RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/is-biden-taking-lessons-from-lady-aoc/

U.S. President Joe Biden began his Earth Day speech at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia on Monday by singling out a few prominent climate-change figures in attendance. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who introduced him, was one of them.

“You know, I learned a long time ago: Listen to that lady; listen to that lady,” he said. “We’re going to talk more about another part of the world, too, real quickly.”

It doesn’t take a genius to guess what region he had in mind. AOC—as the member of his party’s radical “Squad” is familiarly known—has been vocal in her demand that Biden suspend all aid to Israel over the “genocide” it’s committing in Gaza.

When the president said that he and she would be discussing this topic “real quickly,” he was hinting at a meeting that was to take place after the event. Indeed, when it was over, he, AOC and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) flew together to the White House, where the four buddies who share an aversion to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were seen entering the Oval Office.

Before they hopped on the Marine One helicopter and headed to D.C., Biden was stopped by reporters. “Do you condemn the antisemitic protests on college campuses?” one asked.

Echoing the question in his answer, he replied, “I condemn the antisemitic protests; that’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and how they’re being …”

It’s not unusual for Biden to trail off, mid-sentence. But in this case, he may have decided against completing his outrageous statement.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/08/is-the-great-illusion-in-ruins/

In 2021, Joe Biden was elected after a bitterly fought campaign that deposed the incumbent Donald Trump. Democrats eventually captured, for a time, both the House and Senate, ensuring the most left-wing government in modern American history.

Americans were then set to witness a great experiment. For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.

In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment—and the unfortunate disasters that followed.

But first, how was such a radical move to the left even possible in a center-right America?

The Democratic nominee, Biden, had earlier united the left, but only through a Faustian deal. The handlers of a nearly non compos mentis Biden had ushered all his 2020 primary rivals out of the primary races in unison.

But in exchange for their exits that ensured Biden the nomination, the left took over his general campaign—in which Biden was virtually relegated to his basement—and then set his agenda.

Who was running things?

The mysterious architects of White House ideology included, inter alia, the omnipresent, now-Washington-DC-dwelling Obamas, the old socialist gadfly Bernie Sanders, the fossilized tribunes of the black and Latino congressional caucuses, the DEI firebrand Squad, and the neo-socialist scold Elizabeth Warren.

https://quillette.com/2024/04/04/innovation-utilitarianism-conor-mckinley-tesla/

Utilitarianism is currently en vogue. Two of its important contentions are that all lives have equal value and that decisions should be evaluated on how much they raise average well-being (so-called utility). This philosophy underpins many left-wing economic policies because the same amount of money has more value to a poor person than to a rich one. For example, if you take $100 from Jeff Bezos and give it to a starving artist, Bezos won’t even notice but the artist will have ramen for weeks, and average utility will therefore increase. This is probably the rationale behind Bernie Sanders’ claim that the “obscene level of income and wealth inequality in America is a profoundly moral issue that we cannot continue to ignore.” Implicit in this is the assumption that the redistribution of wealth would provide much more benefit to the poor than it would harm the rich.

The problem is that this is only true if we restrict our view to the domestic arena. When inequality is measured on a global scale, most people in the developed world can be considered affluent. If we include foreigners into our utility calculus, we should recommend very different policies: in particular, we should loosen regulations on biotech; we should oppose excessive unionisation; and we should increase the number of highly skilled immigrants we accept.

All these policies promote the most effective foreign aid programme ever discovered: innovation. Figuring out how to do things is expensive, but once we develop that knowledge, it is relatively cheap to distribute. For example, US research institutions and venture capitalists have poured billions into AI research and, as a result, ChatGPT has given every kid with access to the Internet a personal tutor that is an expert in every subject. There is well documented research to show that this effect, known as “catch-up growth,” partially explains why emerging markets grow faster than developed ones. They can just copy what has already worked for us.

Biotech

Developing countries are generally unable to invest large amounts into the research and development of new drugs. But, thanks to innovation in the US, Japan, and Europe, this has not stopped them from accessing vaccines against polio, malaria, smallpox, and COVID-19.

Pharmaceutical companies get lots of bad press for their high profit margins on successful drugs (think of Martin Shkreli). But these criticisms fail to consider the underlying pharmaceutical business model: successful drugs have to pay for all the drugs that never made it to market.