RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/dc-elects-imprisoned-murderer-matthew-vadum/

Voters in the nation’s capital made history by electing a convicted murderer who is still behind bars for his crime to an Advisory Neighborhood Commission, or ANC, which counsels the local government on neighborhood issues such as garbage collection, police patrols, liquor licenses, zoning, and parking.

Joel Caston, 44, has been imprisoned for 26 years following a first-degree murder conviction in the August 14, 1994 killing of 18-year-old Rafiq Washington. Victim and shooter knew each other and there was some unspecified animus between them that cannot easily be divined from online court records. Caston, who was elected June 15, will reportedly be liberated from the D.C. Central Detention Facility this year or next.

Evidence at his 1996 trial demonstrated Washington “was shot and killed in front of the New China Carry Out … at the corner of 16th Street and Good Hope Road, S.E.” A witness saw Caston “run toward Washington, place a revolver inches from Washington’s body, almost touching Washington’s head, and fire ‘about five’ additional shots.’”

Despite his dark past, Caston was elected to the ANC for Ward 7, becoming the first incarcerated person to be elected to public office in the District of Columbia.

Caston has taken for-credit courses through Georgetown University, mentored young prisoners, practiced yoga, and edited a prisoner newspaper. On its website, the university slobbers all over Caston, calling him a “Prison Scholar” even though he’s not a penologist or a criminologist.

“I’m incredibly proud of Joel for his election,” said Georgetown Prisons and Justice Initiative Director Marc M. Howard, who has taught Caston. “Joel is brilliant, dedicated, compassionate and full of integrity.”

“He’s an inspiration to everyone who is lucky enough to know him,” Howard added. “And I’m counting down the days until he comes home, a free man, to share his talent and positivity with the world.”

Although he may not be a cop-killer groupie like Mumia Abu-Jamal-worshipping Marc Lamont Hill, the judgment of Howard, who fancies himself an original thinker, must be called into question because he apparently views the American criminal justice system through a Marxist prism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/duplicitous-jan-6-insurrection-melodrama-bruce-thornton/

After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi kicked two Republicans off the House investigation of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, the Democrats and their media flaks went into high gear to obfuscate Pelosi’s transparently partisan motive to ensure the investigation reaches the preordained conclusion: that Donald Trump incited an “insurrection” aimed at undoing the election results. In response to Pelosi’s obvious attempt to get the fix in, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California pulled all the Republicans from the commission (except for Rhino Liz Cheney).

As always, the Dems’ bare-knuckled “any means necessary” tactics are camouflaged with sophistries, logical fallacies, and begged questions presented as facts.

The progressive site Politico was the eager promulgator of such propaganda. The column is filled with hyperbole like “the deadliest attack on the Capitol in two centuries.” In fact, of course, the only fatalities were three protestors and a DC police officer who all died from natural causes, and Ashli Babbit, an Air Force veteran shot to death by a DC cop even though she posed no immediate physical harm to him or anybody else.

Equally duplicitous, or just plain ignorant, is the phrase “deadliest attack in two centuries.” Apparently, the three writers never heard of the violent attack on the House Chamber by Puerto Rican terrorists in 1954. As Congressmen were discussing the Mexican economy and immigration, the five assailants pulled out semi-automatic pistole and started firing down on them from the gallery. Five representatives were wounded in the attack, saved from death only by the attackers’ poor marksmanship. The terrorists were apprehended, tried, and convicted. One was released in 1978, and the others had their sentences commuted a year later by Jimmy Carter.

Or how about the 1998 attack, when a lunatic entered the Capitol and opened fire, killing two DC policemen? The killer made it to the offices of senior Republican representatives, as staffers crouched under their desks. He was shot by return fire from an officer he had mortally wounded, but the assailant survived. So much for “deadliest attack in two centuries,” or other hype like “deadly day,” used without mentioning that the only violent death was Ashli Babbit’s.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/biden_drifts_off_answering_a_question_during_cnns_town_hall_with_don_lemon_appears_to_listen_to_earpiece_to_get_out_of_incoherent_ramble.html

We’ve all seen this before, as has every leader of every country in the world.  A sitting president of the United States cannot put together a coherent answer to a simple question.  He pauses, appears puzzled, and then comes up with a string of words that appear to have entered his brain via an earpiece.  If the stakes weren’t so high, it would be comic.

Wednesday saw the president of the United States engage in a town hall–format discussion, on friendly territory, with Don Lemon moderating on CNN.  It must have been one of those “good days” that dementia-sufferers sometime enjoy — in Biden’s case, meaning no “lid” was called, removing the leader of the free world from public scrutiny.

(“Calling a lid” is an unprecedented admission that the POTUS is not in full command of his mental faculties and would have Democrats demanding that the 25th Amendment be invoked if a Republican were in office.  But Republicans are far too polite and far too scared of the media to make an issue of it with Biden.)

Even with the friendliest, least demanding moderator imaginable, Don Lemon, it was a challenge for President Joe Biden to get through the entire hour.  His handlers must have believed that with familiar questions and maybe a good earpiece helping him along, he could handle the challenge.

They were wrong

Asked an unchallenging question about 12-year-olds and vaccination, he drifted off in the middle of a sentence, and, as he so often does, looked down, got that Deliverance banjo player look on his face, and appeared to be listening to something in his earpiece, and then strung together a sequence of words that were not grammatically related to the rest of the sentence, but which, on their own, were coherent.  As if repeating what he just heard.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/served_its_purpose_cdc_and_fda_recall_faulty_covid_pcr_test.html

The FDA recalled a faulty COVID test that provided both false-negative and false-positive results, each problematic in different ways.

Last week, big media was salivating over the COVID Delta variant and recommendations for indoor masking, even for the vaccinated, masking young children, and the possibility of a return to last year, with social distancing, capacity limits, and business closures.

There were also news stories that the media dutifully ignored, like ongoing election audits, Hunter Biden’s laptop, his father’s growing inability to think and speak coherently, and growing inflation and unemployment.

Also somehow missed by the investigative sleuths at CNN and MSNBC was the recall of a COVID rapid antigen test last month. This wasn’t just any recall but according to the FDA a serious one, “The FDA has identified this as a Class I recall, the most serious type of recall. Use of these devices may cause serious injuries or death.” That’s an understatement.

Specifically, this is the Innova SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Qualitative Test using a nasal swab and test strip, with a colored line appearing if the person has the Chinese coronavirus. None of these tests are FDA-approved, only being used under emergency use authorization, like the COVID vaccines.

Who used these tests? According to the FDA, these were used by health care providers and large testing programs such as on college campuses. The faulty test provided both false-negative and false-positive results, each problematic but in different ways.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/the-incredible-lightness-of-ibram-x-kendis-anti-racism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

E zra Klein of the New York Times doesn’t usually do brutal takedowns on his podcasts, but his conversation with “anti-racism” guru Ibram X. Kendi is an exception.

Rarely has a sympathetic interview, or at least an overtly friendly interview, done more to expose the shallowness and bankruptcy of the interviewee’s worldview.

Kendi, who has become an industry unto himself, famously contends that any policy that creates a racial inequity, no matter what the intentions, is racism. This is a sophomoric and indefensible view that Klein punctures with a series of “how is this supposed to work?” questions.

The crux of the conversation is an exchange about crime and policing, a topic that would seem relatively simple — let’s get good, robust policing to make black neighborhoods safer — but that presents insuperable problems for Kendi given the absurdity of his premises.

Klein asks Kendi whether support for defunding the police would be an anti-racist policy.

Kendi tries to get around the question. He says that some people have believed that the cause of crime in black neighbors is black people — “it’s their culture, it’s their behavior.” According to his hostile caricature, this is why people believe that “you need police, well-funded police, who can basically control those animals because they’re the cause of crime.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-manchin-just-blew-up-rationale-for-republicans-to-cut-an-infrastructure-deal/

I’ve repeatedly written about how ridiculous and counterproductive it is for a group of Republicans to be negotiating a bipartisan deal on infrastructure with a Democratic Party that is racing to spend $4.1 trillion. But one argument that defenders of the negotiations have been making to conservatives is that if Republicans agree on a bipartisan deal, moderates such as Senator Joe Manchin will be more likely to oppose the larger Democrats-only $3.5 trillion bill crammed with liberal priorities. But now even that flimsy argument has blown up.

CNN’s Manu Raju reports the following on Manchin pushing for bipartisan talks to continue:

Get that? “If the bipartisan infrastructure bill falls apart, everything falls apart”

Far from supporting the theory that a bipartisan deal would dissuade Manchin from supporting the bigger bill, Manchin is making it clear that he thinks agreeing to a bipartisan deal is a critical part of passing the combined spending package. Were it to fall apart, instead of breaking the massive agenda into several smaller parts that may be digestible, moderates will have to consider swallowing a massive $4.1 trillion bill. Additionally, the process would no longer have any bipartisan cover.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/27/another-scheme-to-enlarge-an-already-bloated-federal-government/

If Democrats have their way, America will eventually form a Civilian Climate Corps that will hire and train people to save Earth from overheating. It’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from the party that is obsessed with being an unchallengeable ruling class rather than a participant in our republican style of government.

Last week, House and Senate Democrats celebrated “the newfound momentum behind establishing a formal successor to the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal-era initiative that put people to work building parks, paving roads and planting trees,” E&E News reported.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, promised to use the “power” of his position “to ensure that the Civilian Climate Corps will be included in the reconciliation package, and I will fight to get the biggest boldest CCC possible.”

As usual, the Democrats are having a mind-racing fever dream. In this one they are consumed by visions of spending billions of dollars that aren’t theirs, and sending out swarms of climate zealots to harass, lecture, and hector Americans over their use of fossil fuels. They’re likely seeing themselves solidifying a voter bloc so grateful for the party’s largess, and so indoctrinated by its growing socialist ideology, that it will help elect Democrats for generations. Never underestimate how power hungry the party is, nor how determined the progressive wing that’s driving its agenda is to transform the U.S. by perpetually adding layers of government control.

Simply put, the Democrats are looking to equip 1.5 million shock troops to enforce the Green New Deal.

Climate Corps advocates believe their agenda has a built-in appeal because it’s pulled right from the heart of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. But rather than establishing credibility, a comparison with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s governing should alert Americans to its inherent flaws. The New Deal was not a savior from the Great Depression but instead a constant piling up of government programs and private-sector interventions that extended the misery.

https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/p/nostalgia-of-the-wordsmiths?

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality”-

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes. 

An Émigré From Utopia

When I was a medical student, assigned to the surgical ward, I had an elderly Russian émigré patient, who underwent major abdominal surgery, followed by multiple bleeding episodes requiring more operations. He remained in the hospital a long time, during which we spent many hours together. He told me tales of Mother Russia, its people and his own hair-raising saga of survival. Since my own ancestors came from Russia, one step ahead of pogroms, I was naturally interested in his stories. To a young student living comfortably in America, these were real life, harrowing tales of narrow escapes from fanatical and blood thirsty revolutionaries bent on exterminating the old aristocracy, into which he’d been born. I’d read about such people in Joseph Conrad novels, but to meet an actual living, breathing one was fascinating. Among other things, he was unusually tolerant of pain and suffering, regarding this latest threat to his physical survival with equanimity; his attitude seemed to be “I have survived worse.” He had. He deeply loved America. When I asked him what he thought was the appeal of revolutionary Communism, he smiled as if he had given the question much thought, then replied: “nostalgia”. I have never forgotten that answer, though at the time I forgot to ask, “nostalgia for what?”. Now after 50 plus years of close observation of the human psyche, I think I know.

Many have wondered why the socialist dream remains seductive despite its failures in the real world. This is a psychological question since rational consideration of reality doesn’t change the minds of true believers.  Communism itself seemed to die ignominiously with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it survives now in nostalgic obituaries for long time Stalin defenders in the NYTimes. It lingers on editorial pages in the woke yearning for an unattainable equity in a state run by progressives who will eliminate all differences of ability, talent and biology in pursuit of a transformed human nature and a better world.

Paradise Lost

The engine driving the utopian dream is nostalgia for a lost fantasy of childhood and at the steering wheel are the wordsmith intellectuals. From philosophers like Rousseau, to Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Derrida, Herbert Marcuse, and today’s critical race theorists, intellectuals continue to yearn for a world of perfection—as defined, naturally, by wordsmiths themselves. We were all born innocent and corrupted by external forces like capitalism and the nuclear family.  

The late Robert Nozick, a wordsmith himself, raised the question: Why do intellectuals so often oppose capitalism? https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-do-intellectuals-oppose-capitalism. He suggested it was yearning for lost childhood. Specifically they were the boys and girls who received the currency of smiles and praise from teachers for their verbal ability. As they grew older they learned that our capitalist system does not value words as highly as they once were in the classroom. Outside the classroom, in the schoolyard your ability to hit a jump shot matters more than your ability to talk about it. Pleasing teachers may not get you far in the world outside the classroom. So these budding intellectuals use their skill with words to develop theories of how the bliss of early childhood can be regained along with the status they once enjoyed. Those theories overvalue words, treating them as arbiters of reality. Thus a word like gender is treated as more real than biological sex. In the utopian war on the reality of difference, words can be a potent weapon. As Joseph Conrad wrote in Under Western Eyes: “A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.” Can it destroy reality? We are finding out right now.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/07/wake-up-america-the-world-just-isnt-that-into-you/

Republicans, including many old friends, are outraged that the Biden administration gave up on sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that will pump Russian gas to Germany.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)—on whose foreign policy team I served during the 2016 campaign—declared that he would block Senate confirmation of all of Biden’s ambassadorial appointments until the sanctions are reinstated. Daniel Kochis of the Heritage Foundation titled his piece today, “The US will regret this shameful appeasement of Russia.”

Calm down, everyone. After Donald Trump imposed sanctions on firms laying the Nord Stream 2 pipe across the Baltic Sea, the Russians sent their own ship, and the work is finished. The Germans will go ahead regardless, so the least humiliating thing that Biden could do was to acknowledge reality and stand down.

No one in Europe really cares what Washington thinks about Nord Steam 2 (and a lot of other issues). Once upon a time, about five years ago, America was going to be the new Saudi Arabia, providing Europe with liquefied natural gas to replace Vladimir Putin’s product—at a higher price, to be sure, but wrapped in the blessings of liberty. Trump demanded that Europe eschew Russian gas and buy American LNG instead.

When Trump took office, the energy companies in the S&P 500 were devoting US$70 to $80 billion a year in capital expenditures. This year it will be about $20 billion, barely a quarter as much as the last peak, and analysts polled by Bloomberg put next year’s total at less than $30 billion, despite the strong recovery in energy prices. Natural gas production is down by about 10% from the 2019 peak, and oil production is down by 20%.

US oil rigs aren’t producing as much as promised.
The people with big jobs in Washington came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when America was the technological marvel of the world, and American inventions created the digital age. We haven’t done a lot lately except code some complicated software.