Displaying posts published in

November 2017

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Protecting Academic Freedom Through All the Campus Smoke Peter Wood

By on November 16th, 2017

This article originally appeared at Minding the Campus on October 18, 2017.

Once many years ago I spoke to an Army recruiter who tried to convince me that I would learn many valuable skills in the military, including how to jump from helicopters. I was puzzled. How exactly was learning to jump from a helicopter a valuable skill? He explained that I could then qualify for a career as a flame jumper fighting wildfires.

I passed up that career in favor of the far more practical training in social anthropology. But sometimes it seems I still ended up in the business of jumping into burning terrain. Attempting to make sense of the claims and counterclaims in the debates over free speech strikes me as something like smokejumping. The destination is often obscure, the heat is intense, and the goal keeps changing.

I have good friends in Santa Rosa and don’t mean my metaphor to diminish the awful reality of the devastating California fires. But the image has some purpose. Here, there, and then suddenly over there on a distant ridge, the wildfires burst to life. So too the assaults on intellectual freedom.

I have been working on a larger project in which I attempt to reframe many of the current controversies about free speech by looking at the psychological and anthropological aspects of verbal defiance and transgression. As part of that project, I have been looking over recent examples and attempting to draw distinctions between what we should, perhaps with gritted teeth, accept as provocative speech that still must be tolerated, and speech that “crosses the line” into what should not be tolerated. Not everyone will agree with the lines I’ve drawn. It is easiest, of course, to draw fire from those who profess a doctrine of “no lines.” But as an anthropologist, I know that “no lines” is a fiction. All societies have them. The real questions are Where are they drawn? Who draws them? How are they maintained?

Heckling Democrats at Whittier

On October 5, Whittier College in California hosted an event titled, “A Conversation with the Attorney General,” which was intended to be an hour-long Q & A session with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. The event, open to the public, had been organized by Ian Calderon, a Democrat and majority leader of the California State Assembly. Becerra has been in the news for his public opposition to President Trump’s positions on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) which deals with the legal standing of the approximately 800,000 individuals in the United States who arrived here illegally as children.

The Q & A session took an unexpected turn. About a dozen pro-Trump hecklers showed up and attempted to shout down Becerra and the other speakers. They didn’t succeed in derailing the event, but they impeded it. This is apparently not the first time that pro-Trump protesters have disrupted events put on by elected officials, but it is, as far as I know, the first time it has happened as part of an organized campus event. A key figure and possibly the organizer of the Whittier protest is Arthur Schaper, who has publicly boasted of his role in disrupting other public events involving Democratic speakers. FIRE, which reported the Whittier incident, quotes Schaper as saying:

“I am prepared to be an uncivil civilian, and I don’t care who’s offended. Civility, accommodation, and playing nice with Republican and Democratically elected officials is over. … Making America great again is not about placating and pleasing everyone, but standing up for what is right, even if it means disrupting a few tea parties.”

Stanley Kurtz, writing at National Review Online, responded to the FIRE report and the accompanying video of the protest with distress. Kurtz noted that many have warned that the “leftist campus disruptors” were endangering their own rights by creating a precedent that right-wing activists could copy. That’s exactly what happened at Whittier on October 5. A small consolation is that the protesters included few if any students. This was a mob of partisans from off campus. That doesn’t absolve the college for its failure to maintain order, but it means that the eventuality of heckling from both political extremes among students hasn’t yet materialized.

Lest there be any ambiguity about this, the National Association of Scholars strongly condemns the shout-down of Attorney General Becerra at Whittier College. The actions of Mr. Schaper and others in his group are an assault on academic freedom, the integrity of higher education, and the civility on which our republic depends.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Professor: Add ‘Weight-Based Microaggressions’ to School Diversity Curriculum The list of reasons for why people face difficulties is literally endless — are we going to add every single one of them to schools’ diversity programs? By Katherine Timpf

By on November 16th, 2017

A sociology professor at the University of Alabama has called for “weight-based microaggressions” to be added to the school’s diversity curriculum.

The professor, Andrea Hunt, surveyed 13 overweight college administrators and found that many of them reported having experienced “fat shaming” on campus, according to an article in Campus Reform. Hunt co-wrote an academic article on the issue titled, “Fat pedagogy and microaggressions: Experiences of professionals working in higher education settings.”

Tammy Rhodes, the program coordinator and administrative assistant in the University Success Center at the University of North Alabama, co-wrote the article with Hunt.

The article’s abstract cites an observation by an English professor at California University of Pennsylvania, Christina Fisanick — that “fat professors feel compelled to overperform” — and argues that it’s applicable to all areas of higher education, even beyond the classroom.”

“Directors, coordinators, and administrative assistants in academic departments and units also experience this strain in which overworking and taking on too many responsibilities can somehow overcompensate for the societal belief that someone larger is less credible or knowledgible [sic] than someone in a thinner body size,” the abstract states.

“The research concludes by highlighting how body weight should be integrated into diversity training and programming,” it continues.

According to Campus Reform, the text of the article also details some examples of microaggressions that the “fat” people she interviewed told her they’d experienced. For example, a woman named Anita told Rhodes that “business-casual [attire] requirements” were a form of an anti-fat microaggression. One college administrator, Desiree, said she had experienced outright “verbal weightshaming:”

“Because I am a chubby black woman who happens to be very curvy, folks think that it is acceptable to sing songs about big butts or make comments about having some ‘junk in the trunk,’” she said.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

America’s Indispensable Friends As long as the U.S. remains good to weaker but humane states located in dangerous neighborhoods, it will remain great as well. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on November 16th, 2017

The world equates American military power with the maintenance of the postwar global order of free commerce, communications, and travel.

Sometimes American power leads to costly, indecisive interventions like those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya that were not able to translate superiority on the battlefield into lasting peace.

But amid the frustrations of American foreign policy, it is forgotten that the United States also plays a critical but more silent role in ensuring the survival of small, at-risk nations. The majority of them are democratic and pro-Western. But they all share the misfortune of living in dangerous neighborhoods full of bullies.

These small nations are a far cry from rogue clients of China and Russia — theocratic Iran, autocratic North Korea, and totalitarian Venezuela — that oppress their own people and threaten their regions.

In the Middle East, there are two places that consistently remain pro-American: the nation of Israel and the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Both show a spirit and tenacity that so far have ensured their survival against aggressive and far larger neighbors. Both have few friends other than the United States. And both are anomalies. Israel is surrounded by Islamic neighbors. The ethnic Kurds live in the heart of the Arab Middle East. Quite admirably, the U.S. continues to be a patron of both.

For some 500 years, the Ottoman Empire terrified the Christian Middle East and Mediterranean world. Almost every country in its swath was Islamicized. Two tiny unique places were conquered but not transformed: Armenia and Greece. Both suffered terribly at the hands of the Ottomans and their successors, the early-20th-century Turkish state.

Yet both Armenia and Greece remained Christian and kept their languages and cultures. Today, both are still quite vulnerable to renewed neo-Ottoman Turkish pressures.

America has been a friend to both Armenia and Greece, although their histories with the U.S. were often controversial. In turn, they have sent millions of talented and skilled immigrants to the U.S. The world is a far better place because there are 11 million Greeks who keep the legacy of Hellenism alive. Armenia still remains a Western outpost — the first country to formally adopt Christianity as a state religion, and a nation that has preserved its faith under centuries of cruel foreign persecutions.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why the Democrats Really Turned on Bill Clinton Daniel Greenfield

By on November 16th, 2017

In the winter of ’56, Khrushchev told the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that Stalin may not have been a very nice guy. In the fall of ’17, the media began to concede that maybe Bill Clinton did abuse a whole bunch of women. And maybe those women weren’t really part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to make a bloated piggish progressive hero seem like he might not be a very nice guy.

Why are Democrats turning on the Clintons? Same reason Khrushchev turned on Stalin. They’re purging the Clintons for the same reasons that they defended them. They’re calling out Bill Clinton for his sexual assaults for the same reasons that they covered them up. It’s about power and money.

The Democrats smeared Bill Clinton’s accusers then. Now they’ll exploit them to throw the Clintons out.

The #MeToo campaign provided an opening. But if you really want to understand why the left is disavowing Bill Clinton, ignore the hashtags and look at the bigger picture.

Earlier this month, the rollout of Donna Brazile’s book raked Hillary Clinton and her campaign over the coals. The former interim DNC boss made the case that the Clinton campaign had rigged the primaries.

Brazile’s outrage at the rigging is laughable. Not only was she caught passing a debate question to Hillary, but the only reason she was allowed to replace Debbie Wasserman Schultz is that she was a Clintonista who had served as a Clinton adviser and was promoted to head Gore’s campaign.

After Hillary’s collapse, Brazile was left out in the cold. Like Schultz, she was one of Hillary’s fall girls. And unlike Schultz, she didn’t have a cozy congressional district to call her own. Her CNN contract was torn up after the debate question leak. (Though if you think CNN was actually surprised that a Clinton ally leaked it to the Clintons, you’re also shocked that there’s gambling going on at Rick’s Cafe Americain. CNN had disavow Donna who then had to disavow Hillary. Now the Dems are disavowing the Clintons.)

Brazile’s book tour was Act 1 in purging the Clintons from the Dem establishment. Talking about Bill Clinton’s sexual harassment and abuses is Act 2. And the odds are very good that there’s an Act 3.

Why get rid of the Clintons? Let’s look at what the First Grifters have been doing to the Dems.

In May, Hillary rolled out Onward Together. The new SuperPAC was supposed to fundraise for lefty groups. But the groups don’t actually appear to be getting the cash.

Understandable. The flat broke Clintons always have lots of bills to pay and private jets to book. And good chardonnay doesn’t come cheap. A 1787 vintage Chateau d’Yquem runs to $100K a bottle.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Howard Jacobson, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Simon Schama : In Defense of Israel

By on November 16th, 2017

‘Howard Jacobson, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Simon Schama posted an open letter in The Times in which they said they were “troubled by the tone and direction of debate about Israel and Zionism within the Labour Party”.

In the centenary year of the Balfour Declaration, in which the British government committed its support to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the trio say: “Zionism is the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. We believe that anti-Zionism, with its antisemitic characteristics, has no place in a civil society.”

In 2009, Booker Prize winner Jacobson, now 75, wrote that criticism of Israel was “a desire to word a country out of existence,” and this week he again equated criticism of Israel with the will to destroy it.

“We do not object to fair criticism of Israel governments,” the three wrote, “but this has grown to be indistinguishable from a demonisation of Zionism itself – the right of the Jewish people to a homeland, and the very existence of a Jewish state.”

They said Jewish conspiracy theories had resurfaced along with “the promotion of vicious, fictitious parallels with genocide and Nazism,” adding: “How, in such instances, is anti-Zionism distinguishable from antisemitism?”

Adding their voice to a growing debate about anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the authors also allege that anti-Zionists “claim innocence of any antisemitic intent” but “frequently borrow the libels of classical Jew-hating”.

Turning their combined attention to Labour, they say “such themes and language have become widespread in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party… so far the Labour leadership’s reaction has been derisory. It is not enough to denounce all racisms”.’

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Welcome Home Jihadis! by Khadija Khan

By on November 16th, 2017

After a humiliating defeat in Syria and Iraq, thousands of European jihadis are set to return home. Western governments seem set to roll out the red-carpet for them as if they were heroes rather than turncoats.

The UK has launched an integration program, Operation Constrain, for its homecoming jihadis to provide them with assistance in finding a job and living a “normal” life.

Such theatrics, however, are not expected to deter determined terrorists, unless the authorities are equally determined with brutal honesty to see what is being said extremist mosques and seminaries and know their sources of funding.

When a minister from the Gulf warns European countries that their mosques or imams should be licensed, you know you have a problem on your hands.

While France and Germany marked memorial days for the 2015 Paris and 2016 Berlin terrorist attacks, many Islamists seem to remain undeterred. The October 31 terror attack in New York and the arrest of three suspected ISIS militants in Germany are merely reminders of how determined many Islamists are to rattle the foundations of modern civilization and move their plans forward inch by inch.

As ISIS retreats in Syria and Iraq, its adherents show up in the West as “inspired” home-grown or would-be terrorists. Anyone believing that these homecoming terrorists were merely hostages of ISIS or were only given air-guns is misinformed.

So many terrorist attacks this year have made people in the West doubt the ability of governments to counter terrorist aggression. Some political leaders, such as London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, have said that people will just have to get used to terror attacks — a response the public might understandably find less than satisfactory.

Meanwhile, President Trump’s tweet after the October 31 attack in New York — “We must not allow ISIS to return, or enter, our country after defeating them in the Middle East and elsewhere. Enough!” — resurfaced skepticism about how terrorism is being handled.

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s Unsung Success in the Middle East By David P. Goldman

By on November 16th, 2017

President Trump’s Middle East policy is simple: Back our friends and scare the hell out of our enemies, and negotiate where possible with our competitors like Russia and China. By and large it’s working, unlike the catastrophically failed polices of the previous two administrations. Trump did what he said he would do and succeeded. You wouldn’t know that from the #fakenews media.

Start with Israel: The Muslim strategy to destroy Israel hasn’t envisioned war–not at least since 1973–because Israel in all cases would win. Instead, the objective is to ring Israel with missiles and force Israel to retaliate against missile attacks in such a way that the “international community” would respond by imposing a “settlement” on Israel that would leave Israel vulnerable to further missiles attacks, and so forth. This is stated explicitly by Palestinian strategists cited by Haviv Rettig Gur in The Times of Israel.

George W. Bush and Obama gave aid and comfort to the encircle-and-strangle strategy by tying Israel’s hands. Then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wouldn’t let Olmert attack Hezbollah with full force in 2006. Rice thinks the Palestinian movement is a branch of the U.S. civil rights movement (if you don’t believe that characterization, read her book “Democracy,” which I will review for Claremont Review of Books).

Obama sandbagged Israel during the 2014 Gaza rocket attacks, suspending delivery of Hellfire missiles to the Jewish State. Israel is the only country in the world that embeds human rights lawyers in every infantry company to make sure that its soldiers keep collateral damage to a minimum.

Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese militia, has 150,000 rockets aimed at Israel, and many of them can hit any target in the country. In the case of a major rocket attack from Hezbollah against Israel, military logic dictates the preemptive neutralization of rocket launchers embedded in civilian populations–what an Israeli strategist close to the PM described to me as “Dresden.” There would be tens of thousands of civilian casualties. Trump will not tie Israel’s hands in the case of attack, and will not interfere with Israel’s ability to defend herself. That makes Israel’s deterrent against Iran credible.

Hillary Clinton insisted that the “technology of war,” in particular the rockets ringing Israel, would force Israel to accept a phony peace agreement whose main effect would be to bring the rocket launchers closer to Israel. The photograph below shows the runways and main terminal building of Israel’s international airport from an Arab village in Judea: Hand this over to the Palestinians and primitive short-range missiles can shut down the Israel economy. There’s an easy way to stop the rockets, which is to kill the people who shoot them. That might mean killing the human shields whom the cowardly terrorists put in front of the rockets, but under international law, a country acting in self-defense has every right to kill civilians.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fusion GPS Co-Founder Leaked Dossier to Reporters in Retaliation for Comey Reopening Clinton Email Case By Debra Heine

By on November 16th, 2017

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson refused to answer key questions during his seven-hour closed-door appearance Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee, Fox News reported Wednesday. But he did acknowledge that he personally discussed allegations in the Steele dossier with members of the media, even though he did not speak to the sources behind the allegations himself to verify whether they were true.

Moreover, he reportedly said that he leaked details from the dirty dossier to reporters right before the 2016 election because he was “upset” that then-FBI director James Comey had reopened the Clinton email case.

Simpson told investigators he never spoke to the underlying sources of the document, never traveled to Russia and did not verify the dossier beyond comparing the claims to “open source” media reporting.

The source said Simpson also told investigators he was “upset” when then FBI Director James Comey re-opened the Hillary Clinton email investigation in late October 2016, and Simpson wanted to push back.

Simpson’s attorneys negotiated the details of his appearance before the committee last week, agreeing to voluntarily testify rather than be subpoenaed.

“Throughout this entire year, the White House and its allies on the Hill and elsewhere have attempted at every turn to smear Fusion GPS because of its connection to the Steele dossier,” Simpson’s attorney Joshua Levy said Tuesday.

Levy admitted that Steele and Simpson had briefed reporters on the dossier last year, but insisted that neither Simpson nor Fusion GPS paid members of the media to publish stories of any kind.

Banker turned human rights activist Bill Browder has accused Fusion of hiring journalists to plant stories in the media.

Fusion, meanwhile, continued to fight the Intel Committee’s request for their bank records in court on Wednesday.

According to The Daily Caller, Steele has revealed in court papers in London that “he was directed by Fusion to brief reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Yahoo! News and The New Yorker in September 2016.”

Steele also gave an interview via Skype to Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who published an article about Steele’s allegations on Oct. 31, 2016.

Levy maintains that the dossier is legitimate.

“What they did do is they contracted with Christopher Steele…. This experienced British intelligence official came back with a report that now in hindsight looks quite accurate,” Levy said.

Fox News is standing by its report that Simpson met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya before and after the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign officials. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Sixty nails in climate alarmism’s coffin By Jerry Shenk

By on November 16th, 2017

There are plenty of well-credentialed, objective, if little-publicized, climate skeptics, but few who are able to present their material in layman’s terms to an audience of curious, unschooled, but receptive climate truth-seekers.

A new resource provides a point-by-point review and response to each of the climate industry’s claims, citing the “normalcy” of much of their “alarming” data.

In an entertaining, easy-to-read, elegantly-written, meticulously-researched, well-documented and illustrated 143-page book (including citations) entitled “Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know,” geologist Gregory Wrightstone presents a clear picture of the climate alarmism that attracts cynical big-government advocates and grips much of the scientific community, complicit media and the gullible among us.

Wrightstone employs government sources, peer-reviewed publications and other scholarly works to reassure readers that our Earth has become healthier and more prosperous because of rising carbon dioxide and temperature levels, rather than in spite of them.

The book details sixty inconvenient facts. Considering the climate alarmists’ persistent clamor about “scientific consensus.” Arguably, Inconvenient Fact #31 should have appeared first: “Science is not consensus and consensus is not science.”

Wrightstone’s droll observation about the financial incentives driving many career-invested scientists to mislead or overstate the “catastrophic” potential of climate change, often without historical or even scientific context, is spot on: “Fund it and they will find it.”

The book documents as facts that global warming is not happening at anywhere near the rates predicted by climate doomsayers, and that forewarnings of abnormal extreme weather events related to climate change simply haven’t occurred. Wrightstone makes a persuasive case that the “settled science” of global warming — alternately, climate change, extreme weather (or pick the term du jour) — is neither settled nor, in many cases, even science.

Some highlights: Only a trace gas, carbon dioxide isn’t the primary greenhouse gas; CO2’s warming effect declines as its concentration increases; and CO2 is plant food, so more of it means moister soil, fewer droughts and forest fires, a greener Earth, more plant growth and more food for humans and animals.

Continue reading →
MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Three Billboards – American Gothic Redux By Marilyn Penn

By on November 16th, 2017

Three Billboards, written and directed by Martin McDonaugh, has a cover story of a mother’s insurmountable guilt and grief over the murder of her young daughter who was raped while dying Compounding the tragedy of this brutal crime is the apparent inactivity of the police dept in working this case and finding the culprit. The mother, played by a fierce Frances McDormand, hatches a plan to challenge their complacency by calling out the police chief and reprinting the police report on three prominent billboards right outside the small town of Ebbing, Missouri. Several factors complicate this plan: the expense of the billboard rental, the fact that the police chief is dying of pancreatic cancer and the reaction of the town to this public disgrace.

Amid this set-up, you will find grotesque caricatures instead of real characters – American crackers who punctuate every word with the omnipresent F modifier along with other salacious references to female anatomy and disposition. This is set in relief by the letters written by the fatally ill police chief (Woody Harrelson) who is wondrously also capable of multi-syllabic, poetic expression including a reference to Oscar Wilde, straight out of left field for a small-town Missouri cop. Admittedly, he hears the name from his much younger Australian wife, an alcoholic who is inexplicably in nowheresville America with a much older husband, but she would more likely know the name Adele than Oscar Wilde. Mildred, the grieving mother played by Frances, is another unbelievable pastiche who is a formerly battered wife, somehow capable of standing up to the town’s authority and disdain, hurling Molotov cocktails to burn down the police station and contemplating the murder of an incidental bad guy not implicated in her daughter’s case. From the way she is played by McDormand, she would have killed her sadistic husband the second time he assaulted her, not hung around for years of abuse until the children were grown and her son could come to her defense. None of the details in these character sketches make any visual, dramatic or logical sense. Did I mention that there’s also a dwarf?

Rounding out the implausibles is the shiftless cop played by Sam Rockwell as a mama’s boy afraid to own up both to her and his own gay-dom. Though severely burned in the aforementioned fire at the police department, he is out of the hospital and his bandages in a week and mirabile dictu, he overhears a confession of a rapist sitting in the booth behind him at the local tavern. Though Frances has berated the local priest with her choicest potty-mouth expletives earlier in the film, one can only marvel at the author’s resort to a deus ex machina for some serendipitous clues.

If you compare this film with another one also dealing with a person’s guilt and grief, you will see the difference: one author going for easy laughs, casual violence and characters that are grotesques while the other finds the humanity in simple working-class people portrayed with understated honesty and true emotional depth. For that experience, revisit Manchester By The Sea, written by the incomparable Ken Lonergan who will take you inside the characters’ hearts instead of watching them from an insultingly superior perch.

Continue reading →