RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/14/will-worker-resistance-to-bidens-vaccine-mandates-tank-the-economy/

President Joe Biden’s command that private businesses require their workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 is a shocking abuse of presidential power. Just as bad, by discouraging workers from staying on the job, it might tank the economy, which is already reeling from COVID-related shortages and soaring inflation.

On Sept. 9, Biden announced that businesses with 100 or more employees would have to require them to be vaccinated or take weekly COVID tests to prove they don’t have the Wuhan bug. This edict will affect as many as 100 million American workers.

One big problem: Cities, states and counties have in the past had authority to mandate things such as vaccines, not the federal government. Biden is literally creating a new authority for the presidency out of thin air, the kind of thing that authoritarian dictators do.

What’s more, Biden’s “order” is nothing of the sort. He announced it in early September, but has never released written rules for the government to enforce. So as of today, there is no “rule” or “order” to follow. Just a statement to the media.

The problem is, businesses, local and state government agencies, health providers, hospitals and others are forging ahead with their own plans to force workers to take one of the vaccines. And they’re using Biden’s phony “order” for cover.

The city of Boston, for instance, just suspended 812 workers for non-compliance. Boeing says it will require its workers to get vaccinated, or be suspended.

https://thehill.com/policy/international/576797-us-rejoins-un-human-rights-council-reversing-trump-exit

“The Human Rights Council is often lambasted for the election of members who hold the worst records for human rights violations and for a disproportionate focus on condemning Israel for alleged human rights abuses compared to other countries. ”

The U.S. on Thursday was elected to serve on the U.N. Human Rights Council beginning next year, rejoining the highly scrutinized international committee after leaving it in 2018 under then-President Trump.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the move, saying the council plays a “meaningful role” in protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms, but suffers from “serious flaws,” including disproportionate focus on condemning Israel. 

“Together, we must push back against attempts to subvert the ideals upon which the Human Rights Council was founded, including that each person is endowed with human rights and that states are obliged to protect those rights,” Blinken said in a statement.

The secretary had announced in February that the U.S. would return to the council as an observer, part of President Biden’s push to reengage on the global stage in general and among international forums, in particular.

Trump withdrew the U.S. from the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2018, part of a series of withdrawals from international bodies. Then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Niki Haley criticized the council as exercising a “chronic bias against Israel” and a “hypocritical” body that “makes a mockery of human rights.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/americas-current-malaise-biden/

The word malaise, a general feeling of uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify, is creeping into discussions. It’s a politically loaded word, following its use by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 to describe the country he could not figure out to how lead.

Carter’s specific use of the term focused on the energy crisis, when OPEC monkeyed with America’s oil supply. But Carter saw that something much deeper was wrong. There wasn’t just an oil shortage to manage, but a recession of hope, a crisis of confidence that someone would have to lead America out of. He perceived that we were tired, worn down, unable to come together in common purpose and fix something.

It would be interesting to hear what Carter thinks about 2021, when things once again don’t work well. Flights don’t fly. Inflation has returned. Gas is expensive. Supply chain problems mean Americans for the first time since World War Two are rationing and getting used to hearing ‘we don’t have any and aren’t sure when we will’. Unemployment plagues us as COVID tore the wool off of many Americans’ eyes about how little meaningless jobs for sub-living wages contributed to their piggy banks or their sense of self-worth. Nurses who were last year’s heroes for working unvaccinated are fired today for being unvaccinated.

There appears no end to COVID. The promised conclusion, the vaccine, proved as rich a lie as two weeks to flatten the curve. Even fully vaccinated people are prisoners to restrictions and mandates that often make no sense, or at the very least vary so much from state to state as to challenge their usefulness. There is little faith that the economic devastation caused by mismanaged restrictions will ever be addressed; the poor will just get poorer. There is a declining sense that COVID is a problem that can be managed as it has been in much of the world (see Europe, especially Scandinavia). The conclusion is that no one is really in charge.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/13/the-new-gender-religion-tricks-liberals-into-betraying-children/

Since sexual reproduction first appeared on planet Earth some 1.2 billion years ago, sex has been determined—not assigned—based on compatibility for reproduction. That 1.2-billion year streak will soon end at a school-board meeting near you. If you attend, bow in silence: you’ll be entering the temple of a new religion—albeit a temple with fluorescent lights and folding chairs, where establishment shamans hand down the new laws of nature with absolutely no consultation with nature. The calendar on the wall will display the year zero.

The new gospel requires school staff to say “she” even when they mean “he.” It lets boys play on girls’ sports teams and compete against other girls. It lets boys into girls’ locker rooms to change for swim class. Gender may be “reassigned.” Biological sex dissolves. Everything that once reflected sex is now said to reflect gender. “Transitioning” is this religion’s central sacrament.

How do gender priests transform the bread and wine of contradiction into undeniable truths? How do they claim to know that your children should be bound by their shocking new laws? Is it biology? Liberal ideals? Divine revelation?

No. Gender priests claim to find their new religion in the mysteries of language itself. In other words, word games. We should no sooner listen to a gender priest inspired by word games than to a medicine man inspired by astrology.

A sick establishment uses word games to force society to accept contradictions. That isn’t the theory of some Christian zealot or Reaganite culture warrior. It’s the theory of Herbert Marcuse, the late founder of the New Left. His 1964 classic One Dimensional Man inaugurated a critical theory still used by Marxists today—and gender religion would be far too much, even for a liberal like him. 

The new gender religion is, in fact, a triumph of what Marcuse most despised—a bad kind of thinking he ironically called “positive thought.” Positive thought leads to a kind of word gaming called “positive language.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/13/is-america-becoming-rome-versus-byzantium/

In A.D. 286 the Roman emperor Diocletian split in half the huge Roman Empire administratively—and peacefully—under the control of two emperors. 

A Western empire included much of modern-day Western Europe and northwest Africa. The Eastern half controlled Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia, and northeastern Africa. 

By 330 the Emperor Constantine institutionalized that split by moving the empire’s capital from Rome to his new imperial city of Constantinople, founded on the site of the old Greek polis of Byzantium. 

The two administrative halves of the once huge empire continued to drift apart. Soon there arose two increasingly different, though still kindred versions of a once unified Romanity. 

The Western empire eventually collapsed into chaos by the latter 5th century A.D..

Yet the Roman eastern half survived for nearly a thousand years. It was soon known as the Byzantine Empire, until overwhelmed by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 A.D..  

Historians still disagree over why the East endured while the West crumbled. And they cite the various roles of differing geography, border challenges, tribal enemies, and internal challenges. 

We moderns certainly have developed unfair stereotypes of a supposedly decadent late imperial Rome of Hollywood sensationalism that deserved its end. And we likewise mistakenly typecast a rigid, ultra-orthodox bureaucratic “Byzantine” alternative that supposedly grew more reactionary to survive in a rough neighborhood. 

Yet in both cases, separate geography multiplied the growing differences between a Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian, and older civilization in the east, versus a more or less polyglot and often fractious Christianity in the Latin West. 

Byzantium held firm against ancient neighboring Persian, Middle Eastern, and Egyptian rivals. But the West disintegrated into a tribal amalgam of its own former peoples.  

Unlike the West, the glue that held the East together against centuries of foreign enemies, was the revered idea of an ancient and uncompromising Hellenism—the preservation of a common, holistic Greek language, religion, culture, and history.   

By A.D. 600, at a time when the West had long ago fragmented into tribes and proto-European kingdoms, the jewel at Constantinople was the nerve center of the most impressive civilization in the world, stretching from the Eastern Asia Minor to southern Italy. 

There is now much talk of a new American red state/blue state split—and even wild threats of another Civil War. Certainly, millions of Americans yearly self-select, disengage from their political opposites, and make moves based on diverging ideology, culture, politics, religiosity or lack of it, and differing views of the American past. 

More conservative traditionalists head for the interior between the coasts, where there is usually smaller government, fewer taxes, more religiosity, and unapologetic traditionalists. 

https://asiatimes.com/2021/10/gobbling-chinas-exports-us-sinks-into-dependency/

China’s exports rose 28% in September from the year-earlier level, more than the analyst consensus had forecast. More important is that China’s exports to the United States have risen by 31% since January 2018, when President Trump imposed tariffs on a wide range of US imports from China. At a seasonally adjusted annual rate, the US is buying $635 billion of Chinese goods, equal to a staggering 27% of US manufacturing Gross Domestic Product.

During the same period, China’s exports to South Korea rose by 50%, to Taiwan by 60%, and to Germany by 61%, but China imports almost as much from these three countries.

Demand for Chinese goods after the pandemic disruption has strained China’s production capacity, contributing to a power shortage that is now forcing cutbacks in key industries, including computer chips.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/tugas-prices-seven-year-high-and-rising-biden-offensive-against-domestic-oil

“Average gas price: June 2020: $2.21 June 2021: $3.07 President Biden’s economy!” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tweeted during the summer. 

“You forgot to mention that gas prices are the same now as they were in June 2018,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki fired back. “Or that this time last year unemployment was 11.1% — today it’s 5.8%. @POTUS agrees families shouldn’t pay more at the pump — that’s why he’s opposed to GOP proposals to raise the gas tax.”

Yet, the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill reportedly includes an estimated $6 billion worth of charges on U.S. oil and gas operators on federal lands, which could effectively put mom and pop small business, and minority and Native-owned operations out of business, in addition to killing tens of thousands of jobs.   

There isn’t enough oil and gas supply to meet U.S. demand, due to a combination of factors, including the Biden administration halting new leases on federal land, halting the Keystone Pipeline, increasing regulatory burdens, and other measures that will take years to correct, those in the industry argue.

In one of his first acts in office, President Joe Biden, through executive order, halted the issuance of new oil and gas leases on federal lands, effectively stopping much production for existing operations. He also eliminated low-cost Canadian crude from being processed by mid-continent and Gulf Coast and U.S. refiners by prohibiting the Keystone pipeline from opening. 

If Biden had not severely hampered domestic production, the U.S. would have an ample supply of oil and gas and commensurately lower costs at the pump, industry experts argue. 

The $6 billion in additional costs imposed on the industry included in the budget reconciliation bill include new methane fees, inspection fees, severance fees, and bonding requirements, as well as additional requirements for operating on federal lands.

https://dailypatriotreport.com/tulsi-gabbard-americans-are-being-lied-to-by-the-biden-administration/

On Saturday, former presidential candidate and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard appeared on Fox News and told viewers that the Biden Administration is straight up lying to the American people about the border crisis and Afghanistan withdrawal.

Gabbard explained, “The faith and trust that the American people need to have in our leaders is dropping every day. The Department of Homeland Security Secretary recently told Congress our borders are secure. This is what he said, this kind of bald-faced lie, whether it has to do with domestic issues or foreign policy issues. We’ve seen this with Afghanistan and the tragically botched withdrawal of our troops and Americans out of Afghanistan. When people are being lied to, the American people are being lied to, it is revealing of the arrogance and the self-serving nature of leaders who are in power in this country.”

She added, “The disrespect that they have for the American people, and it’s why people are losing faith and trust in those leaders. If we have leaders who respect the people, then the people will respect our leaders. If we have leaders who trust the American people, we will trust our leaders. And that’s the problem here is we don’t have leaders who have that trust and respect and who therefore put themselves ahead of the interests of the people.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/de-nihil-lloyd-billingsley/

“The hatred and resentment of Trump is so deep,” Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Bruce Thornton recently noted, “that we now have a ruling party whose main principle is to do the opposite of whatever Trump did no matter how much it benefited the country.” That statement is freighted with meaning and based on considerable evidence.

President Trump withdrew from the Paris Accords, which gives a pass to major polluters China and India. The Biden Junta, what the late Angelo Codevilla called an oligarchy, rejoined the agreement, promising billions of dollars that will wind up enriching “energy grifters.” For all the spending, the United States gets essentially nothing.

President Trump achieved energy independence for America, reducing the cost of energy in particular and the cost of living in general. By freeing the nation from dependence on oil-rich hostile regimes, Trump also boosted America’s national security in a dangerous world.

Joe Biden, who likes to rule by diktat, canceled the Keystone X pipeline, banned fracking and called off oil and gas leases on public lands. This sent the price of gasoline skyrocketing, a severe blow to working Americans but a windfall for OPEC, where Biden showed up with his begging bowl. Thornton was correct that “our economy and our geopolitical clout have been damaged.”

While under fire from the Russia and Ukraine hoaxes, Trump began construction of a border wall. He also halted ridiculous “catch and release” policies, and tasked ICE to remove dangerous criminal illegals from the United States.

The Biden Junta not only stopped construction of the wall but gave the border an existential problem. Thousands of “migrants” from all over the world are now streaming into to the USA, with no check for COVID or other diseases, and exempt from the rules that now restrict legitimate citizens and legal immigrants. The Biden Junta vilifies the Border Patrol and welcomes the invaders. Many get shipped to other parts of the nation with no accountability to Congress or the people.