RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/05/stealth-fascism-ii-dissalution-of-civil.html

I wrote the following just to illustrate a term I invented to capture the character of what is happening today, in 2020, because of the coronovirus and about the changing character of America:

Stealth Fascism

Taking my cue from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead , what would Howard Roark do or not do? Imagine he is faced with the likes of the Coronovirus in the 1920s and 1930s. He would laugh.

He would touch his face, while scratching his head over a designing problem.

He would not regularly disinfect his architectural drawings to show to prospective clients or employers.

He would take occasional trips to shop.

He would not constantly wash his hands, using a disinfectant; or a hand sanitizer.

He would go out, not stay at home, and wonder what the hell ws “discretionary” or “essential” travel.

He would go to work.

He would not use his elbow to sneeze into.
He would not wear a mask.He was already in conflict with the collectivism of his time.

He would eat and drink in a speakeasy, when he had the money.

He would not maintain a social distance from Dominique Francon.

 He would perform other actions or non-actions we should take for granted, as sane behavior, as normal in his world.

I’m really surprised and disappointed by how readily Americans are to submit to stealth fascism. It’s not a world I want to live in. It’s becoming less and less tolerable for me.

I have a good mind to order a Lone Ranger mask from Amazon.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15997/michael-flynn-innocent

From a legal and policy point of view, encouraging the FBI to misuse its legitimate authority to investigate past crimes, solely to create future crimes is both immoral and illegal.

Let us hear now from the former civil libertarians for whom any violation of law is permissible, as long as it is directed at a Trump associate.

Anyone who knows how the system works in practice would understand why an innocent man—or a defendant in a close case—might be coerced into pleading guilty…. in this case, it is alleged that the government threatened, if Flynn did not plead guilty, to indict his son.

There must be a single standard of justice and civil liberties — including the presumption of innocence — that transcends partisan politics. This message has been forgotten by both parties.

More than a year ago I wrote that it was clear General Michael Flynn should never have pleaded guilty because he did not commit a crime. Even if he lied to the FBI, his lie was not “material.” For a lie to be a crime under federal law, it must be material to the investigation – meaning that the lies pertain to the issues being legitimately investigated. The role of the FBI is to investigate past crimes, not to create new ones. Because the FBI investigators already knew the answer to the question they asked him—whether he had spoken to the Russian Ambassador—their purpose was not to elicit new information relevant to their investigation, but rather to spring a perjury trap on him. When they asked Flynn the question, they had a recording of his conversation with the Russian, of which he was presumably unaware. So his answer was not material to the investigation because they already had the information about which they were inquiring.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/07/is-the-cdc-meddling-with-the-2020-election/

The coronavirus crisis is reaping big political benefits for Democrats. President Trump’s signature achievement—a booming economy with record low unemployment, rising middle-class wages, and a sky-high stock market—lies in tatters. At least 33 million Americans abruptly and without warning are out of work. Second-quarter gross domestic product estimates are horrifying, a double-digit dive that the country has never experienced even in the direst economic times.

Americans are scared for their health and fearful of the future. Neighbors are turning on each other; the inner tyrant of every state governor, mayor, and police officer has been unleashed. And President Trump has been denied access to his only stimulant—energetic political rallies where he connects directly with supporters across the country.

Instead, the president has been stuck in Washington, D.C., listening to the advice of “experts” who used fraudulent models to convince him in late March to “shut down” the country.

Trump’s rival, Joe Biden, has been safely shuttered away in his home studio where he struggles to read teleprompter scripts or offer articulate responses to softball questions from late-night hosts. The Democratic National Convention has been canceled so the American electorate won’t be able to assess Biden’s frailty and incoherence on a national stage a few months before Election Day.

At the same time, near-daily disclosures confirm that corrupt federal prosecutors and cops loyal to Barack Obama targeted Trump associates to sabotage his 2016 candidacy and then derail his presidency under the ruse of Russian election collusion.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/covid19_governments_bad_choices_and_the_impact_on_doctors.html

Private physicians’ offices across the country have had to furlough core staff, often with decades of service to their businesses, because of the coronavirus-induced, government-mandated shutdown.  Doctors who own these small business ventures, many of whom were on the front lines in the battle against AIDS back when it was 100% lethal, have been forced to sit on their hands at home for this pandemic.  Surgery centers, frequently the lifeline between economic solvency and bankruptcy for both private surgeons and hospitals, are lying dormant, their fixed costs still accruing.

Promised federal bailout money is not going to come close to repairing the long-term damage done by this medieval “fix” recommended by “the scientific experts.”  Those advising our leaders have provided a great excuse for the forces seeking to justify government-run health care and expand the power of an unchecked, totalitarian federal bureaucracy.  Medical practices, like many small businesses across the country, are being killed off for the cause of “saving just one more life.”  What they have done is unconscionable, poorly justified, and quite frankly, un-American.

History will not be kind to the CDC when the dust settles from this crisis.  The Communicable Disease Center exists to help us with situations just like COVID-19, pandemics being its purview.  It could be argued that having the nation prepared with accurate means of testing for novel viruses and being equipped with an adequate number of masks and ventilators would be an obvious first purpose for the agency.  Yet in the past couple of years, the agency has spent well over a billion and a half dollars for things like chronic disease prevention, health promotion, environmental health, and injury prevention.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-p-goldman/2020/05/07/dont-forget-why-the-deep-state-targeted-mike-flynn-n389003

Now that the Justice Department has abandoned its prosecution of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, it’s important to remember what made the case of Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn so central to the Intelligence Community’s mutiny against Trump. As a reminder, here is what I wrote in Asia Times last November:

As chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Flynn had warned that American support for Sunni jihadists in Syria had the unintended effect of supporting the new caliphate movement, that is, ISIS. Among all the heads and former heads of the 17 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, Flynn was the only one who had objected to the disastrous covert intervention in Syria and foreseen its baleful consequences. Obama fired him, but Donald Trump hired him as a top campaign aide and then appointed him national security adviser.

The Syrian debacle brought Russia into Syria in 2015; the American-backed jihad had turned into a Petri dish for Russian Muslims from the Caucasus, as well as Chinese Uighurs and a motley assortment of foreign militants. Russia had interests of opportunity, for example, a warm-water refueling station for its Mediterranean fleet, but the risk of blowback from the Syrian civil war was the most urgent motive for President Vladimir Putin’s intervention.

That is the background to the mutiny in the US Intelligence Community against the elected commander-in-chief.