RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/11/why-the-left-tells-lies-about-christopher-columbus/

For over a decade, Columbus has been painted as a mass murderer, committing all sorts of crimes in the New World, including genocide.

So far, though, he has not–at least, not yet–been accused of not providing transgender bathrooms in his ships.

Those accusations are complete fabrications, unsupported by even one shred of historical evidence. Let me repeat that because it is very important: there is no historical basis, no contemporary documents, nothing, that indicates that he engaged in all of the “crimes” that present-day activists have promulgated. None! Zip! Nada!

The “accusations” (which often sound more like insults than rational accusations) range from the gruesome (claiming he chopped off Indians’ hands for not bringing gold or carrying out genocide—total fabrications) to the infantile (ridiculing the fact that one of his ships sunk—he was not the captain of that particular ship and they were sailing in uncharted seas abounding in hidden reefs), to the stupid (Democrat politicians and Native Americans claiming that Columbus carried out genocide in North America, where he never set foot nor sail).

Nonetheless, we can expect the usual posturing and sloganeering on Columbus Day by historically illiterate leftists and “indigenous people,” some of the latter being about as Native American as Elizabeth Warren.

One should consult primary sources (preferably in the original Spanish and not in translations): his logbook, the “Capitulations” (legal documents, also known as the “Book of Privileges”), the contemporary biographies, and especially “Los Cuatro Viajes del Almirante y su Testamento,” and, “Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias,” both written by Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who as every schoolchild in Spain and the Caribbean knows, was the Apostle of the Indians for working indefatigably to protect the Indians from his fellow Spaniards.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-remedy-antiviral-government-funding-merck-molnupiravir-11633897174?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

When Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics announced on Oct. 1 that their new antiviral pill reduced Covid hospitalizations by roughly half, some in the media blamed Donald Trump. An Axios headline: “Before Merck backed COVID antiviral, Trump admin turned it down.” In fact, Trump officials pushed for government funding to accelerate the development of the drug, molnupiravir. They were opposed by a career official, Rick Bright, whom Democrats praised as a “whistleblower.”

Mr. Bright joined the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority in 2010 and became Barda’s director in 2016. The authority, part of the Health and Human Services Department, is charged with preparing for and responding to public-health threats. After Mr. Bright repeatedly clashed with HHS officials, he was reassigned in April 2020 to a lower-level job at the National Institutes of Health. Mr. Bright then filed a complaint accusing Trump officials of pressuring him to fast-track unsafe drugs and award contracts “based on political connections and cronyism.”

He claimed that even before the pandemic, they were inappropriately pressing Barda to fund clinical studies of molnupiravir, which had shown promise against other viruses in lab experiments at Emory University. Mr. Bright’s complaint alleged that George Painter, CEO of Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory, and Trump HHS official Robert Kadlec had urged Barda in November 2019 to “invest millions of dollars into their ‘miracle cure.’ ” It noted that “similar experimental drugs in this class had been shown to cause reproductive toxicity in animals, and offspring from treated animals had been born without teeth and without parts of their skulls.” But similar effects hadn’t occurred with molnupiravir. Mr. Bright rejected the Emory funding request; the decision “clearly frustrated Dr. Kadlec and further strained their relationship,” according to the complaint.

A few months later, officials were trying to accelerate treatments for the novel coronavirus. A March 2020 study by scientists at Emory, Vanderbilt and the University of North Carolina showed molnupiravir was highly potent against Covid-19 in human cells and prevented other coronaviruses, including SARS, from causing severe lung damage in mice. “This new drug not only has high potential for treating COVID-19 patients, but also appears effective for the treatment of other serious coronavirus infections,” said the study’s senior author, Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at UNC.

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/against-the-commodification-of-blackness?token=

Recently, Bari Weiss was kind enough to have me as a guest on her podcast, Honestly. We had a wide-ranging conversation that covers my path to academia, my personal struggles, my work as an economist, education, and of course, race in the US.

BARI WEISS: Glenn, if one really cared about black lives and one wanted to insist on a movement that actually fulfilled the promise of black lives mattering, what would be the top three priorities of that movement?

GLENN LOURY: I think self-determination and some sense of what we mean by taking responsibility for our lives. That’s in the Shelby Steele ballpark that we started this interview talking about. I’d say education. I’m sorry, and this is partisan, but the public school unions are poorly serving—on the whole, in the places where black students congregate—the intellectual needs of those students. Now, there are other people to be faulted as well. Opening up that system to innovation is absolutely imperative to improving the quality of black life in this country.

And people are going to dismiss me. They are going to say I’m anti-union, and they’re going to say I’m a right-wing ideologue. I’m going to say I’m looking at failure. I’m looking at multigenerational failure and the public safety piece of this narrative that the police are out to get black people, this contempt for law, the lawlessness of the George Floyd protests, the celebration of that lawlessness, the silence in the face of it.

Patriotism, and by that I don’t mean blind loyalty to a flag salute. I mean seeing yourself as an integral part of the American project. This is our country. We don’t stand off from it. There is no United Nations where black claims will be negotiated. We must make our peace with our fellow citizens here. That has corollaries. Two national anthems is a terrible idea. Reparations for slavery is a mistake. It wrongly places the nature of the moral problem. It creates these parties as between which a negotiation and a deal is being cut. There are not two parties here. There’s only one party.

I have to say, on the last one, I feel very, very torn about the issue of reparations. Because I feel, in lieu of some kind of organized government-run reparations program—and let’s put aside the incompetence of the government and the rest—instead, what’s happening is a kind of piecemeal hand-to-hand patchwork reparations program that is actually stoking incredible contempt and suspicion and tension among racial groups right now.