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March 2023

EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Shining Light on Science Education’s Dark Age By Gregory Wrightstone

By on March 29th, 2023

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/03/27/shining_light_on_science_educations_dark_age_889136.html

The science teachers’ bureaucracy is driving climate education into an unquestioning adherence to unscientific methodology. The cost will be measured in students without facility for the more than 400-year-old scientific method and lacking the critical thinking necessary for sustaining civilization and advancing humankind.

Many observers of education have been concerned for some time about the state of science education in America. Teaching, it seems, has drifted from open inquiry to an indoctrination of students into a political agenda. Members of the science-based CO2 Coalition of Arlington, Virginia were concerned enough to launch an education initiative to provide scientific knowledge for elementary and middle school-age students without the climate alarm that permeates the public-school curriculum. 

Their concern spiked to alarm with the publication of “The Teaching of Climate Science,” a position paper of the 40,000-member National Science Teaching Association (NSTA). In it, the NSTA advocates that teachers conform to the “consensus” opinion that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide will cause dangerous overheating of Earth. Possibly even worse than the promotion of “consensus” was their endorsement of censorship of any scientific information that deviates from the consensus groupthink. 

A critical review of the NSTA Statement was recently completed by a select panel of CO2 Coalition experts and summarized in their publication Challenging the National Science Teaching Association’s Position Statement on Climate Change. The panel was comprised of some of the most esteemed scientists and experts in the field including three members of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The review found that the NSTA’s Position Statement on Climate Change promotes the education of students through indoctrination instead of critical thinking skills and the scientific method. Throughout the document, promotion of “consensus” is advanced, while all dissenting scientific facts are censored or derided. 

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America After the Stanford episode, Ilya Shapiro sounds a warning: The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution. By Tunku Varadarajan

By on March 29th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-law-schools-could-bring-down-america-ilya-shapiro-dei-bureaucracy-stanford-supreme-court-rule-of-law-34c402c2?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Wokeness, or what used to be called political correctness, once seemed merely harebrained, the product of shallow ideas and immature passion. The common view was that undergraduates would outgrow it once they left campus and faced the rigors of the real world.

You seldom hear that anymore, as those ideas have run amok in culture- and economy-defining institutions ranging from news organizations and local governments to professional societies and corporate boardrooms. But Ilya Shapiro thinks we’re not alarmed enough about their influence in one important corner of academia: law schools. The professional ideologues who wield administrative authority on American college campuses want nothing less than to “change the American constitutional system,” Mr. Shapiro says. They pose a grave long-term threat to “the rule of law and inalienable rights, and even concepts like equal treatment under the law.”

Mr. Shapiro, 45, is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Hunkered down in the study of his Virginia home, he’s working on a book, “Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education,” that seeks to lay bare the process by which bureaucrats appointed to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” on campus have “perverted our system of legal education.”

A prime example was in the news as we spoke. Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter had invited Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to speak on campus. Confronted by a vicious leftist student mob, he asked administrators to intervene. Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for DEI, arose to deliver prepared remarks, which concluded: “I look out and I don’t ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ I look out and I say, ‘I’m glad this is going on here.’ ”

Mr. Shapiro experienced a different kind of DEI humiliation in January 2022. He was concluding his tenure as a vice president of the Cato Institute and due to start a new job as executive director of the Center for the Constitution at Georgetown’s law school. Then Justice Stephen Breyer announced he would retire. Mr. Shapiro tweeted that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the “objectively best pick” for the vacancy but President Biden had already disqualified him on the basis of race and sex. Mr. Shapiro opined that Judge Srinivasan “alas doesn’t fit into the intersectional hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The problem with Israel’s protests This movement is defending the power of an unaccountable judiciary.Daniel Ben-Ami

By on March 29th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/28/the-problem-with-israels-protests/

Many of those watching the footage of the massive angry protests that have been engulfing Israel since the start of the year are likely to feel inspired. It looks like a sizeable proportion of the Israeli public is demonstrating for democracy against a right-wing coalition government, which includes a significant far-right element.

These protests have developed in response to the government’s judicial-reform package. This includes the controversial override clause, piskat hahitgabrut, which gives the elected Knesset the right to override the powerful Supreme Court’s veto on legislation, with a simple parliamentary majority. Many opponents of the reforms accuse Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of wanting to overhaul the judiciary for dubious, personal reasons. He is currently standing trial on corruption charges, which he denies.

On Monday, the protests spiralled into a general strike, affecting airports, hospitals, schools and universities. And now, under intense pressure, Netanyahu has announced that he is to pause the legislation until the summer, in order to prevent a ‘rupture among our people’.

It might seem tempting to draw a parallel between the demonstrations in Israel and the recent protests in France against Emmanuel Macron’s pensions-reform package. In both cases, it seems that the public is on the streets protesting against unpopular measures imposed by an authoritarian leader. But such an impression of Israel’s protests would be misleading.

Aside from the obvious differences between Israel and France (no nearby militias or nations have pledged to destroy France, for one thing), the nature of both protest movements is very different. Above all, the protests in Israel are driven principally by the nation’s elites. These include reserve military pilots and senior intelligence officers, who play a prominent role in Israeli society. It also involves the heads of high-tech firms – the richest section of Israeli society.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Fed Passes the Buck on Bank Failures Michael Barr’s excuses for regulatory blunders are simply unbelievable.

By on March 29th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-reserve-michael-barr-senate-testimony-martin-gruenberg-silicon-valley-bank-failure-f16d23d8?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

One certainty in politics is that the Federal Reserve will never accept responsibility for any financial problem. Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr played that self-exoneration game on Tuesday before the Senate as he blamed bankers and Congress for Silicon Valley Bank’s failure. This act is simply unbelievable.

No one disputes that bankers failed to hedge the risk posed by rising interest rates to asset prices and deposits. What Mr. Barr didn’t say is that the Fed’s historic monetary mistake created the incentives for the bank blunders. The Fed fueled the fantastic deposit growth at SVB and other banks with its prolonged quantitative easing and zero interest-rate policy that caused banks to pile into longer-term, higher-yielding assets.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Martin Gruenberg noted in his testimony Tuesday that SVB’s balance sheet more than tripled in size between the end of 2019 and 2022, “coinciding with rapid growth in the innovation economy and a significant increase in the valuation placed on public and private companies.” That’s a cagey way of saying the Fed inflated tech valuations.

Silicon Valley investors cashed out shares at elevated prices and poured their windfall into startups with SVB accounts. SVB had more deposits than it could safely lend, so it loaded up on long-dated Treasurys and Fannie Mae securities that offered relatively high yields and were deemed low or no risk by regulators. What could go wrong?

When near-zero interest rates persist for nearly 13 years with hardly a blip upward, some bankers will bet this will last forever as they hunt for yield. The Fed had also assured the world until very late in 2021 that it had no plans to change its policies because inflation was transitory.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

EVs Are The Yugo Of The 21st Century

By on March 28th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/28/evs-are-the-yugo-of-the-21st-century/

Way back in the mid-1980s, communist Yugoslavia exported the Yugo, a compact car that sold for around $4,000. It was so poorly made that bumping into a pole at 5 mph could total it.

Fast forward to today, and a new class of cars has a similar problem. A minor accident can cause a total loss, even if the car’s been driven only a few miles. The only difference is that these cars aren’t cheap imports from some godforsaken socialist state. These are state-of-art electric vehicles that come with an average sticker price of $55,000.

Why are insurance companies totaling low-mileage EVs that have been in a fender bender? For the same reason you could total a new Yugo when backing out of a parking spot. The cost of repair is exorbitant.

As Reuters reported recently, “For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents,” which means the only viable option is to replace the battery, which represents about half the cost of the car.

A replacement battery for a $44,000 Tesla Model 3 can cost up to $20,000.

One expert told Reuters that Tesla’s Model Y has “zero repairability” because its battery is built into the structure of the car.

As a result, drivers are finding that even a minor accident ends up with their shiny new EVs being hauled away to the junkyard.

Reuters’ search of EV salvage sales in the U.S. and Europe found a large number of low-mileage EVs made by Tesla, Nissan, Hyundai, and others being scrapped.

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why the Nashville Christian School Shooting Is About to Disappear from the News Cycle Matt Vespa

By on March 28th, 2023

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/03/27/of-course-you-all-know-why-the-liberal-media-is-going-to-smother-the-nashville-shooting-n2621182

Julio has been covering the tragedy in Nashville, Tennessee. Six people, three children, and three adult staffers, were shot and killed at the Covenant School, a private Christian learning institution. Anti-gun activists hijacked a press conference on the incident earlier today. The Biden White House will probably push the usual talking points about banning so-called assault weapons, which will be echoed by their allies on the gun control issue. Unlike the shootings at Michigan State University and East High School in Denver, Colorado, this perpetrator had a handgun and two AR-15-style rifles. You can already hear the anti-gun Left licking their lips—now they had a chance to score some points. Except they can’t, Audrey Hale was identified as the shooter, and this person was transgender. Hale was shot and killed by police during the assault. 

As Julio wrote, there is a manifesto and maps of potential targets. This shooter planned this attack, and given the setting; a hate crime cannot be ruled out. The lingering question will remain unresolved since a transgender mass shooter is one story the media will avoid like the plague. Authorities said they have a working theory on a motive but are unwilling to disclose it at this time (via NBC News): 

The shooter, Audrey Hale, 28, of Nashville, identified as transgender and had no previous criminal record, according to the chief. 

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Xi and Vlad, a Wake-Up Call for America and the West The new Axis of Evil. by D.W. Wilber

By on March 28th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/xi-and-vlad-a-wake-up-call-for-america-and-the-west/

The recent visit of the Communist Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Moscow for meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin was partly intended to be a big poke in the eye to America, and a message to the West in general that China is on the move and fully intends to replace the United States as the world’s only superpower. A quote that is often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte might seem appropriate at this point in time, “Let China Sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.” China is definitely awake.

The Moscow meetings were full of pomp and ceremony, but truthfully, Russian President Vladimir Putin is really just along for the ride, a junior partner and temporary ally of China during this period of transition as a result of China asserting itself internationally. China really doesn’t need Russia, but Russia and Vladimir Putin definitely needs China.

Vladimir Putin’s ill-conceived invasion of Ukraine, with the Ukrainians proving to be a tenacious enemy exacting huge costs in Russian lives and materiel, has made Putin’s grip on power in Russia somewhat tenuous. Xi Jinping knows this. Putin needs China’s support to keep him from possibly having an unanticipated ‘accident’ or ‘health emergency,’ as has sometimes been the case when a Russian leader falls out of favor with the ruling elite in the Kremlin.

Xi Jinping has provided that support, for the moment. But Xi Jinping has no intention of allowing Putin to drag China down with Russia should the Ukrainian invasion continue to go badly for Putin. China will cut Putin loose in a heartbeat if this new relationship threatens China’s long term goals in any way. China has embarked on what can only be described as something akin to a ‘marriage of convenience’ with Russia, and will only maintain that relationship as long as it benefits China’s agenda.

The diplomatic full court press that China’s been pursuing in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and in our own hemisphere is a direct result of the weakness of the Biden Administration. Joe Biden simply isn’t physically or mentally capable of meeting the rigors of the job as president. He can barely make it to Delaware every weekend to rest and recover from his demanding 20-hour work week.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Only 38% in U.S. Say Patriotism is Important This is what national suicide looks like. by Daniel Greenfield

By on March 28th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/only-38-in-u-s-say-patriotism-is-important/

“I have felt broken after elections, but I’ve never lost hope. Seeing numbers like these however is much more devastating. Bad governments can be removed, but what happens when a people loses its soul?”

Wrecking a nation and a society has consequences. Tell people enough that America was built on slavery, that it’s a racist society, or that it’s been governed by a secret elite that starts all the wars, and patriotism goes out the window. Ridicule religion, destroy moral values and you leave behind little more than political religions of cults of personality and conspiracy theories. Announce that the planet will soon die and that carpe diem is the only sensible thing anyway, and how many will choose children over the latest iPhone.

I don’t think we need to worry about WWIII. That’s so 80s. We need to worry that we’re committing cultural suicide.

Some 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and 39% said religion was very important. That was down sharply from when the Journal first asked the question in 1998, when 70% deemed patriotism to be very important, and 62% said so of religion.

Having children is down to 30%.

But don’t worry, we’re discovering what really matters in life.

The only priority the Journal tested that has grown in importance in the past quarter-century is money, which was cited as very important by 43% in the new survey, up from 31% in 1998.

You can’t get the latest Apple mixed reality headset so you can live in the metaverse without money. Until guaranteed minimum income and full luxury communism arrive.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

National Security Threat: Another Latin American Country Chooses China by Judith Bergman

By on March 28th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19534/china-latin-america-security-threat

The Biden administration seems adept at launching grand schemes that make it look as if it is doing something about countering China in Latin America, but American leadership seems to be entirely absent.

This absence of US leadership in Latin America has become seriously critical: senior military commanders in the US warn that China’s actions in Latin America pose increasing risks to US national security.

“What concerns me as a Combatant Commander is the myriad of ways in which the PRC is spreading its malign influence, wielding its economic might, and conducting gray zone activities to expand its military and political access and influence…” — General Laura Jane Richardson, Commander, US Southern Command, to the House Armed Services Committee, March 8, 2023.

“The PRC is investing in critical infrastructure, including deep-water ports, cyber, and space facilities which can have a potential dual use for malign commercial and military activities. In any potential global conflict, the PRC could leverage strategic regional ports to restrict U.S. naval and commercial ship access. This is a strategic risk that we can’t accept or ignore.” — General Laura Jane Richardson, March 8, 2023.

Unfortunately, ignoring those risks seems to be exactly what the Biden administration is doing.

What is the point of such [US] programs, however, if they are unable to stop Latin American countries from being forced to turn to China for leadership, or at least having the US try to counter yet another future Chinese takeover in Latin America?

Honduras recently cut ties with Taiwan and established diplomatic ties with China.

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ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Israel’s Judicial System Is The Dream Of The American Left By: David Harsanyi

By on March 28th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/27/israels-judicial-system-is-the-dream-of-the-american-left/

No constitution. No limiting principles of governance. Entrenched leftist judges who get to appoint their own successors in perpetuity. Courts that offer arbitrary, expedient, constantly evolving, sometimes contradictory rulings to block laws passed by duly-elected, center-right governments. An attorney general empowered to bar elected leaders from participating in national debates. Sounds like a progressive paradise.

This is the reality of the Israeli high court, which is likely imbued with more power than any other in the Western world. It is not always wrong. It is not always nakedly partisan. But it has power to act as a judicial dictatorship, and often does.

And after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government proposed reforming this insane system — procedural reforms that would be in place no matter who was in power — the left acted as the contemporary left always acts when it doesn’t get its way. It got hysterical. The mass protests that erupted were hardly “spontaneous,” though, contrary to many reports in the establishment media. Most of the demonstrations were organized by Israel’s biggest unions and egged on by foreigners. Because a less powerful judiciary threatens the center-left’s power.

A country without a constitution or bill of rights, and only a single house of parliament — one that, by the nature of the system, is controlled by the prime minister (or vice versa) — will struggle to maintain any genuine checks and balances. The direct democratic character of Israel’s government, one that American progressives would like to emulate, gives both too much power to the prime minister and too much power to fringe parties the prime minister needs to keep in line to rule. It’s a dysfunctional mess.

But the nation’s judicial system is even worse. Israel’s political system was created by leftists who envisioned a one-party state. From its inception, the nation’s socialists suppressed — sometimes violently — political opposition. And in the 1950s, a ruling Labor Party preempted the opposition from infiltrating the courts by empowering judges to veto appointees to the bench. This created a self-perpetuating, generationally cocooned judiciary that functions without any set of cohesive legal principles or oversight.

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