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Ruth King

Victory within Reach By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/victory_within_reach.html

Victory is such a glorious word.  Anybody who has ever felt victorious knows exactly what I mean.  Those of us who have been lucky enough to grasp it also know that it does not last.  It arrives, fills the soul with a warm sensation of contentment and gratitude, and vanishes almost as quickly as it appeared.  Once the effervescence of victory blows away, those who felt its touch speak of it with reverence.  The word is pronounced more slowly and with more care as the passage of time pushes it deeper into our memories.

I hope President Trump is re-elected in the next couple weeks and that those reading now will feel what I describe above.  Some might say, “It’s just politics,” or “It doesn’t really matter,” or “We never win.”  But it isn’t just politics, it matters a great deal, and winning is only a small component of the 2024 election.  You can walk into a casino, pull the lever on a slot machine, and become a big winner.  But you will not feel victorious.

Why is that?  Because victory is about so much more than winning.  Victory is success in a struggle against overwhelming odds.  It is the completion of a challenge with almost unbearable difficulties.  To be victorious is to push through pain and anguish.  It requires transforming into something greater than you were when you started the journey.  It comes with physical and emotional costs.  That’s why victory tastes so sweet.  It is an exotic fruit that grows on a tiny island in the middle of a vast ocean.  Once you find it, nothing ever tastes the same.

Have we suffered?  Absolutely.  We’ve endured as politicians sent the best blue-collar jobs overseas and manufacturing towns collapsed.  We’ve watched the Federal Reserve print dollar bills on demand, lawmakers jack up the national debt to once unimaginable sums, and investment banks gamble with our retirement savings.  We’ve fought wars for “American freedom” only to discover that the people pushing those wars could not care less about our constitutional rights or individual liberties.  We’ve seen the American dream fade as the cost of living precipitously rises and opportunities for economic advancement disappear.  We’ve witnessed the fracturing of the Union as the federal government intentionally disregards immigration law and floods the country with tens of millions of foreign nationals with little interest in assimilation.  We’ve experienced cartel violence while officials cook the books and lie about crime going down.  Hell, yes, we’ve suffered…but we’ve also persevered.

California’s Unelected Tyrants A bureaucratic culture of intimidation, extortion, and political retaliation, mixed with gross incompetence, is life in California. We may hope it doesn’t become life in America.By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/23/californias-unelected-tyrants/

Democrats claim that the MAGA movement constitutes a “threat to democracy.” Once you cut through their incessant rhetoric on race and gender, the threat the Democrats most fear is that an elected chief executive may actually try to control the executive branch. And when candidate Trump aligns himself with capable businessmen, including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, government bureaucrats aren’t wrong to be afraid for their jobs along with the repressive policies they’ve imposed.

Voters who still haven’t made up their minds which threat to take seriously—“protecting democracy” vs. “draining the swamp”—should ponder life in California, where Democrats, run by bureaucrats and billionaires, wield absolute power. Decriminalized crime. Record homelessness. Punitive, impossible cost of living. The highest taxes. Failing schools. Fleeing businesses. And a state bureaucracy that is openly hostile towards unsubsidized home builders, oil and gas producers, farmers, loggers, ranchers, manufacturers, and any other productive, job-creating citizens.

If you want to pick one bureaucracy in California that epitomizes the ignorance, fanaticism, arrogance, and corruption that plagues that state, look no further than the California Coastal Commission. Ran by an unelected 12-member board, this state agency has the power to stop virtually any activity they wish if it is within five miles of the Pacific Coast or in the ocean within three miles of land. For nearly a half century, along an 840-mile coastline stretching from Oregon to Mexico, the Coastal Commission has been a capricious tyrant.

One of the most consequential examples of the Coastal Commission’s recent abuse of power was their unanimous rejection of a proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach in Southern California. This facility would have produced 55,000 acre-feet per year of fresh water from the ocean and had already painstakingly secured permits and approvals from a dizzying array of federal, state, regional, and local agencies. The company attempting to build the plant, Poseidon Water, spent over 20 years and more than $100 million fighting off environmentalist lawsuits and paying for innumerable engineering studies and permit applications. The plant would have been an exemplary model of how to safely desalinate ocean water with minimal environmental impact. But in May 2022, in a 12-0 decision, the California Coastal Commission killed the project.

Jeffrey H. Anderson Return of the Masks Ignoring the evidence of medical studies, five Bay Area counties announce mask mandates in health-care facilities.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/return-of-the-masks

Regardless of Americans’ preference for seeing each other’s faces and breathing in fresh air, many public health officials are still fond of masks mandates. Accordingly, almost five years after Covid-19 hit our shores, a handful of counties encircling the San Francisco Bay have announced new mask mandates in various health-care facilities. San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, and Napa Counties have all declared mask mandates for health-care workers in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, or both, starting the day after Halloween and extending until early spring.

San Mateo County, which borders the southern part of San Francisco, has announced that its mask mandate in skilled nursing facilities will also cover family members and friends who visit patients. The county’s health officer has asked the local sheriff and chief of police to “ensure compliance with and enforce this Order,” as a “violation of any provision of this Order constitutes an imminent threat and immediate menace to public health.” She declares that such violations are “punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both.”

One of the great lessons from the pandemic should have been that America’s founders knew what they were doing when they separated the powers of government, and when they entrusted policymaking to the legislative branch. Americans shouldn’t be put in the position of potentially being tyrannized by one kingly official wielding largely unchecked powers. Yet the source of the mandates in at least three of these counties, and likely in all five, is a lone individual: the county health officer (joined, in Alameda County, with the city of Berkeley’s acting health officer).

The health officers are dictating medical protocols to doctors. Many doctors don’t want to wear masks because they compromise interaction with patients, because they force people to breathe in unhealthy levels of their own carbon dioxide, and—most importantly—because the best scientific evidence suggests that they don’t work. But, convinced that they know better, the health officers are ordering doctors to obey their commands or else face punishment by law enforcement for being a “menace to public health.”

For the record, cloth masks won’t qualify as acceptable face coverings, at least not in San Mateo, Santa Clara (home of San Jose, Stanford, and Silicon Valley), or Napa (home of the French Laundry restaurant). The good news is that, in all three counties, masks won’t be required in the health-care facilities’ gift shops. So, even if you don’t get to smile at your loved one when you visit, you’ll still get to shop for souvenirs or knick-knacks unimpeded.

Bill Clinton Makes the Case for Donald Trump Oops. by Jenny Beth Martin

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bill-clinton-makes-the-case-for-donald-trump/

Kamala Harris isn’t happy with Bill Clinton. The former president, a Democrat All-Star for decades, made trouble for the Harris campaign Sunday when he acknowledged an obvious truth that Harris would rather not talk about – Laken Riley would very likely be alive today if not for the lax border security policies ordered and implemented by the Biden-Harris administration.

“You got a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn’t you – they made an ad about it – a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant,” said Clinton at a Harris campaign event in Fort Valley, Georgia. “Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened.”

Bill Clinton, meet Michael Kinsley, the liberal journalist who famously defined a “gaffe” as “when a politician tells the truth.”

On February 22 of this year, Riley’s body was found close to a walking trail in a wooded area near the Athens, Georgia campus of the University of Georgia. She had been a nursing student at Augusta University. Law enforcement authorities disclosed the following day that they had captured and charged an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, Jose Antonio Ibarra, with Riley’s murder.

Ibarra was only present in the United States because the Biden-Harris administration had made a deliberate decision to allow him into the country. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Ibarra had been detained by the Border Patrol on September 8, 2022, after he was caught entering the country unlawfully near El Paso, Texas.

It is unclear whether he had, after his apprehension, entered an asylum claim.

Whether he had or had not, he had entered the country unlawfully. He should have been detained and then deported. But the Biden-Harris administration – acting through Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and his subordinates, carrying out a policy the Biden-Harris administration had earlier decided – had made a choice to allow Ibarra to remain in the country. So he had been released.

Barack Obama’s Anti-Constitutional Lecture Obama chastises “the brothers”. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/barack-obamas-anti-constitutional-lecture/

The Dems are marshaling their forces in the face of Kamala Harris’s waning support from voters. Particularly troubling for them is the loss of a fifth of black men’s support, given that in a tight race it doesn’t take a lot of defections to determine the outcome. So, the Party’s éminence grise, Barack Obama, went to Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, to lecture a group of black men in Pittsburgh.

Obama expressed his displeasured with black males’ lack of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, which seemed “to be more pronounced with the brothers.” Nor did Obama like the “reasons and excuses” for their disaffection with Harris, which one imagines include issues such as inflation, crime, and the chaotic border. With condescending arrogance, Obama sniffed, “I have a problem with that.”

Worse yet, Obama exploited an insulting stereotype that black men are misogynists. Brushing away those “reasons and excuses” that trouble millions of voters of every ethnicity, Obama explained that “Because part of it [male support for Trump] makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”

The blow-back from all sides was swift. “Obama’s remark,” The Hill reports, “have drawn the ire of several prominent Black Americans. Former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner asked, ‘Why are Black men being lectured to? Why are Black men being belittled in ways that no other voting group [is]?’ Turner added ‘she has a lot of love’ for Obama, ‘but for him to single out Black men is wrong, and some of the Black men that I have talked to have their reasons why they want to vote a different way, and even if some of us may not like that, we have to respect it.’”

Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ) agreed on X: “Voting for someone solely based on the color of their skin is a shallow approach that undermines the true value of leadership and character. Judging a candidate on their principles, vision, and ability to lead, rather than rely on racial identity should be the deciding factor.”

Senior Hamas official arrives in Moscow for talks

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/senior-hamas-official-arrives-in-moscow-for-talks/

A senior member of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzouk, has arrived in Moscow on a planned visit, Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti reports, citing a diplomatic source.

Hamas politburo member Abu Marzouk intends to hold a series of meetings with Russian officials, RIA says, without providing any further details.

Russia has ties to all key players in the Middle East, including Israel, Iran, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

Moscow has repeatedly blamed the current crisis in the Middle East on the failure of US diplomacy, and called for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and the resumption of talks aimed at finding a peace settlement.

The FBI Makes an Announcement About the Pentagon Leaker Katie Pavlich

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2024/10/22/the-fbi-makes-an-announcement-about-the-pentagon-leaker-n2646567#google_vignette

The Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed Tuesday morning the law enforcement agency has launched a probe into the Pentagon and who leaked top secret Israeli strike plans against Iran over the weekend. 

“The FBI is investigating the alleged leak of classified documents and working closely with our partners in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community,” Fox News reported Tuesday morning. “As this is an ongoing investigation, we have no further comment.” 

What Investors Are Telling Us About Green Energy

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/23/what-investors-are-telling-us-about-green-energy/

A little more than a year ago, a New York Times headline proclaimed what so many have said is absolutely, undeniably so: “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.” Despite the story’s examples that were supposed to buttress the claims, reality tells a different story.

A recent analysis by Bloomberg found that “the fast money on Wall Street has taken a close look at key sectors in the green economy and decided to bet against them.”

“Despite vast green stimulus packages in the U.S., Europe, and China, more hedge funds are on average net short batteries, solar, electric vehicles, and hydrogen than are long those sectors; and more funds are net long fossil fuels than are shorting oil, gas, and coal.”

Hedge fund institutions have concluded, says Bloomberg, that “many climate investments” haven’t posted returns as quickly nor as profitably as they had expected.

Bloomberg’s sources blamed politics, both in the U.S. and abroad.

If so, we say good, because the green energy crusade has been driven solely by Democratic and progressive politics rather than rigorous research and compelling arguments. It’s about time that the skeptical side posted a few victories in trying to stop the wholly unnecessary climate agenda of the left.

Finding a Cure for Psychology Anthony Daniels

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/astringencies/finding-a-cure-for-psychology-anthony-daniels/

Claims to understanding are not understanding itself: indeed, sometimes it is far from clear what understanding would consist of. As the Haitian peasants say, behind mountains, more mountains: that is to say, one never arrives at the final cause of anything. We have to make do with whatever explanations satisfy us, and seem to work, for our current purposes.

There is often a strange disconnection, however, between claims to understanding and the practical consequences of that supposed understanding. For example, the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Washington has sometimes claimed greatly to have advanced human understanding of addiction, largely thanks to itself, at the same time as the country in which it is located has suffered from an unprecedented epidemic of deaths from overdose—of drugs of addiction. The total of these deaths far exceeds that of all American military deaths since the end of the Second World War, two major wars included. One might have thought that this would give pause to those who claim increased understanding, but this does not appear to be the case.

The vast increase in the study of crime has not resulted in the diminution of crime, on the contrary, though it has certainly increased the number of criminologists. Perhaps these two increases—in crime and in criminologists—are not causally related, but it is at least possible that they are. I think it fair to say that criminologists are more likely to concern themselves with the perpetrators than with the victims, and their investigations are invariably exculpatory in effect, undermining justification for punishment. They are also under institutional and social pressure to come up with arcane theories, because there is no point (and no career advancement) in concluding what any drunk in any pub has concluded without much reflection.

One often hears the demand that the fundamental causes of crime should be understood, failing the discovery of which nothing much can be done about it. This is mistaken on two grounds: apart from attributing everything to an unmoved mover, one can always ask what the cause of a cause is, so that the fundament is never reached; but this does not normally paralyse us completely.

Another field of study whose academics and practitioners have made claims to great strides in understanding is psychology. This study too has undergone a vast expansion, indeed out of all recognition. Psychology is now the third most popular subject in American colleges and universities, and no doubt elsewhere as well.

West’s Political Elites Mourn the Death of a Terrorist Group by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21037/political-elites-mourn-hezbollah

[T]he West’s political “elites” condemned Israel for defending itself by targeting Hezbollah’s leadership.

There was no mention of international law for Hezbollah’s unprovoked, year-long attacks: bombardments of missiles and attack drones every day at a country smaller than New Jersey.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell lamented Israel’s continued successful attempts at destroying one of Iran’s proxy armies.

When Israel took out Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, one of the world’s most dangerous arch-terrorists, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres could barely hold back his disappointment, counterfactually calling Hezbollah’s unprovoked war against Israel and the IDF’s response a “cycle of violence.”

Only Argentina’s President Javier Milei displayed a reaction fitting the removal of a terrorist mass murderer…

Israel, as has been noted, is doing the entire world an enormous service by taking out Hezbollah.

Iran, just since October 2023, through its militias in Syria and Iraq, has launched more than 160 attacks on the US forces in the Middle East.

[W]hen Israel killed Ibrahim Aqil, the mastermind of the 1983 attacks and a member of Hezbollah’s Jihad Council, its highest military body, the US could not even bring itself to thank its ally.

The world’s political elites apparently cannot forgive Israel for seeking to defend itself, and rid the world of terrorists working to destroy both America and Western civilization. Could these elites, wittingly or not, be working towards the same result?

It took the world community nearly a year to condemn the war in Lebanon, but they got the wrong mark. Instead of condemning Hezbollah, the world’s largest Iranian proxy terrorist army, with an estimated 40,000 – 50,000 fighters, for starting a year-long war on October 8, 2023 in support of the terrorist organization Hamas, the West’s political “elites” condemned Israel for defending itself by targeting Hezbollah’s leadership.

The UN Security Council called an emergency session on September 20, during which UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk told ambassadors that he was “appalled by the breadth and impact” of the attacks on Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies.