RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17812/paskudnyak

“Paskudnyak” will surely become familiar to our ears during the remaining years of the Biden Presidency as this ill-starred administration becomes the tool of power players, profiteering lobbyists, and Progressives intent on abducting an enfeebled White House for their own socialist mission.

[T]he Biden administration has revealed itself to be a weekly calamity that must be blamed on either incompetence or worse, a captive of special interests whose agenda has nothing to do with protecting the nation’s future.

The President’s popularity has declined to its lowest level since he was sworn in, with half the nation’s adults disapproving of his performance, according to a report by Reuters. Not surprisingly, the dramatic plummet began following his disastrous retreat from Afghanistan that will see countless Afghans executed for embracing our democratic principles.

From Capitol Hill to the White House, we are witnessing the hinge of history that will determine whether America will continue as a respected world power and it will be decided, in very large measure, by those who may well have chosen power and profits over patriotism.

We might want to make the word “Paskudnyak” a plural.

For the Afghans left behind….

For the French who were double-dealed….

For the Texans confronting an open border that mocks our nation’s sovereignty…

And for the members of the Fed who privately know just how destructive our massive national debt will be to our future…

All of them may want to learn a word not currently in their vocabulary:

“Paskudnyak”

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/vaccine-mandates-the-end-of-covid

This Will Come Back to Haunt Us

By Jay Bhattacharya and Jonathan Ketcham  

Why the push for vaccine passports and mandates? Public health officials have offered one overriding justification: As soon as enough of us are vaccinated, we’ll reach herd immunity and the disease will stop spreading. Vaccine passports and mandates get us there faster.

This is nonsense.

We have good reason to doubt that, if most everyone got vaccinated, we’d achieve herd immunity. That’s because the protection offered by the Covid-19 vaccines against infection is short-lived. A large study of vaccinated patients in Qatar found that, by five months after the second jab, the vaccine’s effectiveness had already started to wane. It continued to protect against severe disease and death, but it did not provide any protection from less severe infection.

In fact, getting Covid and recovering from it is better protection from future reinfection and severe Covid disease than any of the available vaccines. This is clear from an excellent Israeli study. 

That study, conducted at the Maccabi Healthcare Services, in Tel Aviv, makes clear that it is probably safer to be in a room filled with unvaccinated people who have recovered from Covid than it is to be in a room filled with vaccinated people who have never had Covid.

Now, looking beyond the epidemiology, it’s worth considering the psychology that comes into play when we start forcing people to do things: It is practically a mathematical certainty that the mandates will lead many people to distrust the government, leading experts at places like the Centers for Disease Control, and our most prominent research universities even more than they do now. Why, the thinking goes, are you forcing me to do something that, you insist, is obviously good for me? If it were obviously good for me, you wouldn’t have to force me to do it. 

The mandates, far from persuading the unvaccinated to fall into line, will further undermine the authority of those pushing them — and, critically, it will make it that much harder to persuade the public to get vaccinated when an even more dangerous pandemic sweeps the globe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17802/democrats-bill-endangering-israel

This is not an “occupation.” It is legitimate and entirely lawful self-defense. It would be a lie — a blood libel — for the United States to declare Gaza to be occupied territory.

Under international law, a military occupation may continue as long as there is belligerence, as there certainly continues to be.

Had Israeli troops remained, Israel would be criticized. Now that they have left, there is still criticism. For some, Israel can do no right.

Jerusalem is more complicated… These are not occupied territories. Nor is the rest of East Jerusalem which is part of a united city.

Israel twice offered to end its presence in more than 90% of the West Bank in exchange for peace. The Palestinian leadership refused these offers and are thus responsible for the current situation.

The bill proposed by Levin and his fellow Democrats encourages the refusal of Palestinian leaders to negotiate painful compromises that are essential to achieving peace. It also rewards the pay-to-slay and terrorist policies… It sends a dangerous message to Palestinian naysayers: you do not have to negotiate or compromise; the United States will compel Israel to give in to your demands without requiring the Palestinians to negotiate, compromise or give up terrorism.

A far better bill would be one that conditioned reopening the Palestinian embassy on a willingness of the Palestinian leadership to return to the negotiating table and engage in genuine and honest discussions leading toward a peaceful two-state solution that assured security for Israel and autonomy for the West Bank Palestinians. (There can be no solution for Gaza except a military one as long as Hamas remains in charge, and persists in its terrorism and refuses to recognize Israel.)

Just when Congress overwhelmingly defeated an effort by eight radical Democrats and one Republican to defund Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, several “mainstream” Democrats proposed legislation that is equally dangerous and filled with half-truths, omissions and outright fabrications.

Congressman Andy Levin has introduced a bill that purports to further the “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although I favor two states for two peoples, I strongly oppose Levin’s perhaps well-intentioned but ill-conceived bill, because it would destroy any prospect for peace, would reward and encourage terrorism and disincentivize Palestinian leaders from negotiating with Israel.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/tragedy-therapy-and-challenge-jihad-bruce-thornton/

After a year of righteous anger and renewed patriotism, post-9/11 America returned to many of the dysfunctional orthodoxies and bad received wisdom that had helped pave the way for al Qaeda’s success. Foreign policy in particular quickly shifted from punitive kinetic realism to enhance our prestige and create deterrence, to nation-building idealism and cringing “diplomatic outreach.” But this “rules-based international order” foreign-policy thinking itself was a consequence of a long shift in Western culture from tragic realism to therapeutic idealism that permeates our culture and accounts for many of its utopian fantasies.

Twenty years later, the debacle in Afghanistan shows that when it comes to Islam, we are still crippled by our therapeutic delusions.

The tragic view of human life derives from both our Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots. It can be summed up in a line from Euripides: “To suffer is necessity for mortals.” We are beings driven by destructive passions and impulses, yet possessing as well conscious minds and free will. We live in a hostile natural world indifferent to our pain and suffering. We are bound by time and vulnerable to change and the consequence of choices that we can’t foresee. Our world is defined by those limits, and no human effort, no philosophy, no social or political order we create can transcend them or our destructive passions.

Modernity is defined by its claims to correct this tragic world through human knowledge, technology, and the progressive improvement of humanity by eliminating those tragic constants that create our misery and suffering. Educate people to know their true best interests, remove or reform tyrannical governments, provide adequate nutrition and health-care, and create freedom and prosperity, then people will become peaceful, free, and tolerant. Pain, suffering, the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” injustice, bigotry, cruelty, hunger, and even emotional pain caused by our own bad choices––remove these tragic conditions of human existence and we can create heaven on earth.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/28/bidens-vaccine-mandate-gets-more-pointless-every-day/

Three weeks ago, President Joe Biden told America he’d ordered his regulators to draw up “emergency” workplace rules requiring vaccinations for everyone working for big companies. Those rules have yet to emerge. And they might not emerge for another month and a half.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration announced on Friday – which is the day politicians choose to release news when they want minimal coverage – that federal contractors will have until Dec. 8 to comply with that part of his mandate. More than two months from now.

In other words, Biden hasn’t managed to get his federal mandate implemented yet, and won’t for some time. What he has managed to achieve is dissension, confusion, lawsuits, and worker shortages – as well as a steady decline in daily vaccination rates. (See the chart below.)Mark it down as another Biden “success.”

Biden directed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to create those “emergency” rules. Businesses will need them to know who can be exempted from the mandate and why, what the penalty will be for failing to comply, paperwork requirements, etc. These businesses will also need to know that they aren’t violating the Americans with Disabilities Act while enforcing the Biden vaccine mandate.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-new-spending-whopper-11632780042?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Where have all the “fact checkers” gone? On Saturday night President Joe Biden took to social media to repeat his new multi-trillion-dollar falsehood. And much of the press corps has nothing to offer in response but approbation.

A Journal editorial published online Friday night noted the latest Biden tall tale about his effort to enact a historic spending binge, estimated to cost $3.5 trillion, but perhaps as much as $5 trillion or more:

The agenda that was being sold a few weeks ago as the modern equivalent of the New Deal or Great Society is actually so modest it doesn’t cost a thing.
“Every time I hear this is going to cost A, B, C, or D—the truth is, based on the commitment that I made, it’s going to cost nothing,” President Biden said at a press conference Friday, trying to restore momentum to the reconciliation package, “because we’re going to raise the revenue.”
We didn’t know that when you pay for something that makes it free… And so a talking point is born, or at least trying to be: The largest tax increase as a share of GDP and the largest entitlement expansion since the 1960s costs nothing. And money grows on trees.

Instead of correcting his multi-trillion-dollar whopper, the President then took to Twitter on Saturday night to falsely claim:

My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars.

One does not need to venture beyond Mr. Biden’s own website to see that the costs of his agenda are enormous, and therefore that this claim is false.

The Biden tweet then made another claim which essentially refuted the first one—acknowledging that there will be significant costs, and that taxpayers will bear them:

Instead of wasting money on tax breaks, loopholes, and tax evasion for big corporations and the wealthy, we can make a once-in-a-generation investment in working America.

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2021/09/27/the-collapse-of-bidens-world-n1481335

Despite his vow to “build back better,” China is forcing all of Joe Biden’s moves. The Asian giant’s decision to pursue its own climate policy, consisting largely of more industrialization with green trimmings, effectively kills the Paris accords, so long a part of the progressive platform.  How could it not? Beijing produces more emissions than the EU and U.S. combined.

“In 2019, China’s emissions not only eclipsed that of the US — the world’s second-largest emitter at 11% of the global total — but also, for the first time, surpassed the emissions of all developed countries combined … When added together, GHG emissions from all members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as all 27 EU member states, reached 14,057 MMt CO2e in 2019, about 36 MMt CO2e short of China’s total.”

Not only is climate change DOA, but the post-WW2 alliance structure is in the ICU. China’s naval expansion pushed Washington to undercut the planned Australian purchase of French conventional submarines in favor of U.K.-U.S. nuclear designs. “For Mr. Macron, the [AUKUS] submarine debacle demonstrates that the NATO alliance is debilitated to the point of dysfunction through lack of trust. The glue has gone. Without transparency — and in the submarine deal there was none — alliance, in the French view, becomes an empty word.”

The “glue” that held NATO together was fear of the Soviet bear. But that once formidable bruin is mangy and supplanted by the much more formidable CCP dragon. The decline of European alliances reflects the strategic primacy of Asia. The irony was that up until Kevin Rudd became PM, Australia actually wanted to become part of Asia. But Chinese expansionism changed all that and stirred in the Aussie breast the old but not wholly forgotten memories of alliances with the English-speaking world.

But the ultimate blow to Biden’s Global World has been to its economic underpinnings. China had been going broke gradually, then all of a sudden. “The roots of the crisis date to [Chinese] tax reforms in 1994 which bolstered central government coffers but left local governments reliant on land financing for revenue.” By China’s own reckoning, the country’s vaunted economic growth rested on three huge bubbles that, once exploded, could threaten the Party’s own legitimacy. “This year, Xi has set out to reform the ‘three huge mountains’ of housing, education and healthcare to rein in soaring costs for city dwellers as a way to shore up legitimacy as the ‘people’s leader’, analysts said.”

The Communist Party encouraged the bubbles in order to tax them. But now, with the stream of new business finally exhausted and the entire edifice threatening to collapse like a house of cards, Chairman Xi has suddenly rediscovered Maoism.