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JUNE 2, 2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

FIGHTING THE LIE – FROM FOX:   Tucker Carlson called President Joe Biden's claims that the greatest threat to the U.S. was white supremacy a "disgusting lie" Wednesday on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," and Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper agreed the rhetoric was "sad."  Carlson pointed out that, according to available data from law enforcement, the statistics do not support what Biden claimed – noting that while there were about 60 killings reported as white supremacist between 2015 and 2019, nearly 800 civilians were murdered in Chicago in 2020 alone.  Biden also claimed that White Americans who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan were not embarrassed by their "hate" and that "that hate became embedded systematically and systemically in our laws and our culture."  "We do ourselves no favors by pretending none of this ever happened or it doesn't impact us today. Because it does still impact us today," Biden said.  Cooper said Biden's comments were part of "perhaps one of worst race hoaxes since the Jussie Smollett charge."  We have racism in America, but  America is emphatically NOT a racist country.  A racist country doesn't elect Barack Obama as president, Kamala Harris as vice president, not does it fight a civil war over slavery.  The political left, which now runs much of the Democratic Party, despises America and is trying to force a false narrative on us.  The result, if they are successful, will be a country in which black and white are separated, and a country too weak and divided to defend itself.

MORE DUMBING DOWN – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   The Board of Regents at the University of California system voted on May 21 to make all of their schools “test blind” for the 2023-24 school year, and to not use the SAT or ACT standardized tests after that.  The UC website reported this suspension will “allow the University to create a new test that better aligns with the content the University expects students to have mastered for college readiness. However, if a new test does not meet specified criteria in time for fall 2025 admission, UC will eliminate the standardized testing requirement for California students.”  The UC system had been one of many college systems in the country that went temporarily “test optional” in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether or not standardized tests come back at those other schools is currently up for grabs.  Long seen as a metric for academic success and aptitude, standardized testing has come under increased scrutiny in recent years by some educators and activists. The worldwide pandemic at least temporarily tipped things in their favor.  The anti-ACT/SAT group FairTest sent out a news release in early May announcing, “The number of accredited, bachelor-degree granting colleges and universities that will not require current high school juniors applying for fall 2022 admission to submit test scores has topped 1,400 schools. That’s more than 60% of the 2,330 undergraduate institutions in the United States.”   As Johnny Carson used to say, "Aren't we lucky."  You'd think that colleges would want to keep standardized tests as another tool to judge achievement.  But achievement ain't what many colleges are about these days.

June 2,  2021     Permalink

WE ARE UNDER ATTACK, CONSTANTLY – OVERNIGHT:  Cyber warfare is here.  Our defenses are inadequate.  It's probable that Vladimir Putin is testing President Biden a few weeks before their anticipated summit meeting.  From Fox: 

Top cybersecurity officials warned Wednesday that the U.S. can expect to see more ransomware attacks as the nation reels from recent hits on U.S interests, including meat supplies and fuel.

Chris Butera, head of Threat Hunting for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said ransomware has "continued to increase, especially in our state, local governments, as well as our critical instructor space."

"The ransomware actors have become more brazen," he said during a virtual summit Wednesday. "They've started to exfiltrate data and try to extort payments."

"I do think we will continue to see that happen," Butera said, adding cybersecurity is a "primary priority" for the U.S. government.

Ransomware attacks have increasingly targeted American interests, most recently shutting down U.S. meat plants affiliated with the world’s largest meatpacker, Brazil-based JBS, earlier this week.

Butera said the government does not encourage companies to pay out ransoms on cyber-attacks but said the administration "understands" if private companies disagree.

"The government does not advocate paying ransoms," Butera said. "But we do understand that it is a significant, difficult decision for some of these organizations when they are put under the gun to try to manage their business operations during these times."

The Biden administration’s stance on handling ransomware aligns with the government’s traditional attitude when it comes to paying ransom to any criminal or terrorist group.

"This is a continuation of U.S. policy," Resident Fellow for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Klon Kitchen told Fox News. "We have always encouraged companies not to pay ransom, because it encourages future attacks."

And...

The White House has attributed the attacks on JBS and the East Coast’s Colonial pipeline – which struck the largest U.S. fuel pipeline last month – to criminal organizations within Russia.

Biden is expected to address the attacks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the June 16 summit in Geneva, White House officials announced Wednesday.

But the president has so far not said the Kremlin has had any affiliation with the ransomware attacks.

"It’s time for the United States to start putting heads on spikes when it comes to confronting and dismantling ransomware groups," Kitchen said.

"If President Biden does not confront Vladimir Putin about the ransomware groups perpetrating from within Russia, he will be failing in his duty to protect the United States from these types of attacks," he added.

COMMENT:  All this, and much more, was predicted by experts in digital warfare.  And on top of it, very much to be feared, is the possibility of an EMP attack on the United States.  A technologically advanced enemy would explode a nuclear device over our country.  The electronic pulses from the blast could wreck much of our computerized infrastructure, bringing the United States to a halt.  Don't be indifferent to this. 

Have a nice day.

June 2,  2021     Permalink

JUNE 1,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

A JOURNALISTIC SCANDAL – FROM FOX:   New York Times writer David Leonhardt told "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter on Sunday that the media made a "mistake" by ignoring Sen. Tom Cotton, R.-Ark., and others who suggested for months that COVID-19 could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, before new evidence surfaced last week giving credence to the lab leak possibility.  A Wall Street Journal report released last week revealed that a few researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were ill in November 2019 with COVID-like symptoms. Once word spread, media outlets who once dismissed the lab leak theory as "fringe" suddenly started treating it as credible, such as the New York Times, who published starkly different headlines from May 2020 to May 2021.  New York Times writer David Leonhardt told "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter on Sunday that the media made a "mistake" by ignoring Sen. Tom Cotton, R.-Ark., and others who suggested for months that COVID-19 could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, before new evidence surfaced last week giving credence to the lab leak possibility.  I'm mildly pleased that some journalists have found religion.  It's long overdue.  But they now have to go on to other journalistic misadventures, like climate change and the reporting of the Vietnam War, and concede major inaccuracies and exaggerations that misled the country.  They can also throw in their sweetheart reporting of Barack Hussein Obama Jr, leading to the election of one of the worst presidents of our lifetime.

June 1, 2021       Permalink

THE HISPANIC VOTE AND A GOP VICTORY – OVERNIGHT:  There is clear political movement within the Hispanic communities of America, and Republicans plan to benefit from it.  They may well do so.  From RealClearPolitics:

Marco Rubio and Rick Scott gathered reporters in a conference room early Thursday morning at the National Republican Senatorial Committee for a light breakfast, a PowerPoint presentation, and a paradigm shift.

The vaunted “coalition of the ascendant,” that mix of young voters and minority voters and white college-educated voters who together carried Barack Obama to a second term, has fractured.

Projected demographic changes will continue but will not lead to permanent Democratic majorities. Anyone looking to forecast the future of American politics should look to red Florida, not blue California.

At least so said GOP pollster Curt Anderson, who laid out the findings of a new NRSC survey of Hispanic voters in battleground states. The top line from his 34-page slide deck? “The coalition of the ascendant is descending.” The proof? The two senators sitting at the table who won election in a Sun Belt state that has become “substantially less white and more Republican.”

The moment for their multiethnic, multiracial working-class coalition has arrived, Republicans hope, and Hispanic voters are the key. “They said how well Marco would do because he is of Cuban descent,” Scott said, noting how Rubio won 48% of those voters in his 2016 race, “but when I did it, they said, ‘Well, there is something different about Florida.’ If you look at these poll numbers, it is not. If you look at these poll numbers, Hispanics across the country are Republicans.”

The GOP theory of the case ahead of the midterms, where Republicans must not only defend 20 of their own seats but also flip at least one Democratic seat to retake the Senate, sounds simple. “If Republicans reach out to them,” Scott said of Hispanics, “we are going to win.”

The survey of 1,200 Hispanic likely voters in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin, conducted by OnMessage Strategies, is welcome news to a party that went, in just four years, from unified control of Washington to banishment in the electoral wilderness. It shows an increasingly conservative Hispanic population open to the culture wars that Donald Trump waged.

These voters reject socialism and favor the free market by a margin of 63% to 17%, a sentiment that holds roughly the same among all Central and South American subsets.

They agree also, 67% to 28%, with the widespread angst that the nation is in decline and fear their children will not enjoy the same opportunities. About four out of five say that public schools are failing, while two-thirds worry that too many Americans are “losing our traditional values centered on faith, family, and freedom,” and agree that “cancel culture has gotten out of hand.”

The in-house numbers dovetailed with the biography of Rubio, himself a second-generation Cuban American. “The argument from the left is that this country is a place that has not been good for people, other than the majority, over much of our history,” he said. “And Hispanics just don't buy it. And the reason why they don't buy it is very simple: They know what life is like in another country.
“You can just imagine it, right? You came from Venezuela, you came from Cuba, or you came from Nicaragua, or you’re Colombian, and you saw what happened in those countries,” he added. “Now you put your kids in schools where they try to teach them that Che Guevara was some kind of hero?”

Rubio admitted that his message might be lost on some, perhaps the white college-educated slice of the ascendant coalition who “have the luxury of imagining” some “utopian country somewhere that has a better history and a better life than America.” This is not, he insisted, the case for a majority of Hispanics.

“When you have come from somewhere else, and you know what life is like in another country, you know how special this country is,” he said. “You sure as hell don't want to live in a second country where those things are lost.”

COMMENT:    Read the whole thing.  It's very compelling.  The Hispanic communities are poised to play a leading role in returning America to traditional values, values they came here to embrace and defend.  Compare please with the "bring it down" mentality of the other side.

June 1, 2021       Permalink