Archive for the ‘education’ Category

Today I was reading a piece by Robert F. Graboyes PhD who is advocating the destruction of his Alma Marta Columbia University in order to save the University System in a piece titled Columbia Delenda Est.

Cato’s entreaty—“Carthago Delenda Est”—was intended not only to punish the Carthaginians, but also to warn other states from behaving as Carthage had. Laying waste to Columbia’s prestige would send a chilling message to other institutions choosing to tolerate, appease, and celebrate threats and acts against Jews.

While the entire article is worth your time I took note of a specific bit of it that I think speaks volumes (Emphasis Mine)

For states and morally upright colleges, make it easier for those students to transfer to your institutions. For example, in January, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered his state’s universities to waive usual transfer requirements for Jewish students facing “well-founded fear of religious persecution” elsewhere and urged Florida’s universities to offer in-state tuition and scholarships to financially disadvantaged transfer students.

Now I’ve always been a believer that the right thing is also the smart thing and this is a perfect example because doing the right thing: Giving Jewish students in fear of their safety a refuge is the smart thing: Attracting students who are interested in actually learning rather than protesting and are from an ethnic/religious group that despite being 0.2% of the population of the world accounts for 22% of the Nobel Prizes which is a rate of 11,250% above average.

But even more important than that fact DeSantis did this in JANUARY the same month that the president of Harvard resigned. He was smart enough to see that it wasn’t the end, it was the beginning of what was coming and took action long before Columba descended into the pit.

That’s what far sighted leadership is. Anticipating a problem in the early stages and advancing a solution that both solves the problem and helps the organization you are leading.

DeSantis’ move is a godsend for Jewish students who no longer feel safe in the Ivy league but it will be a bigger godsend for the Universities in Florida who will get an influx of hard working motivated students, donor dollars from the families of those hard working students and with a little luck end up hosing a future Nobel Prize winner who will of course attract more high level scholars and thus dollars to the state.

Thus Ron DeSantis’ decision to do the right thing will benefit the people of Florida long after he is out of office, perhaps even long after he is dead and gone.

That’s why is was my first choice in 2024 and will likely be my first choice in 2028 no matter what happens in November and it’s a reason why more than just Jewish students in fear of their lives are heading to Florida in droves.

Unexpectedly of course.

Lieutenant Harold Kaminsky: [to Captain John Earle, who demanded confirmation before alerting anyone when informed of a sub sighting in the restricted zone] You wanted confirmation, Captain? [Pointing to the Pearl Harbor fleet aflame] Take a look! There’s your confirmation!

Tora Tora Tora 1970

I found myself thinking of my father yesterday and realizing that the people who are currently occupying colleges and screaming for the destruction of Israel and the death of Jews would have defined him as having “White Privilege”.

Well he certainly was white (although many in society didn’t consider the children of Sicilian immigrants white and he certainly was loaded with privilege his entire life.

  • He had the privilege of being born to a family of 9 from Parents who came from Sicily with nothing
  • He had the privilege of leaving school at 13 to work full time in the paper mills to help support a family that while having a little bit of land was dead poor.
  • He had the privilege of working through the shutdowns of the plant to clean out the vats for extra money in an age when there was no such thing as “welfare”.
  • He had the privilege to spend years in the Pacific on an Ammunition ship knowing it would take but a single hit for his life to end it his 20’s.
  • He had the privilege after the war of running a bar and restaurant in a town that didn’t like Italians.
  • He had the privilege of enduring gunshots fired at his house and business for being an Italian businessman in the wrong town, of being jumped and in one instance run over for daring to carry on and not pay protection.
  • He had the privilege of seeing his wife and mother of his four children at the time caught in an explosion at his place, being badly burned but somehow surviving to eventually give birth to a fifth child.
  • He had the privilege of using his skills as a carpenter to build the house where he moved his family to and eventually build next door to his mother-in-law after her husband died to take care of her.
  • He had the privilege of having her move in with her and devoting himself full time to her welfare when she was too sick to live in her house next door.
  • And he had the privilege of after a lifetime of labor to die just after retirement at 65 before he ever received his first social security check.

But the biggest privilege he had was being brought up in a faithful Catholic house, marrying a faithful Catholic wife and during all that time of unremitting labor and danger thanking God for all the blessings he had. Always sharing what he had with strangers in need and never complaining about his lot, at least not in the 23 years that I shared a house with him.

Yet in contrast we see people attending elite universities, people who have rarely if ever had to struggle, who would be considered part of the 1% not just of this nation but of all human history abusing that advantage to gain an elite education, flouting the law and terrorizing their fellow students whose primary crime is to belong to a race that has survived thousands years of various attempts to exterminate them.

I’ll wager these pampered fools never had “no” said to them in their lives. They wouldn’t have lasted 15 minutes in the great depression let alone on the battlefields of World War 2 in the world where my dad and millions like him bore the “privilege” of responsibility. They’ve not builders they’re destroyers.

Even worse the “adults” in the room are encouraging them to continue such behavior and at the highest levels of Government people holding power do little or nothing out of fear that enforcing the law might cost them votes come November.

In my fathers day they would have been quickly arrested and subject to the full penalties of the law and in states like Florida where sanity still rules they are, which is why you aren’t seeing Campus takeovers and bridges blocked, because people protest within the boundaries of the laws and the adults in charge make sure that if they cross the line between exercising their rights and abusing the rights of others, they suffer the consequences.

These kids never faced the consequences of their actions. Now all of us get have the “privilege” of doing so.

Mrs. Marathon Pundit, third from left, at Young Pioneers event in Sece, Latvia, in 1976.

By John Ruberry

On Friday, the far-left Chicago Teachers Union organized a rally for voting age Chicago Public School students, during school hours, the “Student Power Forum.” 

They might as well have called it the Young Pioneers march.

The event was co-sponsored by Bring Chicago Home, which is working to pass a referendum, also called Bring Chicago Home, that will increase Chicago’s real estate transaction tax on properties selling for more than $1 million.

Election day in Illinois is Tuesday.

Proponents call Bring Chicago Home a “mansion tax,” but many retail storefronts and apartment buildings, and probably all skyscrapers, are worth more than that. I call it a jobs killer and a rent raiser. Funds from the tax hike, if voters approve it, will aid the homeless. No specifics are given as to how the homeless will benefit from Bring Chicago Home.

Of course, Chicago’s leftist mayor, Brandon Johnson, enthusiastically supports Bring Chicago Home. Johnson, who prior to his election as mayor, had no executive experience, but he’s a former CPS teacher and a longtime Chicago Teachers Union organizer. 

The rally, argues the center-right Illinois Policy Institute, likely violates CPS ethics rules, and the group quickly filed an ethics complaint. CTU called that move “racist.”

Now that Johnson is mayor, it’s difficult to ascertain a difference between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union. Johnson, besides being a former CTU employee, appointed six of the seven members of the Chicago Board of Education. Johnson is a mentor of CTU president Stacey Davis Gates–she has a son attending a Catholic high school–and she recently suggested, as collective bargaining between the two “separate” entities could end up costing taxpayers $50 billion. I hope she was joking.

CPS and CTU will be negotiating against itself. Let’s call them CPS/CTU.

Let’s return to the Young Pioneers. Regular readers here and my own blog know that Mrs. Marathon Pundit was born in Latvia when it was part of the Soviet Union. Enrollment in the Young Pioneers was mandatory after children turned nine. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Vladimir Lenin’s wife, was a driving force in the creation of the Young Pioneers. Similar groups were founded in most of the other communist states. 

Krupskaya recognized that young minds are malleable and vulnerable to manipulation. So does the Chicago Teachers Union. 

Some of the Young Pioneers activities were similar to what the Girl Scouts enjoy, Mrs. Marathon Pundit told me, but there was some communist indoctrination that she had to endure.

These are the four leftist education Rs: Reading, writing, arithmetic, and radicalism. 

CPS/CTU is heading in that direction in regard to kids.

As for the first three Rs, CPS/CTU is doing a wretched job in addressing them. In both reading and mathematics, only about 20 percent of CPS seniors perform at grade level.

There is some good news. Chicago conservatives–yes, they exist–found some surprising allies in opposing CPS/CTU pulling voting age students out of school to attend the Bring Chicago Home rally. Former Chicago alderman Dick Simpson, as well as journalists Eric Zorn and Laura Washington–all liberals–have decried the move.

As I mentioned earlier, there are no specifics on how Bring Chicago home revenue will be spent, assuming the referendum passes. But the Chicago Teachers Union has an idea. According to a leaked document obtained by the Illinois Policy Institute, CTU will be making a not-so-surpising demand as part of its focus on housing, which it says, “begins now with Bring Chicago Home on March 19.” At the top of the CTU list is this shakedown, “Financial assistance for CTU members to live & work in the city.”

Are there homeless CPS/CTU teachers?

Chicago’s high school “Young Pioneers” are what Lenin called “useful idiots.”

There could be five Rs in Chicago schools soon, rent assistance for teachers would be the fifth.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Right now the left has the Gays and the Transgenders and the Hollywood elites & media in which they are overrepresented and they figure that’s the best things to have, but in America Islam is a thing of the future.  In 20 years the children of Muslims now being raised on the tenets of Sharia law in America will be old enough to vote and Democrats going to make sure they get those votes when the time come, not now but 10-20 years from now.

DatechGuy 2016

Always look on the bright side of Life

Eric Idle

The various anti-Semitic marches and events tearing through the country in general and campus’ in particular have rightly gotten plenty of press. To a large degree this is made possible by the steady increase of Islam in the country whose effect some Jewish liberals are finally grasping after ignoring warning from folks like Pam Geller, Robert Spencer and occasionally me.

But being of an optimistic nature one likes to look and the bright side of this change and one of those bright sides is getting almost no press:

Minneapolis area school district says it will let families opt out of LGBT curriculum materials after several Muslim families threatened to sue.

St. Louis Park Public School District just west of Minneapolis said it will allow families to opt their kids out of reading books with LGBT themes.

Somali Muslim families had threatened to sue the district, alleging that not allowing families to opt out potentially violates the Constitution and state law.

Now remember Minnesota is as blue as they come, they’ve actually passed laws encouraging the trans madness to a point where they’ve created a shortage of doctors available to castrate children from other states who rush there to be cut up.

But on this issue, they’ve caved pretty fast, no big publicity campaign, no MSM trying to shame the parents, no grandstanding by Hollywood or academia or clever “don’t say gay” tag for the school system in question. Just a quick retreat. As Robert Spencer put it when writing about the case:

Of course, school district officials in Minneapolis, which has a significant Somali Muslim population, may not have wanted to appear so “Islamophobic” as to fight Muslim families in court. This was especially true because the families based their case on Islam: “on November 2, the families’ attorneys sent the district a letter explaining Islamic teachings around gender and sexuality and outlining the timeline of parents’ complaints about the LGBT books.”

He also notes a great mistake being made by Christians there.

The real pity here is that Christian parents and those from other faith groups didn’t join the legal case as well. The Muslim families acted after “some of the families’ elementary school children had been exposed to LGBT characters in picture books, which caused ‘significant confusion and distress,’” according to the letter the families sent to the school district. Christian and other parents have also experienced “significant confusion and distress” over this propaganda being forced onto their children, and they should have protested.

You’re going to see a lot more of this and it’s going to eventually force the left to make a choice and my guess is they will choose Islam, at least if they know how to count.

Closing thought. How fast would the school board have laughed the parents out of the place if they had been Catholic and not Muslim?