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June 2022

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Challenging SJP Chicago’s Lies and Toxic Radicalism The Freedom Center’s leaflets expose Jew-hatred. Richard L. Cravatts

By on June 2nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/challenging-sjp-chicagos-lies-and-toxic-radicalism-richard-l-cravatts/

In yet another revealing example of its hypocrisy and obtuseness when assessing the consequences of its own behavior, the University of Chicago’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was again whining about being victimized by ideological opponents.

What was SJP’s complaint this time? In a letter to the editor in the university’s newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, SJP expressed its displeasure with the fact that on May 23rd, “the David Horowitz Freedom Center plastered more than 5,000 leaflets on and around campus demonizing Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students.”

Employing its tired tactic of whining that any effort by SJP’s critics is motivated by a desire to shut down any support of Palestinian self-determination, the letter preposterously suggested that the leaflets were posted on campus solely “in order to muzzle and disparage pro-Palestinian activism . . . .”

More absurdly, SJP claimed that the Horowitz Center’s “work aims to censor and misrepresent our academic production and to create an environment of surveillance and fear surrounding scholarship about Palestine.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Green Energy Chickens Coming Home to Roost Never in history has a civilization willfully embarked on destroying its own material foundations. Bruce Thornton

By on June 2nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/green-energy-chickens-coming-home-roost-bruce-thornton/

This year will graphically demonstrate the malign consequences of the misguided efforts to replace cheap, reliable fossil fuel energy with unreliable, inefficient “renewable” energy like wind and solar. Never in history has a civilization willfully embarked on destroying its material foundations, based solely on a hypothesis rather than scientifically established fact.

The first red flag alerting us to this feckless policy appeared during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Much of Europe––the most aggressive nations in replacing fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels––has grown dependent on Russian exports to make up for the energy lost from shutting down nuclear and coal-fired power plants. Since directly helping Ukraine by fighting is politically impossible, sanctions were imposed on Russia’s oil and gas industries.

But sanctions severe enough to concentrate Putin’s mind carried a political cost as well as an economic one. So Europe is still buying Russian energy, postponing tougher sanctions until the end of the year. The result has been the embarrassing and dishonorable spectacle of European countries helping to finance Russia’s brutal war crimes. Indeed some have accepted Putin’s condition that purchases be made in rubles, thus mitigating the damage to Russia’s economy.

Here at home, warnings of electricity blackouts across the country this summer have not slowed down many states’ increased efforts to shutter electrical plants powered by coal, natural gas, and nuclear fission. In New York, Governor Kathy Holchul has announced the state’s commitment to enforcing a requirement that new power plants must achieve “zero on-site greenhouse gas emissions for new construction no later than 2027.” This policy of wishful thinking follows New York’s Climate Act of 2019, which requires that all power generation comes from “green” sources by 2040, including 70% from renewable energy by 2030.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

A Democratic Circus Is Shaping up in the New York Tenth Congressional District Primary: John Fund

By on June 2nd, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-democratic-circus-is-shaping-up-in-the-new-york-tenth-congressional-district-primary/?utm_

“As depressing as politics is, we need to look for any entertainment available. It looks like the Democratic primary in New York’s tenth congressional district will provide as many laughs, groans, pratfalls and surprises as a world-class circus when it comes to town.”

Now that New York’s highest court surprised everyone by tossing out the state’s blatant Democratic gerrymander of its congressional districts, voters can look forward to real competitive races in many of the districts.

A new congressional district that includes Lower Manhattan and the “woke” Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn won’t be competitive in November, but the wide-open Democratic primary will provide a fascinating look at every crazy form of leftism ever catalogued.

The most well-known candidate is former NYC mayor Bill DeBlasio, who left office loathed by even most Democrats, but who’s banking on some people forgetting his two failed terms.

Yuh-Line Niou represents Manhattan’s Chinatown in the state assembly, but is best known for embracing the Black Lives Matter campaign, as when she liked a tweet that contained a photo comparing the attendees at a recent police funeral to Nazi storm troopers.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Colleges Are Creating Adult Children By Jack Wolfsohn

By on June 2nd, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/colleges-are-creating-adult-children/

College students are increasingly childish, unable to think for themselves, and follow the crowd rather than pursue their own interests, according to William Deresiewicz, a former professor at Yale University who discusses this in a recent guest post on Bari Weiss’s Substack Common Sense. They are ultimately unable to grow up. Students immediately turn to their professors for direction rather than confront issues themselves, he writes.

Deresiewicz borrows a term from one of his former students — “excellent sheep” — to describe the majority of the students he taught and those who populate elite college campuses today. He points out that despite the rise of campus wokeness, with its “radical-sounding sloganeering,” students are not becoming more creative and independent-minded. Deresiewicz stresses that excellent sheephood is really about acquiring more — more money, power, status, and connections — while claiming, to make oneself feel better, that one is doing it for altruistic reasons. This, he says, explains things like the alarming lack of protests against out-of-control tuition, strangulating pandemic policies, and many universities’ investments in China. 

While the campus protests of the 1960s challenged the authority of professors and campus administrators, Deresiewicz observes, protesters today do not demand more power from their higher-ups. In fact, they just put what they have been taught into action. Social-justice warriors lobby those in power to do their bidding for them. They are much more comfortable acting as the children rather than as the adults in the room. And those in authority accede to their demands rather than assert their dominance. They’re all on the same side, after all. Deresewicz states the reality bluntly: “College is now regarded as the last stage of childhood, not the first of adulthood. . . . Society has not given them any way to grow up — not financially, not psychologically, not morally.”

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Iran Plotted Cyberattack on Boston Children’s Hospital during Nuclear Talks By Jimmy Quinn

By on June 2nd, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/iran-plotted-cyberattack-on-boston-childrens-hospital-during-nuclear-talks/?utm_source=

FBI director Christopher Wray revealed that Iran plotted a cyberattack against the Boston Children’s Hospital last summer, as the Biden administration negotiated a return to the nuclear agreement with Tehran.

Wray, speaking to a Boston College cybersecurity conference today, called the attempted attack “one of the most despicable cyberattacks I’ve seen.”

He said the FBI worked to thwart the plot after receiving a tip from an intelligence partner, and that the agency notified the hospital.

“And quick actions by everyone involved, especially at the hospital, protected both the network and the sick kids who depend on it,” he said.

Wray didn’t specify whether the attack, which was planned by “hackers sponsored by the Iranian government,” would have been a ransomware attack. He did, however, elaborate on the threat posed by such schemes.

“Unfortunately, hospitals these days — and many other providers of critical infrastructure — have even more to worry about than Iranian government hackers.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Unsafe At Any Speed? Electric Cars Keep Catching Fire

By on June 2nd, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/02/unsafe-at-any-speed-electric-cars-keep-catching-fire/

In Vancouver, Canada, in late May, a Tesla Model Y burst into flames while the driver was waiting for a light at an intersection. He had to kick out a window to escape.

Around the same time, a new Tesla burst into flames in Brooklyn, Illinois, and a week before that a Model 3 caught fire in California City, California, while it was parked in a driveway.

In April, a deadly lithium-ion battery fire occurred in a Tesla car crash in Houston.

Last year, a Tesla caught fire while charging overnight in a garage, which the Washington Post described as “one in a string of recent examples showing what can happen when electric cars are left parked in garages to charge overnight” and which promoted electric vehicle (EV) makers to warn “owners not to leave the cars charging unattended in certain circumstances, or sitting fully charged in garages.” (This site keeps tabs on Tesla fires.)

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Title IX Rewrite Is an Assault on Women’s Rights The administration’s new draft rules redefine the word ‘sex’ to mean ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity.’By Jennifer C. Braceras and Inez Feltscher Stepman

By on June 2nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-title-ix-rewrite-is-an-assault-on-womens-rights-schools-protected-speech-education-harassment-11654114281?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“Out of a single sentence barring discrimination on the basis of sex, the Biden administration is illegally rewriting federal law to erase women and undermine constitutional liberties. Because the scope of the proposed rules is so vast, and its implementation is being managed by bureaucrats behind the scenes, average Americans may not have noticed. They need to wake up.”

Title IX is a simple anti-discrimination mandate that prohibits federally funded educational institutions from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” Yet, without congressional authorization or other constitutional authority, the Biden administration is writing new Title IX rules to socially engineer every aspect of the educational experience—from student speech and school athletics to high-school locker room use and relationships between adult college students.

These draft rules, leaked to the media in dribs and drabs, have been delayed repeatedly to avoid organized backlash. Behind the scenes, the administration is telling educational institutions that the rules are a fait accompli, demanding enforcement that curtails freedom of speech, due process and women’s rights.

Although Title IX makes no mention of sexual harassment or assault, the Supreme Court has held that a school that tolerates sexual misconduct may be found to have violated Title IX. At the same time, the high court has been clear that most speech (including speech about sex roles) does not rise to the level of unlawful sexual harassment.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard Needs Merit-Based Admissions A Supreme Court decision could force colleges to move away from affirmative action and create true diversity on campus. By Alan M. Dershowitz

By on June 2nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-needs-merit-based-admissions-college-supreme-court-decision-policies-race-11654116449?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

The Supreme Court, in its next term, will render a decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, which will determine the legality of Harvard’s race-based affirmative-action program. The plaintiff’s claim that, by creating a floor for certain racial and ethnic groups in its admissions, Harvard created a ceiling for Asian-Americans. The result is that Asian-Americans who are academically qualified become victims of discrimination.

If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, as many experts believe it will, Harvard and many universities around the country will have to continue their quests for increased racial diversity without violating the specific terms of the decision.

The time has come, however, for universities to abandon their efforts to achieve superficial, artificial diversity based on race. The coming decision would provide American schools with an opportunity to develop admission criteria based on academic achievement and potential—while abolishing such non-merit-based criteria as legacy status, athletics, geography and other nonacademic preferences. There would be resistance to getting rid of these advantages, but it could be done.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Confronting Conformity and Collectivism with David Mamet It is our own individual responsibility that must play a part in saving the order of things. By Emina Melonic

By on June 1st, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/31/confronting-conformity-and-collectivism-with-david-mamet/

EXCERPTS

Leftist film and theater critics (are there really any other kind?) have had a hard time accepting Mamet’s political views, yet they’re caught in their own “Catch-22,” an existential condition that plagues every leftist. They can’t help but admire Mamet’s work and see the significance of it, yet they issue disclaimers upon disclaimers about how it’s “unfortunate” and “sad” that Mamet has lost his political way. It’s a hallmark of a leftist pseudo-intellectual to “gift” the conservative with a heap of pity and condescension in an effort to induce an apology and contrition from the said conservative.

Today, American culture is even more dismantled. With Barack Obama, America started to put all of these academic theories into practice, and now, political correctness has reached another level of absurdity. In his typical style (a blend of cultural analysis, memoir, and drama), Mamet explores the current social and political predicament in Recessional: the Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. He touches upon many subjects: media, Judaism, wokeness, Donald Trump, literature, and inevitably, COVID. The political game has changed and Mamet is fully aware of this. The book is not so much an argument against leftism (since categories of “Left” and “Right” have changed or in some cases, been erased) as it is a way to bring down conformity, collectivism, and mediocrity. These three components are what drive Mamet’s thoughts, implicitly and explicitly.

The problem of culture is not simply political, claims Mamet, but also religious. He’s not saying that everyone needs to find God, hitting us over our heads with a two-by-four, but the Jewish tradition from which he bases his beliefs clearly guides his thoughts and analysis. He’s rightfully aware that what is causing much of the chaos in our world is man’s refusal to see perennial aspects of human nature. We are fallen beings, and in many ways (as Qohelet/Ecclesiastes tells us) “What has been will be again/what has been done will be done again;/there is nothing new under the sun.” Some people have no humility and seek false idols so they can worship them and feel better about their own mediocrity and inadequacies.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Attempted Reagan Assassin John Hinckley Jr. to Be Released, Judge Rules: Arjun Singh

By on June 1st, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/attempted-reagan-assassin-john-hinckley-jr-to-be-released-judge-rules/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

John Hinckley Jr., the man who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan over 41 years ago in 1981, will be fully and unconditionally released from a federal mental-health facility.

At a final hearing on the subject on Wednesday, U.S. Senior District Judge Paul Friedman, a Clinton appointee to the district court for the District of Columbia, said that Hinckley, 67, would be released from the care of Saint Elizabeths Hospital without any preconditions on June 15.

Friedman, who since 2003 has overseen periodic requests from Hinckley for privileges during his confinement, said that “if he hadn’t tried to kill a president, he would have been released unconditionally a long time ago.”

On March 30, 1981, as Reagan was leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., Hinckley drew a .22 caliber revolver and fired at the president as he was entering his limousine. Four of the six explosive rounds he fired struck the president.

Wounded were D.C. police officer Tom Delahanty and U.S. Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, who placed himself in the line of fire, while Press Secretary James Brady sustained a gunshot to the head, which resulted in lifelong paralysis. The White House Press Briefing Room is named in his honor.

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