ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Real Cost of Government Mandated Wind and Solar By Norman Rogers

Posted By on October 20th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_real_cost_of_government_mandated_wind_and_solar.html

The government and big financial institutions promote a fraudulent analysis of the cost of solar and wind electricity. Their narrative is that wind and solar are competitive with traditional fossil fuels and that the cost of wind and solar is rapidly dropping. Academics and the media amplify and spread the fraudulent analysis.

The basis of the fraud is a simple comparison of the cost per kilowatt hour at the plant fence for electricity produced by wind or solar versus electricity produced by a traditional plant. Some or all of the massive subsidies for wind and solar are ignored in such comparisons. With such a rigged comparison, wind or solar may seem competitive.

A proper comparison reveals that wind or solar are five or even ten times more expensive than natural gas or coal electricity. To understand why this is so, we have to explain some basic facts that apply to either wind or solar.

Wind or solar is erratic, intermittent electricity. It comes and goes according to the supply of wind and sunlight. Wind is erratic from day to day and usually has a seasonal cycle. Sunlight depends on clouds, seasons and of course does not work at night. The consequence is that wind or solar electricity supply must be 100% backed up by conventional electricity plants. If 100% backup is neglected, rolling blackouts are the result when there is a lull in wind or solar production. The lull can be of short duration or seasonal.

Residential rooftop solar is backed up by the connection to the electric utility. The utility has to spend money on generating plants and a distribution network to maintain backup for the residential rooftop system. When rooftop solar is present, the utility is usually undercompensated for providing the backup service. When cloudiness happens over a wide area the backup plants go into high gear. Cloudiness happens even in sunny southern California.

The cost of backup plants for rooftop solar is borne by all the customers of the utility, not just the rooftop solar users that brag about how cheap their electricity is.

Wind or solar have both economies of scale and penalties of scale. The economy of scale results from the massive expansion of the industry. The equipment is cheaper and more efficient. The penalties of scale are more subtle.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Weaponizing Our Schools Richard Cravatts’ new ebook reveals the Left’s racist assault on America’s students. Sara Dogan

Posted By on October 20th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/weaponizing-our-schools-sara-dogan/

Below is Sara Dogan’s introduction to Richard Cravatts’ new ebook on Critical Race Theory in K-12 indoctrination. Read Weaponizing Our Schools: HERE. And make sure to visit StopK12Indoctrination.org.

As the debate over Critical Race Theory has emerged in the media and garnered the attention of the nation, Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., has aided us in understanding the insidious nature of this radical new ideology now being taught to American schoolchildren and the myriad ways in which public school students are being groomed to carry out the agendas of the Left.In the following articles, Cravatts documents and exposes the left’s attempts to indoctrinate America’s youth through our public schools. We meet Bettina Love, founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network, a group recently promoted by President Biden’s Department of Education, who believes that we must “recognize America and its schools as spaces of Whiteness, White rage, and White Supremacy, all of which function to terrorize students of color.” We learn about the children’s book Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness (Ordinary Terrible Things), which claims that “Racism is a white person’s problem and we are all caught up in it” and portrays “whiteness” as a literal deal with a pointy-tailed devil. Not My Idea is now being taught to schoolchildren in 30 school districts across America. Meanwhile, 4th and 5th grade students in the Seattle Public School district are taught to question whether “Black Lives Matter in America?” and are presented with skewed data which allegedly prove that police officers, motivated by racism, unjustly murder innocent black men with impunity.

“CRT does not teach tolerance by urging school children to be kind to each other and treat each other as equals, which it purports to do,” writes Cravatts, “but instead elevates blackness by degrading whiteness, making white people seem to be regressive, intolerant, hateful, and perennially racist as part of their very nature. Thus, CRT is condemned by its critics for branding white children in this way while at the same time telegraphing to black children that they are perpetual victims in a society dominated by whites who are morally defective as a result of their racist core.”

Weaponizing Our Schools is an essential read for anyone concerned about the future of public education in America.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Jewish Students Under Attack The hostile climate on university campuses that targets Jews. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on October 20th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/jewish-students-under-attack-richard-l-cravatts/

“Anti-Semitism, disguised as anti-Zionism, is still Jew-hatred.”

As yet more evidence that Jewish students have continued to be targets of bias on university campuses, a Spring 2021 poll by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, together with the Cohen Research Group, revealed that 65% of students in the leading Jewish fraternity and sorority have “felt unsafe” on campus, while 50% of students surveyed have felt “the need to hide their identity.”

The study, which surveyed 1,027 members of the Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) fraternity and Alpha Epsilon Phi (AEPhi) sorority, confirmed what many observers have already witnessed; namely, that half of students have masked their Jewish identity and that more than fifty percent have felt it necessary to hide their support of Israel. Additionally, of those polled, some two-thirds experienced or were familiar with anti-Semitic incidents that occurred over the previous four months.

While, sadly, bias against Jewish students still includes examples of what might be termed “classic anti-Semitism,” aspersions against Jews as a religion or people, what the poll referred to as “traditional anti-Semitic tropes,” the thornier issue of identifying the new anti-Semitism is that it has emerged as part and parcel of the university’s war against Israel. So, while jokes about Jews and stereotypes of them being “greedy” or “cheap” still persist, the unfortunate side-product of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel advocacy is that it frequently morphs into something closer to anti-Semitic speech and behavior than mere “criticism of Israel.”

Thus, sentiment such as “The ‘Jewish Lobby’ has too much power in the United States” or “Zionism is a form of White Supremacy,” both of which were encountered by students being polled, suggests that the identity of Jews as the logical supporters of Zionism and the Jewish state is relevant to the biased person who expresses such thoughts. When sentiments are expressed like “Israel treats Palestinians how the Nazis treated the Jews” and derogatory statements such as “Zionists are murderers,” both of which were also revealed in the poll, it is clear that biases against Jews are regularly conflated with, and arise as a result of, the existence and behavior of the Jewish state.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is The U.S. Up To China’s Challenge?

Posted By on October 20th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/20/is-the-u-s-up-to-chinas-challenge/

News that China has launched a hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear payload around the Earth should be both a wake-up call and a call to action for America. Unfortunately, the current administration and the military it leads are woefully inadequate to the task.

The response from the Biden White House to the news that the Chinese now have a seriously threatening weapon that could vaporize American cities would have been laughable if it weren’t so frightening in its absurd naivete.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, responding to a Financial Times report that the Chinese “launch in August of nuclear-capable rocket that circled the globe took U.S. intelligence by surprise,” said flippantly the administration “welcomes stiff competition.”

Welcomes stiff competition. That sounds like something the satirical but eerily accurate Babylon Bee would concoct, And yet, there it is.

A far more accurate response came from Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who called the missile shot a “wake-up call for the United States and our allies.” It was, he said, a “Sputnik moment.”

Now the question isn’t whether the U.S. will still keep its commitment to protecting Taiwan from a Chinese attack. The really big question now is whether the White House will keep its constitutional duty to protect the U.S.

The media are already debating this “new Cold War” with China, and rightly so.

After decades of pretending China might be a friendly ally in the world, we’ve now seen the Tiger’s real stripes. Led by Xi Jinping, Beijing has moved sharply leftward to reclaim its communist legacy, breaking its Hong Kong treaty, cracking down on dissent and religious belief, creating a dystopian omnipresent online surveillance state, crushing private businesses, and engaging in what looks from afar like genocide against the Muslim Uighurs.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Are supply chain disruptions the beginning of the end of globalization? Gordon Chang

Posted By on October 20th, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/577239-are-supply-chain-disruptions-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-globalization

At the end of last week, there were 584 container ships idling off the world’s ports, waiting to be loaded or unloaded. Disruptions in the bulk cargo sector look to be even worse.

Experts suggest the problems are temporary. For instance, Bloomberg columnist Brooke Sutherland maintains that three weeks of declines in ocean freight rates tells us “the worst may be over for the supply-chain snarls that have plagued shipments of everything from Coca-Cola Co. ingredients to paint, toys, and industrial fasteners.” 

The optimism, however, is premature. The snarls could last years. Moreover, the severe disruptions, however long they persist, will help end the current period of globalization. Interconnectedness, it is now evident, has a steep price.

The backlog is serious. “Companies are waiting for goods they ordered a year ago,” Jonathan Bass, CEO of WhomHome and an onshoring advocate, told me during a recent conversation. “Predictions that we will come out of supply-chain issues in the summer of 2022 are way off base. I think 2024 is more realistic.” 

In the meantime, expect empty shelves. Vice President Kamala Harris, while in Singapore in August, suggested Americans do their holiday shopping early. “If you want to have Christmas toys for your children it might now — it might be the time to start buying them because the delay may be many, many months,” she warned. American consumers, living in a land of plenty, will have to get used to scarcity.

These unprecedented problems are the result of a confluence of short-term factors, such as worker shortages, COVID-19 control measures, and an array of misguided government policies on both sides of the Pacific. Bass also pointed out a factor almost never mentioned: “Older ships will soon be heading to the yards to be refitted with cleaner propulsion systems.” 

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Garland Weaponized The Department Of Injustice Justin Smith

Posted By on October 20th, 2021

https://thebluestateconservative.com/author/justinosmith/

America’s children are the core and heart of Her future, but one wouldn’t know it by the manner in which so many school board members across the country are willing to indoctrinate them to accept immoral and deviant personal and social behavior and hate America. Along with this indoctrination, their illiberal and tyrannical mask and vaccine mandates serve to also make our children believe that their liberty and freedom are privileges from government rather than Inalienable God-given Rights, against the parents’ succinct wishes. And most Americans would prefer, or are demanding, that these school boards actually educate and keep their children safe from drug-pushers, shooters, and rapists who roam the halls of their schools.

Instead of doing anything that truly makes schools safer and better in America, they inundate our children with homoerotic curriculum and Critical Race Theory trash that is as vile, evil, and immoral a thing as one will ever witness, in a nation that is supposedly ranked number one in education globally, although our children can’t do math and science. Then they have the gall to act as if they have been attacked and victimized when parents arrive at school board meetings to angrily confront the evil they have facilitated and perpetrated.

On September 29, 2021, Viola Garcia, president of the National School Boards Association (NSBA), wrote a letter to the Oval Office placeholder asking for help in stopping “threats and acts of violence against schoolchildren, public school board members, and other public school district officials and educators”, essentially because her fevered imagination equates parents attempting to hold school boards accountable with threats and intimidation. Her and her ilk are pushing a Marxist, Maoist Cancel Culture agenda, and anybody that expresses real opposition to that agenda are told to shut their mouths and sit down or leave. Failure to obey too often results in police officers violating those parents’ rights and forcibly removing them from the room.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bari Weiss :We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage Say no to the Woke RevolutionBari Weiss

Posted By on October 20th, 2021

https://www.commentary.org/articles/bari-weiss/resist-woke-revolution/

A lot of people want to convince you that you need a Ph.D. or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory to understand the woke movement and its worldview. You do not. You simply need to believe your own eyes and ears. 

Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools.  And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully. 

In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. Just ask Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal who was fired—fired—because she said she supports black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter.

In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. It is why statues of Grant and Washington are being torn down. And it is why William Peris, a UCLA lecturer and an Air Force veteran, was investigated for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out loud in class.

In this ideology, intentions don’t matter. That is why Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic utility worker at San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired for making what someone said he thought was a white-supremacist hand gesture—when in fact he was cracking his knuckles out of his car window.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Asian Students and NYC Exam Schools with Wai Wah Chin Glenn Loury

Posted By on October 20th, 2021

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/asian-students-and-nyc-exam-schools?token=

New York City’s exam high schools are, in many ways, the crown jewels of the city’s public education system. They’re prestigious, rigorous, and STEM-focused. And, importantly, admission to them is determined by student performance on a single test. They’re meritocratic engines that allow smart, hard-working kids to get a kind of education that would be otherwise inaccessible to many of them.

They also tend to have high concentrations of Asian American students, sometimes over 50%. My guest Wai Wah Chin, Charter President of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York, thinks this accounts for recent efforts by the mayor, the schools chancellor, and others to change admissions standards. According to Wai Wah, this attempt to make these schools “look more like the city” by admitting more black and Latino students entails discriminating against Asian American students who have earned their spot by virtue of their test performance.

This is a controversial issue, and it’s not confined to New York. Below, Wai Wah outlines why exam schools are so important, and why she is fighting to preserve a model educational program.

GLENN LOURY: Now we have actually collaborated on something. I should mention this right at the outset. The Pacific Legal Foundation produced and Rob Montz the filmmaker oversaw the production of Dream Factories, I believe is what the documentary is called, which is an investigation of the controversy in New York City about the specialized exam admissions high schools—Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech—in which you, that controversy, have been very actively involved. Maybe we could start by you telling us a little bit about the controversy and about your role in it and where things are standing now on that set of issues in New York City.

WAI WAH CHIN: Thank you, Glenn. It was great to be with you in Dream Factories. We, of course, didn’t meet at that time because the shooting of the film happens quite separately in different pieces. But I think it captured a lot of the emotions of a very important topic. And the important topic is about excellence in our schools, meritocracy, and also the anti-Asian discrimination that’s happening in the schools here in New York, as well as in many other areas in education across this country.

ELECTIONS, POLITICS Comments turned off

Democrats Are Increasingly Freaking Out About 2022 Chris Queen

Posted By on October 19th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2021/10/18/democrats-are-increasingly-freaking-out-about-2022-n1524804

The 2020 election was a tough one for Democrats. Other than the presidency and the Senate, Democrats suffered at the ballot box. The party lost 11 House seats and face the narrowest House majority in two decades. Add to the damage the beating Democrats took in state races, and 2020 looked like a pummeling indeed.

The Biden presidency hasn’t made things any better. The party is dealing with infighting between moderates and far-left members, and the president’s approval ratings are abysmal. On top of these factors, Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) became the latest among 10 key Democrats to announce their retirement ahead of the 2022 election cycle last week.

As a result, the 2022 midterm elections are looking more like an uphill battle for Democrats, and they’re freaking out about it. Back in September, Democrats were already talking about a “bloodbath” and “going for broke” on progressive agenda items, but their mood is growing increasingly fearful.

According to The Hill:

“To be blunt, I’m not feeling good about where we are,” one senior Democratic congressional aide said. “Look, it was never going to be easy or anything. It was always kind of contingent on what got done. I just think we’re starting to see how fragile this is.”

The numbers already favor the GOP. The Republicans only need to turn five seats red to gain a majority in the House, and that’s even without redistricting, which will also work to the GOP’s advantage next year.

The Senate currently sits at 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris as a tying vote, and several Democrats are vulnerable, including Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), who won a special election to fill a seat that is up for reelection this cycle.

The 2022 election is also a clear referendum on President Biden and his agenda, which have given Republicans plenty of ammunition to use throughout the campaign season. Approval numbers and recent issue polls don’t bode well for Biden and his party.

On top of all these genuine concerns for the Democrats, a slew of “longshot” candidates have entered key races, drawing attention and donations away from Democrats who stand a better chance of winning their elections. Democrat strategists have their hands full with some unviable candidates.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Christopher Steele: Product of a Corrupt FBI Christopher Steele is a symptom, not a cause, of what ails the FBI. The nation’s top law enforcement agency flagrantly involves itself in U.S. elections on behalf of the Democratic Party. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on October 19th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/18/christopher-steele-product-of-a-corrupt-fbi/

Just as the special counsel’s investigation into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane—the FBI counterintelligence probe launched in the summer of 2016 to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—is showing signs of life, one of the central figures in the hoax is attempting to burnish his sullied image.

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos has produced a documentary featuring Christopher Steele, the man responsible for the so-called dossier bearing his name. “Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier,” streamed on Hulu Monday night; promotional clips hinted that, far from a hard-hitting interview exposing Steele for the charlatan he is, Stephanopoulos gave Steele a chance to spin his story ahead of possible new indictments related to John Durham’s inquiry into the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax. 

Rather than depict Steele accurately, Stephanopoulos and ABC News social media interns repeatedly describe Steele as an “ex-British spy” or “former intelligence officer” even though Steele left MI6, the UKs version of the CIA, in 2009 to start a consulting business. (That same year, Steele presented a report on Russia to President Obama.) Steele’s now-discredited dossier, which Stephanopoulos tries to portray as “raw intelligence,” was the basis not just for the entire Russian collusion hoax but also served as key evidence to support four illicit FISA applications to obtain warrants to spy on Donald Trump and his associates.

Stephanopoulos’ goal, of course, is to convince uninformed viewers—in other words, most of Stephanopoulos’ audience on any given day—that Steele was working in an official national security capacity instead of as a Democratic political operative paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to dig up dirt on Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race.

But Steele, many folks forget, also had another funder in 2016: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An often overlooked fact about Steele is that at the same time he was being paid by the Clinton campaign and DNC, he also was being paid by the FBI as a “confidential human source,” otherwise known as an “informant.”