RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fbi-escalates-deadly-violence/

On August 9, “The FBI shot and killed a Utah man who allegedly made online threats to kill President Joe Biden and New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg.” In establishment media reports on the FBI action, “allegedly” gets a workout.

The FBI shot dead Craig Robertson, a 74-year-old woodworker who had allegedly threatened other politicians, including Gavin Newsom and just about every Democrat except Jimmy Carter. Reports on the shooting did not include original-source documentation of the alleged threats.

According to NBC, the FBI received a tip from “a social media company” pertaining to a user called @winston4eagles. The FBI believed the person with that user name to be Robertson. He allegedly told the FBI to get a warrant and they showed up at his house in force in the early hours of August 9.

Video of the engagement does not reveal whether Robertson was armed or fired shots before the FBI shot him dead. The FBI claims Robertson brandished a .357 revolver but it was “unclear if Robertson fired the weapon.” This was hardly the only unusual aspect of the killing.

Threats to the president of the United States are normally handled by the Secret Service. The Service told reporters the action against Robertson was an “FBI-led effort.” As it happens, deployment of deadly force is longstanding FBI practice.

This month marks 31 years since the FBI deployed massive military force against a single family. For choosing to live in rural Idaho, U.S. Army veteran Randy Weaver and his family were smeared as “white separatists.”

In the Ruby Ridge siege of 1992, brought on by an ATF entrapment scheme, the FBI deployed some 400 heavily armed agents, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers against Weaver and his family. The rules of engagement allowed deadly force against any family member seen with a firearm, but in effect it was shoot on sight.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/silk-road-armin-rosen

Despite its chaos and dysfunction, or perhaps as a direct result of it, New York City is an infinity of different paradises. The bleacher bums at Yankee Stadium and the bird-watchers in the Central Park Ramble have each found their utopias. Bushwick, land of amoral excess, is a mile from the part of Williamsburg where everyone is a strict Satmar Hasid. And of course there are differences, mostly visible only to Hasids themselves, between the ideal of structure and meaning on display on Lee Avenue in Williamsburg and the ones evoked in the side streets off 13th Avenue in Borough Park a few miles south, where other mystically inflected Jewish notions of the good life hold sway.

One such vision is expressed through Mitchell Silk’s townhouse. It has a pantry that doubles as a Pesach kitchen, which is a less typical feature than the nearby cabinet of silver Judaica or the dining room display of photos from the old country, great-grandparents looking severe and half-dreaming under babushkas and frock coats. But Silk is among the very few Nadvorna Hasids with a shelf of books in Chinese.

The shelf is in a skylit office built atop the townhouse’s roof, separate from the impressively spotless two floors where his wife and eight children live. This cube-shaped room has an exercise bike and is at eye level with a loudspeaker on top of a nearby school that announces the arrival of Shabbat every week. When I visited him, Silk, the first Hasidic Jew ever to hold a Senate-confirmed position in the U.S. government, wore cuff links bearing the seal of the U.S. Treasury Department.

Silk, now 61, served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for international markets in Donald Trump’s administration. Beginning in the  mid-1980s, Silk helped pioneer the highly specialized field of China-related trade law.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/27/trumps-job-for-vivek-czar-in-charge-of-swamp-drainage/

It’s only been a few days since the first GOP debate, but already the kettle of journalist-vultures have gorged themselves on the carrion, their frenzied wake having picked the corpses bare. Alas, this feeding famishes the craving it seeks to satisfy, so we are left with sticky piles of bones, gobbets of contradictory opinion, and precious little enlightenment. We all know that when it comes to the so-called “rule of law” in this country, “the process is the punishment.” When it comes to spectacles like the Fox News-sponsored GOP debate, the process seems to be the point.

It is, I am sure you will agree, rather a pointless point, but the very pointlessness of the exercise was clearly the cherished goal.  Why else would all those producers and technicians and lovingly coiffed and pressed interlocutors Bret Baier and whatever the bleached-blonde Fox mannequin who sat next to him was called: why serve up all that fatuousness just to hear them hector the candidates with a smorgasbord of silly questions followed by the admonition: “You have 30 seconds” or “You have one minute” to answer?

I happen to have Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided on my desk at the moment. It is an account of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Each of the seven debates lasted about three hours. One candidate would open with a 60 minute statement, to which  the other would answer with a 90-minute response. The first speaker ended with a 30-minute rejoinder. I am trying to picture what Abraham Lincoln’s response to the instruction “You have 30 seconds to reply” would be. I can’t really do it, but I suspect it would be unprintable.

As I have said elsewhere, I suspect that future historians will draw a line under this snazzy pseudo-debate, marking it down as the beginning of the end of the entire genre. Given the changes in how people get their news today—not from television, mostly—this terminus a quo was probably foreordained anyway. But it was confirmed by the simultaneous broadcast of Tucker Carlson’s interview with the only serious Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump.

The bean counters tell us that about 12.4 million people watched the FoxNews debated; that’s down from about 25 million back when Trump participated in 2020 and 2016. It took only a few hours before Tucker’s interview with Trump had racked up more than 220 million views.

I am not quite sure what that number means, other than many more people tuned into Tucker than digested what Asa Hutchinson or Chris Christie or Tim Scott or Doug what’s-his-name from North (or was it South?) Dakota had to say.

Opinions vary about the performances of the A-list participants in this B-list event.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/prosecution-as-persecution/

The establishment Left’s war on Trump shows no signs of letting up.

Last week, international news reported that Germany is considering a ban on the right-wing political party Alternative for Deutschland, which has made considerable electoral gains in recent years, and which has polled recently as the country’s second most popular political party. Such a ban would effectively lock the party out of democratic government. It might be hard to imagine such a thing happening in America, but in many ways, we’re already there. As left-wing internationalists tighten their grip on state power, protecting “Our Sacred Democracy” increasingly seems to require the most draconian efforts on the part of elites to limit the choices that citizens have in elections.

It wasn’t always this way. Only ten years ago, leaders like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton felt so little threat from typical Americans that they mocked them as “deplorables” and people “bitterly clinging” to guns and religion. But after the clingers taught the Democrats a lesson in the 2016 election, the Left establishment resolved to crush them—for good.

Weeks after Biden “won” the 2020 election, Time magazine gleefully reported on the various covert operations that “fortified” the contest against Trump. Of course, by “fortification” they didn’t mean “protection against fraud and interference.” After all, the 2020 election saw fraud and interference on a scale that would have been unimaginable only five years ago. The “fortification,” then, aimed to protect the administrative state from the electoral judgment of the public.

Aside from the documented ballot manipulation, shady methods of vote tallying, Zuckerbucks, and suspension of state-level constitutional rules regarding who has the power to modify election law—all of which benefitted Biden—there were many other forms of malfeasance. We know now that Russiagate was a post hoc effort to undermine the result of the 2016 election.

Close calls: Near Misses on Airport Runways

The U.S. has not had a fatal plane crash involving a commercial airline in more than 14 years — an incredible safety achievement.

But the elaborate system that keeps planes from crashing is struggling. In recent years, air traffic controllers, who guide planes out of harm’s way, have suffered a staff shortage. Out of 313 air traffic control facilities nationwide, just three as of May met staff targets set by the Federal Aviation Administration and the union representing controllers.

Aviation officials worry the shortage is leading to close calls, in which planes nearly crash. There were at least 46 near misses involving commercial airlines last month, according to an investigation by my colleagues Sydney Ember and Emily Steel that published this morning. Those close calls are still a small fraction of the nearly 1.4 million flights in the U.S. each month, and it is not clear whether the rate is increasing.

But any close call is dangerous, potentially leading to a fatal crash that breaks America’s safety streak. As a spokesman for the F.A.A. said, “One close call is one too many.” The agency’s goal is to reduce the number of such near misses to zero. Staff shortages make that harder.

“The controllers we’ve talked to take real pride in their job, and they work really hard to make sure these planes are safe,” Emily told me. “But they’re worried that the circumstances around their jobs could make them slip up and that those mistakes could be very dangerous.”

What is behind the shortage? Part of the problem goes back decades: In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan fired thousands of air traffic controllers who were on strike. The F.A.A. then hired new controllers. Many retired when they became eligible to do so 20 years later. And now, another 20 years later, another wave of controllers is retiring.

Chronic disinvestment in government services is another cause. Over the past decade, the number of fully trained controllers has fallen 10 percent, while airport traffic has increased 5 percent. The F.A.A. has asked for more money to increase hiring. Even if the agency receives those funds, it will take time to hire new controllers and train them.

In the meantime, the U.S. risks more close calls. Some in aviation worry it’s only a matter of time before the overworked system fails to stop a deadly crash.

“Aviation officials will say that we have the safest system in the world,” Sydney said. “But underlying that success are risks and issues that deserve attention.”

In some near misses, airplanes have come so close to each other that officials described the encounters as “skin to skin.”