RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-british-medical-journal-story

In February of 2010, the New York Times released a front page story entitled, “Research Ties Diabetes Drug to Heart Woes.” The lede read:

Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month, according to confidential government reports that recommend the drug be removed from the market.

The Times piece quoted an internal F.D.A. report that said the GlaxoSmithKline diabetes drug Avandia, also known as Rosiglitazone, was “linked” to 304 deaths in 2009, adding the conclusion of the two doctors who authored the report: “Rosiglitazone should be removed from the market.” The story was released in advance of a Senate Finance Committee study that produced a series of damning internal documents, including one in which an FDA safety officer expressed concern that Avandia presented such serious cardiovascular risks that “the safety of the study itself cannot be assured, and is not acceptable.”

One of the chief investigators on that study was Paul Thacker, at the time a committee aide under Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley. Multi-year document hauls like the Avandia report were Thacker’s stock in trade. I first met him around then because his committee frequently dealt with financial crisis issues I covered. Thacker, who went on to contribute to a number of commercial and academic journals, was trained in a tradition of bipartisan committee reporting that relies heavily on documents and on-the-record testimony, i.e. the indisputable stuff both sides are comfortable backing.

https://www.city-journal.org/school-mask-mandates-are-unnecessary

Children are perhaps the most-masked people in America, and clearly the people least needing to be masked. Whether or not one believes that masks work—and the best available scientific research suggests, as I have detailed in City Journal, that surgical and cloth masks provide little to no benefit in stopping the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive—kids are plainly the least likely to be struck ill by Covid and probably the least likely to spread it.

There’s an extraordinary difference—even greater than widely recognized—between Covid-19’s effects on kids and its effects on adults, as fatality numbers show. Far from regarding this important fact as a godsend for the upcoming generation, however, many policymakers have treated it as an irrelevancy. At the same time, they have ignored that children living in mask-mandate states have had essentially identical Covid fatality rates as kids living in mask-free states.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/ketanji-brown-jacksons-harvard-race-discrimination-problem/

If Biden selects this judge, she will have to answer for her service on the board of a racially discriminatory college.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has a race-discrimination problem, and it just got a lot bigger. That problem could complicate her candidacy for the Supreme Court.

The D.C. Circuit judge is near the top of the very short list to replace Stephen Breyer; indeed, she is widely seen as the front-runner. Just as Brett Kavanaugh was once a law clerk for Anthony Kennedy and replaced him on the Supreme Court, Jackson once clerked for Breyer. A federal district-court judge since 2013, she was elevated last year to the D.C. Circuit, a court long treated by both parties as a farm team for Supreme Court picks. Former D.C. Circuit judges nominated to the Court include Kavanaugh, Merrick Garland, John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clarence Thomas, Douglas Ginsburg, Robert Bork, and Antonin Scalia. She just published her first D.C. Circuit opinion.

The firestorm over Joe Biden’s unpopular pledge to exclude everyone but African-American women from consideration for his first Supreme Court nomination has put Jackson and the other short-listers under a microscope. There are a number of concerns with her judicial record, from her record of reversals by the D.C. Circuit as a district judge to her turgid writing style.

But the timing of the nomination presents a more serious and polarizing issue: Harvard University’s policy of race discrimination against Asian students, which is currently being challenged in a lawsuit pending before the Supreme Court, in tandem with a parallel case involving the University of North Carolina. The parties to the case have just submitted a briefing schedule that would put the case over onto the fall 2022 calendar — after Breyer has left the Court. If Jackson were nominated and confirmed by October, she could potentially be in a position to hear the case.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-all-whoopi-goldberg-now-anti-semitism-jews-holocaust-hitler-race-religion-extermination-the-view-11643820936?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

“Who speaks with presumed authority and moral superiority but next to no knowledge? In our culture, that would be everyone with a Twitter account, an iPhone, a classroom full of students, an election coming up, or a TV show. Our entire culture is marinated in people mindlessly mouthing off simply because they have an audience. Everyone is Whoopi Goldberg in his own small way.”

It was a bad moment when Whoopi Goldberg asserted on “The View” that the Holocaust wasn’t about race but about “man’s inhumanity to man.” Her comment, limited by her understanding of the American black-white binary of race, was historically uninformed. Hitler identified Jews as an inferior race and specifically targeted them for extermination. Nazi ideas were deeply influenced by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82), who believed Germanic “Aryans” were superior to all other whites and nonwhites alike.

Adding to Ms. Goldberg’s confusion, and to the anger her words have generated, was her assertion that Jews were and are “white.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-adams-serious-about-crime-is-biden-new-york-police-nypd-attacks-black-civilian-shooting-violent-crime-mora-rivera-11643833722?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Biden will meet with New York City Mayor Eric Adams Thursday, in a belated acknowledgment of the violent crime surge that began with the George Floyd riots of 2020. Mr. Biden arrives in New York following the second funeral for a policeman in less than a week. Officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora were responding to a domestic-violence call at a Harlem apartment on Jan. 21. A man emerged from a bedroom, shooting, and continued to shoot Rivera and Mora as they lay on the ground, in what a police source calls an “execution.” Rivera, 22, died at the scene; Mora, 27, a bullet lodged in his brain, was taken off life support four days later.

Such ambush attacks on officers were up 115% nationwide in 2021, the National Fraternal Order of Police reported. All told, 73 officers were intentionally killed in 2021, the highest number since 1995 (apart from the 9/11 attacks) and at least a 56% increase over 2020. This January’s casualties included a Houston-area corporal gunned down during a car stop before he even got out of his cruiser; a St. Louis officer who had been following a car connected to a homicide and who was critically shot in the abdomen; a Milwaukee County deputy shot seven times by a suspect fleeing a car stop; and three Houston officers shot during a vehicle pursuit. On Dec. 16 in Baltimore, Officer Keona Holley was assassinated with two bullets to the head while sitting alone in her patrol car at 1.30 a.m.

Mr. Biden will want to talk about gun control and federal funding for social services and police hiring. Expect him to ignore the root cause of record-breaking violence—the demonization of law enforcement, to which he has contributed. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Biden asserted that black parents were right to fear for their children’s lives at the hands of the police. On April 12, 2021, the president tweeted about the need to address the “trauma that Black America experiences every day” from police shootings. On Oct. 16, during the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service in Washington, he lamented that the promise of “equal and impartial justice” was denied in “too many communities—black and brown” and that too many families “are grieving unnecessary losses of their sons, their daughters, their fathers, their brothers” from police violence.