RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/neil-young-v-joe-rogan-and-free-speech

Earlier this week, legendary Canadian-American musician Neil Young laid out an ultimatum to the streaming music service Spotify. “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he wrote in an open letter he posted on his website. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Young was furious at the “fake information about vaccines” on Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, which gets an average of 11 million listeners per episode, according to some estimates. In recent months, Rogan has interviewed various medical experts and scientists, some of whom have voiced skepticism about the Covid-19 vaccines.

Though Young quickly scrubbed the letter from his website, it appears that his ultimatum was serious. The streaming service has begun taking down the singer’s music.

In a way, the market worked here. Young decided that he couldn’t share Spotify with Rogan; Spotify stood by Rogan. Each party in the dispute chose his own path: Rogan got to keep his independence, while Young can avoid the discomfort of sharing a platform with someone whose views he finds abhorrent. The censors didn’t win.

If you doubt that “censor” is an appropriate word to describe those pressuring Spotify to dump Rogan, consider this: the platform is the world’s largest streaming service, with a whopping 31 percent market share in the second quarter of 2021. When a private corporation controls such a large portion of an information ecosystem, its content decisions are more than mere acts of moderation; it is laying out the boundaries of the discourse itself. That’s precisely why Young believed that Rogan’s views shouldn’t have a platform.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/29/unthinking-tools-of-unreason-itself/

“As good almost kill a man as kill a good book,” John Milton wrote in Areopagitica, his passionate and closely reasoned and historically buttressed attack on governmental licensing of books. “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.”

There are many ways, of course, to kill reason itself as manifest in the printed word. One of the most absurd, surely, is to judge the books not by what is in them, but by some characteristic that is not pertinent to the matter. Imagine someone combing through a library, marking for suspicion and for future elimination all books with purple covers, or all books whose total pages are divisible by 23, or all books beginning with the word “God.” No one would be so stupid, you say.

Tell it to the librarians at Bard College. Three students have taken up the assignment to evaluate the 400,000 books in its Stevenson Library not according to the content of the books, their inherent value, their beauty, their approach to the truth, but according to whether the authors were male or female, or of this race or that, had these or those sexual proclivities, or tooled around in a wheelchair rather than walking with two feet. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/29/bad-portents-for-biden/

The ancient world was full of signs and portents that the high and mighty ignored at their peril. When, for example, Xerxes set out on his campaign against Greece in 480 B.C., Herodotus tells us that “a great portent” appeared. 

Xerxes paid no attention to it, however, although it was quite easy to interpret. A horse gave birth to a hare, which clearly symbolized the fact that Xerxes was about to lead an expedition against Hellas with the greatest pride and magnificence, but would return to the same place running for his life.

That was about the size of, too. At the Battle of Salamis later that year, the Greeks delivered a crushing blow to the Persian navy. Xerxes decided to retreat with the bulk of his army back to Persia. It was a disaster. He lost most of his men to disease, famine, and exhaustion. It was a pitiful remnant that arrived at the Hellespont nearly two months later, only to find the bridges they had built at the outset of their campaign utterly wrecked. Xerxes was rowed across the channel, enraged but broken. 

I thought of that episode the other day when I read of the dramatic collapse of a bridge in Pittsburgh just before Joe Biden was due to arrive to rally his troops for a further assault on American independence and prosperity. 

That wasn’t how the agenda was described, of course. No, it was supposed to be the “unofficial launch of a new strategy the President devised to shore up his political fortunes by changing how he spends his time.”

In particular, we are told, Biden will be spending less time wrangling with Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D- Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D- W.Va.) over why they refuse to rubber-stamp his agenda and more time “jetting to places where he can highlight his achievements to ordinary Americans.” I do like to think about what “highlighting his achievements” might mean. I think this is where logicians start talking about “null sets.” Bridge collapse or no bridge collapse, however, I don’t think that was meant ironically. To quote Donald Trump, “Sad!” 

But this just underscores the uncomfortable possibility that, when it comes to Joe Biden, the signs and portents are addressed as much to us as to him. 

Biden talks about infrastructure. We’re the ones that have to drive over the crumbling bridges. 

We read the news. We know about Biden’s plummeting poll numbers. We know that inflation is out of control. We know that the stock market is skittish if not verging on panic. We look on, amazed, as the president of the United States all but invites Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Memo to the president: When it comes to armies violating the borders of sovereign nations a “minor incursion” is analogous to being “a little bit pregnant.”

“The White House quickly tried to walk back the remark,” but then is there a remark that Biden has made in his tenure as president that the White House has not “quickly tried to walk back”?

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/02/07/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=magazine&utm_term=title

You may have the impression that criminal-justice progressives took a big hit in the last election. That’s because the media played up the defeat of the Minneapolis measure to replace that city’s police with a new public-safety department. But while that was a significant victory over the anti-police movement, it wasn’t the only criminal-justice issue on ballots. Nationwide, voting results were mixed. In Austin, Texas, for instance, a measure to undo a slashing of the police-department budget by one-third failed. And more ominously, progressive prosecutors, such as Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, continue to win elections. There are leftist district attorneys in Chicago, Boston, Houston, and St. Louis. And don’t forget San Francisco, where Chesa Boudin presides over shoplifter heaven (and faces a recall election in June over his policies). Now we have to add to the list Manhattan, where Alvin Bragg just swept to victory.

To Bragg’s credit, he laid out in detail his policy plans, a reflection of previous jobs in which he gained familiarity with the legal issues surrounding criminal cases. But those plans are so driven by ideology and so fixated on reducing incarceration that one can only hope he does not (or cannot) carry them out.

To prove my case, I will explore in depth two policy issues that Bragg discussed at length in his campaign literature. They are issues that every district attorney must deal with: pretrial release (the processing of a case after arrest and before final adjudication) and the treatment of low-level offenses (in New York, misdemeanors and violations).

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/when_the_people_stop_believing_the_government_and_the_media.html

Arguably the USSR crumbled because everybody was lying to everybody else, so that nothing could be believed, including (especially) economic transactions. 

With the Biden Administration, the US has entered this same territory. Anyone paying attention can see that the occupant of the White House lapses into dementia on a regular and accelerating basis.  In moments of crisis, he is quietly sent out to have some ice cream and go shopping while the hidden hands that make the real decisions (and make them badly) take over.

The propaganda efforts, a joint project of the media and the progressives in control of the Biden administration, no longer even attempt a veneer of plausibility, contradicting the everydaty direct experiences of Americans:

… the USDA claims: “2021 retail food price inflation continued at same pace as 2020….”

Our media are now owned by half a dozen transnationals, with the practical effect that they all collude in their “narratives,” leaving us surrounded by lies. This is not just a moral and ethical challenge, but it’s also immensely impractical for a fairly free market, which freezes when info is centralized. The media owners and colluders have all the info, the free market has very little. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/reining_in_rogue_progressive_district_attorneys_and_judges.html

Will disbarment get their attention?

As I write this, New York City is laying to rest a 22-year-old police officer killed in an ambush attack by a career criminal.

New York Distict Attorney Alvin Bragg has doubled down on his written progressive policy stating that the U.S. Constitution gives him the right not to prosecute certain crimes, while Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon has recommended prosecuting a 26-year-old adult transgendered female as a juvenile for a sexual assault on a 10-year-old committed when the suspect was 17 years of age.

If convicted in juvenile court under Gascon’s proposal, the suspect would be incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility with other minors. Rational people understand this is not an acceptable solution. 

Meanwhile, Bragg tries to justify his blatant disregard for enforcing the laws he is sworn to uphold by stating, “No prosecutor is enforcing every single law all of the time. We are all exercising prosecutorial discretion.” The problem however is that Bragg’s day one memo flatly outlines certain crimes will not be prosecuted under any circumstances, including resisting arrest. Is it any wonder that felonious assaults against the police are on the rise?

How then do we hold these rogue D.A.s and judges who are sworn to uphold the laws and protect all citizens, but who release criminals with no bond, or deliberately fail to bring appropriate charges responsible? Is it through repeated recall efforts which have failed in George Gascon’s case? I have a different recommendation. For every criminal defendant who is deliberately released on extremely low or no bond and commits a felonious crime when they should be behind bars, the victim of that new crime should bring disbarment proceedings against the district attorney, or judge who deliberately set that criminal free.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/01/27/what_did_clinton_know_about_the_russiagate_smear_and_when_did_she_know_it_the_evidence_builds_813739.html

As indictments and new court filings indicate that Special Counsel John Durham is investigating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for feeding false reports to the FBI to incriminate Donald Trump and his advisers as Kremlin agents, Clinton’s role in the burgeoning scandal remains elusive. What did she know and when did she know it?

Top officials involved in her campaign have repeatedly claimed, some under oath, that they and the candidate were unaware of the foundation of their disinformation campaign: the 35-page collection of now debunked claims of Trump/Russia collusion known as the Steele dossier. Even though her campaign helped pay for the dossier, they claim she only read it after BuzzFeed News published it in 2017.

But court documents, behind-the-scenes video footage and recently surfaced evidence reveal that Clinton and her top campaign advisers were much more involved in the more than $1 million operation to dredge up dirt on Trump and Russia than they have let on. The evidence suggests that the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory sprang from a multi-pronged effort within the Clinton campaign, which manufactured many of the false claims, then fed them to friendly media and law enforcement officials. Clinton herself was at the center of these efforts, using her personal Twitter account and presidential debates to echo the false claims of Steele and others that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians.

Although Clinton has not been pressed by major media on her role in Russiagate, a short scene in the 2020 documentary “Hillary” suggests she was aware of the effort. It shows Clinton speaking to her running mate, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, and his wife, Anne, in hushed tones about Trump and Russia in a back room before a campaign event in early October 2016. Clinton expressed concerns over Trump’s “weird connections” to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. She informed Kaine that she and her aides were “scratching hard” to expose them, a project Kaine seemed to be hearing about for the first time.

“I don’t say this lightly,” Clinton whispered, pausing to look over her shoulder, “[but Trump’s] agenda is other people’s agenda.”

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/
In a September 2021 Public Agenda/USA Today/Ipsos poll, 72% of Americans thought it would be “good for the country” if there were less political hostility and a greater focus on common ground. Yet only 9% of respondents thought hostilities would decrease in the next decade, while 42% expected them to increase. Why have political differences made us so bitter? Why do we hate those with different opinions so intensely? What does this anger mean for the future of our nation?

Political hatred has had a long gestation.  It is easy to blame the crude and narcissistic Donald Trump. But this bitterness preceded him. He made things worse, but he was not its genesis. He reflected the animosity felt by rural and mid-Americans toward coastal elites. He widened and deepened the divide, but he was not its cause. Barack Obama, as the first African American elected President, was one who could have bridged racial dissensions. Instead, he made things worse. It is true that Mr. Obama was despised by a few right-wing racists, but most criticisms of his policies were assumed by his supporters to be race-based. President Joe Biden ran on a platform of unity, yet he has fanned the flames of partisanship; an example – when in Georgia he referred to Republicans as similar to Jefferson Davis, George Wallace and Bull Connor, ironically all Democrats. Political hatefulness has deepened because of social media and cable TV.

I do not presume to know all reasons why we have become so angry. But I suspect three culprits play a role: wokeism, identity politics, and a breakdown of traditional ethical norms. Wokeism is a creed that uses Jacobin tactics to foster economic chaos and property destruction, as it obsesses about climate, race, class and gender. Climate evangelists call opponents deniers – those who suggest adaption and see natural forces as an important cause of climate change. Then we have transgender women allowed to compete in women’s college sports. Wokeism in the classroom and the boardroom has replaced meritocracy with equity, in the belief it will produce equality of outcomes. In their unbridled zeal, these acolytes of wokeism, with their self-righteousness and absence of common sense, remind one of Dickens’ Mrs. Jellyby.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/how-housing-first-fueled-the-homelessness-crisis

In New York City last week, a woman died when a homeless man pushed her onto the Times Square subway tracks. Over the weekend, Los Angeles suffered a tragedy when a homeless man with a long rap sheet stabbed a woman to death in an upscale furniture store.

For the last 40 years, America has been in a crisis of homelessness. The damage extends to the homeless, their victims, and the cities that suffer from failed policies. Far-left liberals have dominated policymaking, but the problem is getting worse, not better. It’s time for a reset on homeless policies.

It’s not about spending more money. Federal funding for homelessness has grown every year in the last decade, resulting in a jaw-dropping 200% increase . Despite this, from 2014 to 2019 (before COVID-19), the number of unsheltered people, who mostly live outdoors, increased 21%, according to a report from the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. In California, the unsheltered homeless during this same period increased 47%, and overall homelessness increased 31%.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/01/27/throwback_thursday_us_spent_112000_to_study_if_different_personalities_prefer_different_foods_813172.html

“The study apparently broke in Psychology Today magazine, in an article titled “Profiles in Eating – Sexy Vegetarians and other Diet Based Social Stereotypes.”

We’ve all seen those clickbait quizzes offering to decipher what type of personality we have based on our favorite foods. A few of us may have even taken them, but nobody actually believes preferring pizza over pasta has any meaningful interpretation for our personality.

Nobody, except some scientists in 1982, to whom the government paid $40,000 to conduct scientific research on the matter. Today, adjusted for inflation, the government spent the equivalent of $112,500 on the study.

Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) highlighted this as his “Golden Fleece Award” for the month of January 1982. The U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $40,000 on a yearlong study called “Food Preferences and Social Identity” to test the claim that people with a certain personality prefer certain types of food.

Sen. Proxmire had the right response when said in a press release, “SO WHAT? Who cares what it means whether you eat carrots or caviar? Here’s a $40,000 study calculated to make the American taxpayer eat his heart out.”