RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.cfact.org/2023/12/13/the-u-s-strategic-petroleum-reserve-only-has-a-20-day-supply-for-the-country/

In 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo against the United States, triggering a crude oil crisis that sent the U.S. economy into a recession. To mitigate any future shortages of oil, President Gerald Ford signed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which established the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

The SPR is centrally located along the Gulf Coast, where the oil can be distributed to nearly half of all U.S. oil refineries using interstate pipelines or barges.

Interestingly, California, the 4th largest economy in the world, has no access to the SPR as there are no pipelines over the Sierra Mountains to reach the “California Energy Island”.

A few years after the SPR was authorized, in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis in 1977, the Department of Energy was established to lessen our dependence on foreign oil.

Today, California, the 4th largest economy in the world, California is importing almost 60 percent of its crude oil demands from foreign countries to support the state’s 9 International airports, 41 Military airports, and 3 of the largest shipping ports in America!

Now, after 50 years, the Department of Energy (DOE) is comprised of approximately 14,000 federal employees, over 95,000 management and operating contractors, 83 field locations, and a $48 billion dollar budget, the United States remains a net crude oil importer. Although exports increased in the first half of 2023, the United States’ demands have also been increasing, resulting in imports exceeding exports, meaning the U.S. remains a net crude oil importer.

The United States, as a net crude oil importer, continues to rely on foreign countries to run the 118 international airports in the United States and the 500 Military airports in the United States.

Despite efforts from a group of Republican lawmakers, a Confederate statue in the Arlington National Cemetery will be removed in the coming days.

The Reconciliation Monument, known as the Confederate Statue, is part of the push to remove military installations named after the Confederacy in the wake of the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

According to a press release from the national cemetery, the statue will be removed from the cemetery by Dec. 22.

The move to remove the statue is in compliance with the Congressional mandate to remove all Confederate memorials by Jan. 1, 2024.

The Congressional mandate, passed in 2020, declared that the Department of Defense must remove all “names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America” by Jan. 1, 2024.

An Arlington National Cemetery spokesperson confirmed to Fox News Digital that safety fencing has been installed around the Confederate Memorial as preparation begins to deconstruct the memorial, which was erected in 1914.

While the work occurs, the surrounding landscape, graves, and headstones will be protected, the cemetery said.

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2023/12/16/us-relies-on-china-drc-abusive-labor-for-key-mineral-n4924807

Net zero’s dirty little secret is the African child labor and China’s forced labor for mining cobalt. But what that also means is that the United States is heavily dependent on our existential enemy and child labor for one of the most important minerals in modern society.

Even NPR recognizes the problem. “Right now, most of the cobalt the US and its allies use comes from mines that are owned or controlled by China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” the outlet reported. Of course, NPR did not explain that those supposedly wonderfully eco-friendly electric cars, besides being unreliable, are a lot dirtier than environmentalists admit, precisely because of that cobalt mining for their batteries. But our phones also require cobalt. The need for lithium ion batteries made relatively unimportant cobalt a highly desired substance within the last few decades. The U.S. was set to have one cobalt mine in Idaho, but it closed before starting to operate. We need these mines — not to chase the Biden administration’s impossible “net zero” dreams, but because the electronics that form such a key part of our society require cobalt.

I previously highlighted the ethical concerns around cobalt mining for electric vehicle (EV) batteries. According to “Ethical Consumer” in 2022: “70% of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo.” But there’s a massive child labor problem in the DRC. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), child labor is involved in Congo’s cobalt ore, copper, diamond, gold, tantalum ore, tin ore, and tungsten ore mining. Despite the smug smile on your hippie uncle’s face as he drives his Tesla, his toxic EV battery is dependent on exploitation of kids.

It gets worse. Much of the DRC’s cobalt is under the influence or control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which also has a modest little goal of taking down America and dominating the world. As of March, “China’s share of cobalt production is expected to reach half of global output, up from 44 percent currently. China’s cobalt refining reached 140,000 metric tons in 2022–77 percent share of the world’s refining capacity.” So your phone quite possibly depends on our worst enemy for its cobalt. That’s not exactly what we’d call an encouraging state of affairs. Oh, by the way, Hunter Biden was part of a venture that helped the Chinese buy one of the world’s biggest cobalt deposits.

https://www.aol.com/im-not-progressive-fetterman-breaks-120000771.html

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., is breaking with progressives on hot-button issues with his fiery support for Israel and calls for Democrats to engage on tougher immigration laws, disappointing some on the left [who want more potential Democratic voters] as he shows an independent streak.

He’s also continually scolding Democrats for not pushing Sen. Bob Menendez out of office after he was indicted on federal charges of taking bribes and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt, which the New Jersey Democrat denies.

In the 2022 campaign, Fetterman’s ties to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., prompted GOP opponent Mehmet Oz to tell voters he’d be a mere “sidekick” for the democratic socialist. But Fetterman’s recent stances point to an unorthodox brand of blue-collar liberalism, with a dash of outsider populism, in a purple state that is expected to be hotly contested again in the 2024 elections.

In an interview, the first-term Pennsylvania Democrat said his critics shouldn’t be surprised.

“I’m not a progressive,” Fetterman told NBC News. “I just think I’m a Democrat that is very committed to choice and other things. But with Israel, I’m going to be on the right [not wrong] side of that. And immigration is something near and dear to me, and I think we do have to effectively address it as well.”

Fetterman insisted he can be pro-immigration while also favoring policies to restrict the flow of migration to manageable levels, disagreeing with progressives who oppose new limits on asylum and bash some of the ideas in the negotiations as cruel.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/multi-culti-reckoning/

The explosion of support for Hamas’s assault on human decency could well turn out to be the high-water mark of the progressive Left. The authoritarian multicultural ideology generated on campuses and transmitted dutifully by the established media has reached its apex and may now begin to descend.

The signs are tentative but some are unmistakable. Corporate and university Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) departments are being slashed, and increasingly seen as both burdensome and discriminatory toward whites, Jews, and Asians. One-third of DEI professionals lost their jobs in 2022. Brands that posted Pride month messages in 2022, such as Lego and Miller Lite, have abandoned such posturing. Even the Navy deleted Pride-related messaging from Instagram and Twitter.

Perhaps more significant may be the rebellion of donors to the leading universities, prime movers of the ideology that drives everything from the DEI establishment. Money is the mother’s milk of politics and universities and foundations alike. The overt hostility toward Israel on campuses, and the resulting feeling of threat among Jewish students, makes Jewish and non-Jewish donors wonder where their money is going.

Even liberal Jews, such as Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky, have been shocked by the rise of racialized and antisemitic politics at prestigious institutions. A possible loss of Jewish voters matters little at the presidential level but could prove relevant in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Unlike their French, Canadian, and British co-religionists, they may function as a rearguard in reining in the far Left.

But the biggest loss may be financial, as well as intellectual. As William Domhoff pointed out in his 1972 book Fat Cats and Democrats, wealthy Jews have been, since the New Deal, major leading donors of the Democratic Party. Jews provide roughly half of all donations, and comprise many of Biden’s top contributors.

This shift, however, extends well beyond Jews, as many long-time Democrats recoil from the party’s embrace of an ideology—propounded by influential leftist intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault—that justifies criminal violence if committed by an oppressed identity group, a policy calculated to spark ever more ethnic turmoil.

https://victorhanson.com/civilization-versus-the-new-nihilists/

Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party.

If the Left wished radically to alter the demography of the U.S., it could have expanded legal immigration through legislation or the courts.

Instead, it simply erased the border and dynamited federal immigration law.

By fiat, nihilists ended the wall, and stopped detaining and deporting illegal aliens altogether.

Or was it worse than that when candidate Joe Biden in September 2019 urged would-be illegal aliens to “surge” the border?

As a result, through laxity and entitlement incentives, eight-million illegal entrants have swarmed the southern border under the Biden administration.

They are swamping border towns, bankrupting big-city budgets, and infuriating even Democratic constituencies.

The same nihilism applies to crime.

In the old days liberals gave light sentences to criminals or reduced bail. But today leftist prosecutors do not even seek bail. They hardly prosecute theft or random assaults.

Criminals are arrested and released the same day. Is the nihilist plan to destroy the entire body of American jurisprudence, and to ensure “equity” in being victimized?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20219/border-crisis-new-york

You could not blame Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams, or anyone else, if — as they remember the economic boom and global calm of the pre-Covid America of President Donald Trump — they were to cast their secret ballot in November for more of the “Trump Boom.”

US President Joe Biden’s disastrous Open Border policy has turned “sanctuary cities” into unrecognizable migrant camps, and New York City is at ground zero of this crisis. More than 110,000 migrants have been left off on Manhattan streets, more than twice as many as cities such as Los Angeles and Houston.

Remember when self-proclaimed “Sanctuary Martha’s Vineyard” would not accept even 50?

Not surprisingly, the New York mayor’s poll numbers have plunged as New Yorkers of all stripes looked at what the city has become, reportedly finding his management of the issue pathetic. The problem is twofold. It was not Adams who created the problem, and when he looked to Washington for financial help, he came away with the warning, “the cavalry isn’t coming.”

The impact on New York City from the “Biden border crisis” is, on one hand, incalculable regarding the destruction of its quality of life. On the other hand, you can calculate down to the dollar what it is costing New York. Adams has told every city department commissioner that there will be the need for $4 billion in budget cuts over the next 18 months to close an even larger $7.1 billion gap expected in 2024. Every agency, from the police department to the parks, will be impacted. These cuts harm the very fabric of the city’s ability to function, yet the Biden administration does not seem to have any intention of providing economic aid for a crisis of its making.

Although we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws. Virtually every one of us is the descendant of immigrants who risked everything to come to this country. Most came with a handful of currency and the name of some distant relative who would vouch for them. We recognize the enormous power that came from the collective energies of so many wishing to call themselves Americans, but that did not come about from an “open border” policy that now leaves our nation’s cities picking up the tab and, worse, that potentially leaves the country open to terrorism from migrants who are not able to be checked or from the 1.6 million “gotaways” — that we know about. It took only 19 terrorists on 9/11 to bring down the World Trade Center, in an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people.