News of the Week for Feb. 6^th, 2022

• Riots & Revolution
• Corona Virus
• Gun Rights
• Hide the Decline
• Obamacare
• War & Terror
• National News
• Economy & Taxes
• International News
• Opinion

 

Riots & Revolution

 

Seattle Officials Drafted Legislation to Hand Over Police Building to BLM Rioters in June 2020
Former Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan’s administration drafted legislation in June 2020 that would have transferred the police department’s East Precinct building to a Black Lives Matter organization, the Seattle Times reported on Sunday.

SF DA’s Office Accused of Withholding Evidence in Effort to Convict Cop of Excessive Force
Prosecutors at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office are being accused of withholding evidence in hopes of convicting a San Francisco police officer of excessive force.

BLM purchased an $8.1 million building in Toronto but didn’t tell BLM Toronto
Last week the Washington Examiner reported that Black Lives Matter, the national organizing group which raised at least $90 million over the past 18 months, appears to have no director and no office. The address listed on their tax forms is a multi-purposed building in Los Angeles which houses several restaurants but no BLM office. As for who is running the organization, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors resigned last spring after her personal home buying spree made news. On her way out, she selected two other activists to take her place but both of them dropped out last September, meaning there is apparently no one running the organization at present. The group’s two remaining board members wouldn’t answer questions about it.

‘BLM’s house of cards is starting to fall’: Indiana AG says ‘scam’ organization that has $60m is causing him ‘concern’ but declines to say if he’s launched an investigation after California DoJ went after the leaders
Indiana AG Todd Rokita slammed Black Lives Matter Wednesday, comparing the charity to an ‘illegal enterprise’ whose ‘house of cards’ is about to fall

Chesa Boudin’s office accused of rigging case against cop
Embattled liberal San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is facing a recall election this summer and the latest headlines out of the City by the Bay this week are unlikely to improve his prospects. The Chief of Police in his city announced on Thursday that the SFPD would no longer cooperate with Boudin’s office in the prosecution of any police officers accused of misconduct or charged with crimes. The reason for this decision stems from the claims of a prosecutor working for Boudin who said that she hid potentially exculpatory evidence from the defense attorneys representing a cop who was accused of excessive use of force. The prosecutor went public with her story, saying that she was ordered to withhold the evidence and feared that she would lose her job if she failed to comply.

 

Corona Virus

 

Trucker protests: Demonstrators join rallies across Canada as Covid-19 trucker protests spread
From the western province of Alberta, moving east to Quebec City, and in cities and towns in between, thousands of Canadians have hit the streets in trucks, tractors, cars and on foot to protest the nation’s Covid-19 restrictions.

 

Gun Rights

 

Biden Admin Has Records on Nearly One Billion Gun Sales
ATF database on firearm sales sparks fears Biden admin tracking millions of gun owners

Biden’s BS about Gun-Manufacturer Immunity from Suit
One of the President Biden’s most unappealing attributes — a lot to work with here — is his penchant for incanting, with painfully off-key conviction, the dullest of left-wing whoppers as if they hadn’t been blown up eons ago.

 

Hide the Decline

Environment &
“Green Energy”

 

Green Wrecking Ball: Germany Clearing “Undisturbed” 1000-Year Old Forest, Make Way For Massive Wind Park
Germany’s government has not only taken a wrecking ball to the nation in terms of COVID, but also to its biodiversity in its self-deluded bid to protect the climate.

 

Obamacare

Government in Healthcare

 

Universal health care bill faces deadline in California
California Democrats must decide Monday whether to advance a bill that would make the government pay for everybody’s health care in the nation’s most populous state; a key test of whether one of their most long-sought policy goals can overcome fierce opposition from business groups and the insurance industry.

Single payer fails to advance in California…again
It has been a few years since California tried to advance single payer through a legislature controlled entirely by Democrats. The last time they tried it, back in 2017, things didn’t go too well. Back then, the plan to pass single payer was torpedoed by a cost estimate which concluded it would cost the state $400 billion per year, about half of which would have to be paid through new taxes.

 

War & Terror

 

Homemade Explosive Devices Detonated Inside 2 Cars In Sacramento Over Past Week
An investigation is underway after police say two homemade explosive devices were detonated inside cars in south Sacramento this week.

Ukraine, NATO, and Germany
I don’t agree with everything that Aris Roussinos, writing in Unherd, has to say in his latest article, not least when it comes to his view that “with every day, it becomes more likely that a great hammer blow is about to descend on Ukraine.” Cold comfort it may be, but I still think that a “minor incursion” (in President Biden’s unfortunate phrase) is more probable, but what do I know? Roussinos is also careful to say that “no-one can predict with certainty what will happen next,” adding (and it wouldn’t surprise me if the second half of his sentence tells the true story) that “what happens next will be Putin’s choice, and perhaps he has not yet decided.” Click on the link that Roussinos provides, which is to Michael Kofman’s take on Russia’s next move. It is not reassuring reading.

Chinese Fascism
Is the Chinese party-state a fascist regime? Melissa Chan, a reporter focusing on Chinese transnational influence, thinks so. She had an op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday arguing that it isn’t enough to call the Chinese Communist Party an authoritarian entity. She also prefers the fascist to totalitarian, the other alternative label which many have taken to recently, given a number of historical parallels she identifies in her piece.

Russia introduces export ban on ammonium nitrate for two months — government
This is a temporary measure, First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov explained

Did a US raid take out the leader of ISIS? UPDATE: Biden says yes
Just how “successful” was this raid in northwest Syria? It depends on who the target really was. The Pentagon has said little about targeting thus far other than calling the raid a counter-terrorism mission.

Pompeo: Chinese Hypersonic Threat a “Very Difficult Problem”
Mike Pompeo warned this week that defending the United States from a hypersonic-missile attack is “a very difficult problem.” The former secretary of state’s remarks provide the latest example of a senior U.S. official vexed by this emerging threat.

Weaponizing Russian Natural Gas: Just How MAD Is It?
In a recent article written for Bloomberg, Javier Blas looks at the extent of the EU’s dependence on Russian natural gas. It’s no secret that the number is high, almost 40 percent. But Blas also examines how much of that gas flows through Ukraine, and thus would be vulnerable in the event of intensified fighting in that country. He highlights the fact (something which is not well understood) that this amount has fallen by some 65 percent over the past couple of decades, as new pipelines have opened up offering different transit routes, a process that would continue if the Nord Stream 2 pipelines open for business (my guess: they will). The amount of gas that flows through Ukraine is still considerable, but Ukraine is, Blas explains, now “only” a key transit point for Russian gas into Austria, Italy, and Slovakia. (However, unlike much of the rest of the continent, Italy maintains strategic gas reserves.)

Lone U.S. Hacker Brings Down Entire North Korean Internet – Twice
The anonymous hacker says that he was taking revenge for a North Korean cyberattack on Western security researchers carried out by North Korean spies last year. He says he was frustrated by the lack of response from the U.S. over the attack and decided to take matters into his own hands.

China’s Last Land War
What Americans call the Vietnam War is known elsewhere in the world as the Second Indochina War. The First Indochina War was between France and Vietnam in the ’40s and ’50s. It functioned as a war of independence for Vietnam, previously part of French Indochina, and resulted in the creation of North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

Chicom Factoid of the Day
In 1956, Chairman Mao delivered his “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” speech, unveiling The Hundred Flowers Campaign. Mao encouraged fellow Chinese Communists to openly express criticisms and grievances about the system — acknowledging that the state had executed 700,000 domestic enemies in the two preceding years, but also promised that there would be “no more killings.” Most intellectuals remained silent, having seen Maoist treachery up close, but hundreds of gullible writers, students, scientists, and politicians began debating and speaking up, falling into Mao’s trap. By 1957, most of them had been labeled “right-wingers” and rounded up. In what was a mere amuse bouche to the coming carnage, around 700,000 — some scholars believe this included around 10 percent of Chinese intellectuals and engineers — were sentenced to 20 years of hard labor, most never coming home. Hundreds of thousands more were forced to move to the rural areas in preparation for a collectivist experiment.

Russia Is Driving Sweden and Finland Closer to NATO
Moscow’s aggression may have permanently changed Nordic security debates.

House Passes Dem China Bill, Rejecting United-Front Sanctions
The House passed the America COMPETES Act, the industrial-policy and China-competition legislation pushed by House Democratic leadership and the Biden administration, on a near party-line vote this afternoon.

ESPN panelist: How can we judge China’s genocide when voting rights here are under assault?
Clay Travis wondered whether the hidden hand of Disney, ESPN’s parent company, might have been behind this segment. Disney values its access to China’s market verrrrrry highly, after all. Would anyone put it past them to air Chinese propaganda on the Uyghur genocide in their U.S. programming in order to curry favor?

Biden Waives Sanctions on Iran’s “Civilian” Nuclear Program in Bid to Restore 2015 Deal
Iranian foreign minister says Biden’s nuclear waiver “is not enough” as regime rushes to build a bomb.

Kyiv could fall in days with a huge civilian toll, U.S. assessments find
Russia is close to completing preparations for what appears to be a large-scale invasion of Ukraine that could leave up to 50,000 civilians killed or wounded, decapitate the government in Kyiv within two days, and launch a humanitarian crisis with up to 5 million refugees fleeing the resulting chaos, according to updated U.S. military and intelligence assessments briefed to lawmakers and European partners over the past several days.

 

National

 

Biden’s Pledge To Appoint Black Woman To SCOTUS Was Quid Pro Quo For James Clyburn’s Endorsement
A promise Biden now portrays as high-minded in fact was a trade for an endorsement.

U. Nebraska revises mascot to avoid perception of “white supremacy”
The University of Nebraska has changed its longtime mascot “Herbie Husker” because of what he was doing with his hand — making an “OK” gesture that has become associated with white supremacy.

Hmmm: Becerra first Cabinet secretary under the bus?
Surprising if true, since Pete Buttigieg should have gone under the bus already, thanks to his absentee neglect of the supply-chain crisis. With Joe Biden’s approval ratings still in search of a floor, though, inevitably the White House would look for another scapegoat to get a reset of sorts on a failing policy area. According to the Washington Post and this obvious trial balloon, Xavier Becerra’s about to explore the beauty of time with his family:

Xavier Becerra Is a Disaster at HHS? Who Could Have Seen That Coming?
The Morning Jolt, January 8, 2021: “In [Xavier] Becerra, Biden has selected a hardline partisan with no health-care experience to run HHS during a pandemic.”

Fighting Back against the Leftist Censors on Campus
Remember when academic leftists embraced free speech? When they proudly declared that they had the right to speak truth to power? Well, now that they have power, they like using it to silence anyone who challenges their views.

Hispanic Students Were Forced To Learn Critical Race Theory. They Hated It.
Kali Fontanilla discovered that not only was CRT being taught in the classroom—her minority students were failing it.

Georgetown Law to Put Ilya Shapiro on Administrative Leave
Ilya Shapiro, who is facing an aggressive smear campaign for a series of tweets about racial preferences in Supreme Court nominations that he acknowledges were poorly worded, has been placed on administrative leave from his new post at Georgetown Law pending an “investigation into whether he violated [the university’s] policies and expectations on professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment,” according to an email that Bill Treanor, the dean of the law school, sent to the student body today.

Report: Congress’s effort to “Trump-proof” next election now focusing on competing slates of electors
To repeat a point from a few weeks ago, there are three stages at which a presidential election might be manipulated: Vote-casting, vote-counting, and congressional certification. Trump devoted most of his attention in 2020 to the third stage, which is how we ended up with the vice president hiding in the Capitol basement to avoid being killed.

The Lost City of Cahokia Was Mysteriously Abandoned, And We Still Don’t Know Why
For a couple of hundred years, Cahokia was the place to be in what is now the US state of Illinois. The bustling, vibrant city was at one time home to some 15,000 people, but by the end of the 14th century it was deserted – and researchers still aren’t sure why.

Hispanic kids in California struggled with CRT-inspired ethnic studies ‘brainwashing’
Over at Reason, Robby Soave has a really interesting story about a high school English teacher from Salinas, California, a district with a large Hispanic population. After the start of the pandemic, teacher Kali Fontanilla noticed that a bunch of students seemed to be failing a new ethnic studies class. Fontanilla herself wasn’t teaching the class but she taught English to many of the students who were inexplicably failing. She became curious about why, so she went into the online portal where teachers kept their lesson plans to see what the class was about.

FIRE Survey Finds Most People See Cancel Culture as a Threat to Democracy and Freedom
“The chilling effect of self-censorship is real — and can have an alarming effect on how Americans communicate.”

“Running Gun Battle” in Florida Town Leaves One Dead, Four Wounded
Polk County, Florida, is in the central part of the state, between Tampa to the west and Orlando to the northeast. It used to be a mostly rural area, with lots of orange groves and a cheap place to retire, but the population has grown to more than 700,000, adding about 250,000 new residents in just the past 20 years. Some of the new residents of Polk County are thugs, and they had some of their typical thug fun over the weekend.

MEGAFORCE RECORDS Founder JON ZAZULA Passes Away
Megaforce Records founder Jon Zazula has passed aya at the age of 69. His daughter Rikki Zazula shared the news on her social media account

Notes on the election of 1876
The Electoral Count Act (ECA) has become a subject of controversy. There’s a bipartisan movement to amend it. Donald Trump baselessly invokes that movement as support for his claim that Mike Pence could have overturned the 2020 presidential election.

Georgetown Law Student Protesters Demand Ilya Shapiro Firing, Reparations, Place To Cry, End To “Originalist” Center
There seems to be a pre-existing unhappiness at Georgetown Law that erupted with Shapiro’s tweets the spark. “One student floated the idea of defunding the Center for the Constitution…. Another pressed Treanor on why the Center existed at all, given the originalist views of its director, Randy Barnett.”

Schools Conspire With Outside Groups Behind Parents’ Backs to Counsel Kids on Myriad Gender Choices
As a former school board member and currently a public school teacher of 30 years, I want to share some information with parents that school districts won’t tell them.

Just how “torn” is Senate GOP on SCOTUS strategy?
Are Senate Republicans really “split” on strategy in handling Joe Biden’s nomination to the Supreme Court? Or are they just offering a multi-pronged approach to an inevitability that will generally suit the entire caucus?

Latest exit leaves California Assembly with 5 vacancies
Term limits, the pandemic and a once-a-decade redistricting process have combined to prompt a flurry of early exits from the California Assembly, leaving the chamber with an usually high number of vacancies.

Wait, Schumer *never* told Biden about Joe Manchin’s red lines on Build Back Better?
Remember this bombshell revelation from the end of September?

Stifling Debate And Purging Dissenters At Georgetown Law Over Ilya Shapiro
Nate Hochman: “Campus groups ban dissent, professors lead Zoom therapy sessions, and some students privately admit that ‘we only want Ilya fired because of his conservative political views.'”

How Bad is Crime in L.A.?
On a crisp Friday evening in early December, dozens of guests were milling about the backyard of a $5 million Spanish revival home perched high above the sloping chaparral of Temescal Canyon. It was a holiday event for a financial firm, but despite the flowing booze and endless traysof appetizers, a pall hung over the festivities.

California county on track to be run by militia-aligned group
Shasta county’s recall efforts highlight how distrust in the government has led to increasing extremism in local politics

Radical Trans Ideology Being Taught in Mass. High School Biology Class
A biology teacher at a Massachusetts high school is teaching students radical leftist gender theory instead of biology.

A Cosmic Airburst May Have Devastated a Vast Native American Culture 1,500 Years Ago
More than 1500 years ago, a vast culture known as the Hopewell tradition (or Hopewell culture) stretched across what is today the eastern United States.

In free lunch food fraud, the case laid out
I embedded two of the three search warrants executed around the Twin Cities by the FBI on January 20 here (February 1) and here (February 2). The third is at the bottom of this post. If you have followed along so far, please don’t miss this one. It focuses on Aimee Bock, the mastermind of the scheme implicating Feeding Our Future, and lays out the case in vivid detail including photographs of houses bought with taxpayer funds procured from the government in the course of the fraud.

It’s Back: Senators Want EARN IT Bill to Scan All Online Messages
People don’t want outsiders reading their private messages —not their physical mail, not their texts, not their DMs, nothing. It’s a clear and obvious point, but one place it doesn’t seem to have reached is the U.S. Senate.

It’s Back: Senators Want EARN IT Bill to Scan All Online Messages
People don’t want outsiders reading their private messages —not their physical mail, not their texts, not their DMs, nothing. It’s a clear and obvious point, but one place it doesn’t seem to have reached is the U.S. Senate.

NYT: Suburban women stuck in “politics of gloom” ahead of midterms
Well, who isn’t? Inflation has hit a 40-year high, we’re edging up to another wage-price spiral, another war is brewing in eastern Europe, and we’re entering Year 3 of pandemic life. Anyone not perceiving political and cultural gloom at this moment might need their head examined.

Tennessee Senate Expels Corrupt Democrat Convicted of Defrauding Federally Funded Nursing School
Democrat Katrina Robinson started a school for nurses and other health-care workers, got millions in federal grants for it, and was just convicted of fraud for using it as her personal piggy bank

Mike Pence: ‘Trump Is Wrong. I Had No Right To Overturn the Election.’
Republican party officials voted earlier on Friday to censure Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the only two Republicans participating in the investigation of the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol

Corey Lewandowski: Trump has tasked me with destroying Chris Sununu
Corey being Corey, there’s no way to tell how much he might be exaggerating what Trump actually said to him. Remember that he was fired from Trump’s Super PAC in September after the wife of a Republican donor accused him of sexually harassing her at an event. That wasn’t the first time he’d been too disruptive even for TrumpWorld either, having been fired as campaign manager in 2016.

Pence rebukes Trump: He’s wrong and “un-American” to say that I had the power to overturn the election
Probably not going to be Trump/Pence again in 2024, huh?

RNC censures Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for persecuting people engaged in “legitimate political discourse”
“It’s not a vote to censure Cheney and Kinzinger as much as it is a vote to pardon the rioters,” Amanda Carpenter wrote.

Black legislators caucus in VA House of Delegates refuses to admit black Republican A.C. Cordoza
Last year Republicans routed Democrats in the Virginia elections. In addition to winning the governorship and lieutenant governorship, they also took control of the Virginia House of Delegates. One of the last races to be decided in the VA House was the race between black Republican A.C. Cordoza and Democratic incumbent Martha Mugler. After a recount, Cordoza won the race by roughly 100 votes.

Joe Rogan Apologizes for “Shameful” Past Use of Racial Slur
As pressure has intensified on Spotify and its star podcaster Joe Rogan, listeners reported that the company had quietly removed dozens of episodes of his show, while Rogan apologized early Saturday for his use of a racial slur in past episodes.

Jury Sees Damning Internal Emails In Sarah Palin’s Libel Case Against NY Times
“emails between New York Times editors reveal they ignored fact checkers and admitted to ‘sneaking a link’ between Sarah Palin and the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords”

Biden’s Presidency is Entering the Polling Danger Zone of “Worst President Ever”
“Most voters think President Joe Biden is one of the worst ever to hold the office, and rank him below his two immediate predecessors in the White House.”

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions
Psilocybin, prayer oil, and net neutrality.

Member of #TeamJackson Allegedly Edited Wikipedia Bios of Potential Supreme Court Nominees
A former clerk to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is accused of burnishing her Wiki bio, while sabotaging those of other contenders to replace Justice Breyer.

New CA bill would hold hotels, motels accountable for trafficking
35th District Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham has introduced a new bill to the California State Assembly that advances the fight against human trafficking, he announced Friday.

Humans feel more comfortable talking to “female” robots, study reveals
When it comes to robots, a new study finds the future really is female. A Washington State University researcher has found that people respond better to robots which have “female” characteristics instead of male ones.

Have You Heard of “The CROWN Act”?
Friday, I wrote about the “Is Professionalism a Racist Construct?” seminar that Washington University in St. Louis did last week, but I hadn’t watched the full hour-long video and — oh, boy! — is it chock full of craziness. After a half-hour, they begin talking about The CROWN Act, and go on about it for 10 minutes. What is The CROWN Act?

“Ground zero” for woke District Attorneys is in New York City, of course
You may have noticed a dangerous trend that’s been spreading across the nation in recent years. There is a new generation of exceedingly woke District Attorneys and state prosecutors who have been pushing a soft-on-crime agenda that places the welfare and comfort of convicted criminals over the safety of the community. We’ve covered many of them here, including Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, Los Angeles DA George Gascon, Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Chicago State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. Other, less famous (or notorious) examples abound. But as the New York Post reveals this week, many of them have one thing in common. Most of them have ties to a “think tank” in the Hell’s Kitchen district of New York City known as the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution located in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Many of these woke prosecutors are either graduates of the institute or have close ties to it. And the type of propaganda being taught to the next generation of prosecutors is simply off the charts in terms of wokeness and “reform” nonsense.

 

Economy & Taxes

 

Inflation is High, Will Remain Elevated for Years
As anticipated, the latest data show that prices continued to rise at an incredible pace in December. The Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCEPI), which is the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, grew at a continuously compounding annual rate of 5.6 percent from December 2020 to December 2021. Inflation has averaged 3.5 percent since January 2020, just prior to the pandemic.

How the child tax credit exemplifies what’s going wrong
The expanded child tax credit program recently expired after having run from July until December of 2021. The program was put in place as part of of the American Rescue Plan of 2021. Eligible parents of children under the age of 17 were able to request advance payments of up to $300 per child, depending on the child’s age, to be be received on the 15th of each month. Now that the program has expired, families who took advantage of the program are having to get used to going back to the way the program was handled before the waves of pandemic relief were handed out. The Build Back Better Act had a provision to further extend the program in some of its many versions, but we all know what happened to that bill. NBC News was one of many media outlets that began interviewing angry parents describing various hardships they have encountered with the termination of the program.

The Raskin Fed Nomination: Not a Great Idea
A couple of weeks ago, I took a look at the nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to become the Fed’s vice chairwoman for supervision. It didn’t seem like a great idea (and, as I reported, I wasn’t alone in thinking so).

Add Warehouse Space to the List of Supply Constraints
Businesses affected by supply-chain disruptions are currently looking at ways to build resilience to future supply-chain shocks. Reliance on just-in-time supply chains has left some businesses without goods as shipping delays abound, so they are looking to keep larger inventories to remedy the problem.

The socialist dream of the “land tax”
Here’s something a little different for you this afternoon. Hearing progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren lecturing the country about the need for a (likely unconstitutional) “wealth tax” is nothing new. There have been plenty of “eat the rich” plans proposed to address what activists see as the “problem of some people having too much money.” But I ran across a slightly different version of these redistributionist dreams today in a column at The Editorial Board written by Polly Cleveland. It caught my eye, partly because of the long and rather laborious title, “What if we replaced all federal levies, including the income tax, with a tax on land?”

Gas prices reach record highs in Orange and Los Angeles counties
Gas prices in Orange County have reached a record high. The average price of self-serve regular is $4.70 a gallon, beating the previous record set in 2012

 

International

 

Scottish Woman Visited by Police for Posting Her Charity’s Policy
Nicola Murray, from Perthshire, Scotland, miscarried three babies due to domestic abuse. Murray set up a nonprofit, Brodie’s Trust, named after her miscarried son, in order to support women who have “suffered pregnancy loss through Domestic Violence or Forced Termination.”

Cuba runs out of milk, breaking Castro’s promise
For some time, they did — but today, many go without.

Cuba slaps new tax on food sales as economic woes hit hard
Cuba on Saturday announced a new 10 percent tax on retail food sales, as the country endures economic woes marked by rampant inflation.

 

Opinion

 

Sore winners in Sacramento
We all know what a sore loser is — someone who lacks grace in defeat. But strangely, in California politics, we have sore winners.

Trump’s disturbing claim that Pence could “overturn the election”
This past weekend, Donald Trump claimed that Mike Pence, as vice president, had the power to change the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump said: “Unfortunately, [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election.”

Destroy the Public-School Systems
A local Fox affiliate reports that last year in Baltimore’s largest high school, 77 percent of students graduated reading at an elementary-school level, and many of them at a kindergarten level. Only twelve students at the school were at grade level — that’s under two percent. And it was a whistleblower who came forward with this information

Fire the Statisticians!
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish caudillo, is surely a typical politician of our times — our very, very, very stupid times. Faced with high inflation caused in part by his illiterate crackpot regime’s loosey-goosey monetary policy, he ordered an even loosier-goosier policy, cutting interest rates even further on the theory that high interest rates are just a bankers’ plot against him — and by “bankers” you can go ahead and just say “Jews,” which is what the Erdogan regime habitually does.

Harvard’s Method of Discrimination Is Affront to Individual Dignity
In a move that may finally put an end to race-conscious admissions, the Supreme Court accepted a petition to hear Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard on Jan 24.

The Power of “No”
The simplest of words is the key to defeating cancel culture.

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Harvard Race-Discrimination Problem
If Biden selects this judge, she will have to answer for her service on the board of a racially discriminatory college.

Pro-Worker Nationalism-Populism Won’t Help Workers
Did “pro-worker” conservative nationalism-populism help workers while President Trump was in office? No.

1936 and Now
To some of us, it seems we have been writing about China and the Olympics our whole lives, or our whole careers. I have a piece on the homepage today: ” ‘Genocide Games,’ Again.” The PRC tried to get the Summer Games for 2000. They lost out to Sydney. The International Olympic Committee made that decision in September 1993. Then the PRC campaigned for the 2008 Summer Games — and got them. And starting today, of course, they are presiding over the Winter Games.

The Toxic Absurdity of “Diversity Statements”
I as if landing a college teaching position wasn’t already difficult enough, the powers-that-be have placed another obstacle in job-seekers’ path: the so-called “Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” better known as the “diversity statement” or “DEI statement.” Many (most?) institutions now require such a document as part of the application packet along with the traditional CV, cover letter, and transcripts.

What Does “White Supremacy” Mean?
This is a question I have been thinking about for a while, but never found the right entry point for exploring it until today

RNC Should Take a Lesson from Mike Pence
The Republican National Committee has voted to formally censure Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for “actions in their positions as members of the January 6th Select Committee not befitting Republican members of Congress.” This is both morally repellent and politically self-destructive.

Long Live Ukraine, Taiwan and the Nation-State
A critical achievement of modern civilization may rest on the fate of these two small countries, in danger of being swallowed by imperial neighbors.

RNC Should Take a Lesson from Mike Pence
The Republican National Committee has voted to formally censure Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for “actions in their positions as members of the January 6th Select Committee not befitting Republican members of Congress.” This is both morally repellent and politically self-destructive.

Equal rights or color and gender quotas? Jan
It was interesting to read columnist Larry Elder’s take on equal rights vs. equal outcomes in today’s local newspaper — the same day President Joe Biden promised to nominate the first Black woman to replace the retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

The End of the Republicans’ Big Tent
The party has no tolerance for dissent within its ranks.