RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21016/america-technological-leadership

There is no small irony that Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to mock the Biden Administration’s “green energy” policies and its flawed decision to rely on wind and solar as our nation’s future sources of essential electricity.

Consider: The exponential growth of AI is now powering the next generation of innovations that range from spacecraft to speech, and it is creating an enormous demand for energy to run the servers that drive this technology. Fortune believes that AI electricity requirements could consume as much as a quarter of all electrical power in the United States within six years. That is a mind-boggling amount of electricity, and it comes at the expense of every other industrial sector as well as our residential requirements. There is just so much electrical power generated in the United States to go around.

The opposite side of that coin is if American AI innovators cannot access the needed power to operate their data centers, we will have no choice but to cede our nation’s AI leadership to those countries fully prepared to do what they must to dominate this field.

Like China.

To be clear, the competition to take the lead in AI will make the Cold War space race competition look like a JV touch football game.

All of this comes at a time when the White House will have us believe that the pathway to the future lies in electricity generated by wind and solar. Even the most optimistic estimates say that those sources cannot meet America’s immediate or long-term energy requirements, despite billions in federal subsidies.

One response comes from an AI leader that wants to ensure it can be in the vanguard of innovation in this crucial area: Microsoft.

In a decision that must be driving Progressive “greens” to distraction, a reactor unit in the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania is now scheduled, pending regulatory review, to reopen by the end of this decade.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-10-12-more-doj-and-fbi-corruption

A couple of weeks ago I posed the question of whether the recently-initiated federal prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams is legitimate, or whether it is yet another instance of abject corruption by our Department of Justice and FBI, in this instance pay-back by the prosecutors for Adams’s criticism of the regime’s immigration policies. To help you as you ponder that question, it might be useful to look at a few other things that the DOJ and FBI are recently up to.

As Item Number 1, Justice “Special Counsel” Jack Smith chose the date of October 2 — 34 days before the upcoming election — to file his brief laying out his reasons why ex-President Trump does not qualify for immunity from prosecution under the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States. Smith’s brief, which is 165 pages long, was then promptly unsealed by the District Judge in the case, Tanya Chutkan. I am not going to quote from it here, but it is fair to say that the brief goes out of its way to be as inflammatory as possible against the former President.

In a New York Times op-ed on October 9, Professor Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School raises completely legitimate questions about the timing of the filing. Note that Goldsmith is no fan of Trump. From the op-ed:

[T]he timing of the release should receive more scrutiny, because the Department of Justice should not have allowed the information to be disclosed so close to Election Day. This event is the latest of many examples of Biden administration officials paying insufficient public attention to executive branch rules that are designed to ensure that prosecutions are, in appearance and reality, conducted fairly and apolitically. . . . It is . . . vital . . . for the executive branch to take scrupulous care to assure the public that the prosecutions are conducted in compliance with pertinent rules. On this score, Mr. Smith has failed. . . . The filing is in clear tension with the Justice Department’s 60-day rule, which the department inspector general has described as a “longstanding department practice of delaying overt investigative steps or disclosures that could impact an election” within 60 days of an election.

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/sheriff-coachella-checkpoint/2024/10/13/id/1183910/

Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, said he may have prevented a third assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump after stopping a man at a road checkpoint who was allegedly in possession of an illegal firearm, or firearms, and fake rally passes.

On Saturday, just before 5 p.m, deputies assigned to Trump’s security detail for his Coachella Valley rally stopped the driver of a black SUV, Vem Miller, 49, half a mile from the rally entrance, according to a press release from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office. Miller “was found to be illegally in possession of a shotgun, a loaded handgun, and a high-capacity magazine,” as well as fake press and VIP passes.

“We probably stopped another assassination attempt,” Bianco said, according to the New York Post.

The sheriff’s office said that Miller was taken into custody “without incident” and booked at the John J. Benoit Detention Center for “possession of a loaded firearm and possession of a high-capacity magazine.”

He was released Saturday on $5,000 bail and is scheduled to appear at the Indio Larson Justice Center on Jan. 2, 2025.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/lying-by-omission

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent appearance on CBS News has ignited yet another round of controversy. This time, the firestorm surrounded the network’s Tony Dokoupil, who dared to ask Coates challenging, if obvious, questions. Those who treat Coates as a modern-day prophet claimed that the anchor’s behavior crossed the line into insensitivity, and even racism.

What followed was ritual humiliation. CBS subjected Dokoupil to what can only be described as a struggle session, bringing in DEI consultants to “educate” him on the acceptable bounds of discourse and the proper body language to maintain when talking to an exalted minority guest. This is the state of modern journalism: the slightest challenge to the progressive narrative results in swift reeducation efforts.

A review of the substance of the underlying exchange, and the baffling explanation Coates offered in defense of his unfairness toward Israel, illuminates why there has been such a rush to reframe his CBS appearance as a hostile confrontation.

Dokoupil’s first comments and question challenged the broadside against Israel contained in Coates’s new book, The Message. “The content of that section” on Israel, noted Dokoupil, “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” “Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates . . . a very talented, smart guy, leave out so much?” Dokoupil asked. In a book largely about Israel’s security practices and their supposed excesses, the anchor pressed, “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it?” These are crucial questions that Coates must have anticipated receiving from even a friendly interlocutor. Dokoupil offers one more natural follow-up for the author, who cannot find the slightest justification for Israel’s security measures: “Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?”

Coates’s response was puzzling, but revelatory:

I would say the perspective that you just outlined—there is no shortage of that perspective in American media. . . . I am most concerned, always, with those who don’t have a voice, with those who don’t have the ability to talk. I have asked repeatedly, in my interviews, whether there is a single network [or] mainstream organization in America with a Palestinian-American bureau chief or correspondent who actually has a voice to articulate their part of the world. . . . The reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out. But what I saw in Palestine . . . those were the stories that I have not heard.

In these few lines, Coates channels rhetoric that he has employed throughout his career—a nebulous invocation of marginalized peoples (here, Palestinians) and a claim that their members are denied a platform in the American public sphere.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/urban-violent-crime-surged-40-percent-beginning-in-2019/

The further removed we are from the presidential debate, the clearer it is that ABC’s David Muir’s “fact-checking” of former President Trump’s remarks on surging crime was outrageous.

In insisting that “the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,” Muir relied on FBI statistics that, at best, showed a marginal one-year drop — down 3 percent nationwide from 2022 to 2023. Even if the bureau’s numbers were arguably reliable, such a reduction would be negligible. In reality, though, the FBI’s numbers are not reliable. And most significantly, Muir ignored the trajectory of the past five years, which tells a dramatically different story in major American cities — almost uniformly run by Democrats.

There, violent crime has, indeed, surged.

Jeffrey Anderson led the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) during Trump’s administration. Unlike Muir, he is a reliable source, both on overall trends and the flaws of FBI crime-statistic reporting — beginning with the rudimentary fact that the bureau is an investigative agency, not a statistical agency.

Writing in the City Journal, Anderson explains that if we start with 2019 — right before the radical Left’s George Floyd riots and the toxic combination of the defund-the-police movement and the Progressive Prosecutor Project of non-enforcement policies — and then run the numbers through 2023, there was “a whopping 40 percent surge in urban violent crime” (emphasis added). During the same timeframe, urban property crime increased by 26 percent.

Anderson is relying on the BJS’s National Crime Victim Survey. The NCVS is a Nixon-era crime measuring tool. It is the gold standard because it grapples with the fact that most crime — probably about 55 percent — goes unreported. By searching for victims, rather than recording only crimes that are reported to the police, it provides a more accurate depiction.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/ron_desantis_shows_the_country_how_it_s_done.html

Amid all the shambles, disorganization, delays, and waste seen any time the federal or many state governments gets involved in something, we have Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis to demonstrate what competent leadership looks like.

He’s like a breath of fresh air.

According to TIPP Insights which had an excellent rundown of all the competent things DeSantis actually did — providing fuel, restoring electric power, setting up shelters, and actually yanking open a closed landfill through a wise use of eminent domain so that hurricane debris could be dumped there to clear the roads for first responders:

DeSantis’s 15-minute address was a masterclass on what the government could and should do. Even the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, a bitter critic of all governments, would have been impressed [though he would likely have been upset to know that the storm’s name coincided with his].

DeSantis was a picture of quiet efficiency, a master conductor of a disparate orchestra with hundreds of thousands of players. He starkly contrasted with Vice President Kamala Harris, who tried to show leadership on a Zoom call with senior federal officials also preparing for Hurricane Milton.

During the recent hurricane emergencies, DeSantis got immediately involved in protecting the state, having already been prepared for it, and then in help during the storm and after the storm. It’s a big job, given the double natural disasters he’s been dealing with.

But he got to it, and even delivered extra help to other states that didn’t prepare as well as he did, such as North Carolina, delivering massive amounts of temporary bridging so that rescuers could deal with washed away roads and bridges, rescuing the injured, delivering supplies, and getting others out of those areas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-biden-teams-disastrous-performance-on-disaster-relief/

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been promoted to the position of senior adviser to the president while continuing to serve as press secretary for the remainder of President Biden’s term. Ms. Jean-Pierre proved once again during her October 7th White House press briefing why the most accurate title for her service to the Biden-Harris administration is Chief Propaganda Officer. She resorted to the Biden-Harris administration’s customary accusation of “misinformation” when asked why the Biden administration is providing additional money to Lebanon while North Carolina residents in need are not getting enough federal disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Ms. Jean-Pierre charged that the question asked by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy was premised on misinformation:

PETER DOOCY: President Biden is fond of saying, “Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value.” If he has money for people in Lebanon right now without Congress having to come back, what does it say about his values — there’s not enough money right now for people in North Carolina who need it. That’s not misinformation.

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Wait, no it is, your whole premise of the question is misinformation, sir. Yes, it is…the way you’re asking me the question is misinformation. There is money that we are allocating to the impacted areas, and there’s money there to help people who truly need it. There are survivors who need the funding — who need the funding, and it’s there.

PETER DOOCY: You can’t call a question that you don’t like “misinformation.”

The Biden-Harris administration believes that it can do so by weaponizing the words “misinformation/disinformation” to discredit and even censor any information that contradicts their party line. Vice President Kamala Harris and other senior members of the administration are beating the “misinformation” drum while spreading misinformation of their own. Contrary to their claims that the hard-hit communities in western North Carolina are getting all the federal resources they need, folks on the ground who are suffering say otherwise. North Carolina residents have been without adequate basic necessities, such as food, water, shelter, and means of communication, for too long. They have been relying primarily on volunteers and each other to deal with the destruction left behind by Hurricane Helene.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) does not have enough funding to make it through the rest of the hurricane season, according to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Moreover, as of October 6th, only nine percent of FEMA staff members were available to deal with Hurricane Milton or any other natural disaster to come, according to the agency’s daily operations briefing cited by the New York Times.

Yet despite all this, Vice President Kamala Harris proudly announced that her administration is sending nearly $157 million in additional assistance to Lebanon to meet the “essential needs” of the Lebanese people.