NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s funny watching a Kennedy struggle with the Rittenhouse case By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on November 21st, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/its_funny_watching_a_kennedy_struggle_with_the_rittenhouse_case.html

I’ve never been a fan of the Kennedy mystique. When I think of John F. Kennedy, aside from the fact that I enjoy reminding Democrats that he would be a Republican now, I think of compulsive womanizing, massive drug cocktails, and the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco. My thoughts about Teddy Kennedy are even worse. With him, it’s a fake neck brace and Mary Jo Kopechne slowly suffocating in a car lodged in shallow water. I also think of his waitress sandwiches.

With those images in mind, I had to laugh (along with a lot of other people) when Maria Shriver, Teddy’s niece, announced on Twitter that she had no idea how to explain to her son how someone could commit a crime and not get “charged” for anything.

There’s a lot to unpack in the following tweet:

First, the tweet manages to imply that Shriver is trying to explain this mystery of life to a little boy, someone who is slowly learning his way around the world and struggling to form his own opinions. Maybe he’s ten or thirteen.

Nope. Her older son is 28 and her younger one is 24. Talk about infantilizing one of those boys…er, young men.

Second, Shriver has spent decades as a journalist and was First Lady of California during ex-husband Arnold Schwarzenegger’s term as a RINO governor in California’s statehouse. With that in mind, her statement that she’s shocked that Kyle Rittenhouse (who is much younger than both her sons) “didn’t get charged for anything” makes her sound like a moron.

What really happened back in September 2020 is that the Kenosha District Attorney charged Kyle with lightning speed. That’s why he was in court for three weeks, watching the allegations against him crumble.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Build Back Better’ Is Climate-Change Socialism, Not The Smaller Government We Need Lewis K. Uhler and Joseph Yocca

Posted By on November 21st, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/19/build-back-better-is-climate-change-socialism-not-the-smaller-right-sized-government-we-need/

Just 10 months into his administration, Joe Biden is seemingly a man on a destructive mission:  everything he touches augers spectacularly into the political dirt and his approval rating reflects the country’s dismay.

Last week, consumer prices jumped the highest in 31 years owing to non-stop stimulus checks, big government spending and energy sector “climate change” subsidies to electrical vehicle (EV) promoters and manufacturers. 

Everything from food prices to used cars increased faster than paychecks. If a working person didn’t receive a 6.2% pay raise this year, he/she is losing money, plain and simple.  There hasn’t been a measurement this dramatic in decades.

Inflation is not an act of God.  It’s completely manmade largely through government policy.  Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman famously pointed out that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary problem.  Between March 2020 and September 2021 the amount of money in circulation has increased a staggering 336%.  That year-over-year average price increases for consumables is 6% is not a reflection of the full measure of the problem, which is much worse. 

In poll after poll, Americans are recording their complete dissatisfaction with Biden’s job performance, the latest coming last weekend in an NBC Survey that had Chuck Todd almost in tears:  fully 71% feel our nation is on the wrong path, with only 22% saying things are going well.  And that tracks with many other polls pushing this administration underwater except a slight bump for “climate change”.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Republican primaries fill up as GOP eyes big gains by David M. Drucker

Posted By on November 21st, 2021

Crowded Republican primaries for Senate are growing more crowded by the day as ambitious conservatives move to seize political opportunity as the party’s 2022 prospects soar amid President Joe Biden’s struggles.

In Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, states where competition for the Republican nomination for Senate is competitive and the field of candidates robust, new candidates are emerging. The rush of fresh Republican contenders for higher office is coinciding with growing voter dissatisfaction with Biden and generic-ballot polling for Congress that suggests the GOP could sweep the Democrats from power in the midterm elections.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Saving children’s books from wokeness A new startup promises a more pro-American approach Bethany Mandel

Posted By on November 21st, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/saving-childrens-books-wokeness/

There is something deeply sinister happening in the world of children’s literature. Whereas the children’s section at your local library or bookstore was once filled with fables and fairy tales, it’s now filled with titles like The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish and Race Cars: A Children’s Book About White Privilege and How Mommas Love Their Babies featuring wholesome lines like “Some mommas dance all night long in special shoes. It’s hard work!” The illustrations accompanying that page are an outdoor shot of a strip club at night, with glowing neon lights and a woman protesting for fair wages for strippers.

This is a recent tweet from the author:

Other children’s book writers, those who want to write what was once considered appropriate for kids, are stymied. One aspiring writer told me, “I’ve been in the query process the last two months and I cannot believe how many agents are requesting LGBTQ children’s books.”

Another aspiring author echoed her remarks, shedding light on the inner workings of the process, “The agents and publishers ARE the gatekeepers, making sure the books that are being published are aligned with the current agenda. If you aren’t familiar with it, check out this site. It is a summary of the twitter posts by agents and editors about their manuscript wishlists. Some are so transparent, they will state they only want LGBTQ+ stories, or demand a book set in WWI, ‘but make it queer.’ Some agents have stated they will only accept books on climate change until they have a cohort of writers defending the environment. It is deflating and concerning and frustrating, both as a teacher and as a YA historical fiction writer. The YA historicals that are being published often pervert the history to force a queer romance.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Can the University of Austin spark a new Enlightenment? Challenging rigid wokeness by building a university Heather Heying

Posted By on November 21st, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/university-austin-spark-new-enlightenment/

The University of Austin, America’s newest university, was launched this month. I am one of five founders, because I am convinced that higher education is at considerable risk. A new ideology — sometimes called social justice, and revealed in numerous ways, but most succinctly called “woke” — is taking a huge toll on the free exchange of ideas.

Safe spaces and trigger warnings are demanded by students, and many faculty as well, rather than recognizing that challenge, risk, and discomfort create strength of will, and wisdom. Instead of being the adults in the room, scared and hapless administrators capitulate to their demands.

We are told that borrowing from other cultures is inherently predatory — “cultural appropriation” — rather than being one of the most ancient ways that humans have expanded our repertoire, making connections between both people and ideas. We are asked to believe anew in original sin, this one based on skin color. Faculty and students who step outside of the new orthodoxy risk being ridiculed, shouted at, even chased off campus. Tenure means nothing when a mob is at the door. The very concepts of objective reality and merit are taken to be offensive at best, outdated and untrue at worst.

These are instantiations of a self-limiting ideology that mocks the very premises of America’s founding documents, and of the mottos of many established universities as well. Harvard proclaims veritas; Yale adds lux to the mix. But there is little truth in the woke ideology, and little light.

These manifestations of the new ideology are a caricature of deep thought, from the naivete of the beliefs to the insistence that they not be questioned. But there are forces older and yet more influential in play, which for decades have bent research and curriculum to their will.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

From Kenosha riots to Kyle Rittenhouse trial, biased media coverage makes everyone angrier: Jonathan Turley

Posted By on November 21st, 2021

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/11/19/kyle-rittenhouse-verdict-not-guilty-trial-media-bias/8686176002/

In our age of rage, Rittenhouse had to be convicted to fulfill the narrative. Acquittal has to be evidence of a racist justice system.

The full acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse is now in. The result was hardly a surprise to many of us who watched the trial rather than the media coverage. The jury spent days carefully considering the evidence and could not find a single count that was supported beyond a reasonable doubt.

In rendering its verdict, the jury fulfilled its core function in our legal system. The jury was designed to protect an individual from becoming the grist of a criminal justice system. As the Supreme Court noted in Duncan v. Louisiana (1968): 

“Providing an accused with the right to be tried by a jury of his peers gave him an inestimable safeguard against the corrupt or overzealous prosecutor and against the compliant, biased, or eccentric judge.”

The American jury is designed to stand between the mob and a defendant; between the government and the accused. The thin line of a dozen citizens can prove the most unassailable wall for justice in our system.

The media’s guilty verdict

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“WE JUST CAN’T LOCATE ANYTHING” – CALIFORNIA CONTROLLER TO THE CIRCUIT COURT JUDGE

Posted By on November 21st, 2021

https://mailchi.mp/3130fb5a8dda/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-58617?e=0c8ccf8e98

In 2019, the California controller rejected our freedom of information request for the state’s line-by-line expenditures saying they couldn’t “locate” any of the 50 million bills they paid the previous year.

So, we sued them. (California is the only state not to produce their state spending subject to our open records request.)

Yesterday, California Controller Betty Yee’s lawyers closed oral argument in the superior court, by effectively re-treading that most implausible argument:

We can’t locate anything.
 
Not. One. Single. Transaction. A checkbook doesn’t exist. 

It’s offensive to taxpayers across America. It’s offensive to the American experiment that’s premised upon individual freedom and liberty. It’s offensive to every citizen in California who deserves to be able to follow the money.

It’s offensive to all of us.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

When The Costs Hit Home, Nobody Will Give Up Fossil Fuels Francis Menton

Posted By on November 21st, 2021

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=7336059e81

As noted in my post this past Sunday, no amount of fake happy talk in the so-called “Glasgow Climate Pact” can obscure the obvious fact that nobody agreed to anything. To read the text of the “pact,” everybody claims to think that this whole “decarbonization” thing to “save the planet” is real. We’re all going to do something really, really significant, but it will be next year, or maybe the year after that. And meanwhile, nobody has made any remotely serious effort to cost this thing out. Are we talking about a ten percent increase in the cost of energy for this decarbonization project, or will it be a doubling, or maybe a tripling — or maybe even a multiplication by ten?

With tens of trillions of dollars at stake in the world economy, let alone the majority of humanity at risk of energy poverty, you would think that we would be far down the road toward detailed engineering studies of what the decarbonized energy world will look like and exactly how much it will cost. But it is exactly the opposite. Everywhere — or at least everywhere in the Western countries — government functionaries with degrees in English or Political Science (or maybe Gender Studies) issue edicts that carbon emissions will be reduced “50% by 2030” or “90% by 2050,” without any knowledge or understanding of how that may be accomplished.

So, as the costs of attempting to “transition” away from fossil fuels start to hit home, will anybody actually go through with the project? I think that the chance of that is about zero. China and India show how it works. To judge by their actions (rather than their words), they have long since figured out that solar and wind energy can’t succeed in running a modern economy, so they mouth empty platitudes to placate the Western zealots, make unenforceable promises that only come due after everyone is dead, and forge ahead with massive development of coal power. And even more telling are recent developments in Western jurisdictions. When the first hint arrives that fossil fuel restrictions are going to impose cost increases large enough for meaningful numbers of voters to notice, even the bluest of blue U.S. states take about three minutes to abandon their “decarbonization” promises.

For the latest from India, check out this piece from Reuters today headlined “India’s Jindal plans to start building Botswana coal mine in 2022.” Recall first that at the just-ended COP26 in Glasgow, India supposedly “pledged” to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2070. You would not be wrong to infer that the year 2070 was selected to be safely after all current world leaders are long since at least retired, and most likely dead. Today’s Reuters piece, on the other hand, gives the here and now:

India’s Jindal Steel & Power Limited . . . will start building a coal mine in Botswana’s southeastern Mmamabula coalfields in 2022, aiming to supply the export market and a planned coal power plant, a company official said. The Indian industrial giant aims for the mine to produce 4.5 million tonnes of coal per year.

It’s a big project, but a tiny part of the proven coal resources of the African country of Botswana:

Despite the global shift from coal, Botswana is pushing ahead with developing its estimated 212 billion tonnes of coal resources.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Enslavement of the Black by the White: ‘The Bedrock of the West’?[1] by Drieu Godefridi

Posted By on November 20th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17951/slavery

The “1619 Project” literature is characteristic of today’s neo-racist movement, which reduces the West to slavery and slavery to the West. In this nursery rhyme, everyone born with white skin is wrong, if not satanic.

The Republic of Venice (697-1797 AD) made a specialty of transporting shiploads of white slaves from Northern and Eastern Europe to Constantinople and from the Black Sea to North Africa.

The origins of slavery are white. It is just a timely reminder that slavery is an integral part of human history components and that the practice of slavery is not the prerogative of any particular group. “Slavery”, as Paul Louis reminds us, “is one of the few features that were common to all civilisations”.

Slavery is not a moral choice, it is a financial one. Large US companies and pension funds rush to invest in China despite its reported use of Uyghurs there as slaves.

Regrettably, there was no movement in the Muslim world comparable to Western abolitionism. The West, led by a fiercely abolitionist British state, was the one stopping and then breaking the millennia-old and perfectly-oiled slavery mechanism of the Arab-Turkish-Muslim world.

In short, there is nothing specifically Western about slavery; but everything specifically Western about abolitionism.

In August 2019, The New York Times initiated The 1619 Project, consisting of a collection of articles designed to illustrate that slavery was “one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution”. This project is directed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times staff reporter who is not a historian but an avowed “critical race theory” activist. [2]

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: WHO COULD REPLACE KAMALA HARRIS?

Posted By on November 20th, 2021

Be careful what you wish for…..

After 11 months of campaigning for the Democratic nomination Kamala Harris dropped out of the race on Dec. 3, 2019 after Elizabeth Warren but  before New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio. Now the long knives are out for our hapless Vice-President and rumors are circulating that she will be asked/forced to resign.

Who will take her place? Let’s face it….has to be a woman, and Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar are women of the color white. Hmmmmm……a dilemma…..and that woman could be president.

Stacey Abrams anyone?

Could Stacey Abrams Beat Joe Biden in 2024? What Polls Show About Potential Rivals

https://www.newsweek.com/could-stacey-abrams-beat-joe-biden-2024-what-polls-show-about-potential-rivals-1650796

Just asking…..rsk