RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/5-of-the-most-important-stories-in-the-history-of-america/

I’ve written literally thousands of commentaries, and I’ve never had this problem before. I have five of the biggest stories in the history of America to tell you about — all at the same time. They’re all so important, I can’t decide which one to write about. So, I’m going to write about all five.

I’ll let you choose which one I should write about in expanded detail next week. Send me an email. Vote for the story you’d like me to write about in detail: WayneRoot@gmail.com

In the meantime, here is a short and sweet “Cliff Notes” version of all five.

STORY No. 1: Of Course China Likely Intentionally Released COVID-19. But Even More Shocking is Who Helped Them

Everyone in power is finally in agreement that COVID-19 most likely came from a Chinese biowarfare lab. I told you that three years ago. But even that is not the real shocker. Tucker Carlson had a doctor who escaped China on his show this week. She says China intentionally released COVID-19 to destroy America and the Western economies. This was a planned attack upon America.

I’ve been predicting that story for three years too. China had just lost the trade war. Their entire economy was about to collapse. At that exact moment, COVID-19 was unleashed on America and the Western world. That was never a coincidence. But I’ve got an even bigger shocker…

The biggest story is that China did not do this alone.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/03/13/the-morning-briefing-some-walls-might-be-closing-in-on-the-biden-crime-family-n1677755

We here on the right have long known that the Biden family has business ties all over the place that are rather unsavory. Honestly, most people on the left do too, they just don’t care. That’s why various forms of leftmedia were scrambling before the 2020 election to pretend Hunter Biden’s laptop was a nothingburger story. Their overreaction was the only reaction we needed to know that we were correct.

There is no bombshell news, but it looks like some progress has been made in exposing the depths of the Biden business depravity, especially when it comes to the commies in the country with which we will soon be fighting a war.

Kevin was the bearer of good news over the weekend:

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that people are finally starting to cooperate in the investigation into Hunter Biden’s “business dealings” with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Of course, that’s been the problem thus far. Papa B has been using the full power the federal government that’s under his control to block any inquiries into what his ne’er-do-well son has been doing as a side hustle to support his art career.

My friend Stephen Green is fond of saying that “Joe Biden is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party.” Obviously, the ChiComs got a package deal and Hunter was thrown in.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3895242-post-decency-politics-house-democrats-use-a-hearing-to-attack-free-speech-and-a-free-press/

“At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Those words were first asked by lawyer Joseph Welch in his confrontation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) during the Senate’s infamous Army-McCarthy hearings. This week, nearly 70 years later, Welch’s words seem more relevant than ever after House Democrats savaged two journalists who attempted to explain a government effort to censor citizens. 

It was only the latest of a series of hearings in which FBI agents and other whistleblowers, experts and journalists have been personally attacked for raising free-speech concerns. This week’s hearing showed definitively that we live in a post-decency era.

The latest attacks came as journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified about breaking the “Twitter Files” story, detailing how the FBI and other agencies secretly sought to censor or ban citizens from social media. In her opening statement, Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), the ranking member of the House Judiciary subcommittee, attacked them as “so-called journalists” and said they were “a direct threat” to the safety of others by reporting the censorship story.

Taibbi pushed back, saying that “I’m not a ‘so-called journalist’” and giving a brief description of his award-winning career at Rolling Stone magazine and other publications. Yet other committee members also attacked the honesty of the two journalists. And after failed efforts to claim they were Elon Musk’s corrupt “scribes,” or limited by him in their investigations, the committee members attacked their ethics.

The witnesses were attacked on everything but their choice of socks.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/protest-porn

A few days after the November 2016 elections, I sat down to write out my feelings, which consisted mainly of fear and loathing. The president-elect, I intoned, was a dangerous lunatic, one likely to recall the ghosts of Fuehrers past. His election meant the death of America, of democracy itself, and maybe even scores of Americans. “Assume the worst is imminent,” I advised. Celebrities I’d admired my entire life praised the piece on Twitter. NPR came calling. Seven years later, my cri de coeur remains one of Tablet’s most widely read articles. As a piece of writing, it was moving, forceful, and … entirely wrong.

You can find much to dislike about Trump—his policies, his personality, and an assortment of other failings—and, over the next four years, I did just that, often and with gusto. But my piece remains an embarrassment, more hysterical ululation than an attempt at the kind of useful or correct analysis that readers deserve. Reading it today, I realize that, for a brief moment there, I lost my goddamned mind.

So, what happened? It’s important for all of us, but particularly for those of us who make a living asking others for their trust, to give an honest accounting of our mistakes, so here’s a very brief one of mine. Trump’s ascendance was a time of uncertainty, and I felt scared. The language of moral absolutes offered some solace; so did the company of so many others who treated me to encomia like “morally courageous” or “a fierce and clear-eyed defender of democracy,” and with whom I relished text threads in which we shared articles and tweets and posts that enabled us to soak together in a pool of ever-expanding righteous fury.

The resistance offered purpose and community, and something else too: It offered the pleasure of letting yourself get caught up in something. The Women’s March, BLM, Russiagate—they all seemed to offer, in the moment, the irresistible possibility of coming-together-ness to promote or defend justice. And in every single one of these cases, the core leadership or premise which we held as solid was later proven wrong, or worse.

And now, the same fever is taking over Israel.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-bank-doesnt-deserve-a-taxpayer-bailout-federal-reserve-fdic-risk-startups-treasury-interest-rates-ad440fe9?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Mr. Ramaswamy, a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is a co-founder of Strive Asset Management.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced Sunday evening that Silicon Valley Bank’s uninsured depositors would gain access to their deposits on Monday. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. insures only deposits up to $250,000. The bailout creates incentives for risky behavior, teaching large depositors that they can throw money at risky banks without diversifying or conducting diligence. SVB long lobbied for looser risk limits by arguing that its failure wouldn’t create systemic risk and thus didn’t merit special intervention by the U.S. government. Yet on Sunday, Treasury deemed SVB “systemically important.”

To the extent that failing to make SVB’s uninsured depositors whole would have heightened the risk of a run on other banks, the Federal Reserve should have played its role as lender of last resort. Another option would have been to increase the FDIC coverage limit to a level that would avert a run, shoring up public confidence in other U.S. banks without showing favoritism toward SVB.

SVB’s situation is different from that of most U.S. banks. Only 11% of its deposits were insured. While the operating accounts of small businesses often exceed the FDIC limit, large banks usually sweep the excess into cash-management programs that buy Treasury bills and other securities. As the nation’s 16th-largest bank, SVB simply chose not to do so. For some reason Roku, the publicly traded maker of streaming devices, had a $487 million balance with the bank.

https://dianebederman.com/what-is-the-legal-origin-of-self-defence/

Is self-defence a God Given right? Are our Courts breaking God’s law?

We begin with one of the most important statements from the Bible:

All life is sacred.

There are millions who say that individuals have the right to self-defence. This right has been questioned in America and Canada.

In America we watched the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse who was ultimately found not guilty for the act of self defense.

“Self-defence law in Wisconsin, which is generally consistent across the states, allows for an individual to use deadly force when they reasonably believe deadly force or serious force that could cause great bodily harm or death is about to be used against them.”

In Canada, a man was charged with murder for killing an intruder in his house who was also carrying a gun.

“An Ontario case raises the thorny question of how far Canadians can go to protect themselves and their property from attack — and avoid criminal charges.”

Lisa Dufraimont, a criminal law professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall law school said:

“What we’re trying to do here is to balance the security of the person who is being subjected to some sort of attack or assault on the one hand, with the security of the person who might get shot…. We don’t want to undervalue either of those lives.”

Because we start with the teaching: all life is sacred.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Two conflicting yearnings embody all men and women – the desire to be free and the desire to be a part of a tribe: family, club, group, community, nation, etc. At their extremes, the two result in either anarchy or dependency. Anarchy can lead to the emergence of a strong, unscrupulous leader, a tyrant. Statism can lead to a loss of independence, the abandonment of personal responsibility and the rise of authoritarianism.

It is to mitigate the worst outcomes of either extreme – to live together as individuals, civilly and productively – that governments were created. Throughout history, most governments minimized individual freedom, while emphasizing security. The United States was (and is) different. In 1776, the Founders met in Philadelphia to address independence from Great Britain. The final paragraph of the Declaration of Independence speaks of the “Representatives of the united States of America,” with the “u” in united not capitalized. To reduce the threat of autocracy, the Constitution established a federal government of three separate but equal branches. It created a representative government – “of the people, by the people, for the people” – that provided freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, the press, and petitions, all to ensure individuals remained free. It was (and is) a government based on the rule of law, on equal rights, and one that recognizes the private ownership of property. (And the “u” in United States was capitalized in 1781).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19470/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt

At this stage, it is not possible to measure or list what the countless uses of tools such as ChatGPT will be in the future — but it is clearly a revolution.

After all, does ChatGPT have its own consciousness? Let’s ask her!

Question: Dear ChatGPT, do you consider yourself as a personality in its own right, distinct from your creators?

ChatGPT: As an Al language model, I don’t have the capacity to consider myself as personality in its own right, distinct from my creators. I don’t have feelings, emotions, beliefs, or desires like a human being. I’m just a machine learning model designed to process and generate natural language responses based on the patterns it has learned from large amounts of data. While I’m capable of generating responses that may appear to be conversational, I’m ultimately just a tool created by humans to assist with language-based tasks. I don’t have a sense of self or a distinct personality separate from my programming.

Faced with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT and its little brothers (and sisters), two ways of approaching them stand out. The first could be described as not-all-that-good at knowledge and the second as not-all-that-bad at knowledge.

The first approach is the result of catching AI at fault, for example by showing that it is in fact wrong, or flawed in its “reasoning” process. This is a very common line of attack on the networks, which are now littered with screenshots showing GPT chat errors. This is not useless: it reminds us that these AIs are not infallible. But who doubted that, when it is explicitly stated that ChatGPT, for example, has no access to the web and that its credentials end in 2021? It is amusing, in this respect, to see an intellectual as sharp as Nassim Nicholas Taleb being outraged that ChatGPT is unable to deliver URLs valid in 2023 on the bikeable roads in Atlanta.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/03/09/recent-first-ladies-and-their-academic-degrees-n1676985

“I might say in my defense that I would not have addressed so contentious a subject had the press, the talking heads, and the bien pensants — those I call intelleftuals — not extravagantly touted such mediocre efforts as pageants of superior accomplishment and intelligence. Their bloviations merely serve a political agenda rather than a scrupulous assessment of quality — which is, I submit, the curse of our age.”

I am frankly amazed at the intellectual ineptitude revealed by our recent Democrat First Ladies’ degree-awarded ventures in academic exposition and by the media adulation they have received for their efforts. Having recently published an analysis of Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation, pointing out its utter inadequacy, I find it comes as no surprise that former First Lady Michelle Obama considers it a work of substantial merit and heaps accolades on Biden as “a brilliant woman who has distinguished herself in her profession.”

Michelle Obama is herself the recipient of an academic honor in the shape of a Bachelor’s Degree from Princeton for her senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” in which she attempts to estimate “an introspective measure of change, as perceived by the individual” in “the effects of a Princeton education on Blacks and Black students’ attitudes…pre-, intra-, and post-Princeton.” A putative achievement of this dubious nature does not confirm Obama (then Michelle LaVaughn Robinson) as qualified to comment on the brilliance of others.

Given the acclaim Michelle Obama has enjoyed for her influential public voice, it behooves us to consider where and how her career acquired its impetus — her vaunted thesis. True, the thesis was written many years ago, but let us not forget that it served as Obama’s ticket into the “new elite,” despite its being a gallimaufry of platitudes and pseudo-academic fustian.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/09/a-handy-january-6-fact-sheet/

In another example of Washington’s inexorable slide into banana republic territory, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) took to the floor of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday to call for the removal of an American journalist. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anchor treat the American people, and American democracy, with such disdain,” Schumer said during his seven-minute authoritarian tirade. “And he’s going to come back tonight with another segment. Fox News should tell him not to. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch—tell Mr. Carlson not to run a second segment of lies. You know it’s a lie.”

Schumer later reiterated his demand to a group of journalists who, rather than denounce one of the most powerful government officials in the country attempting to silence an influential member of the media, dutifully reported Schumer’s bleating without question.

Republican senators including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) joined the fray, echoing Schumer’s faux concerns over “national security.”

Clearly, it’s panic time. The White House, Congress, and the Democratic Party propaganda arm that is the corporate media realize their carefully engineered narrative about January 6 is imploding in real time. Which is why they’re accusing Carlson of “whitewashing” and “rewriting” the events of January 6. Anything less than total fealty to regime-approved talking points about what happened before and after that day now is considered a “threat to democracy.”

But facts are facts. And no amount of pearl-clutching by the hags on “The View” or threats made by U.S. senators can alter the reality of January 6. Between video recordings, witness testimony, court filings, and news reporting, the undeniable truth about January 6 cannot be willfully wished away even by the most skilled spinmeisters.