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October 2022

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

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

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.

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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

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.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

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

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.

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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

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.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China: The Immovable Supreme Leader by Amir Taheri

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.

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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

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.

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