EDUCATION Comments turned off

The great “Awokening”

Posted By on June 5th, 2019

https://www.bradleyfdn.org/prizes/

New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, has been named a co-recipient of the 2019 Bradley Prize .

In accepting the award he lamented how “many things have mutated into their opposites”.

“Consider, to take just one example, the fate of our colleges and universities. Once upon a time — and it was not so long ago, they were institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilisation. Today most are devoted to the repudiation of truth and the subversion of those values. In short they are laboratories for the cultivation of wokeness…”

Roger is only getting started. The full address is above. Only 10 minutes, every second is gold.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Dirty Rotten Climate Scandals Tony Thomas

Posted By on June 5th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet

Shakespeare’s monster, Caliban, dreamed of clouds opening to  show riches ready to drop upon him. Climate scientists don’t have to dream about it – honors, awards and cash prizes rain down in torrents. Other scientists try to help humanity, but while climate scientists may kid themselves and others that they share that goal, their practical intent is to raise energy costs and harm nations’ energy efficiency via renewables. While they posture as planet-savers in white coats, some of them pocket awards of half-million dollars, even a million, and notch up more career-enhancing medals than a North Korean general.

A couple of local prizes are the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science ($A250,000) for ex-President of the Australian Academy of Science Kurt Lambeck last October, and in January UNSW Professor John Church pocketed a $A320,000 half-share of the 400,000 Euro BBVA Prize.

Both have done science work of international repute and their reputations in their specialist fields are deservedly high. However, Lambeck is a long-standing smiter of “deniers” and Church propagates via the ABC such lurid scenarios as  this: “… if the world’s carbon emissions continue unmitigated, a threshold will be crossed which will lead to the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This, with melts from glaciers and ice in Antarctica will lead to a sea level rise in the order of seven metres.” 

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Death and the Democrats By Sebastian Gorka

Posted By on June 5th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/05/death-and-the-democrats/

Our nation is unique.

Most every other nation was established in a capricious fashion. Whether defined by an ethnicity, a linguistic community, or the happenstance of being ruled by a royal dynastic elite, other countries were not the result of their people appealing to first principles, of building a political structure from scratch based upon the lessons of prior centuries. Ours is different.

Yes, our Republic was born out of war, as has been the case with so many others over the centuries. But our Revolutionary War wasn’t simply waged over a brute demand for self-determination. The catalyst for the fight that would result in our being an independent nation-state was the grievous transgressions of a monarch who our Founding Fathers saw as acting in direct contravention to objective and universal truths.

After our unlikely victory against what was then the most powerful empire the world had ever seen, our forefathers enshrined those truths into our founding documents. And the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution have served not only to codify those principles as the foundation of our political system for at least 11 generations, they have become a beacon for hundreds of millions of non-Americans around the world who also believe in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” When dissidents escape house arrest or brave shark-infested waters in search of freedom, their destination is rarely the French embassy or the shores of Africa.

When discussing rights—particularly those rights enumerated in our Constitution—we often weigh priorities. Freedom of speech purists, for example, insist that without the First Amendment, all other rights are nugatory, while Second Amendment advocates stand unwavering in their conviction that without the right of the population to protect itself from a tyrannical government, everything else is hypothetical.

Yet it should be obvious where our existence as free men and women starts. Not with the right of association, or a free press, or freedom of conscience, or the right to keep and bear arms. Everything begins with the right to life.

That is, unless you are a Democrat in 2019.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

David Marcus: From Occupy To AOC: The Rise Of The New Progressives, Part 3 With the election of Donald Trump, the New Progressives seized their opportunity to turn protest into political power with a new star.

Posted By on June 5th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/05/from-occupy-to-aoc-the-rise-of-th

Entering The Halls Of Power

On January 21, 2017 Donald Trump woke up as president of the United States for the first time. In those morning hours, hundreds of thousands of protesters were making their way to Washington DC for the most significant protest since Occupy Wall Street, which had occurred roughly five years earlier. Donning pink p-ssy hats and dedicated to overthrowing the patriarchy, and Trump, the Women’s March took to the streets.

At the time it was presented as an organic outpouring of anti-Trump emotion. But we now know that it was not only carefully organized, but that the New Progressives were the march’s driving force and leadership. Its manifesto, among other things, promised intersectionality, and to break down systems of oppression.

Suddenly these concepts once limited to a few thousand in Zuccotti Park were being marched on by hundreds of thousands. That is not to say that all of these women and men supported the entire far-left agenda of the Women’s March. Rather, Trump’s election provided the New Progressives the opportunity to cast themselves as his opposite, and if Trump was the ultimate evil, that made them the ultimate good.

Indeed, even the Women’s March itself was accused of insufficient wokeness, as illustrated by a Washington Post headline just three days later that asked, “Was the Women’s March just another display of white privilege? Some think so.”

The irony of this is that the organizers, people like Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, had pushed the march’s manifesto and goals so far left of center using the exactly the same justification as was used for the Occupy General Assembly’s progressive stack: the most marginalized must lead, white women were to take a back seat and listen. Just as with Occupy Wall Street, there was, at best, antipathy towards Israel, and at worst outright anti-Semitism.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, POLITICS Comments turned off

Warren Says Combating Climate Change Is ‘A Bigger Challenge Than WWII’ Elizabeth Warren dished out a climate change agenda that is as improbable as it is expensive, then turned around and insulted WWII vets.By Susanna Hoffman

Posted By on June 5th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/05/warren-says-combating-climate-change-is-a-bigger-challenge-than-wwii/

At a campaign event in Detroit, Michigan, on Tuesday, 2020 Democrat presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said that climate change is an even bigger challenge than World War II.

“America has faced huge challenges before, WWII and putting a man on the moon,” Warren said. “This environmental catastrophe bearing down on us may be the biggest challenge yet.”

Warren’s disconcerting comparison to WWII must mean her plans to prevent climate change are drastic indeed. To handle this global threat, Warren weirdly implies we must have to mobilize a greater American industrial base than was in place during WWII, as well as more scientific innovation and resources than required to put a man on the moon.

This is Warren’s pitch for her Green Manufacturing Plan, which is part of her commitment to the Green New Deal that Democrats across the board have pledged to support. According to her website, Warren is looking at a 10-year plan to invest $2 trillion into an expected $23 trillion market for clean energy technology. This investment will help us “achieve the ambitious targets of the Green New Deal,” Warren wrote on her website.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will Mueller’s Testimony Make a Difference? By Matthew Continetti

Posted By on June 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/robert-muellers-testimony-will-it-make-difference/

Plenty of Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, would like to see Robert Mueller testify before Congress despite the special counsel’s reluctance to appear. Each party has its reasons. Democrats want to score political points by re-litigating Mueller’s report on national television. Republicans want to ask him about when, exactly, he knew there was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, and about the origins of the investigation itself.

Some liberals go further. They say Mueller’s testimony might have a galvanizing effect on public opinion, and help convince voters that President Trump should be impeached. “If history is any guide,” writes Steve Benen at MSNBC, “the more Americans are confronted with damaging details about the president’s alleged misdeeds, the more the polls are likely to shift.”

Count me skeptical. While there have been slight ups and downs, for the most part polling on impeachment has been stable. The public continues to oppose it.

For example: In the November CNN exit poll, 40 percent of voters were for impeachment. After the release of the Mueller report, the debate over its findings, and Mueller’s press conference last week, CNN’s most recent poll of adults has support for impeachment at . . . 41 percent.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Mexico Is an Asylum Free-Rider By Mark Krikorian

Posted By on June 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/mexico-asylum-policy-hypocrisy/

It embraces an expansive definition of asylum, then passes the buck by waving asylum-seekers northward.

President Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Mexican goods starting next week may or may not get Mexico to be more cooperative in preventing third-country “asylum-seekers” from passing through on the way to our border. I’m not too concerned about the costs that such a tariff would impose on U.S. businesses and consumers (which would be real), because the costs would be worth it if the tactic were actually to work. I’m skeptical it will, since Mexico always has a chip on its shoulder with regard to us. But recent signs suggest I might be pleasantly surprised. Here’s hoping.

Perhaps more important than the means, however, are the desired ends. During a call with reporters last week, acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan laid out three specific steps the administration wants Mexico to take. First is tightening security on Mexico’s border with Guatemala and chokepoints in southern Mexico (such as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec). Second is targeting the smuggling organizations; as McAleenan said, “The logistical effort to move 100,000 people through a country every four weeks is immense. This is noticeable.”

Mexico might well agree to these two demands, potentially averting the tariffs. But the third demand is the most consequential, and the most difficult. As McAleenan put it, “We need to be able to protect people in the first safe country they arrive in — really, all through the hemisphere, but certainly with our partner to the south.” In other words, the administration wants Mexico to sign a “safe third country” agreement, whereby foreigners who pass through Mexico would not be permitted even to apply for asylum at the U.S. border, and Mexico would agree to take them back, because if they were genuinely fleeing persecution, they should have applied in the first safe country they reached. As Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation wrote last fall about one of the migrant caravans, “ignoring Mexico’s asylum process is prima facie evidence that a claim for asylum in the U.S. is bogus.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

9 Times The Obama Administration Fought Subpoenas or Blocked Officials from Testifying Before Congress By Matt Margolis

Posted By on June 5th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/9-times-the-obama-administration-fought-subpoenas-or-blocked-officials-from-testifying-before-congress/

After the long and thorough, and, of course, incredibly expensive Mueller investigation, Democrats were left distraught over a lack of any crime to justify going forward with impeachment. In the wake of the Mueller Report, they’ve since promised new investigations in the hopes of finding some crime to justify putting the country through a process that most don’t want us to go through just because Democrats haven’t gotten over the 2016 election. In recent weeks, stories about subpoenas being challenged and Trump officials being instructed not testify have been saturating the news and being presented as evidence of further obstruction. Most notably, Attorney General Barr faces a forthcoming vote of contempt in the House for not wanting to be a part of the Democrats’ witch hunt.

It seems as good a time as any to remind Democrats that we know their outrage is phony and that we know this is just pandering to their base who wants to see them “resist, resist, resist” at all costs. So, I’ve compiled nine examples of fights over subpoenas or testimony during the Obama years. The point here is that fights between the executive branch and the legislative branch over executive privilege are nothing new. Despite the rhetoric that the Trump administration’s fighting back against Democrat witchhunts being unprecedented, Barack Obama spent eight years fighting with Congress over their exercising their rights to oversight.

HISTORY Comments turned off

D-Day By the Numbers, By the Men By Stephen Green J

Posted By on June 5th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/d-day-by-the-numbers-by-the-men/

I want you to imagine picking up every resident of a medium-sized city, everything they’ll need to eat and drink and rest for a few days, any vehicles they might need, gasoline of course, plus lots of guns and ammo — did I mention this was a hunting trip? — and then moving them all in a few short hours a distance of anywhere from 30 to 125 miles or so.

Now imagine you have to move all those people and all that stuff partly by air, but mostly across heavy seas in foul weather.

Under enemy fire.

I should also mention that if you messed up any of the big details, a lot of your people are going to die, and then you’re going to have to figure out how to move them all back without getting too many more of them killed.

And all that is just the beginning. Because once you’ve done all that, those men on that “hunting trip” are going to have to take and widen a beachhead big enough and secure enough that you can rebuild (or build from scratch!) the ports and roads necessary to bring another million men over… plus all additional the stuff all those additional men will need.

That, in a logistical nutshell, was what the Allies had to accomplish 75 years ago on D-Day.

Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower said that “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” The planning which went into Operation Overlord boggles the mind.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump reads FDR prayer as Queen Elizabeth II, world leaders mark D-Day anniversary in Portsmouth

Posted By on June 5th, 2019

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/06/05/donald-trump-queen-elizabeth-75th-anniversary-d-day-invasion/1349585001/
PORTSMOUTH, England – On the final leg of his three-day state visit to Britain, President Donald Trump joined Queen Elizabeth II and leaders from around the world in paying respects to Allied service members who 75 years ago took part in the D-Day landings that helped liberate Europe from Nazi Germany’s military occupation.

The Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, were the largest land, air and sea invasion in history and Portsmouth Naval Base, near where the commemorations took place Wednesday, served as a key launch pad for those forces.

In an address, the queen said that “75 years ago, hundreds of thousands of young soldiers, sailors and airmen left these shores in the cause of freedom. In a broadcast to the nation at that time, my father, King George VI, said: ‘What is demanded from us all is something more than courage and endurance; we need a revival of spirit, a new unconquerable resolve.’ That is exactly what those brave men brought to the battle, as the fate of the world depended on their success.”

Earlier, in a special message to mark the occasion, the queen said: “At this time of reflection for veterans of the conflict and their families, I am sure that these commemorations will provide an opportunity to honor those who made extraordinary sacrifices to secure freedom in Europe. They must never be forgotten.”

In addition to Trump, the queen and Prime Minister Theresa May hosted 14 other leaders in Portsmouth, including France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Angela Merkel and Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Prince Charles attended with representatives from every country that participated in the storming of the beaches along France’s northwestern coast in a surprise attack involving 5,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes and 150,000 soldiers. More than 4,000 Allied service members – more than half of them American – died in the assault credited with changing the course of the war.

The event featured a number of British and American veterans of the invasion. Their chests bore ribbons and medals and a few of them clutched canes. The story of the build-up to the battle was told through live music, performances and readings.

“We must never forget,” said D-Day veteran John Jenkins, 99, addressing a crowd of more than a thousand seated in folding chairs before an amphitheater-type stage. About 300 World War II veterans attended the ceremony on England’s south coast.