RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/01/__trashed-5/

So-called progressive Democrats are buzzing about a “Great Reset” under Joe Biden, as if they have some completely new ideas to make our economy better and stronger. Sorry, but they’re merely repackaging the failed ideas of socialism and hoping Americans will be suckers enough to buy it. Don’t fall for it.

After months of COVID-19 lockdowns and growing restrictions on your personal liberties, you’ll soon be hearing from Democrats that this is the “new normal.” To function in this brave new world, we need to join the rest of the nations in a global “Great Reset” to create a better, more sustainable economy.

Sounds great? It isn’t. In fact, it’s a thinly disguised assault on free markets and Americans’ individual liberties and rights. Once those things are given away, you’ll be little more than a pawn in the globalists’ big game.

You might be wondering, where did this idea even come from? The answer: The World Economic Forum, a group of high-level government officials, economists, billionaires and corporate leaders whose goal is to make the world safe for big business.

Here’s how the WEF describes the Great Reset:

There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.

Let’s parse this mere handful of words for a moment. They contain a world of hidden meaning.

“Global stakeholders.” That’s who they want to replace “shareholders,” people who actually invested their dollars and have, as the saying goes, skin in the game. We’d have to give up traditional free markets, low taxes, relatively light regulation and our rights as U.S. citizens to be managed instead by inchoate groups of global “stakeholders.”

That means left-wing activist groups, non-governmental organizations, foreign officials, loosely structured busybodies and sell-out bankers and economists would make life-and-death decisions for businesses. Hiring, firing, production, where they locate, how they do business. Everything.

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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/the_covid_case_con_continues.html

As many Americans recover from their “virtual Thanksgiving,” sharing prayers and turkey across the internet, the media is pushing their November propaganda narrative, that Dementia Joe really won the presidential election and that COVID cases are once again surging across America.

The Washington Post claims that Wuhan coronavirus cases are “skyrocketing” while the New York Times wails that “It has hit us with a vengeance.” Yet the media is oblivious, either ignorantly or deliberately, to the reality that positive tests are not the same thing as cases.

A “case” has a very specific definition, apparently beyond the intellectual realm of Wolf Blitzer or Neil Cavuto. The CDC provides a specific “case definition.”  A case is not just a positive test.  Instead, what is needed is “presumptive laboratory evidence AND either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence.”  Notice the AND, meaning not simply a positive test.

The current COVID surges are positive tests, and even those are suspect, without regard to whether those who test positive are actually sick or not. I was curious about drive-by testing and last weekend gave it a whirl. It only took about 20 minutes and was free, meaning I got what I paid for. Results were promised within three days but took just over seven days to find out that I was virus free.

Given the sensitivity of the COVID PCR test, it is likely that some of those being tested, without any symptoms or exposure, will be reported as test positive and added to the case tickers running constantly on Fox News and CNN.

Saying someone with a positive COVID test is a “case” is fraudulent. For comparison, blood glucose has an upper test limit of 140. Is everyone above that number a diabetic? Even if they just ate a doughnut or ice cream cone before testing? Or does it take more than a single blood glucose level before one is diagnosed with diabetes? Does a single elevated blood pressure test make one hypertensive? Certainly not.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/12/the-fury-of-the-fatherless

The Trump administration’s recent designation of several American cities as “anarchic jurisdictions” may turn out to have been nothing more than a quixotic gambit in the supercharged run-up to November 3. But the fact that it was thinkable in the first place points to a truth beyond electoral politics: The frenzy that has been enacted in city after American city since May 2020 demands more scrutiny than it has yet received.

It is true that most protests have been peaceful. It is also true that the exceptions—marked by violence and biliousness and unreason and, well, anarchy—have been far more common than many people have understood, at least until recently. As of late September, a USA TODAY/Ipsos poll reports that two-thirds of respondents believe that “protesters and counterprotesters are overwhelming American cities.” The majority is on to something.

According to the first thorough examination of the street protests triggered by the death of George Floyd, undertaken by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project in conjunction with the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton, more than 10,600 incidents of what is benignly called “unrest” were recorded between May 24 and August 22. Of these, some 570 involved violence. Of those, most have involved Black Lives Matter activists. Preliminary insurance estimates show that the damage will surpass the $1.2 billion in damages accrued during the 1992 Rodney King riots. And then there are the atmospherics that separate these protests from many that have gone before: lusty screaming, ecstatic vandalism, the menacing of bystanders.

The ritualistic exhibition of destructive behaviors in city after city is without precedent in America. Neither the civil rights demonstrations nor the protests against the war in Vietnam looked remotely like this. The differences demand explanation. Blame what you will on the usual bête noirs: ­Donald Trump, cancel culture, police brutality, political tribalism, the coronavirus pandemic, far-right militias, BLM, antifa. All these factors feed the “­demand” side of the protests and rioting, the ­reasons for the ritualistic enactment. But what about the “supply” side—the ready and apparently inexhaustible ranks of demonstrators themselves? What explains them?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/our-real-systemic-problem/

America’s got a problem that’s systemic in nature. This problem has less to do with individual intentions than the structure within which our intentions are formed. That structure explains a great deal about observed disparities in wealth, and other advantages, between various racial and ethnic groups. It helps explain why we’re torn apart by arguments over school shootings and abortion. It even helps explain why we’ve turned away from traditional religion and patriotism and adopted a secular faith built around hollow and pernicious ideas like systemic racism instead. In short, our systemic problem helps explain many of the core disagreements around which contemporary American politics are organized. The challenge I refer to — our real systemic problem — is family decline.

A twist of this issue—and a telling sign of our times—is that we’re barred from discussing it. Charles Murray once said, commenting on the connection between a vast range of positive outcomes for children and being reared by two biological parents who remain married, “I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.” That Murray himself is periodically shouted down on college campuses adds a nice touch.

While our fake systemic problem is on half the country’s lips, our real systemic problem is verboten. We don’t want to risk offense by mentioning an issue so touchy — and that touches nearly everyone nowadays in some way or other because … well, because it’s systemic. Because the family has been seen since approximately forever as society’s foundation, it makes sense from the traditional point of view that family decline would have pervasive social effects. Yet no one dares discuss it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/return-of-the-obama-economists-11606778301?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

If Joe Biden is trying to distinguish his emerging Administration from Barack Obama’s, he hasn’t succeeded in the choice of economic advisers he rolled out Monday. They’re Obama veterans who believe in more spending, more regulation, higher taxes, and easier money. Let’s hope the result is better than what became known as “secular stagnation” during the Obama years.

Janet Yellen, the Treasury nominee, is an economist with a distinguished political resume. She’s a Keynesian from the James Tobin school who believes in spending as fiscal stimulus and low interest rates. As Federal Reserve Chair in Mr. Obama’s second term, she was slow to raise interest rates and reduce the Fed’s bond purchases. She’ll likely favor a 2009-style policy mix next year with a spending blowout while urging the Fed to monetize it.

Mr. Biden has also signed up Jared Bernstein, an architect of the Obama stimulus who famously predicted in January 2009 that spending would keep unemployment below 8% and hit 7% by autumn of 2010. Not quite. The jobless rate hit 10% in October 2009, stayed at 9.9% through April 2010, and didn’t fall below 7% until November 2013. Mr. Bernstein put his trust in the Keynesian “multiplier” that $1 of new spending yields as much as an extra $1.57 or more of additional GDP. Wrong again.

Mr. Bernstein will join the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where his boss will be Princeton economist Cecilia Rouse. She’s a veteran of the Clinton and Obama White Houses. Her academic work has focused on microeconomic subjects such as education and the labor market, and her research is skeptical of the benefits of school choice.