RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/time-give-thanks-bruce-bawer/

Dare I suggest that many of us aren’t feeling terribly inclined to be thankful this year? The months of lockdown have sapped our spirits and then some, taking a psychological toll of a kind that has yet to be fully appreciated, let alone properly diagnosed. The utterly insane Antifa and BLM riots – plus the spineless public officials who refused to quell them, and the disgraceful journalists who called them “mostly peaceful” – made many of us ask, in genuine bafflement and alarm: what on Earth has happened to America? And the possibility that rampant electoral fraud will deny the best president of our lifetimes a second term has caused widespread bitterness – not to mention astonishment and disillusion at the thought that so many American election officials could be capable of such Third World-level corruption.

There are other reasons for dismay. During the Trump years, we’ve learned that almost everyone in our national news media is simply not to be trusted. We’ve learned that Barack Obama, in an audacious act of treason that had the support of Biden, Hillary, and others, actively sought to unseat his successor. The idea that these traitors will probably get off not only scot-free but bathed in enduring adulation is grounds for a major funk.

Add to all this the prospect of a Biden-Harris administration, with everything that that signifies – including the re-empowerment of China, the reversal of Trump’s economic triumphs, a return to a Palestinian-centered Middle Eastern policy, an end to responsible border controls, and the acceleration of poisonous left-wing cultural developments at home – and it’s far from a formula for good cheer.

As 2020 approaches its close, in short, there’s plenty of cause for concern about the direction America will take in 2021 and afterwards.

All the more reason, then, to turn away from the news, at least for a day, and embrace Thanksgiving. Bah and humbug to the autocratic governors and mayors who are ordering us not to gather together. The hell with those social-justice warriors for whom Thanksgiving is nothing other than an opportunity to accuse America of racism and genocide.

https://thepostmillennial.com/jim-mattis-rejects-america-first/

Among the many things that General Jim Mattis would like to see done differently under Biden administration, a transition away from a United States international policy of America First makes the top of his list.

Former Secretary of Defense and Four-Star General Mattis wrote an op-ed in Foreign Affairs on Monday, explaining why the United States should prioritize stronger relations with its allies instead of putting its interests above those of the international community.Mattis’ contention is that, as powerful as the United States might be militarily, its interests are best served when it can count on a group of reliable allies to further its goals instead of a threat of force. 

Over the past four years, Mattis believes that an “America First” mentality has hindered the investment necessary to create that kind of international network and has left the United States disconnected.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) noted that it will be hard to push through this agenda reversal when there are more than 70 million Americans who support America First.

Under the Trump administration, the United States has pulled back from NATO, demanding that Euopean nations not leave the US to foot the bill for their protection. The Trump administration pulled funding from the World Health Organization over its poor handling of informing the global community about the pandemic. The US also withdrew from the Asia-Pacific trade pact. These are actions Mattis sees as characteristic of a US-first international policy.

“Continued failure to adequately invest in relationships with allies and partners and to cooperate with them to shape the international environment risks the erosion of this network… Even worse, it could result in the emergence of other, competing networks, presaging an international order from which the United States is excluded, unable to influence outcomes because it is simply not present,” Mattis said.

Mattis’ proposal for a Biden administration would be a significant departure from the last four years—one that many, like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), vehemently disagree with. He stated his support of an international foreign policy that emphasizes US interests abroad.

https://www.aier.org/article/the-blizzard-of-bogus-journalism-on-covid/

This game of hunt-and-kill Covid cases has reached peak absurdity, especially in media culture. 

Take a look at Supermarkets are the most common place to catch Covid, new data reveals. It’s a story on a “study” assembled by Public Health England (PHE) from the NHS Test and Trace App. Here is the conclusion. In the six days of November studied, “of those who tested positive, it was found that 18.3 per cent had visited a supermarket.”

Now, if the alarm bells don’t go off with that one, you didn’t pay attention to 7th grade science. If the app had also included showering, eating, and breathing, it might have found a 100% correlation. Yes, the people who tested positive probably did shop, as do most people. That doesn’t mean that shopping gives you Covid and it certainly doesn’t mean that shopping kills you. 

Even if shopping is a way to get Covid, this is a very widespread and mostly mild virus for 99.8% percent of the population with an infection fatality rate as low as 0.05% for those under 70. Competent infectious disease experts have said multiple times that test, track, and isolate strategies are nearly useless for controlling viruses such as this. 

https://www.aier.org/article/death-by-lockdown/

On March 28 – very early in the pandemic – AIER published an article that I felt at the time received far too little attention. “Drugs, Suicide, and Crime: Empirical Estimates of the Human Toll of the Shutdown” by economists Audrey and Thomas Duncan cited empirical literature on the human toll of economic devastation. 

This article forecasted more than 100,000 excess deaths due to drug overdoses, suicide, alcoholism, homicide, and untreated depression – all a result not of the virus but of policies of mandatory human separation, economic downturn, business and school closures, closed medical services, and general depression that comes with a loss of freedom and choice. 

These two economists demonstrated that as bad as a virus is, policies that wreck normal social functioning will cause massive and completely unnecessary suffering and death. Because the article was so well-cited, with references to all the available literature, I thought it would make a difference. But after it appeared, it was crickets. I was amazed. Here you have a beautiful piece of research that perfectly forecasted the nightmare being created by politicians and their advisers and it made no dent in the national narrative. 

Here we are seven months later and the worst has come true. These two economists should be considered prophets. Sure enough, the Centers for Disease Control has documented a shocking number of excess deaths not from Covid. 

Scott Atlas summarizes:

Hispanic: 40% excess deaths NOT Covid related 
Black: 46% NOT Covid related 
White: 38% NOT Covid related 
25-44: 77% excess deaths NOT Covid related 
65+: 39% NOT Covid related

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/operation-warp-speed-and-the-creative-society/

Its success is a reminder that there is no limit to American ingenuity when government stands alongside the people rather than in front of them.

R ecently the New York Times published an in-depth report on the success of the public-private partnership to develop a coronavirus vaccine. The program, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, devoted the resources of the U.S. government to aid private companies in the design, testing, and distribution of an effective vaccination for COVID-19. The deadline: one year after the virus’s appearance in Wuhan, China.

And it worked. If the FDA grants emergency use authorization to Pfizer in a few weeks, as is widely expected, the first shots will be administered to frontline health-care workers before New Year’s. The end of the pandemic is in sight.

Pfizer stayed somewhat aloof from Operation Warp Speed. After reporting results from its vaccine trials, a company spokesperson was quick to point out that Pfizer did not receive funding from the program. But it did call on the government a couple of times, and it agreed to sell 100 million doses of its vaccine to the United States long before clinical trials were complete. Moderna, by contrast, worked closely with the feds. “Nearly $2.5 billion in federal funds helped Moderna buy raw materials, expand its factory, and enlarge its work force by 50 percent,” according to the Times. “In return, it promised to deliver 100 million doses to the federal government.”

https://spectator.us/salem-thanksgiving-coronavirus-panic-safetyism/

Had King James’s Privy Council contained a proto-Anthony Fauci in 1620, there might not have been a Thanksgiving holiday for the current-day Fauci and his peers to cancel four centuries later. The transatlantic voyage that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock would have been unthinkable under the ‘stay safe’ philosophy that now governs American life.

Nearly half the 102 occupants of the Mayflower died in their first year of settlement at Plymouth, sometimes at a rate of three a day. Such a mortality rate was predictable. The earlier outpost at Jamestown, founded in 1607, lost 66 of its original 104 settlers in its first nine months. By 1609, following the also predictable loss at sea of a ship coming to resupply the colony, starvation at Jamestown had grown so dire that residents dug corpses from their graves to eat any remaining flesh, later reported the colony’s first president in 1625.

Other early settlement casualties included the outpost of Roanoke, which simply disappeared. Overall, for every six would-be colonists who ventured across the Atlantic, only one survived, according to one estimate. Trying to establish a new life in the New World was most definitely not ‘safe’.

And yet the voyagers kept coming, driven by something beyond safetyism — religious zeal, ambition, passion for discovery, the desire for greater freedom. Those Americans who later spread across the continent, whether as solo explorers or in wagon trains, likewise eschewed a ‘stay safe’ philosophy.

Today, we are strangling American society in order to avoid a risk of death so infinitesimal — roughly 0.001 percent — for the majority of Americans that it would not have registered in any possible cost-benefit analysis governing both notable American endeavors and quotidian activities over the last four centuries. Our current Thanksgiving Day mantras — ‘Stay within your pod. Stay within your bubble. Stay within your household’ (in the words of a University of California, San Francisco, epidemiologist); don’t travel, don’t share food, don’t touch your family members or friends, speak only in hushed tones — make a mockery of the spirit that creates a country and sustains human life.

Dr. Albert Ellis, one of the world’s top psychologists, suggests that the study of past track records is an essential undertaking for an effective assessment of the future: “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” 

This suggestion is also applicable to the assessment of policy formulation by the next US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who will be the most influential foreign and national security policy-maker in President-elect Joe Biden’s Administration.

Blinken’s close ties with Biden, dating back to Biden’s chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, make him, potentially, as influential as were Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Jim Baker during the presidency of Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush respectively.

Israel policy.  Blinken opposes Israel’s annexation of – and expanded Jewish presence in – any part of Judea and Samaria, as well as in Jerusalem beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines. He considers Israeli dramatic land concessions to be a prerequisite for peace.  He supports the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the pre-1967 Jordan-occupied-Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem. However, according to Blinken, “US aid to Israel is beyond debate and should never be used as leverage to influence Israel’s policies toward Palestinians…. It’s in the US interest that Israel has the means to secure itself…. Israel’s security is challenged on a daily basis. Israel faces existential threats every single day.”  

Palestinian policy. Blinken assumes that a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and East Jerusalem would serve justice and would spare Israel a demographic calamity. He ignores the well-documented demographic reality, which exposes the myth of the Arab demographic timebomb. He approaches the Palestinian issue from the human rights angle, notwithstanding the Palestinian track record as a role model for anti-Jewish hate-education and incitement, 100-year-old anti-Jewish terrorism and intra-Arab terrorism and treachery. Irrespective of Middle East reality, he believes in the centrality of the Palestinian issue on the Arab agenda and the pursuit of Israel-Arab peace.  
Blinken aims to restore annual financial aid to the Palestinian Authority (which was suspended due to the PA’s financial support of families of terrorists and the systematic heralding of terrorists), as well as the annual financial transfer to UNRWA (which was suspended due to its funding of the PA’s hate education). Also, he will reopen the PLO office in Washington, DC.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thursday is Thanksgiving, a uniquely American holiday. (And, with sheltering in place, unique to this year!) Like Christmas and Easter, it is a religious holiday, as the Pilgrims who we celebrate, and who landed in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts 400 hundred years ago this month, were escaping religious persecution. But, while the Pilgrims were Christians, this holiday is spiritual in a broader sense. The God we thank when we sit down to feast may be whatever God we choose. After all, according to a 2019 Pew Research survey a third of Americans – 35% – do not consider themselves Christian, but all celebrate Thanksgiving. So, no matter one’s religion, if any, all give thanks for the good fortune to live in this Country. 

The Pilgrims were Puritan refugees from England, where they had wanted a simpler and purer church than the Church of England offered. They went to Leiden, Holland around 1610, but returned to England to sail from Plymouth to the new world, in September 1620. Not one of the 102 passengers or 30 crew members would have made that trip without a belief that God would guide them. They crossed three thousand miles of unchartered ocean to an unknown destination, to arrive in November as winter was taking hold.

The Mayflower Society, made up of 150,000 descendants, estimates there are 35 million people who could trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower. The concept of the power of compound interest proves the point. Of the passengers and crew members, about one third died that first winter. Most of the rest (about 80 people) stayed. Since I can trace my ancestry back to William Bradford, I know that I am, through his son and granddaughter Mercy Steele, the 11th generation – William Bradford would be my nine-greats grandfather, his genes diluted by the fact that I also carry the genes of another 2047 nine-greats grandparents![1] (Apparently through William Bradford, Clint Eastwood and Hugh Heffner are cousins!) While many children died in infancy, most families were large, as children were assets. If one assumes, for sake of argument, that each family had three children and that twenty-three of the seventy-five survivors had children one gets to 35 million in the 13th generation, my grandchildren’s generation.[2] The actual number of Mayflower descendants may be far higher. Other ships, carrying mostly British subjects, began arriving in 1621. Conclusion: The Mayflower Society, to which I do not belong, is not exclusive.