Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Question: What Do the Board of Harvard and the BBC Have In Common?

Posted: December 12, 2023 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Answer: The both decided their affirmative action hires (Claudine Gay & Jodie Whitaker) must not be seen as failures no matter what the results are.

The BBC saw the rating for Doctor Who crash and burn during the uber woke (as opposed to regular woke) years of her tenure but it would have been unthinkable for the first female doctor who Jodie Whitaker lovingly call Dr. Karen by the good folks at Nerdrotic so they continued to carry her allowing the crashing and burning to continue to the point where not even the return of David Tennant, Catherine Tate and Russell T Davies could saving the ratings numbers.

Now comes the Harvard board having the first black woman president of Harvard not only on national TV being unable to declare calling for the extermination of the Jews against Harvard policy but exposed as a serial plagiarist. Harvard is getting pilloried all over, donors are running for the doors BUT again the first black woman to be president of Harvard MUST NOT be allowed to be perceived as a failure, must NOT be shown to be unqualified and must NOT have the suggestion that she is causing damage perhaps irreparable, to the school’s reputation.

Therefore the Board of Harvard, while having concerns, has decided to stand by her leading Ed Morrissey to quip

Indeed. And now I wait with bated breath to see what Beege can discover on the question of how one gets fired at Harvard, if not for anti-Semitism and academic fraud. Any opposition to identitarian policies and DEI/CRT pedagogy would be an obvious guess

Unexpectedly of course

Saving higher education

Posted: December 12, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

As I have written several times, higher education is an absolute mess, from its leftist culture to its ambivalence toward educating students about essential subjects.

Having suffered through numerous attacks at three universities for my conservative viewpoints, I have some suggestions on how to correct the problems in higher education.

First, eliminate tenure, which provides lifetime jobs and propagates the leftist culture. After only seven years, faculty members who are usually in their twenties when they arrive on campus don’t have to worry much about what they say or do for the next 40 or so years after tenure. 

Faculty members play an important role in hiring new faculty. It’s a bit like closed union shops where you only get accepted if you share political viewpoints or know someone already on the inside. 

Even CNN’s Fareed Zakaria acknowledged recently that higher education policies “use race, gender, and sexuality as political weapons to enforce intellectual conformity, dictate tenure decisions, and punish dissenters.” I guess a broken clock can be right twice a day!

Second, eliminate nonprofit status for private colleges and universities. Since these institutions have become political petri dishes, make them pay for their antics.

Third, look seriously at the amount of tax dollars that flow to higher education. Institutions of higher education get more than $1 trillion in tax money from various governmental agencies. State and local governments allocated about nine percent of their total budgets—more than the amount paid for highways and roads. About four percent of the federal budget goes to higher education—much of it in loans to students who end up heavily in debt. 

I am heartened that the public is starting to see that the emperors have no clothes. 

Americans’ attitudes about higher education have turned sharply negative in the past decade. In a Gallup poll, the percentage of young adults who said a college degree is important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Another poll found that about a third of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. In another Gallup poll, almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

Partly as a result of these attitudes, the number of college students has dropped dramatically in recent years. In the fall of 2010, more than 18 million undergraduates were enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States. That figure has been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021.

It’s time for individuals, colleges’ boards of trustees, and government entities to take a good, hard look at what higher education has become and make sure that the trends of intolerance and leftist thinking stop now!

The Biden Regime is now using the FBI to target Traditionalist Catholics

Posted: December 7, 2023 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Joe Biden and his handlers have demonstrated a pathological disdain for traditional American values and traditions, along with a similar disdain for reality.  They despise the concepts of individual liberty, limited government, free market economics, and Judeo-Christian Religious values.  That is because they are radical leftists to the very core of their being.

Projection is one of the cornerstones of leftist ideology, and the Biden Regime epitomizes this.  They completely ignore the violence committed by the left’s shock troops, ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter.  They accuse the peaceful MAGA and Tea Party movements of  being violent threats to our democracy.

The Biden Regime has also demonstrated a pathological disdain for the Constitution of the United States, most particularly the First, Second, Fourth, amd Fifth Ammendments.

The scandal chronicled in this article exemplifies everything despicable about the Biden Regime: FBI Interviewed Priest, Choir Director in Investigation Targeting Catholics (breitbart.com)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) allegedly interviewed a priest and a church choir director as part of its investigation into “radical traditionalist” Catholics, a House Weaponization Committee report obtained by Fox News Digital details.

In February, a now-retracted leaked memo from the FBI Richmond Field Office titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” showed the bureau was targeting Catholics, and had used information from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to guide the crafting of the memo. As Breitbart News reported, the memo showed the Richmond office had found that violent extremists’ “interest” in “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology was growing and that it therefore presented an opportunity for the FBI to engage with certain churches in an attempt to goad the churches’ leadership into serving as FBI “tripwires,” who would operate like unofficial informants to the FBI.

This loathsome behavior on the part of the FBI violates the Fourth Amendment and the Free Exercise of Religion clause of the First Amendment,

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) revealed in August that multiple FBI field offices were allegedly involved in crafting the memo, which detailed plans to target “radical traditionalist” Catholics, despite FBI Director Christoper Wray’s testimony that it was a “product from a single field office.”

The House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have been investigating the FBI’s investigation of certain Catholics as potential domestic terrorists since the leak. The committee’s new report concludes that there was “no legitimate basis for the memorandum to insert federal law enforcement into Catholic houses of worship,” according to Fox News Digital. 

The report further accuses the FBI of “abus[ing] its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists.”

If it wasn’t for The House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, would this scandal have come to light?

“The Committee and Select Subcommittee discovered that the FBI relied on at least one undercover agent to develop its assessment and the FBI even proposed developing sources among the Catholic clergy and church leadership,” the report states. “Not only did the FBI propose to develop sources, but it already interviewed a priest and choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond, Virginia for the memorandum.”

The committee said, citing whistleblower disclosures, that the FBI interviewed the priest and choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond, Virginia, to “inform on the parishioner under investigation.” The committee added that if the whistleblower had not come forward, the memo targeting Catholics would likely “still be operative in FBI systems, violating the religious liberties of millions of Catholic Americans,” according to the report. 

This despicable investigation is a clear violation of the Free Exercise of Religion clause of the First Amendment and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  These traditional Catholics were targeted because they hold beliefs that are at odds with Progressive Orthodoxy.

The committee’s report points to documents obtained by the committee’s subpoena which allegedly show the agency “singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists.”

“While the FBI claims it ‘does not categorize investigations as domestic terrorism based on the religious beliefs—to include Catholicism—of the subject involved,’ an FBI-wide memorandum originating from the FBI’s Richmond Field Office did just that,” the committee said, according to the report. “Under the guise of tackling the threat of domestic terrorism, the memorandum painted certain ‘radical-traditionalist Catholics’ (RTCs) as violent extremists and proposed opportunities for the FBI to infiltrate Catholic churches as a form of ‘threat mitigation.’”

The college football mess

Posted: December 5, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

As college football fans look forward to bowl season, it’s time to realize that the sport has become an absolute mess.

I’ll put aside the flap over Florida State being excluded from the playoffs because I can see both sides of the argument. I also never liked FSU, so I admit my bias against the Seminoles. I also don’t understand why FSU has eluded the PC police for its mascot and name. 

But I digress. 

The collegiate model is changing, and revenue streams might need to be improved to fill the growing money pit. It should be noted that the average operating deficit among the 100 major programs stood at $18.8 million in 2019.

“Almost nobody is in good shape, and the few schools in decent shape are experiencing a world that’s much more unstable and uncertain,” Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist professor at Smith College, told 247Sports. “Even if they’re in decent shape now, they still have to worry about it.

For example, the Big 10 started as a Midwestern conference that has grown into 18 universities spanning the country from east to west. That’s primarily because the league has the most lucrative TV contracts worth more than $1 billion annually. As the realignment of various leagues started, the Pac-12 took the biggest hit, falling to a mere two schools—Oregon State and Washington State—as Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington moved to the Big 10. Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado joined the Big 12. Two West Coast teams, UC Berkeley and Stanford, are joining the Atlantic Coast Conference. The Big 12 lost Oklahoma and Texas to the Southeast Conference.

The impetus for conference realignment is rooted in money. That’s why Oklahoma and Texas secretly pursued the SEC in the summer of 2021 and opted to surrender $100 million to leave the Big 12 one year earlier than expected in 2024. UCLA and USC bolted the Pac-12 for the Big 10 in the summer of 2022 and will begin competing in the wealthiest conference in college athletics in 2024.

The salaries for coaches are out of control. According to an ESPN analysis, well-known programs spent more than $533 million in dead money owed to coaches who were fired without cause with time left on their contracts from 2010 to 2021. Now add the buyout of $76 million to Jimbo Fisher of Texas A&M!

The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay reminisced recently about the time Alabama coach Bear Bryant stipulated in his contract that he had to make a dollar less than the university’s president.

Two other changes—the transfer portal and the Name, Image, and Likeness plan—have created even more havoc in college football. According to Higher-ed Ethics Watch, the transfer portal has created “a lack of loyalty to the schools from which they transfer, a lack of loyalty to their teammates, many of whom cannot take advantage of the transfer portal because of their anonymity as a student-athlete, commercialization of college athletics, which once was a fully amateur sport, and outsiders buying the allegiance of student-athletes through promises of being able to financially benefit from their NIL after they transfer.” 

Moreover, the NIL program has benefited only a few players and makes little sense when one looks at the top earners. For example, Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter of Colorado earned $4.1 million and $1.8 million, respectively, even though they played on a team that won only four games this year. Arch Manning has an excellent pedigree but has yet to start a game for Texas. Still, he’s estimated to earn nearly $3 million this year. 

Simply put, college football is about making more and more money, but only a few colleges and players benefit from the current system. 

 

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