NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

The Biden administration is destroying our national security infrastructure By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 6th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/the_biden_administration_is_destroying_our_national_security_infrastructure.html

America has been facing a helium crisis that goes far beyond balloons and threatens our medical care and military readiness. Thankfully, a new helium reservoir has just been discovered, but the ongoing helium shortage won’t instantly go away and, combined with the Biden administration’s many anti-military policies, still leaves us vulnerable to a military strike by a foreign actor.

On Friday, news broke about the helium reservoir, along with the fact that (a) our national security depends on helium, (b) we’re dangerously low on that essential gas, and (c) a current reserve sell-out will reduce helium capacity going forward:

A potential helium reservoir was discovered in Minnesota last week after drillers bored deep beneath the forest floor of the state’s Iron Range as supplies of the noble gas dwindle in the U.S.

Pulsar Helium Inc., a Canadian-based company, announced in a news release on Thursday that its team encountered gases with concentrations of up to 12.4% helium when its drilling rig reached a total depth of 2,200 at the Topaz Project drill site. Helium concentrations above 0.3% are considered economically viable.

[snip]

Helium’s unique qualities make the gas an important and desired resource.

While known as a lightweight gas that can fill balloons and blimps, helium can also take a liquid form that acts as a coolant for superconducting magnets needed to operate MRI machines and in the manufacturing of semiconductors. The gas also has applications in the defense industry, from rocket engine testing to air-to-air missile guidance systems and more.

In January, the Compressed Gas Association warned in a letter that the U.S. government’s selling of its Federal Helium Reserve system (FHR) “could lead to severe disruptions in the U.S. helium supply chain.”

If you’re wondering what the “government’s selling of its Federal Helium Reserve” means, the answer is that the U.S. just sold off part of its stockpile.

On Thursday, the U.S. government sold the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground stockpile based in Amarillo, Texas, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Taxpayer U The U.S. radical indoctrination centers, aka our colleges, are heavily funded by the citizenry. By Larry Sand

Posted By on March 6th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/06/taxpayer-u/

The college horror stories are endless. A mandatory Title IX training session at Harvard instructs students that “fatphobia” and “cis-heterosexism” perpetuate violence and that using the wrong pronouns constitutes abuse. Yet, hatred against Jews is tolerated at the school.

In California, community colleges teach that if someone claims they are not a racist, they are in denial and that colorblindness “perpetuates existing racial inequities and denies systematic racism.” A Michigan college held a “queer” abortion stories event earlier this year. The once-venerable University of Chicago is planning to host a “kink and consent” workshop for students, in which the practice of sex play with ropes will be taught.

Yet, the conservative Turning Point USA was denied a campus chapter at Cortland, part of the State University of NY. So much for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

As John Ellis, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, notes, “Higher education by and for political radicals was foreseen and banned by the American Association of University Professors, which in a celebrated 1915 policy statement warned teachers ‘against taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions.’ The AAUP already understood that political indoctrination would stamp out opposing views, which means the end of rational analysis and debate, the essential core of higher education. The 1915 statement is still a recognized professional standard—except that almost everywhere, it is ignored, at least until the public is looking.”

As the sordid college stories circulate in the media, it is rarely acknowledged that everyday taxpaying Americans of all political bents are subsidizing the insanity. According to Just Facts, colleges and universities received $226 billion in revenue from federal, state, and local funding sources in 2022. Also, from 1959 to 2021, inflation-adjusted government spending on higher education rose from $4,137 per student per year to $13,434. (This amount doesn’t include additional government funding for university research, university hospitals, or student loans.)

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Renewable Scam John Stossel

Posted By on March 6th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/john-stossel/2024/03/06/the-renewable-scam-n4927051

“We’re building a clean energy future,” says President Joe Biden.

Who is “we”? 

Well, you pay for it.

He and his “green” cronies do most of the building. 

Lately, they’re pouring more of your money into “renewable energy.” They promise to give us “carbon-free power” from the sun and wind.

My new video illustrates some problems with that, using scenes from a new documentary series called “Juice: Power, Politics and the Grid.” 

Political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. notes, “It’s quite intuitive for people to understand that there’s a lot of power in solar energy. We feel the wind. The idea that you can get something for nothing, people find enormously appealing.”

Especially in California, where politicians now require all new homes to have solar panels, all new cars sold in 2035 to be zero-emission, and all the state’s electricity to come from carbon-free resources by 2045.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Glazov Gang: Rashida Tlaib Votes Against Banning Hamas Terrorists From USA When loyalties become more than clear.

Posted By on March 6th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/glazov-gang-rashida-tlaib-votes-against-banning-hamas-terrorists-from-usa/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Anni Cyrus being interviewed on The Breanna Morello Show.

Anni discusses Rashida Tlaib Votes Against Banning Hamas Terrorists From USA, revealing When loyalties become more than clear.

Don’t miss it!

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Comedy Dies in Woke Darkness “Free men have free tongues.” by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on March 6th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/comedy-dies-in-woke-darkness/

Last week four stand-up comedians were disinvited from a comedy club in Seattle, right around the corner from the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” or CHAZ, a glorified squatters’ camp created by antifa and BLM “peaceful” rioters during the 2020 “summer of love.” The four comedians fell afoul of neighborhood wokesters who complained to the club’s management in order to “ensure the programming stayed aligned with the socially diligent enclave’s ethos.”

Such stories have become so frequent that many people just shrug off the seriousness of their implications. But comedy is not just a type of entertainment, or a matter of taste. Comedy is much more than that: it is a critical part of the political institutions in governments in which citizens are free to speak publicly, and have the right to hold their leaders accountable to the people and, in the U.S., the Constitution.

Censorship, “cancel culture,” speech codes––in short, punishing the speech that one faction strives to silence for political gain–– all strike at the heart of our freedom and unalienable rights. Indeed, from the time decades ago that the “politically correct” Nurse Ratched feminists started scolding “sexist” jokes by saying, “That’s not funny!”, the woke have insidiously intensified their war on humor and the First Amendment.

The political heritage of comedy arose with the creation of constitutional rule by citizens in the ancient Greek poleis, particularly in Athens where citizenship was extended to the non-elites as well as to the rich and noble. This epochal development required extensive adjustments to the old order of aristocrats for whom ruling the state was a birthright, what Pindar, the celebrator of aristocrat achievements in the Panhellenic games, called the “splendor in the blood,” the inherited superiority of talent, charisma, wisdom, and character needed to be leaders of men.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Biden, Trump Are Neck-And-Neck, But Is Winning 2024 Popular Vote Enough? I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on March 6th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/06/biden-trump-stay-neck-and-neck-but-will-winning-2024-popular-vote-be-enough-ii-tipp-poll/

Each side in today’s often-angry political debate over the upcoming presidential election seems convinced that its candidate has a clear advantage. But, as of now, neither President Joe Biden nor former President Donald Trump has an obvious edge in the popular vote as we enter the final eight months of the 2024 election season, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Despite being widely criticized for his lackluster campaign and showing continuing signs of age-related mental impairment, Biden holds a slender 43% to 42% lead over Trump. The online national poll of 1,246 registered voters was taken from Feb. 28 to March 1, with a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

Among those taking the poll, 8% said they preferred someone “other” than Biden or Trump, while 7% said they were “not sure.”

The partisan breakdown was fairly even, with 85% of Dems favoring Biden and 86% of Republicans favoring Trump. Among independents, a crucial swing vote for both candidates, the prospective vote broke 37% in favor of Trump, 36% in favor of Biden, with a hefty 16% saying “other” and 11% “not sure.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why the US is Losing the War to the Houthis by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 6th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20463/losing-war-to-houthis

What is the Biden administration doing wrong? Apart from scale, it’s trying to target Houthi drones and missiles, and some air bases…. This is the same approach that failed in Iraq….

When rockets are targeted, the terrorists run away and regroup, but when the terrorists are targeted, they have to keep running, so they don’t have the time and space to regroup.

That is what the proposed hostage deal and the various calls for a ‘ceasefire’ are really about.

Biden is unwilling to target the Houthis and so they keep attacking.

Given a choice between alienating the country and his party’s terror supporters, he chose a middle ground of “show” strikes… that will avoid offending terror supporters but also will not end the Houthi attacks.

This strategy serves no one except Biden who has sacrificed the nation’s prestige, a major international waterway and the lives of two U.S. Navy SEALs to win an election.

After President Joe Biden came home from his Caribbean vacation, the Deputy Defense Secretary came back from hers and the Secretary of Defense was on the verge of being released from the hospital, airstrikes were finally authorized against the Houthi Jihadis attacking ships in the Red Sea.

Biden said that the air strikes sent “a clear message that the United States and our partners will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most critical commercial routes.”

P.C.-CULTURE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The UN’s insult to women Why has yet another man been appointed to represent British women on the global stage?Julie Burchill

Posted By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/05/the-uns-insult-to-women/

‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’, sang Henry Higgins in the 1964 film, My Fair Lady. If there were to be a remake in 2024, the film might be called My Fair Ladyboy. It would update the story of a professor of phonetics, who turns a cockney girl into the toast of high society, into the tale of a professor of hormonology, who turns a mockney boy into the toast of café society. For today, a sizable minority of trendsetters and lawmakers think men can be just as good – if not better – at being women.

A man in a frock has even been appointed by UN Women to represent British women on the global stage. ‘Katie’ Neeves was on X last week smarming that: ‘I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted as a UN Women UK delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, which is the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.’

Neaves’s X handle – @cool2btrans – gives the game away. As does the name of his business, Martin Neeves Photography and Film. Presumably he retained the old name in case potential customers think kooky Katie might be less efficient.

We’ve been here before, of course. The ‘model’ Munroe Bergdorf – born Ian Beaumont to middle-class parents in the picturesque village of Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex – was appointed the first ‘UK champion’ for UN Women towards the end of last year. This understandably caused a right kerfuffle, not least because Bergdorf has shown contempt for the historical struggles for women’s rights. Infamously, he once branded the Suffragettes ‘white supremacists’ – this from an airhead who probably thinks that ‘force-feeding’ means being slipped a few hidden carbs before Marbs by an envious frenemy.

BOOKS Comments turned off

William Ruger A Conservative Liberal A new biography puts Milton Friedman’s greatness at the center of twentieth-century economic history.

Posted By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-conservative-liberal

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, by Jennifer Burns (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 592 pp., $27.73)

Jennifer Burns’s biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, will be the standard reference for anyone wanting to dive deeply into the life of the great economist and the world in which he flourished. The historical context that Burns provides makes the book almost as much a work of post-1929 economic and intellectual history as a biography of the bespectacled, diminutive professor who so influenced it. Though Burns is not uncritical of her subject, the story she tells will leave most right-leaning readers longing for the days when Friedman was one of their champions.

Before going back to Friedman’s youth in Rahway, New Jersey, and his time at Rutgers University, Burns introduces him at his apex, as economist extraordinaire and public intellectual. She notes that Friedman did more than lead the charge against Keynesianism; he “offered a philosophy of freedom that made a tremendous political impact in a liberty-loving country.” One of Burns’s goals is to “restore the fullness of Friedman’s thought to his public image” and to “approach Friedman as a scholar . . . setting his ideas in context and making his achievements legible for a new generation, either friend or foe.”

She touches all the key points of Friedman’s life, including his time at the University of Chicago as student and professor; the key influences on his thinking; his period away from academia in Washington and New York; his scholarship and leadership of the Chicago School of Economics, especially its “monetarism” and challenge to Keynesian orthodoxy; his work on the consumption function and the permanent income hypothesis, monetary history, the Phillips Curve, and the negative income tax; the controversy over his work in Chile and his relationship with Augusto Pinochet’s regime; his scuffles with mentor Arthur Burns; and the influence of his ideas on the late twentieth century and beyond. Reflecting on Friedman’s long shadow, Burns concludes that by century’s end, “the basics of monetarism had been adopted into conventional wisdom” and that “many of the things he had pressed for throughout his professional life had come to pass.”

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden’s settlement delusions Contrary to the administration’s claims, history proves that the settlements are neither illegal nor an impediment to peace. Eric Levine

Posted By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/bidens-settlement-delusions/

Last week, the Biden administration reversed the “Pompeo Doctrine,” which recognized that Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria are not “per se inconsistent with international law.”

Biden’s record of being wrong on every single important foreign policy issue of the last 50 years remains unblemished. His decision is wrong as a matter of law and fact. It is also bad politics and undermines Israeli and American national security.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken summed up the administration’s position by saying, “It’s been longstanding U.S. policy under Republican and Democratic administrations alike that new settlements are counterproductive to reaching an enduring peace. … They’re also inconsistent with international law. Our administration maintains a firm opposition to settlement expansion. And in our judgment, this only weakens—it doesn’t strengthen—Israel’s security.”

History disproves Blinken’s claim that “settlements are counterproductive to reaching an enduring peace.” In fact, Israel has always been willing to remove settlements to achieve peace.

The 1978 Israel-Egypt peace treaty required that Israel dismantle its settlements in the Sinai. Prime Minister Menachem Begin did so, deploying the IDF to physically remove those settlers who refused to leave. Clearly, the settlements were not a barrier to peace.

In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the evacuation of all Israelis from Gaza and turned it over to the Palestinians. Like Begin before him, Sharon sent the IDF to remove the settlers who would not leave. There were no Jews in Gaza for 18 years. Only after the Oct. 7 massacre did Israelis return to exercise their legitimate and legal right to self-defense.