RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-biden-asleep-wheel-cop26-glasgow/

Did Joe Biden fall asleep during the opening speeches of the COP26 climate jamboree in Glasgow? It’s hard to blame him if he did. A conference dedicated to saving the planet is generating nothing but hot air, some of it carboniferously heavy with the exhaust of the armada of private jets that brought the guests. But it’s Biden’s job to stay awake, look lively and remember his lines.

The footage shows a frail man who’s jetlagged, pushing eighty and trying his best to absorb the torrent of heated eco-bilge that’s being pumped into his ears. But he’s only human. The presidential eyelids start to flutter as a speaker pleads “on behalf of everyone, disabled and non-disabled…to stop the destruction of this magnificent planet.” Biden gives a desperate, hostage-like look at the camera, but there’s no way out. The shutters are coming down. Soon, the president of the United States is heading down, down, down to the Land of Nod.

Yet again, the president’s feebleness is there for the world to see — or not. On Friday, Biden became the first American president in living memory not to go live before the cameras with the Pope. Was it because they’ve fallen out over abortion — or because Biden’s team didn’t want a jetlagged president to embarrass himself and his nation?

Meanwhile, “poopy pants Biden” trended on Twitter after Amy Tarkanian, the former chairwoman of the Republican party of Nevada, suggested that “the word around Rome” was that Biden’s private audience had to be extended because the president had suffered a “bathroom accident” in the pontiff’s presence.

These allegations cannot be substantiated without producing the presidential pants, but their tone shows how close Biden’s public appearances are to low comedy, and how quickly he has soiled his image in the American public’s estimation. He is underwater in the polls, his agenda is stalled in Congress, and when he does eventually appear in public, he blames everyone else.

The putative leader of the West is missing in inaction. On Sunday, after the G20 summit in Rome, the leaders of nineteen G20 states lined up for a photo at the Trevi Fountain. Only Joe Biden wasn’t there.

https://www.city-journal.org/att-racial-reeducation-program

AT&T Corporation has created a racial reeducation program that promotes the idea that “American racism is a uniquely white trait” and boosts left-wing causes such as “reparations,” “defund police,” and “trans activism.”

I have obtained a cache of internal documents about the company’s initiative, called Listen Understand Act, which is based on the core principles of critical race theory, including “intersectionality,” “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility.” CEO John Stankey launched the program last year and, subsequently, has told employees that private corporations such as AT&T have an “obligation to engage on this issue of racial injustice” and push for “systemic reforms in police departments across the country.”

According to a senior employee, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, managers at AT&T are now assessed annually on diversity issues, with mandatory participation in programs such as discussion groups, book clubs, mentorship programs, and race reeducation exercises. White employees, the source said, are tacitly expected to confess their complicity in “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” or they will be penalized in their performance reviews. As part of the overall initiative, employees are asked to sign a loyalty pledge to “keep pushing for change,” with suggested “intentions” such as “reading more about systemic racism” and “challenging others’ language that is hateful.” “If you don’t do it,” the senior employee says, “you’re [considered] a racist.” AT&T did not respond when asked for comment. 

On the first page of AT&T’s Listen Understand Act internal portal, the company encourages employees to study a resource called “White America, if you want to know who’s responsible for racism, look in the mirror.” The article claims that the United States is a “racist society” and lays out its thesis plainly: “White people, you are the problem. Regardless of how much you say you detest racism, you are the sole reason it has flourished for centuries.” The author, Dahleen Glanton, writes that “American racism is a uniquely white trait” and that “Black people cannot be racist.” White women, she claims, “have been telling lies on black men since they were first brought to America in chains,” and, along with their white male counterparts, “enjoy the opportunities and privileges that white supremacy affords [them].”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/31/who-eventually-won-the-cold-war/

Pause for a minute to recall the recent past: Did the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unlawfully intervene in the chain of command to reroute decisions of nuclear weapon readiness through himself? Did he really contact his Chinese Communist counterpart to promise him that China would be warned of possible U.S. aggression? 

Did the lead medical authority on America’s COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, deny under oath the fact that he routed U.S. aid money, through a third party, to the ground-zero Wuhan virology lab to enhance gain-of-function viral research? 

Did Attorney General Merrick Garland sic the FBI on parents complaining about critical race theory—on the concocted accusation from a school board group, in part cooked up with White House staffer help, that the parents were likely “domestic terrorists”? 

Did we really spend 22 months and $40 million chasing the “Russian collusion” hoax, a myth ginned up by the left-wing media and its enablers in the FBI and CIA? 

Does the public really believe our current ministry of information that the “border is closed”? Or that high gas prices are good? Or that empty shelves reflect strong demand and will result in a more mature public no longer needing to buy superfluous goods? 

Or that spiraling inflation is proof of a strong economy? Or that the road to the Kabul airport was open to anyone with a U.S. passport who wished to leave? Or that the accidental U.S. drone killing of a family in Kabul was a “righteous strike”?

Or that Russians and Trump operatives created a fake lost Hunter Biden laptop, as our former intelligence officials implied on the eve of the election? 

Since when did the government and the now state media issue such serial lies? When did we begin to resemble our old Cold War enemies—to the delight of our current enemies?

Commissars and Culturalists

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/30/low-characters-in-ludicrous-situations/

Reflecting on the unfolding disaster that is our social and political life in the United States during the consulship of Biden, I cannot help but think of Aristotle’s description of the structure of Greek tragedy. Obviously, the parallels are not exact. For one thing, tragedy as Aristotle understood it was a quick affair, its action over within a single day. Our national tragedy, by contrast, seems to lumber on indefinitely. 

Then there is the question of the character of the protagonist. Aristotle’s chap is “a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.” Sound like Joe Biden? Almost, maybe, but not really. Rudy Giuliani was not talking through his hat when he invoked the specter of the “Biden crime family,” as the words “laptop,” “China,” and “10 percent for the big guy” remind us. 

There are many other differences between tragedy in Aristotle’s sense and the disaster we are suffering through. Still, when I think about the development Aristotle traces from ἁμαρτία (the tragic flaw) through ἀναγνώρισις (recognition) to περιπέτεια (the sudden reversal of fortune) to καταστροφή, the “catastrophe” that ties up the loose ends and consummates the action, I think “We’re somewhere on that road,” though exactly where is hard to say. Have we achieved the enlightenment of recognition yet? I am not at all sure about that. 

Signs of the sudden reversal of fortune are all around us, though evidence of any impending catharsis (κάθαρσις) is exceedingly meager. Why? Perhaps it’s because the emotions through which the purgation is supposed to take place are not yet fully present and accounted for. Aristotle said that the emotions of pity (ἔλεος) and fear (φόβος) are the motors of tragic fulfillment. My sense is that there is plenty of fear abroad. Pity? Not so much. (Although, thinking about it, maybe there is plenty of pity around us, too. “Pity,” Aristotle says in the Rhetoric, “may be defined as a feeling of pain at an apparent evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves . . . and moreover to befall us soon.”) 

At the end of the day, though, I wonder whether we’re caught in a tragedy at all. I have no doubt that we are hurtling towards a catastrophe (in the Greek sense) that will be, well, catastrophic (in the modern sense). But Aristotle insists that tragedy is about grave matters and noble characters. Comedy, he says, is about low or mean characters and trades in the ludicrous or ridiculous. Isn’t that where we are now? Have we embarked on a new genre, featuring low characters in ludicrous situations who ultimately come, and bring everyone around them, to a disastrous end? Or perhaps it is not so new, but is just the “dark” or “black” comedy that elite opinion, which likes to smirk but hates happy endings, so loves to wallow in? 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/bidens_weird_weekend_in_rome.html

Biden’s weekend in Rome took on an increasingly surreal quality as the weekend progressed. The weirdness started on Saturday when he arrived with an 85-car entourage to attend a G20 summit that was purportedly focused on “climate change” (or, more likely, focused on using climate change to increase political power), followed by Biden’s marginalized status for the group photo op. By Sunday, Biden missed an important photo op, claimed he was playing elevator games, used a reference to Mussolini while in Rome, may have been a COVID carrier when he met with the Pope, and had an ugly rumor following him.

After almost vanishing from Saturday’s photo op, Biden vanished entirely from Sunday’s photo op at Rome’s famous Trevi fountain. There they all were, tossing coins in the fountain to placate pagan gods (and hoping that Gaia heard their pleas regarding climate change) but, unlike yesterday, when a “Where’s Waldo” style search eventually located Biden, this time he was nowhere to be seen:

The White House offered no excuse (so far as I know) for Biden’s absence.

So, he missed a photo op. That’s a “whatever,” right? Maybe, but how do we explain the other strange stuff?

There’s the footage of Biden introducing Secretary of State Blinken. The first thing you’ll notice is Biden’s barely-there delivery, as if he’s someone who doesn’t speak English and is reading the words phonetically. But what really caught everyone’s attention was that reference to getting the trains to run on time.