RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/14/truth-leaks-out/

The quest for truth-in-COVID did pick up some steam in late spring 2021. 

Not about the vaccine, though. 

About the origins of the virus. 

From the first days of the epidemic, strong circumstantial evidence suggested Sars-CoV-2 had leaked from a Chinese lab. Both the virus itself and the facts around its emergence pointed to human intervention. 

Wuhan, the city of 10 million people where the first cases were found, is home to China’s most important viral research laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute aggressively researched bat coronaviruses, which China had viewed as a serious risk since the original SARS outbreak in 2003. 

In 2017 the institute opened China’s first Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. Level 4 labs are the most secure available, designed to handle deadly pathogens such as Ebola. But just months after the lab opened, U.S. State Department officials visited and reported in a cable to Washington that the new facility was at risk of a serious accident. They found “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

The troubled lab was located only miles from the first cluster of cases in central Wuhan. And it had worked with a virus very similar to Sars-CoV-2 known as RaTG13 (or RaBtCov/4991), which had been found in a cave in 2013 after several miners working there became seriously ill with pneumonia.

That cave—like other caves that had large numbers of the bats that were the original animal hosts for naturally occurring coronaviruses—was nowhere near Wuhan. It was located in southern China, several hundred miles away. And the Chinese couldn’t trace a chain of human transmission from that region to Wuhan. They had reported no early cases in the villages and cities around the caves, or between the caves and Wuhan. 

Early on, Chinese and international reports had offered a different potential explanation for the fact Sars-CoV-2 had emerged first in Wuhan. They linked the outbreak to a large “wet market” there. Wet markets, which are common in China, sell wild and domesticated live animals for slaughter. An NPR reporter visited a similar market in Hong Kong and reported that “it’s quite obvious why the term ‘wet’ is used. . . . The countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted.”

But the theory was discounted within months, because Chinese researchers could not find Sars-CoV-2 in tissue samples of animals taken from the Wuhan wet market.

Meanwhile, from the start of the epidemic, Chinese authorities at every level behaved as if they had something to hide. Sending police to silence Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who in late December 2020 had first warned about the new pneumonia, was only the first step. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/01/dem-crime-wave-criminals-arent-just-stealing-daniel-greenfield/

Under the rule of a party that has virtually legalized crime, that defunds police, and blames crime on social inequity, the criminals have hijacked entire cities, crime is escalating, and the criminals are becoming more ambitious.

New York and California, among other states, have effectively legalized robbing stores and porch piracy. But the gangs are moving beyond that to not just stealing packages, they’re hijacking trucks.

Instead of shoplifting from stores, some thieves are zeroing in on another target: Trains and delivery trucks full of packages on the way to customers’ doorsteps.

UPS Chief Executive Carol Tome said Friday that one of the company’s 18-wheeler trucks was robbed in Atlanta in the early hours of the morning. She said thieves hijacked the truck after the driver left one of the delivery company’s largest hubs.

It’s Atlanta. Why not? How is Soros DA Darius Pattillo working out?

“He was stopped at gunpoint. He was zip-tied, thrown into the back of his feeder car and they took the packages,” she said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” The robbery took place in late December, according to an NBC news report.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/transgenderism_destroys_the_family.html

How is it that injecting cattle with hormones is evil, but injecting kids with hormones to obscure their true sex is the new frontier?

In March of 1970, Anne Bernays penned a piece titled “What Are You Supposed to Do if You Like Children?”[1]  Her target was the Women’s Liberation Movement that was ushering in ideas that “men are sexual vampires, [and] marriage is stunting and exploitative.”

In short, Bernays focused on “liberation’s” “paralyzing excesses” because at the root of  Liberation’s determination “to disintegrate the sexes is the disabling anxiety that different means the same thing as inferior.”  But “anybody can see that women are as valuable as men but they are not more the same than ears and eyes.”

Bernays railed against the idea that “[l]iberation insists that women be absolute ‘equals’ with men.”

Why?

Those women who are “willing to acknowledge the remotest emotional obligation to husband and children, especially to children during their fragile first five or six years of life … can’t summon the time, physical energy, and psychic equipment to do two jobs simultaneously.  You can’t split a woman’s life down the middle and expect each half, like a severed worm, to go happily crawling off, to survive and function in perfect health.”

Yet that is exactly what has been demanded of most women as they valiantly try to raise a family and work outside their homes.  Or they simply decide that children are not worth their time or effort, or some other agency is left to the care and development of their children.

https://thelibertydaily.com/tulsi-gabbard-skewers-joe-biden-as-being-even-more-divisive-than-another-hatemongering-democrat/

Tulsi Gabbard ran her presidential campaign against Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrat field by establishing she’s more willing to try to unite the country rather than bow to the radical progressives running her party today. It didn’t work out well for her politically, but her popularity has stayed relatively high even as she continues talking politics from outside the Beltway.

She hit Biden hard over his speech promoting the Democrats’ voter fraud legislation in Georgia. In fact, she hit him with the ultimate insult, saying that he’s even more divisive than the queen of party division, Hillary Clinton.

“Hillary’s calling tens of millions of Americans deplorables was divisive & disgusting. But Biden has gone further, calling those who disagree with his actions & policies domestic enemies, traitors, and racists. Biden promised to unite us, but he is doing all he can do divide us.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-crosses-the-quinnipiac-11642185888?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

As America approaches the end of the first year of the Biden presidency—or as Democrats describe it, the era of greed—the White House is arguing that Mr. Biden’s recent polling numbers aren’t as bad as they seem. More consequentially, the president appears to have just admitted that state voting laws aren’t as bad as he often claims.

As for the polling, the White House faces a tough sell in suggesting that public opinion surveys underrate his political strength, given that the industry famously overestimated his appeal and the popularity of congressional Democrats in the days before the 2020 election.

But the White House is now attacking the methodology behind a particular poll which this week delivered an especially harsh assessment of the president’s standing among Americans.

Hans Nichols of Axios reports:

White House deputy chief of staff Jennifer O’Malley Dillon is publicly attacking a new poll that gave President Biden a 33% approval rating, using the full weight of her office to call it an “outlier,” according to a memo shared with Axios…

https://asiatimes.com/2022/01/worst-us-inflation-since-82-is-huge-underestimate/

Shelter accounts for about a third of American household expenditure, and the cost of buying or renting shelter is up nearly 20% over the past year. Yet the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for shelter reported Jan. 12 by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed an increase of just 4.2 over the past year.

Private surveys conducted by the big rental sites, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com, show increases of 13% to 18% during 2021, and the Case-Shiller Index of US home prices jumped 18% in the year through October.

Who are you going to believe, to paraphrase Groucho Marx – the US government or your own eyes?

Part of the discrepancy involves a simple time lag. The US government looks at the present cost of housing while the private rental surveys register the cost of a new rental. It takes a while for leases to expire and new, higher-cost leases to take effect.

https://www.city-journal.org/new-evidence-connects-police-protests-and-rising-violent-crime

In 2015 and 2016, the coincidence of a major surge in homicides following mass protests over the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, prompted a heated debate about whether the demonstrations, and the anti-police hostility they engendered, helped cause the murder spike. Law enforcement leaders and some public commentators—including City Journal contributing editor Heather Mac Donald—identified a “Ferguson Effect,” whereby public scrutiny reduced police proactivity and led to an increase in violent crime. Supporters of the protests just as fervently derided the idea as imaginary and “debunked.”

Social scientists made a few contributions to this debate, but the research they produced offered limited insight into the causal relationship between scrutiny, proactivity, and crime. Two new studies, however, rely on better data sets and methods to provide strong evidence that highly scrutinized officer-involved fatalities reduce discretionary police activity and lead to an increase in violent crime.

The more-recent study, just published in the Journal of Public Economics by university economists Cheng Cheng and Wei Long, looks at the effect of Brown’s death on police activity and crime on a week-to-week level in St. Louis (which is near Ferguson), and on a month-to-month level in 60 big cities. The St. Louis police department collects high-quality data on self-initiated activity, the authors note, allowing them to assess in specific detail police behavior just before and just after Brown’s death.

Their findings manage somehow to be both unsurprising and shocking. In the immediate aftermath of Brown’s death, self-initiated arrests fell 62 percent. Similar declines are seen across nine out of 11 categories of self-initiated activities, including foot patrol (down 82 percent) and pedestrian checks (76 percent). Notably, the decline in arrests is concentrated among misdemeanor arrests (more discretionary than felonies) and among arrests of blacks (rather than whites). This reduction in police activity persisted for at least the next two years. In the same period, the city experienced a significant rise in homicide and aggravated assault.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18124/shocking-carnage

In America’s most important city, and within Manhattan, there is now a District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, who has redefined evil: in his view, it is the criminal who needs protecting, not the victim. Bragg (pictured) has directed his office to stop seeking prison sentences for criminals who prey on those unfortunate enough to be walking the streets of Manhattan.

One would have thought that after a repeat felon out on a $1,000 bail is alleged to have driven his car into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six people and injuring countless others, those who have sought to dismantle our criminal justice system would have recognized how their actions have created murderous carnage across the nation.

But that is far from the case and the lawless cannot believe their good fortune.

In America’s most important city, New York, and within Manhattan, its most famous borough, there is now a District Attorney who, in changing what his office will prosecute, has essentially redefined evil.

In a staff memo leaked to the media, Alvin Bragg has directed his office to stop seeking prison sentences for criminals who prey on those unfortunate enough to be walking the streets of Manhattan. In addition, he has instructed assistant district attorneys to downgrade felony charges in cases ranging from armed robbery to drug dealing.

If a foreign nation sought to destabilize our society by creating such a scenario we would consider it an act of war.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/democrats-defeated-pandemic-promises/

“It’s time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day” was the much ridiculed answer from Vice President Kamala Harris in an interview with NBC News on Thursday. It has been lampooned in almost every corner of the media and memed all over the internet, and rightly so.

Harris has been plagued her entire electoral career by a sense that she isn’t prepared. This time the test is the pandemic, which is a major problem for her and Joe Biden almost a year into their administration. It’s a term they were elected to almost exclusively on the promise of “shutting down the virus.” But viruses are a non-political problem, despite Biden’s politicizing it during the 2020 election.

Biden leveraged that politicization effectively to oust Donald Trump, whose own rhetoric on Covid was sloppy and absurd. Yet despite a national media that told the country the virus only affects restaurants and beachgoers in Florida and not social justice protesters, and despite Biden’s own seven-point plan that amounted to not much more than demanding and attempting to mandate vaccination on the population, the virus rages on.

There are now record numbers of cases in both blue and red states (hence the media panic and the adjustment of reporting case numbers in hospitals, as the AP is doing). There is a national shortage of tests, long lines at testing sites, and school closures at the behest of Biden’s teacher’s union donors. There’s also an effort to double down on masking kids, a strategy that is likely to radicalize parents even more, as all evidence now points to masking children being unnecessary, as kids already have strong natural defenses against Covid.