Archive for the ‘education’ Category

Let’s not go Brandon: Chicago’s new mayor focusing on wrong root causes of crime

Posted: December 17, 2023 by John Ruberry in crime, education, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

Last Thursday, Chicago’s new mayor, Brandon Johnson, the candidate of the far-left Chicago Teachers Union, held a press conference. It was one of those dog-and-pony shows, also in attendance was the city’s police superintendant, Larry Snelling a Johnson appointee, and other municipal officials.

Armed with brochures, Johnson unveiled the “People’s Plan for Community Safety.” Who are the people that devised the plan? Presumably that group doesn’t include cops and crime victims, and it almost certainly doesn’t include the South Side family who had two cars stolen in separate incidents last month. One theft was a carjacking that was captured in a horrifying video. 

Crime was the main campaign issue in this spring’s runoff election for mayor. Paul Vallas, a moderate Democrat, promised to beef up law enforcement. It was the center piece of his lackluster campaign. Johnson, appealing to his African American and leftist whites, vowed to attack crime at the root causes–just like the outgoing mayor, Lori Lightfoot.

Crime soared under Lightfoot. And now that she is gone, it’s still high. While Chicago’s murder rate is a little bit lower, post-pandemic, it’s still higher than it was in 2019. There are more robberies and auto thefts than a year ago, and many more compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Predictably, Johnson and the other city officials at the presser focused on the “root causes” of Chicago crime.

From the event’s press release:

There is a shattered sense of safety in Chicago that has been driven by decades of purposeful disinvestment in our communities. It is time for a new community safety approach – one that addresses the root of the problem by investing in our people and neighborhoods to secure a safer Chicago for generations to come. The People’s Plan for Community Safety calls upon our entire city, and especially those most impacted by violence, to create solutions together.

Lightfoot’s failures as mayor went beyond law enforcement. But Chicago tried the healie-feelie approach to crime under Lightfoot. It didn’t work.

Chicagoans voted to double-down on dopey.

Commenting the next day on the Morning Answer with Dan and Amy, co-host Dan Proft threw a penalty flag at Johnson’s root causes crimefighting strategy. Reminding listeners that Johnson is half of a two-parent household, Proft said Johnson is focusing on the wrong root causes. 

Indeed.

A few days earlier in the Wall Street Journal, Proft noted, Jason L. Riley pointed his finger at the true root cause of rising crime rates, the proliferation of fatherless households since 1960. Referring to what is known as “the success sequence,” Riley wrote: 

A decade ago, New York City launched a campaign to combat teen pregnancy. It featured ads on buses and subway cars that read: “If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty.”

He continued: 

We could use more of that moralizing from public officials, whether the issue is solo parenting, substance abuse or crime. The success sequence works to keep people not only off the dole but also out of trouble with the law. High-school graduates and children raised by both parents are much less likely to end up in jail. “Virtually every major social pathology,” political scientist Stephen Baskerville writes, “has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders—all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor, surpassing even race and poverty.”

Chicago, and most American large cities, as well as many suburbs and rural communities, have been on a failure sequence for decades.

I’m not claiming to have the answers to turning around the failure sequence, ignoring the problem, along the lines of placing electric tape over the check engine light on your car when it flashes, of course means more failure. And yes, there are single moms who do a stupendous job raising kids.

One time-tested way out of poverty is quality education. Utilizing education to achieve success worked for that Founding Father without a father, Alexander Hamilton.

But Johnson, a former Chicago Public Schools teacher who was a longtime paid organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, even while serving as a Cook County commissioner, remains overly loyal to the CTU.

Also last week, the Chicago Board of Education, which includes six Johnson appointees, approved a resolution, in the name of equity of course, that has long been on the CTU’s anti-education wish list, removing the ability of students to attend high schools–better high schools–outside of their neighborhoods. Most of the students who benefit from the doomed program are minorities. Of low-income 11th-grade CPS students, less than 20 percent of them score at grade level in reading and math.

In another attack on students, the state’s private school tuition tax credit program, the Invest in Kids Act, which was signed into law six years ago by a Republican governor, will be allowed to expire next year.

Chicago–and Illinois–are focusing on the wrong root causes.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Four Reasons Why Nobody Should Be Surprised at Gay, Kornbluth and Magill Answers under Oath

Posted: December 7, 2023 by datechguy in culture, education, Israel
Tags: , , , , , ,

Jedediah Tucker Ward: It’s not hypothetical to Dr. Pavel, he wrote it.

Michael Grazier: So he says.

Jedediah Tucker Ward: So he says under oath.

Class Action 1991

There are three reasons why we should not be surprised at either the testimony of these “ladies” who are running elite colleges concerning calling for the genocide of Jews

or the sudden volte face when no longer under oath from Penn

and Harvard

Let’s take them in Order

1. Under Oath

You see when under oath you are in a position that there are sanctions for lying so as long as they were under oath they didn’t want to assert something that would have been provably false. Particularly with GOP representatives ready to call them out on it.

But once they were no longer under oath, they could make any assertion they wanted without fear of the law.

2. Support for Antifa & BLM

The second reason is less legalistic. At colleges all over the country we have seen people support and even join in on the looting and torching of American cities since 2018. We have seen such actions defended and even promoted by groups on campus with facility and administration giving very public support to such things.

Given those facts how could they credibly claim that such statements are violations the policies of their universities.

3. He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune:

The third reason is a bit more mercenary and can be summarized in one word: CASH:

Over 200 US universities including elite institutions Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been accused of raking in $13 billion in “undocumented contributions from foreign governments,” according to a new report.

A sizable portion of the funds were said to be donated from authoritarian regimes around the globe including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China and the UAE, the report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) claimed.

Furthermore consider this:

I’ll say this for these universities, when someone buys them they stay bought.

4. No Enemies on the Left

Finally let’s look at a simple reality.

If I walked onto the campus of Harvard, or MIT, or Penn or frankly almost any university in Massachusetts and sat down to pray my Rosary with a sign next to me that said:

  1. There are two genders
  2. Transgenderism is a form of mental illness
  3. Marriage is between a man and a woman

I would likely at best be escorted forcibly off campus and at worst surrounded and attacked by a raging mob of leftists with no consideration of my 1st Amendment rights. After all I’m a conservative Catholic who actually believes

But the reality is that those people who are screaming “From the River to the Sea” and calling for the death of Jews are reliable votes for Democrats and for all the failings of modern Universities they can do the Ghastly Tom Hagen Math:

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.

It’s only been seven years since I wrote those words but they are certainly coming true.

Frankly if they wanted to deflect the question all they would have had to say, is something like:

“While I and the university find such speech horrific as long as it’s just speech it’s not actionable under the Constitution. The first amendment doesn’t have an exception for ‘evil'”.

Alas for them, such a statement would be the source of many lawsuits for all those who have been cancelled, fired and harassed over the last few years for having mainstream conservative opinions.

The left never expels useful idiots until their usefulness is over.

Stacy McCain Notes the Johnson vs Hamas Question, Robert Zimmerman Provides the Answer

Posted: October 31, 2023 by datechguy in education, elections, media, politics
Tags: , , , , , ,

One of the advantages of waking up in excruciating pain is that you are up early enough to notice pieces quickly such as this one from Stacy McCain on what the media thinks REAL threat to the country is today ( Spoiler: it’s not Hamas or their supporters) :

Based on his stated supposedly biblical positions, the Bible in Johnson’s head is a silly, vicious farrago of ignorance and bigotry, and a blueprint for Christofascist tyranny. . . .
[T]he right loves to say we live in a republic not a democracy. And what they mean by that is that authoritarian disenfranchisement is awesome as long as it benefits the party of white biblical Christofascism. . . .

Do you want to read the whole thing? Probably not, but I felt obligated to throw the link in there, just so you could see that I’m not making this up. Does anyone really believe that “Christofascist tyranny” and “authoritarian disenfranchisement” (whatever that means) are eminent dangers to our country, or that Mike Johnson aspires to achieve this?

Johnson of course is the new very unexpected speaker of the house and democrats who created his speakership by voting with the 8 GOP reps who wanted to outset Speaker McCarthy are having a serious case of buyers remorse. To wit:

MAGA Mike unveiled the first piece of legislation promoted by his regime.

CBS reported, “House Republicans want to pay for emergency aid to Israel by cutting funding to the IRS, teeing up a collision with the White House and Democrat-controlled Senate over how to support a key U.S. ally.

“The House GOP released a $14.3 billion standalone measure on Monday that would pay for aid to Israel by cutting the same amount in funding that was allocated to the IRS under the Inflation Reduction Act, one of President Biden’s signature pieces of legislation.”

That is what conservatives have wanted for 31 years now, going back to the Reform Party, the Gingrich Revolution, the Tea Party and Trump. $30 trillion later, we may actually get cutting-before-spending legislation.

That’s via Don Surber whose early morning piece I caught almost as soon as it was published thanks to the pain still hitting me in the gut.

That the left media would be going all in on painting the rather mild mannered speaker they despise as an existential threat to American Democracy at a time when Jewish students are being advised to hide in attics at Universities and cities like Boston and New York have folks extoling the virtues of those who kidnap, murder women and children and behead babies might seem odd when this stuff is being plastered all over the news:

To the right are screen captures from two very large protests, the top showing a demonstration of an estimated 7,000 pro-Hamas protesters taking over the Brooklyn Bridge in New York on October 28, 2023. In the video at one point you can read a sign that clearly says, “Our soldiers will not be held accountable for anything.”

The second picture is from a protest in Chicago. The demonstrators at this moment are chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”, a chant that has always meant in plain language, “We will kill all the Jews in Israel because Allah said only Muslims can live there.” It is also written into the Hamas founding charter, which states unequivocally that it “owes its loyalty to Allah, derives from Islam its way of life, and strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”

That comes from a Robert Zimmerman piece linked by Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit around the time I woke screaming in pain today. Zimmerman notes these thing that one can’t help notice in the news but then provides the answer to why the left seeks to elevate Mike Johnson as a danger while ignoring the threat of mobs provoking fear and violence :

What has not been noted enough however is the political allegiances of these pro-Hamas demonstrators. While not every Democrat favors what Hamas did on October 7th, we can be very very VERY confident that practically every single one of these pro-Hamas protesters, calling for the death of every Jew in Israel and numbering in the tens of thousands, is a Democrat, and has been voting for Democrats their entire lives.

This is the base of the Democratic Party. It is why the anti-Semitic “squad” of Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), and Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) are all elected members of the Democratic Party caucus in the House of Representatives. The first two represent districts strongly controlled by Democrats, most of whom come from the local Muslim communities, while latter two come from the one-party secular cities of New York and Boston, controlled wholly by Democrats.

This is of course consistent with the ghastly Tom Hagen Math that I’ve been writing about since 2016:

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.

And if that means that Jews in the US have to live in terror for their lives, particularly in blue cities and bright blue campus’ nationwide, well so be it.

The only problem is that this isn’t something that plays well outside of the deepest of blue cities so it must be suppressed and/or ignored because the story can’t be about Democrats supporting babykillers and kidnappers. Stacy McCain again:

Readers will recall that we last paid attention to Mr. Berlatsky two weeks ago (“Noah Berlatsky, Who Seems to Be OK With Pedophiles, Sure Does Hate Republicans,” Oct. 9), when Berlatsky sought to persuade his readers that what was really newsworthy was not that Hamas terrorists had slaughtered hundreds of Israelis civilians, but rather the Republican reaction to this massacre. Notice the pattern: No matter what the actual news may be, every day is Attack Republicans Day for Noah Berlatsky.

Why do you think that is?

Stacy gives his reason why Berlatsky wants to advance this narrative, but in my mind Mr. Zimmerman’s explanation as to why Democrats want to change the subject is more persuasive. I fully believe that in just a few years we will see this from Democrats:

Or you simply an example of a “good German”, who makes believe evil isn’t happening in your name, and will later claim “you just didn’t know, you had no idea what the Nazis were really doing?”

For the left to see themselves in the light of truth might be unbearable. But for the voters of the nation to see Democrats in the light of truth, that’s unthinkable.

Today’s elitist college students are good at standardized tests, but they can’t figure out good and evil

Posted: October 15, 2023 by John Ruberry in education, Israel, Israel vs Hamas, middle east, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics, war
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

Sherman McCoy, the Yale-educated lead character of Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities–and an old money WASP–saw himself as a “Master of the Universe.”

But as the Book of Proverbs says, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”

At America’s elite universities, such as Yale and the rest of the Ivy League, as well as NYU, Stanford, and some others, there are thousands of students who see themselves as Masters of the Universe. In reality, they have the right family connections, and they are very good at taking standardized tests, such as the SAT. Or, instead of being old money types like McCoy, they check the right woke boxes. 

Ryna Workman, who is non-binary (box one), Black (box two), and a leftist (box three), in her (Workman prefers they/them pronouns) role as president of the NYU Student Bar Association president, wrote a hateful anti-Israeli statement about the October 7 attacks that, among other things, said that the Jewish state “bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.” Among those murdered were babies. The Nazi’s Einsatzgruppen also indiscriminately killed babies–and many others–during the Holocaust.

People calling their political enemies Nazis is as old as the Nazi movement and almost always it’s an overstated charge–but calling Hamas members Nazis is accurate. 

Fortunately, there has been some pushback. Winston and Strawn, an elite Chicago law firm where Jim Thompson, Illinois’ longest-serving governor–and a Republican–once served as CEO, repealed its job offer to Workman. 

Good.

After former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who had previously served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, decried the dozens of Harvard student groups siding with Hamas over Israel in a statement, some of those organizations retracted their support. 

Summers, on X, said, “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.” 

These so-called Masters of the Universe are playing with half a deck of cards, one filled with jokers, not the harmless harlequin types, but evil clowns of the Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix ilk. 

In the words that Dan Bongino uses so often, “They are stupid smart people.” These young elitists don’t know the difference between good and evil.

So many of them are the evil Jokers of the Universe.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Older Entries
Newer Entries