RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dei-cash-cow

There is an old saw that, in America, every great cause begins as a movement and eventually degenerates into a racket. This is certainly true of the past decade’s most fashionable cause: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” What might have begun as a social movement has now become a business—and not just in the United States. According to McKinsey & Company, spending on “DEI-related efforts” across the globe totaled $7.5 billion in 2020. If trends continue, that figure will exceed $15 billion by 2026.

And, in another American tradition, government contractors have turned a profit on this fad. While it’s hard to determine the precise amount of money that Washington spends on DEI, a search for contracts, grants, and other outlays that reference “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and similar terms suggests that DEI principles were attached to more than $1 billion in federal contracts last year.

This represents a rapid change. In 2019, according to our search, the federal government awarded only $27 million in contracts with language related to “diversity and inclusion.” But after the death of George Floyd in 2020, the federal government and private contractors went all-in on DEI, seeking to implement the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government” equity agenda.

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-uk-is-a-window-to-our-dystopian-future/

Take a walk down my street. There aren’t enough warehouse venues and gang-related killings to warrant the label of “edgy,” and there are far too many two-parents-kids-and-a-dog residences for the “up and coming” label to make any sense. It’s suburban London — those “invincible suburbs” — and predictably predictable.

But look closer. How could there be four solicitors’ offices on a single road? Clearly, they aren’t wanting for customers. Queues of men (only men) spill out onto the pavement. You can see them at all times of day, smoking and shuffling and checking their cracked phone screens incessantly. The buildings they loiter outside all seem to have the same branding. The services advertised are certainly the same: “Immigration law, visa services, overstayers, failed asylum.” You’ll notice that “Rashid & Rashid Solicitors,” the office with the distinctively garish green lettering, has been shuttered. A note on the door tells you it has been closed on orders of the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Googling it takes you to a news article, suggesting it was part of a “visa scam.” A brick has been thrown through the glass window. 

Travel further. Visit Oxford, the seat of English advanced education — and site of a notoriously prolific child grooming ring. Go north to Bradford, which has its own university. Like so many others, it has fallen on hard times. School graduates feel that the fees just aren’t worth it anymore, turned off by a depressed job market and post-Covid learning “modernizations” that somehow manage to make a bachelor’s degree an even bigger waste of time. The one year master’s course is still popular, though. It’s relatively cheap, but the university has still set up two recruitment offices in South Asia. It brings students, some of whom don’t seem to ever turn up to class. But they pay. If the university closes, the town will lose a quarter of its jobs. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/the-trump-bragg-merchan-chess-game/

Is the president-elect being played?

It is rare to witness such a disconnect between pro-Trump media commentators and the Trump defense team as we’re seeing in today’s news: Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg agrees that Trump’s sentencing must be postponed while other proceedings — in particular, Trump’s posttrial motion to vacate the jury’s guilty verdicts — continue. There is outrage in the commentariat, yet Trump and his lawyers are spinning this development as a great victory.

There is a chess game going on here. Bottom line: I believe Bragg is trying to manipulate Trump into asking that the prosecution be suspended for four years.

Despite the Democrats’ campaign rhetoric, Trump is not a convicted felon now, a jury’s guilty verdict notwithstanding. Only the court’s formal entry of a judgment of conviction after sentencing makes a defendant a convicted felon. Bragg knows Trump does not want to be sentenced and have the judgment of conviction entered on the court’s record (and thus on Trump’s personal record). I wager that the DA is calculating that if the president-elect is given the choice of either a four-year suspension of the case or a sentencing so that Trump can eventually appeal the conviction, Trump will choose the former.

If it is Trump himself who asks for that outcome, all the people complaining about the unfairness and harm to the public interest of having a criminal case hanging over a sitting president’s head for four years will have to mute their outrage. And I think Trump is going to ask for that outcome — which is why his lawyers are already equating postponement with victory.

Let’s try to break it into the three relevant stages: (1) Trump’s posttrial motion to dismiss the guilty verdicts based on the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling (which is now on the table); (2) sentencing and entry of the judgment of conviction (which would happen if Judge Juan Merchan denies the posttrial motion); and (3) appeal, which most close observers experienced in criminal law issues believe Trump has a good chance of winning.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/is_burgum_the_right_choice_for_interior_secretary_and_energy_czar.html

From running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination himself, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum has proven himself a Trump loyalist who commands the president-elect’s trust. Announcing Burgum’s appointment at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump said, “He’s going to head the Department of Interior, and he’s going to be fantastic.”

However, given Burgum’s background, affiliations, and views on important issues, is he the right choice for Secretary of the Interior? Trump has also made him the nation’s energy czar by appointing him chairman of the newly formed National Energy Council. But is Burgum fit to chair the council and, under that post, take a seat on the National Security Council?

A close look at Burgum’s origins, career, political and policy plays, and most importantly, his association with people and ideologies in line with leftist-globalists is called for. The facts will make it evident that it won’t be unreasonable to ask if he will serve the interests of “We, the people” in the new Trump administration.

Burgum, a native North Dakotan, grew up in the small town of Arthur and earned a BA from North Dakota State University and an MBA from Stanford. His family had a thriving agribusiness started by his grandfather. His father’s death when he was in high school deeply affected him, and, showing initiative, he started a chimney-sweeping business while still an undergraduate. As an adolescent, he ran his own newspaper. These early efforts impressed his professors at Stanford.

After working as an analyst at McKinsey & Company, he adopted a data-driven approach to business and other decisions, which he still adheres to. In 1983, he invested in Great Plains Software, which he built into a billion-dollar business and sold to Microsoft in 2001. His Stanford classmate and friend Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft. He is also friends with Bill Gates, the Black Rock group, and many deep-pocketed energy industry CEOs.

Today, he’s one of the wealthiest and shrewdest politicians in the U.S. During his short-lived run for president, he spent more than $2.9 million on ads, more than any other politician or group. To reach the quota of donors who would take him to the debate stage, he offered $20 gift cards to each person who donated $1.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-two-american-nations/

In 1845, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli published Sybil, or The Two Nations, a literary exposition of the social and economic changes that followed the industrial revolution, especially the travails and squalor of the urban working class set off against the aristocracy–– or ‘“the rich and the poor.’”

These two classes, as one character famously describes them, comprise “‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’”

The political polarization graphically on display during the recent presidential election season–– particularly the unhinged hysteria of the “woke” Democrats after Trump’s victory ––calls to mind Disraeli’s influential novel, for it captures our country’s great divide between not just the economic classes and political ideologies, but also mores, morals, values, tastes, cultures, and sensibilities. Not since the Civil War have such stark differences among the pluribus threatened the American unum.

America, of course, has always been divided by its complex diversity of ethnicities, languages, dialects, manners, customs, faiths, beliefs, cultures, and numerous other defining folkways. Our Constitutional structures are the Framers’ response to that contentious diversity: the Bill of Rights to protect diverse citizens, federalism to protect the diverse states, and a tripartite national government divided and mutually balanced to protect our freedom from the tyranny of any concentrated power attempting to dominate everybody else.

Starting in the later 19th century, for a while, new technologies both of communication such as radio, movies, and television; and of transportation like railroads, automobiles, and airplanes, distributed regional and ethnic cultures across the nation through entertainment, magazines, and tourism. Also, consumer capitalism and mass advertising more widely sold products and fashions that now became the tokens of identity in the homogenizing of America’s regional cultures, and the weakening of all those myriad ethnicities and their distinctive folkways accelerated this process.

Another change that contributed to the refashioning of identities was the postwar expansion and availability of higher education to a more diverse citizenry. Moreover, by the Sixties, colleges and universities were more liberal and left-wing than the nation as a whole, making a college education another marker of identity as well as social status. The influence of the left increasingly made political affiliations signs of elite status too, one with its own tastes and fashions in entertainment, clothes, travel, cuisines, and especially more liberal and hedonistic habits and behavior regarding sex and drugs.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/11/19/hillary-clinton-uranium-giveaway-to-russia-n4934428

The good news is that nuclear power — safe, clean, affordable, and carbon-free — has been coming back in a big way here in the USA in recent months. The weird news is that it’s generally left-leaning tech firms and AI’s ravenous need for electricity leading the charge (SWIDT?) to build new nuclear power plants or spin shuttered ones back up.

The bad news is that the voters of this country were twice reckless enough to put people like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton in charge — and now Russia is putting the kibosh on the uranium exports we need for nuclear power.

Bloomberg reported this week that “Russia is temporarily limiting exports of enriched uranium to the U.S., creating potential supply risks to utilities operating American reactors that generate almost a fifth of the nation’s electricity.

“Utilities tend to make purchases well in advance,” the report continued, “so any impact is unlikely to be immediate.” However, “To break the dependence on Russia and other state-owned enterprises, coordinated western responses are required,” Veronica Baker, spokeswoman for Canadian uranium mining company Cameco, said in a statement.

The only US-based commercial enrichment facility is located in New Mexico and is owned by Urenco Ltd, a British, Dutch, and German consortium. (Also: “Urenco,” really? Did nobody who speaks English bother to sound that out before they slapped the name on the company letterhead?) The Biden administration did what it always does and threw money at the problem with “a multibillion-dollar effort to restart the nation’s domestic uranium enrichment capabilities,” according to a Just the News staff report, but Urenco expects only a 15% increase by 2027.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The paradox in Senator Schumer’s statement – a statement unchallenged by Ms. Maddow – is that he admitted to (and would have agreed with) Ms. Truss’s words written five years later – that unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats exert unacceptable power over our nation’s most powerful people, let alone the rest of us. Neither he nor Ms. Maddow acknowledged the irony embedded in their exchang

As I wrote on November 6, I felt relief, not joy, with the election’s verdict. But as my wife and I spent six days driving around Pennsylvania and Virginia visiting grandchildren, I thought of the election and its consequences. And I concluded that the growing power of the state and its threat to individual freedom has become so powerful that a traditional Republican candidate might not be willing to confront such an oppressive force – that it would take an individual unafraid to incur the wrath of the administrative state.

There is no question that a government that looks after 335 million people needs a professional bureaucracy. The President and the Executive Branch appoint roughly 4,000 individuals, a tiny fraction of the two million federal civilian employees. The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, prohibits partisan political activity among civilian employees in the executive branch of the Federal and District of Columbia Governments, even as it excludes those Presidential appointees whose jobs depend on Senate confirmation. Nevertheless, violations of the Hatch Act have become rampant in recent years, especially in intelligence agencies and within the Justice Department, as “lawfare” was waged against Mr. Trump and some of his backers.

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/11/pro-jihad-vandals-invade-home-of-university-of-washington-president-carve-hamas-symbols?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pro-jihad-vandals-invade-home-of-university-of-washington-president-carve-hamas-symbols

A significant escalation, and more is to come.

“Pro-Palestinian vandals invade home of University of Washington president, carve Hamas symbols,” by Danielle Greyman-Kennard, Jerusalem Post, November 15, 2024:

Pro-Palestinian vandals invaded the home of University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce, on Thursday, damaging her car and leaving pro-Hamas symbols, the university confirmed in a statement.

University spokesperson Victor Balta said in an email Thursday evening that “several masked perpetrators” invaded Cauce’s home, where they slashed the tires to her car and painted “pro-Hamas symbols” across multiple surfaces. Videos circulating online show inverted triangles being painted onto home’s walls.

Those recorded promised, “you will not know peace until you meet the demands of our movement.”

“Free Palestine” and “blood on your hands” were also spray painted on Cause’s property.

“Making threats against a public official in an attempt to intimidate them is a crime,” Balta said in the statement. She confirmed that police were investigating the incident and that it “will not influence University policy.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/19/can-elon-and-vivek-really-slash-2-trillion-from-bloated-u-s-budget/

As you’ve probably figured out, the headline above is a trick, a rhetorical question. Because we know going in that our government has spent so much since the COVID-era began that there’s no question it can be cut sharply. And, in answer to the question above, $2 trillion is just a start.

But that’s just a base number set by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, tagged by President-elect Donald Trump to head the new Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE” for short.

“As President Trump said, what we need is common sense,” Musk said. “This won’t be business as usual. This is going to be a revolution.”

And by that, he means a root-and-branch restructuring of the U.S. government and its sprawling, wasteful mega-bureaucracy, with co-leader Ramaswamy set to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Ambitious indeed.

We’re ecstatic to hear a presidential administration entering with genuine talk of sharply reducing the actual size of government. With $36 trillion in debt (and rising fast), we as a nation will soon be functionally bankrupt, unable to pay our bills or raise more money in debt markets to continue our spending.

The fiscal situation is grave, affecting everything from defense to Social Security and Medicare and everything in between.

As such, the plan by the DOGE-duo of Musk and Ramaswamy can actually be seen not as a radical attack on government, but rather as an effort to restore some balance after four years of the Democrats’ insane spending and debt accumulation to pay for its COVID schemes.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/18/mad-at-the-election-blame-obama/

Liberals who are in the throes of capitulation and despair after Donald Trump’s crushing electoral and popular vote win can lay blame for their disastrous loss at the feet of one man: Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama built the Trump wave. His failure to live up to the promises of his populist 2008 run has cursed the Democratic Party, probably for a generation. The Washington DC establishment in just two short months is going to get “scholonged” by an angry and vengeful Trump, ready to rain executive hellfire on the bureaucrats and institutions that have spent the last nine years fighting him tooth and nail.

All of this could have been prevented. In 2008, Obama swept into power with a crushing electoral college and popular vote majority. He won Iowa, Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. He even won Indiana. Democrats swept into power in Congress with a 74-seat lead in the House, nearly 59% of seats, and were gifted with a magical 60-seat filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate.

This was a generational victory, a sign that voters were fed up with politics as usual and the failures of the GOP and the Washington and Wall Street establishment as such. This victory wasn’t just about electing the first Black president, though that was important: The policies and platform at stake appealed deeply to voters.

It is worth remembering what exactly those policies were.

Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end the Afghanistan war with honor, help the economy by reducing health care costs (prioritizing “Main Street” over Wall Street), and bring about a new era of racial harmony. Moreover, Obama explicitly eschewed radical leftist politics. He explicitly defended traditional marriage. In his DNC nomination speech, he condemned employers who “undercut American wages by hiring illegal workers.”