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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Before Going to War, Consider Who’s in Charge Let’s not go charging into the valley of death with our junto of fatuous fanatics in command.       By Stephen Balch

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/23/before-going-to-war-consider-whos-in-charge/

America is drifting toward war, wafted by a chorus of political and punditical sirens. A great many of them are conservatives, including popular media personalities with large audiences. They’ve been warned by other conservatives about the risks of confrontation with Russia that deeper intervention in Ukraine poses.

But since few want to abandon the Ukrainians altogether, the conservative camp faces a quandary. How much risk is too much risk? Is riskiness more a matter of the quantity or the quality of support we provide to Ukraine? Is it more a matter of optics or battlefield utility? Does it matter from exactly whence it immediately arrives? Is it important how much it steers the antagonists toward possible off-ramps? These would be difficult questions for even a consummate diplomatist to answer. Not an eager player of Russian roulette, for whatever it’s worth, I incline toward overall prudence. Keep the supplies flowing at pretty much their present rate and hope deadlock leads eventually to an agreement that neither side will like but that both can politically accept. Or so it seems to me.

Russia not taking Gen. Mark Milley’s phone calls By Monica Showalter

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

Gen. Mark Milley, the Pentagon swamp creature who brought us the Afghanistan pullout and turned the U.S. military focus to “white rage,” doesn’t seem to be able to get Russia’s generals, now bombing Ukraine, to return his phone calls.

According to the Washington Post:

Repeated attempts by the United States’ top defense and military leaders to speak with their Russian counterparts have been rejected by Moscow for the last month, leaving the world’s two largest nuclear powers in the dark about explanations for military movements and raising fears of a major miscalculation or battlefield accident.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have tried to set up phone calls with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov but the Russians “have so far declined to engage,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby in a statement Wednesday.

The attempted calls by Austin and Milley, which have not previously been reported, come as Russia conducts operations near the borders of NATO members Poland and Romania while the United States and its European allies conduct air-policing operations over the Baltic Sea and pour weapons and equipment into Ukraine by ground transport.

Trying Trump by Resignation Letter Is Disgraceful By Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/trying-trump-by-resignation-letter-is-disgraceful/

“But none of this happened. Trump was not charged “with falsifying business records.” The prosecutors did not secure “an indictment of Mr. Trump.” The matter was not “the highest-profile case ever brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.” Mr. Trump was not “the first American president to face criminal charges.” And Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz did “not demonstrate that the former president had intended to inflate the value of his golf clubs, hotels and office buildings.” 

The leaked judgments of a dissenting Manhattan prosecutor can’t be allowed to negate the presumption of innocence to which every American is entitled.

Y esterday’s New York Times contained a long report on a resignation letter that was leaked from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, in which it is revealed that “one of the senior Manhattan prosecutors who investigated Donald J. Trump,” Mark F. Pomerantz, “believed that the former president was ‘guilty of numerous felony violations’ and that it was ‘a grave failure of justice’ not to hold him accountable.”

Americans of all political stripes should be horrified by this development, and the leaker, whoever he may be, should be summarily fired.

Arizona Passes Bills Banning Transgender Athletes in Women’s Sports, Gender Reassignment Surgery for Minors By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/arizona-passes-bills-banning-transgender-athletes-in-womens-sports-gender-reassignment-surgery-for-minors/

Arizona passed bills Thursday banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports and minors from undergoing gender transition surgery, adding another member to the growing coalition of Republican states that have passed such measures.

It is uncertain whether Governor Doug Ducey will sign the bills. While he is a Republican, that doesn’t necessarily mean he will rubber stamp the bills, given that the Republican governors of Utah and Indiana recently vetoed their versions of the sports legislation.

Prohibiting transgender athletes from female sports has become a major Republican platform issue. Multiple red states have passed bills restricting K-12 and collegiate athletics to biological sex. Idaho was the first do so in 2020, but its law is currently entrenched in litigation, as is West Virginia’s.

In Texas, Governor Gregg Abbott has ordered investigations into medical providers and parents who enable children’s transition surgeries.

Market Innovations Make Nuclear An Energy Crisis Solution By Roy Mathews

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/03/22/market_innovations_make_nuclear_an_energy_crisis_solution_823059.html

One of the few positive takeaways from the war in Ukraine is the long overdue reconciliation of people’s overblown fear of nuclear power and the world’s need for sustainable clean energy. The current energy crisis rocking the U.S. has seen pipelines canceled and prices rising at the pump, with electric vehicles being touted as the answer. Fears of another Chernobyl have long dogged the nuclear industry and limited its appeal.

But, as they say, needs must.

The stigma of nuclear power being too prone to human error to be a viable and safe energy source may be headed to the dustbin of history. European countries that have recently moved away from nuclear power are starting to realize that dependence on Russian fossil fuels is a problem that perhaps only nuclear power can abate. Take Germany, for example: With Russia as its largest supplier of crude oil, the country has had to reconsider a decision that would shut down half of its nuclear plants this year.

Americans face triple whammy as rent, gas and electric bills surge By Irina Ivanova

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inflation-gas-prices-rent-electricity-bills-rise/

Zachary Lloyd makes $14,800 a year as a graduate teaching assistant at Florida State University — right around the poverty line for a single adult. So the 25-year-old was looking forward to a pay increase starting this fall that would net him about $1,000 more, just about covering his higher costs for groceries, fast food and gasoline.Then his lease came up for renewal, and Lloyd learned his management company was raising the rent on the Tallahassee apartment he shares with a fellow student by $250 a month.

“I was shocked when I opened the letter today — it was almost 18%, which is not covered by a pay raise,” he told CBS MoneyWatch.

Lloyd is facing a dilemma distressingly common among America’s 120 million renters. With the cost of rent, transportation and utilities all rising at double-digits, many households are forking over last year’s pay increases, and then some, just to make ends meet.

Lysenko: A cautionary tale for the West By James Mullin

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

“Follow the Science” seems to have replaced “Go with God” as humanity’s go-to prayer. At least, the left would have us think so. But science is a much more complicated construction than leftists want you to realize, and there was a not very distant time and place where “Follow the Science” led to the needless death of millions.

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who rose to prominence (and eternal infamy) in the 1930s. Lysenko was, you might say, an unelected bureaucrat in the Soviet system—if you can say that when the system itself is an unelected dictatorship. He was an agronomist and biologist. I almost said geneticist, but he surprisingly didn’t believe in genes. That is remarkable because he lived over 50 years after the epic (and accurate) studies and theories of the Augustinian Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel.

Lysenko, like most scientists, would have labored in relative faceless, harmless obscurity (see Dr. Bunsen Honeydew) and eventually had his science thoroughly repudiated, except that the State catapulted him to prominence and authority. (I know what you’re now thinking here—that I’m writing about the charismatic Dr. Anthony Fauci—but actually not so. Hang in there). Stalin himself loved this guy and his foundationless theories, and essentially put him in charge of Soviet agriculture—a placement that would leave millions of Ukrainians and Russians dead from starvation.

The Power of Terrible Ideas By Rael Jean Isaac *****

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/the_power_of_terrible_ideas.html

While many have criticized the current enthusiasm for judging the past by the standards of the present (and condemning those past leaders who did not meet them), few have noted how many currently dominant beliefs are totally disconnected from reality and have a profoundly destructive impact.  I propose to discuss two of them here: ideas about the nature of mental illness which have produced what Charles Krauthammer called “an army of broken souls foraging and freezing in the streets” and the conviction that our planet is in existential danger from human-induced climate change. The latter has led to a wholly unwarranted, hugely expensive crusade to eliminate fossil fuels.  The chief effect has been to strengthen the leverage of those countries, many of them enemies of the West, that continue to produce these fuels, which remain essential to the functioning of industrial societies.

In the 1960s, a mad idea was born, the notion that there is no such thing as mental illness. Incredibly, it would become the foundation for public policy.  The idea sprang independently from two maverick psychiatrists at opposite ideological poles, on the right U.S. psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, an unsparing libertarian, and on the left the British Ronald Laing.  Szasz disposed of mental illness by verbal sleight of hand: “Mental illnesses do not exist; indeed they cannot exist because the mind is not a bodily part or bodily organ.”  (Never mind that the brain is the bodily organ that malfunctions in mental illness.) Psychiatry is “a form of quackery because it offers cures for which there are no diseases.”  Laing treated schizophrenia, the most disabling mental illness, as a “voyage of discovery”; “we find that a person who is labeled insane is often the sanest member of his or her family.”

The Real ‘Reset’ Is Coming The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/23/the-real-reset-is-coming/

Joe Biden believes the Ukraine war will mark the start of a “new world order.” 

In the middle of the COVID global pandemic, Klaus Schwab and global elites likewise announced a “Great Reset.” 

Accordingly, the nations of the world would have to surrender their sovereignty to an international body of experts. They would enlighten us on taxes, diversity, and green policies. 

When Donald Trump got elected in 2016, marquee journalists announced partisan reporting would have to displace the old, supposedly disinterested approach to the news. 

There is a common theme here. 

In normal times progressives worry that they do not have public support for their policies. 

Only in crises do they feel that the political Left and media can merge to use apocalyptic times to ram through usually unpopular approaches to foreign and domestic problems. 

We saw that last year: fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, junk the Electoral College, and nationalize voting laws. 

These “new orders” and “resets” always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes. 

So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. 

Yes, Ketanji Brown Jackson Accused America of War Crimes. The Media is Lying About It. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/03/yes-ketanji-brown-jackson-accused-america-war-daniel-greenfield/

Fact checks were an Orwellian farce before all this. Now they’re just editorials that try to tell you that black is white and white is black.

The media’s hysterical efforts to spin Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record has escalated into an insistence that she didn’t say the things she said.

Jackson had filed a petition on behalf of Gitmo terrorists (she claims that federal public defenders don’t pick their clients, but she continued to be involved in Gitmo cases on a pro bono basis even after moving on to a law firm) and in a petition on behalf of the terrorists, which named President Bush, Rumsfeld and others, accused the United States of America of acts that “constitute war crimes and/or crimes against humanity”.

There’s zero ambiguity in this regard. It’s there in black and white.