Saturday Miscellany

First, the news from Harvard is not good. Prof. Lawrence Summers calls out his university for its cavalier attitude toward anti-Semitism.

He wrote this on Twitter:

The House committee report on Harvard and antisemitism is clearly a political document, and I am sure is not fully balanced. Nonetheless, the evidence directly from members of Harvard’s anti-semitism advisory group is very troubling. It confirms the suspicions of many of that the university maintains a double standard between anti-semitism and other forms of prejudice. A dramatic decline in financial support is the least of the prices the university is paying for its failings. 

Our university has been highlighted on Saturday Night Live, provided the most watched film clip in Congressional history, witnessed declines in applications, been subject to multiple civil rights law suits and even faced threats that managers would be unwilling to manage its money. The Corporation as fiduciary has ultimate responsibility for maintaining order, setting broad values and choosing leaders at Harvard. The report makes clear the extent of their failure.

You can kiss Harvard’s reputation good-bye. Is there anything that DEI cannot destroy?

Second, MIT hired a half-dozen diversity officers. In time it discovered that two of them were serial plagiarists. I have noted this in the past, especially through the work of retired professor Robert Weisberg, a man who saw that affirmative action admissions were accepting people who could not do college level work, and who were inclined to plagiarize. (See my blog post of July 18, 2022.) Of course, professors were strictly forbidden to say anything about it, lest they be charged with racism.

The Washington Free Beacon has the story:

In June 2021, a year into the cultural aftershocks of George Floyd's death, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set out to meet the moment, as so many other schools had, by hiring more diversity officers.

MIT welcomed six new deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion, one for each of the institute's main schools, as part of a "DEI Strategic Action Plan" launched the previous year. Aimed at boosting the representation of women and minorities, in part by developing DEI criteria for staff performance reviews, the plan pledged to "make equity central" to the university "while ensuring the highest standards of excellence."

But according to a 71-page complaint filed with the university on Saturday, at least two of the six DEI officials may not be living up to those standards. The complaint alleges that Tracie Jones-Barrett and Alana Anderson are serial plagiarists, copying entire pages of text without attribution and riding roughshod over MIT's academic integrity policies.

Third, not wanting to be less retarded than other totalitarian movements, the Scottish Green Party has just expelled thirteen members for the thought crime of affirming that there are only two sexes, and that biology determines which is which.

Ths comes from The National:

THE Scottish Greens have expelled 13 members for signing a declaration which said “sex is a biological reality” and called for trans men to be banned from women’s changing rooms.

The party said those who signed the Scottish Green Women’s Declaration were in breach of the party’s code of conduct.

The declaration states: “Sex should not be confused with gender. Sex is a biological reality and is both the site of and the excuse for women’s oppression.”

It also said that women had the right to “female-only spaces such as changing rooms, hospital wards, sanitary and sleeping accommodation, refuges, hostels and prisons”.

It added: “Women have the right to refuse consent to males being in these female-only spaces or males delivering intimate services to females such as washing, dressing or counselling.”

Signatories also claimed there was a “chilling atmosphere of censure and fear within the party, which affects not only free speech but also free thought”.

Fourth, in the migrant crime blotter, we turn to Germany where they apparently keep better figures than we do. According to Steve Watson in modernity.news, German unions are complaining about the crime committed by migrants in the train system.

I will not emphasize the ethnicity of the perpetrators, because I do not have to. The victims are invariably female-- so, why have the authorities not chosen to defend women? 

The head of a German rail union warns that the country’s train system is turning into a “battleground” thanks to a wave of violence and intimidation being unleashed by male asylum seekers against female staff.

In an interview with Focus Online, Steffi Recknagel, the head of the Railway and Transport Union (EVG) in Thuringia, says that the average day is “sometimes life-threatening” for employees due to the sheer amount of abuse being dished out by migrants.

“I have an average of three employees sitting in my Erfurt office every week for legal advice. They were attacked, spat on, insulted, threatened or pushed,” said Recknagel, adding that female employees are being slapped, kicked, spat at and threatened with being stabbed by the ‘refugees’.

“The worst case was that a train attendant was threatened with a knife,” said Recknagel, adding that another was physically attacked from behind and “the air was knocked out of her.”

The union boss said that one stretch of the network was particularly bad, specifically the one frequented by Syrian, Afghan, and Turkish migrants from the local asylum center.

Naturally, we are all waiting for feminists to stand tall and proud to defend female workers. I suspect that we will have a long wait.

Fifth, you will recall the moment when the thoroughly diverse and woke American military declared that it was going to liberate shipping lanes from Houthi rebels in Yemen.

And you probably know that Joe Biden’s military failed at that task.

Daniel DePetros reports in the London Telegraph. His article is entitled: 

Iran and the Houthis have defeated the US military

Here is the story:

This assumption is almost universal yet has been disproven time and time again, particularly in the Middle East. Take Yemen. The Houthis, the de-facto government in the country, has been treating the Red Sea as its own personal firing range since November. The Iran-backed militia has attacked civilian vessels and US Navy ships transiting the waterway more than 100 times over that time-span, ostensibly in support of the Palestinians. 

Houthi leaders have been abundantly clear throughout: the attacks in the Red Sea will continue as long as Israel continues fighting in Gaza.

 

The Biden administration, in cooperation with the United Kingdom, has attempted to change the Houthis’ strategic calculus by taking military action against their assets on the ground. The US and UK have conducted four rounds of comprehensive airstrikes against Houthi military facilities across Yemen, the latest occurring in February. US Air Force and Navy jets have shot down Houthi drones and missiles multiple times a week, in addition to striking Houthi ground locations. Yet the mere fact that the US is taking military action every week is proof that US policy isn’t impacting the Houthis decision-making whatsoever. The Houthi missiles keep on coming. 

You will have noticed that the story has disappeared from most mainstream media outlets.

Sixth, meanwhile in Israel and in Washington a great debate is taking place. Should the Israeli armies set out a plan for how to govern Gaza after war or should it ignore the Biden administration calls for such a plan and proceed toward victory.

In another time the Biden plan would have been called nation building. As it happens, and as Daniel Greenfield reminded us in this column from Front Page Magazine, it has been tried before, in the Middle East, and it has never worked.

One recalls the efforts to shore up the Palestine Liberation Organization, the group in charge of the West Bank. This is the basis for the Palestinian Authority, the group that the Biden administration wants to empower.

Greenfield explains:

The PLO state failed long before Iran took over Iraq and the Taliban took over Afghanistan. There had never been anything peaceful, democratic or aspirational about Arafat and the PLO. By the time that Hamas had captured Gaza after winning democratic elections, it had long been clear to everyone outside of D.C. that rather than ending terrorism, statehood had incarnated it.

Any ‘Palestinian’ state was doomed to be a terrorist state. The only question is who would run it. And the answer was that the biggest and deadliest terrorists would command popular support.

Greenfield continues:

The Biden administration has never stopped insisting that Israel needs a “day after” plan for rebuilding Gaza under a PLO government and some “moderate” terrorists from Hamas. Three generations after it became the norm, fighting a war without nation building as an endgame is so impossible that warfare experts can’t even understand what they’re seeing in Israel.

The verdict:

Nation building has failed in every single Muslim country it’s been tried, not just by the United States after 9/11, but by the British between WWI and WWII. The entire Middle East is one long great nation building disaster shaped by primeval nation building experiments such as the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Hashemite monarchies and finally the recession of colonialism.

Seventh, surely, you know about the tumult-- or should we call it a cat fight-- that took place on Thursday in the House Oversight Committee.

Now, we have the definitive commentary on the event, from the satirical site, The Babylon Bee.

With women on the House Oversight Committee raising a ruckus and bringing a halt to legislative business, congressmen announced they had built a special soundproof Girl Congress next door for the womenfolk to go so the men could get some work done.

The smaller, cuter congress building was helpfully painted pink and has been outfitted with all the girls' most desirable amenities, including thousands of throw pillows, wicker baskets, and Stanley tumblers to give the girl congressmen a comfortable place to screech obscenities at each other while the male congressmen tended to the business of the country.

"They're going to love it," said Pennsylvania Representative Scott Perry. "It's got all the things girls need. They can just go in there, do their girl things behind closed doors, and let us handle all the real congressional stuff. We even made sure to decorate it with stuff from that Joanna Gaines lady from the television. 

There are salads to eat. Barbies. And little kittens. Girls love little kittens, right?"

The ladies were fully worthy of the Babylon Bee.

Finally, for those of you who are ready to get out of your minds and into your lives, I recommend a dose of life coaching. Now I have some free consulting hours in my coaching practice and would be happy to oblige. Contact me via email at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com. Or via telephone at 212-682-6678.

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