RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dem-mask-hypocrisy-on-full-display/

Last week ended with perennial Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, posting pictures of herself maskless in a classroom full of masked children and teachers. When the public reacted negatively to the images, Abrams defended herself by explaining that she had only appeared maskless in photos on the condition that everyone else around her did don face-coverings. Much better, then.

Abrams is far from alone, though. The pandemic has seen countless examples of politicians convinced that while it’s imperative that the little people — be they younger or less famous and wealthy — wear masks as their patriotic duty, the VIPs should remain exempt from such strictures.

Just a few days after Abrams’s gaffe, Representative Elissa Slotkin posted a picture of what appeared to be a townhall event in her district. Slotkin is in the foreground wearing an enormous smile. The other attendees appear in the background, wearing masks.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/08/why-the-joe-rogan-spotify-fight-will-define-free-speech-for-us-all/

Remind us again what it was that Joe Rogan said that got the left so apoplectic. Did he spew hate speech? Call for an insurrection? Say mean things about a protected minority?

No? The left wanted him canceled because he supposedly aired misinformation about COVID? Are you kidding? If this is the new standard for censorship, you can kiss free speech goodbye.

After all, anything can be labeled “misinformation.”

Would you dare to say climate change hysteria is unfounded? Or government-provided daycare is a bad idea? Or Joe Biden’s massive welfare expansion is a bad idea? Election fraud is real? Dogs are better pets than cats? Misinformation! Misinformation!! Misinformation!!! Misinformation!!!!

What information did Rogan spread about COVID that has so alarmed the left? That masks are ineffective? That all we needed was a 15-day lockdown to “slow the spread”? That there was no way the virus resulted from Chinese lab experiments? That schools had to be shut down? That this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”?

Oh, wait, those were all uttered by people like Anthony Fauci.

No, the left claims that Rogan, by not being sufficiently panicked about COVID and not toeing the line on the vaccination mandates, is guilty of second-degree murder, with Spotify being an accessory. As Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan put it, “People are dying because of COVID misinformation that Spotify packages as glib podcast fodder.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/08/famed_alzheimers_researcher_john_hardy_is_a_knight__but_not_in_shining_armor_813737.html

The celebrated Alzheimer’s Disease researcher John Hardy was among the British doctors and medical researchers honored by Queen Elizabeth II with knighthoods at the dawn of the new year. It was just the latest on a long list of prestigious awards Hardy has collected, including the Potamkin Prize for his work identifying genetic aspects of Alzheimer’s disease, the MetLife Prize, the Thudichum medal, the Robert A. Pritzker Prize, and the Breakthrough Prize.

In 2018, Hardy added the Brain Prize to his list of accolades. Awarded by the Danish Lundbeck Foundation, it is regularly referred to as the “Nobel of neuroscience.” Winners are assumed to be on the short list for the Nobels themselves.

Missing among all the flattering kudos and attendant news coverage has been any mention of the geneticist’s leading role in a conspiracy that held Alzheimer’s research hostage to fraudulently acquired gene patents. The sordid affair mired efforts to find a cure in tangled, resource-sapping litigation. The last of the courthouse wrangling that began in 2003 wouldn’t be resolved for more than a decade – a resolution that came with a ringing rebuke from the bench expressing the judge’s outrage at the scheme, the schemers, and the damage they caused.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/bidens_administration_wants_to_make_life_easier_for_minority_crack_addicts.html

In times past, the American government stood with productive people and pushed back against the forces of corruption and decay. In Biden’s America, though, the opposite is true. Big cities are becoming concierge services for hard-drug addicts and Biden’s administration is joining in, with a multi-million plan to provide crackpipes for addicts. And here’s the kicker: In the name of equity, the administration will make a special effort to bring these instruments of destruction to Blacks and members of the LGBTQ+ crowd.

There’s a growing trend on the left to facilitate drug addiction. Just recently, under ex-Mayor de Blasio’s aegis, New York opened legal shooting galleries—or, as they’re politely called, “Overdose Prevention Centers.” On the very first day, five people overdosed in the Harlem site—although they were brought back to life.

The theory is that, if the drug addicts have a nice, safe place to shoot up, fewer will die. This is the same belief system that sees parents offer their kids pot and alcohol at home so that they’re not on the mean streets doing drugs. Either way, with a green light from those who would ordinarily try to protect them from vice, the kids end up seriously addicted and heading downhill fast. (Just ask Robert Downey Jr., who ended up in federal prison after his dad got him started on drugs; or ask Mackenzie Phillips, whose father did the same for her.)

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/07/no-shot-at-a-fair-trial-for-january-6-defendants-in-the-swamp/

The first set of trials for the hundreds of protesters charged in the Justice Department’s sweeping criminal investigation into January 6 begins later this month. Since the Capitol building is considered the scene of the crime, every trial will be held in the District of Columbia—which means the jury pool will be composed solely of residents living in the nation’s capital.

To say this is a problem for Trump supporters facing even minor charges is a huge understatement.

January 6 defendants already have suffered the wrath of D.C.-based federal judges who’ve imposed unusually harsh prison sentences for low level misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies while routinely berating defendants from the bench.

For example, before sentencing a man who pleaded guilty to “parading” in the Capitol to serve 14 days in prison, D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, declared that January 6 protesters were “told lies, told falsehoods, told our election was stolen when it clearly was not.” The defendant, Mehta claimed, “was a pawn in a game directed and played by people who should know better.”

Now the fate of hundreds of January 6 defendants is in the hands of biased judges like Mehta and a city populated with government workers who voted nearly 94 percent for Joe Biden in 2020, prompting some defense attorneys to try to move trials out of Washington. In July, a defense lawyer in one high-profile case filed a change of venue motion before Judge Mehta that explained why January 6 defendants could not get a fair trial in such a heavily Democratic, politically obsessed  city. “The level of antipathy towards Trump and his supporters in the District is off the charts and makes it impossible to find an impartial jury,” David W. Fischer, the attorney representing Thomas Caldwell, charged in the multi-defendant Oath Keepers prosecution.

Politicians and the media continue falsely to portray January 6 defendants as racists, Fischer continued, an accusation certain to enrage potential jurors in a city evenly split between blacks and left-wing whites. “President Biden, in a speech ironically advertised as intended to heal America’s racial divide, referred to January 6th Trump protesters as ‘thugs, insurrectionists, political extremists, and white supremacists.’ At his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged to ‘supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on 6 January.’”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/08/the-chilling-effect-of-big-tech-censorship/

Over the past few years, we have witnessed a growing trend amongst social media companies and other tech giants to censor content. “Big Tech censorship” has become a rallying cry for conservative content creators. This practice has the overt effect of silencing conservative voices, but it also has a potentially more powerful consequence – a chilling effect on speech.

The chilling effect is often defined as “a usually undesirable discouraging effect or influence.” In politics and policy, the term is mostly used to label the actions of a government that intentionally or even inadvertently stifles free expression. An example of this practice can be seen in Cuba. When the Cuban government cracks down on a journalist critical of the ruling regime, this sends a warning to other journalists in the country to tread lightly on certain topics out of fear they may be the next to be targeted. The effect of the original specific crackdown is to stifle speech more generally across all media in the country.

Like it or not, the censorship of conservative voices by Big Tech is having the same effect.

https://www.city-journal.org/child-custody-gender-gauntlet

Before she decided to strip him of all custody over his son, Drew*—before determining that he would have no say in whether Drew began medical gender transition—California Superior Court Judge Joni Hiramoto asked Ted Hudacko this: “If your son [Drew] were medically psychotic and believed himself to be the Queen of England, would you love him?”

“Of course I would,” the senior software engineer at Apple replied, according to the court transcript. “I’d also try to get him help.”

“I understand that qualifier,” Judge Hiramoto replied. “But if it were—if you were told by [Drew’s] psychiatrist, psychologist that [Drew] was very fragile and that confronting him—or, I’m sorry, confronting them with the idea that they are not the Queen of England is very harmful to their mental health, could you go along and say, ‘OK, [Drew], you are the Queen of England and I love you; you are my child and I want you to do great and please continue to see your psychologist.’ Could you do that?”

“Yes,” Hudacko said. “That sounds like part of a process that might take some time, sure.”

“What process?” Judge Hiramoto said. “What is the thing that might take some time? Accepting the idea that [Drew] occupies an identity that you believe is not true?”

“The identity you just mentioned to me was the Queen of England,” Ted began. “I can tell him and I can affirm that to him, to reassuring him situationally; but objectively, he is not the Queen of England and that won’t change, and even the therapist in that case would know that.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/prison-gang-politics-frontpagemagcom/

When new inmates arrive in California state prisons, they pass through the gauntlet of other men and must make a quick decision: With whom do they stand? They have four options: the whites, the blacks, the Latinos, and the others. For most of the “fish,” or fresh convicts, it’s not much of a choice—they are chosen. The prisons are divided into strictly separated racial gangs, which have their own leadership structure, lunch tables, yard space, and black markets. The new inmates typically fall in with their racial brothers: whites with whites, blacks with blacks, Latinos with Latinos. The only exceptions are those who join the others: a collection of smaller ethnic groups, sexual minorities, and whites who refuse to join with the Aryan Brotherhood.

California prison gangs operate on a model of collective, identity-based security. If a white inmate attacks a black inmate, or vice versa, their racial compatriots must fight to protect the group’s interests. The threat of race war, they believe, is the only way to secure peace. The prisoners maintain separate facilities, separate sleeping quarters, and separate trade networks. They communicate with the other races through “reps,” or emissaries, who deliver messages on behalf of gang leaders. An individual might not want to join the white supremacists or the Norteño drug-runners, but his survival depends on doing so. Courts have occasionally attempted to integrate prison facilities but have never succeeded. Prison wardens have accepted the racial reality and work in tacit cooperation with the gangs to maintain segregated intake, cell assignment, and amenities.

I spent three years directing a documentary about life in America’s three poorest cities, including Stockton, California, which has some of the highest crime and incarceration rates in the country. Stockton is a case study in America’s diverse racial future: it is approximately one-quarter white, one-quarter black, one-quarter Latino, and one-quarter Asian. In the city’s daily activities, the racial groups generally cooperate and go about their business together. There are widespread interracial friendships, marriages, and families. Even some of the city’s street gangs are multiracial. But in the jails and prisons that surround the city, the cultural divide is stark: inmates are subsumed into their racial group; enmity between the races is the assumed condition; racial violence, retaliation, and revenge always loom. There are no individuals, only identity-based expressions of power. This “prison politics” has been cemented into the system.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/biden_betraying_the_nation_he_leads.html

It would be far better for the nation if the military didn’t discharge the unvaccinated…and the people did discharge the Biden administration.

The U.S. Army is going to immediately start discharging the unvaccinated. And this after attempting to purge itself of patriots, devout Christians, and Trump supporters. At this rate, the “force” may literally soon mirror its recruiting slogan of 2001-2006, which touted an “Army Of One.” This seems particularly bizarre timing, given the fact that Uncle Sam believes Russia is going to invade Ukraine soon, and China is now openly threatening Taiwan.

The Biden administration has also pressured hospitals and businesses to get rid of their unvaccinated employees, putting more burden on already over-stressed doctors and nurses and worsening the ubiquitous labor shortages and supply chain disruptions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/07/when-will-covid-19-become-endemic/

With pandemic fatigue becoming ever more intense, there is increasing speculation about when the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, might become “endemic” – a time when outbreaks will be more modest and manageable and we can “coexist” with the virus. That juncture has been described as when the virus has become “annoying but rarely deadly or disruptive.” Unfortunately, there are no quantitative milestones that tell us when we’ve arrived. It’s really a judgment by individuals and society, and prematurely concluding that we’ve reached endemicity and abandoning precautions can have perilous consequences.

Many observers cite influenza – the “flu” – as an example of an endemic infectious disease, so it’s useful to review its impacts. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s statistics, from 2012-2019 the flu virus annually caused about 31 million symptomatic illnesses, 400,000 hospitalizations, and 39,000 deaths in the U.S. Those high numbers are in spite of moderately good vaccines, with efficacy in the range of 40%-60%, and which need to be administered each year.

Apparently, that’s what we, as a society, consider manageable and acceptable; after all, we don’t impose lockdowns, mask requirements, or widespread vaccine mandates during the annual flu outbreaks.