RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://americanmind.org/salvo/class-homicide/

Massive inequality and the rise of a new feudal system have nearly destroyed the chances of social mobility.

There’s much talk today, from left and right, about threats to democracy, yet little focus on the social dynamic critical to its survival. In this respect, we may see the current, and troubling, escalation of violent political rhetoric, and even political violence, not so much as the cause of polarization but the result of changing class dynamics, most notably the increasingly perilous state of the yeoman middle class.

The United States, and much of the high-income world, is going through a revision of class relations resonant with gilded age, or even feudal models. A recent British parliamentary study projects that by 2030, the top one percent will expand their share to two thirds of the world’s wealth, with the biggest gains overwhelmingly concentrated at the top one percent of the top one percent—the top 0.01 percent.Similarly, in this country, since the mid-1980s, the share of national wealth held by those below the top 10 percent has fallen by 12 percentage points, the same proportion that the top 0.1 percent gained.As one conservative economist put it succinctly in 2018, “The economic legacy of the last decade is excessive corporate consolidation, a mas­sive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent from the middle class.” 

Hierarchy triumphs over merit and even luck

In the process, the aspirational character long essential to American society is being transformed. According to one study, the chances of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the income ladder has declined by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. Data from the Census Bureau show that the share of national income going to the middle 60 percent of households has fallen to a record low.

In the economy, hierarchy is rapidly replacing opportunity. Banking and finance, treated amiably by Washington during the Financial Crisis, have become increasingly concentrated while many smaller regional institutions have either been acquired or driven out of business.  Growing corporate concentration has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy in both the U.S. and Europe. In Silicon Valley now, the renowned garage culture has morphed into a Gargantua of giant firms with market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 to 90 percent of key tech markets.  

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-feds-coordinate-with-facebook-twitter-white-house-social-media-emails-covid-instagram-11662761613?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

One nagging question in the social-media age is how online platforms like Facebook and Twitter choose to “moderate” speech—and why, and whether the government is leaning on them to step it up. Hundreds of pages of emails between federal officials and the big social sites were recently dropped in court, and they make for instructive, if not definitive, reading.

The civil case was brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, who allege that misinformation crackdowns by the tech giants are legally “government action,” since they involve “open collusion” with public officials. In a court filing last week, the AGs posted some of what they have already obtained, which they call “a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise.’”

Well, maybe. Many of the email chains read like good-faith interactions between public officials and internet companies worried about clearly false information. What raises eyebrows in some communications, though, is an oozing solicitousness toward top White House advisers. This week the judge granted additional discovery, meaning more emails soon.

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The trouble with seeing all of the correspondence, some of which dates to the Trump Administration, as inherently illegitimate is that much of it seems to involve actual misinformation. The White House flags the Instagram user anthonyfauciofficial, apparently someone posing as Dr. Anthony Fauci, and asks: “Any way we can get this pulled down? It is not actually one of ours.” The answer from Facebook (most of the names are redacted): “Yep, on it!”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-lessons-of-9-11-are-still-unlearned/

Twenty-one years have passed since the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, and our foreign policy establishment and ruling elite still have not learned the lessons of that horrendous carnage. The Romans thought even fools could learn from experience, but our credentialed mavens can’t break free of their institutional orthodoxy and narratives. As a consequence, our foreign policy and international relations continue to put our national security at risk.

This misinterpretation of modern Islam’s traditional resistance to infidel hegemony began with the Iranian Revolution, the first of subsequent jihadist attacks on the U.S. that culminated on 9/11. The West filtered that religious revolution through the old ideas of anticolonialism and national self-determination encoded in the Versailles settlement. Barack Obama, in his cringing flattery of Islam during his 2009 Cairo speech, recycled this stale received wisdom, blaming “tensions” between Islam and the West on “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

This ahistorical orthodoxy had been explicitly rejected 30 years earlier by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who proclaimed the traditional Islamic universalist goals of the Iranian Revolution: “We shall export our revolution to the world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds throughout the world, there will be jihad.” Nor was Khomeini an outlier among Muslims. Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, similarly said that his designs for transforming Egypt into an Islamic state ruled by sharia law would be a “springboard for universal expansion ‘until the entire world will chant the name of the Prophet.’”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/07/the-world-wants-no-part-of-woke-but-its-glad-we-do/

“While we war on our past, our competitors abroad prep for the future. They are more likely to erect than tear down statues. We spend what we borrow; they invest what they earn.  How odd America once taught the world what works—only now to mock its own lessons.”

The United States obsesses over whether biological men can compete in women’s sports as transgendered males. 

Crime is spiking at levels not seen in 40 years. But it is considered racist to suggest that arrests, indictments, convictions, and incarcerations deter crime. 

Major U.S. downtowns almost overnight went from mostly safe and clean to terrifying and toxic—and we brag that we are at least “tolerant” of the medieval conditions.

The Pentagon and CIA put out recruitment videos that sound like kindergarten diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. 

Yet the military is less eager to explain why the United States met utter humiliation in Afghanistan or why the army only has met about 50 percent of its scheduled recruitment targets. 

Few dare to attribute declining morale, inept strategic thinking, and anemic recruitment to the stereotyping and targeting of middle-class white males, Soviet-style workshops, and diversity, equity, and inclusion mind conditioning. 

The Biden Administration in its first 18 months warred on the U.S. oil and gas industry. Radical cutbacks in fossil fuels supposedly would “transition” the world to a greener future.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18872/inflation-reduction-act

The IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] is revolutionary in what it purports to do for the climate. The only impact it will have on inflation is to increase it.

The IRA deliberately sets about impoverishing many Americans by increasing taxes “on everyone” and increasing tax audits at the same time as prices are skyrocketing. Imposing steeper taxes at a time of steeper prices may not mean that much to the rich, but has the effect of a stealth double-tax that crushes especially middle- and working-class families, who now find themselves forced to choose between necessities such as food, gasoline or rent. Reports state that 42% of Americans are struggling financially.

The political theory governing this economic sledgehammer seems to be seems to be that a bigger, centralized government that controls people is “better” — at least for the politicians — than a government that prizes the individual, individual freedoms and the ability to spend hard-earned money the way he or she wishes, rather than how government chooses to spend it for him.

The government can then promise everyone goodies to keep them dependent, while it decides what to dole out, when and to whom: what cars you must buy, what doctors and healthcare you are allowed to have; what “social justice” and gender issues your children are to be taught in school; which companies — possibly of campaign donors — should be rewarded with subsidies and handouts, and which, such as donors to other political parties, should be targeted for audits and confiscations.

As the cost of energy — gasoline, heating air-conditioning — continues to rise, in addition to financing America’s adversaries that produce oil and gas such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela, all purchases for Americans, in an increasing downward spiral, become increasingly unaffordable. All goods that are manufactured or transported continue to cost more, forcing Americans to pay even higher prices for virtually everything. Already squeezed, many Americans will be forced to start buying less. Restaurants, even fast-food places, for instance, will become luxury items and attract fewer customers; many small businesses will be forced to close and their employees will be laid off, creating still less purchasing power.

If the Biden administration believes that the top earners in the US are not paying their fair share of taxes, then Congress should change the tax laws. Between incentivizing the golden goose and killing it are many shades of gray.

[A]s long as China “is building more than half of the world’s new coal power plants,” and all of us on the planet are breathing the same air, we are essentially depriving Americans of low-cost energy independence while enriching, again, overt adversaries such as Russia and Iran that export oil for as high a price as they can.

Whoever imagined that doubling the size of the IRS is just what the American people have been pining for — spending $80 billion of the American taxpayers’ hard-earned money to target not Russia, China or Iran — but Americans? And political opponents?

Moreover, these 87,000 new IRS agents will likely have zero interest in taking on either well-lawyered corporations or “ultra-wealthy” individuals…. The easiest target, of course, would be small business owners and middle-class individuals, for whom hiring a lawyer or accountant to refute a claim would cost more than just paying the IRS to go away.

The best news of all, however, is that they are armed! The IRS recently took down a recruiting ad – at the same time as many Americans are advocating for gun control — saying that agents must be “willing to carry a firearm” and “use deadly force, if necessary.” Now, that is what you might call persuasive. It also uncomfortably resembles the start of an armed federal militia to federalize the police, replace those precincts that were defunded, and begin targeting Americans — call it the Papa Doc or Venezuela model — hardly what the founding fathers had in mind. That is where they came in — and the reason for the Second Amendment.

The government, the Wall Street Journal determined, was embarking on a plan, to “raise a total of $739 billion in revenue, and spend a total of $433 billion…. to reduce the deficit by about $102 billion over a decade” – in government terms, a rounding error, with your tax dollars. But not a dollar for more Homeland Security agents to address the nearly 5 million illegal aliens — including 900,000 “gotaways” — rampant human trafficking, escalating child sex slavery, and massive drug smuggling that resulted, last year alone, in more than 107,000 deaths.

“By forcing up the price of fossil fuels, policy-makers have put the cart before the horse. Instead, we need to make green energy much cheaper and more effective. Humanity has relied on innovation to fix other big challenges. We didn’t solve air pollution by forcing everyone to stop driving, but by inventing the catalytic converter that drastically lowers pollution. We didn’t slash hunger by telling everyone to eat less, but through the Green Revolution that enabled farmers to produce much more food.” – Bjørn Lomborg, author and climate change expert, Financial Post; June 29, 2022

Other countries are likely to be less passionate about having clean energy and more passionate about the bottom line. Russia, for instance, has been trying for years to limit America’s oil production to prod the US to transfer its dependence on oil to, you guessed it again!, Russia. If the US had the widespread, inexpensive oil production it enjoyed two years ago, Putin would never have had the resources even to think of invading Ukraine. The US is, quixotically, funding both sides of this war.

The Student Loan Relief plan is a grotesque reverse transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

The biggest surprise of all in the IRA may have been, unbelievably, a new “Green Bank”, filled with $27 billion of your money for the Environmental Protection Agency — which, of course, knows so much about banking. It is supposed to be a “fund for clean energy projects,” but, as the government, cagily warns, “false claims risks exist.” What could possibly go wrong?

The Inflation Reduction Act and Student Loan Relief act and all these giveaways by the government, are yet more examples of government largess with the money of its citizens. Once again, politicians are taking taxpayer money and distributing it to favored causes and businesses and then limiting the choices we can make as to how we want to live. It is bad policy in a country where freedom is supposed to reign.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wondered aloud how Republicans could vote against Mother Earth. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin possibly wondered how Republicans could vote against his so-called “Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).” In reality, Pelosi was closer to describing the contents of the IRA than was Manchin.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/08/the-political-party-that-is-built-on-lies/

For decades the political left has called those on the political right fascists. Doing so is particularly de rigeur these days, with Joe Biden saying that Donald Trump supporters are semi-fascists, and then devoting an entire speech to trying to convince the nation that those who disagree with him and his party are threats to our republic. But it’s nothing more than another lie told to sustain the Democratic Party’s campaign to occupy America.

Democrats have been calling their political opponents fascists since at least 1948, when Harry Truman said a Republican election win would pose a fascistic threat to America, and be even more dangerous than communism.

Labelling Republicans as fascists is of course as absurd today as it was then. Fascists want to empower the state, trap a people within its confines, strip them of their individuality, and eliminate dissent. This describes the Democratic Party for more accurately than the Republican Party (which has rarely done enough to stop the Democrats’ assault on the Constitution, our institutions, and civilization in general).

The Democrats’ tower of lies has been constructed with the help of the media, which outside of a few exceptions, are no longer objective, or even pretend to be, and are instead propagandists for the party they are loyal to. In just the last six years the media have perpetuated the stolen-by-Russia 2016 presidential election lie, the Stacey Abrams I’m-the-real-governor-of-Georgia lie, and the lie that the incriminating information on Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

The press also lies about policies, casting Democrats’ ideas in the best light possible, the Republicans’ policies in the worst. A recent and especially egregious example: Both the Democrats and the media have been calling Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law the Don’t Say Gay Bill, a gross and intentional mischaracterization intended to vilify and poison.

Rather than promote freedom and prosperity, Democrats’ policies enslave and impoverish middle and lower America while at the same time prop up the leftist ruling class and its cronies. But no one would know this by listening to the media and their handlers in the party.

Remember the Green New Deal? It was passed off as an effort to save the planet from overheating, but it was designed as a wealth redistribution scheme. More recently, the Inflation Reduction Act, passed along party lines, will not reduce inflation, as its name implies, but it does enact provisions of the Green New Deal that would not otherwise have made it through Congress.

This is nothing new. President Barack Obama lied about Obamacare, one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation to ever become law.

Though much of the truth regarding the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, contradict the narrative, the lying about that day has never ceased. Both the Democrats and the media have dared call it insurrection. But if insurrection it was, who, more than 20 months later, has been charged with the federal crime of insurrection, or any crime that is comparable?

The Democrats have also lied about Antifa (New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler said it’s a “myth”), swore that the right is overrun with white supremacists, and are consistently dishonest about the environment, the climate, firearms, and their fealty to the Second Amendment as well as the rest of the Constitution. They pretended to respect the rule of law, and those who enforce the law, and the limits of the executive branch. There is an incessant drumbeat that nothing is ever their fault. All of it is false.

And who can forget about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lying about her email server, repeatedly, knowing full well the media would never press the issue? And the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lying about then presidential candidate Mitt Romney paying no income taxes for 10 years, and laughing about it later? No ramifications whatsoever.

Illegal aliens largely live in the homes of the vanished agrarians. In turn, they rent out the barns and sheds, and create compounds of 20-30 people, with 10-15 cars parked about. No sheriff, no county inspector, no building inspector dares to set foot on these old homesteads of now dead farmers. They are no-go zones, despite law enforcement denials—sort of like Wild West hideouts that everyone knows, and no one enters.

There the pit bull dogs do bite—and bite. They are unvaccinated and unlicensed. No one knows who is armed, who not. I once stopped by a nearby compound to return a dog that had bolted from there to our place. I knew every inch of that farmhouse and yard, since I visited there at age 10, decades before the current occupants were born. I was greeted warmly as the dog jumped out of the truck, but on the unspoken premise that I was also to leave immediately given the various “operations” that seemed to be going on.

Who fled a felony in Mexico, who came up just to work? Which shed is a chop shop, which a drug den, which a meth lab, which a child care operation? Which lean-to is a cock-fight arena, which a prostitution center, which simply a trailer for a hard-working roofer, which an anything for anybody?

Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas claim all this is reifying Lady Liberty saying, “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But there are no Ellis Island lines here. There is no poor immigrant with papers, intent on queuing up to enter his chosen country legally. And there is certainly no Joe Biden or Alejandro Mayorkas or anyone like them anywhere near here.

NO POSTINGS UNTIL SEPTEMBER 10

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The words “Know thyself” were, according to legend, engraved above the forecourt in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, located on Mount Parnassus in central Greece. A search for self-knowledge is common, and its importance has been lauded by many, from Benjamin Franklin to Lao Tzu to Pythagoras. To fatalist Greeks the saying meant that one should accept the role nature assigned one. But for those of us today who believe we are also nurtured by our environment. self-examination should be an ongoing process.

There are those who dismiss the concept, because we change. Andre Gide wrote in Autumn Leaves: “A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.” But a search for self-understanding is not seeking perfection in the here and now; it seeks to understand; it recognizes that change is given: We have new experiences; we meet different people, and we read. Life does not stand still and neither do we. What if Gide’s caterpillar wanted to become a butterfly? Some conflate self-knowledge with hubris – that in claiming to know ourselves we admit to knowing what we do not know. That, to borrow one of Joe Biden’s favorite expressions, is malarkey. It’s an argument used by woke philosophy professors to confuse young, impressionable minds. It is impossible to know what we do not know.

Self-understanding is important in an ever-changing world. In a recent interview in The Wall Street Journal, American tennis player Danielle Collins spoke “of how to use your strengths and how to work around your weaknesses” to win matches. She understands that her weaknesses will improve with practice, and that her strengths can be harbored and utilized. It was Heraclitus (c.535BC-c.475BC) who is credited with the saying: “Change is the only constant in life.” Knowing oneself is acknowledging that truth.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/05/former-feds-give-justice-department-a-bad-name/

Andrew Weissmann is one weird dude, to say the least.

Weissmann, an author, law professor, and MSNBC legal analyst, is a prolific user of social media—but rather than post a head shot on his Twitter bio page, Weissmann has a photo of a dog staring down a doll resembling Donald Trump lying face-up on the floor. It’s unclear if the dog is supposed to represent Weissmann, described as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “pit bull” during the Russia election collusion investigation, or it’s just another indication of Weissmann’s insatiable obsession with the 45th president of the United States.

Instead of posting freakish pictures of Trump, Weissmann should send Trump a thank you letter every day for the rest of his life. Without Trump, Weissman—best known for having the Supreme Court unanimously overturn his criminal prosecution of Arthur Andersen in 2005 and his failure to uncover any evidence that Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 election—wouldn’t be the media’s go-to source for explaining why this time the Bad Orange Man is really going down.

He is the de facto head of a cottage industry populated by former federal prosecutors paid to give “expert” legal assessments on the Trump scandal du jour. On any given day, Weissmann and his onetime co-workers can be found on cable news shows or in the pages of the Washington Post ranting about Trump’s alleged disregard for the “rule of law” and reminding their equally-rabid followers that “no one is above the law.”

And the FBI’s pillage of Mar-a-Lago on August 8 put this cabal into overdrive. Despite the amusing shift in talking points about what federal investigators took from Trump’s residence that day—hysteria over secret nuclear codes quickly morphed into hysteria over empty folders after a list of seized “evidence” revealed 99 percent of the contraband included personal items such as news clippings and books—the former feds are convinced the trove is proof of Trump’s guilt.

Weissmann recently asked a Democratic congressman why the House Intelligence Committee isn’t investigating Trump on this matter, too. “There’s been no explanation from Donald Trump whatsoever as to why he took these, why he didn’t return them, why are the folders now empty,” Weissmann said to Representative Peter Welch (D-Vt.) on MSNBC last week. “So one question I have is whether some part of Congress . . . shouldn’t be asking the private citizen who was a public servant to come and testify to explain what happened. He is a citizen, all of us would have to respond to a congressional subpoena.”