RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-national-tragedy-of-hunter-bidens-laptop

The recent release of more gigabytes of images and information from Hunter Biden’s laptop adds to the evidence that the all-out elite effort to bury the scandal before the 2020 election wasn’t just to protect Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the American oligarchy. Sure, the 50-plus senior U.S. intelligence professionals who signed a letter claiming the laptop’s contents were “Russian disinformation” wanted to stop Donald Trump from sending angry tweets at them, but the laptop suggests there was much more at stake.

The U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter—including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper—had directed America’s foreign intelligence services while Biden was vice president and before that chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They knew what his son Hunter was doing abroad, because it was their job to know what foreign services know about leading U.S. officials and their families, and how it might affect U.S. national security.

But none of these powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to defending the national interest, lifted a finger to stop Hunter Biden—and really, how could they? He was Joe Biden’s son, after all. And by doing nothing about him, the pillars of America’s intelligence community became the curators of the Biden family’s scandal.

When Trump started asking questions in 2019 about Hunter and his father, prompted by Joe Biden’s public comments about protecting Hunter’s business associates abroad, it became clear that the only way to contain the mushrooming scandal involving key U.S. interests in Ukraine and China—a scandal whose magnitude they had known about for a decade—was to provide the former vice president with all the resources the U.S. government could muster. And that helped make him president.

There is so much data on Hunter Biden’s laptop that it’s hard to keep straight the sequence of images and information that have come from it since the New York Post started sourcing stories to the personal computer in October 2020. The most recent release includes 80,000 images that a Switzerland-based cyber expert recovered from deleted iPad and iPhone accounts backed up on the laptop.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2022/07/27/mrs-zelenskyy-welcomes-vogue-to-the-war-zone-n1615998

Call it the war with the best production value. A propaganda war is being fought between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. From the slick production of videos about a fighter pilot that never existed to the tall tale about the brave soldiers at Snake Island who all perished, it is easy to see why so many in the West have a Ukrainian flag somewhere in their social media profile.

But it was all garbage wrapped around a sliver of truth at best. Then there was the parade of global dignitaries visiting the war zone, seemingly carefree. First Lady Jill Biden went instead of her husband. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went. So did U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.  Even Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Ct.) made a bipartisan trip to get their pictures taken with Zelenskyy. The photo ops that say you were there. Of course, Graham and Blumenthal left with plaques after making profoundly concerning statements about an ongoing conflict:

Today we were treated to a glowing photo spread of Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Volodymyrivna Zelenska in Vogue. This spread follows glowing profiles in some lesser publications such as Today, People, and Parade.  These outlets compiled their pieces from Zelenska’s public statements and career profile. Vogue sent an interview crew into a war zone.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/28/fauci-torments-a-nation/

It will take years if not decades for researchers to document the totality of the cruel harms of the pandemic lock-downs. Whatever the damage, it could have been much worse. With the hindsight of a blind man, and the depravity of a despot, Anthony Fauci said this week the restrictions should have been more draconian than they were. He’s a national headache that just won’t go away.

“If I knew in 2020 what I know now, we would do a lot differently,” Fauci said Monday in an interview on The Hill TV.

“The insidious nature of spread in the community would have been much more of an alarm, and there would have been much, much more stringent restrictions in the sense of very, very heavy encouragement of people to wear masks, physical distancing, what have you.”

Fauci didn’t reference lockdowns by name, but “what have you” is the same as “all of the above,” so don’t think he didn’t have tougher lockdown rules in mind. What else could “much more stringent restrictions” mean? Double-masking and triple-physical distancing? Fauci’s claim that he was nothing more than a bystander who “didn’t recommend locking anything down,” is a “blatant attempt to revise history,” said Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, whose focuses include infectious disease epidemiology.

“Dr. Lockdown owns the school closures and their attendant collateral harms.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/inflation-destroys-the-small-town-soul-of-america/

My friend Dave Sr. owns the diner up the road and runs it with his son, Dave Jr. The family business is coming up on its fortieth anniversary, and Dave Sr., who’s eighty now — though you’d never guess it — reflected to me recently on the mom ‘n pop shops that have disappeared over the last fifty years or so. He and another local old-timer counted dozens that used to dot the two-lane road between our town and the next town over.

“Now, I don’t think you can count more than five or six [small businesses]!” Dave Sr. said. “And they all made a living out of these places. Between government intervention and red tape and so forth, people are afraid to get into small business.”

Running a small business is the epitome of the American Dream. By working hard and being resourceful, Americans have — historically, at least — been able to support their towns and families, take pride in what they do, and achieve self-reliance. These are all things big government hates. So it’s no wonder inflation, which hurts small towns the most, is skyrocketing out of control, while the Biden administration dismisses it as a “high class problem.”

Dave Sr., Dave Jr., and millions of other rural Americans know the true costs of inflation better than anyone. Dave Jr. told me he’s had to raise the prices of menu items three times already this summer. The price of eggs has risen by more than 60 percent. When the cost of inflation is passed onto the consumer, they cut back on excessive expenditures. That means an elderly widower’s twice-weekly trip to the diner — where he catches up with old friends, makes new ones, finds someone to help him mow his lawn, and enjoys social interactions that extend his life — comes to an end. The ten-year-old girl who bonds with her grandmother over pancakes every Saturday morning stays at home now, because there’s not enough money for gas and food. It’s not long before the diner disappears and there’s nowhere left for people to meet and mingle.