RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/hows-anti-trump-doing-not-so-good-bruce-thornton/

Joe Biden was touted by his supporters as the anti-Trump, the seasoned politician and “centrist” who had the experience, gravitas, and governing skills that the radical “demagogue” Donald Trump lacked. Supposedly, Biden also possessed the respect for “democratic norms” and the “empathy” lacking in the abrasive tweetster and crude-talking ex-reality show host. Elect Biden, the pitch went, and the “adults” will be back in charge, the sacred “norms” and “decorum” once again respected, and our status in the world restored.

This appeal, of course, depended on hyping Trump’s “mean” tweets and rhetoric, while ignoring his successful first term achievements both at home and abroad. It also required burnishing Biden’s decades of mediocrity and trimming, his gaffes and plagiarism, his unseemly attention to women and girls, and the stench of corruption wafting from his career. Indeed, the odor was so strong that his media and social media courtiers had to discredit, censor, and embargo the blockbuster New York Post story about son Hunter’s laptop and emails, which we now know is authentic and contains strong, corroborated evidence of Biden’s complicity in his son’s influence-peddling grift. And as the campaign progressed, the Dems’ media flaks were compelled to ignore as well the obvious signs of Biden’s cognitive decline.

But last November the Dems and the media pulled Biden across the finish line, leaving another bad odor of electoral anomalies the bipartisan establishment keeps declaring is actually the stink of conspiracy theories that––without a thorough investigation conducted to settle the issue–– they somehow know are in fact MAGA fantasies. Biden took office, and immediately began undoing Trump’s successes, as if to show that his policies, like his confected “presidential” persona, will be the antitheses of Trump’s.

In just eight months, we have now a record with which we can judge that governing principle.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-energy-price-shock-oil-gas-opec-shortage-11632950693?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Crude prices hit $80 a barrel on Tuesday, and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) warned oil could skyrocket without increased investment in new production. So much for the claim that the death of fossil fuels is nigh.

Europe’s climate follies have created fuel shortages and price spikes that are rippling through global energy markets. Demand for liquefied natural gas in Europe has soared due to waning wind production, the shutdown of coal and nuclear plants, and lower Russian gas deliveries. But there’s not enough LNG to supply Europe and the world.

Asia and Europe are having to burn more coal to keep their lights on. But coal is also in short supply, and factories in China are shutting down as local governments ration power. Gas-powered generators in Asia are switching to burning oil, which is also pushing up crude prices.

Goldman Sachs projects that crude could hit $90 a barrel by year end, which could add 10 to 20 cents a gallon to gasoline prices at the pump. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday assured Americans that the Administration is speaking “to international partners, including OPEC” about “doing more to support the recovery.” How about encouraging more U.S. production?

https://www.city-journal.org/three-facts-about-crime

Though academics, the media, and politicians can’t seem to agree on much when it comes to crime in the United States, three stubborn facts generally apply.

First, crime is heavily concentrated by place. As a general matter, 5 percent of the locations in a given city account for 50 percent of that city’s crime. This finding has been replicated so often that it is sometimes referred to as “the law of crime concentration.” As David Weisburd and Taryn Zastrow note in a recent Manhattan Institute report, “there is tremendous consistency in the degree to which crime is concentrated at hot spots across cities.” This is not just a matter of neighborhoods: between 3 percent and 5 percent of specific addresses on city blocks generate 50 percent or more of reported crimes. And if the focus is strictly on violent crime, such as shootings, then even fewer locations—perhaps a drug house or a liquor-store check-cashing operation—are magnets for an even greater percentage of violent crime.

This first rule has important implications for law enforcement. Identifying and concentrating on hot spots can yield big rewards. Merely parking a patrol car outside of these addresses can lessen crime; even better to identify what exactly is going on there. Some crime may be displaced to other locations when the police shut down hot spots, but evidence shows that suppressing crime at these magnet addresses may create a diffusion of benefits that extends beyond the hot spot. After all, setting up another stash house or problematic liquor store is not always so simple.

Second, violent crime is heavily concentrated in a relatively few individuals. In general, 5 percent of the criminal offenders (not 5 percent of the general population) in a given city commit about 50 percent of that city’s violent crime. One study found that just 1 percent of offenders were responsible for over 60 percent of violent crime.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/anti-semitic-attacks-in-2020-outnumbered-attacks-against-muslims-asians-transgender-people-combined/

More American Jews suffered hate crime attacks in 2020 than Asians, Muslims, and transgender people combined, according to FBI crime tracking data.

The agency recorded 676 instances of criminal offenses motivated by prejudice or hatred of Jews, making anti-Semitic hate crimes the third most common type of hate crimes, trailing anti-black and anti-white attacks.

While the media and politicians have focused on an increase of domestic hate crime attacks against Asians—a trend that has also been the centerpiece of Chinese Communist Party propaganda operations—the FBI recorded just 274 total incidents in 2020. Americans who identify as Asian make up roughly 7 percent of the U.S. population. Jews, who make up just 1.75 percent of the population, are more than twice as likely to experience hate crimes as Asian Americans.

Biden in March signed into law the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which seeks to make the reporting of hate crimes easier for the public and was written in the wake of the #StopAsianHate social media campaign. The bill also directs the Department of Justice to give grants to state and local governments to study ways to reduce hate crimes.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/30/when-will-the-u-s-be-released-from-covid-prison/

Japan announced Tuesday that it was lifting its coronavirus state of emergency. The country joins Norway, Sweden, and Denmark in returning to normal. America, however, will continue to be largely under the boot of politicians, bureaucrats, and meddlesome public health officials. Even convicts have release dates. But we have no idea when we’ll be liberated because there are no objective standards, only political whim.

When asked Monday “how many Americans need to be vaccinated for us to go back to normal,” President Joe Biden replied: “I think we get the vast majority … 96, 97, 98 percent.”

First of all, that’s unrealistic. There is no single activity that more than 95% of the population, any population, will agree to participate in. Even if Biden said that Washington was going to hand out $1 million to every American next week, there would be holdouts. So the president’s benchmark is never going to be met. Which might very well be by design.

Second, herd immunity can be achieved when as little as “70% of the population – more than 200 million people” have recovered from COVID-19, says the Mayo Clinic, which also acknowledges that “reaching herd immunity through vaccination against COVID-19 might be difficult for many reasons.”

Of course a combination of those who have recovered and those who’ve taken the shot(s) could provide herd immunity.

Opinions, of course, vary. Others say the threshold is higher. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose credibility is suspect at best, said at one time that herd immunity could be reached at a 60% to 70% vaccination rate. He then changed it to 70% to 75%, then to 80% to 85%, even suggesting but not claiming that the minimum is 90%, while also admitting that he’s basing his estimates on a gut feeling.

Seems obvious where Biden is getting his “science” from.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-9-28-ze34w2ee653q7kff96h9vux9j86rcy

I feel that I should comment on the indictment of lawyer Michael Sussman by Special Counsel John Durham while the issue is still current. Very likely you have already read extensively about Durham’s indictment of Sussman, which came down on September 16. Sussman was one of the lawyers, although not the head lawyer, at the firm of Perkins Coie, who worked for the DNC and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016.

This indictment is another instance by which we are learning step by step how the Democratic powers and their press side-kicks, through strict control of a “narrative,” think that they can get a critical mass of the American people to believe literally anything, no matter how preposterous. And to a remarkable extent, they are right.

From mid-2016 to mid-2019, we had about three years of non-stop Russia! Russia! Russia! obsession from the Democratic Party and its media adjunct. The stories advancing the narrative numbered in the thousands, and ultimately turned into nothing when Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally issued his report at the end of that period. But how did this whole thing get going and continued for such a long period of time?

On its face, the Sussman indictment appears to be a very odd bird, and by itself not a particularly significant one. The charge is a single count of “lying to the FBI” (18 U.S.C. Section 1001). This statute is a favorite of the feds because almost anyone dumb enough to talk to the FBI can be tripped up on something. The defendant is a relatively small fish in the school of barracudas who had to have been involved in orchestrating the “Trump/Russia collusion” hoax in the 2016 election and thereafter. The “lie” in question is on the seemingly peripheral issue of whether Sussman was working for a client, i.e., the Clinton campaign, or just reporting to the FBI as a public-spirited citizen. Could the FBI really have been fooled about that? And is this really the best they’ve got?

On the flip side, there are some serious indications — although we can’t know for sure — that there is more coming.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/pandemic-border-biden-haiti/

No one has done more to undermine the Biden administration’s vaccination strategy than Joe Biden. From his confusion over when to wear a mask and when not to wear a mask, to the lack of press conferences, on through the Delta variant, we arrive at Biden’s biggest optics crisis yet: 15,000 migrants flooding the southern border under a Del Rio, Texas, bridge in temperatures reaching 100 degrees.

Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed last week that his department’s border officials did not test the some 12,000 to 15,000 migrants for COVID. He did say that some had fallen ill, but would not elaborate further. While appearing on Fox News Sunday, he told Chris Wallace that at least 12,000 of those same migrants were released into the country with a notice to appear in court, which is sure to be ignored by the majority of them, if history is any guide.

So to recap, thousands of migrants, who were not tested for COVID, and not vaccinated to anyone’s knowledge, were just released into the US and are most likely destined for urban city environments. This has been met with sympathetic shrugs from reporters, who have also made a point of highlighting when every mother or father of three who rejects the vaccine dies from COVID.

The Biden administration has offered American citizens an iron fist on vaccinations, to the point of instituting possibly unconstitutional mandates. His CDC demands that your children, as young as three years old, remain masked at their schools for all hours of the day, as well as at daycare. But when it comes to a refugee crisis, these mandates and demands suddenly dissipate. Either we are in a pandemic, where the Delta variant is burning its way across the United States and we must take every precaution to curb it, or we aren’t. Biden cannot have it both ways.

The sight at the border is first and foremost a public health crisis, one that neither our media nor the administration cared much about until they could deploy viral images from Twitter to smear border agents on horses.

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/569994-in-afghanistan-weve-opened-the-gates-of-hell?rl=1

“Fourteen centuries of war between Islam and the West just got ramped up on steroids. ”

The Afghanistan fiasco is the worst strategic blunder since 1938: the year that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved around a copy of the Munich Agreement and proclaimed “peace in our time.” Chamberlain’s failure to understand the enemy gave Germany the space it needed to invade Poland — the event that marked the start of World War II. Chamberlain resigned in 1940 when his political support evaporated. Winston Churchill assumed power, ultimately snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

President Joe Biden’s debacle will have no such savior; the Islamic jihad isn’t that kind of war. Instead of getting us out of Afghanistan, and bringing peace in our time, he’s opened the gates of hell. In one disastrous and grossly ill-conceived strategic move, Biden has armed and empowered the Taliban and elated every Muslim fanatic from Morocco to Mindanao. Not since 9/11 have events so galvanized our enemies — U.S. forces abandoning the field; the Afghan military laying down arms; and the Taliban reestablishing their Islamic Emirate.

Of greater consequence, Biden has handed over to our enemies the geographical heart of Khorasan — the historic Islamic cultural, intellectual and theological center that was overthrown by the Mongols in the 14th century. It included parts of what today are six Asian countries stretching from Iran to Kyrgyzstan. For the Salafi jihadists, the heart of Khorasan is Afghanistan. And for the last several years, the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K) has been establishing a center of operations there for its global Islamic caliphate.

We got a taste of what to expect from ISIS-K on Aug. 26, when 13 American soldiers and 169 Afghans were killed in two suicide bomb attacks on the Kabul Airport.

ISIS-K isn’t alone. The Afghanistan-Pakistan region hosts the largest collection of terrorist organizations in the world, including 20 of 61 groups designated by the U.S. State Department as foreign terrorist organizations. All of them — including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State — are now celebrating this epic victory over the infidels.  

We don’t need a blue-ribbon beltway panel to see what comes next. Afghanistan is evolving before our eyes into the Asian epicenter of the global Islamic jihad — exactly what we set out 20 years ago to stop, and did stop for 20 years. Now, we’re left watching the slow train wreck that U.S. strategy set in motion.  

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Common sense: noun – sound and prudent judgement. Its best antonym: unreasonable – without reason.

Common sense is a phrase we all know but rarely practice. So why is it called common? In A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire wrote: “Common sense is not so common.” It does not appear to exist among our cultural and political elite, where reason has given way to ideology. Ralph Waldo Emerson is alleged to have said: “Common Sense is genius dressed in working clothes.” That is, perhaps, what William Buckley meant when he said he would rather be governed by the first four hundred names in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty? Today, politicians, professors, CEOs, the media and many in the world of entertainment dress more informally, which may be sensible in terms of personal comfort, but a lack of common sense pulsates through their daily activities and commentaries.

Common sense has been banished by the self-righteous. This part of Connecticut is not immune. Last week, in my local paper The Day, appeared an article about the sensible (my word) refusal of Old Lyme’s First Selectman (a Republican) to bring to a vote a resolution proposed by the Democratic Selectwoman which would identify racism as a public health crisis. His refusal was based, first, on the question: What does racism have to do with public health? Secondly, he pointed out such a resolution would imply the town has a race problem. Even the Democratic Selectwoman has said that she does not believe the people in Old Lyme are racist, yet she wants this resolution. Admittedly, the town of 7,000 is estimated to be 97.4% white, but that does not mean the community is racist. Certainly, the Republican First Selectman is not. His daughter is married to a black man whom, with his wife and children, we often see at our beach club. And Old Lyme is among a handful of Connecticut towns that welcome refugees.