RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/18/buttigieg-the-weak-link-in-the-supply-chain/

The only thing more laughable than Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s claim that spending two months on paternity leave counts as “work” is that the massive infrastructure bill in Congress would do anything to fix the supply chain crisis.

When asked on CNBC why the administration waited so long to take action, Buttigieg responded that “we’ve been working this issue from day one”.

Well, not exactly.

As Politico reported, Buttigieg was “mostly offline” starting in mid-August, and only went on a media blitz after Politico disclosed the fact that he’d been on an unannounced leave.

It’s true that Biden issued a supply chain executive order in early February, saying that “we’re not going to wait for a review to be completed before we start closing the existing gaps.”

In June, Biden announced the creation of a new Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force with Buttigieg one of the key members. The next month, Buttigieg said, he’d “convened the entire ecosystem of supply chain actors.”

Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in an attempt to defend the administration’s response, told reporters that “we’ve not only been talking about this since January, we’ve been working to put in place a range of steps to help address the challenges in the supply chains.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/10/17/bidens_epic_fail_at_unity_146577.html

“As I write this, Biden’s job RealClearPolitics average approval rating is underwater by 7.9%. His low numbers, they’re becoming bipartisan.”

As a candidate, now-President Joe Biden said that if elected, he would bring the country together, heal partisan divisions and get things done. How’s that working out?

Sure, on the campaign trail, Biden seemed so convincing. He was the seasoned hand, a former vice president with 36 years in the Senate who knew the ways of Washington.

“We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in the country,” he said in Ohio in October 2020. He said he wanted to “work with one another.” If he occupied the Oval Office, he promised, “there will be no blue states and red states with me.”

Some nine months into his tenure, it’s evident that Biden’s unity pledge ranks with former President Barack Obama’s campaign whopper, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” which won him PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year in 2013.

It’s not just that Biden isn’t producing unity; it’s also that he’s squandering the moment for a bad idea.

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

With societal turbulence all around us, many people feel that we are locked in some great and portentous struggle. But because it is so pervasive and multifaced, the nature of this struggle is not readily obvious. There are many fronts on which this struggle is being fought: racial relations, education, healthcare, popular culture, financial system, and freedom of speech, among others. It is not easy to make sense of it all, especially since the battles are highly pitched and emotions are running very high.

What characterizes these battles, besides their intensity, is deep polarization. The possibility of the warring camps coming together and meeting on some common ground seems to be growing more distant by the day. There is even talk that the two sides will either come to blows, or they will each go their own way in some form of secession.

Many have observed that the contenders seem to be separated by an unbridgeable gap, and yet no one has been able to explain the nature of this gap, or what exactly it is that separates the mindsets of the opposing sides.

In our view the great struggle in the grip of which we find ourselves cuts much deeper than the immediate issues we argue over. The real fight extends beyond any particular point of public friction.

The great battle of our time is a battle about the very nature of reality. More precisely, what the two sides war over on the most fundamental level is what constitutes truth and how it should be determined.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/nebraska_ags_devastating_critique_of_the_suppression_of_effective_covid_therapies.html

What the AG’s formal opinion amounts to is a full and complete takedown of the conspiracy to suppress cheap and effective early Covid-19 treatments.

Legal opinions usually aren’t terribly fun to read, but if you’ve been an ivermectin and/or hydroxychloroquine advocate for use against Wuhan Plague, this one definitely will bring you much joy.

It’s a rather lengthy and full spectrum opinion issued by Doug Peterson, Nebraska’s Attorney General, in response to a query from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services as to whether physicians can be persecuted and tormented for prescribing ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine to patients sick with the China Flu. What the AG’s response amounts to is a full and complete takedown of the conspiracy to suppress cheap and effective early Covid-19 treatments.

All the players — FDA, CDC, Fauci, Big Pharma, the media, all of them — get a glorious and swift kick in the rear end. Portions of it even made me laugh out loud. As far as legal documents go, it’s definitely easy reading and understandable to everyone. It seems clear that the AG’s office went to some trouble to layout the whole saga in a way the masses can understand without translation by legal scholars.

What follows are some of the most relevant parts (at least in my sometimes-humble opinion), but it really is in everyone’s best interest to personally read the opinion in full. People must individually understand what’s actually happening for themselves. This is what will enable We The People to course correct and divert from the ruinous path set for us by the overlords.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/16/art-under-peer-pressure/

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is just so excited to introduce us to “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” its huge retrospective of Johns’ work from the 1950s to the day before yesterday. (Indeed, it’s so huge that New York wasn’t big enough to house it. Part of the exhibition is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But it doesn’t matter where you start. As Bertie Wooster said in another context, “Slice him where you will, a hellhound is still a hellhound.”)

Quoth the Whitney: “Jasper Johns’ groundbreaking work sent shock waves through the art world when it was first shown in the late 1950s, and he has continued to challenge new audiences—and himself—over a career spanning more than sixty-five years.”

“Groundbreaking”? “Shock waves”? “Challenge”? The only thing that Johns’ work—all those crude paintings of American flags, targets, and images swiped ( er, “appropriated”) from innocent teens—the only thing it all challenges is one’s credulity; a credulity, I admit, that cannot help being attended by a certain mixture contempt and envy when you discover that these daubs regularly fetch millions of dollars. Even Hunter Biden must be envious.

The truth is that the images bearing the name of Jasper Johns deserve an honored place not in the history of art but in the history of publicity—department of cheap tricks and mercenary genius.

In this respect, Johns’ oeuvre resembles that of many other celebrated figures in the art world (not to be confused with the world of art), not least his longtime lover and sometime collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, who died in 2008 at 82.

When Rauschenberg died, the Hosannas were loud and predictable. Michael Kimmelman, then chief art critic for the New York Times, spoke for the terminally infatuated when he praised Rauschenberg as an artist who “time and again reshaped art in the 20th century,” whose work “gave new meaning to sculpture,” and whose promiscuous dabblings “defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style.” (Unlike, for example, Leonardo da Vinci, who painted, sculpted, designed buildings, composed music, and did serious mathematical, engineering, and scientific work.)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/10/12/panorama-education-owned-by-us-ag-merrick-garlands-son-in

Last week, AG Garland sent a memo to the head of the FBI, directing him to work with local law enforcement “to address threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.”

Critics say that Garland made the move in response to parents vocally opposing mask mandates and race-related teaching implemented by local school boards.

Nevertheless, the move by Garland to have the FBI investigate parents at school board meetings quickly put his son-in-law’s nationwide education business in the spotlight.

Garland’s son-in-law is Xan Tanner, co-founder, board member, and president (2012-2020) of Panorama Education. Panorama Education sells surveys to school districts across the country that focus on the local “social and emotion climate.” These surveys are then used as justification for new curriculum from other providers that some parents call critical race theory and find objectionable.

Tanner’s company has a large footprint with contracts in 50+ of the nation’s 100 largest school districts. The company describes its business as supporting “13 million students in 23,000 schools and 1,500 districts across 50 states.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/health/coronavirus-delta-surge.html?referringSource=articleShare

“It’s a combination of immunity, but also people being careful,” said Joshua Salomon, an infectious disease expert and modeler at Stanford University.” “It’s not likely that it will be as deadly as the surge we had last winter, unless we get really unlucky with respect to a new variant,” Dr. Salomon said.”

After a brutal summer surge, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, the coronavirus is again in retreat.

The United States is recording roughly 90,000 new infections a day, down more than 40 percent since August. Hospitalizations and deaths are falling, too.

The crisis is not over everywhere — the situation in Alaska is particularly dire — but nationally, the trend is clear, and hopes are rising that the worst is finally behind us.

Again.

Over the past two years, the pandemic has crashed over the country in waves, inundating hospitals and then receding, only to return after Americans let their guard down.

It is difficult to tease apart the reasons that the virus ebbs and flows in this way, and harder still to predict the future.

But as winter looms, there are real reasons for optimism. Nearly 70 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, and many children under 12 are likely to be eligible for their shots in a matter of weeks. Federal regulators could soon authorize the first antiviral pill for Covid-19.

“We are definitely, without a doubt, hands-down in a better place this year than we were last year,” said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research at Boston University.

But the pandemic is not over yet, scientists cautioned. Nearly 2,000 Americans are still dying every day, and another winter surge is plausible. Given how many Americans remain unvaccinated, and how much remains unknown, it is too soon to abandon basic precautions, they said.

“We’ve done this again and again, where we let the foot off the pedal too early,” Dr. Bhadelia said. “It behooves us to be a bit more cautious as we’re trying to get to that finish line.”

Crushing the curve

When the first wave of cases hit the United States in early 2020, there was no Covid vaccine, and essentially no one was immune to the virus. The only way to flatten the proverbial curve was to change individual behavior.

That is what the first round of stay-at-home orders, business closures, mask mandates and bans on large gatherings aimed to do. There is still debate over which of these measures were most effective, but numerous studies suggest that, collectively, they made a difference, keeping people at home and curbing the growth of case numbers.

These policies, combined with voluntary social distancing, most likely helped bring the early surges to an end, researchers said.

https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-amazing-disappearing-dnc-hack/

This is the fifth in a series of articles analyzing the 27-page federal grand jury indictment charging lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a false statement to the FBI.

As stated in the fourth article, when the FBI learned of the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee’s (“DNC”) emails,

it asked to examine the server.  In fact, at the same time as the alleged DNC hack, there were similar reports regarding the

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (“DCCC”) server as well as DNC Chairman John Podesta’s personal email devices.

In testimony before the Senate, FBI Director James Comey stated the following:

Question (by Senator Burr): Did the FBI request access to those devices [the servers and Podesta’s devices] to perform forensics on?

A: Yes, we did.

Q: And would that access have provided intelligence or information helpful to your investigation in possibly finding … including to the Intelligence Community Assessment?

A: Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved. So, it’s the best evidence.

Q: Were you given access to do the forensics on those servers?

A: We were not. We were … a highly respected private company eventually got access and shared with us what they saw there.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/14/was-january-6-part-of-the-fbis-operation-cold-snap/

The tony, bucolic town of Dublin, Ohio would be one of the last places in America expected to host a convention of white supremacist militiamen. Nestled along the Scioto River, the Columbus suburb’s biggest claim to fame is hosting the PGA’s annual Memorial Golf tournament every summer.

But in June 2020, days after the nation was roiled by Black Lives Matter looting and rioting, a man from Wisconsin named Stephen Robeson sponsored a “National Militia Conference” at a Dublin hotel. (Yes, that was the real name of the event.) 

According to BuzzFeed’s exceptional July 2021 investigative report on the FBI-led plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, Robeson “helped organize the national meeting, and he was enthusiastically pushing people he knew to attend.” The purpose of the conference was to recruit people who ultimately would stoke “political violence” against governors who refused to reopen their states after lockdowns supposedly necessitated by COVID.

Some participants said Robeson, known as “Robey,” relentlessly pestered them until they agreed to show up; people came from as far as Maryland and Kansas City, BuzzFeed’s Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison reported. One member of the Three Percenters, an alleged militia group on the FBI’s naughty list, observed people taking photos from discreet locations in the hotel. “The feds are everywhere,” he thought to himself.

Indeed. One of the feds was Robeson himself.

In a motion filed in July by a defense lawyer in the Whitmer kidnapping prosecution, Robeson is described as having a long record “of cooperating with the government in exchange for personal benefits. Basically, this [confidential human source] has a decades-long history of acting as a professional snitch for the government.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/11/01/life-after-capitalism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

The information theory of economics

Anyone determined to provide a “new economics” must haul a heavy burden of proof up a steep slope of professional resistance. At the summits of academic prestige, economics presents a Delphic façade of math and marble.

A still higher barrier faces anyone suggesting major modification to the entrenched system of reasonably free markets and economic incentives associated with “capitalism.” Within recent memory, exponents of free markets — myself included — were celebrating a triumphalist “end of history.” Even China’s “Communist Party” and “Middle Kingdom,” self-consciously central in the order of the universe, were thriving as a self-evidently capitalist regime. China’s entrepreneurs were as “free to choose” as any “robber baron” of yore, particularly if their field was sufficiently technical to baffle the bureaucracy and so long as they didn’t under any circumstances compare their rulers to Winnie-the-Pooh.

With the U.S., Europe, and China all essentially organized by markets, dissenters retreated to government-funded universities, cranky leftist redoubts such as Harvard and the New York Times, and green movements thriving on money and lawyers from the disgruntled families of penitent or deceased entrepreneurs.

As autodidact supply-side paragon Jude Wanniski put it in 1980 — with credit to economists Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell — to most observers, capitalism is simply “the way the world works.” And Wanniski was proved right. I long had criticized him for his judgment that Communist regimes were merely capitalist in a disguise of incompetence. But even this view may prove prescient, as today market-oriented regimes are blithely donning the same disguise.

With banks essentially nationalized and stultified by regulators and no longer making loans to entrepreneurial companies; with the nation recently locked down and masked because of COVID at the caprice of germophobic governors; with energy usage regulated, subsidized, priced, and litigated by bureaucrats around the globe out of a demented fear of CO2 emissions; with education run by manipulative ideologues with lifelong tenure and government appointments, funded by $1.5 trillion in guaranteed student loans; with money pumped up and propagated like gilded gas — we live in a new twilight zone beyond capitalism and freedom.

Thomas Sowell is lapidary: “Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters.’”

Still, for all the complaints in the air, let us give tribute to the far from dismal accomplishments of economic science.