RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nature-attacks-scotus-as-anti-science/

“If anything is a “war on science,” it is publishing ideological articles like this in what is supposed to be a science journal — a trend that seems particularly infectious among establishment medical and scientific outlets. By pushing rank political advocacy that would have been perfectly appropriate in the Nation or Politico — as if the issues discussed were scientific matters — Nature undermined trust in its objectivity as an important institution furthering the dispassionate search for truth.”

Last month I criticized the prestigious journal Science for pushing ideological progressivism and attacking the Supreme Court’s conservative rulings — as if its authors’ and editors’ subjective beliefs and policy preferences are the same thing as supporting objective science.

Not to be outdone in conflating leftism with “science,” the British journal Nature — perhaps the world’s most respected “scientific” publication — has similarly attacked SCOTUS based on the wrongheaded idea that progressive policy preferences are somehow synonymous with good science. From “Inside the Supreme Court’s War on Science,” by Nature’s U. S. correspondent Jeff Tollefson:

In late June, the US Supreme Court issued a trio of landmark decisions that repealed the right to abortion, loosened gun restrictions and curtailed climate regulations. Although the decisions differed in rationale, they share a distinct trait: all three dismissed substantial evidence about how the court’s rulings would affect public health and safety. It is a troubling trend that many scientists fear could undermine the role of scientific evidence in shaping public policy. Now, as the court prepares to consider a landmark case on electoral policies, many worry about the future of American democracy itself.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/u-s-cities-worse-murder-rates-than-ukraines-civilian-death-rate/

You might have thought that when you hear a newscaster or reporter call a major U.S. city a “war zone” because of the high crime and murders occurring there that it was just an exaggeration. It turns out that it isn’t.

“Per capita murder rates in major U.S. cities such as Chicago, Baltimore and St. Louis are outpacing Ukraine’s recorded civilian death rate from Russia’s invasion,” according to Just The News.

Think about that. Cities that get touted as examples of successful progressive places to live have more people dying, relatively, than a nation at war. Cities that held “most peaceful protests” are less safe than a nation at war.

Now ask yourself this: If we are so upset with what is happening in Ukraine, why aren’t we even more upset with what is happening in our own country?

The website compiled information from the United Nations Human Rights Office, U.S. Census Bureau, and other sources to calculate the murder rates between the Ukraine and U.S. cities.

In Ukraine, 5,401 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia’s attack began in February (this is actually believed to be an underestimate). With a population of about 41,167,300, this makes Ukraine’s civilian death rate 13.12 per 100,000 people using official statistics from the United Nations, according to Just The News.

Sadly, there are American cities where this would be an improvement. Baltimore’s homicide rate is 37.3 so far this year or 215 deaths. If the city had the Ukraine’s war-time death rate, the city would have had only 76 murders.

St. Louis’s murder rate is 38.2 per 100,000 so far in 2022. Chicago’s is 14.8 per 100,000.

“Using pre-pandemic data, 52 U.S. cities had worse homicide rates than Ukraine’s civilian death rate. However, crime in the United States has skyrocketed since then, meaning that there may be more cities that qualify as deadlier than Ukraine under assault by Russian forces,” Just The News reported.

How scary is that?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/harvards-sanctuary-for-failed-leftists/

What’s the best way to get to Harvard?

Don’t study and don’t know anything. Just have the right politics. Just ask former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who washed out of the presidential primaries, abandoned a gubernatorial bid after polling at 12%, and then dropped out of a congressional primary after polling next to last at 5%. At least that was better than the 0% that he polled during his presidential campaign.

Where could the most hated politician in New York go? To Massachusetts. Bill de Blasio has become the 2022 visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.

What can Bill de Blasio teach Harvard students besides how to have your wife lose $850 million and get away with it? According to De Blasio, he’ll use his time at Harvard-Kennedy’s Institute of Politics to “to help inspire our nation’s next generation of leaders.” If his track record holds up, half of them will be inspired to move to Florida and the other half to stage a massive race riot.

At Harvard’s Institute of Politics, De Blasio will serve alongside other “prominent elected officials” like Secretary Natalie Tennant, one of the beneficiaries of Soros’; Secretary of State Project, who, despite claiming to oppose Obama while being endorsed by Michelle Obama, lost a Senate race by 62% to 34%. But 34% is still better than DeBlasio’s 5%.

Also on deck at Kennedy Street is former Prime Minister Stefan Löfven of Sweden, a leftist hack, who boasted, “my Europe doesn’t build walls” before folding and agreeing to some border security as the Muslim mass migration mobs swarmed out of control. His deputy famously burst into tears on camera as she announced that Sweden couldn’t take any more illegal migrants.

Neither cared about Sweden, but about their jobs.

Löfven met with terrorists, announced that he would recognize the Islamic terrorist entity inside Israel, and claimed that Muslim terrorists stabbing Jews doesn’t count as terrorism.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/15/attention-conservatives-theyre-coming-for-your-podcasts-next/

So many on the increasingly fascistic left are eager to censor talk they don’t like.

Conservatives have found a way to communicate that is free from Big Tech censors. But how long will it last?

Over the weekend, the liberal Brookings Institution released what it calls “a tool to monitor political broadcasts” on increasingly popular podcasts. Why? To combat “misinformation.”

Brookings treats the growth of podcasts the way Count Floyd would describe one of his movies on the classic Monster Chiller Horror Theater sketch on SCTV. “Ooh, that’s scary, kids, scary!”

Podcasts, it warns, “played a central role in disseminating election fraud narratives in the lead up to January 6.” Scary, kids!

Podcasts “also offered a prime avenue for the spread of pandemic-related misinformation.” Very scary, kids!

What’s really got the left scared is that nobody is controlling what gets said on podcasts. Valerie Wirtschafter at Brookings laments that “despite the real-world harms caused by this misinformation and the medium’s growing reach and influence,” podcasters “can say whatever you want.”

“The nature of the RSS feed, which is open-sourced and accessible by design, represents a significant hurdle for content moderation. Although Apple can remove the RSS feed from its platform, some smaller platforms allow any content on an RSS feed to be played through their services, making it easy for listeners to access a removed podcast elsewhere.”

The horror!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-robert-mueller-shredded-the-fbis-credibility-centralization-intelligence-investigation-crossfire-hurricane-bush-911-clinton-email-sussmann-11663173014?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Mr. Baker is a retired FBI special agent and legal attaché and author of “The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy,” forthcoming in December.

Four days after 9/11, Robert Mueller was summoned to the presidential retreat at Camp David. It was little more than a week since he’d become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

That Saturday morning, Mr. Mueller gave President George W. Bush the FBI’s initial report on the attacks. The Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation, or Penttbom, would become the largest ever conducted by the FBI. It had already identified the 19 hijackers as well as their roles, nationalities, travel documents and histories. The focus had turned to establishing links between the hijackers and al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush, wearing a leather bomber jacket, sat at the head of a big square conference table in the rustic oak cabin. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was at the president’s right. Mr. Mueller, as he later acknowledged, was confident in the report. The FBI had done what it does best—investigate.

Expecting praise or thanks, Mr. Mueller was taken aback when the president interrupted him. “Bob, I expect the FBI to determine who was responsible for the attacks and to help bring them to justice,” he said. “What I want to know from you—today—is what the FBI is doing to prevent the next attack.” That same morning Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet presented a proposed plan of action. At the conclusion of Mr. Tenet’s presentation, Mr. Bush exclaimed, “That’s great.” He turned toward Mr. Mueller and said, “That’s what I want to hear.” Mr. Mueller told me later that he felt humiliated.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/delayed-repairs-shrink-the-submarine-fleet-taiwan-china-navy-amphibious-assault-aircraft-private-shipyards-deployable-boats-materials-11663162266?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet, America’s essential war-fighting instrument in the Indo-Pacific, is about three-fifths the size it should be, chiefly because of maintenance and production delays. This comes amid stepped-up threats to Taiwan by China.

Contesting such an assault would require a submarine force at maximum strength. Congress and the White House should act swiftly to integrate private shipyards that repair submarines into the Navy’s maintenance plans.

American strategists rarely concern themselves with the material issues that determine victory or defeat. They tend to regard international strategy as a question of will, not means. This takes for granted the traditional and outsize U.S. economic-material advantage.

America’s objective in a struggle over Taiwan would be to deny China a rapid victory. The war must become a slog, one that China labors to sustain in a geographically limited form. Generating this situation requires contesting China’s ability to stage an amphibious assault on Taiwan. Submarines would be crucial in such a contest.

The U.S. military today lacks the air forces, air defenses, and surface combatants with sufficient range to contest Chinese air control over Taiwan indefinitely, absent an interdiction campaign against the Chinese mainland that the U.S. has signaled it doesn’t wish to wage. Chinese anti-ship and ground-attack missiles, moreover, would cause damage. Recent war games suggest that in defending Taiwan, the U.S. would lose half its active air force and at least one carrier strike group—a collection of warships defending the aircraft carrier and its air wing. In such a scenario, China would lose 150 to 200 warships and tens of thousands of men.

https://www.newsmax.com/john-gizzi/joe-biden-vladimir-putin-propaganda/2022/09/12/id/1087015/

Nearly 20 months after Joe Biden became president, the area of public diplomacy — that is, using television, radio, digital venues, and other means of communication on the international front — is almost completely unused, grossly underfunded, and neglected.

This is happening at a turbulent time in the world. In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin increased the state media budget to 211 billion rubles (roughly $2.8 billion) — a 34 billion-ruble ($460 million) increase from earlier years — to spend on propaganda to win and enhance support at home for his war on Ukraine.

It is difficult to gauge the overall amount China is spending on propaganda. It has been estimated that $6.6 billion has come out of Beijing since 2009 to accentuate the Chinese media presence worldwide and to sculpt, as Raksha Kumar wrote for Thomson Reuters, “a sophisticated strategy to portray the country’s leadership in a good light.”

Further, Chinese foreign agent spending has skyrocketed from just over $10 million in 2016 to nearly $64 million last year, according to the Center for Responsible Politics.

In the U.S., public diplomacy, funded at $701 million, is funded at a microcosm of the overall State Department budget — just 1.16% of $60.4 billion, according to the budget for the Fiscal Year 2023.

But while the $701 million figure may sound impressive, the 1995 budget for the U.S. Information Agency (which then had exclusive oversight over public diplomacy) was $1.4 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that figure today would be $2.72 billion.

When USIA disappeared in 1999, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and their sister media became free-standing. All the rest of Public Diplomacy disappeared into the State Department.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/bidens_illegal_migrant_surge_costs_taxpayers_204_billion_a_year_study.html

As if inflation brought on by government overspending weren’t high enough already, a new study shows that Joe Biden’s illegal migrant surge is costing taxpayers $20.4 billion a year, or $9,232 for each illegal migrant.

According to Fox News:

FIRST ON FOX: The number of illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. since President Biden took office will cost the U.S. taxpayer over $20 billion each year, according to a new analysis by a hawkish immigration group.

The study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which advocates for lower levels of immigration overall, calculates that the illegal immigrants who have entered the U.S. since Jan. 2021 will add an extra $20.4 billion burden a year, in addition to the $140 billion existing illegal immigrants already cost.

The analysis is based on an estimated 1.3 million released into the U.S. by immigration officials, as well as approximately one million “gotaways” — or illegal immigrants who have slipped past overwhelmed agents. FAIR calculates that each illegal immigrants costs $9,232 a year to support.

Some two million migrants have come on in at Biden’s incentivization of illegal entry, flooding cities such as El Paso, which has now been described by locals as looking like “a third world country,” according to the New York Post. Biden’s catch and release policies of unvetted migrants into the country has created a disaster for U.S. national security, imported third world crime, and created a huge burden for U.S. taxpayers, who are already burdened by Biden’s multiple government spending packages, all of which create inflation.

The $20.4 billion figure, times four years of Joe Biden’s presidency, would bring the migrant total cost to $81.6 billion for the taxpayers which is well more than the $62.5 billion that Joe Biden has shipped to Ukraine to help that country protect its borders.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/12/bidens-doj-doesnt-want-to-disclose-classified-mar-a-lago-documents-except-through-selective-leaks-to-leftist-media/

The government’s latest motion strongly suggests the Biden administration is all-in on pursuing a criminal case against the former president.

Hiding behind the horror of 9/11, the Biden administration demands that a federal judge and the country trust its targeting of a top political opponent—all while leaking details of classified documents to a pliant press.

This development and six others flow from recent court filings in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to obtain a special master’s oversight of the FBI’s seizure of thousands of documents and personal effects from his Mar-a-Lago home. The government doesn’t want to allow an independent review of the documents it’s seized. Trump’s legal team does.

First, The Backdrop

Three days after the August 8, 2022, raid on Trump’s Florida home, an attorney representing the former president spoke with Jay Bratt, the chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Bratt has apparently been leading the investigation into the former president.

Trump’s lawyer asked Bratt “to agree to the appointment of a Special Master to protect the integrity of privileged documents.” Bratt refused. A week-and-a-half later, Trump filed a separate action in a Florida district court seeking judicial oversight and the appointment of a special master.

Federal judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, granted that motion last week, holding a special master shall be appointed to review the seized property, “manage assertions of privilege and make recommendations thereon, and evaluate claims for return of property.” Significantly, Judge Cannon also entered an injunction prohibiting the government from using the documents “for criminal investigative purposes pending resolution of the special master’s review process.” The court then ordered the parties to recommend individuals to fill the special master role, along with proposed procedures for the process by last Friday.

https://johnkassnews.com/the-scream-pritzker-lightfoot-and-their-great-unraveling/

There is nothing that curdles the fortunes of Gov. JB Pritzker and his ally Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot quite like the scream. It exposes them for what they’ve done.

It is a woman’s scream, a real scream of fear that was randomly captured the other day on a Ring doorbell security camera as she was attacked, pulled to the ground, and robbed by thugs as she walked on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Chicago’s “mostly peaceful” and leafy Lakeview neighborhood.

Within that scream of terror hides another, buried sound, part of what the writer Matt Rosenberg, senior editor at wirepoints.org, brilliantly calls “the great unravelling.”

It is the sigh of a once-great but thoroughly exhausted city, a Chicago bone-tired, spent by decades of political corruption, hammered by the brutal application of race card politics in a city of tribes, and in 2020 Lightfoot’s City Hall failed miserably to stop the riots and looting that grew out of the George Floyd protests, and then Lightfoot endorsed the Soros-backed State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for re-election.

It is a city drained by street gang violence and political indifference, where police have been weakened and demoralized, even as private security forces crop up, paid for by those with means who demand protection. In this, Chicago is like Rome.