Hundreds of Illegal Immigrants, Dozens of Unaccompanied Children Apprehended at Border By Catherine Smith

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/19/hundreds-of-illegal-immigrants-dozens-of-unaccompanied-children-apprehended-at-border/

Approximately 200 illegal immigrants including at least 40 unaccompanied minors were apprehended in frigid temperatures in Mission, Texas after being smuggled into the U.S., according to border officials.

The illegal immigrants were accompanied across the border by “human smugglers,” according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Rio Grande Valley Chief Patrol Agent Brian Hastings. It was around Wednesday night at 8 p.m. CST when Hastings tweeted about the apprehensions.

“Nobody comes across that river without a smuggler. Nobody just walks up to the bridge and goes across. A smuggler put them in a raft and paddled them across, probably told them to go up to that road, take a left until you walk into an agent,” CBP Public Affairs Officer Rod Kise told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

According to the report, most of the illegal immigrants were likely transferred from CBP into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, though it is unknown whether the illegal immigrants were deported or released into the interior of the U.S. since that is determined on a case-by-case basis, Kise told the DCNF.

Gone Crazy A New York City public school principal calls on white parents to “subvert white authority.” Christopher F. Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/east-side-community-school-tells-parents-to-become-white-traitors

New York’s East Side Community School recently sent a letter encouraging white parents to become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition.”

The message, sent by principal Mark Federman, showed a graphic outlining eight stages of white identity development—from the lowest form, “white supremacist,” to the intermediate forms of “white confessional” and “white traitor,” to the highest form, “white abolitionist.” The goal of this process, according to the graphic’s creator, Northwestern University professor Barnor Hesse, is to challenge the “regime of whiteness” and eventually to “subvert white authority” and “not [allow] whiteness to reassert itself.”

In the letter to parents, Federman went on a tirade against white conservatives, arguing that “racism and hate is often the underlying cause fueling their beliefs.” He denounced former president Donald Trump as a “lying, racist, sexist, classist, hateful, science-denying bully” and described the Trump supporters who attended the president’s January 6 rally as “a crowd of white supremacists.” Federman’s latest outburst came as no surprise, said one parent of children who no longer attend the school. The parent, who requested anonymity, said that Federman had pushed a divisive “progressive line” to students and families.

The language in Federman’s letter carries disturbing historical echoes. The Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis used the term “race traitor” to describe whites who crossed the color line to work, marry, or associate with nonwhites. The letter’s use of “white abolition” is also troubling. Federman and Hesse claim to want to abolish “whiteness” as a cultural and social construct, but they also use the term to describe an immutable racial essence. As University of New Mexico professor Geoffrey Miller has observed: “Applied to any other group, this would sound like a monstrous euphemism for mass extermination and cultural annihilation.”

China Betrays Its Deal with the Vatican By Nina Shea

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/china-betrays-its-deal-with-the-vatican/

Having secured the papacy’s help in weakening the Chinese Catholic underground, Xi Jinping’s regime is reneging on the commitments it made in return.

Beijing has quietly indicated that it will soon abrogate its “breakthrough” 2018 agreement with the Vatican, which was meant to settle a decades-long dispute over the appointment of bishops in China.

In November, shortly after exchanging diplomatic notes verbales with Rome to renew the deal for another two years, China thoroughly negated it in a dry public posting by the state bureaucracy. Order No. 15, on new administrative rules for religious affairs, includes an article on establishing a process for the selection of Catholic bishops in China after May 1. The document makes no provision for any papal role in the process, not even a papal right to approve or veto episcopal appointments in China, which was supposed to be the single substantive concession to the Vatican in the agreement. It’s as if the deal never happened.

Reneging on a deal with Pope Francis may not be as consequential as overturning the “one country, two systems” agreement that was supposed to guarantee Hong Kong’s autonomy after the city’s return from the United Kingdom to China, but it does reveal the peril of international partnerships with Beijing.

In October, when the two-year renewal of the deal was announced, the Vatican reported that the “results achieved” until then under the agreement were the appointments of two new bishops who had papal approval. Its press statement praised the appointments as “a good start.” “Thanks to the implementation of the Agreement, there will be no illegitimate ordinations,” the statement said, before expressing joy that the Chinese Church would experience “unity” once again. Order No. 15 now casts serious doubt on these claims.

Fighter Jet Aimed at Attacking Taiwan: Leaked Documents By Alex Wu

https://www.theepochtimes.com/edition/china-insider-7-2_3694788/3690286

As the Chinese regime continues to intimidate Taiwan by repeatedly breaching the island’s airspace and escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait, it is developing an advanced fighter jet aircraft in secret.

The Epoch Times recently obtained a military document from a trusted source which unveiled details of a concept fighter jet project, driven by China’s “military-civil fusion” strategy. It also reveals that the Chinese military is developing the new generation fighter jets for attacking Taiwan and competing with the United States.

Several countries around the world are developing a “sixth-generation fighter” aircraft that is more advanced than the fifth-generation fighter aircraft currently in service, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Sweden, India, Japan, Taiwan, and Russia.

The Chinese regime is also developing its own version of a sixth-generation fighter. The Epoch Times recently obtained a document issued by China’s Ministry of National Defense in 2017, in accordance with Beijing’s 13th Five-Year Plan. The document revealed the CCP’s pre-research plan for sixth-generation fighter aircrafts, with a focus on developing an unmanned combat system.

Sen. Manchin (D- West Virginia) opposes Neera Tanden as Biden’s budget chief, imperiling nomination

https://www.aol.com/joe-manchin-comes-against-neera-213200785.html

WASHINGTON — Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said Friday he will oppose Neera Tanden to lead the Office of Management and Budget, imperiling the prospects of a high-profile nominee of President Joe Biden.

“I have carefully reviewed Neera Tanden’s public statements and tweets that were personally directed towards my colleagues on both sides of the aisle from Senator Sanders to Senator McConnell and others,” Manchin said in a statement.

“I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” he said. For this reason, I cannot support her nomination.”His statement is a major blow to her prospects in a Senate split between 50 Democratic members and 50 Republicans.

Culture Warrior Xavier Becerra is Unqualified to Lead HSS Department Brian Burch

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/culture-warrior-xavier-becerra-is-unqualified-to-lead-hss-department-opinion/ar-BB1dPheY

EXCERPTS:

Becerra has been nominated to lead one of our most important government agencies, tasked with enhancing the health and wellbeing of all Americans. Yet he is a deeply partisan and ideologically driven nominee with no formal education, training or background in medicine or health. His most notable experience could best be described as waging left-wing culture wars while serving as attorney general of California.

Perhaps the most egregious example of Becerra’s commitment to political warfare is his years-long legal battle with the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nuns who care for the elderly poor.

Obama administration officials notoriously dragged these nuns to the Supreme Court over a mandate forcing them to provide certain types of contraception and abortion-inducing drugs. After years of litigation, the Supreme Court ruled for the Little Sisters in 2016, and in 2017 the Trump administration granted them full conscience protections.

Becerra, however, wasn’t satisfied. He sued the Trump administration in an attempt to block the protections granted to the Little Sisters and similar faith-based groups.

Becerra’s rigid posture opposed all religious-liberty accommodations, arguing “millions of women in California may be left without access to contraceptives” and that the rule would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to the state.

These baseless accusations were soon exposed—Becerra’s office couldn’t identify a single person who would lose contraception coverage. Furthermore, Becerra hadn’t sued to overturn similar protections for big corporations, and even admitted there were other resources in California for women seeking contraceptives.

Canada’s Covid Vaccine Failure Among other errors, 70% of the doses the government bought aren’t yet approved by its health officials. By Michael Taube

https://www.wsj.com/articles/canadas-covid-vaccine-failure-11613772230?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

If you’re impatient with the pace of Covid-19 vaccine distribution in the U.S., count your blessings. At least you don’t live in Canada. As of Wednesday, my country had administered only 3.52 vaccine doses per 100 people, according to the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data website. The U.S., at 17.00, was doing almost five times as well. The figures were 80.07 in Israel, 25.04 in the U.K. and 5.40 in the European Union.

Why is Canada such a laggard among developed nations? The government of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t negotiate contracts with established drug companies. Rather, it quietly approved a working relationship between Canadian researchers and a Chinese vaccine maker, CanSino Biologics Inc. CanSino abandoned its project in August after multiple failures. Ottawa then had to rush through agreements with Pfizer, Moderna and other companies. “I would not have put all our eggs in the basket of China,” Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole told reporters.

When Canada and other countries experienced a significant spike in Covid-19 cases last month (which has now subsided), Pfizer reduced its shipment to my country by more than two-thirds for several weeks. Moderna announced that only three-quarters of its vaccines would arrive in Canada during early February.

Science Needs Criticism, Not Cheerleading ‘When we lower our standards to pretend we know what we don’t know, we diminish the work and misinform society,’ says Prof. John Staddon. By J. Peder Zane

https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-needs-criticism-not-cheerleading-11613772365?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

When Prof. John Staddon read the “Statement to the Community Regarding Anti-Racism” sent out by Duke University’s president this summer, he was alarmed. The president, Vincent Price, promised to require “anti-racism and anti-bias training for every member of our faculty, student body, and staff.” To Mr. Staddon, that sounded more like indoctrination than academic inquiry. He responded in an open letter.

Mr. Price declared: “I cannot as a white person begin to fully understand the daily fear and pain and oppression that is endemic to the Black experience.” Mr. Staddon’s rejoinder: “Your reassurance is fine as an expression of empathy. I daresay you feel better, and possibly your African American audience does as well. But feelings differ: Unless the discussion can be moved from feelings to facts, no harmony is possible. Empathy, guilt, and good intentions are a dodgy basis for sweeping resolutions.”

Mr. Price affirmed that the “hard work before us” requires the community to “take transformative action now toward eliminating the systems of racism and inequality. . . . That starts with a personal transformation and . . . must end in institutional transformation.” Mr. Staddon countered that “this phraseology will strike many as more like psychotherapy or a call to religious conversion than a policy prescription. What are these ‘systems of racism and inequality?’ How have they affected Duke and how is Duke involved in them? Or are they societal concerns and thus the responsibility not of a university but of government, the church, and civil society?”

This isn’t the first time Mr. Staddon, 83, a tall, English-born American, has challenged the dogma of his peers. A professor of psychology, neuroscience and biology, he is something of a modern Cassandra, warning for more than three decades of the corruption of academia by political activists. As America becomes woke, his scholarly critiques read like prophecy.

But Staddon is a scientist, not a political firebrand. He doesn’t trade barbs over opinions but challenges his colleagues to answer the question that has long been the foundation of Western thought and science: How do you know what you know?

Why Zionists Must Learn To Laugh By Moshe Phillips

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/why-zionists-must-learn-to-laugh/2021/02/18/

“Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote his greatest novel about the Biblical hero Samson. In the most well-known passage of the book, Samson declares: “Tell [the Jewish people] three things in my name, and not two: they must get iron [i.e., weapons]; they must choose a king; and they must learn to laugh.”

Synagogues are being vandalized. Jews are being attacked. University professors and student governments endorse boycotts of Israel and call IDF soldiers “war criminals.” The UN singles out Israel time and again for criticism as Iran and its proxies threaten to wipe Israel off the map.

We stare in horror at the headlines. Media bias against Israel rages out of control while the leaders of most Jewish organizations are reduced to paralysis, focus on nonsense, or – tragically and shamefully – side with our enemies.

Seeing all these developments, a chorus of pundits predict doom and gloom. Many friends of Israel think the world has gone mad while “experts” see all signs pointing to catastrophe ahead.

I disagree. I believe 2021 could prove to be a decisive year for Zionism in America, and it’s up to those of us who consider ourselves Zionists to decide whether to be incapacitated by worry or move forward with confidence.

Revenge by Executive Order Gabriël Moens

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/02/revenge-by-executive-order/

As expected, President Biden wasted no time overturning the Trump legacy with many Executive Orders. Since his inauguration on January 20, ther new president has signed 30 Executive Orders, 19 on the first day of his presidency alone.

Executive Orders are presidential directives addressed to federal authorities subject to congressional and judicial oversight. Perhaps the most famous order is the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln on January 1, 1863. Franklin D Roosevelt signed 3522 Orders, compared with President Trump’s 212 Orders. Some presidents have used this discretionary legislative power sparingly, but certainly since the 1980s, the signing of Orders on their first day in office has provided incoming presidents with an opportunity to destroy the legacy of their predecessors.

There are at least two reasons why this legislative approach to overturning a predecessor’s legacy is a disturbing development. One reason relates to the legislative authority of the president to adopt these measures. Although there is no doubt that, in accordance with Article Two of the US Constitution, the president possesses some degree of discretionary legislative power which usurps the legislative privileges of Congress. Hence, it is an executive power that should be used sparingly.