RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Debt, including unfunded liabilities, threatens to bankrupt us. The southern border has become a porous venue for a record number of illegals and the drugs many bring into this country. An epidemic of crime has transformed our cities. Democrats have weaponized the criminal justice department to go after political opponents. Republicans, in a rush to isolationism, have abandoned global responsibilities – underestimating threats to democratic institutions posed by Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Iran’s Mullahs. Color-blind meritocracy and biological sex have given way to harmful fantasies, with preferential treatment for some groups and favored pronouns for others. A desire for clean energy is countered by demand for clean-technology factories and electricity-hungry data centers, “leaving,” as Evan Halper wrote last week in The Washington Post, “utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.” Biden’s mandate that two thirds of all new cars be electric by 2032 will increase the demand for electricity. One asks: is the country witnessing the death of common sense and entering a death spiral?

I suspect everyone, no matter their political preferences, agrees that we live in contentious times – politically, technologically, and culturally. Of the two Presidential candidates, one is visibly senescent and the other is “the crudest trash-talker in politics,” as Barton Swaim wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. AI threatens to disrupt our lives in unknown ways. DEI, CRT, gender neutral bathrooms and gendered-altered athletes have turned high schools and universities into places alien to parents and alumni.

Perhaps we should step back. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is an aphorism usually attributed to Mark Twain. It suggests that while each era is different, there are recurring themes.

https://www.jns.org/words-matter-as-much-as-weapons/

U.S. President Joe Biden devoted his Ramadan greeting this year to the “terrible suffering” of the Palestinians and the “appalling resurgence” of Islamophobia in the United States.  

He began by citing as fact the fake data of the Gaza Health Ministry, claiming: “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children.”

Before going on to refer to those displaced by the war and “in urgent need of food, water, medicine and shelter,” he expressed sympathy for the American Muslims mourning the loss of loved ones in Gaza.

Not a word about Hamas. Not a single reference to the Oct. 7 rape, torture, immolation and abduction of innocent Israeli men, women and children—including Arab citizens and foreign nationals—that sparked the war.

No naming of the American citizens who are among the 134 out of 253 remaining captives. No blame placed on the terrorists responsible for the massacre and its aftermath.

When he did get around to mentioning the hostages, it was in the context of efforts “to establish an immediate and sustained ceasefire for at least six weeks as part of a deal that releases hostages.”

This was his segue into an old la-la-land fantasy: the failed paradigm of working towards a “two-state solution to ensure Palestinians and Israelis share equal measures of freedom, dignity, security and prosperity.”

If the moral equivalence between a genocidal terrorist organization and the only democracy in the Middle East weren’t sufficiently egregious, Biden quickly shifted gears to highlight another falsehood: the “appalling resurgence of hate and violence toward Muslim Americans.”

https://nypost.com/2024/03/12/us-news/faa-audit-of-boeings-737-production-found-mechanics-using-hotel-card-and-dish-soap-as-makeshift-tools-report/

The Federal Aviation Administration found dozens of issues throughout Boeing’s 737 Max jet production process, including mechanics at one of its key suppliers using a hotel key card and dish soap as makeshift tools to test compliance, according to a report.

The FAA discovered “unacceptable” quality control issues during an audit into Boeing and supplier Spirit AeroSystems that was launched after a door plug flew off a 737 Max 9 mid-air at 16,000 feet on Jan. 5.

The agency did not release its findings to the public, but a presentation detailing the results reviewed by the New York Times reveals a troubling and inconsistent manufacturing process.

Boeing failed 33 out of 89 product audits — a review of specific aspects in the production line — with a total of 97 counts of alleged noncompliance, the auditors found, according to the newspaper.

Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the body of the 737 Max jets, failed seven out of 13 product audits conducted by the FAA, the publication reported. One of its failures dealt with the installation of the plane’s door plug.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/11/us-news/boeing-whistleblower-john-barnett-found-dead-after-testifying-against-company/

A Boeing whistleblower was found dead in his truck in the parking lot of his South Carolina hotel after he failed to show up for the second part of his testimony for a bombshell lawsuit against the company, a report said Monday.

John Barnett, 62, had raised safety concerns at the airline’s factories and provided his first testimony just days before he was found dead from an apparent “self-inflicted” gunshot wound, the Charleston County coroner told the BBC.

Barnett’s attorney, Brian Knowles, told TMZ that he had explicit doubt about the circumstances of his death, and called the self-inflicted gunshot “alleged.”

“Today is a tragic day,” Knowles told Corporate Crime Reporter. “John had been back and forth for quite some time getting prepared. The defense examined him for their allowed seven hours under the rules on Thursday.”

The whistleblower had been staying at the hotel to provide a deposition in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/11/the-anti-democratic-democratic-left/

Joe Biden has claimed that his opponents are assaulting democracy on the basis of the January 6, 2021, buffoonish riot.

Aside from the fact that storming the Capitol Rotunda sometimes is apparently deemed permissible—as in the recent pro-Hamas takeover of it—or aside from the fact that disrupting a federal government proceeding is deemed exempt—as in the recent pro-Hamas throng that blocked the route of the presidential motorcade and thus delayed the State of the Union address to the nation by 26 minutes—who really is attacking democracy?

Take the Supreme Court. After the Court went to a 6-3 conservative majority, liberal law professors, progressive activist groups, and many ends-justify-the-means Democrats in Congress began advocating “packing the court” to gain additional new billets for left-wing judges.

In other words, the left had little confidence that it would hold the White House and the Senate when a judicial opening came up, so it sought to force the issue while it had the power in both.

Formerly, any such notion would have been written off as lunatic and dangerous, given that the nine-justice Supreme Court has been canonized for 155 years since 1869. Second, during the last time Democrats attacked the nine-justice Supreme Court over its supposedly too conservative rulings—Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 notorious court-packing scheme—even fellow liberals opposed the toxic gambit. They knew that it would only lead to a tit-for-tat fluid court every time a new administration took power.

Then there was the public demonization of the court, which saw efforts to scare it into “correct” rulings. The effort was multifaceted.

Sometimes the left-wing method was direct intimidation. So in 2020, then Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) led a throng of pro-abortion protestors to the court’s very doors, threatening Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh by name. He was not subtle in his warnings: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.” 

Hit you? Pay the price?

Later, when left-wing mobs thronged at the private homes of some conservative judges with the intention of intimidating them and leveraging their decisions—in violation of a 1950 federal law—the Biden administration did nothing. No wonder a potential assassin soon showed up near the home of Justice Kavanaugh, and, fortunately, did not go through with his planned attack.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/12/bidens-budget-proves-what-an-epic-disaster-hes-been/

This is Biden’s true legacy. And if he’s allowed to dig the hole any deeper, we may never climb out.

President Joe Biden brags that the budget he released on Monday would cut the deficit by $3 trillion, even while offering truckloads of new goodies to Americans.

That will get headlines.

What won’t make the news is the fact that his Fiscal 2025 budget provides clear and incontrovertible evidence that he has caused a fiscal and economic disaster of epic proportions.

How do we know this? Because buried in the back of the annual budget document is a table called “Baseline by Category.” This is a forecast of spending, revenues, and deficits that would result if the government is left on autopilot.

So, we dug out Biden’s first budget — released in early 2021 — to see what the administration said would happen if Biden did nothing. In other words, what would spending, revenues and deficits look like if all of President Donald Trump’s policies remained in effect. Let’s call this the Trump baseline.

Then we compared that with the latest “Baseline” projection in Biden’s new budget — which assumes that all of Biden’s current policies remain in effect for the foreseeable future. We will call this the Biden baseline.

What did we find?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20468/fani-willis-perjury

If Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis were prosecuting citizen Fani Willis and her former boyfriend Nathan Wade for perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, she would have an extremely strong case.

Based on this and other incriminating evidence, the real issue is not whether this pair should be allowed to continue to prosecute the case against Trump, but instead whether this pair should be investigated, indicted and convicted of serious crimes.

The presiding judge in the case has no power to commence a criminal investigation or prosecution. But other law enforcement authorities do. If they fail, they will be damaging the rule of law, the integrity of the US legal system and the waning trust that many Americans already have in equal justice.

If Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis were prosecuting citizen Fani Willis and her former boyfriend Nathan Wade for perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, she would have an extremely strong case. The evidence of perjury is overwhelming; many individuals have been convicted on far less evidence.

Recall that Willis and Wade testified under oath to the material fact that Willis did not hire Wade as special prosecutor while they were having a romantic relationship. They both testified that the romantic relationship began after the hiring decision was made. If that was a deliberate lie, it satisfies all the elements of perjury.

Let us look at the evidence. First, there is the testimony of two witnesses, both of whom have provided evidence that the relationship began before Wade’s appointment as special prosecutor. As Willis herself reminded us when she was challenged about having no corroboration that she paid Wade back in cash, the testimony of one witness is evidence – meaning her own self-serving testimony – certainly, the testimony of two witnesses is even better evidence. In addition, there is the text by another witness confirming that the relationship began earlier than testified to.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20471/words-of-wisdom

As our great nation begins its countdown to the November 5 presidential election, words of wisdom from three great heroes of history of come to mind.

The first, from America’s Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, reminds us that:

“Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.”

While technically we have been living “in peace and with reasonable happiness,” China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have been very much on the warpath, even if our government has been reluctant to admit it. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led by President Xi Jinping, with North Korea in tow, has openly been prosecuting a “People’s War” – “the asymmetric challenge from the tactical and military to the strategic and political” — since at least 2019, when, already then, he tried to blame China’s declining economy on America, and not on him.

In addition, Xi has repeatedly lied to America about not building military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea; about the human-to human transmissibility of the Wuhan virus, Covid-19; and, through the Chinese Embassy spokesman, Liu Pengyu, that the 2023 spy balloon was just a weather balloon. Xi has, in the meantime, been poisoning more than 100,000 in America each year with fentanyl – more than all the soldiers killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam combined.

The Chinese Communist Party has also been buying up US farmland, especially near military bases; genetically engineering rats in a secret laboratory in California to carry deadly bio-warfare viruses; sending thousands of military-aged men through America’s open borders in groups, possibly as future saboteurs; secretly planting surveillance or sabotage equipment in the electrical grid and shipping cranes sent to America, and entrenching TikTok as a “Trojan Horse” to spy on Americans and spread anti-US propaganda. These are just a few of the antics that the CCP has produced, in addition to years of industrial-scale espionage and trillions in intellectual property theft.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/04/what-jews-mean-to-america/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=

In the nation’s response to the explosion of antisemitism since October 7, nothing less than the future of the free world is at stake

‘Some people like Jews, and some do not.” With these words Winston Churchill once divided humanity into two categories. Of these groups, Churchill certainly belonged to the former, so much so that a friend of his once reflected, “Even Winston had a fault; he was too fond of Jews.” Churchill’s own fondness for Jews, and wonder at Jewish history, was linked to his admiration of his predecessor as prime minister. In the same essay, Churchill cited Benjamin Disraeli as having said that “the Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” Churchill concluded, “We must admit that nothing that has since happened in the history of the world has falsified the truth of Disraeli’s confident assertion.”

Should we seek to summarize our current state of affairs, we could do worse than employ Churchill’s words. Some people, very clearly, do not like Jews. On October 7 — that very day, weeks before Israel even entered Gaza — rallies celebrating Hamas’s massacre of Israelis could be found on the streets of American cities. Today, in my own neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, as I walk home from synagogue on the Sabbath, I am confronted by poster after poster of a hostage of Hamas that some fellow New Yorker has chosen to tear at, shred, or deface. As anti-Israeli hate consumed campuses, the blasé way in which the presidents of America’s leading universities commented before Congress about the well-being of their own Jewish students reflected, as John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, wrote, “how unimportant the feelings or concerns of Jews are within the sociological landscapes they tend.”

Yet in the face of this terrible trend, other events remind us of a striking feature of American life: Some people do like Jews, and in fact some like them a great deal. If one had told a Jew from several centuries ago that, in the year 2023, an antisemitic pogrom would take place and the attack would be celebrated by mobs around the world, this Jew would not have been at all surprised. Yet this Jew would have been astounded to learn that, in response to the celebration of this pogrom, one prominent political party of the most powerful country on earth summoned the presidents of some of the most important universities in the land to publicly admonish them for their failings as academic leaders. Such stories of stalwart, public defenses of Jews against a country’s elites are not abundant in the annals of Jewish history.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/08/the-myth-of-americas-decline/

North America may suffer from some of the world’s poorest political leadership. Yet it seems destined to remain the wealthiest, most dominant place on Earth.

This may come as a surprise to many. After all, generations of pundits have insisted that the future will be forged elsewhere – Europe for some, Japan for others and, more recently, China. But none have the resources, the dynamic population and innovative acumen of North Americans.

Once taken for granted, China’s claim to the future is looking especially wobbly. In 2018, Chinese foreign ministry official Zhao Lijian described efforts to slow China’s dominion as being ‘as stupid as Don Quixote versus the windmills’. He added that ‘China’s win is unstoppable’. Today, China’s triumph looks far from inevitable. Projections that China could surpass the US in terms of aggregate economic output as soon as 2028 are being readjusted to 2036. Some now believe it won’t happen at all.

As for Japan or the EU, neither are likely to ever surpass the US. Each has experienced consistently slower growth. According to International Monetary Fund data, the eurozone economy grew about six per cent over the past 15 years, compared with growth of 82 per cent for the US during the same period. Europe’s once formidable industrial base has eroded in large part due to the ever rising burden of regulation. Germany’s economy, the most powerful economy in the EU, is barely the size of that of California.

Nothing better reflects the tectonic shift in global economic power than investment flows. Between 2012 and 2022, US inbound foreign investment swelled by nearly $100 billion in adjusted dollars, well above the level of investment into China. Levels of inbound investment into the EU and the UK have actually fallen during the same period.