RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/29/fauci-is-now-copying-trump-on-covid/

Donald Trump, Oct. 21, 2020: “We’re learning to live with it. We have no choice.”
Anthony Fauci, Nov. 28, 2021: “We’re going to have to start living with COVID.”

How many times did former President Donald Trump say something that was dismissed as reckless, heartless, stupid, or flat-out wrong only to find out later that he was right? Whatever the number is, add one more.

Over the weekend, Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, admitted that “we’re going to have to start living with COVID. I believe that’s the case because I don’t think we’re going to eradicate it.”

Fauci’s comment came amid rising cases in the U.S. and the new “Omicron” variant that has been spreading in South Africa and is apparently more resistant to vaccines. The World Health Organization declared Omicron as a “variant of concern,” and Fauci said it will likely land here.

But wait. Why would Fauci say that we have to start learning to live with COVID?

After all, Joe “Trust-the-Science” Biden said that “I will take care of this. I will end this. I will make sure we have a plan.”

Oops.

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/11/26/antifa-member-who-took-axe-to-senate-office-given-probation-and-his-axe-back/

We have been discussing the continued incarceration of many individuals for their participation in the Jan. 6th riot.  Despite claims that the riot was an insurrection, the vast majority of defendants have been given relatively minor charges. Nevertheless, the Justice Department has insisted on holding many without bail and some have received longer sentences, like Jacob Chansley (aka “QAnon Shaman”) who was given a 41-month sentence for “obstructing a federal proceeding.”

Thomas “Tas” Alexander Starks, 31, of Lisbon, N.D., faced a strikingly different approach by the Justice Department. The self-avowed Antifa member took an axe to the office of Sen. John Hoeven’s in Fargo on Dec. 21, 2020. Federal sentencing guidelines suggested 10–16 months in prison but he was only sentenced to probation and fined $2,784 for restitution . . . he then reportedly mocked the FBI for returning his axe.  Others declared him a hero and Democratic politicians pitched in for his legal defense.

Starks was caught on videotape axing the door of the congressional office. He pleaded guilty to a single charge of destruction of government property.  The case has received little attention from the media outside of conservative sites.

Starks has made clear that he was neither apologetic nor deterred from the use of such violence. He has posted under the Facebook moniker, “Paul Dunyan,” an apparent reference to his preferred use of an axe as a form of political expression.  He displays the Antifa symbol and, while awaiting sentencing, reportedly wrote: “I am ANTIFA. I will always attack fascists, racial superiority complexes built around nationalism that promotes genocide to fuel a war machine is the worst humanity has to offer.”

It is reminiscent of the defiance shown by arrested Antifa member Jason Charter, who declared “The Movement is winning” after his own arrest.

https://dianebederman.com/here-we-go-again-covid-ghettos-and-lepers-and-o-mi-cron/

Here we go again, Covid: Ghettos and lepers and O Mi Cron!

Congrats to Australia. Just coming out of 262 days of lockdowns. But wait. Here comes Omicron! And here comes government to save us. And sadly, so many want to be saved.

Australia has opened…sort of.

“However, stores selling non-essential goods won’t open until 80% of the state is double vaccinated and masks are required inside and out.”

Oh so the non-vaccinated will be the cause of keeping non-essential closed (I love that term – humans deciding that some are more essential than others – usually government employees are essential) Nothing like putting a mark of Cain or the sign of the leper on these people.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) declared a state of emergency Friday in response to a cold-weather surge of coronavirus infections and the threat of the newly detected omicron variant, making her state one of the first in the country to impose measures against the mutation that was recently sequenced in southern Africa.

Remember back 2 years? It started with a 2 week lockdown to flatten the curve. It’s all about the greater good. Dear self-righteous, sanctimonious, self-serving Liberals – you talk about caring for the other. Until the other makes you uncomfortable.  So you stood with the rules about lockdowns which wiped out the poorest amongst us. Their family businesses destroyed while all were advised to go the big box stores – it would be safer there. Really? It’s OK for hundreds to pile into Walmart – some having to take public transit to get there; you were OK with that. And the shutting down of houses of worship where people with addictions met regularly. But the liquor store and cannabis stores remained open. And suicide went up as did opioid overdose and mental illness.

Well, as we open up and let those non-essential people come back into the world, we are not done. Those unvaccinated! How dare they? We need to mark them with the Mark of Cain, or a leper. They shall not be allowed to be out and about with us!

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-11-27-complete-madness-in-the-biden-administration-energy-policy

Is President Biden doing anything right? To this observer, his policies range from at best merely incompetent, to at worst malicious hatred of the country and people whose interests he was elected to advance. Somewhere in between those two extremes we have Biden’s energy policy. In this arena, appropriate adjectives would be inconsistent, incoherent, and destructive. Don’t even attempt to make sense of it. To summarize in one word, it is complete madness.

I’m old enough to remember the 1970s, and the two “oil shocks” that occurred during that decade. A brief summary of the history can be found in this 2012 piece from Foreign Policy. By 1970/71, U.S. oil production had peaked and begun to decline. 1973 brought the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, and OPEC halted oil shipments to the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. By January 1974, crude oil prices on the world markets had “more than quadrupled” (from around $3 to $12 per barrel). Further constraints on supply in the late 70s, most notably a big drop in supply from Iran following the ouster of the Shah, were followed by a further tripling of the price, this time from about $12 to about $36 per barrel. Government efforts at price controls were largely unsuccessful at restraining prices at the pump, but did cause shortages and lines at gas stations that maddened consumers. Without adequate domestic oil supply, the U.S. became a supplicant to the big international exporters, mainly OPEC and Russia. As reported in that Foreign Policy piece, President Carter reacted by “mak[ing] energy independence the central ambition of his presidency.”

Energy independence was a bi-partisan goal of American Presidents and of the Congress, until President Obama came along. Obama had the opposite strategy. He had drunk the climate Kool-Aid, and thought that the right goals were to restrict the production of fossil fuel energy, which would cause prices to rise and thereby restrict consumption. The famous quote from Obama, uttered in 2008 during his first presidential campaign, was “under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket.” Although that statement specifically dealt with electricity prices, the same principle would apply as well to all energy prices. And Obama sought to put his strategy into practice, both by putting proposed “cap-and-trade” legislation before Congress, and by attempting to use his executive powers to restrict domestic fossil fuel development. However, the cap-and-trade legislation failed in Congress, and domestic “frackers” worked around Obama’s federal restrictions to greatly expand U.S. domestic oil and gas production, mostly on private lands.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

The words noblesse oblige refer to a sense of responsibility of the privileged few to act with magnanimity toward the less privileged – to be responsible for their welfare, but not necessarily to let them into their living rooms. While the term was originally associated with French-speaking British nobility in their treatment of natives in their colonial empire and serfs on their vast estates, it can be said to reflect a conspicuous self-righteousness on the part of today’s Progressive elites who want to preserve their status, while using taxpayer money to keep happy an expanding body of welfare recipients.

Elitism, we are taught, is un-American, yet it is a natural phenomenon. Every society produces elites. Tsarist Russia had theirs and so did the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany had its elite and so does Communist China today. Colonial America had its planters in the south and its merchants in the north. The Industrial Revolution, in the United States, produced the “Gilded Age” in the second half of the 19th Century, giving the Nation New York’s “four hundred,” made famous through the novels of Edith Wharton.

Elitism is inequitable when it becomes entrenched, as it is in despotic countries, like China, North Korea, Cuba and Iran. The top of the economic, social and political ladder should never be comfortable: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” spoke Henry IV in Shakespeare’s eponymous play. A free and democratic country should be open to new ideas and allow free expression. It should praise individualism, independence and self-reliance. It must encourage debate and recognize universal truths; it must commend honesty and integrity. The elitist class should be fluid, not static.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/27/the-covid-follies-play-again/

I was hoping I would never have to write about the Wuhan flu, aka COVID-19, again. I overdosed on it in days of yore. During the Great Panic of 2020, I wrote about it many times.  I really have nothing much new to add. 

Now, as then, I have been astonished that a disease that poses a serious threat to a tiny sliver of the population—some of the elderly, and those with underlying (new vocabulary word!) “co-morbidities” like obesity—should have caused such widespread panic, not to mention such an acrid authoritarian response from so many governments. I was also astonished, and correspondingly disheartened, by the alacrity with which people the world over turned themselves into sheep, allowing their elected representatives (where such existed) to herd them like cattle: docile, bovine, will-less. But that’s how it was. 

Now of course, everything has changed. We have a smorgasbord of vaccines with (we are told) something like a 95 percent success rate. We have a wide range of effective therapeutics, including the once-scorned (because Trump-endorsed) ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, not to mention monoclonal antibody treatment. Right around the corner, I am told, Pfizer and other members of the Big Pharma brotherhood will be offering a pill that (according to some) will cut hospitalizations and death from COVID by almost 90 percent. So the world is once again free, maskless, social. 

Just kidding. 

But why, you might ask, are we still masking up, locking down, and otherwise acting like savages who forgot yesterday’s human sacrifice and now are worried about what the angry, unpropitiated gods might do? 

I like to point out that the great, but under-remarked upon, thing about COVID is that it has all but abolished death from old age. Readers will remember that Florida motorcycle driver who was in a dreadful accident, poor thing, and was spread like raspberry jam across the highway. Nevertheless, assiduous EMTs, or maybe it was some junior assistant of Anthony Fauci, collected enough goo to perform the requisite test and, bingo, he, or it, “tested positive” and was put down at first as a death from COVID.