RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/17/contradictions-gone-viral-n1479646

The controversy over the efficacy and safety of the COVID vaccines and boosters, and the validity of vaccine passports, seems only to have grown more pronounced and, indeed, more vehement with every passing week. The apologists for the vaccines—political leaders, medical “experts” (usually government-affiliated), the media and the punditocracy—have deposed that everyone must be vaccinated, unleashing an army of “fact-checkers” to torpedo any dissident argument and call the credentials and bona fides of highly accredited objectors into question, that is, when they are not being summarily censored.

The legacy press, as to be expected, is busy advancing the staple narrative of the official echelons. There are very few exceptions. I have just come across a particularly egregious and representative sample of such sanctimonious special pleading by Jonathan Kay in Canada’s National Post, worth attending to as an example of hack opportunism to be met with almost everywhere in the mainstream media. The moving finger writes, but in the case of the majority of journalists, only after it has gauged the direction of the wind.

As for our politicians and public health bureaucracies, they have put all their eggs in the mRNA vaccine basket and are now incapable of responding honestly to the bankruptcy of their policies. Their only strategy is to double down on their failure and persist in terrifying a gullible citizenry. Maintaining authority, the perks of office and reputation are powerful incentives. Notwithstanding, contradictions continue to poke holes in the consensus of what passes for official—and much public—unanimity. 

We are told that booster shots, which are coming thick and fast, are fail-safe supplements to counter the proliferation of variants. That these variants seem to have no trouble escaping the orbit of the recommended antidotes does not trouble the equanimity of our so-called “experts.” A recent report states that “An international group of vaccine experts, including officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and World Health Organization (WHO), said that there is no evidence to suggest that the general population needs COVID-19 vaccine booster shots.” Yet they keep coming and the variants keep humming along.

The Mayo Clinic and the CDC expediently changed their definition of vaccination from “produce immunity” to “produce protection,” essentially, from controlling the disease to reducing its symptoms. Apparently, the vaccine train and its caboose of booster shots looked as if it were beginning to run off the rails, requiring the gambit of shunting to another track. In any event, the destination is likely unattainable.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/20/the-fbis-incurable-rot/

The incurable incompetence, corruption, and moral rot of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was on full display last week.

Within a 24-hour period, some of America’s toughest female athletes recounted to a Senate committee their painful tales of how the FBI ignored evidence that team doctor Larry Nassar was a sexual predator, and a powerful attorney who colluded with the FBI to concoct one of the most animating chapters of the Trump-Russia collusion fiction was indicted for lying to federal officials.

Overlap in the two cases is more than ironic, it’s illustrative: Michael Sussman, a lawyer for Perkins Coie, the law firm that was working on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, met with the FBI’s general counsel in September 2016 to plant a false story about Donald Trump’s financial ties to a Russian bank. That same month, the Indianapolis Star broke the story of how Nassar, the longtime physician for the USA Gymnastics team, had sexually abused several female gymnasts. One victim filed a lawsuit after the FBI refused to investigate complaints made to at least two FBI field offices in 2015 and 2016.

But the FBI at that time was too preoccupied with protecting Hillary Clinton to deal with a monster who had systematically raped nearly 300 female American athletes. (As Lee Smith recently noted, the FBI “has been used for a quarter of a century as the place to clean up the Clintons’ dirt.”)

Months before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI, led by James Comey, used its unchecked authority to sabotage Donald Trump. Meanwhile, elite American athletes, including Olympic gold medalists, could not get the bureau’s attention while a sexual abuser continued his rampage. Local FBI agents passed the buck and allegedly falsified reports; one agent reportedly tried to shake down a USA Gymnastics official for a job with the organization.

The FBI’s political game-playing came with irreversible human cost. According to an analysis by the New York Times, at least 40 women and girls, including some of the youngest victims, were assaulted by Nassar between July 2015, the first contact with the FBI, and September 2016. Had the Star not published its exposé of Nassar that month, which finally prompted some action by the FBI, who knows how long his depraved predation would have continued?

“If they’re not going to protect me, I want to know, who are they trying to protect?” McKayla Maroney, a two-time Olympic medalist and one of Nassar’s most frequent victims, asked the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 15.

Maroney may or may not be surprised to learn the agency assigned with protecting the most vulnerable is actually in the business of protecting the most powerful.

Nasser Was Not an Outlier

FBI Director Christopher Wray, hired by President Trump in 2017, publicly apologized. The “fundamental errors” made in the Nassar case, Wray told the judiciary committee, would not happen again as long as he’s head of the agency. “I want to make sure the American people know that the reprehensible conduct . . . is not representative of the work that I see from our 37,000 folks every day.” The rank-and-file, Wray insisted, perform their jobs with “uncompromising integrity.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_great_reset_of_beef_consumption.html

“You are not going to eat beef in the future — I one hundred percent guarantee it.”

Political commentator and rancher Glenn Beck stresses each of those words at the beginning of his recent video.  He explains that in the not too distant future, public land will not be used for cattle grazing, resulting in government-imposed meat shortages.  Beck worries that our food supply will be crippled by the globalists, and Americans will no longer have control over what they eat, how it is processed, and what it costs.

Globalist advocates of the New World Order are promoting so-called “sustainability” programs that will raise beef prices so high that only the super-rich will be able to afford it.  This is designed to be achieved by outlawing grazing on public land, allowing an oligopoly of meat-packers to squeeze ranchers out of business, and popularizing plant-based meat.  It’s the big meat-packers who will make this fake meat, so their profits will continue to skyrocket, sustained under the cover of “climate virtue.”

Veganism is being advanced as the most ethical way to sustain the planet, and to promote human health and animal welfare.  But along with that, ranchers and small- and medium-scale beef-packers are being marginalized.  The very consumption of meat is being damned.  Deploying outright lies, a misguided agenda threatens individual liberty and our freedom to farm, own livestock, control our land, and choose our diet.

The socialist roster of lies about meat-eating must be countered.  One of the biggest lies is that veganism protects the environment.  But according to Dr. Frank Mitloehner, professor and air quality extension specialist at the University of California, Davis, if the entire population of the U.S. became vegan for a year, emissions would be reduced by a mere 2.6%.  He also says advocates of the Green New Deal have been dishonest about the water input assigned to beef.  Cattle mostly ingest green water or rain water.  What’s more, they soon release much of that back to earth by urination — which cannot be said of trees.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/china-uses-disinformation-pretext-ban-more-online-joseph-klein/

The Communist Chinese regime is moving aggressively to solidify what it calls a “civilized” Internet for its citizens. The regime’s definition of a “civilized” Internet is one that adheres to “the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological cyberspace sphere, foster a common ideology among the whole Party and the Chinese people, and interiorize core socialist values.”

China’s rulers want the Internet to serve as their tool to disseminate their propaganda about “the great achievements of [China’s Communist] party in each historical period of revolution, construction, and reform.” The regime intends to crack down on what it characterizes as “misinformation” and to refute so-called online “rumors” with the government’s official party line.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported on an online summary posted by China’s State Council of upcoming proposed regulations. “The country plans to better regulate the production, publication and distribution of online content, classify the management of online accounts and build a national mechanism to stop and prevent disinformation,” according to the Xinhua News Agency.

President Joe Biden has frequently sought to contrast “autocratic governments” like China’s with “democracies.” But at least in the area of freedom of expression on the Internet, Biden’s declared line of demarcation is rapidly disappearing.

Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith co-authored an article with Andrew Keane Woods, a law professor at the University of Arizona College of Law, entitled “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal.” The article claimed that “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” during the last two decades when it came to the debate over whether Internet freedom or control of the network deserved greater priority.

“Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values,” the law professors wrote.

The giant social media companies in the United States are already doing much the same thing as the Chinese regime in terms of censoring online speech they don’t like. The difference is that China’s government is imposing censorship directly on what is posted on social media platforms in China. In the United States, left-wing Silicon Valley plutocrats are doing the dirty work themselves, under pressure by the Biden administration and progressives in Congress to clamp down even further on what they consider to be undesirable speech.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-withdrawal-lost-harvard-rotc-military-training-ivy-league-elites-patriotism-11632152914?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Postmortems on Afghanistan are still focused on failures of the U.S. military and government, but before moving on, we should explore the more fundamental causes of this debacle.

Maybe because I have spent my life in education, I have always valued the observation, attributed to the Duke of Wellington, that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” The qualities developed in those British schoolboys produced the soldiering that defeated Napoleon’s forces. Since armies are typically made up of young people who go straight from school to the battlefield, the traits and habits necessary for winning wars must be already ingrained in those we expect to fight them. Afghanistan was lost in the halls of Harvard.

Harvard was the first college to bring the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, to campus in 1916. ROTC was established by the U.S. National Defense Act, signed by President Woodrow Wilson. Its purpose, then as now, was to encourage college students to undergo military training as potential officers. Many campus plaques honor Harvard students who fought for their country, but ROTC came under attack in 1968 as part of opposition to the Vietnam War, the draft and the “military-industrial complex.” As the war became unpopular, antagonism toward the military on campus grew.

Both the draft and American involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973. One might have expected the voluntary ROTC to flourish, given that the U.S. still had plenty of enemies, some with dangerous weaponry and aims. Instead, rather than encourage outstanding students to undertake military training as part of their civic responsibility, faculty at Harvard and elsewhere took the lead in banishing ROTC from campus.

By the time I arrived at Harvard to teach in 1993, the ostensible justification for keeping ROTC off campus had shifted from objections to its educational function to rejection of the Clinton-era policy toward gay soldiers. Rather than legitimately opposing “don’t ask, don’t tell” through the political process, faculty used it as moral camouflage for their continuing war on military service.

The finer students saw through it. I fondly recall a student forum in 1999 where a self-described “gay libertarian” mocked the university’s policy, saying that the next pretext would be that recruits were not allowed freedom of speech.

But student conscience and conscientiousness were no match for opposition from the small number of faculty ideologues in the humanities and social sciences—the ones who determine a university’s political agenda because the rest of us are too indifferent or weak to stop them.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2021/09/the-left-and-the-decline-of-the-moral-community/

With the emergence of permissive liberalism in the West during the 1960s – much encouraged by the Left – immoral and then amoral conduct became more and more socially acceptable. The abandonment of moral norms in favour of more licentious behaviour is a consequence of widespread public acceptance of the degeneration of society into amorality. This could not happen without the failure of influence of the idea of a moral community of like-minded people, people who see it as their role to perpetuate standards of good conduct that are in danger of being undermined or abandoned altogether. But now, fifty years after the Swinging Sixties, we can see where this has all led. The sexual revolution contributed to the weakening of family ties, as the norm of the extended family gave way to the nuclear family, which then gave way to the single-parent family.3

And now we have the transgender movement seeking to remove from parents any right to object to their child’s manipulation by political activists advocating irreversible life-changing interventions in the name of transgender ‘rights’, promoted and carried out by physicians and counsellors whose role as therapists is deliberately put to serving political ends.4 These activists have abrogated their professional obligation to do no harm, and their ethics have been distorted and eroded such that they now accommodate the doing of irreversible harm to vulnerable children, even against the objections of the parent(s). This is a new form of amorality and barbarism, and it betrays how corrupted the public discourse on moral probity has become.

At root this all comes down to an issue of fundamental moral values, principles, conscience, and character. These are not words you hear or read much in the mainstream media these days, at least not in any meaningful sense. The same applies in education, and in public life. The rhetoric is still occasionally used, but often it rings hollow, lacking meaningful content if the words are used carelessly, as if everyone should know what they mean and so further discussion is unnecessary. 

https://dianebederman.com/medically-assisted-suicide-and-abortion-and-the-sanctity-of-life/

My friend of 50 years died on Tuesday, August 17 at 8:15 AM. It wasn’t a surprise. We were told that she had requested that her life end. Medically assisted suicide. Death with dignity.

I am not against MAID, medically assisted suicide, or abortion, but I fear the slippery slope that we saw with abortion will come to assisted suicide. Almost 7,600 Canadians received medical assistance to end their lives last year, continuing a trend of steady annual increases in cases since the procedure was legalized in 2016.

If we lived in a world where we honoured the sanctity and dignity of all life, perhaps I would not be so fearful. But we don’t live there. Too many have attacked the Judeo/Christian ethic that underpins our way of life. We live in a world that separates essential people from the non-essential in order to permit the destruction of some lives over others. That not only allowed, but commanded, that some people do not have the right to earn a living, to be with loved ones who are dying (talk about death with dignity), to celebrate life. We allowed others to dictate whose businesses will survive and whose could not. We set such restrictions that we allowed opioid overdose to reach all-time highs because too many people lost hope and faith in living. No dignity in those deaths.

We, as a society have shown how easily we will give up the rights of others to protect our own. That is not honouring the sanctity of life.