RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/26/kamala-harris-joe-bidens-excellent-vp-pick-may-kee/

Joe Biden was darned lucky he chose Kamala Harris as his running mate. If he had teamed up with someone capable, someone who had won the trust of the country, Biden might be headed out to pasture. Good pick, Joe.

This is not, as Joe might say, hyperbole. Over the past few months, the president has shown himself not only confused but dangerously confused. At some point, Democrats dragged down by Mr. Biden’s poor performance would likely step in, demanding he resign.

But then we would have Kamala Harris in the Oval Office, an outcome too dreadful to contemplate, even for Democrats.

Mr. Biden is a liability to the U.S. and to his party. His comments appearing to call for regime change in Russia or suggesting that U.S. GIs were soon to enter Ukraine played into Vladimir Putin’s hands and provided invaluable fodder for his propaganda machine.

Of course, it is not just about the Ukraine war that Mr. Biden has appeared confused about. Just recently, the president was asked about his plans to rescind Title 42, the health emergency measure that has allowed our government to rapidly expel people entering the U.S. illegally. Instead of addressing the border situation, Biden talked about the Department of Justice appealing a judge’s ruling that nixed the federal mask mandate on airplanes, conflating the two issues.

This was not because he didn’t hear the question; there was no Marine One helicopter hovering in the background. This was Mr. Biden, confused.

The steady stream of misstatements and contradictions has taken a toll. As have videos of Mr. Biden shaking hands with thin air or being awkwardly coached by his wife Jill to wave to a crowd.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/25/did-a-key-fbi-agent-in-whitmer-plot-attempt-to-surveil-steven-crowder/

In 2017, Steven Crowder, a conservative activist and host of a popular YouTube channel, infiltrated Antifa with his producer.

Weeks before a speaking engagement by Ben Shapiro at the University of Utah—an event Antifa planned to disrupt violently—Crowder worked his way into the group through the use of burner phones and encrypted chats. Crowder secretly recorded discussions between Antifa thugs promising to use “plain clothes and hard tactics” to shut down Shapiro’s speech on September 28, 2017. This included distributing weapons such as ice picks, combat knives, and guns.

Despite a heavy law enforcement presence for Shapiro’s speech, pockets of violence did erupt as Antifa confronted police and Shapiro supporters outside the venue, resulting in the arrest of a handful of rabble-rousers. Crowder then posted a video account of his undercover operation and noted a collective lack of interest by major news organizations in Antifa’s violent pre-planning efforts.

An FBI agent, however, appeared to want more information from Crowder about Antifa’s behind-the-scenes work. It’s unclear how Crowder contacted this particular FBI agent shortly after the Shapiro protest but he described the encounter on Megyn Kelly’s podcast last week: “We got on the phone with a guy at the FBI and he asked ‘how did you get involved, how did you get on this Antifa app?’” Crowder told Kelly about the initial call, wondering aloud why the FBI didn’t know how to access the encrypted chat. The FBI, Crowder said, didn’t express any interest in capturing the perpetrators, which Crowder found “odd.”

The correspondence with this FBI agent, working out of the FBI’s counterterrorism unit in Michigan, continued for some time then tapered off. It wasn’t until recently that Crowder heard the name of his one-time FBI contact: Jayson Chambers.

Chambers was one of the key agents involved in the FBI-concocted plot to “kidnap” and “assassinate” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. He was primarily responsible for handling Dan Chappel, the informant hired by the FBI in the spring of 2020 and compensated at least $60,000 to execute the scheme. “This was the guy on a fishing expedition with my office!” Crowder told Kelly about Chambers. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/04/25/smoking-gun-white-house-visitor-logs-prove-joe-biden-met-with-hunters-business-associates-n1592526

Joe Biden has repeatedly denied any involvement with or knowledge of his son Hunter’s business dealings,

But according to visitor logs from the Obama administration, Eric Schwerin, Hunter Biden’s top business partner, visited the White House 19 times between 2009 and 2015 and met with then-Vice President Biden on at least one of those occasions.

Schwerin is the former president of Hunter’s now-dissolved firm Rosemont Seneca, and logs show that he met with Vice President Joe Biden on November 17, 2010, which was when Hunter was striking multi-million-dollar deals in foreign countries, including China.

In addition to meeting with Joe Biden, Schwerin’s other visits involved meetings with Biden’s staff and second lady Jill Biden’s staff.

“In October 2009, just months after Hunter co-founded Rosemont Seneca, Schwerin met with Evan Ryan, Vice President Biden’s assistant for intergovernmental affairs and public liaison, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building where the vice president’s office is based, according to the visitor logs,” the New York Post reports. Emails also show that Ryan “acted as a conduit for Hunter Biden and his cronies.”

According to the logs, the following visits to the White House were amongst those made by Schwerin:

Meeting with Joe Biden aide Evan Ryan (10/28/2009)
Meeting with Jill Biden special assistant Meg Campbell (2/13/2010)
Meeting with Joe Biden assistant Michele Smith (10/24/2010)
Meeting with Joe Biden (11/17/2010)
Meeting with Joe Biden assistant Kellen Suber (8/22/2011)
Meeting with Jill Biden aide Betsy Massey (3/31/2012)
Meeting with Joe Biden assistant Michele Smith (2/7/2012)
Meeting with Joe Biden’s Director of Administration, Faisal Amin (3/28/2013)
Meeting with Joe Biden assistant Kathy Chung (5/20/2013)

https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/biden-says-emmanuel-macron-didnt-take-his-election-night-call/

President Biden said Monday that French President Emmanuel Macron didn’t come to the phone when he called to congratulate him on his landslide reelection.

Biden said he spoke with Macron’s staff instead on Sunday night as the French president partied at the Eiffel Tower — requiring the US president to call back Monday.

“I feel good about the French election,” Biden said as he returned to DC from a weekend trip home to Delaware. “I tried to talk to him last night. I spoke to his staff and he was at the Eiffel Tower having a good time. And I’m going to be talking to him today.”

Presidential calls to foreign leaders typically are arranged by White House staff to avoid unscripted or embarrassing moments for the leader of the world’s sole superpower.

Biden reached Macron on Monday before hosting the Stanley Cup championship-winning Tampa Bay Lightning team on the White House lawn.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/24/our-spanish-civil-war/

From 1936 to 1939, the civil war in Spain became a European laboratory of new tactics, strategies, logistics, wartime morality, and weapons. Right-wing nationalists under General Francisco Franco finally defeated loyal supporters of an evolutionary socialist republic—but only after much of the Western world had variously weighed in.

The cost to the Spanish people of such brutal and vicious strife was horrific. Over 500,000 Spaniards would die in a little over two-and-a-half years. The country was left in shambles. 

Dictatorships in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and autocratic Portugal poured millions of dollars in military aid and money for Franco’s efforts to seize power. In turn, the Soviet Union often matched that aid with shipments to various communists, socialists, and anarchists of the Popular Front forces. 

Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.

The relatively new regime of Nazi Germany sent to Spain hundreds of tanks and “volunteer” troops, pilots, dive bombers, and transport planes of the Condor Legion. 

But Germany’s intervention was not always quite what it seemed. Behind the scenes, Adolf Hitler provided enough aid to ensure Franco’s likely eventual victory. But he did not send quite enough immediate help either to antagonize his European democratic rivals, or to ensure a quick victory for the Nationalists that might have created a powerful and independent Iberian fascist rival bloc to his own. 

https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/04/here-comes-the-desantis-is-worse-than-trump-narrative/

It’s finally here. We all knew this moment would arrive, it was just a matter of time. The same people who compared Trump to Hitler and called him a threat to democracy, will now tell us that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is even worse than Trump.

It won’t matter if DeSantis runs for president in 2024 or 2028, this will be something you’ll hear repeatedly.

Gabriel Hays of FOX News made the catch:

NBC News column: DeSantis is a ‘clearer danger than Trump,’ pushing ‘thought control’ like ‘Nazi Germany’

An NBC News opinion column asserted Wednesday that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to ban CRT and protect young children from being taught about gender and sexuality in inappropriate ways in public schools, represents “thought control that has happened” in “Nazi Germany” or “today’s China.”

Written by former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut, the opinion piece, titled “Ron DeSantis has taken Trump’s playbook — and made it much more dangerous,” discussed how the Florida Republican has turned Trump’s “divisive talk into real (and really harmful) action” that mirrors action done in “totalitarian societies.”

Aftergut’s reasoning included a variety of DeSantis’ recent policy decisions including the enactment of the Parental Rights in Education Bill, but he was really focused on the governor’s latest initiative, which Aftergut described as, “censoring math books.”

Of course, what liberal analysis of a Republican politician would be complete without a comparison to Hitler and the Nazis?

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/wrestling-with-cognitive-inequality?token=e

When we speak of inequality in the United States, we’re typically talking about economic inequality, whether it be disparities in wealth or differences among individuals in the opportunity to acquire wealth. People have various theories about how to ameliorate economic inequality, from taxing the rich and redistributing wealth to designing programs with the right incentives that give people the opportunity and the motivation to earn more money for themselves. Whatever one’s preferred policy, there will always be some inequality in any free society. But allowing it to run rampant poses a great risk to political and social stability. So, there will always be a need to address the problem in some way.

Still, there are certain kinds of inequality that no tax, program, or social policy will eliminate. For instance, what should we do about people who simply lack the cognitive ability to compete in our economy? What do we do with people whose intellectual abilities are so limited that employers are reluctant to hire them, so finding them any steady work is all but impossible? The sad fact of the matter is that such people exist in any society. So, you would think this problem would fall under the remit of a liberal politics that views (or claims to view) helping the disadvantaged as a moral imperative. But, when the issue has to do with human intelligence—with IQ—we hear very little from anyone, left or right, about how best to help those with cognitive disadvantages find a dignified way to live and work.

That’s because IQ has become so taboo that even admitting to the reality of innate and meaningful differences in intellectual capacity among human beings can get one in trouble. (Note well: I am not talking here about racial differences or about genetics. I am talking about the differences that clearly exist among individuals in mental ability.) Luckily, not everyone is afraid of trouble. In the following excerpt from my recent appearance on Jordan Peterson’s podcast, Jordan outlines this difficult problem with remarkable empathy. The first step to finding a solution to the problem is talking about it, which we do below.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In a letter to a friend in late 1777, after General Burgoyne’s loss at Saratoga, Adam Smith wrote: “There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation.” His point was that great nations can withstand defeats – that it takes a great deal of bungling to bring down a powerful and prosperous state. But he did not deny that nations, like empires, can and do collapse.

We face challenges, but is the United States confronting ruin that could imperil our way of life? In the April 11, 2022 issue of The Atlantic, Jonathon Haidt wrote an article titled “After Babel: How Social Media Dissolved the Mortar of Society and Made America Stupid.” “Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We were disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” Mr. Haidt warned of abuses from social media, which he blamed for the lack of cohesiveness, civility and trust in society and in government, as well as being a risk to democracy. The answer, he believes, lies in three parts: “hardening” democratic institutions against extremist elements; providing more intense regulation of social media, and helping the next generation by letting children be children, encouraging more time for fun and less time on smart phones. While I agree with his suggestions about children, I have doubts as to the wisdom of “hardening” democratic institutions, and I am not a fan of more regulation. In addition, I was disappointed he did not spend more time on how social media impedes free speech, in legacy media, schools, universities and in board rooms.

A world in a whirlwind needs an anchor to windward. For most of man’s history that was religion. Today, in the United States, just over 40% of Americans say religion plays an important role in their lives. In the past two hundred years, since the onset of Industrial Revolution, there have been unprecedented changes in the lives of our species.