EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Death Spiral of Academia What’s happening is a naked threat against the diversification of knowledge, with a future that looks even worse. By Patrick J. Michaels

Posted By on May 4th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/03/the-death-spiral-of-academia/

On March 1, Eric Kaufmann published a remarkably detailed and comprehensive study of bias in academia, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.” Kaufmann’s writing is a product of California’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a small think tank set up to do research forbidden in today’s Academy. His research uncovering rampant leftist political bias in publication, employment, and promotion in the academy—and discrimination against anything right-of-center—qualifies as that kind of work.

In the academy, the free interchange of competing ideas creates knowledge through cooperation, disagreement, debate, and dissent. Kaufmann finds that the last three are severely suppressed and punished. This repression’s pervasiveness may be a death sentence for science, free inquiry, and the advancement of knowledge in our universities.

I am led to that dire conclusion because there doesn’t appear to be any way for universities to prevent it. No solution can arise from within the academy, as it self-selects lifetime faculty that are largely left-wing, making promotion of dissidents highly unlikely. Kaufmann demonstrates profoundly systemic discrimination by leftist faculty against their colleagues who disagree with them politically.

It is important to note that Kaufmann concentrates primarily (but not exclusively) on the social sciences and humanities, in part because that’s where most previous research applies. Data for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) are not as common. There is no a priori reason to believe, however, that these fields are unaffected by systemic biases influencing entire institutions. Sure, one can make the argument that math is apolitical, but one can’t say the same for the many branches of science that now have considerable and controversial policy implications. Even a casual reading of the “educated” literature on environmental science and climatology reveals profound politicization.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Democratic Party’s Stasi The Biden Justice Department is “the shield and the sword”—the motto of East Germany’s Stasi—for the Democratic Party, protecting its own corrupt ranks while terrorizing any and all detractors. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on May 4th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/03/the-democratic-partys-stasi/

While reading emails in his bedroom last Wednesday morning, Paul Hueper heard a loud commotion inside his house. Still clad in pajamas, the Alaska business owner ran to his dining room to see what was happening.

Hueper found himself face-to-face with several armed FBI agents, guns drawn, barking orders to him and his wife, Marilyn. The agents had kicked down the front door of their home in Homer, Alaska where they also operate a day spa and inn.

The pair were quickly handcuffed along with a few houseguests, including a teenager. Paul and Marilyn, who had attended Donald Trump’s speech in Washington, D.C. on January 6 and then walked to the Capitol, were interrogated for at least three hours by federal investigators.

“They said they had a search warrant but didn’t present it to us . . . they said it had something to do with the January 6 riot . . . as they called it,” Hueper told a local radio station after the April 28 raid. “They put us in different rooms to make sure we were telling the same story. They treated us like criminals.”

Marilyn was told she was a suspect in the case of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “stolen” laptop; a few hours into the inquisition, an agent finally showed Marilyn a photo of someone inside the Capitol on January 6 who looked like her. She told agents it wasn’t her and insisted the image had been photoshopped.

The whole incident was somewhat amusing to the Huepers. “We laughed a lot of the time because it was so ridiculous,” Marilyn said. “I could hear Paul laughing in the other room.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

What Culturally Aware Americans Should Read This Summer .By Glenn T. Stanton

Posted By on May 4th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/03/five-books-that-culturally-aware-citizens-should-read-this-summer/

EXCERPT:
 ‘Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters’

The transgender issue has taken the world by storm with head-spinning speed across the globe, sucking up nearly all the oxygen in the culture war room.

Few people are writing on this development with the kind of razor-sharp incisiveness as writer Abigail Shrier. In “Irreversible Damage,” Shrier details an extremely troubling and anti-human trend that has developed in the last few years with our girls — and it’s more than just about the trans issue.

Increasingly, girls suddenly don’t want to be girls anymore and important power centers are taking incredibly dangerous and ill-advised medical steps to help them actively destroy their physical and mental womanhood. It’s not even that they want to become boys, but that disturbing numbers of them want to be “nothing.”

Shrier explains these girls “want to be seen as ‘queer’… They flee womanhood like a house on fire, their minds fixed on escape, not on any particular destination.” So what’s happening here?

Shrier is highlighting the trans craze, not as merely a curious and trendy hop across the river from female to male or vice versa, but a wholly new kind of misogyny. The words of one leading therapist caring for gender dysphoric patients are emblematic of what Shrier has been witnessing. The young girls this therapist sees at her clinic are in great emotional pain.

“A common response that I get from female clients is something along these lines: ‘I don’t know exactly that I want to be a guy. I just know I don’t want to be a girl,’” she explains. Something very profound and troubling is happening to what it means to be one essential half of humanity. We would do well to get to the bottom of it and root it out.

“Irreversible Damage” is a chilling examination of this troubling development among our girls and a pointed challenge to the irresponsible ways far too many adults are uncritically responding to it.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Considering Obama’s Anti-Israel Shill for Israel Ambassador by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 4th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/05/biden-considering-obamas-anti-israel-shill-israel-daniel-greenfield/

Wexler, now the head of the far-left S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, was back in town. Speaking at the Herzliya Conference, he said that Israel should consider extending the ban on Jewish property rights to within the 1949 armistice lines. Anyone Biden picks as his ambassador to Israel is going to be bad. 

While some Jewish Biden donors thought that they would get the job, that’s not happening. It’s a State Dept post for leveraging pressure on Israel to make concessions to Islamic terrorists, take the blame for failed Biden policies in the region, and to do nothing about Iran.

The word is that the horse race has come down to Tom Nides and former Rep. Steve Wexler.

Here’s Tom.

While he was seen as a pro-Israel voice in the Obama administration, he also did work to thwart efforts by Congress to limit US support for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, as well as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Biden administration recently announced that it would restore funding for UNRWA that had been cut by the Trump administration.

That’s the nicer version of it.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Pushes Founders’ America to the Brink Will we pass the test or fall into the abyss of history?Gen. Michael Flynn

Posted By on May 4th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/biden-pushes-founders-america-brink-americans-must-gen-michael-flynn/

https://www.westernjournal.com/exclusive-gen-flynn-biden-pushes-founders-america-brink-americans-must-revisit-original-plan/

James Madison, hailed as the father of our Constitution, is probably turning over in his grave given the shredding of our God-given constitutional values and principles upon which we were founded.

Madison recognized that since concentrating power leads to tyranny, dividing government power was essential for the preservation of liberty. He will never be accused of being short-sighted about the threats government would pose to the people.

Madison and others set out deliberately to design a form of government that would limit abuses and withstand the test of time. America now faces that test, and the central question that has emerged is: Will we pass the test, or will we fall into the abyss of history as other nation-states have done?

Along with other framers of our nation’s Constitution, Madison argued for dividing federal power among the three branches of our government — legislative, executive, and judicial. These should be studied and clearly understood by every American schoolchild from an early age, but to our nation’s and our children’s detriment, they are not.

And what is even less understood is why the Founders adopted a structure that they knew would result in conflict among the branches. In truth, the constitutional structure was designed not to enhance the efficiency of the government but to impede the exercise of raw governmental power and to protect the liberty of the people.

Separation of powers is not a flaw in our system of government, as many demanding changes increasingly assert. It is purposely designed to protect our constitutional republic from the tyranny of a few — tyranny that today is knocking down the door of America.

Contrast the original design chosen by our framers with the intemperate statements of President Biden, who demands Congress yield to his will on matters such as gun control, under the threat that he will usurp the role of Congress by signing executive orders.

Consider the effect of the Democrats’ dangerous threat to pack the Supreme Court if it does not bow to President Biden’s broad claims to executive authority in violation of the separation of powers. Explain why 20 of our 50 Republican senators voted to confirm Merrick Garland as attorney general — under whose leadership the Department of Justice just conducted an early-morning raid on the law office and apartment of President Trump’s former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mexico City Metro System Overpass Collapses, Killing at Least 20 People The accident happened on the metro system’s line 12

Posted By on May 4th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mexico-city-metro-system-overpass-collapses-killing-at-least-13-people-11620106656?mod=world_minor_pos1

MEXICO CITY—An elevated section of the Mexico City metro system collapsed and sent a subway car plunging toward a busy boulevard late Monday, killing at least 20 people and injuring about 70, officials said.

A crane was working to hold up one subway car left dangling on the collapsed section so that emergency workers could enter to check the car to see if anyone was still trapped. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said. She said 49 of the injured were hospitalized and seven were in serious condition and undergoing surgery.

Ms. Sheinbaum said a motorist had been pulled alive from a car that was trapped on the roadway below. Dozens of rescuers continued searching through wreckage from the collapsed, preformed concrete structure.

“There are unfortunately children among the dead,” Ms. Sheinbaum said, without specifying how many.

The overpass was more than 16 feet above the road in the southside borough of Tlahuac, but the train ran above a concrete median strip, which apparently lessened the casualties among motorists on the road below.

“A support beam gave way,” Ms. Sheinbaum said, adding that the beam collapsed just as the train passed over it.

Rescue efforts were briefly interrupted at midnight because the partially dangling train was very weak.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

I Grieve for My Native India Being an immigrant once meant leaving your country of birth behind. No longer.by Tunku Varadarajan

Posted By on May 4th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-grieve-for-my-native-india-11620078871?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

I’m an immigrant, happy and assimilated. I pay closer attention to America than I do to other parts of the world. This isn’t only because I live here. Settling in a country calls for integration that is meticulous, not just heartfelt. That doesn’t mean that I wall myself off from the world. Like many immigrants, I also pay near-obsessive attention to the land of my birth.

Previous immigrant generations needed to erase their old selves to become American. You were more American by being less Italian, or by letting the Greek or Serb in you dwindle. But America now demands less. I’ve never felt pressed to forget India, where I was born. Even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t be able, because of technology. An immigrant now can never let go of the country of his birth.

These days have been suffused with India. I’ve spent my waking hours reading and watching news, talking to people by telephone, taking in tweets and Facebook posts, all of which describe the enormity of India’s pandemic collapse. A decade ago, I spoke to Liberian immigrants who followed from afar that country’s battle with Ebola, and also to people from Haiti as they wrestled with the earthquake’s aftermath. They spoke to me of their impotence (at being unable to help), their guilt (being in America while relatives perished from precisely the sort of fate the immigrant moved here to avoid), and their gut-churning sense of distance from loved ones who’d been sickened or buried under rubble in Port-au-Prince.

I’m in close touch with my family. I speak daily to my mother, who is isolating at home in Delhi, and to my sister, who’s raising her Zoom-schooled sons in that city and doing her job as an elementary-school teacher. My brother works as an editor, putting out a publication whose reporters go out, masked and tireless, writing up the grim news they see. A part of that news was the death of his own wife’s father.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Top Ten Most Racist Colleges and Universities: #7 University of Minnesota Brainwashing students to view themselves as “white supremacists.”

Posted By on May 4th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-7-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#7: University of Minnesota

In an effort to “deconstruct and decentralize whiteness,” the University of Minnesota’s Center for Practice Transformation and School of Social Work recently presented a “12-step program” to make white students aware of their innate “white supremacy.”  This allegedly “anti-racist” course is the ultimate apotheosis of racism, telling whites that as a sole result of their skin color they endorse and promote racist beliefs and policies. 

The course is presented in the form of an online “webinar” titled “Recovery from White Conditioning.” The official program description explains that “The Model of Recovery from White Conditioning, a derivative work based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, is rooted in love and accountability. It involves white people, working in our community to transform violent legacies of whiteness into healthier, white, anti-racist community…” The AA community has notably rejected this usurpation of their 12-step format for an “anti-racist” crusade.

The webinar is led by therapist and clinical supervisor Cristina Combs, a white woman who states that the program “is designed for white people to challenge and support each other to accept our responsibility for dismantling white supremacy, as it lives in us and around us.”

This is the very definition of racism—telling a group of white people that solely because of the color of their skin, white supremacy “lives in us.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Democracies Abetted Iran’s Election to a U.N. Women’s Rights Post By Jimmy Quinn

Posted By on May 4th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democracies-abetted-irans-election-to-a-u-n-womens-rights-post/?utm_source=

The election of Iran, China, and other countries with delinquent human-rights records to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women last month kicked off an international whodunnit.

According to the NGO U.N. Watch, at least five Western democracies eligible to vote on commission membership would have needed to support Tehran’s bid. Meanwhile, the U.S. government called the development “troubling” but declined to issue a sharper condemnation.

Human-rights advocates blame this ambiguous stance on the Biden administration’s efforts to reenter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, as ongoing talks in Vienna get closer to producing an agreement to jumpstart the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “The Biden administration has joined Canada and Europe in a most disciplined reticence to criticize the Islamic Republic’s mounting repression, in the hope that the lack of scrutiny will be seen by the regime as another concession to curb its nuclear program,” said Marian Memarsadeghi, a senior fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute.

The problems with Tehran’s participation in any international entity involving women’s equality should be self-evident. At a Monday morning U.N. Watch press conference that focused on Iran’s election to the commission, panelists, including Memarsadeghi and Shaparak Shajarizadeh, an activist who was jailed twice and assaulted for speaking out against Iran’s mandatory hijab law, pointed to Iran’s manifest hostility to women, including the fact that the age of marriage for girls is 13 and that domestic violence and marital rape are not criminally punishable. (Read more on this from Isaac Schorr.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When Can We Expect That Apology From ‘Biden Republicans’?

Posted By on May 4th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/04/when-can-we-expect-that-apology-from-biden-republicans/

In the run-up to the 2020 elections, we were bombarded with stories about Republicans who were not only opposed to Donald Trump’s reelection but were actively campaigning on behalf of Joe Biden.

These Republicans didn’t just express disdain for Trump, they sang Biden’s praises, calling him a uniter, a reasonable centrist, an honest man, someone who’d reach across the aisle “to get things done.” Now, after Biden’s first 100 days in office, we can see how well those promises have held up.

Our judgment in three words: Not. At. All.

Biden is governing as the most leftist president in history. He has shunned Republicans at every turn. He’s attacked the U.S. as racist. He’s been caught in flagrant lies. And so on.

So let’s see what exactly those “Republicans for Biden” were promising that a vote or Biden would produce. And let’s compare those with what the news tells us is happening now.

“I’m sure there are Republicans and independents who couldn’t imagine crossing over to support a Democrat. They fear Joe may turn sharp left and leave them behind. I don’t believe that because I know the measure of the man. It’s reasonable, faithful, respectful.” — John Kasich