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             Does American superiority in space matter? Think of it this way: The capabilities that enable us to put a Joint Direct Attack Munition within 30 feet of some ISIS thugs, know the positions of friendly troops, or keep an eye on the activities of Russia near the border with Ukraine come from satellites in orbit. In essence, America has dominated the “high ground” of space for close to 60 years.
               Or, to put it bluntly, before there was ever a hint of a Space Force, we had already militarized space. There may be many who will claim we shouldn’t militarize space, but when space is where communications, reconnaissance, and navigation systems are, then it’s already become a military theater. That’s the reality of the situation. And as was the case with air power, eventually space assets will start shooting at each other.
               After Operation Desert Storm, America’s dominance in space was noted by Russia and China. They began working to catch up. They got a lot of help in that regard thanks to the penny-wise and pound-foolish “peace dividend” that came after the fall of the Soviet Union. America, to a large extent, rested on the laurels of winning the Cold War.
               More importantly, China is developing hypersonic weapons and is also trying to make a play for space. In 2007, China destroyed a failed weather satellite — a sign that they had the capability to contest American access to space. How did the Chinese catch up? Well, it turns out that America was busy dealing with radical Islamic terrorism and has been since 2001. It still is today, as indicated by the recent airstrike that took out one of the jihadis behind the 2000 attack on USS Cole (another was killed in a 2002 drone strike, and a third was captured and interrogated).
               When 9/11 happened, there was the need to prepare for the military campaign, not just against al-Qaida and its affiliates, but also the state sponsors of terrorism like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. This drew a lot of attention for the next decade, and as such, other priorities slipped — and that was with George W. Bush in office. The military — and America’s edge in space — took more hits from his successor.
               Even before Osama bin Laden was terminated, Barack scumbag/liar-nObama was already starting to hit the defense budget with a number of cuts, including what turned out to be a premature halt of F-22 production, and the early retirement of USS Enterprise (CVN 65). He also chopped the planned space shuttle replacement.
               President Donald Trump, though, has begun to take space seriously. He not only has been pushing for the creation of a Space Force, he is also taking other steps to restore American primacy in space. A primacy that could very well make the difference between winning and losing a war.
               Among the plans are the assembly of a permanent presence around the moon, as a way station for journeys to Mars. A return of manned missions to the moon, and journeys elsewhere in the solar system are also on the agenda. These not only will give us a chance to learn more about the other planets, but the technological improvements will have benefits that take surprising turns. Such technological leaps can also have military applications, adding to America’s qualitative edge over China.
               It is obvious we will need it, because China has taken advantage of the end of the Cold War to make its own qualitative improvements. Twenty years ago, the bulk of the People’s Liberation Army Navy was in a large number of Luda-class destroyers, Jianghu-class frigates, and Romeo-class diesel-electric submarines, vessels that were relatively low-technology, albeit numerous. Today, though, that navy has the Type 55 and Type 52 destroyers and the Jiangkai-class frigates. As for submarines, the bulk of China’s force are modern Kilo-class submarines — backed by a small force of advanced nuclear attack submarines.
               With China’s rise, and the return of an aggressive Russia, America may wind up feeling thankful for the Trump administration’s push to make America’s advantage in space large again. It won’t just benefit our military, but it could also make life on earth much easier.  

~The Patriot Post

• Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.

• The story of Granada is all about the Islamic Moors. In year 711, these North African Muslims crossed the straits of Gibraltar and quickly conquered the entire Iberian Peninsula, eventually converting most of its habitants. Throughout the Middle Ages, for over seven hundred years, Spain was a predominantly Muslim society, living under Muslim rule.

• The United Daughters of the Confederacy were once a powerful force in public education across the South, right down to rewriting history: slaves were happy, y'all.

             “There are objectives that we want to accomplish that condition the withdrawal,” Bolton said Sunday. The U.S. withdrawal from northeastern Syria will occur, Bolton added, “in a way that makes sure that ISIS is defeated and is not able to revive itself and to become a threat again; and to make sure that the defense of Israel and our other friends in the region is absolutely assured; and to take care of those who fought with us against ISIS and other terrorist groups.”
               That does sound quite a bit different from Trump’s declaration last month: “After historic victories against ISIS, it’s time to bring our great young people home! We have won against ISIS.” At the same time, Trump’s declaration wasn’t based on a timeline but results. “We won’t be finally pulled out until ISIS is gone,” Trump said Sunday. We suppose there’s a difference between defeated and gone. And he tweeted Monday, “No different from my original statements, we will be leaving at a proper pace while at the same time continuing to fight ISIS and doing all else that is prudent and necessary!”
               Results are what Bolton pointed to as well. Indeed, he explained, “Timetables or the timing of the withdrawal occurs as a result of the fulfillment of the conditions and the establishment of the circumstances that we want to see. It’s not the establishment of an arbitrary point for the withdrawal to take place as President scumbag/liar-nObama did in the Afghan situation. … The timetable flows from the policy decisions that we need to implement.”
               No doubt Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had some feedback about a total U.S. pullout, as did our Kurdish allies, whom our Turkish “allies” wish to wipe out.
               So what it comes down to is that, once again, Trump used overstatements and hyperbole because he wanted to make a splash and bring attention to an issue, and then he (and White House officials) walked that back to a more reasonable position that, arguably, Trump had always aimed for. In this case, House Democrats were/are going to pull a Vietnam on Syria — snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory by defunding the efforts and then blaming the president. Trump’s gambit backed Dems into publicly supporting continuing efforts in Syria, which he can then point to when they don’t want to fund it.
               This seems to be a good example of taking Trump seriously but not literally.
               The Resurgent’s Steve Berman aptly sums it up: “The reality is that Syria is a mess — a Gordian knot of alliances, long-simmering feuds, ancient hatreds, and horrific violence. It’s a place where nobody is truly your friend, and everyone is potentially your enemy, and this goes triple for the United States. Trump’s instincts to get out of Syria are not entirely wrong. … But our quick departure also has consequences that hurt American interests. There’s no good answer.”  ~The Patriot Post

The evidence is nauseating. For example, DeSimone notes that in the U.S., heart disease and cancer are ranked number one and two respectively in leading causes of death, each taking well above half a million lives annually. But sitting in third place is something unbeknownst to most people. Sadly, recent research by Johns Hopkins found that medical errors produce a quarter-million deaths each year, although other research suggests 440,000 annual deaths. Yet even these guesstimates could be dwarfed under a Medicare for All scheme. As DeSimone writes:
               Our current health care system is based on a fee-for-service (FFS) reimbursement model that rewards doctors for providing more treatments than necessary because payment is dependent on the quantity, not quality, of care. … Unnecessary tests and treatments have accounted for $200 billion annually and have been found to actually harm patients. That’s because the FFS system is volume-based, not necessarily value-based. Therefore, any increases in the volume of care equal increases in medical errors. … If Medicare for All covered all 325 million Americans — which include the nearly 30 million uninsured Americans and the 41 million more with inadequate health insurance — it would be the most disastrous third-party payer ever, once cost was not a primary factor. Including fatal medical errors and the hundreds of thousands of deaths resulting from longer wait times — already exhibited by VA health care — this could presumably make Medicare for All the single biggest factor to the leading cause of death in the US.
               Clearly, Medicare for All provides no health-care cure, doing nothing is harmful too. That’s why American Enterprise Institute resident fellow James C. Capretta argues, “To Keep Medicare for All at Bay, Offer a Better Alternative.” He rightly observes, “It may not be enough just to be against government-run health care if the public perceives the alternative as inadequate, and, currently, there is widespread agreement that the status quo is inadequate. The provision of medical care remains far too costly. Waste is rampant. Administrative costs are high. The system is fragmented and uncoordinated, the paperwork is maddening, and the quality of care provided to patients is uneven. The persistence of these problems over many years is a major reason why the U.S. has been on a steady march toward greater government control of the health system, even without a full embrace of a nationalized plan.”
               Capretta adds: “Opponents of Medicare for All shouldn’t try to defend the dysfunctional status quo. Instead, they should advance reforms that would make the system work better for patients, and bundle them as the alternative to Medicare for All. The last two years have demonstrated how difficult this challenge will be for Republicans.” Indeed it has. However, capitulating is a recipe for even greater disaster. As Capretta concludes, “Making the case for market-driven health care to a skeptical public is a tough assignment, but there is no real alternative to trying. At some the point, if the market is never tried, the public will get fed up with the waste and dysfunction, and Medicare for All will look like the only answer.” Conservatives mustn’t let that happen. Unify, and stay on message.  ~The Patriot Post

             Amidst the debate, remember a key fact: Democrats once supported securing our southern border with a wall but have totally reversed course. For the entirely cynical political calculus of reaping votes from certain constituents, they now vehemently oppose authorizing a dime for its construction.
               In another cynical calculation, mainstream media broadcast networks reportedly hotly debated whether to air Trump’s address before eventually granting the White House request for eight minutes of airtime.
               CNN’s Brian Stelter relayed a text he says he received from a TV executive: “[Trump] calls us fake news all the time, but needs access to airwaves… If we give him the time, he’ll deliver a fact-free screed without rebuttal. And if we don’t give him the time, he’ll call every network partisan. So we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”
               Such handwringing is amusingly phony. News networks fill up airtime 24/7 with Democrats, lobbyists, and partisan pundits venting outrage at the president for every policy or social-media post. They’re earning big bucks on one-sided bashing of Trump’s celebrity, yet they balk at giving him eight minutes of airtime to make his case for a significant national policy during a government shutdown triggered by a fight over that policy.
               As we argued in 2016, the media was rooting for Trump to win the GOP nomination, giving him (and even his empty podium) what ended up being $5 billion in free (and vastly disproportionate) coverage because they thought him most likely to lose to scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton. “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” said then-CBS Chairman Les Moonves.
               The plan backfired, but media moguls are still heavily invested in their own love-hate relationship with Trump; they hate him even though he’s great for ratings. Ultimately, the almighty dollar led them to open the airwaves tonight. Just expect it to be followed by countless hours of rebuttals — and that doesn’t even include Democrats’ hilarious demand for “equal airtime” to combat his “malice and misinformation.” After all, if anyone knows malice and misinformation, it’s Democrats.  

~The Patriot Post

             Nothing reinforces that norm more effectively than raising a nation of American students who cannot read.
               The numbers are stark: 32% of fourth-graders and 24% of eighth-graders aren’t reading at a basic level, while 37% are proficient or advanced, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s (NAEP) 2017 assessment. Remarkably — or is that pathetically — 37% represents the high-water mark for proficiency. When the NAEP began assessing literacy stats in 1992, only 29% of students had proficient or advanced reading skills.
               A recent article written by Emily Hanford is a real eye-opener because it inadvertently reveals an astounding level of denial on the part of the Educational Establishment. An Establishment so enamored with “cutting edge” educational theories they have been willing to sacrifice the futures of millions of students to validate them.

It tells the story of Jack Silva, chief academic officer for public schools in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 2015, Silva was deeply concerned that only 56% of third-graders were proficient in reading, according to state tests. In beginning his journey toward improving that outcome, he hit his first ideological roadblock. “One excuse that educators have long offered to explain poor reading performance is poverty,” Hanford writes. “In Bethlehem, a small city in Eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town, there are plenty of poor families. But there are fancy homes in Bethlehem, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many students at the wealthier schools weren’t reading very well either.
               It seems neither Silva nor Hanford are familiar with Thomas Sowell. In an articlepublished several years ago, Sowell not only debunks the poverty myth, he reveals that the now-infamous minority achievement gap in reading and other academics didn’t exist until the 1950s. And he explains exactly what happened. “The quest for esoteric methods of trying to educate these children proceeds as if such children had never been successfully educated before,” he writes, “when in fact there are concrete examples, both from history and from our own times, of schools that have been successful in educating children from low-income families and from minority families.”
               Silva was apparently unfamiliar with those concrete examples, so he tasked his new director of literacy, Kim Harper, with discovering the roots of the ongoing failure.
               What she discovered should surprise no one. Attending a professional-development day at one of the district’s lowest-performing elementary schools, Harper learned that actual reading was largely irrelevant. For example, if a child was reading a picture-book story about a “horse” and said “house,” the child was corrected. However, if the child said “pony” that was considered correct — because horse and pony mean the same thing.
               Except that they don’t. Moreover, Harper wondered what a child would do if there were no pictures to aid their reading efforts. “The contextual guessing approach is what a lot of teachers in Bethlehem had learned in their teacher preparation programs,” writes Hanford in an updated article for NPR. “What they hadn’t learned is the science that shows how kids actually learn to read.”
               That article ultimately gets to the “radical” scientific method that proved successful. At Bethlehem’s Calypso Elementary School in March 2018, veteran teacher Lyn Venable promised six children she was going to teach them something “brand spanking new.” Using a story about pets and what they do, she taught a student how to associate sounds with the various letters that made up the word “bark.”
               In other words, this “brand spanking new” approach to reading was phonics. And in a testament to the current state of education, many of the teachers referenced in the article has never heard of phonics, which was presented to them as a “new, science-based” approach to reading.
               New? “In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published a book titled Why Johnny Can’t Read, and What You Can Do About It,” wrote Laurie Endicott Thomas in a 2012 column. “Flesch explained that the only sensible way to teach anyone to read English, or any alphabetic language, is to teach them the relationships between letters and sounds, then teach them how to combine those sounds into words. He called it intensive phonics.”
               Both Thomas and Flesch insist ideology had nothing to do with the Education Establishment abandoning what worked. “I am not one of those people who call them un-American or left-wingers or Communist fellow travelers,” Flesch stated. Thomas agreed. “The people who led the anti-phonics crusade were the ones getting the big royalty checks from the publishing companies and who were depending on wealthy philanthropists for their jobs and for the funding for the colleges where they worked,” she insisted, further stating that people who serve the upper middle class at the expense of the working class “are being bourgeois, not left-wing.”
               Nonsense. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) respectively  contribute 100% and 98.6% of their campaign donations to Democrats. That would be the same NEA that stated the following policy standard — in 1936: “We stand for socializing the individual.”
               At the college level, a study by the National Association of Scholars reveals 39% of surveyed schools did not have a single Republican faculty member, and among the 8,688 full-time professors with Ph.D.s taken from a sample of 51 of the 60 top-ranked liberal arts colleges, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 10 to one. That’s as left-wing as it gets.
               Their ultimate goal? Fundamental transformation. “Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity,” stated the late Harvard University Professor and psychiatrist Dr. Chester Pierce at the International Education Seminar — held in 1973. “It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future.”
               Educational Establishment icon — and avowed socialist — Thomas Dewey was even clearer. “You can’t make socialists out of individualists,” he declared. “Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society, which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.”
               International, interdependent, children of the future who can’t think for themselves, lest they spoil societal harmony? Children who must eschew American exceptionalism and faith in a higher power, lest they be deemed mentally ill? Most Americans are still inclined to see the failure of our Education Establishment, or more accurately, our Democrat Education Complex, as some combination of incompetence and ineptitude.
               When six in 10 school kids remain well on their way toward functional illiteracy — and the dumbing-down of curriculums that accommodate it — nothing could be further from the truth.  

~The Patriot Post