RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/author/joel-zinberg/

Progressives remain unconcerned with the eviction moratorium’s impact on small landlords.

Late last week the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a stay on a lower-court decision that struck down the Biden administration’s extension of the CDC’s nationwide eviction moratorium. Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed the Court’s decision was “cruel” and that it “immorally ripped away” tenant protections. But who is really cruel here? Neither Pelosi nor her progressive colleagues seem at all concerned about the plight of small landlords whose pandemic losses have been exacerbated by the moratorium combined with government ineptitude and indifference.

Yet, as the Court observed, “many landlords have modest means,” and millions of them around the country are “at risk of irreparable harm by depriving them of rent payments with no guarantee of eventual recovery.” A CBS Evening News story described one of them.

Brandie LaCasse, a veteran and single mother, has effectively been rendered homeless by tenants who refuse to leave her upstate New York house or pay rent. Despite more than $23,000 in arrears, LaCasse couldn’t evict her tenant because of federal and state eviction moratoriums. She and her daughter have been forced to live out of her car or stay with friends. Meanwhile, the tenant’s complaints about her own family’s health and financial travails make it clear that LaCasse is unlikely ever to collect any of the back the rent due.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/31/bidens-presidency-is-already-a-total-disaster-and-its-all-his-own-fault/

President Biden is not being swept along by the currents of history, he is turning every challenge he faces into crisis and disaster.

The first seven months of Joe Biden’s presidency have been fraught with crises. First it was the coronavirus pandemic and the vaccine rollout. Then it was the border crisis. Then it was the economy.

And now Afghanistan, where the Taliban are now reportedly hanging people by the neck from U.S.-supplied Blackhawk helicopters, and the U.S. withdrawal has left behind hundreds of Americans and perhaps thousands of Green Card holders in what now amounts to the largest hostage crisis in American history.

The administration is stumbling from one disaster to the next, with no end in sight and public opinion plummeting on nearly every major issue. In each case, the disaster has been entirely of the Biden administration’s own making. Events are not overtaking Biden, his own rank incompetence is.

(Just about the only disaster facing Biden right now that’s not a result of his administration’s policies is the hurricane slamming into the Gulf Coast. But there’s a decent chance he might well botch that, too.)

The events now unfolding in Afghanistan, where the Taliban control about $83 billion worth of U.S. military equipment, are by far the most dramatic and disturbing display of incompetency and horrible policy from the Biden administration, which recent polling reflects. But the Afghanistan disaster follows a train of incompetence that left the station on day one of this presidency.

As soon as Biden came into office, he signed executive orders that guaranteed we would have a migrant crisis on our southwest border. By reversing a raft of Trump-era policies that had managed to control illegal immigration amid a worsening pandemic, Biden effectively opened the borders, sending the message to would-be asylum seekers that if they could manage to get across the Rio Grande with at least one child in tow, they could stay — and if they sent their child alone, he or she would definitely stay.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/grim-rise-antivax-death-local-news-stories/

America is a porned-out society. Half of young men and a fifth of young women admit to viewing porn in the past week (millions more do so and then lie to pollsters about it). Prestige cable shows such as Game of Thrones built their popularity through a bevy of brazenly-displayed breasts. The best-selling book of the 2010s was an erotic BDSM novel; the second and third-place spots were taken by its sequels. And the concept of a quick, dirty, cheap high extends outside the domain of sex, which is why the world has food porn, architecture porn, and military porn.

And now, enter a new genre: COVID-19 death porn.

On Saturday, the Daytona Beach News-Journal noted the death of radio host Marc Bernier after a three-week battle with COVID. Bernier, the paper observed, was ‘an outspoken opponent of vaccinations’. The death of a local radio host might normally be a local story, but this one quickly went national. Many publications noted that Bernier was the third unvaccinated radio host to be stricken down in a single month, following fellow Floridian Dick Farrel and Tennessee veteran Phil Valentine.

Cockburn will concede that when a public figure stakes their life on a certain medical opinion and dies a preventable death as a result, the irony is enough to merit a news story. But he would be remiss if he didn’t observe that standards for this sort of thing seem a tad inconsistent. Losing weight is another entirely controllable way to reduce COVID risk, too, but the same publications that gloat over dead vaccine skeptics have published a Pravda’s worth of takes explaining that COVID-related fat shaming is not funny and not OK.

Plus, more than one article has lurched from an appreciation of public irony into thinly-disguised glee at the death of the unbelievers. A Sunday piece in the Hill with 40,000 Facebook shares absolutely glories in the demise of its subject, while also making it clear his real crimes weren’t vaccine-related at all:

‘Caleb Wallace, 30, who created the San Angelo Freedom Defenders, a group that held a rally to combat ‘COVID-19 tyranny’, died after spending more than a month in the hospital, according to a message posted by his wife, Jessica Wallace, on a GoFundMe page to raise money to cover his hospital bills.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/08/quisling-conservatives-and-the-implacable-left/

EXCERPTS- “It goes against the grain, but the sad fact is that civility is wasted on so-called progressives, who decline to respond in kind. Going along to get along, as did so many in lamenting Donald Trump’s abrasive vulgarity, brought us what exactly? A drooling fool in the Oval Office and all the failures now and to come that his handlers feed into the presidential TelePrompter”

I am not talking about those on the postmodern Left. Nothing can be expected of them but wall to wall dross. I am talking about commentators at various distances rightwards from the centre. They couldn’t help themselves. His policies were good but he was such a “braggard,” “liar,” “buffoon,” etc., etc. Relentlessly, on it went. And it added up.

Sure, players in Australia played only a small part, as did those in the UK and Europe, in tearing the man down. The main game was played out in America. Nevertheless, every bit contributed. Are we about to hear abject mea culpas from those who played their part in giving America a president so mentally unfit for office it defies belief? Don’t hold your breath. Almost all, if not all, of the snipers are know-it-alls.

I didn’t find Trump’s demeanour the least offensive. Was he different? Of course, he was. Without his gigantic personality, reflected in his self-belief, called narcissism by some, how could he ever have survived being dumped upon each minute of every day.

How could he have ever moved the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and forged pacts between Israel and numbers of its neighbouring Arab countries? How could he have let loose oil and gas exploration in this time of morbid climate hysteria? Slashed job-killing taxes and regulations. Started building that wall without congressional support? No other Republic president could have done those things. Think of Bush senior and junior.

Those who position themselves right of centre need to take a grip. They’ve already played their part in ridding us of a unique and powerful champion and given us a drooling fool as a replacement. A first step towards redemption is to admit culpability. Join a self-help group for quisling conservatives.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/30/cnn-confirms-biden-administration-is-bringing-afghan-refugees-to-the-u-s-with-no-paperwork-or-vetting/

The Biden Administration’s hasty extraction of Afghan refugees to the United States has been so rushed and so sloppy that many are arriving into the country with no documentation to confirm who they even are, Breitbart reports.

Even CNN’s coverage of the debacle confirms the lack of preparation and failure to properly vet refugees. Sources from within the evacuation process told CNN that the goal of the Biden Administration has been to “get as many people on the plane as you can, and we’ll sort out the [paperwork] stuff later.” The same sources added that “some people have landed with no documents whatsoever, creating a very challenging work environment for the officers.”

Many of these planes are bringing such unvetted refugees to the Dulles International Airport in Virginia, resettling them in the United States. Sources from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that while they are occasionally able to identify some individuals without any paperwork, the sheer amount of refugees pouring in have made the process “just a math game” that may or may not yield any results. This has led to the chances of importing terrorists “higher and higher,” according to the DHS source.

Last week, Pentagon officials confirmed that roughly 100 of the 7,000 Afghan refugees imported to the U.S. “as prospective recipients” of the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program had been flagged as “potential matches to intelligence agency watch lists” for terrorism suspects. NBC further confirmed that there had been multiple cases of Afghan refugees attempting to board planes to the United States using stolen or fraudulent American passports.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17708/nations-character-failed-leadership

If anyone in the White House or its circling Obama attendants were conscious of history, they would recognize that political will, courage, and integrity forever define the character of nations. Consider the actions of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who, when faced with a devastating military defeat in France, gave his military his full support in accomplishing the miracle of Dunkirk.

And what is less known is that of the 338,000 men evacuated by British ships of all sizes were 100,000 French allies…. One can just imagine how America’s leading military men would have responded to Biden’s directives to abandon allies and weapons to the sworn enemies of democracy and freedom.

This President will have much to answer for as history records his catastrophic failure in how we left Afghanistan. The coming summary executions, the destruction of women’s rights, where even the joy of dancing is forbidden, will be as much part of the Biden legacy as the billions in sophisticated American military equipment now part of the Taliban arsenal.

Perhaps not since 1939, when this nation turned away over 900 German Jews seeking refuge from Nazi terror and certain death, has an American president acted as shamelessly as we approach President Biden’s unilateral deadline for evacuating our Afghan allies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/how-911-terrorists-got-here-terence-p-jeffrey/

The commercial aircraft that al-Qaida terrorists flew into the twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001 — killing 2,977 people — did not take off from some foreign land before flying toward targets here in the United States.

They were all domestic flights that took off from American cities and were headed toward American cities.

American Airlines Flight 11, which struck the north tower of the World Trade Center, took off from Boston and was heading to Los Angeles.

United Airlines Flight 175, which struck the south tower of the World Trade Center, also took off from Boston and was heading to Los Angeles.

American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon, took off from Northern Virginia and was heading to Los Angeles.

United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, took off from Newark and was heading to San Francisco.

Almost three years after the 2001 attacks, the staff of the national commission that Congress created by statute to investigate the event published a report on “9/11 and Terrorist Travel.”

This report began by making a fundamental point: “It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country.”

We let the hijackers in. But did they come here legally? Did they follow our visa and immigration laws? Not according to this 9/11 Commission staff report.

“The story begins with ‘A Factual Overview of the September 11 Border Story,'” says the preface to the report. “In it, we endeavor to dispel the myth that their entry into the United States was ‘clean and legal.’ It was not.”

“Three hijackers carried passports with indicators of Islamic extremism linked to al Qaeda; two others carried passports manipulated in a fraudulent manner,” the report explained. “It is likely that several more hijackers carried passports with similar fraudulent manipulation. Two hijackers lied on their visa applications. Once in the United States, two hijackers violated the terms of their visas. One overstayed his visa. And all but one obtained some form of state identification. We know that six of the hijackers used these state issued identifications to check in for their flights on September 11. Three of them were fraudulently obtained.”

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/inside-the-underground-railroad-out?token=e

On Saturday night I had just sat down to have a drink with a friend when he got a call. He apologized for having to take it, but it was urgent: it was about the Afghan women’s orchestra. They were stuck in Kabul and desperate to get out. He was involved in the effort to extract them.

Twenty minutes later, we ordered another martini. 

I’ve been thinking a lot these past two weeks about luck. The luck of where we are born. The luck of the parents we are born to. And, right now, the luck of who we know.

Knowing — or having proximity to someone who knows my well-placed friend, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — is a matter of life or death for untold numbers of Afghans. 

Listen to the plea of just one of them:

The question of who will live and who will die — part of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer that all Jews say on the high holy days, which are just around the corner — is supposed to be in the hands of God. But right now, for so many Afghans, the answer to that question is in the hands of the Taliban. The chance to live relies on Americans: those who have the luck to live in freedom and those who are determined to right what the Biden administration has gotten so horribly wrong.

Melissa Chen is one of those people.

Melissa co-founded an organization called Ideas Beyond Borders, which digitizes and translates English books and articles into Arabic. And not just any books: Books like Orwell’s ‘“Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now,” and a graphic novel based on John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Works that promote reason, pluralism and liberty. Suffice it to say the translators she works with in places like Egypt, Syria and Iraq do so at great risk.

Because of her connections in the Middle East — and because she is the kind of person who lives by her principles — it did not surprise me that she found herself involved in the efforts to save Afghans from the horrors of the Taliban. She shares some of the details of those remarkable efforts in the essay below.