EDUCATION Comments turned off

PEN Works to Destroy Education By Robert Weissberg

Posted By on August 26th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/pen_works_to_destroy_education.html

Controlling education is the grand prize in today’s culture wars. Why worry about elections if voters arrive at the polls fully ideologically indoctrinated? The Left has recognized this reality for decades and its long march through the institutions to control schools is now finally paying off. How else can one explain why such views as Critical Race Theory now infuse the curriculum from the earliest grades to graduate seminars in elite universities?  

While the Left has been conquering education for decades, conservatives have now finally awakened and are fighting back. The recent election for governor in Virginia and legislation in Florida, for example, illustrated what can happen when parents discover that junior is learning about his/her/them White Privilege. Meanwhile school board elections now can draw national attention.  

The Left is aware of this conservative counterattack and has predictably mobilized to crush all those insisting that education is about acquiring skills such as literacy versus knowing that the Founders were evil rich white slave-owners. The Left’s push back is an all hands-on-deck enterprise, total mobilization in military terms, to sustain its ongoing conquest of American education. Even groups that ostensibly have nothing to do with education have been conscripted to the Left’s crusade.

Such conscription is illustrated by how the venerable organization,  PEN, whose purpose is  to “Defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture” has joined the fray. This is a major mission shift since for over a century PEN had protected controversial authors from censorship, especially imprisonment in dictatorships, and it remains a prestigious free-speech organization worldwide. Now, however, it has focused on K-12 education and joined the woke army’s assault on traditional American values.

In a recent report PEN embraced tactics, notably demonizing opponents, lying, and twisting language that is commonplace among today’s social justice warriors. For the report’s authors, when a state legislature regulates school curriculum in a way antithetical to the Left agendas, it is labeled “imposing a gag order” and “an attack on education.” This “attack” may also mandate “curriculum transparency” (scare quotes in original) that permits parents to discover and then report via hotlines to state authorities what their children are being taught.

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Republicans Don’t Get It Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are plowing new and dangerous ground. Meanwhile, the GOP is silent. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on August 26th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/25/republicans-dont-get-it/

When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) looks around his adopted hometown of Washington, D.C.—a city shamelessly and aggressively using every lever of federal power to destroy Donald Trump and the 76 million Americans who dared to vote for him in 2020—he sees only one menace to the well-being of the nation:

January 6 protesters.

“I do think it’s an important issue,” McConnell said in response to a reporter’s question about a recent poll that ranked “threats to democracy” as the top concern among registered voters who responded. “There were those who were trying to prevent the orderly transfer of power for the first time in American history and that was not good.”

But contrary to his somber reflections, January 6 was very good for McConnell; he got exactly what he wanted after the tear gas smoke cleared that evening. As I explained here, not only did McConnell intentionally leave the Capitol largely unguarded, he warned of the irreparable damage to the republic if his Senate Republican colleagues demanded an audit of contested states—the “official proceeding” actually taking place when the building was breached. McConnell later cooed to a reporter that he had prevailed that day.

“Exhilarating” is how McConnell described his emotions after congressional Republicans, cowed by the four-hour disturbance, abandoned their plans to seek a 2020 election audit commission.

In a way, McConnell is right that the events of January 6 represent a grave threat to the country. They do—just not in the way he thinks. 

The Capitol protest is being used as the pretext to criminalize political dissent as the FBI continues its dragnet to round up 850-and-counting Trump supporters (with new arrests announced just this week) and the Justice Department circles Donald Trump as the alleged instigator of the “insurrection.”

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Hunter Biden Just Slipped Up, Telling The WHOLE World That His Father Has Dementia

Posted By on August 26th, 2022

According to New York Post writer Miranda Devine’s new book, Hunter Biden accidentally let it slip to his therapist that his father has dementia.

Hunter communicated this as a light-hearted turn of phrase, joking that if his father had overcome dementia then he was indeed a man of capability and respect.

Something tells me that he wasn’t just joking around, and while one part of his statement may have been mockery, the subject of that statement seems to have a growing body of evidence behind it…

Let’s take a look at what he said:

A few months before Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign, Hunter Biden was exchanging text messages with Keith Ablow, his therapist and friend, in early January 2019. The book highlighted that Ablow and Hunter were discussing Democratic presidential candidates when Ablow said, “Your dad is the answer” and then later quoted himself, mockingly saying, “Any man who can triumph over dementia is a giant. Think what he could do for our nation’s needed recovery.”

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Falling Life Expectancy Driven By Flailing, Failing Federal Health Baloney-aucracy Bob Maistros

Posted By on August 26th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/26/falling-life-expectancy-driven-by-flailing-failing-federal-health-baloney-aucracy/

“New NCHS report shows life expectancy declined in all 50 states and DC in 2020” – National Center for Health Statistics tweet

Life expectancy didn’t just “decline.” Per woke medical news site Medpage Today, it “plummet(ed).” By nearly two years, a gobsmacking statistic.

This commentator knows what you’re thinking. NBC News beat us to it: “The main reason for the decline, of course, was Covid-19.”

Of course.

Except … expectancy was already flat or down six times between 2012 and 2021. After steadily rising for generations.

Hmmm. Your correspondent is hardly the first to connect these dots, but guess what else changed in Health Care World in the early 2010s? Hint: starts with “O” and ends with “care.”

University of Colorado Boulder professor Ryan Masters, author of a previous life expectancy study (spoiler alert: lifespans dropped further in 2021) noted: “(H)igh rates of obesity and heart disease, along with inequities in access to health care, were already leading the U.S. to lose ground with respect to health and survival before the pandemic. ‘Those same factors made the U.S. more vulnerable … to the mortality consequences of COVID-19.’”

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Death, Despair, And Lockdowns

Posted By on August 26th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/26/death-despair-and-lockdowns/

The old saying that the cure is deadlier than the disease is a worn-out cliche. But that doesn’t mean it can’t make a point. The pandemic lockdowns are a perfect example of a banality being absolutely true.

Over about two-and-one-half years COVID-19 has killed a little more than 1 million Americans and another 5.5 million in the rest of the world. It’s a grim toll. At least its deadly effects will decrease as it becomes endemic.

The same can’t be said for the lockdowns. Their poison will be killing victims for years.

A recent article from the London Telegraph posted in Yahoo News tells the story of “​​experts” believing “decisions taken by the government in the earliest stages of the pandemic may now be coming back to bite.”

“Policies that kept people indoors, scared them away from hospitals and deprived them of treatment and primary care are finally taking their toll,” said the Telegraph.

For more than three months, excess deaths in England and Wales have averaged around 1,000 a week, and none are due to COVID.

It’s not as if the decision-makers weren’t warned. Robert Dingwall, a Nottingham Trent University professor and a government adviser during the pandemic, told the Telegraph that “the picture seems very consistent with what some of us were suggesting from the beginning.”

On our side of the Atlantic, “from April 2020 through at least the end of 2021, Americans died from non-COVID causes at an average annual rate 97,000 in excess of previous trends,” says a National Bureau of Economic Research paper.

It further contends that “excess mortality continues into calendar year 2022,” though it’s safe to say they will persist well past that date.

The authors, one from the University of Chicago Economics Department, the other a partner from a data and investment research firm, say “it should be no surprise that a widespread disruption to patient circumstances would degrade health and even elevate mortality from chronic conditions. Nevertheless, early in the pandemic some experts mocked this perspective as a ‘pet theory about the fatal dangers of quarantine.’” 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The “Great Reset”: A Blueprint for Destroying Freedom, Innovation, and Prosperity by J.B. Shurk

Posted By on August 26th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18825/great-reset-wef

Notice that no nation has managed merely to print money and tax its citizens on the path to prosperity. Real wealth cannot simply be conjured from thin air. There must be recognized value in what a nation and its citizens possess.

More than any other source for national wealth, however, one towers above the rest: innovation. The ability of the human mind to create something new and valuable provides society with endless wealth creation…. Innovation is the magic sauce for generating wealth.

Humans struggling merely to survive in the world do not waste time, labor, or resources on projects that offer no prospect for future reward. Humans working as servants to the state under centrally controlled economies have no incentive to innovate. Only when private ownership and personal liberty combine can human innovation flourish. Freedom is the secret ingredient to innovation’s magic sauce for increasing wealth.

A country whose institutions do not respect property rights or whose customs do not value freedom will remain a barren desert for human innovation. In this way, nations have a great incentive to liberalize over time. Should they not, they quickly become financially and militarily vulnerable to more innovative and wealthier nations. Observing this simple truth, classical liberals have always understood free markets as the gateway to human emancipation. Economic self-interest, in other words, ultimately leads to expansive human rights and liberties across the planet.

Nothing about Western politicians’ embrace of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” or “Build Back Better” paradigms protects property rights or liberty in the slightest. The WEF’s agenda promotes radically anti-liberal programs… [that] will smother human innovation by first depriving Westerners of their freedoms.

Wealthy free nations are a threat to the WEF’s New World Order. If censorship must be embraced to control the “narrative,” then so be it. If citizens must be denied freedom of movement under the guise of a “health emergency,” no big deal. If private bank accounts must be seized to intimidate protesters, then such threats are the price for ensuring compliance. In this way, the WEF’s plans for a controlled economy intentionally reverse centuries of liberal progress. Political leaders today are dragging the West into the past.

First, individual liberties will continue disappearing. Then, the greatest economic engine of all, innovation, will dry up. Finally, wealth will return solely to the hands of a small “ruling class” minority. This is the future the World Economic Forum hails as “progress.” It is not. It is a recipe for human bondage.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Next up: Biden’s energy crisis

Posted By on August 26th, 2022

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3615803-next-up-bidens-energy-crisis/

We’ve had Biden’s inflation and Biden’s recession; now we face Biden’s energy crisis. It didn’t have to be this way.

Twenty million Americans are behind on their utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.

Who is surprised? Even as real wages tumbled 3.6 percent over the past year, electricity prices increased 16 percent, squeezing consumers. Unhappily, things are about to get worse.

Natural gas, used to create power and to heat almost half of America’s homes, is trading at prices nearly double those of last year, and the winter heating season promises to bring even higher prices.

The price of natural gas today is the highest since 2008, before the fracking revolution unleashed almost unlimited gas deposits trapped in tight formations that were previously inaccessible.

Why should the United States suffer a giant increase in costs if we have so much gas? In part, because President Biden pledged this year to double our exports of liquified natural gas (LNG), which means less natural gas available to American consumers.

Biden made that grand gesture to help our allies, who are increasingly cut off from Russian oil and gas because of the war in Ukraine. But he made that promise to send more U.S. natural gas overseas even though the price was already soaring and inventories were low.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s control of Judea & Samaria (West Bank) – US interests? Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on August 26th, 2022

https://bit.ly/3R5Uzh5

*Has Israel’s control of the mountain ridges of Judea & Samaria enhanced or injured US interests?

Will the proposed Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria boost or undermine US interests?

*During the October 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty ceremony, top Jordanian military officers warned their Israeli counterparts that a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River would doom the pro-US Hashemite regime east of the River, transforming Jordan into a uncontrollable terrorist heaven, haunting the highly vulnerable pro-US regimes of the oil-producing Arab Gulf states, as well as the pro-US Egypt.

*In June 1967, Israel gained control over the topographically-dominant mountain ridges of the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria, in a preemptive war against Egypt-Syria-Jordan, which dramatically enhanced its posture of deterrence. 

Israel was transformed from a violence-inducing national security-consumer to a violence-deterring national security-producer, evolving into a unique force-multiplier for the US, constraining the maneuverability of anti-US rogue entities.

*The mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria – 3,000 ft. above the Jordan Valley and 2,000 ft. above pre-1967 Israel – play a major role in determining the survival of Israel, the pro-US Hashemite regime in Jordan and Jordan’s neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula.

*Israel’s control of Judea and Samaria has eliminated much of the threat (to Jordan) of a Judea and Samaria-based Palestinian terrorism and has deterred domestic and regional anti-Hashemite elements.

*For example, in 2022, the Iranian-inspired tension along the Syria-Jordan border – from the Golan Heights to Iraq – is intensifying.  It features Iranian-made drones and cyberattacks on Jordan, as well as an increasing infiltration by Syria-based Iranian terrorists, arms smugglers and drug traffickers. Iran’s Ayatollahs aim at toppling the Hashemite regime, extending their reach toward the Mediterranean, undermining the US’ strategic posture in the Middle East, and intensifying the lethal threat to Israel and Saudi Arabia (Jordan’s southern neighbor).

*Jordan may not be able to face the escalated Iranian threat on its own. While it does not rely on an effective US or Arab military deployment, it perceives Israel as its only proven ally, which has systematically flexed its military muscle against Iran. Moreover, Israel’s posture of deterrence emboldens Jordan, in the face of the Iranian threat, as it did in prior threats posed to the Hashemite regime from the Syrian front.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Five-Figure Handout to the Educated President Biden’s “cancellation” of student debt is indefensible. Robert VerBruggen

Posted By on August 26th, 2022

But barring an adverse court ruling, young Americans with student debt are now set to receive a five-figure handout. And everyone else is set to pay for it.

https://www.city-journal.org/biden-cancellation-of-student-debt-indefensible

After months of will-he-or-won’t-he suspense, President Biden has announced his executive actions on student debt. The administration plans to cancel up to $10,000 for borrowers currently earning up to $125,000 annually ($250,000 for married couples)—with the maximum forgiveness doubled for the students who, based on their parents’ finances, received Pell Grants when they attended college. Biden will also extend the pause on payments “for one final time” through the end of the year and allow those with undergraduate loans to cap their payments at 5 percent of their discretionary income, as opposed to 10 percent under current policy. Because the “cancellation” is really a transfer, the combined changes will cost taxpayers something like $500 billion—about $1,500 for every person in the United States.

Forgiving student debt may be a savvy way for Biden to appeal to young, left-leaning voters, but it’s indefensible as policy. Beyond the baseline question of whether the government should ever wipe out the willfully assumed debts of a preferred class of Americans at the expense of everyone else, the program is a poorly targeted use of taxpayer funds, rewards the dysfunctions of the higher-ed sector, and is likely illegal.

Yes, the limits placed on the program make it less of a bonanza for the upper-middle class than it could have been. The largest debt loads are typically held by those with advanced, not just undergraduate, degrees, so blanket forgiveness would have been a massive windfall for young lawyers. But the $125,000 income threshold doesn’t come close to targeting the most sympathetic cases: those who were preyed upon by low-quality colleges, often didn’t even earn a degree, and wound up working at the proverbial Starbucks. The median earnings for a U.S. female working full-time and year-round were about $50,000 in 2020; for a male, the number was roughly $60,000. Yet the White House set its cutoff for five-figure handouts at more than twice those amounts—and, citing numbers prepared by its own Department of Education, boasts that 87 percent of the debt relief announced yesterday will go to those earning less than $75,000 in individual income. Even that would be an odd threshold for taxpayer largesse, as it’s above the 2020 median household income and more than triple the 2022 Federal Poverty Level for a family of three. But rest assured: “only” about $65 billion will go to individuals earning even more than that by themselves, at a cost of $200 per U.S. resident.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Majority of Americans No Longer Trust Mainstream Media, Regardless of Party Sarah Arnold

Posted By on August 25th, 2022

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/08/24/only-32-percent-trust-the-political-media-n2612197

It’s not news that American’s trust in mainstream media has dissolved over the past few years. Former president Trump hailed political news networks as “fake news” when it became apparent that the networks no longer delivered unbiased information, and instead pushed for a certain narrative. 

According to a new Rasmussen Reports poll, 62 percent of voters believe media bias is getting worse; and 82 percent say “fake news” is only going to become a bigger problem than it is now. 

52 percent of voters just don’t trust political media overall. 

This may be because viewers are left to sort fact from fiction, bombarded with information that may or may not be true. So long are the days where news was simply just news as it happened with no spin or propaganda seeped in. 

When pollsters were asked whether they trust the political news they are getting, just a mere 32 percent said no. 

However, trust in the media varied between parties. 67 percent of Republicans and conservatives were quick to say they are weary of what to believe on the news, while 55 percent of Democrats say they do trust news about President Joe Biden, Washington and Congress. 

It will take a long time for news networks to rebuild the trust, as well as commitment and re-branding to gain viewers back. 

CNN took a nosedive in ratings when the Left decided to become the radical progressives they are today.