RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17415/sinking-ship-of-state

To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.

For the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possibly sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America’s best days are in the past.

What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill — or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company’s headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate — to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.

Few debate the idea that our nation’s infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as “infrastructure” has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for “environmental” agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant.

This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge…. As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.

One suspects that historians and economists will consistently agree on one irrefutable fact: nations that allow their economies to bathe in red ink are destined to fail. This failure takes many roads and differs in timing, but massive, uncontrolled national deficits eventually reduce a nation state to being a pauper, a pariah — and pathetic.

Enter Joe Biden’s “American Jobs Plan,” a $2.3 trillion spending scheme that takes some Americans’ most fevered fantasies and wraps them inside an “infrastructure” label in an effort to convince Capitol Hill that the spending is all about roads and bridges. An analysis by the Wharton School places plenty of caution flags on this initiative.

https://www.jns.org/election-of-atheist-harvard-chaplain-to-leadership-role-continues-to-stir-up-controversy/;

 Greg Epstein, the new president of the Harvard chaplains, is an avowed atheist. His

election has led to a perception gap between the Harvard chaplains who voted for him and the general public, which hasn’t quite come to grips with the idea that an atheist can be a chaplain.

The big reason for the gap is that Harvard’s chaplains have had longer to get used to the idea. A Humanist chaplaincy has existed at Harvard for nearly 50 years. Founded in 1974, it was “the first university Humanist chaplaincy in the world,” reports The Harvard Crimson.

Epstein has filled the role since 2005.

Matthew Schmitz, senior editor of First Things, a journal that grapples with issues of religion and public life, said he stands with the general public. The “average Joe nine times out of 10 has it right,” he said. He told JNS that the selection of an atheist chaplain is a sign of “contempt” for religion at America’s premier educational institution and is “profoundly dangerous to the life of our nation” given Harvard’s “outsized role” in world affairs.

That incredulity was fueled by provocative headlines in the press about Epstein’s new position, particularly a New York Times feature titled: “The New Chief Chaplain at Harvard? An Atheist.”

In an op-ed in The Christian Post, Michael Brown, host of the nationally syndicated radio program Line of Fire, asked the question that drew people to the story in the first place: “How can an atheist be a university chaplain?”

“To be a chaplain, by definition, means to be a religious leader,” he wrote, and “to appoint an atheist to be chief university chaplain is like appointing a Christian evangelist to head up the university’s atheist club. Or a devout Muslim to head up the university’s Judaism club.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/17/what-happened-to-the-beloved-military/

The highest echelon of the U.S. military is becoming dysfunctional. 

There are too many admirals and generals for the size of the current U.S. military. It now boasts three times the number of four-star admirals and generals than we had during World War II—when the country was in an existential war for survival and when, by 1945, our active military personnel was almost nine times larger than the current armed forces. 

Somehow a gradual drift in the agendas of our military leadership has resulted in too many various emphases on domestic cultural, social, and political issues. And naturally, as a result, there is less attention given to winning wars and leveraging such victories to our nation’s strategic advantage.

The consequences of these failures are downright scary for a world superpower upon which millions at home and billions worldwide depend. 

There are too many concurrent Pentagon crises. Any one of them would be dangerous to our national security. Together they imperil our very freedoms and security. 

Reform? 

What is to be done? The Uniform Code of Military Justice must be enforced, and not selectively applied on the basis of rank: officers below the rank of general and admiral now face severe penalties for disparaging in personal terms the current administration, while one stars and above are given de facto exemptions for comments about the previous administration. If the code is not considered law but merely a recommendation, then it should be scrapped. 

The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General and the inspector generals of the various branches of the military must enforce existing laws that carefully define the limits of the Joint Chiefs of Staff activity. And they must punish those officers who violate such statues to interrupt the legal chain of command. 

There must be a cooling off period to prevent retiring military officers from rotating onto the boards and lobbying teams of corporate defense contractors, with the presumption that their knowledge of the operation of the Pentagon can be monetized to the advantage of particular corporations. Five years seems a reasonable period in which our top brass should refrain from joining firms that are seeking lucrative contracts from the Pentagon. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/18/buttigieg-the-weak-link-in-the-supply-chain/

The only thing more laughable than Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s claim that spending two months on paternity leave counts as “work” is that the massive infrastructure bill in Congress would do anything to fix the supply chain crisis.

When asked on CNBC why the administration waited so long to take action, Buttigieg responded that “we’ve been working this issue from day one”.

Well, not exactly.

As Politico reported, Buttigieg was “mostly offline” starting in mid-August, and only went on a media blitz after Politico disclosed the fact that he’d been on an unannounced leave.

It’s true that Biden issued a supply chain executive order in early February, saying that “we’re not going to wait for a review to be completed before we start closing the existing gaps.”

In June, Biden announced the creation of a new Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force with Buttigieg one of the key members. The next month, Buttigieg said, he’d “convened the entire ecosystem of supply chain actors.”

Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in an attempt to defend the administration’s response, told reporters that “we’ve not only been talking about this since January, we’ve been working to put in place a range of steps to help address the challenges in the supply chains.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/10/17/bidens_epic_fail_at_unity_146577.html

“As I write this, Biden’s job RealClearPolitics average approval rating is underwater by 7.9%. His low numbers, they’re becoming bipartisan.”

As a candidate, now-President Joe Biden said that if elected, he would bring the country together, heal partisan divisions and get things done. How’s that working out?

Sure, on the campaign trail, Biden seemed so convincing. He was the seasoned hand, a former vice president with 36 years in the Senate who knew the ways of Washington.

“We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in the country,” he said in Ohio in October 2020. He said he wanted to “work with one another.” If he occupied the Oval Office, he promised, “there will be no blue states and red states with me.”

Some nine months into his tenure, it’s evident that Biden’s unity pledge ranks with former President Barack Obama’s campaign whopper, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” which won him PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year in 2013.

It’s not just that Biden isn’t producing unity; it’s also that he’s squandering the moment for a bad idea.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_great_struggle_of_our_time_the_battle_for_reality.html

With societal turbulence all around us, many people feel that we are locked in some great and portentous struggle. But because it is so pervasive and multifaced, the nature of this struggle is not readily obvious. There are many fronts on which this struggle is being fought: racial relations, education, healthcare, popular culture, financial system, and freedom of speech, among others. It is not easy to make sense of it all, especially since the battles are highly pitched and emotions are running very high.

What characterizes these battles, besides their intensity, is deep polarization. The possibility of the warring camps coming together and meeting on some common ground seems to be growing more distant by the day. There is even talk that the two sides will either come to blows, or they will each go their own way in some form of secession.

Many have observed that the contenders seem to be separated by an unbridgeable gap, and yet no one has been able to explain the nature of this gap, or what exactly it is that separates the mindsets of the opposing sides.

In our view the great struggle in the grip of which we find ourselves cuts much deeper than the immediate issues we argue over. The real fight extends beyond any particular point of public friction.

The great battle of our time is a battle about the very nature of reality. More precisely, what the two sides war over on the most fundamental level is what constitutes truth and how it should be determined.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/nebraska_ags_devastating_critique_of_the_suppression_of_effective_covid_therapies.html

What the AG’s formal opinion amounts to is a full and complete takedown of the conspiracy to suppress cheap and effective early Covid-19 treatments.

Legal opinions usually aren’t terribly fun to read, but if you’ve been an ivermectin and/or hydroxychloroquine advocate for use against Wuhan Plague, this one definitely will bring you much joy.

It’s a rather lengthy and full spectrum opinion issued by Doug Peterson, Nebraska’s Attorney General, in response to a query from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services as to whether physicians can be persecuted and tormented for prescribing ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine to patients sick with the China Flu. What the AG’s response amounts to is a full and complete takedown of the conspiracy to suppress cheap and effective early Covid-19 treatments.

All the players — FDA, CDC, Fauci, Big Pharma, the media, all of them — get a glorious and swift kick in the rear end. Portions of it even made me laugh out loud. As far as legal documents go, it’s definitely easy reading and understandable to everyone. It seems clear that the AG’s office went to some trouble to layout the whole saga in a way the masses can understand without translation by legal scholars.

What follows are some of the most relevant parts (at least in my sometimes-humble opinion), but it really is in everyone’s best interest to personally read the opinion in full. People must individually understand what’s actually happening for themselves. This is what will enable We The People to course correct and divert from the ruinous path set for us by the overlords.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/16/art-under-peer-pressure/

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is just so excited to introduce us to “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” its huge retrospective of Johns’ work from the 1950s to the day before yesterday. (Indeed, it’s so huge that New York wasn’t big enough to house it. Part of the exhibition is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But it doesn’t matter where you start. As Bertie Wooster said in another context, “Slice him where you will, a hellhound is still a hellhound.”)

Quoth the Whitney: “Jasper Johns’ groundbreaking work sent shock waves through the art world when it was first shown in the late 1950s, and he has continued to challenge new audiences—and himself—over a career spanning more than sixty-five years.”

“Groundbreaking”? “Shock waves”? “Challenge”? The only thing that Johns’ work—all those crude paintings of American flags, targets, and images swiped ( er, “appropriated”) from innocent teens—the only thing it all challenges is one’s credulity; a credulity, I admit, that cannot help being attended by a certain mixture contempt and envy when you discover that these daubs regularly fetch millions of dollars. Even Hunter Biden must be envious.

The truth is that the images bearing the name of Jasper Johns deserve an honored place not in the history of art but in the history of publicity—department of cheap tricks and mercenary genius.

In this respect, Johns’ oeuvre resembles that of many other celebrated figures in the art world (not to be confused with the world of art), not least his longtime lover and sometime collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, who died in 2008 at 82.

When Rauschenberg died, the Hosannas were loud and predictable. Michael Kimmelman, then chief art critic for the New York Times, spoke for the terminally infatuated when he praised Rauschenberg as an artist who “time and again reshaped art in the 20th century,” whose work “gave new meaning to sculpture,” and whose promiscuous dabblings “defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style.” (Unlike, for example, Leonardo da Vinci, who painted, sculpted, designed buildings, composed music, and did serious mathematical, engineering, and scientific work.)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/10/12/panorama-education-owned-by-us-ag-merrick-garlands-son-in

Last week, AG Garland sent a memo to the head of the FBI, directing him to work with local law enforcement “to address threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.”

Critics say that Garland made the move in response to parents vocally opposing mask mandates and race-related teaching implemented by local school boards.

Nevertheless, the move by Garland to have the FBI investigate parents at school board meetings quickly put his son-in-law’s nationwide education business in the spotlight.

Garland’s son-in-law is Xan Tanner, co-founder, board member, and president (2012-2020) of Panorama Education. Panorama Education sells surveys to school districts across the country that focus on the local “social and emotion climate.” These surveys are then used as justification for new curriculum from other providers that some parents call critical race theory and find objectionable.

Tanner’s company has a large footprint with contracts in 50+ of the nation’s 100 largest school districts. The company describes its business as supporting “13 million students in 23,000 schools and 1,500 districts across 50 states.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/health/coronavirus-delta-surge.html?referringSource=articleShare

“It’s a combination of immunity, but also people being careful,” said Joshua Salomon, an infectious disease expert and modeler at Stanford University.” “It’s not likely that it will be as deadly as the surge we had last winter, unless we get really unlucky with respect to a new variant,” Dr. Salomon said.”

After a brutal summer surge, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, the coronavirus is again in retreat.

The United States is recording roughly 90,000 new infections a day, down more than 40 percent since August. Hospitalizations and deaths are falling, too.

The crisis is not over everywhere — the situation in Alaska is particularly dire — but nationally, the trend is clear, and hopes are rising that the worst is finally behind us.

Again.

Over the past two years, the pandemic has crashed over the country in waves, inundating hospitals and then receding, only to return after Americans let their guard down.

It is difficult to tease apart the reasons that the virus ebbs and flows in this way, and harder still to predict the future.

But as winter looms, there are real reasons for optimism. Nearly 70 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, and many children under 12 are likely to be eligible for their shots in a matter of weeks. Federal regulators could soon authorize the first antiviral pill for Covid-19.

“We are definitely, without a doubt, hands-down in a better place this year than we were last year,” said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research at Boston University.

But the pandemic is not over yet, scientists cautioned. Nearly 2,000 Americans are still dying every day, and another winter surge is plausible. Given how many Americans remain unvaccinated, and how much remains unknown, it is too soon to abandon basic precautions, they said.

“We’ve done this again and again, where we let the foot off the pedal too early,” Dr. Bhadelia said. “It behooves us to be a bit more cautious as we’re trying to get to that finish line.”

Crushing the curve

When the first wave of cases hit the United States in early 2020, there was no Covid vaccine, and essentially no one was immune to the virus. The only way to flatten the proverbial curve was to change individual behavior.

That is what the first round of stay-at-home orders, business closures, mask mandates and bans on large gatherings aimed to do. There is still debate over which of these measures were most effective, but numerous studies suggest that, collectively, they made a difference, keeping people at home and curbing the growth of case numbers.

These policies, combined with voluntary social distancing, most likely helped bring the early surges to an end, researchers said.