EDUCATION Comments turned off

The College Board’s Secret Apology Private emails show it wasn’t honest about Ron DeSantis and African-American Studies.

Posted By on April 27th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-board-african-american-studies-ap-course-ron-desantis-florida-emails-817262f4?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Gov. Ron DeSantis is credited with forcing a rewrite of a new high-school AP class in African-American Studies, after Florida balked at such lesson topics as “Black Queer Studies.” Denying pressure, the College Board said the revisions were pedagogical: “This course has been shaped only by the input of experts and long-standing AP principles and practices.”

Yet its own faculty advisers privately castigated this as dishonest spin, according to emails we obtained via open-records laws. “I have patiently and quietly watched the ubiquitous interviews and media assertions that AP would not make changes at the behest of any group beyond professors, teachers, and students,” wrote Nishani Frazier, a University of Kansas professor who sits on the AP course’s development committee. “If this is so, which student, professor, or teacher suggested adding black conservatives to the course over Combahee River Collective?”

Ms. Frazier continued: “We all know this is a blatant lie. In fact, the major changes which occurred came from my unit—and not once did AP speak with me about these changes. Instead, it rammed through revisions, pretended course transformation was business as usual, and then further added insult to injury by attempting to gaslight the public with faux innocence.” The course was “edited behind our backs,” she wrote. “What is unsaid is the failure of AP to recognize both its own institutional racism and how its own lies and capitulation precipitated the creation of a monster of its own making.”

Another professor on the curriculum committee, David Embrick of the University of Connecticut, apparently forwarded Ms. Frazier’s cri de coeur to a sociology professor at Trinity College. “Yikes…Nishani is right here,” Mr. Embrick said. The sociologist’s reaction: “Dude, College Board is f— over y’all.”

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Deep Financial System’ Fueling BDS Movement, New Report Says

Posted By on April 27th, 2023

https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/04/26/deep-financial-system-fueling-bds-movement-new-report-says/

A growing alignment of large philanthropic organizations with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign is fueling the movement’s growth on American college campuses, a new report released on Wednesday by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a Manhattan based nonprofit promoting intellectual freedom and reform of American higher education, argues.

“Beyond campus student activism agitating for divestment measures for student governments, and behind the professional organizing that trains student activist organizations, lies a network of legal and financial support that empowers the campus BDS movement to function,” Dr. Ian Oxnevad, a NAS senior research fellow, writes in The Company They Keep: Organizational and Economic Dynamics of the BDS Movement. “The BDS movement relies upon a deep financial system of progressively oriented businesses and nonprofit foundations devoted to a broad array of social justice causes.”

Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP), a left-wing anti-Israel organization which promotes the BDS movement, has received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation whose endowment is valued at $1.27 billion, since 2017, the report said, and the Tides Research Fund, a sponsor of Black Lives Matter, has given the group $75,000 since 2019. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants. Additionally, Palestine Legal, a lawfare group founded in 2012 to support campus BDS groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), is the beneficiary of generous funding from Tides Foundation, a pioneer of activist investment that has given over $1.5 million to anti-Israel initiatives, according to figures included in the report.

Yet, despite the growth of the BDS movement on American campuses over the past decade, the report cites data showing that BDS resolutions proposed in student governments have a 66 percent failure. “With large studies already indicating a limited campus effectiveness of BDS, the question remains regarding how such attempted resolutions take place,” the report says. Such failures, however, have not undermined the ability of pro-BDS activists to wield an immense effect on campus culture. By linking the cause to other left-wing initiatives, it continued, they set the parameters of how students perceive Jewish students, Jewish life organizations, and programs like the Taglit-Birthright Israel program.

The 124 page report includes three case studies on Columbia University, Ohio State University, and University of California-Riverside, assessing the various successes and failures of pro-BDS activists, students and professors at American universities and college campuses. It also chronicles the history of the BDS movement, describing its place within the wider story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “a larger ecosystem of progressive political organizations,” as well as its alleged connection to Palestinian terrorism.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden’s promotion of electric cars could be in for a big surprise By Monica Showalter

Posted By on April 26th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/bidens_promotion_of_electic_cars_could_be_in_for_a_big_surprise.html

Anything the Bidenites can do, the radical leftists running Chile can do better.

Which takes us from the world of Sam Brinton managing U.S. nuclear waste in the states, to (hold muh’ pisco), Chile nationalizing its lithium mines and bringing in a purple-haired feminist activist social-worker academic to regulate their activities instead.

Get a load of Chile’s new “Seremi,” or, secretary of the regional ministry, for the mighty mining province of Antofagasta, Macarena Barramuno, who’s been named for that job in Chile’s desert north.

Antofagasta is home to Chile’s gargantuan lithium mining reserves, the world’s second-largest, whose extraction is used create batteries for Joe Biden’s much-promoted electric cars.

A Google Translate of an item that ran in local PiTV Noticias Calama in neighboring Atacama reads (I left the translation imperfect):

MACARENA BARRAMUÑO ASSUMES AS NEW MINING SEREMI IN ANTOFAGASTA

The social worker took over today, replacing Ruth Rodriguez, who declined to assume the position due to problems.

During the morning, Macarena Barramuño González, a social worker by profession and Master of Development studies specialization of Gender, from the University of Melbourne, took over as the new Mining Seremi for the Antofagasta region, who has developed her career mainly in community management designing , coordinating, and directing initiatives with the purpose of transforming and improving communities.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Another conservative Supreme Court justice under attack By Rajan Laad

Posted By on April 26th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/another_conservative_supreme_court_justice_under_attack.html

Earlier this month, ProPublica attempted to smear Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, implying in its reporting that he was compromised due to his friendship with real estate mogul and billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow based on the holidays the Thomas family spent with the Crow family.

It led many Democrats who themselves have engaged in ethically questionable behavior to besmirch Thomas.

The high priestess of liberal hypocrisy, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a.k.a. AOC, who is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for possible violation of congressional rules for accepting impermissible gifts, is one of the loudest advocates of branding Thomas as corrupt and demanding his impeachment.

The mainstream news media, which is a P.R. wing of the Democrats, amplified the chaos.

The target now is Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Just yesterday, Politico carried a hit piece with a provocative headline: “Law firm head bought Gorsuch-owned property.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Schools Are Ditching Homework, Deadlines in Favor of ‘Equitable Grading’ Approach aims to measure mastery and account for hardships at home; teachers say some students game the system By Sara Randazzo

Posted By on April 26th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-are-ditching-homework-deadlines-in-favor-of-equitable-grading-dcef7c3e

Las Vegas high-school English teacher Laura Jeanne Penrod initially thought the grading changes at her school district made sense. Under the overhaul, students are given more chances to prove they have mastered a subject without being held to arbitrary deadlines, in recognition of challenges some children have outside school.

Soon after the system was introduced, however, Ms. Penrod said her 11th-grade honors students realized the new rules minimized the importance of homework to their final grades, leading many to forgo the brainstorming and rough drafts required ahead of writing a persuasive essay. Some didn’t turn in the essay at all, knowing they could redo it later.

“They’re relying on children having intrinsic motivation, and that is the furthest thing from the truth for this age group,” said Ms. Penrod, a teacher for 17 years.

The Clark County School District where Ms. Penrod works—the nation’s fifth-largest school system—has joined dozens of districts in California, Iowa, Virginia and other states in moves toward “equitable grading” with varying degrees of buy-in. Leaders in the 305,000-student Clark County district said the new approach was about making grades a more accurate reflection of a student’s progress and giving opportunities to all learners.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex Introduction to a series of features about the new global speech-policing bureaucracy, uncovered in the Twitter Files and beyond Matt Taibbi

Posted By on April 26th, 2023

https://www.racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial

Today you’ll find two new #TwitterFiles threads out, one by longtime Racket contributor Matt Orfalea, and another by Andrew Lowenthal, who worked for 18 years defending digital rights at EngageMedia and watched activists in his space slowly be absorbed by what we’re now calling “The Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

The two new threads collectively show the wide political range of revelations in the #TwitterFiles material, which have been slandered — absurdly — as a partisan exercise. Lowenthal, who in his “Insider’s Guide to ‘Anti-Disinformation’” describes himself as a “progressive-minded Australian,” printed a series of exchanges between journalists who attended a summer “tabletop exercise” at the Aspen Institute about a hack-and-leak operation involving Burisma and Hunter Biden, weeks before the actual event. When the actual scandal broke not long after, the existence of that tabletop exercise clearly become newsworthy, but none of the journalists present, who included David Sanger of the New York Times and current Rolling Stone editor Noah Schactman — said a word. Perhaps, as was common with anti-disinfo conferences, the event was off the record. (We asked, and none of the reporters commented). It doesn’t matter. Lowenthal showed how another “anti-disinformation” conference featured the headline speaker Anthony Blinken. He’s currently suspected of having “triggered” the infamous letter signed by 50 intelligence officers saying the Hunter Biden laptop story had the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

As Lowenthal writes: “See how it works? The people accusing others of “disinformation” run the biggest disinformation campaigns themselves.”

On the flip side, Orfalea found a document showing that both the Wikileaks account and that of Dr. Jill Stein were algorithmically added by Twitter to a list given the creepy name is_russian. This was one of two buckets of “Russians” Twitter was collecting, one called “A Priori Russians” (usually, accounts identified as Russian by 3rd party researchers), the other “Inferred Russians” (accounts that had “strong,” “medium,” or “weak” “signals” of Russianness, involving language, type of email account, location of IP address, tweet time, etc). Even Twitter’s own analysts noted that any system that “captured” Jill Stein as “Russian” spoke to the “overly broad nature of is_russian.” It was just such a “signals” or “marker”-based methodology that Twitter and other researchers used to identify “Russians” on the Internet, a methodology Twitter internally called one of “educated guesses,” concealing a company secret about identifying accounts linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency: “We have no realistic way of knowing this on a Twitter-centric basis.”

OPINION Comments turned off

The Anti-Normative Society The campaign against sexual “normativity” is a revolt against reality—and must be resisted. Christopher Rufp

Posted By on April 26th, 2023

https://rufo.substack.com/p/the-anti-normative-society?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1248321&post_id=116087757&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

The most potent line of attack from radical Queer Theory is the discipline’s assault on so-called sexual “normativity.” This is the basic pattern throughout the academic literature and the various subfields that have been inspired by the general thrust of this ideology.

First, you have Queer Theory itself, which provides a ruthless criticism of what it calls the “cis-normative” society, the “heteronormative” society, and the male-female gender binary that underpins it. Then you have a number of derivative subfields, such as fat studies, which provide a ruthless criticism of healthy human proportions, and disability studies, which provides a criticism of well-adjusted, psychologically integrated people. The general idea is that these are norms, promoted by society and reinforced by the economic system of capitalism, that appear to be oriented toward health, reproduction, and psychological integration, but, in fact, are used as a mechanism of oppression against non-normative groups—for example, people who don’t fit into the gender binary or the heterosexual social ideal.

If we break it down further, we see that Queer Theory makes an implicit two-part argument. On the surface, you have a relativistic argument, which says that normative ideals are arbitrary social constructs, and, contrary to the traditional view, society can prioritize either the normative or non-normative at will. In other words, there is no inevitable human hierarchy. On the contrary, these structures are all reproduced through oppressive systems and should be ruthlessly interrogated and deconstructed because, ultimately, none of them have a monopoly on human value.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald On Race and Crime, a Counterfactual Narrative The notion that blacks are at elevated risk for “existing while black” is true—but not because whites are killing them.

Posted By on April 26th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/on-race-and-crime-a-counterfactual-narrative

The shooting of a teen-ager in Kansas City, Missouri, has added “knocking on the door while black” and “existing while black” to the list of activities that allegedly put blacks at daily risk of their lives in white supremacist America. Meantime, the actual configuration of interracial violence is assiduously ignored.

On April 13, 2023, at around 10 P.M., 16-year-old Ralph Yarl went to the wrong address in a Kansas City residential neighborhood to pick up his younger brothers. Yarl rang the doorbell, summoning the 84-year-old homeowner, Andrew Lester, from his bed. Lester, who lived alone and who appears from photographs to be in the early stages of dementia, grabbed his handgun and went to the door. He became “scared to death,” he told the police, when he saw the larger Yarl pulling at the exterior storm door handle. (Yarl denies trying to open the door.) Lester shot Yarl, once in the head and once in the arm, through the storm door. Thankfully, Yarl will likely survive the horrifying attack.

Every news outlet that covered the shooting led with the race of Yarl and of Lester. Yarl was inevitably identified as a “Black” teenager and Lester as a “white” homeowner. The Kansas City district attorney validated the race narrative. The shooting had a “racial component,” the prosecutor said, without offering evidence. (The DA has charged Lester with assault in the first degree because the potential maximum sentence—life in prison—is higher than that for attempted murder.)

President Biden weighed in with his usual trope about black parents living in daily fear for their children’s lives in racist America. “Last night, I had a chance to call Ralph Yarl and his family,” Biden tweeted. “No parent should have to worry that their kid will be shot after ringing the wrong doorbell.” For once Biden left out “black,” but his formula by now is so routine (“Imagine having to worry whether your son or daughter came home from walking down the street, playing in the park or just driving a car,” as “Brown and Black parents” have to do, Biden asked in his 2023 State of the Union address) that he doesn’t need the descriptor to get his racial message across. Biden invited Yarl to visit the White House when he had recovered.

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

ISRAEL: LIKE ALL OTHER NATIONS? ELLIOT KAUFMAN

Posted By on April 26th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/like-all-other-nations

Israel’s Declaration of Independence: The History and Political Theory of the Nation’s Founding Moment, by Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Zigler (Cambridge, 300 pp., $39.99)

It is one of the great stories. Exiled from their land but never ceasing during 2,000 years of persecution to pray for their return, the People of the Book became free and sovereign in the Land of Israel, 75 years ago today.

Now, either the theme song from “Exodus” begins to play, or I tell you that Leon Uris’s story isn’t the only one, and, like countless American Jews before me, I wring my hands over the sins of a remarkably liberal nationalism in a benighted part of the world.

We expect one story or the other and are tired of both. That’s why Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Zigler’s Israel’s Declaration of Independence is a breath of fresh air. Alternating between close textual analysis, thoughtful reflection, and brisk narrative history, the book tells the one story about the creation of Israel that I never saw coming: a comedy.

Rogachevsky, an assistant professor at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center, and Zigler, an investor and economist of unusually humane learning, tell the story straight, as befits a serious work of scholarship. But expect to laugh while you learn; this is history as a comedy of errors.

Prelude: it’s May 1948, the British Mandate for Palestine is ending, Arab attacks are trending toward war, and Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion is determined to declare independence. But what to say? The task of drafting a declaration fell to Pinchas Rosen, who would become Israel’s first justice minister. Like any senior lawyer worth his salt, Rosen immediately dumped the assignment on the junior man in the office, the British-trained Mordechai Beham. Given only the vaguest of instructions, Beham set out to fulfill his duty to the nation.

Act one: Beham plagiarizes Thomas Jefferson. The first draft of the Israeli Declaration—written in English, embarrassingly—would include such masterstrokes as “inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” with the Israeli government “deriving its just power from the consent of the governed.” It’s the kind of language that might have complicated those arms shipments from Czechoslovakia in the subsequent War of Independence.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ukraine’s Iron Harvest and the Oligarchs by Richard Kemp

Posted By on April 26th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19605/ukraine-iron-harvest

The media prefer to talk of mansions and opulent yachts rather than the corporate assets which continue to generate profits for the oligarch class that includes men like Alexei Miller, Igor Sechin, Roman Abramovich, Boris Rotenberg, Vladimir Potanin, Viatcheslav ‘Moshe’ Kantor, and Igor Shuvalov as well as their sons and daughters who occupy key banking and business roles too. All of these have been sanctioned and some of their assets frozen.

Serious consideration should be given to finding a way to hold the beneficiaries of Putin’s largesse even more accountable, if possible, and direct their assets to rectifying the damage that their patron-in-chief has caused. It is likely that tens of billions of US dollars of Putin’s oligarchs’ assets have already been frozen under international sanctions. This means Russia cannot use them, but as things stand, they cannot be confiscated and put to work to help Ukraine re-build, much as there is the desire in the US, UK and EU to do so.

A series of bills has already been introduced in the US Congress towards this aim, but they would all appear to fall foul of domestic laws as well as international investment laws. What is now needed therefore is a coordinated legislative effort in Washington, London and like-minded capitals to permanently deprive Russia of these funds and use them to help offset the massive reconstruction bills that will otherwise fall entirely to US, British and European taxpayers.

The World Bank estimates an overall reconstruction bill for Ukraine at $349 billion, an eye-watering sum that is rising by the week. Ukrainian government sources put it at more like $700 billion. Somehow this has all got to be paid for, and it’s not going to come from Ukraine, whose economy is in tatters after months of fighting for its very survival. The chances of getting Russia to cough up are close to zero, whatever the talk of war crimes trials and reparations.

Meanwhile, sanctioned Russian oligarchs, who themselves bear considerable responsibility for Putin’s aggression, simply alter the ownership of their corporations to avoid penalties, often with their vast fortunes residing in Western banks and property empires. It is time for their wealth to come under greater scrutiny as the world figures out how to put Ukraine back together when the war eventually comes to an end.