We need to build an exit ramp from Ukraine for Putin By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/we_need_to_build_an_exit_ramp_from_ukraine_for_putin.html

The horrors we see daily on our television screens of damage to Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities are bad enough, but the prospect of escalation into a nuclear conflict now seems within the realm of possibility.  That would make the damaged cities and millions of refugees that upset us today seem like the good old days if nukes start flying between two superpowers, each with thousands of warheads in inventory.  Making sure that doesn’t happen should be the top priority of everyone at the NATO Summit Thursday, and in Kyiv and Moscow officialdom, too.

It looks as though Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not going well, with thousands of Russian deaths and casualties; multiple dead generals; and lots of equipment, including one significant ship, destroyed.

But we must take every report from both Moscow and Kyiv with a huge grain of salt.  It is the responsibility of wartime propagandists to lie whenever it might benefit their side, after all.  And there are analysts who see Russia as methodically achieving its goals of partitioning Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine off from the rest, and neutralizing the rest as a buffer between itself and NATO.  This color-coded map of voting results in the 2010 Ukraine election closely resembles the language preferences, with blue regions that supported Yanukovych speaking Russian and red regions that voted for Tymoshenko speaking Ukrainian.

Reject Ketanji Brown Jackson If confirmed, she’ll be even worse than Sotomayor and Kagan. by Josh Hammer

https://spectator.org/reject-ketanji-brown-jackson/

The issue with Ketanji Brown Jackson, the 51-year-old federal appellate judge who is our senile president’s Supreme Court nominee, is not necessarily her on-paper qualifications. By most traditional metrics, she is “qualified”: She has served as both a district court and appellate court judge, served as vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, formerly clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer (the man she has been nominated to replace) and is a double-Harvard alum. In terms of “objective” criteria, this is an impressive resume.

Instead, the issue with Judge Jackson is that she is a left-wing ideologue who, if successfully confirmed by the Senate, will devote the next few decades endeavoring to move the Supreme Court far to the left. All relevant indications are that she will approach her job not like her (slightly) more pragmatic former boss, but like a leftist activist — in the mode of her possible future colleague, the midwit partisan flack Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Worse, Jackson, due to the outrageous race- and sex-conscious nominating process in which President Joe Biden selected her, is uniquely unfit to render equal justice under the law for legal issues affecting race and sex. Even worse, she is a proponent of critical race theory and, despite getting nominated solely due to her XX chromosomal structure, appears ignorant as to how to differentiate men from women. Worst of all, she has shown a peculiar juridical soft spot for some of society’s very worst offenders — pedophiles and child pornographers.

In a just world, Jackson’s nomination to replace Breyer would be soundly defeated. And at a bare minimum, every Republican senator should vote against her.

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Favorite Critical Race Theory Book Rejects the Constitution A judge who does not believe in the Constitution, but believes in critical race theory, is unfit. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/ketanji-brown-jacksons-favorite-critical-race-daniel-greenfield/

The existence of a speech by Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, praising Derrick Bell, the godfather of critical race theory, and citing his book, “Faces At the Bottom of a Well”, as an influence has been widely reported. Conservatives have covered Bell’s racist views, his praise for Farrakhan, his antisemitism, and attacks on America. Much of this was already hashed out during the exposure of the relationship between Barack Obama and Derrick Bell.

But it’s important to specifically focus on Jackson’s interest in “Faces At the Bottom of the Well.”

In her speech, Jackson mentions that Bell, whom along with his wife she praises throughout her speech, “wrote a book in the early 1990s about the persistence of racism in American life”.

The subtitle of the book, which few people have mentioned, is, “The Permanence Of Racism”.

Persistence and permanence are not the same thing. But this is another example of Jackson subtly distorting Bell and his book in order to make their extremism seem more moderate.

Jackson goes on to say that, “My parents had this book on their coffee table for many years, and I remember staring at the image on the cover when I was growing up; I found it difficult to reconcile the image of the person,who seemed to be smiling, with the depressing message that the title and subtitle conveyed. I thought about this book cover again for the first time in forty years when I started preparing for this speech.” That would have made her ten years old.

As others have pointed out, “Faces At the Bottom of the Well” was published when Jackson was in her early twenties during Bell’s tantrum against Harvard University. It’s unlikely that Biden’s Supreme Court nominee grew up with the hateful text, but it’s entirely plausible that she was influenced by the book which came out when she was at Harvard and then Harvard Law.

Since Bell began his racial strike against Harvard Law before she had completed her undergraduate degree, it’s unlikely that she had taken any of his classes, but the former member of the faculty was clearly an influence on her. Perhaps Jackson’s memory is faulty or she’s deliberately backdating the book’s influence to her childhood to make it seem more innocent. Surely no one could blame a ten year old for being attracted to a racialist text.

Climate Change is About Control, Stupid – Not The Environment William L. Kovacs

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/03/23/climate-change-is-about-control-stupid-not-the-environment/

The apocalyptic talk about climate change is nothing more than a diversion tactic by the government, the radical Left, and their mainstream press. The many laws, the trillions in federal appropriations and tax credits, and the unworkable proposals to address climate change will not slow the rise of the oceans or heal the planet.

Lobbying for more climate regulation is to enhance the power of the authoritarian state, not protect the environment.

The radical Left has the world obsessing over whether we have 10, 20 or 50 years before the eve of destruction. The hysteria gives the government the excuse it needs for more controls over the energy we use, the products we purchase, the homes we live in, the food we eat, and since the pandemic when we can leave our homes. However, the data supporting the climate studies are rarely made public so that scientists can test the reproducibility of the studies.

Citizens of the United States already live under a legal framework that contains over 3,000 separate criminal offenses in 50 titles of the U.S. Code, 23,000 pages of federal law, over 200,000 regulations, and almost daily Executive Orders that usually limit those actions deemed objectionable to the kakistocracy.

Additionally, the government has in reserve 136 emergency laws allowing it to assume control over industrial production, communications and banking, and most aspects of commerce. Most of these emergency laws are effective when the president declares them effective.

“Predictions of apocalyptic events that would result in the extinction of humanity, a collapse of civilization, or the destruction of the planet have been made since at least the beginning of the Common Era.” So far, the planet still exists. George Orwell noted, “People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their wishes, and the grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”

The terrifying moment someone switched Biden’s brain off in Poland By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/the_terrifying_moment_someone_switched_bidens_brain_off_in_poland.html

Like many people in failing health (physical or mental), Biden has his good days and his bad days. Somehow, a lot of those bad days are on foreign soil perhaps because—and this is often a problem for people with dementia—he’s away from a familiar environment. Maybe that’s why, in Poland, Biden told members of the 82nd Airborne that they’d soon be on the ground in Ukraine and see the war there for themselves. Did Biden just leak that he’s about to start WWIII or did we hear the ramblings of a damaged, fading brain? Either way, wise people are worried.

Here’s a video of Biden’s statement. However, don’t pay attention only to his words. Instead, note his affect: Slurred speech, vague wandering in a little circle, zero energy. This is a man who seems either to be on way too many drugs or, alternatively, to have been cut off from the drugs that normally keep him functioning:

The Pentagon strikes a blow against transgender madness By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/the_pentagon_strikes_a_blow_against_transgender_madness.html

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s stupid and essentially disrespectful response to the question “What is a woman?” tells us what the official line is from the Biden administration: a woman is whatever the transgender lobby says it is.  And we know that the Biden Pentagon has been going out of its way to accommodate so-called “transgender” troops.  That’s why it’s so delicious that the Pentagon announced today that it is lowering the physical standards for women and older people.

Here’s the story from The Hill (emphasis mine):

Following a three-year review, the Army has scrapped plans to use the same physical fitness test for all soldiers, choosing instead to have some reduced standards to allow women and older soldiers to pass, the service announced Wednesday. 

The decision follows a RAND-led study that found men were more easily passing the new, more difficult Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) compared to women and older soldiers, who were “failing at noticeably higher rates.” That six-event test developed in 2019 was an expansion from the three events — pushups, situps and a run — soldiers had done prior.

The Army first changed its fitness test to include dead lifts, power throws, pushups, planks, a run and a sprint-drag-carry event, as well as a leg tuck that was eventually eliminated. 

Service leaders hoped the newer test — the first such change in more than 40 years — would better replicate tasks needed for combat while reducing the risk of injuries.

But the new fitness curriculum was quickly criticized after it became clear women, older male soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops had difficulty passing it.  

About 44 percent of women failed the test from October 2020 to April 2021, compared to about 7 percent of men, Military.com found at the time.

Sorry, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, but after reading that, I don’t think you need to be a biologist to figure out that there’s something different going on physically when it comes to women and men.  If you have young people in their prime, the women will perform physically like old men and men who spend their days not doing P.T., but doing desk jobs.

No on Ketanji Brown Jackson By The Editors of the National Reviews

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/no-on-ketanji-brown-jackson/

Barring an unexpected plot twist, the Senate Judiciary Committee has concluded its hearings on the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Democratic senators appear primed to confirm her, but Republicans should vote “No.”

The hearings were testy at times, but they were a model of civility compared with the Brett Kavanaugh or Clarence Thomas hearings. Unlike Kavanaugh, Judge Jackson did not have senators reciting the preposterous claims of a since-imprisoned grifter that she was a gang rapist, and did not see the Capitol and the hearing room overrun by angry mobs. Unlike Amy Coney Barrett, she did not face a barrage of media attacks on her faith and her family. Unlike Samuel Alito, she was not slimed by tenuous association with racist or sexist groups, even though Jackson herself currently sits on the board of overseers of a college that is being sued for its open and notorious practice of anti-Asian race discrimination in admissions.

Indeed, Democratic paeans to the historic nature of her nomination to be the first African-American woman on the Court ring hollow due to their prior mistreatment of appellate nominees such as Miguel Estrada and Janice Rogers Brown, both of whom were targeted because Joe Biden, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, and other Senate Democrats feared letting a Republican president appoint a “first.”

Biden Administration’s Nuclear Deal: “This Isn’t Obama’s Iran Deal. It’s Much, Much Worse.” by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18358/iran-deal-biden-obama

“By every indication, the Biden Administration appears to have given away the store…. What is more, the deal appears likely to deepen Iran’s financial and security relationship with Moscow and Beijing, including through arms sales.” — Statement from 49 US Republican Senators, March 14, 2022.

With the increased flow of funds to the ruling mullahs, do expect an increase across Iran in human rights violations and domestic crackdowns on those who oppose the regime’s policies, as hardliners tend to be the ones gaining more power as a result of any lifting of sanctions. Iran’s hardliners already control three branches of the government: the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

Regionally speaking, a nuclear deal will undoubtedly escalate Iran’s interference in the domestic affairs of other countries, despite what the advocates of the nuclear deal argue — just as when then US President Barack Obama predicted that with a nuclear deal, “attitudes will change.” They did. For the worse.

Sanctions relief, as a consequence of a nuclear accord, will most likely finance Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Quds Force (the IRGC branch for extraterritorial operations) and buttress Iran’s terrorist proxies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, Iraq’s Shiite militias, and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The worst parts of the new deal are, of course, that it will enable the Iranian regime, repeatedly listed by the US as a state sponsor of terrorism, to have full nuclear weapons capability, an unlimited number of nuclear warheads, and the intercontinental ballistic missile systems with which to deliver them. In addition, as a separate deal, the US will reportedly release the IRGC from the US List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, “in return for a public commitment from Iran to de-escalation in the region” and a promise “not to attack Americans.”

Iran’s leaders, for a start, never honored their earlier “commitment,” so why would anyone think they would honor this one? In a burst of honesty, though — and a pretty explicit tip-off — they stated that they “didn’t agree to the U.S. demand and suggested giving the U.S. a private side letter instead.”

Then there is that revealingly narcissistic condition, “not to attack Americans”? Oh, then attacking Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis, Europeans, South Americans and everyone else is just fine? Thanks, Biden.

Worse, the Iranians were complicit with al-Qaeda in attacking the US on 9/11/2001. So we are rewarding them?

To top it off, the US State Department just confirmed that Russia and its war-criminal President Vladimir Putin could keep Iran’s “excess uranium.” (Excess of what?) Seriously? So Putin can use Iran’s uranium to threaten bombing his next “Ukraine”?

One can only assume that just as the region has become relatively more peaceful and stable, the Biden administration would like to destabilize it. After surrendering to the Taliban in Afghanistan and failing to deter Putin from invading Ukraine, has the Biden administration not created enough destabilization? Why would a US president want a legacy of three major destabilizations unless someone was interested in bringing down the West?

The US proposals — negotiated for the Americans by Russia of all unimpeachable, trustworthy, above-board advocates — have been described as: “This Isn’t Obama’s Iran Deal. It’s Much, Much Worse.” That sounds about right.

The Biden administration continues to disregard major concerns regarding the Iran nuclear deal, and has reportedly “refused to commit to submit a new Iran deal to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, as per its constitutional obligation.”

Forty-nine Republican Senators recently told the Biden Administration that they will not back the administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Fit to print Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War by Deborah Cohen reviewed by Anne Sebba

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/fit-to-print-hotel-imperial/

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War Deborah Cohen

In January 1936, Harold Nicolson, the British politician and author, reviewed Inside Europe, by the Chicago-born journalist John Gunther. He praised the “American type of wandering or perambulatory foreign correspondent” such as Vincent Sheean, H.R. Knickerbocker (known as Knick), the Mowrer brothers, John Gunther and (the only woman) Dorothy Thompson, as “one of those improvements to modern life that the British would do well to imitate.”

According to Nicolson, the virtue of the book, which famously described Adolf Hitler as a “blob of ectoplasm,” was not merely that it was exciting but “so personal that it may seem dramatic and at the same time educative.” Now Deborah Cohen has provided a rivetingly raw account of the group (with cameo appearances from others, including Rebecca West and “Mickey” Hahn) and the way they worked, switching focus at various points as she joins the dramatic global story with often painful and deeply personal accounts. From 1931 onward, this group of roving American reporters — friends and sometime lovers who occasionally fell out with each other, slept with each other’s partners, suffered tragedies and setbacks — saw what was happening in Europe with great clarity. They wrote powerfully about the rise of the fascist dictators before they were household names and warned about constant violations of the Treaty of Versailles: not always with the same viewpoint or approach.

For example, when Knick published The Boiling Point; Will War Come in Europe? in 1934, Thompson criticized her erstwhile junior for “a hasty production in which he had reported what he’d been told as if he were taking dictation unctuously rather than rendering judgment.” The most important attribute of the journalist, according to Thompson, was brains, not feet.

Elon Musk and the Chinese Temptation by Peter Schweizer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18357/elon-musk-china

“Other American CEOs have close relationships to the [Chinese Communist] Party. But [Elon] Musk is the only one who loudly praises Beijing while running a space company with incredibly sensitive and powerful defense applications.” — Isaac Stone Fish, Barron’s, November 13, 2020.

Musk’s dilemma is not unique. The close technology-sharing relationship between Tesla and SpaceX poses national security risks to his adopted home country, but so do Google’s and Microsoft’s work with China on artificial intelligence. U.S. government policy is predictably slow in catching up to the speed of hard-charging, globe-spanning enterprises like Musk’s, and the Chinese are only too happy to increase that gap.

At some point, however, companies such as SpaceX, Google and Microsoft, and the individual Americans who own, direct, or invest in them, will face a similar choice between their obligation to America and their pursuit of more profits abroad.

Elon Musk has fans all over the ideological spectrum. People on the Left love him for popularizing electric cars with his Tesla company, or maybe for openly smoking pot on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show. Conservatives love him for his entrepreneurial dash and penchant for standing up to politicians and Big Tech censorship of the internet. And everyone loves Musk for responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and severing of its communications links by making his Starlink satellite broadband internet service available in Ukraine and donating Starlink terminals to Ukrainians. The Starlink connectivity, according to one report, may even be helping armed Ukrainian drones target Russian military vehicles.

Less is known about Musk’s business dealings in Communist China, but that might be about to change.