RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/20/is-the-u-s-up-to-chinas-challenge/

News that China has launched a hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear payload around the Earth should be both a wake-up call and a call to action for America. Unfortunately, the current administration and the military it leads are woefully inadequate to the task.

The response from the Biden White House to the news that the Chinese now have a seriously threatening weapon that could vaporize American cities would have been laughable if it weren’t so frightening in its absurd naivete.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, responding to a Financial Times report that the Chinese “launch in August of nuclear-capable rocket that circled the globe took U.S. intelligence by surprise,” said flippantly the administration “welcomes stiff competition.”

Welcomes stiff competition. That sounds like something the satirical but eerily accurate Babylon Bee would concoct, And yet, there it is.

A far more accurate response came from Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who called the missile shot a “wake-up call for the United States and our allies.” It was, he said, a “Sputnik moment.”

Now the question isn’t whether the U.S. will still keep its commitment to protecting Taiwan from a Chinese attack. The really big question now is whether the White House will keep its constitutional duty to protect the U.S.

The media are already debating this “new Cold War” with China, and rightly so.

After decades of pretending China might be a friendly ally in the world, we’ve now seen the Tiger’s real stripes. Led by Xi Jinping, Beijing has moved sharply leftward to reclaim its communist legacy, breaking its Hong Kong treaty, cracking down on dissent and religious belief, creating a dystopian omnipresent online surveillance state, crushing private businesses, and engaging in what looks from afar like genocide against the Muslim Uighurs.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/577239-are-supply-chain-disruptions-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-globalization

At the end of last week, there were 584 container ships idling off the world’s ports, waiting to be loaded or unloaded. Disruptions in the bulk cargo sector look to be even worse.

Experts suggest the problems are temporary. For instance, Bloomberg columnist Brooke Sutherland maintains that three weeks of declines in ocean freight rates tells us “the worst may be over for the supply-chain snarls that have plagued shipments of everything from Coca-Cola Co. ingredients to paint, toys, and industrial fasteners.” 

The optimism, however, is premature. The snarls could last years. Moreover, the severe disruptions, however long they persist, will help end the current period of globalization. Interconnectedness, it is now evident, has a steep price.

The backlog is serious. “Companies are waiting for goods they ordered a year ago,” Jonathan Bass, CEO of WhomHome and an onshoring advocate, told me during a recent conversation. “Predictions that we will come out of supply-chain issues in the summer of 2022 are way off base. I think 2024 is more realistic.” 

In the meantime, expect empty shelves. Vice President Kamala Harris, while in Singapore in August, suggested Americans do their holiday shopping early. “If you want to have Christmas toys for your children it might now — it might be the time to start buying them because the delay may be many, many months,” she warned. American consumers, living in a land of plenty, will have to get used to scarcity.

These unprecedented problems are the result of a confluence of short-term factors, such as worker shortages, COVID-19 control measures, and an array of misguided government policies on both sides of the Pacific. Bass also pointed out a factor almost never mentioned: “Older ships will soon be heading to the yards to be refitted with cleaner propulsion systems.” 

https://www.commentary.org/articles/bari-weiss/resist-woke-revolution/

A lot of people want to convince you that you need a Ph.D. or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory to understand the woke movement and its worldview. You do not. You simply need to believe your own eyes and ears. 

Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools.  And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully. 

In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. Just ask Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal who was fired—fired—because she said she supports black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter.

In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. It is why statues of Grant and Washington are being torn down. And it is why William Peris, a UCLA lecturer and an Air Force veteran, was investigated for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out loud in class.

In this ideology, intentions don’t matter. That is why Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic utility worker at San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired for making what someone said he thought was a white-supremacist hand gesture—when in fact he was cracking his knuckles out of his car window.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/18/christopher-steele-product-of-a-corrupt-fbi/

Just as the special counsel’s investigation into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane—the FBI counterintelligence probe launched in the summer of 2016 to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—is showing signs of life, one of the central figures in the hoax is attempting to burnish his sullied image.

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos has produced a documentary featuring Christopher Steele, the man responsible for the so-called dossier bearing his name. “Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier,” streamed on Hulu Monday night; promotional clips hinted that, far from a hard-hitting interview exposing Steele for the charlatan he is, Stephanopoulos gave Steele a chance to spin his story ahead of possible new indictments related to John Durham’s inquiry into the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax. 

Rather than depict Steele accurately, Stephanopoulos and ABC News social media interns repeatedly describe Steele as an “ex-British spy” or “former intelligence officer” even though Steele left MI6, the UKs version of the CIA, in 2009 to start a consulting business. (That same year, Steele presented a report on Russia to President Obama.) Steele’s now-discredited dossier, which Stephanopoulos tries to portray as “raw intelligence,” was the basis not just for the entire Russian collusion hoax but also served as key evidence to support four illicit FISA applications to obtain warrants to spy on Donald Trump and his associates.

Stephanopoulos’ goal, of course, is to convince uninformed viewers—in other words, most of Stephanopoulos’ audience on any given day—that Steele was working in an official national security capacity instead of as a Democratic political operative paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to dig up dirt on Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race.

But Steele, many folks forget, also had another funder in 2016: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An often overlooked fact about Steele is that at the same time he was being paid by the Clinton campaign and DNC, he also was being paid by the FBI as a “confidential human source,” otherwise known as an “informant.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/18/call-of-the-wild/

In at least some parts of the United States, the Muslim call to prayer, known as the “adhan” or “azan” (Arabic for “announcement”), is a familiar sound. Perhaps because of the freedom of religion that’s guaranteed by the First Amendment and deeply rooted in American culture, and perhaps also because America has a history of extraordinary religious diversity—with native-born faiths ranging from the Mormons to Jehovah’s Witnesses to Seventh-day Adventism to Scientology—there’s been relatively little opposition to the adhan, even by people who may not be thrilled over the spread of Islam in their towns and cities. 

Since the 1970s, for example, the adhan has been broadcast five times a day from the roof of the American Moslem Society in Dearborn (which has one of the country’s highest populations of Muslims per capita). A mosque in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant began doing the same thing in 1981. 

In 2004, residents of Hamtramck, Michigan (which has been described as America’s only Muslim-majority city), voted to officially allow adhans that were already being broadcast from several mosques. By that point, mosques in Detroit, which surrounds Hamtramck, had also been broadcasting adhans for some time. 

In Minneapolis, which is also heavily Muslim (Democrat Ilhan Omar is its representative in Congress), the Dar Ul Hijra Mosque started broadcasting the adhan in April of last year, after Mayor Jacob Frey issued a permit for it. Two months later, Robert Spencer reported that residents of Culver City in Los Angeles County (the longtime home of MGM) were up in arms about the adhan being broadcast five times a day, beginning at 4:30 a.m., from the King Fahad Mosque. 

But in the United States, anyway, such dust-ups don’t last long and don’t have much of an impact on government actions. Nor have they succeeded in turning the adhan into a major national issue. 

In Western Europe, however, for a number of reasons, the situation is somewhat different—although it varies from country to country. Generally speaking, mosques, even when permitted to do so, have chosen not to broadcast the adhan, or to do so on a very limited basis and at very low volume; when the issue has come up, moreover, there’s been outspoken criticism and national headlines. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/the_doj_has_finally_disgorged_some_exculpatory_evidence_about_january_6.html

For a very long time, based on a few short snippets of random videos that people outside and inside of the Capitol shot on January 6, conservatives have been arguing that significant numbers of the people who entered the Capitol that day did so because the Capitol Police let them in. Their presence there wasn’t an insurrection or even an unauthorized trespass—they had a right to be there once the “guardians” of the Capitol opened the door. Now, the official video from the Capitol confirms that those snippets were accurate.

January 6 defendants and conservative media outlets have been demanding for ten months that the Department of Justice release the 14,000 hours of footage it has showing what happened at the Capitol on that day. An administration dedicated to truth and a prosecution abiding by the principle that the government must make exculpatory material available to the defense would have long ago complied with those requests.

But the Biden DOJ is made of sterner, and possibly more corrupt, stuff. It took a court order to make the DOJ disgorge just some of the footage it has. And let me note that the motion to produce that Ethan Nordean, a defendant, filed asking for material to which he is entitled under the law wasn’t enough. Instead, the “Press Coalition,” which includes CNN, The New York Times, and broadcast news networks, had to add its voice to the motion before the judge. (I happen to think it’s noteworthy that the media’s demands had more weight before the judge than the defendant’s rights.)

Buzzfeed posted two 40-minute long videos, one of exterior footage and one of interior footage, that the DOJ finally produced, claiming that they show “A Breach By Jan. 6 Rioters From Start to Finish.” However, according to Julie Kelly, whose word and analysis I trust a lot more than anything from Buzzfeed, the videos, which run for about 35 minutes, actually show quite a different story:

At the start of the video, one officer held open the interior door that accesses the Capitol Rotunda, a space between the House and Senate wings. Five or six unidentified men exited the door and spoke to the officer before leaving. Those men held open the exterior double-doors, where protesters began filing into the building. Nordean’s lawyer said his client is recorded entering the building, with the consent of police, between 2:37 p.m. and 2:38 p.m.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/elizabeth-warren-lying-money-laundering-socialist-jason-d-hill/

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on Wednesday October 13, 2021, that billionaires who have enough money to shoot themselves into space, as Jeff Bezos did this summer, will pay for the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill that is still being negotiated in Congress.

Before analyzing the pure envy and hatred of the productive benefactors of humanity that lie behind her statement, let us identify Warren for what she is: an equivocating, lying, money-laundering, Ponzi-scheming socialist who lives to expropriate the wealth of others to finance socialist programs. She’s contributed nothing in terms of productive value to society—short of being some pit-bull bureaucratic watchdog who lives for enacting legalized theft and money-laundering schemes, which is what socialism boils down to. She denies the fact that production comes before distribution, and that the wealth she so gleefully wants to appropriate was made possible by the ratified choices of individuals who endorsed Bezos’ products and made him wealthy because he added superlative value to their quality of lives. The notion that billionaires don’t pay taxes is such a case of the Big Lie, that it is not even worth refuting.   

What Warren despises is that Bezos regards his personal welfare, enjoyment, and pleasure—all value-choices that comprise his pursuit of his own happiness which is his inalienable right to do with as he pleases. He neither seeks nor needs the permission of others to live optimally.

Elizabeth Warren is jealous, envious, and filled with rage that he has so much surplus income that he can dare to spend it on what she considers to be a frivolous and wasteful activity. Guess what, Warren? The liberal state by design is supposed to remain agnostic on the question of persons’ conceptions of the good life—provided such choices do not violate the rights of others. She is outraged that he’d rather spend millions on a short trip to space than fund the decrepit and corrupt government schools that teach hatred and bigotry via Critical race Theory; that he doesn’t seem to care about funding historically Black colleges which are a total disaster (they are failing abysmally and graduating semi-literate students); that her tuition-free community college education plan won’t be financed. No one should ever be compelled to finance the education of another person’s child. We are not responsible for the procreative choices of other people. The responsibility for a child’s education lies with the parents.

If you cannot afford to educate a child then don’t have one, just as you would not purchase a house or car if you could not afford to finance them. No one has a constitutional right to have children. And no one’s child can be a necessary social good for anyone but the parents of that child. State schools today (and many private schools) are bastions of indoctrination centers teaching hatred of our great republic, encouraging and practicing cancel culture, weaponizing defiance against authority, decolonizing courses by stripping them of canonical texts, and turning schools into Marxist conduits of Social Justice, radical activism, and social eugenics breeding grounds to transform America into a communist charnel house by canceling human agency, and then history, and then our Constitution. No, Sen. Warren. Some of us are going to devote our lives to defunding all public schools and shutting down government schools. She is incensed that she won’t have her drug-pricing policies and undefined “climate crises” funded and foisted on corporations that would just stifle growth and productivity.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17415/sinking-ship-of-state

To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.

For the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possibly sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America’s best days are in the past.

What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill — or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company’s headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate — to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.

Few debate the idea that our nation’s infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as “infrastructure” has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for “environmental” agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant.

This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge…. As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.

One suspects that historians and economists will consistently agree on one irrefutable fact: nations that allow their economies to bathe in red ink are destined to fail. This failure takes many roads and differs in timing, but massive, uncontrolled national deficits eventually reduce a nation state to being a pauper, a pariah — and pathetic.

Enter Joe Biden’s “American Jobs Plan,” a $2.3 trillion spending scheme that takes some Americans’ most fevered fantasies and wraps them inside an “infrastructure” label in an effort to convince Capitol Hill that the spending is all about roads and bridges. An analysis by the Wharton School places plenty of caution flags on this initiative.

https://www.jns.org/election-of-atheist-harvard-chaplain-to-leadership-role-continues-to-stir-up-controversy/;

 Greg Epstein, the new president of the Harvard chaplains, is an avowed atheist. His

election has led to a perception gap between the Harvard chaplains who voted for him and the general public, which hasn’t quite come to grips with the idea that an atheist can be a chaplain.

The big reason for the gap is that Harvard’s chaplains have had longer to get used to the idea. A Humanist chaplaincy has existed at Harvard for nearly 50 years. Founded in 1974, it was “the first university Humanist chaplaincy in the world,” reports The Harvard Crimson.

Epstein has filled the role since 2005.

Matthew Schmitz, senior editor of First Things, a journal that grapples with issues of religion and public life, said he stands with the general public. The “average Joe nine times out of 10 has it right,” he said. He told JNS that the selection of an atheist chaplain is a sign of “contempt” for religion at America’s premier educational institution and is “profoundly dangerous to the life of our nation” given Harvard’s “outsized role” in world affairs.

That incredulity was fueled by provocative headlines in the press about Epstein’s new position, particularly a New York Times feature titled: “The New Chief Chaplain at Harvard? An Atheist.”

In an op-ed in The Christian Post, Michael Brown, host of the nationally syndicated radio program Line of Fire, asked the question that drew people to the story in the first place: “How can an atheist be a university chaplain?”

“To be a chaplain, by definition, means to be a religious leader,” he wrote, and “to appoint an atheist to be chief university chaplain is like appointing a Christian evangelist to head up the university’s atheist club. Or a devout Muslim to head up the university’s Judaism club.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/17/what-happened-to-the-beloved-military/

The highest echelon of the U.S. military is becoming dysfunctional. 

There are too many admirals and generals for the size of the current U.S. military. It now boasts three times the number of four-star admirals and generals than we had during World War II—when the country was in an existential war for survival and when, by 1945, our active military personnel was almost nine times larger than the current armed forces. 

Somehow a gradual drift in the agendas of our military leadership has resulted in too many various emphases on domestic cultural, social, and political issues. And naturally, as a result, there is less attention given to winning wars and leveraging such victories to our nation’s strategic advantage.

The consequences of these failures are downright scary for a world superpower upon which millions at home and billions worldwide depend. 

There are too many concurrent Pentagon crises. Any one of them would be dangerous to our national security. Together they imperil our very freedoms and security. 

Reform? 

What is to be done? The Uniform Code of Military Justice must be enforced, and not selectively applied on the basis of rank: officers below the rank of general and admiral now face severe penalties for disparaging in personal terms the current administration, while one stars and above are given de facto exemptions for comments about the previous administration. If the code is not considered law but merely a recommendation, then it should be scrapped. 

The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General and the inspector generals of the various branches of the military must enforce existing laws that carefully define the limits of the Joint Chiefs of Staff activity. And they must punish those officers who violate such statues to interrupt the legal chain of command. 

There must be a cooling off period to prevent retiring military officers from rotating onto the boards and lobbying teams of corporate defense contractors, with the presumption that their knowledge of the operation of the Pentagon can be monetized to the advantage of particular corporations. Five years seems a reasonable period in which our top brass should refrain from joining firms that are seeking lucrative contracts from the Pentagon.