RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/10/11/you-wont-believe-how-many-times-biden-lied-about-his-corrupt-family-business-n1734250

When I first saw the number showing just how many times Presidentish Joe Biden had effectively lied when he said, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” I was flabbergasted. And until now I have never, ever used the word flabbergasted. Well, maybe (unlike Biden) not never… but certainly not very often.

If only the same could be said about our alleged president and his estranged relationship with the truth.

But then I looked at that number again, thought a bit more about how Biden has spent a lifetime in public “service” telling lies without reservation or hesitation — oftentimes for seemingly no reason — and do you know what I realized?

“Yeah, 29,000 times is about right for this one story.”

I told you it was a big number.

America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the National Archives to dig into Biden’s emails when he was Vice President, which are a matter of public record. Despite Biden’s insistence that he has “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” what the archives showed was something a teensy bit greater than zero.

I’m no calculus surgeon, but I can add up simple rows of figures. And what those figures add up to is 29,067 instances in which Biden effectively lied about “never” having discussed business with Hunter.

But that’s just the icing on the Biden Crime Syndicate’s cake of ick.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/anti-racists-should-stop-talking-like-racists/

A paradox of the Civil Rights movement is that the driving force behind that great victory––the codification in law, acknowledged by a majority of the nation, that color could not and should not compromise black American’s political equality and unalienable rights––was quickly degraded by the continuation of the pseudo-concept of  “race,” an artifact of racist scientism.

Ever since, our racialist discourse has continued to legitimize and prioritize the idea of  “color” as the most essential dimension of our identities. As a result of this racial essentialism, racism has found a new life in the “woke” ideology of “systemic racism” and “white fragility,” which are predicated on the assumption that all so-called “white” people are indelibly stained with racist animus, even if they don’t know it. This claim is the real “Jim Crow 2.0” Joe Biden talked about in 2022, not the common-sense election reforms he was attacking.

So it is today that the central preposterous and destructive fallacy of racism––that every member of the “inferior” race is in all respects indelibly inferior to every member of the “superior” race––lives on.

This maximalist absolutism was necessary in the old South to protect the justification of slavery as a natural institution reflecting the alleged disparities between black and white. But bans on allowing slaves to learn to read, for example, were a tacit admission that totalizing inferiority was incoherent, since if all people of African descent were inferior, how could they learn to read or be further educated?  And without that “natural” inferiority, on what grounds could slavery be justified?

Next, despite several decades of activist historians claiming to find racism based on appearance as far back as ancient Greece, “race” and “racism” as we know them were a product of the Enlightenment and the scientism it fostered. This is not to say that bigotry and prejudice didn’t exist, and often lead to violence and injustice. But such bigotry was in the main not based on how people looked or the color of their skin.

Indeed, the “father of history,” Herodotus, in his 5th century B.C. work Histories, wrote of Ethiopia that “its men are the tallest, the most handsome, and the longest lived,” and said of swarthy Egypt that “it has more wonders in it than any other country in the world and provides more works that defy description than any other place.”

Rather than physical appearance, Greek bigotry reflected a dislike for how other ethnicities lived, their mores, customs, language, laws and, for the Greeks, whether they were free citizens or unfree subjects. The Athenians’ contempt for the Persians, for example, was based on their subjecting themselves to a Great King, in whose presence they had to prostrate themselves and kiss the ground. Even if a Persian was rich, to the Greeks he was still a slave who groveled before a tyrannical master.

https://thespectator.com/topic/kids-running-classroom-democrats-hamas/

he Democratic Party is in a state of rhetorical paralysis. This weekend, as Palestinian terrorists streamed across the Israeli border, the White House maintained hours of thunderous silence. On Saturday, the Biden administration released a few limp paragraphs to the effect that “terrorism is never justified” and “Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.” This, after an uninterrupted outpouring of financial and oratorical support for Ukraine, is weak tea. But as the head of a party that is being overrun in not-so-slow motion by a vigorous young coterie of anti-Israel extremists, what more could Joe Biden say? 

What he should have said — what any decent person, irrespective of his more nuanced views on Middle Eastern politics, should be able at a bare minimum to muster — is that Hamas has exhibited a kind of savagery and cowardice more befitting of beasts than men. Charging into civilian territory, executing women and children at point-blank range, brandishing mutilated bodies like ghoulish trophies to the hooting and bawling of gore-hungry crowds: these twisted acts of barbarism should be unstintingly condemned — and quickly. That ought to be the easy part. 

Amazingly, Democrats now find themselves constrained to tread lightly around the feelings of cold-blooded murderers so as to avoid offending their deranged apologists — many of whom represent the future of the party. Biden — who is already contending with the awkward fact of having recently bestowed a cool $6 billion on the eliminationist Iranian regime, thus making it indirectly into Hamas’s acknowledgments section — can’t even run effective damage control. His loudest supporters are also the ones whose views are most likely to alienate the country at large. His own people can barely get on message. On Saturday, the State Department scrambled to erase not one, but two statements calling for “all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks.” With bright-eyed young staffers popping off tweets like that, who needs enemies? Disingenuous conciliatory pablum — usually Biden’s stock-in-trade — will now be harder and harder to come by as the genocide stans run roughshod over their senescent babysitter. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/12/wheres-kamala-when-we-need-her-most/

Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris showcased her keen grasp of international affairs by explaining the war thusly:

“Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong.”

Despite being true, it was widely mocked for being so incredibly insipid. Kamala wasn’t talking to kindergartners, who probably have a better grasp of world affairs than she, but to listeners of a radio program.

Now, after Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians, including beheading children, Kamala has been silent. The only time we’ve seen her was as she stood stone-faced behind President Joe Biden while he attempted to express outrage that an ally had been brutally attacked.

Kamala has been missing in action for some time. On Sunday, the New York Times magazine even ran a big feature – which obviously had been in the works before the Hamas attack – titled “In Search of Kamala Harris.” The article laments that “After nearly three years, Vice President Kamala Harris is still struggling to make the case for herself – and feels she shouldn’t have to.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/09/secret-agent-fauci/

Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), once paid a covert visit to the Central Intelligence Agency. Rep. Brad Westrup, chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, wants to know if Fauci succeeded in gaining CIA support for his contention that the pandemic arose naturally in the wild, what he calls “proximal origin.” Sen. Rand Paul, a medical doctor who has called for a criminal investigation of Fauci, outlines the possibilities.

Dr. Fauci may have “convinced the CIA to dishonestly obscure the lab origin of COVID.” It is also possible that “the CIA convinced Fauci to obscure the lab origin of COVID.” Or, as Paul sees it, “An outside entity or person with unlimited monetary resources convinced Fauci to influence the CIA to obscure the lab origin of COVID.” By now that should be obvious to all but the willfully blind. Even the FBI now inclines to the laboratory origin, and the evidence is strong.

Dr. Fauci funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. The WIV, in turn, received shipments of deadly pathogens courtesy of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese national who headed the special pathogens unit at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory. In 2017 and 2018, Qiu made at least five trips to the Wuhan lab.

The lab origin was obvious to medical scientists such as Dr. Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research. Fauci pressured him into changing his view to the proximal origin theory, which is speculation, not science. Former CDC director Robert Redfield found evidence of a laboratory origin, he got death threats. No word of any investigation by the FBI, and no surprise that the CIA would collaborate with Fauci.

At the request of Antony Blinken and the Biden campaign, the “intelligence community,” persuaded some 50 officials, including former CIA boss John Brennan, to say that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” According to Rep. Westrup, the agency offered six CIA analysts significant financial incentives to conclude that the result of its investigation was inconclusive.

Those funds could have come from Dr. Fauci, who commanded a budget in the range of $6 billion. As NIAID boss since 1984, Fauci controlled both public health policy and spending on medical research, a huge concentration of power. Consider the experience of Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, an NIH official fired by Fauci for exposing his dangerous drug experiments.

“Dealing with Tony Fauci is like dealing with organized crime,” Fishbein told Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in The Real Anthony Fauci. “He’s like the Godfather. He has connections everywhere. He’s always got people that he’s giving money to in powerful positions to make sure he gets his way, that he gets what he wants.” Despite the efforts of Fauci, the lab origin failed to go away.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/to-win-a-war-fight-one/

As highly civilized people, we’re lost touch with some basic concepts. Like war.

We complain that we never win wars anymore, but that’s because we don’t fight them. Instead, we have limited interventions against insurgents. We try to stabilize failed states. Sometimes we go in, take out a few terrorists, and then go back home. Veterans, whose wounds are very real, sit around wondering what it was all for. So do the families of the men who died fighting in a war that was never a war.

To win a war, you have to fight one.

If your enemy is fighting a war and you’re fighting something less than a war, the enemy will win.

Police actions, nation-building exercises, and the like have vague and poorly defined objectives, while wars have very clear ones.

Wars are either won or lost. That’s why modern governments rarely like fighting them. Or doing anything that has clear and measurable results. Once you declare a war, you know you have to win.

We fight things that are not wars to ‘stabilize’ regions. Wars are not fought for stability, but destruction. To win a war, destroy the enemy. That’s what the United States did in WWII, raining mass death and destruction on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in ways that still make modern liberals cringe.

https://www.racket.news/p/have-they-gone-mad

Hillary Clinton on CNN said of Trump supporters, “You know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members.” This among other things came in the context of a report in Newsweek to the effect that the federal government, and the FBI in particular, has “quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.”

That seems… like a lot of people? In addition to the obvious observation that people like Hillary seem increasingly unmoored from reality, as well as wilfully deaf to the political consequences of their words — Maybe we need to formally deprogram you makes the “Basket of Deplorables” episode seem like a Valentine’s Day card — someone should point out that a month ago, on September 8th, Joe Biden renewed the original State of Emergency issued three days after 9/11 by George W. Bush. We spent the last 22 years giving presidents the ability to surveil, isolate, and detain even American citizens. Fortunately we’ll never regret those decisions!

What impolitic comment is next? “We have enough railway capacity for the job”? “Welcome, future deprogrammed!” banners above the entrances to decommissioned military bases? These people are truly Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and this would be funny, if Hillary Clinton’s mouth were not such an accurate weathervane for establishment thinking.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/10/07/grocery-prices-rising-social-media-complaints/71087569007/

Shilo Lewis was shocked by how much her last grocery store haul cost. 

A cart full of ingredients for sandwiches and tacos – enough for four lunches and a couple of dinners for her and her husband – plus an 18-pack of beer cost her just under $100. The 49-year-old snapped a photo of the haul and posted it on Facebook Wednesday in disbelief.

“If it keeps going up, I don’t know how so many people are going to be able to continue to eat,” she told USA TODAY, adding that she and her husband had to stop at a food bank to stock up on more supplies after the trip to Safeway. The food is meant to last them until Oct. 15, when her next paycheck comes in.

‘We’ve been struggling’

With grocery prices up nearly 17% over the past two years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people are turning to social media to share how much money it takes to feed a family.

One user on X, formerly Twitter, posted a photo of a grocery store haul and said it cost more than $270.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-war-gaza-congress-military-iran-hezbollah-russia-china-a1d6b914?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

At least 11 Americans were among the hundreds killed in the weekend attack in Israel, which has begun striking back at Hamas. The invasion, planned with an assist from Iran, ought to wake up both parties in Washington. The world is awash in threats that will inevitably wash up on our shore if America doesn’t get its act together.

The Israelis have launched air strikes as a prelude to a larger effort in Gaza, and more volatile days are ahead—especially if Hezbollah, another Iranian client, opens a second front on Israel’s northern border.

The larger context is that the U.S. and its allies now face two regional wars provoked by rogue states that are increasingly aligned. Israel and Ukraine are on the front lines, but the risk of an expanded conflict is real. Iran is feeding weapons into Vladimir Putin’s invasion in Ukraine. Mr. Putin is a junior partner of the Chinese Communist Party, which could try to exploit the moment in the Pacific.

The strategic and political point is that the return of war against Israel isn’t an isolated event. It’s the latest installment in the unraveling of global order as American political will and military primacy are called into question.

The President now has an obligation to increase the defense budget and stop treating the U.S. military as a political wedge to feed the American welfare state. For three years Mr. Biden has proposed cuts in defense spending after inflation, even as the world has become more dangerous.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/punishing_hate_but_not_criminals.html

America appears to be becoming a society with fewer and fewer laws, or at least not enforcing those that remain on the books.  We have decriminalized “recreational” drugs and reduced felonies into minor misdemeanors while ignoring open looting and rioting save in certain politically charged circumstances.  Cities have downsized their police departments while no longer prosecuting quality-of-life offenses such as public urination.  Filth and open drug markets are now tolerated as just part of urban life.  

Yes, the criminal code has obviously been eviscerated, but the impetus for greater criminalization gains momentum elsewhere.  This new focus on crime centers on “hate” as the paramount evil facing society.  Now “bad thinking” apart from actual behavior becomes the target of law enforcement.  Criticize Islam’s treatment of women, and you are called Islamophobic; defending it makes you a sexist.  For some, mis-gendering a trans person is hate speech.  Countless colleges now enact speech codes to shield students from psychologically harm.  In fact, such hate — not behavior — has been characterized (p. 95)  as a poison that psychologically debilitates its victims, causing high blood pressure and drug addiction.  We now enforce laws against what Orwell called “thoughtcrime.”  

To use an extreme but hardly inconceivable possibility, a local Progressive district attorney would likely dismiss charges against those robbing a 7-11 convenience store or at least reduce the offense to a minor infraction without jail time.  But if the clerk shadows a young black who enters the store (“racial profiling”) and waves around a baseball bat, he might be accused of race-based hatred.  Thus, at least for the Progressive D.A., the clerk, not the would-be miscreants, must be punished.  And this would occur even if the clerk did not physically injure the would-be thief or bar him from entering the store.  In fact, woe to the clerk if he shoots that would-be black shoplifter in self-defense.  The victim (the shopkeeper) now becomes the criminal while the shoplifter is transformed into the victim thanks to hate crime laws.