RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://mailchi.mp/5c72f39888b2/tune-in-ill-be-speaking-on-american-ingrate-tuesday-night-2517929?e=a0fa704ef6

The only inadvertent benefit of Brennan’s airtime is that it exposes how unmoored our ruling class is from the public it is supposed to serve.

Former Obama administration Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan lies. He doesn’t just lie in the sense of speaking hyperbolically, spinning events, or painting in shades of gray out of purported fealty to national security considerations. Brennan tells outright falsehoods, in venues from television studios to Congress, on matters of utmost importance.

One must ask: Why does corporate media continue to give someone who has proved to be a uniquely deceptive character, whose most noteworthy activity since leaving government has been spewing invective against the president on Twitter, valuable airtime?

Brennan Lies About Russiagate

In his latest public display of dishonesty, Brennan took to “Fox News Sunday” to repeat untruths regarding the Obama administration’s actions regarding then-president-elect Donald Trump and Russia. According to Brennan, “There was no spying on Donald Trump’s campaign.” There was. Of the Steele dossier, Brennan said it “was not used in any way to undergird the judgments that came out of the intelligence community assessment about the Russian actions in the 2016 election.” It was.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/virus-jack-kerwick/

Perhaps, at this juncture, some nine months into the COVID Scare of 2020, the only thing that will emancipate people from the fear—the pathological, obsessive, wildly irrational fear—that has consumed them for the better part of this year is access to a vaccine.

Personally, and while I am not now nor have I ever been an “anti-vaxxer,” I will not go anywhere near any so-called COVID vaccine. The reason for this is simple enough:

Since “the Virus” has never been isolated, purified, and extracted from the bio-chemical soup in which scientists claim to have found it; since, that is, COVID-19 has never been identified with the exactness and rigor demanded by the scientific method, it’s anyone’s guess as to what would be included in an alleged vaccine.   

That COVID has never been scientifically determined is borne out by two indisputable facts:

(1)The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention itself concedes, way down on the 39th page of its 59 page report—“CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel”—that the Virus’s existence has not been proven. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/08/america-tests-positive-for-a-raging-mental-health-pandemic/

While public officials are busy cracking down on freedom using a viral pandemic as their justification, another pandemic comes chopping and reaping, this one caused by the extreme measures that have produced no beneficial results. Both the elected and unelected who have brought this on need to be held accountable.

“Americans’ Mental Health Ratings Sink to New Low,” says the headline of a report from a recent Gallup poll.

“Americans’ latest assessment of their mental health is worse than it has been at any point in the last two decades. Seventy-six percent of U.S. adults rate their mental health positively,” that is, “excellent/good,” while 85% did in 2019. Those who said their mental health or emotional well-being is “excellent” fell from 43% to 34%.

The poll was conducted between Nov. 5 and Nov. 19, before, we must point out, before holiday-spoiling lockdowns were ramped up in much of the country.

In what we would classify as almost an understatement, Gallup said the decline in mental health is “undoubtedly influenced by the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to profoundly disrupt people’s lives.” Yes, it might “also reflect views of the election and the state of race relations.” But we’ve had elections – just four years ago the political left fell into a deep funk over the results – and race relation troubles before. Never have we had our liberties sacked as they have been since March.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-general-at-defense-11607470114?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Joe Biden has picked retired Gen. Lloyd Austin to be his Defense Secretary, and anyone skimming the coverage might believe the most important recommendation is his race. But Senators interested more in substance than identity politics have plenty to think about.

Gen. Austin, 67, served the country well during his four-decade career in the Army. As commander of U.S. forces in Iraq from 2010-11, he oversaw America’s retreat from the country. The general wanted to keep tens of thousands of American forces, which is to his credit. Less defensible is his failure to anticipate the full withdrawal that Barack Obama ordered and prepare adequately, which led to a hasty exit. Mr. Biden, who worked with Gen. Austin during the Obama Administration, might be most attracted to him as a loyal lieutenant.

Gen. Austin was promoted to Commander of U.S. Central Command (Centcom) in 2013 and held the job for three years as Islamic State rampaged across Iraq and Syria. His role in the failed program to train Syrian rebels deserves attention, as does the military’s apparent surprise at the fall of Mosul and swift rise of ISIS in 2014. His spokesman denied it, but Gen. Austin reportedly told the White House that ISIS was only “a flash in the pan.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/08/thats-so-fauci-failing-up-while-botching-science-and-undermining-u-s-allies/

Fauci reversed himself on the safety of the COVID vaccines, apologizing for making false statements about U.S. allies’ work with the Trump administration to save countless lives through cutting-edge medical research.

Joe Biden likes Dr. Anthony Fauci’s lockdown advice so much, he has tapped him for chief medical advisor. Biden also plans to keep Fauci on his COVID advisory board despite Democrats spending 2020 insisting President Trump’s COVID guidance, although clearly influenced by Fauci, contradicted science and hurt the nation.

That same day, Fauci reversed himself on the safety of the COVID vaccines being developed, apologizing for making false statements about U.S. allies’ work in partnership with the Trump administration to save countless lives through cutting-edge medical research.

Axios reported: “‘I have a great deal of confidence in what the U.K. does both scientifically and from a regulator standpoint,’ Dr Fauci told the BBC on Thursday after saying earlier in the day that U.K. regulators ‘rushed’ their approval of the vaccine” for COVID from Pfizer-BioNTech. The day before, the United Kingdom had become the first nation to grant emergency approval to one of three reportedly highly effective vaccines that have been developed in conjunction with massive U.S. taxpayer spending and government effort.

“In the United States, there is such a considerable amount of tension of pushing back on the credibility, on the safety and on the efficacy that if we in the United States had done it as quickly as the U.K. did — and that’s no judgement on the way the U.K. did it — …there likely would have been pushback,” Fauci word-saladed in his apology over the “misunderstanding” he created by criticizing the United Kingdom’s efforts to end the pandemic faster.

“If you go quickly and you do it superficially, people are not going to want to get vaccinated,” Fauci told Fox News. “We have the gold standard of a regulatory approach with the FDA.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/07/no-science-justifies-bans-on-indoor-or-outdoor-dining/

In a video that is simultaneously gut-wrenching and infuriating, a Los Angeles restaurant owner exposed the hypocrisy of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s order to ban outdoor dining in his city.

Angela Mardsen, the owner of Pineapple Hill Grill and Saloon, showed a large outdoor dining area erected for a movie studio about 50 feet from the now-shuttered outdoor section of her restaurant. “I’m losing everything,” an emotional Marden said. “Everything I own is being taken away from me and they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio. We cannot survive, my staff cannot survive.”

Her video went viral with millions of views; it earned a retweet by the president’s son. “It’s like these politicians are trying to destroy all small businesses,” Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted Friday. “Ridiculous!!!”

But government decrees to close bars and restaurants—especially service outside—are more than ridiculous. They are cruel, unconstitutional, and devastating to the hospitality sector, the nation’s second-largest private employer. 

In a December 7 letter to congressional leaders, the National Restaurant Association detailed the “stark” condition of the industry. More than 110,000 restaurants have permanently closed their doors this year; 10,000 establishments have shut down in just the past three months, according to the trade group. November’s unemployment rate for the leisure and hospitality sector is 15 percent, more than double the national jobless rate. Restaurants and bars account for one-fifth of the total job losses in the United States since February 2020.

It’s a wretched situation on both an economic and personal level—particularly since not one executive order is backed by science. 

In fact, closing dining venues is a wholly unscientific mitigation strategy that has no proven impact on halting the spread of COVID-19. One would think that nearly a year into the pandemic, such a drastic measure would be backed by reams of data and real-life examples. Surely hundreds of case studies now are available to justify permanently destroying tens of thousands of small businesses and millions of jobs, right?

Wrong. 

https://www.city-journal.org/blue-state-regulation-driving-out-california-businesses

A Sacramento Bee headline from late October, “How liberal politics, COVID-19 and a high cost of living are fueling a new California exodus,” could have been written, without the virus reference, a year ago. Or ten years ago. The flight from California kicked off long before this year’s pandemic.

Eight years ago, an Investor’s Business Daily editorial laid out the reasons Californians were moving “To Texas (And Arizona And Nevada),” all of them fueled by progressive public policy. That same year, a Manhattan Institute report detailed “the great ongoing California exodus . . . reversing the storied passages of the Dust Bowl era.” The authors attributed the mass departure to policy decisions making the state a less desirable place to live. Two years earlier, in 2010, New Geography asked: “If California Is Doing So Great, Why Are So Many Leaving?” and noted that the state’s “domestic migration has been negative every year since at least 1990.”

Nor is the California exodus limited to desperate residents. Joe Vranich, a relocation specialist once headquartered in Irvine, California, but now settled in Pennsylvania, has been tracking business departures since 2008. Vranich says that he became “irritated by repeated comments from California politicians, including governor Jerry Brown, that business departures . . . were not a big deal.” As he analyzed the companies, jobs, and capital fleeing the state, he realized the drain was significant. The state’s toxic business environment, Vranich estimates, caused as many as 13,000 “disinvestment events” from 2008 to 2016.

Data-analytics software company Palantir is among the firms to announce more recently that it is leaving California. CNBC characterized its decision to relocate from Palo Alto to Denver as “one of the first signals that a long-anticipated exodus from Silicon Valley is on the horizon.” Hewlett-Packard, a garage-band Silicon Valley original, recently announced that it would move its global headquarters to Texas, seeking “opportunities for cost savings,” while accommodating “team members’ preferences about the future of work.”

https://www.city-journal.org/covid-hypocrisy-by-elected-officials-fuels-mistrust

Political atheism is spreading across California, and cynicism is taking hold. Reviling policymakers is not new, of course, but the current disdain is particularly intense. As elected officials’ disregard for constituents and the law becomes ever more evident, all but the most stalwart loyalists are turning against them.

Mistrust is worsened by Covid restrictions “for thee, but not for me.” In September, the unmasked Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, visited a San Francisco hair salon closed under strict emergency pandemic orders. Business owners had been forced to cease operations and the public was restricted from getting haircuts, but Pelosi made herself an exception. Her claims of a “setup,” and a demand that the salon owner apologize to her, did little to restore trust.

More recently, Governor Gavin Newsom instructed citizens to stay home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and avoid all contact with friends and family members from outside their households. Flaunting the rules, he dined at the luxurious French Laundry restaurant with a large group of associates. The result, reported Carla Marinucci in politico.com, was a blow to his approval ratings and inspiration for newfound vigor for his recall. County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl voted to ban all outdoor dining, which she described as “a most dangerous situation”; news soon emerged that she had dined outdoors, at Il Forno Trattoria in Santa Monica. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo spent Thanksgiving at his parents’ home, apparently skirting health guidelines that urge the public to avoid such gatherings.

In San Francisco, trust in local government has reached a nadir. Mayor London Breed maintains some support, but it’s primarily due to her perceived success in keeping Covid cases down. It’s certainly not for increased quality of life, since the city grows filthier and more dangerous every day. Companies, small and large, are leaving. The decline of San Francisco is particularly distressing to those who stay.