RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/blinkens-idiocy-on-the-taliban-and-wo men/#slide-1

The notion of women holding governmental positions is anathema to the Taliban.

I n an observation that would be amusing were it not made under such appalling circumstances, Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that, in assembling its regime in Afghanistan, the Taliban had fallen “very short of the mark” expected by the vaunted “international community.” As the New York Times reports, he was referring specifically to the fundamentalists’ failure to include women in the new government.

I’m constrained yet again to note the sheer idiocy of such remarks from our State Department, nearly 30 years after the principles of sharia supremacism (which is the Taliban’s ideology) figured prominently in U.S. terrorism prosecutions.

The salient point here is not so much about women as it is about fundamentalist Islam’s theory of governance. But maddeningly, our government has always stood ready to turn a blind eye at the latter if it could just get a bit of window dressing on the former.

The Taliban are as literalist and unevolved as it gets, so the notion of women holding governmental positions is anathema to them. But that’s not merely because these are government positions; it’s mainly because they are outside-the-home positions. Before you’d even get to questions of governance, you’d confront the Taliban’s opposition to women’s being outside the home without the supervision of a male relative, to the perceived impropriety of women’s interacting with men to whom they are neither married nor related, and to the perceived intellectual inferiority of women that results, for example, in their testimony being valued at half that of a man’s (rooted in an ancient hadith, the provenance of which is questioned by reformist Islamic scholars and authentically moderate Muslim modernizers).

Yet sharia supremacism is not monolithic.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a sharia-supremacist organization, but it is the most influential one in modern history because it is flexible, even nuanced, about means of advancing sharia’s implementation while remaining unyielding on the crucial matter of ends — fidelity to sharia principles. As I’ve explained on other occasions (and discussed extensively in The Grand Jihad, my 2010 book on the Brotherhood and its alliance with transnational progressives), the most influential scholar in this most influential organization is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Notwithstanding his endorsement of violent jihad, Qaradawi has won plaudits from the usual suspects (such as the State Department) because of, among other things, his “moderate” views on the rights of women to vote and hold elective office.

Now, let’s put this in context.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/here-comes-the-joe-biden-tax-bill-nancy-pelosi-richard-neal-house-ways-and-means-democrats-11631566810?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

It’s been under wraps longer than some Egyptian mummies, but the bill for the Joe Biden – Nancy Pelosi -Bernie Sanders spending agenda is about to be exposed to the air. The Ways and Means Committee draft tax increase that leaked over the weekend is a $2.2 trillion Washington money grab for the ages.

The tax proposals aren’t final, but Ways and Means will start debating them as early as Tuesday. So much for deliberation. As Chairman Richard Neal has said, publicizing tax increases too soon gives the opposition time to build. Now that the details are out, we see what he means.**

The most bizarre spin is that the House Democratic draft is less onerous than President Biden has proposed. As a share of GDP, the House proposal is still the largest tax increase since 1968. It also doesn’t account for the Senate Finance Committee, which has floated a paper with multi-trillions in tax increases to choose from. Think of this exercise as the all-you-can-eat politician’s dinner at Applebee’s.

If Americans are successful, Democrats want to tax more of their income. The top individual tax rate will rise to 39.6% from 37%, as Mr. Biden promised. But wait: The higher tax rate will kick in at a mere $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for married couples. That’s down from $523,600 and $628,300 under current law.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-breakthrough-vaccine-natural-immunity-cdc-fauci-biden-failure-11631548306?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the author of “The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care—And How To Fix It.”

The U.S. spends lavishly on healthcare yet can’t answer basic questions about Covid-19. Some of the best research has come from Israel. American public health agencies should be producing data on breakthrough infections, boosters and natural immunity. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has failed to provide the information needed to inform a sound Covid strategy.

Israel began its vaccine rollout with Pfizer in December, only days after the U.S. But Israel kept good data, reported them out frequently and quickly, and used them to track subsequent Covid infections. When the White House announced its plan to recommend a booster shot for all Americans, it cited Israeli data. The World Health Organization and others criticized the plan, calling the evidence insufficient, and in what seemed like a coordinated protest, two top scientists at the Food and Drug Administration abruptly resigned.

The Biden administration recently got the supporting data it needed to justify its booster plan. But not from the CDC. Another Israeli study showed that a booster resulted in a 10-fold reduction in severe Covid illness in people over 60. The results were published mere weeks after the study’s completion, not months later as often happens in the U.S.

“There’s no doubt,” Anthony Fauci said of the findings in a press briefing, “from the dramatic data from the Israeli study that the boosts that are being now done there and contemplated here support very strongly the rationale for such an approach.” The FDA, trying to evaluate the question of boosters, scrambled to obtain the raw data from Israel.

The bigger question is: Why didn’t the CDC produce the research?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/13/ii-tipp-poll-the-distrust-of-scientists-is-widespread-including-on-covid-vaccines/

From coronavirus vaccines and the virus’ origin to climate change, a substantial portion of the country distrusts scientists to do their jobs honestly and capably. The latest data from the September Issues & Insights/TIPP Poll also found significant differences among Americans of different political views, reflecting a growing politicization of science in America.

The I&I/TIPP poll asked Americans “how much trust do you place in scientists” in three areas of science prominent in today’s headlines: “vaccine safety,” “climate change,” and “coronavirus origin.”

Overall, among the three, vaccine safety was tops in scientist trust, at 61%. Perhaps not surprisingly, that almost perfectly matches the share of the U.S. population currently vaccinated: 63%.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/12/wokeness-an-evil-of-our-age/

History is replete with examples of nations, successful and not-so-successful alike, that abruptly committed suicide. 

The ancient polis of Corcyra devoured itself in a bloody conflict as a collective madness took hold of the island city-state during the Peloponnesian War. 

The Jacobins in 1793 hijacked the French Revolution and turned a movement toward a constitutional republic into a totalitarian, year-zero effort to destroy the past and ensure equity for all—or else. The Reign of Terror—and eventually Napoleon—followed. 

The effort to force war-weary Czarist Russia to reform into a constitutional monarchy ended up being kidnapped by a small but lethal clique of Leninist Bolsheviks. What ensued was the destruction of Russian life—and millions of corpses—over the next 70 years. Ditto Mao Zedong’s various murderous resets culminating in the cannibalistic “Cultural Revolution.” Mao’s final tab was 60-70 million deaths of his fellow Chinese. 

French, Russian, and Chinese wokists all toppled statues, canceled out the nonbelievers, wiped away history, tore down monuments, and declared themselves the purest of all generations in their year zero—before getting down to the business of dividing up the spoils and settling scores.

Most of these bloodbaths started out with the supposedly noble idea of delivering social justice, equity, and fairness before they inevitably went deadly and feral. We should be just as worried about our own woke pandemic.

Mythological

Start with the idea that “wokeness” is an ideology divorced from reality. Nearly all of its premises are complete distortions.

Between 2017 and 2020, minorities had made the greatest gains in employment in U.S. history. Women currently represent about 60 percent of all college students. 

Recent wage gains for minority middle-class Americans outpaced those of the white working- and middle class. The latter were underrepresented in college enrollments and as graduates—but vastly overrepresented (at twice their percentage of the general population) in the toll of combat dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. Asian-Americans and a dozen other ethnic groups outpace so-called whites in per capita and household income. “White privilege” is usually a sloppy term that applies mostly to the white elites who use it to smear others.