RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/fauci-allegedly-resisted-trump-directive-cancel-virus-research-grant

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ top infections disease expert, resisted a directive from President Trump to cancel a research grant for a non-profit that was linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a new book detailing the Trump administration’s handling of COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump issued a directive to Fauci and the National Institutes of Health in April 2020 to cut funding for a study examining how coronaviruses jump from infected bats to humans after it was reportedly linked to the lab in Wuhan, suspected of having leaked the virus.

The exchange between Fauci and the White House is detailed in an upcoming book by Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta called “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” according to Fox News.

The study’s sponsor, EcoHealth Alliance, was then told to end the remaining $369,819 balance of its 2020 grant.

According to the book, on April 2020, Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins received notice that Trump wanted to cancel the grant. Fauci and Collins resisted, telling the White House they “were not sure the NIH actually had the authority to terminate a peer-reviewed grant in the middle of a budget cycle.” 

ttps://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/it-is-just-hype-to-call-electism

Some think it’s just that I don’t like religion and haven’t studied it. And they’re right. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t watched a religion emerge since last year.

I am flattered to see that a person or two out there has actually taken it upon themselves to review my postings of excerpts from my The Elect, as if it were already an actual book. And from these reviews, I can see what a major strain in reviews of the actual book, Woke Racism (out from Portfolio in October) will be. I will be roundly slammed for seeming disrespectful of religion, and for not knowing enough about it to sully it with a comparison to Elect ideology.

I get it. I can see how insufferable I will seem in my take on religion, despite that Woke Racism will pull considerably back on the tone I often took in The Elect. I am, indeed, an atheist. Not an agnostic, but an atheist. And I openly admit that religious commitment perplexes and sometimes even irritates me. It’s partly a matter of personal history.

Want a bit of that dirt? First, the fact that many black Americans are devoutly Christian puts a barrier between them and me that I wish weren’t there. Second, it kept me from being able to share much of my life with a very good childhood friend when he decided to embrace an especially conservative branch of Christianity.

However, those biases acknowledged, my point that Electism has become a religion stands. My point is that religion typically includes a wing of belief that must stand apart from empiricism, that at a certain point one must just “believe.” This is not to dismiss the reams of profound, cosmopolitan close reasoning that theology has produced over the millennia, nor is to dismiss devout people as unintelligent.

Rather, it would seem to me that religious belief requires a person to sequester a part of their cognition for a kind of belief that is not based on logic. Yes, the theologian can slice and dice brilliantly in seeking a rational basis for the faith – but at a certain point, you hit that wall: one must “just” believe, “take that jump and” believe, one must believe … “.. (I don’t know) …”.

My point about The Elect is that its ideology involves – and actually is founded significantly upon – that type of religious thought.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-vivek-ramaswamy-put-wokeism-out-of-business-11624649588?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A self-made multimillionaire who founded a biotech company at 28, Vivek Ramaswamy is every inch the precocious overachiever. He tells me he attended law school while he was in sixth grade. He’s joking, in his own earnest manner. His father, an aircraft engineer at General Electric, had decided to get a law degree at night school. Vivek sat in on the classes with him, so he could keep his dad company on the long car rides to campus and back—a very Indian filial act.

“I was probably the only person my age who’d heard of Antonin Scalia, ” Mr. Ramaswamy, 35, says in a Zoom call from his home in West Chester, Ohio. His father, a political liberal, would often rage on the way home from class about “some Scalia opinion.” Mr. Ramaswamy reckons that this was when he began to form his own political ideas. A libertarian in high school, he switched to being conservative at Harvard in “an act of rebellion” against the politics he found there. That conservatism drove him to step down in January as CEO at Roivant Sciences—the drug-development company that made him rich—and write “Woke, Inc,” a book that takes a scathing look at “corporate America’s social-justice scam.” (It will be published in August.)

Mr. Ramaswamy recently watched the movie “Spotlight,” which tells the story of how reporters at the Boston Globe exposed misconduct (specifically, sexual abuse) by Catholic priests in the early 2000s. “My goal in ‘Woke, Inc.’ is to do the same thing with respect to the Church of Wokeism.” He defines “wokeism” as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the “moral vacuum” created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and “the identity we derived from hard work.” He argues that notions like “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion” and “sustainability” have come to take their place.

“Our collective moral insecurities,” Mr. Ramaswamy says, “have left us vulnerable” to the blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a cynical “arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other.” Each side is getting out of the “trade” something it “could not have gotten alone.”

One hundred and forty-six people in Halifax, Nova Scotia wait on a list to borrow a library book. A question hangs over them: Will activists let them read it?

The book is mine — Irreversible Damage — and it is an investigation of a medical mystery: Why is the number of teenage girls requesting (and obtaining) gender reassignment skyrocketing in the United States, Canada, Scandinavia and Europe? In Great Britain, it’s up 4,400% over the last decade.

Though it shouldn’t be, this has become a highly controversial area of inquiry. The book is an exploration of why so many girls would, in such a short timeframe, decide they are transgender. And it raises questions about whether they’re getting appropriate medical treatment.

The book is not about whether trans people exist. They do. And it is not about adults who elect to medically transition genders. As I have stated endlessly in public interviews and in Senate testimony, I fully support medical transition for mature adults and believe that transgender individuals should live openly without fear or stigma.

Yet since publication, I have faced fierce opposition — not just to the ideas presented, challenged, or explored — but to the publication of the book itself. A top lawyer for the ACLU called for it to be banned. Powerful organizations like GLAAD have lobbied against it and pressured corporations — Target and Amazon among others — to remove Irreversible Damage from their virtual shelves.

There’s a pattern to such censorship campaigns. A fresh example presented itself this past week at Science-Based Medicine, which bills itself as “a group blog exploring issues and controversies in the relationship between science in medicine.”

On Tuesday, one of the blog’s long-time contributors, Dr. Harriet Hall — a family physician and flight surgeon in the Air Force with dozens of publications to her name — posted a favorable review of my book. She examined the scientific claims as well as the medical ones and wrote that the book “combines well-researched facts with horrifying stories about botched surgeries, people who later regret their choices and therapists who are not providing therapy but just validating their patient’s self-diagnosis.” Dr. Hall not only shared my criticisms of “affirmative care” — that is, immediately agreeing with a teen’s self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria and proceeding to hormones and surgeries — but also noted that many physicians and therapists feel the same way but are afraid to say so.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/07/01/how-flawed-social-science-leads-us-astray/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

There are two classes of people in the world, the old saw goes, those who divide hu­manity into two classes, and those who do not.

The charms of easy categorization and broad generalization have tempted social scientists for centuries. But the trend has picked up speed, especially in psychology, over the last several decades, as Jesse Singal capably demonstrates in The Quick Fix, his engaging and persuasive examination of the growing, unfortunate popularity of faddish theories and their prosperous purveyors.

A heterodox liberal who wrote for various center-left outlets before succumbing to the Substack revolution and starting a popular podcast with fellow nonconformist Katie Herzog, Singal characterizes his book as “an attempt to explain the allure of fad psychology, why that allure is so strong, and how both individuals and institutions can do a better job of resisting it.” The product of rigorous research and thoughtful interviews, The Quick Fix surveys a broad expanse of social-science findings and methodically assesses their flaws.

Singal bemoans the all-too-typical “jump from claims that are empirically defensible but complex and context-dependent to claims that are scientifically questionable but sexy and exciting — and simple.” Instead, he argues in favor of slow, incremental progress in social-science research that, while less flashy than the regnant style of inquiry, would not be as susceptible to debunking.

The Quick Fix takes aim at a wide range of pop-psychological trends, including those originating on the left (such as the self-esteem movement, inaugurated in Northern California) as well as those coming from the right (such as the “superpredator” theory of juvenile crime in the mid 1990s, which conservatives championed and which even Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden came to embrace). These swiftly adopted theories all fell woefully short in practice, however, frequently confusing correlation with causation, falling prey to attribution error (unduly emphasizing personality-based explanations over situational reasons for a given phenomenon), and confounding scholarly and popular work.

Particular forms of statistical manipulation have come to infect many of the studies purporting to document key psychological trends. One such method is “p-hacking”: massaging data so that they fit snugly under a widely accepted statistical threshold designed to help exclude results that could have been the product of pure randomness. “Hidden flexibility” is another: suppressing testing results not congenial to the desired hypothesis and instead publishing only supportive data. “File-drawing” is yet another: ignoring unpublished studies that revealed results contrary to the published ones. Then there is “range re­striction”: clustering data samples in a particular segment of distribution, yielding a misleading result.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/book-review-war-of-shadows-the-key-that-unlocked-world-war-ii/

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, by Gershom Gorenberg (Public Affairs, 474 pp., $34)

Russia, Winston Churchill famously said on the eve of World War II, “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”

In an illuminating, thoroughly researched new book, Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg provides a different kind of key to another mystery involving a different sort of Enigma, namely the Nazi system of codes that proved critical to their failure in the Middle East and their ultimate defeat.

In War of Shadows, Gorenberg unlocks a central mystery that befuddled military historians for decades: How was the famed Nazi field marshal Erwin Rommel able to steamroll British and Allied forces in North Africa for more than a year, reaching the brink of conquering Egypt and cracking the British Empire nearly in half, only to suffer an ignominious and consequential humiliation at El Alamein in July 1942 that began to turn the tide of the war?

Gorenberg describes his own book as “a distinctly new portrait of one of the great turning points of the last century.” Indeed, he has marshaled an impressive array of diplomatic cables archived at various British, Israeli, German, Italian, and American facilities, as well as the personal papers of numerous key figures in the story.

Enigma was, at least in theory, an immensely complex system, comprising nearly 2 billion possible settings in its original design. It relied on three toothed wheels containing a nest of wiring that connected a keyboard to a lamp board and enabled encryption. Each keystroke moved the first wheel a single notch, and, after 26 entries, the second wheel ticked one slot. Only after the second wheel completed its full rotation would the third wheel move as well, meaning it took more than 17,000 (26 to the power of three) keystrokes for the wheels to return to their original setting.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-shutdowns-and-masks-suit-the-elite-11624038950?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A marvelous review in these pages last November inspired me to read a new book by O. Carter Snead, “What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Human Bioethics.” It was published by Harvard University Press on Oct. 13. Covid-19 had begun its transformation of American life a few months before, and of course the book made no mention of it.

Yet Mr. Snead’s volume helped explain the bizarre and at times perverse response of prosperous Western nations to the pandemic: the long discontinuation of economic life, the belief that pixelated screens can facilitate human relationships, the prohibitions on ordinary social interactions, the fetishization of masks. These policies and practices weren’t handed down from the ether by Reason and Science but bore the weight of contemporary assumptions about—to borrow Mr. Snead’s title—what it means to be human.

His book isn’t about public health but “public bioethics”—the effort to make humane laws and rules for biotechnology and medical care. Mr. Snead’s premise and theme is that humans are embodied creatures, not mere wills and intellects. That premise stands in contrast with the dominant modern worldview, which he calls “expressive individualism”: the belief that the human self “is not defined by its attachments or networks of relations, but rather by its capacity to choose a future pathway that is revealed by the investigation of its own inner depths of sentiment. . . . Because this self is defined by its capacity to choose, it is associated fundamentally with its will and not its body.”

Mr. Snead is a law professor at Notre Dame and director of its de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. On a recent trip to the Midwest, I drove to South Bend to ask what the pandemic year has revealed about our understanding of humanness.