RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-jerry-rigged-budget-framework-joe-biden-white-house-reconciliation-bill-democrats-11635457542?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Nothing like an artificial political deadline to concentrate the warring liberal minds. Before departing Thursday for next week’s climate gabfest, President Biden declared he has sealed an agreement with Democrats in Congress on a “framework” for a spending bill that he declares will make a “fundamental change in America.”

He’s right about that last bit, but the blueprint the White House released is more frame than work. The jerry-rigged plan is an enormous expansion of government with quarter-baked entitlement programs that will retard work and $1.85 trillion in tax increases that will distort and limit investment. The $1.75 trillion cost that Democrats have assigned their bill is an illusion. They use phony accounting to finance a few years of new spending with 10 years of tax increases.

For example, the plan extends the $3,600 child tax credit for one year at a cost of $110 billion. But Democrats will inevitably extend the credit next year. If Republicans oppose this or try to scale the credit back, they will be attacked for raising taxes on middle-class families. The true 10-year cost is about $1.1 trillion.

The agreement drops the House’s proposed Medicare vision and dental expansion. But it preserves a new hearing benefit, which the White House claims will cost a mere $34 billion and start in 2024. The annual cost of the hearing benefit once fully phased-in is some $16 billion. Congress will invariably make it permanent. True cost: $160 billion.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_end_of_science.html

Rebecca West writes, in The New Meaning of Treason, that a lot of our scientists during World War 2 were communists.  There are several reasons this is important, but the first is that they immediately leaked our research on atomic bombs to Stalin.

They honestly believed in a “global scientific community” — that science knows no political boundaries, and that the world would be better if scientists shared all their information with each other.  Somehow this would usher in an age of peace and plenty, and scientific know-how would mean food for the poor and an end to oppression.

So they gave the bomb to the Soviets.  To the people who used technology to keep millions in chains and torture them and starve them to death.

These days, American scientists are doing the same thing, helping abusive husbands track their wives in Saudi Arabia and helping the Chinese develop social surveillance systems and biological weapons.  The scientists tell you how to do something and fail to understand or care why we shouldn’t do it.  Or maybe it’s the money.

If this proves anything, it’s that people who are taught to analyze physics can be really bad at reading people.  They can theorize about matter and totally miss the substance of a movement.  People say we need a more “scientific” outlook on the world, and they’re right.  We need to teach our kids to be skeptical, and systematic, and logical.  What we don’t need for this world to be a better place is for more kids to become professional chemists.  We need more chemists to pick up The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

You would expect a person with a “scientific” mindset to look for information, and to share it — even a pie-in-the-sky communist.  But the new fan of “science” doesn’t trust the public with information, and so far as he can, when information doesn’t fit his goals, he buries it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/29/bidenomics-build-back-better-blunder/

Swedish socialist economist Assar Lindbeck is semi-famous for saying that “in many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing.” It’s becoming clearer that one of the most efficient ways to destroy the U.S. economy, outside of bombing the country, is to put Joe Biden in the White House.

Economic growth in the third quarter was a meager 2%, the Commerce Department reported Thursday, the most feeble increase of the pandemic recovery. Some economists had forecast a gain closer to 3%, leaving many disappointed. As the Asia Times accurately summed it up, the U.S. “economy ground to a halt.”

The economy grew 33.8% in the third quarter last year, after two straight quarters of GDP losses due to ill-advised lockdown policies. It grew 4.5% in the fourth quarter, and 6.3% in the first quarter of 2021, when Trump economic policies were still in effect. A healthy 6.7% increase followed in the second quarter, but now that Biden’s economic policies have had a few months to stew, the economy looks to have a case of sclerosis.

Blame Biden’s inflation and the supply-chain crisis that has exploded on his sleepy watch. But don’t discount how much the White House and congressional Democrats’ tax-and-spending plans have negatively impacted growth.

One of the more common beliefs among Americans is that a stock market crash caused by greedy investors brought on the Great Depression. But a close look at the history shows that the markets watched, and reacted to, Washington’s actions in the months leading up to Black Tuesday – Oct. 29, 1929.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/10/us-gdp-data-show-stagflation/

Net of inventory accumulation, real GDP for the third quarter was slightly negative, US government data released Thursday morning show. Real GDP grew at an annual rate of 2%, below the forecasters’ consensus of 2.6%, the Commerce Department reported. But a jump in inventories added 2.07 percentage points annualized to GDP. That’s more than the reported growth.

That’s a very odd number, considering that the inventory-to-sales ratio of US business stands at the lowest level on record, due to supply-chain constraints that prevent businesses from restocking. It’s likely that the inventory number was exaggerated. If that’s true, the US economy shrank during the third quarter.

The GDP measure of inflation rose at a 5.7% annual rate during the third quarter, following a 6.2% rate of increase during the second quarter. After inflation, final sales to domestic purchasers rose at an annual rate of just 1%. That’s a textbook portrait of stagflation.

Disposable personal income fell at a 0.7% annual rate, as prices outstripped income growth. By the Labor Department’s measure of prices and average wages, real earnings of US workers have fallen by about 2% over the past year despite nominal pay raises averaging about 4%.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

My parents had a book of cartoons titled, Who’s in Charge Here? Written in 1943, it is a compilation of cartoons by George Price (1901-1995) who had started drawing for The New Yorker in 1929 and continued doing so into his 80s. While Herblock’s cartoon was aimed at President Carter, the message could be directed at today’s White House. As last Saturday’s lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal put it: “…all Presidents stumble in speech. But Mr. Biden’s frequent public confusion about the major issues of the day is a reason for the growing public concern.” If Mr. Biden is mentally unfit, who is in charge?

Mr. Biden’s incoherence and mental lapses should concern us. Roger Kimball, the American art critic and conservative social commentator recently posed a rhetorical question: “Is it more worrisome that Joe Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge?” The White House website states that the power of the Executive Branch is vested in the President of the United States. Including members of the armed forces, the Branch employs more than four million Americans, more than any private company, and a number that exceeds the population of the United States when George Washington became our first President. (In total, according to the Brookings Institute, the federal government employs nine million.) The White House website reads: “The President is both head of state and head of government of the United States of America, and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.” It is arguably the most powerful position in the world. The American people deserve to know who is in charge. 

It does not appear to be Joe Biden whose political reputation extends back over fifty years. During last year’s campaign, he ran as the moderate alternative to Senator’s Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. He promised, like his predecessor Warren Harding 100 years earlier, a return to “normalcy.” However, his support of Critical Race Theory and gender-neutral pronouns, and his recent proposals for a “Green New Deal,” universal basic income, a wealth tax and a five trillion-dollar budget satisfy the most radical Progressives in Congress. They remind us of Barack Obama’s pledge in late October 2008 in Columbia, Missouri, shortly before his election: “…we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” While Mr. Obama later walked back those comments, they preordained Mr. Biden’s intent to “transform” our culture, schools and economy.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/irrationality-and-the-covid-vaccine?token=e

In my Times (£) column this week, I wrote about the dangerous irrationality of those  implacably opposed to the Covid-19 vaccine.

I wrote that while some concerns about the Covid vaccine were understandable — due to the acceleration of the normal testing regimen, or concerns about civil liberties if vaccination is made a condition of someone’s job or entry into a venue — there had been a significant loss of rationality and any sense of proportion. 

You can go online and find people with scientific qualifications saying in terms that the state is actually trying to poison people with the Covid vaccine. But there’s no evidence whatever for this fantastic and paranoid claim. Many who assume that a doctoral or professorial handle confers intellectual authority tend automatically to believe such claims. Under serious and informed scrutiny, however, they fall apart.

Vaccination always involves a balance of harms. But all the available and reputable evidence indicates that the harms resulting from this vaccine are rare and vastly outweighed by its benefits.

It’s claimed, for example, that tens of thousands are suffering serious vaccine side effects. But this is based on statistics showing merely the number of those who subsequently died of other ailments; it doesn’t prove cause and effect. It’s claimed the vaccine may affect women’s fertility; there’s no evidence for that. And so on and on. 

Yet anti-vaxers in Britain have even been abusing and intimidating children at their school gates over taking the vaccine. Such an unhinged set of fears is coming from both ends of the political spectrum. 

Elements on the right have latched onto every single government response to the pandemic to claim a world-wide conspiracy to enslave and poison people, involving globalists, paedophiles, the “deep state,” Jewish financiers — and Bill Gates working with all of the above to control the world through microchips. 

However, vaccine hostility has long roots in liberal “back to nature” movements too which for decades have used homeopathy, eaten only organic food and shunned all vaccinations for their children. The belief that “Big Pharma” drug companies were evil was previously a left-wing mantra. And now, as reported in the Observer, vaccine hostility is associated with the “wellness” industry and alternative lifestyles including ayurvedic healing, meditation and something called “conspirituality”. This turns out to be the intersection of yoga, juice cleanses, New Age thinking and online theories about secret groups controlling the universe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17893/parents-catch-on

Now, in America, self-described “progressives” of any number of different stripes continue to aggressively label and attack as criminals and domestic terrorists any person or group dissenting from their radical agenda. Therefore, the NSBA and others of their ilk have few qualms about calling parents exercising their right to confront smug educrats at public hearings “domestic terrorists.” What is truly alarming is that these opponents of the First Amendment appear to have backing from the Biden White House.

Using the FBI to police local school board meetings is a disturbing example of federal overreach. It would also be nothing new for the FBI. It is very easy to imagine what the Justice Department’s “additional efforts” could include — as we have already seen — surveillance, subpoenas, infiltration, questioning, intimidation, entrapment, enlisting informants, rifling through emails and financial records, the full panoply of investigative methods usually reserved for organized crime mobsters or genuine threats to national security.

The White House may soon regret going down the road of diverting the FBI from more important law enforcement issues to harass parents. Sagging White House approval ratings; an explosive national murder rate; the highest inflation rate in 10 years, the highest gas prices in seven years; and 4.3 million Americans leaving the workforce this past August — not to mention the Chinese Communist Party’s hypersonic missiles and exponentiating global “lily pads” from which to project military power — may help focus the Biden administration on other issues besides school board meetings.

Inserting federal law enforcement into local school matters further makes the case for systematic reforms of the politicized FBI and the Justice Department. The next Congress should closely investigate how this program was implemented and which parents were subjected to FBI harassment, and should expose the links between policymakers and education pressure groups.

House Republicans are lecturing Attorney General Merrick Garland on the rights of parents over the education of their children: “Parents have an undisputed right to direct the upbringing and education of their children, especially as school boards attempt to install controversial curricula,” the 19 Republicans wrote. “Local law enforcement—and not the FBI—are the appropriate authorities to address any local threats or violence.” The October 25 letter was on the letterhead of the House Committee on the Judiciary and had no Democrat signatures.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley went a step further and asked for Garland to resign.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/27/the-ignoble-lie/

“Noble lies” are rarely spun for anyone’s interests other than those of the liars themselves.

In a controversial passage in Plato’s Republic, Socrates introduced the idea of the “noble lie” (“gennaios pseudos”).
A majestic fiction, he says, could sometimes serve society by persuading uninformed citizens of something good for them.

Ever since, many prevaricators have used the excuse that they lied for the common good.

Take Dr. Anthony Fauci, our point man on the COVID-19 epidemic.

Fauci misled the country about mask-wearing during the pandemic by claiming they were of little use. But he argued that he lied so the public would not make a run on masks, deplete the supply, and thus rob medical professionals of protective equipment.

Fauci also told “noble” lies about the likely percentage of the public needing to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. He kept raising the bar — from 60 percent to 70 percent to 75 percent to 80 percent, to 85 percent.

Apparently, Fauci feared a lower figure, even if accurate, might lull people into complacency about getting inoculated.

Fauci also lied about his own role in routing U.S. aid money to subsidize gain-of-function viral research at the Wuhan virology lab — the likely birthplace of COVID-19.

Either Fauci was hiding his own culpability, or he believed the American people might not be able to fully accept that some of their own health officials were promoting the sort of research that was partially responsible for more than 700,000 American deaths.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has serially lied about the number of undocumented immigrants who have crossed into the United States. He falsely claimed mounted agents were whipping migrants. He fibbed about the purported lack of federal data of apprehensions, detentions, and deportations. His assertion that the border is secure was a joke.

Apparently, Mayorkas believes the public would go ballistic or his own administration would be roundly despised, if he told the bitter truth about the border: by intent, the Biden administration has apparently deliberately left it wide open.

And it will likely allow 2 million undocumented immigrants into the country in the current fiscal year.

Related: Of Course: Fauci Revises the Definition of ‘Fully Vaccinated’

Lots of other unelected federal officials lied over the past five years by claiming or implying that harming the Trump administration was in the public interest.

Former FBI directors Andrew McCabe and James Comey likely misled the nation. McCabe admittedly lied that he did not leak FBI information to the media.

James Comey lied under oath on multiple occasions in congressional cross-examinations and claimed he did not know or could not remember basic facts about his own role in promoting the Russian collusion hoax.

Apparently, Comey and McCabe believed that by being less than truthful, they might better emasculate Donald Trump. And that result would be beneficial to America.

Our former intelligence leaders may have been the most brazen liars. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress about the NSA surveillance program, though he denied it.

When caught in the untruth, Clapper reverted to the noble lie that he gave the least untruthful answer, apparently on the pretense that he did not wish to damage the reputation of an important intelligence agency.