NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Destroy Columbus Day, Destroy America The Left’s lust for history to change the future. by Thom Nickels

Posted By on October 10th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/destroy-columbus-day-destroy-america/

A turquoise-colored sign on the door of my bank announcing closure on October 10 because of Indigenous Peoples’ Day inspired me to beat a path to a teller, even though I was not there for banking.

“Excuse me,” I said. “But I have a fun question for you…”

The question was far from fun but I didn’t want to appear strident. “Regarding the sign on the door…. What happened to the holiday called Columbus Day?” The teller rolled her eyes and said the wording on the sign was not the bank’s fault. She explained that the bank had made up a different sign that mentioned Columbus Day but the City of Philadelphia had forced them to scratch out Columbus and insert Indigenous Peoples Day (IPD).

“We didn’t do it,” she assured me.

I recalled how in February 2021 Mayor Jim Kenney signed an executive order effectively changing  Columbus Day in the City of Philadelphia with the (Communist China-sounding) IPD-identifier. That executive order had come after a contentious period beginning in 2020 with the George Floyd riots when left activist mobs attempted to pull down the Frank Rizzo statue (after dousing it in paint and dressing it up in a woman’s bra) located on the steps of the city’s Municipal Services Building since 1998.

As it turned out, the leftists didn’t have to dismantle the statue because Mayor Kenny announced that the city was making plans to remove it and put it into storage.

With the Rizzo statue gone, the Columbus statue in South Philadelphia’s Marconi Plaza became the city’s new Public Enemy No. 1.

Columbus statues were already being removed and beheaded around the country. Across the Delaware River, Camden, New Jersey had dismantled (and smashed to pieces) its Columbus statue in Farnham Park.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The West is on the road to energy ruin Green policies have crippled Europe. They will do the same to America by Emmet Penney

Posted By on October 10th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-west-is-on-the-road-to-energy-ruin/

Since the beginning of the Ukraine war and the sanctions it triggered, energy prices have skyrocketed. President Joe Biden has called this year’s high energy prices “Putin’s price hike.” British prime minister Liz Truss told households that their high energy bills were a fair price to pay for solidarity with Ukraine. Margrethe Vestager, vice president of the European Commission, has encouraged Europeans to take short, cold showers to conserve energy. “When you turn off the water, say ‘Take that, Putin!’” she urged.

But are the high prices really Putin’s fault? He didn’t sanction himself, after all. It’s the West that chose to cut itself off from the Russian fossil fuels upon which it had come to rely. Moreover, the sanctions have failed — Russia’s corporate profits leapt 25 percent between the imposition of the sanctions and the end of August.

So what are the origins of the current energy crisis? When did it really begin?

Let’s play a game. Guess which year these headlines are from: “Curtailed ammonia production in Antwerp and Ludwigshafen.” “High natural gas prices lead to a shutdown of British fertilizer plants.” “Diesel Shortage Amid Soaring Prices: Truck Stops Resort To Rationing.” If you guessed 2022, you’d be wrong. Those are all from September 2021.

The truth is that the energy crisis began to take effect late last year. A combination of post-Covid demand rebound, a wind drought in Europe and depleted fossil fuel storage on the continent all collided to put serious pressure on the world’s industrial systems. Add the longstanding overinvestment in unreliable renewables, nuclear plant closures across the world in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and a global drop of more than 50 percent in oil and gas investment — from $700 billion to $300 billion — between 2014 and last year, and you have everything you need to kick off a global energy crunch. Russian tank treads running from the Donbas to Kyiv just made it all worse.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

64% Of Voters ‘Concerned’ Over Biden’s Mental Health: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on October 10th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/10/64-of-voters-concerned-over-bidens-mental-health-ii-tipp-poll/

Concerns over President Joe Biden’s recent very public displays of possibly age-related mental impairments have jumped among voters since mid-summer, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows. And these worries aren’t partisan, with a majority of all political groups, including Democrats, now expressing concern.

In early August, we asked Americans: “Some people are concerned about President Biden’s mental health. How concerned are you about President Biden’s mental health?” At the time, a number of public displays of unsteadiness, confusion and verbal gaffes seen in the media suggested to many that that the nation’s commander in chief’s mental acuity was questionable.

For instance, 59% overall said they were worried about his mental health. The responses included 82% of Republicans, 56% of independents, but just 39% of Democrats.

We asked the same question in our most recent online poll of 1,376 adults across the country taken from October 5-7, with a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points. This time, the overall number grew to 64%, or nearly two-thirds of all voters.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Cold War Program Gets Hijacked National Resource Centers were meant to further U.S. interests, not to spread woke propaganda. By Neetu Arnold

Posted By on October 10th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-cold-war-program-gets-hijacked-national-resource-center-security-1950s-critical-race-theory-environmental-justice-k-12-language-11665320013?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A Cold War-era federal program has wandered far from its national-security mission and into the woke follies that permeate much of American education. For decades, U.S. colleges and universities have received taxpayer dollars through the Education Department’s National Resource Centers, a program intended to bolster U.S. national security at the height of tension with the Soviet Union. But more recently National Resource Centers are promoting unserious academic research or causes irrelevant to national security.

NRC-funded efforts included a training institute last year at the University of Texas, Austin, where teachers of pre-kindergartners through fifth graders were schooled in “(Un)learning patterns of whiteness in literacy teaching.” In May, Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies sponsored a webinar about using picture books to initiate “conversations centered on advocacy for LGBT Latina/o(x) youth.” The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia hosted a graduate student who uses critical race theory in her research on Russia and Ukraine.

Many scholars have questioned CRT’s academic rigor, distortions of history, and promotion of racial grievances. In fellowships at Syracuse University and Cornell University, education-school faculty incorporate subjects such as environmental justice into teacher-training programs. New York University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies held a 10-month program in which teachers use something called “contemporary critical educational theory” to create “culturally relevant” classroom lessons. The propaganda from such NRC-sponsored initiatives becomes more potent when the efforts include outreach for K-12 teachers, who will pass along what they learn to students.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China: The Immovable Supreme Leader by Amir Taheri

Posted By on October 10th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18966/china-xi-leader

Having changed the party’s constitution, he is no longer required to retire at age 68 and, heading to be 70 next year, he may hang on to power for another 10 years. Nevertheless, things may not be as easy as Xi hopes.

The Chinese Communist Party, with a membership of 98 million, is full of young and ambitious men and women who regard Xi and others in his generation of party chiefs as “Red Princes”, sons of first-generation Communists who owe their ascendancy to nepotism.

Then there is China’s huge and rapidly growing military machine, which consumes over $200 billion each year and contains tens of thousands of young, highly educated and ambitious officers who may not see Xi, a man with no military background, as the sole arbiter of the nation’s fate.

Xi faces two other problems.

First, the Chinese economy is clearly slowing down, with hundreds of businesses going bust and tens of thousands of projects abandoned, while stagflation looms on the horizon.

The second is what some see as systemic corruption. Xi has launched a massive anti-corruption campaign, even issuing death sentences for some senior party figures. But many in China suspect that he is using the campaign as a cover for purging opponents in the party.

When he took over as China’s leader 10 years ago, President Xi Jinping was hailed by Western experts and media as a man who would open the path for major political reforms to reflect the rising tiger’s economic transformation. Some even saw him as a wiser version of Mikhail Gorbachev and speculated that he might adopt the end-of-history narrative by accepting democratization as the only option for a modern industrial power.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

All the President’s Disconnects The best that can be said about him is that he’s consistently wrong. by Frank Schell

Posted By on October 10th, 2022

https://spectator.org/all-the-presidents-disconnects/

“I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates states regarding then Vice President Joe Biden in his book Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War released in 2014.

Nothing much has changed since this statement of Robert Gates, who served as Director of Central Intelligence under President George H.W. Bush, and later as Secretary of Defense under both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline in June of last year has positioned the U.S. from a net exporter of energy to tapping the caverns of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The mullahs of Iran have recently taken to brutal suppression of what began as women protesting, enraged by the death of Mahsa Amini for violating hijab rules. In a strategic disconnect, President Biden has missed an opportunity to address the Iranian people forcefully, to express support for their desire for human rights and regime change. Instead, the White House is seeking another agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear aspirations. To believe that adventurist Iran will not cheat and continue to develop enriched fissile material is a willing suspension of disbelief, to use the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

U.S. Presidents Refuse to Protect the U.S. from North Korea’s Nukes by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on October 9th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18968/us-presidents-refuse-to-protect-the-us-from-north

The U.S. has the power to stop North Korean missile tests but has chosen not to do so. This is true not only of the Biden administration but also its predecessors. The U.S. has continually decided to adopt feeble options.

Chinese banks have been laundering the North’s proceeds of criminal and prohibited activity for decades. The Trump administration in June 2017 designated, pursuant to Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act, China’s Bank of Dandong to be of “primary money laundering concern.” The designation meant the bank could no longer clear dollar transactions through the U.S. banking system.

If the designation was meant as a signal, Beijing ignored it. And the Chinese had assessed the situation correctly. Trump’s administration in 2018 decided not to enforce money-laundering laws against two of the “Big Four” Chinese banks, Agricultural Bank of China and China Construction Bank, which were handling suspicious transactions involving North Korea. Such a designation would have put these banks out of business everywhere outside China, and Beijing, as a practical matter, would have had to stop money-laundering for North Korea.

As a result of inaction, President Trump gave Chinese institutions free passes to violate American statutes. The administration’s decision, an abrogation of its responsibilities to uphold the law, was deeply prejudicial to its efforts to disarm the Kim regime.

The Biden administration has continued Trump’s lax posture.

The administration has the goods on the North Koreans and the Chinese but has continually failed to act. “This failure is a choice. The money Kim Jong Un obtains by fraud, computer hacking, and ransomware and which he uses to build bombs to threaten us is being laundered through our banks. We’re giving Xi Jinping and Kim de facto immunity to keep right on doing it.” — Joshua Stanton, sanctions expert, to Gatestone Institute, October, 2022

North Korea’s accelerated testing of missiles is a reminder that Kim Jong Un is quickly developing the power to destroy American cities. Perhaps the only things his technicians cannot do is miniaturize a nuclear device and shield it from heat upon reentry to the atmosphere. These are, however, capabilities his military, perhaps with China’s help, will develop soon.

Americans might wonder how one of the most destitute regimes on earth can build weapons capable of killing most every American. They may also wonder why Washington has done almost nothing to stop the North Koreans from selling their weapons to Iran, among others.

ELECTIONS, MY SAY: Comments turned off

MEMORY LANE: THE CRITICAL DEBATE BETWEEN INCUMBENT PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER AND CHALLENGER RONALD REAGAN

Posted By on October 9th, 2022

The old cliche: “The more things change the more they remain the same.” Ronald Reagan won by a landslide in 1980. This debate was critical in making the case for conservatism and the need for change.  Long but worth a read: rsk

“The candidates will debate questions on domestic, economic, foreign policy, and national security issues.

The ground rules for this, as agreed by you gentlemen, are these: Each panelist down here will ask a question, the same question, to each of the two candidates. After the two candidates have answered, a panelist will ask followup questions to try to sharpen the answers. The candidates will then have an opportunity each to make a rebuttal. That will constitute the first half of the debate, and I will state the rules for the second half later on.

Now, based on a toss of the coin, Governor Reagan will respond to the first question from Marvin Stone.

QUESTIONS

U.S. ARMED FORCES

Mr. Stone. Governor, as you’re well aware, the question of war and peace has emerged as a central issue in this campaign in the give-and-take of recent weeks. President Carter’s been criticized for responding late to aggressive Soviet impulses, for insufficient buildup of our Armed Forces, and a paralysis in dealing with Afghanistan and Iran. You have been criticized for being all too quick to advocate the use of lots of muscle, military action, to deal with foreign crises. Specifically, what are the differences between the two of you on the uses of American military power?

Governor Reagan. I don’t know what the differences might be, because I don’t know what Mr. Carter’s policies are. I do know what he has said about mine. And I’m only here to tell you that I believe with all my heart that our first priority must be world peace, and that use of force is always and only a last resort, when everything else has failed, and then only with regard to our national security.

Now, I believe, also that this meeting, this mission, this responsibility for preserving the peace, which I believe is a responsibility peculiar to our country, that we cannot shirk our responsibility as the leader of the Free World, because we’re the only one that can do it. And therefore, the burden of maintaining the peace falls on us. And to maintain that peace requires strength. America has never gotten in a war because we were too strong. We can get into a war by letting events get out of hand, as they have in the last 3 years under the foreign policies of this administration of Mr. Carter’s, until we’re faced each time with a crisis. And good management in preserving the peace requires that we control the events and try to intercept before they become a crisis.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Prudence Is a Virtue The ethical man is also the prudent man. Is Joe Biden prudent? Was it prudent to talk about the prospect of Armageddon? By Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 9th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/08/prudence-is-a-virtue/

Joe Biden has me thinking about Aristotle. 

If that seems odd—and I understand that it does—consider Biden’s much publicized remarks last week at a Democratic fundraiser about “Armageddon.” Referring to Vladimir Putin’s veiled but increasingly strident threats to use “all the means at our disposal” to defend Russian territorial integrity, Biden went full-Cuban missile crisis on the assembled members of the great Democratic ATM: “We have not,” he said, “faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis.” 

Hmm.

Are we to infer that Joe Biden is like John F. Kennedy facing down Nikita Khrushchev? You might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment. 

Granted, the idea is preposterous in about 87 different ways. But perhaps Biden’s speechwriters wanted to plant a seed. Anyway, we are probably meant to keep JFK in the back of our minds. 

Biden did not actually cite the Book of Revelation, which identifies Armageddon as the site of the final battle between good and evil at the end of the world, but I have no doubt that the word “Armageddon” was echoing loudly down the corridors of the Kremlin. That, I am pretty sure, was by design. Did it have Putin polishing the launch apparatus on some of his 6000 nukes? I don’t know.

Probably, though, Putin’s lips were pursed when he heard Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president and celebrated T-shirt model, call upon NATO to conduct “preventative action” against Russian targets to prevent their use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

I thought it was cute that Zelenskyy’s translator first said “preventative strikes” before correcting himself and substituting “preventative action.” 

Another seed planted. Was it deliberate? You tell me.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Thirteen judges say ‘no’ to Yale law grads By Monica Showalter

Posted By on October 9th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/thirteenjudges_say_no_to_yale_law_grads.html

Toxic school, toxic graduates.

Instead of learning how to behave professionally as lawyers at Yale law school, the storied and prestigious school, possibly the most prestigious in the country, has become a haven for wokester intolerance of the most infantile sort. Speakers are shouted down instead of debated through the ace legal reasoning they’re supposed to teach over there,dissidents are “canceled” and the radical student body in this atmosphere is making a noisy spectacle of itself.

It’s gotten so bad that judges are saying to themselves they want no part of this — and the rot is so deep the entire school is considered hopelessly tainted. Not surprisingly, Yale is now increasingly seeing its grads treated like pariahs by real-world judges. The tally of judges who have stated they will no longer hire Yale graduates as clerks is now 13.

According to legal blog Behind The Black (hat tip: Instapundit):

Following the public announcement by Judge James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that he would no longer hire Yale graduates as law clerks because of that school’s enthusiasm for blacklisting and censorship, it appears that a dozen other judges have joined his boycott as well.

“Students should be mindful that they will face diminished opportunities if they go to Yale,” said a prominent circuit court judge, whose clerks have gone on to nab Supreme Court clerkships. “I have no confidence that they’re being taught anything.”

With one exception, the judges made clear this is a policy they are imposing on future—not current—Yale Law School students.

Ho’s public speech was even more harsh.

“Yale presents itself as the best, most elite institution of legal education. Yet it’s the worst when it comes to legal cancellation.” The school “sets the tone for other law schools, and for the legal profession at large. I certainly reserve the right to add other schools in the future. But my sincere hope is that I won’t have to. …”