RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/09/airbus-still-does-business-with-putins-russia-but-also-wants-u-s-defense-contracts/

One thing made clear by Vladmir Putin’s war against Ukraine is how out of touch his calculations were regarding Ukraine’s ability to fight, the strength of his forces, and the willingness of the international community to push back against his unhinged brutality.

That last point might be the most surprising of all given the lack of a similar response to Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea and other aggressions in recent times.  Countries — including famously neutral Switzerland — and an impressive number of private companies joined in sanctions and/or took similar steps that have hurt Putin’s ability to impose more pain on the Ukrainian people.

French aerospace giant Airbus is one of the more notable exceptions to the laudable private-sector efforts.

Instead, Airbus is ignoring sanctions on Russia and has gone as far as to successfully pressure the European Union to exempt it from sanctions.  Interestingly, their position comes at a time when they are simultaneously attempting to expand their contracting work with the U.S. Defense Department.

Airbus needs titanium to manufacture planes.  Titanium and titanium alloys are widely used for aircraft.  Titanium’s density is 60% that of steel, so it is lightweight but also strong and resists corrosion.  Airbus gets about half of the titanium it uses from Russia.

After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Airbus continued dealing with Moscow, even going so far as to stockpile more Russian titanium while other plane makers balked at the same chance.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-left-obliterates-morality/

Daniel Patrick Moynihan could never have imagined how far down America might define deviancy when he penned his seminal essay Defining Deviancy Down.

The diplomat, scholar and four-term Democratic Party senator from New York theorized that deviant behavior had become so pervasive, we must redefine it simply to cope as a nation.

“I wrote that there is always a certain amount of deviancy in a society,” Moynihan said of his 1993 essay. “But when you get too much, you begin to think that it’s not really that bad. Pretty soon you become accustomed to very destructive behavior.”

Millions of Americans are now accustomed to some of the most destructive behaviors imaginable, and recent examples of this demonstrate a breathtaking repudiation of human morality.

An American president publicly expressed support for the surgical mutilation of children. Taxpayers are funding drag queen story hours for three year olds.  High school girls are banned from their own locker room because they are uncomfortable sharing it with a boy. A teacher badgers her students not to “judge people just because they wanna have sex with a 5-year-old.”

What used to be defined as medical malpractice, criminal molestation, voyeurism and rape is not only acceptable, it’s encouraged and, in some cases, required. It is deviancy defined so downward, it’s positively subterranean.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/veterans-day-and-whats-at-stake-in-the-mid-term-elections/

When Washington politicians decided to change the dates of holidays to give federal government employees predictable three-day weekends through the 1968 Uniform Monday Holiday Act—which moved the dates of celebration of Presidents Day (formerly Washington’s Birthday), Memorial Day, Labor Day and Columbus Day—they met such opposition from Veterans about changing the date of their holiday, Veterans Day, that they gave up. Apparently, the politicians had forgotten that Veterans Day was first known as Armistice Day, and was celebrated on November 11th because that was the day agreed upon by the Allied nations and Germany to begin a total cessation of hostilities in World War I. In fact, the guns and artillery went silent on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, after some 20 million people from both sides had given their lives in the war effort.

Veterans Day would not be diminished as another commercially oriented “floating” holiday but remain a sacred and fixed day tied to history and to celebrate valor and sacrifice embodied in veterans of foreign wars.

While Veterans remain one of the most patriotic groups in America, there is great concern—even alarm—that the politization of America’s armed forces that started in the Obama years, has now again accelerated, and metastasized into nothing short of betrayal of the military by the powers behind the Biden administration.

President Joe Biden is directly responsible for the worst, most humiliating and damaging defeat in the history of American warfare—the shocking and disgraceful U.S. departure from Afghanistan starting on August 15, 2021. The botched U.S. retreat resulted in the death of thirteen Marines, with more injured, and it left behind to enemy hands several hundred Americans and some $80 billion of military hardware (much of it state of the art) that included Black Hawk helicopters, thousands of Humvees and armored vehicles, and countless numbers of assault rifles—enough to arm dozens of terrorist groups all over the world, whose primary target is the U.S and its allies. Because these results were completely avoidable, many see Biden’s decisions that brought about this disaster calculated and deliberate—as if to help our enemies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/now-what/

It looks like the Republicans come January will control both houses of Congress. The government will still be divided, so neither party will make any big legislative changes in the next two years. The president will no doubt use executive orders to get around Congress to push the Dems’ agenda, but such tinkering is hostage to the next president. So what should the Republicans do for the next two years?

We know what they shouldn’t do, and that’s indulge in happy talk about “bipartisanship” or “reaching across the aisle” or trying “to get things done.” The Democrats have swung so far to the left that there’s very little common ground, outside a national emergency, on which to base cooperation. The moderate Democrat is a near-extinct species, and the radical ideologues have cowed them into compliance. Most Dems who have some common sense and respect for the Constitution’s checks and balances against tyranny have been silenced.

So first, the Republicans must ignore charges of “obstructionism” and “partisanship.” The first principle of the Constitution is “first do no harm,” and one way to do that is for our Senators and Representatives to “set ambition against ambition,” and use their Constitutional powers to stymie the Dems’ tyrannical ambitions. These days that means, as Florida Senator Marco Rubio put it, that the Senate’s “most important job” in a divided government is “to stop bad things from happening,” like confirming the president’s nominees for the courts, his cabinet, and other federal officials.

So no more talk like “the president deserves to have his nominees ratified.” That, and the Republican preemptive cringe when it comes to race and sex, is how we get Supreme Court justices whose only recommendation is their race and/or sex. Like Orwell’s saints, all Biden’s picks should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

In other words, the next two years should see a concerted effort to start holding accountable the bipartisan, big-government guild that too many Republicans have joined, accepting many progressive assumptions about, for example, the role of the federal government in creating, managing, and expanding federal agencies.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/08/your-children-belong-to-the-state/

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell

The incidents of schools indoctrinating children, along with school boards scorning the wishes and objections of their parents may seem puzzling, to say the least. Let me shed some light.

Unlike the hundreds of films that have been made on the Nazis, to my knowledge only two have been made on the genocidal Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, “First They Killed My Father” and “The Killing Fields.” There was a brief scene in the latter of which I think most people did not catch the significance. The Communists had taken over the country and had begun indoctrinating the children. The teacher had drawn on the blackboard stick figures representing a family holding hands. A child was asked to come up to the blackboard whereupon he erased the child figure’s hand holding the mother, thereby separating the child from the family. The teacher smiled with approval.

In all the versions of Marxist regimes, one goal was to separate the children from the parents and own them by the state. Children were encouraged to spy and report them to the authorities for any anti-Communist remarks parents made. And this, indeed, occurred often in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba (even Stalin was disgusted when this took place).

Recently, we saw an instance of a son snitching to the FBI on Christmas Eve over his father’s political views and participation in the January 6 protest. There have been other instances of children turning on their parents. The FBI has started to encourage friends and family to spy on each other and report any dissidents.

This phenomenon rarely occurred in the National Socialist regime, the reason being that its ideology was not anti-family, whereas Marxism is (so was Spartan society, another totalitarian state). Engels and Marx considered the family unit to be a miniature version of capitalism, wherein the man sees the wife and children as property to be exploited, a view echoed by modern feminists since many had a Marxist background. Engels, incidentally, was the first of what is now commonplace, an oxymoron capitalist, that is, a capitalist who promotes Communism.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/08/the-democrats-told-us-who-they-were-when-they-locked-us-down/

The Democrats and their media accomplices keep telling us the Republicans are the fascists and autocrats hungry for power. But just the opposite is true. The Democrats themselves made it clear during the pandemic that they are the party of authoritarianism.

In the spring of 2020, this country went into a lockdown. As Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute has noted, government officials canceled public worship services, segregated the large cities, abolished in-person education, foisted masks on all the kids, destroyed millions of businesses, and censored speech “so that we could barely discover facts.” They shut down concerts, imposed limits on house parties, scrapped weddings and funerals, locked the elderly into their homes and blocked visitation, ended dentistry, and imposed travel restrictions across state borders, says Tucker.

Some officials, however, saw that the rules were oppressive and restored liberty in their states. None of them are Democrats.

The authoritarian streak that runs throughout the Democratic Party came roaring out, no longer hidden just below the surface. Here was their chance to feed their hunger for more raw power. And they dined sumptuously.

The actions of both elected and unelected Democrats were not “hard calls,” as an Atlantic contributor recently labeled them in an appalling plea to grant amnesty to the offenders. They were the coercive orders of monstrous minds that perversely enjoy telling others what they cannot do and what they must do, who take great satisfaction in demanding and receiving obedience to their diktats.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fbi-hides-laptops-of-the-dead/

The FBI is defying a court order to hand over information from the laptop of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in July of 2016. As The Epoch Times reports, the bureau wants the court to reverse the 53-page ruling of federal judge Amos Mazzant, an Obama appointee. If the court declines, the FBI wants to delay release of the data for 66 years.

That would put the release in 2088, when FBI boss Christopher Wray would be 121 years old, so the 66-year figure is code for “never.” As journalist Jim Hoft explains, “people with nothing to hide don’t try to hide nothing,” so the people have a right to wonder what is going on.

Seth Rich was a digital campaigner with the Democratic National Committee. On July 10, 2016, the  27-year-old was gunned down in Washington DC. Police called it a street robbery gone wrong, but the shooters did not take Rich’s wallet, watch or phone. Weeks after the murder, as the BBC reported, “Wikileaks published 20,000 emails obtained from Democratic National Committee computers via an anonymous source.”

Some observers thought the source might be Seth Rich. Many of the emails dealt with the escapades of Hillary Clinton and showed up on social media. For Democrats it was all part of Trump’s collusion with Russia, and establishment media charged that outlets such as Fox were peddling another conspiracy theory.

Others thought the Russia collusion story could be a dodge to distract attention of the murder of Rich. The FBI showed no interest in the basic questions of  motive, means, and opportunity but quickly latched on to Rich’s laptop. Four years later in 2020, the bureau admitted possession of the computer.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-new-puritans/

When was the last time you watched MSNBC or CNN – or any of the broadcast networks? I am not suggesting that one should do this often; but like taking cod’s liver oil or boiled spinach, watching the opposition is an essential ingredient to building character.

Because no matter which of the smug Woke left hosts you happen upon, they are all preaching the same sermon, over and over, so often in fact you would think they would tire of it: we are the virtuous ones, the vigils of Democracy. We are the ones who command history, art, culture. We are America. And them? They are the enemies of democracy.

This is what we have come to. We are no longer a nation divided, but two separate and distinct nations, each with its own culture, its own history, its heroes and villains, its own aspirations, its fears. Even its own language. (Here is Joy Reid telling us that Republicans “taught people the word ‘inflation.’”)

Some have suggested we are witnessing a repeat of the 1960s. But the drug-laden counter-culture of the Strawberry Statement and Abbe Hoffman and the Chicago Seven was quite distinct from today in significant ways. The sixties were about an awakening – an awakening of the mind and a liberation of the body from the shackles of generations of predominantly Anglo-Saxon Puritanism.

Today’s Woke Left are the new Puritans. They do not seek to liberate our minds from habit, or challenge us to innovation, but to enslave us in new doctrines far more rigid than anything earlier generations of Americans could conceive, from redefining biological sex to re-engineering freedom itself.

https://nypost.com/2022/11/05/biden-is-gaslighting-americans-about-his-failed-presidency/

“In 2022, the notion of “voting for the person, not the party” is a luxury voters can no longer afford. A vote to send a Democrat to Congress, or to send a Democrat to a governor’s mansion or, for that matter, to state houses and state courts, is almost surely a vote for this president and his agenda.”

The Biden Administration will be known to history for many things: an open border and its deadly consequences, the abandonment of Afghanistan, weakness that led to catastrophe in Europe, skyrocketing inflation, and the use of federal law enforcement to target political opponents.

The catalog of infamy goes on.

Above all, though, this administration may be remembered for its duplicity — its continual, shameless “gaslighting” of the American people. Biden, his team, and his sycophantic media supporters repeatedly tell us that “all is well” where it manifestly is not. No matter how bad things become in the nation, no matter how many people suffer, reality has no purchase on the ideological bubble of this White House.

That is why, in these midterm elections, the American people must deliver to Joe Biden an unequivocal message: that they refuse to be gaslit, that they are not buying what he is selling.

Biden and his staff spin not simply to be optimistic. They do so to cover up the often deadly consequences of their policy decisions.

This is certainly the case as regards Biden’s open border. The president’s reversal of Trump-era border enforcement, and his effective encouragement of illegal border crossings, has led to widespread human suffering. Migrants have been dying in record numbers as they make their journeys, often under the control of coyotes and human smugglers. Americans are dying, too, as toxic fentanyl pours into the nation.

What do Biden and his aides have to say about all this?

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted that the Biden border disaster was not a “crisis,” but rather a “challenge.” Vice President Kamala Harris has gone further, stating that “the border is secure.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/07/covid-amnesty-will-not-it-cannot-be-given/

EXCERPT:

After a day or so, you start to work your way back to normal – a bit. 

And then – in an effort to get yourself completely off the hook for your bad behavior — you write an article for The Atlantic entitled “Let’s Declare a Drunken Party Amnesty.”

And you have the self-satisfied gall of the recently repentant to think “well, that’s over and we should never discuss it ever again because that would be rude of you.”

That’s not how this works.

The actions taken by Dr. Emily Oster – who had the narcissistic temerity to write the “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty” — and her many many over-credentialed, under-educated power-mad brethren over the past 30 months cannot be given a pass.

What happened during the pandemic was obviously more than a one-off drunken party moment.  Having tee many martoonis does not compare to the whirlwind of destruction the COVID reaction caused.