NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Administration Refuses to Refill Strategic Oil Reserve By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on August 2nd, 2023

On Tuesday, the Biden Administration deliberately chose to not refill the strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) after depleting it to combat a surge in gas prices last year.

According to the Daily Caller, the report from Bloomberg said that the administration considered it to be “too expensive” to refill the vital reserve supply, as the current price of a barrel of oil is roughly $80. The SPR is still at a record low level after Biden released at least 180 million barrels in 2022, in an effort to reduce historically high gas prices prior to the 2022 midterm elections.

“The [Department of Energy (DOE)] remains committed to its replenishment strategy for the SPR, including direct purchases when we can secure a good deal for taxpayers; exchange returns; and cancellation of planned sales where drawdown is unnecessary, in coordination with Congress,” a DOE spokesman said in a statement.

The Biden Administration had previously said it would consider buying back oil to replenish the SPR once the average barrel price falls between $62 and $72, but the average price has instead been on the rise in recent months. On Tuesday, the price of Brent oil crude futures closed at $85.

The decision on Tuesday marked the fourth round of bids to refill the SPR, a crucial reserve supply that had previously only been meant for emergencies such as wartime. Biden’s decision to raid the SPR for the simple purpose of reducing domestic gas prices, so that he and his party would not suffer the consequences in an election, was widely criticized.

DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in July that the Biden Administration would seek to refill the SPR, but admitted that the task may have to wait for a second term.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

If The DeSantis Campaign is in Trouble Why is the Leftist Media Ramping up Their Attacks? Partisans are so desperate to destroy DeSantis they will literally accuse him of anything By Carpe Diem

Posted By on August 2nd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/02/if-the-desantis-campaign-is-in-trouble-why-is-the-leftist-media-ramping-up-their-attacks/

In the last week, the leftist propaganda media—practically in unison, has ramped up their attacks against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in a concerted effort to declare the Republican primary race over—before the first debate has even occurred, and more than five months before the Iowa Caucuses.

These partisans are so desperate to destroy his campaign and sway public opinion that they will literally accuse him of anything, no matter how far removed it is from reality.

Here’s a small fraction of the recent headlines we’ve seen, which I’ve taken the liberty of correcting in bold, below the original.

“The Sputtering DeSantis Campaign Looks for a Restart,” writes the New York Times. 

“In Very Early Stages of Race, DeSantis Campaign Shifts Strategy.”

“Weak, small and reckless: how Ron DeSantis, Republican Napoleon, met his Waterloo,” says The Guardian.

“Strong and Effective: how Ron DeSantis crushed the Left’s radical agenda in Florida.”

“A DeSantis come-from-behind win is looking vanishingly unlikely,” says Politico.

“Politico is terrified DeSantis might win the GOP nomination.”

“Looking for a fight, Ron DeSantis tangles with Kamala Harris,” writes NBC.

“Looking for a fight with Ron DeSantis, Kamala Harris Lies about Florida’s African American history curriculum.”

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Gender CONfirmation Surgery Exploring the perils of reality dysphoria By Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on August 2nd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/02/gender-confirmation-surgery/

“Accredited medical professional groups agree that gender-affirming care is medically necessary, safe, and effective for trans and non-binary youth,” proclaimed Admiral Rachel Levine last October. Back in March, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health ramped up that claim.

“President Biden supports you. I as the Assistant Secretary for Health will support you and I talk about this topic, everywhere I go, to get the word out,” said Levine, a Harvard grad and medical doctor. “I am positive and optimistic and hopeful that the wheel will turn after that and that this issue won’t be as politically and socially such a minefield.”

That endorsement invites a closer look at “gender affirming care,” which as NBC noted, “commonly includes cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and gender reassignment surgeries.”

Dr. Maddie Deutsch, Associate Professor of Clinical Family & Community Medicine at the University of California – San Francisco (UCSF), and Medical Director for UCSF Transgender Care, reviews the “choices, risks, and unknowns associated with feminizing hormone therapy.” Taking higher doses of hormones, “will not necessarily bring about faster changes, but it could endanger your health.” Those pondering the hormone therapy might wonder what form the endangerment could take.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The only way Ron DeSantis prevails Stop attacking Trump, for starters Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 2nd, 2023

https://thespectator.com/politics/only-way-ron-desantis-prevails-2024/ I wonder if Ron DeSantis’s favorite mot these days is from Mark Twain: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Maybe so. But let’s face, the reports are many and deafening. They are also damaging. Consider, to take one recent example, the report, conveyed by Semafor, on the DeSantis Meme Team that works under the rubric of […]

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Wasted Years: Biden’s Foreign Policy Record The Biden administration has missed chances to stem the growing Chinese threat By James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer

Posted By on August 2nd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/01/wasted-years-bidens-foreign-policy-record/

U.S. foreign policy under President Biden has been defined by the combination of the failure to advance U.S. national interests and support for the progress of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The administration continues to act as though the threat from the PRC is not an urgent or an existential one where every moment matters. As such, the PRC’s comprehensive national power has continued to grow, as does its global influence. This matters because no matter who is president in January 2025, the U.S. has lost precious time in its confrontation with China.

U.S. foreign policy under Biden has suffered in four major areas.

First, in Europe, the Biden administration’s continued support for the attritional war in Ukraine serves to drain U.S. defense resources with no end to the conflict in sight. The administration will likely make a push to end the war in 2024 due to the U.S. presidential election cycle. This will be true whether Biden is the candidate for reelection or has been replaced by another. This continues while simmering unrest in Kosovo threatens to destabilize the western Balkans with inattention from the administration. Moreover, our British allies have been poorly treated by this administration due to the president’s apparent hostility stemming from his Irish ancestry. However, the greatest failure of the Biden administration in Europe is that it has not pressed Europe to decouple its economy from China. While there is clear evidence that Europe is looking to the U.S. for leadership on this matter, unfortunately, the U.S. has abandoned the Trump administration’s effort to decouple its economy from the PRC.

Second, in Asia, Biden’s failure is profound. Taiwan remains inadequately armed and supported by the U.S., while the PRC’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) continues planning and preparations for its invasion of the island. Every day counts to bolster Taiwan’s ability to deter an attack with conventional weapons. The time lost will impose a terrific cost when the PLA does attack – and attack it will. Senior U.S. officers have warned of a Chinese attack. In March 2021, Admiral Philip Davidson, then commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, stated that China would attack Taiwan before 2027. In October 2022, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday warned that rather than a 2027 window for Chinese aggression, it may come in a 2023 window. The former commander of U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, warned many times against the impending threat from China. Most recently, U.S. Air Force General Mike Minihan explained in a leaked January 2023 memo that PRC would attack in 2025. The halting measures Biden has taken are insufficient for a conventional deterrent.

Third, the Middle East, South America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Pacific remain arenas of China’s expansion. Iran retains warmed relations with China while the UAE and Saudi Arabia build an increasingly close relationship with Beijing. The Venezuelan government and the new one in Brazil are proudly pro-China. China’s intelligence collection facility in Cuba appears to be expanding and will no doubt soon be expanded to permit a greater number of People’s Liberation Army forces. In Africa, the Chinese military presence continues to grow, with a base in Djibouti and a new one likely in one of the many West African nations that Beijing has cultivated around the Gulf of Guinea. China’s relationships with Angola and, increasingly, Nigeria are alarming. In the Pacific, the familiar pattern of economic investment becoming political influence is witnessed from the Solomon Islands to Kiribati. Biden’s cancellation of his visit to Papua New Guinea and of his visit to Australia to address the parliament is a stain that will not soon be forgotten.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DeSantis Invites Kamala Harris to Florida to Settle ‘Benefits of Slavery’ Drama By Caroline Downey

Posted By on August 2nd, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/desantis-invites-kamala-harris-to-florida-to-settle-benefits-of-slavery-drama/

Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Tuesday invited vice president Kamala Harris to Florida to debate her claims that the Sunshine State’s history curriculum endorses slavery.

“Over the past several weeks, the Biden administration has repeatedly disparaged our state and misinformed Americans about our education system,” the 2024 GOP candidate wrote in the letter.

Harris and other Democratic politicians have accused Florida’s  African American history curriculum of teaching that “enslaved people benefited from slavery.” Teachers’ union, the Florida Education Association, and the NAACP branded the standards “an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected.”

The curriculum includes 191 lessons emphasizing the punitive nature of slave codes, the economic undercurrents of the slave trade, as well as the post-abolition era of segregation and racism. Behind progressives’ hysteria, however, is one item instructing junior-high-school classrooms to “examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” An appended “Clarification” adds that students should consider “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Harris tweeted last week that “extremists” in Florida erased African-American history. She then announced she’d visit Jacksonville, where she delivered remarks blasting the standards. DeSantis asked her to come back for another visit to settle the misunderstandings around the curriculum.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

What NASA and the European Space Agency are admitting but the media are failing to report about our current heat wave Thomas Lifson

Posted By on August 2nd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/what_nasa_and_the_european_space_agency_are_admitting_but_the_media_are_failing_to_report_about_our_current_heat_wave.html

The current heat wave is being relentlessly blamed on increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there is a much more plausible explanation, one that is virtually endorsed by two of the world’s leading scientific organizations.  It turns out that levels of water vapor in the atmosphere have dramatically increased over the last year and a half, and water vapor is well recognized as a greenhouse gas, whose heightened presence leads to higher temperatures, a mechanism that dwarfs any effect CO2 may have.

So why has atmospheric water vapor increased so dramatically?  Because of a historic, gigantic volcanic eruption last year that I — probably along with you — had never heard of.  The mass media ignored it because it took place 490 feet underwater in the South Pacific.  Don’t take it from me; take it from NASA (and please do follow the link to see time-lapse satellite imagery of the underwater eruption and subsequent plume of gases and water injected into the atmosphere):

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere — enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. He led a new study examining the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Where woke math goes to die By W. A. Eliot

Posted By on August 2nd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/where_woke_math_goes_to_die.html

The Mathematical Association of America, founded in 1915 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., is one of the most prominent math societies in the country. The MAA focuses on math education and research at the undergraduate level and higher, and its math journals are among the most highly circulated in the world. Unfortunately, the MAA has gone woke. Its publications and blogs have been flooded with writings supporting BLM, CRT, DEI, and LGBTQ+.

As an example of the latter, in an article on pages 34-35 of the December 2020- January 2021 issue of its newsletter, MAA FOCUS, the author, who describes herself as bisexual, quotes another professor discussing intersectionality who finds it objectionable that the set theory section of a basic textbook on finite mathematics contains the following example:

Let M = males, F = females, D = doctors. What is D ∩ Fc [that is, D intersect the complement of F]?

The answer, of course, is male doctors. But the professor feels “this question is problematic in that it alienates students in my class who feel strongly against the binary in gender identification.”

The MAA’s annual meeting, MathFest, takes place this week, August 2-5, in Tampa. As evidenced by a letter from the MAA, there has been a lot of handwringing about holding the meeting in Florida:

Dear MAA Community,

We know that the location of MAA MathFest this year is a source of concern in our community. Supporters of Gov. DeSantis in the state legislature have passed laws eliminating DEI efforts and restricting the free exchange of ideas in educational settings, limiting the rights of historically marginalized groups to protest, and restricting the choices of women and non-gender conforming individuals’ freedom to make deeply personal decisions regarding healthcare and even restroom use. However, Florida is not homogeneous, and the Tampa community does not reflect the perspectives expressed in these laws.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Great Men’ Are Unconstitutional Who will ensure that freedom endures – “great men” or ordinary citizens? by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on August 2nd, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/great-men-are-unconstitutional/

One of the Democrats’ favorite smears of Republicans is to accuse them of political hero-worship. Ever since Donald Trump took up residence in the NeverTrumpers’ brains, his constituency, especially the MAGA base, have been ridiculed as unsophisticated rubes with low-brow sensibilities and fascist inclinations, while clinging to their tin-pot hero, forgiving all his sins and cheering for “racist dog-whistles.”

In other words, Republicans are inherently vulnerable to political “great men,” the charismatic (to weak-minded “deplorables”) demagogues whose flashy, duplicitous rhetoric easily brushes aside the feeble critical faculties of hoi polloi. That’s why the progs abuse the question-begging epithet “fascist”––it crudely evokes despots like Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, while studiously ignoring totalitarian mass-murderers like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Castro.

And who can forget the Dems’ “slobbering love affair,” as Bernie Goldberg put it, with Barack Obama? Nothing MAGA fans have ever said about Donald Trump comes close to the cringing, creepy encomia of Obama’s acolytes. According to numerous “brights” among our intelligentsia Obama was a “rock star,” the Democrats’ “Tiger Woods,” a politician “it’s hard to be objective when covering,” “so impressive, so charismatic,” “something special,” graced with “chiseled pectorals” and a “keen analytical intelligence,” “prodigious talents,” an “amazing legislative agenda,” and “huge achievements”––that’s just a small sample of the cult-like accolades redolent of the propaganda more typical of totalitarian regimes than of free sovereign citizens.

Remember this embarrassing catalog the next time you hear a progressive mock MAGA idolatry, and recall that postwar political hero-worship has always been a bad habit of the Left and progressives. Who is the conservative version of the psychotic, bumbling Che Guevara, whose famous photograph is an obligatory leftist icon? How is it that communism, a failed ideology responsible for 100 million dead, still retains its allure for cognitive elites, while Nazism, responsible for one-fifth of that toll, is universally condemned except by a tiny fringe of cranks?

But fanatically following a “great leader” transcends party or ideology. Historically, for centuries it was the default form of leadership. The mass of people were the mere subjects to aristocratic elites whose power was a function of their descent from the gods, their innate abilities, legendary myths, and personal charisma. They ruled because of who they were, accountable to no other mortal, but only to fate and their fellow gods.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Which Are the Real Racist States? by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on August 2nd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19854/racist-states

In some political circles in the West, there is a popular tendency to consider Israel a “racist ” or “apartheid” country.

Israel does indeed have a sizable Arab community… who enjoy rights and liberties that for most other minorities in other countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia are still only a dream.

Unlike many other countries, especially in the area, Israel recognizes and respects the rights of all of these minorities. You are welcome to go to Israel and see for yourself. Most critics of Israel, however, would probably prefer not to be “confused by the facts.”

[Congresswoman Pramila] Jayapal, unfortunately, is also totally wrong about Palestinian Arabs’ not having a right to self-determination…. Some territory, according to the Oslo Accords, is still waiting to be negotiated, but for several years, the Palestinian leadership has seemed uninclined to come to the table. Israel has offered the Palestinians statehood—not just once, but on at least six separate occasions…. Each time, the Palestinian leadership has rejected all offers — perhaps because they were only for 97% and not 100% of everything demanded; perhaps out of fear of seeming a traitor; perhaps because there might be a greater preference for a “cause” than for a solution, unless the solution entails the elimination of Israel. Perhaps, also, there is the hope that the international community will simply hand the Palestinians a state, without the need for them to give anything on their end, or perhaps there is just a strong aversion to signing an “end of conflict” resolution. In any event, each time there was an offer, the Palestinians not only rejected it, but did not even propose a counteroffer.

Muslim Arabs in Israel hold senior positions in all walks of life: senior posts in the Israeli parliament (the Knesset); the medical profession; private industry, various government posts, and on the supreme court. There is also no legal obstacle for Israeli Arabs who wish to join the military or the police.

What about the rights of minorities of other nations in the region?

In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees , according to UNRWA, “are socially marginalized, have very limited civil, social, political, and economic rights, including restricted access to the Government of Lebanon’s public health, educational and social services and face significant restrictions on their right to work and right to own property.” UNRWA also reports that the Palestinians are still prevented from employment in 39 professions such as medicine, law, and engineering.

In Turkey, the Civil Servants Law of 1926 has made it virtually impossible for Christians and Jews to work as civil servants at state institutions. Consequently, thousands of non-Muslims lost their jobs. The law required that civil servants had to be “Turkish” – meaning that the government saw its non-Muslim citizens as “non-Turkish”…. As human-rights lawyer Orhan Kemal Cengiz noted, “Not even one single non-Muslim army officer, policeman or judge exists in Turkey. Non-Muslims are absent not only from the security and judiciary establishment but from the public sector altogether.

Turkey, a NATO member… appears perfectly comfortable — as does the rest of the international community –with its hostile 1974 invasion of Cyprus , where the Turks still occupy the north of the island and might be eyeing the south.

Perhaps, if Jayapal genuinely wants to help suffering people, she might focus on the more than 360 million Christians around the world who are being murdered and persecuted on a daily basis.