Displaying posts published in

June 2022

Biden and Oil: Destroy America in Order to Save It Our current oil shortage did not arise from a foreign war or tsunami, but from a deliberate policy to curtail oil production to force a more rapid transition to battery-powered transportation. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/19/biden-and-oil-destroy-america-in-order-to-save-it/

Try to follow the Joe Biden energy plan of frantically trying to get his hands on more of something that his own party despises. 

During the Democratic primaries, Biden ran on the premise that he would end all fossil fuels during his tenure. In 2019-2020 that bluster seemed easy demagoguery at a time of near-record low gas and diesel prices. The American people shrugged at such utopianism since they often were filling up their cars for less than $50.

Biden’s video clips from the primary campaign now seem surreal, as he tried to out-green Bernie Sanders in boasting about what has now become his own self-created energy disaster.

Biden monotonously promised at rallies, such as they were, that he would cancel pipelines, stop new federal leasing to oil and gas companies, persuade lenders to restrict loans to them, put the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve off limits, and embrace the green new deal. Those were certainly campaign boasts that he has followed up on. 

His environmental czar John Kerry has just insulted Americans by lecturing them that there is no need to pump more gas and oil to reduce gas prices that are well over $6 a gallon in many of the Western states. The billionaire Kerry exudes Antoinette disdain for the muscular classes, a hubris that now characterizes the elite rich leadership of the Left in general. 

Kerry and his progressive ilk make no effort to disguise that they feel the credentialed such as themselves, the wealthy, and the progressive enjoy the birthright to fly private, to be limousined, and to bounce between multiple energy-hungry mansions. Those compensations are all necessary, to allow them to focus on the divine task of directing and herding the unthinking and blinkered chumps, dregs, crazies and clingers to do what is for their own good—now most recently defined as paying more than $6 a gallon for gas.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also reassures the country that there is no reason to pump more oil and gas. Instead, she says, we just need to refine more. At her press conferences, she reads all her answers from prepared notes. But apparently Jean-Pierre’s twenty-something press preppers were oblivious that the United States, thanks to hard-left green opposition, has not built a major refinery since 1976, back when there were 110 million fewer Americans. 

Jean-Pierre has no idea why she cannot now and will never in the future answer a question about fossil fuels honestly. She knows that Left for now got what it wanted. Since January 2021 it has all but destroyed the idea of American energy self-sufficiency. 

Official Child Abuse By Philip Carl Salzman

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/philip-carl-salzman/2022/06/18/official-child-abuse-n1606365

“Apparently, no abuse of our children is too extreme when it serves narratives that signal virtue, even though the narratives are false and unscientific: “public health” that imposes useless material impositions on populations that would not need them even if they worked; unsubstantiated critical race theory that is little more than reverse racism; and trans theory that requires denial of biology and of the well-being of troubled youth. This abuse of our children is a disgrace, and we should all be ashamed that we have let it happen.”

Powerful American institutions have brought their power to bear on our children, to the children’s detriment. Rather than nurture children, these institutions have taken our children as fodder to advance their own power and ideological agendas.

The CDC in collusion with self-serving teachers’ unions imposed a mask mandate on school children and continued that mandate even when adults were no longer required to wear masks. This imposition on children was made in spite of the long-known and well-documented fact that children were the segment of the population least vulnerable to COVID-19 and thus not really in danger. The death rate (probability of dying if infected) for children 0-9 years was 0.0, i.e. no deaths, while for children (including those with comorbidities) 10-19, 0.2%, young adults (including those with comorbidities) 20-39, 0.2%, with an increased death rate for older segments of the population. In short, children were at little risk from COVID.

New York Health provides confirmation that deaths of individuals without comorbidities ages 0-17 was 0.0% of all deaths, ages 18-44, 1.0% of all deaths, with the percentage of deaths increasing, e.g. age 75+ comprising 14.2% of all deaths. Taking into account all deaths, including individuals with comorbidities, deaths of 0-17 make up 0.04% of total deaths, while 75+ made up 47.7% of deaths. Once again, the risk to children was minuscule.

International Swimming Federation Will Ban Some Biologically Male Athletes from Women’s Competitions by Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/international-swimming-federation-will-ban-some-biologically-male-athletes-from-womens-competitions/

The international swimming federation FINA announced a new policy on Sunday to ban biologically male athletes who have gone through male puberty from competing in women’s competitions. 

To qualify for women’s competitions, the swimmers must either have never gone through male puberty or had male puberty suppressed at the stage when physical changes begin to appear or before the age of 12, whichever occurred later, according to the policy.

The athletes also have to prove that they have continuously suppressed their testosterone levels since that time.

“We have to protect the rights of our athletes to compete, but we also have to protect competitive fairness at our events, especially the women’s category at FINA competitions,” FINA president Husain al-Musallam said in statement.

The policy also includes proposals for an additional open competition category. FINA is set to form a new working group that will spend six months studying the most effective ways to set up the new category.

Desperate Democrats Meddle in GOP Primaries John Fund

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/desperate-democrats-meddle-in-gop-primaries/

They’re spending millions to help notch primary wins for Republicans they consider unelectable in the general election.

So worried they have spent tens of millions of dollars and counting to promote controversial Republicans in hopes they will win their primaries. In an extremely cynical move, they are pushing candidates in key races who embrace bizarre or unproven theories about the 2020 election and who are the same candidates they claim are a clear and present threat to democracy.

Democratic groups have elevated the profile of marginal or extreme GOP candidates in Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. The reason is that it may work. Helping such Republicans to win their primaries has worked in the past. Democratic senators Claire McCaskill in 2012 and Joe Manchin in 2018 won in part because Democrats worked to nominate the easiest GOP opponents for them (McCaskill was then defeated in her 2018 reelection effort).

In an essay in 2015, “How I Helped Todd Akin Win — So I Could Beat Him Later,” McCaskill recalled her thinking:

We came up with the idea for a ‘dog whistle’ ad, a message that was pitched in such a way that it would be heard only by a certain group of people. I told my team we needed to put Akin’s uber-conservative bona fides in an ad — and then, using reverse psychology, tell voters not to vote for him. And we needed to run the hell out of that ad.

The McCaskill tactic has had some success this year. Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano recently won the GOP gubernatorial nomination in Pennsylvania aided by Democratic-sponsored ads highlighting his conservative agenda. Nonetheless, Mastriano trails Democratic candidate Josh Shapiro by only four points in the latest polls.

In Colorado, liberals are running ads attacking state representative Ron Hanks as “too conservative” in an attempt to raise his profile in the GOP Senate primary.

Bees Are Fish and Other Fake Narratives These days we accept outrageous falsehoods with a shoulder shrug. By Andy Kessler

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bees-are-fish-and-other-fake-narratives-progressive-partisanship-woke-1619-project-words-11655650274?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A friend recently told me he asked the management at a vegan restaurant why they didn’t have honey on the menu. “It’s from an animal, so it’s not vegan,” he was told. He tried to explain that honey isn’t part of a bee but instead nectar that bees carry back to a hive, mix with enzymes, heat, dehydrate . . . Exasperated, he finally said, “It’s bee barf!” (It’s not, but it isn’t prime rib either.) He didn’t win the argument.

I mention this because last month a California court ruled that bumblebees are actually fish and can be protected by the California Endangered Species Act. This is as silly as the Environmental Protection Agency trying to define puddles and drainage ditches as “navigable waters.” Yes, they were saying that a puddle should be regulated like a lake or river. Even before this, the Army Corps of Engineers had a “glancing geese” test, meaning if a migratory bird ever looked at a wet spot, that spot was under federal jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, we have oat milk and almond milk, even though they obviously aren’t milk. Similarly, oxymoronic “plant-based meat,” which isn’t meat, is really fake meat. Even worse, it’s nasty, chock full of salt, and not even good for you. Be warned, we’re being trained that anything can be anything. The truth has taken a back seat. I don’t like it one bit.

In June 2020, in the middle of coronavirus lockdowns, tens of thousands marched in American cities in protest of the police. In the protesters’ defense, 1,200 health and medical professionals signed a letter “in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19.” It went on: “Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response.” Ah, the narrative. How have the signers not been summarily fired and barred from the healthcare industry? We know why: If a bee is a fish, then protests provide immunity.

This is the world we live in today. Who actually believes this stuff? George Orwell said it best in his 1945 “Notes on Nationalism”: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Bertrand Russell had a similarly great line: “This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.”

Show Trials—Then and Now Roger Kimball Roger Kimball

https://www.theepochtimes.com/show-trials-then-and-now_4528243.html?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=rcp

Power Line’s Scott Johnson quoted a TV Guide reporter who described the viewership of the first Jan. 6 House Select Committee’s prime-time television extravaganza as “decent.”In context, “decent” means “dismal” since, as Johnson notes, “the networks graciously handed their prime-time slots over to the committee’s motley crew in unison, Soviet style.”

A show trial is a mock, or make-believe, trial in which the guilt of the party is predetermined.The trial is just a form of theater.Lenin called them “model trials.”

Their aim isn’t to discover the truth—which was supposedly already known—but to stage a propagandist exhibition.

The Soviet Union specialized in the genre, as did communist China, Nazi Germany, and other totalitarian countries.

As the White Queen in “Alice in Wonderland” puts it, it’s always “sentence first—verdict afterwards.”

If you turned on the television on June 9 and you weren’t tuned in to Fox News, you were watching—or “watching”—a couple hours of Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney conducting a show trial.

They vilified Donald Trump while airing a few misleadingly edited clips from the events of that day.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the Democrats went all out on this show.

Even Democrats Blame Biden For Surging Inflation: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/20/even-democrats-blame-biden-for-surging-inflation-ii-tipp-poll/

If there’s a topic uppermost on most people’s minds today, it is certainly the surge in inflation over the past year. Soaring prices have affected virtually every person in the country. And Americans say they know who’s responsible: President Biden. Surprisingly, that includes more than half of all Democrats, too.

May’s 8.6% annualized inflation rate, the highest in 40 years, shocked financial markets and alarmed consumers and workers alike. As we’ve been reminded over the years, inflation acts as a tax on everyone, lowering standards of living, raising costs across the board, and eroding the very foundations of a productive economy. And once entrenched, it’s very difficult to get rid of.

How did this happen? And does President Biden deserve the blame? June’s monthly online I&I/TIPP Poll sought to answer those questions, asking 1,310 adults across the country the following question: “In general, how responsible are President Biden’s policies for causing the current inflation?”

The answers to the poll, which was taken from June 8-10 and has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points, couldn’t be less comforting for Biden and the Democratic Party.

Of those responding, 64% said Biden was “responsible,” choosing either “very responsible” (38%) or “somewhat responsible” (26%). Just 25% answered “not responsible”, with 17% saying “not very responsible” but a far-smaller 8% saying “not at all responsible.” “Not sure” was 10%.

Mahmoud Abbas Wants to ‘Turn the Screws’ on the U.S. Why exactly are we coddling him in his preposterous demands? Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/mahmoud-abbas-wants-turn-screws-us-hugh-fitzgerald/

The Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, wants to “pressure” the American government to do his bidding before Biden visits the Middle East on a trip scheduled for this July. A report on the rich fantasy life of Abbas is here: “Feeding Palestinian delusions,” by Mitchell Bard, JNS.org, June 8, 2022:

“Palestinian Leadership Plans to Increase Pressure on U.S. ahead of Biden’s Visit.”

This headline in the Daily Alert was illustrative of why Palestinian delusions are mainly responsible for their plight. The article associated with the headline said the Palestinians want to “turn the screws on the White House in order to secure lucrative overtures from the Americans.”

Excuse me. Who is the superpower in this equation?

Somehow believing the United States would care about yet another empty symbolic gesture, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas announced that he is considering suspending the Palestinians’ 1994 recognition of Israel. At the time, Yasser Arafat’s letter was viewed as a game-changer. Palestinians finally acknowledged reality and took a necessary step to convince Israel to negotiate with the PLO leader. It was not sufficient, however, and ultimately [that recognition of Israel by the PA] has proved meaningless as Abbas repeatedly states that the Palestinians will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state; the Palestinians have spent every year since “recognition” engaged in terror; he and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, rejected all peace offers; and the Palestinians have not abandoned their pipedream of establishing a state replacing Israel.

Who cares if the PA suspends its recognition of Israel? How will Israel be harmed, given the Abraham Accords that have allowed it to normalize ties with four Arab states, with more members in the offing, including Saudi Arabia? It is the PA that is on the ropes, abandoned by its most important Arab allies, not the Jewish state that with each passing year becomes stronger economically, militarily, and politically. Israel is the original Start-Up Nation that has become a technological powerhouse; every major American tech company now has offices in Israel. Israel has more tech companies that are “unicorns” – that is, upon their IPO, they are valued at more than $1 billion — than any country except the U.S. itself. After China, Israel is the foreign country with the most companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. After Japan, Israel is the foreign country with the most American patents.

Fantasies and Infant Formula The people who can’t deliver on baby formula think they know what gender is right for your child. William Kilpatrick

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/fantasies-and-infant-formula-william-kilpatrick/

June is “Pride Month.”  It’s also the month in which many Americans woke up to the fact that the nation was running out of baby formula.  Distressed mothers couldn’t find any on the supermarket shelves or on Amazon’s site.

When you’re looking for a garden tool and all you can find is a sign that says “this product is currently unavailable,” it’s an inconvenience, but if you’re looking for baby formula and your own supply is about to run out, it’s an emergency.

A nationwide shortage of baby formula is a very big deal, yet the Biden administration which had known for months that a shortage was building, did nothing for the longest time.  It is difficult to avoid the impression that the administration didn’t really care that much.

“Pride Month,” on the other hand, is treated as a really big deal.  The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force celebrate it.  So do schools, sports teams, and major corporations.  Meanwhile, the Biden administration has initiated a National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality.  Why?  Because as President Biden has informed us, transgender rights are the “civil rights issue of our time.”

But what does Pride Month have to do with a baby formula shortage?  Quite a lot, actually.  During Pride Month we are asked to celebrate the LGBTQ+ movement, but implicitly we are being asked to celebrate the ideology that goes with it.  The LGBTQ+ movement is not simply about protecting certain personal choices, it’s also about promulgating a worldview in which babies and families do not figure prominently—at least, not in comparison to the needs and demands of what cultural historian Quentin Anderson called “the imperial self.”

The LGBT thought-world is part of a larger ideology that is widely shared in Washington.  For people who live in that thought-bubble, the subject of babies is not an interesting one. It’s not that they hate babies, but that they don’t think much at all about babies or their needs.  So, it’s no surprise that a shortage of infant formula should catch them flat-footed.  Compared to the really big issues such as world peace, racism, and climate change, the issue of formula shortage seems mundane to them.  On the other hand, if you could link the shortage to bias against trans youth, you might get a hearing.

Russia’s Escalating Influence in Africa by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18487/russia-influence-africa

“Russia relies on a series of asymmetric (and often extralegal) measures for influence—mercenaries, arms-for-resource deals, opaque contracts, election interference, and disinformation.” — Joseph Siegle, Director of Research at the Brookings Institution’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, February 2, 2022.

Although trade between Russia and African countries has reportedly doubled since 2015, to about $20 billion a year, China is still Africa’s largest trade partner, with trade between China and the continent at $254 billion in 2021. But Russia’s ultimate aims in Africa are the same as China’s: To gain influence by making African countries dependent on its services. While in the case of China, investments and infrastructure are offered in exchange for strategic access to vital natural resources and political leverage, in the case of Russia, it is weapons and Russian state-sponsored mercenaries, known as private military companies (PMCs) in return for the same.

“In its African strategy, the Kremlin is motivated foremost by a desire to thwart U.S. policy objectives, almost irrespective of their substance.. Considering Africa ‘one of Russia’s foreign policy priorities,’ Russian President Vladimir Putin also seeks to create African dependencies on Moscow’s military assets …. targeting countries that have fragile governments but are often rich in important raw materials, such as oil, gold, diamonds, uranium, and manganese… They also offer to these governments the ability to conduct counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations unconstrained by human rights responsibilities… In turn, Russia seeks payment in concessions for natural resources, substantial commercial contracts, or access to strategic locations, such as airbases or ports.” — Federica Saini Fasanotti, the Brookings Institution, February 8, 2022.

The largest and most famous of Russia’s PMCs is the Wagner Group, a paramilitary organization linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Vladimir Putin. Although ostensibly appearing as a private business, “its management and operations are deeply intertwined with the Russian military and intelligence community” according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and should be seen, therefore, as “a proxy organization of the Russian state rather than a private company selling services on the open market.”

“Russia’s Wagner Group has withdrawn about 1,300 of its mercenaries from Libya to Russia through Syria to participate in the Russian military operation in Ukraine, according to military and strategic expert Colonel Adel Abdel Kafi.” — Middle East Monitor, March 26, 2022.

“Our competitors clearly see Africa’s rich potential. Russia and China both seek to convert soft and hard power investments into political influence, strategic access, and military advantage.” — General Stephen Townsend, Commander of United States Africa Command, Senate Armed Services Committee on March 15, 2022.

When the United Nations General Assembly voted on March 2, 2022 on a resolution to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, 17 African countries abstained, eight countries did not vote at all and one country (Eritrea) voted against the resolution. When Russia was suspended from the UN Human Rights Council on April 7, African countries were even less willing to counter Russia: Nine African countries voted against suspending Russia, while 24 countries abstained.