RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/27/13-happenings-in-2021-that-i-never-would-have-believed-5-years-ago/

The world seemed to get closer to spinning out of its orbit in 2021. If you’d told me five years ago that men would be treated as women, criminals would not be prosecuted, and censorship would be widespread, I wouldn’t have believed you.

What were once considered the most basic, scientific truths (such as that you’re born with your sex and can’t change it) have broken down. Governments are no longer serving their primary function of providing security and protecting borders.

There are many more. As I reflected on the past year, here are just some of the many things that happened in 2021 that I never would have believed possible if someone had foretold them to me just five years ago.

https://townhall.com/columnists/larryoconnor/2021/12/28/the-biden-presidency-a-horrible-accident-of-history-n2600984

There’s an accident in the Oval Office. Not the kind of accident left on the rug in front of the Resolute Desk on a regular basis by the untrained, rowdy dogs the Biden’s sicced on the unwitting White House staff and Secret Service. I’m talking about the man who sits behind the resolute desk for his daily naps. 

Joe Biden is the accidental president. He is the result of an accident of American politics. 

His presidency will not be remembered with an asterisk, as my friend and fellow Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter would say. No, it will be remembered… reviled… as the accident that it was, is and ever shall be. 

He became the Democrats’ nominee in 2020 by accident. He shouldn’t have even run in the first place. Everyone knows that’s true. 

If he was such a great man and gifted leader and our nation couldn’t do without him, why didn’t he just run for Obama’s third term in 2016 as the sitting vice president? This would’ve been the natural move for such a powerful, important, and wise leader to make. 

But he didn’t run in 2016. And did you notice that nobody seemed to notice? Nobody seemed to care. Even Obama sat by and let him languish as the Democrats openly joked about him and Hillary Clinton’s henchmen bullied him into officially declaring himself a non-candidate. 

At the time, the adoring and compliant media ran interference by declaring that he couldn’t possibly run for office due to the grief over losing his son Beau to cancer. Sure. Yeah. That’s what it was all about. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that Biden had become a walking punchline and even then was seen as too old for the job. 

He ended up getting the 2020 nomination because the other choices at the time were Pete Buttegeig, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. 

Biden was the dream nominee given the nightmare of that choice. So it fell into his lap. 

Couple that accident with the very deliberate bastardization of our elections and voting protocols in 2020 under the dubious guise of fear over China’s diabolical gift to the world, Covid-19, and boom, we got President Accident. 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/12/in-strine-accented-newspeak-freedom-means-submission/

“America’s founders had it right in 1791, in drawing up the Bill of Rights; the first ten amendments to the Constitution. All of these amendments had to do with protecting the individual citizen from government. How can that be? Elected by the people, for the people. It can be so because many of those seeking political power are corrupt. Their goal isn’t to serve the public, it’s to wield power. They have what amounts to personality disorders. This has to be recognised and countered as America’s  Founding Fathers tried to do. Unfortunately, as the virus has shown, they didn’t try hard enough. And that certainly applies in Australia and in most regions and countries now laughingly making up what used to be called the Free World.”

Our freedoms to speak freely, to assemble, to travel, to engage in the ordinary business of life are God-given, I’ve written. So they are, but rulers and governments can take them away, as they have throughout most of history. The people of Hong Kong are feeling it now, as are the women in Afghanistan, as did the East Germans before the wall came down, as did dissenters in revolutionary France.

But wait, there is no need for the past or foreign parts in order to tell the tale. Lest we forget: remember the pregnant lady in Ballarat handcuffed and hauled away for exercising her free speech via a Facebook post; the peaceful protestors in Melbourne bombarded with rubber bullets; and the middle-aged lady knocked to the ground and pepper sprayed in her face from close range by a male police officer, sworn to protect her, for daring to object to the rules made on high.

Normally, when selecting people for occupations which allow them to carry truncheons, guns and other means of exerting power, we recognise that bad eggs might apply. Police forces and armed forces are the prime examples of such occupations. Measures are put in place to spot and weed out thugs and psychopaths. Obviously, this is by no means foolproof, as the police thuggery in Victoria showed. Nevertheless, society is aware of the problem. It’s about time we all started to be aware of the much greater problem of dysfunctionality among politicians. And, accordingly, supported new iron-clad constitutional restraints on their power.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/does-president-biden-know-whats-going-on-in-his-own-administration/

Vanity Fair, December 23:

On October 22, a group of COVID-19 testing experts joined a Zoom call with officials from the Biden administration and presented a strategy for overhauling America’s approach to testing.

The 10-page plan, which Vanity Fair has obtained, would enable the U.S. to finally do what many other countries had already done: Put rapid at-home COVID-19 testing into the hands of average citizens, allowing them to screen themselves in real time and thereby help reduce transmission. The plan called for an estimated 732 million tests per month, a number that would require a major ramp-up of manufacturing capacity. It also recommended, right on the first page, a nationwide “Testing Surge to Prevent Holiday COVID Surge.”

The antigen tests at the center of the plan can detect the virus when patients are at their most contagious.

Three days after the meeting, on October 25, the COVID-19 testing experts—who hailed from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, the COVID Collaborative, and several other organizations—received a back channel communication from a White House official. Their big, bold idea for free home tests for all Americans to avoid a holiday surge, they were told, was dead. That day, the administration instead announced an initiative to move rapid home tests more swiftly through the FDA’s regulatory approval process.

The rapid-test push, in particular, seems to have bumped up against the peculiar challenges of fighting COVID-19 in the 21st-century United States. Difficulties include a regulatory gauntlet intent on vetting devices for exquisite sensitivity, rather than public-health utility; a medical fiefdom in which doctors tend to view patient test results as theirs alone to convey; and a policy suspicion, however inchoate, that too many rapid tests might somehow signal to wary Americans that they could test their way through the pandemic and skip vaccinations altogether. “It’s undeniable that [the administration] took a vaccine-only approach,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a vocal advocate for rapid testing who attended the October White House meeting. The U.S. government “didn’t support the notion of testing as a proper mitigation tool.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cdcs-sudden-change-in-quarantine-guidance-exposes-arbitrary-nature-of-covid-policy/

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just halved the recommended quarantine period for individuals who test positive for Covid and also reduced the time period for those who have been exposed.

In a statement, CDC said, “CDC is shortening the recommended time for isolation from 10 days for people with COVID-19 to 5 days, if asymptomatic, followed by 5 days of wearing a mask when around others. The change is motivated by science demonstrating that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness, generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after.”

There are a few ways to look at this change. One idea — the least believable — is that our scientific understanding of Covid has changed so dramatically in recent days that it prompted this change. The other possibility is that it was an arbitrary standard to begin with, derived out of “an abundance of caution” that was never firmly supported by science. It’s become simply too inconvenient now that Omicron is ripping through the professional class.

Anthony Fauci’s comments on CNN point toward the second explanation.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/587441-biden-should-resolve-to-cease-the-red-queen-justice

For most of us, New Year resolutions are the ultimate exercise of hope over experience, a type of virtue signaling to ourselves in the hope that this year it might actually work. For politicians, it is the same …  just without the hope. With the start of 2022 President Biden will lead the nation in celebrations and reflections. He could truly turn over a new leaf with one resolution: to stop declaring the guilt or innocence of people before they are actually investigated or tried.

History has shown that politicians are rarely late to a hanging or a stoning. From the Dreyfus Affair to Leo Frank, the Scottsboro Boys to the Duke Lacrosse team, there is nothing more binding with the public than to join in expressions of disgust or anger. The difference between a politician and a statesman is that the former demands a result while the latter demands a process from the justice system.

Even before winning the White House, Biden refused to wait for the actual facts before reaching a popular conclusion. For example, after the protests in Lafayette Park in 2020, Biden repeated the now debunked claim that the park was cleared with tear gas to enable a photo op for President Trump. From the outset, there was ample evidence undermining that claim, but neither Biden nor many in the media waited for the investigation to establish the facts. (Later, the Justice Department’s inspector general disproved the claim).

Once in office, President Biden continued that “sentence first, verdict afterwards” habit by making comments that conveyed what he wanted to see happen on legal decisions to be made from agencies. Despite being told that it would be clearly unconstitutional, Biden called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to renew a nationwide moratorium on the eviction of renters.

Within days of the shootings in Kenosha, Wis., then-presidential candidate Joe Biden had strongly implied that Kyle Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist” despite no evidence supporting that claim. Even after many claims about Rittenhouse were debunked and the jury acquitted Rittenhouse of all charges, Biden stated publicly that the verdict left “many Americans feeling angry and concerned, myself included.”

However, Biden’s Red Queen justice approach was most alarming with regards to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents who were falsely accused of “whipping” undocumented immigrants on the southern border. Before any investigation was actually started, Biden expressed anger at the agents and publicly pledged punishment: “It was horrible what — to see, as you saw — to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/12/28/dr-anthony-faucis-retirement-pay-will-exceed-350000-per-year–the-largest-in-us-federal-government-history/?sh=3932fc63609c

On Christmas Eve, Dr. Anthony Fauci turned 81. However, he is not retiring just yet. If he did, Fauci would reap the largest federal retirement package in U.S. history.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com estimate Dr. Fauci’s annual retirement would exceed $350,000. Thereafter, his pension and benefits would continue to increase through annual cost-of-living adjustments. Fauci has 55 years of service as a federal employee.

For the second year in a row, Fauci was the most highly compensated federal employee and out earned the president, four star generals, and roughly 4.3 million of his colleagues. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci earned $434,312 in 2020, the latest year available, up from $417,608 in 2019.

Fauci is currently the Chief Medical Advisor to the President. However, his big salary boost came in 2004 under the George W. Bush Administration (as we reported earlier at Forbes) when Fauci received a “permanent pay adjustment” for his biodefense work. In January 2000, Fauci was also appointed to the Ready Reserve Corps, a corps of “officers on full-time extended active duty.”

$340,000-$350,000 each year in federal retirement payments

Federal employees with Fauci’s length of service can retire to earn “80 percent of [their] high-3 average salary, plus credit for [their] sick leave,” according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

In November, we filed a federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to determine Dr. Fauci’s currently unpublished 2021 salary, job description, royalties, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and employment contract. The case moved quickly and the federal judge ordered production starting on February 1, 2022.

So, at this point, we can use only the last three published years of his salary — 2018: $399,625; 2019: $417,608; and 2020: $434,312 — to calculate his potential retirement earnings.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/how-we-changed-our-minds-in-2021?token=

In the waning days of 2021, or year two of the pandemic, or year zero, depending on how you count, the stakes of changing your mind can feel insurmountable. And of course.

Because the personal has become political, and because politics has swallowed everything, to change is to risk betrayal: of your people, your culture, your tribe. It is to make yourself suspicious. If you change your mind on something, can you still sit with those friends in the endless high school cafeteria that is modern life? Often, the answer is no. 

So it should come as no surprise that everywhere you look, people are digging in. It can feel safer to plug your ears to new information. It can feel comforting to cover your eyes to the terrible outcome of an idea you once embraced as beautiful.

I get it. 

A year ago, I still believed very much that the best use of my energy was to try to work to shore up the old institutions from the inside. I was wrong. My readers know: This newsletter would not exist if I hadn’t changed my mind.  

And once I changed my mind, once I stopped trying to repair a decayed thing from within and set out to build something new, I was suddenly waking up peppy at 5 a.m., no alarm needed. I think that’s because changing your mind is a hopeful act. It means you think there’s a better path forward. It means you’re not done becoming.

As we approach the new year—a time of promises to change; of commitments to resolve something big or something small—I asked people I admire how they have changed their minds in the past year.

We heard so many good answers that we’re running them over the next two days.

Their answers range from quite deep (Celtics player Enes Kanter changed his last name to “Freedom”) to the seemingly small (Leandra Medine, who we’ll publish tomorrow, embraced Birkenstocks and brown suede).

What these writers share is humility. To change is to admit we’re fallible, fumbling along, and that still we reach. It’s to be hopeful and human and alive. — BW