Displaying posts published in

November 2019

Higher Education’s Enemy Within An army of nonfaculty staff push for action and social justice at the expense of free inquiry. By  José A. Cabranes 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/higher-educations-enemy-within-11573251941?emailToken=

Judge Cabranes serves on the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He was Yale’s first general counsel, and later served as a trustee of Yale, Columbia and Colgate universities. This is adapted from remarks delivered Oct. 18 to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which bestowed on him its Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education.

American higher education seems to be in a permanent state of crisis. Almost monthly, a federal court has occasion to reprimand some college or university for improperly chilling speech, even as some students continue to complain that campuses are too friendly to the wrong kind of speakers. Many institutions have cut back on faculty hiring, even as the cost of tuition grows. Two basic, and mutually reinforcing, phenomena are behind the chaos on campus.

First, colleges and universities have subordinated their historic mission of free inquiry to a new pursuit of social justice. Consider the remarkable evolution of Yale’s mission statement. For decades the university said its purpose was “to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge.” The language was banal enough, but nevertheless on the money. In 2016, however, Yale’s president announced a new mission statement, which no longer mentions knowledge. Instead, Yale is now officially “committed to improving the world” and educating “aspiring leaders”—not only through research, but also through “practice.”

Second, American colleges and universities have been overwhelmed by a dangerous alliance of academic bureaucrats and student activists committed to imposing the latest social-justice diktats. This alliance has displaced the traditional governors of the university—the faculty. Indeed, nonfaculty administrators and activists are driving some of the most dangerous developments in university life, including the erosion of the due-process rights of faculty and students, efforts to regulate the “permissible limits” of classroom discussion, and the condemnation of unwelcome ideas as “hate speech.”

How did the university lose its way? How did this new alliance of activists and administrators supplant the faculty?

Warren & a few other Dem presidential hopefuls draw ‘dozens’ not hundreds to poorly-attended rally

None of these fools will ever be able to fill enormous arenas to full capacity with tens of thousands watching on big screen TVs outside!  This ‘environment gathering’ was a major flop. Audience only filled first 3 rows of seats in a small theater. They’re dreaming if they believe that can defeat POTUS MAGNUS. He’s an unbeatable legend in his own time. All of his challengers are as attractive as skunks at a garden party. Charlotte B.

https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1192965604724097024/photo/1

Read coverage of this event at DAILY WIRE below:

www.dailywire.com/news/warren-plays-to-nearly-empty-hall-as-enthusiasm-wanes-for-democratic-candidates

America Needs a War on Waste 100 Examples of Federal Taxpayer Abuse

https://www.openthebooks.com/wsj_100_examples_of_federal_taxpayer_abuse/
Our open letter to President Donald Trump took over two full pages of The Wall Street Journal.

After 225 years, the federal debt was $5.7 trillion.But in the last 20 years? It’s quadrupled, reaching close to $23 trillion.This level of fiscal irresponsibility is not sustainable.
We are publicly urging the President to lead the Transparency Revolution and War on Waste by implementing a four-step plan that includes publishing every White House expenditure online and incentivizing government employees to find and report areas of waste. 
SIGN YOUR NAME TO OUR PETITION, URGING THE PRESIDENT TO WAGE A WAR ON WASTE. 

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION PAYS TO PUT RUNNING SHRIMP ON A TREADMILL – $1.3 MILLION
FY2012-FY2017 | NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION | National Science Foundation (NSF) funded an experiment that tested how sickness impaired shrimp mobility by putting the crustaceans on a treadmill made an uproar in the media and in Congress nearly five years ago. Yet the NSF has once again given tax dollars to the same researchers to put the would-be seafood on a cardiovascular workout regime. The investigators – Louis and Karen Burnett – measure the crustaceans’ responses to low oxygen and high carbon dioxide environments in a variety of ways and would also test their reactions “when performing energetically demanding activities,” according to the award abstract. “The energetically demanding activities will be conducted with the aid of a treadmill, as the technique is effective and will help to make the data comparable to previous studies,” Arriens said.

LOBSTER TAIL & SNOW CRAB PURCHASES — $25.4 MILLION
FY2017-2018 | DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE | As the fiscal year wrapped up, federal agencies celebrated by splurging on luxury food items. The Department of Defense (DOD) originally reported spending $2.3 million on snow crab, Alaskan king crab, and crab legs and claws, plus another $2.3 million on lobster tail. Additionally, agencies spent nearly $300,000 on steak (ribeye, top sirloin, and flank). However, the DOD admitted to inflated disclosures. Their updated numbers reveal lobster and crab purchases amounted to $1.6 million in September 2018 and $25.4 million during an 18-month period. We have additional questions for the agency. Here is a video showing our data download and quantification of $2.3 million (Sept 2018) and $22.1 million (FY2018) in lobster tail purchases as reported by the DOD to the federal government’s official transparency portal at USAspending.gov.

MISTAKES & IMPROPER PAYMENTS DISTRIBUTED BY 20 FEDERAL AGENCIES – $1.5 TRILLION
FY2004–FY2019 | OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT & BUDGET | Congressional Research Service released a report on July 16, 2018, titled “Improper Payments in High-Priority Programs: In Brief.” Garrett Hatch, a specialist in American National Government, authored the report. In the summary, Hatch writes, “Over the period of FY2004 through FY2017, high priority improper payments have totaled $1.2 trillion.” Between FY2017 and FY2019 inclusive, the reports compiled by the Office of Management & Budget show that the agencies admit to approximately $140 billion per year in improper payments. Our reporting published at Forbes.

DEAD PEOPLE RECEIVED MISTAKEN & IMPROPER PAYMENTS – $921 MILLION
FY2018 | MULTIPLE FEDERAL AGENCIES | Dead people received $1 billion in benefits. Medicare, Medicaid, social security payments and also the federal retirement annuity payouts (pensions) kept flowing to dead recipients. Our reporting published at Forbes.

Demographic Jihad? Virginia Muslim Doctor Tied Women’s Tubes Without Their Consent By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/demographic-jihad-virginia-muslim-doctor-tied-womens-tubes-without-their-consent/

The details of this case are simply horrifying. One woman tried for years to conceive a child, but couldn’t. When she finally consulted a fertility specialist, she discovered, according to the Virginian-Pilot, that her “Fallopian tubes had been burned down to nubs, making it impossible to conceive naturally.” It turned out that her physician, Dr. Javaid Perwaiz of Chesapeake, Virginia had tied her tubes without telling her was doing it or obtaining her consent. And she was by no means the only woman whom Dr. Perwaiz victimized in this way.

Dr. Perwaiz’s website is the soul of helpfulness, noting that he has “practiced in the Chesapeake region for over 30 years, providing expert and individualized care to his patients. Personally following each and every patient throughout their pregnancy, he is available 24/7 to meet all of your requests and expectations. His experienced office staff will individualize your care and coordinate your insurance coverage. They provide friendly and knowlegable service for all your healthcare needs. Same day appointments are often available.”

About the good doctor we are told that he was “educated abroad,” with no hint as to where – it was actually in his native Pakistan, as the Virginian-Pilot notes: “Perwaiz has had a medical license since at least 1980, according to state records, having attended medical school in his native Pakistan and completed a residency at Charleston Area Medical Center.”

Judicial Watch: White House Visitor Logs Detail Meetings of Eric Ciaramella

https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-white-house-visitor-logs-detail-meetings-of-eric-ciaramella/

Logs Also Show DNC Contractor Who Allegedly Worked with Ukraine to Investigate Trump/Manafort Visited Obama White House 27 times

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today analysis of Obama-era White House visitor logs that detail meetings of controversial CIA employee Eric Ciaramella, who had been assigned to the White House. Ciaramella reportedly was detailed to the Obama White House in 2015 and returned to the CIA during the Trump administration in 2017. The logs also reveal Alexandra Chalupa, a contractor hired by the DNC during the 2016 election who coordinated with Ukrainians to investigate President Trump and his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, visited the White House 27 times.

The White House visitor logs revealed the following individuals met with Eric Ciaramella while he was detailed to the Obama White House:

Daria Kaleniuk: Co-founder and executive director of the Soros-funded Anticorruption Action Center (AntAC) in Ukraine. She visited on December 9, 2015

The Hill reported that in April 2016, during the U.S. presidential race, the U.S. Embassy under Obama in Kiev, “took the rare step of trying to press the Ukrainian government to back off its investigation of both the U.S. aid and (AntAC).”

MY SAY: A WORD TO TRUMP’S CRITICS

I am sick and tired of the summer soldiers who get their knickers in a knot over every single Trump tweet, insult, malapropism, exaggeration, mini-scandal, etc.

We had a recent Republican president who dressed impeccably, did not tweet, was a perfect gentleman with perfect manners, never divorced, never groped or harassed or ogled women, had a lovely patrician wife, and an absolute absence of scandal no matter what the media tried to dig up on him, and perfectly groomed brown hair.

That describes George W. Bush the minor 43rd President of the United States who accomplished very little in his two terms. He made one superb speech after 9/11, declared a war against the Taliban but declared “mission accomplished” leaving the Taliban scattered but hardly defeated. Only months after 9/11 he invited the tyrant/monarch of Saudi Arabia, locus and funder of almost all the 9/11 terrorists, to his ranch in Crawford Texas to craft another “peace plan” for Israel. He blinked on China, Iran, North Korea, immigration, regulations and domestic energy production and the economy tanked. He was a mediocre, low energy, president who ignited no patriotic passion.

Donald Trump has outpaced him on every single policy-foreign and national. So frankly I don’t give a hoot about his style…. And if you want Obama redux go vote for the Democrats. .rsk

Schiff to Approve GOP Impeachment Tribunal Questions Liz Sheld

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/08/morning-greatness-schiff-to-approve-gop-impeachment-tribunal-questions/

Impeachment Follies: Schiff tells the Republicans they will need to justify any questions they want to ask in the reality show star chamber next week

Supreme Impeachment Emperor Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has decreed that Republicans cannot ask any questions in the impeachment tribunal unless they tickle his impeachment fancy.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff on Thursday released a tightened set of guidelines over what potential witnesses can be called in the impeachment hearings, saying Republicans must justify their relevance according to a three-point criteria.

If the Supreme Impeachment Emperor vetoes a question, the entire committee will vote and the committee has a majority of Democrats on it so its game over. The good news is that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) was added to the committee, so there will be a firebrand having his line of questioning shut down by the Democrats. Yippee.

Ambassador to the Derp State colluded with a Democrat staffer mere days after “whistleblower” complaint was filed

Impeachment darling and fired Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch conducted a private email conversation about a “delicate” issue with a Democrat staffer shortly after Eric Ciaramella filed his pretend whistleblower complaint.

Petri-Dish Leftists For liberal bubble boys, cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug. Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/09/petri-dish-leftists/

As most of my Generation X cohorts were too young at the time to process fully the abysmal political reasons why the 1970s sucked, network television did its part to ensure we kids realized some of the pop-cultural reasons.

I enter into evidence Exhibit 3,471,983: ABC’s 1976 “made-for-television” movie, “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.”

“Based on a true story,” or so it was billed, the flick starred the most popular Sweathog in Mr. Kotter’s class, John Travolta, in the lead role with Mr. Brady (a.k.a., Robert Reed) as his dad; Glynnis O’Connor as his love interest; and, in the golden daze of disco and glitz, spaced out viewers rubbed their bloodshot eyes with Cheeto covered fingers at a cameo by none other than Buzz Aldrin. With a thank you to IMDB for dredging up from my memory hole where I buried it long ago, the fact that the storyline revolved around one Tod Lubitch (Travolta), being born with a deficient immune system. This causes Tod to “spend the rest of his life in a completely sterile environment. His room is completely hermetically sealed against bacteria and virus, his food is specially prepared, and his only human contact comes in the form of gloved hands.”

Talk about a feel-good movie. But, wait for it: “He falls in love with his next-door neighbor, Gina Biggs, and he must decide between following his heart and facing near-certain death, or remaining in his protective bubble forever.” And this being Hollywood, bubble boy meets girl; bubble boy loses girl; bubble boy ditches rubber suit and gets girl again, literally riding off with her on horseback into the sunset.

Some have decried the movie for advocating unprotected sex. I disagree. Instead, the flick was but another riff on breaking out of one’s self-imposed isolation to risk everything for love (which, in hindsight, may not have been the best advice given that we were on the cusp of a herpes outbreak).

Hitler’s Pawn: The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust by Stephen Koch

On November 7, 1938, a 17-year-old Jewish boy named Herschel Grynszpan, distraught over the Nazi persecution of his family and thousands of other Polish German Jews, slipped into the German Embassy in Paris and used a gun he’d never fired before to shoot the first diplomat he saw. When the diplomat died two days later from the wounds, Adolf Hitler and his sinister propaganda henchman, Joseph Goebbels, changed the course of history by turning this one rash act of one Jewish teenager into a pretext for the Kristallnacht, the nationwide orgy of mass state-sponsored anti-Semitic criminality, violence, and murder that initiated the Holocaust. Scholarly accounts of the Kristallnacht, the Holocaust, and the Second World War ordinarily devote a few lines—sometimes even a couple of paragraphs—to Herschel’s story, noting how the Nazis exploited his brave but foolish “protest” to ignite the great pogrom.

In 1938, Europe was on the cusp of a political transformation. Western Europe’s worst fear—and it was a truly terrible fear—was the threat of another world war. After the murderous horrors of the first one, a second, even worse one loomed as madness that could kill millions, bringing the end of civilization. Europeans high and low went into deep denial, desperately convincing themselves that Hitler was somehow a normal, if distasteful, politician who could be handled and appeased. The Munich pact, long since a byword for diplomatic cowardice and disgrace, had been signed a mere month before the Kristallnacht, and for one fleeting month, the pact had been celebrated with delirious mass relief. Apart from Jews and others who had taken Hitler’s measure, the Munich Agreement was greeted by euphoric waves of joyful people—people by the hundreds of thousands literally dancing in the streets.

With the Kristallnacht, that dancing stopped. On November 9–10, when Hitler ripped off his mask of legitimacy and normality to reveal the true face of his fundamentally criminal regime, the pipe dream of a rational, appeasable Hitler died a swift, sickening death. Plenty of appeasers kept busy, but for most, the truth was clear: Hitler would stop at nothing. The fearsome return of war was probable, unavoidable, even inevitable.

The Tyranny of Virtue Salvatore Babones

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/the-tyranny-of-virtue/

Whether it’s Bernie Sanders lauding the Swedish welfare state or Donald Trump demanding the release of an American rapper from a Swedish jail, Americans are fascinated by the Scandinavian home of dancing queens and flat-pack furniture, where sexual liberation seems to have been sublimated into a Freudian fixation on political correctness.

In PC Worlds the American anthropologist Jonathan Friedman, who is married to a Swede and formerly taught in Sweden, offers a rare tour of the “opinion corridors” of the Swedish intellectual elite in this morally compelling but unevenly written indictment of political correctness. Sweden, it turns out, is obsessed with proving its politically correct anti-racism, even to the point of unravelling its once close-knit cities in the cause of multicultural accommodation and closing its eyes to serious crimes ranging from car burning to gang rape, as long as they happen to have been committed by recent immigrants. In Friedman’s telling, Swedish intellectuals are so fixated on demonstrating their anti-racist credentials that perhaps the only plausible explanation is that they are trying to make up for their own deeply held, but publicly inadmissible, racist leanings. In short, he thinks they doth protest too much.

Some of what Friedman criticises as political correctness might pass these days for simple good manners: whatever your politics, blasphemy cartoons and ethnic put-downs are not very nice, even if liberals rightly abhor their prohibition. But today’s Sweden shows how much can go wrong when political correctness is taken too seriously by those who charge themselves with enforcing it. Friedman reports incidents in which self-appointed anti-racist vigilantes make “house calls” on those who have the temerity to contradict the PC party line, vandalising their homes and terrorising their families. Less frightening but potentially more damaging, universities and newspapers have been pressured—sometimes successfully—to dismiss students and fire employees who make factually correct statements about ethnicity, immigration and crime that contradict officially-ordained PC myths.