The World as I See It!

By Rich Kozlovich 

One thing is clear, no President has ever moved faster, more definitively, or more successfully in his first week than has Trump, and has the entire left on their heels clueless what to do, other than claim everything he's doing is illegal and suing him.  That's been tried before, and that got him the Presidency.  As Kurt Schlichter says, Trump’s Winning Streak Is Totally Discombobulating The Democrats, saying:

Donald Trump has not only gotten inside their OODA Loop – observe, orient, decide, and act – but he’s taking their loop and is running around with it like one of those old-timey kids rolling a hoop with a stick. This is amazing. This is glorious. Summon a surgeon – it’s been a little over a week and you’re supposed to call the doctor after just four hours.......

Carole Hornsby Haynes asks if Trump knows what he's doing by going to war with the gender identity crowd saying:

Trump’s ban has triggered a meltdown from liberals, proclaiming the end of “our democracy” (we have a constitutional republic, not a democracy).  The real reason for their hissy fits is that they know they have lost control and have no idea how to regain it. There is more to the liberal rage.  The ban on gender ideology will likely collapse the vast financial empire spawned by the transgender movement in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical “profession.”

Have you've ever wondered how this became such a big thing?  Well.... she follows the money making it clear these vermin are willing to destroy an untold number of children's lives for profit.   What's worse, they had the support of the Merritt Garland's Department of Justice  which was:

...... fiercely determined to support the surgical and chemical mutilation of children in the name of “gender affirming care.” Woe betide any who got in their way, like Dr. Eithan Haim, an honest man who had the misfortune to do part of his residency at Houston’s Texas Children’s Hospital.  ...............This enraged the DOJ, who immediately charged Haim with violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) by releasing information about children still being abused by the hospital. 

It’s legal to disclose protected information to stop serious medical misconduct, but that was of no concern to the DOJ. It was quickly discovered that the information Haim provided fully redacted the names and other identifying information of the children. There was no way to know who the children or their parents were. He didn’t violate HIPAA. That didn’t matter to the DOJ...............Sane Americans would consider exposing physicians and others doing permanent harm to mentally confused kids a good and necessary thing, but not the Garland DOJ. As Americans have come to expect, there were further irregularities in the DOJ’s lunatic pursuit of Dr. Haim........

I so often hear the left declare we have to embrace some scheme or other because "it's for the children".  Hogwash, mostly what they promote is "to the children", and it's destroying civilization, and that's their goal.  John M. Grondelski's article, Democrats for Infanticide,  

Big Abortion plays word games because it knows that if the unvarnished truth was spoken, Americans would be revulsed by the whole sordid business.  The U.S. Senate took up S.6, the “Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act.” The vote was 52-47, a majority but not the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster. So, the bill failed.

The Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act required that if a baby is born alive during a third-trimester abortion (i.e., in months 6-9 of pregnancy), that baby should be provided medical care and allowed to live. Every Senate Democrat said “no.”

Abortion, especially in states that have “codified” Roe, allow third trimester abortions for any reason. Don’t let the propagandists say they are “rare” and sought only in medical distress. They occur and often occur for the same reasons abortions are procured at other stages of pregnancy: because the child interferes with the mother’s social or economic condition, not her life or the result of criminal assault.

 If a child is born alive it's an American citizen with Constitutionally "guaranteed" protection for life, liberty, pursuit of happiness...unless these vile Democrats and murdering leftist abortionist don't like that idea.  When they murder these live births someone needs to make it a criminal case, and drive it all the way to SCOTUS. 

This is a war, and the backbone of the left has been the media, but that's changing, and conservative publishing is making a comeback, and while this deals with books, that's true over the broad range of published material, especially the media, which is going through a metamorphosis from the old myrmidons of the left to new champions of "truth, justice, and the American way", just like Superman, at least the Superman of the 50's.  

The White House is taking control of the Press Briefing Room making changes that will be detrimental to the Pravda media now having received more than 7000 applications for "new media" seats.  Things are going to change. 

Do you think lawfare is done?  Think again, and it will take a massive effort by Trump's new Department of Justice to bring these miscreants under control, and hopefully some of them to prison.   

 Mike McDaniel asks, Will California succeed in secession?   He goes on to say say California is so delusional they think they can go it alone.  He then goes on to show just how stupid these nitwits are.  Well, I have an idea, how about this?  Let them secede, and take Oregon and Washington with them.  Then declare war on them, conquer them, turn them into territories with no Congressional representation, or the right to vote, and a Territorial Governor appointed by the President enforcing martial law.  Sounds like a winner to me, waddayathink?

Amy Wax and her lawsuit against Penn is back in the news, and Mike McDaniel says Penn's antisemitism is going to cost them.  I've followed and posted pieces about this from the beginning, and it was clear from the beginning Amy Wax was not a person to the trifled with. She won't give up, and she won't compromise, and Penn is in my opinion, like most of the big name universities, filled with academic sewer trout.  Here's my article on this, Amy Wax Is the Rock in the Current!

Much of this antisemitism is the result of so many Muslim students causing problems at these universities, and the money being thrown at the universities by rich Muslim nations.  Trump isn't going to allow this as Dershowitz says, "it's good to see Trump acting on these antisemites abusing their visas....they're not "entitled" to be here", and they have no "right" to be here.  

As for the deportation of illegal aliens destroying our economy, because there'll be no one to pick the berries, I gotta ask....Do they really believe that?  Well, that's an old failed argument, after all, if slaves were freed who would pick the cotton? 

Finally, France is going to send troops to Greenland, which is interesting since the French keep throwing out their governments on a monthly basis, and they've just been kicked out of all their former African colonies, so now they're going to declare war on the United States? And Denmark is going to defend against America with dog sleds.  Laughing rolling on the ground emoji here.

Amy Wax Is the Rock in the Current!

Heterodoxy isn't for the faint of heart

By Rich Kozlovich / Tags:  

For years I've stated the two groups mostly considered to be leaders are Ph.D.'s and military officers.  But the fact is both got to the top by being part of the go along to get along crowd, and to the vast majority of them rowing against the tide, or being a rock in the current is totally alien to their thinking, or their character.  But there are exceptions, and they pay a price.  I've added her to the John Boyd Legion of Honor.

In 2019 I posted a link to this article, In Defense of Penn Law Professor Amy Wax, and to my surprise I got thousands of hits on this piece, saying:

The hard left doesn’t want to nominate another white male for president in 2020, or in the words of Politico, “a candidate that looks like Bernie or Joe.” In fact, according to most liberals, police departments would be better off with more nonwhites and fewer whites, as would fire departments, school districts, small businesses, Hollywood,Major League Baseball, U.S. Congress, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, to name a few places.

Whether this is ultimately true is debatable. What’s not is the fact that it’s perfectly okay to call for more diversity in America -- to publicly state things would be better off with more nonwhites and less whites.    

Then back in 2022 this article appeared, Edunomics, which I thought was a great article with a really dumb title, discussing how academia has been totally corrupted with leftist dogma totally destroying free speech.  Amy Wax is at the heart of that discussion saying:

The law school currently has her under review with the hope, it would appear, of taking away her tenure and then her job. Why is this occurring? Dr. Wax is doing what lawyers are taught to do: ask simple but hard questions, relying on facts that result in hard truths and more difficult questions. Dr. Wax has had the audacity to ask if bourgeois culture, which includes hard work, studiousness, delayed gratification, work, marriage, and having children in, rather than out of wedlock might be a good thing. 

She has questioned if it is problematic that most black students in the Penn law school are at the bottom of their classes. She has had the nerve to suggest that some cultures might be superior to others. For asking these impertinent questions, the dean of the law school has her under review.  Apparently, the principle of freedom of expression at Penn is good for me but not for thee. Wax has apparently crossed a “line,” transgressed “appropriate expression,” is a “racist” and a “white supremacist,” and she has yet to receive a “comprehensive and complete statement of all the charges lodged against her.” One can only describe the situation as Kafkaesque. 

I published that piece and tagged these articles thinking her plight wouldn't be much of an issue down the road.  That was a serious error in judgement, and since I had so many hits on the first piece, I should have known better! 

Here we are again, The Amy Wax Inflection Point for 'Elite' Higher Education, saying:

Higher education has been a cesspool of anti-Americanism, censorious leftism and cultural radicalism for longer than I have been alive. The moral rot is, and always has been, particularly acute at Ivy League or otherwise putatively "elite" institutions. The pro-Hamas "protests" that have rocked university campuses since Oct. 7 are indicative.....

......there was the triumvirate of "elite" university presidents who testified before Congress last December that the permissibility of campus calls for the genocide of the Jewish people "depends on the context."......But perhaps the single biggest disgrace to rock academia in recent years has been the University of Pennsylvania's years long crusade against its own tenured law professor, Amy Wax.

It appears it's perfectly acceptable to promote the genocide of Jews in Academia, but to declare mass immigration and multiculturalism is destructive to America and state factually that "black students rarely finish in the top half of graduating law school classes" is totally unacceptable.  Facts and history are anathema to leftists.   

When you consider that in one New York university it's been claimed about 90% of the student freshmen needed remedial reading classes, it's clear questions need to be raised.   How does someone graduate from high school and be incapable of reading?  That alone justifies questioning a lot about what's going on in education in America, including academia, and make no mistake, culture is king, and if that's true, and it was when Herodotus said it 2500 years ago, and it's still true today, then the culture that molded these kid's performance, activity, and attitude, must also be brought into question.

There's one thing abundantly clear, America's schools are failing to teach students fundamental skills.  They can't read, they can't write, they can't work basic math.  Then it must also be clear no matter how much money we're told to keep throwing at the teachers - teachers are failing to do their jobs.  Ergo-----they're overpaid, underworked and need to be fired, starting at the administration level!   If kids never learn to read why in the world would we think they're learning how to think? The socialist goal of making sure the apple falls as far away from the tree as possible is now a leftist success story - students are now too stupid to resist any stupidity the leftists promote. 

In Chicago teachers are being told to pass migrant children irrespective of their performance.  That's an outrageous abuse of these children.  If they can't do the basics how are they be expected to succeed in society?  Turn to crime?  That's not a long term success story.  

Here's what's acceptable to this corrupt cabal of so-called educators these days:

• Democrats are intentionally dumbing down the kids - For decades, most of the media and other Democrats have lied to the public, insisting that they, and not Republicans, care about our children… but their actions and policies show that this propaganda is clearly not true. They only care about money and power, a fact clearly seen when you look at the results in the public education sector. According to a report from US News, the Los Angeles school district spends over $18,000 per student; yet after thirteen years of schooling, only 46% of high school students could read at grade level, and a measly 18% were at grade level in math......
  
• Arizona State University prof claims current abortion policies could lead to forced breeding camps and cannibalism - Arizona State University professor of English Jennifer Irish recently used a school workshop called “A Speculative Future for Reproductive Rights” to express her concern that the country’s current abortion policies could somehow lead to “forced breeding camps” and “cannibalism,” according to a story in The College Fix.  Our abortion policies will lead to cannibalism?! WTH?! Ms. Irish, is it not enough to kill your kids, do you want to eat them, too? English professor Irish, (not to be confused with Irish professor English) stated: “So much of our reality points toward those futures.” Say again. Like what, precisely?......
•  Major Medical School Claims Timeliness, Individualism, And Professionalism Are Part Of White Supremacy  Radical leftism is a disease that, if left unchecked, will destroy our medical system.   Imagine a medical school that believes being on time, acting professionally, and displaying individualism is a display of white supremacy. Duke Medical School claims it is "White supremacy culture" to expect people of color to be on time in a strategic plan for creating an "Anti-Racist Workforce.".....
• The Double Standard on Campus Speech -  After weeks in which college students at campuses from Columbia to Harvard to UCLA celebrated murders and rapes, waved the flags of Islamic terrorist organizations and assaulted Jewish people, one student has finally been held accountable........While no amount of calls for the destruction of America or assaults on Jewish students led to any outrage in the media or actual consequences.....Knocking a Jewish female UCLA student unconscious didn’t do it. Barring Jewish students from being able to go to their classes didn’t do it. Assaulting staff members and faculty at universities didn’t do it. But call a fat black female activist Lizzo” and it’s an instant nationwide outrage.......

But for Amy Wax who calls into "question the academic ability of Black students" question the culture they represent, and invite Jared Taylor to speak in her classroom, who is being classified as a "white supremacist" saying, .... the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration, is unacceptable, and she must be punished.  

Whether you agree with his views or not, that's not the issue.  If academia can spew out all kinds of vile speech about Jews, whites, Christians, and traditional values in America, why should this be prohibited?  Why should she be punished and none of these other academics vile views be found acceptable?  Well, it's simple.  Statistics are racist, and so for "two and a half years, a period spanning successive Penn Law deanships, Wax has been subject to a probe into her alleged wrongthink and misdeeds.", which as "made Penn a pariah among academic freedom advocates."

The judgment finally came this week: Penn Law suspended Wax for a year, reduced her pay for that year by 50%, permanently stripped her of her endowed chair and summer pay, and publicly reprimanded her. Interestingly.......Penn Law had previously offered Wax a settlement that would have lessened her penalty on the condition that she not "disparage the University," not sue Penn and not publicly disclose the exculpatory evidence she had presented during the years long probe. Translation: Shut your mouth and this problem will go away quickly.

Two things are clear, Amy Wax is one tough cookie, and I've no doubt there will be an lawsuit in the near future, and I've no doubt she will win, and there will be another article about this here in P&D.  And secondly, universities are vile breeding grounds for breeding evil: "If you send your child to college, you are playing Russian Roulette with his or her values."

Update 11:15 AM:  This College Just Got an Anonymous $100 Million for Defending Free Speech. - A whopping $100 million donation from an anonymous benefactor found its way into the coffers of the University of Chicago this week, intended to help the university bolster free speech on campus following a case in which a student claims an academic tried to get him expelled over controversial remarks..........The gift comes after a high-profile case involving student Daniel Schmidt, who stated last year that a professor at the University of Chicago was trying to get him expelled for highlighting an anti-white class called “the problem of whiteness.” The professor claimed the student, who has tens of thousands of social media followers, was bullying her. Earlier this week, the president of the university said Schmidt was free to talk about controversial topics like race and IQ, as Schmidt has previously claimed low IQs are the reason  "black people are murdering and mugging my classmates."

Update 9/29/24:   Penn offered Amy Wax $50K to be quiet - ANALYSIS: After years of investigating Wax and impugning her character, the university wanted her to be quiet. The University of Pennsylvania offered Professor Amy Wax $50,000 and reduced penalties if she would promise not to publicly criticize it ahead of tougher sanctions. Wax is a conservative law professor who has faced years of investigations and criticism from university leaders and activists because of her comments on immigration, race, and IQ. The university announced earlier this week Wax will be suspended next year and only receive half of her salary during that time.............“This case is about free expression,” Wax told the Free Beacon. “Penn wanted absolute silence. The big question is: Why do they want to hide what they’re doing?”.............

Penn Professor Amy Wax Punished for ‘Inconvenient Facts’-  The beginning of the end of law professor Amy Wax’s career came on August 9, 2017. That’s when Wax and another law professor, Larry Alexander, published an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer declaring that “all cultures are not equal.”.........The thesis of the 827-word piece was that some people—“working-class whites” with “antisocial habits”; “inner-city blacks” with their “anti-‘acting white’ rap culture”; and Hispanic immigrants who resist assimilation—are at a profound disadvantage in the game of life. This, they argued, is why we should all embrace a 1950s-style “bourgeois culture” that smooths over differences, paving the way for greater national cohesiveness.......

Amy Wax Is Academic Freedom’s Canary in the Coal Mine - Yesterday, (9/24/24) the University of Pennsylvania completed its years-long end run around academic freedom to punish law professor Amy Wax...........Penn is a private school that nonetheless makes First Amendment-like promises to respect its students’ and faculty members’ right to free expression. Whether on a contractual or moral basis, Penn should have kept those promises. Instead, it abandoned principle for the sake of expediency.  While it remains to be seen whether Wax will keep her promise to sue Penn if she’s punished, I told The New York Times yesterday that the university’s decision “should send a chill down the spine of every faculty member, not just at Penn but at every private institution around the country.”......

Edunomics

“Most public universities have become ancillary components of the federal government. This explains, in part, the complete takeover and increasing bureaucratization of the modern research university, public or private.” ~ Daniel Asia

  Daniel Asia – October 1, 2022 @ American Institute for Economic Research

The economics of higher education is fraught, to say the least. Tuition has been rising over the last 20 years at an astonishing rate. Most of this increase funds a now-bloated administrative class via student loans. And if President Biden gets his way, these student loans will be forgiven. The tragedy is that the average taxpayer, who might not have gone to college at all, and who pays her bills and loans in a timely manner, will be the one forced to pay the bill. 

Much of the rest of the money sent off to American colleges and universities comes by way of federal research money for the sciences. Most public universities have thus become ancillary components of the federal government. This explains, in part, the complete takeover and increasing bureaucratization of the modern research university, public or private. It may also help explain the retreat from free speech into the land of wokeness, critical race theory, and intersectionality, as these all align with the progressive politics of the federal bureaucracy and of the donor class. At the moment, there is no financial incentive to reform higher education. Or is there?

Let us look at one case that involved no financial implications per se. This is the famous “water buffalo” incident that took place at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993. A freshman student was working on a paper and experiencing writer’s block. His concentration was further interrupted by noise outside his dormitory window by a group of young co-eds. He proceeded to shout out to them something to the effect of “shut up you water buffalo.” 

He had grown up in a Jewish and Yiddish household, and  this is a rough translation of the Yiddish word behema, which is used to describe “a boor, an uncouth, unmannered individual,” which is to say it describes someone who is a jerk, behaving badly, acting stupidly. It has nothing to do with race. But because it was a case involving, as it turned out, a group of young black women, they took it as a racial epithet. This misunderstanding on the part of the supposedly aggrieved group of black women turned into an in-school trial of the offending party, one Eden Jacobowitz, who ended up leaving school because of the brouhaha. The university refused to back down in calling the incident racially motivated, and pursued its extra-legal pursuit of Mr. Jacobowitz, and only stopped when the group of women mysteriously withdrew their complaint. 

Next up: Oberlin College vs. Gibson’s Bakery (2016). The facts are again pretty simple. A couple of Oberlin College students walked into the bakery and attempted to leave with some stolen baked goods. An employee called them on it and a scuffle ensued. It so happens that one of the students was black, and the college, in its wisdom, concluded that Gibson’s Bakery had committed a racially hostile act. The college then used its massive economic and administrative weight to promote a boycott of the bakery. Gibson’s had enjoyed a fine relationship with the college for over a century. But this turn of events threatened its very existence. As with the water buffalo incident, this event became national news. A full-scale trial ensued, and Gibson’s Bakery won a settlement of $44 million, which was reduced to $36.53 million. The college remains only vaguely repentant, and why not? The final sum amounts to just a rounding error relative to its endowment of almost a billion dollars. 

The slap on the wrist and lack of remorse demonstrates that Oberlin, as an educational institution, seems largely insulated from the real world, and it will do little real soul searching regardless of the size of the judgment. 

This brings us back to the University of Pennsylvania, which seems not to have any institutional memory. Why else would such a prestigious university engage in yet another bout of institutional idiocy? Maybe the component parts of the university have decided that times have changed, and that the new zeitgeist will now be in their favor. They might be right, but I hope not. 

So what’s going on this time? Professor Amy Wax has come up against the progressive junta of the University of Pennsylvania, specifically its law school, where she has been on the faculty for over twenty years. Ms. Wax attended Yale and Oxford as an undergraduate, was trained as a neurologist (Harvard, PhD) and then took her law degree, starting at Harvard and finishing at Columbia. She is currently the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the Penn law school where she has also won numerous teaching awards. 

The law school currently has her under review with the hope, it would appear, of taking away her tenure and then her job. Why is this occurring? Dr. Wax is doing what lawyers are taught to do: ask simple but hard questions, relying on facts that result in hard truths and more difficult questions. Dr. Wax has had the audacity to ask if bourgeois culture, which includes hard work, studiousness, delayed gratification, work, marriage, and having children in, rather than out of wedlock might be a good thing. She has questioned if it is problematic that most black students in the Penn law school are at the bottom of their classes. She has had the nerve to suggest that some cultures might be superior to others. For asking these impertinent questions, the dean of the law school has her under review. 

Apparently, the principle of freedom of expression at Penn is good for me but not for thee. Wax has apparently crossed a “line,” transgressed “appropriate expression,” is a “racist” and a “white supremacist,” and she has yet to receive a “comprehensive and complete statement of all the charges lodged against her.” One can only describe the situation as Kafkaesque. The victim is guilty by definition, and crimes need not be first defined and then proven. That Wax is Jewish is perhaps not central to her case, but with the new anti-Semitism being rife on campus and among its administrative class, this certainly has a whiff and odor of the Dreyfus matter in 19^th century France. Dr. Wax is currently experiencing a battle with cancer, so the situation is seriously testing her physical and mental mettle. Penn’s endowment is a paltry $18 billion. Should this come to a monetary settlement, it would appear Penn, like Oberlin, has the funds to handle it. But Professor Wax is tough and is fighting tooth and nail, even in her present condition, which, by the way, the university is barely acknowledging.

In the real world, economics dictates not just matters of supply and demand, or how to handle scarcity, but also the balance between ideological and monetary policies. This is now also the case in the world of higher education. We can expect to see more of this as lawsuits proliferate in the remorseless, woke, and unrepentant world of the American university.

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Daniel Asia

Daniel Asia has been an eclectic and unique composer from the start. He has enjoyed the usual grants from Meet the Composer, a UK Fulbright award, Guggeneheim Fellowship, MacDowell and Tanglewood fellowships, ASCAP and BMI prizes, Copland Fund grants, and numerous others. He was recently honored with a Music Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

As a writer and critic, his articles have appeared in Academic Questions, The New Criterion, Huffington Post, Athenaeum Review, and New Music Connoisseur. He is the author of Observations on Music, Culture and Politics, recently published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and editor of The Future of (High Culture) in America (also CSP). He is Professor of Music in the Fred Fox School of Music at the University of Arizona, and President of The Center for American Culture and Ideas. www.danielasia.net

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In Defense of Penn Law Professor Amy Wax

July 28, 2019 By Christopher Paslay

In 2001, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a speech at Berkeley Law, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”  

Defending diversity -- taking the position that things would be better off with more nonwhites and fewer whites -- is at the very core of the social justice mentality plaguing America. The hard left doesn’t want to nominate another white male for president in 2020, or in the words of Politico, “a candidate that looks like Bernie or Joe.” In fact, according to most liberals, police departments would be better off with more nonwhites and fewer whites, as would fire departments, school districts, small businesses, Hollywood,Major League Baseball, U.S. Congress, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, to name a few places.    

Whether this is ultimately true is debatable. What’s not is the fact that it’s perfectly okay to call for more diversity in America -- to publicly state things would be better off with more nonwhites and less whites.

Yet when Penn law professor Amy Wax mentioned the same premise only in reverse -- that our country would be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites -- liberals had a complete meltdown; the media vilified her as an intolerant racist, and after hundreds of Penn students signed a petition calling for Wax to be relieved of all teaching duties, Penn Law School issued a statement condemning her words.........To Read More....