RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/drug-prices-havent-been-going-up-generics-inflation-caps-biden-costs-innovation-11640533671?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Build Back Better may be dead, but its proposed drug price controls will likely reappear: negotiating prices for high-cost drugs in Medicare and price controls for most drugs limiting price increases to the annual inflation rate.

President Biden insists such controls are needed because pharmaceutical companies are “jacking up prices on a range of medicines.” He promises “to end the days when drug companies could increase their prices with no oversight and no accountability.” Yet while inflation has skyrocketed under Mr. Biden, drug prices are lower than when he took office. As the consumer-price index over the past year rose 6.8%, the largest increase in 39 years, prescription-drug prices fell 0.3%.

Mr. Biden and other pharmaceutical critics have mistakenly focused on increases in the list prices set by companies. But the actual prices consumers pay, after various discounts and rebates, are considerably lower than list prices, and changes in the two measures differ substantially. Insulin, with large increases in list prices over the past few decades, has become the poster child for unreasonable price increases. Yet net prices have increased much more slowly or not at all.

The best measure is the consumer-price index for prescription drugs, or CPI-Rx, which measures price changes in a large basket of drugs over time, accounting for discounts and most rebates. Another strength of the CPI-Rx is that it accounts for price declines that occur when consumers substitute cheaper generic versions for brand-name drugs. Too often, Mr. Biden and others focus on a few high-priced drugs and fail to consider the entire market.

https://drrichswier.com/category/culture-war/

A timeless paean for peace, written millennia ago by the Biblical Jewish prophet Isaiah, appears on a wall across the street from the entrance to the building in New York City ironically housing that most unholy and unjust organization: the United Nations. The delegates from every part of the world walk by it but most see and understand it not. The words include:

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift-up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. Isaiah 2:4.

On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson once wrote:

Those who hammer their guns into plows, will plow for those who do not.

In a perfect world, Isaiah’s words should be paramount. But this is not a perfect world; it never has been. Jefferson knew it, and it may sadly be much delayed before it yet becomes such a world as envisioned by Isaiah. All we can do is strive mightily to bring the world to a better place than it is now.

But the first two decades of the 21st century do not augur well for humanity. It is, therefore, prudent to maintain personal and national defense against all who harbor ill will and genocidal ambitions against us.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/new_york_surrenders_to_the_woke_revolution.html

I teared up a bit today as I passed the American Museum of Natural History, where an iconic statue of Teddy Roosevelt atop a horse had entranced New York children since 1940. Now only a scaffolding covered by tarp can be seen, as the “racist” statue is prepared for banishment to North Dakota. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter riots, the New York City Council voted unanimously to remove the statue, which depicts Roosevelt leading a Native American and an African. As descendent Theodore Roosevelt V helpfully explained, the statue is “problematic in its hierarchal depiction of its subjects.”

Perhaps Teddy is better off in North Dakota because he’d be aghast at the cowardly state of his beloved New York. Roosevelt belonged to an America that relished bold, confident action. Today, the museum which celebrated Teddy as “the man in the arena” and placed statues of explorers Lewis and Clark and Daniel Boone atop its façade now demands vaccine passports from five-year-olds before they’re allowed to enter. An engraving on the museum’s front praises Teddy as “A great leader of the youth of America In energy and fortitude In the faith of our fathers In defense of the rights of the people.” Today, the youth of America can receive enforced vaccine experiments inside the museum, then proceed to the exhibits on Viruses and Vaccines, where they will be terrified into further submission.

Teddy isn’t the only legend who’s been hurled into oblivion by the New York City Council recently. Thomas Jefferson also isn’t good enough for the Council worthies, who disappeared his statue from their chamber, where it had stood for over a hundred years. The author of the Declaration of Independence was condemned as a pedophile slaveowner with no redeeming qualities, but I think the Council was uneasy having the Founding Father whose motto was “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God” looking over their shoulder.

https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/bidens-checklist-promises

What the president said he’d do — and what he actually did

President Joe Biden entered office with an ambitious agenda. He promised the American people that he would unite the country, defeat a pandemic, rebuild the middle class, and make the U.S. a respected force for good around the world.

He finishes the year with a large list of unfinished business, and slumping approval. The Real Clear Politics average of polls show 53% of American disapprove of the 46th president’s performance, compared to just 43% who approve.

Here’s a checklist of some of the president’s biggest promises and where they stand.

COVID-19

Days before the 2020 election, Biden told a rally in Cleveland that the COVID-19 pandemic would end on his watch. “I’m never going to raise the white flag and surrender,” he said. “We’re going to beat this virus. We’re going to get it under control, I promise you.”

In June, Biden declared victory over the virus. “On July 4, we’re going to celebrate our independence from the virus, as we celebrate our independence of our nation,” he said.

Less than a month later, however, the Delta variant of the virus surged across the U.S., and cases continued to pile up. The Biden administration responded at the end of the summer by announcing vaccine mandates for federal workers and contractors, health care workers, and large private businesses. Those mandates have been struck down repeatedly in federal courts, with judges deeming them unconstitutional.

Last week, the Omicron variant accounted for 73.2% of all new COVID-19 infections in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In less than a month, Omicron overtook Delta as the primary COVID-19 variant in the country, causing cases to spike nationwide.

The economy

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ari-j-kaufman/2021/12/25/introducing-the-leftist-loser-of-the-year-n1544470

In a dreadful year for Democrats, so many options of failure and tone-deafness present themselves: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Alejandro Mayorkas, Jen Psaki, Chuck Schumer, Brian Stelter, and the Cuomo brothers to name a few.

But Seattle socialist Rep. Pramila Jayapal takes the proverbial cake for losing.

She is the vicious chair of the “Congressional Progressive Caucus,” and the public face behind a radical mission to use the bipartisan infrastructure bill to force Sens. Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and other potentially reluctant Democrats into passing the “Build Back Better” social welfare extravaganza.

During the summer and fall, Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed numerous infrastructure votes because of Jayapal, who once ranted, “We will agree to the bipartisan bill if, and only if, we also pass the reconciliation bill first.”

Jayapal finally announced on Nov. 1 that her cabal of fewer than 100 people would vote for the smaller infrastructure bill, despite Manchin not giving assurance he would eventually vote for the larger bill. Jayapal believed President Joe Biden would get Manchin on board despite the West Virginian continuously voicing his legitimate concerns. 

“Throughout the last three months I have been straightforward about my concerns, that I will not support a reconciliation package that expands social programs and irresponsibly adds to our $29 trillion in national debt that no one seems to really care about,” Manchin said on Nov. 1.

Four days later, Jayapal told her caucus they had taken their petulant protest as far as they could. Biden asked Democrats to trust him on Manchin’s commitment to passing the legislation, and though five Marxist representatives — Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib — disagreed, the legislation passed.

It was a disastrous maneuver by Democrats.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/diversity_equity_and_inclusion_result_in_antisemitism.html

G. Tod Slone has written that “as a political ideology, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), has proven time and again to be against freedom, reason, and truth.  Proponents of the ideology tend to be hypocrites and anti-white racists [.]”

In fact, DEI is also a pathway to anti-Semitism.  In a recent Heritage Foundation Report titled “Inclusion Delusion: The Anti-Semitism of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Staff at Universities” the reader learns that 

university DEI staff are better understood as political activists with a narrow and often radical political agenda rather than promoters of welcoming and inclusive environments. Many DEI staff are particularly unwelcoming toward Jewish students who, like the vast majority of Jews worldwide, feel a strong connection to the state of Israel. The political activism of DEI staff may help explain the rising frequency of antisemitic incidents on college campuses as well as the association between college and graduate education and higher levels of antisemitic attitudes.

Rather than promoting diversity and inclusion, universities may be contributing to an increase in anti-Jewish hatred by expanding DEI staff and power.

While DEI staff are supposed to prevent hate/bias incidents directed at any student group — in fact, they have “ethical, legal, and practical obligations” to do so, it appears that “not only do DEI staff fail to attend to Jewish concerns, including scheduling events on Jewish holidays, but there have been reports of diversity officials expressing antisemitic attitudes.”

For example, Kamau Bobb, the head of diversity at Google, wrote that Jews have an “insatiable appetite for war” and an “insensitivity to the suffering [of] others.” 

His punishment — he was reassigned to work on STEM education efforts for Google.

The methodology used by Heritage to examine the anti-Semitism of DEI officials consisted of available Twitter accounts.  Of the “633 tweets regarding Israel, 96% were critical of the Jewish state.  Of the tweets regarding China, 62% expressed favorable sentiment.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/25/myth-making-in-the-modern-age-a-primer/

Most people, I believe, think that the age of myth-making lies in the past. Myths are the things that Ovid wrote about, or Robert Graves cataloged. Their home is in the ancient world, primarily. They live on today mostly in books or in quips. Jack Worthing, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, provides a good illustration of the latter when he exclaims that Lady Bracknell is a Gorgon and then admits that “I don’t really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth.”  

Nevertheless, in school, if we went to an artsy one, we learned that myths were important. They told us not about what happened in the world, precisely. Rather, they told us interesting stories about character, motivation, and the dialectic of hubris and nemesis, crime and punishment. 

All of that is true, but I submit that the impulse to myth-making, if atavistic in origin, remains a potent force and one, moreover, that has been folded into the metabolism of partisan politics. 

An illuminating example from the recent past is the public understanding of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist radical who had adulated the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro. The bullets had barely left Oswald’s rifle before this was known. But the truth about the identity of Kennedy’s assassin was quickly overtaken and enveloped by a partisan myth, assiduously massaged and circulated by Kennedy’s widow, the media, and the political establishment. 

In brief, the myth about Kennedy’s assassin downplayed Oswald’s communist affiliation and insisted that Kennedy was killed not (as he in fact was) by a lone gunman by rather a generalized “spirit of madness and hate.” 

That phrase dripped from the pen of James Reston, one of America’s star columnists whose post at the New York Times amplified and legitimated his opinions nationwide. (The Times was still a respected newspaper in 1963.)

The process of substituting a “climate of hate” for Oswald’s index finger started almost immediately. In Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, James Piereson notes that on the trip back from Dallas, Lady Bird Johnson and others asked if Jackie Kennedy wanted to change out of her blood-spattered clothes. “No,” the grieving widow would always reply, “I want them to see what they have done.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/china-building-150-nuclear-reactors-while-biden-daniel-greenfield/

In his end of the year roundup, Dave Barry joked that, “Inflation continues to be a pesky problem, with food prices soaring and gasoline approaching $4 per gallon everywhere in the nation except California, where, for environmental reasons, it is $137.50.”

He’s not far off the mark. It’s easy to find $6 and $7 a gallon gas. And you can see gas stations like that even in the sight of drilling going on. 

Home and business energy costs are even more insane. Surviving a summer in Southern California means almost certainly having to go into the dreaded Tier 3 at which point “the prizes double” and the costs can be utterly horrifying when you look at your power bill.

The Green special interests based out of California love nothing more than the idea of making their setup into the model for the country. 

The Biden administration had to sign a China ban on slave labor despite lobbying over the impact on solar panels. But while Democrats build solar panels, China is building 150 nuclear reactors. It’s phasing out a lot of its old dams and it’s going to what works.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/22/the-inhumanity-of-identity-politics/

To see how twisted identity politics has become, how morally bereft, just consider this: in 2021, the woke set shed more tears over a convicted child molester who was shot than they did over a much-loved ‘dancing granny’ who was killed by a man wielding his SUV as a weapon.

They wept and tweeted and protested more for Joseph Rosenbaum, the 36-year-old molester of children who was shot by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha in 2020, than they did for Virginia Sorensen, the 79-year-old family woman and member of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies who was mown down by Darrell E Brooks at the Waukesha Christmas parade in November this year.

And the reason for this disparity in political grief, this chasm-sized contrast between the explosion of concern for Rittenhouse’s victims and the shameful, snivelling silence that greeted the Waukesha atrocity, is as straightforward as it is chilling. It’s because of the identity of the killers.

It’s because Rosenbaum was killed by a white man – by the archetypal Bad White Man, if the feverish media hatred for Rittenhouse is to be believed – while Soresen was killed by a black man. By a member of the woke set’s favourite victim group. By someone who hails from one of the sanctified identities.

Which means Rosenbaum’s death fit the woke narrative, seeming to confirm that any one of us could be a victim of the violent privilege of the white male, and therefore we were encouraged to talk about it, ceaselessly. Whereas Sorensen’s death, and the deaths of five others at that bloodied parade, grated against the woke narrative. It had a black perpetrator and white victims. It didn’t compute. It wasn’t useful. So it was hushed. Nothing to see here. Move on. ‘Waukesha feels abandoned after tragic parade attack’, said the New York Post this month, after four solid weeks of muteness over that horrific event from the normally hyper-virtuous hand-wringers of the celebrity and political sets.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/21/the-tyranny-of-public-health/

Public health dominates political discussion today. Masks, vaccines, social distancing – these are the issues about which we now argue daily. Not economics or the increasingly volatile geopolitical situation, but public health.

And I’m not just talking about the Covid pandemic. Indeed, virtually all aspects of social and political life today are now framed through the idiom of public health. Problems we used to treat as political and social questions are now often presented as medical issues.

So critics of prime minister Boris Johnson do not simply question his political record – they also brand him a public-health problem. As one article puts it, ‘Boris Johnson’s dwindling authority [is] becoming a “public-health issue”’. Likewise, Donald Trump was labelled a ‘public-health threat’ by his opponents while in office.

Public health has become a principal means to attack a political opponent or a set of political ideas. In 2019, a group of medics even wrote a letter to the Guardian calling a No Deal Brexit a ‘threat to public health’. Other critics of Brexit called it a ‘confused concept that threatens public health’. As public health has become politicised, politics has become medicalised.

The pandemic has intensified this medicalisation of politics. There is now virtually nothing that cannot be conceived of as a public-health issue. Take racism. Writing in the Lancet earlier this year, identitarian academic Kehinde Andrews insisted that ‘racism is a public-health crisis’. In the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, made a similar claim earlier this year. ‘Racism is a serious public-health threat that directly affects the wellbeing of millions of Americans’, she said. The CDC has since launched a new ‘Racism and Health’ web portal.

All this changes the very meaning of racism. Racial oppression used to be understood in terms of political, social and economic domination. Now it is understood in terms of ill-health. The racially oppressed are now as likely to be seen as patients in need of medical intervention as they are victims of political injustice. ‘Racism isn’t just unfair. It’s making us ill’, complains a Guardian contributor.

Likewise, anti-racist campaigners portray racism as a mental-health problem. Student supporters of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford University have claimed that they feel traumatised by the presence of the Cecil Rhodes statue.

Increasingly, the presentation of a social problem as a supposed threat to public health is a means to draw attention to it. That is why President Biden recently chose to condemn gun violence as a public-health epidemic. Unable to present a critique of violence and crime in moral terms, he decided to offer one through the language of medicine.