RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/18/buttigieg-the-weak-link-in-the-supply-chain/

The only thing more laughable than Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s claim that spending two months on paternity leave counts as “work” is that the massive infrastructure bill in Congress would do anything to fix the supply chain crisis.

When asked on CNBC why the administration waited so long to take action, Buttigieg responded that “we’ve been working this issue from day one”.

Well, not exactly.

As Politico reported, Buttigieg was “mostly offline” starting in mid-August, and only went on a media blitz after Politico disclosed the fact that he’d been on an unannounced leave.

It’s true that Biden issued a supply chain executive order in early February, saying that “we’re not going to wait for a review to be completed before we start closing the existing gaps.”

In June, Biden announced the creation of a new Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force with Buttigieg one of the key members. The next month, Buttigieg said, he’d “convened the entire ecosystem of supply chain actors.”

Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in an attempt to defend the administration’s response, told reporters that “we’ve not only been talking about this since January, we’ve been working to put in place a range of steps to help address the challenges in the supply chains.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/10/17/bidens_epic_fail_at_unity_146577.html

“As I write this, Biden’s job RealClearPolitics average approval rating is underwater by 7.9%. His low numbers, they’re becoming bipartisan.”

As a candidate, now-President Joe Biden said that if elected, he would bring the country together, heal partisan divisions and get things done. How’s that working out?

Sure, on the campaign trail, Biden seemed so convincing. He was the seasoned hand, a former vice president with 36 years in the Senate who knew the ways of Washington.

“We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in the country,” he said in Ohio in October 2020. He said he wanted to “work with one another.” If he occupied the Oval Office, he promised, “there will be no blue states and red states with me.”

Some nine months into his tenure, it’s evident that Biden’s unity pledge ranks with former President Barack Obama’s campaign whopper, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” which won him PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year in 2013.

It’s not just that Biden isn’t producing unity; it’s also that he’s squandering the moment for a bad idea.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-power-over-energy-oil-exports-natural-gas-11634496772?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The White House’s developing response to a global energy crisis raises an unsettling question: If the Biden administration openly discusses restricting energy exports to combat rising consumer fuel prices, what power might it assert to save a planet it believes to be in crisis?

Because Congress and the courts have ceded power to the executive branch over the past several decades, the president, if he so chose, could co-opt powerful national security tools to reduce U.S. carbon emissions. As midterm elections approach, progressives will pressure President Biden to do exactly that.

Remember that one of Mr. Biden’s first executive orders declared that climate change is “central” to national security. It promised to “combat the climate crisis with bold, progressive action,” which could mean almost anything. The administration has begun following through on this rhetoric. In September it announced the creation of a task force “to detect, deter, and disrupt” hydrofluorocarbons, a category of potent greenhouse gases. That alliterative phrase typically is reserved for countering weapons of mass destruction, rogue states and terrorists.

If climate change is “an existential threat to our lives,” as Mr. Biden declared in the wake of Hurricane Ida, then what wouldn’t the administration be prepared to do to address it? Take natural gas. Climate activists used to call it a “bridge fuel” but now decry it as a dangerous pollutant. The Energy Department may rescind operable export authorizations under the Natural Gas Act, though it has never done so. Both the Obama and Trump administrations assured nervous allies that they couldn’t imagine a scenario where revocations would ever be necessary. Climate warriors believe global warming constitutes such a scenario.

The same law allows the department to attach “terms and conditions” to its export approvals. A future in which every natural-gas liquefaction terminal is required to build facilities to capture, store and use carbon dioxide or to install vast amounts of renewable energy capacity for local use is entirely plausible.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-travel-tourism-moon-mission-mars-exploration-11634495445?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Space tourism has arrived, coming into its own with the launch, orbit and safe return of civilians to Earth on SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission in September. Watching that mission was gratifying. It was American ingenuity at its finest and showed that space missions have evolved from a public enterprise to a private one. But it also reinforced the urgency of reasserting broader American leadership in space.

Nearly 25 years ago, when I testified before Congress on space-related developments—and delays—my primary concern was that we were failing to approach the future with the same energy, ambition, vision and execution that characterized our moon missions. Areas of particular concern included American leadership in near-Earth orbit, heavy launch, reusability, public-private partnerships, international cooperation, pioneering civilian space tourism and getting back to the moon and on to Mars.

Consistent with those missions, NASA, Congress, multiple administrations and private industry have made new investments. But American leadership in space is growing more urgent. Successfully advancing science and engineering, putting civilians in orbit on private rockets, widening launch options, and encouraging public-private partnership are good for the future.

Needed now are two other factors, which seem contradictory but are not. First, America must again lead—with the enthusiasm of recent missions—in returning to the moon and then taking humans to Mars. Other nations, not least China, are on that trajectory.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/civil-liberties-are-being-trampled-8bf

Following the 9/11 script, objections to government overreach in the name of 1/6 are demonized as sympathy for terrorists. But government abuses pose the greater threat.

When a population is placed in a state of sufficiently grave fear and anger regarding a perceived threat, concerns about the constitutionality, legality and morality of measures adopted in the name of punishing the enemy typically disappear. The first priority, indeed the sole priority, is to crush the threat. Questions about the legality of actions ostensibly undertaken against the guilty parties are brushed aside as trivial annoyances at best, or, worse, castigated as efforts to sympathize with and protect those responsible for the danger. When a population is subsumed with pulsating fear and rage, there is little patience for seemingly abstract quibbles about legality or ethics. The craving for punishment, for vengeance, for protection, is visceral and thus easily drowns out cerebral or rational impediments to satiating those primal impulses.

The aftermath of the 9/11 attack provided a vivid illustration of that dynamic. The consensus view, which formed immediately, was that anything and everything possible should be done to crush the terrorists who — directly or indirectly — were responsible for that traumatic attack. The few dissenters who attempted to raise doubts about the legality or morality of proposed responses were easily dismissed and marginalized, when not ignored entirely. Typically, they were vilified with the accusation that their constitutional and legal objections were frauds: mere pretexts to conceal their sympathy and even support for the terrorists. It took at least a year or two after that attack for there to be any space for questions about the legality, constitutionality, and morality of the U.S. response to 9/11 to be entertained at all.

For many liberals and Democrats in the U.S., 1/6 is the equivalent of 9/11. One need not speculate about that. Many have said this explicitly. Some prominent Democrats in politics and media have even insisted that 1/6 was worse than 9/11.

Joe Biden’s speechwriters, when preparing his script for his April address to the Joint Session of Congress, called the three-hour riot “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” Liberal icon Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), whose father’s legacy was cemented by years of casting 9/11 as the most barbaric attack ever seen, now serves as Vice Chair of the 1/6 Committee; in that role, she proclaimed that the forces behind 1/6 represent “a threat America has never seen before.” The enabling resolution that created the Select Committee calls 1/6 “one of the darkest days of our democracy.” USA Today’s editor David Mastio published an op-ed whose sole point was a defense of the hysterical thesis from MSNBC analysts that 1/6 is at least as bad as 9/11 if not worse. S.V. Date, the White House correspondent for America’s most nakedly partisan “news” outlet, The Huffington Post, published a series of tweets arguing that 1/6 was worse than 9/11 and that those behind it are more dangerous than Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda ever were.

On George Will’s desire ‘to see January 6 burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11 because it was that scale of a shock to the system.’ No, it wasn’t. There is simply no comparison in scale or motivation between the two. For some perspective: 1/5

https://www.city-journal.org/biden-policy-encouraging-worker-shortages?wallit_nosession=1

At a Cincinnati town hall meeting in July, a local restaurant owner complained to President Biden about how hard it was to find workers even though millions of Americans remain unemployed. Not exactly striking a sympathetic note, Biden told the restaurateur that he expected enterprises like his “to be in a bind for a while,” because “I think it really is a matter of people deciding now that they have opportunities to do other things.” The president didn’t explain what those “other things” might be, but he clearly didn’t seem worried, even though the recovery from the 2020 recession was already sputtering as millions remained unemployed and businesses frantically searched for new hires. While some industries report shortages because their workers are trading up to better jobs elsewhere, America’s work-participation rate—the percentage of adults holding jobs—has plummeted. In the process, the widespread worker shortages of mid-summer have gotten worse.

Back in July, the federal government was still paying enhanced benefits to the unemployed—even though many in Washington, including prominent Democrats, were warning that the federal handouts on top of state unemployment payments were creating a big disincentive to go back to work. That extra federal payment, which had begun under President Trump and was extended by Biden last March, finally ended in early September, but other federal aid continues. The IRS, for instance, now pays families a child tax credit that has expanded to $3,600 per child under six and $3,000 per older child. A recent study estimated that this lucrative benefit, if it becomes permanent as some Democrats have proposed, could prompt up to 1.5 million more mostly low-income parents to leave the workforce over the next few years. Meantime, the Treasury Department has told states that they can use some of the $350 billion stimulus money Washington was sending them to support and expand their own unemployment benefits.

Even before the Covid-induced recession struck, public policy in America had been increasingly discouraging work through expanded and more generous disability payments, longer bouts of enhanced, less restrictive unemployment benefits, and more generous social-welfare payments. One consequence: the ranks of the permanently unemployed have grown in America. In the last 20 years alone, the country’s labor-participation rate shrank from nearly 68 percent of adults to just 63 percent right before the Covid lockdowns began. Then in March 2020, the rate slipped below 61 percent—an unprecedented drop. Since then, it’s climbed less than halfway back to pre-Covid level, despite widespread business re-openings and help-wanted signs everywhere. More people are getting used to not working, and the Biden administration’s proposals for expanding federal aid programs will do little to lure them back.

That’s apparently fine with Biden and his economic advisors. Far from being horrified at the growing number of permanently out-of-work Americans, the administration sees worker shortages as a way to achieve one of its primary economic goals: raising wages. Biden campaigned on boosting the federal minimum wage to $15. He knows he’ll have a tough time pushing that legislation through Congress, even with Democratic control of both houses. This is why administration members have been hinting to the press that widespread shortages are a good thing because they are boosting salaries for those who are working—even while others who formerly worked go off and do “other things.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_great_struggle_of_our_time_the_battle_for_reality.html

With societal turbulence all around us, many people feel that we are locked in some great and portentous struggle. But because it is so pervasive and multifaced, the nature of this struggle is not readily obvious. There are many fronts on which this struggle is being fought: racial relations, education, healthcare, popular culture, financial system, and freedom of speech, among others. It is not easy to make sense of it all, especially since the battles are highly pitched and emotions are running very high.

What characterizes these battles, besides their intensity, is deep polarization. The possibility of the warring camps coming together and meeting on some common ground seems to be growing more distant by the day. There is even talk that the two sides will either come to blows, or they will each go their own way in some form of secession.

Many have observed that the contenders seem to be separated by an unbridgeable gap, and yet no one has been able to explain the nature of this gap, or what exactly it is that separates the mindsets of the opposing sides.

In our view the great struggle in the grip of which we find ourselves cuts much deeper than the immediate issues we argue over. The real fight extends beyond any particular point of public friction.

The great battle of our time is a battle about the very nature of reality. More precisely, what the two sides war over on the most fundamental level is what constitutes truth and how it should be determined.