ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Why all the ‘climate crisis’ mumbo-jumbo doesn’t add up By Mark C. Ross

Posted By on August 14th, 2021

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

Fear is a great motivator, but it comes with a catch.  It tends to inhibit good decision-making.  Demagogues love it because it works so well.  Right now, the Northern Hemisphere is having serious heat waves in many locations.  Oy, vey!  But wait…let me look at this here calendar.  Oh, gee — it’s the middle of August.  Just a coincidence, I guess.

We used to learn in school that there were these things called ice ages.  The last one, the Pleistocene, ended about 10,000 years ago, and it lasted only about 2.5 million years, give or take.  At its peak, 30% of the Earth’s surface was covered with ice.  The oceans were way lower, too. 

The jury is still out on why ice ages happen and why they end.  Back in the 1970s, it was established that the sun goes through a 22-year intensity cycle…sort of.  The hockey stick guy, Michael Mann, wrote an article for Scientific American explaining that his bungled warming prediction was the result of forgetting to include the solar cycle in the data used for his computer model.  I commented online that that was a pretty amateurish mistake for someone who gets paid to be a scientist.  They then yanked my commenting privilege, thus demonstrating the corruption of science by politics.  I didn’t renew my subscription after having one for 30 years, and they spent a bunch of money junk-mailing me to send them the next check.

There’s also this pesky thing called tectonics, in which the Earth’s land masses move around slowly, sometimes bumping into each other, causing large-scale buckling such as the Himalayas.  One of the tip-offs for the establishment of this concept is the uncanny way that South America fits right into the west coast of Africa, just like a part of a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Somehow, it seems, change is now a bad thing, although it’s always been inevitable.  Oh, yeah — there are the demagogues and engineered ignorance, courtesy of your local union-thug teachers.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Obama Lies, Cashill Corrects By Theodore S. Williams

Posted By on August 14th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/obama_lies_cashill_corrects.html

In November 2020, Barack Obama released his newest memoir, A Promised Land.  Now, hot on his heels, comes Jack Cashill’s Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, a savvy and ever-diligent effort to prevent fake news from becoming fake history.

Unsurprisingly, many of Obama’s newly offered truths are woefully inconsistent with those he formerly foisted on us.  I’ve lost track of whether this is version 1.2, 2.1, or 3.0.  In any event, we have yet another layer of Obama’s ipse dixits to add to his earlier ones, undoubtedly also likewise intended to be gospel and therefore ineligible for further questioning.  (Fat chance!)  

Thankfully, truth warrior Jack Cashill, the original Obamologist, continues to remind us of the earlier versions that Obama provided so we can track the layers of obfuscation, the fake corrections, and stick with the only reality that can be documented so far.

Cashill’s book also provides the omitted context within which to evaluate Obama’s claims.  The thirty-plus chapters address such issues as the curiously still evolving purported facts of Obama’s childhood, the as yet unanswered questions about Obama’s birth date and location, and related smokescreens. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Four Horsemen of the Biden Apocalypse By Jeff Crouere

Posted By on August 14th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/the_four_horsemen_of_the_biden_apocalypse.html

In the waning days of the Trump administration, the country was showing signs of economic improvement, people were feeling more confident about battling COVID, and the border was relatively secure as the wall was finally being constructed.

What a difference seven months can make.  It has been a horrific 207 days since President Joe Biden and his radical administration were unleashed on the country.

In effect, a political apocalypse is approaching.  In the New Testament Book of Revelation, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are revealed to be “Conquest, War, Famine, and Death.”  In the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel, the four horsemen are referred to as “sword, famine, wild beasts, and plague.”

In the era of Joe Biden, the four horsemen of our political apocalypse are the border invasion, the economic catastrophe, the assault on our families, and the use of the COVID plague to eliminate our constitutional rights.

1. Invasion.  Biden inherited a secure border and immediately decided to destroy the progress of President Donald Trump and create an unmitigated disaster for Americans.  The border wall was foolishly stopped, the policy of “catch and release” was reinstituted, the “Remain in Mexico” policy was ended, and illegal aliens were given an invitation to enter the United States.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Humiliation in Afghanistan By Byron York

Posted By on August 14th, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-humiliation-in-afghanistan

HUMILIATION IN AFGHANISTAN. The government of Afghanistan is falling fast in the face of a new Taliban offensive. The United States is urging Americans to “leave Afghanistan immediately.” The Biden administration has sent a small force of troops to speed the evacuation. In a particularly telling development, the U.S. is asking the Taliban — pretty please! — not to target the American embassy when they take over the capital of Kabul.

At the Pentagon Wednesday, a reporter asked spokesman John Kirby, a retired Navy admiral, whether the Defense Department “could have done a better job…in articulating what the goals were in Afghanistan and what things were supposed to look like or what they’re not expected to look like when we leave?”

Kirby’s answer was painfully revealing. He began by saying he couldn’t speak for the entire 20-year history of the Afghan war. He conceded that “the goals did migrate over time.” And then he said: “It would be wrong for us not to acknowledge that we did help enable some progress in Afghanistan. More children in schools, including girls, economic and political and social opportunities for women. A democratically elected government — not saying it’s not flawless, but a government. And living conditions that are much better, including life expectancy.”

Kirby echoed a statement made nearly five years ago, in October 2016, by then-Secretary of State John Kerry. Since the war began, Kerry said, “maternal mortality in childbirth in Afghanistan has gone down by 75 percent. Average life expectancy has risen from 42 years to 62 years. Access to basic health care has skyrocketed from nine percent to 67 percent. In 2001, there was only one television station, and it was owned by the government. Now, there are 75 stations and all but two are privately owned. Back then, there were virtually no cell phones, zero. Today, there are 18 million cell phones covering about 90 percent of residential areas connecting Afghans to the world.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Afghanistan Illustrates Biden’s Disastrous Foreign-Policy Instincts By David Harsanyi

Posted By on August 14th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/afghanistan-illustrates-bidens-disastrous-foreign-policy-instincts/

He’s usually wrong, and he’s never called to account for his policy flip-flops.

” The problem is that his instincts are complete garbage.”

T he unfolding disaster in Afghanistan is a bipartisan, trans-administrational failure. It is a humiliation.

Whatever your position is on the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the fact is that after 20 years, after thousands of lives and hundreds of billions spent on the military, police, training, infrastructure and education, the country is likely to fall to radicals in less than 20 days. As of this writing, the Taliban are routing Afghan troops with seeming ease, taking Kandahar, Herat, and closing in on Kabul. The United States has been forced to send 3,000 troops to evacuate Americans to avoid another Fall of Saigon moment.

And for the past 20 years, Joe Biden has been on every side of nearly every position on Afghanistan — usually the wrong one at the wrong time. It’s surreal that a person so uncannily incompetent, so tenaciously wrong on foreign policy, could rise to the presidency, but here we are.

It’s true that support for invading Afghanistan after 9/11 was overwhelming. In October 2001, a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll found that 88 percent of Americans backed military action abroad, and 66 percent supported “sending large numbers of ground troops into combat in Afghanistan.” The United States was going in to weed out those who attacked us. What about the aftermath?

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

How Much Worse Can It Get? By Mark Krikorian

Posted By on August 14th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-much-worse-can-it-get/

I thought for sure the arrest numbers at the border would go down a little in July, if only because of the brutal summer heat.

I was wrong.

Border “encounters” continued their climb under the Biden administration, reaching about 213,000, up 13 percent from June. Of those, about 200,000 were Border Patrol arrests (the rest were illegals at ports of entry).

Perhaps most alarming is that the illegal surge continues to globalize. The share of Border Patrol arrests of illegals not from Mexico or the Northern Triangle countries of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) has doubled over the past six months, from about 15 percent in March to 29 percent in July. (See all the numbers here and here.) 

In fact, the focus on the “Northern Triangle” might have to be modified. While Guatemala and Honduras are still major sources of illegals, El Salvador has been pushed out of fourth place among source countries of illegals; of the 57,000 arrests of non-Mexican/NTCA aliens, 17,000 were from Ecuador, 1,000 miles further south, far more than the 12,000 from El Salvador. Is Vice President Harris going to fix the “root causes” in Ecuador, too?

None of this should be a surprise. My colleague Todd Bensman recently visited a smuggling hub on the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border and published a series of posts under the heading “A United Nations of Illegal Immigration,” in which he described the open transit of people from Mauretania, Cuba, Senegal, Eritrea, and elsewhere. Many are Haitians who were firmly settled in Chile and Brazil, but who are taking Biden up on his invitation to, as Bensman put it, “apply for asylum and secure an economic upgrade.” Of course, resettlement in another country makes them ineligible for asylum, meaning that all of them will lie to U.S. authorities and pretend to have come straight from Haiti.

Even as the total number of arrests rose, the number expelled under the Title 42 public-health order dropped 9 percent, to account for less than half of total arrests. This means that, with a few exceptions, the majority of illegal aliens arrested in July by the Border Patrol were released into the United States, unlikely ever to be made to leave. Of those released, perhaps half won’t even bother to apply for asylum, having successfully used a claim of fear as a gambit for release; of those who do apply, most will be rejected, but stay anyway. That means in July, the Biden border crisis will have been responsible for at least, say, 75,000 new illegal aliens (not counting the got-aways, whose numbers are documented (by remote cameras and other means) to have been increasing as the Border Patrol is overwhelmed with caring for the families and teens Biden’s policies have attracted).

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fear and Self-Loathing at American Express A classic capitalist enterprise attacks capitalism. James Freeman

Posted By on August 14th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fear-and-self-loathing-at-american-express-11628884963?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

This has been the year of woke and weak corporate CEOs trying to signal virtue by endorsing leftist politics and attacking Republicans. But now we have a bizarre case of a business attacking itself. The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo writes this week in the New York Post about a lecture hosted by American Express. He reports that at the Amex corporate event a guest speaker argued that the system of capitalism was founded on racism and that “racist logics and forms of domination” have shaped Western society from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Mr. Rufo quotes the insufferable lecturer telling Amex employees, “You are complicit in giving privileges in one community against the other, under the pretext that we live in a meritocratic system where the market judges everyone the same.”

Well, it’s true that the company’s advertisements have touted the privileges enjoyed by consumers who use its ubiquitous green cards. But the history of American Express is the story of a company that has thrived by offering its many services to a broader and broader clientele. The firm’s website says it has more than 100 million cards in use—accepted by millions of merchants. Sure, it has generally served a higher-income segment than Visa and Mastercard, but there are options for all kinds of consumers.

Mr. Rufo describes how American Express employees had to define themselves:

In a foundational session, the outside consulting firm Paradigm trained AmEx employees to deconstruct their own intersectional identities, mapping their “race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity [and] citizenship” onto an official company worksheet.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

As Close to Economic Nirvana as Could Be Imagined Art Laffer

Posted By on August 14th, 2021

https://www.nysun.com/national/beyond-bretton-woods-it-was-as-close-to-economic/91617/

The formula to ensure prosperity is simple: Add a low-rate, broad-based flat tax to spending restraint, free trade, and sound money, and there you have it.

The Great Depression was born out of xenophobic protectionism, embodied in the 1930 passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, plus 1932’s massive increases in tax rates on our country’s most productive members. The economy collapsed as never before.

Gold being then, as it still is, the first refuge of the cautious, became a safe haven. There were runs on banks as depositors demanded gold in exchange for deposits or currency. The value of gold as measured in goods and services soared, meaning that there was a tremendous fall in the price level. Money back then was gold.

President Roosevelt was swept into office in March of 1933. Instead of reversing Hoover’s tariff and tax increases, Roosevelt made gold the scapegoat. In his first month in office, he legislated the so-called Bank Holiday Act, which prohibited banks from buying or selling foreign currencies or specie — especially gold; eliminated all gold clauses in contracts, public or private; and finally made holding gold by Americans illegal.

Gold ceased to be currency in the United States. This was the first step in ridding the monetary system of gold.

In late 1933, to make matters worse, Roosevelt followed his gold confiscation by devaluing the dollar against foreign currencies by some 60% and raising the official price of gold to $35 an ounce from $20.67. This was an enormous wealth tax on former gold holders. The depression settled in, lasting until 1945.

The anomaly was that while gold was removed from the U.S. economy, it still remained the official settlement medium internationally.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

BDS and Israel Diane Bederman

Posted By on August 14th, 2021

https://dianebederman.com/bds-and-israel/

BDS, Boycott, Divest and Sanction of Israel is a policy shared by millions upon millions if not billions of people. BDS is meant to destroy Israel, the Jewish homeland for more than 3000 years. Why? Because these people are Jew haters. Hitler tried to kill  us. He managed to murder a third of the Jewish individuals; 6 million. BDS wants to destroy Israel itself. I mean, what else does “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” mean?

BDS accuses Israel of being an apartheid state – like South Africa.

From the BDS horse’s mouth:

The BDS movement was launched by 170 Palestinian unions, refugee networks, women’s organizations, professional associations, popular resistance committees and other Palestinian civil society bodies. Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, the Palestinian BDS call urges nonviolent pressure on Israel until it complies with international law.

So what is Apartheid? It is an Afrikaans word meaning ‘separation’ and was the name given to the system of racial segregation and subjugation of the African and other non-white population of South Africa by white settlers from 1948 to 1994.

According to BDS, there are many similarities between apartheid in South Africa and modern day Israeli apartheid. South African apartheid was characterised by settler (white) colonialism and the forced displacement of the indigenous population (black), the division of the colonized into different groups with different rights, severe restrictions on movement and violent suppression of resistance. These, say BDS, are all key characteristics of Israel’s modern day regime over the Palestinian people.

Really? It’s not the Palestinian Authority? But I digress.

Hmmm. Muslims are in the Israeli government and Arab Israelis serve on the Supreme Court. Awad Suleiman  is the first Druze colonel to take command of Air Maintenance Unit 22.Col. Talk about diversity inclusion and equity – here it is.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Japan’s New China Reality A top official recognizes America’s relative decline in the Pacific.

Posted By on August 14th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-new-china-reality-nobuo-kishi-military-11628799373?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The drumbeat of concern from America’s most important Asian ally about China’s military rise is getting louder. Last month Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso warned that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could threaten Japan’s “survival.” Now Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi has bluntly acknowledged America’s relative decline in the Western Pacific and the need for Japan to assert itself militarily to fill the void.

The remarks came in an interview with Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. Mr. Kishi “said the shifting power balance between the US and China ‘has become very conspicuous’ while a military battle over Taiwan had ‘skewed greatly in favour of China,’” the paper reports. He added that China “is trying to change the status quo unilaterally backed by force and coercion” and said “we must build a structure where we can protect ourselves.”

Japanese officials are normally soft-spoken in public, but China’s immense military buildup has become impossible to ignore. According to a new Lowy Institute report by military analyst Thomas Shugart, China has “become the world’s premier sea power by most measures,” adding 80 warships to its navy in the last five years while the U.S. added 36.

Measured by warship tonnage, China’s naval expansion since 2016 easily outpaced the expansion of the U.S. Pacific fleet and the allied “Quad” navies of India, Japan and Australia combined, the report finds. The U.S. Navy retains some qualitative advantages, but quantity eventually overwhelms quality.