RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/20/can-the-truth-set-us-free/

I try to re-read The Confessions (the one by St. Augustine, not the one by Rousseau) every Lent. Since it is that time of year again, and since I am rather weary of the usual quotidian static, I thought I would avert my gaze from the armed camp on the Potomac and say a word or two about my reading. In a famous passage of Book XI of that deep and magisterial book, Augustine asks a simple but apparently imponderable question: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is,” he says, “provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.”

It is hard to read that passage without experiencing a shock of recognition.

There is a basic sense in which, like St. Augustine, we all know what time is. As Einstein once observed, time is “what the clock measures.” Any yet it is impossible not to feel that that answer, though correct, is somehow insufficient to the awesome reality of time—assuming, that is, that time is or has a reality and is not, as some philosophers have insisted, an illusion we contribute to make experience comprehensible.

When Plato described time as “the moving image of eternity,” his formulation was more poetic than Einstein’s, but not necessarily more satisfactory. The fact is that time, like many basic concepts, names an idea we are perfectly familiar with but that we may not be able to explain.

Consider the concept of truth.

There is an important sense in which we all know what truth is. We just couldn’t get along in the world if we didn’t. But being able to apply a concept in daily life does not necessarily mean we can define it. Or that we really understand it.

Medieval philosophers defined truth as “adaequatio intellectus et rei”: a “correspondence between thought and thing.”

That sounds impressive, especially in Latin, and it has a certain intuitive appeal. When we utter a true proposition—“2 + 2 = 4,” say, or “Snow is white”—we can see that there is a correspondence between our judgment and the state of affairs it names.

But what, exactly, is the nature of that “correspondence”?

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/02/17/bidens_economy_will_be_a_train_wreck_660695.html

Warning lights should be flashing. Less than a month in, it’s becoming evident that President Joe Biden’s economic policies are likely to end in disaster. The wrong economic diagnosis and the politics of not letting any crisis go to waste is leading to the most damaging mix of economic policy in decades.

The administration is in thrall to the Keynesian demand-management paradigm that treats every big economic downturn as a potential replay of the Great Depression, thus requiring massive fiscal and monetary stimulus to revive demand. But the Covid slump wasn’t driven by lack of demand, but by deliberate policy decisions taken by federal and state governments to close down economic activity for reasons of public health.

For the time being, Covid policy is economic policy. The 11 states with the highest unemployment are all deep blue; they imposed some of the nation’s most draconian lockdown policies. Eleven of the 12 states with the lowest unemployment rates are red states. Thus, the pace of economic recovery will be dictated by how quickly the brakes are taken off measures to control the pandemic.

Yet in response to a deliberately engineered supply-side contraction, the Biden administration’s prescription is a $1.9 trillion stimulus. This idea drew stinging criticism from no less than Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, who reckons the Biden stimulus is three times larger than the projected gap in output. Together with unprecedentedly loose monetary conditions overseen by Fed chair Jay Powell, we face “the risk of inflation expectations rising sharply,” Summers argued.

As if on cue, the Fed chair stoked those expectations. “Frankly, we welcome slightly higher . . . inflation,” Powell declared last month. “The kind of troubling inflation people like me grew up with seems unlikely in the domestic and global context we’ve been in for some time,” he said – words that could well come back to haunt him should inflation take off.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/deaths-expertise-how-new-york-may-have-created-covid-crisis-following

New York governor lashes out at unreliable experts, while Florida counterpart touts his independent course.

“I think we’re going to have enough hospital space.”

That’s what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said was his reaction early in the COVID-19 pandemic to expert advice that hospitals should discharge elderly COVID-19 patients into nursing homes. 

“There were a lot of people saying you needed to get nursing home patients out of hospitals, send them back to nursing homes, so that you could clear hospital beds,” DeSantis said during a recent Fox News interview. “In Florida, we did the opposite.”

DeSantis has emerged lately as the frontrunner in a bitter, months-long dispute over which state executive — DeSantis in Florida or Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York — most effectively managed the COVID-19 crisis of the past year.

Critics have periodically alleged that the DeSantis administration has been fudging numbers and concealing pandemic data in an effort to make it seem as if his state’s coronavirus data are more favorable than they truly are.

Those accusations have been embodied most prominently by Rebekah Jones, a former state health department official who launched her own COVID dashboard after being fired by the state while claiming Florida was concealing the full extent of the virus’ toll there.

https://mailchi.mp/f7fdb4410258/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-58082?e=0c8ccf8e98

On February 20, 2020, just weeks before our country’s economic shutdown, Adam Andrzejewski, OpenTheBooks’ CEO/Founder, presented to the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Naples, Florida — in a packed room of 900 guests.  

Since then, over 2.3 million people have watched the speech on YouTube…

WATCH HERE: The Depth of the Swamp — Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar

The American people want to know just how corrupt their government is, whether it’s at the local, state, or federal levels, or all of the above. 

What do you think – is it worse than you thought? 

In the presentation, Andrzejewski covered the following topics:

The federal bureaucracy
Improper payments
Federal waste and pork
The Ivy League
Rahm Emanuel
Andrew Cuomo
$300,000 LA lifeguards
Our San Fran poop map
New York City rats
Suing California and Wyoming

and so much more…

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/19/its-time-to-get-real-about-freedom-of-speech/

I’m glad sections of the left find the free-speech crisis so funny. Or ‘free-speech crisis’, as they always put it, those sarky quote marks signalling their scepticism towards the idea that there’s a censorship problem on campus and elsewhere in society. ‘Freeze peach!’, they cry at anyone who thinks it is a bad thing that people can be No Platformed, threatened with death or sacked from their jobs for expressing the ‘wrong’ opinion. Hilarious, isn’t it?

It’s hilarious when activists piss on the door of a feminist academic’s office because they don’t like her criticisms of gender self-ID. It’s hilarious when a disabled working-class grandfather is sacked from his job at Asda because he posted a Billy Connolly skit on social media that made fun of Islam. It’s hilarious when a Labour shadow minister loses her job because she dared to raise concerns about the grooming and rape of working-class girls in various parts of England. It’s hilarious when JK Rowling is bombarded with messages saying ‘fuck you bitch’, ‘bitch I’ll kill you’ and ‘choke on my cock’ because she wrote an entirely non-prejudiced essay on trans issues. It’s all so funny. ‘FREEZE PEACH’ lol.

Make no mistake: when the cultural and media elites mock the idea of a free-speech crisis, when they insist cancel culture doesn’t exist, this is the reality they are denying. This is the abuse, demonisation and, yes, censorship that they claim is not real. Actually, it’s worse than that. These censorship deniers do not merely question the reality of these grim assaults on people’s free expression – after all, we can all see the tweets calling JK Rowling a ‘cunt’ and a ‘whore’, and we all know what urine splashed on someone’s door looks and smells like, so we know this stuff is real. No, they also implicitly justify these chilling crusades against open discussion. By refusing to describe these attacks as attacks on freedom of speech, they normalise them, they green-light them.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/19/no-proof-january-6-was-an-armed-insurrection/

Since the Justice Department launched its nationwide manhunt to track down and arrest anyone involved with the Capitol breach on January 6, hundreds of perpetrators have been arrested.

Most face misdemeanor charges for trespassing or disorderly conduct, but dozens are in jail and denied bond for the thoughtcrime of believing the 2020 presidential election wasn’t on the up-and-up. The acting U.S. attorney general overseeing the investigation promises to apprehend hundreds more, however, it’s been two weeks since authorities have arrested anyone in connection to the probe.

Almost as embarrassing as the bad behavior of a handful of Trump supporters that day is the conduct of the national news media and Washington lawmakers. The country has been subjected to a public group therapy session of sorts wherein grown adults—Republicans and Democrats alike, elected to defend the country at all costs—now recount their harrowing experiences on January 6, which include running away from no one in particular or insisting, without evidence, that they were on the verge of being “murdered.”

The media continue to promote any number of fabricated storylines intended to bolster the laughable narrative of an “insurrection” occurring at the Capitol. The concocted account of the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick recently fell apart; the New York Times, after pressure from outlets including American Greatness, effectively retracted its January 8 article claiming Sicknick was killed by a fire extinguisher at the hands of Trump “loyalists.”

So now it’s time to straighten out another twisted tale animating the folklore of January 6: The idea the random chaos amounted to an “armed insurrection.” Hundreds of crazed Trumpists carrying deadly weapons, the public believes, stormed the Capitol to injure or kill senators, representatives, and even Vice President Mike Pence in order to avenge a “stolen” election.

Most news outlets—as they did with the coverage of Sicknick’s death—unflinchingly repeat the “armed insurrection” trope, which can be traced back to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s January 7 press conference. “[Y[esterday, the President of the United States incited an armed insurrection against America, the gleeful desecration of the US Capitol…and the violence targeting Congress are horrors that will forever stay in our nation’s history,” Pelosi ranted.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/black_sleep_matters.html

Teen Vogue magazine recently published an article by two writers who are calling for “rest reparations” in addition to the regular, old, garden-variety reparations for African Americans, which advocates have been advocating for years. Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa contend that, on average, Black lives are shorter than white ones because Black people experience “generational fatigue” due solely to the fact that they are, in fact, Black.

The two allege that “the American dream is a sleepless one” for Black folks, and claim to have had an epiphany when they realized the reason they were always tired was because they were impacted by “hundreds of years of sleep deprivation” that was due to systemic racism. Their article, titled “Black Power Naps is Addressing Systemic Racism in Sleep,” reveals the Black Power Naps initiative, which purports to be an “artistic initiative with components including physical installations, zines, an opera, and more.” Huh?

Acosta told the magazine that black people and people of color inherited sleep deprivation through years of slavery and control, saying, “We’re dealing with an inheritance of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation was a … deliberate tactic of slave owners to basically make the mind feeble. That same tactic has only evolved.” Huh?

Sosa insisted that generations of slavery have made it imperative for Black people and people of color to rest as much as they can in the following generations.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/culture-warrior-xavier-becerra-is-unqualified-to-lead-hss-department-opinion/ar-BB1dPheY

EXCERPTS:

Becerra has been nominated to lead one of our most important government agencies, tasked with enhancing the health and wellbeing of all Americans. Yet he is a deeply partisan and ideologically driven nominee with no formal education, training or background in medicine or health. His most notable experience could best be described as waging left-wing culture wars while serving as attorney general of California.

Perhaps the most egregious example of Becerra’s commitment to political warfare is his years-long legal battle with the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nuns who care for the elderly poor.

Obama administration officials notoriously dragged these nuns to the Supreme Court over a mandate forcing them to provide certain types of contraception and abortion-inducing drugs. After years of litigation, the Supreme Court ruled for the Little Sisters in 2016, and in 2017 the Trump administration granted them full conscience protections.

Becerra, however, wasn’t satisfied. He sued the Trump administration in an attempt to block the protections granted to the Little Sisters and similar faith-based groups.

Becerra’s rigid posture opposed all religious-liberty accommodations, arguing “millions of women in California may be left without access to contraceptives” and that the rule would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to the state.

These baseless accusations were soon exposed—Becerra’s office couldn’t identify a single person who would lose contraception coverage. Furthermore, Becerra hadn’t sued to overturn similar protections for big corporations, and even admitted there were other resources in California for women seeking contraceptives.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/02/revenge-by-executive-order/

As expected, President Biden wasted no time overturning the Trump legacy with many Executive Orders. Since his inauguration on January 20, ther new president has signed 30 Executive Orders, 19 on the first day of his presidency alone.

Executive Orders are presidential directives addressed to federal authorities subject to congressional and judicial oversight. Perhaps the most famous order is the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln on January 1, 1863. Franklin D Roosevelt signed 3522 Orders, compared with President Trump’s 212 Orders. Some presidents have used this discretionary legislative power sparingly, but certainly since the 1980s, the signing of Orders on their first day in office has provided incoming presidents with an opportunity to destroy the legacy of their predecessors.

There are at least two reasons why this legislative approach to overturning a predecessor’s legacy is a disturbing development. One reason relates to the legislative authority of the president to adopt these measures. Although there is no doubt that, in accordance with Article Two of the US Constitution, the president possesses some degree of discretionary legislative power which usurps the legislative privileges of Congress. Hence, it is an executive power that should be used sparingly.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/02/19/censored-hunter-biden-laptop-story-comes-back-around-to-bite-twitter-n1426849

The former Delaware computer repair shop owner who gave Rudi Giuliani and the FBI emails alleged to be from Hunter Biden’s laptop has again sued Twitter for defamation. John Paul Mac Isaac claimed that Twitter defamed him by censoring a New York Post story over its alleged use of “hacked materials.” Due to Twitter’s suppression of the story, Americans branded Mac Isaac a hacker, costing him business opportunities and ultimately leading him to shut down his business, the lawsuit claims.

“Plaintiff is not a hacker and the information obtained from the computer does not constitute hacked materials because Plaintiff lawfully gained access to the computer, first with the permission of its owner, Biden, and then, after Biden failed to retrieve the recovered data despite Plaintiff’s reuses, in accordance with the Mac Shop’s abandoned property police,” the lawsuit claims. “Plaintiff, as a direct result of Defendant Twitter’s actions and statements, is now widely considered a hacker.”

Mac Isaac filed a similar defamation lawsuit against Twitter late last year, seeking no less than $500 million in damages, but a judge at the Florida court in which he filed tossed the suit over lack of jurisdiction. The new lawsuit aims to address the jurisdiction issue, The Washington Examiner reported.

The new lawsuit claims defamation damages greater than $75,000 and demands that Twitter “make a public retraction of all false statements and to issue a public apology.”

Last October, The New York Post published a bombshell story that implicated then-candidate Joe Biden in his son Hunter’s notorious foreign business deals. Hunter Biden had notoriously cashed in on his father’s name with lucrative deals in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere — while Joe Biden spearheaded Obama administration policy in Ukraine and China.