RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/20/can-the-truth-set-us-free/

I try to re-read The Confessions (the one by St. Augustine, not the one by Rousseau) every Lent. Since it is that time of year again, and since I am rather weary of the usual quotidian static, I thought I would avert my gaze from the armed camp on the Potomac and say a word or two about my reading. In a famous passage of Book XI of that deep and magisterial book, Augustine asks a simple but apparently imponderable question: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is,” he says, “provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.”

It is hard to read that passage without experiencing a shock of recognition.

There is a basic sense in which, like St. Augustine, we all know what time is. As Einstein once observed, time is “what the clock measures.” Any yet it is impossible not to feel that that answer, though correct, is somehow insufficient to the awesome reality of time—assuming, that is, that time is or has a reality and is not, as some philosophers have insisted, an illusion we contribute to make experience comprehensible.

When Plato described time as “the moving image of eternity,” his formulation was more poetic than Einstein’s, but not necessarily more satisfactory. The fact is that time, like many basic concepts, names an idea we are perfectly familiar with but that we may not be able to explain.

Consider the concept of truth.

There is an important sense in which we all know what truth is. We just couldn’t get along in the world if we didn’t. But being able to apply a concept in daily life does not necessarily mean we can define it. Or that we really understand it.

Medieval philosophers defined truth as “adaequatio intellectus et rei”: a “correspondence between thought and thing.”

That sounds impressive, especially in Latin, and it has a certain intuitive appeal. When we utter a true proposition—“2 + 2 = 4,” say, or “Snow is white”—we can see that there is a correspondence between our judgment and the state of affairs it names.

But what, exactly, is the nature of that “correspondence”?

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/02/17/bidens_economy_will_be_a_train_wreck_660695.html

Warning lights should be flashing. Less than a month in, it’s becoming evident that President Joe Biden’s economic policies are likely to end in disaster. The wrong economic diagnosis and the politics of not letting any crisis go to waste is leading to the most damaging mix of economic policy in decades.

The administration is in thrall to the Keynesian demand-management paradigm that treats every big economic downturn as a potential replay of the Great Depression, thus requiring massive fiscal and monetary stimulus to revive demand. But the Covid slump wasn’t driven by lack of demand, but by deliberate policy decisions taken by federal and state governments to close down economic activity for reasons of public health.

For the time being, Covid policy is economic policy. The 11 states with the highest unemployment are all deep blue; they imposed some of the nation’s most draconian lockdown policies. Eleven of the 12 states with the lowest unemployment rates are red states. Thus, the pace of economic recovery will be dictated by how quickly the brakes are taken off measures to control the pandemic.

Yet in response to a deliberately engineered supply-side contraction, the Biden administration’s prescription is a $1.9 trillion stimulus. This idea drew stinging criticism from no less than Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, who reckons the Biden stimulus is three times larger than the projected gap in output. Together with unprecedentedly loose monetary conditions overseen by Fed chair Jay Powell, we face “the risk of inflation expectations rising sharply,” Summers argued.

As if on cue, the Fed chair stoked those expectations. “Frankly, we welcome slightly higher . . . inflation,” Powell declared last month. “The kind of troubling inflation people like me grew up with seems unlikely in the domestic and global context we’ve been in for some time,” he said – words that could well come back to haunt him should inflation take off.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/deaths-expertise-how-new-york-may-have-created-covid-crisis-following

New York governor lashes out at unreliable experts, while Florida counterpart touts his independent course.

“I think we’re going to have enough hospital space.”

That’s what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said was his reaction early in the COVID-19 pandemic to expert advice that hospitals should discharge elderly COVID-19 patients into nursing homes. 

“There were a lot of people saying you needed to get nursing home patients out of hospitals, send them back to nursing homes, so that you could clear hospital beds,” DeSantis said during a recent Fox News interview. “In Florida, we did the opposite.”

DeSantis has emerged lately as the frontrunner in a bitter, months-long dispute over which state executive — DeSantis in Florida or Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York — most effectively managed the COVID-19 crisis of the past year.

Critics have periodically alleged that the DeSantis administration has been fudging numbers and concealing pandemic data in an effort to make it seem as if his state’s coronavirus data are more favorable than they truly are.

Those accusations have been embodied most prominently by Rebekah Jones, a former state health department official who launched her own COVID dashboard after being fired by the state while claiming Florida was concealing the full extent of the virus’ toll there.

https://mailchi.mp/f7fdb4410258/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-58082?e=0c8ccf8e98

On February 20, 2020, just weeks before our country’s economic shutdown, Adam Andrzejewski, OpenTheBooks’ CEO/Founder, presented to the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Naples, Florida — in a packed room of 900 guests.  

Since then, over 2.3 million people have watched the speech on YouTube…

WATCH HERE: The Depth of the Swamp — Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar

The American people want to know just how corrupt their government is, whether it’s at the local, state, or federal levels, or all of the above. 

What do you think – is it worse than you thought? 

In the presentation, Andrzejewski covered the following topics:

The federal bureaucracy
Improper payments
Federal waste and pork
The Ivy League
Rahm Emanuel
Andrew Cuomo
$300,000 LA lifeguards
Our San Fran poop map
New York City rats
Suing California and Wyoming

and so much more…