RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-unseemly-canonization-of-saint-schiff/

In his unyielding hatred of Trump, a ‘conservative’ writer overlooks the many destructive lies Schiff knowingly peddled for years.

G abriel Schoenfeld’s obsequious review for the Bulwark of Congressman Adam Schiff’s semi-fictional memoir Midnight in Washington offers an unfortunate example of the selective moral blindness that infects so many Trump-obsessed writers, leading them to justify the most egregious abuses of power.

Schoenfeld nearly canonizes Schiff, noting that Trump had subjected the congressman to many insults, including “pencil neck,” “Shifty Schiff,” “Little Adam Schiff,” “crooked Adam Schiff,” and “Adam Schitt.” These “crude appellations tell us far more about the appalling character of Donald Trump,” explains Schoenfeld, before bizarrely attacking Bloomberg’s Eli Lake and the Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg — writers any politically sentient being would recognize as Trump critics — for having the temerity to also criticize Schiff as a mendacious partisan. Like the most zealous Trumpist, Schoenfeld demands completely loyalty to the cause.

Then again, even if Trump had been a Russian asset since 1987, it would not change the fact that Schiff remains one of the most dishonorable members of Congress. Granted, this is no small feat. Schoenfeld at least concedes, “It must also be acknowledged that Schiff has made mistakes in the course of his investigations,” but those trip-ups are mere “minor transgressions when measured against the entirety of Schiff’s record.” It’s true that the transgressions Schoenfeld mentions are minor. It’s the ones he ignores that are not.

Schoenfeld uncritically quotes Schiff’s contention that while “there was no way to know” whether Trump had colluded with Russia, he was “determined to find out.” Find out? Schiff not only read the fabulist Steele Dossier into the congressional record after he knew it was a partisan oppo file; but he also continued to declare that the central assertion of the document (that the Trump campaign had colluded and conspired with the Russian government to steal the presidency in 2016) was not only conceivable but a fact. He did so on numerous occasions and with certitude. Schiff famously claimed to be in personal possession of a “smoking gun” in the matter. Schiff has never shared any corroboration for his allegation that a seditious and clandestine conspiracy existed. Not in his speeches. Not in his memoir. Not anywhere. This transgression is so minor, apparently, that Schoenfeld didn’t see the need to mention it.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

John McWhorter is an independent thinker – a rare (at risk of becoming extinct) individual in today’s academy. He is professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history. At age 56, with a PhD from Stanford, he has written almost two dozen books. In his spare time, he is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and an opinion columnist for The New York Times. He describes himself as a “cranky, liberal Democrat.” He is a black man who believes that affirmative action should be based on class, not race, and that woke racism hurts those it claims to help.eview

In this book, he argues that woke racism represents a third wave of anti-racism, “…from people wishing they hadn’t missed the late 1960s.” This wave, he claims, has assumed the traits of a religion, with white privilege as original sin. The third wave “has taken it from the concrete political activism of Martin Luther King to the faith-based commitments of a Martin Luther.” He castigates the proselytizers of this religion, “The Elect,” as “pious, unempirical virtue signalers.” They resemble, in his words, early Christians who “thought of themselves as bearers of truth, in contrast to all other belief systems…” Like other such movements, they appeal “to an idealized past, a fantastical future, and an indelibly polluted present.” For the Elect, black people’s noble past is Africa, a glorified future is one without hate, but the present consists of oppressors and oppressed. He finds the Elect’s sanctimony insulting to blacks, who are led to believe that victimhood is destiny and success is due to special treatment. When conservative blacks deny victimhood, they are smeared by the Elect: Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor-elect Winsome Sears is a “white” supremacist and South Carolina’s Senator Tim Scott is an “Uncle Tom.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/real-fix-homelessness-bruce-bawer/

EXCERPT

“……I didn’t know what should be done about homelessness, but I’d come to realize that handouts weren’t the answer. What, then, is? According to most homelessness activists, it’s Housing First, which has been official U.S. policy since George W. Bush. The thinking behind it is simple: when people are homeless, the main thing they need are homes. So give them homes – permanent public housing, right off the bat, with no strings attached. What if they have other problems that have contributed to their homelessness? Well, those issues can be addressed afterwards.

Reading the Wikipedia entry for Housing First, you’d think it’s been tremendously successful. In various jurisdictions, according to that page, it’s slashed government outlays per homeless person; reduced drinking by homeless alcoholics; lowered “the number of chronically homeless persons living on the streets or in shelters”; brought down hospitalization and incarceration rates; alleviated pressure on the child welfare system; and cut the number of people who become homeless again. Which raises one little question: if Housing First is so spectacularly effective, why are the streets and parks of many American cities swarming with unprecedented numbers of homeless people? Why the seas of tents? Why all the public defecation? Why the staggering number of used syringes in the gutters? In search of the answer to this conundrum, Michael Shellenberger, a longtime San Franciscan, decided to scrutinize approaches to homelessness in jurisdictions around the world. The product is an eye-opening new book entitled San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

His subtitle notwithstanding, Shellenberger didn’t begin his project with the intention of condemning progressives. He’s a longtime progressive himself, with a degree in Peace and Global Studies and a background in environmental activism. In 2008, Time Magazine named him a “Hero of the Environment”; in 2018 he ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of California. Recently, to be sure, he’s been taking on leftist orthodoxies: last year his book Apocalypse Never, an attack on “environmental alarmism,” antagonized climate-change hysterics; San Fransicko will doubtless receive a similar response from the devotees of homelessness ideology, i.e. Housing First.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/book-of-ruth-wisse-phyllis-chesler

Like the poet John Masefield, I also suffer from “sea fever” and so down I went to the “seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” I needed no “tall ship,” only a room on the beach with a terrace—and all the time in the world to read Ruth R. Wisse’s new book, Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation.

Reader: I could not put it down. I still chose to read it slowly, to savor it, take it all in. I must have underlined at least a quarter of the book. Wisse commands an aerial view of Jewish history, bringing it to bear on Israeli politics and on the demonization of the only Jewish state. She continues to issue her clarion call about the plague of “political correctness” that threatens to devour the entire Western enterprise.

Free as a Jew is an “intellectual memoir,” but it is also a family history replete with charming photos; a story of European Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust; and a warm introduction to Yiddish literature, and to many of the major Yiddish writers whom Wisse and her parents knew, hosted, and supported in Montreal, where they lived after fleeing Romania. Wisse introduces us to many of these writers: Sholem Asch, Sholem Aleichem, Itzik Manger, Mendele Mokher Sforim, Abraham Sutzkever, and Chaim Grade, as well as to Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Leonard Cohen, Hillel Halkin, Yehuda Amichai, Irving Howe, and Norman Podhoretz.

For Wisse, Yiddish is not a social justice enterprise, nor is it mainly associated with “progressivism.” Rather, it is a rich language, “associated with the actual Yiddish-speaking communities, which remained what they had always been: outposts of Jewish separatism, consisting mainly of religiously observant Jews living culturally apart from the surrounding population.” Yiddish—the language, the culture, the works—is not meant to be politicized.

Free as a Jew is also a story about Ruth’s love affair with Israel, and about Montreal’s Jews (told through the lens of Ruth’s long career, both at McGill and in publishing, long before she accepted a position at Harvard).

But this work is primarily a quintessential history of ideas, and about the law of unintended intellectual consequences. Wisse now questions her founding Jewish studies, just as I’ve questioned my founding of women’s studies because all identity-based academic studies have become weaponized in the war against Western civilization, which has also come to mean a war against America and Israel.

https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Racism-Religion-Betrayed-America/dp/0593423062

New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the American social fabric.

Americans of good will on both the left and the right are secretly asking themselves the same question: how has the conversation on race in America gone so crazy? We’re told to read books and listen to music by people of color but that wearing certain clothes is “appropriation.” We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being Black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we’ll be seen as unwoke, or worse, labeled a racist. According to John McWhorter, the problem is that a well-meaning but pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion—and one that’s illogical, unreachable, and unintentionally neoracist.
 
In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of “white privilege” and the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervor of the “woke mob.” He shows how this religion that claims to “dismantle racist structures” is actually harming his fellow Black Americans by infantilizing Black people, setting Black students up for failure, and passing policies that disproportionately damage Black communities. The new religion might be called “antiracism,” but it features a racial essentialism that’s barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past.
 
Fortunately for Black America, and for all of us, it’s not too late to push back against woke racism. McWhorter shares scripts and encouragement with those trying to deprogram friends and family. And most importantly, he offers a roadmap to justice that actually will help, not hurt, Black America.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/islamophobia-industry-mark-tapson/

“There is an industry at work today, taking advantage of our liberty, infiltrating and influencing Western values and democracy,” writes Canadian author and blogger Diane Bederman in her brand new book The Islamophobia Industry: The Insidious Infiltration of Islam into the West. As the memory of the 9/11 attacks on American soil a generation ago recedes for many, this courageous short new work serves as an essential wakeup call to a Western world that, in the name of tolerance and inclusion, is allowing our rights and freedoms to be eroded as the value system of Islam grows in influence and power.

FrontPage Mag readers may recall that I interviewed Ms. Bederman here about her previous book The Serpent and the Red Thread, a unique history of antisemitism blending fiction, history and myth. She is also the author of Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here.

I posed some questions to Ms. Bederman about The Islamophobia Industry.

Mark Tapson: To paraphrase a question you pose in the preface to your new book, why did you decide to write a book about Islam at a time when saying anything critical of it is immediately denounced as bigotry?

Diane Bederman: It says 365 times in the Bible: Do Not Fear.

Fear is debilitating. We often run away rather than confront.

I am of an age and in a place where being called an Islamophobe does not worry me. I cannot be canceled! I worry more about my children and grandchildren. We have to teach our children the importance of protecting democracy and freedom. Ducking and hiding will only lead to a loss of that freedom. The ethic that underpins our freedom, the Judeo/Christian ethic, is 3500 years old. We cannot let it perish out of fear of being called a name or even under threat of death. Without freedom, there is no life.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/true-raiders-review-in-the-tunnels-of-jerusalem-11636671808?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

In 1909, a shadowy syndicate of treasure hunters set out from England on an expedition to Jerusalem. Their goal was nothing less than to find and take possession of the Ark of the Covenant—the legendary gold-covered chest in which the shattered remains of the Ten Commandments were said to be stored. Some of the group were fascinated by the mysterious quest itself; some hoped to become rich beyond their wildest dreams.

At the head of the expedition was Monty Parker, the son of an English earl and a veteran of the First Boer War. But the group’s ace-in-the-hole was Valter Juvelius, an eccentric Finnish scholar who claimed to have uncovered a code—in the Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel, based on the number seven—that would lead them to the Ark. This may sound far-fetched today, but the period between the mid-19th and early-20th centuries was a time of fevered archaeological exploration marked by improbable discoveries across the remnants of the ancient world. Finds of the time included the Cuerdale Hoard in England, the palace of Knossos in Crete and Paleolithic cave art in Altamira, Spain.

As Brad Ricca recounts in “True Raiders: The Untold Story of the 1909 Expedition to Find the Legendary Ark ofthe Covenant,” Parker’s expedition encountered problems from the beginning. There were the seasonal rains. And when the locals in Jerusalem learned that the treasure hunters meant to dig under the revered Dome of the Rock, they reacted with violence. But the biggest obstacle was the vagueness of the cipher itself, which, according to Juvelius, was intended both to reveal and obscure the whereabouts of the Ark.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-bet-your-life-review-the-dangers-of-finding-a-cure-11636414251?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

In the fall of 1937, Joan Marlar, a 6-year-old girl in Tulsa, Okla., was diagnosed with strep throat and given an elixir containing a wondrous new medicine, sulfanilamide—an antibiotic hailed by Time magazine not long before as “the medical discovery of the decade.” Over the next week, Joan was racked with nausea; she became weak and tired. Her kidneys shut down, and she lapsed into a coma. Nine days after her diagnosis, she was dead.

The culprit: the medicine she had been given to cure her. The liquid used to dissolve the antibiotic, it turned out, had poisoned her kidneys. The manufacturer had never tested the product for safety—and at the time wasn’t legally obliged to do so. Prodded by this disaster, Congress passed a law in 1938 mandating the safety testing that might have saved Joan and the 104 other Americans who died from the toxic remedy.

The sulfanilamide story is one of a series of prismatic examples shared by Paul Offit in “You Bet Your Life.” Medical progress, he shows, is choppy and uneven, lurching forward in response to a new insight, then stuttering as unexpected limits are revealed.

When Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon, performed the world’s first heart transplant in 1967, Dr. Offit notes, he “became an international celebrity.” And the transplant recipient, a 54-year-old grocer named Louis Washkansky, was briefly “the world’s most famous patient”—though he died several weeks after the operation. Other surgeons were inspired to attempt the procedure. but hope soon turned to despair when, like Washkansky, most recipients died within a year. Life magazine ran a cover story in 1971 titled “The Tragic Record of Heart Transplants.” Yet technology continued to advance, and outcomes gradually improved. Today around 2,300 heart transplants are performed every year in the U.S., and the average length of survival is now 15 years.

Dr. Offit, a pediatrician, vaccine expert and prolific author, is exquisitely attuned to the burden shouldered by the earliest recipients of medical treatments and technologies. Many such patients, like Washkansky, are on death’s door and wouldn’t survive without a new treatment, yet often they don’t survive even with it. The evolution of blood transfusion offers an especially poignant example of this trade-off. Without question, the ability to collect, store and share human blood—gradually achieved in the early 20th century—revolutionized surgery and saved the lives of thousands of warfighters and other trauma victims. Yet Dr. Offit reminds us that transfused blood—contaminated with viruses, including hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV—would kill thousands of recipients before screening tests were available. Today the risk of getting a known virus from a blood transfusion is minuscule; but given the ever-present possibility of new pathogens, the risk is not zero. “When do we cross the line into relative certainty?” Dr. Offit asks. “Do we ever cross it?” Such questions remind us of the fraught ambiguities with which we continuously wrestle.

While risks in the first stages of medical innovation fall primarily on the patients, a heavy toll can be exacted on scientist-practitioners as well. Dr. Offit cites the historian Bettyann Kevles describing a 1920 gathering of radiologists: Because of radiation damage, “so many attendees were missing hands and fingers that when the chicken dinner was served no one could cut their meat.”

https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Risk-Right-Understanding-Science-ebook/dp/B01MAXIL21/ref=sr_1_3?crid=

Do cell phones cause brain cancer? Does BPA threaten our health? How safe are certain dietary supplements, especially those containing exotic herbs or small amounts of toxic substances? Is the HPV vaccine safe? We depend on science and medicine as never before, yet there is widespread misinformation and confusion, amplified by the media, regarding what influences our health. In Getting Risk Right, Geoffrey C. Kabat shows how science works—and sometimes doesn’t—and what separates these two very different outcomes.

Kabat seeks to help us distinguish between claims that are supported by solid science and those that are the result of poorly designed or misinterpreted studies. By exploring different examples, he explains why certain risks are worth worrying about, while others are not. He emphasizes the variable quality of research in contested areas of health risks, as well as the professional, political, and methodological factors that can distort the research process. Drawing on recent systematic critiques of biomedical research and on insights from behavioral psychology, Getting Risk Right examines factors both internal and external to the science that can influence what results get attention and how questionable results can be used to support a particular narrative concerning an alleged public health threat. In this book, Kabat provides a much-needed antidote to what has been called “an epidemic of false claims.”