EDUCATION Comments turned off

Vandana Shiva Is A Shameful Choice For University Lecturer Henry I. Miller and Drew L. Kershen

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/01/13/vandana-shiva-is-a-shameful-choice-for-university-lecturer/

The “Social Justice Warrior Handbook,” which satirizes people who promote liberal, multicultural, anti-capitalist, anti-globalization, and politically correct views, could have had Indian activist and mountebank Vandana Shiva on the cover. She opposes the tools and practices of modern agriculture and science — and well, modernity in general — and advocates regressive policies that cause widespread malnourishment, famine, and death to the very people she claims to champion. And she’s no friend of the environment, either.

It’s particularly ironic, then, that at the end of this month, two esteemed California universities — Stanford and the University of California, Santa Cruz — have invited Shiva to present prestigious lectures. That’s hardly surprising, given the extremist, “progressive” leanings of those institutions, but it is disturbing, nevertheless. Although she gets good press from left-wing and radical environmental publications, and naïve undergraduates dote on her, Shiva is widely considered by the scientific community to be unbalanced (in both senses of the word) for advocating unsound, harmful policies and promulgating disproven theories about agriculture.     

As science writer Jon Entine and Monsanto science communicator Dr. Cami Ryan discussed, many of Shiva’s hobby horses have proven to be exceedingly lame. Some prominent examples:

The “Green Revolution.” The new varieties and practices of the Green Revolution provided greater food security to hundreds of millions of people in developing countries on much of the planet; it made available high-yielding varieties of wheat and also new agronomic and management practices that transformed the ability of Mexico, India, Pakistan, China, and parts of South America to feed their populations. From 1950 to 1992, the world’s grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.7 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland — an extraordinary increase in yield per acre of more than 150%.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Top UK Jewish Group Issues ‘Ten Pledges’ Labour Party Must Take to Regain Trust of British Jews by Benjamin Kerstein

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/01/12/top-uk-jewish-group-issues-ten-pledges-labour-party-must-take-to-regain-trust-of-british-jews/

Britain’s leading Jewish group announced on Sunday that it was issuing “Ten Pledges” the UK Labour party must take if it is to regain the trust of the country’s Jewish community.

Labour, which was resoundingly defeated in the December 2019 general election, has been wracked by antisemitism scandals since 2015, when the party’s far-left — often violently hostile toward Israel — took control of it.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey Muscles-In on the Israel-Greece-Cyprus EastMed Gas Pipeline Deal by Soeren Kern

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15424/eastmed-pipeline-conflict-turkey

The bilateral agreement between Turkey and Libya — which establishes a new Turkey-Libya economic zone that the EastMed pipeline would now have to cross — appears aimed at giving Turkey more leverage over the project.

“The recent Turkey-Libya Memorandum of Understanding on the delimitation of maritime jurisdictions in the Mediterranean Sea infringes upon the sovereign rights of third States and does not comply with the Law of the Sea and cannot produce any legal consequences for third States.” — Charles Michel, President of the European Council, Consilium.Europea.eu, January 9, 2020

In May 2019, Turkey announced that it would begin drilling for gas in waters claimed by Cyprus…. In October 2019, Turkey defied the European Union by sending another drilling ship, the Yavuz, to operate inside waters claimed by Cyprus. Cyprus accused Turkey of a “severe escalation” of violations of its sovereign rights.

Israel, Greece and Cyprus have signed an agreement for a pipeline project to ship natural gas from the Eastern Mediterranean region to Europe. The deal comes amid increasing tensions with Turkey as Ankara seeks to expand its claims over gas-rich areas of the Mediterranean Sea.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, along with their energy ministers, signed the so-called EastMed pipeline deal in Athens on January 2.

The 6-billion-euro ($6.6 billion) project envisages the construction of a 1,900-kilometer (1,180-mile) undersea pipeline that would carry up to 20 billion cubic meters of gas a year from Israeli and Cypriot waters to Crete and then on to the Greek mainland. From there, the gas would be transported to Italy and other countries in southeastern Europe.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran-US: Advantage Trump by Alain Destexhe

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15438/iran-advantage-trump

Europe, too, will have to draw a few conclusions. The European attempt, initiated by France, Germany and the United Kingdom, to circumvent American sanctions on Iran should cease.

In reality, the Iranian regime has just lost a round in its long conflict with the United States. Such air disasters have a lasting effect on people’s minds. The Iranian regime is emerging from this crisis weaker and more isolated than ever before. Trump wins for now.

Iran has emerged completely discredited from the recent phase of conflict with the United States and US President Donald J. Trump appears, for the time being, to be the big winner.

The Iranian regime is proving to be totally incompetent: incapable of managing the funeral of the so-called “martyr” Qassem Soleimani, which resulted in the deaths of more than 50 people, but capable of shooting down “as a result of human error” a commercial flight with 82 of its own nationals on board and killing a total of 176 passengers and crew members. This is the same regime that now announces the resumption of its nuclear weapons program. The bomb could be launched “by mistake,” of course, at Israel – or dropped on a neighboring country, such as Sunni states in the Gulf, or even on Iran itself.

The Iranian people know that the plane was shot down by their own government. There are anti-regime protests across Iran. There is anger over the incompetence and the lies of the last few days. The regime will come out of it weakened. After the death of Soleimani, images of mass rallies may have given the impression of a popular rally against the United States, but it has long been known that such impressions can be misleading.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Remembering the Farming Way Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/12/remembering-the-farming-way/

We need to pause sometimes and remember who these dinosaurs were and what they have contributed. For a while longer, a few are still with us, a sort of collective keyhole through which we can look back into a now unremembered American past, whose codes and mores we simply abandoned—and to our great and present loss.

Almost all the pragmatic agricultural wisdom that my grandparents taught me has long ago been superseded by technology. I don’t anymore calibrate, as I once did when farming in the 1980s, the trajectory of an incoming late summer storm by watching the patterns of nesting birds, or the shifting directions and feel of the wind, or the calendar date or the phases of the moon. Instead, I go online and consult radar photos of storms far out at sea. Meteorology is mostly an exact science now.

Even the agrarian’s socio-scientific arts of observation that I learned from my family are seldom employed in my farming anymore. Back in the day, when a local farmer’s wife died, I was told things like, “Elmer will go pretty soon, too. His color isn’t good and he’s not used to living without her”—and tragically the neighbor usually died within months. Now I guess I would ask Elmer whether his blood tests came back OK, and the sort of blood pressure medicine he takes. I don’t think we believe that superficial facial color supersedes lab work. Farmers did because in an age of limited technology they saw people as plants, and knew that the look and color of a tree or vine—in comparison to others in the orchard or vineyard—was a sign of their viability.

I grew up with an entire local network of clubs and get-togethers, and ferried my grandparents to periodic meetings of the Walnut Improvement Club, Eastern Star, the Odd Fellows, Masons, the Grange, and Sun-Maid growers. They exchanged gossip, of course, but also vital folk and empirical information on irrigation, fertilizers, and machines.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Parents on both the Left and the Right are battling public schools By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/parents_on_both_the_left_and_the_right_are_battling_public_schools.html

America is awash in kind, caring teachers, who want their students to acquire real skills and knowledge. Collectively, though, public schools too often are rigid bureaucracies that ignore individual children. Conservative parents would add that public schools push a hard Left agenda on students captive in their classrooms.

Some parents are starting to fight back. One set of parents, frustrated by public schools’ inflexibility when dealing with handicapped students, is fighting fire with fire by forming a union:

Keri Rodrigues and Alma Marquez said they were so appalled by the low standards of America’s public school teachers unions, they formed the National Parents Union (NPU), so families could have a greater say in their children’s education.

Rodrigues, a mother of three from Boston, and Marquez, a mother of one from Los Angeles, are no strangers to public-sector unions. Rodrigues worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), while Marquez grew up in a union household and worked for Green Dot Public Schools — a public charter organization.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Useful Idiots on the Right: The Never Trumpers By Richard Moss

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/useful_idiots_on_the_right_nevertrumpers_.html

One could perhaps have excused them their earlier indiscretions of November 2016.  He was, after all, an unknown quantity, an outsider of questionable conservative pedigree.  Indeed, Donald Trump had been a fairly typical New York liberal Democrat for much of his life.  And he had led a less than stellar moral life.  And so the pile-on at the time by National Review and others could perhaps have been forgiven, although not really, when one considered the alternative.  As I had written at the time:

Do we not grow weary of the sanctimonious ones?  The Never Trumpers that endlessly hector and scold, and hold themselves up as paragons of moral virtue? They display their good taste by showing contempt for Trump and his supporters.  Some of them claim they will vote down ballot, skipping the Presidential slot, or vote for Evan what’s his name (McMullin).  Some will write in a candidate or go Libertarian, neither of who will have any chance of winning.  Other pious Republicans will even cast their vote for Hillary.

But how much more compelling is the argument today, three years later, in light of the horrendous behavior of the Left, their naked will-to-power and demonic “rule or ruin” ethos?  And what of Trump, his incredible and unexpected victory in 2016, and then his very favorable performance as president and conservative standard-bearer?  What accounts for the odd and self-immolating behavior of the Never Trump crowd, most if not all of them former card-carrying members of the right?

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iranian People Vs. The Mullahs “Death to liars!” – “Death to the dictator!” Joseph Klein

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/protests-erupt-again-iran-joseph-klein/

After the Iranian regime first denied and then finally admitted that it had shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane killing all 176 people aboard, protests broke out against the government in Tehran as well as in other Iranian cities. As many as tens of thousands of Iranian people are said to be involved. Protesters are risking their lives denouncing the government, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.

“Khamenei is a murderer!” some protesters exclaimed. Others shouted slogans such as “Death to liars!”, “Death to the dictator!”, and “You have no shame!” Whatever national unity there was in the immediate aftermath of the American killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimani is now gone. Indeed, protesters were seen ripping up pictures of Soleimani. Even some hardline conservatives in Iran, who generally support the regime, were critical of how the government had handled the downing of the plane.

Riot police, plainclothes security men, and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have been out in full force, trying to keep things under control. Police even arrested the British ambassador to Iran, Rob Macaire, who was attending a vigil for the victims. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described Ambassador Macaire as “an unknown foreigner in an illegal gathering” before confirming the ambassador’s identity and allowing him to be freed. The United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab denounced the arrest of Ambassador Macaire as “a flagrant violation of international law.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Obama vs. Bernie Two socialists. One party. Only one can survive. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/obama-vs-bernie-daniel-greenfield/

In November, Barack Obama paid a call on George Soros. After maintaining a low profile since leaving office, the former chosen one showed up at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington D.C. where the Democracy Alliance was having its annual conclave to decide how to destroy the United States.

After a long Friday afternoon of hearing from assorted minions, members of the Democracy Alliance, who had contributed at least $200,000 to be part of Soros’ real-life SPECTRE alliance, minus the white cat, trooped into the Grand Ballroom for a “fireside chat” before a private dinner with Valerie Jarrett.

And Obama had a simple message for the mandarins in the Mandarin Oriental who had spent fortunes to elect lefties and transform the country. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it,” he told his radical audience. And warned that the Democrat agenda should not be driven by “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party.”

Soros and the Democracy Alliance’s activist wing elected Obama to implement a radical agenda. Now he was warning his old backers that they were in danger of backing agendas that were just too radical.

The outreach was striking because Obama had tried to keep his distance from George Soros. In an interview, Soros had complained about being frozen out by Obama. “He made one phone call thanking me for my support, which was meant to last for five minutes,” the leftist billionaire whined.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The New Racism More bizarre – and toxic – ideas from the Left about inclusion and diversity. Walter Williams

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/new-racism-walter-williams/

A voter may dislike a black, homosexual or female candidate, but it’s not likely that he would openly admit it. However, diversity-crazed leftist/progressive Democrats have openly condemned the physical characteristics of some of their 2020 presidential candidates. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are leading the polls despite the fact that they have been condemned as old white men. While Pete Buttigieg is homosexual, something that pleases diversity crazies, he is also a white man, young and religious. With Kamala Harris’ departure from the race, the Democratic field has lost one of its persons of color. Another, Senator Cory Booker, stands at 2% in the polls; his days are numbered. That means the only Democratic candidates polling high are those condemned as old white people — two men and one woman, Elizabeth Warren.

LaTosha Brown, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said she was initially eager for Joe Biden to enter the race but now has second thoughts. Brown said: “I’m over white men running the country. I don’t know if him [sic] getting in changes the field. He has name recognition, but his strength is also his weakness.” Former presidential candidate Howard Dean lamented, “If we have two old white guys at the top of this ticket, we will lose.” The newest entry into the presidential sweepstakes, Michael Bloomberg, had to apologize for what some see as his diversity insensitivity, namely that of calling fellow presidential candidate Cory Booker “well-spoken” in a TV interview. The New Jersey senator said he was “taken aback” by what he saw as Bloomberg’s racist “trope.”

Michael Moore gave us his racist warning: “Two-thirds of all white guys voted for Trump. That means anytime you see three white guys walking at you, down the street toward you, two of them voted for Trump. You need to move over to the other sidewalk because these are not good people that are walking toward you. You should be afraid of them.”