NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Did U.S. Firms Help Propel China’s Balloon Fleet? By Susan Crabtree

Posted By on February 26th, 2023

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/24/did_us_firms_help_propel_chinas_balloon_fleet_148906.html

Sen. Mark Kelly, who previously served as a decorated space shuttle pilot with NASA, waded into the Chinese spy balloon uproar early this week after keeping publicly mum about it for several weeks.

The Arizona Democrat said it makes no sense for the U.S. military to launch expensive missiles at weather balloons or other benign floating objects. Kelly was referring to a heat-seeking, air-to-air missile used in recent weeks to shoot down several high-flying aerial objects that the administration later suggested likely didn’t pose a threat. Earlier in the month, a U.S. Air Force F-22 shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon after it breached American airspace and floated across the country, setting off a firestorm in Washington.

Kelly, who is set to be inducted into the U.S. Astronauts Hall of Fame in May, says he’s working on legislation that would require weather balloons to carry transponders that would communicate with air traffic control systems to separate research balloons from mysterious objects.

“It would really help the Defense Department to be able to sort out what is civilian science payload, what’s a weather balloon, what’s a NASA balloon, what’s a private company in the United States doing, what might be even a U.S. military,” Kelly, who was tapped to chair a Senate Armed Services subcommittee amid the balloon controversy, told the Associated Press.

Sen. John Tester, a Montana Democrat who is heading up the investigation into how a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to pass over crucial U.S. missile sites, including some in his state, was more forceful.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened and make sure we have a plan going forward to detect and then find out what potential problems this balloon may have caused,” Tester told Fox News.

China’s high-altitude spy balloon controversy appears to have taken most Washington lawmakers and the intelligence community by surprise, but it really shouldn’t have. China’s interest in these stratospheric dirigibles has been an open secret for nearly a decade.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Why the Diversity Industry Is So Homogenous Roger Kimball

Posted By on February 26th, 2023

https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-the-diversity-industry-is-so-homogenous_5071781.html?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=rcp

It’s one of the great ironies of our time that the word “diversity” is repeated everywhere, while the opposite, a stultifying homogeneity, is the reality that’s enforced “on the ground.”

Our educational institutions offer the classic example.

Is there any self-respecting college or university that doesn’t tout its commitment to “diversity” these days?

You can’t peruse a college’s promotional literature, let alone set foot on its campus, without being inundated by assurances that diversity is its most cherished value, the cynosure to which every other pursuit is subordinated.

But when you look at what they actually teach and preach, it turns out that rigid conformity is the order of the day.

We used to titter that there were people whose title was some variation on “dean of diversity.”

“You’re kidding, right?” was the response.

No one is laughing now.

On an increasingly wide range of subjects, only one opinion is granted the patent of diversity. Those deans are there not to invigilate academic excellence but to enforce social and moral conformity.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Thanks to Obama’s ‘Nuclear Deal,’ Iran Now a Major Arms Exporter by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on February 25th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19436/iran-arms-exporter

In the next phase of Iran’s dangerous development, export and proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it is attempting to set up drone assembly lines abroad, likely to expedite the process of weapons delivery to its allies.

“Moscow and Tehran are moving ahead with plans to build a new factory in Russia that could make at least 6,000 Iranian-designed drones for the war in Ukraine, the latest sign of deepening cooperation between the two nations….” — Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2023.

Iran’s regime has also been focusing on the proliferation and export of long- and short-range precision-guided ballistic missiles.

While ballistic missiles can be used for either offensive or defensive purposes, the sophisticated ones are mainly developed as delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons.

Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Media Demands Darkness, Not Sunlight, on January 6 Tapes What we are hearing from the media industrial complex is fear, not concern. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/23/media-demands-darkness-not-sunlight-on-january-6-tapes/

Ever since Axios reported that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gave Fox News host Tucker Carlson unfettered access to surveillance video captured by Capitol security cameras on January 6, 2021, the corporate media has experienced a collective convulsion bordering on a nervous breakdown.

Guardians of the fourth estate long ago abandoned their self-proclaimed role as watchdog over those in power in exchange for the role of lapdog. But apparently the last ones to get the joke are reporters, editors, and cable news hosts themselves, who still operate under the delusion they maintain a vaunted place in the pecking order of American society rather than rank in popularity just below the toxic sludge smoldering in East Palestine, Ohio.

Not long ago—or maybe it has been a long time?—journalists would salivate at the chance to report on the contents of a massive trove of footage related to what the government calls a terror attack, especially if the same government pulled every trick in the book to keep it under wraps. Compelled by slavish idolatry of the state and contempt for the common man, the media, for lack of a better term, is acting as if the release of unseen video recorded on January 6 is a crime in progress.

This comes, mind you, after two full years of uncritically repeating every talking point about the so-called “insurrection” which involves calling it an “insurrection” even though no one has been charged with “insurrection.” No cop cried too unconvincingly, no lawmaker made too outlandish a claim, no occupant of the White House told one too many lies to jolt the slumbering curiosity, or even innate sense of skepticism, of corporate media apparatchiks.

“Breaking news” bulletins sought to grab the attention of their shrinking audience before airing a cherry-picked clip gleaned from the very collection of tapes now considered sacrosanct. 

BOOKS Comments turned off

Command and Control A new book explores how civilians and soldiers work with – and against – each other. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/command-and-control/

This essay is adapted from Cage Fight: Civilian and Democratic Pressures on Military Conflicts and Foreign Policy (Hoover Institution Press, 2023).

In The Gathering Storm, the opening volume of his memoirs of the World War II era, Winston Churchill catalogues the causes of the conflict. Among them he lists “the structures and habits of democratic states,” which “lack those elements of persistence and convictions which can alone give security the humble masses. . . . Even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued even for ten or fifteen years at a time.” From the birth of democracy in ancient Athens until the present, the political institutions that protect the freedom and rights of citizens have also been potentially dangerous in times of war—by complicating and interfering with the policies and decisions that, during a conflict, require swift execution, decisiveness, and persistence.

The “structures and habits” Churchill notes include regularly scheduled elections, by which the citizens hold their elected leaders accountable; the right of all citizens to speak openly and freely on all matters, including the conduct of foreign policy and the management of war; and the voicing of dissent against the war itself and the reasons for conducting it. Most important, in democratic states the military establishment and war are subordinated to the civilian institutions and offices accountable to the citizens through elections.

Voters Call the Shots

Regular elections, in the United States held every two years, make long-term military strategies vulnerable to the shifting moods of the electorate, which are expressed in frequent turnovers in Congress and the presidency. On the other hand, this critical instrument of political accountability can also change a dangerous course.

The iconic example in recent American history is the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, elected after the disastrous abandonment of Vietnam, counseled that we should get over our “inordinate fear of communism” and prioritize human rights in US foreign policy rather than containing and pushing back on the Soviet Union’s adventurism in Latin America, Afghanistan, and Central Africa. Reagan, in contrast, announced that it was “morning in America,” exuded confidence and faith in America’s goodness, increased the military budget, pushed back against Soviet interventions in Latin America, and summed up his strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union as “we win, they lose.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Why the 2020 Election was Unverifiable By Joe Fried

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/why_the_2020_election_was_unverifiable.html

Joe Biden acquired his job through a legal process. However, he did not earn enough verifiable votes to justify the certifications in six key swing states. This issue is addressed in my new book, but here is some of my reasoning. I have limited myself to one example of unverifiable votes for each of those swing states.

Arizona

At an Arizona Senate Committee hearing on January 24, 2022, we learned that precisely 95 percent of Maricopa County overseas military members (and their families) voted for Joe Biden. That is an amazing (as in phony) percentage, given that the overall county-wide vote was fairly even between Biden and Trump (51 to 49%). Winning the military vote in Maricopa County with a 90 percent margin strongly suggests the likelihood of fraud.

The findings were presented at the Committee hearing by Paul Harris, a corporate executive who had been asked to conduct the review during the Cyber Ninjas audit. These are key points from the presentation. (See video @ 1:53.)

The “ballots” were simply unsourced sheets of copy paper.
The number of ballots had jumped dramatically, from 1,600 in 2016 to 9,600 in 2020.
Exactly 95 percent of the votes were for Joe Biden. Harris estimated that these copy paper ballots provided 8,000 net votes to Biden, who ostensibly won the state by just over 10,000 votes.

Paul Harris analyzed just one county. In Pima County, a witness named Kathleen Alby testified that “thousands” of “military faxes” were processed: “At one point that’s all that they were processing were the faxed ones.” And, as in Maricopa County, there was no chain-of-custody documentation. (See video at 8:32.)

Georgia

Garland Favorito is the head of VoterGA.org, and has a forty-year background in information technology. In a detailed press conference, Favorito and his cyber experts itemized fifteen categories of ballot irregularities found during their analysis of ballot images acquired from Fulton County, Georgia. (See video @ 27:00.)

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Thunderdome 2024: here come the Republican hopefuls This primary has all the signs of being even bloodier than the 2016 one

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/thunderdome-2024-here-come-the-republican-hopefuls/?utm_

Over Presidents Day weekend, Donald J. Trump, our most beloved former president — according to him anyway — posted the following to his Truth Social account: “Ron DeSanctimonious wants to cut your Social Security and Medicare, closed up Florida & its beaches, loves RINOS Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Karl Rove (disasters ALL!), is backed by Globalist’s Club for NO Growth, Lincoln Pervert Project, & ‘Uninspired’ Koch — And it only gets worse from there. He is a RINO in disguise!, whose Poll numbers are dropping like a rock. Good luck Ron!”

This is as good a point as any for the launch of Thunderdome 2024, a Republican presidential primary that has all the signs of being even bloodier and more acrimonious than the 2016 contest. Just look at the stakes, the positioning of donors and activists, and — after three cruel rounds of electoral failure — a former president turned red in tooth and claw.

For the dispassionate viewer, it presents a gladiator match for the prize of running against Joe Biden. The field is strikingly different than it was eight years ago, when the money and assumptions were behind the likes of Jeb Bush and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and a bevy of senators and governors fought among themselves in an attempt to set up a mano-a-mano showdown with Trump — a strategy that totally backfired.

Smart Republicans have learned a lot since then. But they’re also taking on a former president who occupies a very different space than he once did: Trump and his supporters are the new GOP establishment, even as he maintains his position as its constant critic. This gives him enormous advantages, and makes Trump, despite what you may have heard, still the likeliest candidate for the Republican nomination. For those who aspire to replace him atop the ticket, it’s wise to remember that the same abiding rule that undid Hillary Clinton and aided Joe Biden is still in place: you can say anything you want about the candidates, but don’t speak poorly of their voters.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Don Lemon gets away with a slap on the wrist CNN should have taken this golden opportunity to shed one of its most embarrassing acts Roger Kimball

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/don-lemon-gets-away-with-a-slap-on-the-wrist/?utm_source=

Have you noticed that bullies tend to grovel when threatened? They are cruel when they have the upper hand, but cringe, cower, and whimper whenever confronted with superior force.

A case in point is the smarmy CNN dittohead Don Lemón. Last week, while commenting about flash-in-the-pan presidential candidate Nikki Haley, he suggested that women over forty were no longer in their “prime.”

One might ask how Lemón, who takes every opportunity to advertise his homosexuality (also his race), would know.  But let’s leave that epistemic puzzle to one side. “Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry,” Lemón declared. “A woman is considered to be in their [er, that’s “her,” Don, “her”] prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s. If you Google ‘when is a woman in her prime,’ it’ll say 20s, 30s and 40s.”

Well, the world’s biggest surveillance network said it, so it must be true.

ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS Comments turned off

Why the whole world is indeed wrong about Israel The launch of a new book about how lethal lies came to drive a murderous narrative Melanie Phillips

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/why-the-whole-world-is-indeed-wrong?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I was delighted to take part this week in an event in Jerusalem to launch the devastating new book by Professor Richard Landes, Can the Whole World be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and the Global Jihad. I previously wrote about the book here.

Joining me on the panel, in addition to Richard Landes, were Brig.Gen. (Rtd.) Yossi Kuperwasser, senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs and head of the Intelligence Methodology Centre Research Institute at the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Centre; and Adam Levick, co-editor of CAMERA UK (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis).

You can watch the whole event below.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

You cannot run businesses, hospitals, and the military on occasional electricity! By Ronald Stein

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://www.cfact.org/2023/02/22/you-cannot-run-businesses-hospitals-and-the-military-on-occasional-electricity/

Regardless of the intermittency of the weather, the electrical grid is expected to deliver continuous and uninterrupted electricity no matter what the weather.

Power grid blackouts are driven by the rapid retirement of small acreage coal and natural gas power plants.

Wind and solar electricity generation requires vast amounts of pristine acreage, but due to the intermittency and variability of breezes and sunshine being a significant deficiency, wind turbines and solar panels do not work most of the time.

This is illustrative of why a myopic focus on renewables for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions through a deepening dependence on the intermittency of wind and solar electricity must ultimately come to terms with the laws of physics and the high financial and environmental cost of achieving a reliable electrical grid with these technologies.

Future carbon dioxide concentrations in the global atmosphere will be largely determined by developing nations who are digging themselves out of abject poverty through the development of coal and natural gas energy resources.

Politicians have backed utility engineers into a corner as politicians now designing the power grid to their liking. However, politicians are not cognizant enough to know that renewables only generate electricity, and thus have no plans for the replacement of what is now manufactured from fossil fuels, which are supporting the 8 billion on this planet!

Over the last 200 years when the world populated from 1 to 8 billion, we learned that crude oil is virtually useless, unless it’s manufactured (refineries) into oil derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products in our daily lives that did not exist before the 1900’s, and the fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of more than 50,000 jets moving people and products, and more than 50,000 merchant ships for global trade flows, and the military and space program.

Chemical products, such as plastics, solvents, and fertilizers, are essential for supporting modern lifestyles.