RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-vaccine-ip-debacle-11620341686?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

We’ve already criticized President Biden’s bewildering decision Wednesday to endorse a patent waiver for Covid vaccines and therapies. But upon more reflection this may be the single worst presidential economic decision since Nixon’s wage-and-price controls.

In one fell swoop he has destroyed tens of billions of dollars in U.S. intellectual property, set a destructive precedent that will reduce pharmaceutical investment, and surrendered America’s advantage in biotech, a key growth industry of the future. Handed an American triumph of innovation and a great soft-power opportunity, Mr. Biden throws it all away.

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India and South Africa have been pushing to suspend patents at the World Trade Organization for months. They claim that waiving IP protections for Covid vaccines and therapies is necessary to expand global access, but their motivation is patently self-interested.

Both are large producers of generic drugs, though they have less expertise and capacity to make complex biologics like mRNA vaccines. They want to force Western pharmaceutical companies to hand over IP free of charge so they can produce and export vaccines and therapies for profit. Their strategy has been to shame Western leaders into surrendering with the help of Democrats in the U.S.

But suspending IP isn’t necessary to expand supply and will impede safe vaccine production. The global vaccine supply is already increasing rapidly thanks to licensing agreements the vaccine makers have made with manufacturers around the world.

Pfizer and BioNTech this week said they aimed to deliver three billion doses this year, up from last summer’s 1.2 billion estimate. Moderna increased its supply forecast for this year to between 800 million and a billion from 600 million. AstraZeneca says it has built a supply network with 25 manufacturing organizations in 15 countries to produce three billion doses this year.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/we-live-in-the-era-of-the-new-conformists_3805525.html?utm_source=partner

In his latest piece, the estimable Victor Davis Hanson asks the rhetorical question “Are Americans Becoming Sovietized?”

Without a doubt. And a key reason behind this, I have been thinking for a long time, is that the left and the semi-left, progressives and liberals, masses of them in our country from the corporate world to the media to the academy to entertainment, are the New Conformists.

Well, not completely new, but conformists beyond doubt. Hardly ever an original thought among them.

They are like the “Triplets” song from Vincente Minelli’s classical musical “The Band Wagon.” (“We do everything alike, we look alike, we dress alike. We walk alike, we talk alike.”)

With this mindset, becoming “Sovietized” scarcely takes an effort. You don’t have to learn a word of Russian beyond “nyet.”

Back in the Fifties, conservatives were accused of being the “organization men” or the “men in the grey flannel suit,” but these days it’s the other way around.

No one is more predictable, more conformist, than the so-called “woke.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/05/06/new-earmarks-costing-taxpayers-10-billion-proposed-by-324-members-of-congress–is-there-wasteful-spending/?sh=275a772c5a93

Pork is back on the table in Congress. Critics say that bringing back earmarks was the equivalent of bringing back Swine Flu.

This week, the U.S. House posted online 3,309 earmarks proposed by 324 members of Congress. The taxpayer cost of these new projects amounted to $9.7 billion.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com mapped each earmark by congressional district. Just click a pin (member district) and scroll down to see the earmarks rendered in the chart beneath the map.

The list was compiled from member websites where they were required to post their appropriation and infrastructure earmarks. There were 220 Democrats and 104 Republicans who embraced the “member directed spending.”

Review the rankings of all 324 members requesting earmarks here. Since 2011, Congress banned earmarks because of systemic corruption. Recently both parties decided to resurrect the practice.

Democrats requested 2,338 earmarks for $4.94 billion. Republicans requested 971 earmarks for $4.7 billion. Six of the top eight members requesting the most earmarks and 14 of the top 25 were Republicans.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.coM

In February 2017, less than a month after he had taken office, Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), in a floor speech, questioned Mr. Trump’s mental health. He was joined by Senator Al Franken (D-MN) and Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA). According to an article in The Hill on February 17, 2017, thirty-five psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers signed a letter to the New York Times that stated, “the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions make him incapable of serving safely as president.” The American Psychiatric Association has long held that to render a professional opinion on a public figure one has not examined is unethical. However, that didn’t stop the thirty-five, none of whom had met with Mr. Trump. We now have a new President. While no gaggle of psychiatrists has weighed in on Mr. Biden, one wonders: Are the President’s cognitive abilities declining, as some have suggested? The truth is, we don’t know; but some, including me, are suspicious that age has taken its toll on the man.  

President Biden has been a stutterer since childhood. According to the National Stuttering Association, stuttering is a “neurological disorder that interferes with the production of speech.” It does not indicate a psychological disorder or mental deficiency. It does not suggest dementia, but neither does it preclude it. Dementia is a catch-all word to describe various symptoms of cognitive decline. Early manifestations would include forgetfulness and limits to social skills and reasoning. In 1988, Mr. Biden suffered two brain aneurysms, but there is no reason to believe they would lead to any form of dementia.

Like those eminent psychiatrists and psychologists who passed judgement on President Trump, my opinion regarding President Biden is empirical, not analytical, so accept my words with caution – a warning the Times did not offer. Yet, to publicly question Mr. Biden’s fitness for office is apparently off limits. In 2017, Republicans like Mike Simpson (R-ID) agreed that Mr. Trump exaggerated and made false statements, and that it is always fair to question any President’s judgements. Yet, there is a deafening silence from both sides of the aisle when it comes to questioning the mental well-being of President Biden. Why?

Why do I feel as I do? Mr. Biden spent thirty-six years in the nation’s most deliberative body – the U.S. Senate. He could be mean-spirited, as Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas came to learn, but he could also be a consensus builder. He campaigned as a moderate and unifier, yet he has governed by Executive Order, signing over sixty EOs in his first hundred days as President, more than double what Mr. Trump did and more than triple what Mr. Obama signed in his first hundred days.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/05/faucism-in-theory-and-practice/

“What is your opinion on how COVID became so well adapted to humans?” Margaret Brennan of CBS News asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, on March 28. 

“You know, Margaret, that’s an argument that goes back and forth,” said Fauci, who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. “A very plausible explanation for this is that this virus jumped from an animal host, a bat to maybe an intermediate host and then to a human.” The “other theory” is that it “accidentally escaped” from “a lab.”

“I think the most likely one is that in nature, in the wild, it adapted itself,” Fauci concluded. Brennan showed no interest in the science behind that astounding statement. 

“All right,” she said, “And as you’re acknowledging there, no evidence. We’re still looking at it. We’ll continue following it. Dr. Fauci, thank you for your opinion and your perspective.” Had Brennan done her homework, she might have found “evidence” that the virus was indeed the product of a lab. For example, she could have asked Fauci if “gain of function” research enabled COVID-19 to become well adapted to humans.  

Gain of function research as Nidhi Subbaraman explains in Nature, “involves making pathogens more deadly or more transmissible.” As the Office of Science Policy of the National Institutes of Health puts it, this research can “enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs)” and that can raise “biosafety and biosecurity concerns.”

Fauci in 2012 cited the risks of such research, wondering “what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” The NIH banned gain of function research in 2014 but revived it in 2017 with no objection from Fauci. Three years later, after a global pandemic, Fauci’s August 2020 “Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got to COVID-19” paper is silent on any role this dangerous research might have played in the COVID-19 outbreak. If anybody comes away from that suspicious of a coverup, it would be hard to blame them. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/05/are-americans-becoming-sovietized/

What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system?

Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?

Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.

1) There was no escape from ideological indoctrination—anywhere.

TV commercials, a job in the bureaucracy, or military assignment all hinged not so much on merit, expertise, or past achievement. What mattered was loud enthusiasm for the Soviet system.

Wokeness is becoming our new Soviet-like state religion. Careerists assert that America was always and still is a systemically racist country, without ever producing proof or a sustained argument.

2) The Soviets fused their press with the government. Pravda or “Truth” was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Party partners.

In 2017, some university and independent media monitoring centers found that 93 percent of American network media coverage of the early Trump Administration was negative. The most inflammatory of the media’s political assertions—Trump-Russia collusion, Hunter Biden’s laptop was a product of “Russian disinformation,” and Capitol Officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by a Trump rioter inside the Capitol—were all false.

3) The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents. Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot “insurrectionary” sentiments.

The Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/biden-says-his-agenda-synonymous-will-people-don-feder/

In his address to a joint session of Congress last week, the most dangerous and delusional thing the president said was when he equated the policies of his administration with the will of the American people.

Biden: “Our Constitution opens with the words, ‘We the People.’ It’s time we remembered that we the people are the government.” In other words, the people are synonymous with the people in power.

At least he got the words (all three of them) right. During the 2020 campaign, he mangled the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, which came out: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created, by the, you know, you know the thing.” Dr. Jill might think about increasing his daily dose of Prevagen.

According to the Geezer-in-chief, We the People implicitly endorse his policies – that by voting for him, We voted for them. Not because of media distortions about COVID, white supremacy, police brutality, or Trump’s meanness, but because we wanted Woke socialism.

Old Joe is beginning to sound like Louis XIV – “The People, that’s Me!”

This is a monumental lie used to justify the misrule of one of the worst administrations in U.S. history.

Let’s test Joe’s thesis against reality.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/blueprint-tyranny-bruce-thornton/

The vulnerability of political freedom and popular sovereignty to tyranny has been a constant theme in political philosophy for 2500 years. It profoundly influenced the creators of the Constitution, an important purpose of which is to forestall the tyranny that destroys political freedom and citizen rule. In the writings of Classical philosophers and historians the Founders could see the blueprint for such a tyranny––one we have seen unfolding in the last few decades, and accelerating in the policies of the current administration.

The Greek historian Polybius in the second century B.C. laid out how a democracy degenerates into tyranny:

So when [the rich] begin to hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits, they begin to seduce and corrupt the people in every possible way, and thus ruin their estates. The result is that through their senseless craving for prominence they stimulate among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them, and then the rule of democracy is transformed into government by violence and strong-arm methods. By this time the people have become accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and their prospects of winning a livelihood depend upon the property of their neighbors, and as soon as they find a leader who is sufficiently ambitious and daring . . . they introduce a regime based on violence.

Many of these preconditions already exist in our country. Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, ambitious politicians of both parties have “stimulate[d] among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them.” We call them “entitlements” rather than “bribes,” funded not by violently seizing the property of the rich, but by annually redistributing $1.6 trillion of the wealth of the upper middle class and the rich through the federal income tax. Indeed, the top one percent of all earners pays 40% of income taxes. The modern update of ancient “bribes” also comprises massive borrowing and electronically printing money. These practices have created nearly $27 trillion in government debt, five trillion more than GDP. The tyrants of Polybius’ day redistributed the wealth of the rich; today we redistribute the future wealth of the young and unborn who will be stuck with the bill.

And this largess will increase dramatically if the current administration successfully passes into law several new mechanisms for redistributing wealth:

$1.9 trillion America Rescue Plan
$2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan
$1.8 trillion American Families Plan
$1 trillion Green New Deal for Cities
$180 billion Green New Deal for Public Housing
$15 trillion over 15 years Thrive Act

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/06/sunshine-state-is-shining-example-in-the-fight-against-big-tech-censorship/

Because the federal government appears unwilling to do anything about the ever-growing problem of big tech censorship, it is left to the states to fight this long-overdue battle.

Fortunately, the Sunshine State is stepping up to the plate, becoming the first state in the country to put a big tech censorship bill on the governor’s desk. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a strong proponent of the bill, is expected to sign it into law soon.

So, how would the Florida bill (SB 7072) actually rein in big tech censorship?

First and foremost, SB 7072 would make it “a violation for social media deplatforming of a political candidate and requires a social medial platform to meet certain requirements when they restrict speech by users.”

More specifically, “The bill prohibits social media platforms from deplatforming candidates for political office and allows the Florida Elections Commission to fine a social media platform $100,000 per day for deplatforming statewide candidates and $10,000 per day for deplatforming all other candidates.”