RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.b;ogspot.com

In 1863, on a cool, sunny November day in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four months after the Battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln gave a four-minute address. In it he reminded the audience: “Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The freedom we experience in this 233-year-old experiment, which is the United States, is based upon the individual citizen being the ultimate source of power, expressed through their representatives in municipalities, states and Washington, D.C. Granted, in times of emergency, presidents and governors have assumed exceptional powers, as did Lincoln when he signed the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863. Nevertheless, fundamental to our democracy is a belief that the people have a greater understanding of their self-interests than do the politicians, bureaucrats and experts who operate the machinery of government. It is, collectively, the wisdom of the people that combine to produce the political strength of our communities, states and nation.

All elections are important and as usual we are being told that the current one is critical, because the two sides are so far apart in how they define individual freedom and in their visions for the future. Democrats, too often, believe that government bureaucrats and “experts” can better decide what people should do than individuals themselves: lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, what courses should be taught children in public schools, what forms of energy we should consume, and what opinions should be allowed on social media. Republicans, in general, believe that people make wise choices when offered alternatives: to mask or not; to take a vaccine or not; to have their children learn Critical Race Theory or not; to buy a hybrid, a gas-guzzler or an electric vehicle. They want options in school choice and be able to weigh alternatives.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/how-to-save-science-from-covid-politics?token=e

Scientific knowledge is supposed to accumulate. We know more than our ancestors; our descendants will know far more than us. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, that building process was severely disrupted.

Federal agencies and their officials have claimed to speak on behalf of science when trying to persuade the public about policies for which there is little or no scientific support. This ham-handedness—and especially the telling of “noble lies”—has gravely undermined public trust. So has the hypocrisy of our elites. Look no further than the Super Bowl, at which celebrities and politicians had fun mask-free, while the following day children in Los Angeles were forced to don masks for school.

The upshot is that science and public health have become political. We now face the very real danger that instead of a shared method to understand the world, science will split into branches of our political parties, each a cudgel of Team Red and Team Blue.

We cannot let that happen.

Thanks to protective vaccines, a huge number of Americans with natural immunity, and a less lethal strain of the disease, now is the time to talk about how to undo the grave damage that has been done. To avoid similar pitfalls when we are faced with the next public health emergency—and to rectify the mistakes that are still unfolding—here are ten crucial lessons:

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2022/02/16/john-durham-almost-the-m

No one can ever claim that the notion of Trump-Russia collusion and the Mueller investigation were downplayed or ignored by the press. It was the opposite. The story was enormous and incessant.

Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center found that from Jan. 20, 2017, through July 20, 2019, the evening newscasts at ABC, CBS and NBC alone devoted an astounding 2,634 minutes to the Trump-Russia narrative.

On Feb. 12, the conservative media reported a “bombshell.” Well, the term “bombshell” is almost copyrighted as a journalism term for “Republican scandal deepener.”

Special counsel John Durham, tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s probe into Donald Trump and Russia, reported a client for Hillary Clinton’s law firm, Perkins Coie, was monitoring internet traffic at Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building and the Executive Office of the President. They wanted information to sell a “narrative” of Trump-Russia collusion.

ABC, CBS and NBC coverage? None. Other networks and major newspapers balked. Then they tiptoed in to deny it meant anything.

From the beginning, liberal partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff have trashed Durham’s probe as “tainted” by Trump’s desires for an investigation. On ABC in 2019, Schiff denounced it as automatically “illegitimate” because “when you win an election, you don’t seek to just prosecute the losing side, but this is what Bill Barr is seeking to do.”

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/producer-prices-inflation-january-2022

Wholesale prices accelerated again in January as strong consumer demand and pandemic-related supply chain snarls continued to fuel the highest inflation in decades.

The Labor Department said Tuesday that its producer price index, which measures inflation at the wholesale level before it reaches consumers, surged 9.7% in January from the year-ago period, slightly below the 12-year high of 9.8% notched in November and December. But in an unexpected turn, prices rose 1% in January on a monthly basis – well above the revised gain of 0.4% in December.

Economists surveyed by Refinitiv expected producer inflation to rise by 9.1% on an annual basis and 0.5% from the previous month.

Core inflation at the wholesale level, which excludes the more volatile measurements of food and energy, increased 0.9% for the month, well above the 0.4% estimate. Over the past 12 months, core prices were up 6.9% – nearly matching the record level hit in 2021.

INFLATION PROBABLY COSTING MOST AMERICANS AN EXTRA $276 A MONTH

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/15/new-durham-filing-clears-the-path-for-more-indictments-in-clinton-financed-russia-hoax/

The story was bizarre, confusing to the point of incoherence, but nevertheless added to a growing constellation of Trump/Russia collusion stories that called into question Trump’s independence as a candidate. In the closing days of the 2016 election, Slate published two articles by Franklin Foer purporting to expose a channel of communication between the Trump campaign and Russia-based Alfa Bank. 

According to the Foer articles, a group of “concerned scientists,” set to work investigating whether Russia launched a cyberattack on the Republican Party like the one that reportedly struck the Democratic National Committee in late 2015 or early 2016. The concerned scientists operated under the pseudonym, “Tea Leaves,” in part to protect their “relationship with the networks and banks that employ [one of the “scientists”] to sift their data.” The article alleged, “the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence.”

In September, Special Counsel John H. Durham signed an indictment charging Michael A. Sussmann, a former Perkins Coie attorney, with lying to the FBI while promoting the Alfa Bank smear. Sussmann denied having an interest in the story when in fact he was directly working on Clinton’s Trump/Russia collusion hoax. 

Contrary to the Slate stories, the Tea Leaves “scientists” were not disinterested, nonpartisan patriots analyzing publicly available data. One of these “scientists,” identified by Durham as “Tech Executive-1,” “exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” including data obtained, “in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.”