RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/02/another-partisan-stunt-by-the-u-s-capitol-police/

Harry Dunn began his testimony last week before the January 6 select committee by asking for a moment of silence in honor of Brian Sicknick.

The U.S. Capitol police officer, testifying under oath, claimed his “fallen colleague . . . died from injuries he sustained in the line of duty defending the Capitol of our beloved democracy.” The committee members and the audience complied.

Dunn’s remark, quite simply, is a lie. Brain Sicknick, 42, died on January 7 of a stroke caused by blood clots near his brain, a tragic and untimely death that the District of Columbia medical examiner did not tie to the events of the previous day.

It is just the latest example of how the U.S. Capitol Police, a federal agency funded by American taxpayers, has taken a leading role in fabricating the mythology of January 6. 

Top brass and rank-and-file officers such as Dunn intentionally continue to mislead the public about what happened that day—especially through the falsehood that Trump fanatics killed a cop during the Capitol protest. “Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and was injured while physically engaging with protesters,” according to a press release issued January 7, 2021. “He returned to his division office and collapsed.  He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.”

Tuesday’s testimony by Dunn and fellow Officer Aquilino Gonell added to the long list of theatrics and political stunts involving Capitol Police officers related to January 6. For the past several months, this rogue agency has acted as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) political enforcers rather than as an objective law enforcement agency.

USCP captured at least 14,000 hours of video from January 6 but refuses to make the footage available to the public. The agency also is attempting to withhold recordings from defense counsel and the news media. An affidavit filed in March by the department’s general counsel confirmed the footage will remain “in the legal control” of USCP.

As part of the legislative branch, the USCP is exempted from Freedom of Information Act rules. No one can legally demand access to the tapes. The agency insists the massive trove of video must remain under seal in order to prevent would-be insurrectionists “who might wish to attack the Capitol again.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/the_headline_says_it_all_over_1000_victims_126_dead_just_2_convictions_6_years_of_mass_shootings_in_chicago.html

Parts of Chicago no longer are governed by the rule of law. In place of ordered civilization, criminal gangs operate with impunity, the residents living in a state of terror, afraid to tell police anything that would aid in capturing the criminals. The true exercise of power is in the hands of those who would be called warlords in other contexts, but (at least for now), the term is too harsh for most ears.

The Chicago Sun-Times has produced a stunning story capturing the extent of lawlessness today, with both granular detail and an overview. After describing one mass shooting:

About two hours after the shots rang out, an alarming dispatch pierced through police radio: Another mass shooting had just rocked the Marquette Park neighborhood, roughly six miles away.

Three alleged gang members had sprayed bullets at a crowd hanging out in the 6200 block of South Artesian Avenue, enjoying the summer night. Twelve people were hit, among them Nyoka Bowie, 37, who suffered a fatal gunshot wound to her chest. Like Grimes and many other victims of mass shootings — defined by the Sun-Times and some researchers as incidents in which four or more people are wounded — she apparently was not the intended target.

In both cases, there was a large number of witnesses and surviving victims, yet no arrests have been made. That is all too common in Chicago, where police say they do not prioritize the cases despite the especially harsh toll such shootings have on a community.

Only one person has been charged in any of the at least 39 mass shootings so far this year, according to a Sun-Times analysis of city data and court records.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/31/when-will-the-covid-revolt-come/

The most cheerful headline I have seen in weeks was on Glenn Reynolds’ New York Post column: “No, Karen, we’re not masking again.” I hope he is right. I do wonder, though. I have no doubt that the second part of his headline—“A winning GOP message for 2022 [and] beyond”—is correct. At least it’s correct if it is expressed as a conditional: It would be a winning strategy were it adopted. As Reynolds notes, “There is a great deal of pent-up frustration and resentment over the inconvenience, the loss of freedom and the general climate of hectoring that the government’s pandemic response has created.” Indeed. And he’s right, too, that 

It’s irritating to be lectured by officials who claim to be smarter than you. It’s infuriating to be lectured by government officials who claim to be smarter than you—but clearly aren’t.

The on-again/off-again claims on masks and vaccination are just part of it. Tired of masks? Get vaccinated, they told us. Now they’re saying wear a mask, even if you’ve been vaccinated and even if you’re associating with others who’ve been vaccinated.

And there’s talk of more lockdowns, which a growing body of scientific evidence suggests were perfectly useless and downright harmful.

As Molly Bloom exclaimed in a different context, Yes, Yes, Yes!

But to return to the question of hope, I am reminded that hope was said by some cynics to have been the last evil in Pandora’s pithos. It seems like only yesterday—in fact, it was just this past May—that both the president and the vice-president of the United States insisted that (as Joe himself put it) “Folks, if you’re fully vaccinated—you no longer need to wear a mask.” 

Of course, that was more than a year after “15 days to slow the spread,” Anthony Fauci’s steady stream of contradictory, though authoritatively delivered, advice, not to mention the recent advent of (cue the scary music) The Delta Variant.  

It was the New York Post, again, that cut to the chase on the latest (unless we’re on to the epsilon variant already) with its cover of July 30. “Insanity!” read its oversized headline and below was a large grid with a tiny bit of the upper right square marked. Of the 161 million people who have been vaccinated, only 5,601 have been hospitalized with the new version of the virus. Of those, only 1,141 have died. That’s .0007 percent. (And how old, one wonders, were those who succumbed and from what comorbidities did they suffer?)

Now it turns out that the latest CDC advice was based largely on an outbreak at Provincetown after the informal party time of “Bear Week” in early July. Andrew Sullivan treated the news with some portion of the skepticism it deserves. In fact, as another commentator pointed out, what the Provincetown outbreak really shows is that “even under perfect conditions for a superspreader event, the vaccine works spectacularly well.”

But even to talk about studies and statistics and “expert” advice is to assume that we are talking primarily about an issue of public health. We aren’t. Consider this list from Jim Treacher: 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-infrastructure-deal-pay-fors-republicans-joe-manchin-11627940099?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and his Senate Republican friends are stressing that their infrastructure deal is “fully paid for.” Read their lips: No new deficit spending. Read their bill: It relies to a great degree on savings and revenue already baked into the fisc or that are unlikely to happen.

Deficit financing is better than increasing taxes, and Republicans at least jettisoned the taxes (until Democrats raise them in their budget reconciliation bill). They also deep-sixed President Biden’s plan to give the IRS $40 billion to harass small businesses, which Democrats claimed would raise hundreds of billions of dollars in new revenue. Their IRS stimulus was dubious, but so are most of the bill’s remaining offsets.

Start with using 10 years of savings from various programs to offset five years of spending. This includes extending by a decade a guarantee fee that government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac charge on mortgages they back.

Congress imposed the 10-basis point fee in 2011 to cover the cost of the government backstop on Fan and Fred. Extending the fee through 2032 is expected to raise $21 billion, but the taxpayer costs will be far greater if the housing giants start to lose money again after the Biden Administration takes steps to ease underwriting standards.

Then there’s magical Medicare accounting. The bill would extend Medicare provider payment cuts by a year through 2031, just inside the 10-year budget window. Senators are counting that as saving $9 billion, but Congress is almost certain to override this provision once hospitals squawk, as they surely will.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/03/biden-attacks-alarmist-covid-news-stories-even-as-he-stokes-them/

CNN might be a horribly biased and woefully unreliable news organization these days, but its reporters do know how to convey the White House propaganda well. Case in point is the story posted on CNN’s website over the weekend about how the Biden administration is desperately trying to get the news media to stop playing up the risk of the Delta variant.

“The White House is frustrated with what it views as alarmist, and in some instances flat-out misleading, news coverage about the Delta variant,”  reported Oliver Darcy over the weekend. “That’s according to two senior Biden administration officials I spoke with Friday, both of whom requested anonymity to candidly offer their opinion on coverage of the CDC data released that suggests vaccinated Americans who become infected with the Delta coronavirus variant can infect others as easily as those who are unvaccinated.”

Darcy goes on to provide a multitude of examples of how the White House berated various news agencies for their coverage of the CDC report that prompted its mask-wearing mandate for vaccinated people.

After the New York Times tweeted that “The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated, an internal C.D.C. report said,” a White House staffer responded:

CNN’s Brian Stelter also parrotted the White House talking points on his weekend show.

“It is time for a reset. A reset in how COVID-19 is covered by the media,” Stelter said. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/01/incompetence-arrogance-woke/

We know the nature of mass hysterias in history, and how they can overwhelm and paralyze what seem to be stable societies.  

We know the roots and origins of the cult of wokeness.  

And we know, too, how such insanity—from the Salem witch trials to Jacobinism to McCarthyism—can spread, despite alienating most of the population, through fear and the threat of personal ruin or worse. These are the dark sides of the tulip, hula-hoop, and pet-rock fads, the mass obsessions so suited to past affluent Western societies.  

But does wokeism serve another purpose as well? Specifically, does it either hide preexisting incompetence or fuel it?  

In the last 18 months, we have seen most of our major institutions go woke and spend considerable amounts of time, capital, and labor on what might be called “commissarism.” Yet in their zeal to rectify society in general and sermonize, virtue signal, pontificate, and perform to the public, many institutions are increasingly failing at what they were established to do. 

Of course, public servants have long suffered the “Bloomberg effect”—focusing on misdemeanors to virtue signal competence as penance for failing to solve the existential crises. If you cannot clear New York City of snow in a timely manner, then lecture the trapped on everything from global warming to the dangers of super-sized soft drinks. Yet wokeism is a bit different since it now pervades our societies as a pandemic of its own. 

Take Delta Airline CEO Ed Bastian. He earns $17 million in annual compensation, and lectures the state of Georgia and the nation at large on our supposedly racist voting laws. The issue at hand is mostly a requirement to show a valid ID to vote—in the manner one must present identification to enter the boarding area of Bastian’s planes. Surely if one should vote without an ID, why not then be allowed to board a Delta flight?

I also suggest the public try to call Delta’s consumer helplines to fix the airline’s post-quarantine screw-ups with credits, refunds, rebooking, and recalibrating charges. Just try it—but expect several hours of wait time on the phone. We know now Delta is woke, but what we don’t know is whether one’s past purchase of a ticket will ensure a spot on a Delta flight, or whether prior money or mileage credited will ever be returned or applied to future travel.  

A cynical observer might suggest that if Ed Bastian cannot ensure adequate consumer service, it won’t matter since he weighs in on voting laws. (Or is it worse than that? Because he pontificates on voting laws and other assorted woke issues, he thinks he can simply worry less about his own consumer services?) 

American Airlines CEO Doug Parker is woke, too. He has denounced a new Texas voting law likewise requiring tougher ID usage—although he later  admitted that he had never read the new statute before virtue signaling its illiberality.  

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/get-ready-for-the-no-buy-list?token=

By any standard, David Sacks is a super successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He’s invested in companies including Airbnb, Bird, Eventbrite, Facebook, Houzz, Lyft, Palantir, Postmates, Reddit, Slack, SpaceX, Twitter, and Uber. Now he’s a general partner at Craft Ventures.

But that’s not the reason to listen to him. It’s because he’s deeply insightful and consistently ahead of the curve on issues including free speech and Big Tech, how to amend Section 230, San Francisco’s meltdown, and more. You might remember his name from this column I wrote a few months back. 

I don’t typically recommend Twitter to anyone I like. But if you’re already there, I strongly suggest following David.

—BW

When I helped create PayPal in 1999, it was in furtherance of a revolutionary idea. No longer would ordinary people be dependent on large financial institutions to start a business. 

Our democratized payment system caught fire and grew exponentially with millions of users who appreciated its ease and simplicity. Traditional banks were too slow and bureaucratic to adapt. Instead, the revolution we spawned two decades ago inspired new startups like Ally, Chime, Square, and Stripe, which have further expanded participation in the financial system. 

But now PayPal is turning its back on its original mission. It is now leading the charge to restrict participation by those it deems unworthy.

First, in January, PayPal blocked a Christian crowdfunding site that raised money to bring demonstrators to Washington on January 6. Then, in February, PayPal announced that it was working with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to ban users from the platform. This week the company announced it is partnering with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to investigate and shut down accounts that the ADL considers too extreme. 

Why is this a problem? Isn’t it perfectly reasonable to make sure bad actors don’t fund hate through these platforms?

I’m a Jewish American who has special appreciation for the ADL’s historical role as a watchdog against antisemitism. Whether it came from the Aryan Nation or the Nation of Islam, the ADL did admirable work in combatting it. But the ADL has changed. Like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the organization has broadened its portfolio from antisemitism (or racism in the SPLC’s case) to cover what it considers to be “hate” or “extremism” in general. 

The new ADL opposed the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh because of his “hostility to reproductive freedom.” It partnered with such beacons of philosemitism as Al Sharpton (you read that right) to boycott Facebook for allowing “hate speech on their platform.” It opposed Trump’s executive order banning Critical Race Theory in federal government training. And it called for Fox News to fire Tucker Carlson for his comments on immigration.

Whether one agrees with any of these positions is beside the point. The point is that the ADL, like the SPLC, now weighs in on issues far beyond its original purview. 

Just as there is no set definition of “hate speech” that everyone agrees upon, the definition of a “hate group” is nebulous and ripe for overuse by those with an agenda. So it should come as no surprise that the ever-increasing list of suspects has grown from unquestionable hate groups, like neo-nazis and the KKK, to organizations who espouse socially conservative views, like the Family Research Council, religious liberty advocates, and even groups concerned with election integrity.