Gen. Milley Won’t Stop Russia From Retrieving U.S. Drone Wreckage The profiles in courage just keep coming. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/gen-milley-wont-stop-russia-from-retrieving-u-s-drone-wreckage/

The profiles in courage just keep coming.

Three U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence said the highest levels of the Kremlin approved the aggressive actions of Russian military fighter jets against a U.S. military drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday.

The Russian jets dropped jet fuel on the MQ-9 Reaper, an unprecedented action, and two of the officials said the intelligence suggests the intent seemed to be to throw the drone off course or disable its surveillance capabilities.

It was “Russian leadership’s intention to be aggressive in the intercept,” said one of the officials.

Russia then followed that up by announcing it was going to retrieve the wreckage to count coup and gain whatever intel they liked.

Russia will attempt to retrieve and study the wreckage of the American MQ-9 drone that crashed into the Black Sea after being harassed by Russian fighter jets.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, told Rossiya-1 TV on Wednesday that he was not certain the drone could be extricated from the water.

Gen. Milley is on the case though.

Leftist Gestapo Tries to Suffocate Charlie Kirk’s Voice at UC Davis “Progressive” Brown Shirts come out in full force. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/leftist-gestapo-tries-to-suffocate-charlie-kirks-voice-in-california/

“Another far-right speaker is coming to UC Davis. How should the community respond?” read the headline on a March 14 Sacramento Bee opinion piece by the Bee’s “opinion assistant” Hannah Holzer,  and UC Davis graduate.

The speaker is a “vocal transphobe and Donald Trump fanatic,” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Kirk’s visit is “upsetting and unwelcome, especially in light of nationwide attacks on the transgender community and on broader LGBTQ+ rights.” In addition, UC Davis has an “abysmal history” of public events that have gone wrong.

In 2011, cops were “pepper spraying students” but Holzer fails to recall that those students were protesting tuition hikes by University of California bosses. Holzer quotes UC Davis English professor Joshua Clover, who has “been targeted by TPUSA, in a recent op-ed for the university’s newspaper.” The Sacramento Bee opinion assistant fails to provide the back story.

In 2019, convicted criminal Kevin Limbaugh gunned down Natalie Corona, 22, a rising star in the Davis police department. The community hailed Corona as a hero and thousands of people, including police officers from across the country, attended a memorial service for the slain officer.

A photo of Corona holding the “thin blue line” flag went viral on social media. The UC Davis campus Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission proclaimed, “this flag represents an attempt by law enforcement to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Professor Clover, who moonlights as Communist poet, was “thankful that every living cop will one day be dead, some by their own hand, some by others, too many of old age.” 

The Murder of the Humanities The “woke” purveyors of “boots are better than Shakespeare” now occupy our universities. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-murder-of-the-humanities/

For nearly 50 years the “humanities,” those courses in higher education that focus on the liberal arts, have been in crisis. This important front in the culture wars recently saw a brief skirmish touched off by a New Yorker article about the last days of the English major. But such analyses are in fact obituaries. The “woke” purveyors of “boots are better than Shakespeare” philistinism have finished their march through the institutions and now occupy our universities. Liberal education, the passing on of the “best that is known and thought,” survives only in a few scattered outposts.

Most of the assaults have come from the political and cultural Left and its more recent guise in the “woke” tribunes who have rebranded the old multicultural, identity victim-politics founded on the Leninist principle, “who whom”–– who is the oppressor, who is the oppressed. We all know the answer: Western civilization and all its works, including its fine arts and “great books,” which are mere “epiphenomena,” as the Marxiste village explainers put it, of the hegemonic ideologies, values, “truths,” “facts,” and “narratives,” all the “hidden persuaders” who exploit the “false consciousness” of the masses.

Onto this dubious and question-begging explanation for the success of capitalism and liberal democracies, Cultural Marxism grafted “identity politics,” the reduction of people’s complex, undetermined humanity, to the superficial characteristics of color and “race,” and to “culture,” one that, particularly in the case of Americans, is fabricated from fake history or crude stereotypes. As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut writes,

“Like the racists before them, contemporary fanatics of cultural identity confine individuals to their group of origin. Like them, they carry differences to the absolute extreme, and in the name of the multiplicity of specific causes destroy any possibility of a natural or cultural community among peoples.”

It follows, then, that the cultural artifacts of one ethnicity are incompatible with those of another. Standards of excellence are inherently racist and oppressive, for they invidiously exclude those of the marginalized “other,” whose history of racist, sexist, and xenophobic oppression and exclusion is thus erased.

House Oversight Committee has ‘documents that show just exactly how the Biden family was getting money from the Chinese Communist Party’ By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/house_oversight_

Documentary proof of an American president getting paid off by our greatest strategic rival, if not enemy, is no small matter.

James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, said some pretty important things yesterday, appearing on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News Channel.  Despite being stonewalled by Janet Yellen over release of Suspicious Activity Reports from banks about Hunter Biden’s transactions, he has gotten evidence about Biden family receipt of money from the CCP.

What encourages me about his revelation is that there now are key forces within the Democrat establishment (which includes the legacy media) that see Joe Biden as a problem to be removed.  His worsening dementia is becoming impossible to hide, and his (really Dr. Jill’s?) determination to run for re-election seems likely to doom not only the presidential prospects of the party, but its congressional prospects as well.

A wipeout, especially if either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis were to occupy the Oval Office with congressional majorities, could lead to doom for the party if it results in exposure of its mendacity.  Both men play for keeps with their opponents.

With this in mind, consider what he told Maria (text and videos via Vivek Saxena of Bizpac Review):

“We’ve had a very good two weeks. We are finally having people cooperate with us. I think we all know the Biden administration is stone-walling. Janet Yellen is stonewalling, not turning over the bank violations,” he replied.

“But fortunately, since we’ve last spoken, we actually have bank records in hand. We have individuals who are working with our community,” he added.

Bro-Bank Blues It’s easy to blame an out-of-control-tech sector for recent financial failures, but Washington created the monster. Nicole Gelinas

https://www.city-journal.org/silicon-valley-bank-who-is-to-blame

Last year, when FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried lost control of the massive cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme he had allegedly created, he ran home to mom and dad. A federal judge granted him bail on the multiple criminal charges he faces after his professor parents promised to keep an eye on their mischievous boy in their Palo Alto house. Now, all of move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley is running home to mom and dad because the Valley actually broke something that it needed. The only thing keeping hundreds of start-ups, as well as some more established tech firms, afloat right now is the fact that the federal government has bailed out all large depositors in the West Coast tech industry’s favored financial institution, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). This state of affairs seems ironic, but it’s not. The trillions in easy money the federal government has pumped into the economy since the 2008 financial crisis in turn created the undisciplined tech sector.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last Friday isn’t particularly interesting. A financial institution created 40 years ago to serve the emerging California tech world, SVB failed for the same reason that failed banks typically fail: it borrowed short-term, taking in money from depositors, and lent long-term. This strategy works—all banks do it—but SVB took it too far, too fast, with zero room for error. The bank’s deposits had tripled in just four years, the Financial Times reported, to nearly $200 billion. The bank took advantage of its status as being just under the threshold for heightened federal regulation to take enormous risk. It invested its short-term deposits—that is, money that customers could withdraw at any time from their checking and savings accounts—in long-term Treasury bonds, at a time when doing so was dangerous. The Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates, meaning that the value of older Treasury bonds issued at lower interest rates—the bonds that SVB held—was falling.

There’s No Liar Like A Biden

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/16/theres-no-liar-like-a-biden/

How do we know when Joe Biden is lying? When he says he gives us his word as a Biden. But that’s not the only time he spins a whopper. He says something untrue quite regularly, the most recent instance a tall tale about his “epiphany” regarding gay marriage.

When asked about his “evolution on marriage equality” during an interview on Monday night’s “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, Biden radically revised his personal history so that he would appear to have been woke for more than a half century. Our president (how did such a thing ever happen?) said he “hadn’t thought much about” same-sex marriage until his “senior in high school.” But one day as his father was dropping him off, he saw “two well-dressed men in suits” kiss each other.

“I mean they give each other a kiss. … And I’ll never forget, I turned, looked at my dad, he said ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other. It’s simple.’ No, I’m not joking. ‘It’s simple. They love each other.’  … It doesn’t matter whether it’s, whether it’s same-sex, or heterosexual couples should be able to be married. What is the problem?”

Here, thanks to PJ Media’s Matt Margolis, is the truth behind another pathological lie from the “Big Guy”:

So Biden claimed he had his epiphany on same-sex marriage as a teenager, yet, in 1973, during his first year in the U.S. Senate, Joe Biden opposed homosexuals working in the federal government, insisting they were a security risk. ‘My gut reaction is that they [homosexuals] are security risks,’ he said, ‘but I must admit I haven’t given this much thought … I’ll be darned!’ He would later support Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy concerning gays in the military, in 1993, and voted in favor of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. In fact, Biden defended his vote on DOMA years later and argued that the issue of same-sex marriage should be left to the states. … As vice president, he even opposed civil unions for same-sex couples.

Biden Administration’s Delusional Plan to Combat Palestinian Terrorism by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19491/combat-palestinian-terrorism

[T]he Biden Administration officials recently proposed a plan “to provide 5,000 Palestinians with commando training in Jordan” and then deploy them to areas under the control of the PA. The 5,000 officers will bring with them 5,000 rifles to Palestinian cities and towns — where almost every Palestinian already has a weapon.

Any time the US has funded, armed and trained Palestinian militias, the target has invariably ended up not terrorist groups but Israelis. Why is there any reason to think that this time will be different?

In addition, the plan would require Israel “to sharply curtail IDF counterterror operations.” The Biden administration, in other words, wants Israel to stop defending itself and rely on the Palestinian leadership and the new Palestinian “commandos” to go after the terrorists. Palestinian officials, meanwhile, are busy glorifying terrorism and paying visits to the families of terrorists.

This would leave the Israelis with the rights to neither self-defense nor hot-pursuit. Terrorists will be able strike inside Israel, then run back to the Palestinian areas where they will be “home free;” instead of being arrested, they will be celebrated.

The Biden plan also reportedly “foresees the deployment of foreign forces, including U.S. military forces, on the ground.”

Israel, roughly the size of New Jersey, would have on its border a Palestinian terrorist army, well-trained, well-funded, and “protected” by a superpower.

[The Israelis] would find themselves in the impossible position of risking harming the Europeans and Americans forces stationed there. These troops, mingled among the Palestinians, would essentially be “human shields,” deliberately placed in harm’s way to prevent Israel from taking any action.

What, then, is the Biden Administration really doing?

An international military presence to help the Palestinians in the West Bank would handcuff the Israelis. This appears to be the real plan.

Worse, if “foreign countries” were allowed into the West Bank to work with the new US-trained Palestinian militias, who would get to decide which foreign countries?

Or perhaps the US will try to persuade the Palestinians to reintegrate Gaza, run by Hamas, an Iranian proxy, into the West Bank, as the US Department of State’s new Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, Hady Amr, recommended in his Brookings report?

Massive Abuses of Government Power: Urgent Reform Needed of Data Privacy and Collection by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19490/data-privacy-collection

[T]he NSA’s surveillance network “has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic”… the NSA, working with the FBI, engaged in the bulk collection of phone records of U.S. citizens’ phone records. Other programs may allow for data collection from Google, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms. These are the alleged capabilities that have been leaked to the media and government watchdog groups. One can only imagine what the federal government’s more secretive and advanced programs might be capable of collecting.

We also must consider data collected by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and from our constellation of spy satellites.

Then there are the other federal security and surveillance agencies such as the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service, to name but a few.

[I]t is time for Congress to fully update the laws surrounding data collection and privacy. This also would give us the ability to see what still works, determine best practices to protect American security and civil liberties, and to end the things that do not — especially those that leave open a backdoor for abuse.

[W]e must examine whether the government has deferred to the rights of American citizens, or has utilized perceived openings to expand its reach and power.

Law enforcement has acted in a way that enhances its capabilities and erodes the rights of American citizens. Three examples include the FBI’s use of Section 215, where the FBI can get secret court orders for business records.

A second example is the use given the FBI of National Security Letters (NSLs). These can be issued by the FBI without a court order. The use of NSLs has expanded massively. In 2000, about 8,500 NSLs were issued. From 2003-2006 that number increased to 192,000. “Sneak and peek” warrants are also now being used more extensively. Without any notification, these allow law enforcement to raid and search someone’s home and computers, among other private property. The target may not be notified of the search for months.

In an investigation involving conservative attorney Victoria Toensing, the FBI used the sneak and peek authorization to gain access to personal records without notifying her, even though she was not a target of any investigation. After 18 months, the Justice Department notified her the case was being closed without ever identifying who was being investigated or even what the issue being investigated was.

With the advent of new technologies, and passage of legislation after 9/11 that possibly has not aged well, the legal framework protecting American citizens’ rights has been shredded. It seems abundantly clear that our government at multiple levels likely abused its powers, and the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization has a tremendous opportunity to set things right.

Recently the U.S. House of Representatives created the new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Congressman Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio. There are at least three areas where this Subcommittee needs to do extensive research. They include but are not limited to:

The scope and extent of the information that the various federal government agencies collect and store.
The restrictions and their effectiveness that are built into the process to protect the rights of American citizens.
Evidence that government policies may have been broken and individuals or organizations may have been targeted inappropriately by the federal government.

In FBI Case, the First Amendment Takes Another Bizarre Hit The same Democratic minority staff that trashed the First Amendment in last week’s Twitter Files hearings put something amazing in writing in a parallel case Matt Taibbi

https://www.racket.news/p/in-fbi-case-the-first-amendment-takes

Racket readers may recall that in November, shortly before the Twitter Files began, I ran an interview with Steve Friend, a onetime FBI agent who lost his career after blowing the whistle on the Bureau.

Friend refused to participate in a bureaucratic scheme to put local agents across the country in charge of J6 cases that were really being run out of the Washington office, a plan that made one Washington-based case look like a national map full of domestic terror cases popping up everywhere. He also objected to heavy-handed tactics like the use of S.W.A.T. teams for a suspect communicating voluntarily through an attorney, and the questioning of people in connection with J6 in cases where the state had little to no evidence. From that story:

Friend didn’t think the interview was warranted, and worried the feds showing up at someone’s door without cause “might do more harm than good” in a part of the country where government was unpopular already. He sucked it up and did the “knock and talk” anyway.

“I said, ‘Hey, were you at the Capitol?’” Friend recalls. “And he said, ‘No, that was my son’s funeral that day. I wasn’t there.’”

He shakes his head. “It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, I can’t believe I just made this guy relive that. And for what? Even if he’d admitted to being there, if he said, ‘I was there, I don’t wanna talk about it,’ I couldn’t even charge that.”

But even though Friend had reservations about some of the cases, his main concern was procedural — that by playing bureaucratic games with who was running these investigations, and putting locals nominally in charge of cases where they were really in supporting roles, they put all of the court cases in jeopardy. “A lot of these guys are bad dudes, and they should go to jail,” he said, about the Oath Keepers. But if “we didn’t follow our rules… we set ourselves up to get crushed at trial,” adding, “I want to win.”

The Learned Ignoramuses of Climate Science Chris Leithner

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/03/the-learned-ignoramuses-of-climate-science-chris-leithner/

Steven Koonin, in his terrific book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021) writes:

with scientists’ unique role comes a special responsibility. We’re the only people who can bring objective science to the discussion, and that is our overriding ethical obligation. Like judges, we’re obligated to put personal feelings aside as we do our job. When we fail to do this, we usurp the public’s right to make informed choices and undermine their confidence in the entire scientific enterprise … Activism masquerading as The Science is pernicious.

Rarely is the masquerade revealed as frankly as it was in an interview published in Discover magazine in October 1989 with Stephen Schneider, a climate scientist at Stanford University. Before he became alarmed about global warming, he had been alarmed about global cooling, in 1971 co-authoring an article in the journal Science warning of it. In the Discover interview, Schneider unintentionally described the deep ethical bog into which he—and, I suspect, many climate scientists—have sunk.

“On the one hand,” he began, “as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts.” The phrase “on the one hand” is ominous, but so far, so good and kudos to Schneider. But then he adds:

On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings … And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place … To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic
statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.