RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/18/the-working-classes-are-a-volcano-waiting-to-erupt/

“What is clear is that neoliberalism, which once promised gains for all classes, now means for most people an inevitable diminishment of living standards in ways not widely seen since the 1940s. We do not know when or if the volcano will erupt, but the prospect of it erupting will be with us for the foreseeable future.”

Whatever the final outcome, the recent French elections have already revealed the comparative irrelevance of many elite concerns, from genderfluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present ‘climate catastrophe’. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about soaring energy, food and housing costs. Many suspect that the cognitive elites, epitomised by President Emmanuel Macron, lack even the ambition to improve their living conditions.

The French elections reflect the essential political conflict of our time. On one side, there is a powerful alliance between the corporate oligarchy and the regulatory clerisy. On the other, there are two beleaguered and angry classes – the small-business owners and artisans, and the vast, largely unorganised service class. The small-business class generally tends to favour the populist right, whether in America, Australia or Europe. These people want the government out of their business and to be left alone. Meanwhile, workers tend towards the populist left, which promises to relieve their economic pain.

The common feature is the politics of anger and resentment. In the first round of the French elections, a majority voted either for Marine Le Pen and other rightist candidates, or for the old Trotskyist warhorse Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other candidates of the hard left. The establishment parties, like the centre-left Parti Socialiste and the Gaullist Républicains, were left way behind. The ultra-green Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, won less than two per cent – a pathetic performance from the onetime ruling party. Intriguingly, voters under 35 went first for Mélenchon and then Le Pen, leaving the technocrat Macron in dismal third place among the young. Macron only won decisively among voters over 60.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_democrats_big_lie_about_puberty_blockers_being_harmless_and_helpful.html

From the moment we’re born, our bodies are constantly changing. The initial changes, from baby to toddler to child, occur when we lack the self-awareness to be taken aback by the process. Indeed, there are only two times in life when we are intensely aware of the changes—and, often, find them disturbing. The first is when we go through puberty and the second is when age finally catches up with us.

In both cases, people may fight back against those changes. We know all about Hollywood stars and the fight against aging. It’s the adolescent changes that matter. The changes can be disturbing and even dismaying. Boys’ voices can squeak embarrassingly and they like to hold a notebook in front of their crotch. Girls get boobs (which boys stare at), hips, and painful, messy, inconvenient periods.

We used to sympathize with adolescents and assure them that this was normal and they’d outgrow it. Nowadays, though, as often as not, they’re told that they’re probably transgender. And no, that’s not me saying that. It’s being said in a video from a company called AMAZE Org, which claims to provide age-appropriate sex education for children:

https://www.city-journal.org/ny-subway-shooter-delusions-likely-fed-by-relentless-cultivation-of-racial-resentment

Had a white male entered a New York subway car in a construction vest and gas mask, carrying a hatchet, a nine-millimeter handgun, extended ammo magazines, gasoline, fireworks, and two smoke grenades; had he then shot off at least 33 rounds, hitting ten people, the Biden administration and the media would have immediately raised an alarm about white nationalist violence. The shooter’s race would have led every story about such an attempted massacre; pundits would have immediately speculated about hate crime and domestic terrorism.

After all, U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland has elevated white supremacist violence to the top of Justice Department priorities. Federal law enforcement agencies regularly warn about coming white nationalist attacks. Since entering the White House, Biden has kept up a constant refrain about lethal white racism. On March 29, 2022, he declaimed that “hate never goes away,” “hate” referring, of course, to white Americans. He added: “If [hate] gets a little bit of oxygen, it comes roaring back out, screaming.” Kamala Harris chimed in: “Racial acts of terror still occur in our nation. And when they do, we must all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators to account.”

If that hypothetical white subway shooter had then been discovered to have posted tirades about black people, had he called for whites to get a gun and start shooting blacks, the global media would be in nuclear meltdown about white supremacy. Protests would be breaking out across the country and corporations would be emitting an avalanche of press releases about America’s racial injustice.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/spin-misrepresentation-and-the-presidents-economic-policy/

A recounting of President Biden’s economic falsehoods.
“The Biden administration has rapidly built a remarkable record of ridiculous economic claims, misrepresentations, and worse.”

The recent White House budget proposal was an exercise in misdirection and spin. The budget document reaffirmed the president’s $2.4 trillion Build Back Better proposal, but simply left its massive cost out of the tax-and-spending tables. To make matters more confusing, the other tax-hike proposals that did appear in the budget were scored under a baseline that assumes Build Back Better has already been enacted.

Such economic sophistry has become a trend under President Biden.

White House economic spin is as old as the modern presidency. George W. Bush and Donald Trump portrayed their tax cuts as the most revolutionary economic growth engines in modern history. Bill Clinton took credit for balanced budgets and a late-1990s economic boom that were almost totally unrelated to presidential policies. Barack Obama spun a far-weaker-than-expected recovery from his inherited recession as a magical triumph of economic management.

And now, in just 14 months, the Biden administration has rapidly built a remarkable record of ridiculous economic claims, misrepresentations, and worse. This is especially notable following a campaign in which Joe Biden presented himself as the more professional, level-headed, serious alternative to Donald Trump.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/15/hold-on-to-your-wallets-wrong-way-krugman-says-inflation-will-soon-ease/
How often does he have to be wrong before the Nobel Committee asks for its prize back?

New York Times columnist and – we’re constantly reminded – Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman says that inflation, which hit another new high this month, will soon abate. Why? Because, he wrote on Tuesday, “Lumber prices have plunged in recent weeks. Prices of industrial metals such as copper are coming down. Prices of used cars are still very high, but their surge has stalled and they may have peaked.”

Oh, wait. That was from a column that Krugman wrote in June 2021.

What he wrote this week was that the gigantic bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last fall will get inflation under control because it will “alleviate the supply bottlenecks that have played a big role in recent inflation, while making workers more productive.”

Our apologies. That was Krugman in August 2021.

What he wrote was that “if we finally get this pandemic under control, the inflation of 2021 will soon fade from memory.”

Oops. That was Krugman in September 2021.

Here’s what he said. “The Fed can easily contain any pickup in inflation.”

Sorry, again, that was Krugman way back in January 2021, when he promised that President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion “rescue” plan wouldn’t cause an inflationary spiral and that the Fed could deal with any uptick in prices with a modest boost in interest rates.

It’s hard to keep up with all the times Krugman reassured us over the past year that inflation wasn’t and wouldn’t ever be a problem under Biden.

What Krugman actually wrote this Tuesday was that “inflation will probably fall significantly over the next few months.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-eternal-covid-emergency-health-and-human-services-xavier-becerra-government-welfare-11649968111?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The Covid emergency is over thanks mainly to vaccines and therapies. Yet Health and Human Service s Secretary Xavier Becerra on Wednesday extended the national public-health emergency for another 90 days. Why? Because permanent crisis means more dependence on government.

The Trump Administration invoked the emergency under the Public Health Service Act on Jan. 31, 2020 to reduce red tape for healthcare providers. But then Congress linked an expansion of Medicaid and food stamps to the declaration. Now progressives don’t want the emergency to end.

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act of March 2020 suspended food-stamp work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents during the emergency. These individuals normally can’t receive benefits for more than three months over a three-year period unless they work or participate in a work-training program. Congress also boosted benefits, so the average monthly payment is now double ($240 per person) what it was in 2019.

Suspending work requirements was intended to help workers laid off during lockdowns when few jobs were available. But once lockdowns eased, businesses were desperate to hire. The sweetened food stamps and suspended work-requirement—on top of enhanced unemployment benefits and other transfer payments—reduced the incentive to return to work.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Power and money are at the heart of politics, so it is unsurprising that politics is rife with corruption. Corrupt politicians rank among the world’s oldest professions. In his 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain wrote: “There is no distinctly American criminal class, except Congress.” Theodore Roosevelt is alleged to have once said, “When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘present’ or ‘not guilty.’ Humor aside, has corruption become more common? Certainly, we have moved beyond the late 19th and early 20th Centuries’ big city political machines like Tammany Hall in New York and the Pendergast organization in Kansas City. But we live in a time and a place that venerates wealth and power.

President Truman famously refused a corporate board seat in 1953 – “You don’t want me. You want the office of the president, and that does not belong to me. It belongs to the American people and its not for sale.” His decision can be contrasted to the wealth accumulated by ex-presidents Bill Clinton ($80 million) and Barack Obama ($70 million). George W. Bush has an estimated net worth of $40 million. Unlike Messrs. Clinton and Obama, Mr. Bush entered the Presidency with an estimated $20 million. And then we have the greatly resisted Donald Trump who became the first individual to lose a billion dollars while President. Yet he is the one cited by an honor-challenged media as being the most corrupt.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/left-twisted-priorities-crime/

Crime is on the rise in cities across America and the left is asleep at the wheel. Democrats are set to be routed in the upcoming midterm elections, but instead of getting onboard with tough-on-crime policies, they’ve focused their efforts on measures that are wildly out of touch with even their own voters.

To start, Democrats have their pandemic lockdowns to thank for at least some of the crime crisis. Carjackings are up in cities, which experts attribute to teenagers who are not in school or extracurricular programs. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said that the pandemic has given people too much free time, which can lead to an uptick in crime. New York City has seen major crimes increase by nearly 40 percent this year, and coincidentally also has some of the strictest pandemic measures.

Even though Americans are clamoring for a crackdown on crime, Democrats have spent the past few years going all in on criminal justice reform. They’ve advocated for “defunding the police,” which in its most generous interpretation means redirecting funds to social workers. Their bail reform policies have made it much easier for violent and career criminals to get out of jail after committing a crime. Plenty of these individuals, such as the Waukesha man who mowed down bystanders at a Christmas parade, commit even more heinous acts of violence after being released.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/14/the-civilizational-suicide-of-criminal-justice-reform/

The long and disturbing rap sheet of Frank James, the black nationalist New York City subway shooter arrested on Wednesday and charged by federal prosecutors with one count of committing a terrorist act against a mass transportation system, ought to serve as a national wake-up call. The 24 hour-plus nerve-racking manhunt ended in anticlimactic fashion, with James apparently calling the NYPD to report his own location. But the Brooklyn shooting, which left 10 people with gunshot wounds and 19 others injured in the resulting fracas, stands as the bloodiest act of carnage in the history of the New York City subway system.

It also should never have happened.

James’ rap sheet includes nine previous arrests in New York alone. Those Empire State arrests include such wide-ranging offenses as a criminal sex act, possession of burglary tools and theft of service. His rap sheet also includes three additional arrests in neighboring New Jersey for the equally wide-ranging offenses of trespass, larceny, and disorderly conduct. Most damning, one of the Garden State arrests entailed a resultant charge for a terroristic threat. James, an avowed anti-white racist, had also frequently talked about violence and committing mass shootings on his personal YouTube page—even doing so as recently as Monday, the day before the shooting.

There is no world in which James should have been out on the street, living a normal life. That he appears to be heading for a jail cell for the rest of his miserable life is just, but long overdue: It comes at least 10 gunshot victims and 29 total victims too late. That he was not already incarcerated is yet another data point evincing the woeful present state of the American criminal justice system. But our criminal justice system is not failing for the reasons “criminal justice reform” proponents from the Left and the libertarian faux-Right claim it is failing.

America, in the year 2022, does not suffer from an over-incarceration problem. On the contrary, we suffer from an under-incarceration problem. The sooner we awake from this collective slumber and seize the moral high ground back from the Soros/Koch-funded forces of “anti-prosecution” local district attorneys, “bail reform,” the jailbreak of slashed sentences and the broader civilizational suicide of the “criminal justice reform” movement, the safer and more secure we will be.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/apocalypse-air-bruce-thornton/

Ukraine’s scenes of urban rubble, streams of refugees, and piles of slaughtered civilians redolent of World War II. Continuing masks and lethal lockdown protocols of the Covid plague. Record levels of  inflation and gasoline nearly $6 a gallon.  Unchecked hordes of illegal immigrants and criminals penetrating our southern border. Mayhem, murder, and brazen theft stalking and defacing our cities.

Amidst these portents of apocalypse, it’s instructive to think of W.B. Yeats’ prescient poem “The Second Coming,” and its lines “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” and to wonder with the poet, “What rough beast, its time come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Such intimations of doom, of course, have been regular episodes in the last hundred years, the “rough beasts” ending up as pretenders. But we can’t rely on the cycles of history to prevent devastating changes in our way of life that will make the previous decades seem like the golden age.

Yeats published his poem in November 1920, when the flawed Versailles settlement of the Great War made optimism for the future difficult. Some knew, moreover, that none of the dysfunctions that had led to war had been corrected. Supreme Allied Commander Marshall Foch prophesized about the Versailles Treaty, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Communism, Nazism, and Fascism arose, and the Great Depression was the crisis these three vicious political religions did not let go to waste.

Throughout the interwar period, the portents of doom appeared in popular novels and “next war” theorists.  “Trench reminiscences” proliferated, keeping alive the novel horrors of the war like poison gas, machine-guns, and artillery lobbing monstrous shells as heavy as a ton. The aerial bombing of the war’s last years inspired numerous warnings about the even more devastating possibilities of destruction from the air in the next war. Theorists wrote of a “knockout blow” on a nation’s capital that would decapitate the government and turn the streets into “one vast raving bedlam,” as historian J.F.C. Fuller put it.