RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/17/biden-and-the-destruction-of-wisdom/

There used to be an agreed-on body of wisdom, which both Left and Right, Republicans and Democrats, generally accepted. Heated arguments and invective centered on implementations and methods of solving problems, which at least both sides agreed were problems. Both ideologies accepted a common core of wisdom, despite their radical differences in interpreting it.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and especially Biden’s strange cabinet of loud Jacobin amateurs, reject the very hallowed knowledge upon which civilization is based. In that sense the public has begun to recognize them as nihilist and anarchist. Nearly two out of three Americans in some polls hold unfavorable views of the Biden Administration. They fear that it is decoupled from both the past and reality, and quite capable of destroying their lives as they have known them.

Nuke Nuttiness

Since late August 1949, a consensus emerged that nuclear powers, for good or evil, were treated differently in matters of global tensions than non-nuclear powers, given the chance of a nuclear conflagration. Arcane rules, but rules, nonetheless, grew up in the Cold War between the Soviet Union, China, the United States, Britain, France and a few other nuclear states about the trip wires surrounding conventional conflicts. 

The agreed upon wisdom from the Hungarian Revolution and Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Middle East wars was to ensure such confrontations did not escalate to nuclear exchanges.

No longer. In the last five months, there has been more idle talk and threats about nuclear warfare than in the 73 years since the Soviet Union got the bomb. In a rational world, there would be two Western agendas amid the Ukraine war: first, how to aid the Ukrainians to resist Russian aggression without destroying their entire country; second, how to do so without either provoking or allowing Russia to use a nuclear weapon, or to encourage other powers like China to consider such alternatives.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/progressive-policies-make-new-york-city-criminal-joseph-klein/

New York City has become a haven for mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless people who live on the streets and in the subways, free to menace the general public. Dangerous criminals are released repeatedly after their arrest with no bail requirement, free to resume preying on innocent victims. There are less police officers available to protect public safety, thanks to reckless cuts in the New York Police Department budget and the departure of police officers in droves who were tired of working in a hostile environment. And New Yorkers have to walk on eggshells when it comes to defending themselves against a criminal attack. Manhattan’s radical progressive pro-criminal district attorney believes that self-defense can be charged as murder.

Just recently, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged a bodega worker with murder for defending himself with a knife against an unprovoked attack by an ex-con that resulted in the assailant’s death. Meanwhile, the assailant’s girlfriend has escaped all charges whatsoever for stabbing the bodega worker because, prosecutors said, she was only trying to help her boyfriend fight back against the bodega worker.

Bragg may be backtracking on the murder charge after speaking on July 12th with city bodega owners who are pressuring him to reverse course. However, the fact that Bragg would even consider filing a murder charge in the first place speaks volumes about his perverse priorities. The radical progressive district attorney has sent New Yorkers the message that they should think twice before fighting back in self-defense. Bragg has compounded this message by supporting efforts in New York to continue limiting law-abiding residents from carrying guns outside their homes for self-defense because “more guns in our communities make us less safe.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/18/progressives-carpet-bombing-of-america/

Russia has changed its war strategy in Ukraine from direct confrontation to simply reducing cities to rubble, often killing civilians. Avoiding indiscriminate death, destruction, and misery no longer matters to the Russians so long as it facilitates their conquest. Sadly, progressives here have adopted a similar approach to imposing their policies and ideologies.

A civil society must be willing to confront disagreement head-on, issue by issue, even though it can be challenging. The goal should be to reconcile different perspectives constructively without unnecessary collateral damage. But progressives seem willing to die on every hill, with their desired ends seeming to justify any means and any pain along the way.

Overreach is everywhere. Progressive climate policy may be the most egregious. Even without knowing the extent of climate change or humans’ impact, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) has become a widely accepted goal. But progressives are like children who want what they want now. They demand immediate, indiscriminate controls on fossil fuels, or even their abolition. They oversell renewables and conceal their true costs and environmental impact. Promoting electric vehicles, they harbor delusions of unlimited natural resources and magically appearing infrastructure. They pay no heed to the limitations of the power grid. They ignore other countries’ non-cooperation, and on and on. The American public pays a steep price for all this, now and for the foreseeable future.

Congress provides munitions in the form of trillion-dollar programs too large to allow for proper monitoring. Pet causes are slipped in – as if a small percentage of trillions of dollars is inconsequential – by hiding them in the fog of war. The resulting inflation lays waste to many businesses and lives.