RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/get_woke_go_broke_now_even_ibram_x_kendis_foundation_is_getting_layoffs.html

Wokesterism is all over, yet as corporation after corporation has learned the hard way, stoking racial or other grievance-group resentment doesn’t actually add value, and in fact is a very good way to go broke.

Therefore, money is drying up for corporations that embrace it, and the cash they dole out to downstream institutions, such as universities, think tanks, activist groups, and big white-shoe foundations. The Bud Light fiasco pretty well shows what happens to those who dive in to embrace woke.

It’s not just scandal-plagued groups like Black Lives Matter, which has done little but riot in cities (hitting black-owned businesses hard) and feather its leaderships’ nests, that has suddenly seen both a drop in public support and incoming funds.

 Now it’s the fancy stuff, the university think tanks, such as Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, led by Ibram X. Kendi, which is seeing big layoffs.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-court-and-the-duty-to-sit-recusal-standards-ethics-durbin-alito-93c4dbb6?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Justice Samuel Alito has refused a demand from Senate Democrats that he disqualify himself from a pending case because of an interview in this newspaper. One of us (Mr. Rivkin) is on the legal team representing the appellants in Moore v. U.S. and conducted the interview jointly with a Journal editor.

In a four-page statement Sept. 8, Justice Alito noted that other justices had previously sat on cases argued by lawyers who had interviewed or written books with them. “We have no control over the attorneys whom parties select to represent them,” he wrote. “We are required to put favorable or unfavorable comments and any personal connections with an attorney out of our minds and judge the cases based solely on the law and the facts. And that is what we do.”

The recusal demand came in an Aug. 3 letter to Chief Justice John Roberts signed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and the committee’s other Democrats, excluding Georgia’s Sen. Jon Ossoff. It is part of a campaign against the court’s conservatives by Democratic politicians, left-wing advocacy groups and journalists whose goals include imposing a congressionally enacted code of ethics on the high court.

Although there already is a judicial ethics code, propounded by the U.S. Judicial Conference, it applies only to the lower federal courts, which Congress established. Proposals to create a Supreme Court code of conduct—including onerous and enforceable recusal requirements—raise fundamental issues of judicial independence and separation of powers. Chief Justice Roberts noted in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) that the justices have a “responsibility to declare unconstitutional those laws that undermine the structure of government established by the Constitution.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19974/trump-maga-dog

If he wants to return to the White House, Donald Trump needs a dog.

That is not an idle observation.

White House history suggests that those presidents who enjoyed canine company in the Oval Office were better able to connect with their national constituency. No surprise when you consider that some 65 million American households report that they own a dog. Demographers also find that, as of 2021, the United States had the most dogs in the world per capita, 274 dogs for every 1000 people.

Dogs cannot but make you laugh, compel you to embrace their unconditional love and loyalty, and allow you to be a better person by simply being in the presence of a wagging tail and a wet nose. A candidate with a dog at his side sends a message that they share a unique insight into these qualities celebrated by dog owners across the country.

The importance of dogs in the White House has long been recognized to the point that in 1999, a Presidential Pet Museum was opened. Its mission remains to preserve the artifacts and legacy of Presidential pooches along with other White House pets.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump never had a pet in the White House and he is the poorer for it. It is easily corrected.

George Washington set the precedent. He is reported to have had 20 dogs, and visited the kennels daily to ensure some quality time with the brood when not guiding the new nation through its multiple challenges.

https://lawliberty.org/is-civic-decline-an-existential-threat/

Several factors combine to make our discordant times more perilous than most of those in America’s past.

The United States is going through one of the most politically divisive times in its history. Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, reminded us last month that sharp and seemingly intractable disagreements are the familiar grist of our national experience. Americans faced them around the election of 1800, in the leadup to the Civil War, in the Gilded Age, around the New Deal, and in the tumultuous 1960s. Yet we resolved all but one of those periods peacefully and emerged from these conflicts on a continued trajectory of ever-greater prosperity and global dominance.

Rove tells a hopeful tale, but past results are no guarantee of future performance. Four new factors combine to make our times more perilous than most past flareups of disunion. First, never have we had an educational establishment so hostile to the story of American exceptionalism, and as a result, never have the young been so willing to think America was bad from the beginning. Second, our cross-political associations have radically declined and with them the bonds that draw Americans together across partisan divides. Instead, we sort ourselves by geography and employment into blue and red bubbles. Third, traditional religious belief has dissipated. People still worship but ever more at the altar of politics. These comprehensive ideological views may give meaning to citizens’ lives but they make compromise hard. And fourth, the stakes (with the exception of those around the Civil War) are generally higher. Government is bigger and thus its control brings greater rewards. Even more importantly, many people claim—sometimes with not implausible reasons—that humanity faces existential crises, like those from climate change and AI. It is hard to feel goodwill to opponents who you think are bent on destroying the human race.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/14/post-postmodern-america/

When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous.

Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps last best witnessed during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

The Biden administration from its outset wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to alter radically the demography of the U.S. by stopping the border wall and allowing into the United States anyone who could walk across the southern border.

Over seven million did just that. Meanwhile, Biden ignored the role of the Mexican cartels in causing nearly 100,000 ANNUAL American fentanyl deaths.

Then border states finally wised up.

They grasped that the entire open-borders, “new Democratic majority” leftwing braggadocio was predicated on its hypocritical architects staying as far away as possible from their new constituents.

So cash strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.

Almost immediately, once magnanimous liberals, whether in Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, or Manhattan, stopped virtue-signaling their support for open borders.

Instead, soon they went berserk over the influx.

So now an embarrassed Biden administration still wishes illegal aliens to keep coming but to stay far away from their advocates—by forcing them to remain in Texas.

That means the president has redefined the US. border. It rests now apparently north of Texas, as Biden cedes sovereignty to Mexico.

Precivilizational greens in California prefer blowing up dams to building them.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/15/bidenomics-bidenflation/

We can imagine the White House summer meeting as President Joe Biden’s handlers, whoever they might be, desperately tried to figure out how boost his flagging favorability ratings among voters. Some genius, no doubt, shouted out “Bidenomics!” as just the ticket to repair his tattered reputation. They rolled it out and, well, Americans still aren’t buying it.

On Thursday, Biden’s people pushed him out once again to flog the nearly dead Bidenomics horse. At an appearance in Maryland touted by the administration as a “major” economic address, Biden told voters that his agenda is about “investing in America and investing in Americans,” and referred to Republican plans to reduce federal spending and lower taxes as “MAGAnomics.”

So far, such rah-rah, pro-Bidenomics rhetoric hasn’t convinced voters.

A recent CNN-SSRS poll, for instance, found that 58% of Americans say that Bidenomics has made the economy worse, up from 50% last year. This, despite a relentless tide of positive press in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, a just-released Rasmussen Reports poll finds 52% saying the economy has become “worse” under Biden, versus 31% who say it’s improved. And our own recent I&I/TIPP Poll found a similar 51% who disagreed with Biden’s statement that his policies were “turning things around.”

Americans have good reason to be pessimistic. Recent headlines, mostly all about the ravages of inflation, and almost all within the last week, tell you why they’re not buying what Biden has to sell:

Bidenomics In Action: 16.7% Bidenflation — The Chickens Come Home To Roost, Hurting Americans (TIPP Insights)
Biden’s Food Inflation Record: Grocery Prices Up 19.6% (Breitbart)
Bidenomics strikes again: Real household income suffers biggest drop since Great Recession (Washington Examiner)
Credit card and car loan defaults hit 10-year high as inflation squeezes families (New York Post)
5 states’ residents got richer, but 17 states’ got poorer, new Census data shows (The Hill)
Inflation rises for second straight month in August on higher gas costs (USA Today)
Wholesale inflation surges more than expected in August (Fox News)
Inflation is weighing down Americans. Many trust Trump, more than Biden, to fix it (USA Today)
In a bad omen for inflation, US oil prices top $90 a barrel for the first time this year (CNN)

It seems there are lots of inflationary “bad omens” these days. At the heart of it all is what we might just as well call “Bidenflation.”

http://www.swtotd.blogsot.com

“I say again, the era of big government is over.”  President William J. Clinton   January 23, 1996

  “For he on honey-dew hath fed/ And drunk the milk of Paradise;” so ends Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” Xanadu, an extravaganza, was located in Mongolia, north of Beijing. Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, was Emperor of China. Xanadu became his first capital, later his summer palace. Khan was the founder of the Yuan Dynasty and ruled China for thirty-four years (1260-1294).

We in the United States have not been so grandiose…yet. However, in Washington there is a sanctimonious belief that all problems can be solved by government, that its bounty has no limits. In the September 12, 2023 issue of The Telegraph (London), Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Jeremy Warner wrote: “The fiscal scale of Bidenomics is larger than Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s by a wide margin. It is larger than Johnson’s guns and butter in the 1960s, or Reagan’s military rearmament in the 1980s. We are witnessing an extraordinary experiment in U.S. economic policy.” The New Deal was a response to a global depression. Johnson’s Guns and Butter was to fund the Vietnam War and his “Great Society.” Reagan’s rearmament won the Cold War. Bidenomics was to mend the nation’s infrastructure, combat a pandemic that was already being addressed, and to fight inflation, a result of easy money, business closures during the pandemic, and rises in energy prices caused by Mr. Biden’s curtailment of exploration and production.

Expanding tentacles of our enlarged administrative state raise questions: How much larger can the federal government grow? White House employment alone, at 524 people, has grown by 27% in the past three years. Is it possible to shrink entitlements, the fastest growing segment of spending? What will be the effect of rising interest rates, which in two or three years will cost a trillion dollars a year? Interest costs are already roughly equal to defense spending. Will defense suffer in an increasingly dangerous world? (At 3.5% of GDP, defense spending is about half of what it was in 1982.)

The numbers are sobering. U.S. GDP is estimated to be $27 trillion in 2023. Total federal debt for this year is estimated to be $32 trillion, or 118.5% of GDP. In addition, state and local debt were $2.1 trillion in 2022. To put those number is in perspective, the ratio of federal debt to GDP at the end of World War II was 117.5 percent. That ratio declined for several years, troughing in 1981 at 32.5%. Fitch Ratings recently lowered their rating on U.S debt from AAA to AA+, saying that “the ratio of debt interest to tax revenue will reach 10% by 2025, the level where it starts to create a snowball effect.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/13/criminals-using-tiktok-to-teach-people-how-to-shoplift/

As the crime crisis worsens across the country, with hundreds of stores in major cities being targeted by mass looting attacks, some of the criminals who engage in organized theft have turned to the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok to teach looting techniques to their followers.

According to the New York Post, such videos appear under the hashtag “borrow tip and tricks,” which has accumulated 8.9 billion views as various “borrowers” share their methods for carrying out such criminal acts.

“Today I went to the mall so I’m going to show you what I borrowed,” said a user by the name of @borrowingqueen. Another user named @b0rrowing.t1ngz ranked stores based on how easy they are to steal from; the list puts Walmart, Walgreens, and Dollar Tree at the top for easiest to loot, while Target, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Sephora are ranked as harder to hit.

The user who gave the ranking then provided additional tips for theft, such as stealing small items first, heading to the restroom to remove the items from their packaging, and avoiding “suspicious” behavior such as looking around for security cameras.

Some of these videos are even being posted by current retail workers, providing information from the inside. One such clip, with over 7.1 million views, was posted by a Target employee who advised potential looters to avoid targeting the same store multiple times.

Mass looting has become a widespread problem in the United States, and particularly in states and cities run by Democrats who favor soft-on-crime policies. California in particular, having recently implemented a law which does not make it a crime to steal as long as the value of the stolen goods remains under $950, has seen a spike in looting even in luxury stores in such cities as Los Angeles. Combined with various bail reform laws that often see criminals released immediately after their arrest, and the penalties for such acts are now lower than ever before.

Looting and organized shoplifting has ultimately cost retail companies a total of over $100 billion, and has led to many prominent stores shutting down flagship locations in large cities due to being unable to combat the rise in crime.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/a_call_to_quills_for_writers_everywhere.html

From time to time, someone asks me for advice on writing.  I want to encourage people to write because this is a crucial time in history.  As the scourge of censorship takes hold across the West, we do not know whether the platforms of communication available to us today will be around tomorrow.  The days of handwritten samizdat may well return, and for this reason, it is important that freethinkers spend time recording their thoughts so that others may learn and do the same.

Writing is good exercise for the brain, and through trial and error, even non-writers will become writers quickly.  Most of what I know comes from reading the words of others — which is a testament to the power of writing.

The most important thing to know about writing is this: always write without fear.  The word “essay” actually means “an attempt.”  Our current understanding of the word as a form of written composition comes from the great sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne, who recorded his thoughts in a collection of “attempts” (essays) during the French Renaissance.  Writing is not about producing perfection; it is about pursuing perfection.

Michelangelo said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”  When I sit down to write, I look for that statue and start to chip away at the rock the best I can.  I begin with an idea of what perfection might look like.  Invariably, I never achieve a perfect result, but sometimes I am a little closer to the ideal in my mind.  Everything I write is an “attempt” to reach this ideal.

Writing should be fun.  “I only write when inspiration strikes,” William Faulkner said before adding, “Fortunately it strikes at nine every morning.”  Although I have found the early morning hours a particularly rich time to write, I hardly ever write until my head is nearly bursting with ideas.  I let thoughts collect and percolate until my brain feels as if it might explode, and only then do I sit down and attempt to sculpt those ideas into something worth saying.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/13/impeach-joe-biden-3/

Editor’s Note: This editorial originally ran on September 26, 2019. Now that the House has announced plans to begin an impeachment inquiry into Biden, we reprint it here just to show how far ahead of the curve we were and how diligently the mainstream press has buried this story for the past four years.

Until the transcript of President Donald Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky emerged on Wednesday, Democrats were in a mad fury with accusations that Trump had bribed a foreign government to investigate the business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The claim, based on a whistleblower’s second-hand account, which none of them had seen, alleged that Trump withheld aid to Ukraine on the condition that it open an investigation on Biden.

Circumstantially at least, there seemed to be some crumbs to back this up. Aside from the mysterious whistleblower claim, the administration had held up an aid package shortly before the call. And then, statements made by Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, seemed to confirm some elements of the story.

When the transcript of the call came out, however, the story fell apart. There was no discussion of aid. Trump did not cajole or pressure Zelensky.

Of course, since the impeachment train had already left the station, Democrats couldn’t suddenly shrug their shoulders and say “never mind.” So the mere fact that Trump brought up the topic of the Biden investigation is now grounds for impeachment.

But if that’s all there is to it, why isn’t Biden under the impeachment cloud?

After all, no one disputes the fact that he pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by telling officials there, in no uncertain terms, that if they didn’t, they’d lose out on $1 billion in aid.