RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/as-united-nations-gather-in-new-york-covid-may/91657/

As heads of state, foreign ministers, ambassadors and members of their entourage gather on the banks of Turtle Bay, let’s pray next week’s opening of the United Nations General Assembly doesn’t become a Covid super spreader.

After last year, when the annual gabfest, known as UNGA for short, was conducted virtually due to pandemic fears, next week’s event will be attended in person by luminaries from most of the world’s countries.

Last month the American mission to the world body sent a letter urging all countries to send a pre-recorded message rather than come to New York. Most, possibly including President Biden, ignored that request. Although the White House is yet to publish Mr. Biden’s schedule for next week, most at Turtle bay believe he’ll attend UNGA in person.

Meanwhile, your local New York watering hole, where the barkeep is required by the city to card all patrons for proof of vaccination but, in what Assemblyman Mark Levine says could “expose them, and NYC, to serious risk,” next week’s visiting dignitaries and their posse are not required to show such documentation. Instead, according to UN officials, they’re encouraged to be vaccinated before arrival.

Oops. As is traditional, next week’s first scheduled national speaker is Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonero — the world’s most outspoken opponent of Covid vaccination. He already contracted the virus and remains adamant that no one, including him, receives the shot.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/14/milleys-alleged-secret-calls-to-china-are-just-another-reason-americans-believe-the-system-is-rigged/

The Washington Post published extremely serious allegations against Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley yesterday, although of course the paper tried to make the centerpiece of the story former President Donald Trump’s erratic behavior.

From WaPo:

Fearful of Donald Trump’s actions in his final weeks as president, the United States’ top military officer twice called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that the two nations would not go to war, a senior defense official said Tuesday after the conversations were described in excerpts from a forthcoming book.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army that the United States would not strike. One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election that defeated Trump. The second call was on Jan. 8, 2021, just two days after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of the outgoing chief executive.

Milley went so far as to promise Li that he would warn his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, according to the book ‘Peril,’ written by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

The story here, however, is not Trump, no matter how much the corrupt corporate media would have it be so. The story is that a military leader defied civilian control over the direction of America’s foreign policy, and did so through secret talks with our chief adversary on the global stage.

Under every president, we hear about “[name] derangement syndrome”; there was Bush Derangement Syndrome, and Obama Derangement Syndrome. But only Trump Derangement Syndrome seems to have led the ostensible upholders of “norms” and “democracy” to treat as no big deal actual violations of democracy’s most sacred norms in the service of thwarting Donald Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/14/the-foul-stench-of-george-w-bush-and-americas-ruling-class/

As with so many other aspects of our time, we seem destined to suffer the most trite and underwhelming imitations of things that once were great or at least impressive. Exhibit A would be the great war advocate, George W. Bush. Can there be a more perfect synthesis of the last 20 years of disappointing American politics than this man? He exemplifies everything—unaware, unashamed, unapologetic—that the American ruling class has become. NeverTrumpers and neocons yearn for a return to the days of measured, steady Bush leadership. We are told constantly now that he is kind, polite, well-bred: a politician from a more dignified tradition of public servants than those of late. But of course, in reality he is none of these things.

The everlasting incompetence and mesmerizing self-delusion on display at his recent 9/11 remarks make that clear.

What kind of a person stands on the very spot where heroic, valiant Americans perished in a tragic last-ditch effort to save a symbol of their ruling class—either the Capitol or the White House, no one knows for certain—and dares to offer criticism of the American people? What kind of cretin could possibly stir himself to lecture the public while standing on the very spot where common, average, everyday people sacrificed themselves to save members of the elite? 

Does any thinking person for a moment believe, were the shoe on the other foot, that a plane load of Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas, highjacked and heading straight for Dollywood with the intention of killing as many ordinary Americans as possible, would rise up and sacrifice themselves to save us?

This historic blunder would be enough for an average underperforming president, but George W. Bush is no average underperformer. These words were delivered not only on the occasion of the common man’s selfless sacrifice par excellence, but also hot on the heels of our ruling class’ greatest military blunder and most embarrassing episode in perhaps our entire national history. The idea that George W. Bush would have the audacity to do anything other than demur the opportunity to speak on 9/11, just weeks after the total failure of our entire engagement in the Middle East, is astonishing.

Instead of heaping praise on this small group of valiant Flight 93 Americans, and humbly asking their forgiveness for his errant and misguided attempts to avenge them, including the embarrassing foreign adventurism undertaken in their name, Bush instead searched the American landscape for a recent, festering wound to scratch . . . and broke it wide open. Why? Why did he feel the need to do this? 

Alluding to the events on January 6, 2021, Bush lectured ordinary Americans—some of them the very people who felt compelled to answer his call to defend America 20 years ago at Ground Zero—on what he considers to be their latent propensity to act like the terrorists he and his fellow negligent elites allowed to murder nearly 3,000 of us. One can believe that the misguided and foolish rioting of January 6 was profoundly wrong, and still feel in one’s bones how inappropriate and small Bush was to profane the remembrance of our heroes with his tedious little lecture.

That extra step to insult is truly breathtaking. This great failure of a wartime president alluded to the chaotic milling about and general parading through the Capitol by a bunch of nincompoops (who neither brought weapons nor used them) and compared it to heinous crimes of murderous zealots. He likened people who essentially walked into the Capitol building and then back out again while harboring incorrect political sentiments to those who slaughtered as many innocents as they possibly could using hijacked commercial jets which they transformed into great flying bombs of incinerating fuel. American citizens behaving badly should not be compared, under any circumstances, to the people who pulverized, at terrific speed, airplanes full of innocents into some of our most iconic and important buildings, instantly killing themselves and everyone onboard in a final nihilistic act of rage and impotent fury. 

The sheer violence to common decency, statesmanship, and self-awareness that George W. Bush, a man I voted for twice, achieved with his 9/11 speech is, I confess, difficult to comprehend.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/george-w-bush-mark-milley-and-violent-extremists-11631667584?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

EXCERPT:

There are of course different types of domestic threats. Today the Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker writes about his Post colleagues’ allegation that in the final months of the Trump administration, America’s senior military officer delivered a remarkable message to China:

In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa…
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley told him. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

Strategists can debate whether assuring Gen. Li should ever be a U.S. strategic priority, but if this story is true it’s hard to see how Gen. Milley could have been effective. Promising to provide warning of an attack right after one has just promised that such an attack won’t occur isn’t a good way to assure anybody.

Not reassuring at all to Americans who treasure our Constitution and the role of the duly-elected President as commander-in-chief is the following passage in which The Post claims:

Milley also summoned senior officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, saying the president alone could give the order — but, crucially, that he, Milley, also had to be involved. Looking each in the eye, Milley asked the officers to affirm that they had understood, the authors write, in what he considered an “oath.”

Alexander Vindman, one of the country’s foremost experts in the field of undermining presidential authority, responds on Twitter to the Post claims about communications with China:

If this is true GEN Milley must resign. He usurped civilian authority, broke Chain of Command, and violated the sacrosanct principle of civilian control over the military. It’s an extremely dangerous precedent. You can’t simply walk away from that.

When you’ve lost Alexander Vindman . . . 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/yom-kippur-god-judges-nations-too-don-feder/

Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, begins at sunset on Wednesday and ends at sunset on Thursday. In between is a time when Heaven and Earth meet – when the fate of every man and woman hangs in the balance. The judgement written on Rosh Hashanah is sealed on Yom Kippur. It’s the court of last resort. From its sentence there is no appeal.

The holiest day of the year begins with the Kol Nidre service and ends with Ne’ila, the closing of the gates of Heaven. Yom Kippur is solemn, yet hopeful.

Three things, we are told, will avert the harsh decree – teshuvah, tefillah, tzedakah – repentance, prayer and acts of righteousness.

Nations too are judged.

At the beginning of the 20th century, three nations were poised to dominate the century – Germany, Russia and Japan. Between them, Germany and Japan were responsible for 75 million deaths in World War II. As they exited the world stage, Russia entered. It gave us the the Cold War and tens of millions of more deaths.

Each was judged.

Germany ended the war in rubble. It was divided for 45 years. Though it achieved relative prosperity, today it has a well-below replacement fertility and a growing Muslim population. It could end this century as part of the Ummah.

Russia came out of communism poor in everything but natural resources (and nuclear weapons), but without the people to exploit them. It has a population of 146 million — to hold the largest land mass of any country — expected to decline to 121 million by 2050. In the meantime, Mother Russia is being pressed by China to the east and Islam to the south.

The sun is setting on Japan, which languishes in the depths of Demographic Winter. Its population declined by almost a million in the last 5 years. One of its few growth industries is removing the remains of those who die alone at home, because they have no family. The phenomenon is so common that they have a name for it “lonely death.”

And what of America?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/impeach-secretary-state-antony-blinken-daniel-greenfield/

I personally don’t favor impeachment. It is a waste of time and money and always devolves into a circus. However, Americans of both parties should demand voluntary resignations of all those who have imperiled national security. rsk

The Clinton administration was very surprised by the Taliban in 1996. A memo from the State Department’s Afghanistan office warning that the Taliban were going to take Kabul never reached Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Nine days later, the Taliban were in charge.

History repeated itself when 23 staffers at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul signed a memo warning that the Taliban were about to take over Kabul and that evacuations needed to begin. The date was July 13, 2021. There was still a month left until the Taliban would enter Kabul. And that should have been plenty of time to conduct an evacuation and get American civilians safely out.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, unlike Christopher, did see the memo. But it contradicted the narrative that he and the rest of the Biden administration had been peddling to the public.

“No one, starting with the Taliban, has an interest in going back to a civil war, because I think what everyone recognizes is there’s no military resolution to the conflict,” Blinken absurdly told ABC News in April after his boss had announced the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan.

The Taliban not only believed that there was a military resolution, they were winning it.

Weeks after the memo, Blinken was still insisting, all evidence to the contrary, that, “No one has an interest in a military takeover of the country by the Taliban, the restoration of an Islamic emirate.”

After China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, praised the Taliban as a “a pivotal military and political force”, and mocked the United States, Blinken responded by celebrating Communist China’s involvement. “If China and other countries are working on that interest, then it’s a positive thing,” he suggested.

Blinken’s insistence that China didn’t want a Taliban takeover was as treasonously wrongheaded as his parallel narrative that the Taliban weren’t really trying to win a war.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/covid-hysteria-could-destroy-a-generation_3997539.html

Initial stay-at-home orders and widespread closures were implemented in a state of panic and uncertainty as COVID-19 quickly swept through the world. Without data, these measures were initially popularly accepted. Two weeks to stop the spread of a novel disease struck most citizens as more than reasonable.

But, as the months have dragged on, the ongoing implementation of lockdowns as a long-term, blunt-force tool has been an utter failure. With more data and information coming to light, many policymakers have failed to reinvestigate and reform their precautionary measures, thus increasingly acting both in conflict with science and in violation of liberties.

This is especially true of school closures. As we accrued more and more studies and demographical data about how COVID-19 impacts children, the findings have largely been a blessing. The risk of COVID-19 to small children is astronomically low, and the risk of transmission between students and their teachers is hugely unlikely.

After months of our kids suffering ill-effects of lockdowns, this should have been a cause for celebration and impetus to cautiously but excitedly reopen our schools. And, yet, closures have continued to drag on in many areas of the country—much to the detriment of students and their families alike.

Lockdowns have robbed children of a formative year of life, imprisoning them in their homes despite their negligible health risk. Basic socialization, formative lessons, and developmental milestones have all been stolen from them.

Many working parents have been forced to double as teachers. Private schools remained open while public schools across the street were shuttered. Socioeconomic divides have been exacerbated. But, for all the logistical consequences our children have faced from lockdown policies, our more consequential failure of them may very well be an ideological one.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/the_white_house_censors_joe_biden.html

Last week, word emerged from the White House that Biden’s own staff can’t stand to listen to him.  It’s not that they don’t agree with his policies (heck — they probably crafted them).  Instead, it’s that he’s such a verbal loose cannon that they shudder when they hear him speak off the cuff.  Yesterday, the White House staffers paying attention to his answers about western wildfires were so worried about where his mouth was taking him that they pulled the plug on him in mid-sentence.

We, along with every political outlet in America, reported last week on a Politico story explaining that Biden’s staff constantly worry about Mr. Big Mouth in the White House.  As we summed it up then, “we still don’t know who is dictating his policies, but it appears that everyone in Biden’s orbit is begging him to keep his mouth shut and be the good little puppet they need.”

The same Politico story noted that “[Biden’s] verbal miscues have been causing headaches for him and his team.  Biden has delivered several self-inflicted wounds during freewheeling Q&A sessions that required immediate clean-up.”  That problem may explain why, on Monday, a panicked White House cut off Biden’s feed in mid-sentence:

The White House abruptly cut the feed of President Biden’s briefing on wildfires with federal and state officials.

During Monday’s visit to Boise, Idaho, Biden received a briefing about the ongoing wildfires that have plagued several states out west.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/general-milley-should-be-fired-for-holding-secret-personal-talks-with-china/

If we did not already have enough reasons to believe that General Mark Milley has no business serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, today’s blockbuster story in the Washington Post, excerpted from the Bob Woodward/Robert Costa book Peril, should confirm this. Any Congress worthy of the name in a democracy would open an investigation of General Milley and push for his removal; any president who took his oath seriously would fire him immediately.

Here is what Woodward and Costa report, apparently from General Milley’s own mouth as one of their principal sources for the book:

Twice in the final months of the Trump administration, the country’s top military officer was so fearful that the president’s actions might spark a war with China that he moved urgently to avert armed conflict. In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike. . . . One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election . . . and the other on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol siege . . .

Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.” . . .  In the second call, placed to address Chinese fears about the events of Jan. 6, Li wasn’t as easily assuaged, even after Milley promised him, “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.” Li remained rattled, and Milley, who did not relay the conversation to Trump, . . . understood why. The chairman . . . believed the president had suffered a mental decline after the election . . . a view he communicated to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi . . . on Jan. 8. He agreed with her evaluation that Trump was unstable. . . . Believing that China could lash out if it felt at risk from an unpredictable and vengeful American president, Milley took action.