RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/apocalypse-air-bruce-thornton/

Ukraine’s scenes of urban rubble, streams of refugees, and piles of slaughtered civilians redolent of World War II. Continuing masks and lethal lockdown protocols of the Covid plague. Record levels of  inflation and gasoline nearly $6 a gallon.  Unchecked hordes of illegal immigrants and criminals penetrating our southern border. Mayhem, murder, and brazen theft stalking and defacing our cities.

Amidst these portents of apocalypse, it’s instructive to think of W.B. Yeats’ prescient poem “The Second Coming,” and its lines “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” and to wonder with the poet, “What rough beast, its time come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Such intimations of doom, of course, have been regular episodes in the last hundred years, the “rough beasts” ending up as pretenders. But we can’t rely on the cycles of history to prevent devastating changes in our way of life that will make the previous decades seem like the golden age.

Yeats published his poem in November 1920, when the flawed Versailles settlement of the Great War made optimism for the future difficult. Some knew, moreover, that none of the dysfunctions that had led to war had been corrected. Supreme Allied Commander Marshall Foch prophesized about the Versailles Treaty, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Communism, Nazism, and Fascism arose, and the Great Depression was the crisis these three vicious political religions did not let go to waste.

Throughout the interwar period, the portents of doom appeared in popular novels and “next war” theorists.  “Trench reminiscences” proliferated, keeping alive the novel horrors of the war like poison gas, machine-guns, and artillery lobbing monstrous shells as heavy as a ton. The aerial bombing of the war’s last years inspired numerous warnings about the even more devastating possibilities of destruction from the air in the next war. Theorists wrote of a “knockout blow” on a nation’s capital that would decapitate the government and turn the streets into “one vast raving bedlam,” as historian J.F.C. Fuller put it.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/13/justice-department-plans-to-re-try-two-remaining-whitmer-fednapping-defendants/

Despite a humiliating defeat in what the Justice Department considered one of its biggest domestic terror investigations in recent history, federal prosecutors announced they will re-try two men who were not acquitted last week on charges of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.

Chief District Court Judge Robert Jonker declared a mistrial on April 8 after a jury in western Michigan could not agree on the guilt of Adam Fox, the so-called ringleader, and Barry Croft, Jr. related to the alleged plot; two other men, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta, were found not guilty on all charges and went home last Friday night after spending 18 months in jail.

Defense attorneys argued the men were entrapped by the FBI, which the jury presumably believed in the case of Harris and Caserta. Numerous FBI experts and agents took the stand for the government, as did Dan Chappel, the lead informant and one of his FBI handlers. The three-week trial exposed a wide-ranging operation inside the FBI and Justice Department to target the men—who did not know each other until the FBI got involved—infiltrate the group with informants and undercover agents, create encrypted group chats monitored by the FBI, plan and fund excursions including a surveillance trip to Whitmer’s summer cottage, secretly record every conversation including when the targets were high on marijuana, and drive several defendants to the arrest site in October 2020 under a phony pretense.

Nonetheless, Andrew Birge, assistant U.S. Attorney for Western Michigan, confirmed this week his office plans to again prosecute Fox and Croft; Birge’s office told a Grand Rapids television station on Monday that charges will be refiled.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/13/loose-nuke-talk/

Americans, like the planet’s other 7.5 billion people, are not prone to talk or think much about nuclear weapons. 

Of course, some of us are old enough to remember how “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD, was supposed to ensure the general peace. 

Some recall the eerie Cold War-era nuclear bomb movies like “Dr. Strangelove” or “Fail Safe” or more recent postnuclear armageddon films like “The Book of Eli.”

Millions have grown up referring to the scary “doomsday clock” of atomic scientists that usually ticks closer to a midnight nuclear holocaust in times of crisis.

So the planet is not naïve about the dangers of its 13,000 to 15,000 nuclear weapons. In 1961, the Soviet Union terrified the world when it exploded history’s greatest nuke—the 50 megaton “Tsar Bomba.” 

The Cuban Missile Crisis a year later brought the United States and the Soviet Union closer to a nuclear exchange than at any time since. 

In 1983, Ronald Reagan countered the Soviet nuclear-tipped SS-20 ballistic missiles aimed at Europe by stationing American Pershing II missiles in Germany. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/04/13/feds-apologize-to-violent-blm-and-antifa-rioters-for-not-being-nicer-to-them-as-they-set-fires-in-front-of-white-house-n1589582

If you still weren’t convinced of the legal double standard between the right and the left, this announcement by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday should remove all doubt.

The Biden Administration’s radical civil rights division boss at the DOJ has “reached an agreement to settle claims in four civil cases arising from the June 1, 2020, law enforcement response to racial justice demonstrations in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.”

This was during the Black Lives Matter and Antifa Reign of Terror or, as then-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan accidentally coined it, a “Summer of Love,” after the George Floyd riots began in Minneapolis and spread across the country.

Protesters and violent rioters set seized upon Lafayette Square, breaching a White House perimeter, and rioted, rallied, and set fires for days. An umbrella group called “Shut Down DC,” composed of far-left professional agitators, including Lisa Fithian, called helped orchestrate the attack to incapacitate the nation’s capitol.

Washington, D.C. not only indulged this “first amendment activity,” but Mayor Muriel Bowser also encouraged it by memorializing part of the city streets with a Black Lives Matter mural paid for by taxpayers.