RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/01/09/california-inferno-was-preventable-blame-malfeasance-of-newsom-bass-for-catastrophe/
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of the book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” He is a lifelong resident of Southern California.

I’m here in California. I’ve been a lifelong resident of the state, fifth generation to live in the same house. I had a house in the Sierra, and it would almost burn down three years ago during the Aspen Fire, and I’m speaking on the evening when you’ve all heard about the disastrous fire in Los Angeles.

As I’m speaking on a Wednesday night, there have been 15,000 acres, 1,000 structures destroyed. Nobody knows how many people are killed or missing. And how do we characterize this? Everybody’s talking about the Santa Ana winds, climate change—I mean everybody, the people in power.”

But it was preventable. And once it started, this fire, it could have been assuaged. You could have had it lessened, that the severity didn’t have to be as catastrophic. So, I would characterize it as a DEI–Green New Deal hydrogen bomb. It’s something out of “Dante’s Inferno.”

And what I mean by that is, it’s a systems breakdown, a civilizational collapse. When you look at the people in charge, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom flew in, to sort of do these performance-art stunts, but he has systematically ensured that water out of the Sacramento River and the watershed of Northern California would go out to the sea, rather than into the aqueduct, so Los Angeles didn’t have sufficient amounts of water.
 
He bragged not very long ago that he blew up four dams on the Klamath River. They provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power. They offered recreation, flood control, irrigation. He blew them up.

California’s fire management, whether we look at the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire near where I’m speaking, it destroyed 60 million trees. We have no timber industry in California. [Newsom’s] dismantled it.

We don’t clean the forest. We don’t let loggers come in and have a viable livelihood by harvesting trees. It’s sort of considered natural to let these things burn or to at least create the conditions in which they will inevitably be burned.

It’s almost as if we don’t like humans. We worry about grubs and worms and birds and the ecosystem.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/12/merchans-verdict-a-conviction-without-consequence/

I was at a dinner event on Thursday night when the news came that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett decided to throw a sop to the left.  At issue was whether the Democrat activist New York judge and Joe Biden contributor Juan Merchan should be allowed to sentence Donald Trump in the magic bookkeeping-error-non-disclosure-agreement case in which a possible misdemeanor underwent a legal transubstantiation and suddenly became a polished thirty-four-count felony. Amazing.

Along the way, Merchan issued gag orders against Trump,  interfered with his campaigning, and generally made it plain that he was singling Trump out for unfair treatment.  Still, Roberts and Barrett joined the Court’s left flank to render a 5-4 decision against Trump. Merchan could proceed with the sentencing of the past and now future president of the United States.

Merchan found Trump guilty, guilty, guilty last May. Thirty-four times did he pronounce “guilty.”  The world was amazed. The entire case was unprecedented. Not only was Merchan himself a Democrat activist, his daughter Loren has made millions from consulting for progressive candidates from Kamala Harris on down. What a long time ago it seems. Joe Biden was still running for president in May. Donald Trump had yet to be shot by a would-be assassin.  And Kamala Harris was still cackling in the wings.

We’ve had a lot of legal decisions since then, most of which have gone decidedly against the anti-Trump, lawfare establishment.  We also had an election, which Trump won handily, and a vast and sudden change in the emotional weather of the country.

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, there was a surge of optimism and people said that it was “morning in America” again. The bad Carter years gave way to a period of enthusiasm and confidence. Gone was Carter’s gas rationing, his skyrocketing inflation, unemployment,  and interest rates (what Reagan called “the misery index”).  Gone too was the hostage crisis in Iran. Reagan jump-started a period of economic growth through which the developed world saw the greatest accumulation of wealth in history. Reagan’s philosophy of “we win, they lose” put the Soviet Union on the fast track to disintegration, which happened in 1991, just a couple of years after Reagan left office.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21307/us-free-speech-eu-censorship

What is important is the solidarity being forged between the major US social media platforms and the incoming US administration in support of real freedom of expression.

The new US administration will not tolerate levying fines of tens of billions of dollars on major US technology companies by an EU that is drifting towards authoritarianism and is at the same time more dependent than ever on American power.

It would be in Europe’s lasting interest to prepare for the return of free and unfettered expression.

Anyone wishing to gauge the extent of the European Union’s regulatory drift will need to read Articles 34 and 35 of the Digital Services Act (DSA). Given their length it is impossible to quote them in full here, so here is an extract:

DSA Article 34, “Risk assessment”:

“1. Providers of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines shall diligently identify, analyse and assess any systemic risks in the Union stemming from the design or functioning of their service and its related systems, including algorithmic systems (…) and shall include the following systemic risks (…) (a) the dissemination of illegal content through their services (which includes ‘hate speech’); (b) any actual or foreseeable negative effects for the exercise of fundamental rights, in particular the fundamental rights (…) to non-discrimination; (c) any actual or foreseeable negative effects on civic discourse and electoral processes, and public security; (d) any actual or foreseeable negative effects in relation to (…) public health (…) and serious negative consequences to the person’s physical and mental well-being (…).”

Article 35, “Mitigation of risks,” obliges these platforms to take a whole arsenal of preventive and repressive measures, basically to prevent the sharing of information that displeases the European Commission. In short, the idea is to force these platforms to pay hordes of patrol officers to relentlessly hunt down opinions that do not please the European Lord. The preventive nature of these measures means that they can be described as censorship in the strict sense. What’s more, general censorship, because the terms used by the European legislator – hate, non-discrimination, civic discourse, electoral process, public security, public health, well-being – are so vague that censors with (digital) scissors do cut wherever they please, at the whim of the European Prince.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/sen-john-fetterman-to-become-first-sitting-democratic-senator-to-visit-trump-at-mar-a-lago/ar-BB1rbwVn?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=7148764e0eff4e62f664f37163b33dd4&ei=27

Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman said Thursday that he has accepted an invitation from President-elect Donald Trump to meet with him at Mar-a-Lago, which will make him the first sitting Democratic Senator known to have visited him at his Florida home since the election.

“President Trump invited me to meet, and I accepted. I’m the Senator for all Pennsylvanians — not just Democrats in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said in a statement. CBS News first reported that Fetterman accepted Trump’s invitation to meet.

“That is the plan. Yes, we are going to have a conversation,” Fetterman told CBS News. “I think that one, he’s the president, or he will be officially.”

“And I think it’s pretty reasonable that if the president would like to have a conversation — or invite someone to have a conversation — to have it. And no one is my gatekeeper,” he added.

Fetterman has continued to break with his party over his support of many of Trump’s cabinet picks. He has also been very vocal on allegations of antisemitism in the Democratic party and has been a vocal supporter of Israel. Now, he will be the first sitting Democrat in the Senate to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago.