NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. Relies on China, Congo Abusive Labor for Key Mineral Catherine Salgado

Posted By on December 17th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2023/12/16/us-relies-on-china-drc-abusive-labor-for-key-mineral-n4924807

Net zero’s dirty little secret is the African child labor and China’s forced labor for mining cobalt. But what that also means is that the United States is heavily dependent on our existential enemy and child labor for one of the most important minerals in modern society.

Even NPR recognizes the problem. “Right now, most of the cobalt the US and its allies use comes from mines that are owned or controlled by China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” the outlet reported. Of course, NPR did not explain that those supposedly wonderfully eco-friendly electric cars, besides being unreliable, are a lot dirtier than environmentalists admit, precisely because of that cobalt mining for their batteries. But our phones also require cobalt. The need for lithium ion batteries made relatively unimportant cobalt a highly desired substance within the last few decades. The U.S. was set to have one cobalt mine in Idaho, but it closed before starting to operate. We need these mines — not to chase the Biden administration’s impossible “net zero” dreams, but because the electronics that form such a key part of our society require cobalt.

I previously highlighted the ethical concerns around cobalt mining for electric vehicle (EV) batteries. According to “Ethical Consumer” in 2022: “70% of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo.” But there’s a massive child labor problem in the DRC. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), child labor is involved in Congo’s cobalt ore, copper, diamond, gold, tantalum ore, tin ore, and tungsten ore mining. Despite the smug smile on your hippie uncle’s face as he drives his Tesla, his toxic EV battery is dependent on exploitation of kids.

It gets worse. Much of the DRC’s cobalt is under the influence or control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which also has a modest little goal of taking down America and dominating the world. As of March, “China’s share of cobalt production is expected to reach half of global output, up from 44 percent currently. China’s cobalt refining reached 140,000 metric tons in 2022–77 percent share of the world’s refining capacity.” So your phone quite possibly depends on our worst enemy for its cobalt. That’s not exactly what we’d call an encouraging state of affairs. Oh, by the way, Hunter Biden was part of a venture that helped the Chinese buy one of the world’s biggest cobalt deposits.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Border Agents on Alert After 10 IEDs Recovered Lincoln Brown

Posted By on December 17th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/lincolnbrown/2023/12/15/border-agents-on-alert-after-10-ieds-recovered-n4924778

We live in an odd time. Ours is the era caught between the normal life of the past and a dystopian future. We are watching things come to pass that, less than a decade ago, most of us would never have envisioned. We have front-row seats to the devolution of society. I will spare you the litany of those things that have gone awry in the past few years as America and the world approach terminal velocity.

Aside from 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Japanese incursions into Alaska, and balloon bombs during the Second World War, for the most part, combat has been unknown on or close to American soil. In fact, we now have a generation of people who know little, if anything about 9/11. 

The concept that a foreign agent or power would commit an act of war in or even near the United States has seemed for so long to be impractical and impossible. Some would like to believe that 9/11 was a fluke. Nothing like that could ever happen again. Hamas is a liberation organization, and everyone who crosses the border illegally is just here to make a better life for themselves. Only a racist, xenophobic conservative would ever believe otherwise. 

But U.S. Customs and Border Protection has told its agents to keep an eye out for IEDs. In our arrogance, we tend to think that things like IEDs are confined to war zones in distant lands. But on Wednesday, Mexican authorities located ten such devices on the Mexican side. Fox News reported that the IEDs were found after what amounted to a firefight near Tucson between two rival cartels. Each side wanted control of the area that has a gap in the border fence. That gap has previously served as a portal for transporting drugs. It is currently used for human trafficking. One suspect was found with an AK-47, two magazines, loose rounds, and a handgun. 

Granted, Americans were not the targets of this firefight, but does anyone think that the cartels care if non-combatants are caught in the crossfire? And how long will these sorts of skirmishes be contained to the border? Cartels already have shown that they have no regard for human life. The prevalence of drug and human trafficking is evidence enough of that. The Fox story said that even as Republicans try to fight for tougher border security, the Biden administration is digging in its heels, claiming that such measures would “cut off nearly all access to humanitarian protections in ways that are inconsistent with our Nation’s values and international obligations.” 

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Media’s Deafening Silence About American Hostages

Posted By on December 17th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/14/the-deafening-media-silence-about-americans-held-hostage-by-hamas/

On Monday, the White House held a Hanukkah reception. Among those not invited: American families who have relatives currently being held hostage by Hamas.

CNN reported that: “Ruby Chen, whose son Itay is a reservist missing since the militant group’s October 7 attacks on Israel, said a number of the families of American hostages were in Washington, D.C., this week, and had reached out to the White House asking to attend the reception but were not invited. A White House spokesperson declined to comment.”

The White House then scrambled to have these families meet President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

Biden isn’t the only one who doesn’t seem to care much about these hostages. The press has been weirdly quiet about their plight and seems content to wait for Biden to “negotiate” their release. If they’re even still alive.

Who are these hostages? Who are the families? What are they going through? It’s possible there have been news reports telling the world about the seven American men and possibly one American woman who are being held captive by these murdering, butchering, raping terrorist thugs. But we couldn’t find any. Even Biden’s unbelievable invitation foul-up was given ho-hum treatment.

This is in stark contrast to other such stories, where the press devotes endless amounts of ink to personalizing and humanizing victims — if they’re the right victim of the right sort of crime, that is.

This media blackout is not for lack of trying by the families. USA Today notes that these families have a public relations firm representing them. And several told CNN that “they wanted the international community – both governments and the Red Cross – to push more forcefully on behalf of their loved ones, to speak out against the terrible conditions they’re experiencing and for their release.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

America’s Dismal Test Scores Are a Bipartisan Failure US students are falling further behind the rest of the world. Politicians don’t seem to have noticed. Michael Bloomberg

Posted By on December 17th, 2023

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-13/michael-r-bloomberg-students-dismal-test-scores-are-a-bipartisan-failure?srnd=opinion

For anyone concerned about America’s future, the latest findings from the Program for International Student Assessment are nothing short of alarming. US math scores fell by 13 points between 2018 and 2022, with students continuing to underperform their peers in most other developed countries. This failure underscores the need to improve America’s schools and hold them accountable for results. Sadly, it’s not clear our country’s elected leaders are paying attention.

The PISA test measured the aptitude of students from 81 countries in math, reading and science. And while US students mostly held steady in reading and science, overall, they are behind many competitors. Out of 37 participating members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the US ranked 26th in math — a slight improvement over 2018, but still unacceptably low. Yet it was enough for Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to declare that the $190 billion in federal relief spent on public schools since 2020 has “kept the United States in the game.”

If so, too many students are still losing. Student math performance was its worst in two decades. The gap between the US and the highest-performing countries grew. More than a third of American students failed to demonstrate basic proficiency in math. Just 7% of 15-year-olds scored in the highest two levels, compared to 41% in Singapore and 32% in Taiwan.

At the most basic level, US students need more classroom instruction to make up for pandemic learning loss. That should include high-dosage tutoring, longer school days and mandatory summer school for those furthest behind. Over the longer term, closing academic deficits with the rest of the world also requires policymakers to bolster teacher quality, adopt more rigorous instructional materials and promote greater competition through the expansion of high-quality public charter schools.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Most Powerful Anti-Trump Argument in the GOP Has Evaporated With Biden’s poll numbers plummeting, Trump’s electability isn’t an issue anymore. Rich Lowry

Posted By on December 17th, 2023

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/14/trump-biden-primary-electability-00131616

Joe Biden has done Donald Trump the enormous favor of collapsing before our eyes.

As the 2024 GOP presidential race heads into the first contests, Biden’s abysmal run of polling has boosted Trump and undercut his Republican opponents by hanging a neon sign on our politics reading, “TRUMP CAN WIN.”

It may be that Trump, such is his hold on GOP voters, didn’t need any help establishing a dominant position in the fight for the Republican nomination, but two exogenous events have boosted him.

First, the indictments from the Justice Department and Democratic prosecutors created a predictable rally-around-Trump effect that put him on a fundamentally higher trajectory in the race, and second, Biden’s execrable polling has completely eliminated any possibility of making an electability argument against Trump.

There’s picking your opponent through underhanded ads — something Democrats did to help get vulnerable MAGA opponents in 2022 — and then there’s picking your opponent through your own incredible weakness that makes him look even more alluring to his partisans.

The most salient doubt about Trump among on-the-fence Republicans has never been his policy priorities, governing effectiveness or conduct after the 2020 election, but his ability to win.

Trump’s standing in the party was shaken after the 2022 elections when Republicans underperformed, and he had his fingerprints on the disappointment. The Ron DeSantis landslide in Florida created a contrast that seemingly opened a vista for an intuitive, winning argument — stick with Trump and lose, or go with the young, fresh governor and win.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Claudine Gay’s way with words How to get away with plagiarism at Harvard Peter Wood

Posted By on December 17th, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/claudine-gay-way-words-dei-plagiarism/

Claudine Gay is a self-declared “transformational” president of Harvard University. She campaigned for the job by promising to retire the old Harvard of privilege and patrimony and to bring into being a new Harvard founded on principles of anti-racism and social justice. How is she doing?

At the moment, she is a bit distracted by allegations of plagiarism in her slim portfolio of publications. But she has a whole sea of troubles to take arms against. Let’s let her rest a moment on the shore and consider a small story from the not-always-illustrious past of America’s greatest university. 

In 2007 Harvard admitted as a transfer student a young man, Adam Wheeler, who had completed his first two years at Bowdoin College in Maine. Adam had achieved a spectacular academic record at Bowdoin and would go to achieve comparable results as junior and senior at Harvard. But before he could graduate, Adam was exposed as a fraud who through a combination of plagiarism, forgery and arrant lying had faked his way through his whole undergraduate career. Julie Zauzmer, a reporter for the Harvard Crimson, provided the audacious nuts and bolts in her 2012 book, Conning Harvard. 

How did Adam Wheeler get so far? He worked very hard at fooling people but, beyond that, he trusted that Harvard would never bother to double-check anything he submitted. His test scores were phony. His grades were doctored. His letters of recommendation were forged. And his essays were plagiarized. And he was right.

Wheeler’s luck ran out only when the chairman of the English Department, James Simpson, read his application for a Fulbright fellowship and discovered that Wheeler had stolen long passages from a book he knew well: Essays on General Education in Harvard College.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

We Were Taught to Hate Jews ‘It’s like asking me how often I drink water. Antisemitism was everywhere.’ Apostates, former Islamists, and an almost-terrorist on how they changed their minds. By Madeleine Rowley

Posted By on December 17th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/we-were-taught-to-hate-jews?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The following five ex-Muslims grew up in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, but they were all indoctrinated, they say, with the same views on Jews and Israel. They remember a childhood shot through with antisemitic moments ranging from the mundane (one woman recalls her aunt claiming Jews put cancer in her vegetables at the market) to the deadly (a former extremist went as far as to pick a location in London for a terrorist attack he planned to carry out at 17).

These hateful ideas, repeated by their family members, religious leaders, and teachers, are part and parcel of the same animus, they say, that fueled Hamas’s attacks on October 7.

Some of the people you will hear from below have received death threats for speaking out on issues like antisemitism and sexism in the Muslim world. One uses a pen name to protect herself and her daughter from her terrorist ex-husband, who is currently jailed in Egypt. All of them came to reject their loathing for Jewish people and the West, and have rebuilt their lives in the wake of their realizations. Here are their stories, which you can read or click to listen to each author recite in the audio recordings below.

“To enter our classroom, we had to step on a painting of the Israeli flag on the ground.”

When I was born, Iran was still free. You could drink and dance, and women could wear whatever they wanted. I’ll never forget my first day of school after the Islamic Revolution. I was six, and my mother entered my room with a long, dark, and formless manteau and a piece of fabric for my hair and neck.

“My darling,” she said, “this is your uniform.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Today’s Hyper-Connected Network Systems Face Myriad Security Challenges Chuck Brooks

Posted By on December 17th, 2023

https://www.securityinfowatch.com/critical-infrastructure/article/53078430/todays-hyper-connected-network-systems-face-myriad-security-challenges

The current state of the cyber ecosystem is a precarious one. The perimeters have become blurred, and as the capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices have grown exponentially, so have cyber intrusions from sophisticated malware to both Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) Industrial Control Systems (ICS), and SCADA networks. The threat is even more amplified as those networks are converging.

According to PMMI Business Intelligence’s “2021 Cybersecurity: Assess Your Risk,” report from, Information Technology (IT) attacks “specifically target the enterprise IT systems at a manufacturer, seeking to gain entry through vectors such as email, a CRM system, or an ERP program, which can span across an operation.” Operational Technology (OT) attacks “are designed to exploit the systems that are directly on the plant floor. An OT attack can originate through vectors such as individual sensors on the production line, SCADA/HMI panels, or even unsecured PLCs.” Cybersecurity 101: The Difference Between IT and OT Attacks | OEM Magazine

But in our increasingly hyper-connected internet environments, most physical security systems have become tethered to IT networks and evolving cloud infrastructure. The trend of integration of Industrial hardware and software combined with growing networked IT sensors is redefining the surface attack opportunities for hackers across all digital infrastructures.

The IT OT Convergence Supply Chain

Protecting the fusion of IT/OT networks from cyber-attacks is an urgent challenge that requires orchestration. They all have unique operational frameworks, access points, and a variety of legacy systems and are intertwined with varying regulation and compliance protocols. And a lack of trained skilled workforce is a continual issue in IT, OT and ISC cybersecurity.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘I’m not a progressive’: Sen. John Fetterman breaks with the left, showing a maverick side: Sahil Kapur

Posted By on December 17th, 2023

https://www.aol.com/im-not-progressive-fetterman-breaks-120000771.html

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., is breaking with progressives on hot-button issues with his fiery support for Israel and calls for Democrats to engage on tougher immigration laws, disappointing some on the left [who want more potential Democratic voters] as he shows an independent streak.

He’s also continually scolding Democrats for not pushing Sen. Bob Menendez out of office after he was indicted on federal charges of taking bribes and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt, which the New Jersey Democrat denies.

In the 2022 campaign, Fetterman’s ties to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., prompted GOP opponent Mehmet Oz to tell voters he’d be a mere “sidekick” for the democratic socialist. But Fetterman’s recent stances point to an unorthodox brand of blue-collar liberalism, with a dash of outsider populism, in a purple state that is expected to be hotly contested again in the 2024 elections.

In an interview, the first-term Pennsylvania Democrat said his critics shouldn’t be surprised.

“I’m not a progressive,” Fetterman told NBC News. “I just think I’m a Democrat that is very committed to choice and other things. But with Israel, I’m going to be on the right [not wrong] side of that. And immigration is something near and dear to me, and I think we do have to effectively address it as well.”

Fetterman insisted he can be pro-immigration while also favoring policies to restrict the flow of migration to manageable levels, disagreeing with progressives who oppose new limits on asylum and bash some of the ideas in the negotiations as cruel.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

BILL MAHER: FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA VIDEO

Posted By on December 17th, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-CRXROorw