RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Most of us conservatives who take our politics seriously have struggled with the phenomenon that was (and is) Donald Trump. We were taught that character matters, but we also know that so do issues. When they collide, on which side should we stand?

All of us, regardless of political leanings, struggle to fit today’s partisan political environment into the moral universe we inherited. As a conservative, I struggle to keep my moral compass firmly fixed in a world turned increasingly woke, where facts are subordinated to the narrative, where truth is relative and where censorship is applied. As an essayist, it is not my function to convince the reader of the righteousness of my positions, but to explain why I believe as I do. The ethical standards I apply to political thought are based on my parents, lessons from school and college, from travel and conversations, and from reading.

I grew up during and just after World War II, when distinctions between good and evil seemed clear. We were raised to respect our elders, especially parents, and taught manners and civil behavior. We were read to from Aesop’s Fables with its universal moral lessons, and we were taught accountability and personal responsibility. In school, we saluted the flag and sang the Star-Spangled Banner. We were patriots, believing in the good of America. We knew she was not perfect, for we had learned our Founders met “to form a more perfect union,” not a perfect one. Memorial Day was a big holiday for us, as was the 4th of July. We celebrated, as separate holidays, the births of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. While we were taught humility, we were proud (and felt fortunate) to be Americans.

Yet, beneath that surface of 1950s calm lay social inequalities of which we were partially aware. Women were not treated as equals in the job market and segregation was a fact of life, and not just in the South. However, from our studies of American history we knew that progress had been made over the decades. And from our studies of world history, we learned of the uniqueness of the United States – not perfect, but better than the countries from which our ancestors had emigrated. That knowledge did not make us complacent; it made us aware of how we could effect change for the common good. In our later teens and early twenties, we witnessed historic changes in Civil and women’s rights, and we embraced those changes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-attack-on-an-alzheimers-drug-11624314809?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Public-health and media critics failed to stop federal approval of Aduhelm, Biogen’s new drug for Alzheimer’s. So now they’re mounting an assault on the drug’s cost to stop Medicare from paying for it. Their sudden and rare concern for the federal fisc is illuminating, and not in a good way.

“It’s unconscionable to ask seniors and taxpayers to pay $56,000 a year for a drug that has yet to be proven effective,” Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden tweeted after the Food and Drug Administration approved Aduhelm this month. “Medicare must be able to negotiate a fair price for prescription drugs.” He means impose price controls, while others want Medicare to restrict coverage of the drug.

The healthcare policy shop Altarum last week projected Aduhelm would increase prescription drug spending by more than 8% by mid-decade. The sages at Axios hype: “Biogen’s new Alzheimer’s treatment could be experts’ nightmare drug spending scenario: An extremely expensive product that millions of desperate patients could be eligible for—and it may not even work.” Note the bow to “experts.”

Nobody has said Aduhelm is a cure, but it is the first treatment following hundreds of failures that has shown evidence in clinical trials of removing amyloid plaque—a hallmark of the disease—and slowing cognitive decline.

https://www.city-journal.org/stand-up-for-police-and-for-new-york?wallit_nosession=1

During the mayoral tenures of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, crime in every form plummeted throughout New York City. The mandate to clean up the mess that Gotham had become worked, and cops were proud to play a key role in removing the decades-old image of “the ungovernable city.” By the time I was sworn in as a New York City police officer in 1997, the city’s revival was well underway.

That year—with the city’s murder rate reduced 66 percent since the start of the decade—businesses were investing in the Big Apple, parks were transforming into green respites amid the concrete panorama, and Disney had arrived in Times Square, all confirming that New York had become a family-friendly place. The NYPD’s improved technology in tracking crime and maintaining public-order statistics allowed the department to allocate police resources more effectively, despite some drawbacks. Less measurable were the sweat, toil, tears, and blood—too much blood—that had been spent by members of the NYPD in serving the city. In the face of this enormous effort and sacrifice, all who took the time to notice witnessed the tangible result: every community in the city was safer than it had been.

That all began to change in January 2014, when Bill de Blasio, who had run a campaign highly critical of the police, became mayor. Throughout most of his mayoralty, de Blasio benefited from the NYPD’s continued success in keeping crime down, especially in his first term, under the guidance of Commissioner William J. Bratton. But he gradually shifted the public narrative from highlighting the success of the NYPD to vilifying the department. By 2020, especially in the aftermath of riots in June, the city’s crime rate was accelerating upward, even as more public officials portrayed the NYPD as an institution that could not be trusted, staffed by badge-wearing rogues serving a systemically flawed government.

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/06/21/despite-vaccine-triumphs-sciences-performance-during-the-pandemic-has-been-decidedly-mixed

While Western labs hit a home run, the public health community made unforced errors, and China threw deadly bean balls.

For the health sciences, these are the best of times and the worst of times. The best have been dramatic achievements emerging from American and European labs. The worst have been lab practices in China and the secrecy surrounding them.

The powerful tools developed by Western scientists were consistently used to save lives, most dramatically with the development of vaccines that have succeeded in suppressing the pandemic in those places where their use has been widespread. The same tools, in the hands of Chinese virologists, were used to experiment with deadly pathogens. We don’t know if they were trying to develop biowarfare agents or tools to combat future pandemics, and we don’t know crucial information about the origins and early spread of the virus because Beijing is hiding it.

We do know the deadly toll. According to Johns Hopkins statistics, there have been 177 million known cases of COVID-19 worldwide and 3.8 million deaths. Beyond that is the devastating impact on mental health, schooling and economic activity worldwide.

A third group of scientists, public health specialists in the U.S., falls between the best and worst. Tasked with immense responsibility and under intense time pressure, they achieved mixed results, at best, in their primary task: protecting Americans’ health and safety.

As we emerge from our bunkers, people naturally want to assign responsibility for the high costs they incurred. Were all those costs necessary? Could we have done better? Who deserves blame—or praise? Some have piled that blame on “science,” when they really mean mistakes by public health officials. Those same officials, hoping to escape responsibility, have depicted themselves as the very embodiment of modern science and technical proficiency.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/following_the_scientists_who_were_destroying_america_just_to_spite_trump.html

For the past year and a half of COVID, we have been told by those supposedly in the know, to “follow the science.”  Those who question the science are at best called names, like “deniers” or “racists”, and at worst, lose their jobs and reputations, and are banned from social media.

One gets an appreciation for what scientists of centuries ago endured as they questioned science dogma of the day such as the Earth being flat or the Sun revolving around Earth. Such censorship was attributed to the medieval scientific mindset centuries ago long before the enlightened age of Facebook, Twitter, and CNN.

Last year’s outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus allowed the world to travel back in time to an age where sailors feared sailing off the edge of the world into a pit of monsters or nothingness. Instead of being called “flat Earthers” they are called anti-maskers or anti-vaxers. How did we get to such a place where science can’t be questioned, at least science deemed incontrovertible by the government and media?

It started with the climate change movement. Back in the 1970s we faced a crisis of global cooling. A few decades later it changed to global warming, where the planet would heat up enough to melt the polar icecaps, flooding coastal cities. When these fatalistic predictions failed to pan out, the movement created a new name, climate change, that conveniently covered both warm and cool temperatures, rain, drought, storms, and all other forms of weather, attributing normally changing weather to something nefarious

Scientists are supposed to follow the scientific method, observing natural phenomena, collecting data, forming a hypothesis to explain these observations, then refining the hypotheses as new data emerges. Instead, with both climate science and COVID the process has been reversed, ignoring or jiggering the data to conform with a predetermined hypothesis, rejecting new or contrary data simply because scientists did not like or approve of the source of the contrary data.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/cair-collectable-and-disposable-wives-club-joe-kaufman/

CAIR is a radical Muslim organization. The group’s strong ties to Hamas and those convicted of terror-related activity attest to this fact. However, terrorism is not the only indicator of CAIR’s fanaticism. Recently, following a domestic abuse scandal involving then-CAIR-Florida Executive Director Hassan Shibly, CAIR’s problems regarding treatment of women were made public, and it appears these issues go well beyond Shibly. Indeed, these illicit acts may have plagued the three most prominent leaders CAIR-Florida has employed, since its inception: Shibly, Ahmed Bedier and Nezar Hamze. It is yet another reason to expose the corrupt nature of this group.

This past January, two weeks after his then-wife, Imane Sadrati, put out a video and written statement alleging she suffered domestic violence at the hands of Shibly, Shibly resigned from his position with CAIR. Sadrati stated, “[W]hen I was 9 months pregnant with my first born, my marriage became volatile and abusive. What I assumed was ‘just a disagreement’ turned into screams. What would have been annoying remarks suddenly became violent blows… My husband hurt me mentally, emotionally and physically behind closed doors and openly in front of my children… I need your support to put an end to domestic violence in my home!”

Since then, many more allegations have surfaced re Shibly, including that of ‘secret marriages.’ The woman who Shibly now refers to as “wife,” Vanessa, was the product of one of these, an Islamic marriage that took place during his legal marriage to Sadrati. Former CAIR-Florida Legislative & Government Affairs Director Laila Abdelaziz said she resigned her job in part due to Shibly’s sexual harassment. Ex-CAIR-Florida Communications Director Sam Bowden said she was witness to Shibly’s improper behavior and labeled him a “pervert, abuser, manipulator” and “monster.” Reportedly, CAIR had knowledge of Shibly’s exploits but largely ignored them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/racist-training-program-us-navy-daniel-greenfield/

As he assumed the office of Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday announced that he wanted to change the Navy. While the title of his remarks in the video you see here below was: “One Team, One Navy,” its actual message was racist and divisive. His bottom line: only “conversations” about race would help. The “conversations” he referred to were in fact a lecture from America’s most popular and fact-challenged racist du jour, Ibram X. Kendi.

The “conversation” included “shared” videos of naval personnel claiming that America was racist and that they were angry. “Being African-American in America is not fun,” an aviation technician claimed, especially no doubt for a two-term African-American president who pocketed $100 million for the skillful exploitation of his public office.

There was no word on whether being African in Somalia, Sudan, and Nigeria is any more “fun” than being black in America or whether being a Somalian hater of Jews and America might put you on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and get you protected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the leadership of the Democrat Party.

In keeping with Gilday’s efforts to divide the Navy by race, an official Navy video endorsed the Marxist organization Black Lives Matter and denounced police for the death of drug-dealer-accomplice Breonna Taylor, who was shot resisting arrest when her boyfriend triggered a hailstorm of bullets after shooting and wounding a police officer doing his job. Bottom line of the video: naval recruits and officers need to hate their “white supremacist” country and question their service.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-admin-turns-national-security-agencies-against-online-misinformation/

Federal law enforcement and various intelligence agencies are bolstering programs to police online speech and purported “misinformation,” according to a report released by President Joe Biden’s National Security Council. 

The report, titled the “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” details myriad initiatives and strategies to help counter “the threat posed by domestic terrorism today.” Chief among the concerns for White House national security officials is the proliferation of “Internet-based communications platforms.”

In response, the federal government, led by the Department of Homeland Security, is “funding and implementing or planning evidence-based digital programming” aimed at “enhancing media literacy and critical thinking skills” of the public. These federal programs, the NSC alleges, will serve “as a mechanism for strengthening [American] … resilience to disinformation and misinformation online.”

“We will pursue innovative ways to foster and cultivate digital literacy and related programs, including educational materials and interactive online resources such as skills-enhancing online games,” the report reads. “This can prove a useful component to forging the resilience that may help to stem domestic terrorism recruitment and mobilization to violence.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/21/biden-breaks-the-record-on-wealth-transfers-4-9-trillion/
As Alexis de Tocqueville warned, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

The Democrats’ new favorite term is “human infrastructure,” which pretty much means anything they want to spend money on.

That raises the question: Just how much does the government spend on “human infrastructure” today? Turns out, it’s an eye-popping $4.9 trillion this year alone – a new record.

Buried in President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget is a document called Historical Tables, which breaks down annual federal revenues and spending in a variety of ways. One of the tables in this document tracks what the government calls “direct payments to individuals.”

These payments, mind you, don’t count salaries paid to federal employees or the cost of buying equipment. It’s just what the name states – direct money transfers. As the budget document explains:

‘These are federal government spending programs designed to transfer income (in cash or in-kind) to individuals or families. To the extent feasible, this category does not include reimbursements for current services rendered to the Government (e.g., salaries and interest).’

Under Biden, direct payments hit a huge new record high. Think about it this way. At $4.9 trillion, “direct payments to individuals” this year are equal to the entire federal budget of just two years ago. These money transfers will account for 22.3% of the nation’s entire GDP.

If this income transfer were a country, it would be bigger than Germany’s entire economy and slightly smaller than Japan’s.