RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://mailchi.mp/0f3d8e3d3f71/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health

Being a lifeguard in California can be unbelievably lucrative. If we had only known, many of us would have packed our bags and headed west for a career on the California beach.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that lifeguards make a fortune in Los Angeles County. Seven lifeguards made more than $300,000 and 82 lifeguards had total earnings that exceed $200,000 in 2019, the latest year available.

Fernando Boiteux was the most highly paid and earned $391,971. As the “acting chief lifeguard,” he out-earned 1,000 of his peers: salary ($205,619), perks ($60,452), and benefits ($125,900).

The second highest paid, Captain Daniel Douglas, pulled down $140,706 in base pay, and a whopping $131,493 in overtime pay, with $21,760 in “other pay” and $74,709 in benefits. Total compensation amounted to $368,668.

Overtime pay drove earnings into corporate executive range.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/28/is-racism-moral-now/

“Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expediencies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people . . . ”

—Damon Young, New York Times contributor

“Over the past year, I have, of course, still had to interact with white people on Zoom or watch them on television or worry about whether they would succeed in reelecting a white-supremacist president. But white people aren’t in my face all of the time. I can, more or less, only deal with whiteness when I want to . . . White people haven’t improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them.”

—Elie Mystal, The Nation     

Racism is the deductive bias against, and often hatred of, an entire racial group. It is often birthed by dislike of particular individuals of a given group that supposedly justifies, by extension, disliking or indeed hating all of them. The popular reaction against this widespread toxic pathology shown African Americans birthed the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War, the resistance to Jim Crow, and the modern Civil Rights movement.

But now there grows a strange new ahistorical “antiracism” racism.

One variety encourages holistic hatred, blaming all of one’s own unhappiness, indeed all of the cosmic injustice in the manmade and natural world—the very air, water, and earth—on a white racial collective.

Another constructs a purported racial pathology to encourage segregation and separation from all members of the white race, thereby limiting all “exposure” to a toxic people.

These are not just the idle critical race theory rants of intellectuals. They now are reified in racially segregated graduations and dorms and in systemic racialist reeducation and confessional workshops in government, the military, and private enterprise. In fact, the new antiracism racism is flagrantly directed at “whiteness”—the obsession of an America gone mad.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/truth-about-boulder-massacre-don-feder/

In coverage of the March 22 Boulder, CO. supermarket massacre, The New York Times was true to form (All the News That’s Fit to Spin), reporting that “investigators were trying to determine what motivated a 21-year-old man” charged with 10 murders.

Whenever the establishment media tell you that the authorities are diligently searching for a motive in a mass shooting, it means there’s no shortage of clues that they don’t want to follow, to keep you from jumping to any logical conclusions.

In typical New York Times fashion, the newspaper devoted two paragraphs to the murder weapon (a “Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic pistol”), while avoiding any mention of Islam or jihad.

The story did include one tantalizing detail: that the suspect’s identity was “previously known to the FBI,” because it was “linked to another individual under investigation.” Readers were left to wonder — linked to an individual being investigated for what? Linked in what way? Were they pen pals, bridge partners?

The media is portraying Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa (say, is that a Scandinavian name?) as a classic nut case. His brother describes him as “mentally ill,” “paranoid” and “anti-social.” He thought he was being followed and was prone to violence – none of which is in any way incompatible with Islamic terrorism. The typical jihadist isn’t warm, outgoing and full of bonhomie.

What they aren’t telling you:

Alissa is a refugee from Syria, one of the most anti-Semitic countries in a region notorious for Jew-hatred.
Online, he described himself as a faithful Muslim.
He believed Islamophobia is ubiquitous.
He thought America was a racist, Islamophobic country. If only we treated religion-of-peaceniks as well as Christians are treated in Muslim countries. LOL.
He despised Donald Trump.
He drove 32 miles from his home in Arvada to a supermarket in Boulder for his shooting spree.
The market where the murders took place (King Soopers) is part of a chain that advertises a large selection of kosher food.
This particular market is favored by Boulder’s Jewish community.
It happened five days before the beginning of Passover.

Be assured that any anti-Semitic rants have been purged from his Face Book and Twitter accounts, which were taken down immediately after the murders.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/lloyd-lloyd-billingsley/

“Like FDR in his waning days, Joe Biden is a pathetic puppet of the Democrats’ Harry Hopkins squad. These leftist Green New Dealers want Biden to give America’s adversaries everything they want, asking little or nothing in return. Joe Biden is running for president in 2024, when he’ll be 82. So far he’s performing well as the nation’s undertaker-in-chief.”

“The perception of you that got you elected as a moral, decent man is the reason a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and are trusting you with unaccompanied minors.”

That was PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor at Joe Biden’s March 25 press conference. The event was really a worship service, conducted by house hagiographers and lacking only mandatory timed applause. Still, the proceedings did prove informative in a different way.

Biden needed a cheat sheet and marked photos of approved reporters. The Delaware Democrat is utterly captive to his handlers, a condition previously showcased by America’s 32nd president.

Many Americans, and people around the world, still believe Franklin Delano Roosevelt was fully able-bodied and a tower of strength during World War II. In 1985, Hugh Gregory Gallagher challenged that perception in FDR’s Splendid Deception: The moving story of Roosevelt’s massive disability – and the intense efforts to conceal it from the public.

In 1920, FDR was the Democrat candidate for vice president under James Cox. The next year, he suffered an attack of polio, and as Gallagher notes, FDR was “anxious that press should not know how severely paralyzed he had become.” FDR associate Louis Howe “constantly misled reporters” and worked out “a scheme to transfer Roosevelt without reporters discovering just how ill he really was.”

As Gallagher recalled, “FDR had made it a rule, during his first campaign for governor, that photographers were not to take pictures of him looking crippled or helpless.” During his entire career, reporters obeyed with startling fidelity.

Not a single newsreel showed President Roosevelt being lifted, carried or pushed in his chair.

If a photographer broke the rules, the Secret Service would seize the camera and expose the film.  The Secret Service built ramps for the president, sometimes raising an entire street to the level of the building entrance with wooden trestles and scaffolding. These extensive measures allowed the FDR to appear to “walk” from his car into a building without undue effort.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/29/the_bipartisan_senate_bill_you_havent_heard_about_145490.html

Two weeks ago, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin told his colleagues in a floor speech, “It’s time to change the Senate rules and stop holding this Senate hostage.”

Last Thursday, the Senate voted on a bill to push back the application deadline for the Paycheck Protection Program — the low-interest loan program helping small businesses survive the pandemic — from March 31 to May 31. The bill passed 92-7, and is headed to President Biden’s desk.

If the Senate were actually being held hostage, this measure would not have passed. Admittedly, the bill does not qualify as sweeping legislation. Its passage does not immediately pave the way for the Democrats’ ambitious legislative proposals such as expanding voting rights, investing trillions in infrastructure, addressing climate change, raising the minimum wage or establishing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers.

But the PPP extension is more than naming a post office. With the loan program scheduled to expire on Wednesday, blocking an extension would have left 190,000 businesses with pending applications in the cold.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/watch-out-for-a-vaccine-patent-heist-11616959785?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Pharmaceutical companies have come to the world’s rescue with Covid-19 vaccines, but these days no good deed by business goes unpunished. The Biden Administration is now under pressure to support a political campaign to break vaccine patents.

India and South Africa last fall petitioned the World Trade Organization to suspend intellectual property protections on Covid vaccines and treatments, which they say is necessary to expand global access. Fifty-five other countries plus an army of nonprofiits and labor unions have joined the attempted heist.

“Multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies,” Bernie Sanders says. Adds Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro : “We need to make the public policy choices both in the U.S. and at the WTO that puts patients first.”

***Patent-breakers are presenting a false choice between protecting intellectual property and public health. Breaking patents won’t accelerate vaccine production or distribution to poor countries. Pharmaceutical companies are ramping up manufacturing as fast as they can, including in low-income countries.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/27/poonfang-pushover-eric-swalwell-still-on-intel-committee/

Democrats last week tabled a GOP resolution to remove Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from the House Intelligence Committee. Republicans have been pushing for Swalwell’s removal since Axios exposed the Democrat’s capers with Fang Fang, also known as Christine Fang, a spy from Communist China.

As Debra Saunders noted, Fang raised money for Swalwell’s 2014 reelection campaign and also helped place at least one intern in Swalwell’s House office. That was actual collusion, from someone who falsely accused Trump of collusion with the Kremlin. Swalwell suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, but there’s more to the California Democrat who fell for the honey trap, the oldest espionage trick in the book. 

Swalwell faithfully repeated Chinese Communist propaganda practically word for word, and it’s hard to find a case where Swalwell disagrees with China or criticizes their human rights record. The PRC is in fact a genocidal Stalinist dictatorship, a reality Democrats and Republicans alike these days tend to ignore. 

Swalwell blamed the Axios report on President Trump, and that was not his first shot in the blame game. The former prosecutor, who ran for president of the United States, specializes in guilt by accusation. 

In a March 26, 2019 appearance on Fox News, Martha MacCallum asked Swalwell if he had any second thoughts about things he had said in the two years before the release of the Mueller report that found no evidence of collusion. Swalwell drew a blank. MacCallum pressed the case of the infamous Steele dossier. Swalwell turned the tables and asked what in the dossier had been found false.

For Swalwell, Trump’s firing of FBI boss James Comey was prima facie evidence of the president’s guilt. Mueller found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy, and no guilt. Swalwell made repeated claims of substantive evidence he failed to produce and, like the establishment media, he has no second thoughts. 

The California Democrat was the biggest haul in Fang Fang’s operations between 2011 and 2015. That year the FBI warned Swalwell, who supposedly was unaware, that Fang worked for Beijing. The case is strong that Swalwell should not hold office, let alone occupy a place on the intelligence committee, where he is privy to the most sensitive information. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/27/christopher-lasch-vs-the-elites-of-our-time/

Several friends who have been reading the work of Christopher Lasch prompted me to return to the work of this historian and cultural critic. What follows is an adaptation and expansion of some earlier thoughts about Lasch.

***

“No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate.”

“. . .  the bad news goes on and on.”

—Christopher Lasch

With the untimely death of Christopher Lasch in 1994 at the age of 61, America was deprived of one of her most articulate and earnestly plangent social critics. By training, Lasch was an historian of 19th- and 20th-century American culture. For some 30- years, he specialized in anatomizing—exaggerating, some would say—certain “odious facts” about American culture. 

Already in 1965, in his widely admired book The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963, Lasch deplored the “decline of the sense of community” in American society. Subtitled “The Intellectual as Social Type,” this collection of biographical vignettes was meant to register the “peculiarly fragmented character of modern society” by examining the lives and works of social reformers and pontificators from Jane Addams and Randolph Bourne through Lincoln Steffens, Herbert Croly, and Walter Lippmann. It ended with a polemical chapter called “The Anti-intellectualism of the Intellectuals,” in which prominent writers and activists such as Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Dwight Macdonald, and—speaking of odious facts about American culture—Norman Mailer were taken to task for failing to develop any politically effective criticism of American society.

As the 1960s devolved, so did the tenor of Lasch’s complaints. In The Agony of the American Left (1969), he informed us that we now faced “an unprecedented crisis” wrought by capitalism, “giant corporations,” and other familiar villains. Co-opted by such nefarious forces, the American intellectual Left was in “agony” because it had become politically ineffective. He concluded that “It is clearer than ever that radicalism”—which he went on to identify with socialism—“is the only long-term hope for America.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/the-case-for-prosecuting-hunter-biden/

 C harles C. W. Cooke had a post this week that said everything that ought to be said about why it would be fitting to prosecute Hunter Biden’s apparent making of a false statement on the required firearms application form. I want to add a few points about prosecutorial discretion, the potential of an additional gun crime, and our two-tiered justice system.

The Politico story Charlie cites stresses that prosecutions arising out of false statements on Form 4473 are rare. As Charlie rightly observes, that in itself is a problem (a point Kevin D. Williamson also made a few days ago). Still, it is worth widening the lens beyond the narrow false-statements provision in the gun laws because the government actually prosecutes false statements all the time.

There is a general false-statements statute (Section 1001 of the penal code) which can be applied any time someone makes a false statement, including a material omission, to some branch, department, or agency of the federal government. Then there are false statements charges that apply to particular subject-matter areas, such as firearms or taxes. Hence, we have Section 922(a)(6), which, as Charlie explained, applies to false statements made in connection with the acquisition or attempted acquisition of a firearm.

The fact that these narrowly tailored false-statements statutes are invoked more rarely should not be taken to mean that false-statements prosecutions are infrequent. They are not. And a good many false statements that result in indictments involve situations markedly less serious than lying to conceal a disqualification from firearms possession — especially under circumstances where, due to the lie, the disqualified person succeeded in obtaining a gun (and then was lax in safeguarding it).

In the Mueller investigation, for instance, Michael Flynn was prosecuted for misdescribing a conversation, indicative of no misconduct, of which the FBI had a recording and therefore no need to question him. George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan were prosecuted for false statements about the dates of meetings, and in neither situation was an investigation impeded — much less were the prevaricators, thereby, able to acquire dangerous weapons.