NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Epic Fail: L.A. Ports Are More Clogged Now Than Before Biden’s Supply Chain ‘Fix’

Posted By on November 5th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/05/epic-fail-l-a-ports-are-more-clogged-now-than-before-bidens-supply-chain-fix/

President Joe Biden says he’s been addressing supply chain problems “since Day One,” but that’s consisted mainly of appointing task forces and holding summits. His latest bold “action” was to beg G-20 leaders to “help address global supply chain issues.”

The one concrete step Biden has taken was, he said, to get the Los Angeles ports to stay open 24/7, which he announced on Oct. 13. Biden said this has the “potential to be a gamechanger.” A White House fact sheet declared that it “will speed up shipments of goods throughout the country.”

Except, that’s not what’s happened.

In fact, things have gotten worse at those ports, not better, since Biden’s “game changer.”

On Oct. 10, three days before the president’s announcement, there were 60 container ships waiting offshore to get into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and 27 were at berths unloading or loading cargo, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California.

This Tuesday, there were 77 container ships waiting, while 25 were berthed.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Demoralization of the American Teacher Shane Trotter Shane Trotter

Posted By on November 5th, 2021

https://quillette.com/2021/11/03/the-demoralization-of-the-american-teacher/

Ten years ago, I showed up for my first day as a high school teacher. I had landed a job in the best school of what is often called a “destination district.” Still, I knew I was facing an uphill battle. Warnings abounded of an American public school system in decline. But I was undeterred. I had that youthful sense that education needed change and I was just the one to change it.

Throughout that first year I worked incessantly—creating lessons, grading, and making myself available to students an hour before school each day. I ran around the room joking with students, telling stories, creating relevant analogies, and turning pop-culture songs into lesson reviews that I’d sing for the class.

My students looked forward to my energy and I enjoyed their sense of humor. Still, I couldn’t have predicted how unprepared my students would be. They had never taken notes. They were shocked that my test reviews weren’t a list of the questions on the test. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t allow 20 minutes of review before the test, or why a history exam would have sections requiring written responses. In fact, many would just skip the entire short answer and essay sections, despite being given these topics in advance. Those who did respond often wrote single words or incoherent run-ons.

I’d spend entire classes explaining what I wanted to see in the short answer responses. We’d practice writing the “who, what, where, when, and why this concept is important.” But little changed. After their years of schooling in which writing never extended beyond filling in a blank, my expectations were analogous to asking high schoolers to solve algebraic equations when they had not yet learned to multiply and divide. They were capable, but it was going to take a lot of effort to fill in the gaps. Which raises the question, why would a student be willing to put in that much work?

I was fighting the overwhelming tide of a system intent upon handing over diplomas. Over half of my students would have failed if I gave them the grade they earned. But the unwritten, yet well-communicated, rule was that teachers should never fail a student if it could be helped. The onus was on the teacher to hound students for late assignments and find a way to bump them to a C.

As much as I wanted to fight every battle, I eventually caved to the exhaustion of a demanding Texas high school coaching schedule (which seemed to be the job I was really hired for). I compromised more times than I would have ever thought possible. I eliminated homework, allowed test retakes, gave fill-in-the-blank notes, graded essays at a 5th grade level, gave test reviews that were basically the test, and intentionally made tests easy. When there were still too many students failing at the end of a grading period, I went above and beyond to manufacture easy routes to a passing grade so that only a handful of incomprehensibly effort-averse students failed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Manchin and Sinema: Cassandras of the Senate The two moderate Democrats saw Tuesday’s crisis coming By Stephen L. Miller

Posted By on November 5th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-manchin-kyrsten-sinema-cassandras-senate/

Tuesday was a very bad night for the Democratic Party. They lost the Virginia governorship and House of Delegates, almost lost the New Jersey governorship, and lost several local school board seats in crucial electoral states such as Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Colorado.

Blue states that kept schools closed or mostly shuttered for the duration of the pandemic now play host to legions of angry, fed-up parents. Nationally, Joe Biden’s approval ratings are crashing harder than Hunter Biden after a stint at the Chateau Marmont, and his domestic agenda is stalled in Congress, thanks to two Democratic senators who clearly saw the writing on the wall and the red wave coming: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

“I’ve been saying this for many, many months, people have concerns, people are concerned,” Manchin told reporters on Wednesday. “You can read so much into all of that last night. I think it should be a call to all of us have to be more attentive to the people back home.”

After Biden surveyed the wreckage in Virginia, he urged his party to hit the gas pedal on passing the infrastructure and Build Back Better bills, suggesting that perhaps the failure to pass the acts affected the outcome of the Virginia governor’s race. This is a typical trick, one he learned from his old boss: if people don’t like the agenda, it must be because there isn’t enough of it.

But Manchin and Sinema are in the right here. They have navigated the negotiations patiently and deftly, perhaps aware of what happened to their party the last time an enormous unpopular package was rammed through Congress by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Obamacare was passed in 2010, but four years later the Democrats were still paying the price for its unpopularity. The 2014 midterm swing was the largest transfer of congressional power since World War Two. 2022 looks to not only be a repeat, but worse, even at local levels where the core of the Democratic Party power structure is in danger: teachers’ unions.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Let’s hear it for Winsome Sears Virginia’s new lieutenant governor is the first woman of color and naturalized citizen ever elected statewide John Fund

Posted By on November 5th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/hear-winsome-sears-virginia-lieutentant-governor/

Of all the improbable outcomes in this week’s elections, a couple struck me as worthy of a Hollywood movie script. Ed Durr, the truck driver who toppled the New Jersey State Senate president after spending just $153 was one.

But an even more inspirational, and almost as implausible, script could be fashioned from the story of Winsome Earle Sears, a 57-year-old Virginia mother of three, who by being elected Virginia’s lieutenant governor became the first female minority and naturalized citizen ever elected statewide. CNN and MSNBC ignored her memorable Election Night victory statement, but Fox didn’t:

Her “Winsome vs Goliath” story will no doubt now make her a fixture on the lecture circuit. Devoutly religious, an aimless Sears was born in Jamaica and grew up in the Bronx. When she was 18 her Jamaican grandmother died and she took it as a sign she had to make something of herself. She joined the Marines, became an electrician and diesel mechanic, and learned that “you don’t get respect there unless you dig your own ditch.”

After three years she left with many commendations and then married a Marine first lieutenant, moving back with him to his home town of Norfolk, Virginia. She began raising three children. After a job in banking, she had another sign that she should help others, and she became director of the Hope Center, a Salvation Army homeless shelter for mothers and their children. After two years, she left to become a graduate student at Regent University. Then in 2001, Republicans had no candidate to run in a redrawn 58 percent black House district in Norfolk that was represented by Delegate William P. Robison, an incumbent who had served 20 years in office.

Robinson, a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, was flush with cash from special interests. Two months before the election, his campaign had $34,000 in the bank; she had $77. Then Robinson, a Harvard-educated criminal-defense lawyer, was found in contempt of court for missing a criminal hearing and sentenced to five days in jail. He served one day and was freed pending appeal. He also faced contempt-of-court hearings in at least two other cases.

Sears walked much of her district to meet voters, by all accounts more than living up to her first name.

But her views quickly came under attack. She says she lost the endorsement of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot when she told them she was “a Christian first and a Republican second.” Then the campaign turned ugly, with threats and intimidation. “Because I was a Republican, I was told I wasn’t black enough,” says the richly dark-skinned Sears. Phone calls featuring the sound of military boots would be made to her home late at night. She says that Michael F. Muhammad, head of the New Black Panthers Party, cursed and threatened her.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

COP26: A climate carnival to remember and ridicule  By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 5th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/cop26-a-climate-carnival-to-remember-and-ridicule-opinion-684033

Had participants in the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow this week not taken themselves so seriously, the global happening would have made for great comedy. It’s always amusing watching the “woke” trip themselves up without even realizing it, after all.

A perfect example was the refusal of the guards at the Scottish Event Campus to allow Energy Minister Karin Elharrar to enter the premises. This was not, however, because the government official suffering from muscular dystrophy did not have the proper proof of COVID-19 vaccination – a requirement for all the delegates to the convention.

No, the most relevant politician to the topic at hand, aside from Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg, was safe on that score.

The reason for her inability to grace the place with her presence was, well, her disability. Somehow, with all the pining about the destruction of the planet and preparation for the summit, nobody among the enlightened crowd in kilt-land had thought to arrange for wheelchair accessibility.

In fairness, it’s hard for people who concern themselves with the plight of mankind – and fate of the world’s grandchildren – to take individual human beings into account. This makes sense. Huge goals, and the trillions of dollars pledged for their future realization, are a lot easier to contemplate than small, far less costly ones that need immediate and inconvenient attention.

When he learned of Elharrar’s predicament, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett complained, and rightly so. He went as far as to threaten not to attend the following day’s sessions if the matter was not rectified. When it was, he personally accompanied her to meetings. One of these was with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who made a point of personally apologizing to Elharrar.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joel Zinberg, M.D. Mandating Trouble Mayor de Blasio’s needlessly inflexible requirement that city workers be vaccinated will endanger New York.

Posted By on November 5th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/the-dangers-of-nyc-vaccine-mandate?wallit_nosession=1

Thanks to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for city workers, New York faces the prospect of slower ambulance- and fire-response times, fewer cops on the street to battle rising crime rates, and accumulations of uncollected trash. It didn’t have to be this way.

The mandate, imposed two weeks ago, excludes the alternative option of undergoing regular Covid-19 testing, putting unvaccinated city workers without religious or medical exemptions on unpaid leave as of November 1. A last-minute surge in vaccinations brought the rate for city employees up to 90 percent, but significant numbers of the essential workers remain unvaccinated. As of November 1, vaccination rates were 84 percent for the police, 82 percent for the Department of Sanitation, and 80 percent for the Fire Department (which includes 75 percent of firefighters and 87 percent of EMTs).

Nine thousand city workers, including as many as 2,500 NYPD employees and 1,000 firefighters, are now on unpaid leave. Another 12,000 city workers, including 1,000 FDNY members and 6,500 NYPD officers, have applied for religious or medical exemptions. If, as expected, most of these exemptions are denied, thousands more essential workers could end up on leave.

Workable alternatives exist to this assault on essential services.

Applicants for exemptions to the vaccine mandate will be permitted to work and be tested weekly while their requests are being processed. If it is safe for exemption-seekers to continue working with weekly tests, then why not offer this same accommodation to any worker who continues to refuse vaccination? This is the same alternative provided for in President Biden’s proposed OSHA vaccine mandate.

Another option would be to exempt from the mandate anyone who can provide proof of natural immunity, resulting from prior Covid-19 infection and recovery. Prior infection with SARS-CoV-2 can be readily documented with a previous positive PCR test or antigen test, a positive antibody test, or a T-cell test.

By May 31, 2020, during the first of several Covid-19 waves in the city, 40.7 percent of EMS responders and 34.5 percent of firefighters had already been on medical leave for suspected or confirmed Covid-19. Now, more than a year and a half later, even higher numbers of essential workers have likely been infected.

The CDC has long suggested that previously infected people get vaccinated to strengthen their immunity. This would amount to a booster, in the same way that fully vaccinated people can improve their immunity with an additional shot. But the relevant question is: Does natural immunity without vaccination protect as well as full vaccination without booster?

Experts generally say that natural infection almost always causes better immunity than vaccines. While the evidence is mixed, it seems clear that both natural and vaccine-provided Covid-19 immunity provide effective protection.

A new CDC review shows that infection with SARS-CoV-2 and vaccination each result in a low risk of subsequent infection for six months or more. This finding holds true for both the Delta and pre-Delta variants. In addition, both prior infection and vaccination confer high levels of protection against symptomatic Covid-19 illness.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian Authority Campaign Against Palestinian NGOs by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17913/the-palestinian-authority-campaign-against

The six Palestinian NGOs were classified by Israel as terrorist organizations because of their affiliation with the PLO’s Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by both the United States and the European Union.

The PFLP, which has carried out many attacks against Israelis, including civilians, is one of 11 groups that form the PLO, headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Each group receives monthly allocations of up to $70,000 from the PLO’s unofficial finance ministry.

Yet while Israel has come under attack for its move against the six NGOs, there is almost no mention that the Palestinian Authority (PA), which joined the bandwagon of anti-Israel criticism, has also been targeting Palestinian NGOs for quite some time.

[T]he PA has been targeting hundreds of Palestinian NGOs… as part of an effort to control them and take their funds. Unlike Israel, the PA is not targeting the NGOs because of their affiliation with terrorism. Many of the NGOs have been critical of the PA leadership: that is why Abbas wants to silence them.

Al-Haq, one of the six organizations labeled by Israel as a terrorist organization… pointed out that this was not the first time the PA leadership had targeted Palestinian NGOs.

When Al-Haq complained about the PA decree targeting Palestinian NGOs, the mainstream media in the West, as well as several human rights organizations self-righteously chose to look the other way…. The international community did not demand clarifications from the PA leadership about his “assault” on Palestinian NGOs.

Palestinian legal expert Majed al-Arouri…. said that more than 20,000 Palestinian employees would lose their jobs as a result of the restrictions imposed by the PA on the work of Palestinian NGOs and charitable organizations.

As far as many in the international community are concerned, it is fine if Abbas takes punitive measures against the PFLP, but it is outrageous if Israel does it.

Those who are ignoring Abbas’s crackdown on the Palestinian NGOs are depriving the Palestinians of democracy and freedom of speech.

The international community’s obsession with Israel… proves that it is more interested in condemning and delegitimizing Israel than improving the status of human rights and democracy under the PA.

Israel’s recent decision to designate six Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as terrorist organizations sparked a wave of protests and condemnations from many parties around the world, including human rights groups and political activists. Israel is being accused of cracking down on Palestinian civil society organizations not because of their affiliation with a terrorist group, but because of their political activities, which are often not that different.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” Sydney Williams

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The moral of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf is that false cries for help mean real calls for help will be ignored. A climate apocalypse has been forecast for years, sometimes by the well-intentioned but naïve looking to do good, but often by the cynical seeking political or personal advantage.

Two years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recognizing that global temperatures are indeed rising, compiled a list of dire climate predictions that did not happen. Here is a sample: In 1969, the Nobel winning German scientist, Paul Ehrlich predicted that everybody would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam.” In 1974 Time Magazine warned that “space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.” The New York Times in 1978 reported that an “international team of specialists” feared the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” Over the next ten years, Cassandras changed their forecasts from cooling to warming: An Associated Press headline from 1989 read, quoting UN officials: “Rising seas could obliterate nations.” And who could forget Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which he predicted that Artic ice would be gone in seven years. Today, doomsayers blame every forest fire, drought and hurricane on anthropological-caused climate change.

I am not a climate change denier. In fact, I know of no one who is. The term is used by climate disciples to belittle heretics who dare question the dogma that man alone is at fault for a warming planet. They are ruthless in their treatment of those skeptical of their professed causes of a changing climate. In National Geographic’s film Before the Flood, Bjørn Lomborg is listed as one of the ten most prominent “climate deniers.” Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and, in my opinion, the most reasonable voice on the subject. He begins every interview by repeating that he believes the Earth is warming. His sin is that he uses empirical evidence, logic and common sense to demonstrate that claimed apocalyptic consequences are more hyperbole than factual, which he explains in his 2020 book False Alarm. Fostering panic over climate change gets Progressives elected, sells books and movies and abets corporate welfare for renewable sources of energy. But for the rest of us, it does more harm than good.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Not A Joke: Taliban Asks for International Aid to Help It Fight…Climate Change By Robert Spencer

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/11/02/not-a-joke-taliban-asks-for-international-aid-to-help-it-fightclimate-change-n1529075

Kyle Shideler, the Director/Senior Analyst for Homeland Security & Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, said it best: “They may have a 7th-century law code, but they grift with the best of the 21st century.” The Taliban does indeed appear to have caught on to one of the most lucrative gravy trains of the first part of the 21st century and are eager to get in on the loot; the jihad terror group has issued a call for aid from international organizations to help it fight the scourge of climate change.

Apparently, the Taliban would have us believe that in between executing allies of the United States, confiscating guns, setting women on fire and making sure they don’t work or go to school, and persecuting Shi’ite Hazaras, their jihadis just really want to spend some time working on clean energy programs and making Afghanistan green.

Showing a fine grasp of how the game is played, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen explained: “Afghanistan has a fragile climate. There is need for tremendous work.” Accordingly, “some climate change projects which have already been approved and were funded by Green Climate Fund, UNDP, Afghan Aid, should fully resume work.”

Would environmentalists be safe working in Afghanistan? Why, sure! The Taliban, said Shaheen, would make sure of that: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is committed to providing security and a safe environment for the work of NGOs and charity organizations.”

Of course. This is the group, mind you, that abducted and murdered five aid workers from Save the Children in April 2015. In May 2019, Taliban jihadis murdered five aid workers from the American organization Counterpart International because, they said, Counterpart was promoting women being in the proximity of men in public. Then in June 2020, the UN accused the Taliban of “deliberate attacks” against health care workers.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Nearing the Crossroads As 2024 approaches, what will Trump do? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/03/trump-nearing-the-crossroads/

“Or will Trump redo 2016, bulldoze to the nomination, go for the jugular of the now hard-left Democratic Party, clobbering his way to a 2016-like Electoral College victory—or a defeat that others who copied his agendas might have avoided?”
The Left may not wish to admit it, but the fortunes of a once moribund Donald Trump of January 2021 have now largely recovered—even before the stunning gubernatorial victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. 

How and why? 

One, Joe Biden did not, as dishonestly advertised, prove to be good Ol’ “Lunch bucket” Joe. He was no moderate from Scranton. Instead, Biden has served as the clueless gun barrel through which hard-core leftists fired off the most unpopular agenda in memory. 

Open borders, huge deficits, the Afghanistan catastrophe, looming stagflation, empty shelves, bottlenecked ports, soaring energy prices, toxic critical race theory, the disastrous previews of the Green New Deal, a weaponized federal government, and the addled decline of Biden himself have done more than just collapse support for the president and his policies.  

More importantly, Biden’s string of catastrophes endangers the very stuff of life, from the ability to afford gas to finding goods on the shelves. 

Two, for 10 months, Donald Trump has been stripped of all his social network outlets. The progressive Silicon monopolies thought they had silenced the once omnipresent Trump. 

But their muzzles had unintended consequences. The less Trump was on social media, the more the public remembered his good policies rather than his controversial tweets. 

Three, Donald Trump was as responsible or not responsible for COVID-19 deaths as is Joe Biden. On Biden’s watch, more have died each day on average from the disease than during Trump’s tenure from the start of the pandemic.