Displaying posts published in

February 2023

“It’s a mess’: Messages to Southwest pilots show meltdown unfolding The airline canceled more than 16,000 flights over 11 days in December.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/southwest-airlines-executive-face-lawmakers-after-holiday-chaos/story?id=97002900

Southwest Airlines Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson faced lawmakers Thursday in a highly-anticipated Senate Commerce Committee hearing to answer for the airline’s historic holiday meltdown.

“Let me be clear: we messed up,” Watterson testified. “In hindsight, we did not have enough winter operational resilience.”

The largest domestic airline in the U.S., Southwest canceled more than 16,000 flights over an 11-day period at the end of December due to a combination of severe winter weather, staffing shortages and technology issues, the company said. Thousands were left stranded in airports across the country instead of at home for the holidays.

Lawmakers want the company to explain the massive disruption at Thursday’s Senate hearing, titled “Strengthening Airline Operations and Consumer Protections.”

“The American people have a lot of questions about the Southwest debacle in December that left passengers stranded or unable to be with loved ones over the holidays,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on Wednesday. “We’re going to ask for answers to those questions. I’m interested in hearing the pilot’s testimony that this debacle could have been avoided if Southwest had made investments sooner.”

New York vs. Florida, by the Numbers Some numbers tell a story about comparative governance.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-vs-florida-comparative-statistics-budget-medicaid-population-taxes-752ee7b6?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Comparative governance is a useful course of study, not least because bad governance is so costly to people and prosperity. We often write about the migration from the Northeast to Florida and other states, but sometimes the contrast is best illuminated with some data.

Take a look at the nearby chart comparing some key indicators of governance in a pair of states that not long ago were about the same size—New York and Florida. As recently as 2013 the two states had similar populations, but so many people have moved to the Sunshine State that it’s now roughly 2.6 million people larger.

A Tale of Two States
Yet, believe it or not, Florida’s state budget as measured in the latest proposals from the two governors, is only half the size of New York’s. This is in part a reflection of their tax burden, which in Florida is much smaller. If Florida politicians want to spend more, the state’s economy has to grow more. New York’s politicians can raise income taxes, as they do with great frequency.

Florida has no state income tax, while New York’s top tax rate is 10.9%. In New York City, the top rate is 14.8%, while in Miami it’s zero. Any guess why Ken Griffin moved his Citadel hedge fund to Miami instead of New York when he was looking for an alternative to Chicago? Florida has a 6% sales tax, higher than New York’s, but New York City’s combined state and city sales tax is 8.875%.

Biden Tells a Deficit Fairy Tale Red ink soars in the new fiscal year as spending surges, despite White House claims.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-deficit-congressional-budget-office-spending-fiscal-year-11675979171?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden boasted during his State of the Union address about cutting the deficit by a record $1.7 trillion. His putative conversion into a born-again deficit cutter is belied by this week’s Congressional Budget Office federal budget report for January, which shows the deficit has doubled in the first four months of this fiscal year.

CBO reports that the budget deficit from October through January swelled to $522 billion from $259 billion in the same period last year after adjusting for a timing shift in payments. Receipts are tracking $43 billion lower than last year, mostly owing to reduced individual income taxes, while spending is running $220 billion higher.

The Federal Reserve’s remittances to the Treasury from earnings on its portfolio of securities have decreased to less than $1 billion from $37 billion. For most of the last decade, the Fed was a profit center for Treasury owing to the interest paid on its accumulation of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities. But now the Fed is paying higher interest on bank reserves. Meantime, net interest payments on U.S. debt increased by $58 billion in the first four months of the year.

Entitlement spending has grown by $76 billion owing to inflation adjustments and the Administration’s public-health emergency declaration, which has prevented states from returning to their pre-pandemic Medicaid policies. The Administration plans to end the emergency in May, but many people removed from Medicaid will be eligible for expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies.

‘Ticking bomb’: Palestinians sexually harass Israeli girls on public buses David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/ticking-bomb-palestinians-sexually-harass-jewish-girls-on-public-buses/

Many Jews in Samaria are afraid to take the bus. Arab workers, who are not Israeli citizens, have effectively taken them over. Jewish residents find themselves outnumbered 50-to-1.

The situation is especially dire for young women, who are subject to sexual assault. Hundreds of cases have been documented of the harassment of girls as young as 11. Despite a growing clamor from parents for action, little has been done.

Yigal Brand, director general of World Betar, a Zionist youth movement, lives in Havot Yair (aka the Yair Farm) in Samaria. He wrote an open letter on Jan. 18 to Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who is responsible for civil administration in Judea and Samaria, and Miri Regev, the minister of transport and road safety.

“Thousands of workers every day use these bus lines (subsidized by the state for its citizens!!!!) that travel from central cities to Samaria,” Brand wrote.

He added that young soldiers find themselves alone on buses surrounded by Arabs and the situation can descend into bullying and harassment and could lead to a loss of life. He called on the ministers “to treat this ticking bomb seriously.”

Islamic Justice Prevails: Stripped Naked and Paraded in Egypt, Christian Grandmother Is Now the Guilty One by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19368/islamic-justice

Her “crime” was that her son was accused of being romantically involved with a Muslim woman. Islam assumes the man is superior, and that non-Muslims must never have authority over Muslims. Non-Muslim men may therefore never court or marry Muslim women, although Muslim men may court and marry non-Muslim women. Why do so many Western women support this unabashed discrimination?

Several Christian homes in the village were also looted and torched during this 2016 riot, in keeping with Islamic law, or sharia, which prescribes the collective punishment of non-Muslim “infidels.”

It took the… local policemen more than two hours to appear, giving the mob of 300 “ample time”… to brutalize her.

Sadly, such is the notion of “justice” in many Muslim nations. Muslims, because they are part of the “right” tribe — Islam — are seldom punished when transgressing the rights of “infidel” minorities, who, in keeping with the prevailing sentiment, are apparently supposed to feel lucky to be afforded any tolerance at all.

Islamic “justice” — which usually finds Muslims in the right, and non-Muslims in the wrong — or rather, tribal justice, has, once again, prevailed in Egypt.

Not only have the Muslim men who stripped naked and publicly abused an elderly Christian grandmother been acquitted in a court of law; now she is the one facing serious legal charges to compensate her tormentors.

How to Combat Gender Theory in Public Schools Strengthen parents’ rights, regulate classroom instruction, and require curriculum transparency.Christopher F. Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-combat-gender-theory-in-public-schools

As radical gender theory has made its way into public schools across the United States, children as young as five have been exposed to ideas that encourage them to question their gender identities, sometimes with life-changing and irreversible results. Despite Americans’ broadly shared skepticism about gender-identity curricula and practices in schools, many ideologically motivated teachers and administrators have not relented in their mission to advance radical gender theory, even in otherwise-conservative areas.

Among many other examples I’ve uncovered, in Illinois’ Evanston-Skokie School District, kindergarteners read books affirming transgender conversions; in Springfield, Missouri, teacher and administrator training recommends recognizing and affirming a panoply of student gender identities. Over 4,000 schools nationwide feature “gender and sexuality” (GSA) clubs, the national organization which calls for the abolition of the American judicial system and the “cisgender heterosexual patriarchy.”

Too often, teachers and administrators keep parents in the dark or pressure them into “affirming” their child’s claimed gender identity. Indeed, school policies often advise—or require—teachers not to share gender-related information with parents. Michigan’s Department of Education encourages teachers to facilitate students’ sexual transitions without parental consent. In Fairfax, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland, teachers are expressly barred from “outing” supposedly transgender children to their parents. The GSA Network instructs adult club “advisors” to keep a child’s involvement in a GSA club confidential.

The Approaching Disintegration of Academia Universities cannot withstand the assault on objective truth. Mark Goldblatt

https://quillette.com/2023/02/07/the-approaching-disintegration-of-academia/

“The disintegration of academia is coming. Whichever side precipitates the break, it will be a necessary development. Higher education is a serious intellectual endeavor, and nothing is less intellectually serious in contemporary academia than the suggestion that the pursuit of objectivity has been discredited. Empirical observation, mathematical inquiry, inductive and deductive reasoning, and falsifiability are the sine qua nons of higher education. As courses of study in the humanities and social sciences depart from such things, they cease to be higher education in the Enlightenment sense.”

Several years ago, in the pre-pandemic world of in-person meetings, a newly hired colleague at Fashion Institute of Technology proposed an LGBT-themed sociology course before the School of Liberal Arts. This is a necessary step in getting the course approved by the college-wide curriculum committee. It’s a time for constructive feedback and occasional tweaking before the final committee vote.

It was a good course. The proposal was clear and concise, indicating not only a command of the relevant literature but a sensitivity to students’ interests, expectations, and ability to handle the workload. But I noticed an apparently minor, easily correctable issue. Among the learning outcomes listed was a requirement that students develop a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ perspectives and rights. That struck me as problematic. I happen to think that such acceptance is a good thing, but to stipulate it as a learning outcome raises a knotty question. If a student masters the course material, turns in the required work, and passes the exams, but doesn’t exhibit that acceptance, is he going to fail?

A Book for Australia (and America) Ben Crocker

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/a-book-for-australia/

Princeton-raised, Israel-residing political philosopher Yoram Hazony is the figurehead of the nascent Euro-American National Conservatism movement. Increasingly, his ideas are entering mainstream political debate. The 2022 National Conservatism conference in Miami opened with a speech from the now highly favoured Republican presidential hopeful, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Coalescing around him are a growing number of thinkers, young and old, intent on rejuvenating a movement which they acknowledge has largely failed to conserve that which it holds most dear.

I have attended two of Hazony’s conferences in the United States, and found them invigorating—earnest and open forums of debate, attracting public intellectuals and private citizens alike, all sincerely interested in building a better future for the nation.

Much of Hazony’s thinking has found its way into his latest book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. Though I am sure he did not expressly intend it, I believe Hazony has written a book about Australia.

The book is about Anglo-American conserv­atism—that is, the instantiation, perpetuation, collapse and prospective renewal of an authentic conservatism in the British and American
bodies politic. This does not mean Hazony excludes the rest of the world from his project. However, the scope of his inquiry is necessarily focused on the reception of conservative thought in the two world-powerful English-speaking nations.

The Delusion of Rent Control A reflection on the abuse of government authority. by Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-delusion-of-rent-control/

George Santayana’s admonition that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” was apparently lost on progressive Democrats in Congress, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D–N.Y.), who appealed to President Biden to address what they recklessly described as “corporate price gouging in the real estate sector.” In a January 9 letter to the White House, 50 members of Congress urged the administration to use various agencies to impose a nationwide program of rent control, since, as the letter asserted, “the rent is too high and millions of people across this country are struggling to stay stably housed as a result.”

What the letter writers have conveniently forgotten, of course, is that the rental housing market is still reeling from the rent and eviction moratorium questionably implemented by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the midst of the Covid pandemic in the form of the CARES Act Section 4024(b). As a result of that moratorium, property owners—who themselves had to continue paying mortgages, property taxes, utilities and other operating expenses—found themselves with tenants who could decide whether or not they could afford their present rent, resulting in months of losses to property owners as tenants simply refused to pay rent—whether or not they could afford to. So the “corporate price gouging” cited in the Congressional letter may simply reflect the real estate industry’s effort to begin to recoup the significant losses experienced during the moratorium.

Rent control is not a rent moratorium, but it does reward tenants and punish rental property owners by a process euphemistically defined as “rent stabilization,” but which is actually a government attempt to control what rent a private property owner can receive from a tenant, with the assumption that private landlords can, and should, provide affordable housing to needy renters by absorbing losses forced on them in what should be an unencumbered marketplace.

Sliding Toward the Abyss in Scandinavia Islamization is a gradual process, but not so gradual that you can’t see it happening. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/sliding-toward-the-abyss-in-scandinavia/

As Islam continues to gain numbers and power in Western Europe, certain questions take on greater importance. If you’re female or Jewish or gay, for example, and the only local doctor without a full patient list is a Muslim (and given how some nationalized medical systems work, this kind of situation arises not infrequently), do you choose to assume that he doesn’t take his religion’s teachings seriously, or do you move?

A rise in Muslim numbers means a rise in Muslim influence on many fronts. In Norway, there are about 1500 Jews and about 175,000 Muslims. When Jewish parents complain about their kids being beaten by their Muslim classmates – a charge that, if acted upon, can lead to major unrest – how do you expect teachers, principals, cops, and politicians to respond?

Or consider the Christian People’s Party (KrF), the traditional political home of Norway’s aging religious right. As that cohort dies out, KrF risks extinction. How to recoup? Some of its leaders, possessed of a fanciful misconception that all “people of faith” share essentially the same values, have tried reaching out to Muslims. But so far this hasn’t worked too well, largely because of KrF’s ardent support for Israel. Which raises the question: as the party’s crisis intensifies even further, will KrF feel compelled to distance itself from Israel?

Then there’s this news item. On January 30, Norway’s newspaper of record, Aftenposten, reported that the Oslo police department had established a special patrol unit for the Muslim-heavy neighborhood of Tøyen. Police don’t routinely patrol on foot in Oslo, but the members of this four-person group will do so, the purported goal being to improve community relations – to have friendly chats with the locals, to get to know them better, to develop trust.

It’s a puzzling piece of news. As longtime observers of Muslim neighborhoods in Western Europe are well aware, once an urban area has become sufficiently Islamized, police cars (and fire engines) that try to enter it risk being attacked violently by the inhabitants. In districts that haven’t yet reached that magical saturation point, you can still enter without triggering displays of rage, but the tension and sense of threat will be palpable. Do Oslo authorities expect that Tøyen, which is definitely at that tense stage, will now transform suddenly into Mayberry, with its own genial Sheriff Andy and his three deputies hanging out on street corners and shooting the breeze with imams, halal butchers, and women in niqab?

One not insignificant detail ignored in the Aftenposten article is that neighborhoods like Tøyen have already had their own patrols for many years – patrols, that is, by the morality police, whose job is to seek out violations of sharia. The whole premise underlying the existence of the morality police is that these neighborhoods are, practically speaking, under the jurisdiction not of the Norwegian government but of local imams and patriarchs. Does Oslo’s tiny new constabulary quartet – the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as it were – plan to challenge that control? Or does it expect to forge some kind of working relationship with its Islamic counterpart? How will the morality police react when they see that one member of the new patrol is female? (Will she wear niqab?)

Like most other Western government programs conceived in response to the challenge of Islam, needless to say, this Tøyen initiative is absurd – based on the delusion (and how stunning that it still persists after all these years!) that if many Muslims feel little or no connection to mainstream society, it’s because authorities have failed to reach out to them sufficiently. It’s as if those authorities are unaware that one of the key commandments of the Koran is don’t befriend the infidel.

Speaking of the Koran, Aftenposten’s story about the new Tøyen patrol came three days before it was reported that Oslo police had prohibited an anti-Islam group, SIAN (Stop the Islamization of Norway), from carrying out a planned Koran-burning outside the Turkish embassy, in protest against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opposition to Sweden and Finnish membership in NATO. (As it happens, a similar protest in Stockholm was allowed to go forward.) Why did the Oslo police ban the demo? Because, they explained, they feared it would provoke an act of terrorism and/or lead to domestic disorder – an outright admission that they’ve granted Al-Qaeda and ISIS a veto on free speech in Norway and that they’ve lost the numerical battle against the enemy within.

And most Norwegians, it turns out, are on the side of the cops. Survey results released on Tuesday show that only 33% of them think Koran-burning should be permitted. When only a third of a country’s population support the small minority who are actively standing up for everyone’s freedom, how long can that freedom endure?

Numbers! A surprisingly frank article appeared in last Sunday’s Aftenposten. The headline was “Not entirely colorblind: Have Oslo’s youth become a big colorful community after 50 years of immigration? There’s not much sign of it.” I expected it to be yet another piece – they’ve been writing them for decades – smearing Norwegians as racists. But no, in the eastern half of Oslo things have now moved beyond that. At Oslo’s largest school, Kuben Upper Secondary School, reporter Hilde Lundgaard visited a typical classroom, in which only two – yes, two – of the students were ethnic Norwegians. A few inquiries established that most of the non-Norwegian kids don’t have any ethnic Norwegian friends at all – and prefer it that way.

In fact, they don’t even see themselves as Norwegian. Even those who were born in Norway, Lundgaard found, refer to themselves as “foreigners.” A girl named Fatima, whose parents are Pakistani, admitted that she feels safest around “people with my cultural background.” One teacher told Lundgaard that “the pupils are unbelievably preoccupied with color and ethnicity.” Although the teacher apparently didn’t feel comfortable adding the word “religion,” Lundgaard cited a researcher, Monica Rosten, who’s dared to tiptoe closer to the truth, writing that “[students] with religious identity find one another.” Religious, of course, being code for Muslim.

Lundgaard’s article reads like a portrait of Norway’s future: a majority Muslim country in which the views of ethnic Norwegians about immigration and integration – or, for that matter, about anything whatsoever – have become irrelevant, simply because Muslims now outnumber them.

To be sure, not all of the schools in Oslo are majority Muslim. Here’s a February 6 story about a primary school in central Oslo where most of the pupils are apparently ethnic Norwegian. At present, a male teacher’s assistant (unnamed) from that school (also unnamed) is on trial for molesting several of the little girls under his care. He’s not ethnic Norwegian – at his trial, he’s using an Arabic translator. One mother testified that she complained about him repeatedly to the school’s principal, but the latter “didn’t care,” explaining that the assistant was from “another culture.”

Indeed, he is – a culture in which young men are taught that they’re free to abuse the children of infidels. If convicted, he’ll spend no more than 60 days behind bars. (By comparison, I just now watched an episode of a documentary series about Norwegian customs officers in which they arrested a Polish trucker for smuggling vodka. Sentence: six years.)

When more and more people who hold responsible positions in a civilized society place deference to a barbaric foreign culture above the well-being of their society’s own children, how long is that civilization for this world?

If civilization is slipping away in Norway, it’s on even slippier ground in Sweden. Take the municipality of Botkyrka. Incorporating part of southern Stockholm, it’s increasingly populated by Muslims and plagued by crime – and was recently the setting of an illuminating, and unsettling, political predicament.

Botkyrka, by the way, made the news back in September 2018 when Ali Khalil, head of the local Green Party, promised leaders of an opposing party, the Moderates (M), to turn out 3,000 votes for them in that year’s elections in exchange for a plot of land on which the congregation of the Alby Mosque in Botkyrka could build itself a new house of worship. When this proposal was made public, Khalil had to step down from his political office. The story cycled out quickly enough, but its lesson was clear: Muslims in many parts of Western Europe are reaching a point at which they can manipulate politics through sheer numbers.

Now Botkyrka has made the political news again – with another development that teaches the same lesson. It concerns the leader of Botkyrka’s municipal council, a Social Democrat politician named Ebba Östlin, who’s made a name for herself as a bold crime-fighter – an unusual distinction in a country where all too many police departments prefer not to send officers into dangerous neighborhoods, where all too many judges are loath to mete out tough sentences to Muslim miscreants and where all too many politicians are scared even to speak about Islamic crime.

One of Östlin’s most controversial actions while in office was the closure of several youth centers – basically, after-school recreational clubs – that turned out to have employed convicted felons, and to have been riddled with violence and narcotics. The centers, which had been run by a local community college, were later reopened under the direct (and stricter) control of the municipality.

On January 28, the Social Democrats of Botkyrka were holding a meeting when a group of about 50 people showed up and identified themselves as newly enrolled party members. With these new members in attendance, a vote was held in which Östlin was removed from her post as local party leader – which meant that she was automatically out as head of the municipal council. The votes cast by the new members, all of whom supported Östlin’s ouster, were decisive in her removal.

Who were these new members? Many of them, according to Aftonbladet columnist Oisín Cantwell, “barely even knew Swedish” and “didn’t seem to understand what they were doing there.” Also, several were recognizable as having “close connections to gang crime” – specifically, to the notorious Vårby crime network, whose shady leader, Chihab Lamouri, is originally from “some country in the Middle East.” At least one of them was a notorious gang figure who’d “recently been released from prison.”

What was going on here? “There are many indications,” wrote Cantwell, in what reads like a major understatement, “that organized crime may have participated in the ouster of the leading politician in the municipality.” He asked: “What happens to Botkyrka if a social democrat who owes a debt of gratitude to the Vårby network takes over?” In the years to come, this sort of question will be raised increasingly.

There’s more to the Botkyrka story. On Thursday, it was reported that people who’d voted for Östlin at that meeting later received threatening text messages. Several of them described the incident as a “coup.” But what to do? Tobias Baudin, the national secretary of the Social Democrats, was quick – in good Swedish fashion – to throw in the towel, declaring the vote in Botkyrka legitimate; another of the party’s national leaders promised on the TV news that the party would stand with Östlin, although he hardly seemed worked up about the situation. But what could the party do?

It was Hans Rustad, editor of the alternative Norwegian news website document.no, who made the key point in a February 4 piece. Immigrants, he observed, “constitute such a large proportion” of Sweden’s current population “that they can take over democratic processes if they wish.” And the same process is underway all over Western Europe, with the potential consequences for these societies extending far beyond electoral politics.

In any event, anyone with a grain of sense can see where all this is leading.