Hoover Daily Report. Zito. Competence Over Nonsense. George Friedman. Climate Comments. Reasons Not To Age. More

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Hoover Daily Report

NATO: Contemporary Threats And Vision For The Future With Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg

interview with H. R. McMaster, Jens Stoltenberg via Battlegrounds

In this episode of Battlegrounds, H.R. McMaster and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg discuss how to overcome today’s threats and strengthen the alliance for the future.

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Education as a Battleground

Larry P. Arnn, President, Hillsdale College

The following is adapted from remarks delivered on November 3, 2022, at a Hillsdale College reception in Santa Clara, California.

IF YOU want to see the problem with American education, look at a chart illustrating the comparative growth in the number of students, teachers, and district administrators in our public schools in the period between 2000 and 2019. The number of district administrators grew by a whopping 87.6 percent during these years, far outstripping the growth in the number of students (7.6 percent) and teachers (8.7 percent).

      In illustrating the difference in these rates of growth, the chart also illustrates a fundamental change that has come over our nation as a whole during this period—a change in how we govern ourselves and how we live. To say a change is fundamental means that it concerns the foundation of things. If the foundation changes, then the things built on it are changed. Education is fundamental, and it has changed radically. This has changed everything else.

CONTINUE READING

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TRUMP WAS ALWAYS THE RESULT OF THE CONSERVATIVE POPULIST COALITION, NOT THE CAUSE

BY SALENA ZITO

Click for the full story:

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It is about time we quit being dependent on an adversary that wants to surpass us in every manner. It is as if Israel had surrendered to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinians: +++

Exclusive: Inside the U.S.'s decision to strengthen domestic supply chains to break China's monopoly on critical minerals The U.S. has taken important steps in shoring up its supply chains for what the U.S. Geological Survey classifies as "critical minerals".These are the minerals, such as cobalt, lithium and 17 rare earth elements, crucial to manufacture of all of America's green technology, including EV batteries and wind turbines. These minerals are also used in nearly every mobile device and computer.Plus, the Pentagon needs these minerals for its jets, weapon and communication systems.Yet China controls up to 90% of these critical minerals markets. And U.S. stockpiles of reserves are woefully low.But the U.S. government is committed to securing domestic sources of these minerals. Exploration and mining companies are in line to benefit under this new plan as $1.6 billion has been earmarked for this task.

This is all good news for investors.

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I have no way of knowing but when the focus is on everything else but competence this is what can happen

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Why is No One in Congress Calling for Joe Biden’s Secretary of the Army to be Fired?

If you think back to the very beginning of the illegitimate Biden regime’s time in office, you might remember that they were always bragging about their “historic” appointments to various government positions.

The first “this” and the first “that” were being appointed to government jobs and cabinet positions instead of the most competent or qualified people, and we were all supposed to applaud.

One of those “historic” appointments was Christine Wormuth. She was, the Biden regime told us smugly, the first woman to be appointed to the position of Secretary of the Army. Too bad she’s also turned out to be a catastrophic failure at the job, despite being the first woman to hold it.

A couple of things that the Biden regime didn’t brag about were also important about this appointment. Christine Wormuth has no military experience AND no management experience of any kind under her belt. We’ve had civilians serve in these sorts of positions in the past, but those were always people with impressive management skills and a track record of success.

Christine Wormuth doesn’t have that. She’s been a policy flack who has bounced around between the Clinton and Obama administrations.

And now she’s in charge of the Army?

Wormuth did serve in the Department of Defense as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy between 2014 and 2016. If you just thought to yourself, “Hey, wasn’t that the same time as when ISIS took over a big chunk of Iraq and Syria and set up a Caliphate ruling over 10 million people?” then you are correct.

That’s exactly what she was supposed to be advising the Secretary of Defense about at that time. So, Christine Wormuth didn’t exactly do a bang-up job in that position, either. But the Biden regime put her in charge of the US Army anyway!

The number one priority for the Secretary of the Army position is supposed to be meeting the quarterly recruitment goals so that the Army is ready and fully staffed in case a war breaks out. Christine Wormuth just missed the quarterly recruitment goal for the Army for the first time since we did away with the draft after Vietnam.

And she missed it by a lot. Only 45,000 people enlisted in the last quarter, instead of the 60,000 that was the goal. She failed by 25% at her number one task.

What’s she been doing instead of the number one priority of the Secretary of the Army? Well, that’s easy since she put out a memo about her goals in this “historic” appointment.

One of Christine Wormuth’s goals is “to continue our efforts to be resilient in the face of climate change.”

Wormuth continues, “The Army must adapt its installations, acquisition programs and training to be able to operate in a changing environment and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

What?! Is that somehow more important than having a military that will be ready to face off against China or Russia if the doo-doo really hits the fan? Apparently, it is to Christine Wormuth.

Another one of Wormuth’s main goals is to “reduce harmful behaviors” in the Army. Which behaviors? Racism, extremism (supporting Donald Trump), and sexual harassment.

As any commander will tell you, the number one harmful behavior that the armed services face on almost any military base is drunk driving and DUI arrests. It’s not the stuff that Christine Wormuth is worried about.

The amazing thing is that Republicans in Congress are not calling for Christine Wormuth to be fired. She has no management experience and no military experience, and she has politicized the military by chasing after fake partisan political goals like fighting global warming.

This woman is endangering national security. She needs to be fired immediately, but it doesn’t seem like anyone even notices or cares about how badly she’s failing.

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A Near Miss in Poland

Thoughts in and around geopolitics.

By: George Friedman

Perhaps the best novel by Tom Clancy, who often wrote about Cold War confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union, was "The Hunt for Red October." In it, a state-of-the-art submarine whose captain and crew were defecting to the U.S. crossed the Atlantic while avoiding kill and capture by their former comrades. The stakes were high and tensions rose. In a critical scene, U.S. and Soviet aircraft maneuvered around each other, and when a U.S. sub-hunter tried an emergency landing on a U.S. aircraft carrier, it crashed. The admiral commanding the fleet said, “This business will get out of control.” Snagging a Soviet submarine, from his point of view, wasn’t worth the risk the U.S. was running.

When I heard the initial reports that two Russian missiles had struck Poland, I remembered those words: “This business will get out of control.” It appeared that the Russians were attacking a non-combatant country, one filled with American troops, advisers and contractors, and with systems that monitored Russian actions. It appeared that the Russians had just expanded the war to another country, and perhaps to the rest of NATO. I didn’t know where the missiles had fallen, but I assumed it was a depot for American equipment moving to Ukraine or some surveillance site.

If the Russians had decided to expand the war to Poland, the United States would counter by striking Russia, something it had not yet done. The danger was that with missiles flying, it would be difficult to determine which were carrying nuclear warheads and which were carrying conventional ones. The uncertainty would potentially push the war into a nuclear exchange.

It was vital that the missiles that hit Poland not be Russian. Very quickly, the United States issued statements that the missiles were from Ukrainian air defenses, and eventually Ukraine agreed. I tend to believe this version; spending precious long-range missiles to deliver conventional payloads onto rural Poland is not useful to the war effort and thus not credible. But given the stakes, I did for a moment wonder if the U.S. would deny it was a Russian missile so that it wouldn’t feel compelled to retaliate. But the initial panic gave way to the calming notion that this was simply the whole business getting out of hand.

It also raised the question of why the war continues. The rationale makes enough military sense: Russia wanted strategic depth, and the West doesn’t want a Russian presence on the border of NATO. But the current combat doesn’t. Russia has all but lost the war. Its intent was to take control of Ukraine and block an anti-Russian force from using it as a base. There appears to be no circumstance under which Moscow will succeed in that regard, given the capability of Ukrainian troops and the mass of American weapons. More Russian forces are being readied, but they are unlikely to turn the tide.

The Ukrainians understandably want to regain their entire country. But any viable negotiation will give Moscow the opportunity to save face. If Russia comes back from talks empty-handed, President Vladimir Putin’s position will become even shakier than it is now, forcing him to reject talks and continue the war. To cede a small amount of territory in Donbas, a region with a large Russian population anyway, would be painful to Ukraine, but the number of Ukrainians that would die if the war continues would have to be measured against the pain of making concessions.

The United States holds the cards. Ukraine can’t continue the war without the U.S., which has already made it clear to Kyiv that it’s high time to start negotiating an end. Washington hasn’t lost any of its own troops, of course, but it has spent a great deal of money on the war, some of it weakening the American economy, and the economy of Europe has been sufficiently affected that it raises the question of whether the alliance could last the winter. The U.S. has achieved the mission it set for itself, and it understands that peace will involve concessions to Russia – thus is the nature of negotiations. Ukraine has to weigh the cost of continuing the war, with all the attendant casualties and damages, against whatever concessions may emerge.

If the war does continue, then we are at the point where the business gets out of hand. Though Russia has failed to win, it can still fight, however fruitlessly. If put in a position where there is no room to negotiate, the nuclear option might become attractive to Moscow. I actually don’t think this would be the case, but the risk of Russian irrationality is not worth the price.

As the incident in Poland shows, wars have a tendency to surprise us. As necessary and well-fought as the conflict may be for Ukraine, the country is paying a terrible price. Russia has found its military limit, and it is now facing a reckoning that cannot be predicted. The U.S. has achieved its goal. Moving on will require a negotiation in which Russia asks for something, and deserving or not, it will end this episode of human loss. Those who want everything are often surprised to have received nothing.

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A Little Learning on Methane and Climate Change

By William Happer

Before leaving for a week of virtue-signaling at the COP27 climate conference with other world elites, President Joe Biden would have done well to reread Hans Christian Anderson’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

“In the great city where he [the Emperor] lived, life was always gay,” Anderson wrote. “Every day many strangers came to town, and among them one day came two swindlers. They let it be known they were weavers, and they said they could weave the most magnificent fabrics imaginable. Not only were their colors and patterns uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid.”

In Biden’s case, the new clothes are the nonsense that there is a climate emergency. But who would want to be considered “unfit for his office” or “unusually stupid” by questioning whether there really is an emergency? So, resplendent in his new regalia, President Biden has proposed regulations on methane emissions by the U.S. oil and gas industry, at a direct cost of more than $1 billion annually, to deal with a nonexistent problem.

In fact, there is no climate emergency and there will not be one, with or without new regulations on methane emissions. Methane, the molecule CH4, is the main constituent of natural gas. Animals like cattle and sheep belch methane as they chew their cud. They are able to get more energy from forage by digesting some of the cellulose with the aid of methane-generating microorganisms in their stomachs. Termites use the same trick to digest wood. Microorganisms in soils, notably rice paddies, also emit large amounts of methane.

To understand why methane regulation will be irrelevant to climate, it is necessary to discuss a few numbers. This is not customary in climate discussions, which are usually more based in emotion than in fact.

Like water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), and nitrous oxide (N2O), methane is a naturally occurring greenhouse gas. Together with clouds, greenhouse gases control how heat added to the Earth by sunlight is returned as thermal infrared radiation to space. Greenhouse gases impede the flow of heat from Earth’s surface to space.

The details of how this happens are considerably more complicated than described by the adjective “heat-trapping.” Much of the heat transfer near the surface is due to convection of moist air and has little to do with greenhouse gases. And how the temperature varies with altitude at various locations on Earth’s surface is as important as the concentration of greenhouse gases.

Few realize that large increases in the concentrations of greenhouse gases cause very small changes in the heat balance of the atmosphere. Doubling the concentration of methane – a 100% increase, which would take about 200 years at the current growth rates – would reduce the heat flow to space by only 0.3%, leading to an average global temperature change of only 0.2 °C. This is less than one-quarter of the change in temperature observed over the past 150 years.

Most of the predicted catastrophic warming from greenhouse gas emissions is due to positive feedbacks that are highly speculative, at best. In accordance with Le Chatelier’s principle, most feedbacks of natural systems are negative, not positive.

So, even if regulations on U.S. methane emissions could completely stop the increase of atmospheric methane (they can’t), they would likely only lower the average global temperature in the year 2222 by about 0.2 °C, a completely trivial amount given that humans have adapted to a much larger change over the past century while reducing climate deaths by over 98%. And U.S. regulations will have little influence on global emissions, where producers are unlikely to be as easily cowed.

Given that consumption of fossil fuels is likely to increase over the next few decades as developing countries pull themselves out of poverty, restrictions on U.S. oil and gas production will simply shift production to autocratic nations such as Russia, which have much higher methane-emissions rates than U.S. producers do.

Also, you can bet that if the Biden administration is successful in promulgating regulations on oil and gas producers, it will expand these efforts into ranching and agriculture, which emit about the same amount of methane as energy production. No sector of the economy will remain untouched by the EPA’s long arm of climate regulations.

Biden and his advisors should reassess his new clothes and remember the wise word of the poet Alexander Pope:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.

There shallow draughts intoxicate brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

A little learning really is a dangerous thing. Learn a few more scientific facts and sober up, President Biden!

William Happer is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Princeton University and is Chairman of the Board of the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit organization established in 2015.

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A dozen reasons not to age:

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TWELVE COMMANDMENTS FOR SENIORS

#1 - Talk to yourself. There are times you need expert advice.

#2 - “In Style” are the clothes that still fit.

#3 - You don't need anger management. You need people to stop pissing you off.

#4 - Your people skills are just fine. It's your tolerance for idiots that needs work.

#5 - The biggest lie you tell yourself is, “I don't need to write that down. I'll remember it.”

#6 - “On time” is when you get there.

#7 - Even duct tape can't fix stupid, but it sure does muffle the sound.

#8 - It would be wonderful if we could put ourselves in the dryer for ten minutes, then come out wrinkle-free and three sizes smaller?

#9 - Lately, you've noticed people your age are so much older than you.

#10 - Growing old should have taken longer.

#11 - Aging has slowed you down, but it hasn't shut you up.

#12 - You still haven't learned to act your age and hope you never will.

. . . And one more:

“One for the road” means peeing before you leave the house

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Otzma Yehudit head MK Itamar Ben-Gvir announced his intention to split his Knesset faction from the Religious Zionist Party headed by MK Bezalel Smotrich on Friday afternoon.

The faction split, which was agreed upon in the initial agreements to form a unified list for the election, comes in the midst of coalition negotiations with prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu. Smotrich's negotiations with the Likud head have stalled due to the Religious Zionists head's demand to take up the Defense Ministry.

In the same statement announcing the split, Otzma Yehudit said its leader beseeched Netanyahu to agree to Smotrich's "legitimate demands," which Ben-Gvir said would help the incoming government fulfill its "fully right-wing" vision, in a Friday phone call.

Various reports since Netanyahu's election victory claim the former prime minister is mindful of US concerns over the potential appointments of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as ministers in his government.

As Smotrich stalls, Ben-Gvir gains ground in negotiations

As Smotrich is unable to find common ground with Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir's negotiations with the prime minister-designate progressed significantly, with the two agreeing on Thursday to work on a number of issues important to the right-wing, including the regulation of illegal West Bank outposts.

Despite this, Ben-Gvir reiterated on Friday that he maintains complete loyalty to coordinating with Smotrich and believes his political partner’s demands are completely reasonable and justified.

Ben-Gvir previously defended Smotrich on Twitter, saying that he is an "ideologue through and through," calling on all coalition partners to "act responsibly" and form a right-wing government.

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It should be discriminatory and therefor, unconstitutionl:

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FAIR News: The Future of Affirmative Action

Dear Friends of FAIR,

Under current legal precedent, colleges and universities may consider applicants’ “race” in making admissions decisions. However, the Supreme Court is currently reconsidering that doctrine in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. On October 31, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments. The skepticism toward “racial preferences” by a majority of the Justices was clear, and a potentially precedent-changing decision is expected by June 2023.

Earlier this year, FAIR’s legal team and network counsel filed an amicus brief in support of Students for Fair Admissions. Our pro-human mission and philosophy means that we advocate for treating people as unique individuals who share a common humanity, and not as representatives of identity groups. Many policies and programs intended to ensure equal opportunity for all individuals, including those from historically underrepresented groups, align with our values of fairness, understanding, and humanity. However, policies or programs that discriminate against or advantage individuals based on skin color or ethnicity in order to achieve group-based outcomes are inconsistent with FAIR’s principles.

As FAIR’s Chief Legal Officer Letitia Kim states in the brief:

It is a given that the competition for limited spaces at elite institutions is nothing if not fierce. In a just world, any student selected for admission should be confident that criteria were fair and evenly applied. Where immutable traits are added to the admissions mix, this perception of fairness may be cast into doubt. Group preferences stigmatize individuals of African and Latino descent. Many individuals have described the demoralizing self-doubt they experienced from wondering whether they received their positions only as a means to fill a hidden quota.

Two generations ago, my father, an immigrant from Mexico, benefitted from programs that gave him access to job opportunities and scholarships that were not available to my mother, whose Ashkenazi ancestry had imbued her with lighter skin. My wife, who immigrated to North America as a refugee from Ukraine when it was part of the former USSR, was similarly excluded from work and educational opportunities due to her ancestry. At what point can we start to hold every person to the same standards, and seek to grant them access to the same opportunities—regardless of skin color, ancestry, gender, sexual orientation, or other immutable characteristics?

Discriminating against a person based on the color of that person’s skin upends this nation’s foundational tenets of equality, the importance of individual rights, and the need to temper institutional power, while sacrificing our humanity in the process. Fundamental principles formed over centuries through the democratic process and forged through the crucible of tyranny and oppression should not be abandoned. It is wrong to treat applicants as representatives of identity groups, rather than as unique individuals with intrinsic value. By using reductive group preferences that are a crude proxy for an individual’s life experience, competence, or character, we elevate institutional interests over individual rights. In turn, this promotes division, resentment, and dehumanization.

America is increasingly a country of people with “mixed” ancestry. Last year, an overwhelming 94% of U.S. adults approved of marriages between people racialized as “black” and people racialized as “white,” up from 87% in 2013. The change in attitude toward intermarriage over the past two generations is striking—just 4% approved when Gallup first asked the question in 1958. And it’s not just opinions that have changed. In 1967, the year that the Supreme Court struck down “anti-miscegenation” laws in Southern states with the landmark Loving v. Virginia decision, only 3% of marriages in the U.S. were between people of a different “race” or ethnicity.

By 2015, those rates had increased more than five-fold:

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Dems Planning Major Changes for 2024 Presidential Primaries          READ MORE ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++