RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/12/wheres-kamala-when-we-need-her-most/

Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris showcased her keen grasp of international affairs by explaining the war thusly:

“Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong.”

Despite being true, it was widely mocked for being so incredibly insipid. Kamala wasn’t talking to kindergartners, who probably have a better grasp of world affairs than she, but to listeners of a radio program.

Now, after Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians, including beheading children, Kamala has been silent. The only time we’ve seen her was as she stood stone-faced behind President Joe Biden while he attempted to express outrage that an ally had been brutally attacked.

Kamala has been missing in action for some time. On Sunday, the New York Times magazine even ran a big feature – which obviously had been in the works before the Hamas attack – titled “In Search of Kamala Harris.” The article laments that “After nearly three years, Vice President Kamala Harris is still struggling to make the case for herself – and feels she shouldn’t have to.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/09/secret-agent-fauci/

Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), once paid a covert visit to the Central Intelligence Agency. Rep. Brad Westrup, chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, wants to know if Fauci succeeded in gaining CIA support for his contention that the pandemic arose naturally in the wild, what he calls “proximal origin.” Sen. Rand Paul, a medical doctor who has called for a criminal investigation of Fauci, outlines the possibilities.

Dr. Fauci may have “convinced the CIA to dishonestly obscure the lab origin of COVID.” It is also possible that “the CIA convinced Fauci to obscure the lab origin of COVID.” Or, as Paul sees it, “An outside entity or person with unlimited monetary resources convinced Fauci to influence the CIA to obscure the lab origin of COVID.” By now that should be obvious to all but the willfully blind. Even the FBI now inclines to the laboratory origin, and the evidence is strong.

Dr. Fauci funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. The WIV, in turn, received shipments of deadly pathogens courtesy of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese national who headed the special pathogens unit at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory. In 2017 and 2018, Qiu made at least five trips to the Wuhan lab.

The lab origin was obvious to medical scientists such as Dr. Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research. Fauci pressured him into changing his view to the proximal origin theory, which is speculation, not science. Former CDC director Robert Redfield found evidence of a laboratory origin, he got death threats. No word of any investigation by the FBI, and no surprise that the CIA would collaborate with Fauci.

At the request of Antony Blinken and the Biden campaign, the “intelligence community,” persuaded some 50 officials, including former CIA boss John Brennan, to say that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” According to Rep. Westrup, the agency offered six CIA analysts significant financial incentives to conclude that the result of its investigation was inconclusive.

Those funds could have come from Dr. Fauci, who commanded a budget in the range of $6 billion. As NIAID boss since 1984, Fauci controlled both public health policy and spending on medical research, a huge concentration of power. Consider the experience of Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, an NIH official fired by Fauci for exposing his dangerous drug experiments.

“Dealing with Tony Fauci is like dealing with organized crime,” Fishbein told Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in The Real Anthony Fauci. “He’s like the Godfather. He has connections everywhere. He’s always got people that he’s giving money to in powerful positions to make sure he gets his way, that he gets what he wants.” Despite the efforts of Fauci, the lab origin failed to go away.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/to-win-a-war-fight-one/

As highly civilized people, we’re lost touch with some basic concepts. Like war.

We complain that we never win wars anymore, but that’s because we don’t fight them. Instead, we have limited interventions against insurgents. We try to stabilize failed states. Sometimes we go in, take out a few terrorists, and then go back home. Veterans, whose wounds are very real, sit around wondering what it was all for. So do the families of the men who died fighting in a war that was never a war.

To win a war, you have to fight one.

If your enemy is fighting a war and you’re fighting something less than a war, the enemy will win.

Police actions, nation-building exercises, and the like have vague and poorly defined objectives, while wars have very clear ones.

Wars are either won or lost. That’s why modern governments rarely like fighting them. Or doing anything that has clear and measurable results. Once you declare a war, you know you have to win.

We fight things that are not wars to ‘stabilize’ regions. Wars are not fought for stability, but destruction. To win a war, destroy the enemy. That’s what the United States did in WWII, raining mass death and destruction on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in ways that still make modern liberals cringe.

https://www.racket.news/p/have-they-gone-mad

Hillary Clinton on CNN said of Trump supporters, “You know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members.” This among other things came in the context of a report in Newsweek to the effect that the federal government, and the FBI in particular, has “quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.”

That seems… like a lot of people? In addition to the obvious observation that people like Hillary seem increasingly unmoored from reality, as well as wilfully deaf to the political consequences of their words — Maybe we need to formally deprogram you makes the “Basket of Deplorables” episode seem like a Valentine’s Day card — someone should point out that a month ago, on September 8th, Joe Biden renewed the original State of Emergency issued three days after 9/11 by George W. Bush. We spent the last 22 years giving presidents the ability to surveil, isolate, and detain even American citizens. Fortunately we’ll never regret those decisions!

What impolitic comment is next? “We have enough railway capacity for the job”? “Welcome, future deprogrammed!” banners above the entrances to decommissioned military bases? These people are truly Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and this would be funny, if Hillary Clinton’s mouth were not such an accurate weathervane for establishment thinking.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/10/07/grocery-prices-rising-social-media-complaints/71087569007/

Shilo Lewis was shocked by how much her last grocery store haul cost. 

A cart full of ingredients for sandwiches and tacos – enough for four lunches and a couple of dinners for her and her husband – plus an 18-pack of beer cost her just under $100. The 49-year-old snapped a photo of the haul and posted it on Facebook Wednesday in disbelief.

“If it keeps going up, I don’t know how so many people are going to be able to continue to eat,” she told USA TODAY, adding that she and her husband had to stop at a food bank to stock up on more supplies after the trip to Safeway. The food is meant to last them until Oct. 15, when her next paycheck comes in.

‘We’ve been struggling’

With grocery prices up nearly 17% over the past two years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people are turning to social media to share how much money it takes to feed a family.

One user on X, formerly Twitter, posted a photo of a grocery store haul and said it cost more than $270.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-war-gaza-congress-military-iran-hezbollah-russia-china-a1d6b914?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

At least 11 Americans were among the hundreds killed in the weekend attack in Israel, which has begun striking back at Hamas. The invasion, planned with an assist from Iran, ought to wake up both parties in Washington. The world is awash in threats that will inevitably wash up on our shore if America doesn’t get its act together.

The Israelis have launched air strikes as a prelude to a larger effort in Gaza, and more volatile days are ahead—especially if Hezbollah, another Iranian client, opens a second front on Israel’s northern border.

The larger context is that the U.S. and its allies now face two regional wars provoked by rogue states that are increasingly aligned. Israel and Ukraine are on the front lines, but the risk of an expanded conflict is real. Iran is feeding weapons into Vladimir Putin’s invasion in Ukraine. Mr. Putin is a junior partner of the Chinese Communist Party, which could try to exploit the moment in the Pacific.

The strategic and political point is that the return of war against Israel isn’t an isolated event. It’s the latest installment in the unraveling of global order as American political will and military primacy are called into question.

The President now has an obligation to increase the defense budget and stop treating the U.S. military as a political wedge to feed the American welfare state. For three years Mr. Biden has proposed cuts in defense spending after inflation, even as the world has become more dangerous.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/punishing_hate_but_not_criminals.html

America appears to be becoming a society with fewer and fewer laws, or at least not enforcing those that remain on the books.  We have decriminalized “recreational” drugs and reduced felonies into minor misdemeanors while ignoring open looting and rioting save in certain politically charged circumstances.  Cities have downsized their police departments while no longer prosecuting quality-of-life offenses such as public urination.  Filth and open drug markets are now tolerated as just part of urban life.  

Yes, the criminal code has obviously been eviscerated, but the impetus for greater criminalization gains momentum elsewhere.  This new focus on crime centers on “hate” as the paramount evil facing society.  Now “bad thinking” apart from actual behavior becomes the target of law enforcement.  Criticize Islam’s treatment of women, and you are called Islamophobic; defending it makes you a sexist.  For some, mis-gendering a trans person is hate speech.  Countless colleges now enact speech codes to shield students from psychologically harm.  In fact, such hate — not behavior — has been characterized (p. 95)  as a poison that psychologically debilitates its victims, causing high blood pressure and drug addiction.  We now enforce laws against what Orwell called “thoughtcrime.”  

To use an extreme but hardly inconceivable possibility, a local Progressive district attorney would likely dismiss charges against those robbing a 7-11 convenience store or at least reduce the offense to a minor infraction without jail time.  But if the clerk shadows a young black who enters the store (“racial profiling”) and waves around a baseball bat, he might be accused of race-based hatred.  Thus, at least for the Progressive D.A., the clerk, not the would-be miscreants, must be punished.  And this would occur even if the clerk did not physically injure the would-be thief or bar him from entering the store.  In fact, woe to the clerk if he shoots that would-be black shoplifter in self-defense.  The victim (the shopkeeper) now becomes the criminal while the shoplifter is transformed into the victim thanks to hate crime laws.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/if_we_the_people_were_actually_in_charge.html

Perhaps no greater delusion stubbornly persists from one generation to the next than the idea that governments can be trusted.  Sure, they conduct their affairs in secret, spy on their own people, and arm themselves to the teeth — but, by all means, trust them as you would a dear relative.  Sure, they steal from productive citizens, manipulate markets, and swell their bureaucratic armies with ever-growing taxes — but, by all means, trust them as you would a close business associate.  Sure, they impose their beliefs on our culture, ban the public expression of unfavored religions, and interpose their agents between parents and children — but, by all means, trust them as you might a pastor, rabbi, or priest.

Even after the global wars, genocides, engineered famines, and kill squads that made the last century the most barbaric in human history, it is exceedingly common to hear Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and others from the Church of Big Government mock ordinary citizens for not putting absolute faith in government institutions.  Distancing themselves from the State-sanctioned atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao while nonetheless pursuing policies that similarly elevate the organs of government and intimidate citizens into compliance, today’s ruling-class cult leaders pretend that the twentieth century’s mass slaughters could never be repeated here and now — as if the predisposition toward mass murder were a peculiarly German, Russian, or Chinese prerogative and not a tragic ailment endemic to the whole human race.

Oh, sure, Justin Trudeau confiscated the bank accounts of Canadians who resisted his tyrannical COVID lockdowns, but such rank authoritarianism was necessary to protect the public’s health.  Sure, Barack Obama — with assists from a complicit Congress and Supreme Court — effectively nationalized a fifth of the economy under a broad system of health care mandates, but that, too, was necessary to protect the public’s health.  Sure, Hillary Clinton recently suggested that “there needs to be a formal deprogramming of MAGA cult members,” but her proposal might be justified as merely a mental health initiative intended to…protect the public from itself.  

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/08/thoughts-on-proclamation-7463-or-digital-mccarthyism-on-the-move/

On September 14, 2001, George W. Bush, exercising “the power vested in [him] as President of the Untied States,” issued Proclamation 7463, a “Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks.” That got the ball rolling on the construction of the surveillance state.

At the time, the extreme measure seemed justified. Three days earlier, the United States had suffered its most devastating terrorist attack in history.

But how about this: On September 8, 2023, Joe Biden quietly renewed the Bush era emergency measures for another year. I was told there would be no math, but that makes 22 years and counting that a vast array of surveillance assets have been mobilized against—against whom?

When George W. Bush was president, they were focused on al Qaeda and kindred groups. Today?

Today, that fearsome governmental power is still assembled. Increasingly, however, it seems to be focused against those the administration fears or dislikes.

Traditional Catholics, for example, or parents upset with their local school boards.

At the head of the list of potential “domestic extremists” are the tens of millions of people who support Donald Trump (not to mention, of course, Trump himself). A couple of days ago, Hillary Clinton took to CNN (it would be CNN) to say that something needed to be done to silence those misguided people who supported Trump. “Maybe,” she said, “there needs to be a formal deprogramming” of MAGA “cult members.”

Apparently the FBI agrees. According to a much-cited article in Newsweek, the agency has created a “new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.” That article suggests that the FBI is struggling to combat genuine threats without attacking people who simply support Trump and other populist candidates. I wonder, though, how scrupulous they are being in protecting people’s Constitutional rights to free speech and political dissent.

Actually, I do not wonder. It is quite clear, as The New York Post observed, that the agency is deploying “some of the same counterterrorism methods honed to fight al Qaeda” in its scrutiny of Trump supporters and “AGAAVE,” i.e., “anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism” (an acronym that, as the Post suggested, “looks like a typo for a sugar substitute”).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20031/ronald-reagan-warning

The free-fall that is now the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is a needless self-inflicted political wound that only serves to distract the GOP caucus, and the nation at large, from the very real crises facing America.

Rather than focus on the open borders that are transforming our nation’s cities into migrant camps and threats from foreign adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party, we are engaged in recriminations and intraparty personal feuds. Rather than tackle a crippling debt of nearly $33 trillion, we are witnessing a political drama associated with selecting a new Speaker of the House. Rather than advance American energy independence, we are parsing possible votes for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s replacement. And instead of confronting those who would seek to steal the results of the next presidential election, we are engaged in recriminations and arguments about who and what sparked the historic firing of the Speaker.

These actions will not protect the integrity of the ballot box any more than chaos will rescue a democracy that is under cyber-assault and intellectual property theft by foreign states hostile to our role as leader of the free world.

This is distraction from the genuine challenges that will determine America’s standing in this century.

In the middle of this muddle is a Democrat-Progressive coalition content to watch that descent into political turmoil. It works to their advantage. The coalition may well be thinking — not without justification — that if Republicans are engaged in a needless ideological food-fight among themselves, the GOP is bound to lose focus on the truly important issues that will chart our future, thereby allowing us to set the agenda and win more Congressional seats in 2024.

What House Republicans have forgotten is the primary instruction offered by President Ronald Reagan:, “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” They also seem not to remember a California colleague of Reagan, Gaylord Parkinson, who served as that state’s GOP Chairman, who warned, “Henceforth, if any Republican has a grievance against another, that grievance is not to be bared publicly.”