NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What ‘wokeness’ really means By Jarrad Winter

Posted By on October 27th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/what_wokeness_really_means.html

“I am an American. I have no skin color worthy of note, no particular geographical heritage I care to claim as my own. My race is called Freedom, my People come in every hue. I will stand with my brothers and sisters of all skin hues against every tyranny known to man. I will not back down. I refuse to be afraid. I’m an American, the most fearsome ethnicity ever devised.”

The tacit premise of Wokeness is that minorities are intellectually deficient and hopelessly oppressed by everything around them (thanks to the inherent racism of all White people and the irredeemably xenophobic the institutions that they created).

The problem with calling Wokeness an anti-racism movement is self-evident. Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow people are not dumber than White people. Some of my favorite brainy individuals could never be mistaken for a White Supremacists (except maybe by the delusional NPR).  Moreover, of all the minorities I’ve known and befriended during my lifetime, not a single one has ever expressed any belief that Whitey is on the hunt for them, rigging everything from Math to English against them. I’m the type to specifically ask questions like:

“Hey, Bro… with all the talk of racism everywhere, do you feel like your life is consumed by White folks oppressing you at every turn?”

The reason I’ve never received a “yes” answer to any such question is that I tend to have responsible friends — skin color in no way part of the equation. What Woke really rests on is people who don’t take personal responsibility, the victim mentality type.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

That Dirty Green Energy

Posted By on October 27th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/27/that-dirty-green-energy-2/

While governments from Washington westward to California are forcing vaccinations on Americans whether they want the shots or not, don’t forget that policymakers want to do much the same with renewable energy. But renewables aren’t the unalloyed good we’re told they are. They have nasty downsides.

The forms of energy accepted by activists and politicians as “renewable” or “green” are restricted to wind and solar. While both are renewable (and are intermittent and therefore unreliable), neither is truly green. In this editorial, we will focus on solar, just to keep things short.

Solar power depends on photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight to electricity. Those panels, indispensable to the process, are where solar power’s green reputation breaks down.

To start with, solar panels have a lifespan of roughly 25 to 30 years, so at some point, they become trash. (For the record, powering the world with solar energy would require more than 51 billion panels, which would take up more than 115,000 square miles, a parcel of land larger than Arizona.)

There are nearly 1.5 million panels right now in the lower 48.) What do we do with them?

Solar panels are recyclable – technically. But “the process in which materials are separated can be tedious and requires advanced machinery,” says CED Greentech, which means energy will be burned to extract the components.

Consequently, most dead solar panels, which are in fact considered hazardous waste, end up in landfills. Which isn’t green at all, since the greens despise landfills.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Has America Been Overtaken by Creeping Credentialism? Library-science degrees, hotel management degrees, journalism degrees: Is a college degree necessary for nearly every white-collar job these days?

Posted By on October 27th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/has-america-been-overtaken-by-creeping-credentialism-college-jobs-requirements-11635282885?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Editor’s note: In this Future View, students debate “credentialism,” the ever-expanding requirement of college degrees.  Very interesting responses….read them all…..rsk

EDUCATION Comments turned off

About Those Domestic-Terrorist Parents Merrick Garland should rescind his misguided school boards memo.

Posted By on October 27th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/about-those-domestic-terrorists-national-school-boards-association-merrick-garland-memo-fbi-11635285900?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

It took a few weeks, but the National School Boards Association has apologized for sending a letter to President Biden suggesting that “threats and acts of violence” at school board meetings might be “domestic terrorism.” The NSBA now admits there was “no justification for some of the language included in the letter,” which could have parents investigated under the Patriot Act for trying to influence what their children are taught.

The retraction comes after tremendous blow-back. First came parents at school board meetings with T-shirts saying “Parents are not domestic terrorists.” Then 21 state school board associations distanced themselves from the letter. The Ohio, Missouri and Pennsylvania state associations cut ties altogether.

It turns out that when Chip Slaven, the NSBA interim executive director and CEO, and president Viola Garcia sent the letter, they did so without consulting their own board. But according to one of Mr. Slaven’s emails, they did work with White House staff.

The NSBA has owned up to its mistake, but what about the Biden Administration? Days after the NSBA letter was sent, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to intervene—without spelling out the federal authority or hard evidence for what the AG called a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence.” This directive still stands.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Greenpeace co-founder joins climate change skeptics Kevin Mooney

Posted By on October 27th, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/greenpeace-co-founder-joins-climate-change-skeptics

Polar bears would not exist today without climate change, and they may even be thriving because of current climate trends. That’s what the co-founder of Greenpeace told scientists, economists, and academics who took part in an international conference challenging alarmist claims about global warming.

Patrick Moore, a Canadian environmentalist who previously served as president of Greenpeace Canada and director of Greenpeace International, was one of several speakers featured as part of the Heartland Institute’s conference on the topic held this month.

During his talk, Moore described some of the events that helped gain notoriety for Greenpeace, such as the campaigns directed against nuclear testing and whale hunting dating back to the 1970s. He eventually felt compelled to leave Greenpeace when activists began to lose sight of their humanitarian mission while engaging in campaigns that were not rooted in sound science, he explained.

“At a philosophical level, Greenpeace had started with a strong humanitarian orientation to save human civilization from nuclear war,” Moore said. “That meant we actually liked people. That’s the peace in Greenpeace. The green, of course, was the environment. … I decided to fashion myself a sensible environmentalist basing my positions on science and logic rather than sensationalism, misinformation, and fear.”

Moore is now a director for the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit group that includes scientists devoted to highlighting the benefits of carbon dioxide. He is also the author of a new book titled Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, which takes aim at what Moore described as “scare stories” that cannot be justified on the basis of scientific observation and verification.

This is where the polar bears come into play. While environmental activist groups continue to circulate information based on the idea that “human-caused climate change” is a threat to the species, Moore sees a natural, dynamic evolutionary process at work.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Durham’s Salad Shooter Knowingly concocting a fake narrative to fool the FBI and CIA is going to affect many Hillary Clinton campaign players, special counsel John Durham has let it be known in discovery. by George Parry

Posted By on October 27th, 2021

https://spectator.org/john-durhams-salad-shooter/

This is the sixth in a series of articles analyzing the federal grand jury indictment charging lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a materially false statement to the FBI’s General Counsel. The indictment spelled out Sussmann’s involvement in a thus-far uncharged conspiracy to create a false narrative that was calculated to demonstrate a secret channel of internet communications between the Trump Organization and the Russian Alfa-Bank.

Recently Sussmann’s lawyers moved for a bill of particulars alleging that the indictment lacks sufficient detail and clarity for their client to prepare his defense.

Special Counsel John Durham’s brief in opposition pointed out that the 27-page indictment amply satisfies the legal requirement that it need only include a plain, concise, and definitive written statement of the essential facts constituting the offense charged. Moreover, Durham’s opposing brief also points out that the prosecution has already provided the defense with ample clarification by way of expansive and massive discovery.

According to Durham, on October 7, the government “made its first production of discovery to the defense” which “included more than 6,000 documents, comprising approximately 81,000 pages.” The documents were “received in response to grand jury subpoenas issued to fifteen separate individuals, entities, and organizations — including among others, political organizations, a university, university researchers, an investigative firm, and numerous companies.”

The prosecution is also “working expeditiously to declassify large volumes of materials” which it expects to provide to the defense “[w]ithin approximately two weeks” which will include, “among other things,” the following:

More than 30 declassified reports of interviews conducted in the course of Durham’s investigation;
Emails and other documents shown to witnesses during the interviews;
Investigators’ notes taken during the interviews;
Transcripts of grand jury testimony for multiple witnesses;
The majority of the FBI’s electronic “case file” pertaining to its investigation of the now discredited Trump-Alfa Bank allegations which Sussmann is accused of presenting to the FBI’s General Counsel;
Emails, memoranda, reports, and other records obtained from “Agency-2” (identified elsewhere as the CIA), including “write-ups” of Sussmann’s meetings with CIA personnel in which Sussmann is accused of providing the false Trump-Alfa Bank allegations.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The slippery semantics of Anthony Fauci Fauci’s absolutist answer on gain-of-function research from May has proven to be false Stephen Miller

Posted By on October 27th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/slippery-semantics-anthony-fauci-gain-function-coronavirus/

“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again: the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded ‘gain-of-function’ research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” 

That was Dr Anthony Fauci during a May 2021 congressional hearing. It kicked off a months-long national media effort to frame questions around gain-of-function research and US-taxpayer-funded virus manipulation as a Royal Rumble between Fauci and Senator Rand Paul.

When he testifies or sits for friendly network interviews, Fauci depends on semantics. He relies on the naivety of the interviewer and the audience, employing terminology and definitions he believes only he understands.

But like the ponytailed Chad in Good Will Hunting attempting to flex his big brain, Fauci’s arguments fall apart in front of the initiated.

Last week, Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director of the NIH, sent a letter to Congress saying that EcoHealth Alliance failed to report certain aspects of the experimental work it had been conducting in China on bats and bat-borne viruses. Tabak pledged that the NIH and Fauci’s NIAID would take administrative action, but not much more than that.

So Fauci’s absolutist answer from May has proven to be false. At the very least, the doctor needs to answer directly why he chose to deflect questions on gain-of-function research, something his own agency is claiming it had no idea was happening. How could have Fauci have denied back in May something so “categorically” if EcoHealth Alliance, run by Fauci ally Peter Daszak, had failed to report the full extent of their experiments?

When Fauci sat for a cozy Sunday interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, he once again deployed his semantic game on the interviewer. Stephanopoulos framed the revealing letter from Tabak as “critics pouncing”:

“Some critics and analysts have seized on that to say you and others have misled the public about US funding of this so-called gain-of-function research. The NIH says that’s false.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

When Your Body Is Someone Else’s Haunted House Dara Horn’s brilliant new book Bari Weiss

Posted By on October 27th, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-your-body-is-someone-elses-haunted

Tomorrow marks three years since the massacre at Tree of Life, the most lethal attack on Jews in American history and a watershed event in the lives of so many I love.

I find myself pulled back to that time. To the shock I felt. To the sense I had immediately that the country I thought I lived in was changing in radical ways, even if I didn’t yet fully understand them.

One of the people who helped me make sense of it all — who helped me see that the fate of Jews and the fate of liberty are intertwined; who helped me grasp that an assault on Jews was an assault on the very notion of difference — was Dara Horn.

Dara is a novelist and an essayist whose writings on Jewish history, culture politics has shaped my own thinking. Her new book is called “People Love Dead Jews.”

This is a book deeply relevant to everyone who cares about the future of America, not just the future of American Jews.

………Sometimes your body is someone else’s haunted house. Other people look at you and can only see the dead.

I first discovered this at the age of seventeen in the most trivial of moments, at an academic quiz bowl tournament in Nashville, Tennessee—where, as the only girl from my New Jersey high school, I shared a hotel room with two girls from Mississippi. We were strangers and competitors pretending to be friends. One night we stayed up late chatting about our favorite childhood TV shows, about how we had each believed that Mr. Rogers was personally addressing us through the screen. We laughed together until one girl said, “It’s like Jesus. Even if he didn’t know my name when he was dying on the cross, I still know he loved me, and if he knew my name, he would have loved me too.” The other girl squealed, “I know, right? It’s just like Jesus!” Then the two of them, full of messianic joy, looked at me.

I said nothing—a very loud nothing. The girls waited, uncomfortable, until one braved the silence. “It seems like people up north are much less religious,” she tried. “How often do you go to church?”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Parents Teaching or Government Indoctrination – You Choose by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on October 27th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17892/schools-indoctrination

Every expert who came in indicated that the most important thing in a child’s learning was the presence of a caring adult in that child’s life. We learned that schools most connected to their community were most likely to be successful. And that schools that focused on the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic achieved the best results.
Hillary Clinton once famously said it takes a village to raise a child. It is hard to disagree with that statement on its face until you realize the village Clinton had in mind is the government and not the parents and families who make it up.
While the media may portray this as a battle about COVID mandates, American history, or the teaching of sexuality, those are just the scrimmages that we are witnessing. The real battle is for who the teacher will be in our children’s lives — parents and loving local individuals who know our children’s names, or faceless government bureaucrats hell-bent on indoctrinating our children with their particular worldview.
McAuliffe, Garland, and the NSBA would have you believe that parents are domestic terrorists, but it is time for them to realize how their way of thinking poses a real threat to American rights. Put me in the category of those that believe parents are the ones who should be raising our kids.

The discontent at school board meetings across America is hard to miss. It is showing up in the news and social media feeds that people are watching and reading in their homes. Many people, however, are missing the major driver of this discontent — the major transformation that the White House, National School Boards Association (NSBA) and others are trying to impose on our government schools.

The recent debate statements by Terry McAuliffe, the Democrats’ Virginia gubernatorial candidate, and actions by Attorney General Merrick Garland following a letter from the NSBA clearly signal they believe that government schools are a tool to be used to indoctrinate children. They also believe the force of the federal government should be used to back them up.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The bigger picture behind the narrow Gantz-NGO controversy  by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-bigger-picture-behind-the-narrow-gantz-ngo-controversy/

When Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced on Friday that he is listing six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist groups, all hell broke loose on the left. The outcry, which emanated not only from Washington and Brussels, but from the halls of the Knesset in Jerusalem and Muqata in Ramallah, could have been anticipated.
There’s no sacred cow as holy as a self-described “humanitarian organization,” especially when it’s associated with and financed by equally untouchable foundations. Thus, though the impetus behind Gantz’s move was perfectly reasonable, he was promptly attacked, including from within the government of which he is a prominent member.
The groups in question—Al-Haq, Addameer, Defense for Children International-Palestine, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees—have, according to Gantz, been “active under the cover of civil-society organizations, but in practice belong to and constitute an arm of the [PFLP] … the main activity of which is the liberation of Palestine and destruction of Israel.”

Most of Gantz’s critics don’t dispute that the Iran-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a terrorist organization. In fact, it is officially designated as such by the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Israel. Naturally, the thugs in the Palestinian Authority have a different view, as they consider the indiscriminate murder of Jews and enemies of other stripes to be a legitimate form of political, ideological and religious protest.

The controversy, then, has focused not on the PFLP, but rather on a number of different issues, each more disingenuous (and revealing) than the next.

Let’s start with U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price’s stern reaction to the news, telling reporters that Israel hadn’t given America “advance warning,” and stating that the administration “will be requesting more information regarding the basis for these designations.”