RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/is_genocide_too_powerful_a_word.html

Genocide is a potent word.  It refers to the decimation of an entire group.  It results in destruction on a massive scale.  It defies the imagination even though we have often witnessed it in the 20th century.

To most people, it is the concerted evisceration of a particular group, whether they be Jews annihilated by the Nazis, Uyghurs by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or the Ukrainians by Stalin.  Of the latter, the term Holodomor comes to mind.  It was a man-made famine that affected the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, causing mass starvation in grain-growing regions.  In acknowledgment of its scale, the famine is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).”

These events need to be understood as the prelude to global actions that are now convulsing the world and whose ultimate goal is the destruction of human life.

Often begun as a bid for the welfare of humanity, these decisions must be regarded as the “alibis of tyrants” with resultant deadly consequences.

Consider the dictates that have caused and will continue to cause food shortages and starvation.

https://lawliberty.org/why-ai-cant-think/

Just for fun, I tease the hell out of ChatGPT in spare moments. Chatbots have no self, that is, no purpose for existing, and therefore can’t think. There is no such thing as thought in the abstract: thought is always someone’s thought, and mental activity doesn’t constitute thought unless it comes from a thinker who has a reason for thinking. To think, we must distinguish between significant and insignificant objects of thought, that is, those that matter to us and those that don’t (the exception that proves the rule is paranoid schizophrenia, which makes everything significant).

Higher thought is self-conscious, in that it involves awareness of how we think. Kant distinguished between Vernunft, usually translated as “reason,” as opposed to Verstand, the simple categorizing and sorting function of the mind, or “understanding.” The English translation doesn’t quite convey the difference: Vernunft derives from the same root as Vernehmen, “to interrogate.” It implies a critical examination of how we think.

That helps explain why ChatGPT does so badly with self-referential jokes that it hasn’t heard before. GPT has no self, and the switch of the vantage-point of subject—what makes self-referential jokes funny to begin with—leaves it confused.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/owner-of-two-of-san-franciscos-largest-hotels-pulling-out-of-city-path-to-recovery-remains-clouded/

The owner of two of San Francisco’s largest downtown hotels is stopping mortgage payments and going into foreclosure on the properties, stating that the city faces “major challenges” and that reducing exposure to the market is in the best interest of investors.

Park Hotels & Resorts said Monday that it was stopping payment on a $725 million loan secured by the two hotels, the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square and 1,024-room Parc 55.

The Hilton is San Francisco’s largest hotel, and Parc 55 is the fourth largest.

Thomas J. Baltimore Jr., CEO of the Virginia-based company, called the decision “very difficult, but necessary,” noting record-high downtown office vacancy, “concerns over street conditions,” and reduced convention business.

“After much thought and consideration, we believe it is in the best interest for Park’s stockholders to materially reduce our current exposure to the San Francisco market,” Baltimore said in a prepared statement. “Now more than ever, we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges – both old and new.”

The announcement comes less than a week after the San Francisco Travel Association launched a $6 million ad campaign – it’s biggest ever – to lure tourists back to the troubled California city.

The Always San Francisco campaign calls San Francisco “the most beautiful city in the world.” It features images of iconic San Francisco landmarks, opening with a drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. The opening ad has scenes of people dancing, drinking, and eating, and includes one pink-haired drag queen, Lady Camden, a one-time contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-millenarian-harms-race?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The adviser on artificial intelligence (AI) to the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, says the world has about two years to prevent AI from threatening the human race.

Almost every day, it seems, experts are making bone-chilling predictions about the imminent threat to humanity from AI. Godfrey Hinton, the computer scientist who is considered to be the Dr Frankenstein to this monster, warned weeks ago about his own creation:

These things could get more intelligent than us and could decide to take over, and we need to worry now about how we prevent that happening.

Last month, more than 350 executives and researchers from the world’s biggest AI laboratories issued a joint statement that 

mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.

Scientists at the Future of Life organisation wrote in an open letter:  

AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity.

Yet almost every day, it seems, experts are making bone-chilling predictions about the imminent threat to humanity from climate change.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/world-health-organization-north-korea-kim-jong-un-world-health-assembly-donald-trump-9fb7d02b?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The World Health Organization had a bad pandemic, bowing far too much to Chinese influence and making it harder to discover the origin of Covid-19. The WHO added to that embarrassment recently when the World Health Assembly voted to allow North Korea to serve on the WHO executive board.

Yes, that’s the government in Pyongyang known for its network of camps where political prisoners starve to death. On the executive board, Pyongyang will have a say in setting and enforcing international norms about global health—which it will no doubt flout if WHO ever dared apply them to North Korea.

The farce continued when Donald Trump congratulated North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on his social media platform, Truth Social. “Congratulations to Kim Jung Un!” [sic] wrote the former President. Keep in mind Mr. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the WHO after its Covid blunders, only to have President Biden rejoin.

Mr. Trump’s comments didn’t sit well with his rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination. “No one should be praising the dictator in North Korea or praising the leader of Russia who has launched an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine,” former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News. Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, said “you don’t congratulate a thug.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “we need to be getting out of WHO” rather than “congratulating” Kim for being involved in the WHO.

Meanwhile, WHO denied Taiwan even observer status to the World Health Assembly, and singled out Israel for condemnation over claims it violated the health rights of its Palestinian and Druze populations. Kim Jong Un will fit right in.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/our_descent_into_clown_world.html

Before the Woke Wars began in earnest, I once naïvely thought that men’s professional sports would remain a small redoubt from the insipid idiocy of “political correctness.”  Stadiums where rowdy fans cheer on strong men engaging in physical acts of confrontation — and sometimes bloody violence — seemed like sturdy cultural ramparts capable of keeping leftist indoctrination at bay.  Alas, owner-imposed ideology across leagues and organized intimidation campaigns against individual players have combined with enough force to crash through the gates.  

Now grown men who have spent their lives training for battle meekly embrace ever-changing Marxist planks before millions of spectators, who likewise are allowed to watch only if they implicitly accept the State’s woke dogma.  Will players and fans be forced to kneel during the National Anthem this week?  To reject their religious faith as an expression of “hate”?  To applaud child-grooming and predation?  To cheer the World Health Organization’s dictatorial control over their lives?  Stay tuned.  The sports leagues will let you know what to believe just as soon as the Marxist brigades lay down new marching orders.  Even men with a surplus of testosterone will be expected to comply.

Just as the beer companies, fake conservative news networks, and so many iconic American companies before them, the sports leagues have turned their backs on generations of loyal fans in a display of repugnant pusillanimity.  I wonder whether the Judases will one day regret it.  I know that the ESG- and DIE-pushing communists are castrating corporate holdouts that resist the Woke Borg, but by bending to the Borg’s will, these companies have destroyed any goodwill with lifelong allies.  When the Marxists come for another pound of flesh from their corporate vassals — and another after that — those in charge will eventually be forced to fight back or surrender.  By that time, though, nobody will be willing to come to their defense.

This has always been the shortsighted corporate gamble of the Woke Wars — there’s never been a communist revolution that did not devour itself.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-new-treason-of-the-clerks/

When French writer Julien Benda published The Treason of the Clerks in 1926, Europe still lay in the shadow of the Great War and a failure of civilizational nerve. The old verities of faith were eroding, and new political religions like communism, ethnonationalism, and fascism were battling for ascendancy in people’s hearts and in the streets.

For Benda, this cultural malaise was the consequence of intellectuals––the “clerks” whose vocation is the life of the mind and the search for truth––having betrayed that calling to honor humane ideals and moral integrity, and instead pursued “practical advantages” in order to fulfill the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action,” and promote the idea that “politics decides morality.” He particularly focused on the ideologies “owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions.”

In short, a betrayal of the true vocation of the intellectual to “urge their fellow beings to other religions than to the religion of the material.”

Today, the disease Benda analyzed has metastasized throughout our body politic. This new “betrayal of the clerks” touches on every dimension of our culture, not just the universities, the natural habitat of today’s intellectuals, or its adjuncts in high-brow culture, but in K-12 education, popular culture, many churches, government agencies, sports, media, and entertainments.

This abandonment of truth and moral clarity, and in its place the adoption of a philistine, relativistic utilitarianism, has deep roots. The most heinous betrayal by intellectuals supposedly committed to truth and humane principle is the Holocaust. The seed of this atrocity was “scientific racism,” the application of Darwinian evolution to political and social policy.

https://victorhanson.com/ossified-americana-part-four/

The FBI

How, then, do we alter the FBI to save it from itself?

1. Choice One: Move the entire headquarters to Kansas City or Laramie or Oklahoma City. There would be far less incestuous media/political/bureaucratic marriages, lobbying, and consulting, and far less opportunity for cocktail-hour networking, plotting, profiting, and cajoling. And, of course, a different sort of FBI agent would prefer to live far from DC.

2. Choice Two: Farm out the agency’s divisions among the cabinencies. The Departments of the Treasury, Homeland Security, Justice, and Interior could inherit various orphaned FBI sects from counterterrorism to counterfeiting to drugs. A division head would not have the power of a Comey or Wray and be a bit humbler and more reasonable under congressional testimony.

3. Choice Three: Reform the FBI. Put a 5-year limit on the Directorship. Create a permanent oversight committee in Congress. Require special permission to conduct swat-style arrest raids. Advise all FBI personnel that lying to Congress or to federal investigators results in automatic dismissal and loss of pensions, with criminal proceedings to follow.

The Pentagon

The U.S. military’s last draw in a major war was some 70 years ago in South Korea. We won the First Gulf War of 1991, but lost the brief peace by insanely allowing Saddam Hussein, in defeat and humiliation, to slaughter the Kurds and Shias. A decade of no-fly-zones and Iraq 2.0 followed.

The Iraq War (2003-2010) was finally won in 2008. But then Obama yanked out U.S. troops, ISIS absorbed much of the country, and Trump really did have to “bomb the sh*t out of ISIS” to restore the country to whatever it is now.

Our Clinton/Rice/Power Libyan bombing misadventure ruined that country.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/04/the-strange-pandemic-of-white-disparagement/

One of the tenets of the early civil rights movement some 65 years ago was ending racial stereotyping.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. called for emphasizing the “content of our character” over “the color of our skin,” the subtext was “stop judging people as a faceless collective on the basis of their superficial appearance and instead look to them as individuals with unique characters.”

It is tragic that King’s plea for an integrated, assimilated society, in which race became incidental, not essential to our personas, has mostly been abandoned by the Left in favor of racial stereotyping, collective guilting, and scapegoating by race and gender.

Indeed, many of the old Confederate pathologies—fixation on racial essence, obsession with genealogy, nullification of federal laws, states’ rights, and segregated spaces and ceremonies—are now rehabilitated by woke activists.

In that larger landscape, the collective adjective and noun “white” now has also been redefined and mainstreamed as a pejorative to the point of banality.

“White” followed by a string of subsequent oppressive nouns—“rage,” “supremacy,” “privilege”—has become a twitch on campus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion deans and provosts cannot write a memo, issue a communique, or sign a directive without a reference to “white” something or other.

Like the mysterious omnipresence of transgenderism in popular culture, all of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad—a pet-rock or hula-hoop-like collective madness.

Yet such an addiction remains bizarre in a variety of ways. Millions in the present are now to be libeled as oppressors by the contemporary self-described oppressed—supposedly for what some whites who are mostly now dead once did to now mostly dead others.

Yet what does “white” really mean anymore? Is it an adjective or noun indicating color? Culture? Race? Ethnicity? Is white defined as three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter paleness? Is it an overarching state of mind that encompasses both “Duck Dynasty” and “The West Wing”?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/06/those-who-oppose-capitalism-are-the-enemies-of-freedom/

By now, much of the country has heard or read about the City University of New York law school graduate who was allowed to unspool a spiteful tirade as the school’s commencement speaker. She made a number of vile statements, but her call to “fight against capitalism” stood out to us. She and her fellow travelers know what few casual observers are aware of, that is, an attack on capitalism is an attack on liberty.

Condemning capitalism is nothing new in this country. We’ve heard the angry criticisms all of our lives, and they weren’t novel when we were young. It’s tragic, really, that so many in the West see the tension between “capitalists” and their ideological opponents as merely a conflict between ideas about which economic system we should have.

But it’s more than that. It’s a battle between freedom and subjugation.

Capitalism is not an economic system imposed by government in the way socialism or communism or any form of Marxism or planned economy is imposed on people against their will. Capitalism is merely the economic activity that men will engage in when left alone, when they are free to act as they wish. It is spontaneous, ordered and entirely organic. 

When men are free to trade with each other without government intrusion, they will inevitably seek and sell capital. And why wouldn’t they? It is their nature. Innovators and entrepreneurs hungry to make their ideas flesh need capital to fund their ventures. Those who have capital see opportunities to reap profits, so they trade their capital in an open market for profits to be realized later.

This is not exploitation but the manifestation of liberty. Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1952 “Planning for Freedom” essay that “planning and capitalism are utterly incompatible.” The former is “conducted according to the government’s orders” while the latter follows the plans of entrepreneurs “eager to profit by best filling the wants of consumers.”

Von Mises also noted in the same essay that “the idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion.”