RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/11/the-dire-implications-of-covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy/

The seven-day moving average for COVID-19 deaths in the United States is around 1,800, the same as in early December 2020, before any vaccines were authorized for emergency use. How is that possible, 10 months after safe and effective vaccines began to be administered? 

It’s due to a combination of three interrelated factors: the Delta variant’s increased transmissibility and virulence; the degree of immunity in the population, which is a function of both the efficacy and durability of the vaccines; and the decisions of individuals and policymakers. Peoples’ reluctance to get the COVID-19 vaccine – what’s known as “vaccine hesitancy” – has played a large role in the nation’s failure to reach herd immunity. As of Oct. 6 the U.S. population is only 56.4% fully vaccinated, which makes us 41st most vaccinated in the world, despite being the headquarters of vaccine development for all three FDA-approved vaccines.

Over the course of the pandemic, the goal of COVID-19 vaccine has evolved; originally it was intended to prevent symptomatic infections (the criterion for efficacy in the clinical trials). With widespread vaccination, we are now seeing so-called “breakthrough” infections (mostly mild) in vaccinees, but the vaccines have been highly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths.

Misinformation is rife and has its roots both in domestic political activism and insidious foreign propaganda. Much of the anti-vaccine sentiment is the product of what can only be described as an industry, the principal protagonists of which are an organized group of professional propagandists. As reported in the science journal Nature, they are people “running multi-million-dollar organizations, incorporated mainly in the United States, with as many as 60 staff each.”  Some of the most prolific were identified by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which found that a small number of people, the “Disinformation Dozen,” produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/12/how-about-some-data-covid-19-transparency/

Since the early days of the pandemic, the public has been misled and misinformed, the goalposts pulled down and taken out of the stadium, and the data too often puzzling. Much of the country has lost confidence in politicians and public health officials. It’s important to know if those doubts are legitimate or misplaced.

One route to the truth would be a federal grand jury probe that would determine if the case and death counts have been inflated and not reflective of reality.

Would it be a witch hunt? A political sideshow? No. It would be a sober and justifiable inquiry. The nation deserves to know if a crisis was manufactured or real. If the numbers are accurate, then a probe will go a long way toward restoring confidence in our public health officials. If they’re not, then someone needs to be held accountable for the errors, negligence, or intentional deception that hurt so many and divided a country.

“​​Public health policy must be based upon accurate and independently verifiable data to optimize outcomes and strengthen the public’s trust in the people leading them through this crisis,” say a couple of Republican legislators in Oregon who are asking the U.S. attorney there for an “independent state and/or special federal grand jury investigation” of the data.

“The ability to definitively diagnose who is infectious,” they continue, “and distinguish them from who is not is paramount in assessing the situation and ensuring the people in immediate need receive the skilled care they deserve.”

More than 1,700 Oregonians and 53,000 in total have signed the lawmakers’ petition.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/partisan-science-antiscience-facts-misrepresentation-fauci-lancet-lab-leak-11633960740?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Medieval thinkers pretending to infallibility often claimed to have received a direct revelation from God. Since the 19th century, secular thinkers have invoked science. As Anthony Fauci said in June, “a lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly are attacks on science.”

One can often tell that an appeal to science is unwarranted without knowing anything about the science in question. If science is treated as a solid block, each part of which is as indubitable as all the others, then science has been misunderstood. Science always contains some propositions less firmly grounded than others: on the frontier, newly discovered, based on experiments not readily replicated.

Some parts of climate science have been tested countless times—like the greenhouse effect—but specific predictions about rising temperatures and their effects have often proved mistaken. Early last year we were treated to the delightful spectacle of Montana’s Glacier National Park removing signs that said its glaciers would be gone by 2020. Some scientific statements prove false; that’s how science works. Those who claim that to doubt any part of the consensus is to be “antiscience” or “a denier” are themselves being unscientific.

Science operates by a process of criticism. Scientists don’t experience divine revelations, they propose hypotheses that they and others test. This rigorous process of testing gives science the persuasiveness that mere journalism lacks. If a scientific periodical expels editors or peer reviewers because they don’t accept some prevailing theory, that process has been short-circuited. Those who call for such expulsions have missed the whole point of how science works. They are the true deniers, far more dangerous to science than a religious fundamentalist who believes the world is 6,000 years old.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/10/revolt-of-the-masses-the-left-has-overplayed-its-h/

I think the left is realizing it has a tiger by the tail. The people are getting uppity.

Parents are assailing school boards over critical race theory and transgender madness. So much so that the Biden Justice Department is sending out the FBI to investigate whether, as the National School Boards Association bombastically charges, some parents are guilty of “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

Boy, it’s lucky for those BLM/Antifa rioters in 2020 that they refrained from badmouthing teachers and school officials while torching the cities. Their “peaceful protests” might have been investigated.

Meanwhile, former Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton bag man who is running again for his old job, stated, “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.” He added, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

This stuff ticks off parents, and GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin is taking full advantage. He is running ads accurately depicting Mr. McAuliffe as an authoritarian, anti-parent elitist.

Republicans are looking to take back Virginia in November and Congress in 2022. Democrats in districts carried by former President Trump are as nervous as a hockey goalie playing without a face mask.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/cancel-culture-is-no-laughing-matter/

 Comedian Dave Chappell’s latest Netflix special, “The Closer,” is making the rounds but not for its hilarity. No, its high ratings can be attributed to the venom that it has elicited from the mainstream press and social media.

Nothing piques curiosity more than public outrage, after all. There’s no doubt, then, that a huge portion of viewers tuned in just to see what all the fuss was about.
As a longtime fan of the irreverent performer’s, I would have watched the show anyway. But many of my peers hadn’t paid the slightest attention to Chappelle until the scandal erupted. Once it did, they rushed to join in the conversation by seeing the program for themselves.

Chappelle was already Enemy No. 1 in LBGTQ circles for his “transphobia.” He’s been raked over the coals by feminists for his ostensible disdain for women. Some whites, as well, don’t take kindly to the veteran black comic’s persistent mockery of them.

But this time, his jokes about Jews have aroused serious ire. The anger stems from two main passages of the hour-and-a-quarter-long act.
He leads in to the first anti-Semitic sequence by talking about the COVID-19 pandemic by insulting other groups.
“I don’t want you to worry about me,” he begins. “I’m vaccinated; I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. I’ve got to admit, that’s probably the most n**gerish decision I’ve made in a long time. … I walk in to the doc like, ‘Give me the third best option; I’ll have what the homeless people are having.’”
He goes on to say that he actually contracted the virus, which made him feel “gross.”
“I haven’t felt dirty like that in a long time,” he says. “Last time I can remember feeling dirty like that, man, I must have been a little boy … being molested by a preacher. But don’t feel bad for me; I liked it.”
He then recounts having had to quarantine for 10 days. Left alone in his room, he says, he watched videos, many of which, “sadly, were of black people beating up Asians for no reason.”

https://townhall.com/columnists/josephbowman/2021/10/11/sympathy-for-the-devil-columbus-day-and-why-it-matters-n2597185

Today is the second Monday of October and thus is Columbus Day. For many of us, this is little more than a three-day weekend. However, it is seen as an unjust celebration of “whiteness” and imperialism for an increasing number of Americans and signifies how uniquely evil America is. This hatred for Columbus and the misunderstanding of what it is he did is nothing new. In fact, the earliest criticisms of Columbus were made about a century ago by the old Democratic party institution, The Ku Klux Klan. The Klan did not want Americans celebrating a southern European Catholic like Columbus. They argued America was a protestant country founded by Northern Europeans. Anti-Columbus sentiment has festered and grown because of the broader apathy of many Americans who see today as a mere excuse for a three-day weekend. Even Columbus himself did not quite understand the magnitude of his voyages. He went to his grave thinking he had discovered the West Indies and not an entirely new pair of continents. Columbus and his explorations matter, though, and not just for people from the United States.

One of the common dismissals of Columbus is that he never even set foot in America. Instead, he landed in the Bahamas. So why should we care about him? What sense does it make for Americans to celebrate an Italian explorer in the employ of Spain, landing in the Bahamas while searching for the Indies?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/10/the-left-got-what-it-wanted-so-now-what/

What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?

Then

No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.

Foreign Policy published an article by a liberal Obama Administration lawyer outlining all the ways to remove an elected president as soon as possible—including consideration of a military coup. 

The FBI and the entrenched bureaucrats at the Justice Department continued their prior failed efforts during the campaign to seed the lies of the fabricated Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. A 22-month-long and $40 million hoax ended with the special counsel himself, a doddering Robert Mueller, swearing under oath that he essentially knew nothing about the dossier or Fusion GPS—the twin catalysts that had prompted his very own investigation. 

Fired FBI Director James Comey—a lion on Twitter, and a lamb when under oath—on over 240 occasions testified to the Congress that he either did not know or could not remember, when asked details about the collusion fraud that the philosopher G-man had helped perpetuate. 

No one worried about the weaponization of government. So, we went right from the nefarious legacy of John Brennan (who lied under oath to Congress twice), James Clapper (who lied under oath to Congress once), James Comey (who leaked confidential presidential memos), Andrew McCabe (who gave false testimony to federal investigators), Lisa Page (who was fired from the special counsel’s legal team for various unprofessional conduct), Peter Strzok (about whom there is not enough space to detail his transgressions), and the now convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith onto the next round of impeachments. 

Two of them followed. Neither was conducted by a special counsel. There was no array of witnesses, no prosecutorial report. Much less were there formal charges of a specific high crime or misdemeanor, or bribery or treason, as specified by the Constitution. 

In the end, both farces ended in trials—but not before the Left had established lots of baleful precedents. Impeachment is now simply a tool to embarrass a president in his first term when he has lost the House. A Senate trial could hound an innocent president, even as a private citizen out of office. And a chief justice need not preside over the Senate trial. If and when Joe Biden loses the House, the Left should applaud any attempt to impeach him—given it established the new model of opposition.

Of the January 6 debacle, we were not told that it was a riot involving lawbreakers who would be punished. Instead, we were lied to that it was an “armed insurrection,” a “coup,” and “a rebellion” of massive proportions. 

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. In Animal Farm fashion, there were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

It mattered nothing that “armed” in the case of January 6 meant that no firearms were used or even found among the protestors. No one was charged with conspiracy, insurrection, or racketeering. But many were placed in solitary confinement without specific charges being filed—to the utter delight of liberal groups like the ACLU and human rights organizations.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/10/10/the-clock-is-ticking-on-bidens-presidency-n1522886

Joe Biden’s massive $4 trillion spending bills are in mortal danger of collapsing under their own weight as the gap between what the radicals want and what less-radical Democrats will vote for widens.

To make matters worse for ordinary Americans, Biden has come down decisively on the side of the radicals, leaving party moderates to wonder where the sanity went.

The $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, already passed by the Senate, is languishing in political purgatory with radical Democrats in the House threatening to kill it unless their $3.5 trillion social safety net bill is approved first. Resentful moderates feel they’ve been lied to by the president and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who promised an up-or-down vote on the bipartisan bill before the end of September.

Here we are a third of the way through October and the House still isn’t ready to consider infrastructure legislation or the safety net bill. Why is that?

Part of the problem is that radicals will be radicals and despite sweet-talking and compromising from Biden, Bernie Sanders and his radical allies have announced they have “compromised enough” and have declared all-out war to get what they want.

Washington Post:

This upcoming stretch may be Biden’s last chance to revive a presidency that has suffered major blows in recent months. Since being rocked by the Afghan withdrawal and the surging delta variant over the summer, Biden’s approval rating has fallen steadily, hitting a low of 38 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll. Some of the campaign pledges that inspired Biden’s supporters, from voting rights to immigration reform, have fallen by the wayside. A jobs report Friday suggested the economy has been slowed down by the delta variant.

The dust-up between Sanders and moderate West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin is illustrative of Biden’s problems. Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin might live on the same planet but that’s about the extent of their similarities. Both men inhabit different realities. Both men talk past each other because neither man understands the language being spoken.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/columbus_changed_to_world_forever_and_for_the_better.html

Adam Smith is called the “father of modern economics.” His book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is one of history’s most influential books. In Chapter 1, Smith said that the discovery of the Americas was one of the “most important events recorded in the history of mankind.” Was he correct? Let’s review some history. 

Today it’s unpopular to support Columbus or to even recognize the significance of his achievements. Statutes of Columbus are being destroyed all over the Americas.

Was he the vile, murderous conquistador that “woke” 21st century, anti-history millennials portray him to be? Some of the atrocities that Columbus is accused of committing include: 

He/Europeans enslaved indigenous peoples;
He/Europeans tried to convert indigenous peoples to Christianity;
He/Europeans established brutal tribute systems; and
He failed to control subordinates who pillaged, plundered and killed the Natives.

So, was Columbus as evil as he’s accused or was he a “man of his time” who was doing what any other explorer would have done in his position?

In 1500, no European considered Native Americans to be their equal. Why? Because the Indians didn’t have the “one true religion.” That thinking is proven in Hernando Cortès’s 1519 Letter sent back to the Spanish Crown in which he described Aztec human sacrifice, and stated that God had sent the Spaniards to bring the Gospel to “these barbaric people.” This inequality among peoples and races was the accepted thinking the world over, by all people and all societies until recently. Name the time and era, and various peoples considered themselves to be the “chosen” or superior race, often because of religion. The Jews, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Vikings, Muslims and Christians all thought of themselves as being better than their neighbors, whom they conquered, often times slaughtered, and enslaved. Even today in 2021, many races and cultures still see themselves as such. Simply look at China for proof. Many Chinese openly are anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-anyone not Chinese.