RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/27/trumps-job-for-vivek-czar-in-charge-of-swamp-drainage/

It’s only been a few days since the first GOP debate, but already the kettle of journalist-vultures have gorged themselves on the carrion, their frenzied wake having picked the corpses bare. Alas, this feeding famishes the craving it seeks to satisfy, so we are left with sticky piles of bones, gobbets of contradictory opinion, and precious little enlightenment. We all know that when it comes to the so-called “rule of law” in this country, “the process is the punishment.” When it comes to spectacles like the Fox News-sponsored GOP debate, the process seems to be the point.

It is, I am sure you will agree, rather a pointless point, but the very pointlessness of the exercise was clearly the cherished goal.  Why else would all those producers and technicians and lovingly coiffed and pressed interlocutors Bret Baier and whatever the bleached-blonde Fox mannequin who sat next to him was called: why serve up all that fatuousness just to hear them hector the candidates with a smorgasbord of silly questions followed by the admonition: “You have 30 seconds” or “You have one minute” to answer?

I happen to have Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided on my desk at the moment. It is an account of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Each of the seven debates lasted about three hours. One candidate would open with a 60 minute statement, to which  the other would answer with a 90-minute response. The first speaker ended with a 30-minute rejoinder. I am trying to picture what Abraham Lincoln’s response to the instruction “You have 30 seconds to reply” would be. I can’t really do it, but I suspect it would be unprintable.

As I have said elsewhere, I suspect that future historians will draw a line under this snazzy pseudo-debate, marking it down as the beginning of the end of the entire genre. Given the changes in how people get their news today—not from television, mostly—this terminus a quo was probably foreordained anyway. But it was confirmed by the simultaneous broadcast of Tucker Carlson’s interview with the only serious Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump.

The bean counters tell us that about 12.4 million people watched the FoxNews debated; that’s down from about 25 million back when Trump participated in 2020 and 2016. It took only a few hours before Tucker’s interview with Trump had racked up more than 220 million views.

I am not quite sure what that number means, other than many more people tuned into Tucker than digested what Asa Hutchinson or Chris Christie or Tim Scott or Doug what’s-his-name from North (or was it South?) Dakota had to say.

Opinions vary about the performances of the A-list participants in this B-list event.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/prosecution-as-persecution/

The establishment Left’s war on Trump shows no signs of letting up.

Last week, international news reported that Germany is considering a ban on the right-wing political party Alternative for Deutschland, which has made considerable electoral gains in recent years, and which has polled recently as the country’s second most popular political party. Such a ban would effectively lock the party out of democratic government. It might be hard to imagine such a thing happening in America, but in many ways, we’re already there. As left-wing internationalists tighten their grip on state power, protecting “Our Sacred Democracy” increasingly seems to require the most draconian efforts on the part of elites to limit the choices that citizens have in elections.

It wasn’t always this way. Only ten years ago, leaders like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton felt so little threat from typical Americans that they mocked them as “deplorables” and people “bitterly clinging” to guns and religion. But after the clingers taught the Democrats a lesson in the 2016 election, the Left establishment resolved to crush them—for good.

Weeks after Biden “won” the 2020 election, Time magazine gleefully reported on the various covert operations that “fortified” the contest against Trump. Of course, by “fortification” they didn’t mean “protection against fraud and interference.” After all, the 2020 election saw fraud and interference on a scale that would have been unimaginable only five years ago. The “fortification,” then, aimed to protect the administrative state from the electoral judgment of the public.

Aside from the documented ballot manipulation, shady methods of vote tallying, Zuckerbucks, and suspension of state-level constitutional rules regarding who has the power to modify election law—all of which benefitted Biden—there were many other forms of malfeasance. We know now that Russiagate was a post hoc effort to undermine the result of the 2016 election.

Close calls: Near Misses on Airport Runways

The U.S. has not had a fatal plane crash involving a commercial airline in more than 14 years — an incredible safety achievement.

But the elaborate system that keeps planes from crashing is struggling. In recent years, air traffic controllers, who guide planes out of harm’s way, have suffered a staff shortage. Out of 313 air traffic control facilities nationwide, just three as of May met staff targets set by the Federal Aviation Administration and the union representing controllers.

Aviation officials worry the shortage is leading to close calls, in which planes nearly crash. There were at least 46 near misses involving commercial airlines last month, according to an investigation by my colleagues Sydney Ember and Emily Steel that published this morning. Those close calls are still a small fraction of the nearly 1.4 million flights in the U.S. each month, and it is not clear whether the rate is increasing.

But any close call is dangerous, potentially leading to a fatal crash that breaks America’s safety streak. As a spokesman for the F.A.A. said, “One close call is one too many.” The agency’s goal is to reduce the number of such near misses to zero. Staff shortages make that harder.

“The controllers we’ve talked to take real pride in their job, and they work really hard to make sure these planes are safe,” Emily told me. “But they’re worried that the circumstances around their jobs could make them slip up and that those mistakes could be very dangerous.”

What is behind the shortage? Part of the problem goes back decades: In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan fired thousands of air traffic controllers who were on strike. The F.A.A. then hired new controllers. Many retired when they became eligible to do so 20 years later. And now, another 20 years later, another wave of controllers is retiring.

Chronic disinvestment in government services is another cause. Over the past decade, the number of fully trained controllers has fallen 10 percent, while airport traffic has increased 5 percent. The F.A.A. has asked for more money to increase hiring. Even if the agency receives those funds, it will take time to hire new controllers and train them.

In the meantime, the U.S. risks more close calls. Some in aviation worry it’s only a matter of time before the overworked system fails to stop a deadly crash.

“Aviation officials will say that we have the safest system in the world,” Sydney said. “But underlying that success are risks and issues that deserve attention.”

In some near misses, airplanes have come so close to each other that officials described the encounters as “skin to skin.”

https://victorhanson.com/the-biden-clans-con-is-coming-to-an-end/

Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden—and ultimately Joe Biden himself.

As Vice President, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.

So what is the Congress to do now—un-impeach and exonerate an innocent impeached Donald Trump, and instead impeach a guilty Biden for essentially the same allegations?

After all, the Left redefined the impeachment bar in 2019 as leveraging foreign aid to Ukraine to benefit one’s political career.

And that is exactly what Joe Biden did to ensure his son could continue to raise millions for the Biden family with foreign governments, while being shielded from political consequences.

An impeached Trump also was accused of using the power of government to go after his likely 2020 presidential rival by suggesting that Joe Biden and his family were corrupt, and should be investigated by Ukrainian officials for fraud and bribery.

Despite Joe Biden’s denials, Trump was right: there was plenty of evidence to link Ukrainian unwarranted payoffs going into Biden family coffers.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/21/actually-joe-all-your-objectives-were-failures/

“Name me a single objective we’ve ever set out to accomplish that we’ve failed on. Name me one, in all of our history. Not one!”

-President Joe Biden, August 16, 2023 

Joe Biden in one of his now accustomed angry “get off my grass” moods dared the press to find just one of his policies/objectives that has not worked. Silence followed.

Perhaps it was polite to say nothing, given even the media knows almost every enacted Biden policy has failed.

Here is a summation of what he should instead apologize for.

Biden in late summer 2021 sought a 20th anniversary celebration of 9/11 and the 2001 subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. He wished to be the landmark president that yanked everyone out of Afghanistan after 20 years in country. But the result was the greatest military humiliation of the United States since the flight from Vietnam in 1975.

Consider the ripples of Biden’s disaster. U.S. deterrence was crippled worldwide. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea almost immediately began to bluster or return to their chronic harassment of U.S. and allied ships and planes. We left thousands of allied Afghans to face Taliban retribution, along with some Western contractors.

Biden abandoned a $1 billion embassy, and a $300 million remodeled Bagram airbase strategically located not far from China and Russia, and easily defensible. Perhaps $50 billion in U.S. weaponry and supplies were abandoned and now find their way into the international terrorist mart.

All our pride flags, our multimillion gender studies programs at Kabul University, and our George Floyd murals did not just come to naught, but were replaced by the Taliban’s anti-homosexual campaigns, burkas, and detestation of any trace of American popular culture.

Vladimir Putin sized up the skedaddle. He collated it with Biden’s unhinged quip that he would not get too excited if Putin just staged a “minor” invasion of Ukraine. He remembered Biden’s earlier request to Putin to modulate Russian hacking to exempt a few humanitarian American institutions. Then Russia concluded of our shaky Commander-in-Chief that he either did not care or could do nothing about another Russian invasion.

The result so far is more than 500,000 dead and wounded in the war, a Verdun-stand-off along with fortified lines, the steady depletion of our munitions and weapon stocks, and a new China/Russia/Iran/North Korean axis, with wink and nod assistance from NATO Turkey.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/georgias-trump-indictment-partisan-political-hit-job/

How is it a criminal enterprise to challenge the results of a razor-thin election?

How is it a criminal enterprise if the first amendment protects it?

The sweeping 98-page document charges Former President Trump and nineteen others with various felony charges for actions that occurred in the frenetic time immediately following the 2020 Presidential Election, an election Trump officially lost by the slimmest of margins: 0.23% and 11,779 votes.

For those of us who live here in Georgia, there was a palpable feeling that something was wrong. This was the first election where we had ballot drop-off boxes spread all over with nobody keeping an eye on them. There were daily reports of ballot harvesting in nursing homes. There were mysterious water leaks where the votes were being counted, poll watchers were reporting a lack of access to the count, and the counting seemed to stop and start for no apparent reason. Cynics suspected the pauses were meant to figure out how many votes Joe Bide still needed to carry Georgia.

Once Georgia was officially called for Joe Biden, President Trump, and his team immediately cried foul and began looking for ways to challenge and even overturn the election. There did not seem to be a coherent legal strategy to get into court and challenge the election. However, one lawsuit filed in Fulton County sought to challenge 147,000 absentee ballots to see if any were illegitimate. The plaintiff was not Donald Trump. This suit alleged evidence of fraudulent ballots and improper ballot counting in Fulton County. Nine Georgia voters filed it. These voters never had their day in court because the judge dismissed the case without hearing the Plaintiff’s evidence on the grounds that they “lacked standing.”

Trump appealed to Georgia’s Secretary of State by calling and imploring him to take action to correct the perceived fraud given the razor-thin margin of defeat. In addition, Trump listened to advice and counsel from a variety of lawyers, including Attorney General Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, and John Eastman, to name a few.

Bill Barr reportedly told Trump the election was clean, and he lost fair and square. It remains a mystery how Barr came to this conclusion without investigating Trump’s claims of fraud. Meanwhile, Eastman and others reportedly advised Trump that it was plausible to contest the election by imploring Vice President Pence to disregard the slate of electors from Georgia (and other places) in favor of an alternate slate of Trump electors when counting the electoral college votes. For this strategy to prevail, any alternate electors would need to have their names submitted by the constitutional deadline of the 4th Wednesday in December 2020. So, in Georgia and other states, Trump supporters presented themselves as alternate electors on the theory that if any of the fraud claims could be sufficiently proven, the Vice President would be able to count the Trump Electors.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/07/an-abc-of-woke/

Originating as black American parlance for resisting racial and social inequality, Woke has morphed into a generic term for radically left-wing social and political awareness. According to Perry Bacon Jr. of the Washington Post it represents the following doctrines for the American Left: rejection of American exceptionalism; a claim that the United States has never been a true democracy; a claim that non-white people (“people of colour”) are victims of systemic and institutional racism; that white Americans enjoy “white privilege”; that African Americans deserve reparations for slavery and post-enslavement discrimination; that disparities among racial groups are explained by discrimination; that US law enforcement agencies are designed to discriminate against people of colour and so should be defunded, disbanded or at least heavily reformed; that women suffer from systemic sexism; that individuals should be able to identify with any gender or none; that US capitalism is deeply flawed.

Bacon’s list is not definitive, but the common subtext of Wokeism is invariably victimhood. This is a psychologically determined attitude, considered by Wokeists to transcend any contrary empirical evidence. Professor Jean-François Braunstein of the Sorbonne has remarked that Wokeism offers theories of knowledge that validate feelings over facts. Sometimes celebrities empathise with victimhood by claiming it for themselves. Prince Harry wanted us to believe that he had been “cut off” financially by his father, despite having been able to buy a multi-million-dollar Californian mansion; he also claims to “want his family back” and an apology from it, picturing himself as the injured party after insulting the royal family repeatedly in public.

Victimhood is now also becoming an excuse for violence by fringe groups with a dubious and anti-science agenda, for example “trans-activists”. Generational victimhood relating to climate change holds white civilisation responsible for creating global warming in the industrial revolution and exporting climate-damaging technology to the rest of the world, which is not therefore responsible for climate damage and should be paid reparations. Little or no mention is made of the astonishing benefits to mankind yielded by the industrial revolution, or of the self-critical culture of free countries that made them the first to urge action against climate change (as also against slavery).

Although European countries have quite different political and social features from America, they have imported Woke ideology pretty much wholesale. Even France, arguably the country least susceptible to Wokeism due to its “universalist” tradition, which in principle is blind to people’s colour and origin, has now got an incipiently woke Minister of Education. Pap Ndiaye told Le Monde that he did not experience racism growing up in France and only “realised that [he] was black” when he was twenty-five and studying in the United States. Indeed, importation to Europe happens chiefly through academia, where mediocre scholars have weaponised Woke ideology as a way of advancing their power by targeting individuals and institutions that can be presented as insufficiently conformist to Woke assumptions.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/08/23/the-summoning-rituals-of-the-left-n1721490

The malignant playbook of the contemporary left is generally considered to be Saul Alinsky’s 1989 “Rules for Radicals,” and there is certainly much truth to the story of the book’s destructive influence. But the source text for social and political upheaval is Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven’s far more detailed and authoritative 1997 manual, “The Breaking of the American Social Compact.”

The Cloward-Piven strategy seeks to hasten the fall of the free market and the republican structure of government by overloading the administrative apparatus with an avalanche of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis mode and eventual economic collapse. Choking the welfare rolls, for example, would serve to generate a political and financial meltdown, break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears, and bring the system crashing down. The fear, turmoil, and violence accompanying such a debacle would provide the perfect conditions for fostering radical change.

We see the strategy in action today, forging a situation that was unnecessary from the start via a series of tactical steps, among which: the campaign against productive farming; the so-called 15-minute city herding people into condo-congested urban centers where they are readily supervised and mastered; open borders allowing for a refugee tsunami to alter the character of the nation; a censoring and disinformative media rendered corrupt to the core; the mandating of useless masks or plausibly toxic vaccines; and the implementation of a digital currency in which citizens’ spending can be monitored, restricted, or even frozen. Such phenomena have no basis in even the remotest necessity but are essential in order to prepare the ground for an imminent totalitarian state.

This is the rationale for the so-called COVID pandemic and the bugbear of “Climate Change.” A bad flu season affecting mainly the elderly with comorbidities is not a viral pandemic, as Dr. Vernon Coleman ironically shows. The climate is always changing as a matter of course — the term “climate change” is a gross oxymoron; the thesis of anthropogenic forcing obscures the fact that carbon is material for life and nitrogen for farming. COVID and Climate are tactical phantoms that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with social control. The Clowardly rePivening put in place by the Democrat Party has only one aim: to create a crisis out of thin air and then seek to defuse it by creating a real crisis that advantages only the Party. It is the diabolical form of creation ex nihilo.

Thus, a ginned-up pandemic is a perfect excuse for mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, especially if the voter rolls have been flooded with uncountable and counterfeit names and the voting stations have been commandeered. There is no immigration chaos unless a chain system is entrenched and the border is left wide open. There is no such thing as “white supremacy” unless it is apodictically proclaimed and false-flag operations are carried out. There is no need for costly, largely ineffective, and harmful renewable energy installations unless drilling has been rendered illegal and the oil pipelines have been shut down to avoid a bogus climate catastrophe. The bible of the Democrat left begins: Let there be a crisis. And there was a crisis.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/23/government-funded-science-journal-admits-over-2600-of-its-papers-may-have-exaggerated-claims/

A top science journal that receives funding from the federal government was recently forced to admit that well over 2,000 of the research papers it has published contain “exaggerated claims.”

As Just The News reports, over 2,600 papers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) peer-reviewed journal Science were closely scrutinized by rival research journal Scientometrics. In the subsequent study, it was determined that, from 1997 to 2021, the journal saw a 40% drop in the use of “hedging” words.

In scientific research and other forms of academic writing, “hedging” words refers to terms and phrases such as “could” or “appear to,” in order to provide some room for doubt rather than depict absolute confidence. In 1997, there were roughly 115.8 examples of hedging for every 10,000 words. However, by 2021, that rate had fallen to just 67.42 per every 10,000.

Responding to the criticism, the news division of Science acknowledged that this new research “suggests a worrisome rise of unreliable, exaggerated claims.”

The non-profit watchdog group Influence Watch reports that “the federal government is the largest identifiable source of funding for AAAS,” as the association has received roughly $3.3 million per year from the federal government between 2008 and 2017, in addition to many other grants the association received.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19919/justice-requires-fair-procedures

“Justice, justice you shall pursue,” the Bible commands (Deuteronomy 16:20); and that, in doing justice, one must not “recognize faces.”

The late US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once observed that the history of liberty is largely a history of procedural fairness. Our constitution embodies that history by reading “the due process of law.”

Lately, however, many so-called progressives have been willing to ignore procedural safeguards and due process in their campaign to get former President Donald Trump — to misuse the law in an effort to prevent the leading Republican candidate from running against the incumbent candidate for president. In doing so, they are violating the second principle of justice: “Do not recognize faces.” That commandment is the basis for the blindfolded statute of justice.

Some progressives who would ignore procedural safeguards to get Trump acknowledge that this is because they regard him as especially dangerous and therefore undeserving of due process. Special injustice for an unjust man!

Injustice, once practiced against an unjust person, will serve as precedent for deploying it against just persons.

Another weapon is scheduling. They are trying to get convictions in friendly locations before the 2024 elections, and willing to risk reversal on appeal, which would occur only after the election. Accordingly, they are seeking very early trial dates…. No decent defense lawyer would agree to try a case with so little time to prepare. Yet a group of prominent “get Trump” Republican lawyers has filed a brief supporting that unconstitutional rush to injustice.

These and other “get Trump” lawyers should read the Judeo-Christian commands to do procedural as well as substantive justice, and not to recognize faces. If they follow those wise commands, they will stop trying to “get Trump” or potentially any of us. Instead, they will pursue justice without regard to the face, name or party of the person being investigated and prosecuted.

Whatever one thinks of former President Donald Trump, everyone who cares about liberty for all must oppose the weaponization of laws and procedures that are aimed at him, lest the weapons be turned on us.(Image source: iStock)

“Justice, justice you shall pursue,” the Bible commands (Deuteronomy 16:20); and that, in doing justice, one must not “recognize faces.”