RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theepochtimes.com/tech-totalitarians-are-on-the-march_4319982.html

The Chinese were pathbreakers.

With their system of “social credit,” which seeks to enforce conformity by “grading” an individual’s or business’s adherence to the party line and imposing penalties for deviations, they have showed the West the way.

If you don’t espouse the right attitudes, you might find yourself barred from public transportation, from work permits or travel visas, from preferred jobs and other social—which includes economic—perquisites.

It’s a totalitarian’s dream—one that was dreamt by George Orwell in the pages of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”—and it’s made all the more total by advances in technology.

Winston Smith, Orwell’s unhappy protagonist, had to contend with a tiny two-way television set in his flat that he could not turn off and that constantly eavesdropped on him.

Chinese citizens have to contend with having their texts, emails, and internet activity constantly scrutinized, which also means having every phone conversation docketed and financial transaction tracked.

Cameras, backed up with facial-recognition technology, are everywhere, watching, listening, building up a record that can always be marshaled as an indictment.

It’s a good thing, isn’t it, that we in the freedom-loving West eschew such totalitarian intrusiveness?

Just kidding.

The American Department of Justice showed how it is done in the land of the formerly free when it employed all those techniques to track down, arrest, and incarcerate hundreds of people involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, protest at the Capitol.

Phone and social media accounts were hoovered up and dissected; facial recognition technology was deployed and weaponized; financial transactions and travel records were subpoenaed and combed through.

Hundreds of people are still languishing in a Washington, D.C. gulag, waiting while the authorities expend vast amounts of legal ingenuity to transform various misdemeanors into felonies.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2022/03/11/russian-economy-in-shock-due-to-sanctions-but-so-is-ours-without-them-n1565674

The Russian economy is in “shock” over what the Kremlin calls “economic warfare” waged by the U.S. and the West… so what’s our excuse?

According to a new Reuters report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “Our economy is experiencing a shock impact now and there are negative consequences, they will be minimized.”

Exactly how Moscow would minimize those negative consequences — with much of Russia’s trade and finance halted, sanctioned, or frozen — wasn’t specified.

“This is absolutely unprecedented,” Peskov said. “The economic war that has started against our country has never taken place before. So it is very hard to forecast anything.”

Bloomberg calls the pinch “a domestic toll that’s already comparable to the worst downturns of President Vladimir Putin’s more than two decades in power.”

“Russia is already headed for one of its biggest inflation spikes this century and the risk of shortages is prompting the government to impose restrictions on exports,” according to the report.

A Bank of Russia survey showed that analysts believe the Russian economy will shrink 8% or more in 2022, compared to a pre-Ukraine War consensus of 2.4% growth.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/03/10/how_ukraine_conspired_with_dems_against_trump_to_

Six years ago, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country, the Ukrainians bet that a Hillary Clinton presidency would offer better protection from Russian President Vladimir Putin, even though he had invaded Crimea during the Obama-Biden administration, whose Russian policies Clinton vowed to continue.

Ukraine worked with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats against Donald Trump as protection against President Vladimir Putin of Russia … 

… but Ukraine’s bet backfired both when Trump won in 2016 — and when Russia invaded after the Democrats regained power under Joe Biden.

Working with both the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign, Ukrainian government officials intervened in the 2016 race to help Clinton and hurt  Donald Trump in a sweeping and systematic foreign influence operation that’s been largely ignored by the press. The improper, if not illegal, operation was run chiefly out of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, where officials worked hand-in-glove with a Ukrainian-American activist and Clinton campaign operative to attack the Trump campaign. The Obama White House was also deeply involved in an effort to groom their own favored leader in Ukraine and then work with his government to dig up dirt on – and even investigate — their political rival.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/02/the-biden-inflation-octopus/

The Democrats will suffer historic losses in the November midterms. 

This disaster for their party will come about not just because of the Afghanistan debacle, an appeased Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of the southern border, the supply chain mess, or their support for critical race theory demagoguery.  

The culprit for the political wipeout will be out-of-control inflation—and for several reasons.  

First, the Biden Administration is in such denial of inflation that it sounds to Americans simply callous and indifferent to the misery it has unleashed. 

Biden officials have scoffed at price spikes as “transitory.” Or they have preposterously claimed spiraling costs are a concern only to the elite. They blame the Ukraine crisis. Or they fault the out-of-office bogeyman, Donald Trump.  

The administration assures us that consumer prices are only rising at an annualized rate of 7.5 percent—as if the steepest increase in 40 years actually is not all that bad. 

Yet the middle class knows that inflation is far worse when it comes to the stuff of life: buying a house, car, gas, meat, or lumber. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/idiots_of_high_culture.html

I recently saw the headline in a Classical Music website: “Cardiff Philharmonic removes Tchaikovsky from programme in light of Russian invasion of Ukraine.”  Oh, poor Pyotr Ilyich, he has been dead for almost 130 years, but he turns out to be guilty of the Russian fascism of the 21st century. He was hit by the Russian aggression as if by a ricocheting bullet.

A wave of hatred to Russian culture has rolled over the planet like a tsunami.  All over the world, cultural idiots are removing from their programs works by the great composers Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff and canceling performances by musicians, singers and dancers who had the misfortune to come from the USSR or Russia.

The conformist idiots who run the culture business try their best to portray themselves as “more Catholic than the Pope” when it comes to shunning all things Russian. They fired Valery Gergiev, the head conductor of the Munich Symphony Orchestra; the manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Peter Gelb, banned the prim donna Anna Netrebko when she refused to publicly condemn Putin. Gergiev and Netrebko spend most of their time in the Western countries, but they are still the Russian citizens, having deep roots there, so it’s painful and even dangerous for them to publicly condemn the Russian invasion, especially given the vindictive nature of the present-day Kremlin czar. Not everyone has the courage or desperation to do this.

It’s easy to be a hero and judge others from the comfort of New York or Munich. I could understand if they were fired for publicly supporting the aggression, but firing them for remaining silent?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-biden-nominee-supreme-court-violent-crime-democrats-racial-identity-affirmative-action-racism-clarenc-thomas-11646769193?mod=opinion_major_pos7

Joe Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 when President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Mr. Biden accused Bush of putting racial identity ahead of qualifications: “Had Thomas been white, he never would have been nominated. The only reason he’s on the court is because he’s black.” Now the shoe is on the other foot.

If Sen. Biden could only speculate about the Thomas nomination, no such speculation is needed concerning President Biden’s choice of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the seat being vacated by Justice Stephen Breyer. Two years ago, while running for president, Mr. Biden announced that his first nominee to the court would be a black woman. No whites (or men) need apply.

Later this year, the Supreme Court will consider a case involving the use of race in college admissions. The focus will be on whether these policies are compatible with the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause and with federal statutes that explicitly ban racial discrimination. Still, the dubious legality of racial double standards—clear to anyone who believes that words mean what they say—is only one of the problems with affirmative action. Racial preferences also serve to diminish black achievement. They allow others to take credit for black accomplishments, and they imply that black upward mobility can’t or won’t occur without officially sanctioned favoritism.

When Elizabeth Warren ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012 and was accused of identifying as Native American to bolster her academic career, she became indignant. “I got what I got because of the work I’ve done,” she told the Boston Globe. In other words, she responded the way any self-respecting woman would respond to accusations that she was less qualified but hired anyway for diversity reasons. Liberal proponents of affirmative action tell blacks that there is no shame in being hired based on their skin color, but why are black overachievers like Justice Thomas or Judge Jackson expected to be any less self-respecting than Sen. Warren?

The reality is that blacks were advancing at a faster clip, both educationally and economically, before the implementation of affirmative action policies in the 1970s. At best, racial preferences continued a pre-existing trend. In the 1940s and ’50s, the poverty rate fell further for blacks than for whites. In the 1960s, black household income doubled. The postwar economic boom lifted all groups, but blacks especially. A similar phenomenon occurred to a lesser extent in the pre-pandemic economy under Donald Trump, when black wages rose faster than white wages, and black unemployment and poverty reached record lows. Apparently, blacks need tight labor markets more than they need a woke president.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-joe-bidens-inflation-vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-prices-bureau-of-labor-statistics-11646952656?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Inflation keeps rising, and working Americans are paying the price in falling real incomes. That’s the bad news from Thursday’s consumer-price index report for February, and the White House can’t blame Vladimir Putin for this one, though it’s trying.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said prices rose 0.8% in the month, the fastest rate in four months. That’s 7.9% over the last 12 months, and 8.4% over the last three months. In other words, inflation is accelerating.

The inflation surge was driven by rising costs for gasoline, food and shelter (imputed rents). But the price increases were also broad-based, suggesting that the psychology of rising prices has set in with businesses and consumers. The price of services (not counting energy services) rose 0.5% for the month. Remember when inflation was supposedly caused by supply-chain shortfalls for goods?

Well, services aren’t goods. Transportation costs rose 1.4%, and shelter jumped by 0.5%. The latter are likely to keep rising because they usually trail housing costs (which aren’t directly part of the consumer-price index).

https://www.city-journal.org/homicides-are-a-national-crisis

In his State of the Union address last week, President Biden declared, “The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them.” This line conflicts with Biden’s radical posturing after George Floyd’s death in 2020, but he’s right to talk about the necessity of adequately funding law enforcement. Over the past two years, homicidal violence has become a national crisis, with little coverage in the mainstream media.

As data from CDC and FBI crime reports released last fall demonstrate, 2020 saw the largest ever year-to-year increase in homicides. Following the George Floyd protests, cities such as Minneapolis, Portland, and New York City experienced an explosion in violence not seen in decades. The mayhem continued to mount in 2021, as under-resourced and demoralized police departments across the country struggled to quell rising neighborhood violence. At least a dozen cities nationwide shattered historical homicide records last year, including Portland, Austin, and Philadelphia.

Austin, Texas, saw one of the sharpest homicide spikes in 2021, with murders skyrocketing 86 percent. The city has never witnessed a higher homicide toll in a single year. “Typically, in Austin, homicide detectives average 3-4 homicides per year. 2021 was different,” Austin police lieutenant Brett Bailey told KXAN. “Several of the detectives were nearing [investigation of] their 10th homicide for the year.”

https://americanmind.org/salvo/trumps-virtues/

Many leading Republicans and conservatives want someone other than Donald Trump to run for President in 2024. But this judgment requires an assessment of Trump’s vices and virtues in the context of our current political and cultural circumstances, as well as an assessment of other prospective Republican presidential candidates. Among the talked-about alternatives to Trump, I have not yet seen anyone who possesses either his virtues or his backbone. I am not suggesting that everyone make way for Trump; rather that it is too early to throw him overboard.

I regularly ask Republican politicians what they think of Donald Trump. The most frequent response is some version of, “I like his policies but don’t like the rest of him.” But this formulation gets it almost backwards. Although Trump advanced many important policies, it is the “rest of him” that contains the virtues that inspired a movement.

Trump was born for the current American crisis: the life and death struggle against the totalitarian enemy I call “woke communism.” The “woke comms” have seized every political, cultural, and economic center of power in the country from where they ruthlessly push their agenda. That agenda rests on the conviction that America is thoroughly bad (systemically racist) and must be destroyed. 

If there is one thing that patriotic Americans know about Trump it is that he, like them, is unequivocally pro-American and willing to fight to defend the American way of life. When Collin Kaepernick and his ilk knelt before the American flag, Trump called them “sons of bitches.” As always, he was being forceful, authentic, and unmistakably clear.