RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://reason.com/2021/12/27/rip-pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated/?utm_medium=email

If you spend too much time observing the way politicians speak, you’ll pick up an almost perceptibly mechanical gear-shift in their heads when the brain-groove reminds them to reproduce an anecdote or talking point they have formulated so many times before. Occasionally the subconscious rebels against the alienating monotony with apologetic prefix clauses like, “That’s why I like to say,” or “I always tell the story that,” but the pre-sets mostly override such human twitches to deliver the desired political result.

So it was for President Joe Biden’s counterproductive “pandemic of the unvaccinated” slogan, which the White House COVID-19 Response Team introduced in mid-July, and which the president was still regurgitating inaccurately as late as December 14.

In a local TV interview with News Center 7 in Dayton, Ohio, the president was asked about whether his administration would continue fighting his contested employer vaccine mandates in court. The politician-brain quickly whirred into gear.

“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated,” Biden emphasized, on the same day that the omicron variant produced a one-day positive-case increase of 16 percent in highly vaccinated New York City. “That’s the problem. And so everybody talks about ‘freedom,’ and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anybody else? What about that?”

What about that indeed. New York City’s one-shot vaccination rate (of 92 percent for adults, 83 percent for kids between 13 and 17) “rivals any number in the free world,” Politico’s Jack Shafer observed last week, and yet somehow my vaccinated teen and boosted self spent Christmas under quarantine. The fact-checkers over at The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact generously rated Biden’s “vaccinated…do not spread the disease” claim as only “mostly” false, despite epidemiologist quotes like “[the] statement is not accurate,” and “vaccinated individuals can definitely infect other people.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/26/surveillance-video-show-d-c-police-beating-women-on-january-6/

Recently-released surveillance video from inside the lower west terrace tunnel at the Capitol building from last January 6 confirms what American Greatness has reported for months: law enforcement officers from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Capitol Police led a brutal assault against Trump supporters trapped inside that tunnel during the Capitol protest.

The three-hour clip offers one angle of what happened between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. in the tunnel, the site of the most violent clashes between police and protesters. It also is the location where Rosanne Boyland, a Trump supporter from Georgia, died.

One clip shows the attack on Victoria White, a Minnesota mother of four who was viciously beaten by at least two D.C. Metro officers including a supervisor:

The video supports what White told me in a series of interviews earlier this month; she was repeatedly beaten on the head with a baton and punched directly in the face numerous times by police. One officer grabbed her by the hair and shook her head side to side. Government charging documents, however, claim White—who is 5’6”, weighs 155 pounds, and had no weapon—was the aggressor:

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/26/sowing-winds-and-reaping-whirlwinds/

“For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. ”
— Hosea 8:7

Joe Biden, first as a candidate and then in the White House, from the outset saw the COVID-19 pandemic mainly as a means of leveraging political support, from the manner in which the lockdowns allowed him to run a virtual campaign from his basement to equating Donald Trump with the COVID-19 virus.

Like many on the Left, Biden was overt in such cynicism. So were Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, and Jane Fonda—who claimed that COVID was a “never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste” moment. Panic and lockdowns could help achieve single-payer health care, or a recalibrated capitalism, or the end of Donald Trump himself. 

At the height of the last presidential campaign, Biden in September 2020 declared that Trump was responsible for the then-current 200,000 COVID deaths: “If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive.”

Biden felt no need to list details where Trump had lethally erred or had not “done his job.” 

He did not explain how any president should be able to prevent all deaths from a plague. And in 2020, Biden certainly had no expectation that before his own first year as president was over the cumulative deaths from the pandemic would exceed 800,000. He would have found it surreal to even imagine that soon there would be far more deaths under his own tenure than during Trump’s presidency—despite being the beneficiary of ubiquitous vaccinations, new therapies, and antiviral drugs unavailable throughout most of 2020.

During the 2020 campaign, both Biden and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris also had cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of the Operation Warp Speed vaccines. They repeatedly implied that any forthcoming jabs would be tainted by Trump’s sponsorship. 

Yet, later in office, both would publicly deplore any doubt similar to their own about vaccination safety or efficacy. Indeed, they equated remaining unvaxed to being unpatriotic. In addition, when Biden was inaugurated, he claimed that no Americans had been vaccinated. In fact, on some days under Trump more than a million people were receiving vaccinations. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/26/2022-new-years-resolution/

 We are living in a unique historical moment where we will need to change some of our attitudes toward politics, confrontation, and activism if we and our children are to survive as free people, and as Americans bequeathed with God-given rights. Further, if we do not begin to take off our kid gloves, our children will be indoctrinated in anti-American concepts of “civil rights” and “social justice” and immersed in smut. Now is the time to battle for country, family, and God and for what is good, wholesome, and righteous.

It is clear that the political Left, whose political home and power base is in today’s Democratic Party, fervently wants to make us second-class citizens. Even questioning the decisions of local school boards or election results will taint you with the label “white extremist” so as to nullify your legitimacy. Americans are being silenced, threatened with job loss, and forced into social submission to the progressive Left’s fictitious and repressive paradigm. It is profoundly un-American. But, that is not surprising given that the Left no longer subscribes to the historic American ethos and way of life.

They are sending or allowing Antifa, BLM, and anarchist goons to burn cities, destroy shops, and beat up locals to get their way. They intimidate, bully, and maim—all in the name of social justice. If done by others, what BLM and Antifa do would be labeled criminal and immediately prosecuted. Now is the time for Americans, especially religious Americans, to fight back! Self-righteous anger is justified, indeed called for, against people on an unending rampage to physically harm you, rob you of your lawful heritage, and purposefully foul the souls of your children. 

We religious people must get involved in the nitty-gritty political arena, and as citizens we need to muster the emotional self-confidence and fortitude—the stomach—to confront those hell-bent on bullying us into submission.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/pardon_me_for_not_joining_in_the_mourning_for_desmond_tutu.html

Bishop Desmond Tutu, the South African bishop known for his fight to end apartheid is being universally lauded. I do not share that sentiment. While I will certainly acknowledge that he was a warrior against one of the great evils of his time, I believe that, on the scales of goodness, he squandered that moral virtue by being an ardent advocate of anti-Semitism and an enemy to Israel.

Over the years, I’ve found philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism to be very good yardsticks of both nations and people. Regarding the former, it’s no coincidence that, throughout history, those nations that thrive are, for their time and place, philo-Semitic, while those that fail are anti-Semitic. One can say that this is God’s will or one can note that free societies benefit all citizens and part of a free society is that it leaves its Jews alone. You don’t have to love Jews, you just have to leave them be. Totalitarian societies, on the other hand, the ones that oppress their people, invariably hate their Jews and use them as a scapegoat to distract the masses from the horrors of the regime.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, the same turns out to be true: Totalitarian individuals hate Jews; freedom-oriented people don’t. I happen to believe that this is because the Torah stands for absolute moral truths, justice, and a reckoning in the afterlife. Totalitarians oppose all those things.

This doesn’t mean that individual Jews are all moral, just, or will be rewarded in the afterlife. There have been and still are a lot of Jews who are bad people. Still, symbolically, those core virtues are Jewish ideas and leftists back away from them like slugs from salt or vampires from the cross.

And this gets me to Desmond Tutu. I won’t repeat here, because you can read it everywhere else, that he fought to end apartheid which was, as I said, one of the great evils of the modern era. However, Desmond Tutu also practiced the African version of liberation theology—and liberation theology, quite simply, is a fusion of communism and Christianity.

As is true for all leftist ideologies, those who support liberation theology are hostile to Israel. Karl Marx, a self-hating Jewish convert, baked anti-Semitism into the communist cake, both because he personally bought into all the worst stereotypes about Jews and because he melded Jews in with capitalism, which encouraged the true-believers to think that overthrowing Jews was a shortcut to achieving “true” socialism.

Back in 2015, the Gatestone Institute wrote how Desmond Tutu strongly supported both liberation theology and the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, which attempts to use economic means to destroy Israel:

A virulent global campaign by a powerful Christian lobby is trying to influence the Church and use it to delegitimize Israel. The lobbying group is the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, with Nobel Prize Laureate and retired Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu as its patron.

Tutu not only agreed to serve as Sabeel’s patron but also to “assist the Palestinian Christian organization in its outreach and development work with Christian Churches around the world.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/islamophobic-hate-crime-virginia-turns-out-be-fake-robert-spencer/

Want power and influence? The quickest path to both in today’s absurd society is to be a victim, and hate crimes are the currency of victimhood. In such an environment, it is not surprising that many hate crimes would be faked. Despite the fact that this is a recurring phenomenon, however, every hate crime claim is taken at face value in the establishment media and blasted far and wide; when many are found to be fake, the lie has once again gone twice around the world before the truth has finished putting on its shoes. All this played out yet again over the last few days in a Virginia high school, with, of course, no lessons learned.

According to WJLA in Northern Virginia, a Muslim girl who is a sophomore at Fairfax High School claimed that last Tuesday, she was the victim of an “Islamophobic” attack. She and a purported eyewitness claimed that “several students made offensive drawings referencing Muslims, Jews, and George Floyd.” When they confronted these hate-filled, no doubt MAGA-hat-wearing white male offenders, the crude louts “made offensive comments and one got very close” to the Muslim girl.

According to that girl, mayhem ensued: “My backpack bumped into him, and then he got mad, and he pushed me, and he grabbed my hijab. So I punched him in the stomach because he wouldn’t let go. And he threw me across the room and I hit my whole left side on the chair and desk.” She claims that “she eventually wound up on the floor and had difficulty breathing.”

By her own account, the Muslim girl has been thoroughly traumatized. “I haven’t been able to eat, keep food down,” she told WUSA, “‘cause of the stress, and how, uh, disgusted I am that, uh, I had to go through this at my school where I should feel safe.” She said, however, that she was fighting for justice for every girl who wears the hijab. “It’s for every hijabi out there. Every Muslim girl, every Muslim person, every Muslim guy. It’s not, uh – it’s a daily thing that we go through, and people are trying to cover it up and make it look like, uh, an accident.” She also charged that “the school is trying to cover it up, and said I had a panic attack, which did not happen.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/tutus-no-nos-bruce-bawer/

EXCERPTS

Tutu’s glow faded even more for me after 9/11. Of course he lamented the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon – how could he do otherwise, given all the checks he’d received, drawn on New York banks? – but he sounded far more emotionally worked up when he condemned the subsequent acts of retaliation by NATO. Indeed, while he soft-pedaled his criticism of Islamic terrorists – and stubbornly refused to criticize Islam itself, asserting in 2006 that “no religion is inherently violent or encourages violence” and that people of one faith “mustn’t despise, disparage or speak ill of another faith” – he savaged George W. Bush and Tony Blair, both of whom, he maintained, should be tried for war crimes in The Hague. (No Truth and Reconciliation Commission, apparently, for them.)

And although he’d publicly proclaimed his love for Winnie Mandela, Tutu refused to sit down with Blair at a 2012 conference, lecturing the prime minister afterwards in a Guardian op-ed: “You are a member of our family, God’s family. You are made for goodness, for honesty, for morality, for love; so are our brothers and sisters in Iraq, in the U.S., in Syria, in Israel and Iran.” Pondering this op-ed in Canada’s National Post, a writer named Wayne K. Spear rightly dismissed it as so much “greasy pontification,” pointing out that

Whether or not our brothers and sisters were “made for goodness,” some of them are committed to the destruction of apostate and infidel. Saddam Hussein seems to have been made, like the communist Russian dictator he both admired and emulated, for engendering terror among his rivals. As long as our world produces people such as these, leaders must from time to time have recourse to the necessary evil of war.

By this point, for me, the bloom was definitely off Tutu’s rose. But I didn’t fully grasp the scale of his awfulness until he started speaking up frequently about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His sympathies, he made clear, were entirely with Yasser Arafat and company. He compared Israel to Nazi Germany. He used his clout to get the University of Johannesburg to sever its ties with its Israeli fellows. But he wasn’t just critical of Israel. He criticized Jews. In fact, it became pretty apparent that he hated Jews. In a 2011 article, Alan Dershowitz offered a brief summing-up of Tutu’s comments on the subject:

He has called the Jews “a peculiar people” and has accused “the Jews” of causing many of the world’s problems….He has said that “the Jews thought they had a monopoly of God: Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.” He has said that Jews have been “fighting against” and being “opposed to” his God. He has “compared the features of the ancient Holy Temple in Jerusalem to the features of the apartheid system in South Africa.” He has complained that “the Jewish people with their traditions, religion and long history of persecution sometimes appear to have caused a refugee problem among others.” Tutu has minimized the suffering of those murdered in the Holocaust by asserting that “the gas chambers” made for “a neater death” than did apartheid. He has demanded that its victims must “forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust,” while refusing to forgive the “Jewish people” for “persecute[ing] others.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/drug-prices-havent-been-going-up-generics-inflation-caps-biden-costs-innovation-11640533671?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Build Back Better may be dead, but its proposed drug price controls will likely reappear: negotiating prices for high-cost drugs in Medicare and price controls for most drugs limiting price increases to the annual inflation rate.

President Biden insists such controls are needed because pharmaceutical companies are “jacking up prices on a range of medicines.” He promises “to end the days when drug companies could increase their prices with no oversight and no accountability.” Yet while inflation has skyrocketed under Mr. Biden, drug prices are lower than when he took office. As the consumer-price index over the past year rose 6.8%, the largest increase in 39 years, prescription-drug prices fell 0.3%.

Mr. Biden and other pharmaceutical critics have mistakenly focused on increases in the list prices set by companies. But the actual prices consumers pay, after various discounts and rebates, are considerably lower than list prices, and changes in the two measures differ substantially. Insulin, with large increases in list prices over the past few decades, has become the poster child for unreasonable price increases. Yet net prices have increased much more slowly or not at all.

The best measure is the consumer-price index for prescription drugs, or CPI-Rx, which measures price changes in a large basket of drugs over time, accounting for discounts and most rebates. Another strength of the CPI-Rx is that it accounts for price declines that occur when consumers substitute cheaper generic versions for brand-name drugs. Too often, Mr. Biden and others focus on a few high-priced drugs and fail to consider the entire market.