RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-1-20-when-the-administrative-state-slips-its-bonds

For the past few weeks, everybody’s attention has been focused on the looming demise of President Biden’s legislative agenda. Both the massive social spending bill (going by the Orwellian name “Build Back Better”) and the anti-voter-integrity bill, have now conclusively failed, at least in their most recent forms. A major part of the Build Back Better monstrosity was the launching of the Green New Deal, with its attendant suppression of the use of carbon-based fuels.

So, at least for now, these things are dead in Congress. But what’s happening over in the Administrative State? That’s where, in Woodrow Wilson’s progressive vision, the “experts” from various fields of endeavor have gathered in the government, unconstrained by the Constitution’s separation of powers, to make the all-important rules for a smoothly running society. Today there are hundreds of thousands of these “experts” in the bureaucracy. To a person, they appear to believe that the most pressing issue of our era is saving the world from U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide. How do they know that? Obviously, they know it because they are the “experts.”

Under what legislative authority do these “experts” operate to impose their green agenda? Excellent question. Barack Obama had a big plan for “cap and trade” legislation to lower emissions by driving up the price of all fossil fuels. (“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, the price of electricity will necessarily skyrocket.”). The legislation failed in Congress. Biden’s Green New Deal also has so far failed in Congress. There has been no relevant amendment to the Clean Air Act further empowering the bureaucracy to regulate carbon emissions since such emissions first became a progressive obsession in the early 2000s.

Clearly then, the bureaucracy must be stymied in its goal to effect a fundamental transformation of the U.S. energy system by suppressing production and use of fossil fuels, while they await Congressional authorization to proceed. If you think that is true, you do not understand the extent to which the Administrative State has slipped its constitutional bonds.

For today, let me highlight just a few of the initiatives currently emanating from the Administrative State.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Like all species (or, at least, those of which I am aware), man is born with an innate trust for the female who gave him birth. We would not survive, without the care and feeding by she who gave us life. As we age, caution grows. As Sophocles said, “mistrust blossoms.” Nature has instilled in most animals a sense of wariness of danger, be it predators, fire or some other peril. This allows the rabbit to avoid the coyote, the mole to avoid the fox, or the deer to run from man. We have the same instincts. It is why the hair on the back of our neck stands up when unseen hazards lurk, or why we become suspicious when someone says, “trust me.”

Trust is akin to a sixth sense, like echolocation that allows bats to fly in the dark. It is defined as a belief in the reliability of someone or something, be it a spouse or an automobile. It reflects both emotion and reasoning, as in the faithfulness of a relationship, or the trust we have for an old car. Trust in the business world, according to a December 2021 article in The Atlantic, is about two things: competence and character. Once lost, it is hard to re-build. The article suggests three steps to help recover lost trust: the use of humor, sharing one’s vulnerabilities and promoting transparency – lessons for those who govern us. 

A September 2021 Gallup Poll found trust in government near record lows. It mimicked a Pew Research Center survey published last May. The Pew poll saw trust in government at 24% as of April 2021. That could be compared to trust in government at 68% during the height of the anti-War movement in 1968. The Gallup poll showed that a lack of trust in government extends to all branches; it is lowest in the legislative branch and highest in local governments. In the Gallup poll, a mere 7% of respondents had a great deal of trust in the media. As recently as September 2018, that number stood at 14%. Distrust in government and the media may manifest wisdom on the part of the people, but it reflects poorly on those judged.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/what-those-who-accept-the-stolen-land-myth-dont-understand/

Woke culture demands ritual acknowledgements about Native Americans. Those, however, who think this should also apply to Palestinians don’t understand that Jews are indigenous in Israel.

One of the tragicomic if all too prevalent customs of contemporary woke corporate culture is the way many groups and corporations now open meetings with ritual acknowledgments that they are on “stolen land.” It involves the convener of the gathering to begin any proceedings by first stating that those speaking are “on the lands” of whatever Native American tribe once lived there as the indigenous inhabitants of the North American continent.

That is part of the context of the claim that the State of Israel was built on “stolen land,” a phrase that was used by Hussain Altamimi, one of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s staffers when he smeared it as a “racist-European ethno-state.” Unsurprisingly, Altamimi didn’t lose his job when this came out. Why would AOC fire someone who reflects the same hatred of the Jewish state that she and other “Squad” colleagues have often expressed?

This is a commonplace myth spread by those who believe in intersectional ideology, which deems the efforts of all oppressed “people of color” to resist the racist oppression of those possessing “white privilege” to be part of one great righteous struggle.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/theodore-roosevelt-back-to-the-badlands/91960/

This is the week in which the statue of Theodore Roosevelt begins its journey to the Badlands from its pedestal in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Let us just say that New York’s loss will be North Dakota’s gain. The statue had come under fire as “a racist work of public art,” as a mayoral advisory commission described it. It’s hardly a “Square Deal” for TR, who did more than most in his day for racial equality.

When the statue was unveiled in 1940, a New York Times editorial applauded Roosevelt’s taking “his place in enduring bronze among the monuments of this city that he loved.” The Times predicted “few, passing the newly dedicated statue and noting the firm, up-tilted chin and the eyes fixed on a far distance, will doubt” TR “would have met present problems face-forward, with high courage and clear decision.”

Eighty years later, “present problems” have dictated a change of plans. The museum recently lumped the statue among other “powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism” subjected to scrutiny amid “the movement for racial justice that emerged after the murder of George Floyd.” Evicting Roosevelt is a symbol of “progress toward an inclusive and equitable community,” the museum claimed.