RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/where-are-feminists-jason-d-hill/

Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Bruce Bawer’s excellent Frontpage article “Where Are the Gays?” paints a chilling portrait of the imminent torture, execution and amputations that await gay men under Taliban rulership in Afghanistan. And, of course, western gays are silent. Many are too busy hooking up on multiple sex apps. Many have never been concerned with rights that extend beyond the erogenous zones of their genitalia, and several are too busy celebrating the pedophilia presented in the best-selling young adult pornographic novel, Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts), as a moral victory over heteronormative patriarchy.

The majority of sex-addicted gay men live in a curated silo where drugs, hook-ups, flaunting open relationships, and chasing youth and beauty supersede condemning the horrific agenda of the Taliban — an agenda that will no doubt transport Afghanistan back to the Dark Ages.

A reader suggested that a better article would be named: “Where Are All The Feminists?” Given the plight of women under the Taliban when they ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, feminists should be concerned about the repression of the rights of individual women in that country. This concern should extend to the current resurgence of child marriage of young teenage girls to Taliban soldiers.

No, feminists in America will not be criticizing the Taliban, just as neither they nor gays in America have dared criticize the brutal treatment of women and gays under the governance of Hamas in Gaza. Feminists in this country are too consumed with another task: the destruction of the American male, who is seen as the producer of imperialism, “racist capitalism,” and systemic racial and gender oppression. This is their obsession. The destruction of the American male supersedes moral concern for the wanton annihilation of human lives in other countries. They will not speak out against the Taliban because they hate America and American men more than they care about the rights of any individual singled out as a target for discrimination based on membership in a demonized group.  

As we hurtle towards a possible post-American future, this new breed of feminists, a phalanx of zealots, has forged fourth-wave feminism, and it’s far more rabidly anti-male than previous iterations of the ideological movement. You’d think because of its petty maliciousness and deranged radicalism, its appeal would be narrowly limited to the faculty lounges of liberal arts colleges. Yet since the inception of the #MeToo movement, the crazed foot soldiers of fourth-wave feminism managed not only to take their worldview mainstream, but also to put a headlock on the commanding heights of American culture. This is as impressive as it is terrifying.

These new man-haters are seething with toxic feminism, and the further spread of their noxious sentiment could likely spell the death of our country as we know it. Increasingly prevalent is their practice of exploiting female agency and identity to make blanket attacks on men, to neuter manliness, and to advocate for the end of masculinity. These goals are being achieved while simultaneously promulgating the dual concepts that men are by nature nefarious and that female advancement can only come through the wholesale annihilation of heteronormative constructs of maleness. The destructive consequences for relationships at every level of society—from the simple couple to the community to the nation—will be vast and irreparable.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/director_of_the_national_institutes_of_health_grossly_misstates_the_science_on_vaccination_vs_natural_immunity.html

“A sad state of affairs when you can’t trust the data from the top public health official in the United States.”

On the August 12, 2021 Special Report, Bret Baier asked NIH Director Francis Collins: “Can you definitely say to somebody that the vaccine provides better protection than the antibodies you get from actually having had COVID-19?”

Dr Collins replied to Bret and the almost 2 million viewers of Special Report:

“Yes, Bret, I can say that.  There was a study published by CDC just ten days ago in Kentucky, and they looked specifically at people who had had natural infection and people who had been vaccinated and then ended up getting infection again.  So what was the protection level?  It was more than two-fold better for the people who had had the vaccine in terms of protection than people who had had natural infection.  That’s very clear in that Kentucky study.  You know that surprises people.  Kind of surprised me that the vaccine would actually be better than natural infection.  But if you think about it, it kinda makes sense…That’s a settled issue.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/bidens-appalling-trust-in-the-taliban/

The president has been resigned for years to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan.

I t is becoming increasingly difficult to draw any conclusion other than that President Biden knowingly and willfully surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban.

To be clear, this is different from concluding that Biden committed to a recklessly premature date for withdrawing all U.S. forces (which, practically speaking, would necessitate NATO’s departure, too) while being aware that the Taliban were capturing territory and that the Afghan security forces might be unable to hold them off over the ensuing months.

That would be bad, but not as damning as what I am deducing.

I now believe Biden long ago reasoned that the Taliban were going to take over the country inevitably and decided to treat them as the de facto government. Consistent with this — and with the progressive Democratic orientation that American military power is needlessly provocative, and that concessions are the preferred way to inspire rogues into good behavior — Biden determined back in the spring that he would set a firm deadline to pull our forces out, and then demonstrate to the Taliban that the deadline was real.

This, he calculated, would accomplish two things. First, on the domestic political front, the president could claim he was “ending America’s longest war.” Second, Biden could assure the Taliban that he was irreversibly committed to military withdrawal, even though he was extending the Trump administration’s irresponsible May 1 deadline (negotiated with the Taliban in an agreement that cut out, and thus nullified, the ostensibly U.S.-backed Afghan government in Kabul, releasing 5,000 prisoners at the Taliban’s demand).

Biden saw the Taliban as the regime in waiting, with whom his administration was energetically negotiating. If he proved to the Taliban that the U.S. really was leaving no matter what, then he figured the Taliban would allow — even facilitate — the evacuation of thousands of American civilian workers, contractors, and diplomatic personnel. Biden would pull out American troops and trust the Taliban, thus appeased, with the fate of the remaining Americans.

This is mind-boggling, but not the half of it. Biden was also effectively administering the coup de grâce to the Afghan government, and not only by elevating the Taliban to the sole Afghan party with which his administration would negotiate the terms of the U.S. departure. Biden would also pull out in a manner that undermined the Afghan security forces’ capacity to fight the Taliban. After all, if U.S. troops and contractors continued providing technical and logistical support to the Afghan ground and air forces, the Taliban might interpret that as an American commitment to continue the war. Biden would make sure the jihadists had no cause for doubt.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/24/taliban-under-the-bed/

After the fall on Kabul, our elitists raced to Twitter and other forums to equate the Taliban to conservatives and Republicans in the U.S. What kind of country are we becoming, in which a significant part of it cannot, or will not, distinguish the difference between terrorism and political differences?

Duplici-mentarian Michael Moore, as he often is, was an early arrival at the buffet table of buffoonery. While so many of us were wondering just how things could have gone so wrong, even under Joe Biden, he tweeted “their Taliban, our Taliban, everybody’s got a Taliban,” complete with a photo of a few of the Jan. 6 Capitol intruders. Of course it was met with great approval.

Actress Rosanna Arquette, who has declared she will never again stand for the American flag and will kneel when she hears the national anthem, apparently couldn’t help herself, either. She tweeted that “the Taliban extremists” in the U.S. go by “a different name.” She wants the world to know that “the GOP right wing extremists who support destroying democracy are the terrorists in America and will continue to terrorize America until they are  stopped and pay for their crimes against Americans Jan 6.”

“Late Show” host Steven Colbert, dance partner of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, used his national forum to wonder “why should our soldiers be fighting radicals in a civil war in Afghanistan” since “we’ve got our own on Capitol Hill.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid called the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul a “true cautionary tale for the U.S., which has our own far religious right dreaming of a theocracy.” 

And then there’s Ahmed Tharwat, host and producer of some Arab-American television show who “writes for local and international publications.” Last week, the Minneapolis Star Tribune allowed him to rant about “the American Taliban,” which “stormed the Capitol to reinstall their cult leader to office after he lost the election and launched the stop the steal movement.” It was, he said, a “hillbilly coup.”

Much of the effort to link America’s political right to the Taliban is nothing more than pathetic virtue signaling. It’s the screeching of attention-hungry media personalities and celebrities who desperately need to show the world they’re on the right side of history, and are morally and intellectually superior than most of their fellow Americans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/police-thin-blue-line-shootings-black-homicide-crime-proactive-policing-blm-defund-11629750911?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The village of Mount Prospect, Ill., prohibited its police officers earlier this month from wearing a “thin blue line” patch on their uniforms. The patch consists of a black-and-white U.S. flag with one blue stripe. It honors fallen cops and recognizes the role police play in protecting society from anarchy. Detractors insist the symbol makes people of color feel unsafe. Police chiefs and elected officials in San Francisco, Middletown and Manchester, Conn., and elsewhere have banned it.

While Mount Prospect was grappling with threatening police patches, in nearby Chicago the police were dealing with actual violence—against officers and civilians. Three days before the anti-patch vote, Officer Ella French was killed by a bullet to her head during a traffic stop. French and her two partners had pulled over an SUV for expired registration tags. One of the SUV’s occupants, 21-year-old Emonte Morgan, allegedly fought with the officers and opened fire, killing French and critically wounding one of her partners with bullets to the brain, eye and shoulder. Mr. Morgan was on probation for a recent robbery conviction, which a Chicago Tribune story characterizes as not a “serious” crime. His brother Eric, who was driving the SUV, was on probation for a theft conviction.

French and her partner were among the 78 people shot in Chicago over the Aug. 7-8 weekend, 11 of them fatally. Typical of the post- George Floyd urban mayhem, a child—this time a 4-year-old girl—was among the victims. Over Fourth of July weekend in Chicago, a 5-year-old girl, a 6-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy were shot, along with 104 others. On July 1, a 1-month-old infant was critically wounded in a mass shooting. Three young men emerged from a Jeep Cherokee spraying bullets in several directions. A 15-year-old and six other victims were also shot, along with the baby. Hours earlier, a 9-year-old girl was shot in the head.

Chicago is no outlier. In Minneapolis, six children 10 and younger have been shot since late April, including two girls, 6 and 9, who were killed; two boys, 10 and 3, both critically wounded; and an infant. None of these Minneapolis children were shot by a cop; they were killed by criminals who, like them, are black.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-agony-of-the-centrist-democrats-nancy-pelosi-infrastructure-house-spending-11629754803?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

With the House back in town, the debate for Democrats is which colossal plan they should pass first: President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure package? Or Bernie Sanders’s $3.5 trillion budget outline? The media is covering it as a real showdown but, if history holds, this will turn out to be Kabuki theater.

Nine Democrats, including several from swing districts, say the infrastructure bill should be passed before any budget vote is taken, and so far they have held their ground. “We are firmly opposed,” they wrote recently, “to holding the president’s infrastructure legislation hostage to reconciliation, risking its passage and the bipartisan support behind it.”

The left is demanding the opposite. Do the $3.5 trillion spending binge first, the argument goes, and then reward the Democratic centrists with the infrastructure goody bag. Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to lose either faction, and her narrow majority means she has only three votes to spare. She’s trying to accommodate both sides with a rule that lets her claim the two proposals are moving forward more or less simultaneously.

This is mainly about process, not substance. The nine Democratic holdouts want to vote on infrastructure now, but tomorrow they’re prepared to roll over for $3.5 trillion in spending and new entitlements, which is what really matters. “I’ve literally said to my colleagues, ‘Let’s vote on the infrastructure bill, and then, like, 15 minutes later we can start debate on the budget resolution and vote on it the next day,’” Rep. Josh Gottheimer told a reporter.

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/08/23/lets_stop_pretending_about_the_covid-19_vaccines_791050.html

As a family physician, I spend my days dispensing advice. I mean, there’s the occasional cast, skin biopsy, or shot, but most of my patients are seeing me for medical counsel. Never have I been asked about one subject so much as the Covid-19 vaccines, and never have I seen so much doubt and confusion among a group of smart, well-educated people. Interpreting the reality of the effectiveness of these vaccines is complicated: it is waning with time, weakened against delta, unknown when coupled with prior infection, and may not be improved with a booster – but there is new, often murky, data emerging every day. Speaking the truth about the vaccines, however, should not be that hard. We have to be willing to adapt to new data, even when it does not fit neatly into prior messaging.

That’s where our institutions went astray. I understand the desire of our public health officials, spearheaded by the CDC, to instill confidence in the Covid-19 vaccines; they remain the most expedient path to minimize the suffering inflicted by this pandemic. However, by taking on the role of no-nuance vaccine cheerleaders, they left everyone in a worse situation.

Patients and doctors looking to the CDC for guidance in decision-making receive low quality or dated information. The mainstream media is stuck between reporting public health dictates as valid, while being unable to resist doom-and-gloom reports of vaccine “failures” that sell ad space. The obvious gap between “what the CDC says” and “what we see, hear and read” has left a large space for grifters, self-styled experts, and conspiracy theorists to thrive, especially among the large group of vaccine-hesitant (often vaccine-terrified) Americans. The whole thing might have gone better had we stuck to telling the truth as we knew it.

What follows is the truth about the Covid-19 vaccines, as I see it, from the data in hand right now. It is often inconvenient, especially for someone like me, who preferred the easy days of being a vaccine cheerleader when the initial trial data emerged. Do I still recommend a Covid-19 vaccine for the vast majority of my patients? Yes. It just takes a couple extra minutes to discuss now. Most importantly, if I speak the truth now, my patients will be more inclined to trust me later. So let’s see where we really stand:

Let’s stop pretending the vaccines are 90% effective and breakthrough cases are “uncommon.”

The real world effectiveness of the Moderna and Pfizer (mRNA) vaccines appears to be sinking like a stone. We started at 94+% within 2 months of vaccination and against the original SARS-CoV-2 strain. The Israel Pfizer data roughly confirmed this degree of effectiveness in initial real world studies. But, then… waning happened, and delta happened.