RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17415/sinking-ship-of-state

To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.

For the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possibly sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America’s best days are in the past.

What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill — or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company’s headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate — to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.

Few debate the idea that our nation’s infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as “infrastructure” has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for “environmental” agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant.

This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge…. As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.

One suspects that historians and economists will consistently agree on one irrefutable fact: nations that allow their economies to bathe in red ink are destined to fail. This failure takes many roads and differs in timing, but massive, uncontrolled national deficits eventually reduce a nation state to being a pauper, a pariah — and pathetic.

Enter Joe Biden’s “American Jobs Plan,” a $2.3 trillion spending scheme that takes some Americans’ most fevered fantasies and wraps them inside an “infrastructure” label in an effort to convince Capitol Hill that the spending is all about roads and bridges. An analysis by the Wharton School places plenty of caution flags on this initiative.

https://www.jns.org/election-of-atheist-harvard-chaplain-to-leadership-role-continues-to-stir-up-controversy/;

 Greg Epstein, the new president of the Harvard chaplains, is an avowed atheist. His

election has led to a perception gap between the Harvard chaplains who voted for him and the general public, which hasn’t quite come to grips with the idea that an atheist can be a chaplain.

The big reason for the gap is that Harvard’s chaplains have had longer to get used to the idea. A Humanist chaplaincy has existed at Harvard for nearly 50 years. Founded in 1974, it was “the first university Humanist chaplaincy in the world,” reports The Harvard Crimson.

Epstein has filled the role since 2005.

Matthew Schmitz, senior editor of First Things, a journal that grapples with issues of religion and public life, said he stands with the general public. The “average Joe nine times out of 10 has it right,” he said. He told JNS that the selection of an atheist chaplain is a sign of “contempt” for religion at America’s premier educational institution and is “profoundly dangerous to the life of our nation” given Harvard’s “outsized role” in world affairs.

That incredulity was fueled by provocative headlines in the press about Epstein’s new position, particularly a New York Times feature titled: “The New Chief Chaplain at Harvard? An Atheist.”

In an op-ed in The Christian Post, Michael Brown, host of the nationally syndicated radio program Line of Fire, asked the question that drew people to the story in the first place: “How can an atheist be a university chaplain?”

“To be a chaplain, by definition, means to be a religious leader,” he wrote, and “to appoint an atheist to be chief university chaplain is like appointing a Christian evangelist to head up the university’s atheist club. Or a devout Muslim to head up the university’s Judaism club.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/17/what-happened-to-the-beloved-military/

The highest echelon of the U.S. military is becoming dysfunctional. 

There are too many admirals and generals for the size of the current U.S. military. It now boasts three times the number of four-star admirals and generals than we had during World War II—when the country was in an existential war for survival and when, by 1945, our active military personnel was almost nine times larger than the current armed forces. 

Somehow a gradual drift in the agendas of our military leadership has resulted in too many various emphases on domestic cultural, social, and political issues. And naturally, as a result, there is less attention given to winning wars and leveraging such victories to our nation’s strategic advantage.

The consequences of these failures are downright scary for a world superpower upon which millions at home and billions worldwide depend. 

There are too many concurrent Pentagon crises. Any one of them would be dangerous to our national security. Together they imperil our very freedoms and security. 

Reform? 

What is to be done? The Uniform Code of Military Justice must be enforced, and not selectively applied on the basis of rank: officers below the rank of general and admiral now face severe penalties for disparaging in personal terms the current administration, while one stars and above are given de facto exemptions for comments about the previous administration. If the code is not considered law but merely a recommendation, then it should be scrapped. 

The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General and the inspector generals of the various branches of the military must enforce existing laws that carefully define the limits of the Joint Chiefs of Staff activity. And they must punish those officers who violate such statues to interrupt the legal chain of command. 

There must be a cooling off period to prevent retiring military officers from rotating onto the boards and lobbying teams of corporate defense contractors, with the presumption that their knowledge of the operation of the Pentagon can be monetized to the advantage of particular corporations. Five years seems a reasonable period in which our top brass should refrain from joining firms that are seeking lucrative contracts from the Pentagon.