RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/federal-court-blocks-biden-vaccine-mandate-lloyd-billingsley/

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Saturday blocked a Biden vaccine mandate that would have forced private companies with more than 100 employees to get workers vaccinated, submit to weekly tests, or face steep fines. 

Due to start on January 4 and affecting more than 80 million workers, the mandate was to be enforced through the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The appeal court cited “grave statutory and constitutional issues” with the Biden plan, which drew lawsuits from, among others, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton.

“WE WON,” Paxton tweeted after Saturday’s ruling. “The fight is not over and I will never stop resisting this Admin’s unconstitutional overreach!” Paxton told reporters the ruling “gives people hope that they aren’t going to lose their jobs and the president isn’t going to be able to ruin people’s careers and make their lives more difficult.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted. “Emergency hearings will take place soon. We will have our day in court to strike down Biden’s unconstitutional abuse of authority.”

A full 26 states had filed suit against the Biden mandate. Louisiana attorney general Jeff Landry called it “unlawful overreach,” adding that the administration “will not impose medical procedures on the American people without the checks and balances afforded by our Constitution.” For West Virginia attorney general Patrick Morrisey the ruling was “good news” and “Biden’s vaccine mandates are unlawful, unconstitutional and just wrong!”

Companies opposing the Biden mandate included the Daily Wire news website. As co-founder and  CEO Jeremy Boreing explained, “forcing Americans to choose between their livelihoods and their freedom is a grotesque abuse of power and we won’t be a party to it. We will not incur the cost of implementing this testing regime. We will not incur the liability of inserting ourselves into the private health decisions and information of our employees. Our company was founded to stand against tyranny, and we will.”

Biden charged that “the virus will not go away by itself, or because we wish it away. We have to act.” It had apparently escaped the Delaware Democrat’s notice that the vaccines currently being imposed have not exactly been trouble-free. For example, Finland, Sweden and Norway have paused the use of the Moderna vaccine, citing a risk of myocarditis.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/bidens_poll_numbers_continue_to_collapse.html

Thanks to relentless mainstream media propaganda, Joe Biden entered the Oval office with very good poll numbers. Despite the contentious campaign season and the even more contentious election, Americans were willing to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, with 57% of them expressing approval for him in the first weeks of his presidency. Since then, he’s had nowhere to go but down. The latest poll puts his approval at 38% and the slide shows no signs of stopping.

The most recent presidential approval poll comes from USA TODAY/Suffolk University and was taken between Wednesday and Friday last week. That means it caught the responses to the elections on Tuesday, including the way Virginia, which easily gave its Electoral College votes to Biden in 2020, has now turned red, with a Republican Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and State House.

USA TODAY sums up the most recent poll results:

A year before the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans hold a clear lead on the congressional ballot as President Joe Biden’s approval rating sinks to a new low of 38%.

A USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, taken Wednesday through Friday, found that Biden’s support cratered among the independent voters who delivered his margin of victory over President Donald Trump one year ago.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/rage-against-reality-bruce-bawer/

The other day, for the first time since the pandemic began, I was in a properly jam-packed watering hole. The establishment in question was my old Oslo hangout, a largish and rather legendary gay bar called London Pub. I was alone – in fact I seemed to be the only person who was alone in the whole place – and so I just sat there with my $12 glass of wine (welcome to Norway!) and, after a year and a half of living mostly like a hermit, took in the glorious sight of fellow human beings, maskless, enjoying one another’s company.

The patrons could hardly have been more varied, ranging from twenty-somethings to octogenarians, from tiny Asians to doorway-tall Norwegians, from rail-thin to massively obese. The attire was all over the place, from black tie to Lederhosen (Oktoberfest was underway), and there were more blacks than there would have been ten years ago, when I last lived in Oslo. And there was, as always, a sprinkling of women – even, for the first time in my experience, among the staff.

And what struck me was how mellow it all was. There was no tension in the air. Everybody was having a good time together.

My friend Frank, a straight American who used to tend bar at London Pub, wrote on Facebook just the other day that it’s better to work in a gay bar than a straight bar, because you never have to break up fights. A bit of an exaggeration, maybe – but just a bit.

I’ve always opposed the term “gay community,” because it rarely feels like a community. Some gay bars of my acquaintance have guys working the door who turn away the old and the unlovely.

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/11/07/fbi-raids-project-veritas-over-a-missing-biden-diary/

There is a curious story out this weekend on reported FBI raids of writers or associates of Project Veritas, the conservative investigative journalism outfit. Project Veritas has been described variously as “Gonzo” or “guerilla” journalism and some insist it is more of a political than a press organization. However, it fits the definition of journalism, in my view, and that makes the raids troubling. All the more troubling is the cause: the missing diary of President Biden’s daughter Ashley. [Update: The FBI reportedly also raided O’Keefe’s home]

The New York Times reported that the FBI searched two locations in New York in search of the “stolen” diary that went missing days before the 2020 presidential election. Project founder James O’Keefe questioned how the Times received the story within an hour of the first raid.

O’Keefe says that the organization actually received a tip that the diary was abandoned in a room, an allegation that harkened back to the abandoned laptop of Hunter Biden.  However, Ashley reportedly insisted it was stolen.

The use of the FBI is also reminiscent of the still unexplained use of the FBI when Joe Biden was Vice President to search for a gun owned by Hunter Biden that was discarded behind a restaurant.

Project Veritas decided not to run the story because it could not verify that the diary belonged to Biden. (The FBI may have just offered that confirmation). Instead, it alerted the police, according to O’Keefe: “Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner. We never published it.”

So why the raids?  Since when does the FBI conducted raids over missing diaries?

The FBI can cite the interstate elements of the alleged theft as raising a federal crime. However, what is the crime? It is not clear if they are suggesting that the responsible parties were seeking to sell the diary or that there was some national security element (which would be bizarre since Biden’s daughter was writing before her father ever became president).

https://brownstone.org/author/vinay-prasad/

Vinay Prasad MD MPH is a hematologist-oncologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. He runs the VKPrasad lab at UCSF, which studies cancer drugs, health policy, clinical trials and better decision making. He is author of over 300 academic articles, and the books Ending Medical Reversal (2015), and Malignant (2020).

I recently came across two tweets that caught my eye.

Here is the first one from the CDC director:

And here is the second one, from a couple months back:

Together they got me thinking. What do they have in common? What do they tell us about the state of the public communication of science?

Let’s start with the one by Dr. Walensky. I don’t know how to put this politely, but it is a lie, and a truly unbelievable one at that.

First, of all, if it were true, it would mean that masking was more effective that the J&J vaccine (implausible). Second of all, we have actual cluster RCT data from Bangladesh showing a 11% (relative risk reduction). This occurred in a massive trial where masks were provided for free and encouraged. Even here, only surgical masks worked, and cloth did not, and had no where near this effect size. The idea that masks could reduce the chance of infection by 80% is simply untrue, implausible, and cannot be supported by any reliable data.