RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/09/could-joe-biden-order-a-u-s-attack-on-iran/

Could Joe Biden bomb Iran? There are loud calls by some members of Congress and pundits to do this in response to the surge in attacks by Iranian proxy groups against U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria and shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Some thought it was telling last weekend when National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan refused to rule out a U.S. attack on Iran during a press interview.

But why would anyone be calling for American airstrikes against Iran? Why didn’t the massive U.S. airstrikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria last week and the 14 or more U.S. airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen halt their attacks?

The answer to both questions is that American deterrence in the Middle East has seriously eroded during the Biden administration.

Much of this erosion is due to three years of American weakness and foreign policy failures caused by the administration’s incompetent foreign policy. This includes the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, U.S. feuding with Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration’s attempts to appease Iran, and a frivolous foreign policy that treats climate change as the principal national security threat to the United States.

American credibility in the Middle East was further undermined by Biden administration policies in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Although Biden officials offered strong support for Israel immediately after this attack, there soon were signs of a split between the U.S. and Israel as administration officials began to publicly criticize the Israeli government for the way it was conducting the war against Hamas.

Worried about criticism from his progressive supporters, President Biden and his senior national security officials have pressed the Israeli government to end the war quickly and agree to a peace plan based on the two-state solution. Israeli officials have rejected ending the war before it can guarantee Israel’s security and defeat Hamas. They have also said two-state solution peace plans are off the table due to the October 7 attack.

There have also been press reports of growing tension between Biden and Netanyahu, including the president abruptly ending a December 23 phone call with the Israeli leader, Netanyahu repeatedly rejecting Biden’s calls for Palestinian sovereignty, and a report that Biden was running out of patience with Netanyahu

https://www.frontpagemag.com/domestic-terrorism-history-month/

Last Sunday marked 50 years since the Symbionese Liberation (SLA) Army kidnapped Patricia Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. Patty took on the nom de guerre Tania and joined her SLA captors in armed robberies. Arrested in 1975, Hearst drew 35 years but served less than two before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence.

In 2001, President Bill Clinton granted Hearst a full presidential pardon. She married police officer Bernard Shaw and now showcases her French bulldogs at the Westminster Kennel Club. Nice story, but reports come up short on the SLA and other domestic terrorists, whose influence is now on the rise.

The Symbionese Liberation Army was headed by Donald DeFreeze, also known as Cinque Mtume, who served five years for robbery, escaped Soledad prison, and hooked up with radical leftist Patricia “Mizmoon” Soltysik. DeFreeze drew inspiration from Ron Karenga, also known as Maulena Karenga, born Ronald McKinley Everett in Maryland in 1941.

In the late 1960s Karenga rose to prominence as a theoretician of the black nationalist movement. In “The Quotable Karenga” handbook, he told followers:  “When it’s burn, let’s see how much you burn. When it’s kill, let’s see how much you kill. When it’s blow up, let’s see how much you blow up.”

In 1971, a court convicted Karenga of kidnapping and torturing two women in his organization. According to “Karenga Tortured Women Followers, Wife Tells Court,” from the May 3, 1971 Los Angeles Times, Karenga stripped naked Deborah Jones and Gail Davis, whipped them with an electrical cord, and beat the women with a karate baton. Karenga also stuck a hot soldering iron into Davis’ mouth and cranked down on her toes with a vice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-robert-hur-report-classified-documents-119fbb16?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

In a famous case from the 1990s, the mobster Vincent Gigante offered what became known as “the bathrobe defense.” He attended his arraignment in pajamas and a bathrobe and claimed to be mentally impaired. Regarding President Biden’s misuse of classified documents, the country is now asked to believe the forgetful elderly man defense.

That’s likely to be the main public takeaway from special counsel Robert Hur’s 345-page report of his investigation into the secret documents Mr. Biden kept in various places. Mr. Hur reports that he “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” But he concludes that “no criminal charges are warranted,” in large part because he doesn’t believe a jury would convict “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

The report says Mr. Biden kept documents with classified markings about Afghanistan, an issue about which he had taken a particular interest during the Obama Presidency. He also kept notebooks “implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods” in his garage, offices and basement den.

Mr. Biden used these documents and notes to assist in writing his 2007 and 2017 memoirs, and he shared those secrets with a ghostwriter. Mr. Hur also discovered a recorded 2017 conversation in which Mr. Biden said to his ghostwriter that he “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” Mr. Hur also makes clear that with his long experience in public life, Mr. Biden was well aware of the rules required to protect national secrets.

Yet while his report is scathing on the facts, it goes easy on the decision to prosecute. A sitting President can’t be prosecuted under longtime Justice Department rules, but Mr. Hur says he also wouldn’t have prosecuted without such a rule. The reason? He didn’t think a jury would convict beyond a reasonable doubt.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/a_moment_in_history_pregnant_with_purpose.html

A reader recently posted a comment that has stuck with me.  He asked, “Why do I even bother awakening to face another day of truly impending doom?”  He sarcastically added, “May as well get drunk and go back to sleep cuz the ‘Republicans’ won’t do enough this year or next five to prevent the really bad times coming which will make the Depression/WWII seem like the good old days.”  As someone who regularly partakes in gallows humor, I chuckled at the sentiment.  Over the next day, though, the serious thought behind that sentiment began to increasingly sting like a smart jab to the ribs.

I write a lot about “doom and gloom” issues during this era of great social change, much like how a Bangkok meteorologist writes a lot about rain during monsoon season.  Sometimes the steady downpour of “doom and gloom” feels as if it will never come to an end — just as a persistent monsoon often convinces the body that it will never stop raining.  The wet season, however, does finally pass.  So too will this period of prolonged madness.  

It is why I also write so much about a “Great Awakening” happening both here in America and across the West, in which more and more minds are becoming alert to the evils around us.  Sometimes these “awakenings” happen in spurts, where punctuated events jolt sleeping brains awake for the first time.  Seeing people experience an “Aha!” moment is like watching the clouds part so that sunlight can briefly reach the ground.  Those epiphanies are becoming more frequent, and more sunlight is steadily breaking through the swirling chaos that surrounds us.  That doesn’t just fill me with hope; it provides me with a sustained comfort that comes from a firm belief that we will overcome this chaos together.  Why awaken to face another day of impending doom?  Because we are blessed to be “awake.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/academias-double-standard-on-rape

About ten years ago, when I was a young assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College and new to academia, I was taken by surprise when one of my students complained about an assigned text—Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Specifically, her concern was about Ovid’s lack of sensitivity on the subject of rape. The Metamorphoses is a poetic compendium of ancient Greek and Roman myths; one of its common motifs is male gods erotically pursuing females. I was particularly surprised by the student’s comment because Ovid’s elegant and witty text is remarkably sympathetic to the female characters. But I knew that Mawrters are famous for the intensity of their beliefs; it makes sense for students at a women’s college to feel so strongly about violence against women.

In the years that followed, I discovered that in fact the Metamorphoses is a common prompt for virtue signaling, not only for students but also for professional scholars across American universities. It is typical for a public lecture on Ovid’s Metamorphoses to begin with a trigger warning for rape and an invitation to audience members to feel free to step out of the room.

I could never quite square how listeners could be traumatized by Ovidian descriptions of sexual violence. Here, for example, is one of the most famous ones: “while [the god Jupiter] spoke, [the nymph Io] fled, [ . . .] but the god called forth a heavy shadow which involved the wide extended earth and stopped her flight and ravished in that cloud her chastity.” But I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, they not only murdered hundreds of children, elderly, and women and kidnapped hundreds more, but also systematically perpetrated brutal mass gang-rapes, complete with mutilation and other forms of inhuman violence against women. In one witness account, after terrorists finished raping a woman—and while she was still alive—they chopped off one of her breasts and were kicking it to one another like a soccer ball in the dust. In another, a gang-raped woman pleaded with the terrorists to shoot her dead—which they did, once everyone in the group had a turn with her. 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-decadence-of-identity-politics

Among anti-cop legislators, “defund the police” may have lost some currency, but “demoralize the police” is doing just fine.

On January 30, the New York City Council passed the How Many Stops Act, over the veto of Mayor Eric Adams. The law requires New York police officers to fill out a form nearly every time they interact with a civilian. If, for example, an officer asks a potential bystander to a shooting if he had witnessed that shooting, the officer will have to complete a form listing the bystander’s race, sex, and age. Are there other potential witnesses in the area who urgently need to be contacted before they disperse? Too bad. Identity-based paperwork comes first.  (If an officer waits to the end of his shift to finish filling out the forms, he will still likely need to have made some contemporaneous record of his encounters.)

The department’s personnel will spend hundreds of hours a day cumulatively on this bureaucratic task—time diverted from bringing criminals to justice.

The rationale for this unnecessary bill, like almost everything encumbering policing today, is the council’s belief that the NYPD routinely harasses people of color, whether suspects or witnesses.  Never mind that civilians in these newly red-taped investigatory stops are free to ignore the officer’s questions, preserve their anonymity, and walk away.  The council still sees a bigoted purpose in an officer’s reaching out to the public for help in solving crime.

The How Many Stops Act is innocuous, however, compared with California’s data-collection requirements for police officers. New reporting obligations under the Racial & Identity Profiling Act require California officers to fill out an eight-page form (up from four pages last year) with nearly 200 fields when they make what is known as a custodial stop (meaning the civilian is not free to walk away).

The form, generated by the California Department of Justice, comes straight from race- and gender-studies classrooms. The officer first documents whether he, the officer, is a “cisgender man, cisgender woman, transgender man, transgender woman, or nonbinary person.” To avoid placing a retrogressive “gender” straitjacket on the state’s public servants, the form allows an officer to check both “Nonbinary person” and one of the other categories, such as “Cisgender woman.”  “N/A” is not an option; the officer must list a sexual identity. Naturally, there is also an extensive “Officer race or ethnicity” section, asking whether the officer is “Asian, Hispanic/Latine(X), Black/African, Native American, Middle Eastern or South Asian, Pacific Islander, White,” or a combination of the above.

https://pjmedia.com/john-stossel/2024/02/07/ai-is-coming-for-your-job-n4926202

The media warn, “Artificial intelligence will replace millions of jobs.” 

In San Francisco, Teamsters protest, demanding the government “protect” their jobs. In my new video, they chant, “Do not have these self-driving vehicles on San Francisco streets, taking jobs!”

They’re complaining about the Waymo driverless taxis already in use in part of San Francisco (and Phoenix). 

The union is right to worry. Robot cars don’t get tired. They don’t take lunch breaks. They don’t drink or get distracted. Self-driving cars will replace many delivery-driver jobs, taxi jobs, Uber jobs and truck driver jobs. 

Texas is building a special highway with a lane just for self-driving trucks. 

The idea isn’t just to save money by having machines do what people do now, but to get human drivers off the road entirely.

Safety advocates want that, because despite publicity over occasional robot-car crashes, we humans make many more mistakes. Robo-cars will save thousands of lives.

But when I said that in this column last month, some of you said government officials will soon use “safety” as an excuse to outlaw human driving. 

“Regulators will try to ban traditional cars,” writes orangecrate26. “You’re not taking my Mustang, or my guns.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-layoffs-continue-to-roil-industry-with-32000-jobs-cut/ar-BB1hOveK

The tech industry has started 2024 with another wave of job cuts, paring back even further after widespread layoffs last year. So far, some 32,000 tech workers have lost their jobs in 2024 according to Layoffs.fyi, a startup that has been tracking job cuts in the industry since the pandemic. 

Snap Inc. became the latest example, announcing on Monday that it’s reducing its workforce by about 10%, or around 540 employees. Earlier this month, software company Okta Inc. said it would eliminate 7% of its staff to reduce costs, affecting about 400 employees. The list goes on, including Big Tech employers like Amazon.com Inc., Salesforce Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc.

This year, “tech companies are still trying to correct for their over-hiring during the pandemic surge, given that the high interest-rate environment and tech downturn have both lasted longer than initially expected,” Layoffs.fyi founder Roger Lee wrote in an email. 

There have been two main waves of job cuts in recent years, according to Lee. The “early Covid” spike, from the first to second quarters of 2020, and the “interest rate hike” effect, which has been going on since the second quarter of 2022. “This year’s layoffs are typically smaller and more targeted than the layoffs a year ago,” Lee said.