RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/pandemic-science

In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.

One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited, compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science—and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.

As for organized skepticism, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin. Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/01/george-orwells-1984-gets-trigger-warning-daniel-greenfield/

Irony is not only dead, it was beaten to death in a back alley by a woke mob.

The Left is not only trying to usher in the very Ministry of Information that George Orwell was satirizing in 1984 in order to fight “disinformation”, it’s actually slapping a trigger warning on 1984.

Staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

No doubt. That’s probably the point.

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘There’s a certain irony that students are now being issued trigger warnings before reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. Our university campuses are fast becoming dystopian Big Brother zones where Newspeak is practised to diminish the range of intellectual thought and cancel speakers who don’t conform to it.”

What would Orwell have made of this?

After 1984 became so influential, everyone tried to appropriate Orwell. And 1984 regularly featured in the lists of celebrated ‘Banned Books’ though, invariably, these were books that were rarely actually banned. Unlike Animal Farm, whose specific historical analogies to the Soviet Union and the betrayal of the revolution were explosive at the time, 1984’s dystopia appears more generic and open to political appropriation even though it is once again a restatement of the betrayal of leftists who embraced Soviet totalitarianism with doublethink.

But the metaphorical power of 1984 has always been greater than its grounding in the struggle between liberals and Communists during the dawn of the Cold War.

Now, 1984 is getting its own trigger warnings because it’s “offensive and upsetting”. The new variant of leftism is more ideologically concerned with emotion and the hunt for heresy than with anything else. It doesn’t find tyranny problematic, but it hates having its feelings hurt.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/joe-biden-doesnt-know-what-youre-talking-about/

No U-turns for President Biden ahead of midterms

President Biden begins his second year in office with a 42 percent average job-approval rating. Republicans hold a one-point lead over Democrats in the congressional generic ballot (and the generic-ballot question often underestimates GOP support). The Gallup organization reports that in the final quarter of 2021 Republicans took a five-point lead in party identification for the first time since 1995. As of this writing, 28 House Democrats have announced their retirements, with more expected to follow. Biden’s agenda is stalled in Congress, the Supreme Court blocked his employer vaccine mandate, the coronavirus pandemic continues, and inflation is higher than at any point in the last 39 years. The country — not to mention the president — could use a reset.

We’re not getting one. Instead, on January 19, we got Biden’s combative, discursive, and delusional mess of a one-hour-and-51-minute press conference. Among the reasons the occasion was notable — and notorious — was that it forced the White House to clarify later Biden’s comments on not one but two issues: Biden’s ambiguity over America’s response if Russia launches a “minor incursion” into Ukraine, and Biden’s repeated assertion that the Senate’s failure to pass his election-takeover bills throws the legitimacy of the midterm elections into doubt. To watch Biden at the lectern was to experience shock and dismay interspersed with moments of alarm and dark humor. No wonder he hides from the media. It was the worst presidential press conference since Donald Trump stood next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018.

Biden’s message to the 64 percent of the public that says the country is headed in the wrong direction: Everything is fine. Biden’s message to the 42 percent of the public that says economic conditions are poor: You must be joking. “We created six million new jobs — more jobs in one year than at any time before,” Biden said. “Unemployment dropped — the unemployment dropped to 3.9 percent.” Yes, Biden conceded, there is “frustration and fatigue in this country.” But that is due to the pandemic. As for inflation, Biden went on, it will subside when the Federal Reserve tightens the money supply (true), when Congress passes “my Build Back Better plan” (false), and when his anti-monopoly executive orders take effect (also false). “I didn’t overpromise,” Biden said. “But I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/how-progressive-prosecutors-are-betraying-the-constitution/

They’re perverting the principle of prosecutorial discretion to mutilate the laws.

T he job of a judge is to apply the law as it has been written by the legislature. For the last half-century, that has been the most effective argument mounted by constitutional conservatives against activist courts. The judge is not at liberty to legislate. That is, the judge may not revise the laws, under the guise of clearing up nonexistent ambiguities, or filling in nonexistent gaps, or — if we may be blunt about what activist judges actually do — distorting the law to fit the jurist’s subjective sense of fairness and justice.

In a democracy, what is fair and just is left to the judgment of the legislature — the representatives answerable to the people whose lives are directly affected by the laws the legislature enacts. Legislatures are limited only by the Constitution, not by judicial sensibilities.

These principles have been so energetically touted that lawyers can recite them from memory. More importantly, they resonate with the public — to the point that, at confirmation hearings, even progressive judicial candidates pretend to be bound by the law as written. Indeed, it is the historical achievement of the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia that seventies-style judicial freewheeling is no longer de rigueur. Judges must at least go through the motions of wrestling with the text of statutes and constitutional clauses. If they fail to acknowledge the binding law (even if only as a pretext for trying to circumvent it), higher courts are virtually certain to reverse their rulings.

So here is the question: Why do we not demand that prosecutors meet this same standard?

In big cities all across the country, criminals are running amok due to the derelictions of the hard Left’s “Progressive Prosecutor Project” (a label I am proud to have had a hand in). But what are these derelictions? To hear critics tell it, they won’t enforce the laws. That’s true, but doesn’t quite nail it.

It’s not like these folks don’t show up for work every day — these anti-prosecution district attorneys, such as Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, George Gascón in Los Angeles, and, newly added to the cabal, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan. To the contrary, progressive prosecutors work very hard. They have to. Like activist judges, they seek to legitimize their machinations by masquerading them as law.

When we look at what the statutes actually say, however, we find that progressive prosecutors are not applying the laws enacted by the people’s representatives. They are unilaterally decreeing new laws — the same mischief over which activist judges endure ridicule and reversal.

No, no, progressives counter, there’s a big difference: Unlike judges, our prosecutors have been elected. Some, in fact, such as Krasner, have been reelected. They are politically accountable. If the people who live under a prosecutor’s nonenforcement policies do not approve of the inevitable surges in crime, they can oust that prosecutor in the next election.

There is some force to that argument. Maybe we should just shrug our shoulders and say, “If Philadelphians want Larry Krasner, then they deserve Larry Krasner . . . good and hard.” But ballot box aside, many people in Philadelphia and other Democrat-dominated crime sanctuaries are voting with their feet. They are moving to communities that, because the rule of law still holds sway, are strong and stable. Shouldn’t that rush to the exits be part of the “elections have consequences” ledger?

In any event, the main flaw in the “they’re elected” defense of progressive prosecutors is constitutional. Executive officials are not elected to make the laws but to enforce them. In this regard, separation of powers is not merely a legal technicality. The Framers understood that the quickest path to a democratic republic’s destruction would be the accumulation, in a single set of hands, of the powers to legislate and to enforce the laws. To have ordered liberty, the two must be kept apart. The alternative is despotism, in which the rulers either repress their opposition or, as we are seeing with progressive prosecutors, foster a modified anarchy where the laws go unenforced except to the extent they can be weaponized against political foes.

It is no answer to unconstitutional action that the offending official has been elected. Among the Constitution’s main purposes is to stave off tyranny of the majority. If a prosecutor, mayor, or governor acts lawlessly, it is not a defense that if the people don’t like it they can oust him or her next time around.

Progressives and the prosecutors they’ve heavily invested in are well aware of this. That’s why they usually resist the urge to claim that being elected is a license to mutilate the laws. Rather, in their exquisite chutzpah, they insist that the mutilation is really just the upholding of a foundational constitutional principle: prosecutorial discretion.

This is exactly what Alvin Bragg has just done.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/01/20/the_tension_over_truth_and_consequences_gripping_the_fbis_trump-russia_reckoning_812321.html

As he documents the role of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in generating false allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, Special Counsel John Durham has also previewed a challenge to the FBI’s claims about how and why its counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign began. At stake is the completeness of the official reckoning within the U.S. government over the Russiagate scandal – and whether there will be an accounting commensurate with the offense: the abuse of the nation’s highest law enforcement and intelligence powers to damage an opposition presidential candidate turned president, at the behest of his opponent from the governing party he defeated.

The drama is playing out against the clashing approaches of the two Justice Department officials tasked with scrutinizing the Russia probe’s origins and unearthing any misconduct: Durham, the Sphinx-like prosecutor with a reputation for toughness whose work continues; and Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice inspector general, whose December 2019 report faulted the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe but nonetheless concluded that it was launched in good faith.

The bureau’s defenders point to Horowitz’s report to argue that the FBI’s Trump-Russia conspiracy investigation, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, is untainted despite its extensive use of the discredited Clinton-funded Steele dossier. Though highly critical of the bureau’s use of Christopher Steele’s reports, Horowitz concluded that they “played no role in the Crossfire Hurricane opening,” which he said had met the department’s “low threshold” for opening an investigation.

But Durham has made plain his dissent. In response to Horowitz’s report, the special counsel announced that his office had “advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.” Durham stressed that, unlike Horowitz, his “investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department” and has instead obtained “information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/lessons_to_learn_from_lara_logan.html

The perils of false equivalences and overstatements are the shameful trivialization the of darkest chapters in human history.

A few days ago, former “60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan was dropped by her talent agency for comments she made about Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical adviser last Nov. 29.

Logan said the following during an appearance on “Fox News Primetime”:

“This is what people say to me, is that he (Fauci) doesn’t represent science to them — he represents Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps

And I am talking about people all across the world are saying this, because the response from COVID, what it has done to countries everywhere, what it has done to civil liberties, the suicide rates, the poverty — it has obliterated economies,” she added.

Acting a little late on the uptake, United Talent Agency said that Logan’s comments were “highly offensive” and “unacceptable” comments.

Logan also hosts “Lara Logan Has No Agenda” on Fox Nation.

Fauci is demanding that Fox News sack Logan for her comments.

Logan has not appeared on Fox News since the above comments were made. Also, new episodes of her Fox Nation show have not been aired. Warm Springs Production, which produces her series, has distanced itself from Logan.

But is Logan the only one?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_corruption_of_science_by_money_and_marxism.html

There are many shady methids of making money. There are frauds like Ponzi schemes or pump and dump stock schemes. A more subtle scheme is convincing naïve students to take out large loans to pay inflated tuition so that colleges can milk the taxpayer. The consequences of the student loan fraud are far reaching such as delaying family formation and childbearing.

Another academic scheme is to posit a future catastrophe based on “scientific” research. What follows is a vast flow of taxpayer money to the very academic specialty behind the fraud. After all, more research is needed to study the looming catastrophe. Rather than prevent the catastrophe that is imaginary anyway, real catastrophes are created. For example, a consequence of the global warming catastrophe scheme is spending billions on impactable and unaffordable wind and solar electricity.

The enemy of truth is bureaucracy and centralization. President Eisenhower in his farewell address pointed out a great danger to transparency and truth in science is the financing of scientific research by the federal government. I remember attending a scientific conference where one of the attendees that formerly worked at the National Science Foundation severely criticized that bureaucracy as rife with favoritism and politics. No one objected. You could hear a pin drop. None of the other scientists dared say anything, much less criticize the National Science Foundation. Centralization of authority and financing is the deadly enemy of free speech and freedom of thought.

The increasing centralization of the medical industry has resulted in certain drugs being blacklisted for the treatment of COVID. The drugs ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and certain other drugs are widely recognized as being effective therapeutics for prevention and treatment of COVID. These drugs have been used with great results in many countries. A case can be made that hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily as a consequence of the blacklist.

https://www.city-journal.org/public-healths-truth-problem?skip=1

Throughout the pandemic, public-health officials have omitted uncomfortable truths, made misleading statements, and advanced demonstrably false assertions. In the information era, where what one says is easily accessible and anyone may read primary literature, these falsehoods will be increasingly recognized and severely damage the field’s credibility. No doubt, officials and organizations promulgating them had a range of motivations—including honorable ones, such as wanting to encourage salutary choices. Yet the subsequent loss of institutional trust may result in harm that far outweighs any short-term policy objectives.

Consider some messages the field has promoted to the public over the last two years and their shaky relationship with the truth.

Any mask is better than no mask. Last week, CDC director Rochelle Walensky asserted that “any mask is better than no mask.” This statement was factually incorrect when she said it. The only published cluster randomized trial of community cloth masking during Covid-19—performed in rural Bangladesh—found that surgical masks reduced the spread of Covid-19 among villages assigned to wear them, while cloth masks were no better than no masks at all regarding the primary endpoint of blood-test-confirmed Covid-19. In an umbrella review of masking that I coauthored, we found no good evidence to support cloth masking. Two days after Walensky’s statement, the CDC conceded that cloth masking was inferior to other masks. Notably, however, this is still misleading because cloth masking is not just less effective—it is entirely ineffective.

You should wear an N95 mask. Now the CDC has endorsed the use of N95 or equivalent masks in community settings, which it presents as the superior choice. Here, too, the evidence is misleading. First, a masking policy involves more than just the filtration properties of the material; it should consider both filtration and human behavior. Will people wear the mask appropriately? Will there be gaps around the nose? Will they cheat to scratch or drink? Will it cause discomfort and lead to discontinuation? Will they feel invulnerable and seek out higher risk settings? Simply put, the CDC does not know that advising the public to wear N95 is good policy. It could have run a cluster randomized trial, as was done for cloth and surgical masks in Bangladesh; it did not. In fact, the agency has run no randomized trials of masking this entire pandemic.

https://johnkassnews.com/biden-the-president-as-a-soft-biscuit-with-putin-and-xi-jinping-salivating-as-he-floats-on-by/?utm_source=rss&utm_

Now you know why America’s real presidents—perhaps White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and Susan Rice—have kept Joe Biden in the basement for so long.

The other day they let him out for all the world to see. They had to let him out, with his poll numbers dropping. Initially, he appeared somewhat competent as he obediently read what they’d written for him to say.

But then the questions came. And the world could see him fade away.

Of all he was asked at his White House news conference, Mr. Biden was not asked a single question about the epidemic of rising violent crime in American cities ruled by Democrats.

But he was able to reveal the important thing, proving in public what Americans have long suspected. His mind has become soft, like a melted dish of his favorite ice cream. And in his twilight, he offers the world a dangerous dessert, one with nuclear weapons rather than cherries on top.

There is nothing as menacing to the world as a weak president in deep political trouble who is desperate to be led by the hand. And what Biden babbled about Russia, inviting Russia’s killer Vladimir Putin, into Ukraine is chilling.

If former President Donald Trump or any other Republican acted this way, the entire country and all media would be dusting off the 25th Amendment. But Biden is a Democrat, and if he were removed via the 25 Amendment, it would mean installing the vapid and thoroughly unqualified Vice President Cackles in the White House, who has already demonstrated her incompetence. Biden (or Klain and Rice and others) chose her for immutable characteristics. Her obvious failing becomes his insurance policy.

 So Biden is given protection by corrupt corporate media. And the day after his disastrous news conference, team Biden went out on the news shows hoping to clean his mess up.

But there is no spinning out of this or cleaning it up. He’s the president and America is on the hook with him now.