NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Supply chain for dummies: a fairy tale President Biden thinks Americans are too stupid to understand why the shelves are empty: Charles Lipson

Posted By on November 17th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/supply-chain-for-dummies-a-fairy-tale/

Joe Biden cheerfully told Americans that most of them are too thick to understand what a “supply chain” is. Naturally, he understands it thoroughly. You can see with your very own eyes how well he has handled it. Since, as Joe said, you must be wondering why so many shelves are empty, I’m here to explain. Following the president’s wise advice, I will use small words and a simple story.

Let’s begin in the good ol’ days, not too long ago, when the shelves were magically full.

The story begins in a land ever so far away, where happy people worked and worked to make Christmas toys for children in Kansas.

When they finished making the toys, they placed each one in a little box and then placed lots of them in a great big box. They took that big box and many others like it to a good and sturdy ship to sail to America. Finally, after weeks at sea, the ship came close to the golden shore of California.

High up on the mast, a ship’s mate cried, “Eureka! I spy land ahoy!” and the ship sailed into a big dock near the City of Angels. But even the tallest, strongest men could not move the big boxes off the ship.

“Oh, my,” said someone on the dock. “Let’s get a hundred people together and see if we can move the boxes.” They tried and tried but the boxes still wouldn’t move. Finally, a very, very smart person came up with a good idea. “Let’s use a big crane and see if that works.”

And it did work. The big crane lifted the big boxes lift off the ship and lowered them very carefully onto the dock.

“But this is still a long way from Kansas,” sniffed one grumpy man. “The crane won’t reach that far.”

A very smart little girl said, “What about putting the boxes on top of train cars? The engineer and the conductor could take them to Kansas?”

“Oh yes,” said her friend. “Some of the other boxes could go on big trucks, too.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s Military Modernization by Judith Bergman

Posted By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17944/china-military-modernization

“[W]e are being more effectively challenged militarily today than at any…any other time in our history.” — US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, September 20, 2021.

China aims to “complete national defense and military modernization by 2035.” — Jamestown.org, March 26, 2021

China’s modernization of its military is taking place on all levels.

“The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] … seeks a force capable of winning a number of high-end regional conflicts, including the forcible unification of Taiwan, while dissuading, deterring, or defeating third-party military intervention.” — Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, before the Senate US Armed Services Committee, April 26, 2021.

“Hypersonic weapons, a full range of anti-satellite systems, plus cyber, electronic warfare, and challenging air to air missiles are all part of the growing inventory of Chinese capabilities.” — US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, September 20, 2021.

“In 2019, the private PRC-based company Ziyan UAV exhibited armed swarming drones….. During the past five years, China has made achievements in AI-enabled unmanned surface vessels, which China plans to use to patrol and bolster its territorial claims in the South China Sea.” — The Pentagon, Annual 2020 Report to Congress on the Chinese military.

“We’re not a decade ahead.” — Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman and CEO of Google and the chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, National Defense Magazine, October 30, 2020.

“Since 2010, I have been pounding the drum about how serious a threat the People’s Republic of China’s military modernization program is to the ability of the United States to project power into the Indo Pacific, and more broadly our ability to protect our interests and values around the world…. While America is still the dominant military power on the planet, we are being more effectively challenged militarily today than at any…any other time in our history.” These were the words of US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Convention on September 20.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Conversation with Anne Marie Waters by Grégoire Canlorbe

Posted By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17865/anne-marie-waters

Anne Marie Dorothy Waters is a politician and activist in the United Kingdom. She founded and leads the For Britain Party.

“We live in a UK where free speech is a thing of the past, our media is merely a mouthpiece of government diktats, and where decent people are demonized and smeared for holding informed opinions. We are in a Britain that resembles the communist Soviet Union: fear, censorship, excessive government control.”

“Please do not forget that many Muslims, especially women and children, are the victims, as well. Those people are entirely unrepresented.”

“We do not want to ‘Build Back Better’ as the globalists keep demanding; we want to Bring Back Britain.”

“The political and media elite are entirely wedded to the global project of bringing down nation-states. This cannot be done without mass migration.”

“We are a society of science, and reason, and evidence, and just as we achieve that, we open to the door to medievalism and are catapulted back in time. Secularism and free speech, equal rights between the sexes, the protection of children, all of this is being sacrifice for ‘political correctness'”.

“Most of these people are coming here illegally and this is simply allowed to take place while we watch. What is even harder to take is how these illegal immigrants are elevated above the native population. There are thousands of homeless British people in the UK, and yet illegal immigrants are housed in hotels until permanent accommodation is provided to them. No such relief or help is available to homeless Britons.”

“Now that we are about to receive a massive influx of Afghans, some of whom are already responsible for crimes throughout Europe, there are plans in place to give them homes, medical care, training and employment, and even free university attendance. Britons must pay thousands of pounds per year per year to attend university. It is a profound injustice.”

“White children are actively taught that they are racists, colonisers and oppressors.”

“First and foremost, we must stop the immigration. We cannot deal with these problems while the borders are still open…. The rights of terrorists and rapists are considered more important than the safety of the British public….We must scrap all ‘hate speech’ laws and allow our citizens to speak freely. We must enact laws that prevent the press smearing political candidates as ‘fascists’ for daring to tell the truth….We must… deport those who engage in honour violence, FGM, or child marriage… It is also absolutely essential that all of those who express support for jihad, who support terrorists, or who want sharia law, and who are not British citizens, are deported from our country…. These steps are just the beginning but if we were to take them, we would be in a completely different place. The world would no longer see Britain as a soft touch or a hub of jihad.”

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Leftists continue their assaults on language to achieve political goals By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on November 16th, 2021

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

People have been noticing lately that leftists are working hard to change the language to achieve their goals. Leftists are fully aware of the fact that, as George Orwell argued, when you change the available vocabulary, you also change people’s ability to think about things. If you erase from the English language any words tied to liberty (e.g., freedom, individuality, liberal, etc.), people will eventually lose entirely the whole concept of freedom. It’s with that thought in mind that some in the LGBTQ+ crowd are working to rebrand pedophilia. The latest euphemism is “Minor-Attracted Person” but it’s the same old sick idea.

Certain words decline with value over the years. The word beldam, or old hag, comes from the French belle dame, meaning beautiful lady. Once, young people respectfully called elderly women, especially grandmothers, belle dame, and then the word degraded.

Another word that degraded was spinster. Once, it meant a woman who would spin for a living. Eventually, it came to mean a repressed, desiccated, permanently unwed woman. Now, of course, the word is gone entirely because there’s no stigma attached to remaining unmarried.

And then there’s the word “pedophile.” It’s a neologism that psychiatrists created in the 1950s, from the Greek for “loving children,” something the ancient Greeks proudly did. Isn’t that sweet? Except, of course, there’s nothing sweet about it. Pedophiles are people who are sexually attracted to children and, in the worst cases, they act on that attraction. Since its inception, that word has had purely negative connotations.

Well, it turns out that, in today’s progressive world, pedophiles don’t feel that they should be stigmatized in that way. Allyn Walker, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University, in Virginia, is one such person, and Walker is willing to go on the record to make that point.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Word About Democracy from a Man Brought Up in a Dictatorship By Alex Gordon

Posted By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/a_word_about_democracy_from_a_man_brought_up_in_a_dictatorship.html

I am a Jew, and like many Jews, I fled the land where I was born. That was the Soviet Union. I am far from alone. Seems that at every stage of history, someone has been sure to throw the Jews into the sea. The Jews, however, had already been to the sea – when they left Egypt – and got out safely. That sea was the Red Sea. When I got out of the red, socialist sea, I found a sea of democracy in Israel. And here is what I have since learned:

Under Soviet socialism, there was no democracy. The state controlled the press to the extent that there were no automobile disasters, no mine collapses, no factory fires, no train, streetcar or airplane crashes, no earthquakes nor floods.

There were no natural disasters under socialism. If cold winds blew in the USSR, they came from the West. Imported cold currents and cyclones also came from there. If hot winds blew, they were called Afghans. If there were organized thefts of socialist property, their authors were known to have Jewish surnames.

Bad news was forbidden under socialism. And it seems that people got used to it. How much easier it is to live as a person who is not constantly bombarded with reports of catastrophes and crimes, right? Such a person has a life of calm, other than the aspect of life that was streamlined in long queues for food and goods, all of which were sorely lacking under “developed socialism.”

In a totalitarian state, the majority of the population is doomed to be content, for the alternative is dangerous.

In a democracy, the majority of the population is condemned to dissatisfaction, for the alternative is boring: one is too free to enjoy freedom.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Dirty Deal With the Taliban Biden abandoned Americans to protect his deal with the Taliban. The deal isn’t over yet. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/bidens-dirty-deal-taliban-national-security-threat-daniel-greenfield/

Every week new revelations arrive about the scale of Biden’s betrayal in Afghanistan. After months of claiming that only a few hundred Americans had been abandoned behind enemy lines, the real numbers are still growing. Shocking reports continue to come to light including a military memo which claims that over a hundred family members of servicemen may still be trapped under Taliban rule.

Biden and his brass promised an accounting, but have offered only lies and excuses. Congressional hearings have produced nothing except cable news theater. While the Taliban throw parades showing off captured American military equipment, the Biden administration is dispatching $144 million in aid.

With more to come.

The humiliating collapse in Afghanistan is not a mystery. It was the product of a deliberate strategy to maintain relations with the Taliban at any cost. Every step of the disaster was really a betrayal.

Why did the Biden administration abandon Bagram Air Base and the nearby prison facility holding thousands of Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS-K prisoners without notifying the Afghans?

When the Taliban repeatedly violated their agreement to stop the violence, why did the Biden administration still insist on keeping our side of the agreement, withdrawing by the deadline even if it meant leaving Americans behind?

As the Taliban approached Kabul, why was the Biden administration trying to cut a deal to provide a sizable cash delivery if the Taliban included the existing government in its administration?

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Compulsory Racist Training Beliefs are no longer the province of the individual. Tue Nov 16, 2021 Kent Runnells & Loyd Pettegrew

Posted By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/compulsory-racist-training-kent-runnells-loyd-pettegrew/

Webster’s unabridged dictionary defines the term compulsory as “required by law or a rule; obligatory.” Welcome to the politicized world of Americans. Since words now matter more than ever before, it is important to use the correct word at all times and no “incorrect” words!  “Compulsory” should not be allowed to masquerade as “Critical” but it has.

Freedom of speech enshrined in and protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has finally come a cropper, at least for conservatives. CRT, or Critical Race Theory, spawned by the Marxist intellectual elite in our colleges and universities, has taken hold of how we think, speak, and act in our everyday lives. It is enforced by the cancel culture that is no longer limited to progressive imbeciles spewing divisive drivel on social media and has been speciously elevated (by the legacy media) to extend it beyond academics to society at large. Its proponents believe it constitutes a legitimate and worthy social construct. The time has come to call it out for what it is—an effort to disingenuously reset the premise of all issues of race so desperately needing an honest debate in these challenging times.

As the CitiJournal’s John Sailer has written, “Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) [CRT’s first cousin] has almost single-handedly propounded the pedagogical concept of ‘social and emotional learning’ (SEL).” To hell with objectivity in math and the sciences. Three times three is no longer permitted to equal nine, because that microagresssively ignores the needs of eight and ten, themselves some secret code for race, gender or other self-identifications that only the truly Woke can perceive. As long as the left is permitted to write the rule book, the right will never have a level playing field.  

MEDIA Comments turned off

Please Stop Trusting Anything The Mainstream Media ‘Report’

Posted By on November 16th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/16/please-stop-trusting-anything-the-mainstream-media-report/

America’s mainstream, or legacy, media have an agenda. It’s not to subjectively report the truth but to further leftist ideas and policies, all of which are toxic. The press’ disinformation campaign to prop up critical race theory is yet another example of its effort to deceive, manipulate, and divide on behalf of the party it is constantly shilling for.

A new study from the American Enterprise Institute found the media focus on schools teaching the history of slavery and racism, and largely ignore the “bedrock assumptions of CRT, including its explicit rejection of rationality and objectivity.”

AEI’s Frederick M. Hess “examined all news accounts addressing CRT published over a one-year period by four major newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today),” and several “influential education press outlets.” All are news accounts. None are opinion pieces.

“Given that this admittedly revolutionary worldview is what motivates many objections to CRT-influenced pedagogy, one would expect news accounts to routinely address it,” Hess writes in “Media’s Misleading Portrayal of the Fight over Critical Race Theory.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Missouri teachers told ‘white supremacy’ includes ‘all lives matter,’ calling police on blacks Open records release of Springfield, Mo., training materials shows what prompted teacher lawsuit.By John Solomon

Posted By on November 16th, 2021

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/education/missouri-teachers-told-white-supremacy-includes-english-only-calling

Training materials for the Springfield, Mo., school district told teachers they could be engaging in white supremacy simply by insisting the English language be used or calling police on a black suspect, according to records released under a freedom of information request.

The materials, provided to Just the News, include a 40-plus slide training deck that proclaimed its goal was to train teachers on how to address “systemic racism and xenophobia” in the school district and to understand the difference between oppressors and the oppressed. Critics say the slide deck is part of a larger Critical Race Theory curriculum that parents are increasingly rejecting.

It included an “oppression matrix” that identified privileged social groups capable of oppression as including “white people,” “male assigned at birth,” “gender conforming CIS men and women,” “heterosexuals,” “rich, upper-class people” and “Protestants.”

The victims of oppression, the slide stated, included minorities, gays, transgender people, working class and poor Americans.

Instructing teachers that “systemic racism” was a real phenomenon in America, the training defined systemic racism as a system characterized by “public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other social norms that, while not practiced consciously, reinforce and perpetuate racial group inequity.”

“It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure and adapt over time,” one slide declared.

The training also gave a broad definition of white supremacy as “a culture which positions white people and all that is associated with them (whiteness) as ideal.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Patrick Leahy Will Not Run for the Senate in 2022 By Chris Queen

Posted By on November 16th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2021/11/15/patrick-leahy-will-not-run-for-the-senate-again-n1533034

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has announced that he will not run for a ninth term in the Senate in 2022.Leahy is the longest-serving sitting senator and has the fourth-longest senatorial tenure of all time. He’s also the only Democrat ever to represent Vermont in the Senate (don’t forget that Bernie Sanders is technically an independent).

In his announcement, Leahy touted his accomplishments: pressing for standards for organic food and banning land mines. He also chaired various committees, including the Appropriations Committee he currently oversees.