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August 2018

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Kavanaugh Document Fight Grassley is following the precedents set by Democrats on Kagan.

By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-kavanaugh-document-fight-1534202892

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Friday that confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will begin September 4, nearly two months after his nomination. That’s more than enough time for Senators to examine his voluminous public record, but Democrats are alleging a cover-up.

“We are seeing layer after layer of unprecedented secrecy in what is quickly becoming the least transparent nominations process in history,” declared Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last week.

We hear that communications are strained, if they exist at all, between the staffs of Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who is holding her breath and stomping her feet in tune with Mr. Schumer. The California Democrat is running for re-election against a left-leaning Democrat who claims she’s not doing enough to resist all things Trump. She isn’t about to be outflanked on the left regarding Judge Kavanaugh.

In any event, Democrats are the ones demanding the unprecedented. Their latest complaint is that documents from Mr. Kavanaugh’s years in the White House counsel’s office are being vetted for release by William Burck, a former colleague in the George W. Bush White House. “Unless it was produced by the National Archives, every document you see from Judge Kavanaugh’s White House tenure was selectively chosen for release by his former deputy, Bill Burck. This is not an objective process,” said Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘How Schools Work’ Review: The Worm in the Apple A former education secretary doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to teachers’ unions; still, the Obama administration didn’t take them on. Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews “How Schools Work” by Arne Duncan.

By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-schools-work-review-the-worm-in-the-apple-1534201715?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=contextual&cx_artPos=1#cxrecs_s

Political memoirs are rarely tear-jerkers, but Arne Duncan’s look back at his time as secretary of education under Barack Obama may make school reformers want to cry. It’s not so much that Mr. Duncan, who served from 2009 to 2015 after a stint as head of the Chicago public schools, was bad at his job or in any way unprepared for its challenges. In fact, as “How Schools Work” makes clear, he understood a great deal about the problems plaguing American education. But that very understanding makes his cabinet tenure—recounted here alongside other tales from his public life—feel like a painful missed opportunity.

Mr. Duncan’s theme is that our education system is built on lies. He tells the story of volunteering, while he was in college, at his mother’s after-school tutoring program in Chicago, where she helped neighborhood kids with their schoolwork. His principal charge was a young African-American named Calvin, a rising high-school senior who had more than enough basketball talent to play for a Division I team. Mr. Duncan assumed that Calvin, a solid B-student from an intact, hard-working family, just needed some help studying for the ACT ahead of applying for college—until the first day that Mr. Duncan sat down with him and realized that he was reading at the level of a second-grader. Despite a summer of hard work, Calvin wasn’t going anywhere.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Milwaukee’s Public School Barricade The bureaucracy defies a state law on selling vacant buildings

By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/milwaukees-public-school-barricade-1534203534

Teachers’ unions and their liberal allies are desperately trying to preserve the failing public school status quo. Witness how the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system is defying a state mandate to sell vacant property to charter and private schools.

Milwaukee’s public schools are a mess. Merely 62% of students graduate from high school in four years, and proficiency rates are 15% in math and just over 20% in English. Families are escaping to charter and private schools, which has resulted in 11,000 vacant seats and a budget shortfall that’s expected to swell to $130 million within five years.

We wrote in 2015 about how MPS blocked charter and private school purchases of empty school buildings, which prevented high-performing schools like St. Marcus Lutheran from expanding. The state legislature then passed a law ordering the city and school district to sell vacant public school buildings.

Well, what do you know, the district still hasn’t sold a single vacant building to other schools despite 13 letters of interest from private and charter operators for 11 vacant buildings, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. Following protests from the teachers’ union, a local zoning board denied a bid by Right Step, a private school for children expelled from Milwaukee public schools. The city hasn’t even classified many unused buildings as “vacant.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

After Helsinki: A Coup in the Making Srdja Trifkovic

By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2018/September/43/9/magazine/article/10845200

President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16 have ignited an ongoing paroxysm of rage and hysteria in the U.S. media. Morbid Russophobia and Putin-hate are déjà-vu, but the outpouring of vitriol against Trump has been raised to an entirely new level. The deplorable vulgarian of yore has morphed into a metaphysical incarnation of evil, an “enemy of the people” par excellence. Orwell’s “two minutes of hatred” has become a continuous, 24/7 orgy.

The roll call of attackers reads like a Who’s Who of the U.S. Deep State. The list of their hyperbolic adjectives (including “sellout,” “traitor,” “Putin’s pussycat,” etc.) is familiar to the curious, starting with Barack Obama’s CIA chief John Brennan (“high crimes and misdemeanors”). The outraged were particularly incited by Trump’s refusal to parrot the “Russiagate” narrative, falsely presented as the result of an “intelligence community consensus.”

Trump’s refusal was justified, on factual as well as political and moral grounds. No evidence of any kind exists to prove Russian meddling in the presidential election, or thereafter. It never will be found, for the simple reason that both Podesta’s and DNC emails were leaked, not hacked. The meddling myth is just a tool the Deep State has used since late 2016 to torpedo Trump’s attempt at détente with Moscow. Its operatives saw this attempt, with reason, as a threat to the maintenance of the duopolistic, neolib-neocon system of full-spectrum global dominance.

Just three weeks after the Helsinki summit, it is tricky to discern its implications and likely consequences, but three themes seem clear.

First and foremost, nothing of substance has been settled. It is of course possible and desirable to make a fair and enduring deal with Russia on all contentious issues (Ukraine, Syria, cyberspace, terrorism, trade, etc.). In operational terms, the biggest problem for Trump is not how to keep his supporters loyal; it is how to ensure that his own bureaucratic machine will obey and apply his vision, regardless of what Putin and he may yet agree to next fall. A chronically disloyal civil-service apparatus—especially at the Department of State and the CIA, but also at Defense—overwhelmingly subscribes to the Weltanschauung of Trump’s haters and detractors.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Fox & Friends picks up the Newton school scandal

By on August 13th, 2018

Fox News reports on Newton teachers’ emails against “objectivity” in the classroom.

APT recently unearthed emails from Newton high school teachers which show extreme political bias and a pathologically politicized approach to educating Newton students. One teacher writes of not wanting to “get fired for being a liberal propagandist,” while another fears that “the call for ‘objectivity’ may just inadvertently become the most effective destructive weapon against social justice.”

Our exposé of this scandal in The Federalist went viral, and has now made Fox News.

Fox & Friends has featured APT’s findings on the Newton schools scandal twice in two days now.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Gayle Harris, Suffragan Bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, defames Israel

By on August 13th, 2018

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

To quote CAMERAorg:

‘G while speaking at a meeting of the denomination’s House of Bishops during the 2018 General Convention.

During her testimony in favor of a resolution that condemned Israel for allegedly mistreating Palestinian children (but made no mention of the hate-indoctrination on television shows broadcast by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority), Harris accused Israeli soldiers of shooting a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in the back 10 times.

When did this happen? What is the name of the victim? The first that the world heard of this atrocity was from Harris herself speaking at a church meeting a few years after the alleged incident happened. That doesn’t make any sense. Since when would Palestinian leaders fail to broadcast such an atrocity to the world?

Harris also told a story about Israeli security officials attempting to handcuff a three-year-old boy after his rubber ball bounced off the Temple Mount onto the Western Wall.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center highlighted the absurdity of the bouncing-ball story: “There is a high stone wall on top of the Temple Mount that blocks balls and people from going over the side.” Moreover, as anyone who has been on the Temple Mount can attest, Israeli soldiers do not need to “come up” to the Temple Mount as Harris stated, because they are already stationed on the site.

CAMERA has called on Bishop Harris to provide confirmatory details about these stories and if she can’t retract them and apologize for spreading unsubstantiated propaganda to her fellow Bishops. The Israel-Palestinian conflict is tragic enough. It does not need to be made worse by unsubstantiated atrocity stories that only serve to demonize Israel.’ (See also here and here)

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Supreme Leader Rules Out U.S. Talks in Trump-esque Style “THERE WILL BE NO WAR, NOR WILL WE NEGOTIATE WITH THE U.S.,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweets By Asa Fitch in Dubai

By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-supreme-leader-rules-out-u-s-talks-in-trump-esque-style-1534172157

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled out direct talks with the U.S. on Monday, rejecting an offer from Donald Trump in the president’s own style—a strongly worded, all-caps tweet.

“THERE WILL BE NO WAR, NOR WILL WE NEGOTIATE WITH THE U.S.,” Mr. Khamenei, who has final say in state matters and must approve any political talks, said on his official Twitter account.

“Even if we ever—impossible as it is—negotiated with the U.S., it would never ever be with the current U.S. administration,” he added in a separate tweet.

The pronouncement, which repeated comments from a speech Mr. Khamenei delivered earlier Monday, appeared to erase any uncertainty over Iran’s response to Mr. Trump’s offer late in July for unconditional talks

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Robert Spencer’s Surpassing Study of an Age-Old, Ongoing Threat If the West manages to avoid doom from the forces of Jihad, it will be in large part due to books like this. Hugh Fitzgerald

By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270999/robert-spencers-surpassing-study-age-old-ongoing-hugh-fitzgerald

Robert Spencer’s The History of Jihad tells, in magnificent measure, the story of how, over 1400 years, the votaries of Islam have observed the religious duty of holy war, or Jihad, warfare against the Unbelievers. Reviewers sometimes insist that “if you can only read one book on the subject, read this one.” Here such insistence is not hyperbole. Spencer tells in lively fashion a deadly story, of how what started with a few dozen followers in a dusty town in western Arabia became today’s ideological empire of 1.6 billion members of the Islamic community or umma, mostly to be found in 57 Muslim-majority countries, but now also including hundreds of millions of Muslims in Europe, North America, and India.

How did this happen? How did Muhammad manage to survive early setbacks in Mecca to become the ruler of Arabia? Spencer offers overwhelming evidence that along with brute force, deceit and terror were Muhammad’s chief weapons. “War is deceit,” he insisted. He told his followers that “I have been made victorious through terror.” These — brute force, deceit, and terror — have remained the chief weapons of Jihad throughout history.

Spencer takes us through the campaigns that allowed Muhammad to go from near-fatal weakness to strength. Muhammad’s victory over a much larger enemy at the Battle of Badr in 624 signaled a change in his fortunes; he never looked back. Muhammad relied until 628 only on force to defeat his enemies. But in that year, he agreed to the Treaty of Al Hudaibiyya, which would become the first example of victory through guile. Muhammad had signed a truce treaty (hudna), with the Quraysh tribe of Mecca. It was to last ten years. One of its provisions required Muhammad to return to the Quraysh any member of the tribe who came to him. When a woman of the Quraysh came over to the Muslims, Muhammad broke the treaty (after 18 months) by refusing to send her back, claiming — wrongly — that the treaty only required him to send back men, not women. Muhammad was willing to break the treaty because his forces had grown stronger; he was now prepared to take on the Quraysh. The violation of this treaty by Muhammad has been the model for Muslim treaty-making with Unbelievers ever since; it was even mentioned by Yasser Arafat, to signal to his Muslim followers that they need not worry; he had no intention of meeting his commitments under any agreement signed with Israel. It would be salutary if those who today pressure Israel to sign this or that treaty with the “Palestinians” were to learn about the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya and, for many Muslims, its enduring significance.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Getting Ready for China By Jim Talent

By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/chinese-military-buildup-dangerous/The Chinese armed forces will surpass ours unless we allocate more funds for modernization.

Robert Hood, the assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, recently stated that the DOD does not expect, and evidently will not request, another significant budget increase in financial year 2020. Given what is happening in East Asia, that is inexplicable to me.

Four years ago, I wrote two columns in these pages detailing the ongoing buildup of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the reasons for it. The buildup has continued apace since then. Here is a graphic that I first posted a year ago showing how the balance of power in East Asia has shifted:

The implications of this graphic are exactly what they appear to be: Chinese arms now dominate, albeit imperfectly, the East Asian strategic environment. It’s become their sphere of influence. The peace of the region, and the ability of other nations to trade and travel through it on equal terms, now hang on the margin of China’s fear that a major confrontation would trigger escalating armed conflict with American and allied forces before they are ready for it.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Peter O’Brien A Sane NEG From a Better PM

By on August 13th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/08/obrien-climate/

With climateers now saying the fabled two-degree warming limit won’t be enough after all, a decent PM might react thus: ‘As the science is settled, we’re redirecting all those climate dollars to fixing the grid because, if it’s going to get hot, we’ll need cheap, reliable power and lots of air conditioning’.

An interesting juxtaposition in a recent Australian. My eye was first caught by an article about a paper, lead-authored by Professor Will Steffen, predicting that beyond 2C of global warming all hell will break loose. Fortunately there was also an eminently readable piece by Professor Ian Plimer arguing the case for the beneficial effect of CO2 and demolishing the notion that it could lead to Steffen-like outcomes.

The apocalyptic ‘hothouse earth’ alarmism postulated by Steffen et al was quite common about ten years ago but has been somewhat muted of late as a consequence of the planet’s refusal to behave as catastropharians insisted it would: CO2 has risen but the global temperature, even with BoM-style gingering of temperature records, has not risen to any significant degree if at all. I wonder if President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement might have anything to do with the re-emergence of this kind of junk ‘science’? As the US was the primary source of all those climate dollars and they have dried up, the panic amongst climate careerists is very nearly palpable. Expect to see many more of Big Climate’s rent-seekers and grant-snafflers stepping up the hysteria.

Steffen’s theory is that, once we get to 2C warming above pre-industrial levels – now only 1.2C away, as it happens –there will be “a cascade of feedbacks with terrible consequences for ecosystems, society and economies”. Without action, we are told, “the feedbacks could lead to a much higher global average temperature than any inter­glacial in the past 1.2 million years.”

The theory used to be that increasing atmospheric CO2 would drive increasing atmospheric temperature, which would, in turn, lead to more floods, droughts, cyclones and extinction of species. Whilst increasing CO2 is regarded as the initial trigger, the real damage, warming-wise, will be done as other factors come into play — methane released by a melting arctic tundra, for example. This is the “feedback” that has climate scientists so preoccupied it is a wonder they can marshal the concentration to lodge their latest grant applications. Well, perhaps not.

In any case, the IPCC has a metric to gauge all this “climate sensitivity”. There are two main versions – Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and Transient Climate Sensitivity. They are defined as follows:

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