RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-white-house-art-of-furious-persuasion-psaki-manchin-build-back-better-no-statement-11639947001?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The progressive whiz kids who run President Biden’s White House don’t have much sense of self-restraint—or common political sense. Their response on Sunday to Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition to Build Back Better was to accuse him of bad faith while saying they’ll beat him up until he changes his mind.

Press secretary Jen Psaki issued a blistering statement saying Mr. Manchin’s comments on Fox News Sunday “are at odds with his discussions this week with the President, with White House staff, and with his own public utterances.” We can’t speak for his private White House talks, but Mr. Manchin’s public comments have been consistent for months. On Sunday he finally said no.

Ms. Psaki charged ahead in furious disregard: “Just as Senator Manchin reversed his position on Build Back Better this morning, we will continue to press him to see if he will reverse his position yet again, to honor his prior commitments and be true to his word.”

Maybe Mr. Biden’s masters of the universe know something about the art of persuasion that we don’t. But we doubt calling a Senator a liar is going to bring him around.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2021/12/18/welcome-to-2032-a-merged-physicaldigital-world/?sh=5b5d526d5e12

We are approaching 2022 and rather than ponder the immediate future, I want to explore what may beckon in the ecosystem of disruptive technologies a decade from now. We are in the initial stages of an era of rapid and technological change that will witness regeneration of body parts, new cures for diseases, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, human/computer interface, autonomous vehicles, advanced robotics, flying cars, quantum computing, and connected smart cities. Exciting times may be ahead.

By 2032, it will be logical to assume that the world will be amid a digital and physical transformation beyond our expectations. It is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of scientific and technological advancements that will change how we live and interact.

What should we expect in the coming decade as we begin 2022? While there are many potential paradigms changing technological influences that will impact the future, let us explore three specific categories of future transformation: cognitive computing, health and medicine, and autonomous everything.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/18/adam-schiffs-delusion/

Barbara Broccoli, a producer and owner of the rights to the James Bond franchise, recently entertained the implausible idea that Bond could be non-binary. I’d like to recommend a screenwriter to her: Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)

Not only was pre-Congress Schiff an unsuccessful screenwriter, but as a Congress-pronoun, Schiff has a proven track record of inventing implausible fiction that ends in failure.

If Schiff doesn’t write the script, he could at least market it, as he did with the Trump-Russia collusion lie. Arguably, no Democrat pushed the fictional Trump-Russia collusion narrative more vigorously than Adam Schiff.

In February of 2018 Schiff told reporters that there was “ample evidence in the public domain of collusion if you’re willing to see it.” This collusion was so obvious that the Democrats had to hire special counsel Robert Mueller to find it.

Two years and $32 million from the taxpayers later, Mueller concluded that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Trump-Russia collusion couldn’t be found because Trump-Russia collusion never happened.

Still, a month after Mueller’s conclusion, Schiff went on ABC’s “This Week” and repeated his lie that there was “ample evidence of collusion in plain sight.” Like a madman, Schiff refused to accept reality, and instead repeated the failed, unconvincing story he had spent years rehearsing in his own deranged mind.

While Schiff is both a liar and fraud, he is doggedly persistent–as lunatics often are.  That’s why, Schiff’s case, persistence is not a virtue, but rather a vice.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-manchin-may-have-just-killed-transformational-liberalism-for-a-decade/

Senator Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) says he’s done with President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. And if saying so on Fox News wasn’t enough, he added an explanation point in a statement released shortly after his appearance, in which he declared: “My Democratic colleagues in Washington are determined to dramatically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country even more vulnerable to the threats we face. I cannot take that risk.”

It is, of course, possible that once they stare into the abyss of defeat, Biden and Democrats may decide to finally cave and give Manchin everything he wants. For instance, he has indicated a willingness to vote for up to $1.75 trillion in spending, and said that he’s more open to picking one priority and fully funding it for a decade rather than starting lots of new programs, funding them for a few years, and hoping they get renewed. So there’s some reason for conservatives to keep the champagne on ice.

But realistically, this approach would require blowing up the bill that had been carefully negotiated for months just to squeak through the House, and getting progressives to swallow whatever Manchin wants whole. The expanded child tax credit that has resulted in monthly payments to families will expire at the end of the year. So trying to pass it next year — which would require every penny of the bill if fully paid for over a decade — would essentially mean creating a new program rather than extending one that’s already on the books.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/david-solway-2/2021/12/17/what-is-evil-n1542472

Everywhere we turn these days we see evil in action. It was always thus, but in the current social, political, and medical environment it seems especially prominent. We observe a pandemic that has caused global and historically immense damage and devastation, a cataclysm of biblical proportions. We see governments, official agencies, and corporate consortiums that have fed the public with lies and misinformation as to the origins, causes, and cures of the plague. We witness elections that have been rigged and stolen and note corruption in high places that seems unprecedented. We see wars that have been fought for no useful purposes and thoughtless surrenders that only accentuated their stupidity. We experience legislation in democratic countries that remind one of the practices of totalitarian regimes. We see honest people and reputable professionals censored by monopoly media and digital platforms and deprived of their livelihoods. We face mobs of co-opted citizens, fearful and manic, who resemble the brainwashed masses in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Every day there are a plethora of new reports of dissimulation, atrocity, depravity, crime, and social breakdown that have become standard fare. The News changes from day to day and even within the same day, and yet it is almost always the same. “Hot button” is cold coffee and “topical” differs only in particulars, remaining generic and fundamentally indistinguishable, part of a ditto realm. We are captive, as Canada’s premier columnist Rex Murphy writes, to “the morbid isms of our time” of “confected scandal and demonstrations” that characterize “the imperial reach of this timid and repressive age.”

In a world torn asunder by violence, cruelty, and corruption, the question of evil, addressed by philosophers and theologians for millennia, is unavoidable. We tend to use the word indiscriminately, as a catch-all phrase and verbal convenience devoid of substantive content and analytic rigor. Is what we call “evil” a concept of the human mind, a descriptive term that applies to impulses, acts, and events that issue in various forms of suffering in both the world of man and the world of nature? Life in nature, including predatory disease, is essentially predicated on the digestive tract—“this munching universe,” as Lawrence Durrell called it. Death is the operative principle. Life in the human world is a theater of greed, deception, hatred, and murder recognized by the Ten Commandments, a list of axioms that have proven largely unable to counteract the bloodbath of history and the pathological compulsions of the individual psyche.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-p-goldman/2021/12/18/trumps-alleged-anti-semitism-n1542666

“There’s people in this country that are Jewish [who] no longer love Israel. I’ll tell you the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews of this country. It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress, and today I think it’s the exact opposite. And I think [former President Barack] Obama and [President Joe] Biden did that.

“And yet in the election, they still get a lot of votes from Jewish people, which tells you that the Jewish people—and I’ve said this for a long time—the Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel. I mean, you look at The New York Times, The New York Times hates Israel. Hates them. And they’re Jewish people who run The New York Times, I mean the Sulzberger family.”

The line about “absolute power over Congress” is cringeworthy. Yes, it is an anti-Semitic trope. Trump fits the canonical definition of a philo-Semite (an anti-Semite who likes Jews). He harbors some anti-Semitic prejudices about the extent of Jewish power. But he’s still a friend of the Jewish people and of the State of Israel. Before the 2016 election, an Israeli politician asked me what I thought of Trump (full disclosure: I worked for Ted Cruz in 2016). I said, “Imagine if Hitler had liked Jews!” I published that malicious remark. Nonetheless, I voted for Trump twice and defended him against the Deep State conspiracy to unseat him. There are anti-Semites and anti-Semites, but I’ll get to that.

As my friend Caroline Glick writes in Israel Hayom:

Trump was the most pro-Israel president in history. None of his predecessors, (and certainly not his successor President Joe Biden), come close….[he]stopped US financial support for the Palestinian Authority and shut down the PLO’s representative office in Washington, DC because Abbas funds and incites terrorism.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/12/19/breaking-joe-manchin-just-killed-the-build-back-better-act-n1542721

After months of negotiations failed to achieve an adequate compromise, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) declared on Sunday that there’s no way he can support Joe Biden’s big government socialist agenda, known as the Build Back Better Act.

Manchin said on Fox News Sunday that he worked hard to reach an acceptable compromise.

According to Manchin, the legislation being pursued by Democrats was just too much on top of historic inflation, the national debt, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’ve done everything humanly possible,” he said. “When you have these things coming at you the way they are right now … I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation.”

“This is a no,” he added. “I have tried everything I know to do.”

With the U.S. Senate split 50-50, Joe Biden needed every single Democrat to back the legislation. With Joe Manchin officially declaring he cannot support the bill, The Build Back Better Act is, at least for now, dead.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/12/19/fauci-orchestrated-quick-and-devastating-takedown-of-anti-lockdown-experts-n1542717

New emails released by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that last year, outgoing National Institutes of Health Dir. Dr. Francis Collins instructed Dr. Anthony Fauci to carry out a “quick and devastating” takedown of The Great Barrington Declaration, a document authored by experts who advocated for herd immunity to stop the pandemic, and “focused protection” for the most vulnerable populations over universal lockdowns.

According to the declaration, “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health” that will lead to “greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. ”

“Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed,” states the declaration.

“As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls,” the declaration continues. “We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity … Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”

This, it seems, was unacceptable to Collins and Fauci.