RUTHFULLY YOURS

@billmaher

: “The woke believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan.”

BILL MAHER: I’m always trying to make the case that liberal is a different animal than woke. Because it is. You can be woke with all the nonsense that now implies, but don’t say that somehow it is an extension of liberalism. It is most often an undoing of liberalism. You can have your points of view and your positions, but don’t try to piggyback on what I have always believed.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/04/the-tyranny-of-google/

EXCERPT:

Google turns 25-years-old today. Back then, it was a given that technology would change the world for the better. And by studying the practices of the founders, we could improve ourselves, too. So, how well does this assessment of Google hold up today?

In its early years, Google embodied technical excellence and good taste. Its original (and for a while, only) service was a web search engine based on a simple borrowed idea. The search results were rated according to the density of in-bound links, just as academic papers are ranked by the number of times they are cited. This method gave us results far superior to those of its rival search engines.

Google also benefited from having a certain mystique. Its front page – google.com – was immaculately clean and uncluttered. The service was very fast and helpful, too, correcting your misspellings. Initially, Google seemed to have no interest in serving us any other products or services, or apparently, even making money. Occasionally, the front page featured a whimsical cartoon. Google seemed to embody the kind of a shiny, hopeful liberal idealism expressed in Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s boyish founders, would be our companions to the future, just as Kirk and Spock had been.

At one point in his book, Jarvis allows himself a dark thought: What would happen if Google fell from its saintly standards and tried to screw us? We needn’t worry, he assures us: ‘Google could lose our trust the moment it misuses the data it has about us or decides to use our growing dependence on it as a chokehold to charge us (as cable companies, phone companies and airlines do).’

Such optimism seems very naïve today. It is still true that Google does not charge us, as consumers, directly. But multiple authorities across several continents have judged that it does operate a chokehold on competition, and this costs us all a lot.

For example, in 2022, the EU levied a record fine against Alphabet, Google’s umbrella company. Having once vowed never to detain people on their journey to another destination longer than necessary, Google now seeks to keep people on its own properties for as long as possible. According to the European Commission, Google abused its market dominance to give an illegal advantage to its shopping service. Google also dominates dozens of markets that once had thriving competition, from smartphone platforms to web browsers, all of which serve as funnels to deliver us to its advertising business. Google also participated in a secret wage-fixing cartel against US technology workers that suppressed wages by some $3 billion, according to one complainant in a class-action lawsuit.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/04/what-the-left-did-to-our-country/

In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.

With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.

The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.

After getting elected through temporarily pivoting to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.

To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were racist. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist transformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and racist nation.

The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.

Yet Obama’s unfufilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary transformation of the Democratic Party and country.

It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans vote and conduct their legal system.

Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.

How was all this possible?

Covid had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.

https://mrctv.org/blog/craig-bannister/august-unemployment-rate-jumps-employment-june-and-july-revised-downward

In August, the unemployment rate jumped 0.3 points, from 3.5% 3.8%, as the number of long-term unemployed increased, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Friday.

The nation’s unemployment rate jumped 0.3 percentage point to 3.8% in August, as the number of unemployed persons increased by 514,000 to 6.4 million.

Among the unemployed, the number of job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs increased by 294,000 to 2.9 million in August, offsetting a decrease of 280,000 in July.

The rise in the unemployment rate, coupled an increase in job losers, highlights ongoing challenges in the economy. Meanwhile, the number of persons employed part-time for economic reasons remained unchanged.

Key economic measures for August:

The number of unemployed persons increased by 514,000 from July.
Increases were recorded in both the number of persons unemployed less than 5 weeks, at 2.2 million, and the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more), at 1.3 million.
The long-term unemployed accounted for 20.3% of all unemployed persons.
Labor force participation rate rose by 0.2 percentage points, to 62.8%.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/03/only-thing-todays-avant-garde-artists-challenge-is-our-patience/

Let’s take a break from the depressing world of politics and talk for a moment about the equally depressing subject of the art world.

What is it about the word “art?” Pronounce it, and the IQ of susceptible folk is instantly halved. (I’ve seen cases where it is diminished by 87 percent). Normally sensible people who do not, as a rule, appreciate being being made fools of stand idly by as the chief art critic for The New York Times tells them that that a charlatan climbing naked up a scaffolding while applying vaseline to sensitive parts of his body is “the most important American artist of his generation.”

Instead of throwing something soft and rotting at such mountebanks, they nod solemnly and reach for their wallets. They are only too eager, when a stiffy arrives from the Museum of Modern Art or similar establishment, to don the soup and fish and buzz round to the super exclusive evening event where scores of beautiful people line up to sip the shampoo and admire a tank full of formaldehyde and a dead tiger shark.

What is it about the word “art” that endows it with this mind-and-character-wrecking property? Why does it induce incontinent gibbering, not to mention mind-boggling extravagance, among normally hard-headed souls?

A full answer would take us deep into the pathology of our time. It has something to do with what I’ve called elsewhere the institutionalization of the avant-garde, the contradictory project whereby the tics and outré attitudes of the avant-garde go mainstream. The half-comic, half-contemptible result is that ordinary bourgeois adults find themselves in the embarrassing position of celebrating the juvenile, anti-bourgeois antics of people who detest them.

Our misuse of the word “art” also has something to do with our age’s tendency to look to art for spiritual satisfactions traditionally afforded by religion. “In the absence of a belief in God,” Wallace Stevens observed, “poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/john_singletary_has_a_vision_for_one_of_americas_poorest_most_crimeridden_cities.html

Yesterday, I had a great conversation with John Singletary, who is running for Mayor of North Charleston, South Carolina. I came away very impressed with him. If he wins, by redirecting government funds to better causes, he might help break the poverty cycle in a city that has one of the worst crime problems in America and that has huge pockets of black poverty. However, I couldn’t help wondering whether government money, no matter how good the intentions behind it, can undo a situation that government money created in the first place.

Singletary, who was born and raised in North Charleston, is a Citadel graduate and a successful businessman. Despite having worked in places as far away as California, his heart and his home are in North Charleston. There are some things you need to know about North Charleston, not just on its own but also in the context of South Carolina and Charleston, to appreciate his concerns and understand his plans if elected.

South Carolina was a majority-black state almost from its inception until 1920. After the Civil War, Charleston’s population had a huge black majority. Beginning around 1920, though, the Great Northern Migration began, as blacks fled the South for economic opportunities in the North. Even today, the coastal part of the state, specifically Charleston, continues to hemorrhage black residents.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/02/oliver-anthony-and-the-woke-hatred-for-the-working-class/

The thing I love most about Oliver Anthony, aside from that apocalyptic timbre in his country singing, is that he’s forced the elite to unmask itself. We live under elites-in-denial. ‘We’re not the establishment!’, cry the movers and shakers of the upper middle-classes, even as they force your kids to genuflect to gender ideology, screw up economic growth with their climate-change hysteria, and dictate with Caesar-like conviction what is and isn’t sayable in the modern town square of social media. And yet in their foaming response to Mr Anthony, they’ve told on themselves. They’ve revealed that they know perfectly well who this red-bearded warbler from Farmville, Virginia is singing about in his rebellious ballads against The Man: it’s them.

Anthony has become a viral sensation since his song ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ hit the internet. His pained anthem – think Nashville with a dash of Nietzsche – is No1 in the US. He’s hob-nobbing with Joe Rogan. He’s fawned over by top Republicans (much to his irritation. ‘I. Don’t. Support. Either. Side’, is his wise take on America’s polarised politics.) And he’s generated miles of commentary as coastal elites who normally only encounter men in beards when a hip barista hands them their seven-dollar coffee try to work out why this fella from Farmville has hit a nerve.

In short, his protest song has done what protest songs are supposed to. It’s shaken shit up. It’s rattled our rulers. That’s the brilliant irony of someone like Billy Bragg writing in the Guardian of all places that Anthony’s song isn’t truly ‘blue collar’ and thus is not a proper protest song. Mr Bragg, that Anthony offends a cultural turncoat like you, the Eighties outsider turned bien pensant bore, and that he horrifies the plummy scribes of the Guardian who probably think Farmville is an iPhone game, is all the proof we need that this is a protest song, and a good one.

Anthony’s genius is that he has forced our elites-in-denial to do what elites must occasionally do: demonise dissent. Just as old establishments bristled at Elvis’s sexy hips or the Sex Pistols’ anarchical antics or Sinéad O’Connor’s blasphemies against Rome, so the new establishment loses sleep over Anthony’s angry crooning on ‘bullshit pay’, high taxes and obese folk who live off welfare. He’s ‘punch[ing] down on the poor’, says Bragg in the Guardian – which is rich from a newspaper that spent the past seven years raging against the dumb gammon (ie, pigs) who voted for Brexit.

Anthony embodies country’s ‘nastiest impulses’, tuts Time magazine. His songs feel ‘parochial to the point of bigotry’, it says. The Independent’s culture reporter damns ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ as ‘doggerel’. Worse, it’s ‘artless’, a ‘blunt-force hissy fit’. That’s what The Man has always said about the musical revolts against him – that they’re gauche, trashy, with a huge chip on their shoulders. Blue-rinse Christians said it about punk; now twentysomething woke graduates say it about Oliver Anthony.

One of the funniest sights of recent weeks has been liberal columnists poring over Anthony’s lyrics and class-splaining why he’s not a Real Protest Singer. Listen to Woody Guthrie, not this, they plead, like those right-on whites in the 1990s who were aghast that some blacks seemed to prefer the nihilistic swagger of NWA to the righteous anti-racism of Public Enemy.

In 2023 we are on pace to complete over 600 live television and radio interviews.

Here’s just a sample of how hard we are working to defend YOU, the hard-working taxpayer from government waste, fraud, corruption and taxpayer abuse:

NEO-GENDER INVESTIGATION: We launched our investigation into California Governor Gavin Newsom spending millions and encouraging K-12 students to Invent Their Own Gender!
CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT CITATION: U.S. Senator Joni Ernst cited our oversight of the administrative state in her Make ‘Em Squeal Award — two-thirds of federal workers are literally phoning it in working from home.
NIH FACT-CHECKING: We contributed context to a NewsGuard fact-check on third-party royalties paid to Dr. Fauci and 2,400 other scientists at the National Institutes of Health. 
NATIONAL INTERVIEWS ACROSS THE COUNTRY: Our auditors held public officials accountable in live interviews on local broadcast news: FOX17-Nashville, TN; CBS-Austin, TX; Good Day Maine-Portland, ME; NBC-Las Vegas, NV; and FOX45-Baltimore, MD.
BREAKING NASHVILLE INVESTIGATION: In Nashville, our deputy policy director Rachel O’Brien broke the story of the city’s homeless division violating audit standards while spending tens of millions of dollars in the last two years. 
DIGGING INTO NATIONAL DEBT AND “CLUB FED”: We did live radio and television interviews on topics ranging from “The National Debt Is Our #1 National Security Threat” to “Club Fed” — the pay and perks of the federal bureaucracy.
EPA FUNDING + JOE MANCHIN: National journalists cited our findings on topics ranging from “How Big Is Joe Manchin’s Social Security Check?” to “Most EPA Employees Really Don’t Want To Show Back Up To The Office.”
COMING UP: And our auditors also contributed data and findings to journalists who will publish breaking investigations in next week’s national news.  

… Stay tuned! 

https://www.declassified.live/p/florida-grandmas-obstructionists

U.S District Court Judge Amit Mehta admitted he continues to “struggle with” what happened on January 6.

The Obama appointee made that public confession Wednesday afternoon during the sentencing hearing for Florida resident Connie Meggs. A D.C. jury convicted Meggs, 61, of numerous offenses including obstruction of an official proceeding and interfering with law enforcement related to her conduct on January 6. Meggs traveled to the nation’s capital with her husband, Kelly, a member of the Oath Keepers who is currently serving 12 years in prison for his role in January 6. (Mehta imposed that sentence in May.) She spent less than 20 minutes inside the Capitol, brought no weapon, and assaulted no one.

Nonetheless, Mehta condemned January 6 as a “crime committed against the citizens of the United States.” The four-hour disturbance “altered the social fabric in a way a normal crime does not,” Mehta claimed—which is true just not in the way he thinks. He further insisted the country would have been “far better off if no one had come to Washington” that day.

Despite Meggs losing everything after January 6—including both her parents—and spending 45 days in a Florida jail denied release after her February 2021 arrest followed by 2 1/2 years on home detention wearing an ankle monitor, Judge Mehta was not finished inflicting pain on the grandmother of three. Meggs, often uncontrollably sobbing, read a lengthy letter of apology to the court while angrily blaming her husband for choosing the Oath Keepers over their family. “I’m a good person,” Meggs told Mehta as her son and grandchildren broke down in the gallery. “Please don’t take their mother and grandmother away from them.”

But Mehta, while criticizing the Department of Justice for seeking an “overly punitive” prison sentence of up to ten years, will take Meggs away from her already broken family. Acknowledging her lack of criminal history, devotion to her family, and work in her community, Mehta still insisted she still must pay a further price for not understanding the ‘broader context” of her involvement in the events of January 6. “We don’t have January 6, it does not happen, without people like you,” Mehta scolded.

Not only did Mehta order Meggs to serve 15 months in prison, but he also agreed to DOJ’s request to add a “terror” enhancement to her sentence. “[Meggs] committed offenses that were calculated to influence or affect the conduct of the government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct,” assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Rakoczy wrote in the government’s 62-page sentencing recommendation for Meggs and her co-defendants, which included a 72-year-old man from Ohio and an autistic young man also from Florida. “All five defendants were active participants in the Oath Keepers’ conspiracy to prevent, hinder, or delay the certification proceeding, and to use force, intimidation, or threats to prevent members of Congress from discharging their duties during that proceeding.”

Mehta concurred. Connie Meggs, a churchgoing, patriotic grandmother, is now branded a domestic terrorist.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/worst-soros-da-got-training-in-how-to-discriminate-against-white-victims/

All Soros DAs are terrible. Pamela Price is in a league of her own.

DA Price is as open as possible about wanting to give criminals a pass and constantly accuses her critics of racism. Everyone from the NAACP to the local Asian community have condemned her. When she refused to meet with the families of murder victims, Rep. Eric Swalwell of all people invited the mother of a murder victim to testify to Congress. The sheer awfulness of Price has alienated virtually everyone.

Highlights include the murder of a 2-year-old Asian boy in which DA Price said she was looking for ways to “support AAPI victims of violence in ways that open up broader possibilities for healing and non-carceral forms of accountability” and then “accused Asian-Americans complaining about her pro-crime policies of “mob violence” and claimed that “as a descendant of people in this country who were historically subjected to mob violence in the form of lynchings, racist profiling and wrongful convictions, I am particularly sensitive to the danger of this type of comment” and proposed a forum to “better educate” Asian Americans.

Then the NAACP took its turn.

In the letter, the local NAACP chapter said residents are “sick and tired” of the shootings, car-break-ins and highway shootouts and implored city leaders to declare a state of emergency.

“There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety,” the group wrote.

“It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.”

The group, along with Bishop Bob Jackson of the Acts Full Gospel Church, said Price’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute serious criminals, as reported by The Post, has created “the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric and created a heyday for Oakland criminals.”

Heather McDonald discovered that Price was reacting to the criticism by hosting anti-racism training teaching her staff how to discriminate against “white victims”.