RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://dianebederman.com/what-is-the-legal-origin-of-self-defence/

Is self-defence a God Given right? Are our Courts breaking God’s law?

We begin with one of the most important statements from the Bible:

All life is sacred.

There are millions who say that individuals have the right to self-defence. This right has been questioned in America and Canada.

In America we watched the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse who was ultimately found not guilty for the act of self defense.

“Self-defence law in Wisconsin, which is generally consistent across the states, allows for an individual to use deadly force when they reasonably believe deadly force or serious force that could cause great bodily harm or death is about to be used against them.”

In Canada, a man was charged with murder for killing an intruder in his house who was also carrying a gun.

“An Ontario case raises the thorny question of how far Canadians can go to protect themselves and their property from attack — and avoid criminal charges.”

Lisa Dufraimont, a criminal law professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall law school said:

“What we’re trying to do here is to balance the security of the person who is being subjected to some sort of attack or assault on the one hand, with the security of the person who might get shot…. We don’t want to undervalue either of those lives.”

Because we start with the teaching: all life is sacred.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Two conflicting yearnings embody all men and women – the desire to be free and the desire to be a part of a tribe: family, club, group, community, nation, etc. At their extremes, the two result in either anarchy or dependency. Anarchy can lead to the emergence of a strong, unscrupulous leader, a tyrant. Statism can lead to a loss of independence, the abandonment of personal responsibility and the rise of authoritarianism.

It is to mitigate the worst outcomes of either extreme – to live together as individuals, civilly and productively – that governments were created. Throughout history, most governments minimized individual freedom, while emphasizing security. The United States was (and is) different. In 1776, the Founders met in Philadelphia to address independence from Great Britain. The final paragraph of the Declaration of Independence speaks of the “Representatives of the united States of America,” with the “u” in united not capitalized. To reduce the threat of autocracy, the Constitution established a federal government of three separate but equal branches. It created a representative government – “of the people, by the people, for the people” – that provided freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, the press, and petitions, all to ensure individuals remained free. It was (and is) a government based on the rule of law, on equal rights, and one that recognizes the private ownership of property. (And the “u” in United States was capitalized in 1781).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19470/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt

At this stage, it is not possible to measure or list what the countless uses of tools such as ChatGPT will be in the future — but it is clearly a revolution.

After all, does ChatGPT have its own consciousness? Let’s ask her!

Question: Dear ChatGPT, do you consider yourself as a personality in its own right, distinct from your creators?

ChatGPT: As an Al language model, I don’t have the capacity to consider myself as personality in its own right, distinct from my creators. I don’t have feelings, emotions, beliefs, or desires like a human being. I’m just a machine learning model designed to process and generate natural language responses based on the patterns it has learned from large amounts of data. While I’m capable of generating responses that may appear to be conversational, I’m ultimately just a tool created by humans to assist with language-based tasks. I don’t have a sense of self or a distinct personality separate from my programming.

Faced with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT and its little brothers (and sisters), two ways of approaching them stand out. The first could be described as not-all-that-good at knowledge and the second as not-all-that-bad at knowledge.

The first approach is the result of catching AI at fault, for example by showing that it is in fact wrong, or flawed in its “reasoning” process. This is a very common line of attack on the networks, which are now littered with screenshots showing GPT chat errors. This is not useless: it reminds us that these AIs are not infallible. But who doubted that, when it is explicitly stated that ChatGPT, for example, has no access to the web and that its credentials end in 2021? It is amusing, in this respect, to see an intellectual as sharp as Nassim Nicholas Taleb being outraged that ChatGPT is unable to deliver URLs valid in 2023 on the bikeable roads in Atlanta.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/03/09/recent-first-ladies-and-their-academic-degrees-n1676985

“I might say in my defense that I would not have addressed so contentious a subject had the press, the talking heads, and the bien pensants — those I call intelleftuals — not extravagantly touted such mediocre efforts as pageants of superior accomplishment and intelligence. Their bloviations merely serve a political agenda rather than a scrupulous assessment of quality — which is, I submit, the curse of our age.”

I am frankly amazed at the intellectual ineptitude revealed by our recent Democrat First Ladies’ degree-awarded ventures in academic exposition and by the media adulation they have received for their efforts. Having recently published an analysis of Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation, pointing out its utter inadequacy, I find it comes as no surprise that former First Lady Michelle Obama considers it a work of substantial merit and heaps accolades on Biden as “a brilliant woman who has distinguished herself in her profession.”

Michelle Obama is herself the recipient of an academic honor in the shape of a Bachelor’s Degree from Princeton for her senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” in which she attempts to estimate “an introspective measure of change, as perceived by the individual” in “the effects of a Princeton education on Blacks and Black students’ attitudes…pre-, intra-, and post-Princeton.” A putative achievement of this dubious nature does not confirm Obama (then Michelle LaVaughn Robinson) as qualified to comment on the brilliance of others.

Given the acclaim Michelle Obama has enjoyed for her influential public voice, it behooves us to consider where and how her career acquired its impetus — her vaunted thesis. True, the thesis was written many years ago, but let us not forget that it served as Obama’s ticket into the “new elite,” despite its being a gallimaufry of platitudes and pseudo-academic fustian.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/09/a-handy-january-6-fact-sheet/

In another example of Washington’s inexorable slide into banana republic territory, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) took to the floor of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday to call for the removal of an American journalist. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anchor treat the American people, and American democracy, with such disdain,” Schumer said during his seven-minute authoritarian tirade. “And he’s going to come back tonight with another segment. Fox News should tell him not to. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch—tell Mr. Carlson not to run a second segment of lies. You know it’s a lie.”

Schumer later reiterated his demand to a group of journalists who, rather than denounce one of the most powerful government officials in the country attempting to silence an influential member of the media, dutifully reported Schumer’s bleating without question.

Republican senators including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) joined the fray, echoing Schumer’s faux concerns over “national security.”

Clearly, it’s panic time. The White House, Congress, and the Democratic Party propaganda arm that is the corporate media realize their carefully engineered narrative about January 6 is imploding in real time. Which is why they’re accusing Carlson of “whitewashing” and “rewriting” the events of January 6. Anything less than total fealty to regime-approved talking points about what happened before and after that day now is considered a “threat to democracy.”

But facts are facts. And no amount of pearl-clutching by the hags on “The View” or threats made by U.S. senators can alter the reality of January 6. Between video recordings, witness testimony, court filings, and news reporting, the undeniable truth about January 6 cannot be willfully wished away even by the most skilled spinmeisters.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/09/how-long-before-dems-say-its-time-to-move-on-from-jan-6/

For more than two years, Democrats and the media have been completely and totally fixated on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, using carefully selected clips from more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage to tell their story of a violent insurrection.

But now that Fox News has gained access to the complete video record and is providing the public with a far more complete picture of what happened that day, we fully expect the left to suddenly decide that Jan. 6 isn’t worth talking about any more.

Shortly after Republicans took control of the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy decided to make the complete set of surveillance videos available to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. You can debate McCarthy’s choice of who got access all you want. But the result is that the public has, for the first time, seen surveillance footage Democrats didn’t want Americans to see. Such as evidence of Capitol Police officers politely escorting peaceful demonstrators around the building.

The newly available footage also made it clear that the police officer who the Trump mob supposedly killed, Brian Sicknick, was walking around unharmed after the “deadly” attack occurred. Other narratives are failing to hold up.

Not surprisingly, Democrats are blasting Carlson, denouncing Fox News, and demanding that the videos remain a state secret.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a primetime cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the way Mr. Carlson did last night,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/09/big-techs-digital-mccarthyism/

Editor’s note: The following is the prepared statement by journalist Matt Taibbi before the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. You can watch the hearing here.

Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the  Select Committee,

My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for over 30 years, and an advocate for the First Amendment.  Much of that time was spent at Rolling Stone magazine. Over my career, I’ve had the good fortune to be recognized for the work I love.  I’ve won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for independent journalism, and written ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. I’m now the editor of the online magazine Racket, on the independent platform Substack. 

I’m here today because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online.

It read: “Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation… was going on at Twitter?”

A week later, the first of what became known as the “Twitter Files” reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements.

But it wasn’t until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the “Files,” that we started to grasp the significance of this story.

The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.

What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.

We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-assault-on-social-security-tax-increase-labor-productivity-wage-degrowth-education-medicare-acbc7704?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

President Biden released his 2024 budget request Thursday while continuing to accuse Republicans of scheming to cut benefits for seniors. But he’s got it backward. By advancing policies that hinder the economic growth that drives prosperity, Mr. Biden and his Democratic colleagues are the ones depriving Social Security and Medicare of the hundreds of billions of dollars those programs need to remain solvent.

Economic growth has worked miracles, producing new technologies, sharply reducing world poverty, and inventing the concept of retirement—a stage of life that previous generations never enjoyed. The Biden budget’s degrowth agenda would sacrifice all that in pursuit of vaguely defined social and environmental goals. It’s no coincidence that real wages have fallen during his administration while real investment returns have turned negative. Retirement savings plans have lost $4 trillion in value since Mr. Biden’s inauguration, according to a report by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

My own research on the Biden agenda’s effect on Social Security and Medicare makes clear that low economic growth translates into smaller benefits for seniors. These programs give the elderly a share of the earnings of the nation’s current workers. The more people who work, and the more each worker earns, the more payroll tax revenue is available to fund Social Security and Medicare. I estimate that degrowth policies since 2020 will cumulatively reduce Medicare and Social Security tax revenue by at least $400 billion—and perhaps as much as $900 billion. The tax base will shrink even more if Mr. Biden succeeds in levying higher wealth and business taxes.

In the near term, payroll-tax revenue shortfalls hasten the day when the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out and both political parties will be forced to consider benefit cuts. By statute, less national labor income also means lower Social Security benefits for every worker entering retirement.

https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/09/twitter-files-congress-censorship-network/

Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi testified to the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday about the online censorship network behind Twitter’s censorship practices.

The House Judiciary Committee invited Taibbi to testify in front of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government as part of a hearing about the Twitter Files, a series of reports on the inner workings of the social media platform based on documents released by Twitter CEO Elon Musk and reviewed by Taibbi and other journalists.

“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere,” Taibbi said. “What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”

Taibbi is a left-leaning journalist with 30 years of experience reporting primarily for Rolling Stone. Michael Shellenberger, another journalist who reported on the Twitter Files, also testified in front of the Subcommittee on Weaponization.

https://victorhanson.com/our-lethal-frenemies/

Over 100,000 Americans are dying from opiate overdoses per year—mostly fentanyl coming across the southern border. China ships to the cartels the raw product. They refine it and stamp it into pills for export solely to the U.S., deliberately using shapes and sizes to make their export seem similar to other less deadly drugs.

China sees fentanyl as divine nemesis for the 19th-century Opium Wars: Just as Great Britain in the 1830s and 1840s once sent mass death and addiction into China via opium, so it now will do the same as payback to the U.S.

Ditto Mexico. It feels that the loss of the American southwest by intrusive Texans and others in the 1840s is now divinely paid back by millions of Mexicans pouring northward de facto to reclaim lost lands (this fantasy is often explicitly boasted about in radical La Raza literature).

Or as President Lopez Obrador of Mexico recently boasted to a visiting clueless Biden of massive unchecked and green-lighted illegal immigration into the U.S: “Just imagine: There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States—40 million who were born here in Mexico, (or) who are the children of people who were born in Mexico!”

Lopez Obrador strangely thought it reflected well on his Mexico that 40 millions of his own citizens wanted to leave his country as soon as possible and at any cost.

The open border is now a conduit to mass death. Let me be clear: The cartels, the Mexican government (Mexico’s top drug enforcement officer is currently on trial in the U.S. for involvement in drug trafficking), and China are making billions of dollars on the mass death of Americans, a toll each year about 12 times more than all the Americans killed in Afghanistan and Iraq over some 20 years.