RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/01/position-vacant-an-antipodean-desantis/

When deaths have to be up-played. Whenever Trump can be blamed. Otherwise, here’s the latest from CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky: “The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four co-morbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with.”

We’ve recently learnt that half of those in hospital recorded as COVID patients have in fact entered hospital for other reasons. They were routinely tested and found to have the virus. It’s likely deaths, too, have been overstated and, to boot in Australia, have been offset by the drop in deaths from influenza-cum-pneumonia (IP).

To the end October, the latest figures available, deaths from IP were 1,816 in 2021, 1,877 in 2020 compared with an average of 2908 across 2015-19. The difference adds up to about the number of registered COVID deaths to the end October 2021. With a median age of death at around 85 years, it’s true to say that when you get to that age all bets are off.

Let’s not beat around the bush. This has been the greatest overreaction since the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were shot. Now healthy five-year-olds, with zero chance of succumbing to the virus, are being lined up to be injected with an mRNA vaccine, the long-term effects of which are unknown. With such abandonment of responsibility, conscience, decency and common sense, why think this will be over by Christmas? Middle Ages, Modern Ages, CVOID Ages.

Annastacia Palaszczuk’s keeping kids from school for two weeks to give them a better chance of getting the shot, before risking their lives in the classroom. Idiocy, yes. But she’s not as stupid as she acts. There’s a rat cunning at work among the elite and the political class. First, this week’s small example; second, last week’s.

Dominic Perrottet, what a disappointment (see below), says at a press conference on Monday that “over half” the patients in intensive care in NSW are unvaccinated. Half an hour or so later Scott Morrison says that Perrottet said that the patients in intensive care were “predominantly” unvaccinated. Is this an example of the noble lie that Ron DeSantis has rightly rejected in Florida? Or it is simply that today’s callow, ill-educated speech writers no longer have a facility with words?

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/15/joe-biden-deep-state-puppet/

I almost feel sorry for Joe Biden. 

The emphasis, I hasten to add, is on the adverb. Perhaps, if he didn’t make me feel thoroughly sorry for the United States of America, my sympathy for him would be unalloyed. But even many in Biden’s own party are aghast at his performance as president. 

It’s almost a matter of smell, of that sixth sense that alerts sensitive souls to impending disaster. Animals somehow know when an earthquake is coming, even before the ground begins to tremble. The far-left activist Stacey Abrams is well endowed with those antennae, which is why she invented “scheduling issues” and gave the president’s speech in Atlanta a miss last week. The aroma of events like that have a way of clinging to someone, and Abrams had the good sense to know that Joe Biden on “voting rights” and the run-up to Martin Luther King Day was likely to be a redolent affair. 

In the event, it was much worse than she, or anyone else for that matter, could have foreseen. Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff called it the “the worst presidential speech in modern history.” But Paul is a generous man. There was really no need for that qualifying “modern.” Paul mentions Jimmy Carter’s disastrous “malaise speech” of 1979 as a contender for the palm. That speech was indeed horrible. It was one of the things that lost Carter the election the next year. But Biden’s speech was far worse. Carter’s speech was a bizarre combination of cramped, hectoring moralism, much of it lifted from Christopher Lasch, and a repellent, cardigan-clad sentimentality and faux folksiness. 

Carter’s speech, however, was not mendacious. It was simply wrong. Biden’s, on the contrary, was a veritable tissue of incontinent hyperbole, partisan posturing, and outright lies. Even Dick Durbin, Democratic lapdog though he is, acknowledged that Biden “went a little too far in his rhetoric.” You think so, Dick?

Forget about Biden’s description of the January 6 protest at the Capitol as “an attempted coup . . . against the legally expressed will of the American people.” That was insane, granted, but what will be remembered is his over-the-top, shark-jumping hyperbole “I ask every elected official in America,” Biden said in one of the most cringe-making moments of the speech, “How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” Oh, dear. It took about 15 seconds for House Republicans to produce a newspaper clipping in which Biden bragged about being praised by George Wallace. That was back when then-Senator Biden was a proud segregationist. 

Mitch McConnell was waiting offstage with the ax: “He shouted that if you disagree with him, you’re George Wallace,” McConnell said. “If you don’t pass the laws he wants, you’re Bull Connor, and if you oppose giving Democrats untrammeled, one-party control of the country, well, you’re Jefferson Davis.” 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/the_biden_administrations_bizarre_response_to_the_texas_hostage_crisis.html

On Saturday afternoon, a man claiming to be the brother of the Pakistani terrorist Aafia Siddiqui (aka “Lady al Qaeda”) stormed a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and took four people hostage. The resulting standoff lasted for several hours before all four hostages escaped or were freed and the hostage-taker killed. During the event, the Biden administration once again showed itself to be completely tone-deaf, issuing a bizarre, clinical tweet that didn’t even mention that the entire event revolved around al Qaeda-related genocidal antisemitism.

Congregation Beth Israel was almost empty on Saturday because it was live-streaming its Sabbath services. Because of that live-streaming, everyone heard an Islamist enter the synagogue shortly after 10:00 a.m. and take hostage the four people who were there, including the rabbi. He insisted that the government release Siddiqui, a fanatic al Qaeda supporter who was imprisoned in Texas for 86 years after she shot at U.S. service members and was found to have actively plotted mass-casualty al Qaeda attacks.

In the early evening, one hostage was released. Then, shortly before 10 p.m., the 12-hour-long nightmare ended with a frightening denouement. Cameras caught two of the hostages racing out of the building as the terrorist followed them out, aiming his gun at them before he retreated into the building. Soon after, a SWAT team stormed the building, killing the Islamist and freeing the remaining hostage:

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/14/truth-leaks-out/

The quest for truth-in-COVID did pick up some steam in late spring 2021. 

Not about the vaccine, though. 

About the origins of the virus. 

From the first days of the epidemic, strong circumstantial evidence suggested Sars-CoV-2 had leaked from a Chinese lab. Both the virus itself and the facts around its emergence pointed to human intervention. 

Wuhan, the city of 10 million people where the first cases were found, is home to China’s most important viral research laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute aggressively researched bat coronaviruses, which China had viewed as a serious risk since the original SARS outbreak in 2003. 

In 2017 the institute opened China’s first Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. Level 4 labs are the most secure available, designed to handle deadly pathogens such as Ebola. But just months after the lab opened, U.S. State Department officials visited and reported in a cable to Washington that the new facility was at risk of a serious accident. They found “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

The troubled lab was located only miles from the first cluster of cases in central Wuhan. And it had worked with a virus very similar to Sars-CoV-2 known as RaTG13 (or RaBtCov/4991), which had been found in a cave in 2013 after several miners working there became seriously ill with pneumonia.

That cave—like other caves that had large numbers of the bats that were the original animal hosts for naturally occurring coronaviruses—was nowhere near Wuhan. It was located in southern China, several hundred miles away. And the Chinese couldn’t trace a chain of human transmission from that region to Wuhan. They had reported no early cases in the villages and cities around the caves, or between the caves and Wuhan. 

Early on, Chinese and international reports had offered a different potential explanation for the fact Sars-CoV-2 had emerged first in Wuhan. They linked the outbreak to a large “wet market” there. Wet markets, which are common in China, sell wild and domesticated live animals for slaughter. An NPR reporter visited a similar market in Hong Kong and reported that “it’s quite obvious why the term ‘wet’ is used. . . . The countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted.”

But the theory was discounted within months, because Chinese researchers could not find Sars-CoV-2 in tissue samples of animals taken from the Wuhan wet market.

Meanwhile, from the start of the epidemic, Chinese authorities at every level behaved as if they had something to hide. Sending police to silence Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who in late December 2020 had first warned about the new pneumonia, was only the first step. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/01/dem-crime-wave-criminals-arent-just-stealing-daniel-greenfield/

Under the rule of a party that has virtually legalized crime, that defunds police, and blames crime on social inequity, the criminals have hijacked entire cities, crime is escalating, and the criminals are becoming more ambitious.

New York and California, among other states, have effectively legalized robbing stores and porch piracy. But the gangs are moving beyond that to not just stealing packages, they’re hijacking trucks.

Instead of shoplifting from stores, some thieves are zeroing in on another target: Trains and delivery trucks full of packages on the way to customers’ doorsteps.

UPS Chief Executive Carol Tome said Friday that one of the company’s 18-wheeler trucks was robbed in Atlanta in the early hours of the morning. She said thieves hijacked the truck after the driver left one of the delivery company’s largest hubs.

It’s Atlanta. Why not? How is Soros DA Darius Pattillo working out?

“He was stopped at gunpoint. He was zip-tied, thrown into the back of his feeder car and they took the packages,” she said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” The robbery took place in late December, according to an NBC news report.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/transgenderism_destroys_the_family.html

How is it that injecting cattle with hormones is evil, but injecting kids with hormones to obscure their true sex is the new frontier?

In March of 1970, Anne Bernays penned a piece titled “What Are You Supposed to Do if You Like Children?”[1]  Her target was the Women’s Liberation Movement that was ushering in ideas that “men are sexual vampires, [and] marriage is stunting and exploitative.”

In short, Bernays focused on “liberation’s” “paralyzing excesses” because at the root of  Liberation’s determination “to disintegrate the sexes is the disabling anxiety that different means the same thing as inferior.”  But “anybody can see that women are as valuable as men but they are not more the same than ears and eyes.”

Bernays railed against the idea that “[l]iberation insists that women be absolute ‘equals’ with men.”

Why?

Those women who are “willing to acknowledge the remotest emotional obligation to husband and children, especially to children during their fragile first five or six years of life … can’t summon the time, physical energy, and psychic equipment to do two jobs simultaneously.  You can’t split a woman’s life down the middle and expect each half, like a severed worm, to go happily crawling off, to survive and function in perfect health.”

Yet that is exactly what has been demanded of most women as they valiantly try to raise a family and work outside their homes.  Or they simply decide that children are not worth their time or effort, or some other agency is left to the care and development of their children.

https://thelibertydaily.com/tulsi-gabbard-skewers-joe-biden-as-being-even-more-divisive-than-another-hatemongering-democrat/

Tulsi Gabbard ran her presidential campaign against Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrat field by establishing she’s more willing to try to unite the country rather than bow to the radical progressives running her party today. It didn’t work out well for her politically, but her popularity has stayed relatively high even as she continues talking politics from outside the Beltway.

She hit Biden hard over his speech promoting the Democrats’ voter fraud legislation in Georgia. In fact, she hit him with the ultimate insult, saying that he’s even more divisive than the queen of party division, Hillary Clinton.

“Hillary’s calling tens of millions of Americans deplorables was divisive & disgusting. But Biden has gone further, calling those who disagree with his actions & policies domestic enemies, traitors, and racists. Biden promised to unite us, but he is doing all he can do divide us.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-crosses-the-quinnipiac-11642185888?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

As America approaches the end of the first year of the Biden presidency—or as Democrats describe it, the era of greed—the White House is arguing that Mr. Biden’s recent polling numbers aren’t as bad as they seem. More consequentially, the president appears to have just admitted that state voting laws aren’t as bad as he often claims.

As for the polling, the White House faces a tough sell in suggesting that public opinion surveys underrate his political strength, given that the industry famously overestimated his appeal and the popularity of congressional Democrats in the days before the 2020 election.

But the White House is now attacking the methodology behind a particular poll which this week delivered an especially harsh assessment of the president’s standing among Americans.

Hans Nichols of Axios reports:

White House deputy chief of staff Jennifer O’Malley Dillon is publicly attacking a new poll that gave President Biden a 33% approval rating, using the full weight of her office to call it an “outlier,” according to a memo shared with Axios…