Displaying posts published in

November 2021

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The nationwide school revolt is on Parents are rising up, determined that their children not be critical race theory guinea pigs by Gilbert T. Sewall

By on November 9th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nationwide-school-revolt-on-youngkin/

Most Americans want schools to promote knowledge and champion principles of human decency. They want schools to be safe. They do not want children race-shamed, or exposed to the anomic and depraved. A fourteen-year-old boy wandering around campus — any campus — wearing a floor-length dress doesn’t sound wholesome to them.

What’s going on in “our” schools, some ask, and not in a sunny way. Too many know from experience, at least in metro and blue-liberal districts, that any parent who avows the Ten Commandments or praises the Boy Scout Law might get the fish-eye from the principal. If dad objects to critical race theory or transgender bathrooms, heads explode. A frosty diversity lecture might not suffice. Should we call security or 911? Educators for their part tend to think of parent-dissidents as mentally unstable and possibly dangerous. So apparently do shadowy figures inside the Biden administration.

A growing number of parents oppose local educators pitting their children against the nation, history, and values that they have been raised with at home. iPhones hoisted at school board meetings across the nation record the division and dismay. So far — but this might soon change dramatically — public-school educators interpret brewing parental discontent as illegitimate right-wing mobbing. #Resistance feminists who comprise a large share of the public teaching force fall in political line not so much out of conviction but intense, obsessive Trump hatred.

Loudoun County, Virginia’s school follies have aired for months, with Fox News and conservative activists gleefully stirring the pot. Beleaguered school superintendent Scott Ziegler likens disruptive parents to the January 6 Capitol rioters. Board president Brenda Sheridan personifies the zealous equity commissar, relishing power like a suburban Beria. Ziegler, salaried at $285,000 with benefits, tried to cover up a sex assault and got caught red-handed. When are the abject apologies and resignations coming, Loudoun parents have asked for months.

Now, the unexpected outcome of Virginia governor’s race has provided a cautionary tale. Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe’s remark that parents should leave school policy to the pros triggered an astonishing political death spiral. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” he said, when across the country distraught parents are wondering why “our” schools have lost touch with the normal and mundane. His desperate, last-minute campaign claim that Virginia’s teacher corps is too white was sad and disgraceful. Virginia’s new Republican governor-elect Glenn Youngkin repeatedly talks up local parent control.

Continue reading →
CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Down the QAnon rabbit hole The conspiracy theorists are still around and they have big insights about JFK and the Devil by Ben Sixsmith

By on November 9th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/down-qanon-rabbit-hole/

Lies, in many cases, are comparable to sparks. They might not be very dangerous in and of themselves but under the right conditions — or, perhaps, the wrong conditions — they can lead to spectacular fires.

Consider, for example, how a chain of events that began with an anonymous message being posted on an obscure message board in October 2017 led, four years later, to hundreds of Americans gathering in Dallas, Texas, to await the return of the long dead JFK Jr.

Back in October 2017, someone calling themselves “Q” began posting bizarre messages on the /pol/ board of the notorious website 4Chan. Q, claiming to have high level White House security clearance, spoke of “the Storm,” an event in which President Trump and his allies would arrest hundreds of his rivals and expose them as child-eating Luciferians. Somehow, this event failed to transpire.

In fact, Q had something of a talent for failed predictions. He, and his followers in the colorful pro-Trump movement that we know as “QAnon,” predicted the arrests of everyone from Hillary Clinton to Tom Hanks, all of whom have remained conspicuously free. They predicted that Donald Trump would be inaugurated, which, somehow, has failed to happen.

Continue reading →
CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Nancy Pelosi is losing her grip She’s put congressional Democrats in a terrible position — and midterms are coming. By Michael Dahlberg

By on November 9th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nancy-pelosi-losing-her-grip-democrats/

Top Democrats took a media victory lap last weekend, crowing about the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that finally cleared the House on Friday night after months of false starts and intra-party squabbling. The vote came only after Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her latest Hail Mary, attempted to satisfy progressive lawmakers by also allowing a procedural vote on the massive social spending bill craved by liberals. Even then, Pelosi was forced to rely on a handful of Republicans to secure a majority.

Predictably, the White House was eager to spin the bill’s passage as major win for the Biden agenda, claiming it would energize voters and pave the way for trillions more in government spending just in time for the holidays. And yet, despite the high fives and happy talk with reporters, many congressional Democrats will surely spend this week’s recess reflecting on the months of chaotic leadership that preceded the vote. Some will no doubt conclude, if they haven’t already, that they are watching a speaker in decline and a leadership team losing its grip on its own party.

For House Democrats, who face voters in less than a year, that’s an uncomfortable place to be.

While there has been some handwringing on the right over Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s inability to keep 13 of his members from voting for the bill, such criticism overlooks a political reality. As others have noted, infrastructure was always destined to reach the president’s desk, with or without Republican support. Even if reconciliation talks broke down and the entire process became unsalvageable, Democrats were never heading into the midterms without at least one more legislative achievement. Faced with a binary choice of spending less money than they had hoped for or spending nothing at all, it was a safe bet that eventually progressives would opt for the former.

Continue reading →
HISTORY Comments turned off

Kristallnacht: A nationwide pogrom Any suggestion that German Jews were passive in leaving after Kristallnacht are mistaken. Most of those who could escape did so. Many could not. Dr. Alex Grobman

By on November 9th, 2021

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/316525

Between the late evening hours of November 9, and the early morning of the 10th, the German rioters destroyed and firebombed 1,000 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, leaving many of them burning during the night in full view of the public and local firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. Explosives were used in some locations to wreck the buildings. [1]

The shop windows of an estimated 7,500 commercial establishments out of approximately 9,000 Jewish-owned stores were smashed and their merchandise looted or scattered on the sidewalk and streets.[2] It as estimated the amount of plate glass shattered equaled half the yearly production of the plate-glass industry of Belgium, from which the glass had been imported.[3]

Schoolboys were in the vanguard of many attacks against the Jews, and in breaking windows. Teachers provided them with clubs for them to demolish Jewish businesses.[4]

Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, initiated the nation-wide pogrom without any well-defined objective or any strategy as to the methods that would be employed. This led to a “hasty and improvised organization” causing “messiness and miscommunication.” Aside from being disorganized, impulsive and chaotic, “the lack of control” is what terrified the victims. [5]

The magnitude of murder, rape and sexual attacks (the extent to which will never be known), the systematic public humiliations, indiscriminate looting of private homes, loss of property and the level of terror that ensued, shocked the nation and unnerved the regime.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Eating Knesset candy and drinking the Kool-Aid Ruthie Blum

By on November 9th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/eating-knesset-candy-and-drinking-the-kool-aid/

 Photos that emerged last week of Israeli lawmakers munching on candy for two white nights in a row served as a perfect metaphor for the kindergarten-like atmosphere of the Knesset as a whole and the current government in particular.

Though the assortment of sweets was there for a “serious” purpose—to provide an energy boost to the exhausted parliamentarians during the wee hours of Thursday and Friday, when they debated and voted on the 2021 and 2022 state budgets—there was something both comical and disconcerting about the display

The sight of Defense Minister Benny Gantz sucking on a pink lollipop, for example, was a bit cringe-inducing. The mullahs in Tehran must have gotten a kick out of it. Or at least wondered why the Israeli figure charged with targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities opted for a sucker over strong Middle Eastern coffee.

In fairness to Gantz, he wasn’t alone. Indeed, the whole lollipop-licking plenum looked as puerile as it’s been sounding these days, with childish verbiage and decibel levels not even fit for a playground.

Nor did the final passage of the budgets put a stop to the infantile behavior. On the contrary, the aftermath of the marathon that kept the government from falling has been just as embarrassing, if not more.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Friends of Igor Danchenko   The plot thickens as Special Counsel John Durham indicts a Russian Washington-based think-tanker for lying to the FBI about the rumors he passed on to Christopher Steele for his “dossier.” by George Parry

By on November 9th, 2021

https://spectator.org/the-friends-of-igor-danchenko/

The Trump-Russia collusion hoax is the most successful and destructive partisan political scam in the history of our nation. Based on lies portraying Donald Trump as a covert Russian operative, it was cited by the Obama-era FBI and Justice Department as the putative justification for using the nation’s vast intelligence apparatus to investigate Trump and concomitantly benefit Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The underlying lies were compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele upon whose “dossier” the FBI based its FISA warrant applications to spy on Trump advisor Carter Page and, by extension, Trump and his presidential campaign. The Steele Dossier consists of 17 now-discredited reports which collectively allege that Trump was subject to blackmail by the Kremlin for bizarre sexual behavior in a Moscow hotel and that his campaign operatives were conspiring with the Russians to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

When he wrote those reports, Steele was working under contract with Fusion GPS, a private investigations firm that had been retained by Marc Elias, legal counsel to the Clinton campaign, to do opposition research on Trump.

Well after the 2016 election, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) reviewed the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.

According to the OIG’s report, Steele was hired by Fusion GPS to investigate, among other things, “whether there were any ties between the Russian government and Trump or his campaign. Steele’s work for Fusion GPS resulted in his producing numerous election-related reports.” With Fusion GPS’s authorization, he “directly provided more than a dozen of his reports to the FBI between July and October 2016, and several others to the FBI through [DOJ attorney Bruce] Ohr and other third parties.”

The OIG found that that the FBI used Steele’s information to obtain FISA warrants to conduct electronic surveillance of Page. In its warrant applications, the FBI advised the court that “Steele was believed to be a reliable source for three reasons: his professional background; his history of work as an FBI CHS [confidential human source] since 2013; and his prior non-election reporting, which the FBI described as ‘corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.’”

In other words, the FBI averred under oath that, based on Steele’s credibility, derogatory information about Trump and his campaign warranted investigation by means of electronic surveillance.

The OIG also found that, in October 2016, Steele provided briefings regarding his findings to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets. In each, Steele’s credibility as an experienced former British agent who worked Russian intelligence was a material factor in establishing the credibility of the Trump-Russia collusion smear.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s not feeling the pressure to change by Lawrence Haas

By on November 9th, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/580503-irans-not-feeling-the-pressure-to-change?rl=1

All the focus on whether the United States and Iran will resume talks over resurrecting the 2015 global nuclear deal obscures an issue of equal importance: escalating skirmishes between Washington and Jerusalem on the one hand and Tehran on the other that raise the risk of miscalculation and, in turn, war.

In recent days, the United States flew a B-1B bomber over such key regional waterways as the Strait of Hormuz — a vital waterway for global oil shipping — the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal in a show of force that, at points along the way, was joined by aircraft from Israel as well as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

That came after Iran reportedly directed a drone attack on a U.S. military outpost in Syria, causing much damage (but no casualties) and marking what the Washington Post called “the first major attack on U.S. troops in Syria by Iran.” Iranian-backed militias have repeatedly used drones to attack U.S. forces in Iraq.

Washington now considers Iran’s expanding arsenal of drones a bigger short-term threat to regional peace and stability than its nuclear and ballistic missile program. Within days of the drone strike in Syria, U.S. officials imposed sanctions on companies and individuals that it said had ties to Iran’s drone program.

Israel, meanwhile, continues to conduct airstrikes in Syria to prevent Iran from establishing a permanent presence there and from sending sophisticated weapons to its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. Now, Iran plans to send advanced anti-aircraft missile batteries to the region, which will complicate Israeli airstrikes.

While all of those developments raise the risk of miscalculation and war, so too does Iran’s continuing progress on its nuclear program.

Specifically, Iran is enriching uranium at near weapons-grade levels and maintaining stockpiles that far exceed what the 2015 deal allowed, restricting the access of international inspectors to its facilities, and seeking sanctions relief and other concessions before returning to the negotiating table.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told NBC News that its monitoring program in Iran is no longer “intact” because Iran has not repaired a camera at a key facility outside Tehran. Inspectors are relying on such cameras at key sites because, earlier this year, Iran stopped letting international inspectors conduct the snap inspections that the 2015 deal allowed for.

Continue reading →