RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/americas-gender-warriors-in-a-deal-with-the-devil/

In a 1935 radio play, a man dies in a car accident and finds himself in a palatial home where a butler fulfills his every wish for wealth, women and so forth. The man (acted by Colin Clive, the first movie Dr. Frankenstein) cannot bear what he takes for Heaven, and tells his butler, “I want to suffer…I’m sick of Heaven…I can’t stand this confounded everlasting bliss…Well, whatever the devils do to me can’t be as bad as this. I want to go to Hell!”

The butler replies, “Why sir— wherever do you think you are? This is Hell, sir!”

America has turned into Hell — not the Hell of Christian theology, to be sure, but the real Hell in which the satisfaction of narcissistic desire drives the damned into ever more intense misery.

The playwright, John Balderston, wrote the 1931 film “Dracula” and other scripts in the horror genre. In 1960 Charles Beaumont, another genre writer, adapted Balderston’s playlet as an episode of The Twilight Zone. The theme derives from Goethe’s “Faust,” which in turn borrows from the biblical Book of Job.

The biblical Satan tormented Job by taking away what he needed, while the modern devil torments Faust by offering him whatever he wants.

Goethe’s protagonist rejects the devil’s blandishments, eschewing the “gold that runs through my fingers like quicksilver, a game that no-one wins, a girl who ogles my neighbor while I embrace her, honor that disappears like a falling star.”

Today’s Americans have taken the devil’s deal. As Faust told Mephistopheles, he is damned once he tries to hang on to the devil’s passing moment of pleasure. The Americans make a lifestyle out of it, and are just as miserable as the Colin Clive character in Balderston’s fantasy.   

Balderston and Beaumont wrote horror fiction, but not in their darkest imaginings could they have invented the tortures that the devil inflicts on the young people of the West today.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/race-demagogues-are-poisoning-our-politics/

Our racial problem is getting worse, even as we strive as a nation to marginalize racism.
S enator Tim Scott is entirely right: “America is not a racist country.” But America has a serious racial problem. Not a racism problem, a racial problem.

We have a party in power whose strategy for remaining in power is to divide the country along racial lines. Democrats calculate that urban-centered racialist tribalism, amplified by media and pop-culture allies and underwritten by cowed corporations, can cast mainstream America as a deplorable bastion of white supremacism.

The Republicans, the party out of power, generally lack Senator Scott’s confidence and tact in making the counter-case.

The Department of Justice is a key to the Democrats’ strategy. The Obama-Biden administration politicized the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of our government, peddling with relish the progressive portrayal of an indelibly racist America. They’re ba-ack.

Any good agitprop scheme needs a villain. In the Left’s scheme, the nation’s police fit the bill. The scheme also has an abracadabra element: “disparate impact” theory, which conjures proof of “systemic racism” out of thin air.

The Justice Department is critical because the scheme needs the might of the federal government to impose the non-enforcement approach of progressive “policing” on the whole country. This is exactly the opposite of the way the system is supposed to work.

According to our founding framework, the states are responsible for governing their internal affairs. The Constitution would never have been adopted were it not for the principles of federalism. Nothing is more internal, more close to home, than ensuring law and order so that our neighborhoods can enjoy community, security, and prosperity.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/dershowitz-fbis-raid-of-giuliani-unconstitutional_3798677.html

The FBI’s recent raid on an apartment owned by Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, violated the Constitution, according to constitutional expert Alan Dershowitz.

“This was just a misuse of the search and seizure power. Initially, it was turned down; now it was approved, both by a judge and by the attorney general of the United States, so it wasn’t lawless action, but I believe that they acted inconsistently with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution and that there should be remedies for it,” Dershowitz said on Newsmax on Saturday.

“It should be done through subpoena, and that is the constitutional route to getting evidence,” he added.

A search warrant being executed points to officials believing the subject would destroy evidence if the search was not carried out. But the lawyer knew that he was being investigated for months, so there’s no basis for a search unless a subpoena was obtained, Dershowitz argued.

“The 4th Amendment demands a subpoena in these situations, not a search warrant. What they did in this case was unconstitutional,” he said.

Agents obtaining information that is covered by attorney-client privilege would taint prosecutors who may try to prosecute Giuliani, Dershowitz added, saying that he has advised Giuliani’s lawyers on a pro-bono basis to move to get the material back, have the government subjected to subpoena analysis, and force anybody who goes over the material to be from outside the prosecutor’s office, such as a judge.

Maybe you didn’t believe me earlier this month when I issued a warning that the U.S. was “getting ready to go full Venezuela” on economic policy. After Biden’s speech a couple of nights ago, are you starting to get the picture?

All constraints are now lifted. All limits no longer apply. The federal government is now fully unleashed to solve all human problems and bring about perfect fairness and equity in human affairs. And to do so immediately if not sooner. All through the magic of a few trillion additional dollars (per year!) of federal spending. And while we’re at it, we’ll also solve the “climate emergency.” That will cost just another few incremental annual trillion. In the context of our new superpowers, that’s a rounding error.

The flood of proposed new programs and spending is so enormous as to make critiques of any individual items completely pointless. Is there a single one of these proposals that makes sense, or that actually might enhance the well-being of the American people? If so it’s such a small portion as to be insignificant.

Instead, I’ll address what I consider to be the elephant in the room, the obvious thing that somehow never gets mentioned. That is, why haven’t the vast numbers of already-existing federal social service programs and spending already succeeded in solving the problems they were created and funded to solve?

At the end of this post I have included a list of some 83 categories of federal “need based” spending programs. The list comes from a 2018 report by John Early written for the Cato Institute, but he took it from a document put together by the Congressional Research Service in 2013. In other words, I’m sure that there are plenty more of these things since this list was compiled. Note also that this is far, far, far from a complete list of federal income and in-kind distribution and benefit programs, since it specifically only includes those that are “need based.” Thus the list doesn’t even include the single largest federal income distribution program of all, which is Social Security. Aficionados of this subject will also recognize that large numbers of food and nutrition programs and job training programs are also missing, undoubtedly because they are not “need based.” (In this post back in 2014 I found a study that identified some 47 federal job training programs alone.).

Note that the Early list is broken down into two categories, those programs that figure “at least partially in CBO estimates” and those that are “not in CBO estimates.” The “estimates” referred to are estimates of income. The list of what CBO includes in “income” for its purposes differs from what is included by Census. The Census numbers, rather than those of CBO, are the source of things like our statistics on “poverty” and “income inequality.” Unlike CBO, Census does not include 5 of those first 7 categories in “income” in its measures. The excluded 5 are the EITC, SNAP, Medicaid, CHIP and the School Breakfast Program. If you wonder how the spending of a trillion dollars plus per year never seems to improve poverty or income inequality, this is how. The spending is simply excluded when the things we are trying to improve are measured.