RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://tippinsights.com/bidenflation-soars-to-19-2-eroding-americans-purchasing-power/

President Biden, a seasoned politician, has failed miserably in tackling inflation, and it is nearly certain that he can’t wave a magic wand and tame the beast before November. So, he has embarked on an alternate strategy to pin it on Trump. The President, famous for his tales about the “bad dude” Corn Pop, calling a voter at a campaign stop a “lying dog-faced pony soldier,” the death of his uncle Finnegan due to ‘cannibalism’ in Papua New Guinea, and how the xenophobia of Indians and Japanese impede progress, keeps claiming that inflation was nine percent when he took office, even though it was 1.4%.

When President Biden first made the claim, we dismissed it like Special Counsel Robert Hur as coming from a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He has now repeated the claim several times, and we wonder why none of his economic advisors or Nobel Laureate economist friends have corrected him.

Americans know the truth, and the claim comes across as malarkey in plain Biden speak.

The dark reality of Bidenomics is 19.2% inflation under the President’s watch, which is 5.9% annually. When he took office, inflation was at just 1.4%. Since March 2021, it has stayed above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target (38 consecutive months.).

Under Biden, the federal debt has increased by $6.9 trillion. The Federal Reserve printed money out of nothing to finance his spending spree. The increased money supply without a corresponding increase in goods and services reduced the value of each dollar, causing prices to rise quickly and leading to high inflation, effectively acting as a hidden tax on everyone.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/19/the-new-anti-americanism/

I wonder if Empire—the nearly 500-page reader-proof tome by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—is about to make a comeback. The book has long-since disappeared into well-deserved oblivion.

But when it was first published some twenty years ago, it took the world—at least the gullible world of academia and adjacent media middens—by storm.

The venerable literary Marxist Fredric Jameson opined that it was “the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium.” The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek—a plausible replacement for Jameson as the world’s trendiest academic Marxist—declared that it is “nothing less than a rewriting of the The Communist Manifesto for our time.”

Further down the intellectual food chain, Emily Eakin, a journalist for The New York Times, delivered herself of an ecstatic summary, simultaneously certifying and increasing the book’s prestige. Perhaps, she speculated, it is the “Next Big Idea,” the successor to structuralism and deconstruction in the halls of literary academia. It is too soon to say for sure, she cautioned, but, possessed as it is of “the formal trappings of a master theory in the old European tradition,” the book “is filling a void in the humanities.”

Neither blurb writers nor cultural journalists write under oath, of course. But even with all of the appropriate discounts, this is an exceptional outpouring. At the time, Hardt was a thirty-something associate professor in the literature program at Duke. His co-author, Antonio Negri (1933-2023), was  an Italian political philosopher in his late sixties who is described on the book’s dust jacket as “an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome.” I will say more about Negri below.

Empire’s combination of owlish scholarly pretentiousness, on the one hand, and bristling Communist militancy, on the other, more or less guaranteed it at least a respectful audience in the academy.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/which_makes_better_soldiers_dei_or_assimilation.html

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is divisive, as it emphasizes differences based on race, ethnicity, biological sex, gender identities, etc., which is opposed to the time-tested, traditional military culture emphasizing unity, teamwork, selflessness, sacrifice, and assimilation into the warrior ethos.

May 1969, a commercial bus full of sleepy recruits stopped during darkness at Fort Ord, CA. Two Drill Instructors (DIs) jumped on the bus and started screaming, “get off my bus, you dirtbags, and line up outside.” A diverse assortment of now wide-awake young men lined up in four rows and then shuffled/marched to sterile appearing billets with a platoon of 50 recruits in each open bay, gray double-decker bunks with sheets and a wool blanket on both sides of an aisle running down the middle of the bay. They were awake until 0200 scrubbing the billet floors and latrine; up at 0530 the next day.

The next day they marched with DIs yelling commands, to the long quartermaster warehouse to be issued clothing and gear. But, first a stop at the barber building with a line of barbers ready to buzz hair off which they did quickly leaving about 1/4 inch on the top and almost none elsewhere.

Inside the quartermaster building there was a long countertop with mostly civilians on the opposite side manning issue stations; the recruits moved from one station to the other getting standard Olive Drab issue clothes which they stuffed into duffle bags. Sizes for fatigues, socks, t-shirts, boots, etc. were based on the calibrated eyeball estimate of the QM guy behind the counter. The heavy duffle bags were carried back to the billets where the contents were arranged in foot and wall lockers, dress right dress, according to the SOP, inspected and enforced by the DIs.

All of this was done to erase the “back on the block” civilian mentality and quickly replace it with “you’re in the Army now” and don’t forget it mindset. No more personal identities, no more it’s about me, it is now about the “Green Machine, your ass is mine” and your personal identity as a civilian does not matter; it no longer exists — you are now part of the machine — you have one color — Green.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/18/unpacking-ray-dalios-alarmist-prediction-of-civil-war/

The other day, Ray Dalio, the billionaire investor and founder of Bridgewater Associates, told The Financial Times that he sees the risk of a second American civil war as “growing” and places the odds of such a war at “35-40 percent.” According to FT, Dalio’s “research” has led him to conclude that “we are now on the brink,” although we “don’t yet know if we will cross over into much more turbulent times.”

On the one hand, it’s important to remember that Dalio is nearly universally known as a world-class crank. He’s made a lot of money in the markets and has long been considered an astute investor, but he has also long been considered an odd duck, to put it gently. Additionally, the idea that this proclamation and setting of odds are based on “research” is silly. There are no variables one can examine and analyze and then use to calculate an objective estimate of a civil war’s occurrence. To pretend otherwise is… well… perfectly Dalio-esque.

On the other hand, Dalio is hardly alone in his belief that tough times are imminent. Virtually the entirety of the ruling class seems to believe that the zeitgeist of the moment is characterized by anger, hatred, and the expectation of confrontation between political adversaries. Hollywood is busy making movies about a potential Civil War. Political magazines are warning that totalitarianism looms just over the electoral horizon. And even the President of the United States is releasing videos that sound more like pre-fight smack talk than political posturing. In short, Ray Dalio is hardly the first major public figure to express his fear/hope that the nation is “on the brink.”

Ironically, the part of this story Dalio and his fellow elites are missing is that in which they’re the cause of the turmoil that currently plagues the United States, or, at the very least, are exacerbating that turmoil and aggravating the people’s frustrations.

Consider, for example, the description Dalio gives of one of the primary causes of this possible civil war:

This election would be a test of ‘can democracy work well? Will there be an acceptance of the rules and an ability to work well under those rules?’ he said.

[Republican candidate Donald] Trump will follow more rightist, nationalistic, isolationist, protectionist, non-regulatory policies — and more aggressive policies to fight enemies internally and externally, including political enemies. [President Joe] Biden, and even more so the Democratic party without Biden, will be more the opposite….

Ah, I see. It’s all Donald Trump’s fault. Strangely, Dalio doesn’t address the almost inarguable fact that Donald Trump is a symptom of this nation’s political dysfunction rather than the cause of it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/17/if-it-aint-woke-dont-fix-it/

To hear the radical left tell it, America is broken beyond repair.  It must be torn down and rebuilt — “fixed” to the radical left’s specifications.  Following this slanted subjectivism has turned countless American institutions into caricatures. 

Like so many monsters stitched and bolted together by Frankenstein, these once-healthy institutions now lurch stiff-legged before us — and always ever more leftward.  Among them, none stands out more monstrously now than America’s self-proclaimed “elite” colleges. 

The list of the left’s demands is as endless as its proposals are preposterous. 

They demand an open border policy because they claim enforcing national sovereignty is racist.  They demand sanctuary cities because they claim it is racist to not encourage illegal immigration.  Police departments should be defunded because they claim enforcing the law is racist — ditto prosecuting those apprehended in breaking it — despite minorities being the greatest victims of these policies. 

When it comes to schools, they oppose standardized testing and advanced placement courses because they deem these too to be racist, and they oppose school choice because, in the words of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, these are “undermining democracy.”

These radical demands and more have penetrated corporations, sports, establishment media, and entertainment.  The Biden administration’s capitulation to the left’s environmentalism is a case in point. 

On Earth Day, it heralded a grant competition for $7 billion to go to 900,000 low-income families for solar panels: that comes to about $7,800 per house.   If that $7 billion figure sounds familiar it should; it almost exactly matches the $7.5 billion the administration asked Congress for in 2021 for EV charger installation. As of December 2023, not one had been built; by the end of March 2024, only seven had. 

Yet no place has allowed itself to be rebuilt with greater abandon than the campuses of America’s self-styled elite institutions of higher education.  Grotesque anti-Semitism has been retooled into pro-Palestinian “progressivism” by the left.  Their calls for the destruction of Israel have always rested on the preposterous proposition that this somehow did not include those who inhabit it. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-heart-of-alvin-braggs-case-against-trump/

Porn star Stormy Daniels says she had sex with former President Donald Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel in July 2006. To keep her from telling that story, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen says, “the boss” instructed him to pay Daniels $130,000 shortly before the 2016 presidential election.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says that nondisclosure agreement was a serious crime that undermined democracy by concealing information from voters. Of these three accounts, Bragg’s is the least credible.

“This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures, to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior,” lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said at the beginning of Trump’s trial last month. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”

Contrary to Colangelo’s spin, there is nothing “pure and simple” about the case against Trump. To begin with, Trump is not charged with “conspiracy” or “election fraud.” He is charged with violating a New York law against “falsifying business records” with “intent to defraud.”

Trump allegedly did that 34 times by disguising his 2017 reimbursement of Cohen’s payment to Daniels as compensation for legal services. The counts include 11 invoices from Cohen, 11 corresponding checks and 12 ledger entries.

Falsifying business records, ordinarily a misdemeanor, becomes a felony when the defendant’s “intent to defraud” includes an intent to conceal “another crime.” Bragg says Trump had such an intent.

What crime did Trump allegedly try to conceal? Prosecutors say it was a violation of an obscure New York law that makes it a misdemeanor for “two or more persons” to “conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-landmark-on-the-road-to-decline/

The normalization of antisemitic terror we have witnessed among protestors since the October 7 attacks on Israel is a portentous landmark on the West’s road to civilizational degeneration. Every dimension of our socio-political order––all three branches of the federal government, and many blue-state governments; popular entertainment and high-brow culture; mainline churches; corporate boards and C-suites; national security and defense agencies, and education from K-12 to universities–– has been corrupted by illiberal, if not antihuman ideologies that undercut the foundations both of our political freedom and equality, and the morality and ethics that nourish both.

We’ve known for decades that our educational systems have been failing to educate the young, even as politics, social fads, and culture war propaganda have replaced foundational skills like reading, writing, basic science, critical thought, and history. More inimical to learning is the illiberal attacks on First Amendment rights to free speech and academic freedom, and the enforcement of a rigid orthodoxy that punishes and “cancels” those who challenge the party line. Such a regime stifles truth and replaces history with false narratives that serve autocratic agendas.

The protests in support of Hamas, antisemitism, and genocide show how ignorant of basic historical facts are many students attending our most prestigious universities. Consider the historical terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism” incessantly chanted like mantras. They are now stripped of their meaning and reduced to question-begging epithets ––“mind-blockers” and “thought-extinguishers,” as the great historian of Soviet mass murder Robert Conquest describes them, which serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.”

“Inflammation” is exactly the purpose of similar clichés like “genocide,” “settlers,” “famine,” “disproportionate,” “Palestinian homeland,” and all the other slogans and chants we’ve heard over the last eight months from the callow, self-righteous protestors. But it’s not just ignorance of history, but also moral idiocy that afflicts the “activists” siding with sadistic killers

And how grotesque is the lack of self-awareness among affluent “snowflake” undergrads who want to trespass, destroy, assault, and burn, and then demand they be fed, accommodated, and never required to be held accountable by the police, district attorneys, their universities, or future employers? They are the products of the same pathologies to which Sallust, the 1st century B.C. Roman historian, attributed the Roman Republic’s demise: “decadence and hubris—the natural dividends of prosperity.” Just as in Rome, the same cultural malignities now dominate our civilization.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/15/fbi-assaults-against-law-enforcement-at-highest-level-in-ten-years/

The latest data from the FBI reveals that the number of assaults committed against law enforcement officers is at the highest level in at least 10 years.

According to the Daily Caller, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program recorded 79,091 different cases of assault against officers in the year 2023. The most common occurrences were during police responses to assaults against non-officers, with 6,783 such cases. The second-highest occurrence was during responses to drug violations, with 4,879 assaults taking place under such circumstances.

At least 466 officers were assaulted and injured by assailants with firearms, which is also the highest rate of such assaults in the last 10 years. The report also reveals that 194 officers were feloniously killed between 2021 and 2023, thus marking the highest rate of such murders in any three-year period in the last 20 years. The year 2023 saw 60 officers killed, while 61 were killed in 2022, and 73 were killed in 2021.

In 2023, there were 57 offenders who committed felony murder of law enforcement officers. Of those 57 culprits, 32 had previous violent arrests; 54 of the 57 culprits were men, while 8 allegedly suffered some form of mental illness.

Regionally, the South saw the highest number of officers killed in the line of duty in 2023, with 20; this marked a decrease of about 38% from 32 line-of-duty deaths in 2022.

The persistently high rate of violence against police officers is a continuation of the widespread anti-police sentiment that started in 2020, after an African-American named George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His accidental death, falsely believed to be a murder, sparked nationwide race riots and led to numerous far-left politicians calling for a “defunding” of the police. Although political attempts to do so have either failed or been repealed in recent years, anti-police rhetoric remains high, and has also led to a wave of early retirements as well as recruitment struggles for many police departments.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/illegals_accused_of_beating_cops_in_new_york_s_times_square_offered_slap_on_the_wrist_plea_deals.html

On what planet does assaulting a police officer merit a mere six months in the slammer?

Only Planet New York.

According to the Daily Mail:

Six of the migrants accused of assaulting two New York City Police Department officers in Times Square have been offered plea deals – including one who was re-arrested while out on $15,000 bail. 

Ulises Bohorquez, Yohenry Brito, Edgarlis Vegas, Darwin Andres Gomez-Izquiel, Wilson Juarez, Yorman Reveron and Kelvin Servita Arocha appeared in New York Supreme Criminal Court on Tuesday in front of Judge Laura Wood.

The Venezuelan migrants were charged with second-degree assault and the obstruction of a government admin following the attack on January 27 which was caught on video and all have pleaded not guilty.

They were offered this:

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has offered plea deals to Bohorquez, Brito and Gomez-Izquiel for them to serve a year in prison in return to pleading guilty to second-degree assault.

Arocha and Juarez have been presented a deal where they serve six months in prison for pleading guilty to obstructing a government admin.

Yorman Reveron was also offered a deal of two years in prison in exchange for pleading guilty to second degree assault.

The rest of us would go to prison for ten years if we assaulted a police officer, but these illegals are special.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The title of this essay comes from Stanley Kramer’s 1963 mad-cap comedy. With his dying words Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) mentions a stash of loot buried under the “Big W.” The movie is about a bunch of crazies’ search for the money, reminding one of today’s political scene and the race for the Presidency.

We are not living a Hollywood film; but an alien from another planet would be excused for laughing. The ridiculousness of what is being said and done justifies a belly laugh. Writing recently in City Journal, Heather MacDonald noted: “Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatic, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. ‘The university would rather see us dead than divest,’ said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X.” Yascha Mounk, an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins, wrote in a recent issue of The Spectator of some “absurdist moments” at Columbia. Student protesters demanded the university deliver food and drink to them: “When a surprised journalist asked why the university should have such an obligation towards people engaged in blatantly illegal activity, she insisted they had a moral right to ‘basic humanitarian aid.’”

Max Boot, writing in The Washington Post, quoted the Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawaii, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.” Really? Do the citizens of Ireland, Puerto Rico and Hawaii know they are colonized? Who besides Haitians and Koreans have colonized Haiti and Korea in recent years? And Mr. Boot asks: “What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was the name used by some indigenous groups for Central and North America.” Do wizards at Columbia expect descendants of settlers to abandon the farms, towns and cities they and their ancestors have now lived on and in – in some cases for 400 years – so progeny of those long dead can occupy them?

More than seven million illegal (sorry, undocumented) migrants have crossed the southern border since Biden took office, roughly triple the number under President Trump. But this is not a crisis, according to the Biden White House. It is a “challenge,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.