IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

A Man for All Seasons of Border Chaos The President is wasting one of the great political opportunities in recent memory. By James Freeman

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-man-for-all-seasons-of-border-chaos-11631138875?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Has any recent President enjoyed a better opportunity and a greater incentive to enact immigration reform than Joe Biden ? The U.S. is suffering its worst worker shortage ever recorded at the same time it continues to suffer a humanitarian crisis as job seekers and unaccompanied minors mix with opportunistic criminals in the chaos at our southern border. Mr. Biden is desperate to appear caring and competent after his disgracefully executed departure from Afghanistan. He may never have a better set of facts to drive a bipartisan plan to boost border enforcement and increase legal migration. All he has to do is stop indulging the Sandernista desire to remake America and instead focus on solving the country’s problems.

As for the need for more willing workers, the government reported today that open positions in the U.S. hit another record high. Jeff Cox at CNBC notes:

Job openings outnumbered the unemployed by more than 2 million in July as companies struggled to fill a record number of vacancies, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.
The department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which the Federal Reserve watches closely for signs of slack in employment, showed 10.9 million positions open. That was much higher than the FactSet estimate of 9.9 million and the June total of 10.18 million.

Lucia Mutikani at Reuters adds that the JOLTS report “also showed a steady increase in the number of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs, a sign of confidence in the labor market.” She adds:

“This is a super tight job market,” said Jennifer Lee, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto. “The ongoing struggle to find the right worker for the right role continues.”

Many of the right workers are eager to join us from other countries. But instead of crafting solutions to problems in immigration policy, the President pretends they don’t exist. The Journal’s Jason Riley notes:

Remember when the White House assured us in the spring that the migrant surge on the southern border was “seasonal” and nothing to worry about? Oops. “The Border Patrol made about 200,000 arrests at the southern border in July, marking the busiest month at the border in 21 years and a 12% increase over the previous month,” the Journal reported in August, citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. Detention centers are so overwhelmed that illegal immigrants are being released into the population without being screened for Covid.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The World Is Getting Safer From Floods By Bjorn Lomborg

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/flood-climate-change-ipcc-united-nations-infrastructure-deaths-cost-severe-weather-11631134276?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Each Thursday contributor Bjorn Lomborg will provide some important background so readers can have a better understanding of the true effects of climate change and the real costs of climate policy.

Climate change may raise waters and more Americans than ever live in floodplains, but technology and infrastructure protect them.Climate change may raise waters and more Americans than ever live in floodplains, but technology and infrastructure protect them.

Though the images of abandoned cars in waterlogged East Coast streets might make you think otherwise, the relative toll that floods take on the U.S.—in property and lives—has decreased over time. Flooding costs as a share of gross domestic product declined almost 10-fold since 1903 to 0.05% of GDP, while annual flood death risk—fatalities per million—dropped almost threefold. World-wide data are sparser, but flood research shows costs relative to GDP and deaths relative to population have decreased globally from 1980 to 2010.

Scary headlines about rising flood costs tend to come from misleading statistics of total damages, which say more about U.S. economic growth than they do about climate change. Since the start of the 20th century, the U.S. population has quadrupled and annual GDP has increased 36-fold. There are more people and structures in the U.S. than ever—including in floodplains. A flood that hits, say, Atlanta, will encounter far more people and buildings today than 30 years ago. The number of exposed housing units in the city’s floodplain went up by 58% from 1990 to 2010. At the same time, greater wealth and better technology have made people and property in low-lying areas safer from floods. Only when you look at damages in the context of GDP can you filter out what’s a sign of growing wealth and what indicates flood resiliency or vulnerability.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Nikole Hannah-Jones schools a teacher The godmother of 1619-ism takes on the anti-CRT movement Peter Wood

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nikole-hannah-jones-schools-teacher/

Jen Tafuto, an elementary school teacher in Manchester, Connecticut, posted a two-minute video on Twitter in which she announced her resignation from her position. She explained, ‘After six years as a teacher in Connecticut, I decided to resign from what I thought would be my forever career because I felt more like a political activist than a teacher in my own classroom.’

Her announcement, originally posted by 1776ActionOrg on August 30, quickly drew a lot of attention in the media. Fox News, RealClearPolitics, USA Today, the Daily Caller, a local Hartford station and a great cloud of bloggers too. Tafuto resigned because she was forced to teach an ‘anti-racism’ curriculum in which she was ‘pitting students against each other based on the color of their skin’. In her clip she reads a prepared statement from a teleprompter, which is a bit unfortunate. When you see her in subsequent interviews off-script, her distress at having to push ‘critical race theory’ on her seven- and eight-year-old students comes across more naturally.

In the original video she says that among the classroom prompts she was expected to use was, ‘I wonder why many white people didn’t want black people to have an education?’ In her interview with Samantha Renck at the Daily Caller, she explains, ‘Obviously I taught academics throughout the day but we had this block that was designated for “equity”. And in this block we were getting “read-alouds” to read to our students and prompts, questions, thought-provoking conversations starters that were just not [right] for seven- and eight-year olds.’ One such prompt about teachers failing to make ‘black boys matter’ felt like a ‘kick in the gut’. Tafuto regarded this forced pedagogy as a challenge to her ‘moral integrity’.

She need not have wondered, since that’s exactly the point of critical race theory. Tafuto, who is white, was feeling demoralized because she was being cast as someone whose motives in teaching non-white students were inherently illegitimate.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Afghanistan Comes to America What Biden’s Benghazi means for us at home. Eric Rozenman

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/afghanistan-comes-america-eric-rozenman/

Conventional wisdom—correct this time—asserts that the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan makes the world a more dangerous place. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Islamic triumphalists everywhere are emboldened. Fuses burning over Taiwan, Israel, Ukraine and other hot spots grow shorter.

Less recognized is how our self-inflicted Afghanistan catastrophe may create or increase threats at home. Consider four, three military, one political:

*Suppose you are a general or admiral in the U.S. armed forces. You’ve just been required by your constitutionally superior civilian leaders to head the biggest American military debacle since the fall of South Vietnam. You’ve rescued more than 120,000 but abandoned somewhere between 60,000 and 200,000 more Afghan partners and their family members.

You know that as U.S. ground forces withdrew, the South Vietnamese army fought on, with massive U.S. air support defeating the North’s 1972 Easter invasion. Then a Democratic-controlled Congress cut off funds, fuel, ammunition and air support. You also recall the United States, during the Carter administration, restrained the Iranian military to ease out the Shah. That helped ease in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

And now, Kabul. If you’re still in uniform the next time civilians not just override your best advice, as is their constitutional prerogative, but do so in capricious arrogance, then attempt to deflect blame onto you, how likely will you be to snap to and salute? When President Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Jr. for insubordination over the latter’s conduct of the Korean War, MacArthur choose theatrically to “just fade away.” In a more ambiguous situation, fraught with national danger, will you?

*Suppose you’re not a flag officer but rather a colonel, lieutenant colonel or major. Imagine you implemented the orders to abandon Bagram air base at night and without notice to our Afghan allies, as well as to cut off air support for Kabul’s forces and even halt maintenance contracts for its planes and helicopters.

Further, assume you know about private efforts, like the Commercial Task Force of veterans, ex-diplomats and others that rescued a reported 5,000 or more Afghans from Taliban control. Private Americans, on short notice and from scratch, began doing what civilian leaders—with personnel, months of time and billions of dollars to prepare—proved either unserious or incompetent about doing.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Social Justice Schools Burn Books for “Educational Purposes” Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/09/social-justice-schools-burn-books-educational-daniel-greenfield/

They’re spinning the book burning as a “symbolic gesture”. 

Of course, book burnings were always symbolic. There are easier ways to destroy books. Certainly, there were easier ways by the time the National Socialists started burning books. Some years before they began burning people.

This is really a test though to see if you can make book-burning palatable by dressing it up as some sort of New Age spiritual ceremony with fake Indian overtones.

The answer, maybe not quite yet.

The “flame purification” ceremony, first reported by Radio Canada, was held in 2019 by the Conseil scolaire catholique Providence, which oversees elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Ontario. Some 30 books, the national broadcaster reported, were burned for “educational purposes” and then the ashes were used as fertilizer to plant a tree.

The Nazis would have approved of the fertilizer part too. But burning books for “educational purposes” is gloriously Orwellian.

“We bury the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow up in an inclusive country where all can live in prosperity and security,” says a video prepared for students about the book burning, Radio Canada reported.

… or be burned at the stake.

In total, more than 4,700 books were removed from library shelves at 30 schools across the school board, and they have since been destroyed or are in the process of being recycled, Radio Canada reported.

4,700 books being destroyed is Library of Alexandria stuff.

Lyne Cossette, the board’s spokesperson, told National Post that the board formed a committee and “many Aboriginal knowledge keepers and elders participated and were consulted at various stages, from the conceptualization to the evaluation of the books, to the tree planting initiative.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Suicide by ‘Replacement Migration’ Can any nation survive when its character has been transformed? Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/suicide-replacement-migration-bruce-thornton/

The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is also worsening our already dangerous immigration crisis. Tens of thousands Afghans are being brought into the country, with little serious vetting to discriminate between those who served loyally with our troops and intelligence agencies; and those who just want a better life or have more sinister motives. This new influx comes on top of the one million migrants who have crossed our southern border just since Biden’s inauguration. All these new migrants are being dispersed throughout the country at taxpayer expense.

This process of transforming American identity and its defining political principles and virtues has been going on since the feckless 1965 immigration bill, which provided entrance to family members of immigrants, multiplying their numbers by as much as a factor of 8. The political and economic motives for this weakening of our border have likewise long been obvious––voters for progressives, cheap labor for free marketeers.

But another dubious idea has developed to justify our and Europe’s porous borders: Replacement Migrations. Pursuing this short-sighted idea will accelerate the dilution of national identity, an outcome progressives fervently desire as a mechanism for transforming our Constitutional order of divided government, federalism, and unalienable rights into technocratic rule by a “managerial elite.” Those technocrats’ utopian ideals like “equity” an “social justice” will further compromise the rights and freedoms of others.

The pretextual rationale for Replacement Migration is pragmatic: Europe and, in recent years, the U.S. are not reproducing at a rate sufficient to maintain populations through internal growth. The U.S. rate, for example, has declined to 1.64 child per woman from the 2.1 child needed to maintain the population. Combined with medical treatments that extend longevity, this decline in reproduction means fewer younger workers contributing payroll taxes to support greater numbers of those receiving public subsidies. These trends have put programs like Medicare and Social Security on track to run out of money. The UN’s solution is Replacement Migration––importing more-fecund young immigrants, legal or otherwise, to make up the worker deficit.

Hence the erosion of our immigration laws, despite the dangers of lax immigration policies that take in peoples from less advanced regions with cultural, social, and religious customs hostile to the host countries’. In Europe, for example, generous welfare subsidies to migrants combined with restrictions on employment have created a sullen generation of Muslim immigrants exploited by jihadist recruiters working out of some of the many mosques that have arisen across Europe. In addition to the terrorist attacks that follow, migrant participation in crime, especially rape, is much greater than their share of the total population.

Moreover, in many countries, significant numbers of Muslim immigrants are segregated into “no go” neighborhoods or towns where they indulge their cultural and religious practices, such as honor-killing and polygamy, inimical to the liberal democratic principles of their host governments. These developments are the wages of failing to demand assimilation to the host country and its social and political culture.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Underlying Objective of The Academic Boycott of Israeli Institutions Alex Grobman, PhD

Posted By on September 9th, 2021

https://jewishlink.news/features/45878-the-underlying-objective-of-the-academic-boycott-of-israeli-institutions

Why does the BDS movement target Israeli academic institutions? One reason is spoken; the other is not.

The basic assumption is that the boycott is a response to Israel’s alleged egregious polices toward Palestinian Arabs in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. By distorting the image of Israel as an apartheid nation that colonized another people’s land and Jews as an imperious oppressor, the movement accuses Israel of being the leading antagonists in the clash between the West and the rest of humanity. Anti-Jewish and anti-Israel canards once considered objectionable have been “repackaged and reintroduced in a more palatable form” by using more conventional terms of discontent with the West, asserts Aryeh K. Weinberg. In a number of ways, anti-Jewish hatred has shifted from the Jew being the “subversive outsider” to the Jew being seen “as the oppressive insider.”

Acquiescence to Bias

Weinberg argues that acquiescence to bias within the academy provides fertile ground for greater attacks on Jews and the West. Though being anti-American, anti-free market and anti-business don’t constitute a form of bigotry as such, they do suggest a tolerance for crude scapegoating that can effortlessly develop into more dangerous forms of behavior against Jews and other Americans. Antisemitism and hatred of Israel have acquired entrée on to the campus, in part, through manipulating this weakness.

The late Gary A, Tobin, who directed the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, said this anti-Israel ideology resonates throughout much of the academic world, even if only adopted by a comparatively small segment of faculty and students, because these individuals “dominate the campus culture.” Despite extensive talk on campus about social activism, supporting liberal agendas and crusading for the downtrodden, the community is rather “complacent” regarding genocide, abuse of women and children, slavery and other appalling transgressions throughout the world.

A War Against the West

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Voter Fraud Is a Supreme Court Problem It is time for states to end this tyranny by reasserting their own rights. By Dan Gelernter

Posted By on September 8th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/07/voter-fraud-is-a-supreme-court-problem/

As a few American Greatness writers, and many of its readers, have pointed out: If our votes don’t count, nothing else matters. Election fraud should be the top subject in our minds every single day.

Last week, a brilliant piece by Ted McCartney suggested we march on Washington, D.C.—peacefully, but in huge numbers—with just a single demand: A constitutional amendment that requires all voting to take place in-person, on Election Day, with voter ID, on paper ballots, and that the ballots be counted that same evening on live-streamed television under the watchful eyes of as many in-person observers as want to be there.

This is an excellent idea. But now we have to think about the other half of this problem: If election laws aren’t enforced, they are essentially nonexistent. 

How many of us remember the way Republicans on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers in Michigan refused to certify the election results because the numbers didn’t add up—but then the cameras turned off for a few minutes, and, when they came back on, the Republicans announced they’d changed their minds and had decided to certify the results anyway? 

In Georgia, drop boxes that had been receiving dozens or a hundred votes a day suddenly, over Columbus Day weekend, received thousands—but there is no camera footage of these particular drop box locations, so we can’t see what happened. Georgia law requires that all drop boxes have cameras. Any location with no camera footage—and there are several—broke the law. But the Georgia pols figured: Who cares? Who’s going to hold us to account? The Supreme Court?

We all remember the Supreme Court’s disgraceful and disgusting behavior following the 2020 elections. Before the election was certified, the justices didn’t want to interfere with an ongoing process. After the election was certified, they refused to hear the election fraud cases because they said it was now a moot point—the election was a fait accompli. This reasoning could have been parodied from the episode of “Yes, Prime Minister,” in which chief government bureaucrats explain the four stages of government intransigence:

1) We say nothing is going to happen

2) We say something might happen, but we should do nothing

3) We say maybe we should do something, but there’s nothing we can do

4) We say maybe we could have done something, but it’s too late now!

We live, or ought to be living, in a democratic republic in which the ultimate authority rests with the people. This should include ultimate authority over interpreting our own Constitution. Who, then, are the geniuses who decided that nine unelected bureaucrats get the ultimate say about whether any law we pass can actually be a law? Or whether any law actually gets enforced? The decision was made by those nine unelected bureaucrats themselves. The Constitution doesn’t grant the Supreme Court the power of judicial review—they just grabbed it. They stole it. And we said, “OK, sure. How much damage could it do?”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Finding a Remedy for the CRT Pandemic Critical race theory is spreading rapidly, but there are countermeasures in progress. By Larry Sand

Posted By on September 8th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/07/finding-a-remedy-for-the-crt-pandemic/

Critical race theory is metastasizing at a rapid rate, spreading into many American institutions. The woke ideology has even inserted itself in the medical field. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “How Structural Racism Works—Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities” argues that modern American medicine has “historical roots in scientific racism and eugenics movements,” and asserts that “Black communities became medical training grounds and a source of profit, reinforcing the American medical caste system that we have today.”

The American Medical Association also endorses CRT, and denounces equal opportunity and meritocracy as “malignant.” The AMA also claims that the “detrimental effects of colonization, racial capitalism, and enduring forms of supremacism . . . have upheld slavery, genocide, abuse and exploitation of resources.”

At the same time, medical schools are lecturing future doctors about intersectionality, implicit bias, identity, oppression, power and privilege, etc.

Our legal system is no better. As George Leef writes, “Progressivism Surges Through America’s Law Schools.” He cites Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, a former law dean, who insists that introducing CRT is “urgent and necessary.” In the same vein, Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School is going to mandate that students take a CRT course in order to graduate.

Additionally, many businesses have submitted to CRT orthodoxy. The latest domino to fall is Verizon. Christopher Rufo explains that the telecom conglomerate’s diversity trainers “instruct employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and, according to their position on the ‘privilege’ hierarchy, embark on a lifelong ‘anti-racism journey.’”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Government and CDC Are Lying About COVID-19 Vaccine and Ivermectin The question is, why? Wayne Allyn Root

Posted By on September 8th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/government-and-cdc-are-lying-about-covid-19-wayne-allyn-root/

It’s been quite a week. I’ve been in the media business for decades and I’ve never before witnessed such lies, exaggeration and outright fraud. All with the intent to force everyone to be vaccinated. The question is why?

Let’s start with the vaccine itself. The results in Israel prove what a sham, charade and fraud this all is. The U.S. government and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention argue that the vaccine is our only chance to survive. And that people are hospitalized and dying with COVID-19 because they are unvaccinated.

Both arguments are pure fraud.

First, are you aware that anyone who dies within 14 days of getting vaccinated is considered “unvaccinated”? No wonder they claim everyone who is dying is unvaccinated. If you die from COVID-19, whether you’re vaccinated or unvaccinated, they just call you unvaccinated.

If a businessperson in the private sector tried that scam, they’d spend the next 20 years in prison for fraud.

The CDC has also been using stats of COVID-19 deaths going back to January to make the claim that the deaths are almost exclusively among the unvaccinated. That’s because earlier in the year almost everyone was unvaccinated. That’s called rigging the numbers. The CDC must be using the same Democrats who rigged and stole the 2020 election.

Worst of all, the media has blacked out the developing disaster in Israel. Israel is the most vaccinated country in the world. They all got the Pfizer vaccine. At first, deaths and hospitalizations went to almost zero. Israel declared victory over COVID-19.

But everything changed. Today a massive COVID-19 outbreak has engulfed vaccinated Israel. Hospitals are full. People are dying. At this moment, Israel, the most vaccinated nation in the world, has more COVID-19 infections per capita than any country in the world.