Bernie Sanders is out of the running for the presidency of the United States. Millions are disappointed. He stimulated a taste for socialism. The Democratic Party is more socialist now than it was before it watched him entrancing his millions of followers.

He conveyed to crowds of Americans apparently innocent of any knowledge of modern history, that socialism is a benign system for an ideal society in which all are equal, and everyone gets free education from kindergarten to college, and free health care for life.

He has managed not to notice that where the system was tried – as in Russia – it did not established unending human happiness.

Although he went to Soviet Russia himself.  He took his honeymoon there.

He got back home again safely, and has continued to the present day to consider socialism a fine thing.

Other Americans who went there – to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – were just as foolish but not as lucky.

We quote from an article by Tim Tzouliadis, published by the BBC in August 2008:

At the height of the Depression, several thousand American emigrants left New York on the decks of passenger liners waving goodbye to the Statue of Liberty, bound for Leningrad.

Over 100,000 Americans had applied for jobs working in brand new factories in Soviet Russia, ironically built for Stalin by famous American industrialists such as Henry Ford.

Those American emigrants who entered the “workers’ paradise” were certain that they were leaving the misery of unemployment and poverty behind them. They considered themselves fortunate.

Their optimism would prove to be short-lived. Most were stripped of their American passports soon after their arrival.

Considered suspect by Stalin’s paranoid totalitarian state, the foreigners were swept away in the Terror.

The American jazz clubs, the baseball teams, and the English-language schools set up in cities across the USSR, would quickly vanish with them. …

The Metropol Hotel became the weekly venue for the party of rich American journalists, businessmen and engineers who would dance around the circular fountain kept stocked with fish in the middle of the dance-floor.

Diners were encouraged to select their supper, at which point a net would be deftly flourished by the waiter, the fish caught and cooked and brought to their table.

Seventy years later the Metropol is still Moscow’s finest hotel, and the marble fountain is still present in the centre of the dining room. The city has changed radically but the key locations of the American emigration are still there.

In Gorky Park, the American baseball teams would compete against each other in the summer evenings of the early 1930s.

The American Ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, where William C. Bullitt once hosted the “party of the century” in April 1935, still has the Stars and Stripes flying in front and the diplomats still drink cocktails on the terrace.

The original American embassy on Mokhovaya Street is now the headquarters of a Russian investment bank. … At the height of the Terror, the American emigrants had besieged their embassy, begging for passports so they could leave Russia.

They were turned away only to be arrested on the pavement outside by lurking NKVD agents.

Inside, the American diplomats had known about these disappearances almost from the very beginning. But they did little to save their fellow countrymen … 

The emigrants began their long journey either into the prison cells and the Gulag camps, or the shorter route to the execution grounds.

In the killing fields at Butovo, a suburb 27 kilometres south-east of Moscow, several of the American baseball players were executed during the Terror, and lie in mass graves stretching for hundreds of metres.

Thousands were killed in this quiet country backwater, surrounded by trees to muffle their screams. …

Wearing leather aprons and protective gloves, the masked NKVD guards had set about their nightly work methodically, killing young and old alike, understanding that they too would be killed if they refused.

But many also acted willingly, as the conscious and deliberate agents of the class struggle.

Stalin’s executioners had been convinced of the need to “kill and kill and kill” for the benefit of all mankind. And then they returned each morning to steady their nerves with their specifically-allotted quota of vodka, and to douse their clothes in eau-de-cologne to remove the stench of death, ready for the next night’s work.

Vladimir Putin was recently quoted as saying that Russians have nothing to be ashamed of concerning the Terror.

The iconography of totalitarianism remains firmly in place in modern Russian society. The entrance to the Lubyanka is still decorated with hammer and sickles.

(Hat-tip Robert Kantor)

The old ripe-rotten Republican Party, personified by Mitt Romney, is doing all it can to destroy Donald Trump and so prevent a new Republican Party from coming into existence.

From the Political Insider:

Romney is attacking conservative businessman Donald J. Trump. Because Trump is self-funding his campaign, the GOP establishment and political class can’t control him. And that makes Romney angry!

Romney’s full speech was leaked, and included shameless and untrue attacks, such as:

Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat. His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.

But in one tweet, Donald Trump’s son Eric embarrassed Romney in a huge way.

The lack of loyalty is truly astonishing!

Right!

Mitt Romney tried with his ideas, his personality, his policies to gain the presidency, and he failed.

Andrea Tantaros in March, 2016, on Mitt Romney:

How staggeringly stupid the anti-Trump Republican grandees are showing themselves to be – Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Bill Kristol and the rest of them. Because Donald Trump and his style offend their patrician taste, they are trying to abort the new Republican Party that Trump would usher in and set on its new course for a new age. 

They are helping Crooked Hillary Clinton to come to power: she who has sold out her country over and over again. She sold its favors to foreign companies and powers when she was secretary of state through the transparent ruse of getting them to donate vast sums of money to the Clinton Foundation. She allowed its enemies to find out its secrets by using an unsecure server for her emails. She callously let one of its ambassadors and three of its soldiers be killed by Muslim terrorists. She insisted on destroying the frail stability of Libya so that now it is in chaos, with thousands of refugees fleeing from its shores to Europe, many drowning on the voyage. And she is notoriously a bare-faced liar. Is such a person to be trusted with the security and well-being of the nation?

Surely not. But Romney and his anti-Trump conspirators are willing to let her rather than a patriotic, competent, fellow Republican gain the presidency.

They are not only disloyal, they are stupid. Even the smartest among them is being, in this supremely important instance, simply but prodigiously stupid.

Richard Dawkins was unable to attend the Reason Rally in Washington, D.C. on June 4, 2016.

Here’s the speech he would have given:

There are those who fear reason as cold, bleak, cheerless, unpoetic. That’s not just untrue; it’s the very opposite of true. Science is the poetry of reality.

The fact that you exist should brim you over with astonishment. You and I and every other living creature are machines of ineffable complexity. This complexity and its powerful illusion of design is why so many people succumb to the God temptation. The temptation to evade, by invoking a designer, the responsibility to explain. The God temptation is an evasion of responsibility because it invokes the very kind of thing it’s supposed to be explaining.

I’m a biologist, so I speak first of the biological version of the God temptation, the false argument destroyed by Darwin. There’s also a cosmological version. The fundamental constants of physics are said to be “fine-tuned” so that, in the fullness of time, eyes and peacocks, humans and brains will come into existence. The God temptation here is to invoke a divine knob-twiddler to adjust the dials of the physical constants so that they have the exquisitely precise values required to bring evolution, and eventually us, into being.

“God did it” can never be an explanation for anything. It is sheer intellectual cowardice. If you’ll stoop to magicking into existence an unexplained peacock designer, you might as well magic an unexplained peacock and cut out the middleman.

Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel sympathy for such cowardice. The complexity of a living body, every one of its trillion cells, is so mind-shattering to anyone who truly grasps it, the temptation is overwhelming. It’s like when you see a really brilliant conjuring trick. You have to smack yourself and say, “No!” However largely my senses and my instincts are screaming “miracle”, it really isn’t. There is a rational explanation. In the case of the conjuring trick, we know it’s not a miracle. And honest conjurers like Jamy Ian Swiss, James Randi, and Penn & Teller tell us so.

In the case of nature’s apparent miracles, Charles Darwin plays the role of honest conjurer.

But conjurers only tell us that it’s a trick. Darwin tells us exactly how nature’s trick is done: cumulative natural selection. Darwin’s brilliant explanation has withstood 150 years of sustained attack and emerged without a scratch.

Physicists are well on their way to disposing of the cosmic God temptation, too.

My book The God Delusion, celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2016, provoked a score of what came to be called “fleas”: religious books with plagiaristic jacket designs and parasitic titles like The Dawkins Delusion or Deluded By Dawkins. The flea name came from a line of W. B. Yeats: “But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?”

Some of our best theologians, if indeed theology is a subject that can be good at all, if indeed theology is a subject at all, some of our best theologians pathetically tried to argue that, far from being complex, God is simple. There is no limit to the explanatory purposes to which the simple God’s infinite power is put. Is science having a little difficulty explaining X? No problem! Don’t give X another glance! God’s infinite power is effortlessly wheeled in to explain X. Along with everything else. And it’s always a simple explanation, because, after all, there’s only one God. What could be simpler than that?

The effrontery of it is beyond astounding. This supposedly simple God had to know how to set the nuclear force 10³⁹ times stronger than gravity. He had to calculate with similar exactitude the requisite values of half a dozen critical numbers — the fundamental constants of physics.

Do you, with your prodigiously complex brain, understand quantum mechanics? I don’t! Yet God, that paragon of ultimate pure simplicity, not only understands it but invented it! Plus special and general relatively. Plus the Higgs Boson. And dark matter.

Finally, the icing on the cake: On top of being the ultimate mathematics and physics genius, this “simple” God has enough bandwidth to listen to the prayers of billions of people simultaneously, in all the world’s languages. He hears their confessed sins and decides which would be forgiven. He weighs up which cancer patients shall recover, which earthquake victims shall be spared, even who shall win a tennis match. Or a parking space.

God may be almighty, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, but the one thing He cannot be, if He’s even minimally to meet His job description, is “all-simple”. The statistical argument against the divine designer remains intact and inescapably devastating.

God also presents a temptation to laziness that may define our allegiances.

I am Christian! Well, of course I don’t believe in any of that supernatural stuff, but I was baptized, we go to church at Christmas, and I’m certainly not Jewish or Muslim, so I guess that makes me Christian!

By 2050, the population of Mauritania will be predominantly Muslim. It’s simple demography. Just compare the birthrates of the different communities in Mauritania.That makes the lazy assumption that a child of Muslim parents is defined as a Muslim.

Would you define a child of logical positivist parents as a logical positivist?

Would you define a child as a Keynesian on the basis of her parents’ economic school of thought?

One of the reasons I formed the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in the United States is to combat America’s legendary religiosity, a form of obstinate backwardness that has serious implications for the rest of the world.

What church do you go to? The question is presumptuous to the point of rudeness, yet informant after informant tells me how often it’s thrown at newcomers to certain neighborhoods in America, as casually and automatically as a comment on the weather. That the newcomer might not attend the place of worship at all simply doesn’t cross the friendly neighborhood mind. It doesn’t cross the mind of a typical American politician, either, which is why they drag God into every speech, why they bend over backwards to appease religious lobbies when taking important decisions on abortion, stem cell research, and the teaching of evolution.

The Reason Rally is the antidote to all this. Today, in Washington, we celebrate science and urge the retreat of superstition. It is people like you, people who have traveled far to be here, who support secular organizations with your time and money, who are courageous enough to make their atheism known, that are the hope for the future.

I’m sorry doctor’s orders stop me from being in Washington today, except by this minor miracle of science, but I hope to see you at the next Reason Rally!

Although we agree with him by and large (of course), we don’t think it’s a very good speech. It is not sufficiently coherent.

The population of Mauritania is right now 100% Muslim. The children of Muslims are defined as Muslim by Muslim tradition and law. If Dawkins wants to say that the child of Muslims does not have to remain a believer in Islam, he should say so, but he doesn’t make the point. In fact from then on his speech rambles.

We like best the part we have emphasized in bold.

Dawkins was apparently kept from making the speech in person by “a small stroke”. We hope the stroke has not permanently impaired his fine brain. While we have always opposed him on political issues, we have read his books on evolution with much pleasure and learnt a lot from them.

Straight White Men banned From Equality Conference reads a headline. And the article contains the declaration: “One cannot deny the privileges that straight white men have in today’s society.”

Can’t one? What are they exactly? They are not named. But let’s assume the statement is true. Who grants those privileges? Is there a body, a committee, a secret cabal, that allots them? Is it the Bilderbergers? The Elders of Zion? A convention of Harvard finals clubs? The Finnish Sons of Odin? PEGIDA? The Pacific-Union Club of San Francisco? Or “God”?

Or is White Privilege a specter conjured up by the imagination of the envious, the resentful, the grudging, the failing, the self-pitying and the paranoid? All of them would see success as “privilege”.

It is the “white” as accusation that gives the clue.

The specter has been conjured up by racists. America wanted so much to make up for a past of race discrimination that it elected a totally unqualified black president. And the black president has deliberately made race a stinging issue throughout the land.

A most unintended consequence. An unforeseen development. An enormous irony.

“Racist!” is now considered the worst of insults. Of course anyone can hurl it at anyone just to be nasty. It’s a cuss word. It needs no cause in the speech or behavior of the accused.

But in the unwritten lexicon of political correctness authored and held under continual review by the Left; in the abstract agoras of popular discourse – the media, both mainstream and social; in the institutions of higher learning, where the deep thinkers are – the academies; in the universal legislature of fashionable opinion – Hollywood, it is the law that only Whites can be “racist”.

And the worst of Whites are Republicans. And the worst of Republicans is Donald Trump. Ergo, Donald Trump is the worst racist.

Yet try as they might, the Left, the media, the professoriate and its furious disciples, the propagandists of the entertainment industry cannot find anything useful that Trump has said against Blacks.

However …

Ann Coulter writes:

Annoyed at federal judge Gonzalo P. Curiel’s persistent rulings against him in the Trump University case (brought by a law firm that has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches by Bill and Hillary), Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that maybe it’s because the judge is a second-generation Mexican immigrant.

The entire media — and most of the GOP — have spent 10 months telling us that Mexicans in the United States are going to HATE Trump for saying he’ll build a wall. Now they’re outraged that Trump thinks one Mexican hates him for saying he’ll build a wall.

Curiel has distributed scholarships to illegal aliens. He belongs to an organization that sends lawyers to the border to ensure that no illegal aliens’ “human rights” are violated. The name of the organization? The San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association – “La Raza” meaning THE RACE.

Let’s pause to imagine the nomination hearings for a white male who belonged to any organization for white people – much less one with the words “THE RACE” in its title.

The media were going to call Trump a racist whatever he did, and his attack on a Hispanic judge is way better than when they said it was racist for Republicans to talk about Obama’s golfing.

Has anyone ever complained about the ethnicity of white judges or white juries? I’ve done some research and it turns out … THAT’S ALL WE’VE HEARD FOR THE PAST 40 YEARS.

The New York Times alone has published hundreds of articles, editorials, op-eds, movie reviews, sports articles and crossword puzzles darkly invoking “white judges” and “all-white” juries, as if that is ipso facto proof of racist justice.

Two weeks ago – that’s not an error; I didn’t mean to type “decades” and it came out “weeks” – the Times published an op-ed by a federal appeals judge stating: “All-white juries risk undermining the perception of justice in minority communities, even if a mixed-race jury would have reached the same verdict or imposed the same sentence.”

In other words, even when provably not unfair, white jurors create the “perception” of unfairness solely by virtue of the color of their skin. …

I have approximately 1 million … examples of the media going mental about a “white judge” or “all-white jury”, and guess what? In none of them were any of the white people involved members of organizations dedicated to promoting white people, called “THE RACE”. …

The model of a fair jury was the O.J. [Simpson] trial. Nine blacks, one Hispanic and two whites, who had made up their minds before the lawyers’ opening statements. (For my younger readers: O.J. was guilty; the jury acquitted him after 20 seconds of deliberation.) At the end of the trial, one juror gave O.J. the black power salute. Nothing to see here. It was [police officer] Mark Fuhrman’s fault!

In defiance of everyday experience, known facts and common sense, we are all required to publicly endorse the left’s religious belief that [male] whites are always racist, but women and minorities are incapable of any form of bias. …

At least when we’re talking about American blacks, there’s a history of white racism, so the double standard is not so enraging. What did we ever do to Mexicans? Note to Hispanics, Muslims, women, immigrants and gays: You’re not black.

Other than a few right-wingers, no one denounced now-sitting Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for her “wise Latina” speech, in which she said “our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging”.

But Trump is a “racist” for saying the same thing.

Six months ago, a Times editorial demanded that the Republican Senate confirm Obama judicial nominee Luis Felipe Restrepo, on the grounds that “as a Hispani”, Restrepo would bring “ethnic … diversity to the court”.

You see how confusing this is. On one hand, it’s vital that we have more women and Latinos on the courts because white men can’t be trusted to be fair. But to suggest that women and Latinos could ever be unfair in the way that white men can, well, that’s “racist”.

The effrontery of this double standard is so blinding, that the only way liberals can bluff their way through it is with indignation. DO I HEAR YOU RIGHT? ARE YOU SAYING A JUDGE’S ETHNICITY COULD INFLUENCE HIS DECISIONS? (Please, please, please don’t bring up everything we’ve said about white judges and juries for the past four decades.)

They’re betting they can intimidate Republicans – and boy, are they right! The entire Republican Brain Trust has joined the media in their denunciations of Trump for his crazy idea that anyone other than white men can be biased. … 

The NeverTrump crowd is going to get a real workout if they plan to do this every week between now and the election.

What do Republicans think they’re getting out of this appeasement? Proving to voters that elected Republicans are pathetic, impotent media suck-ups is, surprisingly, not hurting Trump.

We appreciate Coulter’s sarcasm. It’s not surprising at all, of course. The more the Republican establishment attacks Trump – led in the outcry by Speaker Paul Ryan who says Trump’s objection to Judge Curiel is “textbook racism” – the more votes Trump can be sure of getting.

Some alumni of Trump University are dissatisfied with what they got for their money. They have been allowed by Judge Gonzalo Curiel [a US District Judge for Southern District of California] to bring a class action. Donald Trump has protested that the Judge is exhibiting bias against him, and suggests it may be because Curiel is a nationalist Mexican and would likely oppose Trump’s plan, if he becomes president, to build a wall on the US-Mexican border to keep Mexican illegal immigrants out of the US.  The media – even conservative media such as Fox News – have made much of Trump’s protest, headlining the issue for the last several days. Behind all the reporting lurks the implication that Trump University is a shady business. As yet there is no evidence that this is the case.

Trump’s rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton,  has not waited for evidence to denounce Trump University, calling it “a scam” and Trump “a fraud”.

Meanwhile a truly scandalous story about the Clintons themselves and a shady university project that might interest a press dedicated to revealing facts the public should know (a dream press that does not exist), is going unnoticed by the mainstream media.

Bloomberg reports:

Former President Bill Clinton stepped down from his position at Laureate International Universities, part of Laureate Education Inc., on Friday [April 22, 2016]. His five-year term as “honorary chancellor,” the company and Clinton’s staff said, had expired.

But Peter Schweizer [author of Clinton Cash, a book about the Clintons’ financial dealings], suggests a different explanation: Clinton actually resigned in order to avoid a wave of negative publicity. Bloomberg Politics [refers to] … a chapter of the book describing what Schweizer presents as a “troubling” co-mingling of official State Department business with the private financial affairs of Bill Clinton and a nonprofit run by Laureate’s chairman, Douglas Becker.

Laureate, which runs for-profit colleges, hired Clinton just as the Obama administration began drafting tougher regulations for federal financial aid that goes to students who attend for-profit colleges. Around the same time, the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions launched an investigation into the industry. In his book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, Schweizer writes that after Bill Clinton accepted the position at Laureate in 2010 in exchange for unspecified payment, his wife “made Laureate part of her State Department Global Partnership”.

The State Department subsequently provided tens of millions of dollars to a nonprofit chaired by Becker, the International Youth Foundation. Citing the foundation’s tax filings, Schweizer writes that while IYF had received government grants (mainly from the U.S. Agency for International Development) as far back as 2001, they “exploded since Bill became chancellor of Laureate”, accounting for the vast majority of the nonprofit’s revenue.

In 2010, “government grants accounted for $23 million of its revenue, compared to $5.4 million from other sources. It received $21 million in 2011 and $23 million in 2012″. … 

The Clinton campaign disputed Schweizer’s characterization. “This is yet another false allegation in a book that is fast being debunked,” said Brian Fallon, a campaign spokesman. “The International Youth Foundation was funded by the Bush administration, well before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State. In fact, the group’s USAID funding actually went down in the year that she arrived at the State Department, not up.” [But] a Bloomberg examination of IYF’s public filings show that in 2009, the year before Bill Clinton joined Laureate, the nonprofit received 11 grants worth $9 million from the State Department or the affiliated USAID. In 2010, the group received 14 grants worth $15.1 million. In 2011, 13 grants added up to $14.6 million. The following year, those numbers jumped:IYF received 21 grants worth $25.5 million, including a direct grant from the State Department.

Laureate has declined to say how much it has paid the former president. Hillary Clinton’s financial disclosure forms in 2012 revealed only that her husband received non-employee compensation of more than $1,000 from the company that year. The Clinton Foundation’s donor disclosures showed that Laureate cumulatively gave between $1 million and $5 million through 2014. In his book, Schweizer noted that Bill Clinton, during the period when his wife was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, spoke at Laureate campuses in Honduras, Mexico City, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Malaysia, Brazil, Peru, and the United States. Schweizer wrote that “based on his typical fee scale”, the half dozen speaking events Clinton has done annually for Laureate “means perhaps $1 million per year”. He dubbed this blend of government service and private remuneration the “Clinton blur”.

Laureate plays up its Clinton ties in a big way. Its homepage prominently features a photo of Clinton speaking this month at a new campus in Panama. Other pages detail Clinton’s role at Laureate and the company’s relationship with the Clinton Global Initiative. The fact [?] that Clinton only signed on for a five-year term was not publicly disclosed when his hire was announced in April 2010 or at any time before [the day he resigned]. In a statement, Laureate spokesman Matthew Yale said, “The politics and motives of the author are obvious and his claims are baseless. We are proud of our association with President Clinton, who shares our commitment to helping young people change their lives through education. We never needed him to defend us, our results speak for themselves — for example the industry leading repayment rates for our students participating in the U.S. government loan program. Regarding the International Youth Foundation, this is an independent non-profit organization; not an affiliate of Laureate. Their contracts with the US government pre-date Secretary Clinton’s arrival at the State Department.”

Schweizer writes, “Isn’t it troubling that while Bill Clinton was being paid by a private corporation, that corporation was also benefiting from State Department actions? Isn’t it troubling that an affiliate of that corporation is also receiving tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money? Isn’t it troubling that this seeming conflict of interest was not disclosed?”

It is. It could be described as the routine corruption of the venal Clintons, and of the those – the media, the agency watchdogs – who do not choose to discover and disclose it.

Why did Bill Clinton “abruptly resign” as “honorary chancellor”?

Was the “honorary chancellor” – a title implying he took no fee for acting in that capacity – really paid only “non-employee compensation of [something] more that $1000”, and “perhaps a million per year” between 2009 and 213 for speaking engagements at Laureate colleges?

Breitbart reports and comments under the headline:  Hillary University: Bill Clinton Bagged $16.46 Million from For-Profit College as State Dept. funneled $55 Million Back:

With her campaign sinking in the polls, Hillary Clinton has launched a desperate attack against Trump University to deflect attention away from her deep involvement with a controversial for-profit college that made the Clintons millions, even as the school faced serious legal scrutiny and criminal investigations.

In April 2015, Bill Clinton was forced to abruptly resign from his lucrative perch as honorary chancellor of Laureate Education, a for-profit college company. The reason for Clinton’s immediate departure: Clinton Cash revealed, and Bloomberg confirmed, that Laureate funneled Bill Clinton $16.46 million over five years while Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. pumped at least $55 million to a group run by Laureate’s founder and chairman, Douglas Becker, a man with strong ties to the Clinton Global Initiative. Laureate has donated between $1 million and $5 million (donations are reported in ranges, not exact amounts) to the Clinton Foundation. …

As the Washington Post reports, “Laureate has stirred controversy throughout Latin America, where it derives two-thirds of its revenue.” During Bill Clinton’s tenure as Laureate’s chancellor, the school spent over $200 million a year on aggressive telemarketing, flashy Internet banner ads, and billboards designed to lure often unprepared students from impoverished countries to enroll in its for-profit classes. The goal: get as many students, regardless of skill level, signed up and paying tuition.

“I meet people all the time who transfer here when they flunk out elsewhere,” agronomy student Arturo Bisono, 25, told the Post. “This has become the place you go when no one else will accept you.”

Others, like Rio state legislator Robson Leite who led a probe into Bill Clinton’s embattled for-profit education scheme, say the company is all about extracting cash, not educating students. “They have turned education into a commodity that focuses more on profit than knowledge,” said Leite.

Progressives have long excoriated for-profit education companies for placing profits over quality pedagogy. Still, for five years, Bill Clinton allowed his face and name to be plastered all over Laureate’s marketing materials. As Clinton Cash reported, pictures of Bill Clinton even lined the walkways at campuses like Laureate’s Bilgi University in Istanbul, Turkey. That Laureate has campuses in Turkey is odd, given that for-profit colleges are illegal there, as well as in Mexico and Chile where Laureate also operates.

A hint there of further corruption – that the governments of those countries were bribed to except Laureate Education from the law.

Shortly after Bill Clinton’s lucrative 2010 Laureate appointment, Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. began pumping millions of its USAID dollars to a sister nonprofit, International Youth Foundation (IYF), which is run by Laureate’s founder and chairman, Douglas Becker. Indeed, State Dept. funding skyrocketed once Bill Clinton got on the Laureate payroll … 

Throughout ten Democratic Party debates, Establishment Media have not asked Hillary Clinton a single question about her and her husband’s for-profit education scam.

Pat Condell passionately makes the case for “Brexit” – Britain’s exit from the European Union:

Brexit The Movie:

Long as the movie is, it’s riveting. Find out just how horrible the EU is – and what a loser!

These are extracts from a tribute to Bernard Lewis, historian of Islam, by Michael Curtis at American Thinker:

Bernard Lewis, the world’s greatest scholar of the Middle East, past and present, has just celebrated his 100th birthday. …

Bernard’s life starting with the passion for books and languages he had already displayed during his Jewish childhood in London, to his first publication in 1937, to his last book of reflections of a Middle East historian is one of devotion to his subject and commitment to truth. His writings on the Middle East, brilliant in the classical British tradition of Gibbon, Macaulay, and Hazlitt, have made an extraordinary contribution to understanding a troubled area of the world. All analysts, even media pundits, will appreciate his two approaches: emphasis on the need for careful historical research; and the importance of understanding a society from within, by learning its languages, reading its writings, visiting it, and talking to its people.

Bernard carried out his research in many countries, especially in Turkey, through his study of texts and documents in national archives that informed his commentaries on Islamic societies and cultures. He was proud of the fact that he was the first scholar to have access to the newly opened Ottoman archives, which then led in 1961 to his magisterial work, The Emergence of Modern Turkey. …

Bernard Lewis is “master of a dozen languages”. He can learn a new language in “a few days”.

One of the amusing events in his career occurred during World War II, while he was supposedly attached to the British Foreign Office but really a member of Army Intelligence. A document in Albanian had been found and possibly contained military information. Bernard learned Albanian in a few days, the only person in Britain who could accomplish this feat, and translated the document that turned out to be not a secret document but a laundry list.

It needs to be said in this era of political correctness that Bernard defended and was proud of his profession as a student of Orientalism, the philology, culture, and religion of the Middle East. Orientalism for him was not, as some literary critics such as Edward Said have asserted, a tool of Western imperialist domination or exploitation by the West to seek power over the Islamic world, but an honorable profession of objective scholarship. … [He wrote]: “What imperial purpose was served by (Britain and France) deciphering the ancient Egyptian language, for example, and then restoring to the Egyptians knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?”

Much of the continuing interest in Bernard’s work on the part of both specialists and the public, stems from his objective analysis of Islamic history and societies. Lewis was never politically correct, and considered political correctness to be anathema. His writings on the religion of Islam and Islamic societies remain vital because of the 1.3 billion Muslims and the role of the Muslim world at the present time. Bernard said he tried to provide a fair and balanced account of the realities of that world, good and bad. …

[H]e points out that the political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy. It was authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical, and still is today. There was a sovereign power to which subjects owed and still owe complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by Holy Islamic law. …

In one of his books he discussed a rarely mentioned subject, one that is usually ignored today: the important Muslim involvement in and contribution to slavery and the slave trade. He was the first person to use the term “Islamic fundamentalism.”

Halfway through his career, Lewis almost by accident became a public intellectual. He reached a wider audience through his commentaries on the sad state of Islamic societies today. Perhaps the first influential and controversial publication was his essay in 1990 on The Roots of Muslim Rage. That rage stemmed partly from Muslim anger over the fact that infidels were ruling over true believers, and partly from the Muslim rejection and war on modernity.

The reality is that Muslim societies had not kept pace with the West. Lewis argued that from the 11th century on, Islamic societies have been decaying because if their own internal problems and self-inflicted failures on political, economic, and gender issues. The deterioration was not the result of Western colonialism. Nevertheless, Islamic societies blame the West for their failures rather than seek reform of their autocratic systems that subsidize extremism. …

He was the first analyst to be conscious, three years before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, of the significance of Osama bin Laden and his ideology of jihadism. Lewis saw Osama not as an ordinary terrorist, but as an ambitious warrior, planning to restore the Islamic Empire …

In this regard, two things were important for Lewis. One was that Islam has not divorced religion and politics. The other was that he rejected the idea that terrorism was not related to Islam. On the contrary, he asserted that terrorists themselves claimed to acting in the name of Islam. …

The issue now for the West is to seek the elimination of the present terrorist Islamist groups. How is this to be done?

He offers no formula for success:

Lewis has … argued that Western efforts and hopes to democratize the Middle East were unlikely to succeed. …

And yet …

Real peace in the Middle East can only come after the dictatorships in the area have gone.

Michael Curtis ends with a statement we heartily endorse:

It is important to recognize the intellectual giants who have contributed to our understanding of the world. Bernard Lewis is one of those giants. 

In return for fawning on the Leftist leadership of the United States for the last seven and a half years, Leftist  journalists (a large majority) have no doubt been accorded many types of ego-flattering, career-enhancing privileges. And that on top of the joy of following their own inclinations anyway.

If after January next year the leadership will no longer be Leftist (a possibility looking more like a probability with each passing day), they’ll have a hard choice to make. Either they must report fairly, accurately, objectively at last; or, if they cannot and will not, be prepared to find themselves at a disadvantage in competition with others who can and will.

Those who decide to make the necessary adjustments will need to begin soon.

Right now would not be too soon.

Of course true objectivity is impossible, as Roger L. Simon points out in an article at PJ Media. But fairness and accuracy can be genuinely attempted, and the attempt if genuine enough will bring a report nearer to the impossible ideal.

Donald Trump, while detailing his veteran donations at a news conference, thoroughly dissed the press and called a reporter “sleazy”. …

Well, of course Donald did because they are mostly sleazy, all of them, including me. I’m particularly sleazy when I’m reporting, slightly less so when I’m writing an opinion piece. And that’s the point — it’s all opinion when you examine it closely, reporting not so much. Nothing is really objective. It can’t be. We’re all biased for one obvious reason — we’re human. Ever meet an unbiased human? It was probably a corpse. An old one. …

Reporters are most sleazy when they pretend to be objective, following diligently in the footsteps of the Grey Lady herself and her onetime motto “All the news that’s fit to print”. Only the Times chose what news [was] fit, not to mention what news “fit” on the front page and what on page twenty-four. Bias anyone? (It took years for theTimes to put Auschwitz on the front page.) Trump knows this behavior well since he’s been manipulating the press for years. Call him Charles Foster Trump.

(After Charles Foster Kane of Citizen Kane – the movie portrait of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.)

I’m surprised Donald hasn’t bought a newspaper by now, not that he needs one. He has a – excuse the expression – trump card, meaning the press needs him (for clicks or viewers) more than he needs the press …

The rest of us are not so lucky. We don’t get to so easily attack the press, even when it attacks us. We don’t have Trump’s megaphone. No one has his megaphone these days.

So Donald is acting for all of us, a solid majority anyway, when he disses the mostly liberal press. It’s certain to be popular.

And I for one am glad we might have a president who seems clued in to alternative voices (i. e., social media) as well and pops off on Twitter. I hope he doesn’t stop (although he might want to work with an editor). The reason is simple. We need as many voices as possible since none is unbiased. A multiplicity of sources is the only way we can even have a chance to get at that truth, to find even a hint of transparency. The current government is doing everything it can to suppress information, as was made obvious Tuesday by the astonishing number of State Department and DOJ lawyers sent to defend Cheryl Mills at the Judicial Watch deposition.

This is likely to get worse. To say we live in dangerous times is an understatement. Traditional sources of information and communication are not the answer. Or are only part of the answer. …

Trump is doing the right thing in holding the press to account. They are a privileged class. I am part of it, peripherally anyway, and have enjoyed that privilege. It is a far stronger privilege, I assure you, than the color of my skin. It gets me into places that many can’t go.

Muhammad Ali, whose death was announced yesterday, was by all accounts a good guy as well as a great boxer.

He changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali when he converted to Islam. Cassius Clay, he said, was his “slave name”:

In 1964, [Cassius Clay] shocked the boxing world by announcing he was a member of the Black Muslims — the Nation of Islam — and was rejecting his “slave name.”

As a Baptist youth he spent much of his time outside the ring reading the Bible. From now on, he would be known as Muhammad Ali and his book of choice would be the Quran.

It seems he believed that only white Americans ever held slaves. But in in fact Muslims have been slave traders and slave owners from the early days of Islam right up to the present:

Some historians estimate that between A.D. 650 and 1900, 10 to 20 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders. Others believe over 20 million enslaved Africans had been delivered through the trans-Sahara route alone to the Islamic world. …

The Arab slave trade typically dealt in the sale of castrated male slaves. Black boys between the age of 8 and 12 had their scrotums and penises completely amputated to prevent them from reproducing. About six of every 10 boys  bled to death during the procedure, according to some sources, but the high price brought by eunuchs on the market made the practice profitable.

For just three – but perhaps most shocking – reports on slaves in the Islamic world, see here (the treatment of women and girls held as slaves by Muslims); and here (women advertised for sale by ISIS on Facebook); and here (a Muslim country has more slaves than anywhere else in the world).

This is an extract from the film The Caliphate: