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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

STEALING OUR MONEY: EILEEN TOPLANSKY

NO URL THIS IS AN ORIGINAL ESSAY FOR RUTHFULLY YOURS

Since most Americans have not had the chance or inclination to read 5,000+ pages of the latest stimulus package, we owe Jesse Watters a debt of gratitude for his accounting of how politicians are misusing taxpayer money.  Instead of assisting Americans, many of whom are on the brink of disaster, the virtue-signaling Democrats want to give

$700M to Sudan
$10M to Pakistan for gender studies
$506M to Central America to fight corruption
$300M to Caribbean countries to study how many fish are in the sea
$500M to build a border wall between Jordan and Syria
$86 million to Cambodia
$1.3 billion to Egypt

Watters emphatically asserts that these politicians are “stealing our money to send it to other countries.”  Moreover, the politicians also dream of the following distributions.

$1.3 million to see if Americans will eat bugs
$2 million to see if going in a hot tub will reduce stress
$150K on Kenyan art classes
$37M to stop Filipino students from playing hooky
$3M to send Russian students to American community colleges
5M to walk lizards on a treadmill
$4.5M to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine

If Americans were not hurting so much, I would have thought that the above list of disbursements was actually a comedy skit to relieve the tension of living from check to check or no check as the case might be.  Gender studies in Pakistan — the land where women are murdered for any Islamic infraction.  As Bruce Thornton explains,

Hypersensitive Covid tests, ‘sick’ fruit, and the mendacious Dr. Fauci By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/hypersensitive_covid_tests_sick_fruit_and_the_mendacious_dr_fauci.html

The Wuhan virus has been politicized around the world, but America has taken politicization to nuclear levels because the Democrats weaponized it against Trump. It’s been in the establishment’s interests to inflate Wuhan virus numbers by manipulating the RT-PCR test used to diagnose people with the virus. In Europe, they’re figuring out the false positives problem, but that information is hidden in the US. A new video, however, explains what’s going on — and the ‘sick’ kiwis help prove it.

The current diagnostic test for the Wuhan virus is based upon the Polymerase Chain Reaction (“PCR”) technique that Kary Banks Mullis, a biochemist, invented in 1983. The technique is so important that Mullis won a Nobel Prize in chemistry – and, unlike the Nobel Peace prize, that is a prize with a legitimate cachet.

Here, shorn of any scientific language at all, is what the PCR technique does: It takes a molecule and repeatedly “cycles” it, with each cycle making the molecule twice as large as before. The first cycle doubles the size (2 x 2); the second cycle creates makes it eight times as big as the original (2 x 2 x 2); the third cycle makes it sixteen times as big (2 x 2 x 2 x 2); and so on, to theoretically indefinite numbers of cycles.

The point of the test is that there will come a point at which you’ve enlarged the molecule enough that you can see what’s inside it. Keep in mind, though, that the more you magnify a thing, the more you see things you wouldn’t have noticed before. For example, the pictures below all show a drop of blood with the magnification increasing from an ordinary camera shot to a regular microscope to an electron microscope:

What’s happening with the PCR test when it’s used to diagnose the Wuhan virus (the “RT-PCR” test) is that there’s no standard for the number of cycles being run to enlarge the molecule inspected. Some labs are doing as many as 30 cycles, which means they’re blowing up the molecule as if it’s in an electron microscope and finding all sorts of things, including minute and meaningless virus particles.

Did Americans Come to Love Big Brother? Millions of Americans may come to resemble Winston Smith, the defeated hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four, who at last accepts the calm. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/27/did-americans-come-to-love-big-brother/

In less than a month, there will likely be no more President Trump for the media to obsess over. No more false stories about him overfeeding koi fish or headlines screeching that Trump told Americans to inject bleach to combat COVID-19. No more Trump-fixated media worries over how to best accentuate bad news and downplay good. 

There will be no more frenzied mockery that Trump was lying about a vaccination delivery date in 2020. Instead, imagine a happier world of 2021 where Dr. Anthony Fauci is the genius behind the vaccination. Joe Biden is the master logistician who inoculated the nation. And COVID-19 disappeared with Trump to Mar-a-Lago. 

There will be no more news blackouts of the first lady, no more snide suggestions that the elegant and quite stunning Melania Trump lacked the beauty and grace of Vogue cover star Michelle Obama and the education and academic authority of Jill Biden.

There will now be no more media bombshells about “Russian collusion” mythologies. There is only the effort to downplay the real, frightening, China collusion narratives. And they involve U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Hunter Biden and the Biden family, and a host of American corporations, universities, and multibillionaires. Nothing to see here, move on.

There will be no more anger over Trump’s use of the term “China virus.” There is only the deadly suppressed truth of the COVID-19 virus that originated in Wuhan, and Beijing’s outright lies about the virus ensured its spread and lethality. No matter, troublemakers. Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg will reassure us that a non-authoritarian China did as well as it could. 

There will be no more media “walls are closing in” frenzies that Trump is crazy and should be removed under the 25th Amendment. There will be only the underground whispers that he seemed a lot more hale than incoming President Joe Biden. 

The real question is not how or even whether the media can exist without its obsessions with Trump, but what will it now do with Joe Biden? To put it another way, the media assumes that its creation of a new fake hero can become even more believable than the construct of its old false villain. 

Fact-Checking the ‘Fact-Checkers’ More fake news about COVID-19. Jack Kerwick

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/fact-checking-fact-checkers-jack-kerwick/

The so-called “Fact-Checker” is a persona that 2020 appears to have brought into its own. Everywhere we turn now, it is impossible to avoid tripping over some self-styled “fact-checker” or other. 

It’s not difficult to notice that all self-proclaimed “fact-checkers” are invariably left-leaning partisans whose only interest is in “fact-checking” the claims of those who challenge the agenda of the Democratic Party.

Of course, the reality is that the moniker of “fact-checker” is of a piece of the fiction that journalists are objective, disinterested, impartial observers and “reporters” of current events who are invested in nothing other than disseminating “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Or some such patent nonsense as this.

In what follows, I will make my first go as a fact-checker, only a fact-checker with a twist: I will begin fact-checking the fact-checkers, both their claims and those of their fellow partisan ideologues.

Here, I will focus only upon the biggest claims of 2020, namely, the claims regarding…“The Virus.”

The Claim:

COVID-19 is a novel virus that scientists have isolated.

Rating: FALSE!

In order to determine whether a virus exists, it must be isolated, purified, and extracted from the bio-chemical concoction of stuff in which it is alleged to have been located. 

This has never been done with COVID.

The Arrogant Righteousness of the West How the new COVID relief bill is emblematic of our willful misunderstanding of the Islamic worldview. Bruce Thornton *****

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/arrogant-righteousness-west-bruce-thornton/

The recently passed $2.3 trillion bill to provide Covid-19 relief programs and fund the government, as usual contains billions of dollars for feeding whole herds of Congressional legislative pork. One of the most egregious is $10 million to fund “gender” programs in Pakistan. Nothing bespeaks our continued misunderstanding and dismissal of Islamic doctrine and practice than this arrogant program that violates fundamental precepts of sharia law.

Such blindness is nothing new, but has characterized our government’s assumptions that guide policies involving Muslim nations. Under the guise of “respecting” Islam instead we insult observant Muslims by assuming our secular, technocratic, globalist paradigms are the default ways to live for the whole planet. But our smug righteousness and certainty reaffirm for traditionalist Muslims our spiritual poverty and ultimate moral fragility.

Like nearly all Muslim majority nations, Pakistan’s constitution encodes sharia law, the totalizing guide and authority for every aspect of human life. One product of this code is the social and juridical inequality of women. And many of the dysfunctions like honor killings and legal inequality that this ill-conceived $10 million program seeks to eliminate derive from these strictures. That’s why Pakistan is ranked second to last in sex equality. Given this simple reality, how successful can any program be at correcting sexist laws and customs predicated on deeply held religious beliefs?

Such myopia has for four decades impaired our understanding of the Islamic world. First our foreign policy establishment misinterpreted the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Trapped in the postwar anticolonialism narrative that peoples once under the thumb of European powers or the U.S., who installed illiberal autocrats to do their bidding, would rebel against those leaders in order to enjoy democratic freedom, economic opportunity, and full national sovereignty.

Biden, Meet Your Frenemies in Europe The president-elect longs for ‘normal,’ but inherits an EU courting China and pushing out the U.S.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-meet-your-frenemies-in-europe-11609103726?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Biden administration is committed to restoring normal service in U.S. relations with Europe, but the truth is there is no “normal” left. The European Commission talks of a “new trans-Atlantic agenda for global change,” but the European Union is also rushing to complete a trade deal with China. The incoming administration finds itself at odds with the EU over trade and investment. The Biden crowd should ponder one of President Obama’s favorite lines, “The world is what it is,” and respond with as much realism and as little idealism as possible.

Trans-Atlantic relations may improve in tone, but their content has changed and was changing long before Donald Trump entered the White House. The Cold War ended three decades ago. The fruits of that American-led victory include a liberal, democratic and peaceful Europe. The worm in the apple is that the Europeans can act independently, whether as individual nations or in concert through the EU. The more independent they are, the less they want advice from Americans.

The post-Cold War divergence of American and European interests is usually attributed to the George W. Bush administration’s response to 9/11: the bungled interventions that set off a human wave of migrants and terrorism in Europe; the hostile behavior of the Department of Homeland Security, which remains a powerful disincentive to visiting the U.S. All true, but deeper processes were already at work.

The full quotation, from V.S. Naipaul, is: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” In 1945, most of Europe was nothing but rubble. By 1990 Western Europe had remade itself under American supervision and protection. The EU has since expanded to 27 states and sought to secure a place as an independent node in a multipolar world.

Trump signs $2.3T relief, spending package Brett Samuels

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/531632-trump-signs-relief-bill-despite-criticism

President Trump on Sunday signed the government funding and coronavirus relief package, the White House said, averting a government shutdown and delivering economic aid as the pandemic worsens.

Trump signed off on the $2.3 trillion package from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., days after he expressed displeasure with the spending outlined in the omnibus and complained that the coronavirus relief measure should include direct payments of $2,000 per person, up from $600.

But the delay came after Trump single-handedly brought the government to the brink of a shutdown and unemployment benefits expired for millions of Americans Saturday as the bill went unsigned.

Trump has visited his golf club in Florida each day since arriving in the state on Wednesday and has made no public appearances. He did so again on Sunday both before and after signing the legislation.

“I will sign the Omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed,” Trump said in a statement upon signing the legislation. “I will send back to Congress a redlined version, item by item, accompanied by the formal rescission request to Congress insisting that those funds be removed from the bill.”

Testing The “Systemic Racism” Narrative December 26, 2020/ Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-12-26-testing-the-systemic-racism

How do you establish that a hypothesis is true? According to numerous explainers of the scientific method, starting with philosopher Karl Popper, the best you can do is to try to prove the hypothesis false, and fail. By this method — the scientific method — you can never definitively establish “truth” of a hypothesis, but over time you can get close.

Of course, we now live in the era of official narratives permanently immunized from attempts at falsification, nevertheless incorrectly claiming the mantle of “science.” The big three for this crazy year of 2020 are (1) the proposition that forced “lockdowns” and mask-wearing mandates slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus, (2) the proposition that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous increase in global surface temperatures, and (3) the proposition that income and wealth inequality are the result of “systemic racism” in our society. Proponents flood us with information consistent with these narratives, as if such information, if only provided in sufficient quantity, could prove their truth. But if we are really interested in getting as close as possible to the truth, shouldn’t we instead be looking for information inconsistent with the narratives?

Here is the exposition of the scientific method from physicist Richard Feynman from his classic series of recorded lectures:

[W]e compute the consequences of the [hypothesis], to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.  If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.  In that simple statement is the key to science. . . .

For today, let’s consider applying this logical method to testing one of this year’s big three narratives, namely the narrative that “systemic racism” is the principal explanation for disparities of income and wealth in our society. Following Feynman’s exposition, our first step would be to come up with some of the necessary consequences of this hypothesis, so that they can be tested.

Reclaiming the Swamp: The Issue of Our Time Shmuel Klatzkin

https://spectator.org/swamp-class-politics/

In an amusing and insightful article this week on JNS.org entitled “The upside of defeat,” Ruth Blum noted wryly how much easier it is to criticize an opponent who has gained power than to defend a friend who is in office. As she puts it, the critic’s task is simplified by having no need to account for the inevitable weaknesses of any human in high office. She writes:

Being on the offensive requires little more than hurling darts at sure-fire bullseyes, which is why the likes of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and their apologists in the West are comfortable targets.

Far trickier is standing up vigilantly for the person at the helm in one’s own country.

Far trickier indeed.

It is appealing to seek simplicity. William of Occam identified simplicity with truth, and the short and elegant solution to a problem is superior to one that requires complications to arrive at the same solution.

But that’s only part of the story. Occam’s razor only says to prefer the simple answer when the complicated answer is equal to it in every other significant way. Sometimes we impose simplicity on something that is in reality complicated. And that deviates from truth.

Intellectuals are most prone to falling prey to the oversimple idea. Proud of their specialized abilities and well-honed skill at abstract thought and ideas, they can fall prey to the propensity to imagine that their great power has at last triumphed and that their ideas control reality.

Black on Black Indifference By Marilyn Penn

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2016/02/08/black-on-black-indifference/

Name a black American politician, academician or celebrity who has publicly condemned the atrocities of Boko Haram, Al Shabab or Al Qaeda Affiliates.  When did you see a protest march  by Black Lives Matter in solidarity with their murdered Nigerian sisters and brothers?  Has there been any black voice from any black group concerning the 219 schoolgirls who are still missing from the original 276 black girls kidnapped in Nigeria in  2014?  Has Oprah organized a campaign to raise awareness of this ongoing crime among all school-children here and in So. Africa where she has created her own school?  Have there been any demonstrations on American campuses concerning the targeting by Boko Haram of black Nigerian students – killing boys and kidnapping, raping and impregnating girls?  Which academic groups have organized to pressure our government or the UN to take action to stop the slaughter of thousands of Nigerian civilians, their villages burned by the vicious Muslim group whose name translates as “Western Education Forbidden.”  Point to a lead op-ed in the NYTimes written by Cornel West, Alice Walker, Al Sharpton or Spike Lee in the last year that has drawn world attention to the horrific slaughter led by Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Al Qaeda Affiliates or Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa.

To the east of Nigeria is Sudan and the newly formed South Sudan which gained its independence from the militantly Islamic north in 2011.  The South, comprised of Christian and other native religions has suffered starvation of thousands of its people along with rape, forced cannibalism and the massacres of thousands. Since 1955, more than two million people have died, tens of thousands have been kidnapped and enslaved and five million have been displaced in what was the longest running civil war among all nations.  Has the UN established an agency similar to UNRWA, the only relief organization dedicated solely to the needs of Palestinian refugees, kept in that status for more than three generations to sustain anti-Israel political hatred.  Have Europeans and Americans donated billions of dollars to help Christian Sudanese as they are threatened and menaced by Arabization and Islamization?  Has any Muslim organization offered food, medical care, social service welfare to the thousands of blacks victimized by Islamic violence in South Sudan?  The  Islamist persecution of blacks has spread all over Africa to countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Somalia and Tanzania –  has the Pope issued a plea for world leaders to intercede in this human tragedy?