RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/feds-warn-rise-domestic-violent-extremists-where-robert-spencer/

Diversity is our strength, y’all, and so here is some good news: a new bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security that took effect Thursday notes that “the Homeland continues to face a diverse and challenging threat environment.” But before you start celebrating diversity too enthusiastically in this case, be aware: the diversity that they have in mind means that they think you and I are part of the threat now as well.

They say that the threat is coming from both “domestic violent extremists and those inspired or motivated by foreign terrorists and other malign foreign influences,” and they really aren’t all that interested in the threat from those foreign terrorists: USA Today noted that “FBI Director Christopher Wray referred to the rising domestic terror threat, telling a Senate committee that domestic terror cases had more than doubled since early 2020.” If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard about all this new domestic terrorism, it’s because you’re not looking in the place where the feds are finding it: in your mirror.

We know this because the ostensible president’s handlers, and even Old Joe Biden himself, have repeatedly warned about a “white supremacist” terror threat that is supposedly the greatest threat the nation faces today. The only thing this scenario lacks are actual white supremacist terrorists. And so they have to be invented. Old Joe and the establishment media defamed Kyle Rittenhouse as a white supremacist last year, doing everything they could to make him fit their ridiculous myth of violent, racist, right-wing fanatics menacing the good and decent spiritual descendants of the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy, the fine young men and women of Antifa.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/beware_of_infrastructure_bill_signing_ceremony.html

When the White House holds a triumphant signing ceremony today for the Biden/Pelosi Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, H.R. 3684, keep the following facts clearly in mind. 

Democrats claim the bill will “supercharge the American economy and will create thousands of good jobs.” Translation: high-paying government, i.e., taxpayer paid for, jobs for Democrat supporters. 

When you look beyond the title, H.R. 3684 has numerous provisions that Americans don’t want.  

The bill will “restructuring the permitting process.” This is an excuse to expand an already Byzantine, massively expensive, and user-unfriendly federal bureaucracy. Permits will, of course, only go to companies favored by progressive Democrats. Recall the vendor chosen by the Obama Administration to build healthcare.gov was a Canadian company, CGI Federal, with a track record of going over budget and failing to deliver on its contracts. Democrats spent more than $2 billion for a website, that didn’t work! 

There will be “more public-private partnerships,” which is code for giving hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to corporations that support the Democrat party and its candidates, not to the most efficient and lowest bidders. 

H.R. 3864 will extend the reach of broadband internet access, especially to rural America, where such access can be spotty or absent. However, this activity is better done – better coverage at lower cost – using the free market than federal procurement, which is famous for delays, inefficiency, and over-spending. 

Of the $1.2 trillion probably under-estimated price tag, less than 10 percent –$110 billion – will fund true infrastructure: bridges, roads, tunnels, and waterways. This will be billions as political patronage. Companies that contributed to the Democrat party will build out the projects late and at inflated prices. If things go wrong, there will be no accountability.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/this_democrat_criminal_prosecution_system_is_deeply_immoral.html

One certain sign that a country has gone off the rails is when the governing power systematically imposes a criminal prosecution that is prepared to change laws and conditions to favor the criminals over law-abiding citizens and create an atmosphere that leaves them defenseless.

This frightening phenomenon is occurring throughout America, mainly in Democratic states and cities. It is happening so often that it represents a deliberate policy to fundamentally change the American legal system that leaves ordinary citizens defenseless under law.

In Massachusetts, prosecutors can seize your money and hold it indefinitely even if people are not accused of a crime. 

Rachel Rollins is Biden’s nominee to be the next U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts. while serving as District Attorney for Suffolk County, where she declined to prosecute certain dangerous crimes and pushed for ‘reallocating’ police funding.

Rollins was candid that she came into the job as an activist not as a constitutional lawyer. She wrote, “If you want to change the legal system you should become a prosecutor because you have the power to determine changes and what crimes to prosecute.”

In other words, they decide which crimes not to prosecute.  This may be fine if a prosecutor applies reason and restraint, as Senator Ted Cruz argues, but, increasingly, this is not always the case in Democrat America.

Cruz claims that the dangerous reality of a burgeoning Democrat legal system is buried in an anonymous document entitled ‘Appendix C. SCDAO declination and diversion policy.’

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-washington-post-abc-news-poll-spells-doom-for-biden-and-the-democrats/

Remember how last weekend, the conventional wisdom was that passing the infrastructure bill was going to help President Biden and the Democrats turn things around? Good times, good times.

This morning’s new poll from the Washington Post-ABC News demolishes that conventional wisdom into tiny pieces.

Majorities of Americans support President Biden’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package and a pending bill that would spend nearly $2 trillion on social programs and climate initiatives. Yet despite the backing for these measures, Biden’s approval rating has ticked down to a new low, driven largely by more negative views among Democrats and independents, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The Post-ABC poll finds that, if elections were held today, 46 percent of adults overall would back the Republican candidate for Congress and 43 percent would support the Democratic candidate. Among registered voters, the GOP advantage goes to 51 percent vs. 41 percent for Democrats, a historically strong result for Republicans on this measure.

“Historically strong”? I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever heard of the GOP having a ten-point margin on the generic ballot. Not in 1994 or 2010. A handful in 2014 came close.

Just about all of the poll results on economic questions are just brutal for Biden:

The Post-ABC poll also showcases Americans’ current pessimism: Despite a mix of economic signals — falling unemployment and rising prices — 70 percent rate the economy negatively, including 38 percent who say it is in “poor” condition. About half of Americans overall and political independents blame Biden for fast-rising inflation, and more than 6 in 10 Americans say he has not accomplished much after 10 months in office, including 71 percent of independents. . . .

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/13/thinking-critically-about-critical-thinking/

“We must never,” Bismarck is said to have warned, “look into the origins of laws or sausages.” Sage advice, I’ve always thought (and no pun intended with that “sage”)—but how much at odds it is with the dominant current of modern thought, which is to say Enlightenment thought. 

Immanuel Kant, a great hero of the Enlightenment, summed up the alternative to Bismarck’s counsel when, in an essay called “What is Enlightenment?,” he offered Sapere Aude, Dare to know!, as a motto for the movement. Enlightened man, Kant thought, was the first real adult: the first to realize his potential as an autonomous being—a being, as the etymology of the word implies, who “gives the law to himself.” As Kant stressed, this was a moral as well as an intellectual achievement, since it involved courage as much as insight: courage to put aside convention, tradition, and superstition (how the three tended to coalesce for Enlightened thinkers!) in order to rely for guidance on the dictates of reason alone.

Bismarck’s observation cautions reticence about certain matters; it implies that about some things it is better not to inquire too closely. What Walter Bagehot said about the British monarchy—“We must not let in daylight upon magic”—has, from this point of view, a more general application. The legend “Here be monsters” that one sees on certain antique maps applies also to certain precincts of the map of our moral universe. Enlightened man, by contrast, is above all a creature who looks into things: he wants to “get to the bottom” of controversies, to dispel mysteries, to see what makes things “tick,” to understand the mechanics of everything from law to sausages, from love to society. Who has the better advice, Bismarck or Kant?

Of course, it is not a simple choice. For one thing, it might be argued that Kant’s own attitude toward the imperative “Dare to Know!” was complex. In a famous passage toward the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Kant tells us that he was setting limits to reason in order to make room for faith. Exactly what Kant meant by this . . . what to call it? (This admission? Boast? Concession?) Well, whatever Kant meant by his invocation of faith, it has been an abiding matter of debate. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Kant’s “critical philosophy” is itself a monument of Enlightenment thought, as much in its implied commendation of the “critical attitude” as in the “Copernican revolution” he sought to bring about in philosophy.

Today, we can hardly go to the toilet without being urged to cultivate “critical thinking.” Which does not mean, I hasten to add, that we are a society of Kantians. Nevertheless, what we are dealing with here is an educational watchword, not to say a cliché, that has roots in some of the Enlightenment values that Kant espoused. It’s a voracious, quick-growing hybrid. A Google search for the phrase “critical thinking” brings up 102 million results in 0.62 seconds. One of the first matches, God help us, is to something called “The Critical Thinking Community,” whose goal is “to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking.” (Why is it, I wonder, that the conjunction of the phrase “critical thinking” with the word “community” is so reliably productive of nausea?)

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/11/13/appeals-court-reaffirms-its-decision-to-stay-vaccine-mandate-n1532531

Saying that Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans reaffirmed its original decision made on Nov. 6 to block OSHA from taking any steps to enforce the mandate.

The three-judge panel will probably not have the last word on the mandate. A judicial lottery will be held next week to determine in what circuit the several challenges to the mandate will be heard. The New Orleans-based circuit court that ruled last night is one of the most conservative in the nation.

The judges didn’t mince any words in stating how they felt about the mandate.

Washington Post:

“Rather than a delicately handled scalpel, the Mandate is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address,” they wrote.

They said they believed that the ruling imposed a financial burden on businesses and potentially violated the commerce clause of the Constitution.

“The Mandate imposes a financial burden upon them by deputizing their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme, exposes them to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road,” they wrote.

It’s important to note that the legal landscape is now decidedly tilted against the mandate. The administration is now going to have to prove that there is a “grave danger” to workers and that the danger is “immediate.” That’s a difficult standard to meet.

https://freebeacon.com/policy/swiss-billionaire-bankrolling-dark-money-group-pushing-for-biden-climate-initiative/

A Swiss billionaire is bankrolling a leading dark money group lobbying for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan and green energy jobs initiatives, according to corporation and lobbying records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Climate Power, one of the main groups pushing for the White House’s climate agenda, has billed itself as a traditional advocacy organization, with an advisory board featuring John Podesta, Stacey Abrams, and former senator Harry Reid. But the group doesn’t actually exist independently—it is owned and operates as a front group under the Fund for a Better Future, a Democratic dark money organization that has received the majority of its funding from Swiss health care mogul Hansjorg Wyss’s foundation since 2016, according to corporation records.

Wyss has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Fund for a Better Future and other progressive dark money groups and has been the subject of controversy since his opaque web of donations was detailed by the New York Times last spring. The connection between the Wyss-funded Fund for a Better Future and Climate Power has not been reported until now.

The link raises questions about foreign influence on the climate debate and the prominence of dark money groups in the Biden administration’s public advocacy campaign for the Build Back Better legislation. While foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to federal campaigns, lawmakers and watchdogs have raised concerns about foreign donations to nonprofit political advocacy organizations—so-called dark money groups—which could be used as a legal loophole to influence elections.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/11/us-inflation-more-horrible-than-washington-admits/

The US Consumer Inflation Report for October was horrible, showing a 12% annualized rate of price change. But it’s even worse than it looks. The shelter component of the index lags the more reliable private gauges of rent inflation. That means worse is to come.

Three US companies publish national rent indexes – CoreLogic, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com – and their readings of year-on-year rent inflation range from 9% to 16%. But the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a year-on-year rise in the rents of just 3.4%. Shelter represents a third of household expenditures according to the Consumer Price Index.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the private indices and the government measure of rent inflation moved in lockstep, albeit with lags in the latter reflecting the fact that not everyone’s lease expired at the same time. Given past lags, the rent increases should have shown up in CPI by now. So I really can’t explain the discrepancy.

Led by used vehicle prices, durable goods prices rose 12% over the twelve months through October, according to the official data. That can be blamed on the chip shortage, which constrained auto production and left consumers and car dealers in bidding wars for everything on four wheels. But the price of nondurable goods also jumped 10% over the past year. That’s simple demand-pull inflation: the combination of a $6 trillion giveaway to US consumers and enhanced jobless benefits that kept 2 million Americans out of the workforce left too much money to chase too few goods.