RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/where-are-gays-bruce-bawer/

In the last couple of days, as the Taliban consolidated its position in the Afghan capital, I had to go all the way to New Zealand to find an English-language gay news website which acknowledged that this lightning reconquista wasn’t exactly a great development for gay Afghans.

Under the headline “Taliban Plan to Crush Gay Men to Death as they Close in on Capturing Afghanistan,” the Gay Express reminded readers that during the years of Taliban rule (1996-2001), adulterers were executed, thieves subjected to amputation, girls over 10 denied schooling, movie theaters closed, Western TV and music banned, women forced into burkas, and men ordered to wear beards.

In what seems a strict violation of the unwritten rule of Western gay media – i.e. never to say anything positive about the U.S., and especially about Republican governments in the U.S. – the Kiwi website noted that “[w]hile homosexuality has always remained illegal in Afghanistan, laws making it punishable by death were repealed when the United States invaded in 2001.”

But that, warned the website, will surely be reversed, given Taliban judge Gul Rahim’s recent assurance, in an interview with Bild (Germany), that gays, under a new Taliban regime, would be “crushed to death by toppling walls.”

But that story was, as noted, an outlier in the gay Anglosphere. When I turned from the Gay Express to other sites, I found nary a word about the Taliban’s grim plans.

At Pink News (UK), the highlighted stories concerned the firing of a gay teacher by a Christian school in Sydney, Australia; a ban on Pride flags at another school in Newburg, Oregon; and the loss of a lawsuit by Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts-and-crafts stores, which had refused to let M-to-F transsexuals use its ladies’ rooms. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/18/how-did-we-go-from-energy-dominance-to-energy-begging-in-8-months/

In his first day in office, President Joe Biden embarked on a campaign to rein in domestic oil and gas production. On his 204th day in office, he was pleading with OPEC to increase its production to stem the sharp rise in gasoline prices, to which OPEC said no dice.

Virtually overnight, the nation has gone from Trump-era “energy dominance” to a Carter-era energy crisis.

But unlike Jimmy Carter, who blundered his way into gasoline shortages, Biden is intentionally creating the current situation to pay homage to climate “crisis” environmentalists.

During his presidential campaign, Biden promised to “get rid of fossil fuels.” Since taking office, he’s been busy trying to carry out that pledge.

One of the first things he did in office was to call a halt on oil and gas leases on federal lands and off our coastlines, and has yet to resume allowing them even after a federal judge ordered the administration to do so. He shut down construction of the Keystone Pipeline. He blocked energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He directed federal agencies to “eliminate fossil fuel subsidies as consistent with applicable law.” He’s promised to add some $90 billion to the industry’s tax burden by eliminating what he calls tax “subsidies.”

Even now, the administration “is preparing to release a blueprint for limiting sales of U.S. drilling rights as rising oil and gasoline prices highlight the risks of curtailing domestic crude production,” reports Bloomberg. “The Interior Department also is expected to limit new leases in some sensitive coastal and Western areas and begin a broad study of the climate effects of oil and gas development on federal property.”

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

Is REGEN-COV the answer to COVID?

Nearly a year and a half has passed and over 618,000 COVID-19 related deaths were recorded in the U.S. alone and finally the FDA released an emergency use authorization for REGEN-COV; a new drug that was undergoing testing in 2020 (pre-Biden).  It is now an early treatment option for primary care physicians.  Until this point, the only authorized COVID-19 treatment my family doctor had per the July 2021 update to NIH guidelines  was recommend quarantine, wait until symptoms go away or report to a hospital if they get worse.  It is noteworthy that these updated guidelines continue to name hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a prohibited drug, but should be no surprise considering a war on HCQ began soon after President Trump dared to recommend it.    

However, REGEN-COV is no simple take-home medicine like the familiar Tamiflu frequently prescribed for the seasonal flu.  For example, (in the ‘old days’ that ended in March 2020), my wife and I both caught the seasonal flu.  Our doctor immediately prescribed Tamiflu and azithromycin because he knew a delay of even a few days would make Tamiflu less effective. REGEN-COV is similarly recommended only for early use before severe symptoms can develop.  

Once the initial surge of COVID-19 cases and deaths started in March-April 2020, the seasonal flu magically vanished along with Tamiflu despite some early indications that it works on COVID. 

According to the FDA fact sheet on REGEN-COV, the intravenous infusion process it requires appears time-consuming (can take 20 to 50 minutes or more with a one-hour monitoring period immediately after).  For now, it is recommended for use only on confirmed COVID-19 patients over the age of 12 who are at high risk of developing severe symptoms, but permits some flexibility to be given as a preventative to especially high-risk patients.   It sounds so promising the FDA was careful to say it is not a substitute for the vaccines. 

The FDA has known from the beginning that early treatment of COVID-19 is essential yet chose to ignore India’s great success with its initial early treatment protocol that initially included HCQ.  However, when the delta variant arrived it appeared more resistant to HCQ, so India immediately approved and widely distributed a new more potent outpatient COVID kit consisting of Ivermectin, Doxcycline, and Zinc.  This less than $3 kit quickly reversed the delta variant death trend there.  Finding the true cost per-dose of REGEN-COV proved more elusive; ranging from $10 to $2,100 per dose.  Grab your ‘Good Rx’ card just in case.   

https://www.wsj.com/articles/endless-wars-neocon-biden-afghanistan-withdrawal-kabu

Daniel  Crenshaw is a  United States Representative for Texas’s 2nd congressional district since 2019.He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012 as a member of the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team 3.

Almost everyone agrees that what’s happening in Afghanistan is an unmitigated disaster. There is no way to whitewash it, and few are trying. The scenes from Kabul speak for themselves, casting shame and embarrassment on the world’s greatest superpower. There is plenty of blame being passed around, including to the “neocons,” the generals and the Afghans themselves. But what got us here was the widespread belief that American foreign policy should be dictated by a simple slogan: “No more endless wars.” The current spokesman for that belief is President Biden.

The argument for bringing the troops home is an emotional one, arising from exhaustion with overseas conflict. Most people don’t understand the situation in Afghanistan, and that causes distrust and anger. Few deny we needed to take action after 9/11, but few understood what our strategy would be after we got there. Leaders failed to explain that simply leaving would allow the Taliban to re-emerge and again provide safe haven for terrorists. Americans felt stuck and became exhausted over the years with the vast sums of money spent and lives lost, seemingly in a futile attempt to build democracy.

With this growing impatience, the case for cutting our losses grew stronger. But it fails to acknowledge trade-offs—and this simple question: If we evacuate Afghanistan, what will happen? The “no more endless wars” crowd always refused to answer. They prefer to live in a dream world rather than face the reality that our enemies are ideologically opposed to Western civilization and will gladly stage another 9/11 if they have the opportunity and means. They are at war with us whether or not we are at war with them. Leaving Afghanistan would inevitably create a terrorist safe haven.

That simple reality was never properly explained to the public. When Quinnipiac asked in a May survey, “Should we leave Afghanistan?” 62% of respondents said yes. But what if the question was framed more completely: “Should we leave Afghanistan even if it means an increased threat of terrorism to the homeland?”