RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/05/the-divided-brain-and-the-divided-culture/

“The general culture is suffering from highly-focused, over-specialised idiocy — and along with this is the cringe-worthy loss of its sense of humour, in particular a sense of the ridiculous. This is understandable, as its luminaries regularly retail the most ludicrous propositions with a straight face and the admonishment of a wagging finger.”

Everything has a backstory. When I was gearing up to write this essay, the spat between the comedian and podcast interviewer Joe Rogan and the septuagenarian rock star Neil Young broke out. Young demanded that Spotify de-platform the immensely popular Rogan for having the gall to interview a couple of critics of Covid vaccinations. If Spotify did not comply then in protest “he”—meaning his record company—would withdraw his work from the streaming platform.

Rogan is an affable, untutored seeker after knowledge; a rough diamond who is occasionally tasteless and profane and has a very large audience—all things that contemporary elites despise. I watch the occasional Rogan clip on YouTube. I’m not a Spotify subscriber. While I am a big consumer of classic rock music including Mr Young’s music, I still buy CDs. As for controversies, I spend the absolute minimum time on them—enough time to work out what the kerfuffle is about so I can hopefully then ignore it. I had watched the YouTube clips of Rogan’s December interviews with mRNA technology pioneer Robert Malone and research cardiologist Peter McCullough.1 I didn’t spend much time on them. I was familiar with their arguments from various forums.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/30/no-senate-republicans-the-fbi-does-not-deserve

The day before FBI Director Christopher Wray explained to a Senate appropriations subcommittee why his department deserves a $527.8 million raise in 2023, his agents were credited with foiling an ISIS-linked plot to assassinate George W. Bush. An Iraqi national was arrested on May 25 and charged with attempting to smuggle four other Iraqis into the United States then “murder” the former president in retaliation for the war in Iraq. (I will address the sketchiness of this story in a separate column.)

The timing for Wray was suspiciously fortuitous; appointed by Donald Trump in 2018 to lead the scandal-ridden agency, Wray continues to promote the unsubstantiated notion that domestic terrorists, i.e., Trump voters, pose a lethal threat to national security. For nearly a year and a half, armed FBI agents across the country have raided, interrogated, and arrested more than 800 Americans on mostly nonviolent offenses related to January 6, 2021, a four-hour protest that Wray considers an “act of domestic terror.”

Then right before Wray went hat-in-hand to Congress to ask for a budget boost, headlines blared the news that his department thwarted a plan tied to a legitimate terrorist organization overseas?

Color me skeptical.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/shouldnt-hillary-clinton-be-banned?s=r

“Hillary Clinton was falsely accused many times earlier in her career. This time she’s guilty. It’s not society’s fault there’s no legal name for the offense she and her campaign committed. It was serious, and there should be serious consequences.”

Last week, in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis asked ex-campaign manager Robby Mook about the decision to share with a reporter a bogus story about Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Mook answered by giving up his onetime boss. “I discussed it with Hillary,” he said, describing his pitch to the candidate: “Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter… She agreed to that.”

In a country with a functioning media system, this would have been a huge story. Obviously this isn’t Watergate, Hillary Clinton was never president, and Sussmann’s trial doesn’t equate to prosecutions of people like Chuck Colson or Gordon Liddy. But as we’ve slowly been learning for years, a massive fraud was perpetrated on the public with Russiagate, and Mook’s testimony added a substantial piece of the picture, implicating one of the country’s most prominent politicians in one of the more ambitious disinformation campaigns we’ve seen.

There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/13/blue-dog-democrat-endangered-species/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

It is easy to find Democrats who believe that their party’s problem is not runaway inflation, poor communication, or flawed candidates. The real problem, they contend, is that the structure of the U.S. government is biased against the Democratic Party and that the only solution is a sweeping, Constitution-busting rebuild from the ground up.

A certain kind of wonky Democrat will whine that it is just so unfair that Alaska gets as many Senate seats as California, or that Wyoming gets three Electoral College votes when it has only 576,000 people. (You rarely hear them making similar complaints about the District of Columbia, Vermont, or Delaware.)

The subtext is often that it is unfair that so many Senate seats and electoral votes are in the South and the Midwest — broad swaths of the country with majorities of white, culturally conservative voters. Never mind that recent history shows that a Democrat who deviates from party orthodoxy on abortion and guns gets a lot of leeway from culturally conservative voters on other issues. 

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/flag-under-foot-memorial-day-crime-anger/

On my way to work in Midtown Manhattan each day, I pass down 50th Street. Near the corner of Broadway, not long ago someone glued an American flag to the sidewalk and set fire to it. The scorched remnants cry out in resistance to the attempted insult and erasure.

I have no idea what protest prompted this indignity, or whether the person who sealed the flag to where pedestrians would trample it was the same who decided to set it on fire. I haven’t noticed any passersby taking special note of Old Glory reduced to such an inglorious state, surrounded by cigarette butts and other debris.

This isn’t New York City’s fault. We are amid more pressing crises. The subway entrance nearby — one of the main points of access to Midtown — reeks of urine and sometimes worse. We ride it knowing that at any moment some homeless turnstile jumper may try to push someone in front of a train, knife a stranger or, as happened last weekend, shoot a man dead for looking at his cell phone.

Most, but not all the perpetrators are young black men, but older black men and black women have gotten into the game as well. But we can’t talk about this except as a “mental health” crisis. Truth be told, it is an anger crisis.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/joe-biden-whispers-to-naval-academy-graduates/

President Biden revived his frequently ridiculed stage whisper Friday while addressing the US Naval Academy’s Class of 2022, stooping over his microphone to remind them that “I’m your commander-in-chief.”

Biden addressed the graduates for approximately 25 minutes during the outdoor ceremony at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, during which he slammed Russian President Vladimir Putin over his three-month-old invasion of Ukraine.

“The actions taken by Putin were an attempt to — to use my phrase — to Finlandize all of Europe, make it all neutral,” Biden said. “Instead, he NATO-ized all of Europe.”

The phrase “Finlandize,” which the president mispronounced as “Fingalize,” refers to Finland’s Cold War-era practice of treading lightly in international politics so as not to upset its near neighbors in Moscow.

The president was speaking about Finland and Sweden applying to join NATO in response to the Russian invasion, which began Feb. 24 and has been met with stiff resistance from Ukraine’s military.

 On Memorial Day we honor our troops-the ultimate defense of our sovereignty, our freedom and our democracy. General MacArthur was a lifetime soldier, graduating from West Point with perfect scores in discipline and academics. His farewell speech to West Point, which he wrote himself exemplifies the valor and merit of those who will bear arms and die for Duty, Honor and Country.

As Hannah Senesh, the martyred heroine of World War Two wrote:

“Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.”  rsk 

Duty, Honor, Country

Gen. Douglas Mac Arthur’s ‘s speech to the Corps of Cadets
at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., May 12, 1962.

As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, “Where are you bound for, General?” and when I replied, “West Point,” he remarked, “Beautiful place: have you ever been there before?”

No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this, coming from a profession I have served so long and a people I have loved so well. It fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily to honor a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code — the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. That is the animation of this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal, arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always.

“Duty, Honor, Country” — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do.º They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

They give you a temper of the will,º a quality of theº imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease.

They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?

Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefieldº many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world’s noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.

His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy’s breast.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-lack-of-morality-and-courage/

With shock and dismay, I read this statement that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs, made on May 23:

Many countries in the world depend on Ukrainian grain. As for what we’re doing about it, we don’t have any naval assets on the Black Sea. We don’t intend to. . . . It’s a no-go for commercial shipping.

Note the use of the pronoun “we.” Milley is the top military adviser to the president. So it is reasonable to assume that the “we” refers to both General Milley and President Biden.

There is a moral component to Milley’s words. Both the president and the chairman profess to be devout in their religion. Tens of thousands of the world’s poor will starve to death because, as Milley put it, “we don’t intend to place naval assets in the Black Sea.” Thus were morality and compassion dismissed.

More important, the president and the chairman are charged with defending our beloved nation. Putting morality aside, we expect courage from those whose job is to protect us. By fleeing from the Black Sea when Putin sailed in, they jointly abandoned the bedrock principle of freedom of the seas. No commercial shipping, General Milley declared, not with Putin glowering. And so they have established the precedent for Xi to push us out of the South China Sea or the Taiwan Straits.

Both morality (feeding the poor) and courage (standing up for the principles of our nation) have been abandoned in the Black Sea. President Biden and General Milley’s peremptory decision to give up is discouraging. The least they could have done was organize a humanitarian convoy, including the United States and many other nations, to escort out the grain ships.

Why haven’t they done it? Do they believe that Putin would go to war against dozens of countries in order to starve the poor? Sadly, our president and the chairman of the joint chiefs took counsel of their fears. It is past time to put aside fear and do the right thing.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/29/politics/paul-pelosi-arrested-dui/index.html

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was arrested and charged with driving under the influence after being involved in a collision Saturday night, law enforcement officials said.

Paul Pelosi, 82, was arrested at 11:44 p.m. PT and charged with driving under the influence and driving with a blood alcohol content of 0.08% or higher, according to the Napa County Criminal Justice Network’s public booking report. Both charges are misdemeanors.
TMZ was the first to report the arrest.
Pelosi was attempting to cross SR-29 when his 2021 Porsche was hit by a 2014 Jeep traveling northbound on the road, according to a collision report from the California Highway Patrol, which doesn’t identify either driver as being at fault in the crash. Troopers were called to the scene just before 10:30 p.m., the report said.

There were no injuries reported in the crash and the Jeep’s driver was not arrested, the report said.