Category Archives: America

UPDATED (6/5): NEW: Jared Packs Unicorns and Rainbows For Mideast Trip

America, Donald Trump, Gender, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East, Populism

NEW COLUMN IS “Jared Packs Unicorns and Rainbows For Mideast Trip.” It’s now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An abridged version, “Bibi’s Cautious Conservatism May Clash With Jared’s New Peace Plan,” is on Townhall.com.

An excerpt:

JARED KUSHNER couldn’t stare down an uncompromising foe if his wife, Ivanka Trump, held his soft, lily-white hand throughout the ordeal.

Yet ridiculously, a May 22, McClatchy article claimed Mr. Kushner was fixing to “stare down uncompromising foes in fights over immigration and Middle East peace.”

Let us begin with our debutant’s Middle East peace plan, the thing his father-in-law calls “the deal of the century.”

The notion of Jared solving the Israeli-Palestinian vexation is laughable, perhaps the dumbest thing ever. You just know this is a vain Ivanka move to brand the region and add it to her CV. (Ivanka, to those who don’t know, is intent on riding to the presidency herself on her father’s coattails.)

The Arabs slated to partake in the Kushner summit, Bahraini, Saudi and Emirati participants, are likely laughing the hardest.

For one, the Arabs know that Ivanka is calling the shots—and that the president’s fashion-focused daughter is behind the branding of the sexually androgynous, intellectually inchoate production that is Jared Kushner. If you think that’s something Arabs respect, you don’t know Shiite from Shinola.

Wily Arabs are hip to White House dynamics. They know who’s running the West Wing and who to flatter. Some in the region have even given Donald Trump a dubious honorific, Abu Ivanka al-Amriki. Being known as “father of Ivanka the American” is, of course, no honor in the muscular, manly Middle East.

The timing of the Kushner peace plan is especially asinine. For all the upheaval in the region, the Palestinian Problem has nevertheless dropped off the geopolitical radar as an urgent matter to resolve. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Jared Packs Unicorns and Rainbows For Mideast Trip,” is now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

READ an abridged version, “Bibi’s Cautious Conservatism May Clash With Jared’s New Peace Plan,” on Townhall.com.

UPDATE (6/5): Jared definitely has those girl-like broad hips. His is not a man’s shape. The contrast is stark when he’s seen striding alongside these two military figures who have narrow hips and broad shoulders.

WHITE MALE MISERY In America

America, Drug War, Economy, Multiculturalism, Psychiatry, Race, Racism

The Economist’s writer is no angel. But he is dancing like so many angels on the head of a pin in order to minimize the effects of systemic hostility toward white men in America:

… thoughts of suicide were slightly higher on average amongst less-educated whites than other groups.
… heavy drinking was higher amongst whites than other groups.

… opioid abuse along with other prescription drug abuse and illegal drug use remain much higher amongst non-college educated whites. Other research has shown that whites commit suicide at a higher rate than blacks and Hispanics: according to the CDC, white non-Hispanic Americans commit suicide at around three times the rate of blacks and Hispanics, with the highest and growing toll amongst older men.

…increased suicide rates among white men may be caused in part by a decline in income and status.

The Economist also cleverly attempts to minimize the dire situation of white men in America by implying that these “poorly educated” white ingrates are still “better off than women and minorities.”

Then of course, there are the solutions of shallow economic reductionism:

Increase the minimum wage. Provide more generous earned income tax credits. (“Because of lower incomes, minorities and women are more likely to be eligible for EITC payments, and to benefit from minimum wage increases.”)

READ: “Depression is increasing among Americans reaching middle age: Misery is spreading across all groups, but poorly educated white men remain the unhappiest.” (5/15/019)

Is The Economist Bewailing That America Is Becoming A Minority-Majority Country?

America, Argument, Conflict, Europe, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Race, Racism

The transatlantic relations are worth fighting for, laments the Economist, a progressive news magazine. Europe and America must work to stop their relationship from unraveling.

Just about in every issue, the same progressives (excellent journalists, for sure) celebrate that America is on its way to becoming a minority-majority country.

It’s inexplicable, then, that the economist proceeds to bitterly bewail the fact that, “America is becoming less European. A century ago more than 80% of its foreign-born population came from Europe; now the figure is only 10%. Surging economies in Asia are tugging America’s attention away.”

AND,

Europe inevitably counts for less in American eyes than it once did. The generation that formed bonds fighting side-by-side in the second world war is passing away and even the cold war is becoming a distant memory.

READ: “Europe and America must work to stop their relationship unraveling.”

Trump is certainly not retarding the trend:

UPDATED (4/28): Grad Inflation: American Kids Are Dumbest In Developed World, Yet Graduation Rates Keep Rising

Affirmative Action, America, Culture, Education, Kids

American school kids, in aggregate, are the dumbest in the developed world, yet their high-school graduation rates keep rising. Looks puffed-up. The Economist explains how grad inflation is carried out:

…. Nationally, high-school graduation rates have increased at a steady clip even while other measures of learning and achievement—international exams, state-mandated standardised tests, college-admissions test scores—have been flat or even slightly negative. That could be because children are doing better, or because schools are lowering standards.

An ever-present element in these stories is the reliance on online credit-recovery classes. These are remedial courses delivered via computer that students can take if they fail a class, rather than attending summer school or being forced to repeat a grade. Jeremy Noonan, a former science teacher in Douglas County, Georgia, was assigned to supervise a credit-recovery course in 2016. Mr Noonan says a colleague told him that his responsibility was to manage the course so that students received an average grade of 80 or higher, which would enable them to graduate even if they failed the end-of-term exams.

The computer programme doing the teaching allowed students to retake exams they failed, with many of the same questions. “I realised right away it was all about manipulating the system,” he says. “Most teachers just gave the students the answers without bothering to explain the course content,” says Ayde Davis, a former public-school teacher in Del Rio, Texas, who reported violations to the state education agency. “Students could finish their courses at accelerated rates, the administration was happy, and credit-recovery teachers who co-operated were feted.”

Students completed exams at unreasonably fast speeds—one finished a physics exam in four minutes and earned an 80% score, according to records she saved. In the 2015-16 school year, 144 credits were given for recovery courses completed in less than ten hours, Ms Davis’s documents show. According to the makers of credit-recovery software, each course has between 60 and 75 hours of instruction.

It is not possible to know how many credit-recovery programmes are being used as diploma mills. But these courses are now widespread. The Fordham Institute, an education think-tank, estimates that 69% of all high schools in America use them. Some high schools have more than half of their students enrolled in credit-recovery programmes. They are especially popular in urban high schools attended by poor and minority students—in other words, precisely the places where graduation rates have risen fastest.

READ: “Grad inflation: The rise in American high-school graduation rates looks puffed-up. Online credit-recovery classes have been implicated in many school scandals.”

UPDATE (4/28):

And folks think their kids are so smart for flicking through mindless content.

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