RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/abandon-the-swamp/

Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound? I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce? Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen. 

We already knew that James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Michael Sussmann, Kevin Clinesmith, and all the other characters in and around the Russia Collusion Delusion had fabricated the story of Trump’s supposed connection with Russia out of whole cloth. 

We already knew that they had gone out of their way to protect Hillary Clinton. 

We knew that there was no predicate for obtaining a FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of many thousands of such warrants), thus opening a back door into the Trump campaign. 

We knew that the surveillance apparatus of the regime had been weaponized to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and then, when he surprised everyone by winning anyway, to taint his administration and render him radioactive.  

What should we make of Durham’s non-revelatory revelations? I think that, wittingly or not, they were just a big exercise in track-covering, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well, nothing beyond the sound and fury, anyway.

Still, Durham’s bulletin is useful as a marker of the futility in which we labor. André Gide touched on this point when he reminded us that “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” Over the past five or six years, virtually everything that Durham said in his report had already been said. But because no one was listening, it is necessary to start again and say it once more. 

In this spirit, I am going to say again some things I have said elsewhere, beginning with what has become my ritual invocation of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s observation that a week is a long time in politics. That’s time enough, as T. S. Eliot said in another context, “for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/the-absurdities-of-our-age/

A sign of a civilization in headlong decline is its embrace of absurdities. Unfortunately for the United States, we are witnessing an epidemic of nihilist nonsense. Here are a few examples:  

Reparations  

How could a dysfunctional state like California even contemplate $800 billion in reparations? 

The state currently faces a $31 billion annual deficit—and it’s climbing. Its $100 billion high-speed rail project is inert, a veritable Stonehenge of concrete monoliths with a foot of track.  

California’s income tax rates are already the highest in the nation. Its sales taxes, electricity rates, and gas taxes and prices are among the steepest in the country. And for what? 

Crime, homelessness, and medieval decay characterize the once great downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is now not safe to walk alone in any major California city after dark.  

Shoplifting and smash-and-grab theft are no longer treated as crimes. The result is the mass flight of brand stores from our downtowns and inner cities, with all the accustomed cries of “racism,” even as racist public prosecutors pick and choose whether to indict the arrested on the basis of race.  

California infrastructure, once the best in the county, is now among the worst. Decaying and crowded freeways, inadequate water storage, and pot-holed streets are the new norm.  

The state’s public schools are dysfunctional. Once premier public universities are spiraling headlong into decline—junking scholastic tests for admissions, using illegal racial quotas to warp admissions, and institutionalizing racialized dorms and graduation ceremonies.  

Even if California enjoyed a huge surplus, even if 300,000 residents were not fleeing the state each year, even if California had a history of being a Confederate slave state, even if whites were the majority of the population, even if the black population was greater than its present 5-6 percent, it would be insane for the state to even contemplate racial reparations.  

Twenty-seven percent of the state’s residents were born outside of the United States, and have no American ancestors. The state is the most racially diverse in America, and one in which every group could, in theory, lodge complaints against the dead of the past. Mexican-Americans, Armenians, Asians, and the descendants of the impoverished “Okie” diaspora could all cite legacies of bias—but from whom exactly? The long dead?  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/bill_barr_is_his_own_worst_enemy.html

Uniparty propagandist and Deep State shill Bill Barr is waddling from one television studio to the next to tell audiences that the feds will almost certainly indict Donald Trump by late summer for mishandling classified documents.  The Cheka FBI has been outed as a criminal enterprise engaged in subverting elections and spying on the American people, but sure, let’s get all worked up about whether the president of the United States — in whom the Constitution’s Article II executive powers are vested — has somehow inexplicably infringed his own declassification authority.  Although Augustus Gloop Barr can barely conceal his joy, this tiring new chapter in the never-ending “get Trump” saga comes off as yet another manifestation of Bizarro World, in which a group of criminals running the American government get to pretend that nobody is “above the law.”

Walrus Barr enjoys playing the “scolding father” who “knows best” in a worn-out daddy routine alongside scripted corporate news hosts performing for the cameras.  Although he remains a consummate Deep State stooge who will do anything to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the Oval Office, he also spends a great deal of TV time burnishing his “I’m the only adult in the room” bona fides.  He has called out New York State’s vindictive lawsuits against President Trump as a “political hit job” and “gross overreach.”  He has excoriated Democrat district attorney of New York Alvin Bragg’s Trump indictment as an “abomination” that “makes us look like a banana republic.”  He acknowledges that the Durham probe proves that “Russiagate” has not only been a “grave injustice” to Trump, but has also “vindicated” the president’s accurate denunciation of the Clinton-Obama Russia Hoax conspiracy as a “witch hunt” from the very beginning.  Barr readily admits, in other words, that state and federal prosecutors have shamelessly pursued Trump for recklessly and maliciously partisan reasons that have threatened both the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power in the United States.  

After broadly recognizing the seriousness of the Deep State’s crimes and the depth of its depravity, though, loyal palace guard Barr then sweeps these horrific State crimes to the side, shakes his head in disgust, and instead blames his former boss for being “his own worst enemy.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dark-matter/

In 2017, when then-president Donald Trump responded to the ongoing fever of far-left iconoclasm by predicting that radicals would soon be toppling statues of the Founding Fathers, mainstream commentators responded with mockery. Then, sure enough, the statues of our greatest presidents started coming down.

And it’s still happening – not just to political leaders, and not just to statues. It’s happening in every field, including astronomy. Which brings us to the case of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021. Articles published in Scientific American last July, when it began sending back images, make it sound like the marvel of marvels:

* “The most powerful observatory ever made promises to produce some of the most incredible discoveries of our lifetime and beyond.”

* “This is the picture we’ve all been waiting for[:] the deepest image of the cosmos ever captured. Humanity has never seen so far back and so clearly into the depths of the universe’s history.”

* “The next great era of astronomy truly began this morning….the James Webb Space Telescope has at last delivered a complete set of first full-color images.”

Who was James Webb? As administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968, he oversaw the development of the Apollo program – which in 1969, of course, in one of the great triumphs of human history, landed a man on the moon. In his time (he died in 1992), Webb was a revered figure at NASA, and the naming of the telescope after him seemed, at first, entirely reasonable and certainly uncontroversial.

But in March 2021, just over a year before the above-cited articles appeared, Scientific American ran a very different piece about Webb and the telescope named after him. Carrying the bylines of no fewer than four scientists – Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “an assistant professor of physics and a core faculty member in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire”; Sarah Tuttle, a University of Washington astronomer; Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium; and Brian Nord, “a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago” – it was headlined “The James Webb Space Telescope Needs to Be Renamed.”