RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com

American values, which have been denigrated, evolved over two hundred years. It has become common to debase history and belittle capitalism, Certainly, one can find faults in both. One thing that is often forgotten is how rare have been revolutions that produced positive change. The French Revolution of 1789 eliminated a king and produced an Emperor. The Haiti slave rebellion of 1791 got rid of the French and eliminated slavery, but the nation has never had an honest and fair government. The Russian Revolution of 1917 exchanged autocratic Tsars for totalitarian Communists. Other examples: China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, and Iran in 1979. But the American revolution produced a government that evolved into the world’s fairest representative democracy. Capitalism, which creates winners and losers, is antithetical to today’s devotees of DEI, with its focus on equal outcomes. Yet, it is capitalism that encourages competition and offers choices to consumers. Free market capitalism has done more to lift people out of poverty than any other economic system. It provides people opportunities, to strive to do their best in whatever field they choose.

A few other thoughts:

Democracy – a form of government close to the center of a spectrum that stretches from anarchy to autocracy. It is not perfect, as Churchill said in a speech before the House of Commons on November 11, 1947: “…the worse form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Our democracy is, as Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” It is rare. Despite its visible success, according to ourworldindata.org, twice as many people live in “closed autocracies” as live in “liberal democracies.” Yet, we cannot forget that while our government is beneficent, dependency on government, unless it is absolutely necessary, leads to a loss of freedom.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-thin-veneer-of-civilization/

The Left is turning us into a “sh*thole country.”

During a White House meeting with Senators in January, 2018, then-President Donald Trump reportedly questioned the reasoning for allowing immigration from “shithole countries” such as Haiti. This triggered the pearl-clutching mainstream media, and charges of racism flew fast and furious, including from Haiti Ambassador to the U.S. Paul Altidor, who said Trump’s language was based on “clichés and stereotypes rather than actual fact.”

Today Haiti is a shithole country, and that is not a racist cliché or stereotype but actual fact. It is a failed nation in a state of emergency, becoming a dangerous power vacuum in the Caribbean. Awash in violence and chaos, the country is run by a heavily armed gang whose messianic leader Jimmy Cherizier is grotesquely and justifiably nicknamed “Barbeque.”

Even reports of cannibalism have surfaced amid the current chaos, including videos on social media showing at least one gang member gnawing on a human leg from a burning corpse. An anonymous journalist on the ground told The Daily Express, “We have seen images of gang leaders eating people they have killed. We have seen images of people being tortured when they are kidnapped.”

As Horowitz Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield notes, Haiti is a failed state because it lacks “a legitimate government or a functional society,” and its police force is barely distinguishable from the murderous gangs it is supposed to control. The police there actually spawned “Barbeque” Cherizier, a warlord now the most powerful man in Haiti, who has orchestrated or been involved in a number of massacres of the Haitian people.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/18/guilty-but-not-really-guilty/

In 2011, then Homeland Security Advisor to President Obama, John Brennan, swore before Congress that drone-targeted assassination missions near the Pakistani border had not led to “a single collateral death.”

That was an obvious lie with grave consequences, given that Brennan was sworn under oath and was one of the top officials in the US national security community. Yet there were no subsequent repercussions.

In fact, the opposite occurred. Brennan was subsequently rewarded with a 2013 appointment as CIA Director.

But the next year, once again, Brennan lied to Congress, assuring the Senate Intelligence Committee that his CIA had not secretly accessed senate staffers’ computers. Again, there were no consequences for his repeated lies. Instead, Brennan, upon retirement, went on to be an MSNBC/NBC analyst who helped to promulgate the Russian collusion/laptop disinformation hoaxes.

In 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also lied under oath to Congress when he laughably stated that the National Security Agency did not spy on American citizens. Later, when called out by senators, Clapper fudged in a televised interview. “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying no.” Try that contortion with the IRS.

Some members of Congress referred a criminal complaint of perjury against Brennan to then Attorney General Eric Holder. Nothing happened. Again, one of the chiefs of the American national security community was exempted after lying to members of Congress.

Clapper went on to a lucrative position as a CNN national security analyst, and at one point he claimed that Trump was a Putin “asset.”

As far as Eric Holder, he had earlier defied a congressional subpoena and was held in contempt by the House. The Department of Justice, however, chose not to pursue the complaint. Later in the Trump administration, Trump adviser Peter Navarro would be sentenced to four months in jail for similarly resisting a congressional subpoena. Was it a crime or not to resist a congressional subpoena?

https://wokecapital.org/scapegoating-netanyahu-then-and-now/

Benjamin Netanyahu is not fit to be the Prime Minister of Israel.

You don’t have to take my word for this, of course.  No less a luminary than the Senate Majority Leader said as much the other day.  That’s right.  The Majority Leader.  Of the Senate.  Of the United States of America.  Not the Knesset, mind you, but the U.S. Senate.  Moreover, he said that the United States should do everything it can to ensure that Netanyahu is pushed out of power.  Seriously (emphasis added):

In a landmark speech, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “lost his way,” urged new elections in Israel, called for a two-state solution and said the United States should use its “leverage” to push for its goals in the region if Netanyahu remains in power….

[S]aying he spoke for a “silent majority” of American Jews, Schumer said many were “horrified” that Israel was falling short of upholding Jewish values due to its far-right coalition members and the way it is prosecuting the war in Gaza. And he castigated Netanyahu for actively opposing a two-state solution.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d like to see the crosstabs of the survey showing that the “silent majority” of American Jews agree with Schumer on this.  I have a long and notorious history of underestimating American Jews’ loyalty to the Democratic Party, but I still think Schumer is mistaken here.  In fact, I think that he is full of male cattle excrement.

Schumer’s rant – which would be classified as “election interference” if it came from anyone other than a Democrat and were directed at anyone other than Netanyahu – was less about finding a solution to the current problems plaguing Israel and more about finding a scapegoat for the failure of the Democrats’ decades-long delusions about Middle East “peace.”

My American Greatness column tomorrow is about the millennia-old tradition in the West of scapegoating Jews for all the world’s problems when those problems get especially burdensome.  This is a familiar topic in these pages.  As it turns out, scapegoating Netanyahu is the Democrats’ version of this medieval antisemitism.  It allows them to blame “the Jews” without actually having to blame the Jews.  It gives them a handy, ready-made explanation for the failure of the two-state solution that enables them at least to try to play both sides of the issue.  In public, they say things like “of course I support Israel and its right to defend itself,” even as they nod and wink at their agitated Arab and identitarian supporters, whispering, “We know, we know.  It’s really the Jew’s fault.”

https://www.racket.news/p/why-the-tiktok-ban-is-so-dangerous

It’s funny how things work.

Last year at this time, Americans overwhelmingly supported a ban on TikTok. Polls showed a 50-22% overall margin in support of a ban and 70-14% among conservatives. But Congress couldn’t get the RESTRICT Act passed.

As the public learned more about provisions in the bill, and particularly since the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza, the legislative plan grew less popular. Polls dropped to 38-27% in favor by December, and they’re at 35-31% against now.

Yet the House just passed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” by a ridiculous 352-64 margin, with an even more absurd 50-0 unanimous push from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. What gives?

As discussed on the new America This Week, passage of the TikTok ban represents a perfect storm of unpleasant political developments, putting congress back fully in line with the national security establishment on speech. After years of public championing of the First Amendment, congressional Republicans have suddenly and dramatically been brought back into the fold. Meanwhile Democrats, who stand to lose a lot from the bill politically — it’s opposed by 73% of TikTok users, precisely the young voters whose defections since October put Joe Biden’s campaign into a tailspin — are spinning passage of the legislation to its base by suggesting it’s not really happening.

“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok, it’s an attempt to make TikTok better,” is how Nancy Pelosi put it. Congress, the theory goes, will force TikTok to divest, some kindly Wall Street consortium will gobble it up (“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Steve Mnuchin told CNBC), and life will go on. All good, right?

https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-two/

Our nation’s change into something unrecognizable just four years ago had a few precursors and catalysts.

The first was the Obama administration’s redefining of American norms. Before Obama, “racial relations” were largely defined as the historical 12 percent black/88 percent “non-black” dichotomy, in the context of dealing with the sins of southern slavery and Jim Crow and widespread discrimination—and the quest to make race incidental not essential to us all.

Sixty years of serial Civil Rights acts, affirmative action, increased integration and assimilation, interaction, and intermarriage, and “content of your character, not the color of your skin” mentalities were all working toward an ecumenical society, in which soon we would not consider race relevant to who were are and instead focus on the individual not the collective.

“Climate change” took over from “global warming” as Al Gore/John Kerry were unleashed. Suddenly clean burning natural gas was a culprit, a fossil fuel supposedly wrongly disguised as a valuable transition fuel.

Abroad, Iran was redefined as the oppressed Persian, Shiite counterweight to the overdog Gulf monarchies and Zionist Israel. We then would green-light a “Shiite Crescent”—Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza—that would balance our former pro-Western allies, Israel in particular. We then from time to time, as the rivalry heated up, would adjudicate the ensuing creative tension. America would be the honest broker with no real preference for a democratic Western Israel or pro-American autocratic governments in the Gulf, Jordan, or Egypt.

https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-one/

Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden—have either been doubling the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse.

So our presidents, in the manner individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat.

It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary.

So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly?

https://thespectator.com/topic/thirty-two-hour-work-week-bernie-sanders-bad-ideas/

Bernie Sanders is the bottomless cup of bad ideas. He keeps refilling it. Take his latest venti, a law that says everybody gets to work thirty-two hours for forty hours pay. That’s a magical 25 percent pay increase. His next trick is to pull free steak dinners out of a hat.

What do you think would actually happen if such Bernie’s law were passed, enforced and found constitutional? (None of those would actually happen, of course.) The immediate effects would be another 25 percent price increase for labor-intensive products, a huge burden on low-income consumers and an additional incentive to replace more expensive workers with machines and computers.

The substitution of capital for labor is an on-going process, but Bernie would supercharge the effort and create incentives for innovators to come up with products, machines and computer programs that performed those tasks at lower costs. The more expensive the tasks, the greater incentive to figure out ways to save money on them.

Bernie’s Magic Pay Raise would create a major incentive to hire people off-the-books (for the true market price) or to have them work extra hours that way. It would create new incentives for employers to hire workers as individual subcontractors, rather than wage workers. And, of course, it would lead to tens of thousands of court cases where employees were sued for violating the new wage rules. Since the wages would be above market rates (otherwise there would be no need for a mandate), the yearly increases would lag inflation so that real wages would gradually return to market rates.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/west_point_announces_change_to_mission_statement_schools_official_duty_honor_country_motto_has_been_eliminated.html

On Sunday, the Armed Forces Press reported that West Point brass had made a recent decision to “update” the academy’s Mission Statement, which until that point, read as such:

To educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the Nation as an officer in the United States Army.

With the approved revisions, West Point’s official mission now reads:

To build, educate, train, and inspire the Corp of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character committed to the Army Values and ready for a lifetime of service to the Army and Nation.

As you can see, the sacred and “hallowed” words, recognized as the official motto of the school since before even Douglas MacArthur graduated in 1903, have been jettisoned—into the Memory Hole “Duty Honor Country” goes!

John A. Lucas is a former special operations military member with more than 45 years experience as an attorney who now runs the Bravo Blue blog; and yesterday, Lucas reported that an officer to whom he spoke “emphasized that the change was the result of a regular review … to see if any changes were needed to ‘modernize’ the statement.”