RUTHFULLY YOURS

ps://spectatorworld.com/topic/from-9-11-january-6-capitol-hill-riot/

The season is almost upon us of lachrymose memorials to the victims of 9/11. As a nation we choke each year as the anniversary approaches. We can talk about the heroic firefighters and cops, those first-responders who that day sometimes made their last response. We can recount the lists of the dead and the daring of some survivors. A great many Americans remember in vivid detail how the horrors of that day intersected their own lives. What we don’t have is a strong sense of what 9/11 meant and still means to the nation.

Even in this age of declining historical literacy, we have a ready sense of the defining importance of more remote occurrences: Plymouth Rock, Valley Forge, Gettysburg, D-Day. These days, we should add 1619, Wounded Knee and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. Those names and dates — and many others —  instantly conjure a larger story about who we are. But 9/11 is oddly opaque. We sense it is significant but it is like a mountain shrouded in morning mist. We know it’s there but we can’t see it.

That may be because the terrorist attacks that day were inspired by militant Islam and executed by Muslim fanatics. It is bad manners to say that aloud or to make much of it. We still say that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’, and we censure those who dissent as guilty of ‘Islamophobia’. Our national commitment, for so it appears, to multiculturalism precludes any frank assessment of the irreconcilable elements between Western liberal democracy and the Islamic Middle East.

As the Taliban move in for the kill in Afghanistan, we once again turn away from the hard questions about how to sustain American pride in the face of people who abhor us and what American values mean if the world meets our ideals with contempt. One answer to these questions is a counsel of capitulation. Let us admit that we are now and always have been a rotten nation made up of hateful, conniving people who only pretended to be good.

That answer has always had a few cynics in its corner, but it has become the presiding doctrine of the American left, a development which is itself one of the defining consequences of 9/11. At some point in the months following the attack, as the momentary sense of national unity cleared, the left began to adopt the ‘we-deserved-it’ narrative. Not everyone was as outspoken as Ward Churchill who called the office workers in the World Trade Towers ‘little Eichmanns’ or the Revd Jeremiah Wright who preached a sermon shortly after 9/11 that said of the attack, ‘America’s chickens are coming home to roost’. But in a quieter way, these ideas took hold. President Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq crystalized the left’s narrative that America’s bellicosity was the problem. We had more to fear from domestic mistreatment of innocent Muslims than we had from Muslims bent on mass murder.

This muddled view has birthed a generation that has nothing but misgivings about American virtue and American power. And it lies in the background of a brand new attempt to sacralize a new date: January 6, 2021.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/567864-still-in-the-game-will-durhams-report-throw-a-slow-curveball-at-key

Texas Rangers infielder Brock Holt went to the mound this week and threw an eephus — a high-arching, off-speed pitch — in a game against the Oakland Athletics. It is believed to be the slowest pitch recorded in MLB history, and A’s batter Josh Harrison stood in disbelief as the 31 mph pitch was called a strike. Harrison just laughed in amazement.

Pirates outfielder Maurice Van Robays coined the term in the 1946 All-Star Game, explaining, “Eephus ain’t nothing, and that’s a nothing pitch.” But as Holt demonstrated, sometimes a “nothing” slow pitch can amount to a great deal.

That is equally true about the occasional criminal eephus that takes everyone by surprise. For example, U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation has been slow in coming, but on Friday, a report surfaced that he is pitching evidence to a grand jury in an investigation started back in May 2019. The Durham investigation is now longer in duration than former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and many people long forgot that Durham — made a special counsel at the end of the Trump administration — was even still in the game.

The report in The Wall Street Journal said Durham is presenting evidence against FBI agents and possibly others in the use of false information or tips at the start of the Russia investigation in 2016. Those “others” could include a virtual who’s who of Washington politics, and even if they are not indicted, Durham could implicate some of the most powerful figures in politics in his final report, expected in the coming months.

Even for those of us who followed and wrote on the Russia investigation for five years, much has been revealed in the last year. It was disclosed in October, for instance, that President Obama was briefed by his CIA director, John Brennan, on July 28, 2016, on intelligence suggesting that Hillary Clinton planned to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The date was significant because the Russia investigation was initiated July 31, 2016, just three days later.

Throughout the campaign, the Clinton campaign denied any involvement in the creation of the so-called Steele dossier’s allegations of Trump-Russia connections. However, weeks after the election, journalists discovered that the Clinton campaign hid payments for the dossier made to a research firm, Fusion GPS, as “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to the campaign’s law firm. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said at the time that Clinton lawyer Marc Elias, with the law firm of Perkins Coie, denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier. When Vogel tried to report the story, he said, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman declared, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”

It was not just reporters who asked the Clinton campaign about its role in the Steele dossier. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, was questioned by Congress and denied categorically any contractual agreement with Fusion GPS. Sitting beside him was Elias, who reportedly said nothing to correct the misleading information given to Congress.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/14/our-ridiculous-way-of-fighting-wars/

As we look at the disgraceful coda of the Global War on Terror and the tens of thousands of our countrymen who have been maimed or killed with scant results, it is clear to all but few (sadly, those few seem to occupy a lot of Defense Department jobs and think tank posts), there must be a better way to fight our wars. If we look to history, and even demands from the anti-war Left, we might find a better way forward.

Believe it or not, the anti-war Left does have a strong point. No, their point was not to be found in their human barricading of military posts or yelling in congressional meetings with ridiculous costumes. It was in their demand for the third rail of military intervention everyone dismisses: Timelines. 

We are told we cannot set timelines. We are there until “mission accomplished” (or it loses funding, as we have seen). But what if we looked at our past and realized that when a war goes beyond four or five years of mobilization, beneficial results are difficult to identify? Which “victory” was more decisive: World War II or Vietnam? Are we to believe that timelines are beneficial to every type of work (construction, budgets, school testing, sports), but when it comes to deploying our military efforts that is the one thing that somehow needs zero accountability for how long it takes?

Why can we not have a five-year timeline requirement on each war declaration/force authorization? What would a five-year timeline require? Massive deployment of forces. Massive manufacturing of equipment, mobilization of forces, etc. (think of the old World War II movies of assembly lines, etc.). Few realize we fought Desert Storm with a larger Army deployed than our total Army is now. What if we had a manpower/equipment requirement (two Armies, 600 ships, 4000 planes, etc.) before we fight? Somehow, this idea would be dismissed as ludicrous (despite it being automatic in wars we cared to win), but yet having soldiers deployed in combat for half their careers is not?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/14/killing-art/

I recently had occasion to quote Charles Péguy’s observation, from a 1905 essay called “Notre Patrie,” that “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” 

The cowardice in question can be intellectual or moral as well as physical, something that is vividly illustrated by Holland Cotter’s moist, mincing, over-the-shoulder-glancing review for the New York Times of a small but exquisite exhibition of paintings by the great Venetian Renaissance painter we know as Titian (d. 1576). The exhibition, “Titian: Women, Myth & Power,” is ending its three-city run at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The show centers around six large, mythological paintings commissioned by the future Philip II of Spain in the 1550s. 

Based on themes drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the six paintings, reunited in this exhibition for the first time, are among Titian’s most celebrated, and for good reason. Painted between 1551 and the early 1560s, they show Titian at the apex of his powers. Cotter recognizes and affirms the greatness of the paintings but he is nervous, very nervous. You’ll know why when I tell you that pride of place is given to the Gardner’s own, newly restored work, a depiction of the Rape of Europa, a story illustrated by many artists, including Rubens, Guido Reni, and Goya, but not a theme likely to find approbation among contemporary feminists, the audience to which the Times is chiefly concerned to cater. 

The story is a familiar one. Europa, out picnicking with friends, is approached by Zeus in the shape of a bull (this story’s metamorphosis). He charms her, abducts her, and whisks her away to Crete where, as Ovid himself put it in another poem, cetera quis nescit. 

https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2021/07/new-research-suggests-crispr-can-destroy-virus-that-causes-covid-19/

Scientists have discovered a way to stop the COVID-19 virus from replicating in infected human cells, marking major progress towards a definitive treatment for the deadly illness and accentuating the potential of genetic engineering to cure viral diseases.

The study explores the use of CRISPR, a genome editing tool, and builds on research that started at Australia’s Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in 2019, when Dr. Mohamed Fareh and Prof. Joe Trapani showed that CRISPR could be used to eliminate abnormal RNAs that drive children’s cancers.

At the beginning of the pandemic, and in collaboration with Director Prof. Sharon Lewin and Dr. Wei Zhao from the Doherty Institute, the scientists reprogrammed the same CRISPR tool to suppress replication of the RNA virus SARS-CoV-2 — and importantly, its “variants of concern” — in a test tube model. SARS-CoV-2, which is short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, is the virus that causes COVID-19.

“The CRISPR approach is for a treatment,” lead scientist Lewin told the Alliance for Science. “There are currently no good antiviral drugs available for COVID-19. CRISPR can efficiently destroy the virus.”

At the core of the research is an enzyme (CRISPR-Cas13b) that binds to target RNAs and degrades the part of the virus’ genome needed to replicate inside cells.

The scientists applaud the specificity, efficiency and rapid deployment properties of reprogrammed Cas13b, which provides a blueprint for antiviral drug development to suppress and prevent a wide range of SARS-CoV-2 mutants. The same properties can be readily deployed to fight off other pathogenic viruses.

“The flexibility of CRISPR-Cas13,  which only needs the viral sequence, means we can look to rapidly design antivirals for COVID-19 and any new emerging viruses in less than a week,” Fareh said. There were signs that this approach could also be applied to a host of existing viruses, signalling a game-changer for how they are currently treated, he added.

“Unlike conventional anti-viral drugs, the power of this tool lies in its design-flexibility and adaptability, which make it a suitable drug against a multitude of pathogenic viruses including influenza, Ebola, and possibly HIV,” Fareh said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/the-typical-covid-death-rate-for-the-fully-vaccinated-effectively-zero/

Back in the spring, we here at NRO ran a piece by Andrew Michta titled, “The Zero-Risk Western Society.” We could re-run this piece every week — in fact, maybe we should; note to self — and it would still be pertinent. Taking the broad view of our COVID-19 response, Andrew noted “we seem to have become a people no longer capable of accepting any level of risk, while we demand an absolute certainty that those we elect to office provide safety, even at great cost.”

Risk is at the heart of everything that’s been wrong with our pandemic response to date — managing it, calculating it, communicating it.

Today, policy-makers have to reckon with those tradeoffs once more as the Delta variant contributes to a surge in infections, and the media’s corona-coverage amplifies incidents of “breakthrough” cases. The trends are alarming and frustrating. But so would be a heavy-handed government revival of lockdowns (the Biden administration has vowed not to take this step, while leaving wiggle room), travel restrictions (Chicago is flirting with them), and other measures thought to be behind us. Thankfully, data from the Kaiser Family Foundation help put this renewed COVID-19 panic in perspective.

A few takeaways: Among those states reporting data on “breakthrough” cases for the fully vaccinated, the case rate is well below 1 percent. The hospitalization rate ranges from “effectively zero” to .06 percent. And there’s this: “The rates of death among fully vaccinated people with COVID-19 were even lower, effectively zero (0.00%) in all but two reporting states, Arkansas and Michigan[,] where they were 0.01%.”

That number again, “Effectively zero.”

Are there caveats? Sure, there are caveats. The information is incomplete and a few weeks old, and some asymptomatic cases and individuals who did not get tested are surely missing. The study also notes that these hospitalizations and deaths “may or may not have been due to COVID-19.” As Caroline Downey from the news team reports, the CDC (with similar caveats) likewise says that as of early August, the agency had received reports of roughly 7,500 vaccinated patients with severe and/or fatal breakthrough infections, or less than .01 percent.

Fiddle with the numbers even a lot, and the reality is the same: The vast majority of cases are those who are not fully vaccinated. Those who are face a vanishingly small risk of deadly infection.