RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/02/trading-realpolitik-for-a-puppet-show/

A week, as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is supposed to have said, is a long time in politics. Poor Joe Biden would doubtless agree, assuming that he remembers what a week, what a long time, and what politics are. It was just about a week ago, on March 26, that he said, “As a result of our unprecedented sanctions, the ruble was almost immediately reduced to rubble.” 

I wonder who thought of that play on words? The ruble is rubble. Ha, ha, ha. 

The Russian currency did take a sharp dive. But then, almost immediately, it recovered. Why? There are several explanations. The conventional headscratchers hold that it is largely because the nefarious Vladimir Putin has nefariously blackmailed the weak-willed Germans and others who prefer bucking the sanctions in order to heat their homes. What cowards. 

A better explanation, I think, is that Putin, having played this game before, more or less knew what to expect when he invaded Ukraine. The Western press was full of gloating stories about how Mastercard and Visa stopped handling transactions when Biden announced the sanctions. That’ll show ’em. But those companies had done the same thing back in 2014 when, with Barack Obama at the helm in the United States, Putin gobbled up Crimea. This time, Putin was ready. He had already implemented his own card payment system. Mastercard and Visa piggybacked on it. One irony of the situation, as the web site Daily Reckoning observes, is that “instead of Visa and Mastercard getting the fees, Russia’s central bank collected 8.2 billion rubles in net profit, or about $94 million at current exchange rates. Russia actually profited from Visa and Mastercard sanctions.”

File that under “unintended consequences.” 

https://freebeacon.com/columns/biden-runs-out-of-gas/

‘This is a wartime bridge to increase oil supply into production,” President Biden said during his announcement Thursday that he would release more barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve than at any point in American history. His decision was also a concession. None of the policies Biden has enacted throughout his short presidency have alleviated the problems they were meant to solve. Quite the opposite: In practically every case, Biden has made things worse.

Energy? Killing the Keystone pipeline was one of the first things Biden did when he took office. In February, Biden delayed approval of new oil and gas leases. He continues to blame the increase in gas prices on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, even though prices began to rise early in Biden’s term. Biden scapegoats oil companies for sitting on profits, while he could be doing everything in his power to ramp up domestic production of available fuel sources — including nuclear.

The fallout from Putin’s war was bound to make energy scarce and thus more valuable. Biden could have lessened the pain on the American consumer by pursuing an all-of-the-above energy dominance policy from the start, and by reducing the size of the American Rescue Plan so that it didn’t contribute to inflation. He chose to ignore the warnings of economists such as former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and followed his advisers who incorrectly predicted that inflation would be temporary. By turning to the Strategic Reserve, Biden is promoting a temporary fix while the long-term solutions are plain to see. He’s relied on similar gimmicks before. They haven’t worked.

Consider Biden’s immigration policy. He spent his early days as president tearing up President Trump’s agreements with Mexico and several Central American countries that forced asylum-seekers to stay in third-party nations while U.S. judges decided on their claims.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=fefc435a63

About two weeks ago, the New York Times published an article finally conceding that the Hunter Biden laptop and many of the emails on it are authentic. Yesterday (March 30), the Washington Post followed suit. The laptop in question is the one that Hunter left at a Delaware computer repair shop, and whose contents the New York Post revealed in a series of explosive October 2020 articles. Those articles got the NY Post banned from Twitter in the run-up to the 2020 election, while some 51 ex-intelligence officials denounced the laptop as likely “Russian disinformation.” Meanwhile, the Times and the WaPo never breathed a word about the laptop’s existence or its contents for the intervening year and a half.

Both the recent Times and Washington Post articles mention the laptop in the context of reporting on a federal criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax liabilities and business dealings in foreign countries including Ukraine and China. Clearly the newspapers are trying to get out in front of a likely impending indictment of the President’s son. After all, it would be quite embarrassing for them if the President’s son were to get indicted based on events that have long been public but which events have never been mentioned in either of those two papers.

But how about the question of how this investigation, and Hunter’s underlying conduct, relate to President Biden himself? To read the Times and the WaPo, you would think that that whole question is somehow out of line. The Times’s piece doesn’t even discuss Joe’s role or involvement, although it does include this bizarre line:

It is not clear whether the criminal probe is focused solely on Hunter Biden, or if he is among a group of individuals and companies being scrutinized.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18393/business-vs-government

If a corporation builds a better mousetrap than the government, we buy it. And generally, that is a good idea. But it may come with costs, not easily measurable in dollars or speed.
The Constitution itself was not designed for efficiency…. Ours was designed to check and balance power, rather than to expedite results. We pay a price for our desire to prevent too much centralization of authority in any one person or institution. And sometimes we grow impatient at the slow pace of progress.
We want our mail delivered faster and more frequently; we want to know the outcome of elections tonight not next week… we want our disputes resolved without months of pretrial discovery. And so, we turn to the classic American solution: private enterprise, free market competition, capitalism.
The time has come to consider the consider the costs and benefits of this important development.
It is not the object of this article to resolve these issues or to propose specific jurisprudential shifts. It is simply to bring together a number of related changes that have in common the privatization of traditional governmental activities, and to begin a discussion of the legal changes that, especially in the area of social media censorship, seem urgently required.
We must begin a discussion of the legal changes that seem urgently required, especially in the area of media censorship, invasion of privacy and lack of transparency by private companies that appear to be performing functions, possibly at the behest of the government, as a way of bypassing the restrictions placed on the government by the First Amendment.

When I was growing up, the mail was delivered by the post office, money was printed by the treasury, votes were counted by election officials, wars were fought by the army, prisons were run by departments of correction, law enforcement was conducted by the police force, space exploration was done by NASA, legal disputes were resolved by judges and juries.