Monthly Archives: March 2015

Broken Clock Kerry Right This Once

Foreign Policy, Iraq, Israel, Middle East

Most readers crave partisan orthodoxy. How annoying, then, to have to preface every truly “fair and balanced” commentary over these pixelated pages, with disclaimers about my departure from orthodoxy. Since I am about to agree with no other than US Secretary of State John Kerry on a comment he recently made, I had better provide my anti-Kerry credentials to uninitiated ditto-heads.

KERRY’S COWARDLY CONVERGENCE
KERRY’S SEXY MOTHER TERESA

MORE.

In “testimony on the Middle East,” delivered to Congress on Sept. 12, 2002,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “expressed strong support for Washington to oust former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein,” saying: “I think the choice of Iraq is a good choice, it’s the right choice.” “If you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” urged Netanyahu, in 2002.

Said Kerry recently, about Netanyahu:

“The prime minister, as you will recall, was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush, and we all know what happened with that decision.”

Kerry will get no disagreement from these quarters, other than to remind the secretary that he too should thrash about like a fish out of water when Iraq is mentioned. Like Bibi, Kerry supported that unforgivable invasion.

Until recently, Netanyahu and his government, so revered by Republicans, were on the wrong track with Syria too, but have been endeavoring to “radically change [the] tack on Syria, reversing a policy and military strategy that were long geared to opposing Syrian President Bashar Assad.”

I wonder if Bibi even knows of “Assad’s pro-zionist grandfather”?

Given that Netanyahu is both intelligent and knowledgeable, which is more than one can say of Bush, Obama and Kerry—I suspect that unlike our idiots, he does “Know Shiite From Shinola.” However, Bibi is playing the US, out of what he perceives to be dire necessity.

Iran To The Rescue

Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Israel

“Leave ISIS To The Homies” (Sept. 2014) observed that “ISIS’s neighbors, Israel included, didn’t seem particularly concerned about the barbarians at the gate.” The column worried that the “promise of eternal American intervention had, likely, enabled inertia and apathy among regional players,” when the wise thing for “U.S. meddlers” would be to “quit degrading the Syrian Army,” and “leave ISIS to Syria, Tehran and Tel Aviv.”

It has come to pass. the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is leading Shiite militias in battle against ISIS, near “the Islamic State-held city of Tikrit,” Iraq. And Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, like myself, thinks “it could turn out to be ‘a positive thing.’”

Yes, “let the locals take out their trash.”

Hillary And Her Bipartisan Village Idiots

Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Media, Republicans

“Hillary And Her Bipartisan Village Idiots” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.

Recent examples:

A perfectly logical statement made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in February, was framed by CNN anchorette Brooke Baldwin as “controversial.” In view of rife, Islamic anti-Semitism in Europe, Mr. Netanyahu told “all of the European Jews, and all Jews wherever [they] are [that] Israel is the home of every Jew.”

To the rational individual, unburdened by the obtuse thinking of a teletart, Netanyahu’s statement was utterly uncontroversial. It follows from an irremediable reality: The subordinate satellite states of the European Union refuse—and no longer have the power—to properly and vigorously defend their innocent, Jewish and Christian citizens from an identifiable threat.

Another example of the meta-shaping of news came courtesy of Fredricka Witless (whose intellectual prowess I chronicled in “Joan Rivers: Antidote to PC Totalitarianism”).

Ms. Witless used leading questions in an interview with a man she introduced as the “controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks.” In a free society, a painter—impressionist, realist, muralist, cubist, cartoonist—would never be considered controversial. He harms no one in the fulfillment of the requirements of his benign profession.

However, with her leading question, wittingly or unwittingly, Fredricka Whitfield was essentially asking an innocent cartoonist, who ekes out a life hiding from Muhammadans, whether he felt responsible for crimes perpetrated by his assailants. After all, the criminals were spurred by his drawings of their prophet.

Leading questions suggest a certain reality. They force defensive replies. They shift blame. They invert morality and reality.

Likewise has the logic of the debate been lost in the hyperventilating over Mrs. Clinton’s unorthodox email account. The dynamic at play: Hound Hillary Rodham Clinton for lesser, technocratic offenses, thus allowing her to gracefully evade responsibility for serious war crimes: the war on Libya, Hillary’s special project, for one. Benghazi, for another. …

… Read the rest. “Hillary And Her Bipartisan Village Idiots” is now on WND.

The Data Are In: Even American PhDs Are … Dumber

America, Education, Intelligence, Literature, Science, Technology

I’ve been saying it for years, based on my encounters with a relatively smart cohort, through this column. My husband, a South African PhD (received at the age of 24), has been saying it for a long time based on encounters in his field. Barely A Blog correspondent Myron Pauli, a physics PhD from MIT (of which he thinks poorly), has been saying it over these pixelated pages:

American millennials, in general—but even with masters degrees and doctorates—are unimpressive, to put it charitably. They do, however, score high in self-esteem, which is part of the problem. From a 2007, Ottawa Citizen article I wrote:

Paradoxically, while our high school students score near the bottom in international competitions, when asked to rate themselves, they consistently give themselves top marks. But then so do their parents and teachers. Thanks to constant, unwarranted worship, and no moral or rigorous intellectual instruction, American schools are full of lame and lazy megalomaniacs.

The Washington Post cites a recent report by “the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, better known as the OECDU.S,” according to which “millennials with master’s degrees and doctorates did better than their peers in only three countries, Ireland, Poland and Spain. Those in Finland, Sweden and Japan seemed to be on a different planet.”

Top-scoring U.S. millennials – the 90th percentile on the PIAAC test – were at the bottom internationally, ranking higher only than their peers in Spain. The bottom percentile (10th percentile) also lagged behind their peers. And the gap between America’s best and worst was greater than the gap in 14 other countries. This, the study authors said, signaled America’s high degree of inequality.

The “daunting” PIAAC Test showed that “U.S. millennials performed horribly.”

That might even be an understatement, given the extent of the American shortcomings. No matter how you sliced the data – by class, by race, by education – young Americans were laggards compared to their international peers. In every subject, U.S. millennials ranked at the bottom or very close to it, according to a new study by testing company ETS.

“We were taken aback,” said ETS researcher Anita Sands. “We tend to think millennials are really savvy in this area. But that’s not what we are seeing.”

By the way, note how forthrightly readers of the liberal WaPo discuss the well-documented racial differences in scholarly achievement. Alas, could the “dumbassery” documented in the WaPo article be manifesting in the reading and comprehension skills of its readers? For the article explicitly states that results were consistent across “class” and “race.” Yet many readers missed this crucial tidbit.

The information comes courtesy of Vox Day, who also quips as follows about the findings:

This isn’t surprising to me. Generation X had to understand its toys in order to play with them. There is nothing creative about a tablet or a smartphone. You can’t do anything on it. It’s basically a dumb terminal on the mainframe of the Internet. These digital natives are actually digital cargo cultists, comfortably familiar using things they don’t actually know the first thing about. As far as they’re concerned, it might as well be magic.