It’s Monday, October 25th, 2021…but before we begin, a quick story of the scamdemic. A couple TLJ and we are very close with spent the weekend at our home, and the wife, a teacher in a D.C. area school system, shared this story of bureaucratic nonsense.
Seems a high school girl…we’ll call her Suzy Q…tested positive for the WuFlu, so those sitting around her in class (teachers are required to maintain seating charts so as to facilitate contact tracing), despite having been constantly wearing masks and testing negative for the virus, were forced to quarantine for fourteen days. This is where things turn from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Seems Suzy Q’s parents and sister were all in the same high school as she, her mother working in the cafeteria and her father a teacher. Yet, despite the four of them spending significant amounts of time under the same roof sans masks, they weren’t quarantined, as the health department didn’t consider her family close contacts. Go figure!
The only question we have is how long Americans will allow this Kabuki theater…
…to continue. It’s as Jim Geraghty wondered in a recent installment of his Morning Jolt:
“A few weekends ago, I went to MetLife Stadium with 70,231 other people, very few of whom wore masks, for several hours. It wasn’t a super-spreader event.Life went on. Why is it safe for people to go to sporting events and not wear masks but kindergarteners still need to be masked all day long? Unfortunately, CDC director Rochelle Walensky apparently believes fully vaccinated kids should keep wearing masks indefinitely.“
The contradictions, inconsistencies and outright stupidity evidenced in what has essentially been a political response to the purported pandemic almost from the outset (such as being forced to wear a mask while walking through a restaurant past maskless diners), are beyond count. And the hypocrisy demonstrated by our “leaders” certainly hasn’t helped.
Here’s the juice: It isn’t going to end until we, the American electorate, FORCE an end to it…and to those who’ve imposed these incredibly costly and ridiculous restrictions.
“White House handlers shield President Biden from the press as much as possible, and Thursday’s town hall on CNN shows why. Even with a friendly audience and softball questions, Mr. Biden’s performance revealed why so many Americans are losing confidence in his Presidency.
One big problem is that Mr. Biden often doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about...
…Mr. Biden’s confusion extended to foreign policy, which is supposed to be his strength. Regarding Taiwan—a crucial issue with China—Mr. Biden misstated U.S. policy. Asked “can you vow to protect Taiwan,” Mr. Biden said “yes.”
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper must have figured this was news, because he gave Mr. Biden another chance: “So are you saying that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if—”
Mr. Biden: “Yes.”
Mr. Cooper: —“China attacked?”
Mr. Biden: “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.”
The actual U.S. policy toward Taiwan is “strategic ambiguity” about U.S. intentions. The Taiwan Relations Act commits the U.S. to help Taiwan defend itself but does not include a NATO-like commitment to go to war to defend the island democracy. Many people think the U.S. should make such a commitment explicit(We among them!) so Beijing doesn’t miscalculate and invade the island. Was Mr. Biden announcing a change in U.S. policy?
Apparently not, because the White House soon walked back Mr. Biden’s words. Strategic ambiguity lives, or perhaps we should say strategic confusion in the case of Mr. Biden. You have to wonder what the hard men in Beijing think of this performance. Does the fast White House retreat from Mr. Biden’s words mean the U.S. doesn’t intend to defend Taiwan? What is U.S. policy? Wars have started amid such mixed signals to adversaries.
We take no pleasure in pointing this out, since the U.S. needs a President who can handle the strains of the job. Mr. Biden was never Demosthenes, and all Presidents stumble in speech. But Mr. Biden’s frequent public confusion about the major issues of the day is a reason for the growing public concern.“
On the other hand, we take great pleasure in pointing this out, as, in addition to being a serial liar, Grandpa Joe would have accurately been describing The Groper when he mistakenly said of Willy Wonka…
…and, in truth…
Curiously, the Journal‘s editors failed to mention the most alarming aspect of Biden’s performance during the CNN town hall nobody watched…
…the explanation for which may well have been hit upon by Peter Jameson in this link from DuckDuckGo.
Next, writing at NRO, Andy McCarthy poses a pertinent question:
“The Soviet constitution of 1936, Joseph Stalin’s constitution, explicitly guaranteed freedom of speech to all citizens of the USSR — in Article 125, which also vouchsafed the closely related freedoms of the press, of assembly, of mass meetings, and of street demonstrations. When Moscow revised the constitution in 1977, pains were again taken (in Article 50) to ensure — at least on paper — that “citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.”
Were they in a position to do so, the tens of millions of men, women, and children immiserated, imprisoned, enslaved, and killed by the same totalitarian communist regime would have begged to differ.
“Rights” are not rights by virtue of being written down. They are not self-enforcing. Written “rights” are, instead, a reflection of what a body politic perceives to be fundamental. They are not an assurance that this perception will be actualized. Whether freedom of speech truly exists is a cultural question, not a legal one. It hinges on the society’s commitment to liberty as something that is lived, not merely spoken of.
To rely on the legal system to enforce a “right” that the culture, when it gets down to brass tacks, does not support, is to not have a vibrant guarantee. It is to have a parchment promise that is effectively worthless.
Increasingly, the latter is the state of play in the United States, and there are two reasons for this.
First, progressives, who call the tune in the bipartisan political establishment, do not believe in free speech. They may, like the Bolsheviks, nod to it as the tribute stealthy vice must pay to public virtue. But to the limited extent they are ideologically principled rather than just power-hungry, progressives believe that the good is arrived at through scientific study, by experts who, of course, are rigorously apolitical. In this way of thinking, it is not enough to dismiss robust discourse as folly; progressives see free speech as antithetical to human flourishing, an appeal to the passions and prejudices of the masses who are too benighted to sort matters out on their own. With due respect to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. there is no marketplace of ideas; there are the progressive establishment’s ideas, versus the remaining dangerous ideas.
Second, progressives do believe, deeply, in process. While we are in the midst of a period of radicalism, progressive strategy is generally (and in its most effective form) Fabian. Process is the way ascendant progressives advance their own ideas while eroding those of the bourgeois culture. It is the way dominant progressives strangle any emerging competition in the cradle.
The rule of law is a cultural phenomenon. Law enforcement, by contrast, is a process — one that can, perversely, abrade the rule of law it purports to undergird.
As a short-term political objective, the Garland memo cynically paints these recalcitrant parents with the same brush that tars conservatives as “domestic terrorists,” on the rationale that Trump supporters who rioted at the Capitol self-identify as the patriotic political right and profess to share some conservative ideas. (Of course the rioters — whether they realized it or not — were undermining the very constitutional system that is essential to the conservative conception of liberty and thus were anti-conservative, but that is a story for another day.)
As for the long term, Garland’s memo serves the progressive crusade against free speech.
…Today’s progressives say you have free speech…as long as it is not incitement. But then they redefine incitement to entail not just violence the speaker intends but violence to which hypersensitive progressives are “triggered,” even if violence was the last thing the speaker wanted. They reduce “free speech” to a protection only against criminal conviction, not against the intimidating law-enforcement process. And as they marginalize dissent, they excuse, even lionize, the mob.
Free speech is still inscribed in America’s Constitution. That does not mean it is still quintessentially American. We need it to be.“
That this is even the subject of legitimate debate speaks VOLUMES about the state of Liberalism in America and around the globe today.
Turning from the issue of free speech to the matter of deliberate, self-serving deception, the editors at NRO record the substance of…
“We still don’t know(Only if you’re blind, death and dumb!!!) if a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology caused the COVID-19 global pandemic. (Well, to the extent possible, and within the limits of reasonable doubt, YES we DO!!!)But now we do know for certain that there was a cover-up — and that private organizations and the U.S. government either hid information or misled the public regarding several key details about the kinds of research that the U.S. taxpayers were indirectly funding at the Wuhan labs.
Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health and the deputy ethics counselor of the agency, wrote to Congress this week informing it that NIH had indeed funded “gain of function” research on coronaviruses found in bats, through grants to the private research group EcoHealth Alliance. Gain-of-function research takes existing viruses and makes them either more virulent or dangerous, more contagious, or both, toward the end of learning how to fight them. Quite a few virologists question whether the reward is worth the risk of deliberately engineering viruses that are more hazardous to human beings and could accidentally escape the laboratory and set off a pandemic.
…Back in May, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Senator Rand Paul had a heated exchange over whether NIH had ever funded this kind of research. “Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect — that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci averred.
Now NIH admits Fauci’s statement is not quite accurate…”
In other words, Anthony Fauci is a bald-faced liar. It’s life once again imitating art, as Jeff Goldblum predicted the rise of Dr. Faux Chi and EcoAlliance‘s Peter Daszak in the original Jurassic Park back in 1993:
Meanwhile, Dr. Faux Chi is really in trouble now, after it was learned the evil octogenarian’s organization funded experiments on some 44…
“I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID,” Biden said, mocking what he sees as the attitude of mandate opponents. “No, I mean, come on, freedom?!?”
It’s worth noting, as a candidate, Biden opposed a vaccine mandate.
(3). The 46* clown car SAID it left around 100 Americans in Afghanistan. Now, as reported in The Washington Free Beacon, in an off-the-record call with congressional staff they admit leaving closer to 400 U.S. citizens stranded in their ignominious exit.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…
…Speed…
…Travis…
…and last, but never least, the lovely Shannon:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Thomas Paine memorial Common Sense segment, courtesy today of a forward from Townhall.com via Geoff Griffith in which Landon Mion tells us…
We’re relatively certain transgenderism doesn’t rise to the level of a “crime against humanity”, an achievement with which Putin is all-too familiar; But we’re dead certain it’s a sin against God.
Regardless, as contributor Griffith so insightfully observed, “Why did it take a Russian dictator to finally make some sense of the moral decay in Western society?” Rather than, say…a purportedly practicing Roman Catholic with a self-assessed IQ of 11…
…or is he holding up the Roman numeral “II”?
Magoo
Video of the Day
Will Cain tells you all you need to know about 46*’s disastrous town hall meeting watched by hardly anyone at all on the cable network no one watches unless they’re stuck in an airport.
Tales of The Darkside
Courtesy of Geoff Griffith, some ACTUAL climate science, science based on hard data, not biased computer modeling.
On the Lighter Side
We don’t imagine there’s any chance this amount of advertising could possibly impact the nature of the coverage the MSM provided the WuFlu vaccine in general, and Pfizer in particular? Hat tip to Breeze Gould.
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