RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Hard-left podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen interviewed Biden. The topics were what would expect—Biden’s race- and sex-based Supreme Court nominee, claims that Trump and other Republicans support Putin, boasts about his strategic genius, etc.—but the real surprise was Biden’s claim that COVID has made Americans so psychologically unstable they can’t understand that the Biden economy is wonderful.

Here’s what Americans know: They are facing hard times. The economy is creeping back, but it’s nowhere near what it was under Trump before COVID. In 2019, unemployment was 3.6%. It went up to 6.7% in 2020. It’s now 4%, still short of the pre-COVID rate.

That 4% doesn’t even include the millions of people who dropped out of the workforce. CBS blames long COVID but it’s a good bet stimulus checks have also depressed the workforce. If people are paid not to work, they won’t work. When government money finally ends, they might come back.

Inflation is a problem, too. While wages have increased, those increases haven’t kept pace inflation’s 40 year high. A 3.5% raise is meaningless if life’s necessities (food, shelter, energy costs) increase in price by 7% or more.

Reagan rightly said of inflation that it’s “as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hitman.” People don’t care whether the inflation is because of the supply chain problem or because Biden’s green energy (or, really, green lack-of-energy) policies have dramatically bumped up the price of fuel. What matters is that their money is losing value daily.

People also feel despair because it’s frightening to live in the shadow of a potential third world war. They worry that an increasingly desperate, angry Putin, rather than retreating from Ukraine may, instead, go on the attack against Sweden and Finland. They also understand that other tyrants are watching. China, Iran, and North Korea (which just launched a ballistic missile) are gaining courage because they recognize that Biden is weak.

This is why 62% of Americans say Putin would never have attacked Ukraine if Trump were still in the White House. Perhaps they remember Trump’s 2019 threat to Erdogan. In a jovial letter, Trump said work with me for a good deal or I’ll destroy Turkey’s economy. The media sneered, but Erodgan retreated. Biden, however, invited Putin to engage in a “minor incursion.” Putin took that invitation and ran with it.

Things really are bad and Americans know it. Biden’s theory, though, is that everything is great. The problem, he says, is that Americans have become delusional thanks to COVID stress.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/26/this-happy-breed-of-men/

“There’s a deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith wrote to a young correspondent who contemplated with alarm British losses in the American War of Independence. As it happened, Britain absorbed the parturition of the United States with aplomb, growing ever stronger for more than a century. Where are we now? There’s lots of ruin about: no one disputes that. But how are we—we, the English-speaking peoples of the world?—

I am not sure who coined the term “Anglosphere,” but James Bennett gave it currency in his book The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-first Century. Bennett’s book was published in 2004. A paperback edition, with a new Afterword, appeared in 2007. The Anglosphere Challenge endeavored to make good on its optimistic subtitle. The 19th century had been the British century. The 20th century belonged to America. Today, the conventional wisdom predicts that the 21st century will belong to China.  But, Bennett argued, “If the English-speaking nations grasp the opportunity, the twenty-first century will be the Anglosphere century.”

“If.” A tiny word that prompts large questions. What were those opportunities that needed grasping? How sure was our grip? And who, by the way, were “we”? What was this Anglosphere that Bennett apostrophized? Winston Churchill’s opus on the English-speaking peoples, published in four volumes in the mid-1950s, principally included Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. He commenced his story in 55 B.C., when Julius Caesar first “turned his gaze” upon Britain, and concluded as Victoria’s long reign ended. By 2006, when Andrew Roberts extended Churchill’s work in his magisterial History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, the Anglosphere had expanded to include Commonwealth Caribbean countries and, more to the point, India with its 1.4 billion people and the burgeoning capitalist dynamo that is its economy.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/25/canada-the-crisis-is-not-over-n1561994

The news cycle today is dominated by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the cognitive absence of the American president. Canada has been all but forgotten, but the situation in this country threatens to destabilize a Western democracy that shares a border with the U.S. It still requires to be addressed.

As long as Justin Trudeau and his inner cabinet remain intact, Canada will always live under the shadow of potential or imminent crisis. With the sudden and, for many, inexplicable revoking of the Emergencies Act, the country—or the best part of it—breathed a collective sigh of relief. But there is no guarantee against further irruptions to civic and political life. Our whirling dervish of a prime minister, like his favorite totalitarian regime, changes his mind “on a dime.” A man so labile and shallow cannot offer stability and democratic governance to his country, only insecurity, upheaval, and rule by edict.

It is by no means clear why Trudeau needed to invoke the Emergencies Act to dismantle and criminalize a peaceful, blue-collar trucker convoy protesting the vaccine mandates or why a brief interval later he saw fit to revoke it. One day it was necessary; the next day it was not. One theory is that Trudeau saw the polls were turning against him. Another hypothesis, as the Conservative Treehouse explains, is that the undermining of the banking system, caused by the targeting of accounts of those involved with the Freedom Convoy could not be allowed to stand because it obstructed the plans of the World Economic Forum and the collaborative use of the Canadian Bankers Association to create a digital ID system. This assumption seems implausible to me as Trudeau and his finance minister Chrystia Freeland must surely have been on the same page as their WEF masters.

A third possibility, which seems to me the most likely, is that the obligatory Senate vote, judging from the powerful speeches against the legitimacy of the Act, would have been an embarrassing rebuke to Trudeau’s dictatorial and unjustifiable actions, which may have ultimately caused a vote of no confidence in his government.