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On Things Collapsing Reports indicate that the Francis Scott Key Bridge will take at least ten years to rebuild. More than 50 years ago, the original was built in five. By Christopher Roach

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/02/on-things-collapsing/

The recent collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was profoundly dramatic. It struck a chord because something similar happened in Tampa in 1980. Ships are big and always getting bigger. And this bridge was a bit older and not made with today’s state-of-the-art design and technology.

How did it happen? Was it a freak accident? The poisoned fruit of affirmative action? Sabotage or terrorism? I have no idea, and we may not know for a while.

I do know that if the truth threatens some chestnut of politically correct conventional wisdom, it will be hidden in a footnote, if it is allowed to be released at all. Planes have crashed and ships have crashed into other ships, and the possible influence of affirmative action and lower standards was never really explored in any depth, even though it appeared to be a contributing factor. The powers-that-be seem to think we can take people with one or more standard deviations lower general intelligence and obtain the same result in technically demanding fields like aviation, seamanship, medicine, and engineering.

In Baltimore, the captain or pilot apparently sounded the alarm, permitting the police to save many lives by closing off the bridge to traffic. This was the good news part of the story. But I am more concerned about the timeline for the bridge’s replacement. There are reports that it will take at least ten years.

The original was built in five.

Sclerotic Nation

We went from biplanes to jet fighters in 20 years. Then we went from jet fighters to men in space in another 20. But repeating yesteryear’s technological achievements like building skyscrapers, dams, bridges, railroads, and the like is apparently going to take longer and cost more than it did in years, if it is even able to be repeated.

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Iran Smuggles US Weapons from Afghanistan to Terrorists in Israel The weapons denied by Biden to Israel are instead going to terrorists backed by Biden. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/iran-smuggles-us-weapons-from-afghanistan-to-terrorists-in-israel/

In December, the Biden administration blocked a shipment of M4 rifles to Israel. The rifles were meant to be used by local community self-defense units of the kind that had served as the front line of defense against the Hamas attack on Oct 7. However the Biden administration claimed that it was concerned that the self-defense units might be Jewish “right-wing extremists”.

The Islamic terrorists attacking them however had no trouble finding M4 rifles. They just expected theirs to come by a more complicated road from Afghanistan, by way of Iran’s terror operatives, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan via a drug smuggling route, and then inside Israel.

The M4 rifles were part of a package that included grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles, anti-tank landmines, RPGs, C4 and Semtex explosives, and hand grenades.

A number of those were clearly American weapons including the M4s and the M203 grenade launchers: both in use in Afghanistan. The Alma Center, founded by IDF Lt Col (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, believes that the M4s are likely “spoils from Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan.”

If U.S. weapons from Afghanistan made their way to Islamic terrorists in Israel, it would not be the first time. Islamic terrorists in Gaza had been previously spotted with M4 and M16 rifles, including during the Oct 7 attacks. Rep. James Comer had dispatched a letter after the Hamas attacks to the Department of Defense asking it to explain the M4A1 Carbines, which were “specially designed for U.S. Special Operations Forces” in the hands of the terrorists.

“The surprise terror attacks by Hamas into Israel were made possible, in part, because of U.S. arms left behind in Afghanistan by the Biden administration,” Larry Keane, the Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, wrote at the Firearm Industry Trade Association.

The weapons package now intercepted by Israel shows how Iran may have tapped into the weapons left behind in Afghanistan. The weapons shipment appears to be a ‘sandwich’ with Iran moving American weapons to the Islamic terrorists backed by the Biden administration.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Serial protesters disrupt Easter Mass at St. Patrick’s with ‘Free Palestine’ chants before cops haul them away

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/03/31/us-news/protesters-calling-for-cease-fire-ambush-easter-vigil-at-st-patricks-cathedral-in-nyc/

Nothing’s sacred to these guys. 

A trio of attention-seeking protesters — one of whom previously glued his feet to the stands at the US Open as part of a climate-change stunt — were cuffed and hauled out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral after disrupting Easter Mass with shouts of “Free Palestine” on Saturday night, cops say.

Police were called to the iconic Midtown cathedral for complaints about a “disorderly group” just before 9 p.m. The protesters were quickly taken out of the service.

Matthew Menzies, 31, John Rozendaal, 63, and Gregory Schwedock, 35, were taken into custody and charged with disruption of religious service, police told The Post.

While being escorted out, one yelled “Free Palestine,” a video shared to X shows. 

Schwedock, of the Upper East Side, was arrested in September after disrupting the US Open women’s semifinal with activists who used glue to prevent security from ejecting them from Arthur Ashe Stadium after they held up a sign decrying fossil fuels. Their stunt stalled the match for nearly 50 minutes. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Black Gold

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/02/black-gold/

“So let’s be clear: Biden didn’t guarantee to only end fossil fuels, he promised to end life as we know it, and giving him another four years would move us closer to that disaster. Remember this when voting in November.”

In 2019, while campaigning in New Hampshire, Joe Biden promised to “end fossil fuel.” Not only has he failed to keep his promise, oil consumption has reached a new all-time high. For this we should all be thankful.

When a climate activist challenged him on that September day about his connections to the co-founder of a liquified natural gas company, Biden, as he has done throughout his career of “public service,” became Joe the Clown. Calling her “kiddo,” he told her to look into his eyes, then said “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”

The ever-fawning-for-Democrats media called it an “intimate moment.”

But it was nothing more than a typical “Biden moment” on the campaign trail.

As noted, Biden has not ended fossil fuels nor has he set the country on a path in that direction. Domestic oil consumption hit 20.5 million barrels in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, after falling off in 2020, when the authoritarians demanded that we hide under our beds.

Global consumption has grown, too, reaching 99.6 million barrels a day. And it will continue to swell.

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With ‘Friends’ Like Mexico’s Obrador, Who Needs Enemies Like Putin, Xi, Kim Jong Un and the Ayatollahs? Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/01/with-friends-like-obrador/

In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—who prefers to be known as AMLO for short—issued to the Biden administration blackmail demands that sounded more like existential threats.

AMLO warned the U.S. that the current influx of some 10 million illegal aliens through the southern border will most certainly continue—unless America agrees to his ultimatums.

One, Obrador says the U.S. must now send $20 billion in de facto bribery payments to Latin American nations, many of them corrupt and dysfunctional. Apparently, he thinks it is America’s fault that millions of Latin Americans are fleeing these failed states northward, not the inept and corrupt governments that create such misery.

Two, AMLO demands amnesty for vast numbers of Mexican illegal aliens currently unlawfully residing inside the U.S. He apparently also thinks there is no such thing as U.S. immigration law. Or, if there is, such statutes do not apply to citizens of Mexico. Can we ask Mr. Obrador to simply grant permanent visa-free, no-questions-asked residence to any American living in a vacation complex in Mexico?

Three, he also requires America to lift sanctions against anti-American Venezuela. That communist government currently is part of the new China/Russia/Iran strategic axis. It is sending thousands of its citizens northward to enter the U.S. illegally.

Many of them are criminals, as the recent murder of Laken Riley by a felonious Venezuelan illegal alien attests. Dictator Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan regime recently threatened to invade and annex oil-rich Guyana, its smaller neighbor to the east. Maduro’s “security forces” have routinely murdered hundreds of political opponents. This rogue state is apparently Mexico’s newest ally.

Four, AMLO further requires the U.S. to stop its long embargo of communist Castroite-controlled Cuba, a decades-long avowed enemy of the U.S.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Major Airstrike in Damascus—Why Now? Are Iran and the terror masters cooking up something new? P. David Hornik

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/p/israels-major-airstrike-in-damascuswhy?utm_source=substack&publication_id=1319513&post_

According to foreign (non-Israeli) media reports, at about 5 p.m. on Monday, missiles fired from Israeli F-35 fighter jets struck a building beside the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Killed on the spot was a very big fish—Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the top commander in Syria of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—along with six other Iranian officials.

Zahedi is considered the highest-ranking IRGC official to be killed since the US assassinated Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad in January 2020. The airstrike appears to have been both an intelligence and a military feat.

An intelligence feat, because the meeting being held at the time of the strike was reportedly supposed to be top-secret—which would make sense considering Zahedi and others’ seniority plus the fact that Israel had already assassinated a series of Iranian officials in Syria in recent months.

And a military feat, because the building beside the Iranian embassy—supposedly a consulate, but apparently a command center—was part of a complex of diplomatic structures including, right nearby, the Canadian embassy in Syria. A slightly misfired missile hitting the Canadian embassy would, of course, have been a painful and dire incident for Israel.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

John Tierney The WHO’s Power Grab The last thing we need: a new and unaccountable global pandemic czar

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-whos-power-grab

The response to Covid was the greatest mistake in the history of the public-health profession, but the officials responsible for it are determined to do even worse. With the support of the Biden administration, the World Health Organization (WHO) is seeking unprecedented powers to impose its policies on the United States and the rest of the world during the next pandemic.

It was bad enough that America and other countries voluntarily followed WHO bureaucrats’ disastrous pandemic advice instead of heeding the scientists who had presciently warned, long before 2020, that lockdowns, school closures, and mandates for masks and vaccines would be futile, destructive, and unethical. It was bad enough that U.S. officials and the corporate media parroted the WHO’s false claims and ludicrous praise of China’s response. But now the WHO wants new authority to make its bureaucrats’ whims mandatory—and to censor those who disagree with their version of “the science.” 

The WHO hopes to begin this power grab in May at its annual assembly in Geneva, where members will vote on proposed changes in international health regulations and a new treaty governing pandemics. Pamela Hamamoto, the State Department official representing the U.S. in negotiations, has already declared that America is committed to signing a pandemic treaty that will “build a stronger global health architecture,” which is precisely what we don’t need. 

If we learned anything from the pandemic, it was the folly of entrusting narrow-minded public-health officials with wide-ranging powers. The countries that fared best, like Sweden, were the ones that ignored the advice of the WHO, and the U.S. states that fared best, like Florida, were the ones that defied the White House Coronavirus Task Force and the Centers for Disease Control. This wasn’t a new lesson. Previous research had shown that giving national leaders new powers to respond to a natural disaster typically leads to more fatalities and economic damage.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkish Television Discusses Hitting Greece by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on April 1st, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20531/turkish-tv-discusses-hitting-greece

[T]he Turkish government aims to conquer the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea – either militarily or demographically. The goal is the same: the islands’ capture.

The Turkish media also falsely and repeatedly claims that “152 Greek islands and islets in the Aegean belong to Turkey”. These islands, however, historically and legally, belong to Greece, mainly through the 1924 Treaty of Lausanne, 1932 Turkish-Italian Agreements and the 1947 Paris Treaty.

Conquest is part of Islamic jihad (warfare in the service of Islam) which, according to Islamic scriptures, is a communal obligation. The ideology of conquest in the name of jihad is what drove Ottoman Turks to invade and conquer lands stretching across Asia, Europe and Africa for more than 600 years.

According to Islamists, Muslim military expansion is an act of Allah’s favor because Allah bestows those places upon Muslim conquerors.

The Turkish government’s stance on the genocide is a bizarre combination of denial and conceit. First, they say that their ancestors did not commit genocide and that it was merely a war of self-defense. Then, they proclaim “they [Christians] deserved it” and “if need be, we could do it again”.

The US government seems to ignore that Turkey – acting as if it is the successor to the Ottoman Empire – does not stop threatening Greece, Cyprus and Armenia with military invasion.

The US Congress would be well advised to reconsider its decision regarding F-16 sales to Turkey and this alliance altogether.

On Turkey’s pro-government TV channel AHaber, political analysts and national security specialists on February 28 enthusiastically discussed how the Turkish Air Force could strike Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The fury of Europe’s farmers The continent-wide revolt against the green agenda has shaken the EU elites to their core. Fraser Myers

Posted By on April 1st, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/01/the-fury-of-europes-farmers/

Europe’s farmers are rising up – and the elites are terrified. In France, farmers recently staged a four-day ‘siege of Paris’, blocking major roads around the French capital. In January, thousands of tractors descended on Berlin in Germany, lining the streets leading up to the Brandenburg Gate. In Brussels, farmers have gathered from all over Europe to demonstrate against the EU and pelt the European Parliament with eggs. In the Netherlands, tractors have caused the longest traffic jam in the nation’s history, as part of a years-long battle between farmers and the government. This farmers’ revolt is now truly Europe-wide. From Portugal to Poland, from Ireland to Italy, almost every EU country has been rocked by protests. So what is driving this populist uprising? What do the farmers want?

Farmers in each country have their own specific grievances, of course. But there is a common root to their anger. What connects them is the European Union’s green agenda, which has been imposed on agriculture from on-high. It has made farmers’ lives a misery, sacrificing their livelihoods at the altar of climate alarmism. Bureaucrats who have no idea how farmers work and live, have essentially been condemning farms – many of them run by families for generations – to oblivion, all at the stroke of the regulator’s pen. And farmers are simply not putting up with it anymore.

The first stirrings of revolt began in 2019, in the Netherlands, with the so-called nitrogen crisis. The Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the government was failing to cut nitrogen pollution to EU-approved levels. In response, the Dutch government promised ‘drastic measures’ to cut nitrogen emissions. In all but name, it declared war on its nation’s farmers. Suddenly, the government had turned against one of its most important and impressive sectors.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: BOOK AND MOVIE ” THE BOYS IN THE BOAT”

Posted By on April 1st, 2024

 Daniel James Brown had been inspired to write his 2013 non-fiction novel, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, after a chance meeting with the elderly Joe Rantz.

In December 2023, the movie “The Boys in the Boat” directed by George Clooney was based on the true story of the come from behind rowing team at the University of Washington got to compete for gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

It’s a wonderful, patriotic and inspiring story. rsk