RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/opec-gives-biden-and-u-s-consumers-the-middle-finger/

The U.S. expected bad news from the OPEC+ meeting, but the decision to cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day is even worse than expected.

Today’s Morning Jolt spotlights reports that the Biden administration is “panicking” — their reporter’s words, not mine! — that OPEC is about to enact a production cut that will send the price of oil soaring even further. At the beginning of the week, the fear was that OPEC+ was considering a cut of more than 1 million barrels a day.

It is time to elevate the panic level:

The OPEC+ alliance announced it will cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day, the oil cartel and its allies announced Wednesday, which may set the cost of gas rising again after a year of tumultuous prices at the pump.

In a further humiliation for the administration, this move comes after a “full-court press” from the administration against OPEC+ countries, warning them not to cut production:

Amos Hochstein, Biden’s top energy envoy, has played a leading role in the lobbying effort, which has been far more extensive than previously reported amid extreme concern in the White House over the potential cut. Hochstein, along with top national security official Brett McGurk and the administration’s special envoy to Yemen Tim Lenderking, traveled to Jeddah late last month to discuss a range of energy and security issues as a follow up to Biden’s high-profile visit to Saudi Arabia in July. . . .

The White House has asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to make the case personally to some Gulf state finance ministers, including from Kuwait and the UAE, and try to convince them that a production cut would be extremely damaging to the global economy.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/its-time-to-mandate-treatment-of?utm_source=email

What happens when we leave people with psychosis to their demons? Ask the families of Alison Russo-Elling, Nathaniel Rivers, and Michelle Go.

Last Friday in Queens, New York, Peter Zisopoulos, 34 years-old, described by his neighbors as an “odd, quiet loner,” suddenly set upon Lt. Alison Russo-Elling, 61, a veteran paramedic walking back to her station after lunch. He knocked her down then stabbed her to death in a frenzy. He is now being held at the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, awaiting clearance from doctors that he is stable enough to face arraignment on murder charges. Zisopoulos, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was hospitalized in 2018 after allegedly making anti-Asian threats.

This attack is eerily like the one on that took place the afternoon of July 21, in the Bronx, when Nathaniel Rivers, 35, and his wife, the parents of a young son, were sitting in their car near their home, sharing a pizza, waiting for the rain to pass. 

Suddenly, 19-year-old Franklin Mesa came over to Rivers’ car window in an agitated state.Words were exchanged, briefly, before Mesa thrust a knife into Rivers’ chest. Rivers’ wife got out of the car, picked up a pry bar and clobbered Mesa. But it was too late: Mesa had mortally injured Rivers, who died a few minutes later.

Mesa, who has been charged with Rivers’ murder, is said by his family to have schizophrenia. He was well known in the neighborhood for “hostile, aggressive” encounters. Police said he was arrested last year for twice punching somebody in the face. Mesa reportedly once tried to prevent a young mother from getting on a bus.

And yet it appears that nobody made sure Mesa was taking his psychiatric medicine, which his sister said he had been on since he was 15. Had Mesa been properly medicated, Rivers almost certainly would still be alive today.

These horrifying deaths rekindle the national debate over how to prevent violence by the seriously mentally ill. Between 2015 and 2018, 911 calls reporting emotionally disturbed people have jumped by nearly 25 percent in New York City. The share of homeless people in New York with serious mental illness, usually defined as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, has most recently been estimated at 17 percent.

Consider the case of Martial Simon, a 61 year-old mentally ill homeless man, who early this year confessed to pushing 40 year-old Michelle Go onto the subway tracks, where she was killed by an oncoming train. Go was a manager at Deloitte who was lauded for her extensive volunteer work with struggling New Yorkers, including the homeless. Simon has spent decades bouncing between jails and hospitals. Declared mentally unfit to stand trial for the murder of Go, Martial is now being held at a psychiatric facility. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hillary-is-still-spreading-trump-putin-conspiracy-theories/

The Russian collusion hoax has been definitively discredited, but Hillary Clinton clings to it nonetheless, apparently hoping that the anti-Russian sentiment that the invasion of Ukraine has stirred up will help propel her into the White House in 2024. But the Left’s war with reality is leading Hillary, along with many other prominent Leftists, into increasing absurdities, and clinging to the Russia hoax only compounds the problem, making Hillary seem increasingly like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, the aging onetime film star who hasn’t realized that the glory has departed and that there will be no triumphant return to the bright lights.

At a symposium of sycophants at Georgetown University on Thursday, Hillary advanced the fanciful notion that everyone’s favorite bête noire, Vladimir Putin, was rubbing his hands in glee and waiting for Donald Trump’s reelection in 2020 to implement his plan to invade Ukraine. “He got his dreams fulfilled when Trump was elected” in 2016, said Hillary for what must be the twenty-thousandth time. “He, you know, decided that he didn’t want to face me as president,” she added. “So he did all the things we now know he did that are well cataloged.” Well refuted, also.

But as if aware that we have heard that song before, Hillary was also ready with some new material, too. “And I believe that if Trump had been reelected, Putin would have waited for Trump to do what he said he was intending to do, which was to pull us out of NATO.” That would have played right into Putin’s fiendish plans, you see. Hillary continued: “And that would have created such a vacuum that invading Ukraine, which he thought was going to be easy anyway, would be a fait accompli.”

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2022/10/affiramtive-action-democracy-the-supreme-court

On the consequences of racial preferences.

We live, allegedly, in a democracy of sorts. While it is not a plebiscitary democracy, in which every issue is put directly to the people, but rather a representative democracy, it is nonetheless supposed to be a system in which things that the populace wants generally get done, and in which things that the populace doesn’t want done aren’t. It has probably not escaped your notice that this is not a particularly accurate description of our society today.

In fact, one of the most striking things today is the extent to which things that are popular with the political class, but unpopular with the mass of voters, somehow become national priorities nonetheless. By large margins voters in America (and pretty much every other country) are opposed to mass immigration; elites, on the other hand, are very much in favor. Likewise, affirmative action, whether in employment, judicial appointments, or college admissions, is very unpopular, and yet it is the norm today, though sometimes thinly disguised. And, of course, the trans-rights movement, thanks to which female athletes have to compete against biological males, has been very much a top-down phenomenon, not one that arose because the masses demanded it.

Well, the masses are not always right, though I would have thought that the point of our system of government was to ensure, within constitutional limits, that they generally get what they want and are spared things they dislike. As noted, that’s not the case. But why?

In short, the source is what’s known as a principal/agent problem. In a representative democracy, governing isn’t done by the people, who in our system are the principals, but rather by their agents: presidents, members of Congress, judges, and, of course, the vast unelected bureaucracy. But these agents tend to do what they want, rather than what their principals desire.

In the field of corporate finance, this is known as the separation of ownership from control. In a sole proprietorship, the owner also controls the business. In a corporation, not so much. Shareholders own the company, but management effectively controls it. Management is supposed to act entirely and exclusively for shareholders’ benefit, not its own, but in practice managers are often more concerned with their own welfare than with increasing shareholder wealth. In theory, the board of directors, elected by shareholders, ensures that management does what it is supposed to do. In actuality, boards are more likely to be an arm of management than a fierce protector of shareholders. So you get fat salaries and limited consequences for failure, along with freedom for management to subordinate profit to posturing that gains managers social points in their own milieu.