RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/woodward_s_war_deeply_damning_but_not_to_trump.html

Bob Woodward, a past master at the art of marketing bestsellers by reflecting the Democrat zeitgeist, tries his best in his latest offering, War, to put a good face on Biden-Harris incompetence in the Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel conflicts. Although Donald Trump was not a government actor during these events, War inserts vignettes purporting, unsuccessfully, to contrast Trump’s unfitness with Biden’s putative steadiness.

Woodward tries but fails to claim that it is Trump’s alleged instability that threatens our fragile world, and not the ineptitude of the senile, perpetually unintelligent Biden. But to his great credit, the dogged reporter in Woodward overcomes the mediocre polemicist. He simply cannot hide Biden’s abject, foolish incompetence in these conflicts, nor can he conceal, try though he might, Trump’s commonsense assessments of the same events. While hoping to help Biden’s political fortunes, his book is a thinly-veiled but strangely ineffective diatribe against the “fascist” former President he awkwardly stumbles to depict.

Before delving into Biden’s actions, we should recall the wise assessment of the well-respected Robert Gates, former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense in the Obama Administration. Biden, Gates wrote in his 2015 book, had been consistently wrong on every national security and foreign policy issue throughout his long tenure in D.C. Moreover, Biden had long been reputed by his colleagues to have been the least intelligent legislator in Congress.

Given Biden’s recently acknowledged mental incompetence, Woodward tries to contextualize it as a recently-developed condition, with only isolated “early markers” in preceding years. But, again, Woodward’s solid factual recitations are far more skillful than his partisan shadings of them.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/the-campaign-against-justice-gorsuchs-new-book-is-an-embarrassment/

An effort to discredit Justice Gorsuch is overhyped and misleading.

The patently coordinated progressive campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court by personal attacks on the six conservative justices never sleeps. It’s Justice Neil Gorsuch’s turn again in the barrel. Progressives have tried out a number of themes against Gorsuch over the past seven years, to little effect: that he’s arrogant, that he talks too much, that he’s a bad writer, that he’s a plagiarist, or that he did something wrong by selling a house to a Democratic lawyer through an anonymous LLC at below the price he was asking before he joined the Court. Those attacks having gotten nowhere, one of the themes they are still pushing is that Gorsuch misrepresents facts in his opinions.

Given little to work with on this front, they have settled on Gorsuch’s new book, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, which he co-wrote with a former law clerk, Janie Nitze. Gorsuch and Nitze argue that the explosive growth of federal law has costs not only for liberty and small government in general, but for the individual people who find themselves on the business end of all these rules and the people who enforce them.

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post branded it “Justice Gorsuch’s book of fish tales.” An attempted smackdown by Ankush Khardori of Politico was headlined “Neil Gorsuch’s New Book Is an Embarrassment.” Their primary charge is that Gorsuch left out important facts from the stories he tells in the book, chiefly the story of fisherman John Yates. But Marcus and especially Khardori are the ones who should be embarrassed. They are straining to miss the point — and Khardori’s piece is full of its own distortions. I’ll discuss below why Khardori and Marcus are off base on the Yates case. In a second part, I’ll cover the other scraps that they throw at the wall and why Khardori’s past record and his behavior in this episode make him an especially unconvincing advocate against Gorsuch on this score.

Facts and Figures

Woke is not a fad but a cultural revolution—a movement that can only be stopped by a drastic intervention in our institutions and culture.

We in the West are in the third wave of cultural-left ideological enthusiasm. Each “Awokening” has crested, fallen a little, consolidated, then surged again to reach a higher level. The cumulative result is an elite creed which has produced a crime wave, a worsening education system, chaos at the border, and social division. Fired by a cultural socialism that puts equal results and emotional protection for minorities at the center of their moral universe, today’s young people are twice as intolerant of conservative speech as older generations. These young people will be the median voters and employees of tomorrow, leading and controlling the country. Woke cultural socialism is not the classical liberalism of the American Constitution, but a modern “majorities bad, minorities good” Left-liberalism. It is powered by a set of ‘liberal’ emotional attachments rather than liberal principles. These underpin a moral panic about whites and males combined with a starry-eyed patronizing approach to minorities.

Today’s woke extremism is not a repudiation of liberalism, but a perverse extension of it. Our only way out is to use elected, constitutional, government power to break the grip of wokeness in our institutions and schools, steering them toward neutrality and classical liberalism. To do so, the conservative and moderate majority must place culture front and center and spare no effort to win the battle of ideas. Nothing less than the future of our civilization depends on it.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-we-have-never-been-woke-by-musa-al-gharbi

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton, 432 pp., $35)

What is a theory? In philosophy, we usually think of it as a set of propositions. These propositions might be challenged directly, or they might turn out to generate empirical predictions or logical consequences that could be challenged instead. But we can also think of theories as things that live in people’s minds—ideas that shape our vocabularies, our maps of the world, our attunements to perceptions, our instincts about what jumps out as important in our environments. Thinking this way, a theory’s measure is its number of adherents. What ought to be evaluated is how they think when gripped by the theory, not what the theory’s abstract implications might be.

Theories of politics in particular seem apt for this sort of evaluation. Some political philosophies do not specifically entail that horrible things ought to be done. But if such a theory’s adherents always seem to do horrible things once they get power, that should count against the theory.

Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke presents an account of the character and causes of woke politics. It fills a gap in this regard: al-Gharbi, primarily a sociologist, gives a different kind of perspective than, say, Yascha Mounk’s relatively centrist history of wokeness as rooted in radical academic ideas or Richard Hanania’s relatively right-wing history of wokeness as rooted in activist jurisprudence and the administrative state. But at a further remove, We Have Never Been Woke is a story of how theories—both the woke theories criticized and the more classically leftist theories used to criticize them—simultaneously open our eyes to some things while blinding us to others.

https://irishtechnews.ie/inside-cyber-by-chuck-brooks-reviewed/

Inside Cyber, by Chuck Brooks, takes complex ideas about emerging technologies and provides a simplistic explanation of the technology. Brooks takes technology such as quantum computing, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence, and explains the positives and negatives of these new technologies.

We live in a world that seems like it’s changing by the day. Keeping up with the times and understanding all of the new technology around us can seem like an impossible task, especially as it affects our daily lives. Just a few years ago, Artificial Intelligence was considered to only exist in Sci-Fi movies. Cellular speeds are coming close to rivalling Wi-Fi as global satellite communication nears. Countries are scrambling as they prepare for the looming threat of cyber attacks aided by AI. These new technologies will forever change the way the world operates. This book dives into what may seem like an existential threat, providing necessary steps to remain safe and secure.

Cybersecurity

Brook’s passion for cybersecurity and protecting the globe against technological threats is clear with over 10 chapters addressing these issues and how to prevent them. The first 5 chapters break down the common definition of cybersecurity; detailing likely targets of cyber attacks, different types and methods of cyber attacks, and how to best prevent them from occuring. It provides a valued education about cyber security and preventative habits to protect yourself, your business, and your home.

According to the book, in 2023, there were 343,338,964 reported victims of cyber attacks. Email is the most common vector for malware, with about 35% of the malware delivered via email in 2023. Business email compromises accounted for $2.7 billion in losses in 2022.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/immoral-clarity/

The promotional tour for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book revealed to all who can accept the evidence of their own eyes that the celebrated author is a shallow political observer. Coates, who famously rejects complexity, determined that we were all overthinking the generations-old conflict in the Middle East after an eleven-day sojourn to Israel. He papered over the existence of non-Jewish Israeli citizens. He flattened the causes of the wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973. He all but erased the PLO, the intifadas, and Iran’s “ring of fire” terror campaign against the Jewish state. When this cognitive labor was complete, he applied the template of U.S. race relations to Israel-Palestinian discord, pronounced a perfect overlap, and expected to be fêted for his insight. It didn’t quite work out that way.

The question this episode raises is why it took so long for that revelation to dawn on so many. The reaction CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil generated from his employer’s “race and culture unit” following his gentle pushback against some of the premises the author promulgated is instructive. As some of my colleagues observed, Coates’s pronouncements aren’t meant to be scrutinized and fact-checked. They are catechisms. Reading his work as though it were intended as a scholarly contribution to the sum of human knowledge is a mistake. He proclaims orthodoxies. And when his word is challenged, it is not because his observations conflict with reality. It is merely because first contact with this blinding brand of enlightenment can “scare people.”

The enforcers of Coates’s dogmas in the press long ago internalized the notion that their job wasn’t to challenge the factually deficient canon of their credo. It was to promote their conception of “moral clarity.”

To hear the promoters of this alternative mission statement tell it, moral clarity exists in opposition to conventional definitions of objectivity.

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

CHAPTER 40: The Art of Using Technologies to Alter Human Cognition: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28110/chapter-40-the-art-of-using-technologies-to-alter

CHAPTER 41: Your Brain Is the Battlespace: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28111/chapter-41-your-brain-is-the-battlespace 

CHAPTER 42: Quantum Computing Empowers Technocracy, Transhumanism, and the Managerial Unistate: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28112/chapter-42-quantum-computing-empowers-technocracy

CHAPTER 43: Ideological Subversion, Communitarianism, and the 15-Minute City: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28113/chapter-43-ideological-subversion

CHAPTER 44: The American Reformation: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28114/chapter-44-the-american-reformation

CHAPTER 45: Every Conspiracy Begins with a Theory: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28115/chapter-45-every-conspiracy-begins-with-a-theory

An inside look into the mindset of jihad, including firsthand interviews with some of the world’s most sinister terrorists.
During an interrogation in Afghanistan, when asked how long the jihadists intended to fight, a Taliban commander uttered the words, “If it takes a thousand years.” This chilling statement illustrates both how terrorists of this level operate and the generational approach they take when it comes to bringing destruction to the world.
The West is facing a determined enemy with a fundamentally different world view. Author and former Army Captain Jesse Petrilla provides unique insight into the jihadist mind, featuring interviews with Taliban and Al-Qaeda members just after their capture, interviews with international journalists and professors, warnings from European politicians, as well as experiences from travels throughout the Islamic world.
If It Takes a Thousand Years delves into the policies which have enabled our enemies both at home and abroad, providing positive solutions as to how America and the West can confront this threat and protect their way of life.
About the author:
Former Army Captain Jesse Petrilla has traveled worldwide on fact-finding missions, researching the mindset of the jihadists and the policies that enable them. These places include Jordan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Israel (including the West Bank), Egypt, England, France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, meeting with members of parliament, mayors, and everyday citizens. He has served as a civilian advisor to the U.S. Department of State, and was a Liaison Officer in the Army to the Afghan secret police, facilitating the interrogations of over 400 captured Taliban and Al-Qaeda members. Jesse has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, and other media on numerous occasions, and has published articles in FrontPage Magazine, Breitbart, and other publications.