RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/what_is_an_america_that_holds_prisoners_indefinitely_without_charging_them.html

The U.S. is facing a serious constitutional crisis over the handling of the cases of defendants in the Jan. 6 so-called “insurrection” in Washington, D.C. to protest the presidential election modus operandi and the results.  Those being held for many months without a trial are being denied their habeas corpus rights under the U.S. Constitution and even dating back to English law hundreds of years before our Constitution was implemented.  Not only are they being incarcerated without having had a trial, but there is some evidence that they are being mistreated or are being held 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, which is a punishment accorded only the most dangerous criminals, such as serial killers and terrorists.

What are habeas corpus rights?  According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “[h]abeas corpus is a fundamental right in the Constitution that protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment.  Translated from Latin it means ‘show me the body.’  Habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument to safeguard individual freedom against arbitrary executive power.”  A citizen must be charged and cannot be held indefinitely.  A charge requires a trial, and, if found guilty in a trial, there is a sentence for a specific amount of time.

Even PolitiFact — hardly an unbiased fact-checker — relates, “The vast majority of defendants have been released from custody while awaiting trial, but some [my italics] held in jail have been kept in solitary confinement.”  The fact that exact numbers for how many are held in solitary confinement or for how long suggests to this writer evasion by the Washington, D.C. jail authorities.

Despite the attempt by outlets like PolitiFact to minimize the problem of solitary confinement, a number of GOP senators have voiced their concern about this problem, and even the ACLU — certainly not an outreach arm of the Republican Party — has become involved.  However, the Republican senators who are concerned do not have a specific number.  The lack of definitiveness in this area is alarming.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/the_sissy_generation.html

Just 70-80 years ago we had what was dubbed “The Greatest Generation” – the people who had fought and won World War II.  Now, just a couple of generations down the road, we have unconditionally surrendered to a disease with minuscule mortality (for the vast majority of the population), and which is to a large degree treatable. How did that happen?

Roll back to the first months of 2020, when we just learned about the sinister new virus which was killing people and for which we had neither vaccine nor cure. We were scared – in the 21st century, we don’t expect to encounter something to which our medicine has no answer. A lot of things about COVID-19 were unknown at the time, but one of the first confirmed pieces of information was that this virus spares children.

What great news! Whatever calamity befalls us, children are always our main concern. Now, when we know that they are safe, shouldn’t we, adults, breathe a big sigh of relief, return to normal life and let the doctors do what they always do: treat the sick, research for a cure, work on the vaccine? I can imagine that this would have happened a few decades ago, despite the (incorrect) perception that the mortality rate was maybe small, but still meaningful, a few percentage points. Yet the only developed country that behaved more or less like that was Sweden. The rest of mankind locked themselves up and essentially stopped living normal lives.

The word that we heard the most during this time was ‘safety.’ Coming to work is declared unsafe — sure, we can stop working, no big deal. Going to school is unsafe — cheer up, kids, you are staying home today — and next week, and then month after month after month. Wear your mask everywhere and stay at least 6 feet away (better 20) from everybody. Safety is king!

How did we end up here? As very often happens the course happened first gradually, then suddenly. The worship of safety began long ago and now it’s everywhere. Everything we buy and use, from lawnmowers to toasters to toothbrushes, undergoes elaborate safety checks and is accompanied by instructions for safe operation. And not only is it a legal requirement but, for many people, safety became the most important feature of any device. There is a commercial on TV promoting gutter guards.  A woman asks her husband: ‘Do you climb a ladder to clean the gutter?” “Yes.” “But it’s unsafe!” — enough said, everybody needs to get the damn thing.

Of course, nothing is wrong with being safe, and many things that we do toward that end are good and reasonable — like seat belts, and later airbags in cars. But more and more the idea of ‘being safe’ has morphed into ‘feeling safe’, so the natural desire for safety is now abused beyond recognition. In other times, the idea of banning a group of people from entering some location would be called ‘segregation’; today the leftist students who don’t want to be around anybody with different views demand ‘safe spaces.’ When a controversial speaker is invited to speak at a university, protesters wouldn’t say ‘we hate this guy’ (which would be the truth, but ‘hate’ is a loaded word nowadays, better not to use it); instead, they declare that such an event would make them ‘feel unsafe’.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/ama_becomes_a_shill_of_the_left.html

By now the left-wing agenda in schools is increasingly more evident. Incomprehensible writing of the lowest level is now the norm but with an additional twist — students in the nursing field now spout such ideas as demonstrated in the following:

Dear Professor, I do not understand [why] you took points off for using ‘their’ instead of his or hers.  I used that specific word because I am not just referring to my one gender, regardless of whether it relates to one individual or more than one. I have been told to avoid gender biases. As a result, I disagree with the number of points taken off because I chose not to use his or her, as I was not referring to just one gender.

But this is no surprise for anyone in the educational field today because according to the Left  “white language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards which give privilege to those students who embody those habits of white language already.”

Now the Left has co-opted the medical establishment. In the publication titled: Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts” put out by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the AAMC Center for Health Justice, science is essentially perverted.

In essence, it signals the death of scientific inquiry and serious thinking and ushers in a world where it is “critical to address all areas of marginalization and inequity due to sexism, class oppression, homophobia, xenophobia and ableism.”

According to the AMA, there is “outright resistance and denial that racism exists.”  To promote their left-wing agenda, the AMA asserts that “the field of equity, like all other scholarly domains, has developed specific norms that convey authenticity, precision and meaning.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/10/history-will-grind-out-the-truth/

“History will figure that out on its own.” That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  

In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab—and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself.  

Fauci offered arguments from authority by citing his own expertise, as well as that of “card-carrying” specialists. 

But in truth, there is little evidence that any animal species has been found infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus or a close relative that causes COVID-19 or a similar illness.  

Many federal health experts increasingly believe the virus was man-made. A number argue that it was likely a product of gain-of-function research that was funded in part by a U.S. government grant.  

Others concede that Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak—who was involved in gain-of-function research, often in cooperation with the Chinese—were not candid about the full extent of their ties to the Wuhan lab. But despite Chinese resistance to releasing pertinent data, history eventually will sort the truth out—as it does with most controversies of the moment.  

Five years ago, the New York Times, the Washington Post, most of the mainstream media, and the majority of the bipartisan Washington. D.C. political and government establishments insisted that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.  

In support of such conspiracy theories, they fixated on the so-called Steele dossier. It was a supposedly independent research effort detailing “proof” of Trump-Russian cooperation to rob Hillary Clinton of the election.  

That supposed evidence was the unspoken ground swell for a 22-month, $40-million special counsel investigation of Trump conducted by former FBI head Robert Mueller.  

For over 650 days, the country was consumed with “Russian collusion.” Cable news outlets, public television and radio pundits, along with high-ranking Democratic politicians, almost daily announced the impending end of the colluding Trump Administration. 

They peddled rumors of Trump’s supposed obscene activity in Moscow. They spun tales of mysterious meetings between Trump’s family and Russian operatives, and of Trump surrogates’ supposed trips to meet with Russian colluding officials.  

Christopher Steele, the architect of the “dossier,” had not been to Russia in decades. He was a rank partisan in the pay of the Clinton campaign—and for a time the FBI itself.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/can-people-keep-resisting-big-government-tyranny-bruce-thornton/

Last week voters in Virginia delivered a rebuke to the party of consolidated power and technocratic statism when a Republican political tyro defeated a deep-state Democrat in the election for governor. Like Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, the outcome of this victory signals a growing resistance to the Democrats’ overweening, unconstitutional interference in families, businesses, civil society, and state sovereignty. A message has been sent to the Biden administration, a portent of the greater backlash increasingly likely in next year’s midterm elections.

Yet tempering this optimism and faith in our Constitutional guardrails against tyranny is an ancient question, one at the heart of political philosophy for 2500 years: Do the non-elite, ordinary citizens have the capacity to govern? When government power exceeds its Constitutional bounds, will the people use their votes to rein it in? Or is the idea that the common people can govern as delusional as, to use Socrates’ analogy, the crew and passengers of a ship selecting a captain by a majority of their votes?

What happened in Virginia is one of those periodic reactions of voters to policies that are indifferent or hostile to their  beliefs and principles. Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe encapsulated this arrogant disdain for the people when he said during a debate, “I don’t think that parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” following his defense of an earlier veto of a bill while governor that would have given parents some oversight over sexually explicit books in the schools’ libraries. This statement became the emblem of the progressives’ overreach and technocratic disdain for parents.

And the pushback came not just in Virginia. In state and local elections from Pennsylvania to deep-blue Seattle, voters are standing athwart the progressive transformation of this country and yelling “Stop!” Even progressive flaks like The New York Times have warned that these Republican successes “are a grave marker of political peril,” and that the Dems need to return “to the moderate policies and values” that won in 2018 and 2020.