Displaying posts published in

December 2023

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The time has come to hold Mayorkas accountable By William Davis

By on December 8th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/the_time_has_come_to_hold_mayorkas_accountable.html

As Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas continues to treat Congress and the American people with contempt, it’s far past time for the secretary to finally face some consequences for his actions.

Mayorkas narrowly escaped becoming the second cabinet official in U.S. history to be impeached when eight Republicans voted with all House Democrats last month to refer Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s impeachment resolution to the House Homeland Security Committee. Some members who voted against the impeachment resolution indicated that they would ultimately support impeaching Mayorkas, but would like to see a more thorough investigation completed before moving forward.

Mayorkas, like any cabinet official facing impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors, of course, deserves due process. Yet, more than 10 months into the 118th Congress, and over a year since former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy vowed an impeachment inquiry was imminent, there has been no inquiry, and no timetable put forward for impeachment.

The case against Mayorkas is extensive and damning. Since he has been in charge of DHS, the department responsible for securing the U.S. border, millions of illegal aliens have crossed the border, shattering all the wrong records. Just Tuesday, 12,000 foreign nationals crossed into the U.S. illegally, hitting an all-time record for a single day. Mayorkas and other leading Biden administration officials have worked to systematically destroy America’s operational control over its border, while violating the Immigration and Nationality Act, and flagrantly disregarding their Constitutional responsibility to protect the U.S. from invasion. Mayorkas has demonized and demoralized Border Patrol agents, siding with anti-borders conspiracy theorists over his own agents.

He has put the national security of the U.S. at grave risk, allowing a record number of suspected terrorists to cross the border. Every step of the way, Mayorkas has prioritized his destructive anti-borders ideology over his responsibilities under the law. The case for his impeachment and removal is clear, but one person who doesn’t seem to be concerned is Mayorkas himself.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Liel Leibovitz The Big University Fail Leaders of elite schools disgrace themselves before Congress—and expose the rot at the core of American higher education.

By on December 8th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-big-university-fail

Forget Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, now in theaters: if you want to watch an epic drama of vanity and failed leadership that ends in catastrophe, just tune in to the hearing held this week by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Summoned to account for the surging anti-Semitism on their campuses, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania delivered a masterclass in obfuscation. When New York representative Elise Stefanik asked them whether calling for the genocide of the Jewish people violated the codes of conduct of their respective institutions, for example, all three presidents responded by saying that—well, it’s complicated.

“It is a context-dependent decision,” Penn’s Liz Magill answered, driving Stefanik—and anyone else watching with half a heart and a brain—to wonder just what was so difficult or context-dependent about cheering for the murder of every Jewish man, woman, and child.

The hearing made headlines, and rightly so. But it would be a mistake to focus on the trio’s failure to sound remotely empathic when discussing the safety and wellbeing of their Jewish students. The problem with Harvard, Penn, MIT, and others isn’t merely that these previously august institutions condone, or at the very least tolerate, anti-Semitism. It goes much deeper, and you could sum it up in three letters: DEI—or diversity, equity, and inclusion, the ongoing effort to regulate a host of policies pertaining to race, sexual orientation, and other identity markers.

Consider Harvard. Our nation’s most lauded university is currently home to 7,240 undergraduate students and 7,024 administrators, or nearly one administrator for each young adult. Some of these officials, it’s possible, are doing important work. But if you’re wondering what the rest are up to, you needn’t look much further than the Crimson, the university’s long-running student newspaper. Recently, the Crimson reported on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, created on the recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. The Visual Culture and Signage task force’s 24 members, including nine administrators, toiled for months and interviewed more than 500 people before delivering a 26-page report that included recommendations like one urging Harvard to “clarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage.” This farce ended the only way it could have—with the minting of a new administrative post, the FAS campus curator, and a new committee, the FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage, to help facilitate the curator’s all-important work.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard English Department Offers a Course on Taylor Swift Is there anyone more worthy of deep study? by Hugh Fitzgerald

By on December 8th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/harvard-english-department-offers-a-course-on-taylor-swift/

Harvard’s English Department has just announced a new course, to be taught by Professor Stephanie Burt — né Stephen Burt — on the life and work and miracles of Taylor Swift, a pop country singer well known for her garish and skimpy costumes, her semi-obscene pelvic thrusts this way and that way, and her very public romance (it has already lasted two whole months) with tight end Travis Kelce, complete with air kisses thrown between them at his football games and her concerts, to the delight of tens of thousands present for these premeditated displays of true-blue love. Already, hundreds of Harvard students have signed up, hoping to be selected to take this course. It may be the most oversubscribed course in the history of Harvard’s English Department.

The English Department — or rather, Professor Stephanie L. Burt, who created the course and will be teaching it — describe the course here.

In 2009, you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me” on the radio, in grocery stores, and on TV. Harvard English professor Stephanie L. Burt ’94 still remembers the first time she heard it, describing it as so much “better” and “more compelling” than all the other pop songs that were playing at the time.

Fourteen years later, and Burt is still a diehard Swiftie. Her interest in Swift has followed her to the classroom. Next semester, Harvard’s English Department will debut the course “Taylor Swift and Her World,” taught by Burt. In this class, students will earn college credit for their deep dives into Swift’s lyrics, music, and influence, dissecting her catalog and reading a host of authors Burt finds relevant to understanding Swift’s artistry.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Chanukah in Israel Upholds Light Against Darkness A nation finds hope and faith in the face of evil. by Daniel Greenfield

By on December 8th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/chanukah-in-israel-upholds-light-against-darkness/

A week before Chanukah, Israeli soldiers set up a 15-foot tall menorah in Gaza. As the holiday arrives, menorahs large and small will be lit in enemy territory. Lights will flicker along tanks and from across rubble-strewn battlefields. Out of the darkness of the Jihad, there will be light.

The Jewish holiday commemorating the resistance of the Maccabees, a conservative religious family from the hinterlands of Israel, has always had a special resonance in Israel. In the northern parts of Israel that have often come under Hamas rocket attacks, the shells and debris of the rockets have been repurposed into menorahs symbolizing darkness becoming light.

As public menorah lightings in America and Europe are canceled to avoid triggering the rage of Islamists and leftist allies, preparations are underway for a bigger Chanukah than ever in Israel.

300,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes because of the war that began with the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct 7. The war brought an end to tourism and hotel rooms around the country are full of refugees from the war who are living out of the contents of their suitcases. Children who have spent two months in wartime and horror need something to celebrate.

In city squares, voices will ring with the classic Chanukah children’s song, “Banu hosech legaresh” or “We came to drive back the darkness” in defiance of the long solstice night.

In Modiin, the hometown of the Maccabees where the revolt against the Syrian-Greek Empire’s war on Judaism originated, people have been forced to head for shelters after rocket warnings sounded, but it’s not stopping them from preparing menorahs in every home and square. Or from continuing to donate supplies, everything from toothbrushes to cans of tuna, for the hundreds of thousands of refugees and the soldiers mobilized to fight the Islamic terrorists.

According to the European Union, the Maccabean city is actually an “illegal settlement” on land that belongs to the Muslim invaders, and not to the Jews who had fought an empire to free it over 2,000 years ago. Chanukah reaffirms the history of Modiin and the rest of Israel.

History hits differently in Israel.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Jonathan A. Lesser: The Crippling Economic Costs of Green Energy Subsidies

By on December 8th, 2023

https://manhattan.institute/article/the-crippling-economic-costs-of-green-energy-subsidies

The green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) have been justified by the Biden Administration as a booster of U.S. economic growth and jobs.  But when the subsidies are tallied and the overall impacts evaluated, the IRA is a job and economic growth killer. 

Under the IRA, the lion’s share of subsidies will be paid to wind and solar developers.  The subsidies will not expire until electric industry carbon emissions fall by at least 75% below 2005 levels, after which they will gradually decrease.  Even the most optimistic forecasts prepared by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that this will not occur until at least 2046.  Thus, the subsidies for wind and solar will continue unabated for decades.  In total, the subsidies will far exceed what the U.S. government spent in today’s dollars to combat the Great Depression.

The single largest subsidy is the federal investment tax credit (ITC).  Most wind and solar projects will be able to claim a minimum 30% ITC, plus be eligible for an additional 10% credit if the projects rely on domestic manufacturing for components.  

The EIA’s optimistic forecast projects about 900,000 megawatts (MW) of solar photovoltaics, 350,000 MW of onshore wind turbines, and 24,000 MW of offshore wind by 2046.  If all of this generation is built, it will result in direct ITC subsidies totaling between $500 billion and $1 trillion, depending on construction costs.  The greater the costs, the larger the subsidies.  Although wind and solar proponents still claim costs are falling, the reality is the opposite.   Offshore wind developers, especially, are clamoring to renegotiate contracts they signed previously, including guaranteed price adjustments for increasing costs, and relaxing the domestic content requirement so they can claim the additional 10% ITC.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Doomsday Cult Needs To Recalculate Its Many Failed Predictions

By on December 8th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/08/the-doomsday-cult-needs-to-recalculate-its-many-failed-predictions/

Five years ago, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown said, with great certainty, that “in less than five years, even the worst skeptics will be believers.” While we’re not sure why some skeptics are in his mind worse than others, it’s clear that he was wrong.

Wrong as the prediction of the end of snow was wrong. Just as wrong as Prince Charles, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Gore, celebrated activist James Hansen and the tiresome, we’ll-have-no-coal John Kerry declaring we have fewer than 100 months or 12 years or 10 years or four years or 500 days to save Earth from the menace of man-made global warming.

We’ve had a half-century of various failed climate and ecological predictions, 18 of them “spectacularly wrong,” yet the carbon-obsessed doomsayers continue to insist that a planetary tragedy is imminent. The difference between them and the end-of-the-world cults that have to recalculate the day of the apocalypse when their prophecies come and go without incident is that much of the Western world has bought into the climate zealots’ hysteria.

In addition to the many botched timeline predictions, there is also the temperature dashboard warning light message. Once we reach a global temperature that is 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than that of the preindustrial era (whatever that was), we will have arrived at a disastrous threshold. Never mind that there is no such thing as a measurable global temperature, or that the temperature record is unreliable, or that the 1.5 degrees was not established by science but a number agreed upon in order to forge a climate agreement.

And never mind that somehow we have essentially hit that 1.5 degrees Celsius tipping point (the climate holocaust should materialize any day now, right? – the lunatics at the Guardian of course say we’re on the verge of catastrophe) and at the same time, the Associated Press reports “the world is heading for considerably less warming than projected a decade ago.” 

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What Is Really Behind Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to the American People’? by Raymond Ibrahim

By on December 8th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20202/bin-laden-letter-to-the-american-people

“Battle, animosity, and hatred — directed from the Muslim to the infidel — is the foundation of our religion. And we consider this a justice and kindness to them.” — Osama bin Laden, “Al-Qaeda’s Declaration in Response to the Saudi Ulema.”

“There are only three choices in Islam: either willing submission; or payment of the jizya, thereby physical, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or the sword—for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live.” — Osama bin Laden, “Al-Qaeda’s Declaration in Response to the Saudi Ulema.”

In his “Letter to the American People,” however, bin Laden portrays Islam as “the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted.”

When clarifying to the Saudis what Islam really has in store for infidels, bin Laden quoted many of the most militant verses, such as Koran 9:29: “Fight those among the People of the Book [Jews and Christians] who do not believe in Allah, nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.”

Continue reading →