RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/15/whistleblower-warning/

“You may have money, but you have no class.”

As Sir Bedivere (Terry Jones) put it in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who is this who is so wise in the ways of finance and etiquette? Perhaps Thornton Mellon (Rodney Dangerfield) to Dr. Diane Turner (Sally Kellerman) in “Back to School”? 

Not even close. 

The tweeter was former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan, responding to Elon Musk’s tweet of “my pronouns are/Prosecute Fauci.” The Tesla-Twitter boss also got a rise out of Alexander Vindman, star witness of the “bombshell” 2019 impeachment hearings against Donald Trump. Vindman compared Musk to the famed Nazi propagandist he misspelled as “Geobbles,” like some compact car or Star Wars character. 

Musk also caught a blast from Baylor virology professor Dr. Peter Hotez. Like Sollozo with mobster Bruno Tattaglia in “The Godfather,” Hotez is on Anthony Fauci’s payroll for big money. Hotez wants those who criticize Fauci to be prosecuted under hate crimes laws, so it’s no surprise he wanted Musk to take down his tweet. He didn’t, and Musk also got a rise out of Keith Olbermann. 

Back in his sportscaster days, Olbermann fancied himself a wit by describing NBA star Arvydas Sabonis as “Our Vidas.” Rebranded as a media sage, Olberman suggested that Fauci sue Musk. The former MSNBC star also wondered “what terrorist or foreign influence is involved” and what can be done to stop Musk. Fauci’s tweet chorus thus proves instructive about Musk and Trump alike.  

President Trump achieved energy independence and put Americans back to work at record levels. Trump started no new wars and got allies to pay more for their own defense. Trump’s Abraham Accords expanded the prospects for peace in the Middle East. Trump also took out master terrorists Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Qasem Soleimani. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/15/celebrate-elon-musk-but-dont-lose-sight-of-big-techs-structural-problem/

The story of Elon Musk’s acquisition, transformation and public rehabilitation of Twitter is nothing short of remarkable. Here is that rarest of confluences: A right-leaning (or at least right-sympathetic) mega-billionaire privately acquires a disproportionately influential public company out of genuine public-spiritedness, perhaps even a hint of noblesse oblige, and an earnest commitment to preserving open discourse in our modern digital public square; exposes grievous previous company wrongs for the whole world to see in a dramatic unveiling of the eponymous “Twitter Files”; and makes decisive personnel decisions to toss out core leaders of the wretched and corrupt old regime, and begins to chart a promising new path forward.

There has been no equivalent story in my adult lifetime, and there is unlikely to be a similar story again any time soon. This is not the type of corporate development one typically reads about in The Wall Street Journal or sees discussed on CNBC. The story is a unicorn.

The remarkable nature of the Elon Musk/Twitter saga, and the specific revelations about Twitter’s blacklisting of the infamous 2020 campaign-era Hunter Biden laptop story and its censorship/shadow-banning of myriad other right-leaning content creators, has led many on the Right to fete Musk with praise — at times, even fawning adoration. To be sure, that praise is wholly warranted: Musk has thus far proven wrong the skeptics who were unsure just how big an impact he might be able to make at Twitter, answering the call of his civic duty as the world’s wealthiest man. Indeed, he has gone above and beyond his civic duty.

But as transformative as Musk has been in the nascent stages of his Twitter ownership, it is crucial to not forget the bigger picture.

Twitter, though the preferred communicative organ of the American political class and the broader commentariat, pales in comparison to most other Big Tech platforms in terms of its reach. In terms of pure social media platforms alone, Facebook is orders of magnitude more popular than Twitter globally, and is over four times as popular just in the U.S. based on number of users. Facebook’s fellow Meta subsidiary, Instagram, is also roughly three times as popular as Twitter based on volume of American users.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/12/15/how-did-bidens-gender-fluid-nuclear-luggage-thief-get-a-high-security-clearance-n1653972

In the end, he just had too much baggage. Sam Brinton, the Biden administration’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy, is now out of a job after being charged with felony theft and grand larceny for taking bags that didn’t belong to him at the Minneapolis and Las Vegas airports. But Old Joe Biden’s handlers still have a great deal to answer for regarding Brinton. Most notably, there’s this: how did this clown who appeared far more interested in showing himself off wearing women’s clothes than in actually dealing with nuclear waste get a high-level security clearance?

There will probably never be any answer to that question, given the sycophantic Leftist establishment media, but it remains an urgent question given the likelihood — actually, the outright certainty — that this administration will continue to appoint people more for their symbolic value than for their abilities.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/12/15/google-goes-full-on-racist-will-start-marking-the-race-of-business-owners-n1654000

Remember the old “Whites Only/Colored Only” signs on water fountains and bathrooms in the old Jim Crow South? Thanks to Google, that kind of open, in-your-face racism is back with a vengeance. Google is so concerned that you not be racist that it is doing the most racist thing a major corporation has done at least since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: it is planning to mark the race of the owners of various businesses so that racists of all varieties can patronize only the stores of their favored group. Have Google’s far-Left ideologues really thought this through? If they really want to eradicate racism, this is just the way not to do it.

Jeremy Kauffman of LBRY.com tweeted Thursday that “Google has launched a new campaign called ‘Buy Black’ that encourages people to shop based on the race of the store owner. Stores in search and map results will be given icons indicating the race of the owner to make this easier.” Kauffman also pointed out that Google has been pushing this initiative hard for the last month: on Nov. 17, it published a video called “Buying All Black” and subtitled “A Google #BlackOwnedFriday Anthem,” featuring Ludacris and Flo Milli.

“We’re celebrating the third #BlackOwnedFriday,” Google announced happily, “with 70+ Black-owned businesses, a new track, and a block party in Atlanta. Join Ludacris and Flo Milli on their journey searching and shopping Black-owned, and then shop the 100+ products you’ll see throughout the video. Watch the music video, shop the products, and search to support Black-owned on Black Friday and every day.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-hidden-meanings-behind-hanukkah-and-christmas/

For centuries, Hanukkah and Christmas have been linked in the popular imagination through incidental timing. This year, Hanukkah’s next-to-last day falls right on Christmas. But those holidays have far more important things in common than timing or gift-giving.

In their unique way, each holiday celebrates human dignity and freedom, thus reflecting the fundamental values of their respective sister religions, Judaism and Christianity.

Hanukkah commemorates a revolt led by Jews in the second century B.C. against Antiochus IV, who ruled Israel for the Seleucid Empire, one of four that emerged after Alexander the Great’s generals divided his vast holdings following his death. Antiochus sought to eradicate the Jews’ identity, in accordance with the Greek worldview’s secular focus.

“The Greeks looked down at the Jews for having, in their eyes, a very primitive faith,” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach said. “The Greeks had Homer’s Iliad, the Odyssey. They had Greek tragedies, poetry, philosophy. They look at this idea of prayer and faith and belief in God as something very primitive. So they banned it.”

Yet that faith, expressed in the 10 Commandments and the Torah, represented a turning point for human civilization. It reflected the idea that God values human freedom, especially since God is the ultimate free being in the universe, and God created humanity in his free image.

“The 10 Commandments are not a list of rules,” Dennis Prager wrote. “The commandments prove that God wants mankind to be free: ‘I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.’ Following the commandments actually frees us from the terrible consequences of sin, making our lives better.” (Emphases in original).

Nevertheless, Antiochus banned any vestiges of Jewish religion and culture, including the Torah. He even desecrated Jerusalem’s Temple by erecting statues to Greek gods and goddesses and by sacrificing pigs to them. Antiochus went so far as to proclaim himself “epiphanes,” Greek for “divine manifestation.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/12/14/how-i-learned-to-love-free-speech/

Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has exposed the liberal elites’ fear of free speech. His relaxation of its content-moderation policies has sent the blue-ticks into meltdown. Many are so horrified at the prospect of encountering views that differ from their own, they are now threatening to leave the platform altogether. So why have so many on the liberal-left given up on free speech? Why do they seem to have forgotten the dangers of censorship?

Meghan Murphy is a feminist journalist and podcaster. In 2018, her Twitter account was permanently suspended for ‘misgendering’ trans activist Jessica Yaniv. The ban was lifted by Musk last week. She joined Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: I wanted to get your view on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. You have already benefited directly – you recently had your account reinstated after being banned in 2018. But do you think there’s a danger in relying on a powerful billionaire to give us the right to speak freely?

Meghan Murphy: I was excited about the Musk takeover even before I got back on Twitter. I was thrilled at witnessing the meltdown online. I was enjoying the panicking and the flouncing. You had all these people trying to go off to Mastodon, or saying they’ll have to start a new social-media platform – good luck with that. There have been so many attempts to do this over the past four years and unfortunately none of them worked. I wish they had, because I think more platforms would be useful. But nothing has taken off.

I believe Elon Musk really does value free speech. I trust this billionaire more than others, perhaps. But one lesson I hope we have learnt – and something that I’ve certainly learnt – is to not put all of our money in one place, not to bank on only one platform for our speech.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/14/two-antithetical-billionaires/

Before the midterm November elections, Sam Bankman-Fried was a left-wing billionaire heartthrob. 

He properly grew up on the Stanford campus, where his parents were well-known left-wing activist law professors. He went to a tony prep school and on to MIT. 

Bankman-Fried mocked society’s bourgeois capitalist conventions by dressing and looking like a slob in cut-offs and T-shirts. 

Indeed, he bested the nose-ring, Charles Manson-esque appearance of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. He outdid the all-black, Steve Jobs copy-cat get-up of another fallen leftist icon, the now-convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy.

The Left canonized Bankman-Fried for the hundreds of millions of dollars he created out of thin air and channeled to left-wing congressional and state candidates, Joe Biden, and a host of “progressive” causes under the cool slogan “effective altruism.” 

For decades hence—or so Bankman-Fried promised—his cryptocurrency company FTX would churn out billions. Its politically correct gifting won exemptions from the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Democratic-controlled congressional oversight committees.

The loud-talking, left-wing slob promised billions of dollars more in gifts to come. He was knighted as the successor to the kindred financial market manipulator and progressive “philanthropist” George Soros. 

SBF may have been a sloppy, immature fool, but he was no dummy. 

He had learned early on that loud leftist talk, big promises of philanthropy, and huge cash infusions to the media and leftist candidates—all under the veneer of “effective altruism”— ensured de facto immunity for his Ponzi schemes from both bad press and government investigation. 

Then, suddenly, the midterms were over. Powerful financial interests were screaming their millions had vanished at the hands of SBF. 

The Republicans took the House. They promised embarrassing hearings, with Bankman-Fried the loose-talking star villain. And so—presto!—he was finally indicted by the Biden Department of Justice. 

Bankman-Fried, in desperation one last time, had turned to his old props of raggedy dress, nerd talk, and contrived naivete.

His schtick no longer worked. Too many leftists were embarrassed that they got too much money from him. Too many exposed “regulators” had known what this wannabe Madoff character was up to before the midterms. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/12/14/jack-dorsey-accepts-blame-for-twitter-scandals-n1653532

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, admits he “totally gave up” fighting back against prominent activists in the company and takes full responsibility for the social media platform’s many failures that have been exposed in the ongoing release of the Twitter Files.

“I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead,” Dorsey began. “1. Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control. 2. Only the original author may remove content they produce. 3. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.”

“The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles,” he conceded. “This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.”

Dorsey condemned the “dangerous” insults on his “former colleagues” in his screed.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/catherinesalgado/2022/12/14/the-real-life-matrix-ectolife-artificial-womb-facility-to-engineer-grow-babies-in-factory-n1653718

If you thought the millions of plastic pods artificially “growing” human babies in The Matrix were creepy, wait until you see the animation of “EctoLife,” set to be the world’s first artificial womb facility. A recent video posted online by its inventor, Hashem Al-Ghaili, enthusiastically described a facility where tens of thousands of babies could be engineered and gestated in artificial “wombs” with constant monitoring to check for biological defects and growth. EctoLife claims it will engineer the most “viable and genetically superior embryo” as it is “reinventing evolution,” producing up to “30,000 lab-grown babies per year.”

As EctoLife asserted, “Our goal is to provide you with an intelligent offspring that truly reflects your smart choices.” Because eugenics led to such wonderful results in the 20th century!

Remember how leftists have been telling us for years, and continue to tell us, that we’re overpopulating the earth? EctoLife’s ad explicitly said it is “designed to help countries that are suffering from severe population decline”—something that most of the world is suffering from, including America, by the way. Turns out that forgoing reproducing to pursue high-powered careers, luxury vacations, and an end to “climate change” was not such a bright idea. The solution is not being to have babies the way God intended, of course, but to engineer and grow them in fake wombs. That way, “artificial intelligence” (AI) can monitor your baby for “genetic abnormalities” (it’s unclear what would happen to babies who turn out to be supposedly imperfect).