RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/high-stakes-virginia-thomas-sowell/

Although Virginia has been a politically blue state for years, this year’s election has the Democrats’ governor facing a serious challenge.

One of the reasons is that many Virginia parents are outraged by the “woke” propaganda their children are being subjected to in the public schools — and the governor has sided with the education bureaucrats and the teachers union.

Very few politicians in any state dare to go against the teachers unions, which have millions of votes and millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

This is one battle in a much bigger war, and the stakes are far higher than the governorship of Virginia or the Democrats and Republicans. The stakes are the future of this nation.

When school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people, that is a danger to all Americans of every race. Anyone at all familiar with the history of group-identity politics in other countries knows that it has often ended up producing sickening atrocities that have torn whole societies apart.

If you have a strong stomach, read about the 1915 atrocities against the Armenians in Turkey, “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, or the reciprocal atrocities between the Sinhalese and Tamils during their civil war in Sri Lanka.

Do not kid yourself that this cannot happen in America. The relations between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka were once held up to the world as a model of intergroup harmony.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/24-hours-er-katie-hopkins/

Good friends say I’m stubborn as hell. My own mother has slightly less choice words for it — pig-headed, she says, and I guess she knows best.

Either way, as a result of my unwillingness to acknowledge I am struggling, or asking for help last week, I ended up in the back of an ambulance headed to the ER.

I knew I was sick. Even after I regained consciousness, vomiting on my bathroom floor, I thought sleep and a NyQuil would sort me out…pig-headed, you see.

I was wrong. Do not fear, this is not a splurge about myself and the inner workings of my intestines or nasal passages. Nor is it a self-pitying lament about how jolly hard it can be on the road. My affliction was my old adversary, meningitis, returned to remind me I am mortal and need to be a great deal more grateful to be alive.

Rather, this is a glimpse into the inside of an American ER, and a peek into the inner workings of a hospital, in the grip of the COVID storm.

The ambulance men were brusque on arrival, finding my British accent indecipherable and unable to fathom how I had washed up at a hotel on the Oklahoma border without car or a loved one to get me to the hospital. Impatient with my feeble answers, they marked me down as homeless and warned me the hospital was swamped, I should be prepared for a 6-hour wait, and that I should watch my back because “this place is COVID soup.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/dr-anthony-fauci-funds-torture-beagles-tunisian-lloyd-billingsley/

“Our investigators show that Fauci’s NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive,” the non-profit White Coat Waste project told reporters. “They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies,” all to test an “experimental drug.”

White Coat Waste also claimed that some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed so their barking would not disturb the attending scientists. Rep. Nancy Mace fired off a letter to the National Institutes of Health, calling the cordectomies “cruel” and a “reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.” Mace is a South Carolina Republican but signatories to her letter included Democrats Cindy Axne, Steve Cohen, Jimmy Gomez, Josh Gottheimer, Ted Lieu, Mike Quigley, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Terri Sewell and Eleanor Holmes Norton, plus more than a dozen Republicans, including Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Maria Salazar.

In a related cause that could use more bipartisan support, Dr. Fauci and his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) are also under fire for funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The NIAID boss denied funding such research, but now the NIH admits a “limited experiment” to test if bat coronaviruses were “capable of binding” to a human receptor. That contradicts Fauci, the nation’s chief white coat supremacist, who has escaped scrutiny on a number of fronts.

https://www.city-journal.org/equipping-cops-with-military-surplus-lawmakers-taking-aim-at-1033-program

Can anyone forget the images of Taliban fighters riding around Kabul on U.S. vehicles, wearing U.S.-supplied uniforms, and carrying U.S.-made rifles? In addition to stranding people in Afghanistan, the Americans also abandoned Humvees; trucks and armored vehicles, including Mine-Resistant Ambush Protection (MRAP) vehicles valued at about $800,000 each; artillery; aging but operable helicopters and attack aircraft; drones; artillery and mortars; and millions of rounds of ammunition. No one is quite sure how many of these items were disabled or are too sophisticated for the Taliban to operate. Estimates of their value range from $24 billion to $83 billion. Whatever the true figure, U.S. agencies and a few independent investigators agree that close to one-third of what Washington spent on the Afghan defense forces went for war matériel now held by an enemy we ousted 20 years ago.

Contrast the relative apathy shown by many over Taliban possession of this equipment with the ongoing furor over the $7.5 billion worth of decommissioned military gear that the Department of Defense provides to U.S. and territorial police departments under the 1033 Program, which many on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures want to curtail or eliminate. The 1033 Program was meant to save tax dollars by passing off the Pentagon’s excess equipment to local police, who receive the items for free except for shipping costs. The program was part of the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act, though there have been similar programs since the end of World War II. An earlier version of the program under President George H. W. Bush in 1990 and 1991 sought to aid police departments in fighting the war on drugs. Under President Bill Clinton, counterterrorism was also included among the program’s goals.

According to the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), which operates the program as part of the Defense Logistics Agency’s Disposition Services, about 8,000 of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies have received military-grade equipment, subject to approval by their states. Much of the cast-off gear is office equipment, clothing and uniforms, tools, and radios.

It is the “controlled equipment,” including armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft, rifles and grenade launchers, that has led to demands to rein in the program. The outcry over images of police riding on armored vehicles, wearing night-vision goggles, and carrying military-grade firearms during the 2014 Michael Brown protests led President Barack Obama to issue Executive Order 13688 in 2015, limiting what the Defense Department could transfer. Prohibited items included tracked armored vehicles; weaponized aircraft, vessels, and vehicles; .50-caliber firearms and ammunition; bayonets; camouflage uniforms; and grenade launchers. In response, LESO reported that police had returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers, and 1,623 bayonets by April 1, 2016.

But the prohibition was short-lived. In August 2017, President Donald Trump revoked EO 13688, again permitting the transfer of tracked armored vehicles, bayonets, and utility knives—with the rationale for the last two being that officers kept these in their vehicles for use during emergency situations. The program had discontinued transfers of grenade launchers in 1999, prior to Obama’s executive order—a policy that remains in effect today.

Jeffrey Swindoll

Oct 23rd, 2021 10:14 pm

President Joe Biden is on a historic run … but not the good kind.

Biden started 2021 with a 56% approval rating. He’s now down 11 points (44.7%) in the third quarter of 2021 — the worst drop of any U.S. president since World War II.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/25/epic-fail-vaccination-rates-now-lower-than-when-biden-took-office/

President Joe Biden continues to insist that his vaccine mandates have been a roaring success. The truth is far different. In fact, the only thing the mandate seems to have increased is the labor shortage and supply-chain crisis.

“It’s working. We’re making progress,” Biden said recently, pointing to the fact that daily cases had declined 47% and hospitalizations were down 38% in the previous month and a half.

Somehow, the army of media fact-checkers failed to notice that Biden was, shall we say, misleading the public.

First, Biden’s employer mandates still haven’t taken effect, since the federal rules governing companies with more than 100 workers have yet to be released. Biden’s mandate covering federal contractors doesn’t take effect until Dec. 8.

Second, the decline in new COVID cases started at the end of August, nearly two weeks before Biden’s Sept. 9 pronouncement, and hospitalizations and deaths have followed suit, as expected.

This bell curve pattern is the same thing COVID has demonstrated in the past – before vaccines were available or were widespread. Last winter, for example, new COVID cases peaked at the start of January and then plunged, at a time when a comparatively tiny fraction of the public was vaccinated.

The other inconvenient truth for Biden is that vaccination rates are no guarantee that COVID rates will decline. The United Kingdom, to cite on example, is right now experiencing a surge in COVID cases, even though 73% of its population is either fully or partially vaccinated.

In contrast, new COVID cases have been steadily falling in Mexico in recent weeks, where only 40% of the population is fully vaccinated and another 14% partially so.