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December 2018

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Pitzer College Professors Vote to End School’s Partnership With the University of Haifa By Toni Airaksinen

By on December 4th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/pitzer-college-professors-vote-to-end-schools-partnership-with-the-university-of-haifa/

The majority of Pitzer College faculty voted on November 8 to end the school’s study abroad partnership with the University of Haifa in a boycott, divest, sanctions (BSD)-inspired move.

The University of Haifa is the only university in Israel where Pitzer students can study abroad, according to the school’s website. Each year, a handful of Pitzer students take classes taught in English at the school.

According to the Pitzer newspaper, the partnership has existed as early as 1980. Student Ari Sherman, after visiting Haifa through Pitzer, wrote in April 1980 that not only did he enjoy his visit, but that he now calls the country of Israel “home.”

With the recent vote, it appears that partnership will come to an end. While it’s unclear how many faculty attended the meeting for the vote, 172 faculty are listed in the Pitzer directory. The voting information is sealed.

While the vote wasn’t public, at least one student government official attended.

Three days later, students published a resolution on the issue, urging Pitzer to keep ties with Haifa and claiming the vote maliciously singled out Israel and failed to involve other campus stakeholders.

“Only the University of Haifa study abroad program was called into question… marking a departure from [considering] a program on its merits but rather forwarding a clear political agenda,” says 55-R-04, authored by students Isaiah Kramer and Brendan Schultz.

Neither student could be reached by PJ Media. Pitzer University spokeswoman Anna Chang did note that the partnership is still “ongoing” at least till the end of the academic year while the campus community mulls it over.

Dozens of pro-Israel and Zionist nonprofits made statements denouncing the vote, as reported by Jackson Richman of the Jewish News Syndicate.

“The vote to suspend Pitzer College’s study-abroad program with the University of Haifa is a despicable effort by the faculty to impose their hateful anti-Semitic, anti-Israel political agenda on students,” said Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America. CONTINUE AT SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Vive le Nationalisme! Macron’s ambitious agenda clashes with Germany’s pursuit of its own self-interest.By Walter Russell Mead

By on December 4th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vive-le-nationalisme-1543880136

Perhaps French President Emmanuel Macron was busy examining the damage wrought by rioters at the Arc de Triomphe this weekend, but he has not yet responded to a telling suggestion from German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz. Mr. Scholz proposed last week that France turn over its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council to the European Union. Only a French nationalist could disagree, right? And Mr. Macron has made a point of denouncing nationalism as selfish and immoral.

But Mr. Macron’s posturing aside, the French are nationalist to the core. Ask the European parliamentarians and their staffers who must make the expensive, time-consuming, carbon-emitting trip from Brussels to Strasbourg once a month to maintain the absurd fiction that French Strasbourg is the home of the European Parliament. Ask any European negotiator who has tried to prune back the Common Agricultural Policy, a giant boondoggle under which France is the largest recipient of funds. Ask any Italian diplomat about French policies in Libya. Ask any American negotiator about France’s approach to trade. Ask any German diplomat who has had a few drinks.

French diplomacy under President Macron is as nationalist as ever. His core objective is to shift EU economic policy in France’s favor. Mr. Macron hoped introducing market-based reforms in France would persuade Germany to loosen the EU purse strings and give Paris more fiscal running room. Then, perhaps, the resulting boost to the French economy would reconcile public opinion to Mr. Macron’s reforms. But he has not made much progress, in part because the German government is too weak to take large political risks. Now he is facing voters’ wrath.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tickets for Clintons’ stadium speaking tour now marked down 90% By Thomas Lifson

By on December 3rd, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/tickets_for_clintons_stadium_speaking_tour_now_marked_down_90.html

If only this could be called a “close-out sale.” Eagle-eyed Don Surber reports:

Those of you who waited to purchase your tickets to see a power couple from the last century are in luck. Prices for some of the tickets have been sliced by 90% or more.

When the tour was announced two months ago, the cheapest seats were $70.

Now, $6 gets you in.

Don links to the site vividseats.com, selling tickets for tomorrow’s Bill and Hillary Clinton stadium tour event at Smart Financial Centre in Sugarland, Texas, a suburb of Houston in Fort Bend County. The seating capacity of the municipally owned theatre is 6,400.

Obviously, the humiliation of facing a crowd in Toronto last week that filled fewer than 17% of the seats in the giant hockey-basketball arena was more than the Clintons could bear. Even with a theater about one third as big, the danger of a sea of empty seats was so big that drastic markdowns were necessary.

Everyone who paid the original prices is now officially a sucker.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jerome Corsi Ethics Complaint Accuses Mueller of Coercing ‘False Testimony’ By Jack Crowe

By on December 3rd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/jerome-corsi-ethics-complaint-accuses-mueller-of-coercing-false-testimony/

Attorneys representing Jerome Corsi filed an ethics complaint Monday accusing prosecutors in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office of pressuring their client to provide “false testimony” against Republican operative Roger Stone and President Trump.

“Dr. Corsi has been threatened with immediate indictment by Mueller’s prosecutorial staff unless he testifies falsely against Roger Stone and/or President Donald Trump and his presidential campaign, among other false testimony,” Corsi’s lawyers, Larry Klayman and David Gray, said in a complaint submitted to acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker.

Prosecutors working on behalf of special counsel Robert Mueller offered Corsi a plea deal that would require him to admit to making false statements about his communications with Stone, but Corsi says he rejected the deal because he does not believe he knowingly misled prosecutors.

At issue is a September 6 interview in which Corsi told prosecutors he did not communicate with anyone about WikiLeaks’s then-impending release of hacked information about the Clinton campaign. Citing three emails Corsi sent to Stone in 2016, prosecutors informed him that they had evidence to the contrary and, after reviewing those emails, Corsi amended his testimony.

“Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging,” Corsi wrote in one August 2016 email to Stone, apparently referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

STEVEN MOORE: REGAINING TRUST ON MONEY ISSUES

By on December 3rd, 2018

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/dec/2/why-donald-trump-must-declare-war-on-government-wa/

Republicans need to regain the offensive on the fiscal issues. The GOP has somehow allowed big spending Democrats to get to the right of them on the issue of financial responsibility and balanced budgets.

Polls show that Democrats are now more trusted on balancing the budget than Republicans. That’s like losing an arm wrestling contest with Nancy Pelosi.

The big first step for Republicans to regain American trust on fiscal responsibility is for President Trump to deliver a nationally televised prime-time speech from the Oval Office to announce an all-hands-on-deck War on Washington Waste.

Declare a debt spending emergency. If Americans believed Mr. Trump was seriously committed to this initiative, he would be regarded as a fiscal superhero. His approval ratings would sky-rocket. Who better than a businessman president to scrub out the hundreds of billions of useless expenditures that have made Americans so contemptuous of the Washington swamp.

The issue is teed up right now because the spending trends have been so alarming. The Congressional Budget Office just announced that the government is now spending $2 billion more than it takes in every day. Don’t even think about blaming the tax cuts. In 2018, the estimated $3.4 trillion raised in federal revenues was the highest level ever in American history — even with the tax cut. The problem is a spending avalanche that now exceeds $4 trillion of outlays a year.

Several weeks ago a taxpayer watchdog group called OpenTheBooks.com published an open letter signed by former Sen. Tom Coburn, Tom Smith and Adam Andrzejewski and sent to the president urging a waste war and it listed hundreds of examples of taxpayer dollars being flushed down the drain. The nearby table lists many of these little piggies. OpentheBrooks estimates $125 billion in waste at the Pentagon alone.

When Mr. Trump was shown these lists of white elephants he responded: “I thought we already took care of this.” Unfortunately, no. The bureaucratic blob made sure it wouldn’t happen.

Fighting this war on waste won’t be easy. Back in 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed the famous Grace Commission to ferret out waste, duplication and inefficiency in the federal government. That landmark commission of private sector businessmen and women examined every nook and cranny of the cavernous government agencies in and around Washington and uncovered some $420 billion in bureaucratic overspending.

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

8 Fake News Stories Being Peddled About Michael Cohen’s Guilty Plea Following Michael Cohen’s surprise guilty plea, the media and critics of the president wasted no time pushing collusion narratives, conspiracy theories, and outright falsehoods.By Margot Cleveland

By on December 3rd, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/03/8-fake-news-stories-peddled-michael-cohen-right-now/

Last week, Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower complex in Moscow. Cohen told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the Trump Organization stopped pursuing the project in January 2016, but in pleading guilty Cohen stated that he continued to pursue the Trump Tower project into June of that year. Cohen claimed he lied out of loyalty to Trump and to be consistent with then-candidate Trump’s political messaging.

Following Cohen’s surprise guilty plea, the media and critics of the president wasted no time pushing collusion narratives, conspiracy theories, and outright falsehoods. Here are the top eight examples of the fake news being peddled.
1. Donald Trump Jr. Lied To Investigators

NPR’s Friday morning reporting of the development provides the clearest example of the mainstream media pushing fake news in response to Cohen’s guilty plea. After summarizing the details of his plea, NPR pivoted to Donald Trump Jr.’s role in the Moscow Trump Tower negotiations, and claimed the younger Trump lied about the timing of his involvement in the project.

“Trump Jr. told the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017 that although there had been negotiations surrounding a prospective Trump Tower in Moscow, they concluded without result ‘at the end’ of 2014,” the NPR story said, adding that “Trump’s account contrasts with the new version of events given by Cohen on Thursday in a guilty plea in federal court.”

But as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway explained on Friday, NPR confused Trump Jr.’s testimony concerning another Russian deal, which fell apart in 2014, with the Trump Tower negotiations, which the younger Trump stated ended in 2015 or 2016. Thus, contrary to NPR’s breaking story, Trump Jr.’s testimony mirrored the details contained in Cohen’s guilty plea.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

The Tales Of Adventure And Romance Behind World War II’s Flying Tigers by Wilson Shirley see note please

By on December 3rd, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/03/the-tales-of-adventure-and-romance-behind-world-war-iis-flying-tigers/

Good review with a poor end- a ridiculous conclusion “There are many differences, but parallels exist between what Chennault did for China in World War II and what T.E. Lawrence did for the Great Arab Revolt in World War I. Remnants of both men’s efforts live on to this day. Chiang’s Kuomintang governed for decades in Taiwan, and exists now as an opposition party in a multi-party democracy. The remaining Hashemites from Prince Faisal’s family rule over the Kingdom of Jordan, an island of stability in a turbulent region.” Huh????rsk

A new history by Sam Kleiner, ‘The Flying Tigers: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan,’ tells the story of how some of America’s most legendary pilots and mercenaries helped win Word War II.

Before appeasement at Munich, before the invasion of Poland, before Dunkirk, and before the attack on Pearl Harbor, one American man was already fighting in World War II. That man’s name was Claire Chennault. His story, and that of his American Volunteer Group (AVG), is the subject of The Flying Tigers: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan, a fascinating new book by historian Sam Kleiner about the eponymous pilots.

The Flying Tigers, formally the AVG, recruited members mostly from the American Navy, Marines, and Army. Their covert actions began eight months before Pearl Harbor, and were authorized by President Franklin Roosevelt without the knowledge of the isolationist Congress. These men wanted to fight, to see the world, and to be paid well to do it.

So they resigned from the military, left their bases, and were contracted under the authority of the Chinese government to battle Imperial Japan. Readers unfamiliar with the group may recall the iconic images of their P-40 Tomahawk fighter planes, purchased by the Chinese through a third-party corporation, whose noses the airmen painted with shark teeth and eyes.

Sent halfway around the world, these roughly 100 pilots and their ground crew flagrantly violated their country’s official neutrality and trained in Burma during the second half of 1941. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they were perfectly positioned to enter combat, to keep China in the fight against Japan, and to ensure that America’s enemy could not focus all of its might on a shaken and unready United States.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The U.N.’s delusion For decades, the UN has repeatedly shown that it thinks it can set its own facts about Israel, history be damned.

By on December 3rd, 2018

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-UNs-delusion-573363

Former US ambassador to the United Nations and staunch Israel defender Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

For decades, the UN has repeatedly shown that it thinks it can set its own facts about Israel, history be damned.Moynihan is known for, among other things, giving a speech against the UN’s 1975 decision that “Zionism is racism,” a distortion that he called an “infamous act” by which “the abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.”

On Friday, 43 years later, UN member countries authorized six anti-Israel resolutions in the General Assembly, including writing the Jewish people out of Jerusalem’s history, showing all these years later that the institution has not changed.

A resolution approved by 148 countries, and opposed by 11 that are committed to the historic truth, denied Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. That and another, which was approved 156-8, spoke of al-Haram al-Sharif without mentioning that Jews and Christians call it the Temple Mount and that it is Judaism’s holiest site.

After the UN declared Zionism to be racism, Moynihan said in his speech: “As it is a lie which the United Nations has now declared to be a truth, the actual truth must be restated.”

The same applies to Friday’s decisions.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

ISIS Group’s NYC New Year’s Threat: ‘Harvest Them with Silencers and Snipers’ By Bridget Johnson

By on December 3rd, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/isis-groups-nyc-new-years-threat-harvest-them-with-silencers-and-snipers/

An ISIS-supporting media group threatened New York City attacks for New Year’s with suggested tactics including snipers and package bombs.

The latest threat circulated online follows other message from jihadists that have specifically cited Jan. 1 in calling for attacks.

One poster distributed online in mid-November superimposed a masked jihadist wielding a bloody knife over a collage of images from the 2016 Berlin Christmas market attack. It stated that New Year’s Day is “the date of retribution.”

Shortly after that, an ISIS-backing media group released an image of a demolished cityscape with multiple fires, warning, “Soon, Allah willing, the disbelievers will see the very thing they feared: 1-1-2019.”

That same group just released an image of an armed jihadist overlooking New York, stating the city named with a blood-splashed 1/1/2019.

“And hit them with the explosive belts and vehicle bomb, and shock them with adhesive explosives and packages, and harvest them with silencers and snipers, horrify and terrify them with the intrusions,” the text says.

They attribute the directive to late ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the terror group’s chief of its external operations who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2016.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

By Karl Notturno: The Impending Death of Science must read

By on December 3rd, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/02/the-impending

“Unless or until social science shows a more robust and successful track record, it should be left to theoretical musings of its adherents. Applied social science, of course, should be avoided at all costs. For it is little more than tyranny by another name.”

There were approximately 2.5 million scientific papers published last year. Think about that. A researcher would have to read nearly 300 papers an hour, non-stop, just to keep up. And that is not accounting for the more than 50 million scientific papers that have been published since the 17th century. If the researcher somehow managed to read 600 papers an hour (that’s 10 scientific papers each minute) in order to catch up with the established scientific literature, it would still take him 20 years to consume all the papers written. Once again, this is assuming that he didn’t eat or sleep, and was somehow able to read and absorb 10 technical papers each minute.

Needless to say, the readership of any particular paper is abysmally low.

Now imagine taking the time to test and reproduce the results of each paper. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that scientific inquiry has suffered from a “reproducibility crisis” over the past few years. Some surveys have suggested that more than 70 percent of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments. In one of the largest replication studies conducted, 60 percent of psychology studies examined failed the reproducibility test. A research project attempting to replicate social science experiments failed eight out of 21 times to obtain any observed effects consistent with the original findings. These findings deliver a devastating blow to the credibility of the current literature in both the natural and social sciences.

In theory, science has mechanisms in place to safeguard the knowledge it cultivates. But an overly bureaucratic and esoterically compartmentalized academia with perverse funding incentives will doom the practice of science no matter the methodological guardrails. These theoretical guardrails mean very little if they are not practically enforced. After all, the Soviet Union’s constitution had some beautiful, yet ignored, language about freedom of expression and the press.

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