RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/california-forest-fires-taxes-homelessness-same-old-fall-problems/#slide-1

Tech titans and Bay Area Bourbons grow rich, the middle class flees, forests burn.

F all is almost here in California. So we know the annual script.

A few ostracized voices will again warn in vain of the need to remove millions of dead trees withered from the 2013–14 drought and subsequent infestations, clean up tinderbox hillsides, and beef up the fire services. They will all be ignored as right-wing nuts or worse.Environmentalists will sneer that the new forestry sees fires as medicinal and natural, and global warming as inevitable because of “climate deniers.”

Late-summer fires will then consume our foothills, mountains, and forests. Long-dead trees from the drought will explode and send their pitch bombs to shower the forest with flames.

Lives, livelihoods, homes, and cabins will be lost — the lamentable collateral damage of our green future. Billions of dollars will go up in smoke. The billowing haze and ash will cloud and pollute the state for weeks if not months. Tens of thousands will be evacuated and their lives disrupted — and those are the lucky.

California’s deer-in-the headlight progressive officials will blame “climate change” for the conflagrations. The accompanying power brownouts, tardy responses, and official blame-gaming will follow as a prelude for still more solar-panel farms and still less forest management.

There could be a long answer to explain why California for years abandoned dead drought- and insect-stricken trees — over some 60 million of these withered, towering time bombs in their coastal and Sierra forests — to rot. But the short of it was that the kindling and tinderboxes were seen as perfect green mulch for flora and fauna.

https://nypost.com/2020/09/14/new-evidence-makes-hunter-bidens-business-deals-reek-worse-than-ever/

Foreign entities looking to influence American politics sometimes devise lucrative commercial deals involving a politician’s family. While the deals can, and do, ensnare politicians of all stripes, those involving the Biden family are particularly troubling: The transactions implicate US national security.

While Joe Biden served as vice president, his son Hunter received offers from foreign governments and oligarchs in areas where he had little or no expertise. That his foreign partners included a rival state, Communist China, makes these arrangements particularly brazen, even by Washington’s swampy standards.

Newly released Secret Service travel records for Hunter paint a clearer picture of how extensive these efforts were. The documents, reviewed by Judicial Watch, show that between 2009 and 2014, Hunter made 411 trips across 29 countries. While some of those trips were perhaps leisure and others related to his volunteer work for the World Food Program, many of them appear to be connected to deals that he or his associates either secured or sought with foreign governments and oligarchs.

For example, Hunter visited China five times between 2009 and 2014. Most notoriously, he traveled with his father aboard Air Force Two in December 2013 as part of an official visit with Chinese officials. Ten days after their return to Washington, Hunter and his associates partnered with the state-owned Bank of China to formally establish BHR, a new, first-of-its-kind fund aimed at making investments outside China through the newly established Shanghai Free Trade Zone.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/heather-mac-donald-protesters-demand-cops-let-themselves-be-stabbed-or-shot

If the nation’s police officers walked off the job today, it would be hard to blame them. Sunday’s anti-cop riots in Lancaster, Pa., have made the current de facto rules of engagement clear:

Officers may never defend themselves against lethal force if their attacker is a minority. They should simply accept being shot or stabbed as penance for their alleged racism.

In Lancaster, an officer responded to a domestic violence call at a residence where a man had stabbed four people last year. As the officer approached the house, a female escaped out the front door. A man – the suspect from the previous slashings – then emerged and ran at the officer, brandishing a knife over his head. The officer shot him, as the officer was by all appearances legally authorized to do, to stop the threat of deadly force. Twenty-seven-year-old Ricardo Munoz died from the officer’s gunfire.

The response from the “community,” after this summer of lethal cop hatred, was predictable. Rioters pelted Lancaster cops with bricks, glass bottles, and sharp projectiles ripped from road barricades. They smashed the windows of police cruisers, the downtown police precinct, the post office, cafés, and stores. They torched a dumpster dragged from another part of the city. They pulled street signs and bike racks out of sidewalks to use against the police.

Such anarchy, with its photogenic arson, is just the latest chapter in the violence that is now routinely directed at officers during ordinary law enforcement activities, as well as during riots.