RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/daniel-penny-scapegoat-homelessness-system-neely/

Jordan Neely was given a hero’s funeral in Harlem last Friday, eulogized by New York’s most prominent race activists before an audience of the city’s Democratic elite. Neely died on May 1 on a New York City subway car, after being restrained by a Marine veteran who was trying to protect his fellow passengers from Neely’s psychotic outbursts.  

Neely has been turned into a symbol of a racist system of law enforcement and of civilian values that exaggerate the threat of mentally ill vagrants to keep minorities down. Three weeks after Neely’s death, on May 21, another homeless man in New York City slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, likely paralyzing her for life, if she even survives. Neely’s champions have been silent about this latest subway assault. 

All the pathologies afflicting American cities were present in that earlier fatal encounter and its aftermath: the grotesque parody of compassion that is conventional homeless policy; government’s elevation of the supposed interests of the anti-social and dysfunctional over those of the law-abiding and hard-working; anti-white race-baiting and racial bathos.

But the May 1 confrontation between the ex-Marine Daniel Penny and the mentally ill Neely stands for more than failed policy. Reaction to Penny’s intervention illuminates as well the war on manly virtues and their attempted replacement with an emasculated dependence on bureaucrats and social workers. 

Jordan Neely was a standard product of New York’s homelessness empire. A thirty-year-old schizophrenic drug addict, Neely had cut a swathe of destruction and fear through New York’s streets and subways for fifteen years. Despite his predilection for assaulting the elderly, he had been repeatedly allowed to skip out of treatment and jail. In 2019, Neely punched Filemon Castillo Baltazar in the head as the sixty-five-year-old waited for a subway in Greenwich Village. In June 2021, he walloped Anne Mitcheltree in the head inside a deli in the East Village; she was in her late sixties. In November 2021, Neely broke the nose and fractured the eye socket of a sixty-seven-year-old woman as she exited a subway  on the Lower East Side. 

These physical assaults were accompanied by a steady stream of disturbing behavior. In June 2019, for example, Neely banged on the door of a subway ticket agent’s booth and threatened to kill her.

None of these attacks landed Neely in long-term mental health confinement, even though, as a mentally ill chemical abuser (MICA), Neely was certain to attack again. Drug use sharply increases violence in the mentally ill, but Neely’s heavy use of the synthetic marijuana K-2 should have been particularly worrying to his social worker contacts. Due to its strength and powerful psychological effects, K-2 was even more likely to trigger violent outbreaks. No matter. His forty-two arrests produced at best brief jail stints and his hundreds of encounters with outreach workers always left him free to return to the streets. 

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/16/comer-new-bank-records-will-reveal-30m-foreign-payments-to-biden-family/

On Thursday, Congressman James Comer (R-Ky.), Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, claimed that recently-subpoenaed bank records will reveal that the Biden family accepted bribes from foreign nationals to the tune of at least $30 million.

As the New York Post reports, Comer said in an interview on Fox News that “we have more bank records coming in, we’re going to exceed $10 million this week. And I think we’ll get up to between $20 and 30 million.” Comer has said that at least nine members of the Biden family have received foreign income from bribes and shady business deals, including son Hunter, brother James, sister-in-law Sara, son Beau’s widow and Hunter’s ex-girlfriend Hallie, Hunter’s wife Melissa, and Hunter’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle.

The other three members of the Biden family who have received foreign income, according to Comer, are one grandchild and two of his brother’s children.

The claims come amid ongoing revelations concerning an FBI informant who formally accused Biden of bribery while he was vice president, recording his claims in an FD-1023 form. The document, which has been reviewed by the Oversight Committee, claims that both Joe and Hunter Biden each received a bribe of $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, in exchange for a promise that the elder Biden would drastically change U.S. foreign policy.

Since then, Comer has subpoenaed additional Biden bank records from Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, and Cathay Bank.

“We’re going to continue to follow the money,” Comer added in his Thursday interview. “This is going to be hard for Joe Biden to explain.”

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

This is Obama’s Third Term in all but name.

“Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, is obsolete.

“It has existed in the past, it is here in the present, and will, alas, be there in the future.

“The all-powerful state is not a new world that has never existed before. On the contrary, it is merely an extension of what began in the old one.

“Such an overarching regime has patterned itself under every dictator who has planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time.

“It has refinements, technological advances, and a sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But, like every one of the super states that preceded it, there is that one iron rule that it must maintain and retain to survive – logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.”

The words above were spoken by Rod Serling in a Twilight Zone episode from June 2nd, 1961, titled, The Obsolete Man.

It is the story of Mr. Wordsworth who was condemned to death by the state because he refused to stop thinking as an independent human being in a soulless, all powerful state where such dissenting behavior was considered a dangerous aberration. He was thus deemed to be obsolete in the New World Order; a “crime” punishable by death.

And so it is with great sadness that the wonderful, divinely inspired human experiment called the United States of America is remorselessly slipping into its own twilight zone.

Logic and truth, freedom of expression and citizens’ rights, as enshrined in the magnificent Constitution and Bill of Rights, began to be increasingly deemed treacherous and obsolete by the vast and growing power of Big Government under the two-term baleful and imperial presidency of Barack Hussein Obama whose army of unelected apparatchiks eagerly did his bidding without question.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/senator_fetterman_needs_to_resign_and_seek_the_medical_help_he_deserves.html

As a stroke victim, Senator John Fetterman has my deep sympathy. As well, he has my best wishes for recovery, a task to which he should devote himself full-time. But as he demonstrated yesterday in a hearing covering the damage to Interstate 95 in Philadelphia – a link vital to many of his constituents – he is incapable of representing them in the Senate. I watched with a mixture of pity and horror as he was unable to form basic sentences in English, much less pronounce simple words correctly, when Senator Carper from neighboring Delaware asked him to comment:

The citizens of Pennsylvania deserve representation in the Senate for the next five years. Senator Fetterman deserves the time and support needed for a full-time commitment to therapies for the damage his stroke has done.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/reparations-are-no-more-than-a-dream-of-privilege-civil-rights-indentity-politics-victims-175f259a?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

If simple logic were the only measure of truth in matters of race, reparations for black Americans would make perfect sense. We have endured four centuries of an especially mean and degrading persecution. Slavery, and the regime of segregation that followed it, was dawn-to-dusk, cradle-to-grave oppression. The only argument against reparations would be that no contemporary offer of reparation could ever be sufficient compensation.

But since the 1960s, we blacks have been all but overwhelmed with social programs and policies that seek to reparate us. Didn’t the 1964 Civil Rights Act launch an era of reparation in America?

And didn’t that era continue with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty, two sweeping excursions into social engineering that he hoped would “end poverty in our time”? Then there was school busing for integration, free public housing, racial preferences in college admissions, affirmative action in employment, increasingly generous welfare payments and so on.

More recently, in American institutions of every kind, there has emerged a new woke language of big-hat-no-cattle words like “equity,” “inclusion,” “intersectionality,” “triggers,” “affinity spaces,” “allies” and of course the all-purpose “diversity,” today both a mandate and a brand. America has had some 60 years of what might be called reparational social reform—reform meant to uplift not only the poor, but especially those, like black Americans, whose poverty meets the bar of historical grievance.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/15/the-lefts-new-daddy-warbucks/

Alexander Soros’ bragging, “I’m more political,” promises limitless funding of the progressive-Left agenda for the 2024 election. It seems that the June 11 glorified announcement in the Wall Street Journal, exalting Alexander Soros’ accession to his father’s financial empire and global “political-philanthropic” foundations, was meant to boost the young man’s clout. 

The young Soros was groomed for this role for a long time. In 2018, George Soros took him on a world tour, introducing him to presidents and heads of state as his heir. Now, Alexander oversees investments in the $25 billion Soros Fund Management and is the chairman of the New York-based global Open Society Foundations (OSF) board.

“The arc of history doesn’t follow its own course. It needs to be bent,” the elder Soros told the New York Times. “I am really engaged in trying to bend it in the right direction,” he said.

Not to be outdone, Alexander has been doing his own bending by establishing Bend the Arc. This progressive-leftist Jewish group vigorously attacks former U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-socialist Make America Great Again plan, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionist agenda, and the Jewish State of Israel. 

Speaking about Jews and Israel, Alexander parrots his father’s opinions. In July 2012, in an interview published by Philanthropy News Digest, he declared, “I worry when Jews in America start to support policies in Israel which they wouldn’t support in America . . . which don’t give full rights to people who are technically living under occupation [meaning the Palestinians, who are ruled by the corrupt, terrorist Palestinian authority], and which don’t allow for immigration of people who aren’t Jews or for non-Jews to become citizens,” he said, falsely representing the reality in Israel.

Like his father, he stated support of “Israel as a nation-state,” adding, “I don’t believe in a Jewish world and a non-Jewish world.” Instead, he accused Jews of being hypocrites for giving “credence to the old adage that Jews are liberal or left-wing only for their own self-interest.” Incredibly, the new leader of the largest private foundation claiming to advance an “open society” that promotes “equality” is accusing Jews of wanting “a color-blind society with all these different ethnic groups,” not because of their values, but “because it makes them safer”! He continued, “A lot of American Jews do support one thing here, and another thing there, and that’s inconsistent. I don’t think they realize it,” he added. 

So, seeing his Bar-Mitzvah photo in the Journal announcement was unsurprising. Alexander employs the same strategy to preempt criticism long used by his father. George Soros has been using the religion he was born into successfully for decades, claiming to be a victim while trivializing antisemitism. Somehow he manages to label those who dare criticize the Soros agenda, activities, and statements as antisemites.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/15/j6-pipe-bomber-story-goes-boom/

It remains the greatest unsolved mystery related to the events of January 6: Who placed pipe bombs near the headquarters of both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee the night before?

Shortly before the joint session of Congress convened at 1 p.m. to debate the results of the 2020 Electoral College vote, a woman on her way to do some laundry looked down and spotted a device in an alley adjacent to the RNC building. Karlin Younger ran to notify security guards, who then called police. Law enforcement conducted a search of the area and located another device outside the DNC building.

Panic quickly ensued. “I just had to evacuate my office because of a pipe bomb reported outside,” Representative Elaine Luria (D-Va.) tweeted at 1:46 p.m. “I don’t recognize our country today and the members of Congress who have supported this anarchy do not deserve to represent their fellow Americans.”

“I’m sheltering in place in my office,” Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) tweeted at the same time. “The building next door has been evacuated. I can’t believe I have to write this.”

The media immediately suggested the explosives had been planted by someone loyal to the president; the New York Times noted in its breaking report that the bombs were found “just a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol, which Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed on Wednesday afternoon.”

Federal authorities promised a full-throated investigation. During a press conference on January 12, 2021, acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin and Washington FBI Field Office chief Steven D’Antuono emphasized the seriousness of the pipe bomb threat. “They were real devices. They had explosive ignitors,” Sherwin told reporters. D’Antuono announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the identity and arrest of the perpetrator. The FBI, D’Antuono warned, was “looking at all angles, every tool, every rock is being unturned” in pursuit of the bomber.

A few months later, D’Antuono made another desperate plea for the public’s help in his investigation and doubled the reward. “We know it can be a difficult decision to report information about family, friends, or coworkers but this is about protecting human life. We need your help to identify the individual responsible for placing these pipe bombs to ensure that they will not harm themselves or anyone else.”

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

With the thirty-fourth anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre having just passed, it is worth pointing out how that atrocity set the stage for increasing government tyranny across the globe today.  The Chinese slaughter of innocents should always be seen as the other side of the coin to the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Iron Curtain.  

In Europe, where dedicated freedom fighters spent decades creating a “parallel polis” providing both an escape from and organized resistance to totalitarian regimes, the fall of communism naturally followed the rise of public movements for liberty.  In China, where cries for freedom were crushed with tanks and despair for the lost, the one-party communist State’s power grew.  When the United States and other Western countries chose to ignore China’s crimes against humanity in a Faustian exchange for Western companies’ lucrative opportunity to replace their own domestic workforces with Chinese slave labor under the communists’ control, the West proved that it was more than willing to sell out both moral conviction and political principle for a quick buck.  

The Chinese communists learned that Western governments are ultimately corrupt “paper tigers” that pretend to stand for human freedom but instead prostitute their ideals for material greed.  Aspiring tyrants around the world learned that it is better to crush popular opposition movements with gruesome violence than to permit calls for individual liberty and free speech to grow into outright rebellions powerful enough to redirect the course of history. 

Western politicians celebrate the fall of the Soviet Union and occasionally grumble about Chinese human rights abuses, but make no mistake: the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the Tiananmen Square Massacre remain cautionary tales to those enamored of power.  In their minds, they hear only Machiavelli’s warning that, if one must choose, it is far “safer to be feared than loved.”  The COVID police state that still lingers, the “climate change” police state lying up ahead, the abandonment of free speech protections as collateral damage in an imaginary war against “hate,” the World Health Organization’s push for global government through permanent “emergency” — none of these totalitarian monstrosities would exist today had the West stood courageously for human freedom against State-engineered barbarity.

That it did not and instead spent the next three decades empowering China economically, militarily, and reputationally will always be a stain on Western history.  And because Western governments have largely ignored China’s decades of genocide, torture, and enslavement, Western citizens must now live under governments dangerously indifferent to the preservation of human freedom here at home. 

Imagine if the United States had acted more resolutely against the Tiananmen Square Massacre.  Imagine if the dead bodies of students strewn across an area paradoxically named for “heavenly peace” had become an enduring international symbol of the personal sacrifice humans will make to be free and an enduring indictment against State tyranny.  Imagine if the words “Remember Tiananmen Square” had become a common condemnation of all government overreach.  What would the world look like today?  

https://reason.com/2023/06/15/rochelle-walensky-cdc-congress-questions-covid-meta-censorship/

Rochelle Walensky, the outgoing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), faced tough questioning from House Republicans on Tuesday, when she appeared before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.) grilled Walensky about the CDC’s communications with social media companies—Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in particular—during her tenure as the head of the federal agency chiefly responsible for battling COVID-19.

As reported in Reason’s March 2023 issue, Walensky’s CDC routinely communicated with content moderators and Facebook, recommending aggressive takedowns of purported misinformation about mitigation efforts, COVID-19’s origins, and vaccines:

According to a trove of confidential documents obtained by Reason, health advisers at the CDC had significant input on pandemic-era social media policies at Facebook as well. They were consulted frequently, at times daily. They were actively involved in the affairs of content moderators, providing constant and ever-evolving guidance. They requested frequent updates about which topics were trending on the platforms, and they recommended what kinds of content should be deemed false or misleading. “Here are two issues we are seeing a great deal of misinfo on that we wanted to flag for you all,” reads one note from a CDC official. Another email with sample Facebook posts attached begins: “BOLO for a small but growing area of misinfo.”

These Facebook Files show that the platform responded with incredible deference. Facebook routinely asked the government to vet specific claims, including whether the virus was “man-made” rather than zoonotic in origin. (The CDC responded that a man-made origin was “technically possible” but “extremely unlikely.”) In other emails, Facebook asked: “For each of the following claims, which we’ve recently identified on the platform, can you please tell us if: the claim is false; and, if believed, could this claim contribute to vaccine refusals?”

Comer’s questions got straight to the heart of this matter. Unfortunately, Walensky declined to directly comment on it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/16/amtrak-joe-and-the-trans-pacific-trans-indian-railroad/

Some of the best advice ever given was from Mark Twain, who said “it’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.” We’re not saying Joe Biden is stupid, but his comment about “plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean,” removes all doubt that he is all there.

Speaking Wednesday evening before the League of Conservation Voters’ annual dinner, Biden waxed ineloquently:

“We’re talking about building — and I had my team putting together with other countries as well — to build a railroad from the Pacific Ocean — from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Indian Ocean.”

Reports said he also rambled on about a proposal to build a line across sub-Saharan Africa.

It’s too bad Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t offer a few words about the idea. She could have talked about, with a little Russian dressing on top, “the significance of the passage of trains over large bodies of water, which are known as oceans, and they are located on our planet, and there is a great significance to train travel, which has made history throughout history at a moment in time.”

It’s hard to decide which is more likely, construction and completion of Biden’s worldwide train, or the unlikely event he and Harris actually string words together in a coherent manner on the same day.