NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Sydney Williams :Fear

Posted By on October 7th, 2021

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

How far ago it was when a Democrat President could speak of open markets and of trusting the American people. Fear has become a tool of American politicians, especially those on the left, to help control the people they are supposed to serve. In a recent issue of The Spectator, regarding the United States’ handling of the COVID-19 virus, Karol Markowicz wrote: “We are in a moment of profound fear in the U.S…We cannot continue to succumb to a fear of life. We must not continue to be scared of each other.” Yet, politicians used fear to place the sick in nursing homes, and to close places of worship, schools and businesses, and to issue mask and vaccine mandates.

As well, fear of climate change infects our youth. Writing in February 2020 in The Washington Post, Jason Plautz wrote: “Kids are terrified, anxious and depressed about climate change,” while academics, politicians and certain businesses thrive on this fear. Michael Moore and Al Gore made millions out of scaring people about climate change. Thomas P. Gloria, managing director of Industrial Ecology Solutions and Program Director, Sustainability, Harvard Extension School, wrote in the April 22, 2020, edition of the Harvard Gazette: “My fear is, despite the science and the early warning signals that we bear witness to – record temperatures, 1000-year storms, glacial retreat, coral reefs dying on a continental scale – global society may finally wake up, but it may be too late.”

Fear of expressing non-conventional ideas has become pervasive. Many will not speak out for fear of financial retaliation. Ted Rall, author of The Stringer, wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal: “What meaningful difference is there between an authoritarian state, where saying the wrong thing can get you arrested, and a regime of economic censorship, in which the consequence of unpopular expression results in unemployment, potentially followed by eviction and destitution?” A culture that cancels history and opinions is one that denies free speech. How many students fear expressing opinions that depart from a progressive narrative that has become ubiquitous? How many junior executives question their senior managers? Do members of Congress let demands of Party out-weigh their own consciences? Fear of failing grades, loss of job and political retribution are used to suppress speech and control people.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Arabs Are Annoyed With the Europeans by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on October 6th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17798/arabs-annoyed-with-europeans

The European Parliament… has enraged many Arabs by calling for boycotting Expo 2020 Dubai…

The timing of the resolution is problematic. It implies that the European Parliament is seeking to punish the UAE for signing a peace treaty with Israel. The resolution coincided with the first anniversary of the signing of the Abraham Accords, the term used to refer to peace agreements between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain.

By singling out the UAE, the European Parliament has chosen to side with the enemies of peace, cooperation and normalization between Israelis and Arabs.

Worse, the European Parliament saw no reason to call out Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for their daily human rights violations against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Resolutions such as the one taken by the European Parliament are the kind that give the enemies of peace in the Middle East — evidently now including the European Parliament — ammunition to keep fighting to achieve their goal of destroying Israel.

They are opposed to the existence of Israel. They do not want to see Israel in the Middle East. Most of them want to replace Israel….

“[The decision] raises a question mark about the real reasons that led to this hostility practiced by the European Parliament towards a country that has achieved a lot on human rights issues…. The European Parliament is supposed to support these issues, not the exact opposite.” — Mona Ali Al Motawa, prominent writer from Bahrain, Al-Watan, September 21, 2021.

[T]he UAE does not need “a certificate [of honor] from malicious entities and will not be affected by desperate attempts to disrupt its achievements.” — Saudi columnist Dr. Ali Al-Kheshaiban, Al-Ain, September 22, 2021.

Some very vocal Arabs, in short, are loudly telling the Europeans to mind their own business.

The Arabs are also telling the Europeans that if they have to meddle in the internal affairs of the Arab countries, they should at least support those states, such as the UAE, that have made real strides in human rights, rather than supporting and emboldening terrorists through calls for the boycott of global cooperation events.

The European Parliament, one of three legislative branches of the European Union, has enraged many Arabs by calling for a boycott of Expo 2020 Dubai, taking place in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) between October 2021 and March 2022.

The theme of this year’s Expo 2020 Dubai, one of the world’s biggest events, is “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future.” The sub-themes are “Sustainability, Opportunity and Mobility” with a focus on industries, financial capital, governance, employment, education, and technology.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: A SEMESTER ABROAD FOR WOKE STUDENTS

Posted By on October 6th, 2021

I have a young neighbor- a  student at a prestigious college who is really sweet and friendly and voluble. She described her classes on American policies: “like, capitalism, like instituted, like racism and like slavery, for like, a million years.”

She told me that she was hoping to spend a semester abroad and like, she would like learn another language.

I think a semester abroad should be mandatory in Venezuela or Cuba for woke students. And they could add Spanish to their rather pathetic knowledge of English syntax and vocabulary.  Wouldn’t that be like really cool? rsk

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Exactly who or what is the National School Boards Association? By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on October 6th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/exactly_who_or_what_is_the_national_school_boards_association.html

I’m willing to bet that, before this week, most Americans, including parents whose kids are or were in public school, had never heard of the National School Boards Association (“NSBA”). When its president, though, wrote to Joe Biden suggesting that parents who complain about Critical Race Theory, masks, and transgenderism are domestic terrorists, it popped up on our radar. And when the DOJ promptly agreed with that suggestion by promising to send FBI agents to become involved with local school boards, people started wondering just who or what the NSBA really is.

Here’s how the NSBA describes itself:

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) is a federation of state associations and the U.S. territory of the Virgin Islands that represent locally elected school board officials serving approximately 51 million public school students regardless of their disability, ethnicity, socio-economic status or citizenship. Working with and through our state association members, NSBA advocates for equity and excellence in public education through school board leadership.

The NSBA claims to “represent more than 90,000 local school board members….” Those are big numbers.

There’s more but you get the gist: It’s a do-good lobbying organization for American public-school boards. It’s when you get into the details of exactly what constitutes doing good as far as the NSBA is concerned that you realize that it is a group completely dedicated to leftist policies.

The word “equity” crops up repeatedly. As we’ve learned in the last decade, while the Founders were concerned with equality, which means that all people are entitled to equal treatment under the law, along with a citizen’s right to a voice in representative government, equity is different. Equity is a zero-sum game of winners and losers, with the government determining who wins and who loses. It pits groups against each other, treats individuals based on external, immutable characteristics, glories in victimhood, and generally is antithetical to a free people and a free society.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left Can Finally Admit What it Wants The Left now openly supports everything we used to accuse them of supporting. By Dan Gelernter

Posted By on October 6th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/05/the-left-can-finally-admit-what-it-wants/

I remember a staggering conversation with my high school lunch table in the early 2000s. Everyone agreed with one kid’s statement that there was nothing special about living in America: Life in Canada, or anywhere else, would be identical except for maybe the weather. 

At the time, I wondered what was going to happen to America when all these kids grew up. What happens when America’s young adults, far from having any intellectual commitment to freedom, don’t even understand what life would be like without it? 

Twenty or 30 years ago, before my generation metastasized, it was tacitly understood on both sides of the political aisle that leftists—mostly Democrats—had to lie about what they wanted to do. They had to pretend, for instance, that they didn’t want to raise taxes. SNL made fun of this in their famous 1988 sketch “Dukakis After Dark”: “Mike, now that it’s all over, you can tell me. You were going to raise taxes, weren’t you?” “You bet I was!”

Leftists likewise had to pretend they liked the military. This led to Dukakis’ disastrous Abrams tank photo op.  

It wasn’t Dukakis’ fault exactly—as “he” says in the SNL sketch, “We represent unpopular, discredited views.” But if only he’d been more fortunate in his timing, and could have waited 20 or 30 years: Precisely those discredited views were being indoctrinated into school children across the country. The children grew up, and the ideas have found new life. 

Walter Mondale’s 1984 pledge to raise taxes helped destroy his presidential campaign. In 2020, Biden’s pledge to do the same went essentially unnoticed—in part because the press, now run by the kids who were in school when Mondale ran, didn’t want to report it. But also because those kids like the idea of higher taxes. In a sense we’ve come full circle. The Left can finally admit in public all the things it used to hide.  

The Left is finally out of the closet. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Educated Idiots, Critical Race Theory, and Other Bad Ideas A recipe for civilizational corruption and decline. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 6th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/educated-idiots-critical-race-theory-and-other-bad-bruce-thornton/

“Educated idiots” is how my old man described college-educated people who were completely devoid of common sense and moral intelligence, or what Aristotle called “practical wisdom.” But what made them especially annoying was their arrogance, their assumption that because they were professionally credentialed in one area, they were equally knowledgeable about everything else.

This perennial character flaw was recognized by the ancients. Socrates in his defense speech noted this presumptuous claim among the Athenians he questioned during his search for someone wiser than he. The poets and artisans, for example, because they had many useful skills and technical knowledge, “thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.” Nor were the highly educated immune: “There is nothing so absurd,” the Roman orator Cicero wrote, “that hasn’t been said by some philosopher.” Humans by nature are vain and crave recognition for being superior to their fellows, which make us vulnerable to this willful error of thought and character.

But over the last 150 years, the broadening of formal education to include the masses, the increase and hyper-specialization in university disciplines, and the prestige of the natural sciences from the technologies that improved material existence, have made this bad habit ubiquitous. Worse yet, the aggressive promotion during the last fifty years of “college for everyone”–– which necessarily required lower standards and a decline in foundational skills––multiplied the numbers of people with this affliction, even as the quality of their degrees was degraded.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Meretz’s pilgrimage to Ramallah Ruthie Blum

Posted By on October 6th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/meretzs-pilgrimage-to-ramallah/

 If anything illustrates the farcical nature of the current makeup of the government in Jerusalem, it’s the parley in Ramallah on Sunday evening between Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and a delegation of Israel’s Meretz Party, headed by Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz.

Horowitz didn’t even bother to obscure his exit from a meeting of the ministerial committee on fighting the coronavirus, which hadn’t convened since the end of August, in order to make his appointment at the Muqata. But then, his role as the country’s most senior official charged with handling the pandemic is secondary to his true ambition: Palestinian statehood by way of an Israeli withdrawal to the 1947 armistice lines.

Ditto for the two Meretz members—Regional Cooperation Minister Esawi Frej and faction head Knesset member Michal Rozin—who accompanied him. The purpose of their little gathering was twofold.

Firstly, it was to show their voters that, despite their party’s sitting in a coalition with and under politicians traditionally from the right, it’s still committed to Israeli capitulation at all costs. Secondly, it was to signal to Abbas that he has the power to achieve their shared goal.

In one respect, he’s correct. Every party in the coalition possesses the leverage to cause it to fall.
But just like any of the strange bedfellows able to use this option as a threat, none has the desire to follow through with it. They all realize that in such an event, what awaits them on the “day after” is political exile.
In the meantime, each enjoys a degree of freedom from facing the electorate for a fifth time in two-and-a-half years. And Meretz is milking its ability to go against the wishes of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and discuss policy with Holocaust denier Abbas—a “pay for slay” terrorism instigator who’s been refusing to engage in talks with Israel since 2014.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

EPIC: 427,000 Parents Respond to National School Board Association Labeling Them ‘Domestic Terrorists’ By Gwendolyn Sims

Posted By on October 6th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gwendolynsims/2021/10/05/epic-427000-parents-respond-to-national-school-board-association-labeling-them-domestic-terrorists-n1521936

Last week, PJ Media covered the hysterical and threatening letter written by National School Boards Association (NSBA) president Viola Garcia. In the letter sent to none other than President Joe Biden, Garcia accused America’s concerned parents of threats, intimidation, and even “hate crimes” rising to the level of “domestic terrorism” for having the gall to speak up at their local school board meetings. The NSBA also requested “federal assistance to stop threats and acts of violence against school board members, school officials, and teachers.”

This week, however, the leaders of almost two dozen parent organizations fired back with a scathing letter of their own—and it is epic. The letter, written on behalf of members of several parent organizations, made clear that the NSBA’s claims of  “hate” and “terrorism” were shameful:

NSBA cites a tiny number of minor incidents in order to insinuate that parents who are criticizing and protesting the decisions of school boards are engaging in, or may be engaging in, “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” NSBA even invokes the PATRIOT Act. The association of legitimate protest with terrorism and violence reveals both your contempt for parents and your unwillingness to understand and hear the sincere cries of parents on behalf of their children. To equate parents with terrorists dishonors the thousands of victims of actual terrorism around the world. Have you no shame?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

COVID-19 Is Not A ‘Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated’ James D. Agresti

Posted By on October 6th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/06/covid-19-is-not-a-pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated/

On Friday, Sept. 17, the CDC published a study that refutes the common claim that COVID-19 is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Coauthored by more than 50 MDs and Ph.D.’s, the study contains data on the vaccine status of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 at 21 U.S. hospitals across 18 states from March to August of 2021.

Contrary to assertions from the Associated Press and Anthony Fauci that fully vaccinated people comprise only 1% of those being hospitalized or killed by C-19, the study found that 13% of patients hospitalized with C-19 had been fully vaccinated. Moreover, that 13% figure is just the tip of the iceberg because the authors excluded from their study a large group of hospitalized C-19 patients, the bulk of whom were likely vaccinated.

About half of the omitted group and 27% of the C-19 patients in these hospitals were people with “immunocompromising conditions,” such as cancer, HIV, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, scleroderma, and Crohn’s disease. In the words of an FDA official and 18 other coauthors published in a medical journal, “immunocompromised individuals” were “prioritized for early immunization” and are “plausibly more likely to be offered and seek vaccination” because they are highly vulnerable to C-19.

On Sept. 21, Just Facts asked Dr. Wesley Self, the lead author of the study, to release the data on the vaccination status of the C-19 patients with immunocompromising conditions. He has not replied.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Liberal States Flunk The Education Equity Test

Posted By on October 6th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/06/liberal-states-flunk-the-education-equity-test/

Race-obsessed liberals talk a good game when it comes to “equity.” But they could learn a thing or two about delivering it from conservatives who focus on opportunity, not outcomes. That’s one conclusion you can safely draw from a state-by-state analysis of education equity by WalletHub.

In a report released in August, WalletHub looked at 12,927 school districts throughout the U.S. and ranked them comparing average household income and per-pupil spending at public schools in those districts. The bigger the difference, the worse the state scored on equity.

It’s not hard to see a pattern in the results. Of the 10 states with the least equitable school districts, seven are solidly blue: New York, California, Illinois, Oregon, Maine, New Jersey, and New Mexico. On the map below, the darker the color, the more equitable the schools.

Of the 10 with the best equity scores, all but one – Minnesota – are Republican-leaning states.