The heart of raucous rock and roll. The post “We couldn’t”: The album Lemmy thought he could never follow up first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Conservatives believe in the institutions shaped by the accumulated experience of humanity. We know we may be very small, but by standing on the shoulders of those who came before, we can reach very high. Our constitutional law heritage stretches back both to Athens and Jerusalem, our guiding stories wind their way through the history of millennia. We will not let go of the precious gifts we have been given to preserve and augment. We see through the pretense of those revolutionary poseurs who write out great checks on what generations have deposited, but deposit nothing worthwhile of their own. The example of Bonhoeffer should energize us to risk all when that is what is needed. But the moment may come when the institutions have become corrupted and the wisdom they preserved poisoned. The law, the government, even the stories we tell ourselves can be taken over and perverted, leaving us bereft of all except what we have internalized and made one with our soul. To conserve the perverted institutions and the warped narrative they generate would join ourselves to their evil. It is at those times that the true conservative becomes a revolutionary. The truest conservatism is to preserve the deepest of all things – the connection to God and the purposeful wisdom that orders all meaning and being. These thoughts are a reflection borne of thinking again and again about Bonhoeffer, the Angel Studio’s movie that I watched on Thanksgiving. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the film’s subject, was a young German Protestant theologian. He was a man of peace and faith who became a conspirator against a monstrously corrupt state and an accomplice in the attempted assassination of a monster who usurped divinity. Bonhoeffer came to New York to study at the famed Union Theological Seminary in 1930, when a restive Germany was beginning to respond to the siren call of Nazism. The film shows Bonhoeffer as indifferent to what he felt was Union’s musty and detached take on religious life, but alive to the vibrant culture of New York, in particular, to the pulsing life of the Harlem Renaissance, from the worship service of its Abyssinian Baptist Church to the triumphant life of its jazz clubs. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Jordan Peterson Sees the Awesome Power of Stories) The film shows Bonhoeffer guided by one of his classmates, Albert Franklin Fisher, to experience Harlem and grow. The baneful reality of racism woke Bonhoeffer to a theological awareness of how hatred thwarted the goal of the Bible to bring all together “with one shoulder” in the service of God. He came to understand that racial hatred posed an existential threat to our humanity and blasphemed the divine image in which we are fashioned. Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, called to testify to this truth. Unlike so many in the German church and outside it, he saw exactly what Hitler stood for and would have none of it. He was uncowed by the violence of Hitler’s supporters, and when Hitler took over the reins of power, he did not let fear of the regime’s terrible enforcement arm silence his voice of protest. Bonhoeffer eventually had to hide to escape arrest. But his desire to bear witness to his religious calling brought him, in this film’s take, to join a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, which required him to pretend to be a belated convert to Nazism. The plot moved forward, but like every other such plot, did not succeed. Hitler was not killed and Bonhoeffer was eventually exposed due to the tracing back to him of government money he used to bribe guards to allow some Jewish prisoners asylum in Switzerland. There are some who contest that Bonhoeffer ever involved himself in this assassination plot. What is not debated is his end. Imprisoned, Bonhoeffer was hanged only weeks before Germany surrendered to the Allies in May, 1945. There has been some sharp criticism of this film surfacing in left-wing outlets. In Slate, for example, Angela Denker bemoaned that right-wingers had spoiled one of her last remaining heroes. Her point seemed to be that if Bonhoeffer (or anyone) could be appreciated by those on the right, then that person was no longer able to serve as her hero, a claim sounding bizarre to anyone who believes, as Moses Maimonides once put it centuries ago, that one should accept the truth wherever one finds it. After implying that she believed that and was perhaps ashamed of it, Denker spends most of the rest of the article making an orthodox defense of open borders and taking Hitler’s satanic version of nationalism as definitive of any nationalism. To do that, she must ignore both the heroic examples of the self-correcting constitutional republics of the West that fought Hitler by choice (unlike Stalin, who would have preferred to remain Hitler’s ally) as well as the blood-soaked horrors of Communist internationalism that suggest that nationalism per se might not be the problem. She leaves unmentioned as well the Biblical example of a nation that is a family and that carries forward a distinctive national heritage meant to serve as a model for other nations and so to realize a humankind united under God. Seeing that omission, it is not surprising that she never mentions the violent antisemitism that Bonhoeffer abhorred. The film certainly goes the opposite direction, making his stand against antisemitism as its key take-home message, made explicit at its end. But for Denker, this merits not a word. Silence in the face of today’s antisemitism shames her as it does so many on today’s left. It did not shame Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Unlike Denker, the film is alive to the core issues of Bonhoeffer’s life, as most of today’s conservatives are, in my experience. Those in pursuit of what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” shy away from nuances and draw invidious distinctions where none exist. This film gives voice to strong, blunt, and precise criticism of American racism and gives powerful emotional expression to its effects and of the courage and character of the black community in the face of its persecution. Most powerful was its expression of the transformative gift of its music.  The film shows the vibrancy of the music, both within the Harlem church and in the clubs, which Fisher tells Bonhoeffer must be understood as churches themselves (a theme the late Phil Lesh would articulate about the music that descends from that inspiration years later). (READ MORE: The Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh Plays On) Bonhoeffer was an accomplished classical musician, playing chamber music by age eight. In one of the most moving and joyous scenes in the movie, Bonhoeffer, attending a jazz club with Fisher, is invited up by the band leader (who looks and plays a lot like the great Louis Armstrong). He climbs up on stage and begins a classic tune on the piano, the trumpeter takes up the piano theme and swings it, and soon, Bonhoeffer and the band are deep into a wailing, inspired improvisation. This deep appreciation differentiates him not only from a sterile academic approach to religion but also from the sullen hatred of the Nazis. Good music in every era fights against tyranny by its very beauty and power. It transcends hateful politics, yet it is ignored by those like Denker, who is blind to the power of the music, and blind to her own exclusivist brand of politics-cum religion that seems not to have today’s Jew-hatred as one of its central concerns. When my father spoke of politics to me when I was little, he would say that, at the extremes, the right and the left converge — they both are the enemies of freedom. He took the conventional view that the Nazis were on the extreme right, which I did not debate as a child. The point he was making remains true beyond reasonable debate. Yet Denker remains alert only to one sort of oppression, and as a consequence, she must deny that we are allies in her fight. She draws an unnecessary line of exclusion from what is objectively a common cause. She excludes the right as she excludes the Jews from her concerns. Like Stalin, she would fight against Hitler. Like Stalin, no monument would be put up at Babi Yar, for the only story is about the victory of the collectivizing, anti-national left. Identifying Jews and Americans need not apply. It is not surprising. Antisemitism, so central to the movie, so central to Bonhoeffer in spurring his commitment, is so absent as a concern for so many who ally themselves with organs such as Slate. The predictable result of this screaming omission of concern is the metastasizing of antisemitism in America and in the West. The Bonhoeffer portrayed in this film would not have been silent, would have seen such silence as exactly what hatred needs to flourish — the exact same hatred Bonhoeffer so eloquently and courageously opposed. We cannot rest in our institutions. That breeds silence. The left has something to say we need to hear, but they have grown lazy and fat, excluding those who challenge them, and seeking to lock in a political, intellectual, and moral monoculture. Conservatives are not immune to such a temptation. May we continue to resist it. The example of Bonhoeffer should energize us to risk all when that is what is needed, to oppose oppression no matter where it comes from, to embrace truth, and to hold only God as supreme. And as our tradition tells us, God welcomes our challenges as well, challenging us to model Him. The post <i>Bonhoeffer</i> Exposes the Left’s Blindness appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

National Review was once the nation’s premier conservative journal of opinion. The brainchild of William F. Buckley, Jr, the magazine featured the writing of modern conservatism’s first team: James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, William Rusher, Henry Hazlitt, Will Herberg, Brian Crozier, Michael Novak, Joseph Sobran, James J. Kilpatrick, John O’Sullivan, and, of course, Buckley himself. After Trump announced in 2022 that he was running again for the GOP nomination for president in 2024, NR told voters to say “no.” The magazine championed the Goldwater candidacy in 1964, losing the election by a landslide but taking control of the Republican Party from the Rockefeller-wing of the party, and later consolidating conservative control of the GOP with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. With the political rise of Donald Trump and the populist conservative movement, however, National Review fell prey to Trump Derangement Syndrome and began its journey to political irrelevance. In 2015, NR’s editors published an editorial titled “Against Trump,” and featured its opposition to Trump on the magazine’s cover. By then, NR had been effectively taken over by neoconservatives led by Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg, champions of George W. Bush’s endless wars and the Global War on Terror. Interestingly, Buckley in the last years of his life cast doubt on the wisdom of Bush’s Iraq war and on neoconservatives’ place in the conservative movement. The Yale-educated Buckley had a soft-spot for populist governance. Remember, it was Buckley who once remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard University. Not so for the University of Virginia-educated Lowry and the Groucher College-educated Goldberg. Lowry in 2016 told Bill Kristol that Trump was a threat to conservatism because of his embrace of populism. To Goldberg, Trump was in 2016 and is now “unacceptable.” In 2021, Lowry opined that Trump was beatable in 2024 in the GOP primaries, and suggested that throughout the country there is a “massive wall of resistance to Trump.” In 2022, Lowry wrote that it was time for the GOP to “move on from Trump,” and urged Republican congressional candidates to reject Trump’s endorsement. After Trump announced in 2022 that he was running again for the GOP nomination for president in 2024, NR told voters to say “no.”  In 2024, the editors of NR urged Republican primary voters to vote for Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley instead of Trump, whose behavior they said was “injurious to our republic.” Trump’s remarkable victory on November 5th has brought a change of tune to NR’s articles. Lowry himself recently wrote that Trump as president-elect is off to a “strong start.” “Like it or not,” Lowry writes, “Trump is mainstream.” Another featured article urges Trump to undo the Biden administration’s weaponization of the government. Another article praises  Trump’s pick of Elon Musk to be “the disrupter conservatives needed.” And most notably, NR’s January 2025 print issue shows a smiling Trump riding back to the White House with a caption titled: “After the Sweep.” What a far cry from 2016’s “Against Trump.” It won’t work. Trump’s MAGA movement understands that National Review has for a decade opposed Trump and the populist-nationalist movement he leads. NR in its heyday launched a movement that helped put Ronald Reagan in the White House. In the age of Trump, NR is irrelevant. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: The National Endowment for Democracy Should be Defunded on Principle The Last Lion Born 150 Years Ago The post <i>National Review</i>Tries To Jump on the Trump Bandwagon appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to serve as secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is in the hot seat. I fear Hegseth, a combat veteran and Fox & Friends weekend anchor, is not up to the job. I’d rather see someone like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who successfully has run the Sunshine State. If there is a conservative in the spotlight, the prevailing instinct is to go below the belt. But the campaign to slime Hegseth makes you root for the guy. I don’t put a lot of stock in anonymous accusers — so The New Yorker story that relied on unnamed sources to paint Hegseth as, well, brutish toward women did not affect my view of Hegseth. For one thing, Hegseth denies allegations of repeated public intoxication and the sexual assault of a woman in Monterey, California, in 2017. Police investigated the incident but did not press charges. Hegseth reached a financial settlement with his accuser. (READ MORE from Debra J. Saunders: Sabotaging Trump: Abolishing Migrant Restrictions) The latest hit: Based on an anonymous source, The New Yorker reported Hegseth was seen “completely drunk in a public place” in 2014. In the age of cellphone cameras and social media, you’d think photos would have been taken and circulated widely. What I found troubling in the story were allegations that Hegseth had trouble managing two veterans advocacy groups. CNN commentator Margaret Hoover, who was an adviser to one of the groups, Vets for Freedom, before Hegseth became a VFF director, told CNN that Hegseth ran the group “very poorly.” It was an organization with fewer than 10 employees and a budget of less than $10 million, “And he couldn’t do that properly,” Hoover said. She added, “I don’t know how he’s going to run an organization with an $857 billion budget, and three million individuals, based on what I saw in those years.” Even if Hegseth had done a flawless job at VFF, that doesn’t mean the highly decorated vet has the skill set to oversee nearly one million service members and civilians. Hegseth styles himself as a “warfighter,” but the job’s most important skill is management. Friday, The New York Times posted an email Penelope Hegseth sent to her son in 2018 during his second divorce, in which she berated her son for lying, cheating, and sleeping around. (Hegseth has since remarried.) Hegseth’s mother quickly sent her son an apology. Somehow the email made it into The New York Times. Wednesday morning, Mrs. Hegseth appeared on Fox & Friends to assure the public that her anchor son is not the man he was seven years ago. She said that today her son is the right man for the job. If he makes it. On her Sirius XM show, Megyn Kelly asked Hegseth, “Do you think you’re being Kavanaughed right now?” “That’s their playbook,” Hegseth responded. (READ MORE: Trump Picks His Cabinet, Breaks China) Yes, with America’s national security at stake, big media are focused on thinly sourced allegations of personal misbehavior. That’s what’s wrong with journalism today. Forget substance. If there is a conservative in the spotlight, the prevailing instinct is to go below the belt. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The post Smear the Conservative: Episode 2761, Pete Hegseth appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Blossom Dearie’s song, I’ll Take Manhattan, (Great rendition here by Ella Fitzgerald, needs to be brought up to date. With apologies to the late, great Blossom, today’s Manhattan is far from “an isle of joy,” especially if one has to ride the subway. Dante would have loved the NYC subway, giving it a circle of its own. Commissioned to re-write the song, my title would be You Take Manhattan. But Bragg still gets points among Democrats for trying. I’m sure he went home conviction night feeling good about himself. The latest Gotham gothic comes from a Manhattan courtroom where one of America’s latest heroes is being criminally tried for doing the right thing, preposterous and ill-motivated charges having been brought by the most political prosecutor in the lower-48. Informed TAS readers are familiar with how Daniel Penny stepped in and disabled a crazed subway rider who threatened to kill other passengers. “Somebody’s going to die today,” Jordan Neely explained to his terrified fellow riders. He then moved toward innocent strap-hangers in a threatening manner as if to suit the action to the word. Death or great bodily harm might have resulted had Penny not stepped in and done the honorable thing. For which gift to New York, this friend of civilization is placed in peril of prison by Alvin Bragg. Reasonable persons had every reason to expect that Penny acted reasonably, and a reasonable jury, after brief deliberation, would have brought back a verdict of not-guilty. Then trial judge Maxwell Wiley could have thanked the jurors for their service, dismissed Penny, and then sentenced Alvin Bragg to riding the NYC subway for eternity. But no. After three-plus days of deliberation we learned Friday that the jury could not come to a unanimous decision on the manslaughter charge, which was later dropped. But they’ll be back Monday to deal with the lesser charge of negligent homicide, Bragg’s fallback position. Manhattanites are not famous for sticking their necks out for others. Who there now will ever do so again after a brave ex-Marine was roundly punished for doing so? Regardless of the final result of the criminal trial, or the civil case brought against him, Penny’s life has been upended. If he ever gets untangled from New York courts, even if he’s not convicted and sent to prison, it might take most of his remaining life to pay his legal bills. And I’m sure he’ll be nimble enough to spend that life somewhere other than in the Big Apple. Let’s not leave the subject without highlighting the obvious racial elements in this case. It’s Daniel Penny’s ill-luck that he’s white and the dearly departed was black. Reverse the races and the story is totally different. If a brave, black ex-marine stepped in and disabled a crazed, and aggressive white subway rider threatening to attack innocent bystanders, even if it led to the attacker’s death, he would be hailed a hero. No criminal charges would be brought or even considered. New York Mayor Eric Adams would give him the key to the city. He would no longer have to pay for his drinks in New York City bars. He would do guest appearance on the late night TV shoes. Bragg’s World Today’s Manhattan is Alvin Bragg’s world. The people of Manhattan just live in it. And they live under insane rules of engagement. Bragg is a repeat offender in the outrageous charges department. It was his lurid imagination that cooked up the fanciful charges that led to Donald Trump being convicted on 34 felony counts. The charges were incomprehensible. Serious legal scholars had no idea what Trump was being charged with. But no matter. Bragg was confident that jurors in Manhattan — the world-wide headquarters of Trump Derangement Syndrome — would find Donald Trump guilty of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. And they did what was expected of them. Bragg’s purpose in bringing these antic charges was to burnish his own bona-fides among Democrat circles by attempting to throw a spanner in the spokes of Trump’s presidential ambitions. It didn’t keep the Donald out of 1600. But Bragg still gets points among Democrats for trying. I’m sure he went home conviction night feeling good about himself and his prospects. And he doesn’t go home via the subway. So he has the luxury of not having to worry about the Jordan Neely’s of this world. Nor does he have to rely on the Daniel Penny’s of the world to step in and save his fat ass. In the state it’s in, if Eric Adams gave me the key to the city, I’d have all the locks changed. READ MORE from Larry Thornberry: Entrepreneurship Survives Vicious Milton RIP Pete Rose — Few Played the Game Even Remotely Like Him The post The Alvin Bragg Horror Show in Manhattan Continues appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Much has been made of Biden’s purchase of Rashid Khalidi’s book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, which argues Israel is a settler colonialist enterprise.  The Forward, a liberal Jewish newspaper, claims that its “abiding relevance is just one reason why American Jews and Israel supporters should … read Khalidi’s book, now.”  It quotes Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the New Israel Fund, who wrote, “There is no better or more important introduction to this history from the Palestinian perspective than Khalidi’s book.” As to the two million Arab citizens and Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, he has nothing useful to say. Not surprisingly, Khalidi’s narratives most often ignore unpleasant facts.  He suggests that the Arabs who populated what became Palestine had long lived there while Jews were recent immigrants. He neglects to mention that a large share of these Arabs were themselves nineteenth century refugees from Egypt, Russia, and other areas in the Ottoman Empire. (READ MORE from Robert Cherry: Progressives Don’t Want to Learn From Their Mistakes) He neglects to mention that it was the Crusades that decimated the Jewish population, which nonetheless rebuilt their numbers so that well before European immigration, they were a plurality of Jerusalem residents.  Moreover, Khalidi neglects to mention the large internal migration of Arabs from the West Bank to the coastal areas during the mandate period.  These migrants married women from their West Bank home villages and often went there to help harvest crops. Thus, the notion that 1948 Palestinian refugees were displaced from their ancestral homelands is a very problematic narrative. Khalidi minimizes the harmful role of the Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. Khalidi never mentions the pogroms he led in 1921 and 1929, his antisemitic actions while in Iraq, nor why, given his activities in support of Hitler, the Mufti was given a hero’s welcome when he found his way to Egypt after the war.  Moreover, Khalidi substantially understates the violence perpetrated by the Mufti and his supporters to suppress any support for either the 1936 Peel Commission recommendation of a very small Jewish state or the later 1939 White Paper that reversed this position but still allowed a small amount of Jewish immigration to continue. When the Woodhead Commission arrived to examine the prospects for implementing the Peel partition plan, the rebels were instructed “to kill every Arab who communicates with the commission in any form.”  When the Mufti learned that one of the notables planned to testify, he wrote: “Those who go to meet the partition commission should take their shrouds with them.” Khalidi spends little time analyzing why Jewish forces were so victorious during the civil war stage of the 1948 conflict.  He never mentions that the leadership of the volunteer Arab Liberation Army (ALA) was Fawzi al-Qawuqji, a Lebanese Pan-Arabist who had served in Nazi fighting units.  The ALA was without Palestinian leadership and up to 90 percent of volunteers were foreigners.  Without much local support, it was hard to sustain military campaigns. Over 150,000 Arabs fled by the end of March 1948, before Zionist forces began to implement Project Dalet, which Khalidi claims was an ethnic clearing policy.  It was implemented solely to keep open crucial supply lines.  The noted political scientist Meron Benvenisti claimed, “The policy of permanent occupation and destruction of villages was implemented … where Arab attacks had imperiled the lifelines of the Jewish community; the road to Jerusalem and the area around the MAPAM settlement, Mishmar Ha’emeq.”  Benvensti, however, believed that the vast majority of the 380,000 refugees who left their homes by the end of May reflected the impact of the fighting not any ethnic cleansing policy. Khalidi never mentions that the Nakba was defined by Constantin Zureiq as the catastrophe for the victory of any Jewish state on what is perceived as Arab ancestral land.  In 1958, the Nakba was commemorated by radio stations of the United Arab Republic calling on the world’s Arab and Muslim states to hold a symbolic five minutes to mourn the establishment of Israel without any mention of the refugees.  The refugees only become predominant during the 1990s when Arafat has to make the right-of-return central to his negotiating position. When Khalidi discusses the collapse of two-state negotiations, he never mentions the right-of-return.  Moreover, he claims that the second intifada, which began soon after negotiations collapsed, was the result of Ariel Sharon’s provocative presence on the Temple Mount which was the “match to set it off.” Further inquiries, however, strongly suggested that Arafat had planned it. Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar said in September 2010 that Arafat had ordered Hamas, as well as Fatah and the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, to prepare to launch “military operations” against Israel.  Mamduh Nofal, former DFLP military commander, recounted that Arafat “told us, now we are going to the fight, so we must be ready.” Palestinian and Arab Citizens of Israel Finally, Khalidi has no interest in examining the situation of the close to two million Arab citizens of Israel.  This population has increasingly become integrated into the fabric of the country; and increasingly embraces the Israeli state.  Indeed, Khalid is unwilling to assess the changing situation of those Palestinians living in East Jerusalem. In his sole reference, Khalidi writes: According to a 2018 European Union report, the contribution of Arab East Jerusalem to the Palestinian GDP has shrunk from 15 percent in 1993 to 7 percent today … Due to its physical isolation and the strict Israeli permit policy, the city has largely ceased to be the economic, urban, and commercial center that it once was. This weakened influence on the West Bank reflects East Jerusalem becoming integrally tied to the Israeli state.  Over the last decade, East Jerusalem’s educational system has replaced the Jordanian curriculum and enables thousands of Palestinians there to attend Israeli universities. At the Hebrew University alone, 710 Arab students from East Jerusalem were enrolled in 2022, compared with only 36 five years earlier. (READ MORE: Supporting the Hamas Fantasy of Israel’s Destruction) Another focus has been bringing jobs to East Jerusalem. The municipality’s Silicon Wadi plan establishes an innovation quarter for hi-tech companies. A total of 200,000 square meters will be devoted to high-tech businesses, 50,000 to hotels, and another 50,000 to commercial space.  Jerusalem City Council member Laura Wharton of the leftwing Meretz party said:  “The thinking here now is to develop high-tech and other industries that will allow people from East Jerusalem to find employment in Jerusalem.”  Not surprisingly, a 2022 poll found that more East Jerusalem Palestinians favor being citizens of Israel than part of a Palestinian state. Khalidi’s Palestinian narratives only concern the refugees.  As to the two million Arab citizens and Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, he has nothing useful to say.  Liberal Jews at the Forward and NIF who promote Khalidi’s book say more about their animus to Netanyahu than anything else. Robert Cherry is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate and author of Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come (Spring 2025). The post Palestinian Narratives Diverge From Reality appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Ford Motor Company, and other major corporations are backtracking on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and returning to hiring based on merit. Thus, instead of a misguided equity approach, the focus should be increasing the supply of quality black candidates. Make no mistake. A work environment featuring diverse ideas and opinions is highly conducive to success. Similarly, it is important to have a work culture that includes all players on the team. But most often, DEI is focused on prioritizing race and sexual orientation over the applicable criteria of merit. This DEI agenda is problematic. Some people counter that the “E” in DEI implies a commitment to equitable outcomes in addition to equal opportunity. In other words, equality of opportunity is insufficient — certain predetermined outcomes must also be realized. To illustrate this viewpoint, it is commonplace for “equity” to be presented by the iconic image of “equality vs. equity,” where individuals are given boxes of various heights to place all at an equal height to look over a fence to view a baseball game. Though the image has appeal in terms of ensuring a family can watch a baseball game together, applying this concept of equity in education or the business world is not beneficial to either students or individuals in careers. (READ MORE: ‘Antiracism’ is Coming for Medical Science) In K-12 education, equity is leading to a dumbing down of academic standards for black students. For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District has implemented new equity-based grading policies, rewarding A, B, and C grades not based on subject mastery,  but good behavior in the classroom. Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools has done similarly, resulting in a decrease in D and F grades for black students that led to a 4 percent graduation rate increase. In the corporate world, the notion of equity often involves a forced outcome metric of hiring a certain number of black employees, regardless of whether candidates demonstrate they are the best person for the position. As with education, standards are changed to manufacture a certain racial outcome. The hidden assumption of “equity” is that black students or candidates are somehow inferior to others, and thus, the only hope to make gains in hiring is to provide the metaphorical “boxes” under blacks — artificially boosting their qualification based on race — so they can compete in the corporate world. Sometimes described as the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” the idea is both condescending and offensive to blacks. Furthermore, applying the “box” solution to corporate hiring is not appropriate because the priority of any business should be to deliver value to its shareholders rather than racial quotas for its employees. A fundamental flaw of this new definition of equity is it’s backward-focused rather than forward-focused. Some look back on the decades of slavery and Jim Crow and conclude that equity is needed to address not only past discrimination, but also issues they deem to be ongoing and systemic. What’s missing in this assessment is the recognition that while the history of America cannot be changed, incredible gains have been made over the past 60 years since the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964. Black Americans have made sizeable economic progress in both commensurate pay and in building generational wealth through home ownership and investments (i.e., stocks, 401Ks, Roths, etc.). Given this progress in black America, the racism that persists in our country tends to be highly localized with respect to jurisprudence and economic opportunity rather than systemic in nature. While it could be argued this progress is despite systemic racism, the success of black Americans from places such as the Caribbean and Nigeria suggests that cultural factors, rather racial ones, exert a stronger influence on a group’s economic success. But one is still left with the question of how to improve black representation in the business world. The issue comes down to supply. Blacks comprise about 12.5 percent of the U.S. population as of 2024. Thus, the black population is relatively small compared to that of whites, who make up about 66 percent of the population. And despite 88 percent of blacks attaining a high school education as of 2019 (which is about the national average), black college enrollment rates declined from 38 percent in 2010 to 36 percent as of 2022. Furthermore, blacks have the lowest rates of both enrolling and subsequently graduating from four-year colleges within six years — 14 percent, compared to 28 percent for whites. Considering that blacks are only 12.5 percent of the population and graduate from college at half the rate of whites, it is understandable there will be a much smaller pool of qualified black candidates. Thus, instead of a misguided equity approach, the focus should be increasing the supply of quality black candidates. To do that, we need to address the root cause of the low numbers — the poor state of K-12 public education. (READ MORE: Biden, Harris, and DEI (Democrats’ Exquisite Irony)) Rectifying the deficiency of high-quality K-12 education is a vital way to increase the supply of black students who will successfully complete their studies in college and be prepared to compete competitively for sought-after jobs. To ensure a brighter future for black students and the professional black community, high-quality education and high expectations are the keys to success, not an equity agenda. Walter Myers III is a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and an adjunct faculty member at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology. The post Blacks Need High Quality Education, Not a DEI Agenda appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The guys with the long-hair are very worried about the issue of old music. No wonder. With so many classical music concerts, they have received news that there is some guy running around town playing the flute, which is a bland instrument with no distortion or anything. Although it has an elongated shape, the dude uses it to blow, not even to hit things, or make noise, or anything really hard and manly. Finally, it is worth clarifying that in classical music distortion is conceptual, like the origins of the raw material in creative nouvelle cuisine. My junkie neighbor tells me that things are really bad, and that all we need now is for the flute guys to start playing the harp; he ignores the fact that there has already been a harp concert recently only a couple of streets down. And the truth is that it wasn’t all that bad. Since the polyphonic version of Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water that an ex-girlfriend had on her cell phone, I haven’t seen anything quite as thrilling. The metalheads’ concern has been triggered by the arrival in the city of such hostile instruments as the clarinet, the violin, the tambourine, always provocative, and even the xylophone, the wimpiest instrument in the history of music. With the arrival of the xylophone, which especially irritates Pantera fans, the police had to cordon off the area, but even so failed to prevent a group of men sporting Iron Maiden T-shirts from biting the instrument before entering the police van, tearing off several metal bars. The bites from the metalheads, wild but harmonic, propitiated from the xylophone the first notes of Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Fate is cruel. Classical Music This ancestral style of music originated in the 70’s when Paul Stanley of KISS was in the studio engineering “Detroit Rock City.” In the creative heat, the artist had to tie himself to a backwater in the afternoon and breathe. So, during a cigarette break, Stanley grabbed a keyboard and started killing time composing The Four Seasons, Requiem Mass, and The Firebird in a quarter of an hour. Minor works in Stanley’s career, which were later attributed in a manner as indecent as it was random to Vivaldi, Verdi, and Stravinsky, shortly before winning the Miss Finland contest, gave birth to the golden age of classical music. Stanley has always disassociated himself from this affair. There is a new stream of classical music created with AI applications in their freemium versions and it has become the music for waiting rooms of illegal urological clinics. Instrumentation In a way that my Metallica fan friends can understand, I would say that classical music instruments can be divided into two groups: the ones you don’t listen to and the ones you listen to too much. The former include things like the oboe or the cello, while the latter include clarinets, flutes and piccolos, and of course the xylophone, which used with precision is capable of vibrating the balls of a male flea more than a kilometer away. It is probable that the big bang began with a little angel improvising high-pitched xylophone notes on top of a cloud. It is now fashionable to include in classical music concerts tribal instruments brought from remote jungles that, until the appearance of modern conductors, had no contact with humans. If you want to try it and don’t feel like going to the jungle, try blowing hard through a nutshell. I’m not in a position to promise it, but I’ve heard rumors that the next Guns N’ Roses single, if there is one, will feature a blown walnut solo in homage to the ever friendly Chip and Dale. Triangle As for the triangle, scholars of musical stupidity disagree: my thesis is that, if the triangle is a musical instrument, I am Cristiano Ronaldo. So, most probably, the triangle is a musical instrument. Absurd, yes, but an instrument nonetheless. Anyway, you metalheads don’t recognize it as such because there’s no way you can play Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap with a triangle, unless you put an AC/DC LP in your stereo and use the triangle to hit play. Distortion Finally, it is worth clarifying that in classical music distortion is conceptual, like the origins of the raw material in creative nouvelle cuisine. So if you need distortion to really enjoy any kind of music, the best thing to do is to try playing a Wagner vinyl at full volume, but only after letting the cat play with it for a couple of hours. I’ve tried it and, if the cat’s nails are sharp enough, it will sound like Scorpions on an mp3 player bought on Shein. READ MORE from Itxu Diaz: Make Government Small Again Ten Priorities for Trump’s New Administration The post Classical Music Explained to Metalheads appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

My fellow Armenians, When I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice League’s ability to prosecute my political enemies. I kept my promise. But my son’s criminality is a different matter. Look, folks, I gave you my word as a Biden that my abject lying would never impact my role as a loving father. If you were in my shoes as vice president, you would use your senatorial powers to pardon a loved one who Donald Trump’s hooligans unfairly targeted. I have not abused the power to pardon. And you, too, can have one. Democrat politicians care about many things: shielding kids from gun violence, the right of adolescents to change genitalia, windmills. But we also abhor many things — chief among them tax-cheating millionaires and gun-law abusers. My son, Hunter, is none of those things because I pardoned him. But I didn’t just pardon his tax and gun crimes. I pardoned any crime he may or may not have committed, dating back 10 years when he wielded the Biden name to entice crooked governments to enrich our clan. Now, leaving aside that it makes zero sense to pardon people for crimes they didn’t commit — which is like doing 500 sit-ups to burn off fat from a pizza you didn’t eat — the pardon power is absolute. And seeing that I’ll be puttering around the Oval Office for another few months, the pardon train is chugging into a few more stations. Woo! Woo! Upcoming Pardons I hereby pardon the following people, some of whom Hunter recommended because he’s the smartest guy I know: Dr. Anthony Fauci, who graduated from the same medical school as my wife, Dr. Jill Biden, and who knew full well that the computer virus escaped from a Chinese bioweapons lab. Do you honestly think a sloppily gutted tree sloth dangling in some filthy wet market killed millions of people? No sweat, Tony. I’ve got your back. Former Vice President Dick Cheney. I don’t know when Dick grew blonde hair and transitioned into a woman, but to each his/her own. Dick did a great job hiding January 6th footage from the public and looked smoking hot doing it. I hope Jill doesn’t catch me massaging his shoulders while sniffing his hair. Anyway, I don’t want Trump badgering that buxom warmonger. You’re off the hook, cutie-pie. Former Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll, for that atrocious play-call to pass the football rather than handing it off to Marshawn Lynch — who absolutely would’ve scored from the one-yard line in that Super Bowl XLIX loss. Come on, man. Do you know how much money Hunter lost when the Patriots intercepted that pass? Why do you think he hit up the Chinese Communists for cash? But Hunter forgives you, Pete. The Hawk Tuah Girl. I have no idea who this young woman is — Hunter’s keen on her. I’m told she’s Hailey Welch, who got wrapped up in a crypto scam. Look, folks, if you’re stupid enough to sink millions of dollars into an imaginary coin merely because some bimbo made a bawdy joke, Hunter has access to Santa Claus to sell you, and you deserve to lose every cent. You get a pass, Hailey, but not your idiot investors. California Sen.-elect Adam Schiff. Even though this guy looks like a nightmarish, googly-eyed Pez dispenser, nobody perpetuated the Russia collusion hoax better than Adam, and we need him to scheme against Trump in the Senate unencumbered. I absolve you, Adam. U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. I’m not sure if you can charge someone with criminal stupidity, but Sonia’s guilty for suggesting during a recent oral argument that the side effects of taking aspirin equal what a confused, gender-dysphoric boy might experience after being castrated. Aspirin side effects: nausea and heartburn. Castration side effects: permanent infertility and a gaping genital wound. That’s an apples-to-apples comparison if I’ve ever heard one. Sheesh, Sonia, you’re pardoned. Now, leave the incisive legal analysis to Ketanji Brown Jackson. I didn’t lie when I tweeted, “No one is above the law,” earlier this year. Some pimply-faced staffer wrote it on my behalf because when I tried, it read, “Mo wump iz bovine lar.” We Bidens worship truth, even if we rarely tell it. To quote the legal giant Lionel Hutz, “Yeah, but what is ‘truth’? If you follow me.” Here’s the truth: I have not abused the power to pardon. And you, too, can have one if you purchase one of Hunter’s paintings. But you’ll have to act fast because time is running out and supplies are limited. If you follow me. READ MORE from Matt Manochio: Joe and Mika Reconcile With the Don Kamala’s Loss Leaves Obama Seething The post The Power to Pardon appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.