RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

Yes, Virginia, some people are above the law. They are known as politicians, asses and pachyderms; they can be found in barns, zoos, but also in the circus that is Washington. Exhibit ‘A’ includes both the current President and his immediate predecessor. Unlike spider monkeys or black-footed ferrets, politicians are not endangered. In fact, they rank with nematode worms as one of the more prolific animal species on earth.

And, yes Virginia, if one had to classify into one word our two main political parties it would be that Republicans are dysfunctional and Democrats mean-spirited. Two episodes this past week provide examples: Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and his group of eight self-serving, dissident Republicans colluded with Democrats to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. A day or so earlier, as Congress was trying to pass legislation to extend government funding for forty-five days, Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) pulled a fire alarm, so as to delay the vote. Incredulously, he had the temerity to claim he mistook the bright red alarm for an automatic door opener, a mistake impossible to believe of anyone, least of all of a former middle school principal. 

In the wake of the French Revolution (1789-1794), the philosopher and monarchist Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) is alleged to have written, “Every nation has the government it deserves.” Has that become our fate? Is it our fault that we have a cognitively-challenged President, an ego-centric ex-President as his main challenger, a Democratic U.S. Senator who dresses like a slob, and eight Republican Congressmen willing to sacrifice their Party for purposes of self-aggrandizement. Our Founders included Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, giants by today’s standards. Like all humans, they were imperfect, but their positive qualities outweighed their negative ones. After 250 years, can we say our politics have evolved in Darwinian fashion? Or is our current state of political affairs an example of dysgenics – a decrease in the prevalence of traits deemed to be socially desirable?

https://nypost.com/2023/10/03/federal-agencies-spent-3-3-billion-on-new-furniture-while-employees-worked-from-home-during-covid-pandemic/

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent $237,960 on roughly 30 solar-powered picnic tables while the vast majority of its workforce stayed home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The State Department paid more than $117,250 for as many as 40 luxurious Ethan Allen leather recliners to fill its embassy building in Islamabad, Pakistan.

And the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spent $284,000 and $213,828, respectively, to spruce up their mostly empty conference rooms.

The extravagant purchases were all part of an eye-popping $3.3 billion federal agencies spent on new office furniture between 2020 and 2022, a watchdog report exclusively obtained by The Post shows.

The taxpayer watchdog OpenTheBooks.com revealed the furniture splurge in a study published Tuesday, which also cited a Government Accountability Office report that found 17 of the 24 federal agencies are using as little as 9% and as much as 49% of their building capacities well into the fourth year of the pandemic.

In total, the agencies spent more than $1 billion per year on the plush decor — a rate consistent with pre-pandemic levels despite departments filling just a quarter of their available space on average.

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

Do you believe that human beings are sexually aware right from birth?  That children should know about masturbation at 0-4 years, and about hugging, kissing, and sexual behavior at 5-9 years?  Or that children aged 9-12 years should know about sexual attraction, stimulation, and using pornography because by then they are ready for their first sexual experience?

If your answer on all counts is a shocked and emphatic No, you have reason to be very much worried.  For the globalist agenda to upend western civilization strikes at our most vulnerable members.  Is there a plan to  sexualize children, promote pornography, and normalize pedophilia involving the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the U.N. as part of Agenda 2030? The possibility exists. (In 2019, in a meeting at UN headquarters, the WEF signed the UN-Forum Partnership to accelerate the implementation of Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, including its goals for education and health, though details as to what this involves are unclear.)

Under the guise of caring for children’s rights, needs, and health, these organizations are encouraging school systems to incorporate programs rife with sexual content.  To get parents out of the way, they are camouflaging their intent as a commitment to protect the “sexual rights” of minors.  So, schools may not inform parents that their child is being exposed to sexual content, is attending drag queen hour, or is being counseled for sex change.

Such exposure primes children for possible future exploitation, filling their minds with ideas and feelings they are too young to understand.  Brainwashed and confused, they may end up consenting to activities parents have taught them to reject.  Experts say the school programs threaten to normalize pedophilia in the name of “child liberation” and might even amount to grooming.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/watch-kamala-home-buying-climate-anxiety/

Vice President Kamala Harris said young people aren’t buying homes because of “climate anxiety,” not mentioning the sky-high interest rates under her boss, President Joe Biden.

“Young leaders” suffer from “climate anxiety,” which is “their fear about … whether they should have children, whether they should ever think about buying a home for fear that it might be wiped out because of extreme weather occurrences,” Harris said in a Wednesday interview with an Allentown, Pa., news station.

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

What would be the most unAmerican goal today’s so-called Democrat party is pursuing?It is permanent one-party rule.That’s what the New Democrat party is doing by and through its political actions.

Democrats have a long and uncomfortable history of demagoguery, rewriting history when needed and playing fast and loose with the truth.  Today, I will reach back into the history bucket to wash off some of that blackface for which Democrats are famous!

“A split in the Democratic-Republican Party in the mid-1820s gave rise to two factions, i.e., the National Republicans (or Anti-Jacksonians) and the Democrats.  Their most glaring differences lay in their beliefs to which the government should be involved in people’s daily lives.  Democrats tend to favor active government intervention, while Republicans favor a more “hands-off” policy called self-determination.”

We had two parties with but a single, significant difference between them.  Both parties agreed on various economic and societal issues but were split over the extent of government intrusion into people’s lives. 

The Great Depression allowed the Democrat party to shift to newly popular socialism, actually Marxism, as a reaction to President Hoover’s failure to address human suffering adequately.   

Enter President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was victorious by a landslide in 1932 and promised an end to the suffering.  With a mandate from the voters, Roosevelt accomplished three things over his twelve years in office:

He gave hope to the masses
He radically changed our system of government
He can be credited as a central figure in winning the Second World War

It is not generally understood that Roosevelt did not end the Depression but, in actuality, extended it.  Roosevelt’s policies saved lives and did much good, but he did so at the expense of entrepreneurship, innovation, and independence.  Roosevelt was virtually at war with American industrialists until a year before Pearl Harbor commenced a healing process, allowing the U.S. to prepare for war visible just over the horizon.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-implicit-bias-house-of-cards

In the Wall Street Journal, Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin recently published “Why DEI Training Doesn’t Work—and How to Fix It,” a defense of implicit-bias research in the guise of a critique of current corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings. Banaji is one of the two inventors of the concept of implicit bias, and of the related implicit association test (IAT). She and Dobbin hope to acknowledge the flaws of DEI trainings while preserving implicit-bias research—and the associated program of political activism. The authors lament that DEI trainings elicit shame in their subjects, and that they are largely being used to bolster workforce-management policies against possible litigation. Their problem with DEI trainings is not that they are discriminatory, but that they do not strike the right tone:

Reminding managers that they can use these tools to suss out problems and nip them in the bud helps them to feel capable of managing biases and microaggressions. When managers use these skills, they retain women and people of color for long enough to come up for promotion. . . . training isn’t designed to blame people for their moral failings. Instead, it’s galvanizing them to support organizational change by arming them with knowledge.

The problems with DEI trainings are not in their tone, however, but in their substance. The implicit-bias theory (also called unconscious-bias theory) on which these trainings are based has no scientific basis, as years of examinations have consistently demonstrated. Lee Jussim puts it politely in his “12 Reasons to Be Skeptical of Common Claims About Implicit Bias,” but the Open Science Foundation’s archive of Articles Critical of the IAT and Implicit Bias renders a harsher verdict. In 2011, Etienne LeBel and Sampo Paunonen reviewed evidence that measures of implicit bias possess low reliability. In other words, when you test for implicit bias multiple times, you rarely get the same result. Their conclusion was that some part of “implicit bias” is really “random measurement error.” In 2017, Heather Mac Donald’s intensive examination of the theory and its empirical basis (or lack thereof) concluded that the “implicit-bias crusade is agenda-driven social science.” And Bertram Gawronski’s 2019 review of the scholarly literature on implicit-bias research also concludes that there’s no proof that people aren’t self-aware enough to know what’s causing their supposedly “implicit” or “unconscious” biases; and that you can’t prove that there’s any relationship between how people do on the test and how they behave in the real world.

As far back as 2009, Hart Blanton and colleagues reexamined research data on implicit bias. They found that 70 percent of whites who supposedly displayed implicit bias against blacks actually discriminated in favor of blacks.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/05/our-establishments-alternate-realities/

One common denominator that explains why previously successful societies implode is their descent into fantasies. A collective denial prevents even discussion of existential threats and their solutions.

Something like that is happening in the United States. Eight million illegal immigrants have entered the United States by the deliberate erasure of the southern border.

Apparently, the Biden administration sees some unstated advantage in destroying U.S. immigration law and welcoming in would-be new constituents.

Yet, the more the millions arrive, the more Joe Biden and his Homeland Security director Alejandro Mayorkas flat out lie that “the border is secure.”

They both live in a world of make-believe, passed off to the American people as reality.

And the more the Americans are lied to that the border is secure, the more they poll—currently 77 percent—that it is not.

Biden apparently has reversed course and begun using the former pejorative “Bidenomics” as a term of pride.

He now praises this three-year effort to borrow $6-7 trillion, and spike interest rates threefold to 7% on home mortgages—even as prices on essentials like food and fuel have spiked 25-30% since he entered office.

The more that Biden brags about what he did to the economy, the more people poll—over 60%—dissatisfaction with his alternate reality of “Bidenomics.”

Do we remember the humiliation in August 2021 in Afghanistan?

The more Gen. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Joe Biden assured that the American military presence was stable, the more swiftly it crumbled and descended into the worst mass flight of an American army since Vietnam.

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

The ruling class would have us believe that the most dangerous threats to our security and happiness are Russia, global warming, and unapproved speech.  In actuality, the lethal threat of our times and for the foreseeable future is the unconstrained power of the State.  State control versus individual liberty is the conflict that will eventually lead to war, social upheaval, and revolutionary change.  Everything else is either ancillary or a psychological distraction.

The Marxist globalists know this.  Everything they do is engineered to steal personal freedoms and expand government’s oppressive control over the living.  They seek a centralized power structure in which as few people as possible own everything, while everyone else lives as a serf.  To that end, the small cabal of globalist oligarchs continue to siphon wealth and power from ordinary people, strengthening themselves and making their enemies — us — weaker with every thieving pass.

Ordinary people increasingly understand what is happening.  However bad the government’s COVID tyranny has been, it has had the salubrious effect of pulling the wool from the eyes of a great many people.  A primary reason that COVID tyranny has backfired is that it relies on a premise that normal people can see is not true — that the danger from the Wuhan Flu is so great that it justifies lockdowns, censorship, and forced injections of experimental “vaccines.”  Had people been dying in the streets in horrific and ghastly ways, these monumental violations of human rights and personal liberties might have been understood, if not condoned. 

However, ordinary people armed with nothing more than an elementary-school-level comprehension of the Scientific Method and medical ethics know that such radical programs to fight disease are inexcusable unless absolutely necessary.  Once people learned — despite the government’s embargo over such essential information — that young and healthy people had almost no risk of dying or becoming seriously ill from COVID, they also knew that it was unethical to force any kind of experimental treatment upon the unwilling.  Once people learned that the government’s twofold promise — that the “vaccines” prevented both viral infection and transmission — was an easily proven lie, then they knew that there was nothing scientifically rational behind the government’s imperious commands.  Once the government chose to defend its actions — including forced masking and isolation — as critically necessary, despite mounting evidence that these policies did more harm than good, ordinary people began to realize that the whole exercise had nothing to do with public health and everything to do with State control.  Once government scientists started speaking in infantile gibberish — such as, “We’re working at the speed of science!” — the jig was up.  The propaganda had become just too obvious.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-would-frederick-douglass-regard-todays-left/

Frederick Douglass was one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. This man began life as an illiterate slave — nearly all slave owners prevented slaves from learning to read — and rose from slavery to become, along with Abraham Lincoln, the greatest orator of his time, and one of the wisest and most eloquent writers in American history.

He became the great black leader of his day, honored by multiple American presidents who frequently sought his counsel. If you read his autobiography, “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” you will experience English language writing that has few peers in any nonfiction writing in American history.

Every American child and adult should read this book for many reasons. First, it should be read to appreciate the inhumanity of slavery. The physical abuse, and perhaps worst of all, the human degradation inherent to slavery are depicted in understated yet riveting language. Second, it should be read as a document of history. Third, it should be read for its wisdom about the human condition.

Frederick Douglass may be one of the few figures in American history revered by Left and Right, and by nearly all blacks and all whites.

In light of that, it is worth pondering the question: Are Frederick Douglass’ views more consonant with today’s Left or today’s conservatives? It is fair to say that nearly every leftist believes that Frederick Douglass is one of them. But if you read his “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” you will discover a man who, with regard to race, the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and related matters has virtually nothing in common with today’s Left. In fact, leftists would identify every one of the following quotes from Douglass’s autobiography as “white supremacist” and/or “racist.”

Frederick Douglass: “When an unknown man is spoken of in their presence, the first question that arises in the average American mind concerning him and which must be answered is, Of what color is he? and he rises or falls in estimation by the answer given. It is not whether he is a good man or a bad man. That does not seem of primary importance.”

This Douglass quote runs completely counter to the virtually universal left-wing (not liberal, left-wing) claim that race is important and that to ignore it — to attempt to be color-blind — is racist.

The Atlantic, Sept. 13, 2013: From an article titled, “Color Blindness Is Counterproductive”: “How many times have you heard someone say that they ‘don’t see color,’ ‘are color-blind,’ or ‘don’t have a racist bone in their body’? Maybe you’ve even said this yourself. Many sociologists, though, are extremely critical of color blindness as an ideology.”