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August 2023

Actually, Joe, All Your ‘Objectives’ Were Failures Here’s a list of what he should actually apologize for By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/21/actually-joe-all-your-objectives-were-failures/

“Name me a single objective we’ve ever set out to accomplish that we’ve failed on. Name me one, in all of our history. Not one!”

-President Joe Biden, August 16, 2023 

Joe Biden in one of his now accustomed angry “get off my grass” moods dared the press to find just one of his policies/objectives that has not worked. Silence followed.

Perhaps it was polite to say nothing, given even the media knows almost every enacted Biden policy has failed.

Here is a summation of what he should instead apologize for.

Biden in late summer 2021 sought a 20th anniversary celebration of 9/11 and the 2001 subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. He wished to be the landmark president that yanked everyone out of Afghanistan after 20 years in country. But the result was the greatest military humiliation of the United States since the flight from Vietnam in 1975.

Consider the ripples of Biden’s disaster. U.S. deterrence was crippled worldwide. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea almost immediately began to bluster or return to their chronic harassment of U.S. and allied ships and planes. We left thousands of allied Afghans to face Taliban retribution, along with some Western contractors.

Biden abandoned a $1 billion embassy, and a $300 million remodeled Bagram airbase strategically located not far from China and Russia, and easily defensible. Perhaps $50 billion in U.S. weaponry and supplies were abandoned and now find their way into the international terrorist mart.

All our pride flags, our multimillion gender studies programs at Kabul University, and our George Floyd murals did not just come to naught, but were replaced by the Taliban’s anti-homosexual campaigns, burkas, and detestation of any trace of American popular culture.

Vladimir Putin sized up the skedaddle. He collated it with Biden’s unhinged quip that he would not get too excited if Putin just staged a “minor” invasion of Ukraine. He remembered Biden’s earlier request to Putin to modulate Russian hacking to exempt a few humanitarian American institutions. Then Russia concluded of our shaky Commander-in-Chief that he either did not care or could do nothing about another Russian invasion.

The result so far is more than 500,000 dead and wounded in the war, a Verdun-stand-off along with fortified lines, the steady depletion of our munitions and weapon stocks, and a new China/Russia/Iran/North Korean axis, with wink and nod assistance from NATO Turkey.

Some thoughts, all cynical and sour, about the Republican debate By Andrea Widburg ******

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

So, I sat through all two hours of the debate amongst the Republican primary candidates, although I was very irked by Larry Elder’s absence. Having said that, he didn’t miss much. It was like watching a junior high school debate, complete with the cool kids asking stupid questions and the geeks fighting on the stage. I hated every minute of it, thought it was embarrassing for all involved, and found it insulting to the American voters.

If you want details about questions and answers, you’ll find them elsewhere. These are just my impressions.

As is the case every election cycle, the format is appalling. It caters to the media’s assumption that voters cannot hold anything in their brains for more than a minute or two. They think we’re stupid, and the format is set up to cater to that. It’s cruel to legitimate candidates to force them to address complex issues in one-minute soundbites, and it deprives the American people of important information. It’s such a degradation of real political debate.

Within that appalling format, I couldn’t be less impressed with Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. Their questions were shallow and, considering that it was their format, they had no control over the candidates. I also disliked that they thought it was smart to open with a question that saw them playing Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Yes, I understand that the song has resonated with Americans. However, if each candidate gets only one minute, don’t waste time on a song.

Regarding the candidates, I came away thinking that Vivek, DeSantis, and what’s-his-name from North Dakota managed to look the same or better by evening’s end. The fact that I can’t remember what’s-his-name’s name, though, is a reminder that, while he had a couple of good answers, he’s fundamentally a nonentity who just looked better in comparison to some of the others on the stage.

Nikki Haley is a shrill, establishment harridan who kept playing the woman card. Speaking as a woman, I was not impressed. When she ridiculed Vivek Ramaswamy’s lack of foreign policy chops, all I could think of was that she’s someone who supports Biden’s foreign policy. What’s that say about her chops?

I also disagreed profoundly when she said that Ukraine is our friend. As far as I’m concerned, Ukraine, one of the most corrupt nations in the world, is a friend only to politicians and defense contractors (a point Vivek made). And when Pence went on a rant about Putin entering NATO countries, I wanted to yell at him that it’s America that ignored a promise never to push NATO right up to Putin’s doorstep. I’m not defending Putin or Russia. This is a war that would be best ended if both countries lost. What I don’t want to see is America get sucked in.

Georgia’s Trump Indictment: Partisan Political Hit Job Malicious – and absurd – overreach. by Philip Holloway

https://www.frontpagemag.com/georgias-trump-indictment-partisan-political-hit-job/

How is it a criminal enterprise to challenge the results of a razor-thin election?

How is it a criminal enterprise if the first amendment protects it?

The sweeping 98-page document charges Former President Trump and nineteen others with various felony charges for actions that occurred in the frenetic time immediately following the 2020 Presidential Election, an election Trump officially lost by the slimmest of margins: 0.23% and 11,779 votes.

For those of us who live here in Georgia, there was a palpable feeling that something was wrong. This was the first election where we had ballot drop-off boxes spread all over with nobody keeping an eye on them. There were daily reports of ballot harvesting in nursing homes. There were mysterious water leaks where the votes were being counted, poll watchers were reporting a lack of access to the count, and the counting seemed to stop and start for no apparent reason. Cynics suspected the pauses were meant to figure out how many votes Joe Bide still needed to carry Georgia.

Once Georgia was officially called for Joe Biden, President Trump, and his team immediately cried foul and began looking for ways to challenge and even overturn the election. There did not seem to be a coherent legal strategy to get into court and challenge the election. However, one lawsuit filed in Fulton County sought to challenge 147,000 absentee ballots to see if any were illegitimate. The plaintiff was not Donald Trump. This suit alleged evidence of fraudulent ballots and improper ballot counting in Fulton County. Nine Georgia voters filed it. These voters never had their day in court because the judge dismissed the case without hearing the Plaintiff’s evidence on the grounds that they “lacked standing.”

Trump appealed to Georgia’s Secretary of State by calling and imploring him to take action to correct the perceived fraud given the razor-thin margin of defeat. In addition, Trump listened to advice and counsel from a variety of lawyers, including Attorney General Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, and John Eastman, to name a few.

Bill Barr reportedly told Trump the election was clean, and he lost fair and square. It remains a mystery how Barr came to this conclusion without investigating Trump’s claims of fraud. Meanwhile, Eastman and others reportedly advised Trump that it was plausible to contest the election by imploring Vice President Pence to disregard the slate of electors from Georgia (and other places) in favor of an alternate slate of Trump electors when counting the electoral college votes. For this strategy to prevail, any alternate electors would need to have their names submitted by the constitutional deadline of the 4th Wednesday in December 2020. So, in Georgia and other states, Trump supporters presented themselves as alternate electors on the theory that if any of the fraud claims could be sufficiently proven, the Vice President would be able to count the Trump Electors.

Why D.E.I. Needs to Die A phenomenon diametrically opposed to our Constitution. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-d-e-i-needs-to-die/

The Reign of the Woke is starting to totter. The excesses of the tyranny of the tiny trans minority is getting significant pushback, from consumers boycotting woke corporate fellow-travelers like Bud Light and Disney, to parents challenging schools that attempt to usurp their authority over their children.

More significant in the long run, some state universities’ governors are rejecting requirements for faculty and scholars to sign loyalty pledges to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ideology.

The latest grove of academe to end this noxious practice is the Arizona system comprising five campuses with 142,000 students. In addition, the Foundation for Individual Freedom in Education has filed suit against California’s community college system on behalf of six professors to stop the state’s imposition of regulations that require allegiance to highly contested political ideologies, virtually cancelling both academic freedom and the First Amendment.

We should all celebrate these pushbacks, since the politicized dogma of “woke,” as well as the requirement of fealty to it, violates the very core of the university’s traditional mission and purpose: “to know the best that has been known and thought in the world,” as Matthew Arnold defined it, “irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other consideration whatsoever,” and “through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”

The pseudo-concepts of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” have long been “stock notions” that our “woke” commissars “follow staunchly and mechanically.” Typical of all tyrannies, these words have been warped into propaganda advertising an illiberal political program of expanding the political power of one faction of citizens at the expense of others’ freedom–­–the cost being paid by our unalienable rights to freely think, and freely speak in the public square our opinions and beliefs.

1.5 Degrees Of Climate Fabrication

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/24/1-5-degrees-of-climate-fabrication/

Ghoulish scold John Kerry, the White House’s climate hobgoblin, has repeatedly warned that the world is not on track to contain a 1.5-degree Celsius increase in global temperature above the pre-industrial level, and this means disaster is looming. Others have made the same point, and the media just goes along for the ride. Their predictions are worthless, though. We know this because the United Nations told us so.

The rock-solid, undeniable fact is that it’s impossible to make long-term climate predictions, because our climate is ever changing and volatile. It says so in the Third Assessment Report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

And it has said this since 2001, when that report was put together.

Yet Kerry and his ilk, and we use that term with with greatest contempt we can muster, continue to tell us they can predict the global temperature of the future and it’s going to burn us all.

The alarmists point to the sentence that follows, which says, “Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.” They then claim that damning passage is taken out of context.

The ABC of Wokery Nicholas T. Parsons

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/07/an-abc-of-woke/

Originating as black American parlance for resisting racial and social inequality, Woke has morphed into a generic term for radically left-wing social and political awareness. According to Perry Bacon Jr. of the Washington Post it represents the following doctrines for the American Left: rejection of American exceptionalism; a claim that the United States has never been a true democracy; a claim that non-white people (“people of colour”) are victims of systemic and institutional racism; that white Americans enjoy “white privilege”; that African Americans deserve reparations for slavery and post-enslavement discrimination; that disparities among racial groups are explained by discrimination; that US law enforcement agencies are designed to discriminate against people of colour and so should be defunded, disbanded or at least heavily reformed; that women suffer from systemic sexism; that individuals should be able to identify with any gender or none; that US capitalism is deeply flawed.

Bacon’s list is not definitive, but the common subtext of Wokeism is invariably victimhood. This is a psychologically determined attitude, considered by Wokeists to transcend any contrary empirical evidence. Professor Jean-François Braunstein of the Sorbonne has remarked that Wokeism offers theories of knowledge that validate feelings over facts. Sometimes celebrities empathise with victimhood by claiming it for themselves. Prince Harry wanted us to believe that he had been “cut off” financially by his father, despite having been able to buy a multi-million-dollar Californian mansion; he also claims to “want his family back” and an apology from it, picturing himself as the injured party after insulting the royal family repeatedly in public.

Victimhood is now also becoming an excuse for violence by fringe groups with a dubious and anti-science agenda, for example “trans-activists”. Generational victimhood relating to climate change holds white civilisation responsible for creating global warming in the industrial revolution and exporting climate-damaging technology to the rest of the world, which is not therefore responsible for climate damage and should be paid reparations. Little or no mention is made of the astonishing benefits to mankind yielded by the industrial revolution, or of the self-critical culture of free countries that made them the first to urge action against climate change (as also against slavery).

Although European countries have quite different political and social features from America, they have imported Woke ideology pretty much wholesale. Even France, arguably the country least susceptible to Wokeism due to its “universalist” tradition, which in principle is blind to people’s colour and origin, has now got an incipiently woke Minister of Education. Pap Ndiaye told Le Monde that he did not experience racism growing up in France and only “realised that [he] was black” when he was twenty-five and studying in the United States. Indeed, importation to Europe happens chiefly through academia, where mediocre scholars have weaponised Woke ideology as a way of advancing their power by targeting individuals and institutions that can be presented as insufficiently conformist to Woke assumptions.

How Science is Done These Days Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/08/how-science-is-done-these-days/

There’s nothing new about mainstream climate scientists conspiring to bury papers that throw doubt on catastrophic global warming. The Climategate leaks showed co-compiler of the HadCRUT global temperature series Dr Phil Jones emailing Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, July 8, 2004:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth, a colleague] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Thanks to a science whistle-blower, there’s now documentation of a current exercise as bad as that captured in the Jones-Mann correspondence. This new and horrid saga – again involving Dr Mann – sets out to deplatform and destroy a peer-endorsed published paper by four Italian scientists. Their paper in European Physical Journal Plus is titled A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming and documents that extreme weather and related disasters are not generally increasing, contrary to the catastrophists feeding misinformation to the Guardian/ABC axis and other compliant media.

The witch-hunt has Australian elements. Last September, The Australian’s environment writer, Graham Lloyd, highlighted the paper (paywalled) and its conclusion that the “extreme events emergency” was overblown. Sky News Australia, which twice reported the study, picked up more than 400,000 views and thousands of comments.

The green-left Guardian countered with a hit-piece by in-house cataastrophist Graham Readfearn featuring professors Lisa Alexander and Steve Sherwood, both of NSW University. They alleged cherry-picking and misquoting. Their main specific complaint was that the Italians’ paper had drawn on the 2013 5th IPCC Report rather than the recent 6th Report. (The Italians say they submitted the paper before the 6th Report emerged).

The Guardian’s fuss caught the attention of Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) Marlowe Hood, who modestly styles himself “Senior Editor, Future of the Planet” and “Herald of the Anthropocene”. He penned his own diatribe for The Australian (paywalled but also here) against the Italians’ paper. Jumping the gun on any editorial inquiry, AFP branded the study “faulty” and “fundamentally flawed”, involving “discredited assertions” and “grossly manipulated data”. This abuse was normal since AFP and The Guardian are leaders of the Covering Climate Now (CCN) coalition of some 500 media outlets with reach to a 2 billion audience. These outlets signed the CCN pledge to hype catastrophism and rebut and censor any scepticism about our planet’s forecast fiery fate.

The Summoning Rituals of the Left By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/08/23/the-summoning-rituals-of-the-left-n1721490

The malignant playbook of the contemporary left is generally considered to be Saul Alinsky’s 1989 “Rules for Radicals,” and there is certainly much truth to the story of the book’s destructive influence. But the source text for social and political upheaval is Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven’s far more detailed and authoritative 1997 manual, “The Breaking of the American Social Compact.”

The Cloward-Piven strategy seeks to hasten the fall of the free market and the republican structure of government by overloading the administrative apparatus with an avalanche of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis mode and eventual economic collapse. Choking the welfare rolls, for example, would serve to generate a political and financial meltdown, break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears, and bring the system crashing down. The fear, turmoil, and violence accompanying such a debacle would provide the perfect conditions for fostering radical change.

We see the strategy in action today, forging a situation that was unnecessary from the start via a series of tactical steps, among which: the campaign against productive farming; the so-called 15-minute city herding people into condo-congested urban centers where they are readily supervised and mastered; open borders allowing for a refugee tsunami to alter the character of the nation; a censoring and disinformative media rendered corrupt to the core; the mandating of useless masks or plausibly toxic vaccines; and the implementation of a digital currency in which citizens’ spending can be monitored, restricted, or even frozen. Such phenomena have no basis in even the remotest necessity but are essential in order to prepare the ground for an imminent totalitarian state.

This is the rationale for the so-called COVID pandemic and the bugbear of “Climate Change.” A bad flu season affecting mainly the elderly with comorbidities is not a viral pandemic, as Dr. Vernon Coleman ironically shows. The climate is always changing as a matter of course — the term “climate change” is a gross oxymoron; the thesis of anthropogenic forcing obscures the fact that carbon is material for life and nitrogen for farming. COVID and Climate are tactical phantoms that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with social control. The Clowardly rePivening put in place by the Democrat Party has only one aim: to create a crisis out of thin air and then seek to defuse it by creating a real crisis that advantages only the Party. It is the diabolical form of creation ex nihilo.

Thus, a ginned-up pandemic is a perfect excuse for mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, especially if the voter rolls have been flooded with uncountable and counterfeit names and the voting stations have been commandeered. There is no immigration chaos unless a chain system is entrenched and the border is left wide open. There is no such thing as “white supremacy” unless it is apodictically proclaimed and false-flag operations are carried out. There is no need for costly, largely ineffective, and harmful renewable energy installations unless drilling has been rendered illegal and the oil pipelines have been shut down to avoid a bogus climate catastrophe. The bible of the Democrat left begins: Let there be a crisis. And there was a crisis.

Reshaping the Narrative How the discourse on DEI has changed—in a constructive direction. Christopher Rufo

https://rufo.substack.com/p/reshaping-the-narrative?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Last month, I published an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that DEI programs in public universities had created a “stifling orthodoxy that undermines the pursuit of truth.”

The Times has published six letters to the editor responding to my op-ed, under the headline: “University D.E.I. Programs: Do They Help or Harm Education?” Most of the letters were critical, though the editors made sure to include some supportive opinions, including this one from Wayne State University professor Jukka Savolainen:

Thank you for giving voice to Christopher Rufo, who has exposed the diversity-industrial-complex for what it is: a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Mr. Rufo is exactly right when he says that this should not be a partisan issue.

The central purpose of universities is to pursue truth. This mission requires an environment of open debate and political neutrality. Unlike Mr. Rufo, I am not a conservative. In recent presidential campaigns I have voted for Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

However, in the role of a college professor, my loyalties are with an altogether different ideology: the scientific value system. This ideology is inconsistent with identity politics of any flavor.

Government-Funded Science Journal Admits Over 2,600 of its Papers May Have ‘Exaggerated Claims’ By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/23/government-funded-science-journal-admits-over-2600-of-its-papers-may-have-exaggerated-claims/

A top science journal that receives funding from the federal government was recently forced to admit that well over 2,000 of the research papers it has published contain “exaggerated claims.”

As Just The News reports, over 2,600 papers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) peer-reviewed journal Science were closely scrutinized by rival research journal Scientometrics. In the subsequent study, it was determined that, from 1997 to 2021, the journal saw a 40% drop in the use of “hedging” words.

In scientific research and other forms of academic writing, “hedging” words refers to terms and phrases such as “could” or “appear to,” in order to provide some room for doubt rather than depict absolute confidence. In 1997, there were roughly 115.8 examples of hedging for every 10,000 words. However, by 2021, that rate had fallen to just 67.42 per every 10,000.

Responding to the criticism, the news division of Science acknowledged that this new research “suggests a worrisome rise of unreliable, exaggerated claims.”

The non-profit watchdog group Influence Watch reports that “the federal government is the largest identifiable source of funding for AAAS,” as the association has received roughly $3.3 million per year from the federal government between 2008 and 2017, in addition to many other grants the association received.