Medley: Military wokeness investigation, petition to fire hard grader professor, missile crashes in South Korea

Republicans look to investigate negative Biden military policies…

If the Republicans gain the House, one action it would take is to investigate wokeness in the military. Representative Jim Banks, Republican from Indiana, indicated that certain investigations would be a top priority. A GOP House would prioritize cleaning up the mess that Team Biden left with the military, to include the COVID vaccine mandates and other factors impacting recruiting.

From Newsmax:

Banks was asked whether the GOP would block diversity and equity initiatives, such as critical race theory.

“Those are issues that we’ve been very passionate about in the minority, and I guarantee we’ll be just as passionate about them when we get the majority,” Banks told Military.com.

House Armed Services Committee ranking member Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., in line to be chairman of the committee if Republicans regain the majority, told the website: “All this wokeness in the military, we are going to be aggressively trying to root that stuff out.”

Republican efforts to roll back a vaccine mandate or other administration initiatives probably would be futile because President Joe Biden likely wouldn’t sign GOP-sponsored bills.

Also, Democrats could maintain control of the Senate — something that could prevent such bills from even reaching Biden’s desk.

However, Republicans controlling the House could result in messaging bills, as well as hearings and investigations concerning vaccine mandate, diversity initiatives, and anti-extremism efforts, Military.com reported.

Newsmax has details.

Students sign petition complaining about difficult professor…

Maitland Jones Jr., who has four decades of teaching at Princeton, was fired from his position at New York University. Students signed a petition complaining that his classes were difficult. They claimed that the grades that they received from the professor did not match the efforts that they put into the class. The petition pressed on about the high percentage of withdrawals and low grades.

From Fox News:

Jones, 84, told the New York Times that he started seeing a loss of focus among students about a decade ago, but the problem was exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

“They weren’t coming to class, that’s for sure, because I can count the house,” Jones told the newspaper. “They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.”

A spokesperson for New York University disagreed with the way Jones’ dismissal has been framed, saying that in addition to the petition, Jones’ class also had a “very high rate of student withdrawals” and “evaluations scores that were by far the worst” across the school’s undergraduate science courses.

“In short, he was hired to teach, and wasn’t successful,” an NYU spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “NYU has lots of hard courses and lots of tough graders among the faculty — they don’t end up with outcomes that raise questions about the quality and effectiveness of the teaching, as this class did.”

Before lecturing at NYU, Jones pioneered a new way of teaching that emphasized problem-based learning over a “lecture-memorize-regurgitate facts” style, Princeton University’s Dean of Faculty wrote.

Could it be that the negative evaluations were driven by retaliation rather than by merit? Fox News has the article here.

A South Korean ballistic missile crashed during a joint exercise…

Missiles were fired as a part of a joint South Korean and US military exercise. One of these missiles, launched by the South Koreans, crashed on the ground and caused an impromptu light show. People who heard the crash and subsequently saw the burning took to the Internet, prompting officials to shed light on what happened. Netizens feared that the North Koreans had launched an attack.

From the Associated Press:

A Joint Chiefs of Staff official, who spoke on condition of anonymity during a background briefing, said the missile’s warhead didn’t explode during the crash and that the fire was caused by burning rocket propellant. The official said the missile fell soon after liftoff and that no civilian facilities were affected.

Kwon Seong-dong, a governing party lawmaker representing Gangneung, wrote on Facebook that a “weapons system operated by our blood-like taxpayer money ended up threatening our own people” and called for the military to thoroughly investigate the missile failure. He also criticized the military for not issuing a notice about the failure while maintaining a media embargo on the joint drills.

“It was an irresponsible response,” Kwon wrote. “They don’t even have an official press release yet.”

South Korea’s military acknowledged the malfunction hours after internet users raised alarm about the blast and posted social media videos showing an orange ball of flames emerging from an area they described as near the air force base. It said it was investigating what caused the “abnormal flight” of the missile.

Officials at Gangneung’s fire department and city hall said emergency workers were dispatched to the air force base and a nearby army base in response to calls about a possible explosion but were sent back by military officials.

The U.S. and South Korean militaries are conducting the joint exercises to show their ability to deter a North Korean attack on the South. During Tuesday’s drills, they conducted bombing runs by F-15 strike jets using precision munitions and launched two missiles each that are part of the Army Tactical Missile System.

Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was scheduled to return to waters east of South Korea on Wednesday to demonstrate the allies’ “firm will” to counter North’s continued provocations and threats. The carrier was part of drills last week with South Korea and Japan.

The Associated Press title for this story provided hints about their bias.

 

Category: "Teh Stoopid", "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", International Affairs, Military issues