EDUCATION Comments turned off

THE TAXPAYER-FUNDED CHILD ABUSE SYSTEM  Daniel Greenfield 

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2022/11/the-taxpayer-funded-child-abuse-system.html?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_

The National Education Association was caught spending 9% of its budget on member assistance and 50% on various political programs. Teachers’ unions have become enormously powerful by turning their membership and their resources into assets for the Democrats.

Democrats have generously returned the favor by negotiating favorable contracts and allowing teachers’ unions to dismantle the educational system, including shutting down schools for an extended period during the pandemic, eliminating standards in favor of promotion and turning a blind eye to sex abuse. While the shutdown of schools traumatized a generation, leading to increased suicide rates, loss of learning skills, social decline and even higher crime rates, school sex abuse is an ongoing crisis that targets a narrower population of abused students.

That doesn’t mean that the damage is any less.

A recent report reveals that nearly one school employee has been arrested a day on child-sex related charges.

In just the last week, a Utah elementary school teacher was arrested for inappropriate behavior with two female students, a middle school teacher in Pennsylvania was caught sexually abusing a 13-year-old, an Oregon high school basketball coach was arrested for sexually absuing a 17-year-old, a California elementary school employee was arrested on 19 counts of abusing minors going back a decade, and a Washington middle school employee was charged with 137 counts of taking videos in female bathrooms: an incredible school crime log for one week.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany Selling Critical Infrastructure to China by Judith Bergman

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19077/germany-infrastructure-china

On October 26, Germany’s government decided to let the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO Shipping Ports, which has links to China’s People’s Liberation Army, buy a stake in the Port of Hamburg.

The port of Hamburg is Germany’s largest port and the second-largest port in Europe, making it part of Europe’s most critical infrastructure.

Germany’s Foreign Ministry had also reportedly warned that an investment by COSCO “disproportionately expands China’s strategic influence on German and European transport infrastructure as well as Germany’s dependence on China… while China itself does not allow Germany to participate in Chinese ports. In this respect, the acquisition of the container terminal does not only have an economic, but especially a geopolitical aspect.” — dw.com. October 26, 2022.

The Foreign Ministry clearly fears that in a time of crisis between the countries, China’s investment in the port would allow it “to possibly instrumentalize part of Germany’s – and therefore Europe’s – critical infrastructure.”

“Cosco already owns stakes in Europe’s two largest ports at Rotterdam and Antwerp….” — Politico, October 20, 2022.

“COSCO’s status as an important backbone SOE [state-owned enterprise] means that it’s uniquely beholden to the CCP in a way that other SOEs aren’t… COSCO’s organisational structure includes paramilitary capabilities that can be mobilised by the Chinese regime to defeat threats to the CCP’s interests. One such capability is the company’s in-house militia…” — Report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“[S]ome naval analysts to refer to COSCO as the fifth arm of the PLAN [People Liberation Army Navy]” — Naval War College Review, Winter 2019.

“Against the advice of his ministers, the chancellor apparently wants to increase dependence on China. This sell-out of German infrastructure would be a mistake. German ports do not belong in Chinese hands, especially since Europeans can’t take a stake in ports in China.” — Jens Spahn, Christian Democratic Union party, Twitter, October 20, 2022.

Out of 95 ports, 22 are in Europe, 20 in the Middle East and North Africa, 18 in the Americas, 18 in South and Southeast Asia, and nine in sub-Saharan Africa. Just three Chinese companies, among them COSCO Shipping Ports, account for the operations of 81% of those ports.

In Greece, COSCO has completely taken over Piraeus, Greece’s largest port.

Scholz, regardless of the hard lessons that Germany has had to learn with regard to German dependence on Russian gas, has a state visit to China coming up in early November with a German business delegation; letting the COSCO deal fall through would not look good while trying to attract lucrative business deals. China is a key trading partner for Germany: In 2021, it was Germany’s top trading partner for the sixth consecutive year.

“It is in their [Communist Chinese Party’s] interest that we are divided. It’s in our interest that we are united.” — Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, Axios, October 21, 2022.

“We’ve been naive because we considered… that Europe was an open supermarket.” The EU, needs to establish a framework on what it considers “sensitive points.” — French President Emmanuel Macron, The Telegraph, October 21, 2022.

ELECTIONS, FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

More Reasons Voters Might Catch the Red Wave Soon those Americans who cherish freedom and American exceptionalism will face a dire decision. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/more-reasons-voters-might-catch-the-red-wave/

Last week I discussed the issues that concern voters the most and will likely decide their choices––inflation, rampant crime, and our porous southern border, as well as cultural-war issues such as transgenderism and school curricula. But there are other concerns with the policies and actions of the Democrats over the last two years that also might figure in voters’ calculations.

Foreign policy typically is not as urgent for voters as the economy, crime, or border security. Yet our actions and policies abroad necessarily impact our national security, though not as immediately as inflation hits our budgets or crime disrupts our lives. But we need to pay attention, for the current administration has weakened our national security and compromised our national interests by resorting to tired foreign-policy nostrums, feckless actions, and sheer neglect.

Most obvious is the shameful, hasty abandonment of our allies and assets in Afghanistan. We stranded hundreds of Americans, left behind thousands of Afghanistan allies, and squandered billions in military hardware and infrastructure. Worse, we returned to power the brutal Taliban, who nurtured and sheltered the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocity. Now Iran, a genocidal theocrasy with 43 years of American blood on its hands, has filled the vacuum along with other jihadist outfits like ISIS and al Qaeda.

Speaking of Iran, the Biden administration is still pursuing a renewal of Obama’s flawed nuclear deal that transferred billions of dollars to the mullahs, lucre they have used to finance their terrorist adventurism in the Middle East. Meanwhile, their advanced centrifuges keep spinning enough enriched uranium to make nuclear bombs, at the same time they are developing ballistic missiles capable of delivering them. Biden exacerbated this blunder by alienating Iran’s enemies such as our allies like Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations in the region.

Despite Biden’s cringing, his negotiators have been treated contemptuously on the world stage by the mullahs, who emboldened by Biden’s desperate deference, continue to make impossible demands, as they buy more time to reach their goals. Finally, since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Iran has moved closer to Russia and China, forming a triumvirate of evil ambitions to challenge the U.S. and its allies as the guarantor of global order.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left Were the Mad Scientists, We Were Their Lab Rats Once the Left took the presidency, the House, and Senate, they tried a deadly experiment on the American people. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/02/the-left-were-the-mad-scientists-we-were-their-lab-rats/

As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America’s current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats. And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us. 

The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse. 

As interest rates soar, our $31 trillion national debt crowds out everything else in the budget. 

Inflation roars at a rate of 8-9 percent per annum, higher than at any time in 40 years. Yet the prices of the stuff of life—food, fuel, shelter, energy—are far steeper still than the official rate. 

No one is safe from thugs anymore—whether a commuter on a New York subway or the Pelosis in Pacific Heights.

The country reportedly has a 25-day supply of diesel fuel—the energy source that runs the nation. Meanwhile, we keep draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of oil—a commodity we have in abundance but refuse to produce fully.

We never fixed the supply-chain crisis of last year, and so still face shortages of key consumer goods. 

The labor participation rate is at an all-time low—given fat government COVID subsidies, the Siren-song appeal of staying home after the lockdowns, fear of COVID, and millions of workers with long COVID.

The post-Kabul Pentagon is quiet about the depletion of its critical stocks of weaponry. We have sent billions of dollars’ worth in howitzer shells, javelin missiles, and Hilmar rocket launchers to Ukraine without replenishing our own arsenals. The Army’s recruitment rate is off 50 percent this year.

Our broken Navy is ossifying as China expands its fleet in expectation of absorbing Taiwan. 

When we look to the president for an accounting for these madcap experiments, we get nothing. In the last few weeks, Joe Biden has lied that gas was $5 a gallon when he took office when it was half that. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How the Projectionist Game is Played. Part One—“Racist!”Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://victorhanson.com/how-the-projectionist-game-is-played-part-one-racist/

Almost anything or anyone the Left opposes is smeared as racist or a racist. And the rules are made only by the Left.

The N-word is utterly racist. Yet it continues and obviously gains currency when rappers and comedians use it promiscuously on the assumptions that leftists and blacks cannot be racist when using a racist word.

Cultural appropriation is said to be racist. So, blonds who have cornrows in their hair in racist fashion culturally appropriate the black experience.

But MSNBC anchor Joy Reid is not a cultural appropriator when she dies her blond as if she is a Scandinavian Valkyrie? White wannabe rappers are cultural appropriators, but not so black opera singers? Is the rule asymmetry? That those who smear others on racial grounds are exempt from their own racial smears or hypocrisies?

These rules of leftwing racism are so opaque and contradictory that almost everyone falls afoul of them.

It is not racist to demand Asian students have 450 points higher on standardized tests than blacks to enter Harvard and other Ivy League schools; it is racist to suggest that it is racist to use skin color to so discriminate. It is racist of course to pick the race of your future dorm roommate unless you are non-white and so is he/she.

We are told that the MAGA Republicans are racists. But from whom do such charges emanate? Joe Biden?

Did Biden not fabricate the racist corn pop sagas? Was not he the one who called a senior aide “my boy”? I remember Biden half-praising Obama as the first articulate black presidential candidate. He claimed donut shops were the sole domain of Indian Americans. Did not Biden talk down to black professionals that Mitt Romney would put them back in chains, as if an accomplished audience had ever been itself enslaved or would allow that to happen without Joe Biden’s help?

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Our Disunity Is a National Security Threat The military now reflects the selfishness and fragmentation of our culture. Welcome to the looting-the-treasury phase of imperial decline. By Christopher Roach

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/02/our-disunity-is-a-national-security-threat/

In the lawsuit challenging Harvard’s affirmative action practices, a group of senior retired military officers filed an amicus brief, which argued that maintaining affirmative action was a “national security imperative.” Those signing off include four former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, six former superintendents of the service academies, and 17 retired four-star generals, including Wesley Clark and William McRaven. 

Recruiting an adequate number of troops and increasing their quality also seems pretty important. But we know that recent efforts at recruiting have been a disaster, amplified by the mass expulsion of troops who refused the COVID vaccine. 

While things carried on for a while out of habit, eventually the patriotic, mostly white, rural Americans who formed the backbone of the military started doing an about face. Polls show that fewer veterans now want their kids to follow in their footsteps. Conservative Republicans, once the most stalwart supporters of the military, have lately become more critical and less trusting. 

Woke Military Has Difficulty Recruiting

The reason for these trends is obvious: the military leadership has lost its way and its moral compass. 

As the ruling class ethos has shifted leftward, military leaders have become imitators and flatterers of the powerful. That is, top military leaders have decided to move away from the military’s traditional nonpartisanship and color-blindness and instead identify with the managerial class leftism and identity politics of Washington, D.C. This is why they have gay pride events and talk about “white rage.” They confused this ideology with the values of the country as a whole.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Democrat War on Fossil Fuels By William Manning

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_democrat_war_on_fossil_fuels.html

On October 19, in the heat of an election campaign, President Biden told the American people, “We need to increase oil production.”  He went on to say, “My administration has not stopped or slowed U.S. oil production.”  It was a disingenuous statement from a man whose sense of reality, fact, and fiction have become an undecipherable narrative.  Biden failed to mention the executive order he issued which stipulates, “the Secretary of the Interior shall pause new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or in offshore waters.”  This pause is ongoing.  Biden uses the same executive order as an instruction to the secretaries of State, Treasury, Energy, Defense, and Homeland Security, “to organize and deploy the full capacity of its agencies to combat the climate crisis.”

Millions of Americans are employed by businesses supporting the fossil-fuel industry.  Others choose to invest in fossil-fuel businesses.  All Americans rely on fossil fuels to power their businesses, transportation systems, and utilities.  Democrats will destroy these people’s jobs, capital, and imperil the U.S. economy.  The Biden administration decreed that, “we must combat the climate crisis with bold, progressive action that combines the full capacity of the Federal Government with efforts from every corner of our Nation, every level of government, and every sector of our economy.”  By executive order Biden has weaponized the federal bureaucracy to destroy the fossil-fuel industry. 

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) makes the business of refining oil difficult.  The law provides broad powers to the EPA.  It “directs the EPA Administrator to revise regulations to ensure that domestic transportation fuel sold or introduced into commerce, on an annual average basis, contains a specified volume of renewable fuel.”  The George W. Bush Administration and a bipartisan majority in Congress enacted the EISA providing authority to the EPA to dictate terms for the blending of renewable fuels in refineries.

In 2021, 13.9 billion gallons of ethanol were blended into gasoline.  Unfortunately for refiners, they were mandated by the EPA to blend 20.17 billion gallons.  Since there was a shortfall in EPA mandated ethanol consumption in 2021, refiners had to purchase Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) credits to make up the difference.  Each gallon of ethanol produced as a biofuel for blending  comes with a D6 RIN.  Each refiner/blender has a quota imposed by the EPA based on its annual mandate and the production capacity of the refinery.  If the refinery blends more than its quota, the surplus RINS may be sold as credits on the market.  If the refinery blends less than its quota, it must purchase RINS to make up the difference.  If no RIN credits are available on the market, they may be bought from ethanol producers.  In 2021 refiners had to purchase RIN credits for 6.27 billion gallons of ethanol and other biofuels they did not consume.  RIN credit costs vary as they are part of a RIN market that fluctuates.  In 2021 D6 RIN costs ranged between $.20/gallon and $1.20/gallon. A conservative estimate of RIN credit costs to refiners in 2021 is $6 billion.  This cost is passed on to consumers in the price of gasoline.  If the cost can’t be passed to the consumer, it comes out of the refiner’s margin.  

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Now the Disgraced COVID ‘Experts’ Want ‘Amnesty’? By Tanya Berlaga

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/now_the_disgraced_covid_experts_want_amnesty.html

In her recent article in The Atlantic, a Brown University professor, Emily Oster, is calling for “pandemic amnesty.”  She is telling me to “forgive and forget” everyone who was yelling obscenities at me for not wearing a mask in a public park or calling me a mass murderer for posting a picture with a friend visiting.  I must forget all this, the author insists, because all those people had nothing but my well-being in mind!

The author admits that many (if not most!) measures imposed on us by “the experts” were harmful and destructive.  But “dwelling on those mistakes” is “counter-productive.”  After all, people who made these mistakes had only good intentions.

“As we now know,” the author concedes, cloth masks are practically useless.  People who got vaccinated spread COVID as easily as those who did not.  Keeping children locked up at homes had disastrous consequences on their development.  And some of the COVID “mitigation” measures — like beach closures in California — were outright dumb.  But let’s not “dwell” on them — because those were “complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty.”

“We didn’t know!”  the author laments.

After three years of living through the pandemic, the author all but admits that “the experts” were just as clueless about how to approach it as your next-door neighbor.  “The experts” did not know even the most obvious things.

They didn’t know that wearing a dirty piece of cloth over your face would not amount to anything other than a sinus infection.  Seemed like even a third-grader could’ve figured that one out — and many did.

They didn’t know that walking on the beach was the safest activity one could do during a pandemic.  Sunshine and fresh air are the best disinfectants known to men, and a beach in early spring is the best place for “social distancing.”  You don’t need a crystal ball to understand that surfing in the ocean is not “a super-spreader event.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Biden’s Flim-Flam Windfall Profits Tax

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://www.nysun.com/article/bidens-flim-flam-windfall-profits-tax

“Dumb and Dumber” is a 1994 comedy; today it could describe a tragedy … Joe Biden’s energy policy. His latest gambit is to call for a windfall profits tax on oil companies, accusing them of “war profiteering.” He says the large earnings being raked in by oil giants like Exxon and Chevron “are not because of doing something new or innovative.” Instead, Biden said, “Their profits are a windfall of war…”

To be clear, Mr. Biden has no idea whether oil producers are doing anything innovative. While he has met with the leaders of numerous industries and Big Labor groups, he has childishly refused to meet with oil industry executives. I’m pretty sure he has never visited a drilling site or offshore production platform, where advanced American technology — the best in the world — is on display. 

If he talked with industry executives, they might point out that energy is cyclical; the price of oil rises with demand, unless supply goes up more. They might remind him that Exxon lost $22 billion in 2020 because prices fell during the pandemic; naturally Exxon didn’t receive a government handout to compensate them for that gigantic loss. Why should the firm be penalized when prices go back up?

The president is flailing, desperate to haul out something — anything — to show voters he’s acting to lower gasoline prices. But this is utter flim-flam. Only Congress can impose a windfall profits tax on energy companies, a proposal that would land well with liberal Democrats but is likely to find zero support among Republicans. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Could Our Politics Be Even More Childish?

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/03/could-our-politics-be-even-more-childish/

Turn on the television, listen to the radio, or take a stroll through the internet. Democrats and their media confederates are busy dishing out the nonsense in helpings large enough to choke a giant. Either they are intentionally trying to deceive, or they are extraordinarily puerile. Or both.

There are no other possibilities.

To listen to the Democrats as they go begging for votes, to consume the tripe that their helpers in the press are putting out, one would think the Republicans are fascist white supremacists who will kill democracy while setting up themselves in a permanent position of unchallengeable power.

Says Keisha Lance Bottoms, a presidential senior adviser and former Atlanta mayor: “This MAGA Republican agenda is an effort to disrupt our democracy. So, whether it be through November and beyond November, I think it will always be important to call out any effort there is to destroy – essentially, destroy the United States of America.”

The president himself said over the summer that “those of you who love this country, Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans, we must be stronger, more determined and more committed to saving America than the MAGA Republicans are to destroying America.”

Last week, Joe Biden’s former boss urged voters “to elect good people up and down the ballot,” because “across the country, some of the folks who tried to undermine our democracy are running for offices that will oversee the next election. And if they win, there’s no telling what might happen.”