RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/tuesanatomy-hunter-biden-foreign-business-deal-involving

In his new memoir, Hunter Biden declares there is a simple explanation for a life filled with addiction to drugs and alcohol. “I have the capacity and tenacity to use to excess, and a single-minded unwillingness to quit,” he writes. “That makes addiction easy, rather than hard.”

Unraveling his extensive deals with foreign characters — some with controversial histories — while his father was in government, however, is a more complex story.

And no other anecdote illustrates that better than Hunter Biden’s brief engagement with a fugitive Ukrainian oligarch’s team in 2015, one that began with discussions about lobbying his father’s administration to make an indictment go away and ended with a separate $3 million deal and a handsome $275,000 transfer into a firm that routinely paid the younger Biden.

Following the money is a dizzying exercise, with multiple business firms and bank accounts and a discussion about one deal that ends with payment for another business opportunity.

The tale begins in April 2015, when Hunter Biden got an email from his business partner — the now-convicted felon Devon Archer — about a plan to assist the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a Ukrainian who was under U.S. indictment by the Obama-Biden administration, and at the time, a fugitive.

The goal was to see whether Firtash’s felony indictment could be erased or eased with the help of the Obama-Biden State Department, where Hunter Biden’s father held much sway and where the vice president’s longtime national security adviser, Tony Blinken, served as deputy secretary under John Kerry, according to emails and interviews published last week by Just the News.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9444413/Kamala-Harris-not-visited-Mexico-border-taking-charge-migrant-crisis.html

The Vice President was tasked with addressing the crisis at the border amid a surge in migrant numbers
In two weeks she has only held one phone call with the Guatemalan President and offered no interviews
She did not visit the border despite traveling home to California for four days with no public commitments
More than 170,000 migrants were caught trying to cross the border in March, its highest level in two decades
Harris is yet to hold an interview or make a trip to see the ‘humanitarian crisis’ despite her new role

Kamala Harris has still to visit the US-Mexico border or even hold a press conference about her new duties in the two weeks since being tasked with addressing the migrant crisis.

The Vice President spent Easter weekend at her Brentwood home in Southern California where she baked a ‘beautiful’ roast pork with rice and peas, but did not find time in her schedule to visit the nearby border.

In the past two weeks she has also visited Connecticut for a talk with the Boys and Girls Club of New Haven, traveled to Oakland to meet with Gavin Newsom to show support amid his potential recall election, and made a trip to a bakery in Chicago.

Harris has also been busy moving into her new residence at the Naval Observatory just days after she complained about living out of suitcases while it was being renovated.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/06/what-would-a-real-capitol-hill-riot-look-like/

The FBI views the January 6 Capitol Hill protest as “domestic terrorism,” to quote director Christopher Wray. The bureau will work nonstop to bring those responsible to a police-state version of justice.

This included arresting Christopher Kuehne, a Missouri man who appears on security footage doing dangerous stuff like staying inside the velvet ropes and picking up garbage left by other protestors. Kuehne is a retired Marine with two Iraq deployments and a purple heart. The FBI charged him with carrying a deadly weapon, though he had none. The media falsely reported he was a member of the Proud Boys, though he is not. It appears he is being held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day without bail. His wife was kept waiting in freezing weather for hours while an FBI forensics team ransacked their home looking for “evidence.” She was pregnant and has suffered a miscarriage. That story has been effectively deleted from the internet and you won’t find it easily with a search on Google. 

The FBI isn’t alone in claiming the January 6 Capitol protest was the worst thing to happen to America since 9/11. A substantial share of nominally Republican politicians has joined that chorus. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went so far as to say that Donald Trump will have “a place in history” for the Capitol riot: “They could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all.” 

When Graham says this, he knows perfectly well that he is lying. Trump asked the hundreds of thousands of Americans who came to show their support to walk with him peacefully to the Capitol. He made “peaceful” explicit. Nonetheless, every corrupt politician and newscaster in America has been able to find the violent subtext buried somewhere in Trump’s speech. 

Real Incitement

Well, try this on for size: Suppose if, instead of saying “let’s walk to the Capitol peacefully,” Trump instead had said what everyone accuses him of saying. Suppose he’d said, “The election is being stolen from us and I’m not giving up power.” (Remember how the Left fantasized Trump would have to be removed from the Oval Office by force?) Suppose Trump continued: “I am calling on my supporters to defend my presidency with violence. Come to Washington. Bring your guns! Bring every weapon you can lay your hands on. Don’t let anyone stop you. No justice, no peace!” 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/milwaukee_black_panthers_racially_harass_and_force_shutdown_of_asian_nail_salon_as_media_avert_their_eyes.html

“You do not disrespect black women from our community…. You do not disrespect Black Lives Matter…. You ever disrespect a black woman again, we’re going to shut you down.”

With these and other words, a group of 10 Milwaukee Black Panthers invaded an Asian-owned nail salon and threatened it.

Later, they returned, and police arrived.  Instead of protecting the Asian owner, a female officer spoke cordially with the Panthers, addressing their leader as “General” and left the store saying, “All right, I’m sure that he got your message, sir, thank you so much.  We really appreciate you coming down.  Thank you though.”

All of this is on video recordings, boastfully posted to Facebook by the leader of the Panthers, who styles himself “King Rick” and who refers to Black female customers as “queens.”  We know this only thanks to Jim Piwowarczyk of Wisconsin Right Now, who notes that the leader of the group is:

“Darryl King Rick Farmer II,” whose Facebook page proclaims him as, “LEADER AND BLACK GENERAL OF THE ORIGINAL BLACK PANTHERS NATIONWIDE AND OTHER COUNTRIES!”

Following these confrontations, the nail salon has been shut down, its retail space vacated, a business (and jobs) no longer in existence.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/justice-breyer-joins-rbg-warning-dems-against-daniel-greenfield/

It wasn’t all that long ago that the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) were as fired up about packing the Supreme Court (and destroying its legitimacy utterly) as they currently are about rigging all the elections through HR 1 and eliminating the filibuster. The matter had gone far enough that the dictionaries were being revised as the media loudly insisted that “court-packing” was just a term that Republicans had recently made up.

Then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the patron saint of Democrats, warned them it was a terrible idea.

“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” Ginsburg said, speaking to NPR.

“I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court,” Ginsburg noted.

Funny how RBG referred to court-packing and not judicial reform, or whatever euphemism the lefty media had settled on.

Anyway, back to remind the Democrats that court-packing is a terrible idea is the oldest surviving Democrat on the court.

 Justice Stephen Breyer on Tuesday said liberal advocates of big changes at the Supreme Court, including expanding the number of justices, should think “long and hard” about what they’re proposing.

His talk, Breyer said, “seeks to make those whose initial instincts may favor important structural (or other similar institutional) changes, such as forms of ‘court-packing,’ think long and hard before embodying those changes in law.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/higher-superstition-bruce-thornton/

More and more frequently we so-called advanced moderns believe things to be true that an illiterate farmer in 1800 would have known to be false. As every year passes, the self-proclaimed progressive “brights”–– those who “follow the science” rigorously, they claim, when making and supporting public policies–– endorse as proven facts beliefs and policies that are driven by ideological or venal self-interest rather than truth.

If they continue, the consequences will be the bankruptcy of our culture, economy, and political freedom.

Take this statement from CNN, a loud champion of “science”: “It is not possible to know a person’s ‘gender identity’ at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.” Such a statement back in 1800 would have been dismissed as the ravings of a crank or the sales-pitch for some patent snake-oil. The sex of a child, with the exception of some rare birth defects, is obvious at the moment of birth, both empirically and by medical science.

But the current fad of believing that transient psychological states are what create sex identity has led to harmful outcomes, from the physical and psychological trauma caused by hormone therapy and physical mutilation, to the impact on female athletes that follows from allowing  biological males to compete against females, to the risks to women from admitting biological males into homeless or battered women shelters, or public rest-rooms and school showers.

Our economy is hostage to the same fetishizing of “science,” leading to dubious economic proposals that ignore the real science of mathematics. The first problem is thinking that economics is a science, rather than a species of philosophy that uses numerical data in its theoretical and speculative research. Any discipline that takes into account human behavior cannot be a true science able to correctly predict similar outcomes from the same methods and evidence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccine-passports-prolong-lockdowns-11617726629?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
Mr. Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya, a physician and economist, is a professor at Stanford Medical School.

As tens of millions are inoculated against Covid-19, officials in places as diverse as New York state, Israel and China have introduced “vaccine passports,” and there’s talk of making them universal. The idea is simple: Once you’ve received your shots, you get a document or phone app, which you flash to gain entry to previously locked-down venues—restaurants, theaters, sports arenas, offices, schools.

It sounds like a way of easing coercive lockdown restrictions, but it’s the opposite. To see why, consider dining. Restaurants in most parts of the U.S. have already reopened, at limited capacity in some places. A vaccine passport would prohibit entry by potential customers who haven’t received their shots. It would restrict the freedom even of those who have: If you’re vaccinated but your spouse isn’t, forget about dining out as a couple.

Planes and trains, which have continued to operate throughout the pandemic, would suddenly be off-limits to the unvaccinated. The only places where restrictions would be relatively eased would be those still fully locked down, such as many live-event venues and schools. Yet even there, the passport idea depends on keeping the underlying restrictions in place—giving officials an incentive to do so for much longer as leverage to overcome vaccine resistance.

The vaccine passport should therefore be understood not as an easing of restrictions but as a coercive scheme to encourage vaccination. Such measures can be legitimate: Many schools require immunization against common childhood illnesses, and visitors to some African countries must be vaccinated against yellow fever. But Covid vaccine passports would harm, not benefit, public health.

like a public utility, given its extensive reach and power. 

Here are the pertinent details grabbing people’s attention, especially in Silicon Valley: 

Some aspects of Mr. Trump’s account resemble a constitutionally protected public forum. But it seems rather odd to say that something is a government forum when a private company has unrestricted authority to do away with it. The disparity between Twitter’s control and Mr. Trump’s control is stark, to say the least. Mr. Trump blocked several people from interacting with his messages. Twitter barred Mr. Trump not only from interacting with a few users, but removed him from the entire platform, thus barring all Twitter users from interacting with his messages Under its terms of service, Twitter can remove any person from the platform—including the President of the United States—“at any time for any or no reason.” 

Today’s digital platforms provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech, including speech by government actors. Also unprecedented, however, is the concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties. We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms. 

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/04/06/the-ruined-generation-n2587409

The Internet was supposed to bring with it a renaissance, a new enlightenment and a brighter future. It was to be a time when people became smarter, having access to the collective knowledge of humanity at their fingertips, and with the invention of the smart phone, in their pocket, always. What could go wrong? A lot, it turns out. Actually, just about everything. The promise was not kept. All we ended up with was a bunch of narcissists desperate to share pictures of the food they’re eating and demanding validation for their existence from everyone else.

Scroll through social media and you’ll be inundated with selfies and pictures of food. Did something really happen, did you really eat a meal if you didn’t tell the world about? It’s not that these people think you need to know where and what they’re eating, they need you to know. They want the likes and comments, they crave those more than the nutrition in the food. Hell, they probably choose where to eat based on how the food looks more than the taste or cost.

There is an entire segment of our population who now lives for the validation they receive from others. They need it. It’s not just because they like it, it’s because they have no self-worth without it.

It used to be that if you didn’t like someone, or they didn’t like you, you’d simply avoid them and the problem wasn’t only solved, it disappeared. Now people you’ve never met, will likely never meet, and probably would dislike if you did, demand you not only acknowledge their existence, but you celebrate it as well. If your beliefs, deeply held religious or simply a matter of taste, hinder the approval they desire you are labeled an “ist” or a “phobe” of some sort, then God protect you.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/05/media-politicians-still-spreading-the-big-lie-about-officer-sicknick/

Three months ago this week, Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, 42, died. The 12-year veteran of the force passed away the day after hundreds of Trump supporters mobbed the Capitol to protest Congress’ certification of the 2020 Electoral College.

The United States Capitol Police department issued a statement on January 7, just hours after he died. “Officer Brian D. Sicknick passed away due to injuries sustained while on-duty,” the press release read. “Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and was injured while physically engaging with protesters.  He returned to his division office and collapsed. He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.”

Sicknick’s death is a central rallying cry to bolster the narrative that the events of January 6 amounted to a “deadly insurrection” and the perpetrators must be punished accordingly. To produce compelling optics, Sicknick’s remains lay in state in the Capitol rotunda—a somber memorial attended by Joe Biden and his wife as well as lawmakers from both political parties—the weekend before House Democrats launched their second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

In fact, the allegation Trump allies murdered Sicknick with a fire extinguisher is still included in the bill of particulars against the president. “The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher,” the trial memorandum claimed, without evidence, citing only a January 8, 2021 New York Times article as proof.