RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21465/manhattan-project-for-fusion-energy

Tariffs, Ukraine, DOGE, the budget, NATO, the Middle East; the headlines are dominated by daily issues that demand our attention, but they also serve to distract us from the strategic issues that will determine who will be the dominant superpower during the remaining years of 21st Century.

So, it should come as no surprise that China is currently investing billions of dollars to create unlimited power by seeking to conquer the challenging technology of fusion power.

Media reports suggest that Beijing is investing anywhere between $1 billion and $1.5 billion annually into fusion research. One Washington energy insider told the press, “…What’s more important than the number, it’s actually how fast they’re doing this.”

Equally telling is one report, which observed that China’s patents on crucial aspects of fusion technology are more than any other country, including our own.

China’s pursuit of unlimited energy is not just about powering cities and electric vehicles. The most major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) will come about when one country’s computers have access to unlimited power. The country that can lead in AI development will become the next global superpower.

Americans understand the threat. It is important to revisit a national survey recently conducted by President Donald J. Trump’s pollster, McLaughlin & Associates. A significant majority of citizens recognize the danger and want Washington to safeguard our future by investing in fusion energy.

Trump has much on his plate, but the poll revealed that three-in-five voters are concerned that China’s fusion energy leadership could place America’s leadership in jeopardy. The issue should receive the funding priority from Washington that it demands.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/civil-terrorism-anti-israel-radicals?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-

Masked criminals attacked several Citibank locations in New York City one night last September. They brandished no guns and demanded no cash. Instead, they squeezed epoxy and cemented stickers on debit-card readers, damaged door locks, and vandalized windows with profanities and threats of future violence. Rather than keep their identities hidden, the marauders filmed their work and posted it to their enterprise’s Instagram page. “Unity of Fields,” the recently rebranded group formerly known as Palestine Action US—the new name comes from a Palestinian Islamic Jihad call for violence across the world—included a lengthy caption in the post, exhorting followers: “These actions are not hard to do. Please escalate for Palestine and humanity. We will not rest until Palestine is liberated from the river to the sea.”

Over the last few years, but especially since Hamas massacred Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, this type of organized criminal mayhem has increasingly become part of American life. The criminal bands that have arisen act for ideological reasons. They operate where they believe that they have the most latitude: on college campuses and in Democratic-controlled jurisdictions. And their beliefs are overwhelmingly left-wing: radically environmentalist (“Just Stop Oil”), anarcho-socialist (Antifa), and, most often, anti-Israel.

A framework beyond protest politics and civil disobedience is needed to understand this phenomenon. Today’s left-wing agitators deploy random acts of lawlessness designed to inconvenience and disrupt as many civilians as possible, hoping to pressure them to get the government to change course. This tactic is reasonably described as a form of terrorism, though the activists aren’t murderous like al-Qaida or Hamas—they don’t use guns, bombs, or threats of unpredictable bloodshed. Instead, they engage in civil terrorism.

Though some of these groups, like Antifa, are loosely connected networks of the like-minded, the ascendant anti-Israel, and more broadly anti-Western, outfits come with brand names. Within Our Lifetime, Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestine Action, Samidoun, Students for Justice in Palestine, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Palestinian Youth Movement, IfNotNow, and more—the names signal that the chaos they sow is intentional. Like Unity of Fields, they take credit for their actions and try to stoke more unrest through social media. They put their names on the banners, signs, and other paraphernalia that their members and sympathizers display at “direct actions.”

https://bda1776.substack.com/p/insanity-immorality-conspiratorial?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4

Now, on to the topic of the day. Follow the money! Or at least look for it.

Over a decade ago, I began to notice that more and more of my friends were spouting dangerous, hateful, nonsensical garbage. Then I noticed that the problem was hardly restricted to my friends. There seemed to be a groundswell of support for charged beliefs running counter to all available evidence.

You all know some of the top line absurdities, but just to clarify with a few examples: Men cannot become women, the U.S. is not overrun with violent racist cops, and a climate catastrophe is not imminent.

Then came Covid and all bets were off. For three years we were fed a steady stream of nonsense—pronouncements that not only proved to be wrong after the fact, but that made no sense when they were first uttered—yet plenty of “serious” people accepted them as Gospel. Asking basic questions was treated as blasphemy.

Totalitarianism emanated far beyond the weaponization of public health. Violent race rioters burning down business districts were mostly peaceful. An election employing the least credible procedures in American history was the most secure our country had ever seen. Unarmed trespassers wandering through a donnybrook in the Capitol Building sought to bring down the American government. Eliminating cheap and efficient energy was the key to our economic success. An obvious dementia patient was sharp as a tack and in full command of the country.

It was hard to escape the feeling that we were living in an insane asylum—and that the worst of the inmates were firmly in charge. The only plausible alternative was even scarier: We were living through a moral inversion, in which decency was vilified and villainy extolled.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-constitutional-rights-and-freedoms-trump-manners-and-civility/

Long before Donald Trump berated Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelenskyy, the president has been criticized for his lack of decorum, manners, politesse, and political “norms.” From snubbing Hillary Clinton during his first inaugural address, to discarding “diplomatic niceties” when talking with foreign leaders,” as the AP put it in 2019, Trump’s boorishness and vulgarity has been the Dems’ go-to smear.

But complaints about manners and proper behavior generally reflect the mores and sensibilities of privileged elites defined by birth, wealth, and credentials––all policed by professional and political guilds. In a democratic republic in which all citizens are politically free and equal, such rules often function as gate-keepers to keep hoi polloi in their place, at the expense of crafting policies that serve national interests and security. Worse, they are tools for silencing rival factions’ free speech rights by question-begging labels like “misinformation” or “hate-speech.”

Ever since the birth of democracy in ancient Athens and its enfranchisement of the poor and uneducated, the issue of free public speech had been contested. Indeed, empowering the citizen masses to vote in elections, openly deliberate and speak out about policy, and hold office, was the heart of democracy, the public confirmation of the citizens’ freedom and equality––as the extant ancient antidemocratic complaints from antiquity illustrate.

Moreover, to protect the right of free speech the Athenians had very few restrictions on insults and mockery.  Ancient comedy, performed at state-sponsored religious festivals, and managed by citizens, was also a political institution unbridled by rules of decorum. Classicist K.J. Dover writes of comedy in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. that “every Athenian politician we know of from historical sources was accused by comic playwrights of being ugly, diseased, prostituted perverts, the sons of whores by foreigners who bribed their way into citizenship.”

Nor was it just poetic license: political debate in the Athenian Assembly, the legislative body of the state, was just as vulgar. Sordid sexual practices, disreputable parentage, and taking foreign bribes were standard charges made in speeches, including in trials. As the philosopher Democritus said, “Freedom of speech is the sign of freedom.”