RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19212/apple-china

“Think Different”, Apple’s slogan, actually means collaborating with a Communist dictatorship where thinking differently is a crime. And it also means suppressing free speech in America.

That’s why Apple is threatening free speech on Twitter just as it’s threatening it in Shanghai.

What China had to offer was mass production under a ruthlessly totalitarian system that would, when Steve Jobs decided to revamp the iPhone a month before launch, wake up 8,000 workers at midnight for a 12 hour shift.

After Jobs’ death… CEO Tim Cook [signed] a secret $275 billion pact to help Communist China develop “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and vowed to use even more Chinese technology in Apple’s products.

When the Hong Kong protests began, the streets filled with young men and women, most of whom… believed the hype that it was a noble company that didn’t just make gadgets, but aspired to harness human creativity for a better world. Instead, Apple quickly moved to suppress the protests by removing an app used by the protesters to avoid police.

A year before Jobs died, 14 men and women jumped from buildings at Apple’s Foxconn Chinese contractors…. workers were forced to sign contracts promising not to kill themselves. Afterward nets were hung up to catch the falling bodies.

[W]ith protests breaking out against zero-Covid tyranny breaking out in China, people were once again surprised when Apple rushed to aid Communist China’s crackdown by preventing protesters from using AirDrop to communicate and coordinate their activities.

They believed, like so many Americans and Europeans, that Apple stood for something. And Apple does. It stands for tyranny.

That’s why Apple is threatening Twitter’s place in its App Store because under Elon Musk the platform has begun to offer the very thing Apple is helping China stamp out: freedom.

Apple isn’t a great American company, it’s a great Chinese company.

The real message of “Think Different” wasn’t that everyone ought to think differently, but that geniuses are a superior group who ought to have the unlimited power to rigorously implement their vision.

The company doesn’t empower its customers, it tricks them into giving up control so that they can be better controlled.

That is why it’s coming for Twitter and threatening it over its newfound free speech.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/victor-davis-hanson/2022/12/08/does-trump-really-want-to-be-president-again-n1651792

Team Trump has sometimes compared former President Donald Trump’s current quest for a non-sequential second term to two-term President Grover Cleveland’s similar three election bids.

Cleveland remains our only elected president (1884) to have lost a reelection bid (1888) — in a disputed vote — only to be reelected four years later in 1892.

Yet Trump seems determined instead to follow a different, and bullheaded, Teddy Roosevelt model.

Roosevelt left the presidency in 1908, sat out four years, and then lost a reelection bid in 1912, split and alienated the Republican Party, and ensured the election of the progressive Woodrow Wilson.

President Joe Biden’s first “corrective” two years have been an utter disaster.

Biden birthed hyperinflation. He destroyed a secure border and Trump’s energy self-sufficiency. Crime is now out of control. The United States was humiliated abroad in Afghanistan. Rising interest rates will soon spark a recession.

After promising to unite the country, Biden smeared half the voting population as “un-American” and “semi-fascist.”

In addition, almost all of Trump’s prior complaints, predictions, and assertions that the media dismissed as conspiratorial, or crackpot have proven eerily prescient.

Hunter Biden’s laptop was all too authentic.

The FBI was compromised and acted as an agent of the Democratic Party. Anthony Fauci proved a partisan.

Russian collusion was an utter hoax. It was engineered by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and the FBI.

The Wuhan lab did likely birth the engineered COVID virus. That possibility was covered up by the media and public health establishments.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/a_call_to_the_good_people_of_maga_to_denounce_the_lefts_antitrump_slanders.html

For the past ten days or so, Donald J. Trump, has been falsely vilified as a White supremacist who is comfortable in the company of anti-Semites, and attacked for his “calls” to abolish or “terminate” the Constitution (despite having never said such a thing).

History, I believe, will note that the more preposterous the false accusation against Donald J. Trump, the quicker the stirred-up crowd will toss reason aside and follow the persons spewing anti-Trump slander.

So what else is new? These slurs and more have been hurled at Mr. Trump since he announced his first candidacy for president, some seven-and-a-half years ago.

Sadly, as Machiavelli pointed out in Chapter 6 of Il Principe, the logical supporters of a political reformer will be slow to defend the leader against attack from the establishment. This observation on human nature remains trenchant, after nearly 500 years since Machiavelli put his words to paper, as indicated by the reluctance of the logical allies of Donald J. Trump to stand with him against demagogic assault from the Deep State intent on crushing the MAGA (common good) movement — this apathetic attitude resulted in the Mueller investigation, and two phony impeachments, one straddling his term in office and his leave-taking.

And the reluctance to defend our best president since Reagan continues. Imagine how good the years from 2021 to 2025 would have been had MAGA populists stood shoulder to shoulder with our MAGA president who revived the populist spirit expressed by Madison in the first half of Federalist Paper No. 57.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ignoring-lessons-learned-at-pearl-harbor/

Dec. 7, 2022 — Eighty-one years ago today, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida was preparing to lead an airborne strike force of 49 “Kate” bombers, 40 torpedo bombers, 51 “Val” dive-bombers and 43 “Zeke” fighters on the first wave of an assault on Pearl Harbor. At 0854 that terrible Sunday morning, a second wave of 167 aircraft added to the devastation. When the surprise attack was over, 3,581 Americans were dead or wounded; the largest naval anchorage in the Pacific was littered with sunken and burning U.S. warships; the best dry-dock and ship repair facilities west of California were in shambles, and less than 25% of U.S. military aircraft based in Hawaii were still operational.

The Japanese surprise attack was but the first blow in a cascade of disasters. The following day, as Imperial troops invaded the Philippines, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed Dec. 7, 1941, to be “a date which will live in infamy,” and Congress declared war on Japan. Three days later, on Dec. 11, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany declared war on the U.S. in support of their Axis partner in Tokyo. By then, nearly half a million young Americans had already visited military recruiting stations volunteering to fight, and the phrase “Remember Pearl Harbor” was a watchword. When the conflagration finally ended in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945, more than 16 million men and women had served in the U.S. armed forces.

Each year we praise the courage and resolve of the Americans who were in Hawaii that terrible day. Yet, few now acknowledge massive intelligence failures and lack of “situational awareness” in Washington that allowed such a horrific surprise attack to occur. Nor do they mention that America’s poor preparations for war resulted in the loss of every engagement with the Japanese from Dec. 7, 1941, until the battle of Midway on June 4, 1942.