RUTHFULLY YOURS

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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/the_covid_case_con_continues.html

As many Americans recover from their “virtual Thanksgiving,” sharing prayers and turkey across the internet, the media is pushing their November propaganda narrative, that Dementia Joe really won the presidential election and that COVID cases are once again surging across America.

The Washington Post claims that Wuhan coronavirus cases are “skyrocketing” while the New York Times wails that “It has hit us with a vengeance.” Yet the media is oblivious, either ignorantly or deliberately, to the reality that positive tests are not the same thing as cases.

A “case” has a very specific definition, apparently beyond the intellectual realm of Wolf Blitzer or Neil Cavuto. The CDC provides a specific “case definition.”  A case is not just a positive test.  Instead, what is needed is “presumptive laboratory evidence AND either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence.”  Notice the AND, meaning not simply a positive test.

The current COVID surges are positive tests, and even those are suspect, without regard to whether those who test positive are actually sick or not. I was curious about drive-by testing and last weekend gave it a whirl. It only took about 20 minutes and was free, meaning I got what I paid for. Results were promised within three days but took just over seven days to find out that I was virus free.

Given the sensitivity of the COVID PCR test, it is likely that some of those being tested, without any symptoms or exposure, will be reported as test positive and added to the case tickers running constantly on Fox News and CNN.

Saying someone with a positive COVID test is a “case” is fraudulent. For comparison, blood glucose has an upper test limit of 140. Is everyone above that number a diabetic? Even if they just ate a doughnut or ice cream cone before testing? Or does it take more than a single blood glucose level before one is diagnosed with diabetes? Does a single elevated blood pressure test make one hypertensive? Certainly not.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/12/the-fury-of-the-fatherless

The Trump administration’s recent designation of several American cities as “anarchic jurisdictions” may turn out to have been nothing more than a quixotic gambit in the supercharged run-up to November 3. But the fact that it was thinkable in the first place points to a truth beyond electoral politics: The frenzy that has been enacted in city after American city since May 2020 demands more scrutiny than it has yet received.

It is true that most protests have been peaceful. It is also true that the exceptions—marked by violence and biliousness and unreason and, well, anarchy—have been far more common than many people have understood, at least until recently. As of late September, a USA TODAY/Ipsos poll reports that two-thirds of respondents believe that “protesters and counterprotesters are overwhelming American cities.” The majority is on to something.

According to the first thorough examination of the street protests triggered by the death of George Floyd, undertaken by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project in conjunction with the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton, more than 10,600 incidents of what is benignly called “unrest” were recorded between May 24 and August 22. Of these, some 570 involved violence. Of those, most have involved Black Lives Matter activists. Preliminary insurance estimates show that the damage will surpass the $1.2 billion in damages accrued during the 1992 Rodney King riots. And then there are the atmospherics that separate these protests from many that have gone before: lusty screaming, ecstatic vandalism, the menacing of bystanders.

The ritualistic exhibition of destructive behaviors in city after city is without precedent in America. Neither the civil rights demonstrations nor the protests against the war in Vietnam looked remotely like this. The differences demand explanation. Blame what you will on the usual bête noirs: ­Donald Trump, cancel culture, police brutality, political tribalism, the coronavirus pandemic, far-right militias, BLM, antifa. All these factors feed the “­demand” side of the protests and rioting, the ­reasons for the ritualistic enactment. But what about the “supply” side—the ready and apparently inexhaustible ranks of demonstrators themselves? What explains them?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/our-real-systemic-problem/

America’s got a problem that’s systemic in nature. This problem has less to do with individual intentions than the structure within which our intentions are formed. That structure explains a great deal about observed disparities in wealth, and other advantages, between various racial and ethnic groups. It helps explain why we’re torn apart by arguments over school shootings and abortion. It even helps explain why we’ve turned away from traditional religion and patriotism and adopted a secular faith built around hollow and pernicious ideas like systemic racism instead. In short, our systemic problem helps explain many of the core disagreements around which contemporary American politics are organized. The challenge I refer to — our real systemic problem — is family decline.

A twist of this issue—and a telling sign of our times—is that we’re barred from discussing it. Charles Murray once said, commenting on the connection between a vast range of positive outcomes for children and being reared by two biological parents who remain married, “I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.” That Murray himself is periodically shouted down on college campuses adds a nice touch.

While our fake systemic problem is on half the country’s lips, our real systemic problem is verboten. We don’t want to risk offense by mentioning an issue so touchy — and that touches nearly everyone nowadays in some way or other because … well, because it’s systemic. Because the family has been seen since approximately forever as society’s foundation, it makes sense from the traditional point of view that family decline would have pervasive social effects. Yet no one dares discuss it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/return-of-the-obama-economists-11606778301?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

If Joe Biden is trying to distinguish his emerging Administration from Barack Obama’s, he hasn’t succeeded in the choice of economic advisers he rolled out Monday. They’re Obama veterans who believe in more spending, more regulation, higher taxes, and easier money. Let’s hope the result is better than what became known as “secular stagnation” during the Obama years.

Janet Yellen, the Treasury nominee, is an economist with a distinguished political resume. She’s a Keynesian from the James Tobin school who believes in spending as fiscal stimulus and low interest rates. As Federal Reserve Chair in Mr. Obama’s second term, she was slow to raise interest rates and reduce the Fed’s bond purchases. She’ll likely favor a 2009-style policy mix next year with a spending blowout while urging the Fed to monetize it.

Mr. Biden has also signed up Jared Bernstein, an architect of the Obama stimulus who famously predicted in January 2009 that spending would keep unemployment below 8% and hit 7% by autumn of 2010. Not quite. The jobless rate hit 10% in October 2009, stayed at 9.9% through April 2010, and didn’t fall below 7% until November 2013. Mr. Bernstein put his trust in the Keynesian “multiplier” that $1 of new spending yields as much as an extra $1.57 or more of additional GDP. Wrong again.

Mr. Bernstein will join the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where his boss will be Princeton economist Cecilia Rouse. She’s a veteran of the Clinton and Obama White Houses. Her academic work has focused on microeconomic subjects such as education and the labor market, and her research is skeptical of the benefits of school choice.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/30/trumps-michael-flynn-pardon-is-only-the-be

The corporate media has refused to tell Americans the truth, so I will. Here are six key aspects of the case that expose the Obama-Biden administration’s travesty of justice.

On Wednesday, President Trump pardoned an innocent man. Just before Thanksgiving, he signed an executive grant of clemency that provided Michael Flynn a full pardon and ended the criminal case against the retired lieutenant general.

Yet justice has not been served. And it may never be served. Justice for Michael Flynn requires something our country no longer possesses: an honest press.

Justice for Flynn requires the public to understand how the Obama-Biden administration, political appointees, career employees, special counsel attorneys, and a federal judge sought to destroy a war hero’s life to wreak revenge on Flynn for his service to Trump—and with a hope that Flynn’s demise would trigger Trump’s destruction. Justice for Flynn requires that those involved in this scandal be the object of public scorn.

The corporate media has refused to tell Americans the truth, so I will. And the damning facts go much beyond the evidence U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen, whom Attorney General William Barr charged with investigating the prosecution of Flynn, discovered. Here are six key aspects of the Flynn case the press buried that expose the travesty of justice heaped upon Flynn.

https://the-pipeline.org/apparatchik-john-kerry-climate-czar/

Suppose you are a man with a long history of personal mediocrity in important positions. You aren’t quite as publicly toxic as, say, Hillary Clinton. But no one really respects you either. You’re old, 76. You’re definitely a “me too” lothario. You have said nothing notable in 35 years in the public eye, first as a U.S. Senator, then failed presidential candidate, and finally Secretary of State.

Your biggest success was in being the face of Obama’s Iran deal, the entire premise of which was to set up an untrustworthy, fundamentalist regime hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and deeply hated by its own people, as a dominant regional power.

So which job do you get in a Joe Biden Administration?

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Climate Czar!  Nice touch, that “Czar.” Commissar would have been a bit heavy handed. Who knows what the Mandarin translation is.

Actually, John Kerry’s official new title is “Special Presidential Envoy for Climate,” and he will report directly to apparent president-elect Biden. The post is housed within the National Security Council, because, apparently, climate is a now national security issue, which is not quite the same thing as a matter of science, or even weather (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, anybody?).

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/11/30/joe-biden-job-robber/

California Democrats stole the livelihoods of millions when the Legislature passed and the governor signed a bill that virtually outlawed gig work. Might-be-president Joe Biden has promised to sign a federal bill that would also ban independent contract and freelance jobs if he makes it to the White House. Legalizing theft doesn’t make it any less immoral or destructive.

Assembly Bill 5, California’s gift to labor unions, became law on Jan. 1 of this year. It forces companies to hire gig economy workers who were previously classified as independent contractors. As many as 2 million Californians are estimated to be reliant on gig work for their income, both primary and supplemental.

The legislation included some exemptions, which were expanded by this year’s Assembly Bill 2257. It was further weakened, but not killed, by Proposition 22, a ballot measure that defined app-based (rideshare) and delivery drivers as independent contractors. The drivers, regarded by unions as a rich source of membership dues if only they could be organized, were the principal targets of the legislation. That as many as 1.5 million freelancers in dozens of other fields were caught in the dragnet was just a bonus.

Despite its holes, the law still applies to a large group of workers who don’t have enough political influence to gain exemptions from Sacramento. Even those whose professions and occupations were exempted by AB2257 had their lives disrupted for most of the year.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/_the_new_new_normal.html

Crossing the rather grim Grenzübergangsstelle on my first visit to communist East Germany, two things struck me with uncommon force: the gun-emplacement towers every few kilometers along the Hanover-Berlin autobahn, and the comportment of East German drivers. The towers were certainly intimidating, constantly reminding us that we were at permanent risk and convincing us never to drive eccentrically or conspicuously.

But I found the conduct and “positioning” of drivers in their Trabants and Wartburgs even more disconcerting. I noticed that many of these drivers did not adopt the 10-2 grip on the wheel, and almost none practiced the more casual and relaxed one-handed style. Instead, they tended to place their wrists on the top of the steering wheel and let their hands hang limply behind it, like laundry on the line. An inveterate list-maker and note-taker, I began keeping count and found that of the 100 cars I tallied, 32 drivers exhibited this slack or droopy posture, as if they were somehow resigned, enervated and spiritless.

This was, for me, a kind of Joycean epiphany of what life in a socialist or communist regime must entail—it was all in the wrist. As Jan Morris wrote in Fifty Years of Europe, recounting her visit to East Germany,

“Travelling from west to east was like entering a drab and disturbing dream, peopled by all the ogres of totalitarianism, a half-lit world of shabby resentments, where anything could be done to you, I used to feel, without anybody ever hearing of it, and your every step was dogged by watchful eyes and mechanisms.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/obama_scolds_hispanic_trump_voters_for_not_buying_liberal_lies.html

One ungainly paragraph delivered during a Wednesday interview on the “Breakfast Club” encapsulates just about all one needs to know about Barack Obama.

“People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump,” Obama told a trio of black interviewers, “but there’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees, undocumented workers [sic] in cages.  They think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion.”

Where to begin?  How about with Obama’s patronizing use of the word “folks” when speaking to black Americans?  Growing up in a white household in America’s lest black state, Obama’s closest brush with black culture as an adolescent was watching the “Mod Squad” on TV.

Although no one mimics black vernacular and speech patterns as egregiously as Hillary, Obama’s efforts are almost as grating.  Does Obama repeatedly say “a lot of” and “you know” when speaking to largely white audiences?  I doubt it.

Then there is the implication that Trump appealed largely to evangelical Hispanics.  Many Hispanics took exception.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/11/27/does-fauci-realize-that-millions

You’ve seen the photos. Airports are packed. Millions have traveled for the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s not nearly as bad as last year, a sign that there are Americans staying put—but did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the rest of the COVID Nazis think that America was not going to celebrate Thanksgiving? I mean, Fauci again went on Good Morning America Wednesday to give one last piece of advice:

Well, the final message is to do what we’ve been saying for some time. Keep the indoor gatherings as small as you possibly can. We all know how difficult that is because this is such a beautiful, traditional holiday. But by making that sacrifice, you’re going to prevent people from getting infected.”

Okay, well, George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton political operative, repeated Chinese propaganda right there. China, by far, has the highest caseload and death rate. It’s where this virus originated. They brought in incinerators into Wuhan at the outset, which we all know weren’t used to destroy trash. So, enough with this ‘US is the worst hit by COVID’ crap. It’s not. Second, the era of the expert is done. No one is listening. If Trump was never elected, or if COVID hit in 2017, we would have had a much more rational approach to this virus. Instead, the liberal media and the Democrats weaponized it, locked down the states they control without the proper vetting of the data and led to the destruction of countless businesses…for nothing. Everything has changed. The recommendations on masks and the warnings of contact through surfaces has all changed. The r-naught figure has changed. The mortality rate changed.