Jeffrey Swindoll
Oct 23rd, 2021 10:14 pm
President Joe Biden is on a historic run … but not the good kind.
Biden started 2021 with a 56% approval rating. He’s now down 11 points (44.7%) in the third quarter of 2021 — the worst drop of any U.S. president since World War II.
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/25/epic-fail-vaccination-rates-now-lower-than-when-biden-took-office/
President Joe Biden continues to insist that his vaccine mandates have been a roaring success. The truth is far different. In fact, the only thing the mandate seems to have increased is the labor shortage and supply-chain crisis.
“It’s working. We’re making progress,” Biden said recently, pointing to the fact that daily cases had declined 47% and hospitalizations were down 38% in the previous month and a half.
Somehow, the army of media fact-checkers failed to notice that Biden was, shall we say, misleading the public.
First, Biden’s employer mandates still haven’t taken effect, since the federal rules governing companies with more than 100 workers have yet to be released. Biden’s mandate covering federal contractors doesn’t take effect until Dec. 8.
Second, the decline in new COVID cases started at the end of August, nearly two weeks before Biden’s Sept. 9 pronouncement, and hospitalizations and deaths have followed suit, as expected.
This bell curve pattern is the same thing COVID has demonstrated in the past – before vaccines were available or were widespread. Last winter, for example, new COVID cases peaked at the start of January and then plunged, at a time when a comparatively tiny fraction of the public was vaccinated.
The other inconvenient truth for Biden is that vaccination rates are no guarantee that COVID rates will decline. The United Kingdom, to cite on example, is right now experiencing a surge in COVID cases, even though 73% of its population is either fully or partially vaccinated.
In contrast, new COVID cases have been steadily falling in Mexico in recent weeks, where only 40% of the population is fully vaccinated and another 14% partially so.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/a_culture_that_celebrates_fake_heroes_while_crucifying_real_ones_cannot_endure_.html
“Believe in something,” Nike told consumers in 2018, “even it means sacrificing everything.” The advertisement features former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick giving a stoic stare to those social justice warriors being spurred to buy the company’s product.
In what may be the swiftest example of the Mandela Effect taking hold on the American cultural psyche, many Americans believe that Colin Kaepernick was headlong into a promising NFL future when he boldly decided to take a knee during the National Anthem in order to protest police brutality, and for this crime against the political and social status quo, he was ostracized by the racist NFL and its fans.
The broad belief in this myth is much more pernicious and destructive, however, than our innocently misremembering that the Monopoly man wears a monocle.
And it is most certainly a myth. The reality is that on August 26, 2016, Kaepernick decided to sit on the bench during the Anthem, not kneel. Nothing ostentatious, and there was something almost childish about it, in fact. Perhaps he didn’t like being benched for Blaine Gabbert, who was, according to Mike Foss at USA Today, possibly “the worst quarterback employed by the NFL” at the time, before he goes on to explain that he might have actually been the second-worst quarterback — behind only the horrendously bad Kaepernick in 2015.
It wasn’t the first time that he sat during the Anthem, but it was the first time that reporters seem to have been struck by it enough to ask him about it. When asked why he didn’t stand, he famously said, “I’m not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”
BLM, the MSM, and SJWs rejoiced, of course. There were many critics, too (myself included), but the NFL didn’t exactly censure or oppress him in any way. They issued a statement saying that the league “encouraged” but didn’t “require” standing for the Anthem. The team and coach supported him. And eventually, he got his shot in the 2016 regular season (and earning about $17 million for his trouble), playing in 11 games. Unfortunately, the 49ers only won one of those games, and he went into free agency after that terrible season as the league’s most inaccurate passer of the previous two years, with nearly a quarter of his passes statistically categorized as “off-target” passes.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/23/the-farce-of-american-despotism/
Reflecting on Joe Biden’s disastrous “town hall” with Anderson Cooper on Thursday, The Spectator’s Dominic Green asks a question that has to weigh heavily on the mind of every American adult: “Is it more worrisome that Joe Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge?” I have long argued that allowing Biden to appear in public is a form of elder abuse, and I have speculated that he really is not in control of his actions but is manipulated, puppet-like, by a shadowy cadre of unnamed string-pullers I have called “The Committee.”
I do not have any proof that such is the case. I infer the existence and machinations of The Committee from Biden’s ostentatious incompetence and apparent senility. Has any president in the history of the Republic overseen such a destructive litany of failures so early in his tenure? Observers around the world caught their breath in August as our botched exit from Afghanistan went from appalling to something much worse and more deadly. What will be its defining image? The desperate Afghans clinging to and then falling from the landing gear of a transport plane as it took off from the Kabul airport? Or will it be the images of the slaughter perpetrated by a suicide (that is, a homicide) bomber outside the airport, an incident that killed some 170 people include more than a dozen U.S. military personnel?
Or maybe it will be the image of the drone strike launched in retaliation for that slaughter, a strike that was supposed to have targeted an ISIS-K operative but in fact killed zero terrorists and instead blew to bits 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. The United States initially said they had obliterated an ISIS-K operative along with the collateral damage, but eventually they had to admit that, nope, they got no bad guys, just 10 innocent Afghans.
General Mark “White Rage” Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, initially called the attack a “righteous strike,” but then walked that back to describe it as a “heart-wrenching” “horrible tragedy of war.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden himself called the evacuation from Afghanistan an “extraordinary success.”
I wonder what the hundreds of Americans stranded in Afghanistan think about that? The administration initially said that everyone who wanted to get out could get out, then it acknowledged that a handful of Americans were left behind, then “about a hundred.” That number has just been adjusted up to more than 400. I wonder, too, what the families of those murdered by the Taliban, and then hanged from construction cranes as “examples” to the populace, think of that judgment? Something similar, I suspect, to what the husband and children of Negar Masoomi, the pregnant policewoman who allegedly was murdered in front of them by Taliban agents in September, think.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17841/jetblue-jihadist
If we are trying to ascertain motive in a situation like this, shouting “Allah” would seem to be a key detail. That potentially moves the incident from “disturbed passenger freaks out over failed phone connection” to “jihadist tries to commit suicide attack.” It does not prove the latter case of course, but it does make it part of the conversation.
However, you would have to go to the FBI affidavit to get that detail. The Washington Post write up of the incident, clearly based on the affidavit, went so far as noting that El Dahr “yelled in Spanish and Arabic” but omitted that he was shouting about Allah — despite the obvious news value in that detail.
Granted there could be a variety of reasons why El Dahr was invoking his supreme being. But there is only one reason for not reporting it — deliberately to obscure a possible tie to Islamic radicalism.
If a radical Islamist hijacked an airplane, we might never know it was an act of terrorism. That is, if we rely only on the mainstream media.
Case in point: On September 22, Khalil El Dahr, a passenger on JetBlue Flight 261 from Boston to Puerto Rico, suddenly rushed to the front of the aircraft, choked and kicked a flight attendant, tried to break into the flight deck, and urged crew members to shoot him. It took a half-dozen flight attendants to restrain El Dahr, tying him down with flex cuffs, seat belt extenders and a necktie. On landing in Puerto Rico, El Dahr was arrested and charged with interference with flight crew members and attendants, a federal crime.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/our-punchline-in-chief/
Joe Biden is, quite literally, a joke.
F . Scott Fitzgerald was incorrect when he averred that “there are no second acts in American lives.” But, if we tweak his aphorism just a little, we will arrive quickly at the truth: There are no second acts in American lives once the American in question has become a joke.
Joe Biden has become a joke.
I do not mean this as a sharp criticism, but quite literally. Joe Biden is a meme. He is a punchline. He is a source of mirth and amusement. Worse still, he is the subject of a series of jokes with which the apolitical and disengaged have become casually familiar. “Why,” I hear it asked, “has Biden fallen so far, so quickly in the public’s estimation, and why has he not recovered?” The answer to both questions is that he is inspiring the wrong response in the public at large. Disappointment can be addressed. Anger can be quelled. Suspicion can be dissipated. Ill fortune can be reversed. But mockery is another matter altogether: In politics, ridicule — that freewheeling cousin of contempt and derision — has a nasty habit of becoming permanent. “They laugh that win,” wrote Shakespeare. Indeed. And they who are laughed at, lose.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-we-lose-when-we-lose-thomas?token=
After years of debate and a unanimous decision by New York City officials, the statue of Thomas Jefferson that has stood in the City Council chamber since 1915 is on its way out. Banished from official display, the seven-foot likeness will find its new home, likely in the New York Historical Society, by the end of the year.
The removal is disgraceful. Unlike monuments to Confederate leaders that display them in full military glory, Jefferson is depicted as a writer. Holding a quill pen in one hand and the Declaration of Independence in the other, he is clearly being honored for composing an immortal argument for liberty and equality. That is the accomplishment that the Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus, in a 2019 letter, called “the disgusting and racist basis on which America was founded.”
It is a fact known to all Americans that Jefferson didn’t live up to his own words. He owned more than 600 people over the course of his life. Unlike George Washington, moreover, he did not take even halting steps toward manumission. It’s little comfort that Jefferson recognized his own hypocrisy. “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?” Jefferson asked in his Notes on the State of Virginia. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
The removal of the statue isn’t just an attack on Jefferson, though. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz put it: “The New York City Council hearing on Monday to remove a statue honoring Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence — a serious blow, especially to the most vulnerable among us, for whom Jefferson’s cry of equality is the last best hope.”
https://swtotd.blogspot.com/
On September 30, 1981, interest rates on U.S. Treasuries peaked. The yield on the 20-year stood at 15.78%. Nobody recognized that the bear market in bonds had ended, and a new bull market had begun. (Coincidentally, this was ten and a half months before the stock market bottomed in mid-August 1982.) Jason Zweig wrote in the October 1, 2021, edition of The Wall Street Journal: “The inescapable lesson of September 30, 1981, is that markets can keep moving in the same direction longer than anyone can imagine – and then shoot explosively in the opposite direction when no one expects it, impelled by forces no one may ever fully understand.” The current yield on the 20-year is 1.9%. On March 9, 2020, the yield on the 20-year was 0.87%. Are we in the early stages of a new bear market for bonds? If we are, lower prices will mean higher rates and increased costs for the American taxpayer. I don’t pretend to have an answer, but the question is relevant given the amount of debt our nation is carrying and the speed with which deficits are building, with few politicians on either side of the aisle seemingly concerned.
We live in an age when debt is considered a good thing. As long as interest rates remain low and one’s income allows the payment of interest and the repayment of the principal, borrowing at today’s interest rate levels may be a sensible strategy. It allows one to purchase and use something today, like a home, car, dish washer or college education, without having to pay for it until tomorrow. Yet not all sources of income are secure and not all interest rates are static. Incomes can disappear and interest rates can rise. Debt can have unforeseen and unfortunate consequences.
Throughout most of history, debt was considered a form of servitude of the borrower to the lender, as suggested by Thomas Jefferson in the rubric above. Those of my generation remember Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1955 hit song: Sixteen Tons, which begins: “Another day older and deeper in debt,” and ends: “I owe my soul to the company store.”
The Bible’s Proverbs 22:7 reads: “The rich rules over the poor/And the borrower is servant to the lender.” In Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe) warned: “Interest works night and day, in fair weather and in foul. It gnaws at a man’s substance with invisible teeth.” A quote attributed to President Andrew Jackson is blunt: “When you get in debt you become a slave.” It was not only slave owners and Presidents like Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson who equated debt to servitude, Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838, wrote in his 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom: “I had a wholesome dread of the consequences of running in debt.” Today, with historically low interest rates, such concerns have slipped our consciousness.
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/anthony-fauci-nih-congress-gain-function-jail/
Anyone wishing to appreciate the nature of our two-tier society needs only to contrast the fate of St Anthony Fauci with that, say, of General Mike Flynn or any of the dozens of political prisoners who are, many of them, being held without charge in appalling conditions in a Washington, D.C. prison even as I write.
Fauci has been a carbuncle on the countenance of American life at least since he help spread the myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the 1980s. The new Chinese flu was custom made for his brand of panic-mongering and totalitarian posturing.
Just a few weeks ago, he was saying that it was “too early” to say whether we would be allowed to gather for Christmas. We’ve known for some time now that he was involved with, and paid with taxpayer money for, “gain of function” research at the Wuhan virology lab where the novel coronavirus that has caused such upheaval was developed.
Yes, that’s right. Fauci was paid by your tax dollars to help weaponize a virus that he then went on to exploit as a means to enhance his lugubrious celebrity.
He lied, under oath, about his role in his testimony before Congress, most pointedly in his heated exchanges with Senator Rand Paul this last summer.
Now we have Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, publicly challenging Fauci, charging that he is guilty of spreading “misinformation” about taxpayer funding of Fauci’s “gain of function” research at the Chinese virology laboratory.
Of course, “misinformation” in this case is just a polysyllabic synonym for lying — and besides wasn’t it Jen Psaki herself wanted people to be punished for spreading “misinformation”?
Yes, but she didn’t mean people like Fauci, who is on team A and is therefore exempt from public obloquy, not to mention federal prosecution.
https://victorhanson.com/the-ironies-of-the-rioting-youth-of-2020/
By August 2020, the protests, demonstrations, riots, looting, and arson that followed from the national outrage over the killing of George Floyd had spread to most of America’s cities. But the furor over Floyd’s death was not the only catalyst of the protests. The previously instituted national quarantine—roughly from March 20 through September—had emasculated the U.S. economy.
Unemployment claims, in a prior economy of 3.5 percent near record low unemployment, now soared to 31,491,627 Americans out of work. The annual budget saw over $4 trillion in additional debt. Those who bore the greatest brunt were not coastal elites, but the recovering and once stagnant areas of the nation’s interior and inner cities.
Forty percent of Americans making less than $40,000 were believed to have lost their jobs. But even the lockdown was not the only catalyst for the rioting. There were also more existential foundations of the hysteria. Many of those inner-city youth rioting and demonstrating, for all the political rhetoric, were suffering from a 21 percent unemployment rate during the quarantine, nearly three times higher than the rate of college graduates. Half those under 50 had lost their jobs, were furloughed or suffered pay cuts.
Some of the urban single youth of all races, the foot soldiers of the more organized BLM and Antifa brigades—who were not mere opportunistic looters and rioters—were mired in tuition debt to acquire what were often nonmarketable degrees. They often added insult to injury by finding themselves nevertheless working in low-wage jobs. That paradox required the architects of Antifa and other purveyors of violence apparently to retreat to Marxist exegeses to explain their own lack of upward mobility and society’s culpability for not appreciating fully their woke genius and potentials. So veritable mass imprisonment within one’s homes, followed by an economic tsunami were the fuel for public rioting, should any spark, such as the killing of George Floyd, ignite the prior combustible fumes in our midst.
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