RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/344548

IGNORANCE, REMEDIAL IGNORANCE, AND TENURED IGNORANCE….JUST APPALLING!!!!!RSK

What Does Bowdoin Teach? — a report released today by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) — is the most comprehensive assessment of the academic culture, customs, and values of a college conducted to date. It is a devastating appraisal. The study, authored by NAS president and former Boston University professor and administrator Peter Wood, is the product of 18 months of research and is primarily devoted to answering the question it poses.

As Isaiah Berlin might have said, Bowdoin teaches many small things but few big things. Its academic departments and the courses they offer are, for the most part, narrowly specialized. In classes, questions of first principle are routinely settled in advance. As a result, the report finds, students have little chance of receiving a bona fide liberal-arts education or of learning to think critically.

A social anthropologist by training, Wood refers to his study as a “full-fledged ethnography.” Bowdoin is, he suspects, a representative example of the education on offer at liberal-arts colleges across the country. The report documents an increasingly fractured academy that has no common curriculum and in which so-called identity studies take priority over a study of the West. It highlights, for example, the 36 freshmen seminars offered at Bowdoin in the fall of 2012. They are designed to teach writing and critical-thinking skills and to introduce students to the various academic departments. Some of the subjects are unsurprising: The Korean War, Great Issues in Science, Political Leadership. Others seem less conducive to critical thinking and fruitful classroom discussion: Queer Gardens, Beyond Pocahontas: Native American Stereotypes; Sexual Life of Colonialism; Modern Western Prostitutes.

Queer Gardens, an exploration of the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and of “the link between gardens and transgression,” simply “does not teach critical thinking as well as Plato’s Republic,” the report notes; nor does any subject that has “no canon of works that embody exemplary achievement in the difficult dialogic task of critical thinking.”

The freshmen seminars, and Queer Gardens in particular, illustrate the increasing specialization of academia, which Wood documents statistically. Bowdoin today teaches far fewer survey courses than it did in the 1964–65 academic year, used for the purposes of comparison. As a result, students wind up in courses that presume they have obtained general knowledge in the subject area and mastered basic ideas. The school does not offer a single course in American military, political, diplomatic, or intellectual history.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/344646 Senator Marco Rubio is the man of the hour. He has deftly positioned himself as the indispensable figure in this year’s immigration debate. His participation has given the Gang of Eight approach to amnesty some insulation from grassroots conservative criticism, at least for a time. Liberals in Congress understand that his imprimatur is essential […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/your-money-redfords-glorified-murderers-or-hero-who-stopped-them/?print=1 Bill Ayers, cofounder of the terrorist group Weatherman, was hosted by Minnesota State University as a “scholar-in-residence” last month. (I reported [1] on this, as well as on his appearance at the Association for Teacher Educators conference at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Atlanta.) For an ex-terrorist, Bill Ayers has had a comfortable […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/larry-grathwohl-hero/ “Two, four, six, eight — now it’s time to smash the state!” chanted the mob. One protestor climbed up a flagpole in front of the Justice Department. To the cheers and delight of the crowd, he cut down Old Glory and in its place raised a Viet Cong flag. Police fired tear gas. The […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324685104578389251299266168.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLEThird

PETE DU PONT WAS THE VERY SUCCESSFUL REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR OF DELAWARE (1977-1985)….AND ONE OF THE FINEST AND SMARTEST POLITICIANS IN AMERICA….RSK

The domestic policies of the Obama administration evince a lack of understanding and experience in how an economy functions and grows. Things are not quite so clear with the administration’s foreign policies, where we see both encouraging and discouraging indications.

Those who think one of the federal government’s primary responsibilities is providing a strong national defense should be heartened by President Obama’s increased authorization of drone strikes against terrorists on foreign soil. Likewise the administration’s continued use of the Guantanamo Bay detention center and many of the Bush-era security tools.

Unfortunately, there is much the president and his team get wrong on foreign policy. At times it seems that politics stand in the way of good policy. At least in the first term, the team suffers from an apparent naiveté in thinking the mere presence of Barack Obama in the Oval Office would make their “reset” with Russia productive or cause terrorists and the rogues leading Iran, North Korea and other troublesome countries to like the United States all of a sudden.

One of the administration’s most significant failings is its missile defense policy. It was 30 years ago last week that President Reagan spoke to the American people from the Oval Office and pushed the idea of a strategic defense initiative. SDI was derided by those on the left as “star wars” and considered fanciful by many of all political stripes due to the state of the available technology at that time.

Still, who could dispute Reagan’s goal—a world in which an intentional or accidental nuclear launch could end in something other than mutually assured destruction? Reagan said SDI would “offer a new hope for our children in the 21st century,” adding his basic duties as president included “the duty to protect and strengthen the peace.”

Critics were correct that the technology to develop, deploy and (most important) rely on such a system did not exist in 1983. There was much to do and many dollars to spend before something along these lines could be accomplished. But what a worthwhile effort it would be, and if pursued fully, it could have been this generation’s space program. Progress was made over the years, as technology was tested, refined and deployed. Sitting here in the 21st century, we are not yet able to fully deliver the “new hope for our children” of which Reagan spoke, but we do have functioning theater-based systems.

Mr. Obama seems not to like the idea of missile defense very much. As national security writer Clifford May noted recently: “In 2001, Barack Obama, then a state senator, said flatly: ‘I don’t agree with a missile-defense system.’ Seven years later, during his first presidential campaign, then-senator Obama pledged to slash $10 billion from the Pentagon’s missile-defense budget—about $1 billion more than the U.S. was actually spending on missile defense at the time.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324020504578398713144082092.html?mod=hp_opinion There was something missing from President Obama’s Wednesday speech in Denver about gun violence. He focused almost exclusively on passing gun-control laws, and not at all on one of the nation’s biggest promoters of violence: the entertainment industry. The president’s campaign against gun violence has produced a stale debate marked by lots of speeches […]

The use of children in Palestinian Authority propaganda is at the very least, concerning – at worst – it is Western-sponsored child abuse http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3141/state_sponsored_child_abuse In 2004, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (CSUCS) released a “global report” on the use of children in militaries around the world. Some of the findings, as […]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/04/03/wheres-obamas-moral-clarity-on-korea/

OBAMA’S PREDECESSOR GEORGE BUSH AND HIS HAPLESS STATE DEPARTMENT HAD NO MORAL CLARITY ON NORTH KOREA EITHER. AMBASSADOR CHRISTOPHER HILL, WITH THE STRING OF FAILURES IN THE DAYTON ACCORDS, BOSNIA AND KOSOVO BEHIND HIM WAS SENT IN 2005 TO CONDUCT “NEGOTIATIONS” WITH NORTH KOREA WHICH WENT ON FOR THREE YEARS AND RESULTED IN NOTHING BUT CONTINUING BUILDUP OF NORTH KOREA’S NUKES. PRESIDENT OBAMA THEN APPOINTED THIS OVER PROMOTED TYRO AS AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ…..RSK

Welcome to 2013. Maybe the Mayans couldn’t add correctly. A tiny totalitarian regime is threatening the United States with nuclear attack, and the president has barely spoken on the matter since the threats were made. It isn’t hard to imagine how other presidents would have reacted differently.

First consider Bill Clinton. Forget the motivations, one thing is for sure — Clinton wasn’t afraid to speak with moral clarity in international affairs. He led NATO against a thug Serbian regime’s ethnic cleansing. Clinton labeled evil as evil.
Imagine how Ronald Reagan would have reacted to threats of nuclear attack on the United States by Kim Jong-Un. For starters, I suspect Reagan would have begun a dialog with Kim’s victims years before a nuclear crisis erupted.

North Korea has become the world’s largest gulag. North Koreans are even two inches shorter than their South Korean counterparts. Kim Jong-Un’s hereditary totalitarianism has produced a nation of malnourished shrimps.

Reagan would not have been quiet about their circumstances.

Reagan spoke to the victims of communist totalitarianism around the world, and reassured them that freedom’s light remained lit. History tells us that the victims, even in the most controlled parts of the Soviet Union, heard Reagan. His words gave them hope, and eventually gave them courage to tear down walls.

Reagan spoke with moral clarity to the communist slave masters about the immorality of their regimes. He delegitimized communist governments by speaking directly to communism’s victims. He provided a moral contrast between America that is good and great and communist regimes that were evil and destined for the dustbin of history.

Speaking these truths directly to the victims of communism made peace more likely, even as the domestic left warned that such clarity was destabilizing.

The cheapest and most peaceful way for the crisis on the Korean peninsula to diffuse is for the slaves of Kim Jong-Un to throw off their slavemaster and join the ranks of people who have emerged from the darkness of communism to the light of freedom.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/bringing_down_america_a_review.html

BRINGING DOWN AMERICA: An FBI Informant with the Weathermen, by Larry Grathwohl and Frank Reagan, originally published in 1976, is being reintroduced in 2013. Its introduction is written by Dr. Tina Trent.

During a dangerously volatile period of domestic terrorism, young anarchists were plotting the upending of America. In the vanguard stood the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. Implanted in 1969 in the heart of a revolutionary movement, Larry Grathwohl, a 22-year-old Vietnam vet, found himself acting as an FBI informant. Inserted into the Weather Underground organization under deep cover, he became privy to their terror plots as well as the leadership’s “reasoning”. It is this facet which still resonates today. BRINGING DOWN AMERICA is a gripping tale of plots and subplots, each one aimed at “the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie [and] the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat”, as Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones exhorted in their 1974 manifesto, “Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.” The subtext of this gripping memoir is brought to the fore in Chapter 14: “The Cover Is Blown:”

Once in the van we drove around the city… while we were driving Maynard & Green (my FBI handlers) began telling me about the mystery man waiting for me. He was an Arab guerrilla. My meeting was to be in strict confidence. They refused to tell me why he was in the country, how he got in, obviously he was working for the U.S….

The implication was very clear. The FBI understood that the Weathermen were deepening their foreign ties. It was inevitable that Arab terror contacts would be made. Thus, Ali Baba, an Arab informant, was sending a warning to Larry: having him as a “go-between” would mitigate any hesitation to cooperate with the Weathermen, in effect, keeping the FBI one step ahead.

Not only that, Ali Baba issued other warnings to Larry: “the Arabs plan to strike at the next Olympic games in 1972 [reviewer’s note: and they made good on their threat] and there is talk of doing something at the World’s Fair in Spokane in 1974.”

For the record, El (Al) Fatah was the referenced Arab guerrilla group. Yes, the very same terror outfit spawned by the godfather of suicide terror, “Chairman” Yasir Arafat, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In tandem, the Weathermen conspired with the KGB and attendant communist regimes. The war being waged against the U.S. by the radical left and Islamist jihadis is premised on the U.S. as the Western spear and Israel as its twin “imperialistic” cousin. It has been playing out for decades, in one form or another. Nothing has changed other than the fact that many escaped justice and are entering their senior years. Despite their advancing age, they are as dangerous as ever — perhaps more so. Bill Ayers, the foremost leader of the Weathermen “is in his third decade as a national leader in the movement to radicalize the educational training of schoolteachers”. His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a top leader too “is a professor of law at Northwestern and a high-ranking officer in the American Bar Association.” Eleanor Raskin (ne Stein) “is a law professor at S.U.N.Y Albany and, astonishingly, a NYS administrative law judge”. Jeff Jones “currently heads the New York-based Apollo Alliance, a highly influential coalition of labor leaders and environmentalists, and was responsible for drafting President Obama’s 2009 Recovery Act.”

The Jewish Civil War Rife with tales of brother pitted against brother, North and South, the American Civil War always carried for me the resonance of a biblical narrative of family strife. How could it not when, during the Civil Rights era of my childhood, that undercurrent played out daily in my own household, as […]