RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/biden-ethics-son.html

There should be little doubt that President Biden was not being truthful when, days after the Taliban’s victory, he told ABC News that his senior military advisers had not urged him to keep some 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. The president’s claim was flatly contradicted last week in sworn testimony from Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., the head of U.S. Central Command.

During the generals’ testimony, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, sought to defend her boss by pointing to a line in Biden’s interview in which he appeared to suggest that the military’s advice “was split.”

Another whopper. What split? As The Times’s Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and David Sanger reported in April, right after Lloyd Austin was sworn in as secretary of defense in January, he and his top generals “were in lock step in recommending that about 3,000 to 4,500 troops stay in Afghanistan.” Asked whether there were top military advisers who argued otherwise, Psaki evaded the question.

Biden’s dissembling, regarding the worst-executed major foreign policy decision in years, would be a scandal in any presidency. It’s worse coming from the man who campaigned for office by insisting that he stood “for honor and telling the truth.”

A week earlier, Politico’s Ben Schreckinger published a scrupulously reported book on the Biden family. It makes a compelling case that some of the most explosive emails from Hunter Biden’s purported laptop were entirely genuine — a claim that Schreckinger confirmed with multiple sources, including a Swedish government agency, and that was never explicitly denied by Hunter himself.

That includes a 2017 email in which one of Hunter’s potential business partners proposed a “provisional agreement” with the now-defunct company CEFC China Energy to share equity percentages in a new venture, with “10 Jim” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” Jim Biden is the president’s brother. “The big guy,” according to Tony Bobulinski, a recipient of the email, is Hunter’s father.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a05e044bdd

I spend a lot of time at this site ridiculing the unfalsifiable hyperbole and altered data that pass for “science” in the field of climate change. But climate change is just one of many areas where people who have little idea what real science consists of nevertheless claim the mantle of science to order others around. Right now the response to Covid-19, the Chinese Virus, competes with the response to climate change for the most egregious misuse of the imprimatur of “science” to justify political goals.

As background for this post, I refer to the Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science,” which appeared, among other places, in this post of September 12, 2020: “Science is a process for understanding reality through using experiment or data to attempt to falsify falsifiable hypotheses.” Under this definition, the classic example of real science at work is the randomized controlled drug trial, best understood as an attempt to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that the drug at issue is effective, through proving that a placebo works just as well. When the attempt at falsification fails, then the drug has been shown, at least provisionally, to be effective.

The Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science” is what I seem to remember learning on the subject back in junior high school, and that I have since confirmed by reading up on the work of philosopher Karl Popper and others. The alternative definition of “science” mentioned in my September 2020 post is that “science is what people who call themselves scientists do.” Under this alternative definition, “following the science” means taking instruction from whoever appear to be, or declare themselves to be, the most expert scientists of the moment. In the field of Covid-19, those people would be the CDC and the NIAID (Fauci’s organization), and everyone who takes funding from them and their allies and therefore can’t disagree with anything they say without risking job and career.

Back on August 5, the CDC “updated” their “guidance” on the subject of masking for students, teachers and other staff in schools. The updated guidance reads as follows:

CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

How far ago it was when a Democrat President could speak of open markets and of trusting the American people. Fear has become a tool of American politicians, especially those on the left, to help control the people they are supposed to serve. In a recent issue of The Spectator, regarding the United States’ handling of the COVID-19 virus, Karol Markowicz wrote: “We are in a moment of profound fear in the U.S…We cannot continue to succumb to a fear of life. We must not continue to be scared of each other.” Yet, politicians used fear to place the sick in nursing homes, and to close places of worship, schools and businesses, and to issue mask and vaccine mandates.

As well, fear of climate change infects our youth. Writing in February 2020 in The Washington Post, Jason Plautz wrote: “Kids are terrified, anxious and depressed about climate change,” while academics, politicians and certain businesses thrive on this fear. Michael Moore and Al Gore made millions out of scaring people about climate change. Thomas P. Gloria, managing director of Industrial Ecology Solutions and Program Director, Sustainability, Harvard Extension School, wrote in the April 22, 2020, edition of the Harvard Gazette: “My fear is, despite the science and the early warning signals that we bear witness to – record temperatures, 1000-year storms, glacial retreat, coral reefs dying on a continental scale – global society may finally wake up, but it may be too late.”

Fear of expressing non-conventional ideas has become pervasive. Many will not speak out for fear of financial retaliation. Ted Rall, author of The Stringer, wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal: “What meaningful difference is there between an authoritarian state, where saying the wrong thing can get you arrested, and a regime of economic censorship, in which the consequence of unpopular expression results in unemployment, potentially followed by eviction and destitution?” A culture that cancels history and opinions is one that denies free speech. How many students fear expressing opinions that depart from a progressive narrative that has become ubiquitous? How many junior executives question their senior managers? Do members of Congress let demands of Party out-weigh their own consciences? Fear of failing grades, loss of job and political retribution are used to suppress speech and control people.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/05/the-left-can-finally-admit-what-it-wants/

I remember a staggering conversation with my high school lunch table in the early 2000s. Everyone agreed with one kid’s statement that there was nothing special about living in America: Life in Canada, or anywhere else, would be identical except for maybe the weather. 

At the time, I wondered what was going to happen to America when all these kids grew up. What happens when America’s young adults, far from having any intellectual commitment to freedom, don’t even understand what life would be like without it? 

Twenty or 30 years ago, before my generation metastasized, it was tacitly understood on both sides of the political aisle that leftists—mostly Democrats—had to lie about what they wanted to do. They had to pretend, for instance, that they didn’t want to raise taxes. SNL made fun of this in their famous 1988 sketch “Dukakis After Dark”: “Mike, now that it’s all over, you can tell me. You were going to raise taxes, weren’t you?” “You bet I was!”

Leftists likewise had to pretend they liked the military. This led to Dukakis’ disastrous Abrams tank photo op.  

It wasn’t Dukakis’ fault exactly—as “he” says in the SNL sketch, “We represent unpopular, discredited views.” But if only he’d been more fortunate in his timing, and could have waited 20 or 30 years: Precisely those discredited views were being indoctrinated into school children across the country. The children grew up, and the ideas have found new life. 

Walter Mondale’s 1984 pledge to raise taxes helped destroy his presidential campaign. In 2020, Biden’s pledge to do the same went essentially unnoticed—in part because the press, now run by the kids who were in school when Mondale ran, didn’t want to report it. But also because those kids like the idea of higher taxes. In a sense we’ve come full circle. The Left can finally admit in public all the things it used to hide.  

The Left is finally out of the closet.