RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/three_takeaways_from_afghanistan_for_us_at_home.html

First, remember our troops, living and dead, who served the United States in Afghanistan since 2001.  They are owed our gratitude for their steadfast presence in a difficult country and our help as they and their families, and the families of the dead, navigate the emotionally terrible terrain of a defeat inflicted not by the enemy, but by our government’s failure to plan properly for the end of their mission.  If it was time for the U.S. to leave, then so be it.  But there is nothing the civilians or the military higher-ups can say that will make Americans believe they knew what they were doing.  Resignations are in order.

Spare a moment, too, for the 182,071 soldiers in the Afghan Army and Air Force and the 118,628 members of the police and paramilitary security forces serving as of July 2021.  Yes, the Afghan force collapsed — but only after the U.S. withdrew its air power and intelligence capabilities, both of which the Afghans had relied upon under our tutelage.

Second, retire the word “privilege” as used in the U.S. to denigrate those perceived to have some inborn, unearned advantage.  Whatever your color, race, or sex; whether you are the sixth great-grandchild of slave or fifth great-grandchild of Chinese railroad slaves or the second-generation Vietnamese refugees or the remnants of the Holocaust — if you live in the United States today, you are privileged.  You have the advantages of freedom, liberty, and a Constitution.  You have access to education, food, medicine, and bathrooms.  If you doubt your privilege, watch CNN.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/02/above-all-do-no-harm-in-medicine-or-politics/
We’ve been betrayed by elected officials who follow the hypocritical path of pandering and self-interest.

Physicians are taught in their training the principle, “First, Do No Harm,” one of the primary precepts of patient care, and which is found in early versions of the Hippocratic Oath. By contrast, many politicians seem to abide by the hypocritical oath, treating inconsistency, irrationality, and harm as incidental and subordinate to their self-interest. Lately, this approach to public service has become, literally, lethal.

Two prominent issues illustrate how embracing the hypocritical oath can inflict serious harm. The first is the handling of the pandemic, and the second is the dangerous distortion of the criminal justice system in many parts of the country.

It was just last year that numerous Democratic politicians, including then-vice-presidential-candidate Kamala Harris, stated unequivocally that a vaccine developed under President Donald Trump could not be trusted. It was as if she and others believed that the Trump administration’s career civil-servant regulators would cut corners and issue premature, risky approvals. Although there was pressure exerted on the FDA to act according to political timetables, nothing suggests that either product development or governmental review was inappropriately rushed.

Of course, after Joe Biden won the election, these same politicians could not pivot fast enough. Universal vaccination suddenly (and justifiably) became the mantra of the new administration. Unfortunately, some people seemed not to heed the volte-face, and the seeds of doubt planted last fall have borne fruit in the form of vaccine hesitancy. This is by no means an indictment of the vaccines. Rational people with no medical reason to hesitate should undoubtedly be taking the shot. The vaccines may not pose zero risk, but they are extremely safe; and for almost everyone, the risks of contracting COVID-19 are far, far greater, and prevention offers the added “bonus” of avoiding “long COVID” symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath, and loss of taste or smell, that persist in between 10% and 30% of those who recover from even mild cases.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/02/u-s-in-more-trouble-than-at-any-time-in-its-history/

Candidate Joe Biden said last October that we were nearing the “most important election of our lifetime.” He was right. What made it so crucial was keeping him out of the White House.

President Joe Biden is visibly exhausted. His mental decline that began long before the 2020 election appears to have now gone straight over a cliff. The first seven months of his term have depleted him so thoroughly that the toll taken by eight years of the modern presidency look mild in comparison.

His errors and poor judgment continue and compound. Never in possession of an abundance of sound thinking, he’s been drained of what little wisdom he ever had. And he’s only going to get worse.

Biden’s record of failure is well-documented. He’s been a train wreck in progress for decades. Just added to his resume of misery is the ongoing catastrophe in Afghanistan where Americans have been murdered and abandoned; historic inflation that threatens economic growth; a workforce that feels work is optional; dire conditions in which businesses can’t find enough workers; an open wound on our southern border; and a greenlighting of terrorism both in the U.S. and abroad.

President Ice Cream has also caused further political and social division, increased gasoline prices through perverse energy policies, and forsaken allies while inviting enemies and rogues to test American resolve. Given that his handlers often call a lid on his workdays before afternoon tea, he’s often been able to make a hash of things before lunch.

https://quillette.com/2021/09/01/welcome-to-cold-war-ii/

In early June, with little fanfare or press coverage, the US Senate passed a 2,400-page bill called “The United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA).” Heralded as “the most significant government intervention in industrial policy in decades,” the bill will pump over $200 billion into a diverse spectrum of R&D initiatives over the next five years with the sole purpose of bolstering “competitiveness against China.”

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the alarming extent of America’s dependence on foreign countries. Nowhere was this more apparent or more dire than in the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as medical masks. “Medical supply chains that span oceans and continents,” note Martha Mendoza and Juliet Linderman in an article for PBS Frontline, “are the fragile lifelines between raw materials and manufacturers overseas, and healthcare workers on COVID-19 front lines in the US. As link after link broke, the system fell apart.” Mendoza and Linderman’s joint coverage of the issue followed a months-long investigation and reveals just how vulnerable America allowed itself to become. As the world turned inwards and borders began to close, complex global supply chains were paralyzed. Locked-down countries had entire industrial sectors knocked out at the very moment they were most needed. It wasn’t until February 2020, nearly three months after COVID-19 cases began to appear, that China restarted its medical factories.

This, as it turned out, was a problem unknown to many Americans. Even prior to the coronavirus, China manufactured well over half of the world’s masks. It has since “expanded production nearly 12-fold since then,” Keith Bradsher and Liz Alderman report in the New York Times. Moreover, China “bought up much of the rest of the world’s supply,” importing 56 million respirators and masks following the January lockdown in Wuhan. China’s medical dominance also accounts for over 60 percent of global antibiotics and sedative exports.

China—like any country—looked after its own citizens first. Rushing to contain COVID-19 domestically, medical supplies leaving the country shrank overnight. In February 2020, the Associated Press found a 55 percent drop in N95 imports to America as well as a 40 percent decline in hand sanitizer and swab imports. “The critical shortage of medical supplies across the US, including testing swabs, protective masks, surgical gowns and hand sanitizer, can be tied to a sudden drop in imports, mostly from China,” Mendoza and Linderman wrote in March 2020.

Once the scale of the pandemic and the importance of basic medical supplies became clear, many countries adopted a “Beggar Thy Neighbour” approach reminiscent of the Great Depression, scrambling to protect themselves at the expense of others. It wasn’t only China looking after its own interests; American allies including South Korea, India, Taiwan, France, and the United Kingdom all imposed export restrictions on a host of coronavirus-related products. The US was no different. President Trump invoked the Korean War-era Defence Production Act and demanded that 3M halt exports of N95 masks to Canada and Latin America.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-job-approval-underwater-in-most-swing-states-amid-afghanistan-fiasco/

According to a new national poll conducted by Civiqs, President Joe Biden’s job approval rating is underwater in most swing states. The military withdrawal and chaotic civilian evacuation from Afghanistan overseen by Biden left the country in Taliban control and led to the deaths of 13 American soldiers and countless Afghans.

In six hotly contested battlegrounds during the 2020 election — namely Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas — Biden’s approval rating is underwater by ten or more percentage points.

In Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Virginia and Wisconsin too, more Americans disappointed in, rather than satisfied with, Biden’s job performance, but by a single digit margin. Biden beat Trump in each of these states in 2020.

Biden’s net approval rating has dropped from a positive five percent when he assumed office in January to negative eight percent in August, Civiqs calculated.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/01/dr-scott-atlas-science-killed-itself-over-covid-19/

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American people have been told to “follow the science.” Yet for a year and a half, they’ve heard contradicting messages from self-appointed prophets of “the science” like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We learned that politicians who claimed their decisions were science-driven often ignored scientific findings that didn’t fit certain political narratives. We discovered that scientists are fallible human beings, and some would let personal interests and political views cloud their judgment.

Is science itself one of the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic? I asked Dr. Scott Atlas at the 13th annual Freedom Conference hosted by the Steamboat Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization. Formerly a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, Atlas is now a senior fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institution.

Atlas has been under constant attacks by the left and the corporate media since he served as a special adviser to former President Trump and a member of the White House coronavirus task force from August to November 2020. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran hit pieces on Atlas, questioning his qualifications despite his distinguished career and scholarship.

Google-owned YouTube also removed a 50-minute video of Atlas’s interview with the Hoover Institute. Twitter took down his tweet that questioned the effectiveness of masks.

‘Science’ Destroyed Its Own Credibility

Atlas has refused to be silenced. He has a lot to say about how the scientific field and Americans’ trust in it have been tremendously harmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Science has been not just a victim,” he told me, “but actively participated in the self-destruction of its credibility.”

To prove his point, Atlas referred to the now infamous letter published in Lancet, which denounced the lab-leak theory as a “conspiracy” that created “fear, rumors, and prejudice.” Facebook “fact-checkers” used the letter to censor discussion of the lab-leak theory for more than a year.

It then surfaced in The Daily Mail that Peter Daszak, president of Eco Health Alliance, orchestrated a group of scientists to write the letter without disclosing the EHA’s close financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Now many scientists accept that the WIV lab-leak theory is just as probable as the natural origin theory.

Atlas also faulted leading scientific publications such as Nature and Lancet for playing “important roles in enabling, encouraging, and enforcing the false narrative.” In June, journalist Ian Birrell cited one source who estimated the publisher of Nature had sponsorship agreements worth millions of dollars from Chinese institutions.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/08/31/biden-administration-erased-afghan-weapons-reports-from-federal-websites/?sh=3cd7779f16ba

The War in Afghanistan has always been a black box, but the Biden administration just made matters worse.

According to an admission obtained from the State Department, Biden officials recently directed federal agencies to scrub their websites of official reports detailing the $82.9 billion in military equipment and training provided to the Afghan security forces since 2001.

The scrubbed audits and reports included detailed accounting of what the U.S. had provided to Afghan forces, down to the number of night vision devices, hand grenades, Black Hawk helicopters, and armored vehicles.

Reports further quantified 208 aircraft and helicopters; 75,000 war vehicles – including 22 Humvees, 50,000 tactical vehicles and nearly 1,000 mine resistant vehicles; and 600,000 weapons – including 350,000 M4 and M16 rifles, 60,000 machine guns, and 25,000 grenade launchers.

The State Department admitted to removing the reports but justified the move as a way to protect Afghan allies. According to a spokesperson:

“The safety of our Afghan contacts is of utmost importance to us. The State Department advised other federal agencies of to [sic] review their web properties for content that highlights cooperation/participation between an Afghan citizen and the USG or a USG partner and remove from public view if it poses a security risk.”

It’s worth noting that the Biden administration already put these partners at risk when officials provided lists of Afghan nationals to the Taliban in a misguided attempt to clear them for evacuation. The Taliban, a known terrorist organization with a history of murdering Afghan citizens working alongside U.S. forces, should never have been trusted with those names.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/31/follow-the-science-toward-tyranny/

Modern science as a discipline carries within itself the seeds of tyrannical rule, for the scientific method requires controlled experiments. But human beings want to be free and reject rules they did not create. Applied directly to society, the methods of natural science would destroy the ways of a free nation.

Of course free men and women use science to uncover knowledge and apply it to improve the human condition. Today the crucial distinction between following science and using it is lost on people and politicians. Without observing that difference, Americans might readily confuse their need for science with a dangerous embrace of the tyranny it demands when imprudently applied to human behavior.

Now comes the U.S. Supreme Court espying tyranny in a bureaucratic Center for Disease Control (CDC) regulation preposterously claiming to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Perhaps the court caught some anti-tyranny virus, for just 48 hours before, it denied the bureaucracy the ability to preserve and enhance the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program—which allows “Dreamers” to remain in the United States illegally and indefinitely. Whatever the epidemiology of its jurisprudence, the court’s unsigned per curiam opinion in Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS has exposed the tyranny of the administrative state. Both the CDC and the DACA examples illustrate the extent to which the federal government is governed not by an elected congress or president, or even the unelected courts but by the administrative state, the nexus of bureaucracy, academia, and media that effectively rules America on behalf of increasingly leftist policies. 

The allegedly anti-COVID regulation is quicker to analyze and ridicule and better illustrates the vices of the administrative state.

First, the CDC justification for regulation of any activity that might contribute to the spread of disease rests on one assertion: because COVID. But government agencies must justify their powers on the basis of a law. In this instance, the court declared, “It strains credulity to believe that this [1944] statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.”  Specifically, the CDC “has imposed a nationwide moratorium on [housing] evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination.”  

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/tech_tyrants_elevate_biden_to_dear_leader_status_with_criticism_forbidden.html

Shana Chappell, whose son U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui was murdered in Afghanistan thanks to the Biden administration’s fecklessness, took to social media to say exactly what she thought of Biden, including questioning the legitimacy of his presidency. It was classic free speech of the type the First Amendment protects…so Instagram (which Facebook owns) suspended her. It later reinstated her, assuring that it was all a mistake when we all know that the only mistake was that Facebook/Instagram got caught. The mere fact that Facebook/Instagram took this step — and thought it could get away with it — is a perfect example of the fact that the Tech Tyrants are functioning in the same way as North Korean censors, banning any speech critical of the “Dear Leader” and his policies.

Kareem Nikoui was a young man who wanted to serve his country and his family was proud of him for that. Had he died in battle at Bagram Air Force Base defending American interests, they would have wept for his loss but consoled themselves with the thought that he died for the greater good.

Thanks to the Biden administration’s criminally bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, though, Kareem Nikoui did not die serving his country. Instead, he was murdered because the Biden administration, having deliberately handed Kabul over to the Taliban, made the Taliban—America’s enemy—responsible for security around the Kabul airport:

In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha—including McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command—spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar. “We have a problem,” Baradar said, according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”

Throughout the day, Biden had remained resolute in his decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan. The collapse of the Afghan government hadn’t changed his mind. McKenzie, aware of those orders, told Baradar that the U.S. mission was only to evacuate American citizens, Afghan allies and others at risk. The United States, he told Baradar, needed the airport to do that.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/afghanistan-southern-us-border-show-biden-kevin-roberts/

The debacle in Afghanistan is still unfolding, but it is already one of the signal disasters of American history. It’s usually premature to assess contemporary events in history’s light, so it’s a sign of just how bad things are in Kabul that I — a historian — am ready to put it alongside the Bay of Pigs, the Fall of Saigon, the Black Hawk Down incident, and 9/11 itself in the list of era-defining American humiliations. It’s bad enough that it’s happening – what’s worse is that we chose it.

And it’s not an aberration for our unmoored American federal government regardless of who occupies the White House or controls Congress. Confronted with a whole summer of insurrectionary violence in American cities, it can’t seem to bring itself to guarantee public order. Confronted with angry citizens overrunning the very seat of its rule on Capitol Hill, it can’t seem to defend itself. Confronted with a metastasizing narco-state threat in Mexico, and a historic crisis of human trafficking overwhelming national borders, it can’t seem to do much but watch.

Yet when confronted with states organizing in blocs to execute tasks reserved to itself — the so-called “Western States Pact” comes to mind, as do the various states sending forces to the U.S.-Mexico border — the federal government seems strangely passive and inert. Perhaps that’s to the good.

It’s tempting to look at unforced errors like this in isolation, just one episode among many. We shouldn’t. The truth is that Afghanistan is part of a larger pattern. Pull the camera back a bit, and the picture becomes more disturbing than even the grim images from Kabul’s beleaguered airport. The incompetence on display in that country is just the latest episode of blundering from a federal government that increasingly cannot do anything it should.

The national government as envisioned and established by the American Founders has just one purpose, succinctly set forth in the Declaration of Independence: “to secure these rights.” Since then, Americans have come to expect federal governance in Washington, D.C., to fulfill an array of roles. For most of American history, it did a credible job of meeting those expectations. Americans of my parents’ generation, for example, reasonably expected the federal government to successfully defend them from enemies abroad and secure law and order at home. They expected it to meet the challenge of public health crises, and run an efficient immigration system. They expected it to assert a monopoly on national authority, and to promote and defend a common American civic narrative.