RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18661/failed-leadership-america

A contemporary of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, penned a series of acerbic commentaries and observations in a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, still in print.

Some of his biting but spot-on definitions include:

Apologize, (verb) – to lay the foundation for a future offense.

Acquaintance, (noun) – A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.

Politics, (noun) – A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Year, (noun) – a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

Bierce was clear eyed about the human condition and politics in particular. One can only imagine what he would make of our current political landscape.

Consider some of today’s words and phrases that would provide him with much to consider. He might hope that his scathing wit could prompt within us the wisdom we all need now. Channeling our inner “Ambrose Bierce,” we might tackle these words with the following definitions:

Schadenfreude, (noun) – In German, it means taking pleasure in the pain of others; in Washington, it seems a state of being.

Power Player Profiteers, (noun) – Lobbyists, political advisors, and special interests reportedly sometimes masquerading as patriots.

Fifth Columnists, (noun) – Clandestine political forces hiding in plain sight while waiting for the moment we are distracted to undermine our democracy.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18615/biden-energy-crisis

The ongoing world energy crisis… seems to have proven for once and all that energy independence is a matter of national security.

To transition to renewable energy, America would have to transform its energy infrastructure and invest heavily in wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars, all of which require rare earth materials as central components. A single industrial-size wind turbine, for instance, requires about one ton of four different kinds of rare earth materials.

Guess who mines more than 70 % of the world’s rare earth materials, and holds at least 85% of the world’s capacity to process them into materials that manufacturers can use? China. Who produces more than 60% of the world’s solar panels, and 45% of the global supply of solar-grade polysilicon, the base material used in solar cells? China. Moreover, rare earths is not a market that outsiders can simply enter. According to the Danish Institute for International Studies: “China today has the expertise, IP rights and production facilities, as well as its own REE- [rare earth elements] consuming industries. China also manufactures a significant and growing share of goods containing REEs, making it practically impossible for competing companies outside China to get a foothold.”

The ongoing world energy crisis, which began in 2021 and has caused record price spikes for oil, natural gas and coal — in combination with Russia’s war on Ukraine — seems to have proven for once and all that energy independence is a matter of national security. Both Europe and the US have recently had to relearn this lesson — yet again — when Russian President Vladimir Putin cut gas supplies to a number of European countries after they refused to pay in Russian rubles — and before that, when the West was confronted with the need to sanction Russian oil and gas exports, while at the same time being dependent on them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/how-liberals-quash-housing-development-getting-richard-l-cravatts/

Kristin Richardson Jordan, Harlem’s City Council member, seems to have put the final nail in the coffin of a 917-unit development, One45, proposed by developer Bruce Teitelbaum for a location on West 145th Street in New York.

Even with the developer’s latest pledge that 40 percent of the units in the twin towers would be affordable, Ms. Jordan (pictured above, center) was apparently unsatisfied—in fact, insulted—that the proposed development was not comprised completely of affordable, rather than mixed-income, units, referring contemptuously to Mr. Teitelbaum’s offer as merely “11th-hour breadcrumbs.”

Maintaining a concentration of poverty has no positive benefits for a neighborhood and specifically works to dissuade middle- and upper-income residents from moving into the area, including white ones, whose presence in Harlem will inevitably result in better public services and schools, upgraded businesses, and an enhanced quality of life.

Ms. Jordan may wish to condemn Harlem to being a monoculture of poverty, entrapping its poor, mostly black residents in an intergenerational trap of decaying real estate, dangerous social pathologies as a result of poverty, and a general cultural and physical stagnation, but no one—including Harlem’s poorest residents—should believe that this outcome is either inevitable or desirable.

Housing for the nation’s poorest citizens is the responsibility of the government and taxpayers, not private real estate developers like Teitelbaum who may wish to do the right thing by offering a portion of One45 as affordable housing but whose main concern is, and should be, maximizing a return on his investment.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/one-more-blockbuster-supreme-court-decision-could-still-be-coming-after-fridays-abortion-ruling

Believe it or not, overturning Roe v Wade may not be the Supreme Court’s most dramatic decision this year. Instead, its ruling on West Virginia vs. the Environmental Protection Agency could prove far more consequential. It could literally upend how our government works.

For the better.

West Virginia vs. the EPA asks whether important policies that impact the lives of all Americans should be made by unelected D.C. bureaucrats or by Congress. This SCOTUS could well decide that ruling by executive agency fiat is no longer acceptable.

The case involves the Clean Power Plan, which was adopted under President Barack Obama to fight climate change; the program was estimated to cost as much as $33 billion per year and would have completely reordered our nation’s power grid. The state of West Virginia, joined by two coal companies and others, sued the EPA, arguing the plan was an abuse of power.

By deciding in favor of West Virginia, the court could begin to rein in the vast powers of the alphabet agencies in D.C. that run our lives and return it to legislators whom we elect to create…legislation. Just as the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion laws are more appropriately left up to the people’s elected representatives, it may decide in West Virginia vs. EPA that Congress, and not federal agencies, should write our laws.

A decision that puts Congress in charge would stall environmental rules intended to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. Legislators, back in the driver’s seat, would have to debate and go public with the consequences – and costs — of regulations that are now adopted with little buy-in from the public.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/28/wont-get-fooled-again/

Let’s explore the possibilities. This is America, after all. We have some experience with such explorations, even if most of us now sit for a living.

Let’s start with the macro view. In order to compete in this world today, we need enormous corporations able to manage huge amounts of capital and command large workforces, while influencing government priorities. Efficiency is gained by size and access to raw materials as well as the access to markets that is gained by using government mandates. This view of economics has been taught since World War II and there are millions of pages of text detailing the potentials, the patterns, and pitfalls. It is often labeled “capitalism” though, like China’s uses of markets, it is only that in passing.

What could go wrong?

There are those who think this arrangement is just swell. Look how big and powerful we have become using these methods. Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair! 

This view is usually promoted by individuals at the upper levels of the food chain, political insiders, and members of established families with sufficient wealth to see them through the ups and downs of an economy based on the myriad uses of power. It’s the way the world works, they say. The way it’s always been. True enough, it is really not so different from 15th-century Italy, is it? The internal combustion engine and the airfoil changed some of the uses of power, but not the big picture. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/28/the-left-aborts-its-right-to-be-called-tolerant-or-intelligent/

The violent and idiotic reaction to Roe is all you need.

Let’s review the news since Friday’s Supreme Court decision – a decision that gave power back to the people to decide what laws should apply when it comes to abortion. Riots. Arson. Calls to assassinate a sitting justice. Threats of violence against anyone who is pro-life.

Here’s a small sampling of headlines.

Calls for Clarence Thomas’ assassination spread across social media after Roe reversed

Christian Clinic Torched

Antifa Packed A Flamethrower For Abortion Riot

Man arrested for attempted murder of LAPD officers amid Roe v. Wade protests

Abortionists go mad, shut down L.A. freeway

Pregnancy Center in Virginia Vandalized

Someone Set Fire to ‘Christ-Centered Ministry,’ Vandalized Premises After Supreme Court’s Abortion Ruling

Violent Portland Pro-Abortion Protesters Destroy, Vandalize Property

Vermont State House vandalized: ‘If abortions aren’t safe you’re not either’

Crisis pregnancy centers under attack after Roe v Wade overturned

LIVE UPDATES: Riots Across U.S.

Notice that several instances of violence are in states that will almost certainly retain liberal access to abortion. Rationality isn’t a strong suit for those on the left. Temper tantrums, yes.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The essayist and author Lance Morrow recently penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal: “Could this be an Antebellum Age?” It certainly seems that way, though with luck a Civil War will not break out as it did in 1861. Nevertheless, anger dominates our politics, media and our culture. It separates friends and divides families. It affects judgements and makes impossible civilized debate. It permeates school board meetings, clouds differences regarding climate change, denies respectful discussion of gender politics; it was the impetus behind the January 6 riots and the subsequent, eponymous Congressional commission, and it has distorted the meaning of the Supreme Court’s decision rescinding Roe v. Wade.

It is through the airing of differences that a consensus is found. Debate is integral to our government and our way of life. In his 1990 autobiography, An American Life, Ronald Reagan, wrote that when he became president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947, he “learned while negotiating contracts you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: ‘I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.’ If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later…”

In a country as large and as diverse as ours there will always be differences in terms of what constitutes the best way forward. It is why we have elections, and it is why, at least nationally, power ricochets back and forth between the two political parties. Compromise has worked in the past, Consider the relationship between two politicians who had in common only their Irish American heritage, Republican President Reagan and Democrat House Speaker Tip O’Neill. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was based on mutual trust and compromise. Similarly, a decade and a half later, Democrat President Bill Clinton reached out to Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the result was the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Yet, similar discussions between President Biden and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are as impossible to imagine as President Trump inviting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a quiet sherry and constructive talk.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/25/more-than-a-stalinist-show-trial/

As Thaddeus McCotter contends, the reproduction of a “Stalinist show trial” is now live in Washington. That invites a look at the original production of 1936-1937, from one of the keenest observers at the time. 

“The Moscow trials, and the purges that followed them, were a turning point in the history of American liberalism, for it was irrevocably polarized by the controversies to which the trials gave rise,” explains the late philosopher Sidney Hook in Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century, published in 1987. As Hook recalled, “news of the trials burst like a bombshell.”

The principal defendants were “all old Bolsheviks, Lenin’s comrades in arms, who had been glorified as heroes of the October Revolution until they fell out of favor with Stalin. Chief among the defendants was Trotsky, acknowledged by Stalin as the architect of the Petrograd insurrection that had placed the Bolsheviks in power.” 

As Hook wondered, “had architects of the great experiment been agents of the Western secret police?” The notion was “inherently incredible,” and the charges against Trotsky, Bukharin, Radek, and others were “mind-boggling.”

The heroes of the October Revolution, Stalin contended, had assassinated Kirov in 1934, planned the assassination of Stalin under the direction of Trotsky, and “conspired with fascist powers Germany and Japan to dismember the Soviet Union, in exchange for services rendered by the Gestapo.” They were also charged with “sabotaging five-year plans, putting nails and glass in butter, inducing erysipelas in pigs, wrecking trains” and so forth.  

All the defendants “confessed with eagerness,” but as Hook recalled, “equally mystifying was the absence of any significant material evidence.” Leon Trotsky, then in exile, “charged that the trials were an elaborate frame-up and defendants had been compelled by torture to play self-incriminating roles.” 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/25/dobbs-reveals-the-prospect-of-a-winning-right/

The Left, and the spineless Right, have done everything that could be done to resuscitate the nerveless impotence that prevailed on the Right before Trump.

Ah, the Babylon Bee once again dispenses news masquerading as satire. Or, rather, it is both satire and news at the same time. “Dems Pause January 6 Hearings To Call For Insurrection.” They don’t even bother to exaggerate anymore. Hark:

After closing down their presentation entitled ‘How Trump Undermined Institutional Authority,’ Democrats raced to join the crowd surrounding the Supreme Court building. ‘Rigged! Rigged decision!’ shouted Senator Elizabeth Warren. ‘Judges must no longer be allowed to hold power! We will never abide by an illegitimate decision by an illegitimate court. Fight, fight!’ she screamed as beleaguered police arrived in riot gear.

Now, as far as I know, Elizabeth Warren did not actually say that. But she might have. It would be in keeping with her behavior. And the always-shy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did step into Fauxcahontas’ shoes, beaming in the midst of protestors as she shouted angry epithets through a bull horn, demanding, inter alia, that Joe Biden should erect abortion factories on federal land so that her female supporters could get on with the grisly business of killing their spawn. (Take a look at those creatures: one thing most of them will never have to worry about is arranging for an abortion.)

I don’t have anything to add to the abundant commentary on the Supreme Court’s overdue decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Honest observers, whatever their view of abortion, understood that the 1973 decision was deeply misguided. Even Saint Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought Roe went too far, was poorly argued, and illegitimately usurped state prerogatives. 

But reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision Friday is not about law, primarily: It is about political theater. Again, the Bee hones in on some salient points.

Despite the fact liberal states will still have the most permissive abortion laws in the world outside North Korea, Democrats helpfully painted the Supreme Court’s decision as a matter of life and death. ‘They are literally going to enslave every woman in America and force them to have 17 babies,’ said Representative Ilhan Omar to a group of mentally unstable lunatics. ‘Which is why the Supreme Court cannot stand! To the streets!’ she shouted, then returned to the House for a speech on why Trump’s words were directly responsible for violence.

Did Ilhan Omar really say that? How can you be sure whether she did or didn’t?

https://bda1776.substack.com/p/victims-of-communism?utm_source=email

On a recent trip to Washington, I was able to find the time to detour by the Museum of the Victims of Communism.  It’s a new museum, it’s a small museum, but it’s a worthwhile museum.  It’s also worth a few words.

I suspect that I was among the very first visitors.  I believe it’s been open less than a month.  I booked noon tickets.  When I arrived at 11:30, the receptionist looked at me and said “you must be Bruce.”  I believe that during my hour-long self-tour, we were the only two people in the building.  So it’s fair to say that the crowds have not yet arrived.

Still, it’s an excellent exhibition at a central location—two blocks north of the White House—and it addresses a critical topic.  The stories it relates are chilling, though not as chilling as the death tolls.  The exhibits go around the world and across time, tallying the fall of European, African, Asian, and American countries to the evils of Communism.  The larger downstairs exhibit focused on the Soviet Union, its conquests, and its satellites, sets a somber stage.  An upstairs exhibit dedicated entirely to China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre rounds it out.

One thought struck me as I was studying the sizable portion dedicated to Stalin.  It’s a thought that’s been gelling for the past decade or so, as I’ve gotten to speak to more people familiar (sadly, many intimately so) with Eastern European Communism.  And it’s a thought I find particularly chilling.