RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18772/jewish-democratic-council

This organization — the Jewish Democratic Council — is misnamed. It recruits members and solicits money based on false advertising. It promotes itself as comprised of pro-Israel Jews. But the reality is that its leadership consists mainly of progressive Democrats who just happen to be Jewish. For them Israel, Iran and anti-Semitism are peripheral issues.

That is increasingly true of many Democratic Jewish voters who prioritize other concerns over Israel, over the growing threat of anti-Semitism from the hard left and hard right, and over other issues that directly affect the Jewish people.

[T]hey obviously do not want to hear the perspective of this Jewish Democrat, because the organization is more united behind social policy issues — abortion, gun control, the environment and the Supreme Court — than they are about Israel. I was told by two people who attended the event that the word “Israel” was never even mentioned….

I shake my head in frustration at why so many left-wing Jewish Democrats are willing to abandon Israel and continue to vote blindly for their grandparents’ Democratic Party without demanding that it marginalize its anti-Israel extremists.

We have no loyalty to the current Democrat Party, just as many of its most prominent officials seem to have no loyalty to so many of their Jewish supporters. We certainly should have no loyalty to organizations such as the Jewish Democratic Council that hides its true priorities behind the misleading label “Jewish.” There is nothing Jewish about their agenda, which is to elect Democrats regardless of their views on issues of direct concern to the Jewish community and Israel.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Victory in the Cold War provided the U.S. a peace dividend that lasted ten years, until the attack on 9/11. U.S. defense spending, as a percent of GDP, declined from 5.6% in 1990 to 3.1% in 2000. It peaked in 2010 at 4.9% but fell to 3.7% in 2020. (In comparison, during the Vietnam war defense spending exceeded 9%.) But history did not end with end of the Cold War, evil did not vanish, and people did not become kinder and gentler. While the United States and the West gloated in victory and let their defense systems erode, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, expanded their defense budgets.

But it is not just spending that is the problem. A smarter and more focused military means commitment on the part of the people and their representatives in Congress. While the U.S. developed technical leadership in social media platforms and video games, it fell behind China and Russia in military technologies. The U.S. graduates about 70,000 engineers each year, which compares to Russia and China, together, graduating ten times that number. The fate of Bell Labs, once known as “the idea factory,” is indicative of our technological decline. As a division of AT&T, and partnering with the U.S. government, it was responsible for world-changing technologies, from the transistor to the laser. Now it is owned by Nokia, a Finnish company. DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) annual budget remained flat in constant dollars over the past twenty-five years, despite significant advances in technology.

Today’s military has embraced wokeism. Soldiers, sailors and airmen are taught to be gender sensitive, to be sure to use the right pronouns. They are instructed in Critical Race Theory and told our nation is systemically racist. In appealing to activists, the military is alienating those most likely to serve.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/03/why-we-lost-trust-in-the-expert-class/

For years, European policy makers had assured the world that the relatively rapid “transition” to “green” energy was the world’s preordained future—regardless of the costs. 

Accordingly, many European Union governments followed the advice of green experts. They eagerly shut down coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants to transition immediately to “renewable energy.” 

Most citizens were afraid to object that in cloudy, cold Germany solar panels were not viable methods of electrical generation—especially in comparison to the country’s vast coal deposits and its large, model nuclear power industry. 

As a result, German government officials warn that this winter, in 19th-century fashion, families will have to burn wood—the dirtiest of modern fuels—to endure the cold. And there is further talk of “warm rooms,” where like pre-civilizational tribal people, the elderly will bunch together within a designated heated room to keep alive. 

Sri Lanka may be the first modern nation to adopt deliberate policies that have led to mass hunger and bankruptcy. The government for a variety of reasons listened to foreign advocates of back-to-nature organic farming, specifically outright abandonment of highly effective synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. 

The result was endemic crop failure. Cash crops for export failed. Widespread hunger followed. Without foreign exchange, it became impossible to import key staples like food and fuel. 

Sri Lanka once had a per capita income twice that of nearby India. Now it cannot feed or fuel itself. 

Unfortunately, its incompetent government trusted radical environmental advisors, many of them foreign experts. Sri Lanka believed it could become the woke darling of the “Environmental, Social, Governance” movement, and that way draw in unlimited Western woke investment. 

Instead, it has embraced a policy of national suicide. 

Recently, a group of 55 distinguished pro-administration economists assured us that Joe Biden’s massive borrowing and new entitlements agenda were not inflationary. In September 2021, these economists with 14 Nobel prize winners among them declared that Biden’s inflationary policies would actually “ease” inflation. 

Last month, inflation spiked to an annualized rate of 9.1 percent. None of these “blue-chip” economists have offered any apologies for lending their prestige to convince Americans of the absurd: that inflating the money supply, spiking new government spending, incentivizing labor non-participation, and keeping interest rates artificially low would not cause inflation. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/04/in-battle-of-red-vs-blue-states-red-states-are-winning-handily/

In the state-level struggle for the future of America, there can be little doubt: The Red State model of free markets, low taxes, and minimal regulation is beating the daylights out of the Blue State model of top-down control, high taxes, and pervasive nanny-state regulation. But will it last?

The Wall Street Journal, deploying data from the center-left Brookings Institution, last month reported that Blue states, those governed by Democrats, were still 1.3 million jobs short of where they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. Red states, those led by Republicans, had managed to add 350,000 jobs.

A big reason for the disparity is the fact that millions fled Blue states during COVID.

“Forty-six million people moved to a different ZIP Code in the year through February 2022, the most in any 12-month period in records going back to 2010,” the Journal wrote. And most of them moved from Blue to Red states, with Florida, Texas, and North Carolina the biggest gainers, while California, New York, and Illinois lost the most.

Big, blue cities, in particular, lost huge numbers of people as soaring crime, sidewalk homeless encampments, COVID lockdowns, high taxes, and miserably underperforming schools made once-beautiful metropolises unlivable for many.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_fightback_against_racial_quotas.html

Victories in court over affirmative action discrimination are accumulating, with more in prospect soon.

E pluribus unum, the traditional motto of the United States, means ‘Out of many, one.’ It asserts that our strength is in assimilation of shared values, goals, and vision. It unifies our diverse races, religions, and other groups by appealing to the ideals of a constitutional republic – freedom, equality, the pursuit of wealth, happiness and excellence through free market competition.

But the hackneyed shibboleth of the Left – Diversity is our strength – stands in direct contradiction to our original national motto. It serves their destructive aim of Balkanizing us by race, gender, sexual orientation, and other sub-groups du jour. Denigrating and rewriting our history, the Left aims to radically transform our culture: discounting merit, hard work, knowledge and experience, it wants to make identity the ubiquitous sine qua non of representation in American society.

This strategy is reified in the so-called ‘social justice’ components of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) guidelines; and critical race theory (CRT) based programs. Such programs try to cure historical discrimination with more discrimination – in the form of quotas based on race, sex, and other increasingly complicated factors – a disastrous strategy that only intensifies social discord instead of ameliorating it. Under such programs, educational institutions, government, businesses and other employers are forced to sacrifice quality and excellence in favor of a diversity that discriminates de novo and is unconstitutional.

One front in the fightback against such quotas is the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation (CERF) v. Alameda County case, recently brought before the Superior Court of California. It exemplifies the conflict between ‘woke’ rhetoric and the enduring legal framework protecting the rights of all citizens – regardless of race, sex, or national origin. CERF, represented by the non-profit Pacific Legal Foundation, is challenging race-based quotas for awarding contracts, contending that this amounts to using taxpayer funds to promote discrimination.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-dam-breaks-and-key-dems-run-away-from-biden-24

You’ve seen the polls showing that large majorities of Democratic voters want the party to pick a new nominee for president in 2024, bypassing incumbent President Joe Biden. Now we’re seeing the living embodiment of those polls as some important Democratic lawmakers distance themselves from, or outright oppose, a reelection run by the nearly 80-year-old president.

It’s not that senior Democrats are eager to disparage a president of their own party. They’re not. Instead, they’re being forced into it by the process of the 2022 campaign, in which they are trying to assure their own reelections. They’re campaigning, doing interviews, and taking part in debates, and the question comes up.

Start with Reps. Dean Phillips (D-MN) and Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN). Last week, Phillips appeared on radio station WCCO, where host Chad Hartman asked him outright: “Do you want Joe Biden to run in 2024? Because the number of Democrats who don’t is staggeringly high.”

Phillips began with obligatory praise of the president — any Democrat who wants Biden to leave has to say how many excellent qualities Biden has. “I have respect for Joe Biden,” Phillips said. “I think he has — despite some mistakes and some missteps, despite his age, I think he’s a man of decency, of good principle, of compassion, of empathy, and of strength.” And then: “But to answer your question directly, which I know is quite rare, uh no, I don’t. I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2022/08/our-golden-age-of-galloping-hypocrisy/

One of life’s perverse pleasures is logging into social media and observing the panoply of human delusion and hypocrisy. It’s extraordinary what people post on the internet. No virtue is too big to signal. No delusion is too small to share.

It’s not just that people cannot determine fact from fiction; or the widespread inability to recognise good sources of information from nonsense. It’s that a collective amnesia garbles minds as soon as they turn on a computer. Suddenly, nobody can remember their past or their present. Everyone forgets that they could give a university lecture on selfishness, not because they’ve studied the psychology of human greed, but because they’ve seldom rejected an opportunity to indulge their selfish desires. I know I haven’t.

And the bigger the vice, the bigger the delusion and hypocrisy. I’ve known women whose underwear would self destruct at the sight of a rich guy in a sports car but who lecture everyone online about equality. I’ve known men who have never met a woman they didn’t want to have sex with, the sort who make sheep nervous just by driving past a field, and who pose as paragons of sexual propriety on Facebook. It’s mass delusion on an epic scale and it’s one of the defining features of our age.

Hypocrisy is always with us, but something different and more virulent has become the norm. Principles no longer matter. Uttering feel-good platitudes is an end in itself and the appearance of virtue is now synonymous with being virtuous. To appear good, post some dim-witted platitude on social media and wallow in the glow of being virtuous and of being an intellectual, because intelligent people, of course, are all of one mind. The hard decisions that people must make to survive, which inevitably create resentment, and which are impossible to avoid, are smoothed over or ignored. This widespread hypocrisy grants a license to the badly behaved to excuse their own behaviour. Everything is permitted to create a virtuous persona. How many times have you exclaimed out loud while reading social media: ‘you are saying that; really, you, of all people, are posting that on Facebook with a straight face’.

The list is endless.

https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2022/08/03/the-point-of-no-return-n2611153

This is an election year. But the issues this year are not about Democrats and Republicans. The big issue is whether this nation has degenerated to a point of no return — a point where we risk destroying ourselves, before our enemies can destroy us.

If there is one moment that symbolized our degeneration, it was when an enraged mob gathered in front of the Supreme Court and a leader of the United States Senate shouted threats against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, saying “You won’t know what hit you!”

There have always been irresponsible demagogues. But there was once a time when anyone who shouted threats to a Supreme Court Justice would see the end of his own political career, and could not show his face in decent society again.

You either believe in laws or you believe in mob rule. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the law or agree with the mob on some particular issue. If threats of violence against judges — and publishing where a judge’s children go to school — is the way to settle issues, then there is not much point in having elections or laws.

There is also not much point in expecting to have freedom. Threats and violence were the way the Nazis came to power in Germany. Freedom is not free. If you can’t be bothered to vote against storm-trooper tactics — regardless of who engages in them, or over what issue — then you can forfeit your freedom.

Worse yet, you can forfeit the freedom of generations not yet born.

Some people seem to think that the Supreme Court has banned abortions. It has done nothing of the sort.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/02/all-fbi-agents-must-blow-their-whistles-or-theyll-be-complicit-in-bureaus-politicization/

What the FBI needs to rehabilitate itself is a cavalcade of whistleblowers exposing the rot within the bureau.

Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office confirmed to The Federalist that the multiple FBI whistleblowers charging misconduct related to the Hunter Biden investigation only came forward in the last two months. While the existence of these new whistleblowers proves promising, other FBI agents with knowledge of misconduct or political bias must stop hiding behind the chain of command and start blowing their own whistles. 

“Multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions” informed the Iowa Republican senator that “Washington Field Office assistant special agent in charge Timothy Thibault and other FBI officials … ‘falsely portray[ed] as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.’”

The whistleblowers further charged that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” Grassley revealed.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/02/the-big-lies-we-cannot-question/

The following was posted on social media recently by a widely respected California-based journalist:

I don’t like being an alarmist but the epidemic of misinformation is becoming critical and increasingly dangerous. It was bad enough when we had a lying POTUS but it is now clear that it’s become a political tactic of a large part of one of our main political parties. And, if one major party can get away with mass lying, so can the other one, so I fear this will spread across ideological boundaries.

It’s fair to say this reflects a majority opinion among journalists throughout the American media, and it invites a response. This journalist accuses “one of our main political parties” of engaging in “mass lying,” obviously referring to the Republicans and obviously blind to the lies promulgated by the Democrats.

The biggest lie allegedly spread by Republicans, now called “The Big Lie,” is to claim the 2020 election was illegitimate. But even if the 2020 election was not compromised due to a relentlessly hostile and partisan media, endless political persecution designed to damage Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, voting rules that were violated and manipulated in swing states, Zuckerbucks, and possibly much more, this assertion still isn’t a Republican “lie.” For better or for worse, there are diverse opinions within the ranks of Republicans. Some think it was a stolen election; others don’t.

But no such dissent exists among Democrats over some of the biggest lies ever told.

The lies Democrats unanimously affirm, with the active complicity of almost every major American institution, are treated as background facts. To deny any of them is to spread “misinformation.” They have become the premises upon which reports are prepared, decisions are made, debates are framed, and policies are imposed. They’re so ubiquitous that if you’re not a skeptic, you don’t even notice. 

Collectively, these lies are destroying our civilization.