RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/06/10/covid-19-vaccines-will-not-be-enough-we-also-need-effective-treatments-15596

The COVID-19 vaccines have been nothing short of miraculous. Life is returning to normal in many places. But ACSH advisor Dr. Henry Miller argues that we will still need effective medical treatments for COVID-19.

COVID-19 vaccines are the miracle that has significantly suppressed the pandemic in a number of countries, including the United States, where the current seven-day moving averages of cases and deaths are at levels not seen since March of 2020.  With continued aggressive vaccination, we can further suppress the numbers – getting us closer to pre-pandemic “normality.”

However, for several reasons, vaccines alone won’t be the whole solution.

First, in spite of the overwhelming and growing evidence of the importance, safety, and efficacy of the vaccines, there remains a core of the population who will refuse them.  

Second, millions of Americans are taking immunosuppressive drugs — for cancer or autoimmune diseases, for example — that may attenuate the effect of the COVID-19 vaccines.  A study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine of more than 650 organ recipients — who take drugs to suppress their immune system to prevent rejection of their transplanted organs – found that 46 percent had no antibody response after two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.  In another study, a large group of academic researchers found that patients with conditions such as lupus, psoriasis and inflammatory bowel disease who were taking two types of drugs — glucocorticoids and B cell depleting agents — had a substantially impaired immune response to the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

Third, the proliferation of “variants of concern” – mutants of the original Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2 that are highly transmissible and may exhibit immune evasiveness in vaccinated subjects — in the future will likely compromise to some degree the efficacy of the currently available vaccines.  Increasing the likelihood of this outcome are the continuing significant outbreaks of COVID-19 in many of the world’s low- and middle-income countries, which provide opportunities for new, opportunistic mutants to emerge.

Fourth, in view of the above, the best-case scenario is probably that COVID-19 will not in the foreseeable future completely disappear but will become endemic like influenza virus and the coronaviruses that can cause the common cold. In order to save lives and modulate the severity of future COVID-19 infections, it will be critical to develop safe and effective treatments in addition to vaccines.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/06/09/almost_overnight_standards_of_color-blind_merit_tumble_across_american_society_780262.html

A broad revolution is underway in the United States as traditional standards used to measure achievement and provide opportunity are being rejected by schools, corporations, and governments in favor of quotas based on race and gender.

On just his sixth day in office, President Biden signaled that the nation’s long held principle of equality for all had come to an end, signing an executive order declaring that “racial equity is not just an issue for any one department of government; it has to be the business of the whole of government” — equity referring to the idea that merely treating everybody the same is not enough, and that an equal outcome for all people has to be the goal.

Over the last few months, many Ivy League and flagship state universities have moved away from a seemingly neutral measure long used to assess applicants – standardized test scores – to give minorities a better shot at admissions.

In May, Hewlett-Packard, the technology company with 50,000 employees worldwide, decreed that by 2030 half of its leadership positions and more than 30% of its technicians and engineers have to be women and that the number of minorities should “meet or exceed” their representation in the tech industry workforce. 

That same month, United Airlines announced that half of the 5,000 pilots it would train at its proprietary flight school between now and 2030 will be women or people of color, with scholarships provided by United and JPMorgan Chase helping with tuition. There was nothing in the United announcement showing that there were enough qualified blacks and women in the pipeline so that a black/female quota of 2,500 new pilots could be filled, and nothing about what the company would do if there weren’t enough qualified candidates.

Delta Airlines, Ralph Lauren, and Wells Fargo are among other major American companies to announce hiring quotas recently as a way to redress racial imbalances, according to Bloomberg News. 

These are just some of the many “woke” initiatives embraced by many of the pillars of American society in the year since social justice protests erupted across the country in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Supporters argue that racial preferences and quotas are necessary to end deeply entrenched disparities. Critics say that they are a new form of discrimination, no more justified than old forms that are widely rejected. And while the stated goal of affirmative action was to simply eliminate unfair discrimination, the equity movement is rooted in a far more expansive and pessimistic view of the United States as irredeemably white supremacist, a view meant to continually challenge American institutions and values.

The rapid transition from equality of treatment to equality of outcomes tests one of the basic post-civil rights principles of American life, namely that the same standards should be applied to all people. Once a measure is applied, not to the unique individual but to that individual’s group identity, the idea that there are neutral, common, universally applicable standards gives way to something else, something subjective and political, with different measures applied to different people, depending on their sex, race, or other characteristics.

The issue of standards, moreover, is not just a matter of values or fairness. With the United States falling behind other countries in math and science, most notably China, standards are matters of competitiveness and national security — even as the military, CIA and other federal agencies embrace equity.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ilhan-omars-tired-islamophobia-act/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Every time Ilhan Omar says something incendiary and/or idiotic — which is quite often — the fallout unfolds in the same way.

First, Omar and her allies smear her critics. After a sad gaggle of Jewish House Democrats finally wrote a tepid letter asking the congresswoman to pretty please “clarify” her comments comparing Israel and the United States to the Taliban and Hamas, Omar took to Twitter to accuse them of using “islamophobic tropes.” Her spokesperson, Jeremy Slevin, claimed that the letter illustrated that “Islamophobia is a normalized part of American political discourse” — in particular, the contention that Omar’s likening of militants who target civilians to those who defend them gives “cover to terrorist groups.” Others, such as her colleague Cori Bush, demanded an end to “anti-Blackness and Islamophobia.”

Second, Omar plays the victim to chill speech. “This is the kind of incitement and hate that leads to real violence,” Omar noted, tweeting a recording of an odious racist threat that was left, presumably, in her voicemail. Of course, simply because there are terrible people in the world, doesn’t change Omar’s words. It is imperative, in fact, that we don’t let some nuts undercut our ability to freely express our political disagreements — which is what Omar is trying to do. And, if we are going to start holding politicians responsible for the actions of third parties, then Omar has a lot of answering to do for the spike in anti-Semitic violence last month.

Then again, her Democratic colleagues never accused Omar of blood libel or of hypnotizing the world for evil. They merely asked her to explain her own statement. It’s certainly not “Islamophobic” to seek clarification for why she believes the Taliban and the United States are morally comparable. It’s a simple question. Surely, Omar, who believes the U.S. was “founded by genocide” and built its power through “neocolonialism,” has some Marxist drivel to share on the topic. And if Omar can’t explain herself, perhaps a reporter will take a short break from the Marjorie Taylor-Greene beat to see what Nancy Pelosi thinks of the statement. But, whatever the case, being an African-American Muslim woman doesn’t give Omar dispensation from debate or immunity from criticism. At least, not yet.

http://The ‘Anti-Racist’ Who Wasn’t By Charles C. W. Cooke

A trendy progressive ideology buckles under the weight of its own paradoxes.

T oday’s edition of the Washington Post comes with the comforting news that the psychiatrist who told an audience at Yale’s medical school that “she fantasized about killing White people” was, in fact, simply expressing to the world how deeply she cares. In an April 6 lecture, prosaically titled “Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” Aruna Khilanani explained that she dreamed of “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a fu**ing favor.” Perhaps because they lacked the tools to interrogate and educate themselves, some observers responded rather negatively to these ideas. But, as Khilanani clarifies today, they have got her completely wrong: What she said was not the product of a demented, bigoted, Charles Manson–esque mind, but of a legitimate “frustration about minority mental health,” a desire to “have more serious conversations about race,” and, ultimately, love. Khilanani does what she does, she told the Post, “because I care.”

Well, that’s a relief.

It does not take an exquisitely trained mind to understand why the oft-trailed and much-coveted “Conversation about Race in America” never actually happens in earnest — and, indeed, why it is unlikely ever to happen in earnest. Thanks to the ever-shifting pseudo-scientific nonsense that underpins almost every contemporary “academic” framework, the plain words a given person uses when discussing race do not tend to matter much these days. What matters, instead, is how our self-appointed arbiters of taste wish those words to be perceived. Thus it is that any self-evidently racist comment made by a favored player is immediately justified in terms that would typically be reserved for an especially pretentious exhibit of modern art — “the intermittently blank canvas explores the tension between sound and electricity in an era of existential dread” — while the jokes, mainstream political opinions, unfortunate coincidences, and childhood indiscretions of the disfavored become crystallized into the permanent mark of the Klan. Who, in his right mind, would consent to talk on the record under these rules?

The erosion of public trust in the FBI is a big problem for the country — for both the rule of law and national security.

S tories such as the one Isaac Schorr reported Wednesday are a big part of why the FBI has lost so much of its good will on Capitol Hill and among the public.

It is not like some barroom blabbermouth called for the prosecution of former Trump officials and a number of congressional Republicans on the theory that they constitute the “command and control element” of a “terrorist group” that attacked the Capitol. Frank Figliuzzi was, for some of the Obama years, the FBI’s top counterintelligence official. And that was after he held other major supervisory positions, managing the work of hundreds of agents, particularly in Cleveland and Miami.

Figliuzzi knows he is mouthing Democratic Party political messaging that has no grounding in a rigorous analysis of evidence and applicable law — the kind of analysis the FBI wants Americans to believe it performs without grinding political axes. Yet he also knows that people who care what Frank Figliuzzi says care only because of his perceived authority as a former high-ranking FBI national-security official. His audience figures that Figliuzzi is an insider, publicly saying what the bureau is quietly thinking.

In reality, what he’s saying is bunk.

Federal prosecutors are a notoriously ambitious bunch. They well know that making cases against the former president, his aides, and pro-Trump congressional Republicans, especially terrorism cases, would thrill the Biden Justice Department. It would also please the FBI — not just the top echelon but rank-and-file agents who are not partisans, but who are well aware that over 100 cops were injured in the lawless melee at the Capitol. A prosecutor who could make such a case would be a star for life: invited to hold forth on the NBC news circuit even more often than Figliuzzi.

Figliuzzi is echoing Attorney General Merrick Garland, who told the Senate that the Capitol riot was the most “dangerous threat to democracy” he’s ever seen. For context, President Biden’s AG made that absurd claim in the course of decrying white supremacism as the nation’s “top domestic violent extremist threat.” (In Obama/Biden-speak, “violent extremist” means terrorism.) We are to believe that Trump supporters are neo-Nazis, more dangerous than Hamas, more dangerous than the Taliban, and — applying the standards of Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar — even more dangerous than the United States itself.

Prosecutors hear this stuff. They want nothing more than to make the case. If it were makable.

Government lawyers are also well aware that Democratic lawmakers, egged on by progressive legal scholars, larded their “Incitement of Insurrection” impeachment article with an allusion to the 14th Amendment — specifically, to Section 3, which potentially bars from holding federal office people who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. The transparent point of this was to lay the groundwork for legal efforts to disqualify the 147 Republicans who supported the untenable Trump gambit to pressure Vice President Pence and Congress into rejecting the certified electoral votes of states whose election results Trump was contesting.