#mark steyn

University of Michigan is blasted as ‘parochial and moronic’ after ridiculous task force bans words like ‘picnic,’ ‘brown bag’ and ‘blacklist’ for being offensive and harming morale

The ‘Words Matter Task Force’ recommended words and phrases to be eliminated by the IT department at the University of Michigan Phrases deemed offensive include ‘native’ and ‘sanity check’ Conservative author Mark Steyn appeared on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ on Wednesday to discuss the list of banned words He blasted the University of Michigan and recommended parents pull their kids out of the…

[ Issue 24.2 ] 

The Republic of Iraq remains severely contaminated with explosive ordnance (EO) according to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor report 2019. Located in southern Iraq, the Iraq Directorate of Mine Action’s (DMA) Regional Mine Action Center South’s (RMAC-S) area of responsibility contains the most contaminated area in Iraq in terms of surface area. The region’s hazard areas recorded in the national mine action database (IMSMA) stood at 1,592 sq km by mid-July 2020, with the Basra Province alone containing 1.27 billion sq m of hazard area. This contamination predominantly originates from various armed conflicts in the region, ranging mostly from the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s to the 2003 Iraq War. The region has seen relatively little conflict with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which bodes well for regional security but means funding for conventional minefield clearance is limited.

From a natural hazard perspective, the region is exposed to a range of natural and human-induced disasters, e.g., droughts, floods, sand-storms, desertification, and various epidemics. Compounding the situation is the country’s poor economic situation, infrastructure, and unreliable internet connectivity. In addition to navigating the contamination hazards mentioned previously, RMAC-S is tasked with prioritizing land release activities based on, inter alia, the socioeconomic status, population vulnerability, and development sectors’ activities that are restricted by the hazardous areas within each district. The presence of minefields in the region’s large oil fields, on which the government relies heavily, further hampers the effective management of mine action resources available to RMAC-S.

ROLE OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Timely access to relevant information is a key enabler for effective decision-making in any organization and even more so when these decisions affect lives and livelihoods. Since 2004, iMMAP has supported and developed the humanitarian mine action (HMA) program’s information management (IM) systems, delivered capacity building activities and facilitated coordination on IM, planning and prioritization between the DMA and other HMA actors in Iraq. Balancing  the access restrictions and security requirements imposed by the government on the national mine action database contents, DMA’s activities created an array of information products that provided decision makers with easier access to data subsets, assisting with data analysis and the contextualization of the hazard areas. The previous system resulted in delayed responses from fully-taxed personnel when staff from RMAC-S operations are met with urgent requests for planning or mine action tasks submitted by implementing partners. The shortfalls of the national budget contribute to the difficulty of retaining skilled national IM staff, complicating the DMA’s operating capacity, and further delaying the output of (paper-based) field report submissions stemming from the problematic infrastructure.

Guest-hosting for Rush on Friday, I mentioned the strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors - as in the stampede of Congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times. Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay - which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a word against Calypso Louie.

There was another conservative virtue-signaling stampede over the weekend. A short video from the Lincoln Memorial went "viral" (notwithstanding its ubiquity, I'm keeping the word in scare-quotes because, like any other virus, this one should be contained): it purported to show a group of Catholic schoolboys in MAGA hats harassing an elderly Native American drummer. The lads were instantly identified as students from Covington Catholic High School, which I'd never heard of but is clearly the kind of tony white-privilege joint where they book Brett Kavanaugh to spike the punch at the gang-rape prom. So naturally social media instantly convicted them and moved on to the usual doxing and death threats. The school itself leapt to dissociate itself from its own pupils and threatened to expel them.

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Yet, instead of a prudent skepticism, my former colleagues at National Review joined the stampede and decided to get way out in front of the story.

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What's disturbing about this fake hate crime is not that the Twitter mob scented blood in its nostrils and went bounding after its prey, but that a big chunk of Conservative Inc piled on, as enthusiastically as the left. And Jay Nordlinger's finger-wagging about an "American disgrace" is absurd in its sanctimony: However you wish to characterize a professional tribal elder intervening in a showdown between upscale Catholic private-school pupils and "Black Hebrew Israelites", it isn't an "American" disgrace. An American disgrace is the declining life expectancy of white males due to addiction, or the collapse of the family in rural America, or a bipartisan political class admitting millions of unskilled illegal immigrants to the country so that MS-13 gangs are now a fact of life in suburban Long Island in order that the Dems can get voters and the GOP's donors can get cheap labor ...or any one of a ton of other "American disgraces" Conservative Inc doesn't talk about because it only takes to the field on the left's terms.

I talked on Rush last Friday about the folly, in philosophical terms, of always accepting your opponents' premises, even unto accepting and advancing the notion that "western civilization" is hate speech. How is that in the interest of even the most milquetoast and watery version of "conservatism"