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Evangelical voters put Donald Trump over the top to protect the unborn, but he has declared war on them instead.

For a start, the World Health Organization estimates that between 2030-2050, climate change will cause approximately 250,000 deaths every year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress.And that was before Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord, putting the entire agreement at risk.

Of course, these arent the unborn children most religious conservatives mean.They mean fetuses and embryoseven miscarried fetuses, which as of last week may be issued birth certificates by the state of Florida. But as a rising generation of creation care Christians have emphasized, to be truly pro-life requires protecting human life in all its forms, not just before birth. And tallying up the Trump administrations war on the unborn is truly horrific.

Theres the 250,000 annual deaths caused by climate-related diseases as droughts increase, crops fail, and micro-climates shift. That number is the tip of the climate change iceberg, however.As President Obama patiently explained to Leonardo DiCaprio in a video that has since gone viral, the greatest human dangers from climate change will result from mass migration, as hundreds of millions of peoplemost of them poorflee coastal areas and newly desertified regions, choking cities and straining food supplies.

Imagine the Syrian refugee crisis, magnified by a hundredfold.

And while youre imagining Syrian refugees, remember that the Syrian conflict was also, in large part, a result of climate change.A 2015 report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that the unprecedented drought from 2007-2010 forced Syrian farmers to abandon their farms for the cities and caused a massive crop failure that led to food shortages, riots, overcrowding, instability, and civil unrest that led to government crackdowns.

This was no ordinary drought.Based on a century of data on precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, the report concluded that anthropogenic climate change made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 20072010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone.Its no wonder that the University College London Institute for Global Health stated that climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.

Oh, but there are others.

Next are the 24,000 Americans who will die each year for lack of health coverage if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, according to a number of studies that have tracked the health effects of insurance (or lack thereof). That number is probably too conservative.It is based on 20 million people losing insuranceless than the Congressional Budget Office now estimates and extrapolates from the impacts of expanded insurance coverage in Massachusetts.Extrapolations based on New York, Maine, and Arizona yield an annual death toll of 44,000. (Incidentally, none of these figures are based on the study cited in one attempted refutation of the projections.)

And then the unknown number of people, born and as yet unborn, who will get sick because of newly lax or eliminated water pollution rules, smog rules, power plant emissions regulations, fracking regulations, and pesticide regulations.Indeed, one of the first acts of the Scott Pruitt-led Environmental Protection Agency was to de-regulate chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that EPAs scientific studies conclusively showed to be a carcinogen.

Overseas, the popular UNICEF program is the worlds largest provider of vaccines to vulnerable children around the world1.5 million of whom die every year due to diseases that can be prevented by vaccination. But instead of increasing funding for UNICEF, the 2018 Trump budget zeroes it out completely, a loss of $132 million for the agency. The human cost?To be determined.

There are even 20,000 refugees with immediately life-threatening health conditions, according to the United Nations, whose entry to the United States has been held up by the administrations on-again/off-again travel ban.

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Then there are the numbers that are harder to quantify.We will never know how many people will get sick because government funding for scientific research has been slashed, for example.Nor can we know the effects of Trumps withdrawal from the international world order and the decline in U.S. global leadership.

And all of these numbers are only the health-related casualties of the Trump administration.The current pace of civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes1,484 were killed in Iraq and Syria during the month of Marchwould blow away the Obama civilian death toll, and the count will likely rise higher as ISIS moves into urban areas.Trump is indeed bombing the hell out of ISIS, and, exactly as predicted, this has resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent bystanders.

Needless to say, none of this includes any future death toll from wars in the Middle East, Iran, the Korean Peninsula, or wherever else the hawkish wing of the Trump administration turns its attention.

There is a coherent ideology tying together all of these statistics. It is the philosophy of tyrants past and present: that power is the greatest good, that life is a bitter competition among hostile combatants, that what matters are properties like strength, fame, money, possessions, and size.

And the worst things?Weakness, femininity, being a nobody, foolishly believing in nave myths of cooperation and compassion.Our vulgar, narcissistic president is a Nietzschean, an Randian, even though I am sure he has never read either of them.His only value is his own aggrandizement.

In their hearts, religious conservatives must know that Trump is not truly pro-life. Not simply because, as he said many times, he believes in the rights of women to make their own reproductive health care choices.But more broadly: because his adolescent, dog-eat-dog worldview is the very opposite of the biblical one, in which Jesus favored the meek, the outcast, the humbleprecisely those Trump would call losers and discard.

God says in Deuteronomy 30:19: I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.Donald Trump has done the opposite.

See the rest here:
Donald Trump's War on the Unborn - Daily Beast

Americas culture wars have evolved greatly from the central issues of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as legalizing same-sex marriage, or what standards of decency hip-hop artists or cable-television shows should adhere to. Now the very concept of higher education its purpose, how its institutions prepare our countrys young adults, and what exactly is being taught in the classroom has taken center stage.

Americans opinions about the current state of higher education, according to a new Pew poll released earlier this week, reveal a stark partisan divide over whether our nations colleges perform a positive societal function. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now believe Americas institutions of higher learning have a negative effect on the country, whereas 72 percent of Democrats say the effect is positive.

Given the profusion of what now seem like weekly horror stories about the way conservative students and professors (or really anyone who dares to express an independent thought) are treated on campus, its no surprise that so many on the right are beginning to question the impact colleges and universities are having on American society.

For over half a century, conservatives have more or less accepted the fact that leftists control the classrooms. The clich of a son or daughter coming back for the holidays armed with all sorts of ideas collected from a freshman sociology seminar typically ends with a polite smile or headshake from the parents and another tuition check. At least, parents could tell themselves, the kids were learning something. Families tolerated the political biases of college professors and administrators because there was an implicit understanding that students would be challenged and educated, whether directly or indirectly, in areas that would eventually prepare them for life as engaged citizens and productive members of the labor force.

Not anymore.

The college experience seems more and more like a four-year vacation at a country club than a serious intellectual journey. I hesitate even to describe college courses as exercises in brainwashing, because the term implies a sort of rigor. A ritzy liberal-arts college presents something more like a perverse interpretation of Karl Marxs vision of a fully Communist society, where students can indoor rock-climb in the morning, enjoy a freshly prepared vegan meal at lunch, pontificate about gender without referencing the required reading later that afternoon, and still make time to drink heavily and indulge in soft drugs at night.

All of that sounds quite lovely on its face, but its no surprise that so many conservatives are deeply disturbed by how much colleges have changed in their lifetime. Considering how far academic standards have eroded on campuses, its difficult to justify the undergraduate degree as a necessary vehicle to the middle and upper-middle class. Its even harder to justify American colleges and universities as a positive societal force instead of just an extremely expensive four-year ritual required in order for an individual to be rewarded with the keys to cosmopolitan society and all the avocado-toast-filled brunches anyone could ask for.

The common refrain from the left that conservatives reject higher education out of a preference for ignorance or a fear of dangerous ideas couldnt be farther from the truth. Conservatives dont defend the Western canon because they think understanding it will make students believe that lower corporate tax rates are one of the best ways to grow the economy, but because we deem it important to understand the Wests intellectual underpinnings so that we can best defend and (yes) criticize it.

Its disappointing but not necessarily surprising that so many self-identified liberals have few gripes about the direction higher education is taking. In the age of Trump, liberals have adopted a bunker mentality and view college campuses as a steadfast safe space at a time when their own political party seems temporarily impotent against historic GOP gains.

As the student-debt bubble grows, I suspect many liberals will begin to regret their indifference to these changes. While 55 percent of Americans still view colleges and universities positively, this number seems awfully slim considering the prominent role higher education plays in the modern economy and as a class signifier. Moreover, the urbanrural cultural divide will only increase in intensity as more individuals realize that one of the main roots of liberals arrogance their prized education is nothing more than a sham.

In ten or 15 years, when Millennials are still mailing checks to Sallie Mae, it wont just be Republicans who ask: What did I get out of this?

READ MORE: The Next Right-Wing Populist Will Win by Attacking American Higher Education New Englands Hallowed Halls, Crumbling A Big Reason for the Rising Cost and Falling Quality of College

Joe Simonson writes about politics and culture.

Here is the original post:
Higher Education: Good or Bad? - National Review

The Village Reporter and the Hometown Huddle

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Casino the movie wikipedia - How to count cards in the game of blackjack - The Village Reporter and the Hometown Huddle

HICKORY The Hickory Career and Arts Magnet (HCAM) School set a national record in June, finishing second in the Crime Scene Investigation competition at the 2017 SkillsUSA national championships held in Louisville, Ky.

Its the highest any North Carolina high school has ever scored in this competition, according to the teams advisor Seth Bailey, HCAM and Catawba Valley Community College (CVCC) criminal justice instructor.

SkillsUSA is a national partnership of students, teachers (middle-school, high-school and college/postsecondary) and industry representatives working together to ensure America has a skilled workforce, according to skillsusa.org. More than 16,000 students competed in 100 occupational and leadership skill areas at the competition.

The HCAM team of Summer Walsh, Shelby Sipe and Brian Martinez entered nationals as the North Carolina state SkillsUSA champions as well.

It took a lot of hard work. The group I have this year did a lot of studying on their own, Bailey said.

They were first in state to reach nationals where they competed against 35 other teams.

I got their scores back, and what was interesting was in high school, on the written exam, the highest score in the state was 95, and thats what we got, and the state average on the written exam was 82, and at nationals, the highest written exam score was 87, and we got an 87, Bailey said. Our team was definitely one of the best.

Summer Walsh graduated from HCAM in May and this was her first year participating in SkillsUSA. She saw it as an important opportunity and called it the best choice shes made concerning her education while in high school.

The competition begins with the teams being briefed on a crime scenario. They use that information to process the crime scene, taking photographs, making measurements.

The group writes a report, building an evidence and photography log. They have three minutes for processing and 30 minutes to fill out evidence bags and their logs.

Walsh is attending CVCC and looks to transfer to a four-year university.

It impacted me big time. I had so much support and really want to do it again next year and it showed me what its like to be working in that field, Walsh said.

She realizes the competition experience isnt exactly like investigating an actual crime scene but it covers all the basics.

In the field, youre not going to have just 30 minutes to process a crime scene, Walsh said. Youre going to have all the time you can get, but theres things called transient evidence, which is evidence that can be damaged in minutes, so you have to hurry up to get that.

She thinks everyone should participate in SkillsUSA.

It shows your skills and ambition and it shows you how passionate you are about your career path, Walsh said.

Shelby Sipe, a junior at HCAM, has always been a fan of the television show CSI, and in the schools Forensics Academy, she found out about the HCAM Crime Scene Investigation team.

When I found out the school offered that course I jumped straight for it, Sipe said.

It was her teacher Seth Bailey who encouraged her to try the SkillsUSA team.

I started doing crime scenes every week, and I realized it was something I really wanted to do. This will help me out a lot, Sipe said.

While its a lot of fun for her, Sipe admits its a big commitment and a lot of work.

You have to know your history about court cases and how to process the evidence, she said.

It comes down to a students attention to detail.

We have a visualization test and you get a certain amount time, like 30 seconds to look at a picture and youre asked about what you see, Sipe said. You have a written test based on background knowledge of criminal justice.

In general, she thinks her time preparing for SkillsUSA made her a better student. It reinforced the idea of discipline when it came to studying and the importance of participating in class.

She already has her sister following in her footsteps when it comes to criminal justice and SkillsUSA.

Its gotten me more involved with working with other people, Sipe said. This has gotten me communicating better in large groups and to do interviews and just get prepared for what is going to happen when I get out into the real world.

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Hickory Career and Arts Magnet sets standard for NC at SkillsUSA championships - Hickory Daily Record

On his 11-year-old frame, Abraham Nakhal of Los Angeles donned a heavy ballistics vest usually worn by Bowling Green Police Department Critical Response Team members.

As one of 25 children who attended the BGPD Junior Police Academy from Wednesday through Friday, he was so excited Wednesday night about returning the next day that he couldnt sleep.

Abraham, who hopes to one day become a police officer or a doctor, is in Bowling Green visiting his aunt Huda Melkey, who persuaded him to attend the camp.

I chose to come here. The first day I came it was so much fun, he said. We met all kinds of police men and women and the police dog.

Then after a while we drove around in carts on the road here which was really, really, really fun, he said of learning about traffic laws on the mock city streets of Safety City, a small replica of Bowling Green set up in front of Greenwood High School.

The tiny city has paved streets and sidewalks, working traffic lights, railroad tracks and a miniature water tower that looks like the tower on hospital hill.

When I came today, I was excited to come, Abraham said. Im just so excited I couldnt sleep.

While traffic safety was the highlight for him, he also enjoyed learning about crime scene investigation. He was surprised that BGPD Critical Response Team members wear camouflage.

I never knew they had camouflage. I thought SWAT wears black all the time because Im from L.A., he said.

They treat us kindly and respectfully. I want to be a cop because they help all human people out there, Abraham said

Braxton McCoy, who after patiently waiting to turn 10 years old, was finally old enough to do it this year, he said of the junior academy.

I always wanted to do this camp, Braxton said.

His biggest takeaway from the camp is to choose a life without drug use, alcohol or smoking, he said.

I thought their gadgets were cool. Their outfits were cool, and its good to help the community, Braxton said.

He hopes to one day become an officer to help the community and all of its needs.

Stella Davis, 12, was attracted to the camp after hearing about her moms participation in the Citizens Police Academy.

I thought it was really fun. It really opened my eyes about drugs and alcohol, Stella said. I really learned how hard the officers jobs are.

Her favorite part of the camp as of Thursday afternoon was the crime scene investigation where she handled mock blood samples and helped find shell casings and a mock gun.

I enjoyed taking the samples of the case we were working on, she said.

I didnt know how many cases they were doing in a day. It surprised me about how many cases they were doing, Stella said.

She is still deciding on a career choice between law enforcement and marine biology.

Shelby Hatler, 10, whose father is retired from Kentucky State Police and mother works as a dispatcher for BGPD, wasnt really surprised by anything she learned at the camp because of things she has already learned at home from her parents. But she thoroughly enjoyed the crime scene investigation.

I got to take the pictures, she said. I liked finding the gun, bullets and evidence.

Im going to be a dispatcher just like my mom, she said.

The annual camp is open to 25 kids ages 10 to 13, Maj. Matt Edwards said.

Its a fun way to show young people what their police department is all about and make a connection between the police and the youth, he said.

The junior academy is more than 10 years old. So far, John Deeb is the only BGPD police officer who as a boy attended the junior police academy.

I anticipate that number will increase, Edwards said.

The kids spend three days learning about all things police before wrapping up with a mock trial and a graduation ceremony. The cost is $50 and scholarships are available.

Its a very hands-on academy, Edwards said. To be fun at this age it has to be hands on.

Sign ups are held every year at the Community Education Summer Activity Fair. For more information, call Officer Ronnie Ward or Edwards at 270-393-4000.

Follow Assistant City Editor Deborah Highland on Twitter @BGDNCrimebeat or visit bgdailynews.com.

See the article here:
Kids learn about cops at junior police academy - Bowling Green Daily News