February 16, 2024
Dear Patriots,
Another week of legal maneuvers, political treachery, Deep State revelations and tragic events.
As always on Friday, we deliver the good news that you may have missed.
1- Great news! The world is greener than ever! Global warming crazies are not happy. But, normal people are celebrating.
New study finds that CO2 is increasing the rate by which the globe is greening, even under drought
QUOTE: A new study finds that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions are driving increased plant growth that's greening the Earth, even in areas experiencing drought.
The peer-reviewed study, which was published in the scientific journal Global Ecology and Conservation, finds that the phenomenon known as "global greening" is an indisputable fact. The rate of global greening has increased slightly, and drought has only slowed, but not stopped, the process.
The study, which was done by Chinese and Australian researchers, attributes the greening to carbon dioxide fertilization as well as land management, such as irrigation. The opposite of greening is referred to as browning. The study found that greening acceleration occurred in 55.15% of the globe, while browning occurred in only 7.28%.
"Combined with meteorological variables, we found that CO2 change dominated the LAI [greening] trend," the authors wrote.
The fact carbon dioxide emissions are stimulating plant growth is not a new finding. In 2016, a study in Nature Climate Change using NASA satellite data found that 25% to 50% of the Earth's vegetated lands showed significant greening over the previous 35 years from when the study was done.
Gregory Wrightstone, executive director of the CO2 Coalition, told Just The News that global greening is among benefits of global warming that are ignored and dismissed because it doesn't fit a narrative that climate change is causing a crisis.
"There's a lot of people who make a lot of money on the backs of the false notion of a pending climate crisis," Wrightstone said.
The group's views of climate change have not been welcomed in mainstream circles.
2- A strong effort is being made in Utah to reintroduce the tenets of Western Civilization to higher education. These endeavors to rewire the abuses of propaganda are important and need our prayers and support. Ideas like this can spread like a brush fire.
As Samuel Adams said: "It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."
The Return of Western Civ
QUOTE: On January 15, 1987, Jesse Jackson led a demonstration of 500 students at Stanford University chanting "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go." Today, 37 years later, Jackson and the student radicals have accomplished their goal. The study of Western civilization in any comprehensive and serious sense is indeed "gone" in most of American higher education. The once requisite undergraduate Western Civilization class has been sidelined with elective (and sometimes required) courses in ethnic, gender, queer, multicultural, and post-colonial studies. The foundations of American constitutional democracy are not required study for our young citizens.
For years, conservatives, traditional liberals, and non-partisan independents have, while lamenting this situation, felt hopeless to do anything about it. But, this month, the Utah State Legislature is planning something transformational in American higher education. Public universities are funded by taxpayers to serve the interests of the public at large. For more than 100 years, state legislatures and university trustees have required state colleges and universities to mandate specific courses that students must take for graduation. In the past, these courses usually involved instruction in American history, citizenship, and Western civilization, and more recently "diversity" mandates and courses in ethnic and gender studies.
Utah State Senator John D. Johnson has just introduced Senate Bill 226, which has the potential to revolutionize higher education in Utah and—if its core tenets spread—throughout the United States. SB 226 is based on model state legislation for public universities developed by education reform champions David Randall of the National Association of Scholars, Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Jenna Robinson of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
The bill will establish an independent academic unit, the School of General Education, which will have its own dean and hiring, firing, promotion, and tenure programs for professors independent from the university's administrative bureaucracy. The "purposes of the School of General Education are to educate students; through books and major debates which form the intellectual foundations of free countries, especially that of the United States through the principles, ideals, and institutions of law, liberty, and civic virtue [that] under pin the American constitutional order."
All students at the University of Utah will be required to take 42 semester hours (13 courses, ten for STEM students) of instruction in the School of General Education to graduate. The required courses specifically include the study of Ancient Greece and Rome; the Hebrew Bible and New Testament; the rise of Christianity, medieval Western Europe; medieval English legal and constitutional history; the Renaissance; the Reformation; the development of parliamentary democracy in Britain; the French Revolution; the Industrial Revolution in Britain; Western science; the rise and fall of the Soviet Union; and Nazi Germany.
The proposed legislation is not a panacea. However, SB 226 offers hope and a template on how to proceed. If this project succeeds and proves to be popular it has the potential to spread to other state universities and influence private institutions. Most importantly, it has the potential to serve the common good by breaking the monopoly of the prevailing orthodoxy in higher education.
For people concerned that the nation's universities have become ideological training grounds for revolutionary shock troops and laboratories of social justice experimentation, the news from Utah is salutary. Finally, there is a chance that higher education may serve to ground our young people—of all perspectives—in the great and good lessons of the past.
3- There are four additional states making hard turns to the right to fix failed education.
Four states that are leading the charge for conservative education
QUOTE: A quartet of conservative state leaders are pointing the way forward when it comes to early childhood education and K–12 schooling.
• In early childhood education, where conservatives have tended to come up empty, Virginia's Glenn Youngkin has put forward a robust vision that offers a clear alternative to supersizing traditional school districts.
• Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders's signature LEARNS Act offers a similarly robust agenda for K–12. LEARNS includes a universal Education Savings Account program that will ultimately deposit $7,500 a year in flexible-use spending accounts that allow families to access a host of private providers if they wish.
• In Louisiana, meanwhile, state superintendent Cade Brumley shepherded through his bipartisan state board an impressive overhaul of the state's social studies standards. He did this by being radically transparent, fielding more than 1,800 public comments and taking extensive feedback from both supporters and critics.
• There has been perhaps no more heartening development in public education than the surge of support for schools to embrace the "science of reading." Rooted in a commitment to the building blocks of literacy, scientifically informed reading offers a systematic, effective way to help young children develop into fluent readers. The pioneer on this count may well be red Mississippi, where the legislature passed and Gov. Phil Bryant signed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013.When it comes to education, it's not enough for conservatives to simply stand athwart history, shouting "Stop!" When taxpayers are spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year on early childhood and K–12 and when public officials make the rules on everything from textbook adoption to preschool teacher licensure, a failure to lead is really a decision to concede.
There are state leaders right now showing how the right can do just this. Their example deserves to be emulated, in Washington and across the land.
4- It is good to see Governor DeSantis back in his state, taking care of the citizens of Florida.
And DeSantis Just Keeps Truckin'
QUOTE: Bummed as I was when Ron DeSantis bowed gracefully out of the presidential scrum, it was nice to have arguably the finest chief executive in fifty states back home in Florida running things full-time.
He hasn't taken a breather to recuperate from the campaigning either, plunging right back into the business of keeping FL humming along.
The legislation he announced support for today, though, is kind of funny in its own right if you think about it in a national context. It's a shot sent squarely across the bow of California's soft-on-crime, unctuous Gavin Newsom.
FL state Rep Bob Rommel (R-Naples) - originally a New York native who won't go back because of the crime - has introduced a bill hiking penalties for retail theft. And not only does it target these retail gangs hitting stores in swarms, but porch pirates are also included by substantially lowering the threshold for felony chargeable thefts.
Start saving those Ring videos of the bums making off with your goods.
They've already got the companion bill working in the FL Senate.
De Santis was unambiguous in his praise for the proposed legislation and with his warnings for retail criminals.
It's nice to have someone who takes the citizens' interests to heart and acts on them.
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