WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Danger of Shrinking American Naval Power China may invade Taiwan within six years, admirals warn. Is the U.S. ready? By Seth Cropsey

Posted By on August 13th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-navy-china-taiwan-military-spending-great-power-competition-war-combat-beijing-11628784300?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

The Chinese military will likely attack Taiwan within six years, Adm. Phil Davidson, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told Congress in March, just before retiring from the Navy. More generally, he said, Beijing’s long-term objective—supplanting the U.S. and remaking the global order to benefit the Chinese Communist Party—will feature confrontation.

Adm. Davidson’s assessment is the clearest articulation of contemporary strategic realities by a major government or military official in the past decade. China is showing its ambitions, increasing its assertiveness in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and ratcheting up military pressure against Taiwan. The Chinese strategic tradition prizes both patience and decisive action when the balance of forces appears favorable.

The implication of Adm. Davidson’s assessment—and a similar one offered this spring by his successor, Adm. John Aquilino —is that any major reduction in U.S. combat strength, particularly naval power, will tempt the Chinese Communist Party to strike.

This assessment should inform the Navy’s recently announced “divest to invest” plan. The Navy will “divest” from older, larger platforms such as the Ticonderoga-class cruiser and reduce its large surface combatant force, including Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, by around one-third.

In turn, the Navy will “invest” in smaller, more numerous platforms, specifically a new Constellation-class frigate and a variety of unmanned surface combatants and undersea vehicles. The Navy will also speed up production of its Virginia-class submarines, the most modern in the fleet, and develop a yet-to-be-defined new submarine class. The Navy hopes “divest to invest” will make the fleet more distributed, more survivable and more lethal.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Dumbing Oregon Down The soft bigotry of low progressive expectations for minority students.

Posted By on August 13th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dumbing-oregon-down-kate-brown-proficiency-requirement-high-school-graduation-11628796270?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Why didn’t we think of that? Politicians and school officials in Oregon are embarrassed that too many minority children fail tests designed to confirm they’ve mastered the “essential skills” that high school is meant to teach. So in the name of racial equity, they’ve now done the progressive thing. Instead of lifting graduation rates by boosting student performance, they’re eliminating the proficiency requirement.

Gov. Kate Brown signed the bill on July 14, but the Oregonian reports her office never issued a press release and the bill was not entered into the legislative database until two weeks later—a “departure from the normal practice” of entering bills the same day they are signed.

The Secretary of the Senate blamed the delay on a staffer experiencing medical issues. But it’s hardly surprising that Gov. Brown and the Democratic Legislature would not wish to draw attention to this attempt to dumb the state down.

The new law extends until 2024 a temporary suspension of the state requirements that kids demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, and math to graduate from high school. Previously, in addition to demonstrating proficiency via Oregon’s Assessments of Knowledge and Skills test, students had the option of taking other standardized tests or submitting a work project to teachers. The new legislation gives the state’s Department of Education until 2022 to write new standards.

The purpose of public education is to provide students with the skills they need to succeed in the world. It is a terrible disservice to issue a diploma that fools them into believing they’ve mastered basic skills they haven’t. It is particularly cruel for the minority students who will pay the highest price when the real world confirms that their high schools have defrauded them of a real education.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Save the American Constitutional Republic: A Message to All Good Americans  By Nurit Greenger

Posted By on August 13th, 2021

https://newsblaze.com/thoughts/opinions/save-the-american-constitutional-republic-a-message-to-all-good-americans_181174/

The Biden government and the Democrat Party are modern slave owners. Their Marxist policies are modern enslavement of the American people. All good Americans who love and care about their country must help to save the American constitutional republic, because the Democrats are working to destroy it.

Democrat Slave Owners

We do not need to ride on their indoctrination policy through Critical Race Theory (CRT) history and the American slaves’ owners past because we are currently riding along with their wave of enslaving the American people’s through their behemoth Marxist government.

Radio host Mark Levin and the author of the book American Marxism is not a modern Spartacus, the gladiator who, along with Crixus, Gannicus, Castus, and Oenomaus, was one of the escaped slave leaders in the Third Servile War, a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. All sources about Spartacus agree that he was a former gladiator and an accomplished military leader.

BUT, through his loud public voice on radio, TV and books, Mark Levin makes it possible for all good Americans, those the Democrats call ‘deplorables’ and ‘Neanderthals’ to make an impact to thwart the Marxist Democrat Party (MDP) and save our beloved American Republic. For eternity American history books will tell our story – the SPARTACUS! – The story of those who rose up to save the Republic while shouting, “I AM SPARTACUS!”

What Levin Sees

Levin notes that Marxists have infiltrated American politics, education, and culture.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Communist China Continues Illegal Actions in the South China Sea by Judith Bergman

Posted By on August 13th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17619/china-illegal-actions-south-china-sea

“The Chinese government’s position on the arbitration is clear, ‘not accept, not participate, and not recognize’… The ‘arbitral award’ deemed by China as ‘a piece of scrap paper’ has long been thrown into the dustbin of history.” — Wu Shicun, President of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, Global Times, July 12, 2021.

“China’s military recently deployed electronic warning and surveillance aircraft and helicopters on two disputed islands in the South China Sea in what analysts say is a sign that the People’s Liberation Army has begun routine air operations from the bases.” — The Washington Times, July 13, 2021.

In March, a huge Chinese fishing fleet descended on Whitsun Reef, which lies within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. The Philippine government called on China to cease “militarizing the area”.

China also claims sovereignty over — and has militarized some of — the Paracel Islands, which it has occupied since 1974, and are also claimed by both Vietnam and Taiwan.

It has been five years since the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in a legally binding decision known as the South China Sea Arbitration Case, ruled against Communist China’s claims to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea.

The Philippine government filed the case against China in 2013 after China seized a reef over which both countries claim sovereignty. In addition to ruling against China’s claim of historic rights to the South China Sea, the court found that China had violated the Philippines’ sovereign rights in its exclusive economic zone by interfering with its fishing and petroleum exploration, as well as by constructing artificial islands in the Spratly Islands archipelago, which had caused “severe harm to the coral reef environment”.

China has constructed artificial islands around seven reefs in the Spratly Islands archipelago. The islands are central to Beijing’s apparent ambition to “have absolute control” over the South China Sea, which holds an estimated 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 11 billion barrels of oil in proven and probable reserves, in addition to maritime resources such as fish. Crucially, the South China Sea is also an essential sea route, which sees a third of the world’s global shipping pass through it every year. Already in 2018, US Navy Admiral Philip Davidson, then Commander of United States Indo-Pacific Command, said that China’s construction of the artificial islands meant that China is capable of “controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States”.

On the fifth anniversary of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s decision, China continues vehemently to reject the ruling in its entirety. According to Wu Shicun, president of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies:

“The Chinese government’s position on the arbitration is clear, ‘not accept, not participate, and not recognize.’ This has come to be widely recognized and accepted by the international community. The ‘arbitral award’ deemed by China as ‘a piece of scrap paper’ has long been thrown into the dustbin of history.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

MY SAY: ELECTIONS 2022

Posted By on August 12th, 2021

Here are the  Republicans who voted in favor of the Infrastructure bill who are running in 2022
Mike Crapo, Idaho- site runs running tally of US debt 2022

Chuck Grassley, Iowa- May run in 2022
John Hoeven, North Dakota 2022

Lisa Murkowski, Alaska- running in 2022

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Hundred-Year Road To CRT A brief look at the progressive agenda in education reveals that critical race theory is just the latest in a long series of attempts to deform and ultimately fracture the country. By Larry Sand

Posted By on August 12th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/the-hundred-year-road-to-crt/

While critical race theory has rightfully garnered much attention of late, it is simply the latest step in advancing what is known as cultural Marxism. Many people lay the origins of America’s left turn to the 1960s, but in fact, it actually dates back to the Progressive Era, a time of social and political reform that started over a hundred years ago. While eliminating some government corruption and granting suffrage for women were positive steps, the early 20th century movement ushered in an era of radical thought that has never left us. What follows are a few stand-out points of the far-left’s invasion into education.

“The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible.” These radical words were uttered in 1909 by Woodrow Wilson as president of Princeton, four years before he became the 28th president of the U.S. (When Wilson won his election in 2012, socialist Eugene Debs received 6 percent of the vote.)

In 1916, education reformer John Dewey began professing what we now call “social justice.” At the same time, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist came upon the scene. He believed that it was most effective to spread revolutionary ideology slowly and incrementally. By doing it gradually, he thought that enough people would eventually be won over to Marxist thought. His approach eventually became known as the “long march through the institutions.”

In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School, came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—hated capitalism and traditional morals. (Marcuse’s dreary One-Dimensional Man was omnipresent when I went to college in the late 1960s.) The professors did not stay in their homeland long, however. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and unfortunately, they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

The 1940s saw the country involved with World War II, and we then focused on regaining domestic tranquility in the 1950s. But things became unhinged in the 1960s. Radicals ruled many college campuses and Saul Alinsky, the uber-leftist community organizer, was hired by the National Education Association as a trainer. John Lloyd, an NEA insider at the time, warned that to understand the union one must learn about Alinsky. Reading Rules for Radicals, will help one “understand NEA more profoundly than reading anything else,” he said, because the organization was modeled on Alinsky’s precepts, which the union used to train its staff.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

American Armageddon What started out as elite woke nonsense now warps everyone’s daily life. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 12th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/american-armageddon/

Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago. 

The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life. 

The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year—with complete impunity. 

There is zero effort to stop them. Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.

Have we ever had a president who made no pretense about destroying federal immigration law and asking of Americans what he does not of illegal aliens? 

Joe Biden has also conceded that his hold on housing evictions deliberately defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably did not have the legal authority to ignore the court, but did not really care. 

As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.

America has also never quite seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism. 

At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment, and record worker shortages, Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords—even after a prior year of such free housing. 

In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed. 

Such insanity means not only that labor-short employers cannot provide goods and services to American consumers. The new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and idle than to get a job and be productive. 

Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Progressives’ ‘Green Energy’ Boondoggle Based on Fantasy and Greed The unholy alliance of Big Business and Big Government. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on August 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/progressives-green-energy-boondoggle-based-fantasy-bruce-thornton/

Last Thursday Joe Biden posed for a photo op with representatives from automobile manufacturers. They gathered there to mark the Biden administration’s plan to raise the miles-per-gallon standard that gasoline powered vehicles must achieve––52 MPG by 2026. The compensation for automakers will comprise more regulatory credits for carmakers and subsidies for electric vehicle (EV) consumers, which will lead to higher prices for trucks and SUVs to offset their losses on EVs. This means consumers of those popular vehicles will be subsidizing EV drivers. And more taxpayer money will go to increasing available electricity, providing more and faster charging stations, and improving battery capacity.

As the Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Behold Big Business colluding with Big Government to grab subsidies and raise consumer prices,” a form of “corporate socialism, or state capitalism.” This unholy alliance calls to mind the “military-industrial complex” Dwight Eisenhower warned about in 1961, a warning still pertinent today.

At least during the Cold War a nuclear-armed Soviet Union posed an existential threat that justified cooperation between politics and the armaments industries. Today, the purveyors of anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming (ACGW) ––the more accurate label masked by the euphemism “climate change”–– are using a dubious theory riddled with uncertainty to justify such crony capitalist policies. The challenges to ACGW in the last few decades have exposed those uncertainties and the dubious “science” proponents claim to be “settled,” and so can justify spending trillions  of taxpayer dollars,

For example, MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer have written, “We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.” So too physicist Steven E. Koonin, who writes in his new book Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.”

On top of the contested rationale for pouring billions of tax-payer dollars into one industry, the logistics of enlarging electricity production for “green” technology like wind turbines, solar panels, and half-ton batteries for EVs, not to mention expanding exponentially the electrical grid, are formidable, as Mark Mills has reported:

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany Will Spend $41 Million to ‘Discover’ Causes of Present-Day Anti-Semitism Will the “investigation” include the Qur’an and Hadith? Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on August 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/germany-will-spend-41-million-dollars-discover-hugh-fitzgerald/

Yes, it’s a puzzlement, all right. What makes so many people – mainly Palestinians and Turks in Germany, Palestinians and Moroccans in the Netherlands, Palestinians and Egyptians in Italy, Palestinians and Pakistanis in Great Britain, Palestinians and North Africans in France – so full of hatred for Jews and the Jewish state? What moves Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, and Nihad Awad, and Linda Sarsour, to come down so hard on “the Jews”? This question requires, the Germans believe, generously subsidized deep research, and they are – it’s understandable, given their regrettable past — eager to fund it. And that is what they have just announced they will embark upon such research, as discussed here: “German Government to Spend $40 Million on Researching What Fuels Antisemitism, Racism,” by Sharon Wrobel, Algemeiner, August 4, 2021. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Will outraged parents reclaim America from this far-left madness? By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on August 12th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/will_outraged_parents_reclaim_america_from_this_farleft_madness.html

Usually, revolutions start at the bottom, with ordinary people pushing back against the tyranny of the powerful, either to create liberty (as happened in America) or to establish their own tyranny (as happens with all socialist revolutions). In America, though, we’re seeing a revolution of the powerful against the little people. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way powerful people are seeking to impose three revolutions on children: Transgenderism, masks, and Critical Race Theory. Parents are beginning to push back, but more of them need to do so and they need to push harder.

On the transgenderism front, the left still seems to have the upper hand. Children’s television is saturated with transgenderism, whether it’s Disney using the Muppet Babies to push transgenderism or Nickelodeon having the venerable Blue, of Blue’s Clues, and tuneless drag queens engage the same three-to-eight-year-old set in the wonders of imaginary sexual identities.

Worse, the American Academy of Pediatrics (“AAP”) – that is, your child’s doctor — is actively pushing transgenderism despite the absence of any scientific basis for doing so. Abigail Shrier, who has bravely spoken out about the huge pressure on girls who once were tomboys to take hormones and slice off their breasts, now notes that the American Academy of Pediatrics is stifling all dissent:

Is it safe for adolescents to undergo gender “transition”? Is it wise for children to take hormones that block puberty? The American Academy of Pediatrics not only has answered these questions in the affirmative but is determined to stifle any debate. On Friday the AAP told an international consortium of more than 100 clinicians and researchers who doubt the reigning orthodoxy that they couldn’t set up an information booth at the association’s national conference. The cosmetics company L’Oreal and the National Peanut Board will be there, but not the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.

When it comes to masks and children, the AAP is also uninterested in either evidence-based thinking or dissent. The same organization that boasts Pfizer as one of its supporters insists that all children over two should be masked. This is despite a study showing that children suffer instant oxygen deprivation (as we all do) when masks are stuck on their faces, only they suffer more.