RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/29/defining-recessions-down-bidens-attempt-to-defy-reality-wont-end-well/

‘For the first time in a decade, our economy is in recession. It’s not official yet – the group that dates recessions doesn’t act until after the fact – but there’s little doubt that we’re in the midst of a downturn.”

That was economist Jared Bernstein back in December 2001. He went on: “The downturn is already taking a toll on those who traditionally bear the brunt of recessions, blue-collar workers in manufacturing, minorities, and other less-advantaged workers.”

That year saw only two non-consecutive quarters of GDP decline. The unemployment rate never got over 5.7%. And when the year was over, GDP had climbed 1%. But it’s still listed on the recession roster.

Today Bernstein, who sits on President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, is trying to argue that, despite two consecutive quarters of a shrinking economy, we aren’t in a recession right now.

“What is a recession?” he and CEA chair Cecilia Rouse asked in a blog post. “While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.”

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Antihero is defined as a character who lacks qualities of a traditional hero – morality, courage, an obeisance to traditional rules of behavior. Wikipedia lists such fictional characters as typifying the antihero: Shakespeare’s Othello, John Milton’s Lucifer, Jane Eyre’s Edward Rochester, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, and George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman. Do you, as does Wikipedia, see our former President among that group? I leave you to be the judge.

No matter one’s opinion, the word ‘antihero’ may make wince the large swath of Americans who see Mr. Trump as a villain – some for his character, which was revealed in his lack of positive response during the afternoon of the January 6 riots; others for his antiestablishment/anti-elitist credentials, which threatened official Washington, including members of January 6 committee. ‘Hero,’ even when preceded by ‘anti’ would not be to their liking.

Yet even those who despise him cannot ignore the fact he was (and is) a hero to his estimated twenty to thirty million die hard supporters, most of whom live in non-elitist communities and work in non-establishment jobs. His supporters, who encompass all genders and races, see big-city and suburban financial and cultural elites as sanctimonious, hypocritical, and uninterested in the social and economic mobility that has characterized the United States. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Joseph Epstein, wrote “My sense is that just as Mr. Trump gave us Joe Biden, liberal culture earlier gave us Mr. Trump.” I agree. Mr. Trump was thrust upon us, in reaction to those who derided American history, patronized minorites and who treated millions of white, working-class Americans as ‘deplorables.’  Those who now reject him most vehemently bear primary responsibility for his political rise.

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=

When President George H.W. Bush delivered a speech to Congress envisioning the emergence of a “new world order”, he had it backward. The new world order wasn’t emerging, it was over

A “new world”, Bush claimed, “is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known” and he shared that vision with Gorbachev. The Soviet Leader, a year away from being toppled, who had cut his teeth on Communist visions of a new world being born only to inherit a failing system that could no longer win wars or feed its own people, must have been amused.

Gorbachev understood what Bush did not, that no new world order was coming, an old world order was returning. Bush lasted a year longer in office than his Soviet counterpart. And yet his own farewell speech couldn’t help but echo Bush, declaring, “we live in a new world now.”

The new world we live in now is one where Russia is trying to rebuild a Czarist empire, and China, Iran, and every other power or power that was, is fighting to recreate its glory days.

The patchwork international order had been a product of the Cold War that Bush and Gorbachev were eagerly bidding farewell to. Globalism, or the post-Cold War international order based on trade, human rights and conferences proved to be as much of a joke as the UN, the WTO, the NGOs and the multilateral organizations that served as its shaky infrastructure.

Bush envisioned “a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle” and “nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice” on the brink of the original Gulf War.

But the only law that ever existed was the law of force enforced by self-interest or idealism.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-message-americas-future-doctors?utm_source=email

Dr. Kristin Collier is an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, where she has served on faculty for 17 years. She also is the director of the medical school’s Program on Health, Spirituality and Religion and has been published in publications including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Many describe her as a consummate physician and superb teacher—deeply liked and respected by her peers. That’s why, out of some 3,000 faculty at Michigan, Dr. Collier was chosen by students and her peers to be this year’s White Coat Ceremony speaker. The White Coat ceremony is one bookend of medical school (graduation is the other), where students put on their white coats for the first time, take a modified Hippocratic oath and begin the long path to becoming a doctor. 

The trouble is that Professor Collier has views on abortion that are out of step with many Michigan medical students—likely the majority of them. She has stated that she defines herself as pro-life, though she does not state the extent of her position (i.e. whether she allows exemptions for rape or incest). In that same interview, in which she talks about her personal transformation from a pro-choice atheist to a Christian, she laments the intolerance for religious people among medical colleagues. “When we consider diversity in the medical profession, religious diversity is not—should not—be exempt from this goal.”

After Michigan announced her speech, the university made it clear that Dr. Collier would not be addressing abortion in her talk. “The White Coat Ceremony is not a platform for discussion of controversial issues, and Dr. Collier never planned to address a divisive topic as part of her remarks,” the dean of the medical school, Marshall Runge, wrote to students and staff earlier this month.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/27/feds-drop-assault-charges-against-man-accused-in-sicknick-attack/

Federal prosecutors today dropped felony assault charges against one of two men accused of attacking Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick on January 6, 2021. George Tanios of West Virginia was arrested in March 2021 and charged with numerous felonies including assault on federal officers with a dangerous or deadly weapon and obstruction of an official proceeding.

In an superseding indictment filed Wednesday morning by the office of Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia handling all January 6 prosecutions, Tanios now faces two misdemeanor counts: entering or remaining on restricted grounds and disorderly conduct.

Tanios and Julian Khater, his co-defendant in the alleged attack, have been portrayed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department and the national news media as the Trump supporters responsible for the death of Sicknick on January 7, 2021. After the New York Times in February 2021 retracted its initial account of what happened to Sicknick—that he was bludgeoned to death by Trump “loyalists” using a fire extinguisher—the media then suggested Sicknick died after suffering an allergic reaction to chemical spray. (Khater remains accused of using pepper spray against a line of officers, including Sicknick, outside that afternoon.)

In April 2021, the D.C. Medical Examiner ruled Sicknick died of natural causes and suffered no internal or external injuries during the Capitol protest.

After prosecutors sought pretrial detention for Tanios and Khater, D.C. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan, 83, denied their release. Both men were sent to the D.C. gulag set aside for January 6 defendants; in August 2021, the D.C. Circuit Court overturned Hogan’s order to keep Tanios behind bars and he was released on strict home detention orders. Khater remains incarcerated awaiting an October 5 trial.

In an interview with American Greatness last October, Tanios, father of three young children, explained how the false charges destroyed his life, including the loss of his sandwich restaurant. “In the court of public opinion, we’ve all been destroyed,” Tanios told me during a phone interview. “The truth is going to come out, though, it has to.”

Tanios is expected to plead guilty today to both misdemeanor counts in Judge Hogan’s courtroom.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-national-tragedy-of-hunter-bidens-laptop

The recent release of more gigabytes of images and information from Hunter Biden’s laptop adds to the evidence that the all-out elite effort to bury the scandal before the 2020 election wasn’t just to protect Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the American oligarchy. Sure, the 50-plus senior U.S. intelligence professionals who signed a letter claiming the laptop’s contents were “Russian disinformation” wanted to stop Donald Trump from sending angry tweets at them, but the laptop suggests there was much more at stake.

The U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter—including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper—had directed America’s foreign intelligence services while Biden was vice president and before that chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They knew what his son Hunter was doing abroad, because it was their job to know what foreign services know about leading U.S. officials and their families, and how it might affect U.S. national security.

But none of these powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to defending the national interest, lifted a finger to stop Hunter Biden—and really, how could they? He was Joe Biden’s son, after all. And by doing nothing about him, the pillars of America’s intelligence community became the curators of the Biden family’s scandal.

When Trump started asking questions in 2019 about Hunter and his father, prompted by Joe Biden’s public comments about protecting Hunter’s business associates abroad, it became clear that the only way to contain the mushrooming scandal involving key U.S. interests in Ukraine and China—a scandal whose magnitude they had known about for a decade—was to provide the former vice president with all the resources the U.S. government could muster. And that helped make him president.

There is so much data on Hunter Biden’s laptop that it’s hard to keep straight the sequence of images and information that have come from it since the New York Post started sourcing stories to the personal computer in October 2020. The most recent release includes 80,000 images that a Switzerland-based cyber expert recovered from deleted iPad and iPhone accounts backed up on the laptop.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2022/07/27/mrs-zelenskyy-welcomes-vogue-to-the-war-zone-n1615998

Call it the war with the best production value. A propaganda war is being fought between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. From the slick production of videos about a fighter pilot that never existed to the tall tale about the brave soldiers at Snake Island who all perished, it is easy to see why so many in the West have a Ukrainian flag somewhere in their social media profile.

But it was all garbage wrapped around a sliver of truth at best. Then there was the parade of global dignitaries visiting the war zone, seemingly carefree. First Lady Jill Biden went instead of her husband. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went. So did U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.  Even Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Ct.) made a bipartisan trip to get their pictures taken with Zelenskyy. The photo ops that say you were there. Of course, Graham and Blumenthal left with plaques after making profoundly concerning statements about an ongoing conflict:

Today we were treated to a glowing photo spread of Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Volodymyrivna Zelenska in Vogue. This spread follows glowing profiles in some lesser publications such as Today, People, and Parade.  These outlets compiled their pieces from Zelenska’s public statements and career profile. Vogue sent an interview crew into a war zone.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/28/fauci-torments-a-nation/

It will take years if not decades for researchers to document the totality of the cruel harms of the pandemic lock-downs. Whatever the damage, it could have been much worse. With the hindsight of a blind man, and the depravity of a despot, Anthony Fauci said this week the restrictions should have been more draconian than they were. He’s a national headache that just won’t go away.

“If I knew in 2020 what I know now, we would do a lot differently,” Fauci said Monday in an interview on The Hill TV.

“The insidious nature of spread in the community would have been much more of an alarm, and there would have been much, much more stringent restrictions in the sense of very, very heavy encouragement of people to wear masks, physical distancing, what have you.”

Fauci didn’t reference lockdowns by name, but “what have you” is the same as “all of the above,” so don’t think he didn’t have tougher lockdown rules in mind. What else could “much more stringent restrictions” mean? Double-masking and triple-physical distancing? Fauci’s claim that he was nothing more than a bystander who “didn’t recommend locking anything down,” is a “blatant attempt to revise history,” said Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, whose focuses include infectious disease epidemiology.

“Dr. Lockdown owns the school closures and their attendant collateral harms.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/inflation-destroys-the-small-town-soul-of-america/

My friend Dave Sr. owns the diner up the road and runs it with his son, Dave Jr. The family business is coming up on its fortieth anniversary, and Dave Sr., who’s eighty now — though you’d never guess it — reflected to me recently on the mom ‘n pop shops that have disappeared over the last fifty years or so. He and another local old-timer counted dozens that used to dot the two-lane road between our town and the next town over.

“Now, I don’t think you can count more than five or six [small businesses]!” Dave Sr. said. “And they all made a living out of these places. Between government intervention and red tape and so forth, people are afraid to get into small business.”

Running a small business is the epitome of the American Dream. By working hard and being resourceful, Americans have — historically, at least — been able to support their towns and families, take pride in what they do, and achieve self-reliance. These are all things big government hates. So it’s no wonder inflation, which hurts small towns the most, is skyrocketing out of control, while the Biden administration dismisses it as a “high class problem.”

Dave Sr., Dave Jr., and millions of other rural Americans know the true costs of inflation better than anyone. Dave Jr. told me he’s had to raise the prices of menu items three times already this summer. The price of eggs has risen by more than 60 percent. When the cost of inflation is passed onto the consumer, they cut back on excessive expenditures. That means an elderly widower’s twice-weekly trip to the diner — where he catches up with old friends, makes new ones, finds someone to help him mow his lawn, and enjoys social interactions that extend his life — comes to an end. The ten-year-old girl who bonds with her grandmother over pancakes every Saturday morning stays at home now, because there’s not enough money for gas and food. It’s not long before the diner disappears and there’s nowhere left for people to meet and mingle.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/07/26/jan-6-committee-hiding-evidence-that-absolves-trump-n1615808

The key narrative of the Jan. 6 Committee is that Donald Trump wanted to incite the violence that took place that day.

To do this, they’ve hidden and manipulated evidence. As we’ve previously reported, they presented a doctored video of Trump’s speech, interwoven with violent images and audio, while not including the portion of President Trump’s speech in which he told his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard. Not once did he call for any violence or for them to break into the building.

But the committee has done even more to undermine the truth. Prior to his rally, Trump informed various military leaders that the event would draw a “large number of protestors,” and instructed his then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to ensure it was “safe” by having troops available.

This evidence, not presented (nor denied) by the Jan. 6 Committee, is found in a Pentagon Inspector General report.

“Mr. Miller and GEN Milley met with the President at the White House at 5:30 p.m.,” the report reads. “The primary topic they discussed was unrelated to the scheduled rally. GEN Milley told us that at the end of the meeting, the President told Mr. Miller that there would be a large number of protestors on January 6, 2021, and Mr. Miller should ensure sufficient National Guard or Soldiers would be there to make sure it was a safe event. Gen Milley told us that Mr. Miller responded, ‘We’ve got a plan and we’ve got it covered.’”