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Take a Hike, Penn State By Andrew Cline

Posted By on April 28th, 2018

Penn State’s Outing Club controversy is about keeping students in a state of childhood.

Penn State University’s Outing Club can no longer organize student-led hiking and camping trips, which the club has done for 98 years. This decision is not about the inherent risk of hiking. It is about letting students be independent adults.

At first, the university explained that the outing, scuba, and caving clubs are “losing recognition due to an unacceptable amount of risk to student members that is associated with their activities,” as a university spokesperson put it.

International mockery helped the Outing Club regain recognition as a student organization, but it will not be allowed to organize trips. It can bring speakers to campus and hold meetings, but going hiking together on club-organized outings is no longer acceptable.

A university spokesperson suggested to the Centre Daily Times that alcohol use was a factor in the decision, though Outing Club says there is no alcohol use on its trips. The real reason was surely contained the sentence before the mention of alcohol use:

In addition to the inherent risks found in many of these student activities that occur without fully trained guides or leaders, the behaviors of some students on unsupervised trips have become a concern. These concerns have, at times, included the misuse of alcohol in the context of already risky activities. This mix is obviously dangerous.

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Free-Speech Lawsuit against UC Berkeley Moves Forward By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on April 28th, 2018

Conservative students at the University of California, Berkeley will be allowed to move forward with their lawsuit alleging the school discriminated against conservative speakers.

U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney ruled Wednesday that the lawsuit levied by two student groups can continue, shooting down the school’s request to dismiss it.

The Berkeley College Republicans and the Young America’s Foundation accused the school of efforts to “restrict and stifle the speech of conservative students whose voices fall beyond the campus political orthodoxy,” after two speakers they invited to campus had their events cancelled.

Conservative author Ann Coulter was bumped from a planned appearance at the school in April 2017 after angry protests by left-leaning students caused security concerns. After a national backlash, the school allowed Coulter to speak in early May during a “dead week” when many students were off campus.

Another conservative writer, David Horowitz, had a speech canceled the same month after difficulties with campus security and accommodations, and the previous February, a Milo Yiannopoulos event was also shut down over safety concerns.

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House Intelligence Committee Republicans Absolve Trump of Collusion By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on April 28th, 2018

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a redacted version of the conclusions from their investigation into Russian election meddling Friday, saying they found “no evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“While the committee found no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded, coordinated, or conspired with the Russian government, the investigation did find poor judgment and ill-considered actions by the Trump and Clinton campaigns,” the Republican report states.

The report cited the Trump Tower meeting between Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and a Russian lawyer as an instance of “poor judgment” on the part of the Trump associates. The report also criticized the Trump campaign’s praise for and contacts with WikiLeaks, which it called a “hostile foreign organization,” as “highly objectionable and inconsistent with U.S. national security interests.”

The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee were not spared in the report, which criticized Democrats for allegedly hiring Russian sources to draft opposition research against then-candidate Trump.

President Trump touted the report on Twitter Friday morning.Democrats, meanwhile, wrote a dissent to the 243-page report in which they accused the majority of a “lack of seriousness and interest in pursuing the truth.” Representative Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the committee, said Republicans had taken a “fundamentally flawed approach to the investigation” and reached “superficial and political” conclusions.

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Nicaragua is back in the news By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Posted By on April 28th, 2018

We remember Nicaragua from the 1980’s, i.e. the “contras,” the “Sandinistas,” and other stories from the Reagan years.

Nicaragua is back in the news because of protests and the government’s reaction to them, as we see in news reports:

Nicaragua has been rocked by a week of protests in which over two dozen people have been killed.
The protests were triggered by tax hikes and benefit cuts meant to shore up the ailing social security system.

On Sunday, President Daniel Ortega said the government would withdraw the pension changes.
But he rejected demands to free detained protesters, withdraw the police and lift some censorship.

The U.S. embassy has moved some employees from Managua as a reaction to the violence. The State Department has also issued a travel warning.

The violence in Nicaragua is related to President Ortega’s proposal to raise taxes to pay for social services & fund public pensions. President Ortega did promise new negotiations with the opposition but not much has happened yet.

The international media has been reporting the violence and the death of Angel Gahona, a journalist who was gunned down during his broadcast. The shooting was caught live on social media.

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University of Texas to Treat Masculinity as a ‘Mental Health’ Issue By Toni Airaksinen

Posted By on April 28th, 2018

The Counseling and Mental Health Center at the University of Texas at Austin recently launched a new program to help male students “take control over their gender identity and develop a healthy sense of masculinity.”

Treating masculinity as if it were a mental health crisis, “MasculinUT” is organized by the school’s counseling staff and most recently organized a poster series encouraging students to develop a “healthy model of masculinity.”

The program is predicated on a critique of so-called “restrictive masculinity.” Men, the program argues, suffer when they are told to “act like a man” or when they are encouraged to fulfill traditional gender roles, such as being “successful” or “the breadwinner.”

Though you might enjoy “taking care of people” or being “active,” MasculinUT warns that many of these attributes are actually dangerous, claiming that “traditional ideas of masculinity place men into rigid (or restrictive) boxes [which]… prevent them from developing their emotional maturity.”

“If you are a male student at UT reading this right now, we hope that learning about this helps you not to feel guilty about having participated in these definitions of masculinity, and instead feel empowered to break the cycle!” the program offers.

The program is currently without leadership, but not for long. The school is in the process of hiring a “healthy masculinities coordinator” to run the program, and a school official tells PJ Media that some hopeful hirees are interviewing for the position later this week. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Title IX Official: Believe Rape Accusations Even if False, Because It’s ‘That Person’s Truth’ By Tom Knighton ????

Posted By on April 28th, 2018

From time to time, Title IX supporters admit they know some campus rape accusations may be false. Yet, they still support the denial of due process rights to the accused.

Earlier this month, Clackamas Community College Title IX coordinator and Dean of Human Resources Patricia Wieck told The College Fix why believing accusers rather than waiting for evidence is important:

Believing survivors means let’s sit down and understand each other’s experience. Let’s believe what that person said, he or she has experienced, that we have experienced. It may not be the truth, as has been determined, but it is that person’s truth and what they were going through.

Are you kidding me?

This woman believes the false destruction of a man’s life via pinning on him one of the most horrible crimes a human can commit — some would argue the worst, and I can’t disagree outright — is preferable to a fair trial because of some postmodernist garbage?

The backers of Title IX have always used a lot of this “truth is subjective” nonsense to defend themselves. Her comments show the entire process is biased — by design.

Wieck is saying that even if the accuser is wrong, she’s right if she really, really feels that way. But if you’re the poor schmuck falsely accused of rape, your feelings — and the evidence you produce — don’t get the same treatment.

The reality is that truth isn’t subjective. Feelings aren’t truth. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Cornel West: ‘So Many of Our Black Elites’ Are ‘Moral Midgets,’ ‘Spiritual Dwarfs’ By Nicholas Ballasy

Posted By on April 28th, 2018

WASHINGTON – In response to the Starbucks incident in Philadelphia earlier this month, Dr. Cornel West said that Americans must fight white supremacy “in all of its forms.”

An employee called the police on two African-Americans in a Starbucks store for sitting inside and not making a purchase. The police arrived and arrested the men, who stated that they were waiting for someone to arrive for a business meeting. Starbucks announced that it plans to close all of its stores on the afternoon of May 29 for “racial bias education.”

West was asked for his preferred outcome of the Starbucks incident.

“We’ve got to fight white supremacy is all of its forms,” West replied after a “Save Our Sons: Stop the Killing” and “Condemn Donald Trump” National Black Men’s Convention march and rally organized by former New Black Panther Party Chairman Malik Shabazz, president of Black Lawyers for Justice, on Saturday outside the White House.

During his speech at the protest, West urged civil rights activists not to “isolate” white supremacy from capitalism.

“I have the love of God and it empowers me in the midst of all of this nightmare, all of the lies and mendacity, all of the cold-heartedness and mean spiritedness of Donald Trump and his cronies and Wall Street and the military industrial complex and the State Department and the Pentagon. They all go together,” he said. “Never isolate white supremacy from capitalism. Never isolate capitalism from colonialism and imperialism and let us bring our critiques to bear on patriarchy.”

West condemned police shootings of African-Americans, telling the crowd to remember that black police officers can be “trigger happy, too.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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From Euthanasia to Mass Murder Alex Grobman, PhD

Posted By on April 28th, 2018

In a ground breaking new study, Austrian medical historian Herwig Czech, debunks the myth that Hans Asperger, who was the first to describe a group of children with distinctive psychological features as “autistic psychopaths,” had opposed the Nazis and defended his patients against the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ program.

The article entitled “Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and ‘race hygiene’ in Nazi-era Vienna, published in Molecular Autism reports that Asperger sent patients to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where almost 800 children were murdered by poisoning and other means from 1940 to 1945.

“The picture that emerges is that of a man who managed to further his career under the Nazi regime, despite his apparent political and ideological distance from it,” Czech concludes. “This was not least due to opportunities created by the political upheaval after Austria’s Anschluss (annexation) to Germany in 1938, including the expulsion of Jewish physicians from the profession.”

By making political compromises to Nazi dogma, Asperger advanced his career by cooperating with the race hygiene system, including the Nazis’ child “euthanasia” program.

The Evolution of Sterilization into Euthanasia Killing Centers

What is often overlooked, is that before the Nazis sent Jews to the gas chambers, where they were murdered with Zyklon-B or carbon monoxide, the Nazis created clandestine programs that systematically targeted certain groups of people for extermination.

The sterilization programs began in late 1933, as historian Henry Friedlander wrote in the Origins of Nazi Genocide. Within a year, 32,268 individuals were sterilized. In 1935 there were 73,174. Justification for this treatment included schizophrenia, epilepsy, alcoholism, deafness, blindness, manic-depression psychosis and feeblemindedness. Those deemed sex offenders were castrated.

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Pompeo: Trump ‘unlikely’ to stay in Iran deal ‘absent substantial fix’

Posted By on April 28th, 2018

Newly confirmed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday said President Trump is “unlikely” to stay in the Iran nuclear deal unless he can get “substantial” fixes.

“There’s been no decision made, so the team is working, and I’m sure we’ll have lots of conversations to deliver what the president has made clear,” Pompeo told reporters during a trip to Brussels for a NATO foreign ministers meeting. “Absent a substantial fix, absent overcoming the shortcomings, the flaws of the deal, he is unlikely to stay in that deal past this May.”

Trump has set a May 12 deadline for European allies to agree to a supplemental deal to cover what he sees as gaps in the international accord or else he will essentially withdraw the United States from the agreement.

The Obama-era deal between the United States, Iran, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union provided Tehran billions in sanctions relief in exchange for curbing its nuclear program.

Trump sees three main issues with the deal: several provisions sunset, inspectors can’t demand to see some military sites, and it does not address Iran’s other activities, including its ballistic missile program and support for terrorist organizations.

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Declassified Congressional Report: James Clapper Lied About Dossier Leaks To CNN By Sean Davis

Posted By on April 28th, 2018

A newly declassified report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections reveals that former intelligence chief James Clapper lied to Congress about information he shared with CNN on the infamous Steele dossier.

Buried within a newly declassified congressional report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections is a shocking revelation: former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper not only leaked information about the infamous Steele dossier and high-level government briefings about it to CNN, he also may have lied to Congress about the matter.

In one of the findings within the 253-page report, the House intelligence committee wrote that Clapper leaked details of a dossier briefing given to then-President-elect Donald Trump to CNN’s Jake Tapper, lied to Congress about the leak, and was rewarded with a CNN contract a few months later.

“Clapper flatly denied ‘discussing[ing] the dossier [compiled by Steele] or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists,’” the committee found.

When asked directly whether he had ever discussed the dossier with any journalists, Clapper replied that he had not, according to a transcript of the proceedings:

MR. ROONEY: Did you discuss the dossier or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists?

MR. CLAPPER: No.