RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/we-must-accept-covid-19-as-an-endemic-disease

Never mind how virulent the coronavirus is. The key point is that it is now endemic.

Perhaps it will become milder over time, perhaps it won’t. Obviously, we must hope that it does, that it follows the same trajectory as other viruses, becoming less lethal but more transmissible until it joins that sprawling family of rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, and, indeed, coronaviruses that we collectively call “colds.”

But as far as public policy goes, the lethality of COVID-19 is a second-order issue. The more immediate question is whether it is feasible to slow its spread and, if it is, whether there are advantages in doing so.

If we think, for example, that widespread vaccination might heap high a protective rampart, then there are arguments for vaccine passports, possibly even for compulsory inoculation. If we think that the disease can be eliminated, then there are arguments for stringent suppression measures. If we think that dangerous new mutations can be kept out, then there are arguments for border restrictions and quarantines.

But what if none of these things is true? What if COVID-19 is as ineradicable and endemic as influenza? What if it comes and goes seasonally, leaving its victims with a dollop of immunity that wanes over time? What if, like the flu, it regularly mutates, meaning that recovery from one version bestows only partial protection against others? What if it is checked rather than halted by vaccines — again, like flu rather than, say, polio?

If we are dealing with such a disease, a recurrent respiratory virus, then almost all the measures that we have put in place around the world are pointless.

Let me repeat that: Almost all of them are pointless.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/02/the-truths-we-dared-not-speak-in-2021/

As the long year of 2021 finally came to a close, there were a number of truths Americans on the Left found themselves privately acknowledging but unable to say in public for fear of doing damage to their political cause, their own reputations, or their sense of security. But as 2022 advances, it will become even more difficult to hide these truths. 

Collusion, RIP

No one wishes to speak of the “dossier” anymore. Everyone knows why: it was never a dossier. It was always a mishmash concoction of half-baked fantasies and outright lies, sloppily thrown together by the grifter and has-been ex-British spy and Trump hater, Christopher Steele—all in the pay of Hillary Clinton, the original architect of the collusion hoax. 

Steele himself admitted that he had no sources or notes to substantiate his “research.” Most of those who had seeded the dossier around Washington now either agree it was fake, or “partially” false, or remain silent in embarrassment. 

The perpetual NeverTrump revisionism is reduced to “The Russian Hoax Hoax,” in pathetic fashion suggesting Putin still colluded with Trump and such “collusion” is provable even without the dossier. 

The logic is Orwellian: in 2017-2020 we heard, “But the dossier shows that ….” In 2020-2021 we heard, “Whoever said the dossier had anything to do with Russian collusion?” 

The FBI—that in part used their paid informant Steele’s lies to birth FISA warrants—now disowns it. The entire 22-month, $40-million Mueller charade ended up in tragicomic style with Robert Mueller under oath denying he knew much of anything about either the purveyor of the dossier, Fusion GPS, or the dossier itself. 

James Comey when asked about it and the investigations it spawned, on 245 occasions under oath claimed he lost his memory or had no knowledge of it. 

The Russian collusion hoax will go down in history as one of the most shameful examples of Washington, D.C. mass hysteria, and of a concentrated effort to destroy an elected president, in modern American political history. 

In the end, we always come back to where we started: Hillary Clinton. 

She used the three firewalls of the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie legal firm, and Fusion GPS, to pay Steele, a foreign national, likely barred by law from providing such dirt to a U.S. presidential campaign. 

Steele then grabbed Clinton and FBI money, and in lazy fashion made a few calls to the now indicted Igor Danchenko, a Russian working in Washington, D.C. at the left-wing Brookings Institution, along with a Clinton crony Charles Dolan doing business in Moscow. Presto, Steele typed up their myths, in scary intelligence white-paper fashion, and passed them off as top-secret “Russian sources.” The dossier became the “proof” needed to show that Trump, in the words of former CIA director John Brennan, was “treasonous” or, as former Director of National Intelligence General (ret.) James Clapper alleged, was a “Russian asset.” 

The Russian collusion hoax is now akin to Joe Biden’s cognitive decline; everyone knows it, but few bother to state the obvious—or rehash their now embarrassing earlier denials. 

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

While the mainstream media, at least in 2020, tracked deaths with the fanaticism of an insurance company, they’ve always lacked accuracy. That’s why it matters when a major American insurance company, which is in the business of accurate data about deaths, announces that Americans in the 18-64 age bracket are dying in unprecedented numbers. The same data suggests that these aren’t COVID deaths, which makes them much more sinister.

OneAmerica is a major insurance company located in Indianapolis with annual revenue of around $2 billion and total assets of around $74 billion. This is not a fly-by-night internet “insurance” company. OneAmerica is the real deal, selling both individual and group life insurance, and it has data and actuarial tables that go back 145 years. It’s also a progressive company that boasts about “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” right on its home page. In other words, it’s not some “scary” right-wing reactionary firm.

During a news conference last week, OneAmerica’s CEO, Scott Davison, had a startling announcement—working-age Americans are dying in unprecedented numbers:

“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”

Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.

“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.

“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”

More remarkably still, these are not COVID deaths. Instead, they are totally different death count from the COVID count the media insisted we know during Trump’s last year and jettisoned during Biden’s first year.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/should_donald_trump_run_in_2024.html

With the turn of the calendar to 2022, Republicans are not only looking to the 2022 midterm elections but to the prospect of Donald Trump running in 2024. Trump is hugely popular with the party’s base and that popularity freezes the plans of other possible candidates for the 2024 nomination. Trump’s hold on that nomination is brittle, however, because of his age. On election day in 2024 Donald Trump will be 78 years old. That is one year older than Ronald Reagan’s age when he left office in 1988.

Looking at the 2024 contest from the other side of the race, there is no reason to expect that Joe Biden will get the nomination. He has been in office for less than one year, and only diehard Democrats believe that he is not suffering from incapacitating mental deficits. The only question is which foreign adversary will take advantage of his weakness: China, Russia or Iran. So the most likely scenario is for Biden’s resignation in 2022 or early 2023.

Trump may be popular now, but once the voters have been shocked by the disaster of one  septuagenarian president why would they roll the dice on a 78-year-old Donald Trump holding office to age 82? It’s a very bad bet, especially when there are younger, capable Republicans available. Ron DeSantis is at the top of the list of strong candidates for the presidency, but by 2023 we should have other governors and several senators eager to reach for the nomination.

I believe the above makes a strong case that it would be unwise for Donald Trump to run for the presidency in 2024. That presents the big question: how to persuade Trump to play the role of “kingmaker” in late 2022 and step back from his own candidacy?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/video-frontpagemagcom/

In this new video, JP Sears sheds light on a trans swimmer from U Penn who is destroying women in competition and setting records. Why is she so much faster than all the other women? Don’t miss the video below!

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

                                                                                                                                T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

                                                                                                                                Choruses from “The Rock,” 1934

Eliot’s concern, during the dark days of 1930s Depression, was the loss of religious faith. While faith is still missing from many of our lives in these temporal times, the more pressing concern is the lack of wisdom amidst so much knowledge. Our leaders, not only in politics but in business, the media, schools, colleges, Hollywood, Wall Street and professional sports, are steeped in the knowledge that specific jobs require, but there is a paucity of wisdom. This concern is not new. The Book of Proverbs, written around 700 BC, addresses the issue in chapter 4, verse 7: “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore, get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding.”

Earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old. Modern homo sapiens arrived about 160,000 years ago, and recorded history dates back 5000 years. Do we ever consider the shortness of our own lives within this continuum of life? The physical conveniences we take for granted – communication, transportation, flush toilets, medicine, heating and cooling, photography, recreational pursuits – date back only a little over 200 years. My three-greats grandparents lived lives more recognizable to those who lived a thousand years previously than to us today. We live in what is called “The Information Age,” an historical period that followed the industrial age, beginning in mid-20th Century. It is characterized by an epochal shift from an economy based on mining and manufacturing to one based on information technology and genetic modification. Unsurprisingly, growth in technologies have exceeded our ability to adapt. We have gained knowledge, but do we understand and appreciate its consequences?

As more time has been spent acquiring knowledge, we have become less wise. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) created the Knowledge Doubling Curve, which showed that until 1900 the amount of information extant doubled every century. By the end of World War II, information was doubling every twenty-five years. Today, data is estimated to be doubling every year, and IBM reckons the “internet of things” will lead to a doubling of knowledge every twelve hours.  Yet, the wisdom of the ancients is unchanged and is as relevant today as when the words were uttered: Tacitus, “The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise;” Confucius, “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail;” Marcus Aurelius, “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” Sadly, the classics, which are filled with wisdom – from the Bible to the Greek poets, from Roman philosophers to Shakespeare, from Aesop to J.R.R. Tolkien – are no longer required reading in schools and universities. STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses have replaced them. The latter are, of course, crucial disciplines in today’s competitive, technological world, but when they are not accompanied by classics the ability to place all that knowledge in perspective is lost.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/biden-at-11-months-one-of-the-worst-years-ever

All of the hope in President Joe Biden’s 21-minute inaugural address, which promised “unity, unity,” has not only evaporated in his first 11 months but left people feeling that 2021 was “one of the worst years ever,” according to the latest Rasmussen Reports survey.

In the poll previewed by Secrets, likely voters said that they not only believe the year was a bust, but that a majority feel 2022 will be bad also.

“If there’s any bright spot in the public’s grim assessment of 2021, at least it was better than 2020, which Americans rated the worst year in more than a decade of surveying,” said Rasmussen in a not so uplifting analysis.

The numbers:

74% said 2021 was a fair to poor year, with most, 48%, calling it poor.
Just 23% called it a good to the best year ever, with just 2% dubbing it “one of the best years.”
63% of Democrats agreed that it was fair to poor.
50% expect 2022 to be fair to poor, and 41% believe it will be good to the best.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-senator-elizabeth-warren-biden-bank-heist-fdic-jelena-mcwilliams-rohit-chopra-gruenberg-khan-cfpb-federal-reserve-nominee-11641155812?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Elizabeth Warren finally got her woman—that is, the Senator and her many acolytes in the Biden Administration have succeeded in ousting Jelena McWilliams as chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The coup deserves attention because of its norm-breaking precedent and what it signals for bank mergers and supposedly independent regulatory agencies.

Ms. McWilliams resigned on Dec. 31, effective Feb. 4, to avoid more turmoil at the bank regulator. But as she wrote in these pages on Dec. 16, her resignation comes amid a concerted and unprecedented political effort to strip her of authority before her term as chair expires in June 2023.

***

The coup has been led by Rohit Chopra, the Warren protege who now runs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is one of four current members of the FDIC board (one post is vacant). The FDIC’s longstanding practice and bylaws, based on its interpretation of the law, is that the chair sets the board’s agenda.

Every administration for 88 years has honored that understanding, including the supposedly norm-breaking Trump Administration. Democrat Martin Gruenberg was allowed to continue as chair until June 2018 after President Trump took office, and no one attempted to oust him.

Enter the Warren-Biden progressives in a hurry. The Senate confirmed Mr. Chopra on Sept. 30 on a 50-48 vote, and as soon as Oct. 31 he presented Ms. McWilliams with a request for information (RFI) on bank mergers. When she said the draft RFI would have to be vetted by FDIC staff, Mr. Chopra publicly released his own RFI without authority from his post at the CFPB, which the FDIC was obliged to contradict.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/pandemic-intelligence-failure-2021-report-card-lloyd-billingsley/

“I’m very sorry, but not this time. Maybe another time when this is all over.” That was Dr. Anthony Fauci last week, telling people not to invite unvaccinated family members to their home for Christmas. The Biden medical adviser also called for those vaccinated and boosted to stay away from gatherings of 30-50 people. As Fauci explained, “those are the kind of functions — in the context of COVID, and particularly in the context of Omicron — that you do not want to go to.” As 2021 closes out, those contexts have yet to gain the attention they deserve.

In early November, health workers in South Africa discovered the Omicron variant and on December 1, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced the first Omicron case in the United States. In November, 2020, medical authorities in India identified the Delta variant of COVID-19, which swept through that country and the UK before arriving in the United States, “where it quickly surged.”

On December 12, 2019, according to the CDC, “a  cluster of patients in Wuhan, Hubei Providence, China begin to experience shortness of breath and fever.” On January 17, 2020, the CDC deployed a team to Washington State in response to the first reported COVID-19 case in the United States. Americans had a right to wonder what their nation’s Epidemic Intelligence Service had been doing, if they knew that such a service existed.

The CDC deploys the EIS, as Diana Robeletto Scalera of the CDC Foundation explains, “to ensure epidemics in other countries do not hit American soil.” EIS disease detectives are “are the ones responsible and they take this role very seriously.”

The EIS had boots on the ground in China, but the disease detectives failed to stop the virus that causes COVID-19 from showing up in America. When the virus did show up, nobody from the EIS told the American people how that that had happened, how the EIS might have failed, or anything the EIS knew about the true origin of the virus.

The “service” itself dates back to the Korean War but in recent decades, considerable mission creep has become evident. As UC Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg noted in Inventing the AIDS Virus, the EIS came to be known as the nation’s “medical CIA.”

EIS vets have worked in the CDC other federal agencies, international bodies such as the World Health Organization, and they are also embedded in the media. EIS vet Lawrence Altman became a medical journalist for the New York Times and Bruce Dan served as a medical editor with ABC News and the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.

Such EIS activists rarely advertise their affiliation, and after the spring of 1993 the EIS membership directory was withdrawn from public view. As Duesberg learned, EIS members “constitute an informal surveillance network,” and can “act as unrecognized advocates for the CDC viewpoint, whether as media journalists or as prominent physicians.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/pushback-against-soft-despotism-comin

Over the last two years, many of us have been surprised and troubled at how eagerly millions of citizens have surrendered their freedoms to the shifting, contradictory, nakedly politicized diktats of various “experts” and government agencies. Coerced vaccinations, boosters, masks, and social distancing continue to be mandated and just as eagerly obeyed, even in the case of the mild Omicron covid variant. The technocratic Left currently ruling the country has wrung every ounce of unconstitutional power from the sovereign people, a large cohort of whom, especially the cognitive elites, have willingly gone along with every new crisis and command.

As the year ends, signs of a pushback are multiplying. But will such resistance reach the critical mass of voters necessary for liberating us from such “soft despotism” and its wardens?

We shouldn’t be surprised that progressives have seized the opportunity to aggrandize themselves through serial changes on the pretext of an exaggerated crisis. It has long been a truism of history that, as James Madison said in 1788, “there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of power, than by sudden usurpations.”

Nearly half a century later, Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw an even more insidious stealth despotism that could arise in American democracy: “An immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure [the people’s] gratifications and to watch over their fate.” And he prophesized that the bureaucratic regulatory state would be the instrument of this “soft despotism”: a power “absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild” that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” The goal is “to keep [the people] in perpetual childhood,” for this power is “well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.”

The last hundred years have seen such a regime gradually become reality. Crises such as the Great Depression, Two World Wars, and other conflicts and recessions provided the pretexts for expanding and concentrating the powers of federal agencies and their “network of small complicated rules.” And like children, too many citizens have accepted these encroachments, willingly ceding their autonomy and freedom to overseers who bribe them with the redistribution of other people’s money, and with promises “alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate” from the cradle to the grave ––what we call “entitlements” but think are unalienable rights.