Observations From the Back Row

Global Warming? The Pope is Wrong, By Alan CarubaI have devoted the better part of more than two and a half decades speaking out against the charlatans that have created and maintained the greatest hoax ever imposed on modern man. At the heart of this hoax has been the United Nations environmental program and at the heart of that program is an agenda to initiate a massive redistribution of wealth from industrialized, successful nations to those who have suffered, as often as not, from being ruled by despots of one description or another…..

Walter E. Williams: California's Water Problem - Californians are experiencing their third year of drought. Headlines read: "Current California Drought Is Driest In State's History; Scientists Fear 'Megadroughts' On Their Way." "Global Warming Upped Heat Driving California's Drought." Then there are scientific claims such as, "There's a rapidly growing body of scientific research finding that California is in the midst of its worst drought in over a millennium (and) global warming has made the drought worse."

Churches in Turkey on the Verge of Extinction - It wasn’t enough that they killed 3 million Christians and expelled another 1.5 million, destroying thousands of churches and monasteries, enslaving and and forcibly converting hundreds of thousands of mostly women and children to Islam; now they want to erase the last traces of Christianity in Turkey.The slaughter and oppression will never end until “…religion is all for Allah,” as the Qur’an says. That’s what they believe — that’s their goal. Period. It’s not about some grievances, it’s not about land disputes — it’s all about Islamic doctrine, as this example shows so well…..

UK: Labour leader says his government will criminalize“Islamophobia” - This is full-blown sharia in the UK — not only will our ban not be lifted, but I would also expect that more voices of freedom will be banned.We are going to make it an aggravated crime. We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police to make sure they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime.” The problem is that Islamic supremacists, apparently deliberately, conflate“Islamophobia” meaning attacks on innocent Muslims, which are never justified, with “Islamophobia” meaning honest examination of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence..

The Islamic Genocide ofChristians: Past and Present - April 24, we remembered how exactly 100 years ago the last historic Muslim caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, tried to cleanse its empire of Christian minorities — Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks — even as we stand by watching as the new caliphate, the Islamic State, resumes the genocide.

Dennis Prager: Why Is Pakistan More Legitimate than Israel? Whenever I have received a call from a listener to my radio show challenging Israel's legitimacy, I have asked these people if they ever called a radio show to challenge any other country's legitimacy.

Clinton:'Deep-Seated Cultural Codes, Religious Beliefs...Have to Be Changed' - Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton says women won't have full access to "reproductive health care" until "deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases" are changed. She urged every woman to be a "champion for change" in the world around them. Clinton made the remarks last Thursday at the 2015 "Women in the World Summit," a three-day gathering in New York that examined the "struggles and triumphs of women and girls around the globe."

Supreme Court to Rule on Same-Sex Marriage, By Alan Caruba

In 1973, the Supreme Court looked into the Constitution, found that it approved of abortion and overruled laws banning it. Other laws have since addressed late term abortions and those resulting from rape or incest, but killing human life in the womb has been lawful since then. According to the Guttmacher Institute from 1973 through 2011, nearly 53 million legal abortions occurred in the U.S. By dismantling the fundamental traditions and beliefs of a nation piece by piece, you ultimate will destroy it. Claiming this is done in the name of “love” or “equality” ignores the greater societal issues involved in marriage; the creation of families with mothers and fathers, and, indeed, the welfare of children raised in same-sex marriages……

Bill Murchison: The Court and Marriage Well. I really can't believe I am saying this. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to tell us what marriage means. Not speculate; not explain. Tell: as in, "Wipe that smile off your face and listen to what I'm telling you."

DOJ: ‘No Scientific Basis' for Saying Same-Sex Couples‘Not Fit to...Become Parents’ - In a brief submitted to the Supreme Court in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which the court will hear tomorrow, the U.S. Department of Justice argues that state laws prohibiting two people of the same sex from marrying each other are…

Steny Hoyer: Same-Sex Couples Are Endowed ‘By God’ With Right to Marry -Citing the Declaration of Independence, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.) argued on the House floor yesterday that same-sex couples are endowed by “their Creator—by God” with a right to marry.

Exclusive: Bakers Facing $135K Fine Over Wedding Cake for Same-Sex Couple Speak Out - Almost two years ago, the owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa had to close their bakery after declining to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. They spoke exclusively to The Daily Signal about the ordeal and the impact on their family.….

Bowing to anti-science Zeitgeist, major food companies ditch safe and useful ingredients - Corporate flights from science, Part 2 and 3: Caving to “consumer concerns.” (For Part 1: see Mac/Cheese below). Chipotle rids itself of GMOs, while Pepsi eliminates aspartame from Diet Pepsi for sucralose. Major benefit for...public health? Not. Read more.

Kraft reformulates mac and cheese in a bow to consumer fears - Kraft is reformulating products to kowtow to consumer fears about “artificial dyes.”All their macaroni and cheese products will contain no artificial preservatives or synthetic colors. We thought that baseless concern had been debunked decades ago. Read more.

Anti-Trust Law and Lawlessness  - We all make mistakes and some of us learn from them. What is even better is to learn from other people's mistakes, where they pay for those mistakes while we learn free of charge.

Puffed-up Leftist Tyranny Punishes Dissenters - Forget for a moment the ever-failing economy, the implosion of our foreign policy coherence, and our virtually unilateral withdrawal in the war on terror under Barack Obama's presidency. If liberty lovers don't start fighting back soon, we'll forfeit our freedom of thought and religious expression under the assault of fascist leftist activists in our culture.

Mychal Massie's Daily Rant

Muslim Sympathizer Ignores Facts - I can appreciate people being sensitive to negativity pursuant to family members who are Muslims, killers, terrorists, and/or associated with same. But specific to that point, I don’t make up the atrocities that Muslims are perpetrating the world over. I don’t preach hate of Muslims; I preach hatred for their evil deeds and the threat they represent to civil society all over the world. Friday morning I received an email from someone identifying himself as Kenneth Martin. He introduced himself by calling me an “a**hole.” He immediately followed that by […]

If Cat My Doesn’t Why Should Obama and Congress? - I live in Florida but my cat stays in Pennsylvania. Late last night I returned to PA. to find that to the surprise of everyone concerned she had urinated on my bed, (multiple times, necessitating my buying a new mattress, pillows, and special laundering to insure the pheromones in her urine are removed from the bedding to prevent her from deciding to do it again. She will not be permitted in my bedroom ever again unless I am in town. If I am willing to take such extraordinary steps because […]

Chicago’s ‘Black Star Project’ Synonym for Hypocrisy - Some things just leave you incredulous. How else can it be said when it comes to the duplicitous standards of blacks pursuant to accountability? I have said it many times and so I say again, black people have a definition of right and wrong that is fluid and predicated completely upon skin color. It matters very little to the majority of blacks what crime a black person commits or whom a black person does harm to as long as said person is “keeping it real” and espouses the right heterodoxy. […]

If Government Healthcare Fails Vets – It Will Fail Us - For those singing the praises of obamacare, I ask you this question: “If the federal government is unable to oversee the healthcare of our veterans who sacrificed their bodies and psychological health for their country, how can the federal government be expected to manage the healthcare of 300 plus million legal Americans and tens of millions of illegal aliens?” If the federal government, i.e., congress and president, ended up with the congressional banking scandal and the congressional post office scandal not to mention that they bankrupted medicare, medicaid, and social […]

Eyes on Education

Editor's Note: I've concluded Mike Admas has complete clarity when he observes that conservatives fail to realize the importance of campus culture wars.  Therefore I've decided to make "Eyes on Education" are regular feature. One thing is clear. We need to stop funding these snake pits of insanity.

It’s Not Harassment If You Like It - Warning: The contents of this column are likely to be deemed offensive by radical feminists and the emotionally handicapped. Please pardon the redundancy. Some conservatives fail to grasp the importance of the campus culture wars. They write to me asking why I don’t cover issues of national importance instead of battling endlessly with college administrators. Their criticisms fall on deaf ears because I understand something they don’t: That the insanity we see on the campus today will threaten our fundamental freedoms when it becomes normalized and bleeds into the broader culture.

My lastest encounter with Nazi-like Muslim thugs.   I spoke last Wednesday night at Brooklyn College, if you can still call it that. Every seat was filled – 80 percent by Muslim students. If this is the future, it is murder. The sneers, the jeers, the laughter – my discussion of the most savage jihad acts was met with huge peals of laughter. It wasn’t a talk; it was a vicious circus: lawless and shameful. From the moment I began to speak, the Muslim students were cackling and catcalling with Jew-hating remarks and jeers.  Lord knows I tried to have a genuine discussion with them. I was patient, I was indulgent – but to no avail. If you watch the video, be sure to watch the Q-and-A as well. That will show you everything. A couple of fights almost broke out. ……There is now a petition by these goons and Nazi-like thugs to “ban hate speech” at Brooklyn College – so afraid are these thuggish students that the truth about Islam and jihad will be heard.   It wasn’t the belly of the beast. It was the beast’s colon. Brooklyn College is not a safe environment for human beings. This event made it clear: Brooklyn College and our nation’s universities in general are not about learning, or about reasoned discourse, or about a search for truth. They are centers for fascist indoctrination. And the fascists were out in force last Wednesday night.

Observations From the Back Row

America's Soft Police State - Today Americans live in a soft police state. We may not sense its severity and doom like runaway slaves or Anne Frank, but the freedoms of the greatest number of Americans have never been more threatened and violated institutionally -- both openly and secretively -- by our own government.

The Fourth Amendment, which is the law limiting government power to search and seize our persons and most private property, has been gutted by executive and administrative actions, Congress, and the courts -- the very bodies that were supposed to enforce it on government. This American Bill of Right is based in English common law, and was written to prevent what’s now called a “police state.”

Although Americans now live in a soft police state, we may not understand how we got to this point, or why reclaiming the Fourth Amendment is essential to retaining our exceptionalism that flows from freedom. Also, a proposed 21st Century Fourth Amendment introduced in the Virginia General Assembly this year is a model that can restore this Bill of Right to its rightful status......

Harry Reid is an “Absolutely Poisonous Figure” and a“Disaster for the Country” - As we get closer to the official date of Harry Reid’s retirement, it seems that more and more people are opening up about just how despicable the man really is. (And folks, he is really despicable.) While many Congressional leaders are lauded with parties, parades and long speeches filled with praise – it is very likely that when Reid finally leaves the hallowed halls in DC it will be dead silent, because no one will have remained behind to say goodbye.....

Doctor joins ISIS medical team in “jihad” against the west: “I wish I’dcome sooner” - Another doctor, affluent and Western educated, leaves everything to join the Islamic State, blowing up Obama’s and every other Western leader’s delusional narrative about poverty, disaffection and illiteracy driving Muslims to jihad.

 

It’s Islam.

 

I’ll also point out that calling those who oppose jihad terror “racists” is laughable. Islam is not a race. Just ask this blue-eyed doctor.

 

Herdsmen in Nigeria, rappers in Germany, doctors in Glasgow, chemical engineering students in Canada, heart surgeons in Saudi Arabia, university students in Britain, imams in America and so forth – what brings these wildly different people together? Jihad. From the Sahara to the Kalahari, London to Lisbon, Manhattan to Madrid, Bali to Boston, Tiananmen Square to Thailand, Myanmar to Malaysia, Nairobi to Nigeria ….. no matter what the background, upbringing, schooling, wealth or poverty, color, what have you, it doesn’t matter. The understanding of Islam and jihad is the same, and it is the motive, the incitement to this monstrous war on the West and and the East and all points in between.....

 

Arizona: Muslim woman raped, beaten and sexually assaulted by groom-to-be for refusing arranged marriage -  “Abdullahi was criticized by the Arizona chapter of the Center for Arabic Islamic Relations, saying the allegations have no basis in the Islamic faith.” This is the low state of journalism these days. The “Center for Arabic Islamic Relations” is most likely the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which once again the mainstream media goes to without any mention of its jihad terror arrests, ties to Hamas, etc. And anyway, CAIR is lying again: what Mohamed Abdullahi did has everything to do with Islam. In Islam, women are possessions of men. If they get out of line, they are to be beaten (Quran 4:34). If they’re raped, it’s their fault, and they bear the “dishonor.” All this is what Abdullahi did. It was quintessentially Islamic....

As U.S. Shutters Coal Plants, China and Japan are Building Them - China and Japan have plans to build massive amounts of coal-fired power plants, while the United States is not only not building new coal-fired power plants, but it is also shuttering many of its existing coal-fired power plants because of Obama Administration policies.  China is building one coal-fired power plant every 7 to 10 days, while Japan plans to build 43 coal-fired power projects to replace its shuttered nuclear units. The United States, on the other hand, cannot build new non-CCS coal-fired power plants and is shuttering existing coal fired power plants. These existing coal-fired power plants retiring in the United States are among the cheapest source of electricity generation in this country. To replace these plants with new generating capacity will cost the nation and thus taxpayers and consumers billions of dollars…..
 

Inquiry Launched Into Global Temperature Data Integrity

Benny Peiser’s Global Warming Policy Foundation Reports: Top Scientists Start To Examine Adjusted Global Warming Figures

The London-based think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation is today launching a major inquiry into the integrity of the official global surface temperature records. Questions have been raised about the reliability of the surface temperature data and the extent to which apparent warming trends may be artefacts of adjustments made after the data are collected. The inquiry will review the technical challenges in accurately measuring surface temperature, and will assess the extent of adjustments to the data, their integrity and whether they tend to increase or decrease the warming trend. --Global Warming Policy Foundation, 26 April 2015

Climatologists have long been aware of the poor state of global surface temperature records and considerable effort has been put into adjusting the raw data to correct known errors and biases. The global surface temperature records have been the subject of considerable and ongoing controversy. In order to try to provide some clarity on the scientific issues, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has invited a panel of experts to investigate and report on these controversies. --The International Temperature Data Review Project

Many people have found the extent of adjustments to the data surprising. While we believe that the 20th century warming is real, we are concerned by claims that the actual trend is different from – or less certain than – has been suggested. We hope to perform a valuable public service by getting everything out into the open. The team approaches the subject as open-minded scientists –we intend to let the science do the talking. Our goal is to help the public understand the challenges in assembling climate data sets, the influence of adjustments and modifications to the data, and whether they are justifiable or not. --Terence Kealey, Chairman of the International Temperature Data Review Project, 26 April 2015

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to global temperatures. Their inquiry’s central aim will be to establish a comprehensive view of just how far the original data has been“adjusted” by the three main surface records: those published by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss), the US National Climate Data Center and Hadcrut, that compiled by the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (Cru), in conjunction with the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction. All of them are run by committed believers in man-made global warming.--Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 26 April 2015

Panel member Professor William van Wijngaarden, a physicist and climate expert from York University in Toronto, said he had been concerned about the records’quality for many years, after noticing that when you examined an individual station ‘you’ll see a sudden jump’. Such jumps, he said, were not natural, but the product of adjustments. ‘Sometimes you get “corrected” data without knowing exactly how it has been changed. I’m a scientist. I’m not going into this with any preconceptions. But if some of the corrections have not been properly made, then we’ll find out. We want to see all the actual station data.’ --David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 26 April 2015

From the Heartland Institute

Why the Assault on ‘Dark Money’ Threatens Free Speech- Our right to free speech is under attack by groups on the Left using Alinskyite tactics and campaign finance laws to silence and intimidate anyone who disagrees with them. Constitutional scholar and Heartland Institute Research Fellow Nick Dranias explores this topic in a new Heartland Policy Study titled“In Defense of Private Civic Engagement: Why the Assault on ‘Dark Money’Threatens Free Speech – and How to Stop the Assault.” Dranias explains how private civic engagement “serves a critically important purpose in keeping the marketplace of ideas focused on the message, not the messenger. It also protects the messenger from retaliation when speaking truth to power.”….

New Jersey Parents, Activists Raise Student Privacy Concerns - “Parents are upset across the spectrum,” said Julia Rubin, a volunteer for Save Our Schools NJ. “Nobody knew what was going on. Not just that they were monitoring. I think it’s the idea that they are monitoring in coordination with the [New Jersey Department of Education].”….

Heartland Heads to Rome to Tell Pope Francis: Global Warming Is Not a Crisis!- We’re flying a team of scientists and climate policy experts to Rome to challenge the alarmism on tap at a global warming workshop at the Vatican on April 28. Stay tuned to Heartland.org all next week for updates on our effort to bring a measure of truth to the conference and debunk the faith-based climate alarmism of the United Nations….

Net Neutrality Is Just as Stupid Internationally as It Is Here- “Imagine Fuel Neutrality – where the government mandates that 18-wheel tractor trailers (whose owners just so happen to donate huge to Democrats) not be charged to fill up at the pump. That necessarily skyrockets gas prices for the rest of us in our little cars –because the stations have to make up that huge money somewhere.”

Americans Have a ‘Right’ to Receive Health Care, Humana CEO Claims - “[Humana CEO Bruce D.] Broussard’s statement that health care is a ‘right’ is an odd one,” said [Justin] Danhof, [an attorney at the National Center for Public Policy Research]. “It certainly isn’t provided for in the Constitution. And millions of Americans make rational decisions to either self-insure, or refuse to purchase health insurance.”

From Pam Geller's Atlas Shrugs

VIDEO Former New York Governor George Pataki: Muslims inciting on the Internet need to be arrested - Former New York Governor George Pataki opened the Republican Jewish Coalition spring conference Friday night – and in this video we have obtained from a closed-to-the-media session, he makes a very strong play on a number of key issues. While Pataki says that “BDS is not a human rights movement, it is anti-Semitic,” he also spoke about what he called The Jackson Rule: Anyone involved in recruiting or fundraising for ISIS, Hamas or any other terrorist organization will face criminal charges in the U.S  Pataki – very rightly – said, “The Internet does not provide a special safe haven...Read the whole entry »

FBI investigating major Islamic State terrorism plot in U.S - Every day another Islamic plot to maim, destroy, slaughter in the cause of Allah. Every day. And the enemedia asks, “will the islamophobia never end?” And the political and cultural elites decry our ads: “if someone gets killed, it will be your fault!” If the media, academic and cultural elites were as tough on the jihadists as they are on myself and my colleagues, we’d have these savages beat…..Read the whole entry »

New York Daily News: AFDI ad criticizing Hamas is “outrageous drivel” that “would offend many Muslims” - The now-notorious NY Daily News is once again doing the bidding of jihadists, and in this particular case, Hamas. According to the Islamic apologists over at the NY Daily News, it’s “outrageous drivel” to call attention to Hamas’ genocidal rhetoric. The terror-linked group CAIR had an ad campaign “rebranding” the word jihad (http://myjihad.org/). They mean to make it into something soft and fuzzy. Our ad campaign is a response to their campaign. Our ads quote high-profile Muslims and Muslim organizations calling for jihad, genocide, gender apartheid, creed apartheid, etc. Shutting down free speech won’t stop these savages, it will embolden them. The “killing Jews is worship to Allah” ad is a direct quote from a...Read the whole entry »

An American Mom and Her Baby Are Being Held Hostage by Obama’s Partners The Taliban - In 2012, a 28-year-old American woman, Caitlin Coleman, was kidnapped along with her husband, Joshua Boyle, while traveling in Afghanistan. Coleman was pregnant and gave birth while in captivity. The family has been held ever since by the Taliban. Her name and that of her husband and baby should be on the lips of every American.  Another story the media doesn’t report.  In his continuing support for the Taliban terrorist group, Obama has refused to call them a terrorist group. They kidnap Americans and the media hardly speaks of it in deference to their dear leader.  Obama’s Afghanistan strategy is to cover for his “peace partners.” For years I have reported on Obama’s sanction and support of the savage Islamic...Read the whole entry »

Minneapolis Muslim charged threatening to kill FBI officials if they didn’t free six Muslims related to Islamic State case - You would think that the arrest of six jihadis in Minneapolis would relieve the Muslim Somali in Minnesota community, the largest in the United States. Instead, it has created tension and animus. What side are they on? A Minneapolis man was charged Friday with threatening law enforcement officials and writing on Twitter that a “massacre” would happen if authorities did not free six men who were arrested earlier this week and accused of trying to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State group, Midnimo.com reported….Read the whole entry »

2 Montreal Muslim teens planned to set off bombs in the Montreal area  - In the West we are under siege. Law enforcement officials are doing an admirable job uncovering and stopping these plots, but how long will their luck hold, as Muslim groups are doing everything they can to end effective counter-terror measures? They stopped an effective program in New York City and are working to create the impression that most of the Muslims who were caught were entrapped. Nonsense. There is nothing that would persuade any loyal citizen to go jihad….Read the whole entry »

“Sustainability” — Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism

Posted by Jack Kerwick @ FrontpageMagazine.com 

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is an academic organization devoted to resisting the politicization of higher education that has infected colleges and universities throughout the Western world.

Recently, it released an exhaustive report on but another ideological fetish to have taken academia by storm: the “sustainability” movement.

In “Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism,” authors Peter Wood and Rachelle Peterson caution readers against being misled by the innocuous euphemism of the movement’s moniker. It is by design that the language of “sustainability” invokes in the average person’s mind pleasant associations with responsible stewardship of the “environment.”

But the “sustainability” movement is much more—and much more ominous—than this.

In essence, it “marks out a new and larger ideological territory in which curtailing economic, political, and intellectual liberty is the price that must be paid now to ensure the welfare of future generations.”

The NAS report elaborates:

“As an ideology, sustainability takes aim at economic and political liberty. Sustainability pictures economic liberty as a combination of strip mining, industrial waste, and rampant pollution. It pictures political liberty as people voting to enjoy the present, heedless of what it will cost future generations.”

What this means is that the proponents of “sustainability” envision as an “alternative to economic liberty…a regime of far-reaching regulation that controls virtually every aspect of energy, industry, personal consumption, waste, food, and transportation.” And their “alternative to political liberty is control vested in agencies and panels run by experts insulated from elections or other expressions of popular will.”

The zealotry of the “sustainability” ideologue, then, is not unlike that of any other inasmuch as it is antithetical to liberty. However, the NAS report is painfully clear that the “sustainability” ideologue has been remarkably successful in making his utopian fantasy into a real world dystopia for most of the Western world.

While the NAS report focuses on “the new fundamentalism” of higher education, its authors note from the outset that no one should be deluded into thinking that this phenomenon is confined to the Ivory Tower. This, in fact, is far from the case. “The movement, of course, extends well beyond the college campus. It affects party politics, government bureaucracy, the energy industry, Hollywood, schools, and consumers.”

Still, it is worth turning to the relationship between “sustainability” and higher education, for “the college campus is where the movement gets its voice of authority, and where it molds the views and commands the attention of young people.”

Both intellectually and financially, the harm that the ideology of sustainability has visited upon academia can’t be overestimated.

Intellectually, students have been deprived of the freedom to genuinely think through a topic that, contrary to what “sustainability” zealots would have them believe, deserves to be debated: whole curricula have been restructured to immunize “sustainability” against criticism.

Hence, “sustainability” ideologues have insured that education will give way to indoctrination.

Although its advocates have tried convincing college and university administrators otherwise, “sustainability” has been no less ruinous on the economic front: American institutions of higher learning “spend more than $3.4 billion per year pursuing their dreams of ‘sustainability’ [.]”

Clearly, this harms no one as much as it harms students, for these billions of dollars of expenditures come “at a time when college tuitions are soaring and 7.5 percent of recent college graduates are unemployed and another 46 percent are underemployed.”

At the same time, “sustainability” ideologues in ever-growing numbers are demanding that “colleges and universities divest their holdings in carbon-based energy companies without regard to forgone income or growth in their endowments.”

The relentlessness with which students are brainwashed into accepting the claims of the sustainability movement is rivaled only by the extent to which they are brainwashed.

Students “sign sustainability pledges, learn about sustainability during orientation, absorb sustainability in their courses, take mandatory sustainability training in residence life programs,” and “are barraged by paid student peers (‘eco-reps’) who ask them to alter their behavior [.]”

As a consequence, students are taught to view “the norm for responsible, virtuous human life and political citizenship” in terms of “strict environmentalism, social experimentation, and a managed anti-free-market economic approach [.]”

So, in summary, there are, then, five ways in which the “sustainability” movement is undercutting liberal learning on college campuses.

First, ideologues preempt debate by way of “blatant appeals to authority,” i.e. bogus claims that there is a “consensus” among scientists that favors the position of the true believers.

Second, “sustainability” is now dogma. Hence, it essentially compels both teaching and research to conform to its dictates. Education recedes before indoctrination.

Third, the orthodoxy of “sustainability” requires an aggressive psychological “reprogramming” of students so that they will be always “attuned to the special demands of the ideology.”

Fourth, “sustainability” threatens the traditional ideals of a liberal arts education insofar as it marginalizes, if it doesn’t altogether reject, these ideals. For instance, “many colleges are embracing something called ‘the environmental humanities,’ which pushes aside the traditional humanities curriculum.”

In other words, nothing less than the intellectual and spiritual heritage of Western civilization is threatened by “sustainability.”

Finally, the ideology of “sustainability” encourages students to waste their resources in time and energy engaged in “pointless battles” when they could have been learning how to exercise responsible, meaningful citizenship.

The National Association of Scholars deserves to be commended for their service. This fine organization of academics has made it plain that neither higher learning nor the rest of Western civilization can sustain the “sustainability” movement.

The Free Market is Not a Suicide Pact

Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

Immigration has become the third rail of American politics.  At a time when the labor force participation rate has fallen to 62 percent and the employment growth for the last 15 years has gone to immigrants, opposing the Super-Amnesty of 12 million illegal aliens is still considered an extreme position… in the Republican Party.

So when Scott Walker merely suggested that Congress should make immigration decisions based on “protecting American workers and American wages”, he was denounced for it by… Republicans.

Walker’s belief that immigration should be based on “our economic situation”, rather than an ideological mandate for open borders, has become an “extreme right” position. And yet this scary “extreme” position that foreign workers shouldn’t be brought in to displace American workers is part of our immigration law. It’s just one of those “extreme” parts that, like the illegality of crossing the border, is being ignored. It’s not just being ignored by Obama. It’s also being ignored by the Republican Party.

Scott Walker’s common sense immigration populism was met with two sets of attacks. The first set came from senators like McCain and Portman playing the old song about all those “jobs Americans won’t do.” (Not that they’re given the chance to do them.) Senator Hatch claimed that, “We know that when we graduate PhDs and master’s degrees and engineers, we don’t have enough of any of those.”

America has no shortage of engineers. Companies aren’t bringing in Third World engineers on H-1B visas because of a shortage, but because they want to fire their American workers and replace them with cheaper foreigners. American IT workers are forced to train their H-1B replacements before being fired.

And that’s when the free market argument kicks in.

Walker was denounced for betraying “free market principles” and for “immigration protectionism”. But if lowering the rate of one million immigrants already arriving each year while Americans can’t find jobs is a violation of free market principles, then why have any limitations on immigration at all?

A poll showed that 13% of the world’s adults or 150 million people would move to the United States if they were allowed to. If 1 million immigrants can’t fill all those jobs that Americans won’t do, let’s try 150 million immigrants.

It would be a violation of free market principles to prevent the 37% of Liberians (genocide in the 80s and 90s), 26% of Dominicans (their last reported unemployment rate in the US was double that of Americans) and 24% of Haitians (Cholera, 14% of the country’s households had a rape in two years) from moving to your town or your city.

Just think of all the cholera, unemployment, rape, welfare and genocide that could be enriching the fabric of our country and your neighborhood right now if it weren’t for all that pesky protectionism.

Clearly we do believe in some form of protectionism. Even Obama hasn’t welcomed in a quarter of Haiti, yet, but the year is still young. The free market isn’t a top-down ideology whose principles require open borders and when it acts as a rigid ideology insisting that its pure application will lead to positive results while ignoring the problems, then it becomes no different than the ideological centrally planned economies destroying themselves.

 

If freedom is to mean anything, it has to mean the freedom of individuals, not of systems. Like Freedom of Speech or Freedom of Religion, the American free market is nothing if it is not the right of Americans to freely do business with each other.

That right unfortunately no longer exists. Americans are less free to do business in their own country than foreign countries are to dump subsidized products or surplus populations in the United States.

What does exist is a mantra of free trade that obligates the United States to accept products dumped from subsidized economies such as China and Japan in the name of free trade, to accede to the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries that aggressively develop and protect their industries and to the Third World immigrants displacing American workers to labor at extremely low wages while their real salaries are paid for by American workers in the form of food stamps and other social benefits.

None of this promotes free market principles. Instead free market principles are exploited to undermine our own free market. The right of Americans to freely trade is under attack from mass migration.

Not only are the new immigrants much more likely to vote to the left, but the mass destruction of American jobs is expanding the ranks of the poor who become much less likely to vote Republican.

In the last presidential election, the under $30K group was a wall of Obama voters. This group is twice as likely to identify as Democrat rather than Republican. It’s had the sharpest drop off in Republican identification. In Pennsylvania, Bush won 39% of these voters while Romney took 24% of their votes.

Does electing Democrats promote free market principles? Does reshaping the electorate so that a Republican in the White House becomes an impossible phenomenon serve free trade?

Free market principles, like any others, must be reducible to the individual. Can importing millions of people who reject free market principles individually be in accordance with free market principles?

Only collectively, and collectivist free market principles are a contradiction in terms and a suicide pact. This collectivist version of free market principles destroys our ability to implement any form of free market in the future. The perversion comes from viewing the free market as an abstract idea expressed through our entanglement in a global network. The free market isn’t a global policy. It’s how we live. It’s our freedom to engage in commerce as we choose. It exists only as long as we are free. Scott Walker hasn’t abandoned free market principles. His critics have.

True free market principles derive from the individual, not from national policies that import millions who collectively reject those principles. Protecting American workers who believe in the free market also protects a free market which, along with our other freedoms, would cease to exist without them.

Freedom is a covenant that comes with rights and responsibilities. Our fundamental responsibility to any freedom is to support and protect it. Those who reject a freedom should not be able to benefit from it.

Europe is in a state of growing civil war with Muslim immigrants because European leaders refused to understand that extending rights to those who do not accept them and do not reciprocate creates rights without responsibilities. A right extended to those who reject it is a failed effort at appeasement.

Freedom isn’t global, it’s local. It does not come from policies, it comes from people. It can’t be implemented internationally by creating hollow organizations and pretending that its member nations are free. International organizations of the left, such as the UN, have already proven it through their failures, but international economic organizations, such as the WTO, have proven it as well.

We can sacrifice the American free market to a non-existent global free market, or we can protect the American free market while letting it serve as a model of domestic economic freedom for other nations.

Immigration has an important place in American life, but it can never become more important than American life. It is not an unlimited good and its implementation must flow from what is best for Americans, not from warping the freedoms that we believe in until they become an abstract ideology that destroys the people who practice them.

Scott Walker is not betraying free market principles when he contends that immigration should be based around the needs of Americans, he is practicing and protecting them.

Senator McCain warned that anything but open borders will end all hope of Republicans winning the Latino vote. Republicans won’t win the Latino vote by recreating the conditions of cheap labor and cheap votes that made Mexico what it is, but through an economy where workers have the opportunity to earn a dependable living so that they don’t turn to the left for their economic salvation.

Our economy should not be a machine for importing cheap votes and cheap labor, because cheap labor feeds even cheaper votes. Republican senators trying to help their donors fill those “jobs Americans won’t do” are turning red states blue. They’ve already cost the Republican Party, California. Now they’re working on the rest of the West.

Republicans who are still uncertain should ask themselves who has a better vision for the future of the party; Scott Walker or John McCain.
 

Consciously Sidelining Ourselves

Erick Erickson | Apr 24, 2015

Though Wal-Mart remains fixed in the American conscience as Sam Walton's business, it is less and less that. Walton was folksy and relatable to the Americans who shopped at Wal-Mart. Everyone could imagine Sam Walton shopping there, too. But over the years, Wal-Mart's management has passed out of the direct hands of Walton's family.

A few of the Walton clan remain on the Wal-Mart board of directors, but now its board also includes Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo!, and Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram. One would be hard pressed to imagine either as regular shoppers at Wal-Mart. For that matter, former counselor to President George W. Bush, Dan Bartlett, is now the executive vice president of corporate affairs for Wal-Mart. It may be hard to imagine many of Wal-Mart's executive leaders being regular shoppers at Wal-Mart.....To Read More.....

My Take - First - I hate shopping, but I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart the minute they came out in favor of all things "green" and "organic" produce. They've done nothing to make me change my mind since. These companies that make all these Corporate Social Responsibility mewing sounds trying to appease those who hate them and all they stand for make me gag. There's one thing to take heart to about Wal-Mart. They are now what Sears was fifty years ago.  Someone else will be what Wal-Mart is today....but hopefully not as corporate collaborators with those who hate and despise capitalism and individual freedom and responsibility.

12 Questions Obama's Science Advisor Refuses To Answer

Alex Epstein

 

Several months ago John Holdren, President Obama’s chief science advisor, offered to answer the public’s questions, particularly about the science behind the administration’s call to make the vast majority of fossil fuel use illegal over the next several decades. From the Press Release:

Dr. John P. Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wants to answer any questions that you have about climate change — what it means, how bad it actually is, and what we can do to fight it.

I was glad to see this. John Holdren and other climate catastrophists—those who believe not in some man-made climate impact but catastrophic climate impact that justifies fossil fuel famine—certainly have a lot of questions they need to answer. As I document in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, they’ve been making breathtakingly bogus predictions of catastrophe for over 30 years. In 1985 Holdren predicted a billion deaths from climate-related famine by the end of this decade. Since then, famine has plummeted and billions have longer life expectancy thanks to fossil fuel-powered industrialization and agriculture.

So I like many others submitted questions on Twitter, following the White House’s instructions to tag them#AskDrH. (I guess the title is supposed to turn Holdren from doomsday Luddite who demanded we embark on a ‘massive campaign’ to ‘de-develop the United States,’ into Dr. H the accessible oracle.)

But Dr. H has not answered any of our questions. Instead, he continues to use his position to make statements like this one on Letterman: .....To Read More....

Observations From the Back Row

Hillary summoned to May 18 public hearing - A House investigatory panel has summoned Hillary Clinton to testify at a May 18 public hearing about her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state, and a second public hearing one month later, on June 18, to grill Clinton about Benghazi.....

VIDEO: Benghazi Select Committee Chair Trey Gowdy on Why the Release of the Report Will Be Delayed Until 2016

Hillary's Vietnam - Headless bodies lie in the sand. Above those corpses stand the black-clad minions of ISIS, outlined against the coastline of Libya. This is the second video in three months depicting Islamic terrorists cutting the heads off of Christian captives.  Bodies float in the Mediterranean Sea, face down. Twelve Christian bodies, thrown from a rubber boat by 15 Muslims. Their launch point: Libya…..

To Protect Religious Freedom, Republicans Attempt Historic Move Against D.C. - A powerful congressional committee passed a measure to kill one of two controversial pieces of legislation from taking effect in the District of Columbia….

What You Need to Know About Gay Marriage and the Supreme Court - Whatever people may think about marriage as a policy matter, everyone should be able to recognize the Constitution does not settle this question…..

Rep. Steve King Announces Bill to 'Restrain the Judges on Marriage'– Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has introduced a bill that would block the federal courts, including the U.S Supreme Court, from hearing or deciding cases involving the definition of marriage…..

House Conservatives Want More Power Over Iran Nuclear Deal - House conservatives expressed skepticism over a bipartisan Senate plan for Congress to review a nuclear deal with Iran, fearing the measure would give lawmakers little power to actually stop an agreement they don't like…..

Obama Puts Heat On India Over Climate Commitments

Benny Peiser's Global Warming Policy Foundation Reports That

India Wants No Climate Deal Without Western Climate Finance

Contrary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent observation that India was under “no pressure” for climate commitments, a US envoy said on Monday that India is being “closely watched” for its contribution to climate change. US envoy Richard Verma said the country was being “closely watched” for its intended contribution towards the global response to climate change. “I don’t think it’s an understatement to say the world is watching very closely what India will do,” he said. --The Times of India, 20 April 2015
 

The developed world would have to "walk the talk" on climate change and provide a green climate fund to the developing world, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar has said, ahead of a crucial UN meet on the issue in Paris later this year.  "Prime Minster (Narendra Modi) has put up an ambitious target of generating 175,000 megawatts of renewable energy. That is a huge contribution of India, because it will save 350 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year and would require 150 billion of investment. So the developed world would also have to put their best foot forward,” he said. --Press Trust of India, 20 April 2015

Ahead of the UN climate talks in Paris later this year, the US today said there is no divide between developed and developing nations on the issue of climate change and emphasised the need to work together to confront challenges of global warming. US Ambassador to India Richard R Verma said: “I think we are moving out and we need to move out of early 1990s world, which was divided into two camps. We are not in two camps anymore.” --The Indian Tribune, 21 April 2015

President Obama said, “Today, there is no greater threat to our planet than climate change.” I say “incredibly” because that just isn’t true – and if President Obama really believes it is, then it is time to panic. Given the state of the world and the urgent problems facing us that directly affect our prospects for peace and prosperity, global warming shouldn’t even be in the top five on the list of problems our president should be worrying about. President Obama is living in a world of denial. He uses global warming as a distraction to dodge the real problems we face and avoid critiques of his performance. --Ed Rogers, The Washington Post, 20 April 2015

This is Earth Day’s 45th anniversary and it’s also – according to Earth Day Network’s somewhat optimistic website – “the year in which world leaders finally pass a binding climate treaty” and “the year in which citizens and organizations divest from fossil fuels and put their money into renewable energy solutions.” To which there is only one sensible answer and it consists of three words: Ain’t. Gonna. Happen. There will be no “binding climate treaty” at the UN climate summit in Paris this year because there has been no ‘global warming’ for 220 months. As the Global Warming Policy Forum’s Benny Peiser notes, this “temperature pause” will lead to a “policy pause.” --James Delingpole, Breitbart News, 22 April 2015

Anyone interested in climate change will have noticed the numerous headlines proclaiming March 2015 to be the warmest month ever and the first three months of 2015 to have broken the record for the warmest start to any year on record.
This year has undoubtedly started off warm, but the claim that it is unprecedented and an obvious example of global warming can only be justified by ignoring contradictory evidence, as many journalists and scientists did. --David Whitehouse, Global Warming Policy Forum, 21 April 2015

Preliminary forecasts from universities in the UK and the US all point to the Atlantic having below average storm activity this year, with some forecasts suggesting there could be near-record breaking low activity. These early forecasts suggest tropical storm and hurricane activity will be around half of the long-term average and if they are true, 2015 could be the quietest hurricane season for over 30 years. --Chris Burton, The Weather Network, 20 April 2015

Former U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson tells the Wall Street Journals’s Simon Constable that climate change has become something of a “new religion” to such an extent that debating it is seen as blasphemy. He also sees an international treaty on carbon emissions as a “stupid thing. --The Wall Street Journal, 23 April 2015

18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year

Mark J. Perry @Mark_J_Perry

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 15 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started......To Read More.....

“Teachers Cannot Teach What They Do Not Know”

Posted by Mary Grabar @ City Journal

 

Sandra Stotsky’s primer for improving American educational standards

 

An Empty Curriculum: The Need to Reform Teacher Licensing Regulations and Tests, by Sandra Stotsky (Rowman & Littlefield, 160 pp., $24)

 

How bad is teacher education today? Consider: all states require that teachers be college graduates, but prospective teachers are passing licensure exams with skills and knowledge ranging from the seventh- to tenth-grade levels. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us, as colleges of education draw from the bottom two-thirds of graduating classes (and for those planning to teach at the elementary levels, it’s the bottom one-third). Much time in such schools is wasted on fashionable, politically tendentious, but ineffective pedagogy. Think Bill Ayers and Paulo Freire, among the most frequently assigned authors in education courses. Think elementary-education professors specializing in such things as gender identity and postcolonialism.

In her new book, An Empty Curriculum: The Need to Reform Teacher Licensing Regulations and Tests, Sandra Stotsky, professor emerita of education at the University of Arkansas, offers a tested model of teacher knowledge, explains why it’s not being used, and describes strategies for overcoming the education establishment’s resistance. Stotsky’s credentials for this task are impressive: in her role as senior associate commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education from 1999 to 2003, she oversaw complete revisions of the state’s pre-K-12 standards as well as its teacher-licensure standards. Until these standards were replaced by the Common Core in 2010, Massachusetts ranked first among the states in educational achievement.

An entrenched education bureaucracy remains a formidable obstacle to meaningful educational reform, particularly in the area of standards. Many state education commissioners and staff “are influenced,” Stotsky says, “by the education schools they attended, teacher unions, school administrators’ needs, the interests of professional education organizations, and the pressure of political groups (especially think tanks, institutes, and policy-oriented organizations that claim expertise on educational matters).” Testing companies, educational entrepreneurs, diversity advocates, accreditation agencies, and political ideologues also have a vested interest in keeping standards low. Teacher-licensure tests, intended to protect children from incompetent teachers, set low passing requirements in order to protect teacher-preparation institutions, most of which, Stotsky points out, enjoy taxpayer funding.

Stotsky reminds readers how rigorous America’s education standards used to be. She cites a Michigan teacher-licensing exam in history from 1900, in which sample essay questions asked future grammar school teachers to, for example, “describe Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth” or “briefly state the result and effect of the Battle of Waterloo, naming the leading general.” States relaxed standards after a post-World War II teacher shortage, however, and relaxed them further after job options expanded for women, and further still after the court challenges of racial discrimination in the 1970s. Additionally, political correctness has corrupted subjects ranging from English and European languages to music and literature.

Stotsky calls on legislators and their constituents to revamp the system. To ensure teacher competency, she proposes raising college-admission standards and abolishing credits for undergraduate education coursework, replacing it with four years of academic coursework for core-subject teachers. Educationally high-achieving countries, such as Finland, South Korea, and Singapore, already take such measures. Extensive studies show that a teacher’s subject-matter knowledge is the best predictor of a student’s achievement, in line with the common-sense notion that “teachers cannot teach what they do not know,” as Stotsky puts it. Graduate-level coursework and professional-development courses should also be in the teacher’s subject areas: coursework for an M.S. or M.A. degree is far more intellectually demanding than for a M.Ed. degree. Stotsky also suggests requiring that directors, department heads, and curriculum specialists at the 5-12 grade level hold a master’s degree in their core subject and at least 18 credits of advanced graduate studies in one of the core academic subjects they supervise.

Such practical measures, however, aren’t in vogue. Much of the rhetoric surrounding the 2009 Race to the Top contest for federal stimulus funds focused on improving teacher quality, but the methods for measuring such quality can be dubious—including having students, beginning as early as kindergarten, evaluate their teachers. Georgia’s eight-year-olds assess teachers on such criteria as “my teacher cares about my learning” and “my teacher shows me how I can use what I learn at home and in the community.” The state then ties teacher bonuses to such ratings.

Stotsky’s compact and data-filled book should serve as a useful resource for pushing back against failed education policies and the bureaucrats who defend them.

Mary Grabar earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and taught college English for 20 years. She is now a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York. Her writing can be found at www.DissidentProf.com and at www.marygrabar.com.