Indoctrinating Colorado Students

Colorado Daily News: Another round of diversity workshops — This time there’s even some new opression terminology by Jessica Peck Corry

In what has become an annual rite of passage, University of Colorado students are being subjected this month to a round of diversity workshops preaching that all whites are racist.

The latest round, hosted by the university’s women’s resource center last Friday, was titled “White on White Taskforce: Acting to Dismantle Racism.” According to organizers, it was “designed to give White people tools to dismantle racism on campus.”

At the workshop, students received a handout espousing the “underlying assumptions” of its leaders. Most notably, it read “reverse racism is impossible,” meaning that non-whites cannot be racist. And also of interest, the handout proclaimed that “racism is part of a system of interlocking oppressions, including sexism, heterosexism, economic oppression, and able-body-ism.”

Able-body-ism. That’s one I’ve never heard before.

Some day, universities will return to their true mission: teaching young people to think and communicate well and (maybe) live moral lives.

Instead of becoming educated, students pay tuition to be subjected to Maoist re-education training camps governed by liberals which smear and insult students and their families as “racist” without so much as a shred of evidence. They are told how to view the world, how to view themselves, and how to view human beings: not as individuals graced by God with a universe of qualities, traits and abilities, but as members of a political category to which certain grievances or accusations apply. If you’re a white male, you’re the plague of planet earth, the oppressor, and your (assumed) whole world view must be changed whether you like it or not. If you’re female, black, Hispanic, homosexual, or any other group deemed by liberals to be oppressed (whether factual or not), you’re forever a child and a victim, and you require the protection of self-appointed saviors who know and care nothing about you except your skin color, class, nationality or gender. The presumptive arrogance and self-righteousness of all this should be apparent, but sadly some students will fall for this insanity, naively believing that their elders understand something that they do not

The radicalism and narcissistic rebellion of the 1960s ended over 40 years ago. At our universities, they are alive and well, and our students are worse off because of it.

Ethanol and Unintended Consequences

Understanding basic economics could have avoided the food shortages now occurring, but elitist environmentalists and those who pushed ethanol as an energy solution, don’t seem to care much about economics or science.

Wall Street Journal: Food Inflation, Riots Spark — Worries for World Leaders IMF, World Bank Push for Solutions; Turmoil in Haiti By BOB DAVIS and DOUGLAS BELKIN

Finance ministers gathered this weekend to grapple with the global financial crisis also struggled with a problem that has plagued the world periodically since before the time of the Pharaohs: food shortages.

Surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83% in the past three years, according to the World Bank — putting huge stress on some of the world’s poorest nations. Even as the ministers met, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was resigning after a week in which that tiny country’s capital was racked by rioting over higher prices for staples like rice and beans.

As food prices soar, protests are breaking out around the world, including this riot Saturday in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields and warehouses. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned in a recent speech that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. Those could include Indonesia, Yemen, Ghana, Uzbekistan and the Philippines. In countries where buying food requires half to three-quarters of a poor person’s income, “there is no margin for survival,” he said.

Many policy makers at the weekend meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank agreed that the problem is severe. Among other targets, they singled out U.S. policies pushing corn-based ethanol and other biofuels as deepening the woes.

And those “U.S. policies” didn’t come from conservatives.

Silvio Berlusconi Wins Italy Election

Telegraph: Silvio Berlusconi wins Italy election By Malcolm Moore

Iraq to Begin Picking Up Tab?

Primetime Politics: Iraq’s Financial Free Ride May End by Anne Flaherty

Iraq’s financial free ride may be over. After five years, Republicans and Democrats seem to have found common ground on at least one aspect of the war. From the fiercest war foes to the most steadfast Bush supporters, they are looking at Iraq’s surging oil income and saying Baghdad should start picking up the tab, particularly for rebuilding hospitals, roads, power lines and the rest of the shattered country.

“I think the American people are growing weary not only of the war, but they are looking at why Baghdad can’t pay more of these costs. And the answer is they can,” says Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska.