RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/exploiting-the-dizziness-of-freedom/

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an “independent” agency funded, staffed, and appointed by a federal agency, has recommended that all adults 64 years and younger be screened for anxiety. The task force has already recommended screening for children and teens from 8 to 18.

As Daniel Henninger writes in the Wall Street Journal,  “The ultimate pandemic is now life itself.” And the consequences of such a dubious policy is to further expand the power of the regulatory state at the price of our freedom.

Our inability to accept the “slings and arrows” not just of “outrageous fortune,” as Hamlet put it, but of everyday slights, worries, disappointments, and fears that necessarily follow from being imperfect humans in an imperfect world, has dangerous implications beyond weakening our characters. As nearly three years of the pandemic have shown, chronic anxiety creates a rationale for the technocratic nanny-state to expand its reach into our private and social lives, threatening our freedom and unalienable rights.

This recommendation by credentialed “experts” exposes several of the bad ideas that characterize the modern West. One of the worst is hubris of technocracy, the idea that a permanent nature of human beings and the tragic dimensions of human existence can be eliminated and utopia made real. Destructive passions and impulses that account for much of human misery require only technological or allegedly scientific intervention by “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin put it, to create “heaven on earth,” the perennial promise of Marxism and its various iterations like progressivism.

Such optimistic assumptions about human perfectibility have been going on for two centuries, despite the copious evidence against such presumptions––the persistence of massive state violence throughout the “Age of Enlightenment,” the industrialized carnage of both world wars, the grotesque evils of genocides and gulags, the brutality and indiscriminate destruction the Russians are currently inflicting on Ukraine, and the daily murder and mayhem, some of it sheer sadism, we can see in the streets of Democrat-controlled cities and on YouTube.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/doctor-anthony-faucis-parting-gift-nih-ecohealth-alliance-peter-daszak-coronavirus-research-11665002675?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

EcoHealth Alliance hasn’t been forthcoming about how it used National Institutes of Health grants for coronavirus research in China that may have resulted in the Covid-19 outbreak. Yet Anthony Fauci on his way to retirement this year is rewarding the outfit by giving it more money for . . . coronavirus research.

The NIH last month awarded EcoHealth Alliance a $653,392 grant to analyze “the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.” According to the NIH, the region has been identified “as a high risk for future emergence of novel coronaviruses and the potential site where SARS-CoV-2 first ‘spilled over’ from bats to people.”

Note how the NIH is promoting EcoHealth Alliance’s claim that Covid-19 emerged through a “spill over” from animals. Many scientists disagree and say the circumstantial and biological evidence suggest a lab leak. But this is problematic for EcoHealth Alliance, which worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on coronavirus lab experiments.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/06/under-bidenomics-a-soft-landing-for-economy-is-no-longer-possible/

The Democratic Party’s faithful are whistling past the graveyard, hoping with all their might we’ll avoid an economic slide. As a matter of general economics, we’re already in a recession. And it looks like things will soon get worse, not better.

“We hope we can have what they say, ‘a soft landing,’ a transition to a place where we don’t lose the gains that I ran to make in the first place for middle-class folks, being able to generate good-paying jobs and — expansion,” President Joe Biden told CBS’ 60 Minutes last month.

Good luck with that, Mr. President. Even members of your own party think it’s hogwash.

As economist Larry Summers, who advised both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said last week, a soft landing is “really quite unlikely.” We agree, as do most economists of our acquaintance.

Indeed, looking at the repeated economic policy mistakes made by Biden, or whoever now is really calling the shots in the White House, and the far-left Democrat-led Congress, it’s hard not to conclude that the economy’s set for a mighty fall.

Four trends stand out:

Stock and housing market declines. The stock market’s epic plunge has destroyed an estimated $11 trillion in wealth this year alone, while home prices, after peaking in June, have fallen sharply as interest rates jump above 6%. As home equity shrinks in a weakening housing market, consumers’ ability to borrow against their homes will also shrink

https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/05/disgraced-ecohealth-alliance-should-be-banished-to-wuhan-but-fauci-just-gave-it-millions-more-tax-dollars/

EcoHealth Alliance should have been disbanded two years ago, Peter Daszak should have been fired, and Anthony Fauci should be in exile.

EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak’s nonprofit that infamously funneled funds into the Wuhan Institute of Virology for the bat-based coronaviruses research that is suspected of starting the Covid-19 pandemic, has just been awarded another grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

And this new grant is once again slated for bat-based coronavirus research. The grant, issued on Sept. 21, is designated for “Analyzing the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam,” and was given specifically by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAID), a branch of the NIH still being run by Anthony Fauci until his upcoming retirement.

The first installment of the grant is for $653,392 and is part of a five-year plan to give the nonprofit a total of $3.3 million. The grant was given the same day the NIAID granted EcoHealth “more than $2.1 million for two more ongoing studies, one of which involves so-called ‘gain-of-function’ to make viruses more dangerous,” according to the New York Post.

Under the Trump administration, EcoHealth Alliance was defunded of taxpayer dollars. Now, after miraculously avoiding massive public backlash following its 2020 defunding, it appears the organization is back in business and carrying on as normal.

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.

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/10/03/from-affirmative-action-to-andy-warhol-buckle-up-for-a-wild-supreme-court-term/

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “It’s hard not to have a big year at the Supreme Court.” That is, of course, manifestly true for the highest court in the land.

Some years are bigger than others, however. That certainly was the case in 2021-22, with historic decisions on abortion, gun rights, climate change and other issues.

On Monday, the new term will begin with a lineup that promises another historic series of rulings — and even greater levels of rage directed at the court.

The last term showed that a stable 6-3 majority has taken hold on the  court. Even with the addition this term of Justice Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson, and possible swing votes from Chief Justice John Roberts or others, there are five conservative justices who have brought clarity to long-contested areas characterized by 5-4 divisions. That is likely to continue this term.

Here are just two of the “matinee” cases that could have a huge impact on both precedent and politics:

Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College

This case on the use of race in college admissions will be heard with a similar case in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.

Since declaring affirmative action in admissions to be unconstitutional in 1978 in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the court has never achieved clarity on the constitutional use of race beyond barring any preference “for no reason other than race or ethnic origin.” Then-Justice Lewis Powell declared, “This the Constitution forbids,” but the court has been unable to say with any coherence and consistency what else it forbids in a line of conflicting and vague 5-4 rulings.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/air_force_academy_woes_highlight_collapse_of_military_values_under_diversity_mania.html

Other than a well-fought win over rival Navy, the United States Air Force Academy had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. 

First, came the story that the Academy gave diversity training to cadets encouraging them to stop using such patently offensive words as mom and dad.  This was followed up closely by a story that the Academy was promoting a fellowship that was open to just about everyone, but straight white men need not apply.  Finally, the school that used to be underpinned by its notable lack of tolerance for lying, cheating or stealing was put on two-years probation by the NCAA, complete with a rather long list of punishments, for apparently cheating at recruiting.

What ties these three stories together is the complete breakdown of values at the school, which are reflective of the breakdown in values across the military.

Both my wife and I graduated from USAFA in the 1990s.  At the time, the school’s values were integrity, service, and excellence.  Cadets were encouraged to put their classmates and country ahead of themselves.  Even the smallest lie or anything that could be construed as cheating, to include poorly documented homework, was a one-way ticket home.   

Those values have been turned upside down in the school’s commitment to the military’s new value system of diversity above all.  For the Air Force-Navy game, the Falcons wore their new uniforms honoring the Space Force. Semper Supra, which means always above, was displayed prominently where names are normally shown.  The motto is somewhat ironic since in today’s military, that’s where diversity and inclusion rank in the priority list, always above and eclipsing everything else.  All other values are subservient to it. 

While the element of the diversity training that suggested cadets should refrain from using words like mom and dad got most of the attention, the bigger problem is the overall philosophy that pits people into tribes and places the individual over the group.  We are now suggesting that we should be conscious of color and “value people for their uniqueness.”