Displaying the most recent of 90908 posts written by

Ruth King

U.S. Army to prioritize fight against climate change By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/us_army_to_prioritize_fight_against_climate_change.html

The U.S. Army recently released a bulletin stating that it will henceforth be “prioritizing climate change“ in its strategic defense planning. The Defense Department has already established the “Department of Defense Climate Working Group,” a new office that will coordinate the DOD’s ongoing response to the allegedly grave threat that climate change poses to the national security of the United States. I wonder if Greta Thunberg will be heading up the DDCWG.

The Army’s laser focus on climate change appears to be in response to President Biden’s stated agenda of aggressively addressing climate change across governmental bodies and is occurring simultaneously with the culture change being imposed on the U.S. military from the top down. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for example, fully supports Biden’s emphasis on climate change…as long as it doesn’t take time away from the troops’ mandatory “Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Training,” or their indoctrination into Marxist theory.

This past April, Austin asserted that “climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act.” He added, “Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”

Am I the only one concerned that the most important military in the world is frightened by climate change?

Austin also noted that his military is committed to electrifying its vehicle fleets and operating more sustainably. What about the cost to build/retrofit, as well as issues with performance and charging time, etc.? All things considered, will these vehicles really be better for the environment? And is that the point of a military?

Maryland’s Largest School District Spent $454K in Taxpayer Money on ‘Anti-Racist System Audit’ By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/marylands-largest-school-district-spent-454k-in-taxpayer-money-on-anti-racist-system-audit/

Maryland’s largest school district spent over $454,000 for an “anti-racist system audit,” according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch, while the district’s middle school students were taught that the phrase “Make America Great Again” was an example of “covert white supremacy” that ranks just below “lynching,” hate crimes,” “the N-word” and “racial slurs.”

Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, says it obtained 685 pages of records on Montgomery County Public Schools’ (MCPS) “anti-racist system audit” and critical race theory classes.

The district hired The Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium to conduct the audit, a company that claims its “expertise in using intersectionality as part of its theory of change makes us uniquely positioned to conduct the Anti-Racist Audit and mitigate the root causes of systemic barriers.” 

The documents include Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium’s “anti-racist system audit” proposal, which describes intersectional theory as “people are often disadvantaged by multiple sources of oppression: their race, class, gender identity, native language, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity markers. Intersectionality recognizes that identity markers (e.g. “female” and “Black”) do not exist independently of each other, and that each informs the others, often creating a complex merging of oppression.” 

Meanwhile, students in Thomas Pyle Middle School’s social justice class who were taught that MAGA is an example of white supremacy were also taught that “white privilege” means being favored by school authorities, having a positive relationship with police, “soaking in media blatantly biased toward my race” and “living ignorant of the dire state of racism today.”

‘Cut off their heads’: Hamas leader repeats murderous directive to kill Jews Hamas previously walked back similar comments from a leader who said all Jews should be slaughtered. By Susan Katz Keating

https://justthenews.com/world/middle-east/cut-their-heads-hamas-leader-re

A senior Hamas leader this month joined a years-long chorus from fellow extremists telling Palestinians to kill Jews using multiple methods, including cutting off their heads with knives, according to translated videos.

In a video released on May 17, the Israel Defense Forces portrayed the latest such demand, from Fathi Hammad, a member of the Hamas Political Bureau. 

“People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives,” Hammad shouted while speaking at a May 7 rally. The video was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “With your hand, cut their artery from here,” Hammad said. “A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads].”

Leaders of the militant group have for years alternately issued and retracted the deadly instructions. Hammad five years ago called for Palestinians around the world to murder Jews.

“All of you 7 million Palestinians abroad, enough of the warming up,” Hammad said at a 2019 protest near Gaza. “You have Jews everywhere, and we must attack every Jew on the globe by way of slaughter and killing, if God permits.”

Those comments brought condemnation, including from Hamas.

“These statements do not represent the movement’s official positions and consistent, adopted policies that stipulate that our conflict is with the occupation, which is occupying our land and sullying our holy sites, and not with Jews around the world or with Judaism as a religion,” the organization said in a statement posted on its website.

The IDF in its Monday video showed that Hamas leaders consistently have called for Jews to be killed.

The deputy speaker of the Hamas parliament, Ahmad Bahr, in 2012 invoked a wide-ranging curse on his perceived enemy.

Racism at Chicago’s City Hall Mayor Lightfoot will no longer do interviews with white reporters.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/racism-at-chicagos-city-hall-11621550316?mod=o

Ol’ Jim Eastland must be smiling. The white segregationist Senator from Mississippi until 1978 has a surprising imitator in Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who said this week she will no longer do interviews with reporters who are white.

This was no rhetorical slip. Ms. Lightfoot, who is black, said in a two-page written statement that from now on “I will be exclusively providing one-on-one interviews with journalists of color.” She justified her decision as a response to “the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically.

She suggested that whatever negative coverage she receives stems from racial bias. “For the past two years, more often than not, we have debated internally, then chosen to say nothing, to let it go, lest we be accused of whining about negative coverage or of ‘playing the race card,’” Ms. Lightfoot wrote.

“And the truth is, it is too heavy a burden to bear, on top of all the other massive challenges our city faces in this moment, to also have to take on the labor of educating white, mostly male members of the news media about the perils and complexities of implicit bias.” So like the racists of the Jim Crow South, the mayor will now judge journalists solely by the color of their skin.

This should be shocking, but the surprise is how little criticism her statement has received. Perhaps it’s simply taboo these days to criticize a black politician who invokes race as a sword and shield.

After the Israeli Cease-Fire Islamist radicals saw how Democratic support for Israel has eroded.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-the-israeli-cease-fire-11621550460?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

As we went to press, it looked like Israel and Hamas would put down their arms—for now. The truce comes less than two weeks after the terrorist group commenced its 4,000-rocket barrage on Israeli civilians—the most intense since it took over the Gaza strip in 2007. Israel’s leadership wouldn’t have approved a cease-fire if it hadn’t accomplished most of what it wanted through air strikes, but the question now is what lessons the region’s players take from the short war and the world’s response.

The cease-fire has no strings attached, so neither Hamas nor Israel won a strategic victory. Israel says Hamas suffered the destruction of its tunnel network and the death of many military leaders. The group may lack the capacity to launch another major war on Israel, which it wants to annihilate, for some time.

Israel’s casualties were more limited because of its Iron Dome anti-missile technology. Yet Hamas inflicted a blow to Israeli democracy by showing that it could foment ethnic violence among Arab and Jewish Israelis, both of whom rioted during the conflict. That’s a tragedy, especially after Arab parties have advanced in recent years within Israel’s democracy.

Meanwhile Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran saw that Democratic support for Israel in the U.S. has declined. We credited President Biden this week with not trying to dictate Israel’s security decisions, but he soon bent rhetorically to his party’s left, saying Wednesday he “expected a significant deescalation today.”

With Iranian Help, Hamas Builds ‘Made in Gaza’ Rockets and Drones to Target Israel More than 4,000 rockets fired; thousands more left in the arsenal, Israelis estimate

https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-iranian-help-hamas-builds-made-in-gaza-rockets-and-drones-to-target-israel-11621535346?mod=hp_lead_pos6

Over the past 10 days, Palestinian militants have unleashed one of the most intense attacks on Israel in decades, firing more than 4,000 short-range rockets and deploying a new, explosive drone intended to evade the country’s Iron Dome air-defense system.

Behind this onslaught, defense officials in Israel and security analysts say, is an extensive arsenal built with technical expertise from Iran and growing local skills in arms manufacturing.

Israeli military leaders say they have destroyed more than two dozen missile-building factories in Gaza with airstrikes in recent days. But they estimate that the militants still have thousands of rockets left and the technical capacity to begin building more when the fighting stops.

As Israel has become more effective at blocking the smuggling of weapons into the isolated Mediterranean strip, Iran has looked for other ways to help Hamas, supplying designs and know-how the militants can use to make rockets—in some cases cobbled together from common materials such as pipes, castor oil and scavenged spent Israeli munitions.

“The design is Iranian but the production is local,” said Ephraim Sneh, a retired Israeli brigadier general and former deputy defense minister.

The Child Soldiers of Portland Public schools are training children to become race-conscious revolutionaries. Christopher F. Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/critical-race-theory-portland-public-schools

There are only a few places on earth where radicals and their children ritualistically burn the American flag and chant “Death to America”: Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul, Ramallah—and Portland, Oregon.

The City of Portland, a cloud-covered metro on the south bank of the Columbia River, has become known for its political protesters. Anarchists, Communists, ecofascists, and various other agitators regularly denounce the police, politicians of both parties, and America itself, and flag-burning has become part of the protesters’ liturgy. Last summer, protesters associated with Antifa upped the ante with chants of “Death to America” and participated in months of violent protests to avenge the death of George Floyd while he was in police custody in Minneapolis. Children as young as four marched with the crowd to the federal courthouse, raising the Black Power fist and chanting “Fuck the Police!”

Famously the “whitest city in America,” Portland has become the unlikely headquarters of race radicalism in the United States. The city has elevated white guilt into a civic religion; its citizens have developed rituals, devotions, and self-criticisms to fight “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” The culminating expression of this orthodoxy is violence: street militias, calling themselves “antiracists” and “antifascists,” smash windows and torch the property of anyone transgressing the new moral law.

We might be tempted to dismiss this as the work of a few harmless radicals “keeping Portland weird,” but in recent years, their underlying ideology on race has become institutionalized. The city government has adopted a series of Five-Year Plans for “equity and inclusion,” shopkeepers have posted political slogans in their windows as a form of protection, and local schools have designed a program of political education for their students that borders on propaganda.

I have spent months investigating the structure of political education in three Portland-area school districts: Tigard-Tualatin School District, Beaverton School District, and Portland Public Schools. I have cultivated sources within each district and obtained troves of internal documents related to the curriculum, training, and internal dynamics of these institutions. We can best understand the political education program in Portland schools by dividing it into three parts: theory, praxis (or practice), and power. The schools have self-consciously adopted the “pedagogy of the oppressed” as their theoretical orientation, activated it through a curriculum of critical race theory, and enforced it through the appointment of de facto political officers within individual schools, generally under the cover of “equity and social-justice” programming. In short, they have begun to replace education with activism.

The results are predictable. By perpetuating the narrative that America is fundamentally evil, steeping children in race theory, and lionizing the Portland rioters, they have consciously pushed students in the direction of race-based “revolution.” In the language of the Left, the political education programs in Portland-area districts constitute a “school-to-radicalism pipeline”: a training ground for child soldiers. This is not hyperbole: some of the most active and violent anarchist groups in Portland are run by teenagers, and dozens of minors were arrested during last year’s riots. These groups have taken up the mantle of climate change, anticapitalism, antifascism, and Black Lives Matter—whatever provides a pretext for violent “direct action.”

6 Reasons College Vaccine Passports Are Absurd And Legally Objectionable By Evita Duffy

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/20/6-reasons-college-vaccine-passports-are-absurd-and-legally-objectionable/

The American university system has scammed students long enough, now forcing us to be experiments for emergency-use vaccines that healthy students don’t need, but Big Pharma desperately wants.

For a year and half now, most college students in America have been barred from in-person learning. We have taken out student loans for already over-priced institutions only to be subjected to vastly inferior remote learning. For students who choose to remain on campus, rather than move back into their high school bedrooms, universities have implemented communist-style COVID rules and regulations that border on violations of civil liberties.

Across America, colleges and universities have allied with pharmaceutical corporations by mandating registered students be vaccinated by the fall of 2021 or be barred from class and campus. 

Students in their late teens and early 20s make up a demographic more likely to die from the seasonal flu than COVID, making the requirement to take an emergency-use vaccine not only potentially dangerous, but absurd. Healthy students are being essentially reduced to guinea pigs for vaccines whose long- and short-term effects are unknown. Moreover, the unethical creation of most of the vaccines opens the door to concerns of conscience.

Students and their parents have a right to object to this violation of medical liberty. Below are six grounds on which students can object.

The Jan. 6 Commission – Just Another Democratic Propaganda Tool

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/21/the-jan-6-commission-just-another-democratic-propaganda-tool/

The Democrats have had their double impeachment of Donald Trump and are now moving on to a congressional probe of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol intrusion. We’re now in America’s third installment of the Democrat-media complex’s Soviet show trial series.

A resolution passed Wednesday 252-175 by the House, with 35 Republicans joining the Democrats, creates a commission to “investigate and report on the facts and causes relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex,” as laid out by a “Dear Colleague” letter from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Three words in the letter – domestic terrorist attack – make it clear that the outcome has already been determined.

A particularly fitting definition of “show trials” is found on Wikipedia, which says they “tend to be retributive rather than corrective and they are also conducted for propagandistic purposes.” Retribution and propaganda are exactly what the Democrats are seeking.

But here are some facts that the Democrats are up against: The incident on Jan. 6 was an insurrection, a domestic terrorist attack, only in the perverted minds of power-hungry Democrats and their media apparatchiks. The offenders were guilty of no more than trespassing, scuffling with authorities, vandalism, and apparently some instances of theft. They were not armed with guns or explosives. The government was never in danger of being overcome. There was no plan to take hostages.

Biden’s first 100 days: Joe’s immigration reform overtaken by border crisis Anna Giaritelli

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bidens-first-100-days-joes-immigration-reform-overtaken-by-border-crisis/ar-AAKcKC3?li=BBnb7Kz

President Joe Biden took office in January promising immigration reform, but his agenda was overtaken by a surge of primarily Central American migrants arriving at the southern border.

The White House came out of the gate in January ready to wipe away Trump-era and decades-old policies.    Biden suspended border wall construction, paused most deportations for 100 days, stopped forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims were being processed, and scrapped bilateral agreements that allowed the United States to send asylum-seekers to Central American countries.

But Biden was unable to avoid a border surge that began brewing at the end of former President Donald Trump’s term. The number of people encountered attempting to come across the border illegally had climbed from 17,000 in April 2020 to 78,000 in January. By March, more than 172,000 people were coming across the border. Federal law enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border stopped 178,622 people trying to enter the country illegally in April, the highest amount in more than two decades.