RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/philadelphia-voters-let-cops-be-cops-c6ebf736?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

After a violent era in Philadelphia, the city’s voters have rejected the broken and bloody promises of the progressive left and nominated two mayoral candidates pledging to restore public safety.

Since Democrats have an overwhelming advantage in voter registration, the likely winner will be Democratic mayoral candidate Cherelle Parker, a former City Council member and state legislator. At a Monday press conference she talked about her goal of “restoring our police department to its full complement and that means using every tool that we can to make sure we get officers on the job.”

She also wants to let them use constitutional tools to do the job. Ms. Parker—and remember she’s a Democrat—is not just saying fund the police. Once funded, she wants them to police vigorously—and last week’s primary victory says that voters agree with her.

The Journal’s Scott Calvert noted last week:

Ms. Parker, the only Black candidate in the top tier of polling and the candidate who had the most Black support, has spoken favorably of police investigative stops commonly known as stop-and-frisk. The practice in Philadelphia has been under judicial oversight since 2011 amid claims of police abuses.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/abandon-the-swamp/

Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound? I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce? Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen. 

We already knew that James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Michael Sussmann, Kevin Clinesmith, and all the other characters in and around the Russia Collusion Delusion had fabricated the story of Trump’s supposed connection with Russia out of whole cloth. 

We already knew that they had gone out of their way to protect Hillary Clinton. 

We knew that there was no predicate for obtaining a FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of many thousands of such warrants), thus opening a back door into the Trump campaign. 

We knew that the surveillance apparatus of the regime had been weaponized to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and then, when he surprised everyone by winning anyway, to taint his administration and render him radioactive.  

What should we make of Durham’s non-revelatory revelations? I think that, wittingly or not, they were just a big exercise in track-covering, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well, nothing beyond the sound and fury, anyway.

Still, Durham’s bulletin is useful as a marker of the futility in which we labor. André Gide touched on this point when he reminded us that “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” Over the past five or six years, virtually everything that Durham said in his report had already been said. But because no one was listening, it is necessary to start again and say it once more. 

In this spirit, I am going to say again some things I have said elsewhere, beginning with what has become my ritual invocation of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s observation that a week is a long time in politics. That’s time enough, as T. S. Eliot said in another context, “for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/the-absurdities-of-our-age/

A sign of a civilization in headlong decline is its embrace of absurdities. Unfortunately for the United States, we are witnessing an epidemic of nihilist nonsense. Here are a few examples:  

Reparations  

How could a dysfunctional state like California even contemplate $800 billion in reparations? 

The state currently faces a $31 billion annual deficit—and it’s climbing. Its $100 billion high-speed rail project is inert, a veritable Stonehenge of concrete monoliths with a foot of track.  

California’s income tax rates are already the highest in the nation. Its sales taxes, electricity rates, and gas taxes and prices are among the steepest in the country. And for what? 

Crime, homelessness, and medieval decay characterize the once great downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is now not safe to walk alone in any major California city after dark.  

Shoplifting and smash-and-grab theft are no longer treated as crimes. The result is the mass flight of brand stores from our downtowns and inner cities, with all the accustomed cries of “racism,” even as racist public prosecutors pick and choose whether to indict the arrested on the basis of race.  

California infrastructure, once the best in the county, is now among the worst. Decaying and crowded freeways, inadequate water storage, and pot-holed streets are the new norm.  

The state’s public schools are dysfunctional. Once premier public universities are spiraling headlong into decline—junking scholastic tests for admissions, using illegal racial quotas to warp admissions, and institutionalizing racialized dorms and graduation ceremonies.  

Even if California enjoyed a huge surplus, even if 300,000 residents were not fleeing the state each year, even if California had a history of being a Confederate slave state, even if whites were the majority of the population, even if the black population was greater than its present 5-6 percent, it would be insane for the state to even contemplate racial reparations.  

Twenty-seven percent of the state’s residents were born outside of the United States, and have no American ancestors. The state is the most racially diverse in America, and one in which every group could, in theory, lodge complaints against the dead of the past. Mexican-Americans, Armenians, Asians, and the descendants of the impoverished “Okie” diaspora could all cite legacies of bias—but from whom exactly? The long dead?  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/bill_barr_is_his_own_worst_enemy.html

Uniparty propagandist and Deep State shill Bill Barr is waddling from one television studio to the next to tell audiences that the feds will almost certainly indict Donald Trump by late summer for mishandling classified documents.  The Cheka FBI has been outed as a criminal enterprise engaged in subverting elections and spying on the American people, but sure, let’s get all worked up about whether the president of the United States — in whom the Constitution’s Article II executive powers are vested — has somehow inexplicably infringed his own declassification authority.  Although Augustus Gloop Barr can barely conceal his joy, this tiring new chapter in the never-ending “get Trump” saga comes off as yet another manifestation of Bizarro World, in which a group of criminals running the American government get to pretend that nobody is “above the law.”

Walrus Barr enjoys playing the “scolding father” who “knows best” in a worn-out daddy routine alongside scripted corporate news hosts performing for the cameras.  Although he remains a consummate Deep State stooge who will do anything to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the Oval Office, he also spends a great deal of TV time burnishing his “I’m the only adult in the room” bona fides.  He has called out New York State’s vindictive lawsuits against President Trump as a “political hit job” and “gross overreach.”  He has excoriated Democrat district attorney of New York Alvin Bragg’s Trump indictment as an “abomination” that “makes us look like a banana republic.”  He acknowledges that the Durham probe proves that “Russiagate” has not only been a “grave injustice” to Trump, but has also “vindicated” the president’s accurate denunciation of the Clinton-Obama Russia Hoax conspiracy as a “witch hunt” from the very beginning.  Barr readily admits, in other words, that state and federal prosecutors have shamelessly pursued Trump for recklessly and maliciously partisan reasons that have threatened both the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power in the United States.  

After broadly recognizing the seriousness of the Deep State’s crimes and the depth of its depravity, though, loyal palace guard Barr then sweeps these horrific State crimes to the side, shakes his head in disgust, and instead blames his former boss for being “his own worst enemy.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dark-matter/

In 2017, when then-president Donald Trump responded to the ongoing fever of far-left iconoclasm by predicting that radicals would soon be toppling statues of the Founding Fathers, mainstream commentators responded with mockery. Then, sure enough, the statues of our greatest presidents started coming down.

And it’s still happening – not just to political leaders, and not just to statues. It’s happening in every field, including astronomy. Which brings us to the case of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021. Articles published in Scientific American last July, when it began sending back images, make it sound like the marvel of marvels:

* “The most powerful observatory ever made promises to produce some of the most incredible discoveries of our lifetime and beyond.”

* “This is the picture we’ve all been waiting for[:] the deepest image of the cosmos ever captured. Humanity has never seen so far back and so clearly into the depths of the universe’s history.”

* “The next great era of astronomy truly began this morning….the James Webb Space Telescope has at last delivered a complete set of first full-color images.”

Who was James Webb? As administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968, he oversaw the development of the Apollo program – which in 1969, of course, in one of the great triumphs of human history, landed a man on the moon. In his time (he died in 1992), Webb was a revered figure at NASA, and the naming of the telescope after him seemed, at first, entirely reasonable and certainly uncontroversial.

But in March 2021, just over a year before the above-cited articles appeared, Scientific American ran a very different piece about Webb and the telescope named after him. Carrying the bylines of no fewer than four scientists – Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “an assistant professor of physics and a core faculty member in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire”; Sarah Tuttle, a University of Washington astronomer; Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium; and Brian Nord, “a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago” – it was headlined “The James Webb Space Telescope Needs to Be Renamed.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/progressive-cities-population-decline-census-bureau-chicago-new-york-san-francisco-e803562c?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Population loss from big cities slowed last year, the Census Bureau reported last week. Was it trying to bury the lead? The bigger news is how Covid lockdowns, crime and the rising cost of living are causing an exodus from big progressive cities.

According to the latest Census data, New York City lost 468,297 people between April 2020 and July 2022, about 5.3% of its population. That’s more people than live in the city of Miami (449,514). Other big losers include Chicago (81,313), Los Angeles (76,529) and San Francisco (65,522). San Francisco lost a larger share of its population (7.5%) than any other major city.

Population decline in these cities slowed but notably didn’t reverse in 2022 after lockdowns were lifted. City leaders blame remote work, but can you blame workers for not returning to offices when they face high taxes, high housing costs and declining public order? Chicago logged 41% more crimes last year than in 2021, and crime is up 43% so this year.

CME Group CEO Terry Duffy recently revealed that his wife was the victim of a carjacking in broad daylight in Chicago. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin last year cited Chicago’s crime surge as the reason he moved his hedge fund to Miami, after first considering New York City. One colleague had been punched by “some random lunatic” in the head, he noted. Another had been robbed at gunpoint.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/soros_is_a_lifelong_antisemite.html

George Soros is one of the strangest persons ever to achieve both power and celebrity, in my opinion. Because he is genetically Jewish, any public criticism of Soros is instantly followed by attack-dog howling by the leftist media, because Soros pays for many of the radical shock troops of the Democratic Party, and he uses that power to protect his public reputation.

But you can read Soros on himself very clearly, and he is quite willing to confess to actions that would make normal people feel suicidal shame and guilt.

The most famous story is told by Soros himself about his early experiences in Budapest, where he grew up in “an anti-semitic secular family” of Jewish origins. Soros’ birth name was “Schwartz” (“black” in German), not an unusual name, but he changed it to Soros, which sounds like a pun on the Yiddish term for trouble and pain, “tsores.”

That word reminds us of the English word “sorrows” as in Handel’s Messiah, which describes Jesus as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

According to his autobiography, George Soros made his first fortune as a young man in Budapest by selling the (stolen) furniture of Jewish families who were deported to the death camps by the Nazis and their Hungarian allies. Soros makes no secret of the fact that he hates Jews, as his father did before him. He also hates the land of Israel, which is often seen to be the only good thing to emerge from the genocide of the Jews by Hitler and the Nazis.

Elon Musk is therefore not wrong to say that Soros “hates humanity,” as shown by Soros’s life-long pursuit of the destruction of the United States and its most precious values.

Today, Soros may be closer to his goal than ever before, given our Swamp Coup against constitutional government in the United States.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/51_people_who_should_never_have_clearances_again.html

As a member of the United States Intelligence Community since I was 22 years old, I’ve had, at minimum, a secret security clearance for the better part of 17 years now. I’ve always taken this responsibility seriously, as while working in intelligence, I’ve seen firsthand the disastrous consequences of intelligence falling into the wrong hands, whether it’s a leak on our own side leading to the death of soldiers or information we’ve received because we convinced our enemies to pass data to us that resulted in successful military and law enforcement operations both in the U.S. and abroad.

Getting a clearance is not an easy process, as most folks will attest. Clearances are given only to those who hold a job that requires one (either military or government service, almost exclusively). The process can take anywhere from three months to a year, depending on the type of clearance. I’ve provided this preamble to ensure that readers understand that I do not make my argument lightly. I know the hundreds of thousands of dollars and man-hours that go into investigating, adjudicating, and processing security clearances.

The 51 Intelligence Community professionals who signed a letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop showed “signs of Russian disinformation” should have their clearances immediately revoked and their access to classified information severed and never again restored. Their blatant disregard for the proper process through which an intelligence investigation is conducted, as well as for national security matters in general, is ground to terminate their clearances immediately.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/19/release-the-manifesto/

On March 27, a transgender lunatic named Audrey Hale shot up a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee. The shooter, who tragically killed three adults and three children before being neutralized by well-trained Metropolitan Nashville Police Department officers, was a 28-year-old biological female who had “transitioned” to a public-facing male “gender identity.” Nashville police also confirmed that the shooter once attended the school herself.

Based simply on those established facts, one might offer a reasonably educated guess as to the likely motive of this horrific school shooting: a one-time Christian seems to have spurned the faith of her upbringing, adopted a vogue new worldview that is in irreconcilable tension with Christianity, and lashed out in one final kamikaze act to vindicate her new paganism and vanquish the foes of her youth. 

The reasonable guess, in short, was—and remains—that this was an ideologically motivated anti-Christian hate crime, an act of domestic terrorism. The veracity of that guess was only bolstered by the revelation, which recently resurfaced on Twitter, that at some point during the murderous rampage, the shooter took precious time to divert from the school, scurry over to the adjacent church, and unload seven rounds into a stained-glass figure of Adam—that is, Adam from Genesis.

Let’s think this one over: Why, exactly, would a transgender former student of a Christian school return to that school to murder innocent Christian children and shoot up a stained-glass representation of no less symbolic a biblical figure than Adam himself? We don’t necessarily need Sherlock Holmes on the case to figure this one out.

In fact, shortly after the slaughter at The Covenant School, Nashville police revealed that the murderer had, in an act all too common in this gruesome genre, left behind a manifesto. But that manifesto has thus far never seen the light of day. In the days following the massacre, as Joe Biden and national Democrats stopped mourning the murdered Christian children and began pleading not to blame the “transgender community” at large, some transgender activists even took to social media to not-so-subtly threaten Nashville police against releasing the manifesto: “Don’t release it, or else.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2023/05/19/weekend-parting-shot-dems-bring-their-usual-level-of-dignity-to-the-house-hearing-n1696732

In case you missed it, on Thursday, the hearing for the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government happened. And of course, the Democrat legislators who are perfectly comfortable with going after corruption, as long as there is an “R” involved, were on hand to ask questions. Ah, the pageantry! The buffoonery! The baboonery! It was all there for the world to see.

Among the donkeys who rode the Clown Car Express across the screens for C-SPAN and other outlets was Representative Linda Sanchez (D-Calif./Karen). If that name sounds familiar, you may remember Ms. Sanchez as the person who flipped off the Republicans at the congressional baseball game. While managing to keep her hands to herself yesterday, she somehow found a way to embarrass herself even more with a single inquiry. Sanchez was questioning FBI whistleblower Marcus Allen. One may argue that the wheels came off as soon as Sanchez opened her mouth.

It wasn’t bad enough that she stepped on a rake. It’s that she kept stepping on one after another. She knew she had the wrong Marcus Allen, but the harridan just couldn’t excuse herself and yield her time. She just kept talking and talking, hoping that she might find someplace to land. As loathsome and uncouth as she is, even I started to feel sorry for her. She talked her way right off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote. But perhaps Barney Fife said it best: “You’re a regular clown, you are. Why don’t you put a red light on your nose and go in the circus?”