RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/build-back-badly/

Less than 24 hours after the Congressional Budget Office announced that the “Build Back Better” (BBB) bill will increase the federal deficit by $367 billion, House Democrats passed the $1.75 trillion legislation with no GOP votes. This bill, essentially a far left wish list of climate and social spending boondoggles, will certainly exacerbate inflation if passed by the Senate. Hence the absence of public support for BBB. A new Harvard/Harris poll asked registered voters, “Do you think a $1.5 to $2 trillion dollar social spending bill will lead to more inflation, less inflation, or would it have no effect on inflation?” A majority (56%) answered, “More.”

It’s increasingly apparent that the specter of inflation is haunting the pocketbooks of most Americans. According to a new Economist/YouGov poll, 76 percent of Americans reported that the price of gas had “gone up a lot” during the past year. The survey also found that 65 percent had experienced significant price increases for food. Moreover, when likely voters are asked about how BBB would affect the nation’s economy in general, it gets a thumbs down. A new survey released by the Trafalgar Group asked likely voters if the bill will be helpful or hurtful to America’s economic recovery?” A majority (52.4%) said that it would be very or somewhat hurtful. An analysis by the Tax Foundation agrees:

We estimate the new House bill would reduce long-run GDP by about 0.4 percent and long-run American incomes (as measured by gross national product or GNP) by about 0.4 percent. The bill would also reduce the capital stock by about 0.8 percent and wages by 0.3 percent, while eliminating 107,000 full-time equivalent jobs.… We estimate that the bill would result in $675 billion of accumulated deficits (including interest payments) during the first decade, leading to an increase in payments to foreign owners of the national debt.

The hilarious response from the Democrats to this has been to claim that BBB will somehow bolster the economy and reduce inflationary pressure. ABC News quotes Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) making this preposterous claim: “Want to fight inflation? Support Build Back Better.” Vice President Harris delivered herself of this vapid assertion during an interview on ABC News’ “Good Morning America”: “When you look at the numbers, the whole point about inflation and why it hurts us is because prices go up. With the Build Back Better agenda, it’s going to bring the cost down.… Talk to the 17 Nobel laureates who are economists who actually have studied the issue.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/dont_let_the_sobs_get_you_down.html

As with anybody who has ever shared an opinion not sanctioned by our leftist ruling class, I often come across some mind-controlled foot soldier for Marxism online, trashing something I’ve written and using the same limited vocabulary of vulgarities to tell me why I should do something profane to myself.  Oh, well!  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Sometimes I get called a “damn hillbilly,” and I think, “Well, thank you.”  If Americans — wherever they now live — could reach deep down inside themselves to find a little leftover hillbilly from a previous generation, then America as a country would find the self-resilience, tenacity, and grit to survive with gusto any bad times that might be ahead.

Unlike the political left, I choose free speech over the government’s ever-expanding war on “hate speech” and the inevitable mental slavery such criminalization of thoughts and words always brings.  That’s how tyranny thrives.  First, certain language is labeled blasphemous and forbidden by polite society because it “triggers” listeners.  Then censorship is justified in order to banish potentially harmful “triggering.”  Then the list of “triggering” offenses expands until every utterance is circumscribed.  And finally, only one government-enforced belief system remains because there are no longer contrary yet permissible points of view.

How do you teach millions of people to obey the State?  Forbid them from having certain thoughts or saying certain things until their natural mental powers shrivel into nothing more than command and control centers for Pavlovian routine.  Informal “hate speech” codes usher in formalized “hate crime” punishments, which always lead to one-party political authoritarianism, which usually awakens a sizable chunk of the self-conquered population to grasp that in its polite obeisance to the perpetually aggrieved, formerly free people inadvertently traded their freedom for the claptrap of “political correctness.”  When that happens, those who want freedom back are forced to fight for it.  The cycle has repeated many times throughout history, and though we are modern, we are not wise.  When hard-won experience is forgotten, those who fight for freedom must remind others what they’ve already lost.  That is where we are today.

That said, I also sometimes come across someone online who has graciously taken the time to read something I’ve written yet finds what I’ve said too terrifying to entertain.  How can the United States of America be at the precipice of replacing liberty with outright tyranny?  

https://patriotpost.us/alexander/84288?mailing_id=6279&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.6279&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=body

“If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” —George Washington (1793)

In just 10 months since Joe Biden’s coronation, the Democrat Party has devolved into a socialist cesspool at an unprecedented pace. While the Democrats dabbled with communist models as far back as FDR’s regime, its most prominent party principals, enemies of Liberty Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, have now joined Biden’s outright embrace of totalitarian tyranny by leading the next generation of fascists and “useful idiots.”

The key questions regarding this massive political shift are: Is the surge to the left just cyclical? What is behind the rapid Demo descent into the socialist authoritarian abyss? Is it the greatest threat we face under Biden?

Looking back two presidential administrations, Barack Obama’s socialists seeded this descent after his victory over “moderate Republican” John McCain in 2008. Predictably, within two years of his taking office, there was a midterm Republican wave, which formed a temporary seawall against the erosion of American Liberty.

In 2012, Republicans ran a “moderate Republican” again and, predictably, Mitt Romney was defeated by Obama. As was the case in 2010, that resulted in a 2014 midterm Republican wave, further growing the House Republican majority and restoring Senate Republican control.

But this midterm congressional cycle does not imply a balancing of political scales, and if Republicans take back the House and Senate in 2022, that will not correct the current socialist surge. Democrat presidents and their congressional lap dogs take 10 steps to the left and Republican midterm majorities either hold the line or move it back to the right a few steps. The net result is that there has been a significant central government shift toward statist authoritarianism since the 1992 election of Bill Clinton, who defeated another “moderate Republican,” George H.W. Bush.

While Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump significantly moved the political needle in the right direction toward constitutional Liberty, Republican congressional majorities since Reagan have not succeeded in holding that line against Democrat presidents.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/serial-liar-adam-schiff-says-doesnt-regret-pushing-fake-hillary-funded-steele-dossier-video/

The Daily Mail reports that Dr. Atlas is coming out with a new book in a couple of days discussing his time at the White House working with crazy and corrupt doctors Fauci and Birx.

Strict lockdowns pushed by White House advisers Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx failed to stop the vulnerable dying from COVID-19, while families suffered and children lost out on their education, according to a forthcoming book by Trump adviser Dr. Scott Atlas…

…A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America,’ is published on November 23 by Bombardier.

‘People were dying from the virus, and the lockdown policies were not preventing the deaths,’ he writes in a copy obtained by DailyMail.com

‘The simple logic of assuming you could stop the spread of, and some said eliminate, a highly contagious virus by shutting down society after millions had been infected was worse than nonsensical.

https://thepatrioticvoice.com/biden-torpedoes-us-labor-production-to-its-lowest-in-40-years/

We all know President Biden is as useless as tits on a bull. Now he can’t even get people to work thanks to his lovely plans for free money to keep people out of work, and his inability to get large-scale employers to pay real wages for their employee’s hard work.

Additionally, the smaller mom-and-pop businesses have found themselves being pushed out of the economy through mandates and forced closings. Their leases and taxes didn’t stop when the pandemic forced them to close, and now many are out of business. As all this occurs, inflation is skyrocketing, and people everywhere are finding themselves consistently doing more with less.

Given how quickly inflation can rise and how slowly it lowers, we are finding ourselves in very perilous territory, and Biden is the cornerstone for all these problems.

As the U.S. Labor Department outlined on Thursday “Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased 5.0 percent in the third quarter of 2021, as output increased 1.7 percent and hours worked increased 7.0 percent. This is the lowest rate of quarterly productivity growth since the second quarter of 1981, when the measure decreased 5.1 percent.”

Let’s break this down a bit.

As defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics “Labor productivity is defined as real output per labor hour, and growth in labor productivity is measured as the change in this ratio over time. Labor productivity growth is what enables workers to produce more goods and services than they otherwise could for a given number of work hours.” In other words, people are doing less with the time they are working.

http://www.tevitroy.org/25821/wokeness-medicine

Twenty years ago, the physician Sally Satel argued in her book PC M.D. that political correctness had taken over medicine. PC M.D. described a lowering of standards to increase doctor diversity, the blithe use of dubious “recovered memories” in sexual-abuse allegations, and the endorsement for political reasons of questionable techniques such as “therapeutic touch.” Some of these concerns no longer have much purchase in our common cultural conversation. But Satel’s larger point continues to resonate: Politics, and especially leftist political theories emanating from the universities, can interfere with the practice of medicine in a deleterious way.

These days, the problem is not “politically correct” medicine, but “woke” medicine. PC’s impact on medicine was real, and worrisome, but the current fear is that PC’s implications could pale before woke’s troubling impositions, which are more intensive in both scale and scope across multiple sectors in health care.

To what extent is ideology influencing the medical field?

The first question is whether wokeness is directing doctors to treat patients unequally. Wokeness at its heart looks at intersectionality and judges people’s merits and worth on their place along the spectrum of oppression. This pernicious concept means that those with more claims to historic oppression should be granted preferable treatment over those with fewer claims—with white “cisnormative” males having none of said claims. The enshrinement of this concept contravenes the foundational principles enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath, the ethic that has guided medical practice for millennia.

The Hippocratic Oath does not actually say, “First, do no harm.” What it does say is this: “Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick.” It specifically directs doctors to avoid the mistreatment of patients, “whether they are free men or slaves.” The practical effects of this doctrine are extraordinary. At the national level, for example, Israeli doctors famously treat victims of terror attacks and the perpetrators of such attacks the same way, with no distinction. This approach has long been widely accepted as a signal of a doctor’s morality and good character and has been broadly absorbed in our popular culture.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/down-qanon-rabbit-hole/

Lies, in many cases, are comparable to sparks. They might not be very dangerous in and of themselves but under the right conditions — or, perhaps, the wrong conditions — they can lead to spectacular fires.

Consider, for example, how a chain of events that began with an anonymous message being posted on an obscure message board in October 2017 led, four years later, to hundreds of Americans gathering in Dallas, Texas, to await the return of the long dead JFK Jr.

Back in October 2017, someone calling themselves “Q” began posting bizarre messages on the /pol/ board of the notorious website 4Chan. Q, claiming to have high level White House security clearance, spoke of “the Storm,” an event in which President Trump and his allies would arrest hundreds of his rivals and expose them as child-eating Luciferians. Somehow, this event failed to transpire.

In fact, Q had something of a talent for failed predictions. He, and his followers in the colorful pro-Trump movement that we know as “QAnon,” predicted the arrests of everyone from Hillary Clinton to Tom Hanks, all of whom have remained conspicuously free. They predicted that Donald Trump would be inaugurated, which, somehow, has failed to happen.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nancy-pelosi-losing-her-grip-democrats/

Top Democrats took a media victory lap last weekend, crowing about the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that finally cleared the House on Friday night after months of false starts and intra-party squabbling. The vote came only after Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her latest Hail Mary, attempted to satisfy progressive lawmakers by also allowing a procedural vote on the massive social spending bill craved by liberals. Even then, Pelosi was forced to rely on a handful of Republicans to secure a majority.

Predictably, the White House was eager to spin the bill’s passage as major win for the Biden agenda, claiming it would energize voters and pave the way for trillions more in government spending just in time for the holidays. And yet, despite the high fives and happy talk with reporters, many congressional Democrats will surely spend this week’s recess reflecting on the months of chaotic leadership that preceded the vote. Some will no doubt conclude, if they haven’t already, that they are watching a speaker in decline and a leadership team losing its grip on its own party.

For House Democrats, who face voters in less than a year, that’s an uncomfortable place to be.

While there has been some handwringing on the right over Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s inability to keep 13 of his members from voting for the bill, such criticism overlooks a political reality. As others have noted, infrastructure was always destined to reach the president’s desk, with or without Republican support. Even if reconciliation talks broke down and the entire process became unsalvageable, Democrats were never heading into the midterms without at least one more legislative achievement. Faced with a binary choice of spending less money than they had hoped for or spending nothing at all, it was a safe bet that eventually progressives would opt for the former.