NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Former Acting DNI Ric Grenell: Gen. Milley’s Lying About Who Decided to Shut Down Bagram By Debra Heine

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/07/former-acting-dni-ric-grenell-gen-milleys-lying-about-who-decided-to-shut-down-bagram/

Ric Grenell, President Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence, on Tuesday said General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has not been truthful about who made the disastrous decision to shut down Bagram Air Force Base before evacuating American citizens and Afghan allies from the war-torn country.

During an interview on Fox News, Grenell took aim at Milley, accusing the four-star general of falsely claiming that the commander in charge of Bagram Air Force Base, General Scott Miller, advised the Biden White House to shut the base down.

“I can tell you that that’s not true. I know that from very first hand information. General Miller did not want to close Bagram but General Milley said that he did,” Grenell told Fox News host Bill Hemmer.

During a press conference on August 18, Milley claimed that CENTCOM commander General Kenneth McKenzie, and General Miller had made the decision to close Bagram Air Force Base.

“Our task given to us at that time, our task was protect the embassy in order for the embassy personnel to continue to function with their consular service and all that. If we were to keep both Bagram and the embassy going, that would be a significant number of military forces that would have exceeded what we had or stayed the same or exceeded what we had,” Milley told reporters.

“So we had to collapse one or the other, and a decision was made. The proposal was made form CENTCOM commander and the commander on the grounds, Scott Miller, to go ahead and collapse Bagram,” Milley continued. “That was all briefed and approved, and we estimated that the risk of going out of HKIA or the risk of going out of Bagram about the same, so going out of HKIA — was estimated to be the better tactical solution in accordance with the mission set we were given and in accordance with getting the troops down to about 600, 700 number.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Weeks Away by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17732/iran-nuclear-weapons-weeks-away

Apparently desperate to revive the nuclear pact, the Biden administration at once began appeasing the ruling clerics of Iran.

From the perspective of Iran’s mullahs, Biden’s desperate efforts to resurrect the nuclear deal manifested his weak leadership and therefore a delectable opportunity for Tehran to buy time, get more concessions, advance its nuclear program and become a nuclear state.

Notwithstanding all these policies of incentives and appeasements, Iran’s mullahs continued to make excuses seemingly to drag out the nuclear talks. One of the latest overtures was that the world powers ought to wait until Iran’s newly elected president, Ebrahim Raisi, took office before resuming the nuclear talks.

By now, Raisi has been president of Iran for more than a month but there has not been the slightest effort by the Islamic Republic to restart any talks; in fact, all the while, the regime appears to have accelerated its enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade.

At the moment, the Iranian regime is reportedly 8-10 weeks away from obtaining the weapons-grade materials necessary for a nuclear weapon.

Since the Biden administration assumed office, the nuclear talks with Iran have gone nowhere. Six rounds of negotiations have been concluded with no results. In contrast, two other issues have gone too far: the Biden administration’s appeasement policies towards the Iranian regime, and the advancement of the mullahs’ nuclear program.

When the Biden administration took office, it announced that it would curb Iran’s nuclear program by returning to the 2015 nuclear deal — known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which by the way Iran never signed — and by subsequently lifting sanctions against the Iranian government.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Recall the California Ideology A careening Golden State is heading for a colossal train wreck. Voters will have to pick between the incompetent engineer or the private passenger rushing into the cab to get the engine back on track. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/08/recall-the-california-ideology/

California once was run by alternating conservatives and mostly centrist Democrats. 

True, paleo-liberal governors like Pat Brown greatly expanded the welfare state. But they also believed in pushing integration, building freeways, dams, aqueducts, and power plants, while preventing forest fires, directing the mentally ill into state hospitals, and ensuring the state enhanced the housing, timber, oil and gas, nuclear, and agricultural industries.  

So why and how would anyone deliberately destroy that heritage? 

Why allow California to have the highest aggregate basket of income, sales, property, and capital gains taxes in the nation, the highest gas and power prices in the continental United States, and nearly the worst schools and infrastructure, the largest populations of homeless, welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and, soon, criminals?

Remember that the left-wing of the Democratic Party became hyper-wealthy through globalization and the tech revolution. Coastal universities like Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley USC, and UCLA became global nexuses of millions who flocked to California to learn business, engineering, science, math, and the professions. 

University endowments were no longer measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars but in the many billions. Hollywood and professional sports now had a lucrative worldwide audience of billions. 

The market capitalization of Silicon Valley was to be measured in the trillions of dollars, as the world bought iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks to Google, tweet, and use Facebook. The result was the greatest concentration of wealth in such a small space in the history of civilization. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Brrr… Arctic Sea Ice Melt the Lowest in 15 Years, Antarctic Sea Ice Above Average By Jim Hoft

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/brrr-arctic-sea-ice-melt-lowest-15-years-antactic-sea-ice-average/

Do you remember when AOC said we had only 12 years left on the planet due to “climate change”?

Yeah… She’s an idiot.We’re going to be fine – and we don’t need to destroy the US economy to save the planet.

The Arctic sea ice is the highest it’s been in nine years. It has increased more than 30% from last year.

And Antarctic sea ice is way above normal.

Tony Heller

@Tony__Heller
The Arctic Ocean gained a record amount of sea ice during the first week of September. Most years the Arctic loses ice, but this year ice extent has increased almost 200,000 km. sq. This will not be reported by @CNN @BBCNews or the @nytimes

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Totalitarian woke culture drives out a true scholar at Portland State University By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/totalitarian_woke_culture_drives_out_a_true_scholar_at_portland_state_university.html

Peter Boghossian become newsworthy about four years ago when he co-published in legitimate academic journals nonsensical papers about dog rape at dog parks and the penis as a social structure. Academia, rather than being embarrassed and reforming itself, doubled down, turning him into a pariah. His efforts to teach open inquiry and logical thinking in his classes also saw his woke students turn on him. Boghossian has finally given up. He resigned from Portland State University and published an illuminating open letter explaining exactly what drove him out.

In his open letter, which you can read in its entirety at Common Sense with Bari Weiss, Boghossian describes an academic system that has completely abandoned any fealty to the old values of curiosity, rationality, open-mindedness, and the art of challenging people’s ideas without seeking to destroy them. Indeed, given that his specialties “are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method,” and his classes cover topics such as “Science, Pseudoscience, and The Philosophy of Education,” Boghossian has built his academic life around principles of free inquiry, free speech, and logic.

Boghossian explains that, in the past, universities supported these principles but, at least at Portland State University, they have abandoned each one:

I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.

I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Google Launches Antiracism Program Teaching That America Is a ‘System of White Supremacy’ By Caroline Downey

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/google-launches-antiracism-program-teaching-that-america-is-a-system-of-white-supremacy/

Google has launched an antiracism program for employees, featuring training workshops and speaker sessions, that teaches the principles of critical race theory, chiefly that America was founded on white supremacy.

The initiative invokes the familiar language of the radicalized ideology, including “intersectionality,” “white privilege,” and “systemic racism,” according to whistleblower documents obtained by Christopher Rufo of City Journal.

In one segment of the program coined “Allyship in Action,” a group of trainers including Google’s head of systemic allyship Randy Reyes and consultants from The Ladipo Group, ask employees to confront their “power and privilege” and rank themselves according to their racial background and sexual orientation.

A number of videos presented to employees conveyed the message that racism is an irredeemable stain on America’s national fabric and that white people have profited from white supremacy, even if they are innocent of engaging in it personally.

Alongside Google’s former global lead for diversity strategy Kamau Bobb, 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones says in one video that  “the first Africans being sold on the White Lion [slave ship in 1619] is more foundational to the American story” than “the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock,” Rufo confirms. She said she was inspired to spearhead the New York Times’s 1619 Project to prove her hypothesis that every facet of modern day America is rooted in slavery.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Stupidity Is No Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Excuse For Team Biden Ernest S. Christian

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/09/stupidity-is-no-get-out-of-jail-free-excuse-for-team-biden/

Team Biden must be held to account for the lethal consequences of its deliberate acts.

Let’s face it. Neither the lethal fiscal and monetary time-bomb implanted in the American economy nor the crimes committed against God and humanity on the world stage in Afghanistan are the result of careless dimwitted “inadvertence.” Those outrages were, instead, in both cases the results of deliberate acts by certified Wokesters.

Take, for example, the injury they are doing to the economy. Butterfingered Wokesters did not “mistakenly” punch the buttons that ignited inflation and set America on the present high-risk, printing-press-money, debt-ridden path toward financial crisis.

Quite the opposite is true.  It is almost as if the Wokesters started off with the strategic goal of doing harm to the economy of the United States – and then meticulously took the tactical steps necessary to complete the job:

dramatically increase taxes that do more economic harm than they raise in revenue for the government to spend (If that is not absurd, what is?);
increase deficit spending and federal debt to unsustainable levels;
print lots of fiat money (about $120 billion a month) by selling the debt to the Federal Reserve;
bribe people to work less and produce fewer goods while consuming more by giving them free money;
put upward pressure on prices (too many free dollars chasing too few goods); and
put the Federal Reserve in the absurd and high-risk position of either continuing to print money and keep interest rates near zero or trying to thread the needle by gradually reducing its purchases of federal debt and gradually increasing interest rates with almost no margin for error and with no ability to stop the Biden Wokesters from messing everything up with another big spending spree.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Has A ‘Whole Of Government’ Plan For Everything … Except Rescuing Americans From Afghanistan

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/09/biden-has-a-whole-of-government-plan-for-everything-except-rescuing-americans-from-afghanistan/

After the Supreme Court decided not to stop a Texas abortion law from going into effect, President Joe Biden promised that he’d “launch a whole-of-government effort to respond to this decision.” No one knows what that means, exactly, but Biden has promised “whole-of-government” solutions for everything under the sun. Everything, that is, except rescuing Americans stuck in Talibanistan.

In his eight short months in the White House, Biden has made the already empty phrase “whole–of-government” a nauseating cliché.

He has a “whole-of-government” agenda to fight COVID, to tackle global warming, to “create good-paying, union jobs for Americans.”

His administration announced a “whole-of-government process that will lift up the voices of federal scientists of many perspectives and backgrounds.”

He promises a “whole-of-government effort” to promote competition in the American economy.

He says he will deliver “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

A Man for All Seasons of Border Chaos The President is wasting one of the great political opportunities in recent memory. By James Freeman

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-man-for-all-seasons-of-border-chaos-11631138875?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Has any recent President enjoyed a better opportunity and a greater incentive to enact immigration reform than Joe Biden ? The U.S. is suffering its worst worker shortage ever recorded at the same time it continues to suffer a humanitarian crisis as job seekers and unaccompanied minors mix with opportunistic criminals in the chaos at our southern border. Mr. Biden is desperate to appear caring and competent after his disgracefully executed departure from Afghanistan. He may never have a better set of facts to drive a bipartisan plan to boost border enforcement and increase legal migration. All he has to do is stop indulging the Sandernista desire to remake America and instead focus on solving the country’s problems.

As for the need for more willing workers, the government reported today that open positions in the U.S. hit another record high. Jeff Cox at CNBC notes:

Job openings outnumbered the unemployed by more than 2 million in July as companies struggled to fill a record number of vacancies, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.
The department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which the Federal Reserve watches closely for signs of slack in employment, showed 10.9 million positions open. That was much higher than the FactSet estimate of 9.9 million and the June total of 10.18 million.

Lucia Mutikani at Reuters adds that the JOLTS report “also showed a steady increase in the number of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs, a sign of confidence in the labor market.” She adds:

“This is a super tight job market,” said Jennifer Lee, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto. “The ongoing struggle to find the right worker for the right role continues.”

Many of the right workers are eager to join us from other countries. But instead of crafting solutions to problems in immigration policy, the President pretends they don’t exist. The Journal’s Jason Riley notes:

Remember when the White House assured us in the spring that the migrant surge on the southern border was “seasonal” and nothing to worry about? Oops. “The Border Patrol made about 200,000 arrests at the southern border in July, marking the busiest month at the border in 21 years and a 12% increase over the previous month,” the Journal reported in August, citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. Detention centers are so overwhelmed that illegal immigrants are being released into the population without being screened for Covid.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The World Is Getting Safer From Floods By Bjorn Lomborg

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/flood-climate-change-ipcc-united-nations-infrastructure-deaths-cost-severe-weather-11631134276?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Each Thursday contributor Bjorn Lomborg will provide some important background so readers can have a better understanding of the true effects of climate change and the real costs of climate policy.

Climate change may raise waters and more Americans than ever live in floodplains, but technology and infrastructure protect them.Climate change may raise waters and more Americans than ever live in floodplains, but technology and infrastructure protect them.

Though the images of abandoned cars in waterlogged East Coast streets might make you think otherwise, the relative toll that floods take on the U.S.—in property and lives—has decreased over time. Flooding costs as a share of gross domestic product declined almost 10-fold since 1903 to 0.05% of GDP, while annual flood death risk—fatalities per million—dropped almost threefold. World-wide data are sparser, but flood research shows costs relative to GDP and deaths relative to population have decreased globally from 1980 to 2010.

Scary headlines about rising flood costs tend to come from misleading statistics of total damages, which say more about U.S. economic growth than they do about climate change. Since the start of the 20th century, the U.S. population has quadrupled and annual GDP has increased 36-fold. There are more people and structures in the U.S. than ever—including in floodplains. A flood that hits, say, Atlanta, will encounter far more people and buildings today than 30 years ago. The number of exposed housing units in the city’s floodplain went up by 58% from 1990 to 2010. At the same time, greater wealth and better technology have made people and property in low-lying areas safer from floods. Only when you look at damages in the context of GDP can you filter out what’s a sign of growing wealth and what indicates flood resiliency or vulnerability.