ISRAEL Comments turned off

No, Hady Amr is not ‘our friend’ By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on December 4th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/no-hady-amr-is-not-our-friend/

Mere hours after the announcement on Tuesday that the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli and Palestinian affairs had been promoted to a position that was tailor-made just for him, the American Jewish Committee jumped in to welcome the move.

“Congratulations to our friend @HadyAmr on being appointed Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs,” tweeted the self-described “staunchly non-partisan” organization. “AJC looks forward to our continued work with you to advance American engagement in the region and the cause of peace across the Middle East.”

The timing wasn’t the only thing disturbing about Amr’s “elevation” to a concocted new job—from whose title the word “Israel” is conspicuously absent—or about the AJC’s fawning response to it. But it was certainly symbolic, as it fell on Nov. 29.

On this date in 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 181, which called for the partition of British-ruled Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one. It was the precursor to the declaration of the birth of the State of Israel less than six months later, on May 14, 1948.
Referred to in Hebrew as Kaf Tet B’November, it is celebrated annually by Israelis and—like Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day)—mourned by the Arabs who rejected the original partition plan and who continue to refuse coexistence with the “Zionist entity.” In a horrifying historical twist, the UNGA has joined the “Palestinians” who mark the nakba (catastrophe) of Israel’s birth by stressing and acting on their intention to eliminate it.

The international body even voted on Wednesday in favor of holding an official commemorative Nakba Day event to honor all those decrying the Jewish state’s upcoming 75th anniversary. The world couldn’t have found a more fitting way to champion the sharp rise in antisemitism that so many countries and NGOs claim to be attempting to combat.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Decline of Higher Education Thoughts on a generational takeover by the Left, and what options remain John M. Ellis

Posted By on December 4th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/the-decline-of-higher-education

In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, academic-freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape. In a small town, somewhere in the heartland, there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople.

Someone like the local mayor would lean on the college president (probably a personal friend), the president would then lean on the department chair, and the young professor was soon gone. The American Association of University Professors would then intervene, and the individual would be reinstated, because the AAUP would in effect threaten blacklisting. Reports of cases like this were reasonably common.

The AAUP would always insist that college campuses must be the one place with unfettered freedom to discuss and analyze issues of all kinds, no matter who might be offended. The analytical function of academia must never be shut down by a shallow local moralism. This was then the consensus of academic life.

If we fast forward to the present, one feature of what’s happening on the campuses looks similar: that crucial analytical function is still getting stifled whenever it offends an equally shallow local moralism. But there’s a startling difference: the actors have changed places. It’s now the professors who do what the small-minded small-town worthies used to do, shutting down analysis whenever it offends them, which is often.

In fact, they do it on a vastly larger scale. Those old AAUP cases were aberrations affecting a tiny minority of campuses, and the infractions were soon corrected. But today, the suppression of debate and analysis happens almost everywhere, and the perpetrators—both professors and administrators—represent a controlling majority of the campuses.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Art Museums and Impermanence Many art museums may still look like the marmoreal palaces of yore, but increasingly their goals are in tension with the calm solidity of their galleries and pavilions. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on December 4th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/03/art-museums-and-impermanence/

The biggest story as I write revolves around Elon Musk’s decision to reveal the truth about how Twitter, largely at the behest of Democrats, intervened in the 2020 presidential campaign to quash damaging news about Joe Biden and thus influence the course of the election. Twitter wasn’t the only entity to put its finger on the electoral scale, but it was a very prominent one. Remember, Twitter shut down the account of Donald Trump, a sitting president of the United States, as part of the media frenzy in the aftermath of the January 6 protests at the Capitol. Twitter shut down the accounts of many other prominent conservatives around the same time. The company also went to extraordinary lengths, ahead of the election, to bury the story, first aired by the New York Post, about Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

As I say, this whole story is the hottest thing going right now, and for those interested in pursuing it I recommend James Woods’ interview with Tucker Carlson and the long thread that the journalist Matt Taibbi has begun to publish at the request of Elon Musk. If prior to this you thought that the 2020 election was on the up-and-up, these revelations might well change your mind. 

But I am not going to say another word about that sordid subject today. Instead, I thought I would step back and consider a different sort of scandalous story, one that involves the fate of the art museum in an age of identity politics. 

I was recently asked to contribute an introduction to “The Museum of Art: Challenge and Response,” a conversation in Melbourne, Australia, between Gerard Vaughan, former Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, and David Bomford, former curator at several museums and now a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert in London. What follows is an adaptation of that introduction. 

Every age, I noted, has its architectural master projects, those programs that not only attract the signal architectural talent of the time but also, in the reach of their tentacles, seem to epitomize the civilizational ambitions of a culture. At one time in the West, that node of interest centered around the Church, at another the palace, at another the town square and attendant civil structures.

Today, there is a good argument to be made that for some time now the apogee of architectural ambition has centered around the art museum. 

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Biden Administration Turns a Blind Eye to Iranian Regime’s Brutal Crackdown by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19176/iran-brutal-crackdown

The Biden administration appears to be repeating Obama administration’s policy of choosing to be silent in the face of the Iranian regime’s bloodshed, human rights violations, and crackdowns that kill and wound peaceful protesters — and has the same policy regarding brave Chinese protestors as well.

One hospital staff member wrote in a message to CNN about a female detainee: “When she first came in, [the officers] said she was hemorrhaging from her rectum… due to repeated rape. The plainclothes men insisted that the doctor write it as rape prior to arrest….” — CNN Special Report, “How Iran’s security forces use rape to quell protests,” November 21, 2022.

Will the Biden administration ever stop appeasing the regime of Iran, called by the US Department of State “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism”?

Will the Biden administration ever start standing with Iranian — and Chinese, Brazilian and Venezuelan — men and women asking only for what we purport to care about — liberty and freedom — but who suffer brutality and suppression from their own governments?

When millions of citizens poured into the streets of Iran in June 2009 to protest against the country’s regime, the Obama administration was silent as many people in Iran cried out, “Are you with us, or are you with them [the ruling mullahs]?” Now, the Biden administration appears to be repeating Obama administration’s policy of choosing to be silent in the face of the Iranian regime’s bloodshed, human rights violations, and crackdowns that kill and wound peaceful protesters — and has the same policy regarding brave Chinese protestors as well.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis’ Fortress Prison by Ben Macintyre

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

“Not since Ian Fleming and John le Carré has a spy writer so captivated readers.”—The Hollywood Reporter

In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend.

But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs.

Prisoners of the Castle traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Your feel-good video of the day: Pushing back against woke corporations By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/your_feelgood_video_of_the_day_pushing_back_against_woke_corporations.html

One of the things we reliably expect from Harvard professors nowadays is that they’re as intellectually bereft as people like Elizabeth Warren, a mediocre leftist law professor who got her gig by falsely claiming to be Native American. Aside from being a leftist, her ideas are just wrong (as, for example, her claim that Biden can magically erase voluntarily incurred student debt.) But there are still sane minds at Harvard, one of whom is Arthur Brooks. Every normal person watching his short “man up” speech to corporate leaders, will find it incredibly refreshing and even worth a few Huzzahs!

Lately, I’ve noticed a despairing tone in conversations with conservatives. It’s not just gamed elections, open borders, a decaying military, attacks on fossil fuel (the foundation for modern life), the martyrdom of the January 6 prisoners, the transgender mafia’s bullying, continued vaccination pressures, or any of the other horrors the left is inflicting on America. What has left them despairing to the point of inertia is the sense that there are no battles that they can fight because the leftist victory is total.

A large portion of that sense of defeat comes about because we’re no longer just fighting at the political level. We’re not even fighting Hollywood and the TV news anymore. What’s really terrifying is that America’s major corporations have gone completely woke. The examples are everywhere, from Disney to airlines telling their flight attendants that it’s fine to be a bearded man with make-up and a dress, to the myriad corporations that have bought into Critical Race Theory, to the tech tyrants and their biased search engines and free-speech crackdowns. We’re tired and feel that it’s just impossible to fight both city hall and main street.

Arthur Brooks, a business and leadership professor at Harvard, as well as a well-known author and speaker, thinks we can fight Main Street because it’s not the monolithic leftist bastion we believe it’s become.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Futile Quest to Protect Racial Diversity By Robert Weissberg

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/the_futile_quest_to_protect_racial_diversity.html

In June of 2023 the Supreme Court will render its decision regarding the legality of racial preferences in higher education. Considering recent rulings, the Court is likely to ban outright or at least severely limit these preferences. Will the Court thus end racial preferences? Unlikely — the passion for “diversity” (i.e., admitting less-qualified minorities) — seems hard-wired in today’s elite universities and, more telling, American higher education has long prepared for this dreaded day. Their strategy is straightforward:  since legal proof of discrimination depends on statistical evidence across racial groups, just eliminate tests like the SAT that expose biases.

The latest installment of messenger shooting is a pronouncement from the American Bar Association permitting law schools to drop the LSAT in the admissions process beginning in fall 2025. No doubt, other subterfuges, for example, eliminating class rankings, are being contemplated. University administrators thus resemble criminals scrubbing the crime scene for any evidence of their wrongdoing. How can you sue universities for racial discrimination if everything is murky and ill-defined? For schools prizing diversity über alles, mission accomplished, or it would seem.

Will hiding statistical evidence of preferences ensure that blacks and Asians finally be on equal footing when it comes to pursuing careers in law or medicine?  The answer is “no,” and, if anything, banning these indicators will only acerbate racial bias. Abolishing quantitative criteria will restore the earlier era when schools freely indulged prejudices. Recall that one of the purposes of SAT-like tests was to overcome the racial/ethnic unfairness that came with subjective admission standards.  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What If MAGA Shrugged? By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/what_if_maga_shrugged.html

Congressional lizards posing as “leaders” met with China Joe in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, and the wretched gerontocracy that rules over us looked happy as clams to be reunited after the political theater of the midterms.  Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Kevin McCarthy, and Turtle McConnell all sported sly, devilish grins that suggested they got exactly what they wanted in last month’s elections.  

In undermining MAGA candidates, Turtle’s iron-fisted control over his Republican minority remains absolute.  Up-Chuck and Child-Sniffer Joe still hold the Senate and retain the power to ram more lawless federal judges through confirmation (with Lindsey Graham’s obedient assistance, of course).  Middling McCarthy has such a weak House majority that he will end up playing so much ball with Democrats in the name of “compromise” that “selling out” will continue being Republicans’ favorite sport.  And wicked witch San Fran Nan gets to booze off into the sunset, looking like a winner whose political expertise is so uncanny that she nearly managed to keep her majority during a foretold “red tsunami” election when roughly 70% of the country has consistently demanded a drastic change of course.

The “woke” Marxist puppeteers actually dictating policy from the Oval Office are so giddy with what they have managed to pull off with this new voting system of anonymous and unsecured mail-in ballots that they actually announced “We the People” as the official White House theme for holiday decorations this year — a fairly direct kidney punch against the broad MAGA coalition of voters who use that appellation from the Constitution’s Preamble to rally support for taking back the country from the China-appeasing, World Economic Forum–devoted, anti–free speech communists long in control of the bureaucratic levers of government.  Sorry, “We the People,” only atheists, oligarchs, globalists, and commies welcome at the White House for now!

Watching the Uniparty’s cabal of corruptocrats flaunt their shared victory is downright nauseating.  It’s such a kick in the teeth to see the same people we’ve been trying to cashier for over a decade still in charge.  Even after a Tea Party revolt against Obama’s socialist overreach that ended up securing strong Republican congressional control (before corporate RINO Paul Ryan and the Turtle Tyrant threw those victories away), the election of MAGA Warrior Donald Trump in 2016, and a 2020 election turnout that brought over ten million new voters into MAGA’s ranks, the same swamp creatures who ran roughshod over the stinking, rotten system back then still manipulate the decaying, rancid system yet today.  Uff da!  This is what a hamster on a wheel must feel like.  No wonder our Tribe of Totalitarian Elders looked so spitefully smug for the cameras.  The wishes of the people have been crushed and discarded once again.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The Science Deniers at the New England Journal of Medicine Experts commonly believe that the only opinions that should count are their own. But what about when their opinions are the ones denying science? By Neil A. Kurtzman, M.D.

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/02/the-science-deniers-at-the-new-england-journal-of-medicine/

The New England Journal of Medicine has published an article called “Protecting Transgender Health and Challenging Science Denialism in Policy.” It is the latest example of using denialism to denigrate any opinion contrary to that of the latest set of experts to claim sovereignty over a controversial subject. The technique is to stifle debate and force discussion from the subject to defense of an unrelated issue. This is what the NEJM paper does to perfection.

The authors place the management of transgender and transgender expansive (TGE) people as an issue between concerned scientists on the one hand and ignorant science deniers on the other. In their view everything on the subject is settled; they have the prescription for the management of TGE, and there is no room for discussion or debate. The laws passed in several states to protect children are, in their view, malicious examples of science denial which should be reversed without any further discussion.

Of course, the paper itself is an example of science denial as there is little, if any, science in it. There is no discussion of which people are included in the TGE category. The authors include no diagnostic criteria for this disease. They likely would deny that it is a disease, despite its treatment with potent drugs and surgery. They offer no discussion as to why TGE, which until recently was an extremely rare problem, has ballooned into ubiquity. 

They also use past attitudes about homosexuality to justify what they think is appropriate management of TGE. In their view, falsehoods that “contain inflammatory statements that gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy alone thereby evoking the same dangerous stereotyping that once pathologized homosexuality” apply to gender dysphoria. Nobody today wants to treat homosexuality with psychotherapy, drugs, or surgery. If the authors think that gender dysphoria should be treated with these three modalities, it is they who are pathologizing TGE. These treatments are being dispensed by physicians at medical centers. Have the doctors and hospitals gone into the management of non-diseases? Non-diseases that will require lifetime follow-up. Who are the science deniers?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

“Statistical Murder”? By depriving communities of wealth, ill-conceived climate-change proposals will lead to worse health outcomes. Henry I. Miller Tom Hafer

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/climate-change-conference-devises-wrong-solutions

It’s often said that members of Generation Z are clueless, and the signs that these young people held at the November COP27 conference are evidence of that proposition. They fail to see the big picture. Let’s accept, for the moment, the premise of their advocacy: that human activities produce greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide, which give rise to atmospheric warming, and thus to some degree of disruption and damage. Even so, as these health-care professionals should know, any cure should not be worse than the disease—but that’s precisely what we see in many proposed remedies for climate change.

Climate activists are clamoring for expensive interventions, including massive transformations of energy production, modes of transportation, building design, and even diminished population growth. They also want huge amounts of monetary compensation paid to poor countries to offset climate change-related environmental and economic damage. The most popular interventions include monumental expenditures on subsidies for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles. But will these measures produce the desired results? And isn’t it possible that depriving taxpayers of the vast resources required to fund climate measures would itself produce negative effects?

The En-ROADS climate model, created by and maintained by Climate Interactive and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, provides answers. En-ROADS is a highly complex, interactive model with a simple interface that allows users to explore and understand the effects of various interventions that influence climate, including the use of coal, nuclear, wind, and solar power, increasing the numbers of electric vehicles (EVs), the planting of trees, and so on.

En-ROADS examines the effects on temperature rise of global implementation of these various parameters out to the year 2100. It predicts that, if nothing is done by then, the planet’s temperature will rise by about 3.6 degrees Celsius. Maximal global use of wind turbines, solar panels, and other renewables would reduce that rise by only 0.2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. Maximal incentives for a transition to electric vehicles globally would yield a similar reduction. For shorter periods, such as 30 years from now, those reductions, taken together, would amount to less than 0.05 degrees Celsius—in other words, negligible. Is this worth a price tag of more than $1,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States?