RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/25/why-bother/

To what purpose? That is the question of each individual life; one that is asked at least 8 billion times a day. Said in a less cosmetic manner: why bother?

The answer is visible in the way that each of us lives. The religious among us may strive to meet the commandments of our faiths, where our failures may be more visible than our successes, but at least there is a theme to our lives. 

Some of us follow our own codes of conduct. This can be interesting to observe, and perhaps more exciting in outcome, but it’s sometimes dangerous. Some have secular philosophies as broadly encompassing as most religions. These can be very persuasive to the bewildered and to those who have lost faith when an older belief has failed. 

There are many who simply follow others, letting someone else determine their course in life. This, of course, is the way of children. And there are always some who follow impulse, or the corporal demands of hunger, shelter, pain and pleasure. These are often the first victims of circumstance.

To this mix of philosophies, now there is an added ingredient, the nature of which has only just been plumbed, and that only at the shallow end. Those who say that there is nothing new under the sun ought to take notice. Artificial intelligence—AI—is not only something mankind has not encountered before, but something that offers new perspectives on the human predicament. 

For instance, what would be the moral philosophy of such machine intelligence? Is preservation a matter of importance when a specific device can be exactly replicated? What part does identity play for a contrivance that can add to its very being as easily as plugging in an extra hard drive? Meanwhile, human beings cannot change the genetic code that drives us. 

Into this brave new world we now go. Efficiency has already been set as the standard measure. We have been chasing that chimera for centuries now. Speed is also a mark of distinction. Cost is certainly a criterion. And it appears already that the mere human being is not up to snuff. 

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/25/bidens-ukraine-serenade/

Once again, Elon Musk nailed the zeitgeist, or a least a hefty portion of it, in a meme he tweeted. The image shows a soda dispenser. Two spigots are visible, blue on the left, red on the right. The index and middle fingers of someone’s right hand are pushing buttons to dispense blue and red fluid, respectively, into a single cup. A label on the left dispenser reads, “Laughing at WWIII memes.” On the right, the label reads, “Kinda being worried about WWIII.” Is there any sane person who, contemplating what is happening in Ukraine, does not share that ambivalence? 

Until recently, worries about nuclear Armageddon seemed so 1950s and ’60s. Ancient history. The era of “duck and cover.” That “public service” film started life in earnest but in time became a joke. A comment on an internet posting of the clip summed up the attitude: “When I watched this film in grade school in the ’50s, I believed I’d soon be dead, crispy-fried. I just watched again here and laughed so hard I couldn’t finish.”

Why the laughter? Partly because everyone realizes that crouching under a desk with your hands over your head will not afford much protection against a nuclear blast. (Hence the frequent, somewhat rude addendum to the precautionary instructions: “Crouch down under your desk; put your head between your legs; kiss your ass goodbye.”)

Decades went by. There was no nuclear attack. Therefore there would never be a nuclear attack. That was the unspoken if faulty logic. 

There are several different currents of thought and sentiment that make up the dominant consensus. One flowed from the doctrine of deterrence and “mutually assured destruction.” That seems to have worked for decades, bolstering both faith in the doctrine and the widespread forgetfulness about the stakes behind the policy. 

At the same time, critics have pointed out that “MAD” was an appropriate acronym for a doctrine that seriously contemplated incinerating tens or hundreds of millions of people. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove” (with its biting subtitle “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”) gave a darkly humorous voice to that recognition. Most people, I suspect, are divided in their minds, recognizing the potential enormity of the doctrine while appreciating the wisdom of Benjamin Jowett’s comment that “Precautions are always blamed. When successful, they are said to be unnecessary.”

https://www.city-journal.org/html/tomorrow%E2%80%99s-wars-13258.html

Can big battles, then, haunt us once more? If the European Union were to dissolve and return to a twentieth-century landscape of proud rivals, or if the former Soviet republics were to form a collective resistance to an aggrandizing Russia (as they did for much of the nineteenth century), or if the North Koreans, Pakistanis, or Chinese were to gamble on an agenda of sudden aggression (as they have on previous occasions when they were confident of achieving political objectives), then we might well see a return of decisive battles. The U.S. military still prepares for all sorts of conventional challenges. We keep thousands of tanks and artillery pieces in constant readiness, along with close-ground support missiles and planes, in fear that the People’s Army of Korea might try to swarm across the Demilitarized Zone into Seoul, or that the Chinese Red Army might storm the beaches of Taiwan.

Waterloos or Verduns may revisit us, especially in the half-century ahead, in which constant military innovation may reduce the cost of war, or relegate battle to the domain of massed waves of robots and drones, or see a sudden technological shift back to the defensive that would nullify the tyranny of today’s incredibly destructive munitions. New technology may make all sorts of deadly arms as cheap as iPods, and more lethal than M-16s, while creating shirts and coats impervious to small-arms fire—and therefore making battle cheap again, uncertain, and once more to be tried. Should a few reckless states feel that nuclear war in an age of antiballistic missiles might be winnable, or that the consequences of mass death might be offset by perpetuity spent in a glorious collective paradise, then even the seemingly unimaginable—nuclear showdown—becomes imaginable.

In short, if the conducive political, economic, and cultural requisites for set battles realign, as they have periodically over the centuries, we will see our own modern version of a Cannae or Shiloh. And these collisions will be frightening as never before.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/democrats_introduce_resolution_to_ban_trump_from_us_capitol.html

House Democrats introduced a resolution that would bar former President Donald Trump — along with Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Peter Navarro, Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Kenneth Cheseboro, Rudy Giuliani, and other figures — from entering the U.S. Capitol.

Reps. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) introduced the resolution in the House Committee on House Administration.

The measure draws on information from the former House Jan. 6 Committee, arguing that Trump and his allies put members of congress in “genuine peril.”

“The effort to undermine and overturn the 2020 presidential election damaged the functions of our democracy,” the resolution states.

Those efforts also “damaged the integrity of Congress’s constitutional role in certifying the election results” and “put the lives of Members of Congress and the Vice President of the United States in genuine peril,” it adds.

Shortly after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Williams introduced a similar measure that would ban Trump from visiting the Capitol.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/vermont_once_embraced_eugenics_now_it_embraces_pubertyblockers.html

America is being torn apart by a “scientific” dispute over the appropriateness of hormone-blockers for minor children.  The safety of these drugs is in question, as well as whether children are being fully assessed for mental health issues that may underlie gender dysphoria.  A number of responsible states have initiated legislation to ban their use, most recently joined by Tennessee.  Meanwhile, another group of states are rushing to shield these drug regimens for kids from parental or legal interference.  Vermont, which eagerly embraced eugenics and forced sterilization a century ago, is aggressively creating a modern version of Underground Railroad for people in other states (with no age limits) to freely obtain hormone-meddling “therapies” in the Green Mountains.

Vermont has been a frontrunner in providing abortions through all stages of pregnancy.  Progressives shrieked in feigned panic when Roe v. Wade was overturned, claiming that women’s “rights” to infanticide were thereby threatened — even though Roe acknowledged fetal viability and the existence of a second life meriting legal protections at some stage of development in the womb.  “Women’s rights” became the clarion call in Vermont’s 2022 elections, in which nearly 77% of Vermont voters voted “Yes” to a constitutional amendment (Proposal 5) enshrining abortion ’til birth.

Proposal 5 was also a Trojan horse to etch the “right” to puberty-blockers for children into law, using the vague language “personal reproductive autonomy.”  Having regained a progressive supermajority in the election by this ruse, the Vermont Legislature has wasted no time pushing through novel extremist legislation to codify the practice of administering experimental puberty hormone–blockers to children.  H.89 passed the House on February 10 by a resounding child-mutilating margin of 130-13 and is now in the Vermont Senate.

https://rufo.substack.com/p/biden-creates-a-national-dei-bureaucracy

Last week, President Joseph Biden quietly signed an executive order that promises to create a national DEI bureaucracy and embed the principles of left-wing racialism throughout the federal government.

The order, titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” relies on three key strategies: creating internal cadres and power centers through the deployment of “Agency Equity Teams”; funding third-party political activism through grants to “community[-based] organizations”; and weaponizing civil rights law by requiring federal agencies to use artificial intelligence “in a manner that advances equity.”

In this video, I explain how Biden’s executive order manipulates language and statistics in order to nationalize the DEI movement, suppress dissent from the new racial orthodoxy, and subvert the Constitution’s promise of equal treatment under the law.

Transcript

President Joe Biden is overhauling the entire federal government along the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it seems like nobody has noticed. Last week, he signed another executive order promoting DEI called “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” There was very little news coverage about this, but I think that it is an extremely important development. It has ramifications for almost everything that we’ve been talking about the last few years, and I’d like to go into this in detail to really understand how this DEI ideology works, how it embeds itself in the bureaucracy, and what it means for our country, what it means for our constitution, and what it means for our government.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/another_bad_day_for_the_inflation_reduction_act.html

We are not sure about Senator Manchin’s 2024 U.S. Senate plans. We did hear that Senator Tester of Montana is running for re-election.  In fact, Senator Tester said that he is running because “Montanans need a fighter holding Washington accountable and I’m running to defend our Montana values.”

Well, I hope someone will ask both men about the Inflation Reduction Act in light of the new inflation concerns.  This is from The Wall Street Journal:

This measure of inflation, a favorite of the Federal Reserve, accelerated in January at the fastest monthly pace since June. The PCE index is worth following because it offers a view of price changes from business sources and takes into account the substitution of goods and services in a way the consumer-price index doesn’t.

PCE inflation overall rose 0.6% for the month, up from 0.2% in each of November and December. 

The PCE index over the last 12 months is up 5.4%, which was up slightly from December after several months of decline. Inflation in services drove much of the increase and is up 5.7% since January 2022.

The story here is that inflation is proving stickier than many expected. 

Don’t you hate it when things prove stickier than expected?  I think consumers shopping for food can relate to that.  The Biden administration keeps telling you that inflation is dropping, but the prices of food and lots of other things are not.

The new report means that Chairman Powell may have to tinker with those interest rates again.  The new inflation concerns mean that Mr. Manchin and Mr. Tester will get questions about their votes that made the infamous Inflation Reduction Act possible.  I think a lot of good people in Montana and West Virginia will ask these gentlemen why they voted with Senator Schumer.

https://victorhanson.com/our-neronian-super-bowl-part-two/

The game itself was well-played and exciting. But the entire spectacle is heading into a strange and ultimately suicidal territory. Before the National Anthem, there was sung and observed the “Black” national anthem of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It is a wonderful song, but no substitution for our common, shared National Anthem, if such a thing even still exists in the era of a fragmenting America.

The country is supposedly “one people” with one anthem. There are now as many “Latinos” as there are blacks. So why not a Latino national anthem? Ditto Asians. But is it fair to have just one ethnic anthem and not others? What will be the criteria of segregated anthems?

How strange: If in 1960 Bull Connor had dictated to blacks (and who knows, he may have?), “you sing your own ‘separate but equal’ anthem before the nation’s National Anthem,” he would have been dubbed a racist up north and a segregationist down south. So have we come full circle?

Are we following the universities, those beacons of enlightenment and morality, which boast of multiple graduations, all predicated on race or gender? We could devote 30 minutes of pregame time to various chauvinistic anthems, or simply junk the game altogether and sing dozens of anthems ad nauseam?

The NFL bragged that its Super Bowl won 112 million viewers. But that number still counts as a million short from last year, and one million fewer than 2015, when there were about 15 million fewer Americans than now.

True, the NFL has recovered from its dismal Covid/Kaepernick years. But it seems bent to follow the descending trajectory of the NBA. Last year’s final NBA championship game earned a mere 14 million viewers. That was up from the 8.5 million catastrophe of 2020—but far below the 35 million in 1998. How, a quarter-century ago, could there have been 65 million fewer Americans and yet over 20 million more viewers! Where over the last 25 years did those 20 million viewers go?