RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://victorhanson.com/january-6th-versus-the-durham-revelations-part-one/

There are now two concurrent Washington, D.C.-area dramas.

One is the last gasp of the politically motivated January 6th Committee hearings.

The proceedings have been restarted to coincide with the final stretch of the midterms and to give Rep. Lynn Cheney a last appearance of political legitimacy, before in defeat she loses public attention.

She will be soon orphaned from her current leftwing aficionados who (only) temporarily appreciate her useful idiocy. And her former conservative loyalists see her apostasy as self-obsessed narcissism and teeth-gnashing for naively betting on the complete and lasting disgrace of Donald Trump, the supposedly successful, bipartisan “healing” administration of Joe Biden, and the “return of sanity” of the Republican Party to presentable and nobly losing Washington-centric Romneyism and McCainism. She lost in a landslide in Wyoming, but had she been running for a national office, she would have lost any such effort by a comparable margin.

For all its pathetic virtue signaling, the committee could never get around the fact that Speaker Pelosi, by vetoing Republican appointees, had turned the proceedings into a Soviet-style show trial.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19036/political-mislabeling

Buried within the volumes of federal statues is a regulation that allows the Department of Justice to pursue those who mislabel a food product with a penalty provision that warns the guilty party “shall be imprisoned for not more than one year or fined not more than $1,000, or both.”

Federal prosecutors will surely go after you if you mislabel fruit as organic when it is not.

In fact, state and federal law enforcement agencies have a blizzard of regulations they can harness when a manufacturer, company or individual engages in what can be described as deceptive consumer practices.

It would appear, however, that the one area not particularly well policed is Washington’s fondness for labeling things as they would like you to believe as opposed to what they are.

Take the president’s “Inflation Reduction Act.”

His plan allocates approximately $300 billion in “Deficit Reduction” and $369 billion in “Energy Security and Climate Change” programs over the next decade. It is a plan that will inundate the economy, already wracked with record inflation, with money still wet from federal printing presses. It is a plan that has no more connection to reducing inflation than the oil companies have in reducing their pump profits. It is a not so polite fiction and it begs the question: If we can go after someone who mislabels organic carrots, why can’t we pursue the type of political mislabeling that puts the nation’s economy at risk?

Equally questionable is how, where and by whom the billions inside the “Energy Security and Climate Change” program will be administered. Consider the credentials of President Joe Biden’s pick to direct this program, John Podesta.

If honesty in labeling was applied to Podesta’s resumé, it would be noted that he was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and founder of what The New York Times describes as a left-wing think tank. How is this political operative America’s choice to distribute what a cynic might describe as, potentially, one of the nation’s largest political slush funds in history? Were that the case, the idea of labeling it as a “climate change” fund would certainly be reason to open a file to investigate the suggestion of “consumer fraud.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/26/progressives-have-descended-into-madness-and-are-dragging-the-rest-of-us-with-them/

Demented

1 : mad, insane

2 : affected by or exhibiting cognitive dementia. Merriam-Webster

So America is really, truly, genuinely, actually, not kidding, experiencing a debate as to whether it is “ageism” or “ableism” to question the fitness for office of:

A soon-to-be octogenarian quasi-president who

habitually walks off podiums reaching out to shake hands with the air and then wanders around confused;
frequently interrupts himself mid-sentence when he lapses into incoherence;
regularly utters policy statements laden with global import that must be immediately walked back by White House staff; and
recently looked into the audience seeking a deceased politician – whose passing he was there to commemorate.

A candidate for United States Senate, the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body™, who

earlier this year suffered a massive, debilitating stroke yet refuses to release his medical records;
in his rare public appearances never fails to mangle multiple words, phrases and thoughts;
informed a liberal network reporter that he required a closed captioning device to comprehend her interview questions; and
required one in last night’s debate.

Puh-leeze. It is not discrimination in any way, shape, or form to expect that at a minimum, a president be sufficiently sentient to represent his nation with dignity on the world stage. Or a senator be capable of engaging intelligently with his colleagues, the public and the media without his spouse’s or technological intervention.

Rather, sophists’ attempt, on purely political grounds, to protect public figures who fall under the second definition of the term “demented” offered above is perhaps the most conclusive proof ever that the progressive movement has completely descended into the first.  And is slowly but surely dragging the rest of this once truly exceptional nation with it.

https://www.city-journal.org/myth-of-the-nonviolent-drug-offender

Devon Kurtz is the director of public safety policy at the Cicero Institute. He also mentors people coming out of prison in his home state of Vermont.

After President Biden pardoned Americans convicted of federal marijuana possession last week, reform advocates praised his action as a “historic” step away from mass incarceration, while critics lamented it as another blow to public safety. The truth is somewhat less momentous: the pardons affect only about 6,500 people, none of whom is currently in prison, and drug crimes account for only a small portion of America’s prison population.

The extreme reactions on both sides are consistent with the public’s warped perceptions of the effects of drug enforcement on our criminal-justice system, which activists and the media have propagated through books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and documentaries like 13th. This component of the prison-reform narrative is disingenuous and distracts from the more pressing work of finding solutions to violent crime.

Of the approximately 145,000 people in federal prisons and 1,040,000 people in state prisons, less than 3.5 percent are incarcerated for a conviction related to drug possession. Even when one expands the scope beyond mere possession to all other types of drug offenses (many of which are associated with violent cartels and gangs), the proportion rises only to 18 percent.

The hard truth for criminal-justice reformers is that violent offenses are far more prevalent among America’s prisoners. At the state level—where nine in ten prisoners are incarcerated—almost 60 percent of inmates committed violent crimes. Roughly 143,000 people are imprisoned for convictions related to sexual assault and 155,000 for homicide, compared with 146,000 for all drug crimes combined. The idea that America’s “mass” incarceration is a result of drug crimes is absurd.

America’s incarceration “problem” relates directly to its violent-crime problem. The nation’s incarceration rate—roughly 639 per 100,000 people—is four to six times that of its high-income peers in Europe and Asia. Without context, that statistic is alarming, but when we consider that America’s homicide rate is 7.5 times higher than those same peer nations, our incarceration rate seems more justified.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/24/halloween-and-election-day-days-for-the-undying-dead/

Some very scary ideas never seem to die. There is a great Geico Insurance commercial playing off horror film tropes, in which several teenagers hide in a shed behind some chainsaws rather than go to a waiting automobile to escape a serial killer. But unlike this commercial, our political tropes are not so funny. The political ideology of socialism has killed and maimed hundreds of millions, haunting us for the last 100 years. Yet political leaders just continue to change the name—national socialism, communism, progressivism—and try again. 

The basic reason authoritarians get away with this is because some academic minds never seem to tire of the idea of trying to make everyone equal. It is not enough to have equal opportunity; they want equal results. The attempts to implement this insanity and the failures are well documented—empirically, historically, and existentially. Nevertheless, new dissertations clog the diploma mills every year as young minds, well-shaped by a politically progressive public school system, attempt to square the circle. 

During the recent funeral ceremonies for Queen Elizabeth II, several seemingly well-educated commentators seemed to offer their support for the idea of the British monarchy, with its stability and traditions, as a better alternative to our messy democracy. Never mind that America isn’t supposed to be a democracy but, rather, a representative republic. It’s still too messy. But Lo! Within just a few weeks that same hallowed British system has collapsed yet again. Who is messy now? 

Similarly, a number of financial commentators have extolled the efficiencies of the “Chinese system.” They really know how to get things done, don’t ya know. They don’t waste energy on political games. A crafty dictator like Xi is better suited to a complex world of shifting priorities. The yuan will soon replace the dollar as the standard for the world. China is already more powerful than the United States, both economically and militarily. etc. etc. Except for the fact that it’s not true, it makes for compelling copy if you are the sort who longs for such certainty. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/24/republicans-in-congress-pile-on-j6-defendants/

The sentencing of Steve Bannon, a longtime confidant of Donald Trump and harsh critic of the Joe Biden regime, wasn’t the only action at the Elijah Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, D.C. on Friday. Around the same time U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols announced his decision to send Bannon to prison for four months following his contempt of Congress conviction, Nichols’ colleagues were handling several cases related to the Department of Justice’s massive investigation into the events of January 6, 2021.

In separate courtrooms last Friday, three men were sentenced to years in prison for their involvement in the Capitol protest, including Matthew Bledsoe of Mississippi, who will spend four years in jail after a D.C. jury found him guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding, a nonviolent felony. A man from Kentucky pleaded guilty to one count of civil disorder in another courtroom. And in courtroom 23A, five members of the Oath Keepers, a so-called “militia” group according to federal prosecutors, entered the fourth week of their seditious conspiracy jury trial.

Once again last week—similar to every other week—the Prettyman courthouse was overrun with January 6 cases; arraignments, detention hearings, status conferences, and plea agreements routinely swamp the daily calendar of nearly two-dozen federal judges in the nation’s capital. A press release issued by Matthew Graves, the Biden campaign advisor and current U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia responsible for the unprecedented criminal investigation and grand jury proceedings targeting Donald Trump, bragged that “more than 880 individuals have been arrested in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, including over 270 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.”

But Graves’ office is just getting started. The Justice Department recently warned that the government plans to more than double that number over the next few months. “Prosecutors estimate that more than 2,000 people actually entered the Capitol unlawfully that day, which means hundreds more arrests are likely in the months to come,” Politico reported in July. (Graves on Monday also announced the appointment of two D.C.-based prosecutors to investigate voting fraud in the 2022 election and combat “discrimination and intimidation at the polls.”)

New arrests are announced each week in what can only be considered at this point a punative legal crusade against Americans who protested Biden’s election that day.

The prosecution has nothing to do with justice or public safety and everything to do with retaliation and revenge. Further, the overwhelming majority of charges are misdemeanor offenses that nonetheless result in terrifying FBI raids, bankruptcies, job losses, media harassment, and destroyed families for those targeted. The government is undefeated in more than a dozen jury trials for January 6 defendants; jurors living in perhaps the most hyperpartisan city in the country have convicted every Capitol protester on every count in record time as judges refuse to move trials out of Washington, D.C. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/glazov-gang-inside-the-globalists-haunting-depopulation-agenda/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Patrick Wood, the Editor-in-Chief of Technocracy.news and the author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation.

Patrick takes us Inside the Globalists’ Haunting Depopulation Agenda, unveiling The global elitists’ crude strategy to do the opposite of “Be fruitful and multiply.”  

Don’t miss it!

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_student_loan_giveaway_already_has_been_spent.html

The Feds released the numbers on federal finances for FY 2022 on Friday. The numbers are in the Monthly Treasury Statement. No doubt you are gasping for the results of Year Two of the Biden Interregnum. Of course, I have published all the numbers on my usgovernmentspending.com.

First, the Deficit. President Biden has proudly announced that he has cut the deficit in half. So he has, from $2.78 trillion in 2021 all the way down to $1.38 trillion in 2022. Here’s what that looks like:

So now we are not quite down to the last deficit before COVID.  Let’s Go Brandon!

The federal debt, of course, is on the ever increase, from $28.4 trillion at the end of FY 2021 to $30.9 trillion at the end of FY 2022. That’s 127 percent of GDP, higher than the end of World War II.

But hey! We’ve been fighting World War Greedy Bankers and World War COVID for the last 20 years! Let’s Go Brandon!

I find the trend in federal debt interesting. As you can see, after World War II the ruling class all got together and decided to bring the debt down as a percent of GDP. That downward trend ended when the Best and Brightest decided to bask in the glory of the Great Society. Debt started upward in the 1980s when Reagan cut taxes while the Democrats refused to cut spending. But debt leveled out in the era of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats before exploding in the real-estate and credit system meltdown of 2008.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/25/2022s-october-surprise-therell-be-no-thanksgiving-for-some/

Many Americans were concerned last year that their Thanksgivings would not be celebrations of plenty but rather bitter experiences of want. This year, those fears have become a harsh reality in Joe Biden’s America, leaving one in four to say they will skip Thanksgiving in 2020 “to save money.”

In November 2021, with the country’s first Thanksgiving under Biden’s unsteady hand approaching, families were facing a holiday meal that was 14% more expensive than the year before. It was only a few months after the Joe from Scranton administration had bragged that a Fourth of July barbecue would cost a full 16 cents less than the year before.

This year, the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal could cost as much as 75% more than it did in Biden’s first year on office. The cost of whole frozen hen recently reached $1.99 a pound, well in excess of last year’s $1.15.

“A typical Thanksgiving bird” in the 8- to 16-pound range “now costs $31.84,” the Post Millennial reported over the weekend, citing Agriculture Department data.

The large increase is due in part to an avian flu that has killed 3.6% of the U.S. supply, says the Post Millennial. But even without the thinning of the flock, the cost of a turkey would still hit altitudes far higher than the flightless birds can reach. We know this because the cost of other Thanksgiving meal items are also higher than in 2021.

For instance, the price of stuffing is $3.99 this year, says the Post Millennial, much higher than last year’s $2.29, while “sweet potatoes rose to $3.97 from $3.56.” The price of green beans and pumpkin pie mix are also inflated over 2021.  In a news story headlined “Rising prices set to gobble up Americans’ Thanksgiving budgets,” the Los Angeles Times says “flour is up 24%,” from a year ago while “butter and margarine are up 32%.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19027/google-mum

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

Google first unleashed MUM to fight what it considered COVID “misinformation” by making sure that everyone saw “high quality and timely information from trusted health authorities like the World Health Organization”. By reducing the number of sources to only those that agree with its agenda, Google is able to deliver fast results while getting rid of different points of view.

Google long ago ceased being a way to find different answers and its search results are deliberately repetitive. Search is an illusion. The user thinks that he’s browsing the internet when he’s actually spinning his wheels in Google’s walled garden.

Or as Pandu Nayak, VP of search at Google, wrote in a recent post, “By using our latest AI model, Multitask Unified Model (MUM), our systems can now understand the notion of consensus, which is when multiple high-quality sources on the web all agree on the same fact.”

Google disagrees with many of its users about what “reliable sources” or “high-quality sources” entail.

In 2022, Google’s search is hopelessly broken because the company no longer has any interest in providing the search service that made it a monopoly, giving a ranked list of diverse results, but wants everyone to speak into their phones and receive a single answer. The consensus.

If you own an advanced Android phone, you may find that Google Assistant will interrupt conversations to offer its own “insights”. Google is also pursuing “prebunking” of what it considers “misinformation” with preemptive propaganda campaigns.

Jigsaw, the company’s most explicitly political arm, is researching what it calls “prebunking” or attacking views it opposes before they can even gain traction. Prebunking is currently being experimentally tested by Google’s Jigsaw to fight “misinformation” in Poland and other Eastern European countries….

Google’s YouTube already has a broad set of bans covering everything from questioning global warming, contradicting medical experts, and debating 2020 election results. These are a window into the company’s political agendas and how it seeks to enforce political conformity.

While it seeks to narrow the sphere of acceptable information in its platforms, Google is working with the leftist Poynter Institute, one of the most notoriously biased fact check spammers…. The company claims to have spent $75 million on efforts to fight “misinformation.” And who determines what misinformation is? He who controls the algorithms.

As the midterm elections approach, YouTube spokeswoman, Ivy Choi, promised that the video site’s recommendations are “continuously and prominently surfacing midterms-related content from authoritative news sources and limiting the spread of harmful midterms-related misinformation.” The technical term for this is mass propaganda. That’s what Big Tech does.

The internet was revolutionary because it upended the central systems of mass propaganda which allowed a government and a handful of men to enforce their consensus on a helpless public…..

Conservatives are one of the cultural barriers because their existence is a marked reminder that Big Tech does not control everything….. [Big Tech] manage systems that extend around the country and the world. When they encounter different points of view, they seek to wipe them out.

MUM is yet another tool for enforcing a totalitarian conformity on the diversity of the internet.

Google doesn’t want you to think differently or to think for yourself. What it wants users to do is to shut up and listen to Big MUM.

Forget Big Brother, Big MUM is Google’s new tool for suppressing conservatives.

MUM or Multitask Unified Model was hyped last year as the company’s new machine learning algorithm. MUM had been initially described as an innovative way to allow Google’s dying search service to answer natural language questions by drawing on multiple sources.