RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/05/the-drugfather/

“My financial disclosure is public knowledge and has been so for the last 37 years or so the last 35 years. All you have to do is ask for it. You’re so misinformed, all you have to do is ask for it.”

That was Dr. Anthony Fauci last month, in response to Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a medical doctor. As Adam Andrezejewski of OpentheBooks.com learned, the “public knowledge” part is a stretch. 

Fauci’s 2021 salary, and what he earned in royalties, had not been made public. As many as 1,000 National Institutes of Health scientists receive royalties, and each payment is “a potential conflict of interest.” So it was of some concern that “NIH admits it holds approximately 1,200 pages relating to Fauci’s financial information and conflict of interest disclosures.” 

As it turns out, this sort of secrecy is standard practice. 

According to a 2005 British Medical Journal report now posted on an NIH website, patients who took part in NIH clinical trials “had no idea that scientists at the institutes received $8.9m (£4.8m; €6.8m) in royalty payments and might benefit financially for the use of their discoveries by pharmaceutical companies and device makers.” 

Nearly 1,000 NIH researchers received annual royalty payments and “NIH researchers spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars studying the treatments that they had developed that were licensed to drug companies.” If they had known about the researchers’ financial interests, “patients might have thought differently about the risks of trial treatment.” 

The two leading researchers were Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his deputy Clifford Lane. They received payments for the development of interleukin-2 as a treatment for HIV/AIDS. Dr. Lane told the BMJ that the payment was part of his federal compensation and “the government patented the development and shared the payments it received with the inventors.” 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/05/do-you-trust-the-u-s-government/

Do you trust the U.S. government? I don’t recommend it.  

Consider what John Kirby, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said a couple of days ago at a press briefing. “We believe,” Kirby said, that Russia is planning to stage a fake attack by Ukrainian military or intelligence forces against Russian sovereign territory, or against Russian speaking people,” in order to justify an invasion of Ukraine. Kirby had lots of details: “We believe that Russia would produce a very graphic propaganda video, which would include corpses and actors that would be depicting mourners, and images of destroyed locations, as well as military equipment, at the hands of Ukraine or the West.” 

Gosh. Should we be worried? Yes. But not necessarily for the reasons that Kirby and his puppet masters want you to be worried. The United States is sending troops and arms to aid Ukraine, so of course there needs to be an emergency to justify that action. John Kirby just outlined a scary scenario. But inquiring minds want to know: What’s his evidence for this dramatic claim? 

That was the burden of the remarkable exchange between State Department spokesman Ned Price and veteran AP reporter Matt Lee. 

OK, Lee said, we’ve just heard that Russia is in the process of organizing a gigantic false flag operation to justify its attack on Ukraine. “What evidence,” Lee asked, “do you have to support the idea that there is some propaganda film in the making?”

Bingo. What followed is the stuff of legend.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/look_with_dawning_horror_at_the_presidential_line_of_succession.html

In Major League Baseball, starting pitchers get plenty of press, all the glory, and the really big bucks.  But true afficionados of the sport know that a team is only as good as its bullpen, a collection of lesser known pitchers who are called upon when the starting pitcher runs out of gas.

When it comes to the U.S. government, who’s our big stud starting pitcher?  Why, that would be “Clueless Joe” Biden, the crusty old conniver who turns eighty in November.

Clueless Joe may have once had a political fastball and the ability to put it where he wanted.  But as he turns eighty, Joe Biden’s physically and mentally shot.  All he serves up now is slop.  Even the lying left-wing media are starting to admit what’s been patently obvious to anyone with a working cerebrum: clueless Joe has run out of gas.

It’s only a matter of time before America has to make that call to the bullpen.  And whom do we have warming up in the bullpen, you ask?

Why, that would be the crafty leftie from California, “Heels Up” Harris.  Harris earned her moniker by being Willie Brown’s side piece as she, um, climbed the ladder of political success.

As California’s deputy attorney general, Heels Up sent hundreds of blacks to prison for marijuana offenses.  But years later, when the political winds had changed, Harris laughed off her prior actions.

Having “evolved” on the issue of pot, Harris smilingly admitted to smoking joints in school while listening to Tupac and Snoop Dogg, neither of whom had recorded anything at that time.  Referring to weed, Kammy averred that “it gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/05/terry-fox-and-the-truckers-n1556407

“The question needs to be posed. Who are the real yahoos? Who are the real defacers and defamers? Who are the real thieves and grifters and hypocrites? Who are those who inspire genuine disgust?”

Canadian national hero Terry Fox (1958-1981), after having had a leg amputated due to cancer in 1977, embarked on a cross-country run in 1980 to raise money for cancer research. An annual event held across Canada continues to honor his memory. Terry Fox became a national hero because he represented the spirit of courage and defiance, of rising above the odds, of refusing to surrender to the trials of his condition. He began his “Marathon of Hope” in St. John’s on the island of Newfoundland and ran many thousand kilometers to Thunder Bay, Ontario.

In a telling parallel, the Freedom Convoy, taking issue with the vaccine mandates and demanding the resignation of Canada’s discredited prime minister Justin Trudeau, traversed the country from Prince Rupert, British Columbia to the nation’s capital in Ottawa, travelling approximately the same distance, almost 4,000 kilometers, enduring sub-zero temperatures and without accommodations and salaried income. GoFundMe predictably suspended trucker crowdfunding, only a small portion of the over $10 million sum accumulated having been released owing to obstructionist government intervention. The transparent pretext is that the funds may be used to promote “extremism,” “hate” and “violence.”

Though hampered by spiteful authoritarian manipulations, maligned by the press and the political elect, and libeled for the heinous act of profaning the statue of Terry Fox, the truckers, in fact, embody the buoyant spirit of Terry Fox as they bravely protest the sickly condition in which the country now finds itself—a corrupt media, a coercive government, a heretofore apathetic public and probably the absolute worst prime minister who has ever defaced not a statue but his very office. They want their traditional freedoms back. They want their Constitutional rights restored. And they are prepared to assert these rights.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/02/gov-desantis-and-texas-pressure-forces-gofundme-daniel-greenfield/

The two positive outcomes of this episode are that…

1. Every conservative now knows not to use GoFundMe. The tech platform has a long history of banning and discriminating against conservatives. This time its overreach went into the millions. 

2. Florida and Texas flexed their newfound legal muscle at a tech company and it backed off. GoFundMe is much smaller in scale than the real monsters like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and lacks their layers of lobbyists and paid politicians. But it’s mid-size enough to make for a good field test.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that he would “investigate” the company, accusing them of fraud.

“It is a fraud for @gofundme to commandeer $9M in donations sent to support truckers and give it to causes of their own choosing. I will work with @AGAshleyMoody to investigate these deceptive practices — these donors should be given a refund.”

GoFundMe also drew the ire of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who stated on social media that he would be launching a fraud investigation.

“Patriotic Texans donated to Canadian truckers’ worthy cause using GoFundMe. This BLM-backing company went woke, froze the funds, & failed to deliver Texans’ money,” Paxton said. “Today I assembled a team to investigate their potential fraud & deception. Texas donors will get Justice!”

GoFundMe had clearly been scrambling for excuses. 

https://vinoandveritassociety.com/articles/supreme-court-matters-colorblind-constitution-v-racial-tribalism%EF%BF%BC/

“When President Bush nominated him for the Supreme Court in 1991, Clarence Thomas quickly learned that his greatest opponent was neither the Ku Klux Klan nor any racist rural sheriff. It was Joe Biden — then a United States Senator and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee — and the mostly-white, college-educated progressive political allies who joined Biden’s effort to destroy Thomas.”

Two years ago, Presidential Candidate Joe Biden promised to nominate someone with black skin for the United States Supreme Court, should he ever get the opportunity. With Justice Breyer announcing his retirement, President Biden now has the opportunity. 

Sorry, Dr. King. A nation in which citizens are judged “by the content of their character” and not “the color of their skin” isn’t going to happen on Joe Biden’s watch. He judges nominees on the color of their skin.

It’s curious that now, as President, Biden limits the pool of possible Supreme Court jurists to people with dark pigment. In 1991, then-Senator Biden had an opportunity to assist Clarence Thomas take a seat on the Supreme Court bench. Yet, Biden did everything within his power to stop it.

The life of Clarence Thomas should be an inspiration for all Americans. Born into the mires of poverty, compounded by Jim Crow racism, violence, and injustice, Thomas was anything but destined by birth to high government positions and circles of political elites.

https://www.city-journal.org/art-institute-of-chicago-redefines-its-purpose-as-antiracism

“Western civilization is not about whiteness; it is a universal legacy. But the guardians of that civilization, by portraying it as antithetical to racial justice because of demographic characteristics, are stunting the human imagination—and impoverishing the world.”

The Art Institute of Chicago is not the first museum to turn on its docent program. But it is the most consequential. It is worth tracing the developments that led to the docent firings in some detail. The Institute is a case study in what happens when museums and other cultural organizations declare their mission to be antiracism. The final result, if unchecked, will be the cancellation of a civilization.

Chicago’s Art Institute, founded in 1879 as both a museum and an art school, emerged from the post–Civil War wave of museum building. Successful businessmen from San Francisco to Boston created grand receptacles for European art in the spirit of democratic elitism, believing that history’s masterpieces should be available to all. The Institute’s original holdings consisted almost entirely of plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture, reflecting the centuries-long view that the classical world represented the pinnacle of artistic achievement in the West. Soon, however, Chicago’s Gilded Age benefactors began donating a more sweeping range of works, starting with a bequest of 44 predominantly Barbizon School oil paintings from the widow of Henry Field, brother of the Marshall Field & Company founder. More than four dozen classics of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism came the Institute’s way in 1925 and 1926. Non-Western traditions started filling out the collections as well; the largest gift in the Institute’s history, from civic leader Martin Ryerson in 1933, included Asian art among Old Master paintings, textiles, and decorative arts.

Philanthropists underwrote the nearly continuous expansions of the Institute’s 1893 Beaux-Arts building on Michigan Avenue to accommodate the growing holdings. Today, the Institute constitutes one of the finest repositories of global art on the American continent; one small corridor, containing exquisite pastel portraits by Martin Quentin de la Tour, Chardin, and other Ancien Régime artists, alone warrants a visit.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/04/woke-capital-wont-save-the-planet-but-it-will-crash-the-economy/

Judged by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s latest letter, January 2022 might turn out to have been the highwater mark of woke capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is not “woke,” Fink says, because capitalism is driven by mutually beneficial relationships between businesses and their stakeholders. He’s right. What Fink describes is capitalism pure and simple, the stakeholder modifier adding nothing to the uniqueness of capitalism in harnessing competition and innovation for the benefit of all.

Fink’s shift is more than rhetorical. Just three years ago, in his 2019 “Profit and Purpose” letter, Fink told CEOs that the $24 trillion of wealth Millennials expect to inherit from their Boomer parents meant that ESG (environment, social, governance) issues “will be increasingly material to corporate valuations.” Now Fink tells them that “long-term profitability” is the measure by which markets will determine their companies’ success, dumping the ESG valuation metrics he’d previously championed.

Why, then, launch a Center for Stakeholder Capitalism, as BlackRock intends, and not simply a Center for Capitalism? “Your company’s purpose is its north star,” Fink says, echoing the Big Idea of his “Profit & Purpose” letter. BlackRock is the largest shareholder in Unilever. London-based Terry Smith, a top 15 Unilever shareholder, slammed Unilever’s top management for being obsessed with public displays of sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on business fundamentals. In his letter to Fundsmith shareholders, Smith wrote, “a company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot.” Ouch.

The days of woke CEOs criticizing democratically elected politicians for, say, not mandating unisex bathrooms, also seem to be drawing to a close. CEOs should be thoughtful in how they address social issues, Fink says, advising them to show humility and stay grounded. But Fink himself has some way to travel along the humility road. He requires all companies BlackRock invests in to set short-, medium-, and long-term targets for greenhouse gas reductions—as if BlackRock is an enforcement arm of government and net zero is a done deal. “Incumbents need to be clear about their pathway [to] succeeding in a net zero economy,” he writes.