RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/undermining_democracy_with_chaos.html

America will not fall to an external enemy, but to internal subversion that will collapse the body politic. The method was advanced decades ago by two sociologists, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. They sought to create a guaranteed income by throwing the welfare rolls into chaos. They never succeeded and their obsession with it was not widely shared, but their emphasis on chaos to bring about dramatic social change found a receptive audience among Marxists and leftists.

Cloward and Piven’s emphasis on chaos had a vast appeal to Marxists because they found it impossible to organize a working class more concerned with immediate material benefits than revolution. Instead of organizing for revolution, the Marxist ideology moved to undermining democracy by creating chaos.

Not deterred by the failure of the street violence of the sixties to bring about the Marxist revolution, Piven, in 2012, was still clinging to her fantasies of violence and chaos as mechanisms for social change. As she noted, “Protest, even violent protest, is thus inextricably linked to the progress of democracy, whether in challenging dictatorships, or in keeping democratic regimes from neglecting the needs of their own people. The existential aspect of protest seems also to apply to some cases of violent protests in autocracies, and sometimes in democracies as well.”

This strain of sophistry that violence can create democratic progress, as absurd as it is, explains the tolerance of our institutions for the violence we have seen in Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis. This tolerance of violence stimulates the revolutionary fantasies of Black Lives Matter and Antifa.  

It is not simply in the streets that chaos is to bring about leftist socio-political change, but it is also true of the embrace of chaos in our institutions. Nowhere has the institutional threat been greater than in the activities of the so-called congressional “Squad” that has cleverly branded themselves as social justice warriors while seeking to produce chaos by defunding the police, leaning on the Biden administration to insert leftists in positions of power, and seeking to deluge the economy with obscene sums of money. The Squad knows that if printing money led to prosperity, Zimbabwe and Venezuela would boast the world’s two strongest economies.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/29/needed-protection-against-our-professed-protectors/

Responding to retail gas prices that have skyrocketed to record levels, President Joe Biden has decided to pose as Americans’ protector from abuses in the energy marketplace. Ignoring his energy policy resume, which includes his cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, limiting of drilling leases and opposition to fracking, each of which predictably raises oil and gas prices, he wants to move blame by pointing his finger at alleged price-gouging, manipulation and/or collusion. As the president’s letter to the FTC put it, “The Federal Trade Commission has authority to consider whether illegal conduct is costing families at the pump. I believe you should do so immediately.”

However, that portrayal is simply a very well-worn, calculated pretense.

Real collusion has long been illegal, which raises the question of why our supposedly vigilant regulators didn’t prevent what they suddenly want to use now as a scapegoat until after the fact. Oil and gas are heavily regulated on the premise Americans need to be protected from the risk of such industry depradations. So where was the “protection”?

There has also been a long list of past industry investigations, also timed to bail out politicians and regulators from well-deserved blame, which have produced no evidence of collusion. 

Further, insinuations of gouging, manipulation or implied collusion rely on ambiguous terms. What evidence could prove, rather than just assert, gouging? Political assertions run in terms of charging “excessive” prices or failing to charge “fair” or “reasonable” prices, but none of those modifiers have clear meanings.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/new-york-declares-a-health-care-state?token=

Now this is a lie so brazen even Andrew Cuomo might hesitate to tell it.

New York’s new and unimproved governor, Kathy Hochul, last seen telling you to Get Vaxxed For Jesus (I kid you not), has now declared a “state of emergency” that will allow Health Department bureaucrats to block “non-urgent” medical procedures at hospitals. Because who needs a colonoscopy, anyway?

Hochul says the Xi – I mean Omicron, definitely not Xi! – variant is behind the emergency.

This explanation would be more compelling if even one case of Omicron had been detected ANYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES.

Gee, I wonder what’s really causing the hospital bed shortages?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/29/fauci-is-now-copying-trump-on-covid/

Donald Trump, Oct. 21, 2020: “We’re learning to live with it. We have no choice.”
Anthony Fauci, Nov. 28, 2021: “We’re going to have to start living with COVID.”

How many times did former President Donald Trump say something that was dismissed as reckless, heartless, stupid, or flat-out wrong only to find out later that he was right? Whatever the number is, add one more.

Over the weekend, Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, admitted that “we’re going to have to start living with COVID. I believe that’s the case because I don’t think we’re going to eradicate it.”

Fauci’s comment came amid rising cases in the U.S. and the new “Omicron” variant that has been spreading in South Africa and is apparently more resistant to vaccines. The World Health Organization declared Omicron as a “variant of concern,” and Fauci said it will likely land here.

But wait. Why would Fauci say that we have to start learning to live with COVID?

After all, Joe “Trust-the-Science” Biden said that “I will take care of this. I will end this. I will make sure we have a plan.”

Oops.

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/11/26/antifa-member-who-took-axe-to-senate-office-given-probation-and-his-axe-back/

We have been discussing the continued incarceration of many individuals for their participation in the Jan. 6th riot.  Despite claims that the riot was an insurrection, the vast majority of defendants have been given relatively minor charges. Nevertheless, the Justice Department has insisted on holding many without bail and some have received longer sentences, like Jacob Chansley (aka “QAnon Shaman”) who was given a 41-month sentence for “obstructing a federal proceeding.”

Thomas “Tas” Alexander Starks, 31, of Lisbon, N.D., faced a strikingly different approach by the Justice Department. The self-avowed Antifa member took an axe to the office of Sen. John Hoeven’s in Fargo on Dec. 21, 2020. Federal sentencing guidelines suggested 10–16 months in prison but he was only sentenced to probation and fined $2,784 for restitution . . . he then reportedly mocked the FBI for returning his axe.  Others declared him a hero and Democratic politicians pitched in for his legal defense.

Starks was caught on videotape axing the door of the congressional office. He pleaded guilty to a single charge of destruction of government property.  The case has received little attention from the media outside of conservative sites.

Starks has made clear that he was neither apologetic nor deterred from the use of such violence. He has posted under the Facebook moniker, “Paul Dunyan,” an apparent reference to his preferred use of an axe as a form of political expression.  He displays the Antifa symbol and, while awaiting sentencing, reportedly wrote: “I am ANTIFA. I will always attack fascists, racial superiority complexes built around nationalism that promotes genocide to fuel a war machine is the worst humanity has to offer.”

It is reminiscent of the defiance shown by arrested Antifa member Jason Charter, who declared “The Movement is winning” after his own arrest.

https://dianebederman.com/here-we-go-again-covid-ghettos-and-lepers-and-o-mi-cron/

Here we go again, Covid: Ghettos and lepers and O Mi Cron!

Congrats to Australia. Just coming out of 262 days of lockdowns. But wait. Here comes Omicron! And here comes government to save us. And sadly, so many want to be saved.

Australia has opened…sort of.

“However, stores selling non-essential goods won’t open until 80% of the state is double vaccinated and masks are required inside and out.”

Oh so the non-vaccinated will be the cause of keeping non-essential closed (I love that term – humans deciding that some are more essential than others – usually government employees are essential) Nothing like putting a mark of Cain or the sign of the leper on these people.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) declared a state of emergency Friday in response to a cold-weather surge of coronavirus infections and the threat of the newly detected omicron variant, making her state one of the first in the country to impose measures against the mutation that was recently sequenced in southern Africa.

Remember back 2 years? It started with a 2 week lockdown to flatten the curve. It’s all about the greater good. Dear self-righteous, sanctimonious, self-serving Liberals – you talk about caring for the other. Until the other makes you uncomfortable.  So you stood with the rules about lockdowns which wiped out the poorest amongst us. Their family businesses destroyed while all were advised to go the big box stores – it would be safer there. Really? It’s OK for hundreds to pile into Walmart – some having to take public transit to get there; you were OK with that. And the shutting down of houses of worship where people with addictions met regularly. But the liquor store and cannabis stores remained open. And suicide went up as did opioid overdose and mental illness.

Well, as we open up and let those non-essential people come back into the world, we are not done. Those unvaccinated! How dare they? We need to mark them with the Mark of Cain, or a leper. They shall not be allowed to be out and about with us!

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-11-27-complete-madness-in-the-biden-administration-energy-policy

Is President Biden doing anything right? To this observer, his policies range from at best merely incompetent, to at worst malicious hatred of the country and people whose interests he was elected to advance. Somewhere in between those two extremes we have Biden’s energy policy. In this arena, appropriate adjectives would be inconsistent, incoherent, and destructive. Don’t even attempt to make sense of it. To summarize in one word, it is complete madness.

I’m old enough to remember the 1970s, and the two “oil shocks” that occurred during that decade. A brief summary of the history can be found in this 2012 piece from Foreign Policy. By 1970/71, U.S. oil production had peaked and begun to decline. 1973 brought the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, and OPEC halted oil shipments to the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. By January 1974, crude oil prices on the world markets had “more than quadrupled” (from around $3 to $12 per barrel). Further constraints on supply in the late 70s, most notably a big drop in supply from Iran following the ouster of the Shah, were followed by a further tripling of the price, this time from about $12 to about $36 per barrel. Government efforts at price controls were largely unsuccessful at restraining prices at the pump, but did cause shortages and lines at gas stations that maddened consumers. Without adequate domestic oil supply, the U.S. became a supplicant to the big international exporters, mainly OPEC and Russia. As reported in that Foreign Policy piece, President Carter reacted by “mak[ing] energy independence the central ambition of his presidency.”

Energy independence was a bi-partisan goal of American Presidents and of the Congress, until President Obama came along. Obama had the opposite strategy. He had drunk the climate Kool-Aid, and thought that the right goals were to restrict the production of fossil fuel energy, which would cause prices to rise and thereby restrict consumption. The famous quote from Obama, uttered in 2008 during his first presidential campaign, was “under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket.” Although that statement specifically dealt with electricity prices, the same principle would apply as well to all energy prices. And Obama sought to put his strategy into practice, both by putting proposed “cap-and-trade” legislation before Congress, and by attempting to use his executive powers to restrict domestic fossil fuel development. However, the cap-and-trade legislation failed in Congress, and domestic “frackers” worked around Obama’s federal restrictions to greatly expand U.S. domestic oil and gas production, mostly on private lands.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

The words noblesse oblige refer to a sense of responsibility of the privileged few to act with magnanimity toward the less privileged – to be responsible for their welfare, but not necessarily to let them into their living rooms. While the term was originally associated with French-speaking British nobility in their treatment of natives in their colonial empire and serfs on their vast estates, it can be said to reflect a conspicuous self-righteousness on the part of today’s Progressive elites who want to preserve their status, while using taxpayer money to keep happy an expanding body of welfare recipients.

Elitism, we are taught, is un-American, yet it is a natural phenomenon. Every society produces elites. Tsarist Russia had theirs and so did the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany had its elite and so does Communist China today. Colonial America had its planters in the south and its merchants in the north. The Industrial Revolution, in the United States, produced the “Gilded Age” in the second half of the 19th Century, giving the Nation New York’s “four hundred,” made famous through the novels of Edith Wharton.

Elitism is inequitable when it becomes entrenched, as it is in despotic countries, like China, North Korea, Cuba and Iran. The top of the economic, social and political ladder should never be comfortable: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” spoke Henry IV in Shakespeare’s eponymous play. A free and democratic country should be open to new ideas and allow free expression. It should praise individualism, independence and self-reliance. It must encourage debate and recognize universal truths; it must commend honesty and integrity. The elitist class should be fluid, not static.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/27/the-covid-follies-play-again/

I was hoping I would never have to write about the Wuhan flu, aka COVID-19, again. I overdosed on it in days of yore. During the Great Panic of 2020, I wrote about it many times.  I really have nothing much new to add. 

Now, as then, I have been astonished that a disease that poses a serious threat to a tiny sliver of the population—some of the elderly, and those with underlying (new vocabulary word!) “co-morbidities” like obesity—should have caused such widespread panic, not to mention such an acrid authoritarian response from so many governments. I was also astonished, and correspondingly disheartened, by the alacrity with which people the world over turned themselves into sheep, allowing their elected representatives (where such existed) to herd them like cattle: docile, bovine, will-less. But that’s how it was. 

Now of course, everything has changed. We have a smorgasbord of vaccines with (we are told) something like a 95 percent success rate. We have a wide range of effective therapeutics, including the once-scorned (because Trump-endorsed) ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, not to mention monoclonal antibody treatment. Right around the corner, I am told, Pfizer and other members of the Big Pharma brotherhood will be offering a pill that (according to some) will cut hospitalizations and death from COVID by almost 90 percent. So the world is once again free, maskless, social. 

Just kidding. 

But why, you might ask, are we still masking up, locking down, and otherwise acting like savages who forgot yesterday’s human sacrifice and now are worried about what the angry, unpropitiated gods might do? 

I like to point out that the great, but under-remarked upon, thing about COVID is that it has all but abolished death from old age. Readers will remember that Florida motorcycle driver who was in a dreadful accident, poor thing, and was spread like raspberry jam across the highway. Nevertheless, assiduous EMTs, or maybe it was some junior assistant of Anthony Fauci, collected enough goo to perform the requisite test and, bingo, he, or it, “tested positive” and was put down at first as a death from COVID. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/looters-hit-la-home-depot-bottega-veneta-on-black-friday/

Two Los Angeles County stores became the latest victims of California’s “smash and grab” looting wave on Black Friday.

A group of 15-to-20-year-old suspects targeted a Home Depot store in Lakewood around 8:30 p.m., making off with crowbars, mallets and sledgehammers, according to Fox 11 Los Angeles. The group, which arrived in as many as ten vehicles and ran into the store wearing ski masks, reportedly emptied out an entire section of hammers before taking off, KCBS-TV reported.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told the station the stolen tools could be used in more robberies at other LA-area stores.

Meanwhile, in Beverly Grove, looters stole high-end merchandise and pepper sprayed those who tried to stop them, KCBS-TV reported.

The robberies come after Los Angeles police chief Michel Moore told the city’s Police Commission on Tuesday that the department would be “dedicating resources to some of these higher-end locations to deter further acts of violence.” 

The “smash and grab” break-in comes amid a wave of similar burglaries in California.

A group of 20 looters targeted a Nordstrom store in Los Angeles on Monday night, using a sledgehammer to smash the store’s windows in and steal an unknown amount of merchandise, police said. That burglary, which resulted in three arrests, took place at The Grove shopping mall just before 11 p.m., CBS Los Angeles reported.

The suspects fled the scene in four vehicles, according to the report. Police pursued one of the cars and arrested three suspects after they attempted to flee on foot.

One hour before the Nordstrom incident, burglar reportedly stole $8,500 in cash from a CVS roughly ten miles away. Authorities are investigating to see if there is a possible connection between the two burglaries. 

One day earlier, a mob of robbers hit stores in Hayward and San Jose for the third consecutive day of looting in the San Francisco Bay area. On Sunday, a wave of 30 to 40 young people arrived at a jewelry store in Southland Mall in Hayward where they reportedly smashed glass counters and ran off. A second, smaller wave of people came shortly after to finish the job, Da Lin of KPIX-TV reported.

Last weekend, a group of looters struck a Nordstrom in Walnut Creek, assaulting staff and intimidating patrons. They reportedly even pepper sprayed a few individuals.