RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/yom-kippur-god-judges-nations-too-don-feder/

Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, begins at sunset on Wednesday and ends at sunset on Thursday. In between is a time when Heaven and Earth meet – when the fate of every man and woman hangs in the balance. The judgement written on Rosh Hashanah is sealed on Yom Kippur. It’s the court of last resort. From its sentence there is no appeal.

The holiest day of the year begins with the Kol Nidre service and ends with Ne’ila, the closing of the gates of Heaven. Yom Kippur is solemn, yet hopeful.

Three things, we are told, will avert the harsh decree – teshuvah, tefillah, tzedakah – repentance, prayer and acts of righteousness.

Nations too are judged.

At the beginning of the 20th century, three nations were poised to dominate the century – Germany, Russia and Japan. Between them, Germany and Japan were responsible for 75 million deaths in World War II. As they exited the world stage, Russia entered. It gave us the the Cold War and tens of millions of more deaths.

Each was judged.

Germany ended the war in rubble. It was divided for 45 years. Though it achieved relative prosperity, today it has a well-below replacement fertility and a growing Muslim population. It could end this century as part of the Ummah.

Russia came out of communism poor in everything but natural resources (and nuclear weapons), but without the people to exploit them. It has a population of 146 million — to hold the largest land mass of any country — expected to decline to 121 million by 2050. In the meantime, Mother Russia is being pressed by China to the east and Islam to the south.

The sun is setting on Japan, which languishes in the depths of Demographic Winter. Its population declined by almost a million in the last 5 years. One of its few growth industries is removing the remains of those who die alone at home, because they have no family. The phenomenon is so common that they have a name for it “lonely death.”

And what of America?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/impeach-secretary-state-antony-blinken-daniel-greenfield/

I personally don’t favor impeachment. It is a waste of time and money and always devolves into a circus. However, Americans of both parties should demand voluntary resignations of all those who have imperiled national security. rsk

The Clinton administration was very surprised by the Taliban in 1996. A memo from the State Department’s Afghanistan office warning that the Taliban were going to take Kabul never reached Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Nine days later, the Taliban were in charge.

History repeated itself when 23 staffers at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul signed a memo warning that the Taliban were about to take over Kabul and that evacuations needed to begin. The date was July 13, 2021. There was still a month left until the Taliban would enter Kabul. And that should have been plenty of time to conduct an evacuation and get American civilians safely out.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, unlike Christopher, did see the memo. But it contradicted the narrative that he and the rest of the Biden administration had been peddling to the public.

“No one, starting with the Taliban, has an interest in going back to a civil war, because I think what everyone recognizes is there’s no military resolution to the conflict,” Blinken absurdly told ABC News in April after his boss had announced the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan.

The Taliban not only believed that there was a military resolution, they were winning it.

Weeks after the memo, Blinken was still insisting, all evidence to the contrary, that, “No one has an interest in a military takeover of the country by the Taliban, the restoration of an Islamic emirate.”

After China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, praised the Taliban as a “a pivotal military and political force”, and mocked the United States, Blinken responded by celebrating Communist China’s involvement. “If China and other countries are working on that interest, then it’s a positive thing,” he suggested.

Blinken’s insistence that China didn’t want a Taliban takeover was as treasonously wrongheaded as his parallel narrative that the Taliban weren’t really trying to win a war.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/covid-hysteria-could-destroy-a-generation_3997539.html

Initial stay-at-home orders and widespread closures were implemented in a state of panic and uncertainty as COVID-19 quickly swept through the world. Without data, these measures were initially popularly accepted. Two weeks to stop the spread of a novel disease struck most citizens as more than reasonable.

But, as the months have dragged on, the ongoing implementation of lockdowns as a long-term, blunt-force tool has been an utter failure. With more data and information coming to light, many policymakers have failed to reinvestigate and reform their precautionary measures, thus increasingly acting both in conflict with science and in violation of liberties.

This is especially true of school closures. As we accrued more and more studies and demographical data about how COVID-19 impacts children, the findings have largely been a blessing. The risk of COVID-19 to small children is astronomically low, and the risk of transmission between students and their teachers is hugely unlikely.

After months of our kids suffering ill-effects of lockdowns, this should have been a cause for celebration and impetus to cautiously but excitedly reopen our schools. And, yet, closures have continued to drag on in many areas of the country—much to the detriment of students and their families alike.

Lockdowns have robbed children of a formative year of life, imprisoning them in their homes despite their negligible health risk. Basic socialization, formative lessons, and developmental milestones have all been stolen from them.

Many working parents have been forced to double as teachers. Private schools remained open while public schools across the street were shuttered. Socioeconomic divides have been exacerbated. But, for all the logistical consequences our children have faced from lockdown policies, our more consequential failure of them may very well be an ideological one.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/the_white_house_censors_joe_biden.html

Last week, word emerged from the White House that Biden’s own staff can’t stand to listen to him.  It’s not that they don’t agree with his policies (heck — they probably crafted them).  Instead, it’s that he’s such a verbal loose cannon that they shudder when they hear him speak off the cuff.  Yesterday, the White House staffers paying attention to his answers about western wildfires were so worried about where his mouth was taking him that they pulled the plug on him in mid-sentence.

We, along with every political outlet in America, reported last week on a Politico story explaining that Biden’s staff constantly worry about Mr. Big Mouth in the White House.  As we summed it up then, “we still don’t know who is dictating his policies, but it appears that everyone in Biden’s orbit is begging him to keep his mouth shut and be the good little puppet they need.”

The same Politico story noted that “[Biden’s] verbal miscues have been causing headaches for him and his team.  Biden has delivered several self-inflicted wounds during freewheeling Q&A sessions that required immediate clean-up.”  That problem may explain why, on Monday, a panicked White House cut off Biden’s feed in mid-sentence:

The White House abruptly cut the feed of President Biden’s briefing on wildfires with federal and state officials.

During Monday’s visit to Boise, Idaho, Biden received a briefing about the ongoing wildfires that have plagued several states out west.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/general-milley-should-be-fired-for-holding-secret-personal-talks-with-china/

If we did not already have enough reasons to believe that General Mark Milley has no business serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, today’s blockbuster story in the Washington Post, excerpted from the Bob Woodward/Robert Costa book Peril, should confirm this. Any Congress worthy of the name in a democracy would open an investigation of General Milley and push for his removal; any president who took his oath seriously would fire him immediately.

Here is what Woodward and Costa report, apparently from General Milley’s own mouth as one of their principal sources for the book:

Twice in the final months of the Trump administration, the country’s top military officer was so fearful that the president’s actions might spark a war with China that he moved urgently to avert armed conflict. In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike. . . . One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election . . . and the other on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol siege . . .

Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.” . . .  In the second call, placed to address Chinese fears about the events of Jan. 6, Li wasn’t as easily assuaged, even after Milley promised him, “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.” Li remained rattled, and Milley, who did not relay the conversation to Trump, . . . understood why. The chairman . . . believed the president had suffered a mental decline after the election . . . a view he communicated to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi . . . on Jan. 8. He agreed with her evaluation that Trump was unstable. . . . Believing that China could lash out if it felt at risk from an unpredictable and vengeful American president, Milley took action.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/15/who-pays-for-dems-plan-to-spend-trillions-to-stimulate-economy-hint-not-the-rich/

“Promises of utopia through ever-expanding government paid for by the rich, a perennial socialist ideal, never work out. In the end, average Americans, not the rich, always pick up the tab.”

The increasingly far-left Democrats and President Joe Biden seem dead set on pushing through another massive “stimulus” package of $3.5 trillion. Given the chance, they’ll make it even bigger. To pass it, they’re promising that someone called the “rich” will pay for it all. Don’t believe it.

It’s only “fair,” they say, to make “wealthy Americans” and corporations pay for all the things you want and need, especially upgraded infrastructure, improved health care, and better schools.

The best example of this mindset was this week’s viral photo of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a designer dress emblazoned with “Tax The Rich” while attending a $30,000-a-plate fundraiser (above). The irony, apparently, is lost on Democrats.

The Dems’ plan, on paper at least, claims to collect about $2.9 trillion from the wealthy and corporations, mainly by raising tax rates on high-income families from 37% to 39.6%, corporate tax rates from 21% to 26.5%, and by jacking up the capital-gains tax rate from 20% to 25%.

Another $900 billion or so will come from the vague category of “taxpayer compliance,” which seems to indicate a more aggressive IRS, and from letting Medicare directly “negotiate” – that is, extort – steep cuts in drug prices by pharmaceutical companies.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-masking-of-the-servant-class

From the start of the pandemic, political elites have been repeatedly caught exempting themselves from the restrictive rules they impose on the lives of those over whom they rule. Governors, mayors, ministers and Speakers of the House have been filmed violating their own COVID protocols in order to dine with their closest lobbyist-friends, enjoy a coddled hair styling in chic salons, or unwind after signing new lockdown and quarantine orders by sneaking away for a weekend getaway with the family. The trend became so widespread that ABC News gathered all the examples under the headline “Elected officials slammed for hypocrisy for not following own COVID-19 advice,” while Business Insider in May updated the reporting with this: “14 prominent Democrats stand accused of hypocrisy for ignoring COVID-19 restrictions they’re urging their constituents to obey.”

Most of those transgressions were too flagrant to ignore and thus produced some degree of scandal and resentment for the political officials granting themselves such license. Dominant liberal culture is, if nothing else, fiercely rule-abiding: they get very upset when they see anyone defying decrees from authorities, even if the rule-breaker is the official who promulgated the directives for everyone else. Photos released last November of California Governor Gavin Newsom giggling maskless as he sat with other maskless state health officials celebrating the birthday of a powerful lobbyist — just one month after he told the public to “to keep your mask on in between bites” and while severe state-imposed restrictions were in place regarding leaving one’s home — caused a drop in popularity and helped fueled a recall initiative against him. Newsom and these other officials broke their own rules, and even among liberals who venerate their leaders as celebrities, rule-breaking is frowned upon.

But as is so often the case, the most disturbing aspects of elite behavior are found not in what they have prohibited but rather in what they have decided is permissible. When it comes to mask mandates, it is now commonplace to see two distinct classes of people: those who remain maskless as they are served, and those they employ as their servants who must have their faces covered at all times. Prior to the COVID pandemic, it was difficult to imagine how the enormous chasm between the lives of cultural and political elites and everyone else could be made any larger, yet the pandemic generated a new form of crude cultural segregation: a series of protocols which ensure that maskless elites need not ever cast eyes upon the faces of their servant class.

Last month, a delightful event was hosted by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for wealthy Democratic donors in Napa — the same wine region of choice for Gov. Newsom’s notorious dinner party — at which the cheapest tickets were $100 each and a “chair” designation was available for $29,000. Video of the outdoor festivities showed an overwhelmingly white crowd of rich Democratic donors sitting maskless virtually on top of one another — not an iota of social distancing to be found — as Pelosi imparted her deep wisdom about public policy.