ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

US energy policy and the pursuit of failure…again By Peter Z. Grossman

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/556003-us-energy-policy-and-the-pursuit-of-failureagain

We’ve been here before.  

The development of the Biden administration’s energy and climate policies is following a path set by the energy policies of the 1970s. That is not a good model to follow. Failure followed failure. Essentially U.S. energy policy has been created by a four-step process: 

First, an energy crisis is declared. Presidents and legislators feel the pressure to “do something.” 

Second, policy proposals that supposedly will provide a solution are announced. 

Third, assuming the sense of crisis lingers, extreme measures are passed in Congress or initiated by executive action, or both. 

Fourth, the measures prove ineffective and, although billions are spent, the measures are either repealed or just forgotten. In the meantime, market forces end the “crisis.” 

Presidents Nixon and Ford went through steps one and two. The Arab oil embargo and the subsequent gasoline shortages made it necessary for officials to offer radical ideas. But the end of the lines at gas stations and the fall in oil prices meant the end of the sense of crisis. That made officials reluctant to pursue the radical measures that had been proposed.  

It took the energy crisis of 1979-80 to follow the path to its conclusion. The return of gasoline shortages and sky-high energy prices induced President Carter to devise a comprehensive energy plan.  

Carter and his energy secretary believed that the U.S. and most of rest of the world were rapidly running out of oil and natural gas. All remaining oil and the wealth it entailed would go to the oil exporters (especially the hated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC), while we shivered in the dark.  

So drastic measures were needed. Carter’s policies, if enacted, were supposed to make the U.S. energy independent, but would have other virtues including protecting the American way of life. 

The major component of this plan was to replace two million barrels a day of oil imports with a substitute derived from processing American coal. These “synfuels” would cost $88 billion (inflation-adjusted $320 billion), a number then-Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger later admitted “came from nowhere.” Moreover, five different agencies of the government said that the synfuels goal wasn’t feasible.   

As distress at the pump (especially rising prices) continued, Congress passed most of Carter’s plan, including the creation of the Synfuels Corporation.  

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden administration suspends oil and gas leases in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Juliet Eilperin, Josh Partlow

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration-to-cancel-oil-and-gas-leases-in-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge/ar-AAKBBzA

The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, targeting one of President Donald Trump’s most significant environmental acts during his last days in office.

The move by the Interior Department, which could spark a major legal battle, dims the prospect of oil drilling in a pristine and politically charged expanse of Alaskan wilderness that Republicans and Democrats have fought over for four decades. The Trump administration auctioned off the right to drill in the refuge’s coastal plain — home to hundreds of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl as well as the southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears — just two weeks before President Biden was inaugurated.

Now the Biden administration is taking steps to block those leases, citing problems with the environmental review process. In Tuesday’s Interior Department order, Secretary Deb Haaland said that a review of the Trump administration’s leasing program in the wildlife refuge found “multiple legal deficiencies” including “insufficient analysis” required by environmental laws and a failure to assess other alternatives. Haaland’s order calls for a temporary moratorium on all activities related to those leases in order to conduct “a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the oil and gas program.”

The step, coming just days after the Justice Department defended another drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, underscores the balancing act the new administration aims to strike as it slows fossil fuel development on public lands. While Biden has paused new federal oil and gas leasing and pledged to drastically cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, he has taken a much more cautious approach toward most oil and gas operations approved under his predecessor.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The American Century  of Humiliation By: Kathleen Brush, Ph.D.

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://abyssum.org/2021/06/01/xi-is-surely-enjoying-the-humiliating-footage-of-neutered-police-and-uncontrolled-violence-on-americas-streets-uncontrolled-violence-is-the-marker-of-a-failed-state/

America’s Achilles heel is its disregard for history. Domestically, it leads to ill-informed decisions like centering American history on the historical fairy tale called Project 1619. Internationally, it is an endless source of comic relief. 

The latest fodder was American wrestler and Hollywood star, John Cena, groveling for forgiveness from the Chinese. His non-mistake? He called Taiwan a country. The Chinese response? More groveling from the American. 

China’s President Xi surely savored the show. He loves humiliating the American superpower. Xi is Mao’s protégé and he’s finishing his mission to seek retribution for China’s Century of Humiliation (1839-1949) at the hands of Western, Russian, and Japanese powers, by converting China into the humiliator. 

Historically specializing in psychological warfare, China is suited to the task. Humiliation and intimidation gave China a vast tributary empire in eastern Asia until the early 19th century. Today, China merges psychology with vast economic, cyber, and military assets to exert control over other nations.

To achieve Mao’s mission, the first step was unifying the Chinese population. The second was building economic strength. The disunity of the ethnically diverse Chinese population was a perennial source of endless conflict. Integrated populations had been a secret weapon of their humiliating adversaries. To level the playing field, China mandated assimilation and delivered Han Chinese ethnic homogeneity in record-breaking time – never to be altered.

  

Watching Leftist political leaders leverage the havoc created by rioting Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists to damage America’s once admired integrated population was priceless. China bombarded social media quoting officials like Kamala Harris: “racism is real in America. And it has always been. Xenophobia is real in America, and always has been. Sexism, too.” 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘We Are Going To Expose You’: Vets Crenshaw, Cotton Create Whistleblower Doc To Combat ‘Woke’ Efforts In U.S. Military By Hank Berrien

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-are-going-to-expose-you-vets-crenshaw-cotton-create-whistleblower-doc-to-combat-woke-efforts-in-u-s-military

On Saturday, Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton and Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, both military veterans, teamed up to release a whistleblower form for military members to fill out if they spot any “woke” training efforts.

Crenshaw tweeted, “Enough is enough. We won’t let our military fall to woke ideology. We have just launched a whistleblower webpage where you can submit your story. Your complaint will be legally protected, and go to my office and @SenTomCotton.”

Crenshaw added, “With written permission we will anonymously publish egregious complaints on social media and tell the country what’s happening in our military. For too long, progressive Pentagon staffers have been calling the shots for our warfighters, and spineless military commanders have let it happen. Now we are going to expose you.”

The whistleblower form states:

We advise that whistleblowers use your personal resources and contact information when communicating submitting this form, and that you do not use your work equipment or work contact information. Further, do not submit classified information or other information barred from release through this form or by email.

Various U.S. laws at the federal, state and local level prohibit retaliation against whistleblowers for providing information to Congress. However, you still take serious risks when you report allegations of wrongdoing. We recommend that you consult an attorney experienced in whistleblower law for further guidance. We respect your confidentiality, and we will use your contact information only to follow up with you regarding your submission. You may submit a disclosure anonymously. However, please be aware that anonymous disclosures may limit our ability to respond to the information that you provide.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hey Facebook, Ban This!

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/02/hey-facebook-ban-this/

Last week, we learned that Facebook had been banning posts suggesting that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab. We became aware only when Facebook announced that it would no longer ban such posts, raising the question of why it was doing so in the first place. It wasn’t as though there was no possibility that a lab leak was responsible. There was an ongoing discussion of this.

Then over the weekend, we learned that Facebook apparently has plans to ban posts that might encourage “vaccine hesitancy.” What does that mean? Who knows. Facebook never reveals how it makes such decisions.

“Anything that questions the vaccine or the narrative regarding the vaccine, which is, you know, everyone should get the vaccine and the vaccine is good and you’re not going to get many bad side effects, anything outside of that realm is basically considered under ‘vaccine hesitancy’ by Facebook’s algorithms,” Morgan Kahmann, a former data center technician for Facebook, told Fox News.

How does Facebook justify this? It doesn’t. In one section of its “Community Standards” document, Facebook flatly denies that it removes “false news” posts. It says “we do not remove false news from Facebook but we significantly reduce its distribution by showing it lower in News Feed.”

We’ve run into Facebook’s horrible “false news” attacks ourselves. One of our posts – correctly – stated that then-candidate Joe Biden wanted to outlaw gas-powered cars. That was based on Biden’s own campaign promises. Facebook flagged the headline as false – not the editorial – based on a bogus fact check. Facebook readership of the editorial crashed as a result.

It happened again when Facebook moved to block distribution of an article we published on COVID-19 rates in the U.S., in which we noted how infection rates in Europe at the time were far higher than the U.S., yet the U.S. – or more particularly, President Donald Trump – was being blamed for a massive failure to contain the disease. As with the Biden editorial, readership crashed as soon as Facebook slapped its “partly false” label on it.

Facebook has been not only removing COVID-19 stories it doesn’t like, but posts regarding election fraud as well, according to ABC News.

BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Barack Obama’s Parallel Russian Universe By Jack Cashill

Posted By on June 1st, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/barack_obamas_parallel_russian_universe.html

As an admittedly partisan writer, my bias shows up in the subjects I cover, not in the facts I report. I want to know what the other guys know. It is always helpful, often essential.

Reporters in the political center and on left seem to feel no such obligation. Writing for audiences that know no more than what Big Media has chosen to tell them, these “journalists” are inclined to write politically useful fiction and often get away with it.

Such is the case with Edward-Isaac Dovere in his new bestseller, Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump. Although no great fan of Barack Obama, Dovere accepts uncritically Team Obama’s collective amnesia about the Russian collusion plot.

As the former Chief Washington Correspondent for Politico, Dovere has no excuse for his ignorance. Despite his time in Washington, he seems totally unaware of the serious reporting done on Russian collusion by people like National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, Gregg Jarrett, and Sara Carter of Fox News, John Solomon of Just the News, Mollie Hemingway and Margot Cleveland of the Federalist, Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, Lee Smith of the Hudson Institute, syndicated columnist Diana West, and Peter Schweizer among others.

In the way of example, Dovere has great sport with President Donald Trump’s tweet on March 4, 2017: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found.” According to Dovere, Obama thought the claim “totally absurd.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who wants Biden’s massive budget? The President wasn’t elected to carry out such a vast expansion of centralized government Charles Lipson

Posted By on June 1st, 2021

https://spectator.us/topic/who-wants-bidens-massive-budget/

President Joe Biden just proposed the largest budget (as a percentage of America’s economy) since the country was fighting Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. He’s doing it when there is no emergency, only an overweening desire to pass progressive programs quickly, before they lose their legislative majority.

The best historical analogue to his proposed budget increase is Lyndon Johnson’s cradle-to-grave Great Society Program. It has the same flaws. In fact, Biden’s program is best understood as the next step in a long political arc, extending from Franklin Roosevelt to LBJ to Obamacare.

All of them proposed centralized government solutions to almost every social problem, particularly endemic problems among the poor.

Today, those problems are caused mainly by the breakdown of family structures, high rates of urban violence and public schooling that doesn’t prepare graduates for jobs that require higher and higher levels of education. LBJ’s programs were designed to solve some of those problems, particularly poverty and social breakdown. The direct transfer programs certainly increased recipients’ income, but the big planning schemes only made problems worse. Biden’s programs are likely to do the same.

Roosevelt and Johnson permanently changed Washington’s role in American life to achieve their goals. Again, Biden proposes to extend the core Democratic objective. By vastly increasing the government’s share of the economy, along with ever-increasing bureaucratic regulations, his programs will make America’s government and economy much more like Europe’s social democracy. That means a larger social safety net, higher taxes, and slower growth. It means less control by state and local government, and less autonomy for individuals.

Biden’s budget raises several fundamental questions.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The rise and fall of the ‘Never Netanyahu’ coalition The only thing uniting the “Never Netanyahu” coalition is hatred of the man himself, and of religious Jews. That’s a weak bond and won’t make for a stable power-sharing arrangement. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 1st, 2021

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-never-netanyahu-coalition/

Whenever I get asked about Israeli politics on the radio, the first thing I do is point out that Israeli politics isn’t America, it’s European.

Israel was controlled by the British. More of its founders were European than American. That means the same messy coalition parliamentary politics without even the benefit of regional representation and direct elections.

It’s a terrible system that serves all the wrong people.

The last few years have been a grinding disaster of repeat elections because first, a huge chunk of Israel’s political spectrum wants to oust Netanyahu. Those on the left, including pseudo-centrists like Yesh Atid Party leader Yair Lapid, are motivated by ideology. Others, on the right, are scrambling for power.

Second, no leader within Netanyahu’s Likud or outside has emerged as a viable alternative to him. Non-Likud parties have little credibility. Especially those on the left. The fake centrist parties that act as leftist stalking horses have even less credibility.

What finally happened is that one of the alternative right-wing parties got together with the left and Israel’s worst enemies to form a coalition. And the media is celebrating Netanyahu’s downfall while preparing to spin this as proof that Israel is terrible.

I’m not in the business of making political predictions, but I am skeptical that a coalition so ridiculously unwieldy can hold up. And Netanyahu is far from done. There are plenty of reasons for Israelis to be disappointed by Netanyahu, but this alternative coalition is the equivalent of Never Trumpers campaigning for Hillary. Except it’s even worse, by a factor of a few thousand.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s stock of enriched uranium 16 times higher than limit set out in JCPA

Posted By on June 1st, 2021

https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/06/01/irans-stock-of-enriched-uranium-16-times-higher-than-limit-set-out-in-jcpa/

Iran has also failed to explain traces of uranium found at several undeclared sites, a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency shows, possibly setting up a fresh diplomatic clash between Tehran and the West that could derail wider nuclear talks currently underway in Vienna.

Iran holds a quantity of low enriched uranium nearly 16 times higher than the limit authorized in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a report Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

After Washington pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018 under former US President Donald Trump and re-imposed crippling economic sanctions against Tehran, Iran began breaching the deal’s restrictions on its nuclear activities as of 2019.

One of its more recent breaches, enriching uranium to 60%, a big step towards weapons-grade from the 20% it had previously reached and the deal’s 3.67% limit, continued. The IAEA estimated that Iran had produced 2.4 kg of uranium enriched to that level and 62.8 kg of uranium enriched to up to 20%.

Iran’s production of experimental quantities of uranium metal, which is prohibited under the deal and has prompted protests by Western powers because of its potential use in the core of nuclear weapons, also continued. Iran produced 2.42 kg, the IAEA reported, up from 3.6 grams three months ago.

Iran has also failed to explain traces of uranium found at several undeclared sites, the report by the UN nuclear watchdog showed, possibly setting up a fresh diplomatic clash between Tehran and the West that could derail wider nuclear talks that are currently underway in Vienna.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Biden Administration Rewards Terrorists: Abbas and Hamas by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on June 1st, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17413/biden-administration-rewards-terrorists-abbas

Ironically, the same Abbas who told Blinken that he (Abbas) is committed to a peace process with Israel is the same Abbas who also wants to see his Israeli “peace partners” put on trial at the ICC.
Now comes Blinken and announces that the reopening of the consulate in the city. Here is how the Palestinians understand his gestures: If you fire 4,000 rockets and missiles at Israel, you get a US embassy in Jerusalem and millions of dollars of US taxpayer money. It works! The solution, then, is to keep on doing it!
By reopening the consulate, Blinken is telling both Hamas and Abbas that the US does not recognize Jerusalem as the united and undivided capital of Israel.
Blinken has also sent a message to Abbas and Hamas that former US President Donald Trump’s formula of “peace for peace” in the Middle East is off the table; they no longer need to worry.
Abbas and Hamas are rubbing their hands because, the way they see it, the Biden administration has just achieved their goal of scrapping Trump’s peace plan, “Peace to Prosperity: A vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People.”
By rewarding Abbas, Hamas and the anti-normalization camp in the Arab world, the Biden administration has bludgeoned its declared objective of reviving a peace process in the Middle East. It has demonstrated decisively that corruption and dictatorship pay. It has shown that terrorism pays – to the tune of millions of dollars. Palestinian incitement and violence against Israel are unlikely to recede in the context of such an encouraging outcome.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s May 25 announcement that the Biden administration will ask Congress to allocate $75 million in aid to the Palestinians and that Washington will reopen the US Consulate in Jerusalem — which previously had served as a de facto embassy handling US relations with the Palestinians — is sending the wrong message to the leaders of the Palestinians.

First, these overtures signal Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that the US will support and lavish funding on any Arab leader who seriously abuses not only his own people but also his neighbors. This policy would also include leaders such as Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Xinping in China and Supreme Guide Ali Kamenei in Iran, as well as other despots.

One pretext for the war that Hamas initiated was that Abbas had cancelled parliamentary elections to have been held this month and July. The real reason the elections were canceled was that they would have resulted in another victory for Hamas.

Hamas won the last parliamentary election in 2006 due to the Palestinians’ frustration over the rampant political, administrative and economic corruption in Fatah, the dominant faction of Abbas’s PA.

The Biden administration — by offering Abbas more money and reopening the US diplomatic mission that deals directly with the Palestinians — is actually rewarding Abbas for those attributes.