RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/18/christopher-steele-product-of-a-corrupt-fbi/

Just as the special counsel’s investigation into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane—the FBI counterintelligence probe launched in the summer of 2016 to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—is showing signs of life, one of the central figures in the hoax is attempting to burnish his sullied image.

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos has produced a documentary featuring Christopher Steele, the man responsible for the so-called dossier bearing his name. “Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier,” streamed on Hulu Monday night; promotional clips hinted that, far from a hard-hitting interview exposing Steele for the charlatan he is, Stephanopoulos gave Steele a chance to spin his story ahead of possible new indictments related to John Durham’s inquiry into the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax. 

Rather than depict Steele accurately, Stephanopoulos and ABC News social media interns repeatedly describe Steele as an “ex-British spy” or “former intelligence officer” even though Steele left MI6, the UKs version of the CIA, in 2009 to start a consulting business. (That same year, Steele presented a report on Russia to President Obama.) Steele’s now-discredited dossier, which Stephanopoulos tries to portray as “raw intelligence,” was the basis not just for the entire Russian collusion hoax but also served as key evidence to support four illicit FISA applications to obtain warrants to spy on Donald Trump and his associates.

Stephanopoulos’ goal, of course, is to convince uninformed viewers—in other words, most of Stephanopoulos’ audience on any given day—that Steele was working in an official national security capacity instead of as a Democratic political operative paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to dig up dirt on Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race.

But Steele, many folks forget, also had another funder in 2016: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An often overlooked fact about Steele is that at the same time he was being paid by the Clinton campaign and DNC, he also was being paid by the FBI as a “confidential human source,” otherwise known as an “informant.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/18/call-of-the-wild/

In at least some parts of the United States, the Muslim call to prayer, known as the “adhan” or “azan” (Arabic for “announcement”), is a familiar sound. Perhaps because of the freedom of religion that’s guaranteed by the First Amendment and deeply rooted in American culture, and perhaps also because America has a history of extraordinary religious diversity—with native-born faiths ranging from the Mormons to Jehovah’s Witnesses to Seventh-day Adventism to Scientology—there’s been relatively little opposition to the adhan, even by people who may not be thrilled over the spread of Islam in their towns and cities. 

Since the 1970s, for example, the adhan has been broadcast five times a day from the roof of the American Moslem Society in Dearborn (which has one of the country’s highest populations of Muslims per capita). A mosque in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant began doing the same thing in 1981. 

In 2004, residents of Hamtramck, Michigan (which has been described as America’s only Muslim-majority city), voted to officially allow adhans that were already being broadcast from several mosques. By that point, mosques in Detroit, which surrounds Hamtramck, had also been broadcasting adhans for some time. 

In Minneapolis, which is also heavily Muslim (Democrat Ilhan Omar is its representative in Congress), the Dar Ul Hijra Mosque started broadcasting the adhan in April of last year, after Mayor Jacob Frey issued a permit for it. Two months later, Robert Spencer reported that residents of Culver City in Los Angeles County (the longtime home of MGM) were up in arms about the adhan being broadcast five times a day, beginning at 4:30 a.m., from the King Fahad Mosque. 

But in the United States, anyway, such dust-ups don’t last long and don’t have much of an impact on government actions. Nor have they succeeded in turning the adhan into a major national issue. 

In Western Europe, however, for a number of reasons, the situation is somewhat different—although it varies from country to country. Generally speaking, mosques, even when permitted to do so, have chosen not to broadcast the adhan, or to do so on a very limited basis and at very low volume; when the issue has come up, moreover, there’s been outspoken criticism and national headlines. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/the_doj_has_finally_disgorged_some_exculpatory_evidence_about_january_6.html

For a very long time, based on a few short snippets of random videos that people outside and inside of the Capitol shot on January 6, conservatives have been arguing that significant numbers of the people who entered the Capitol that day did so because the Capitol Police let them in. Their presence there wasn’t an insurrection or even an unauthorized trespass—they had a right to be there once the “guardians” of the Capitol opened the door. Now, the official video from the Capitol confirms that those snippets were accurate.

January 6 defendants and conservative media outlets have been demanding for ten months that the Department of Justice release the 14,000 hours of footage it has showing what happened at the Capitol on that day. An administration dedicated to truth and a prosecution abiding by the principle that the government must make exculpatory material available to the defense would have long ago complied with those requests.

But the Biden DOJ is made of sterner, and possibly more corrupt, stuff. It took a court order to make the DOJ disgorge just some of the footage it has. And let me note that the motion to produce that Ethan Nordean, a defendant, filed asking for material to which he is entitled under the law wasn’t enough. Instead, the “Press Coalition,” which includes CNN, The New York Times, and broadcast news networks, had to add its voice to the motion before the judge. (I happen to think it’s noteworthy that the media’s demands had more weight before the judge than the defendant’s rights.)

Buzzfeed posted two 40-minute long videos, one of exterior footage and one of interior footage, that the DOJ finally produced, claiming that they show “A Breach By Jan. 6 Rioters From Start to Finish.” However, according to Julie Kelly, whose word and analysis I trust a lot more than anything from Buzzfeed, the videos, which run for about 35 minutes, actually show quite a different story:

At the start of the video, one officer held open the interior door that accesses the Capitol Rotunda, a space between the House and Senate wings. Five or six unidentified men exited the door and spoke to the officer before leaving. Those men held open the exterior double-doors, where protesters began filing into the building. Nordean’s lawyer said his client is recorded entering the building, with the consent of police, between 2:37 p.m. and 2:38 p.m.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/elizabeth-warren-lying-money-laundering-socialist-jason-d-hill/

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on Wednesday October 13, 2021, that billionaires who have enough money to shoot themselves into space, as Jeff Bezos did this summer, will pay for the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill that is still being negotiated in Congress.

Before analyzing the pure envy and hatred of the productive benefactors of humanity that lie behind her statement, let us identify Warren for what she is: an equivocating, lying, money-laundering, Ponzi-scheming socialist who lives to expropriate the wealth of others to finance socialist programs. She’s contributed nothing in terms of productive value to society—short of being some pit-bull bureaucratic watchdog who lives for enacting legalized theft and money-laundering schemes, which is what socialism boils down to. She denies the fact that production comes before distribution, and that the wealth she so gleefully wants to appropriate was made possible by the ratified choices of individuals who endorsed Bezos’ products and made him wealthy because he added superlative value to their quality of lives. The notion that billionaires don’t pay taxes is such a case of the Big Lie, that it is not even worth refuting.   

What Warren despises is that Bezos regards his personal welfare, enjoyment, and pleasure—all value-choices that comprise his pursuit of his own happiness which is his inalienable right to do with as he pleases. He neither seeks nor needs the permission of others to live optimally.

Elizabeth Warren is jealous, envious, and filled with rage that he has so much surplus income that he can dare to spend it on what she considers to be a frivolous and wasteful activity. Guess what, Warren? The liberal state by design is supposed to remain agnostic on the question of persons’ conceptions of the good life—provided such choices do not violate the rights of others. She is outraged that he’d rather spend millions on a short trip to space than fund the decrepit and corrupt government schools that teach hatred and bigotry via Critical race Theory; that he doesn’t seem to care about funding historically Black colleges which are a total disaster (they are failing abysmally and graduating semi-literate students); that her tuition-free community college education plan won’t be financed. No one should ever be compelled to finance the education of another person’s child. We are not responsible for the procreative choices of other people. The responsibility for a child’s education lies with the parents.

If you cannot afford to educate a child then don’t have one, just as you would not purchase a house or car if you could not afford to finance them. No one has a constitutional right to have children. And no one’s child can be a necessary social good for anyone but the parents of that child. State schools today (and many private schools) are bastions of indoctrination centers teaching hatred of our great republic, encouraging and practicing cancel culture, weaponizing defiance against authority, decolonizing courses by stripping them of canonical texts, and turning schools into Marxist conduits of Social Justice, radical activism, and social eugenics breeding grounds to transform America into a communist charnel house by canceling human agency, and then history, and then our Constitution. No, Sen. Warren. Some of us are going to devote our lives to defunding all public schools and shutting down government schools. She is incensed that she won’t have her drug-pricing policies and undefined “climate crises” funded and foisted on corporations that would just stifle growth and productivity.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-hypersonic-wake-up-call-11634596933?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Most Americans believe the U.S. has the world’s most dominant military, but that dominance is ending. The report that China has tested a new hypersonic missile should alert the country to the growing danger.

“China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target,” reportsthe Financial Times. Hypersonic missiles are harder to track and destroy than ballistic missiles and could evade U.S. missile defenses.

The hypersonic news follows the discovery this year of hundreds of new missile silos in the Chinese desert, almost certainly for nuclear missiles. This isn’t the behavior of a nation merely interested in defending its sovereignty. China has global ambitions, and they include projecting military power as a way to assert its political and commercial interests.

This is important to understand because the next major war won’t look anything like the last one. The U.S. homeland was spared from most of World War II’s destruction. But the next conflict will feature cyber attacks, hypersonic missiles, and unmanned vehicles using artificial intelligence that put the U.S. at risk of attack from afar. Hiding behind fortress America won’t be possible, if it ever was.

It’s also alarming if the reports are correct that U.S. intelligence was caught off-guard by the hypersonic test. The U.S. has intelligence agencies precisely to prevent surprises like this. The Intelligence Community is made up of some 18 organizations that received $85.8 billion in 2020. Congress should investigate what we’re paying for and what we’re getting.

It would also be helpful to stop assisting the People’s Liberation Army. The Chinese firm Phytium Technology, for example, works with the PLA to conduct research on hypersonic flight, according to the Washington Post.

“While the Biden administration rightly placed Phytium on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, it has not applied the Foreign Direct Product Rule that was successfully used to counter Huawei,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) said in a statement. As such, he added, U.S.-derived technology produced by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company still enables Phytium’s research.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/build-back-better-tax-increases-subsidies-household-income-11634592447?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The two sides of a coin are typically regarded as opposites. In the case of President Biden’s $5 trillion Build Back Better bill, the two sides are actually the same. Both the revenue and expenditure provisions of this agenda will cause substantial decreases in employment. The only difference will be how.

The Build Back Better bill would deliver a double blow to an already disrupted labor market. Most of the explicit tax increases in the agenda directly disincentivize investment, which reduces capital, wealth, wages and employment. Meanwhile, the creation of new (and the expansion of existing) employment-tested and income-tested benefits would increase the implicit tax on working.

The tax increases on both corporate and pass-through business income would reduce wage growth by shifting investment out of the business sector, reducing competition and overall investment, and contributing to lower employment. The tax increases on capital gains, as well as increased corporate taxes on foreign profits, would exacerbate these effects.

The expansion of Affordable Care Act subsidies and paid medical-leave mandates would also reduce employment levels by tying benefits to not working. This and other provisions are gifts to unions, helping them achieve the goal of higher wages through reduced labor supply.

The bill would expand the child tax credit for households that earn no income for a full calendar year. Perhaps the bill’s authors are too young to remember the 1996 welfare-reform law, which demonstrated how sensitive single mothers’ work behaviors are to such disincentives.