on campus, the proposal would deprive students of their fundamental right to freedom of association, enshrined in the First Amendment.

Ultimately, Harvard’s decision to punish students who are members of such organizations, which choose members based on gender, comes down to a difference of opinion about values.

President Drew Faust explained in a 2016 letter that Harvard’s commitment to having “a truly inclusive community” was one of the university’s “deepest values.” Faust also asserted that gender is an “arbitrary” distinction between individuals.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump the Deal-maker and the Middle East by Amir Taheri

Posted By on March 4th, 2018

The first reason that so many deal-makers have failed is that peace is never negotiated and is always imposed by the side that wins a war. There is not any instance in history, which is primarily a narrative of countless wars, in which an outsider has imposed peace on unwilling belligerents.

The second reason is that outside deal-makers have their interests and agendas which make an already tangled web even more complicated. For example, in the case of American deal-makers, how to win Jewish votes in the US without antagonizing the Arabs who sell us oil and buy our arms?

The third reason is that whenever a status quo is at least tolerable for both belligerents, the desire for risking it in the hope of an ill-defined peace is diminished. Many people in the world live with a status quo they don’t regard as ideal.

There is one thing that Trump the deal-maker could do. He could ask the Israelis and the Palestinians to work on an agreement, each in their own camp, on what they exactly want, and report to him.

Casting himself as the best friend Israel could hope for, President Donald Trump is promising, some may say threatening, to unveil his grand plan for a peace “deal” to end the so-called “Middle East problem”.

Trump has always fancied himself as a deal-maker; he has even written a book on the subject. It is, therefore, no surprise that he might want to put his skill to use on an issue which has defied numerous deal-makers for six decades.

What are the chances of him succeeding? The short answer is: nil!

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Is No One Talking about the Violence of Popular Entertainment after Parkland? By Douglas Murray

Posted By on March 4th, 2018

When President Trump raised the issue yesterday, his comments were either derided or ignored by pundits. But he had a point.

Since the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., a considerable amount of energy has understandably been expended on the matter of which guns should be available to whom and when. But it is striking that the president’s comments on Thursday about film and video-game violence have been either derided or glossed over. They are worth lingering on.

Most of us probably inhabit a kind of bubble when it comes to violence on screen. We choose to watch the sorts of films we think we’ll like and, unless we are film critics, get to avoid the sorts of films we think will bore or repel us. Until we become parents, most of us probably pay no particular attention to the drip-feed of blood and gore that now forms the basis of almost all popular entertainment.

As it happens, I’ve had to be on a lot of planes recently, and have used some of the time to watch movies I would never otherwise seek out. Apart from concluding that the Oscars shouldn’t award anyone for anything this year (can’t the whole thing just be called off?), I have mainly been repulsed at the extreme violence (often mixed with the most crass “sexiness”) that seems now to be the cinematic norm.

I could describe the sheer awfulness of Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde, a long-legged female spy dispatching her male foes in gruesome fashion between coolly pouring herself drinks, but I didn’t make it to the end. Far worse was a film I did slog all the way through, Kingsman 2. I won’t bother to explain the risible plot, but it is presented as a sort of cooler, wryer, modern take on James Bond. Certainly all the advertising for it, the cast, and the buttons it presses make it clear that it is not aimed at an adult audience. I was surprised at the opening to see that it had an R rating, not least because I had heard people (including an air-stewardess) talking about having taken their children to see it.

A culture that encourages enjoyment of horrific violence alongside a sort of flippant approach to its consequences cannot be helping matters.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Does Women’s March Leader Believe Jews Use Pot to Make Black Men Gay? Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 4th, 2018

What do you get when you combine the Women’s March, the Nation of Islam and pure crazy? The Pot Plot. And now here’s Calypso Louie Farrakhan.

Farrakhan told the crowd that the “white people running Mexico are Mexican-Jews,”… Jews are “the mother and father of apartheid.” He also promoted the “Pot Plot” conspiracy that the Jews and the US government are manipulating strains of marijuana to feminize black men.

He even mentioned the Women’s March, saying that while he thought the event was a good thing, women need to learn how to cook so their husbands don’t become obese. Tamika Mallory, one of the March organizers, was in the audience, and got a special shout-out from Farrakhan. Mallory posted two Instagram photos from the event, which Carmen Perez, another Women’s March organizer, commented on with “raise the roof” emojis.

#IntersectionalFeminism.

But wait, what? Jews are using pot to feminize black men? Apparently the Pot Plot is a Nation of Islam thing and its premise is suspiciously similar to some :PLO and Hamas conspiracy theories about Israel.

During a September appearance at a mosque in Chicago, Nation of Islam student minister Wesley Muhammad claimed that Jews and the U.S. government are engaged in a “Pot Plot” to emasculate black men and turn them into homosexuals by distributing specially modified versions of marijuana.

During his nearly two-hour long tirade at the Chicago mosque, Muhammad explained that the “Pot Plot is not the paranoid racial fantasizing of your brother, but the Pot Plot is the actual scheme of your enemy.” He continued, “It’s the US government and the Synagogue of Satan’s scheme to use manipulated marijuana along with other drugs to de-masculinize and feminize the black male of America.” (The “Synagogue of Satan” is a phrase that Louis Farrakhan, NOI’s leader, uses to refer to Jews.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Google Recruiters Told to “Cancel interviews with applicants Who Weren’t Female, Black or Hispanic” Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 4th, 2018

YouTube is a Google joint. And Google really needs to be investigated.

The media left has been trying to obstruct an investigations of discriminatory practices by spamming fake discrimination lawsuits by lefties. But the evidence still keeps pilling up.

YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity, according to a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee.

“Last spring, YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic,”

This is blatant discrimination. Google is denying it, but it would fit with what we know about the toxic crybullying atmosphere inside the search and online ad monopoly.

Arne Wilberg, a former longtime recruiter filed the lawsuit. It alleges that,

“In April of 2017, Google’s Technology Staffing Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black, or Hispanic and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. Plaintiff refused to comply with this request.”

Which is a good thing as it’s illegal.

The lawsuit is heavily documented. It documents for example that, “the manager of YouTube’s Tech Staffing Management Team, Allison Alogna, wrote an e-mail to the staffing team in which she writes, “Hi Team: Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups.”

It also states that, “Google on occasion would circulate e-mails instructing its employees to purge any and all references to the race-gender quotas from its e-mail database.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Schooling for Totalitarianism By Emina Melonic ****

Posted By on March 4th, 2018

Marching in protest has become the activity du jour in America. The latest planned protest is “March for Our Lives,” scheduled for March 24 in Washington, D.C. and at high schools across the nation. Ostensibly, it is organized by the students who survived the mass shooting in Florida. But this myth has been busted pretty thoroughly, by Buzzfeed, of all outlets. It should not have taken that crack team of journalists to figure out that high school students couldn’t possibly make this happen without the “guidance” of some very powerful people. But common sense, unfortunately, isn’t the order of the day.https://amgreatness.com/2018/03/02/schooling-for-totalitarianism/

An organization funded by Michael Bloomberg, Everytown for Gun Safety, is the main organization behind the effort. Joining forces are people like Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, and Steven Spielberg, who donated large amounts of money. The basics of the event were likely orchestrated before the shooting even happened. The claims that this is not about politics but about student safety are preposterous because the objective is to expand gun laws, which are already quite strict.

As much as the particulars of this event are important, my objective is more to explore a cultural problem in America. Some students have gladly stepped into the public arena, reciting clichés and canards alongside the proclamation they will “not be silenced anymore.” As if! The overabundance of primitive emotionalism is astounding and the media can’t get enough of it because at the core of it all is hatred for Donald Trump.

American youth are confused. In this instance, they are being used by the Leftist machine to create a public narrative meant to evoke sympathy in the pursuit of policy changes. If you disagree—or worse yet, if you ignore these poor children (who, in case you forgot, are our future!)—then you are a cold-hearted person who lacks compassion or sympathy with the victims of an atrocity.
Miseducation in America

At the center of this emotionalism is the American educational system. “Public education” today is not so much education in the requirements of citizenship in a self-governing republic as it is a series of collectivist events designed to indoctrinate and arm the students with a leftist ideology. I have always been amazed at the coercion that takes place in schools—not from peer pressure so much, but from the teachers.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

From Chile, a powerful sign the Trump revolution is spreading By Monica Showalter

Posted By on March 4th, 2018

So you think President Trump is doing badly? Some of the smarter leaders on the world scene are coming to other conclusions, which is to say the Trump revolution is spreading.

Late last year, Chile held a presidential election, and in its result, Chilean voters finally dumped its corruption-plagued, soggy socialist government, up ’til now led by Michelle Bachelet, and re-elected center-right past president, Sebastián Piñera, instead.

Piñera’s finest moment during his last presidency was in 2010, at the helm of the Chilean mining crisis, when 33 miners were trapped more than two miles underground amid few hopes for their rescue. Piñera had been told by his advisers just to keep the cameras away, because it was a losing political picture. He defied them, visited the campsite out in the remote Atacama desert up north, heaped resources onto the rescuers, and the spectacular rescue that followed, which was the result of his keen interest and willingness to defy the odds, was all his.

He’s now done something similar as he prepares to start his new term. According to El Mostrador, a Santiago-based Chilean newspaper (in Spanish), he’s called in the ICBMs of the economics world into his cabinet, the Chicago Boys, who are the embodiment of free-market economics. The Chicago Boys took their ideas straight from Milton Friedman in the 1970s, predating both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and their free-market reforms turned Chile into a first-world country. Chile is the home to the famous Chilean Model of private savings accounts for pensions that the left screams about, because that reform did more than anything to transform Chile.

El Mostrador reports that multiple people with high-firepower economic degrees are being lined up for Piñera’s cabinet as he takes office this month. Here is a Google translation, with a few clarifications in brackets from me:

The Chicago Boys in the cabinet and undersecretaries of the next term of office of Sebastián Piñera are Cristián Larroulet, as head of the Second Floor of La Moneda; Juan Andrés Fontaine, who will be in charge of the MOP [Ministry of Public Works] this time; José Ramón Valente, the doctrinaire future holder of Economy; Rodrigo Cerda, acting as Director of Budgets; and Alfredo Moreno, in the position of Minister of Social Development.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Another fake global warming scare is busted as scientists ‘surprised’ By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on March 4th, 2018

A favorite technique of the propagandists of the Global Warming scare is to find cute and cuddly creatures that they can claim are “threatened” by global warming. For years, an iconic picture of a polar bear on an ice floe was used to frighten children into clutching their stuffed teddy bears and demanding Mommy and Daddy act to save them.

But the bloom started coming off that rose when a scientist who had made population estimates that allowed the bears to be classified as threatened admitted that the estimates were: “A guess to satisfy public demand” but wrapped in the prestige of settled science.”

The scam took an even heavier blow when NASA admitted there was no measurable retreat in polar ice last year

But that hasn’t stopped other cure species from being held up as hostages to carbon. Along with polar bears, another favorite creature is penguins, so cute in their version of tuxedos.

Ever eager NASA published a warning less than two years ago: “Climate change may shrink Adélie penguin range by end of century.”

Climate has influenced the distribution patterns of Adélie penguins across Antarctica for millions of years. The geologic record tells us that as glaciers expanded and covered Adélie breeding habitats with ice, penguins in the region abandoned their colonies. When the glaciers melted during warming periods, the Adélie penguins were able to return to their rocky breeding grounds.

Now, a NASA-funded study by University of Delaware scientists and colleagues at other institutions reports that this warming may no longer be beneficial for Adélie penguins. In a paper published June 29 in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers project that approximately 30 percent of current Adélie colonies may be in decline by 2060, and approximately 60 percent of the present population might be dwindling by 2099. They also found the penguins at more southerly sites in Antarctica may be less affected by climate change.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

U.S. and Israel Sharply at Odds on Military Aid to Lebanon By P. David Hornik

Posted By on March 4th, 2018

Last month during a conference at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, the State Department’s David Satterfield said the administration would keep “bolster[ing] the elements of state security in Lebanon, with an emphasis on the Lebanese army.”

So reports Eldad Shavit, a researcher at the institute. Yet at the same conference another State Department official, Nathan Sales, argued “that the Lebanese army is currently a tool of Hezbollah and … it is therefore pointless to strengthen it.”

Which of those two diametrically opposed views, coming from the same State Department, is accurate?

If Sales is right, it is troubling that since 2006, as Shavit notes, the U.S. has given the Lebanese army “more than $1.6 billion in military aid,” and that “recent months have witnessed an expansion in U.S. aid, some of which has already reached Lebanon.” This aid included attack planes and helicopters as well as drones.

The official Israeli view is that it’s all a big mistake. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman says:

[T]he Lebanese army has lost its independence and is another unit in Hezbollah’s apparatus, and therefore, as far as we are concerned, the infrastructure of the Lebanese army and the Lebanese state is one with the infrastructure of Hezbollah.

Shavit, a former high-ranking intelligence official, spells it out in more detail:

Close cooperation continues between the Lebanese army and Hezbollah. Therefore, the working assumption must be that weapons and knowledge that reach the Lebanese army will find their way into the hands of Hezbollah. This means that all aid to the Lebanese army is liable to strengthen the military capabilities of Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, officially listed as a terror organization by the State Department, is an enemy of the West that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

And yet:

Lebanese authorities are taking no action to prevent Hezbollah from increasing its military capabilities, and no efforts were made to prevent the group from deploying surface-to-surface missiles and rockets intended for striking at Israel and taking measures to improve the systems’ accuracy.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Early Voting Numbers in Texas a Wake-Up Call for Republicans By Rick Moran

Posted By on March 4th, 2018

It appears that the hysteria ginned up by Democrats and their media allies against Donald Trump is having its intended effect. It has terrified Democratic voters to the point that a blue tide threatens to overwhelm the GOP this November.

Early voting in Texas in advance of the Tuesday Democratic primary offers an ominous peek at what could be in store for the GOP in the mid term elections.

Dallas Morning News:

According to the Texas secretary of state’s website — which tracks only the 15 counties with the most registered voters — 161,607 people voted in the Democratic primary in 2014 during the first 10 days of early voting. This year, 310,275 people voted in the Democratic primary in the same span — a 92 percent increase. Polls closed Friday at 7 p.m., with Election Day on Tuesday.

On the GOP side, 273,293 people had voted in the Republican primary as of Thursday. That’s still an 18 percent increase from 2014, when 231,530 voted in the Republican primary during the first 10 days of early voting.

Democrats may hold a 36,982 vote lead, but that doesn’t mean all of those voters are Democrats. Since Texas has semi-open primaries, voters can choose which party’s primary to vote in. (There is a caveat to choosing: In a runoff, voters must stick with the same party.)

Political experts attribute much of Texas’ increased voter turnout as a reaction to the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, as well as the state’s eight open congressional seats.