RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/on-the-passivity-of-jews/

Jabotinsky was one of the founders of the Jewish state. He was a Russian Jew living in England. He enlisted in the British Army during World War I, and negotiated, with the British government, to allow Russian-immigrant Jews to fight in the Mideast, known then as “Palestine.” He succeeded in getting a special but limited dispensation for the Jews: They would not be allowed to fight, but could be enlisted as mule drivers. They were formed into the Zion Mule Corps under the direction of a Colonel Patterson, fought at Gallipoli, and, reconstituted as the Jewish Legion, were, it seems, responsible for most of the victories attributed to Lawrence in the dime-novel journalism of Lowell Thomas.

Jabotinsky was the colleague of Josef Trumpeldor, an ex-colonel of the czarist army. Trumpeldor was the first Zionist to advocate, and practice, self-defense as an inalienable right. He, a Jew, rose to high rank in an anti-Semitic army through determination and strength, and he quite simply did not understand how his fellow Jews hoped to thrive in a hostile world without these qualities. Jabotinsky was his protégé. He said, “You can take the Jew out of exile, but you can’t take the exile out of the Jew.”

We Jews, individually, are human beings capable of heroism; but as a group, we are trained, first and most importantly, to escape notice. For notice has, for thousands of years, equaled death. I exempt from indictment for “camouflage” not only the Jews of Israel but the Orthodox communities of the Diaspora. And now my exemptions are complete.

I was stunned, last year, to see a television commercial proclaiming the universal appeal of its product. There were happy young and old, black and white, straight and gay, and, mirabile dictu, a young Jewish couple, identifiable by the man’s yarmulke.

Who had seen the like before? Not I.

Were Jews, in violation of all historical norms, being presented as human beings? No. They were being appealed to as consumers.

https://dianebederman.com/front-line-medical-workers-exhausted/

I watch NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. During the pandemic he has introduced us to many “essential” front line health care workers who share their stories with us. Holt, like so many in main stream media, seems to be using the plight of health care workers to take us down a path to submission where we give up all the hard won freedoms bequeathed to us.

Many front line workers are exhausted. They tell us about their exhaustion. One told us that her children cannot come and hug her when she comes home. She has to shower first. One ICU doctor shared his mental distress, the trauma of so many sick people and those who die.

Odd.I don’t remember Lester Holt interviewing the men and women of the armed forces on a daily basis so they could share their angst when in war. No one seemed too concerned about their lives. Their fears. Their exhaustion. Their mental health. I assume when soldiers volunteered during peace time, many had no idea that war would be coming. But when it did, they went to war.

Dear essential health care workers, you signed up to care for sick people. And a pandemic arrived. And you are serving.

These medical people, who have such angst, are still alive. True, some health care workers, sadly, have died in the line of duty, unlike non-essential people who have taken their lives because their livelihood was taken away – so that health care workers would not be overwhelmed. Non-essential people lost their jobs, their businesses, their families, their dignity.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-patrick-gaspard-george-soros-biden-cabinet

After a lifetime of serving the Democratic Party, Joe Biden has no fixed beliefs. He can’t have any; the party has changed too much.

Joe Biden became a Democrat back when Democrats represented America’s working-class wage earners, heavily Catholic and concentrated in the big cities and industrial states. Democratic voters of that era tended to be populist on economic matters –they liked Social Security and Medicare — but they were basically conservative on social questions. They believed in biology, and most of them got married and went to church.

That’s the world Joe Biden grew up in. His “Joe from Scranton, son of a coal miner” shtick is a relic from that era. He still whips it out occasionally at events, but only for nostalgic reasons. After all, 1962 seems like yesterday. But in fact, it was a long time ago. That Democratic Party has been extinct for decades.

The modern Democratic Party no longer represents wage earners. It is now funded almost exclusively by Silicon Valley and the finance establishment, the billionaire class. Its foot soldiers don’t work in factories. They’re community organizers. They’re members of interest groups that have coalesced around a specific race or sex or sexual orientation.

None of these groups exist for the benefit of the United States. They exist only for their own benefit. Their purpose is very clear: To leverage our political system in order to collect as much money and as much power as they can for their own members and for their members alone. This is called identity politics and it is the most divisive way possible to run a government.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/the_great_reset_and_klaus_schwab.html

The time has come to implement the Great Reject before we experience the Great Regret.

Klaus Schwab, the chief proponent of a global project called the “Great Reset,” may be the most influential “intellectual” in the world today. A former member of the UN Advisory Board on Sustainable Development, he is the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF) that meets annually in the Swiss resort town of Davos. Business Insider explains, “Each year, business leaders and heads of state give lectures and speak on panels about topics ranging from gender equality and venture capital to mental health and climate change.” And as the WEF website states, “The non-profit organization’s aim is to engage the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”

The “Great Reset,” a term coined in a 2011 book by economist Richard Florida and wholeheartedly adopted by Schwab in the context of the United Nation’s Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, proposes to determine “the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of the global commons.” It presents itself as a humane and compassionate means to inaugurate a beneficial root-and-branch transformation of the social, economic and political structure of the world’s “operating systems”: capitalism, the free market and democracy.

Practical capitalism is to be supplanted by what Schwab calls “stakeholder capitalism” in which the private sector is tightly controlled by government (otherwise known as “fascism”). The free market is considered unfair and skewed to the advantage of a piratical business class exploiting the world’s poor and hungry. Democracy is regarded as an inefficient political arrangement relying on the incapacity of the demos to understand its own best interests or to command the intricacy of integrated governing structures and processes.

https://spectator.org/biden-administration-obama/

These past, few, head-spinning weeks, journalists have rushed to identify Joe Biden’s next “historic” staffing choice with the gusto once reserved for finding Malaysian Air 370 or Lindbergh’s baby. This is all window dressing.

A more useful headline for those keen on ignoring election fraud might have read something like, “Who Will Pull Strings in Biden Puppet Regime (Presuming There Is One)?” I will attempt to answer that, but first some sample headlines:

ABC News: “Biden announces historic picks for foreign policy and national security Cabinet posts.”

NPR: “Biden Announces More Historic Picks For His Economics Team.”

CBS: “Biden announces key cabinet picks, including historic firsts.”

Going deeper still, CNN’s Kate Sullivan cites seven “historic firsts” in Biden’s administration, including such exotica as “first Latino and immigrant” Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and “first woman of color and first South Asian American” to serve as Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

What might make these seven individuals even remotely newsworthy is not their sex or ethnicity, but the fact that all were appointed to previous positions by Barack Obama. Four of them also served under Bill Clinton—one presumes just figuratively.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/04/donald_trump_a_street-fighting_man_144778.html

Politics is like boxing. Prize fighters maneuver and look for weaknesses to attack within a set of rules that are designed to protect them and limit mayhem within the ring. But Donald Trump is not a boxer performing in the ring by a sanctioned set of rules. He is a street fighter who flouts the rules. He showed Republicans they can win by breaking the conventions that set limits on party conflict — limits that protect us by preventing party competition from dissolving into civic turmoil.

After the 2012 elections that gave President Obama a second term in the White House, the Republican National Committee did an autopsy, “The Growth and Opportunity Project,” to examine why Republicans lost to Obama. Again. The party concluded that it needed to do a better job appealing to Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, and gays if it wanted to be competitive in the future. The GOP needed to modernize its program to attract growing segments of the American electorate. 

But another analysis, called “the missing white voter” thesis, circulated. It offered a different explanation for the GOP’s defeat. Political analyst Sean Trende argued that 6 million downscale white workers were missing in action; they didn’t vote, costing Mitt Romney the election. In other words, there was another path forward for the GOP to win other than trying to keep up with demographic trends as outlined in the “Growth and Opportunity Project.”

Enter Donald J. Trump, the street fighter who ignores the rules of political combat. 

He articulated a program and perfected a style that attracted and mobilized these missing white voters. His norm-shattering nihilism matched perfectly this group’s lack of faith in a Democratic Party that reflected the “woke” obsessions of educated elites, mistrust in a government that was captured by special interests, lack of hope in a future that consisted of dead-end jobs, and little confidence in democracy that didn’t work for people like them.

https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/12/02/denigrating-hoover/

Matt Larson (“Hoover has gone too far,” Nov. 19, 2020) cited me among others in his Stanford Daily angry attack on Hoover Institution scholars. He alleges that we at Hoover are purportedly “more interested in making money and promoting right-wing politics than in doing actual academic research.” Larson also charges that “Hoover fellows constitute a veritable wall of shame. They have been involved in just about every type of skeezy behavior imaginable.” These are serious writs against our institution and yet mostly leveled without substantiation.

My colleagues can address these particular loaded charges of “every type of skeezy behavior imaginable” in their own fashion. But to the degree that these unfounded stereotypes pertain to me, and for the record, I have never received any compensation for media appearances. I am not “making money” on corporate boards. Nor have I ever worked in “right wing politics” — or on any campaign of either party. I am a registered independent voter without party affiliation, and the author of over 20 scholarly books on classical, agrarian and military history and culture. Scholarship, and its dissemination among the broader public, are the major criteria by which all Hoover senior fellows are annually reviewed.

Writing additional political, cultural and social commentary, or appearing on air to discuss written work, is not spreading “disinformation.” That is a false charge that Larson also lodged by focusing solely on one particular television interview I did on Fox News — in part, ironically critical of election coverage on Fox News. But even within such a narrow focus, Larson’s allegations are an unfortunate conglomeration of falsehoods, misrepresentations and half-truths. 

The media relish negative news. “If it bleeds it leads” still holds, and perhaps it’s never been truer than in the COVID-19 era. Every day the news highlights the spread of the virus and tells the sad stories of some of its victims.

And yet, much of the media does not pay sufficient attention to the good news regarding improved treatments and survival of patients with the coronavirus. In contrast with the international media, the American press has been unrelentingly negative in its COVID coverage, even when there is good news to tell. That negativity is part of what fuels a culture of fear that affects local, state and federal politicians and the decisions they make.

But there is a lot of good news to tell. The case fatality rate from the virus has dropped sharply since March. The infection survival rate is 99.95 percent for people under 70 and 95 percent for people over 70. Hospitals are much better equipped to handle patients, with improved ventilator protocols, improved management of outpatients and new therapeutic strategies to provide relief and recoveries. Moreover, thanks to multiple ongoing clinical trials around the world, there may soon be a safe and effective vaccine.

By contrast with their focus on COVID deaths, the media have paid scant attention to the enormous medical and psychological harms from the lockdowns in use to slow the pandemic. Despite the enormous collateral damage lockdowns have caused, England, France, Germany, Spain and other European countries are all intensifying their lockdowns once again.

By lockdowns, we mean the all-too-familiar shuttered schools and universities, closed playgrounds and parks, silent churches and bankrupt stores and businesses that have become emblematic of American civic life these past months. The relative dearth of reporting on the harms caused by lockdowns is odd, since lives lost from lockdown are no less important than lives lost from COVID infection. But they’ve received much less media attention.

The harms from lockdown have been catastrophic. Consider the psychological harm. Reader, since you’re reading this in lockdown, you can undoubtedly relate to the isolation and loneliness that these policies can cause by shutting down typical channels for social interaction. In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that one in four young adults had seriously considered suicide. Opioid and other drug related deaths are on a sharp and unsurprising upswing.

The burden of these policies falls disproportionately on some of the most vulnerable. For example, isolation led to a 20 percent increase in dementia-related deaths among our elderly population. Moreover, retrospective analysis of the lockdown in the United States shows that patients skipped cancer screenings, childhood immunizations, diabetes management visits and even treatment for heart attacks.

Internationally, the lockdowns have placed 130 million people on the brink of starvation, 80 million children at risk for diphtheria, measles and polio, and 1.8 million patients at risk of death from tuberculosis. The lockdowns in developed countries have devastated the poor in poor countries. The World Economic Forum estimates that the lockdowns will cause an additional 150 million people to fall into extreme poverty, 125 times as many people as have died from COVID.

Though there has been some coverage of lockdown harms, the media have not paid the same attention to it as they have to COVID deaths. If there is a COVID-death tracker, there should be side-by-side with it a lockdown-death tracker.

The lack of balanced media attention towards the good news about the virus and the costs of lockdowns comes with its own cost. Without a balanced approach to COVID news, the public cannot make informed choices about COVID policy, such as school closures. Even a diligent citizen cannot make an informed judgment about the wisdom of continuing lockdowns if only their benefits are emphasized and their costs downplayed. The media have an obligation to show both.

Latino seniors suffering from COVID-19 need help now
Florida officials were asked to avoid public statements on…

Finally, the neglect of the good COVID news breeds panic and fear, which is never a good public health strategy. The public should know that the pandemic will not be here forever. While these are challenging times – and, for many families, life-changing times – like every other pandemic in human history, the COVID-19 pandemic will end. With wise and informed policy choices, we can reduce its ultimate toll of death and human misery.

Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economics Research. Prof. Bhattacharya’s research work focuses on the epidemiology of COVID-19 and on effects of COVID-19 lockdown policy. He is the co-author of the Great Barrington declaration.

Christos A. Makridis, PhD is an assistant research professor at Arizona State University, a non-resident fellow at Baylor University, a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and a senior adviser at Gallup. Christos previously served on the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @camakridis.