RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/08/16/bill-de-blasio-and-the-decline-of-new-york-city/#slide-1

The next mayor will have to contend with a legacy of wreckage

New York City is shrinking. Or rather: It was shrinking. Quite a while ago. Then it started to grow. Then it grew dramatically. But after eight years of Bill de Blasio as mayor, it is contracting once again, as the economic and population surge that took the city from the slough of despond to new heights over the course of four decades has been reversed. This is not the result of COVID. It is the result of a disastrous mayoralty and the ideas, prejudices, and idiocies that have animated it. De Blasio’s legacy as he prepares to leave office is just that: a city in decline.

Bill de Blasio has governed with a potent mix of old and new — the bad old and the horrible new. He has pushed wretched new ideas that have blighted the education system and poisoned the streetscape. And he has revivified incompetent policies driven by ideological priors — ideas so long discredited that their failure had been forgotten and had to be experienced yet again by young New Yorkers who weren’t alive when the city was nearly destroyed by them and were therefore unable to heed the warnings of those of us who did live through their nightmarish implementation.

To tell the story of de Blasio’s New York, we need to go back to the city’s great devastation.

In 1970, 7.9 million people lived in New York City. Ten years later, that number had dropped by a staggering 800,000. Over the course of the ’70s, residents voted with their feet and got the hell out of Dodge — fleeing an increasingly lawless and chaotic municipality whose feckless authorities stood by and let the place fester and rot.

This unprecedented depopulation was the consequence of a budgetary free fall that led the city to the verge of bankruptcy in 1975 — a managerial catastrophe that wreaked havoc on garbage collection, public safety, schooling, even on the grass in its parks. Its leaders, Nathan Glazer once quipped, stopped doing the things they knew how to do (like picking up the garbage) and started trying to do things no one knows how to do (like ending poverty). The expansion of social-welfare programs came at the expense of the prosaic quotidian tasks necessary if any city is to be livable.

Here’s just one example. In his book The Fires, Joe Flood tells the story of how Mayor John V. Lindsay (whose time in office ran from 1966 to 1973) sought to redirect city money so that he could spend it on social programs. He hired the RAND Corporation to study the city’s fire department: “NYC-RAND’s goal was nothing less than a new way of administering cities: use the mathematical brilliance of the computer modelers and systems analysts who had revolutionized military strategy to turn Gotham’s corrupt, insular and unresponsive bureaucracy into a streamlined, non-partisan technocracy.”

Using RAND’s efficiency experts and their findings as fodder and justification, Lindsay’s people closed dozens of fire stations because of supposed redundancies. Meanwhile, the department’s inspectors stopped ensuring the good working order of the city’s hydrants. The result: Enormous swaths of the Bronx burned down in the 1970s because there were no nearby fire trucks to put out the fires and no water in the hydrants when they did show up.

The staggeringly dark popular-culture portrayals of New York in the 1970s — Death Wish, Taxi Driver — didn’t feel excessive. They felt like documentaries. In 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, subway hijackers demand $1 million for the safe return of their hostages. “This city doesn’t have a million dollars!” shouts the mayor. It was a joke, but it was no joke.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/anthony_fauci_peaked_in_medical_school.html

Since then, his career has been a downhill trajectory into bureaucratic mediocrity and bullying.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has an impressive resume but nothing in it meant that he was qualified to be the ultimate decision-maker for a contagious disease, especially one that his actions helped create. It’s high time his wings are clipped before more Americans die.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is brilliant. At least according to his fawning Wikipedia entry, which says he graduated number one in his medical school class at Cornell, and then did two years of internal medicine residency at their prestigious hospital, following which he was invited to train and work at the NIH (unfairly, in my opinion, called a yellow beret.)

Understanding Fauci’s career there requires some backstory. The U.S. Public Health Service (“USPHS”) evolved from the medical branch of the Coast Guard. Its head, called the Surgeon General of the United States, is technically a vice-admiral in the Coast Guard. Important people serving in various parts of the USPHS (NIH, CDC, FDA) are officers, for they are in one of eight “uniform services” of the US government. The NIH, one subsidiary, does specialized medical research and, in some cases, provides healthcare for patients who are of research interest.

Before 1973, all male physicians, regardless of age, served in one of the uniform services of the federal government. Most were drafted into the Army, with a smaller number into the other armed forces. However, physicians could fulfill their Selective Service obligations by joining the NIH. Understandably these positions were very highly sought after in the late 60s, during the Vietnam war. Only the top 1% were invited to join. A slot at the NIH ordinarily led to a career in research or in medical academia. Many, like Tony, trained and then stayed at NIH for their careers.

I treated gonorrhea in Vietnam for the U.S. Army. Tony did a fellowship in Immunology at the NIH. Immunology is a subspecialty of internal medicine dealing with autoimmune diseases like systemic lupus; allergic disorders like asthma; and in Tony’s case, vaccine development.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/texas-governor-orders-review-of-whether-gender-transition-surgery-constitutes-child-abuse/

Texas governor Greg Abbott on Friday directed the state Department of Family Protective Services to issue a determination on whether gender-transition surgery on children constitutes child abuse.

“Subjecting a child to genital mutilation through reassignment surgery creates a ‘genuine threat of substantial harm from physical injury to the child,’” Abbott wrote in a letter to the department. “This broad definition of ‘abuse’ should cover a surgical procedure that will sterilize the child, such as orchiectomy or hysterectomy, or remove otherwise healthy body parts, such as penectomy or mastectomy. Indeed, Texas already outlaws female genital mutilation of a child, and presumably that also constitutes child abuse.”

Abbott’s directive comes after federal judges temporarily blocked an Arkansas law banning gender-transition procedures for minors late last month.

The law, which was the first of its kind, forbids doctors from providing gender-transition hormone treatment, puberty blockers, or sex-reassignment surgery to minors. It was set to take effect on July 28.

However, U.S. District Judge Jay Moody ruled that the ACLU was likely to win its challenge against the law and that allowing the measure to take effect would hurt transgender youths currently undergoing the procedures.

The state argued that it has a legitimate interest in banning the procedures for minors; Republican attorneys general from 17 states urged the judge to uphold the ban.

Those who back the legislation say they aim to protect children from irreversible procedures they could later regret.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-joe-biden-has-done-should-be-too-much-even-for-john-roberts/

The best defense of John Roberts has always been that, rather than being weak or easily influenced, he comes from a judicial school of thought — popular among conservatives in the 1980s and before — that holds judicial restraint as its highest value. In recent years, many conservatives (including myself) have come to believe that the judicial branch has a strong role to play in enforcing the Constitution as written, as well as in policing the statutory limits that Congress has placed on the executive branch. But, before originalism took over (as it should have), this was not always the case. Indeed, insofar as conservatives were likely to criticize the Supreme Court during the middle of the last century, it was not for coming to the wrong decisions per se, but for being “activist” at the expense of the other branches. Viewed through a certain light, John Roberts’s jurisprudence can be seen as an expression of this older view. Yes, he’s sometimes willing to step in if the question is particularly obvious or the infraction particularly egregious. But, in general, he’d rather exhibit a light touch.

Until recently, it has been possible to square John Roberts’s approach to the eviction moratorium with his general approach to his job. But, as of this week, that is no longer the case. We don’t actually know what Roberts thinks of the statutory question underlying the CDC’s eviction moratorium, because he didn’t write anything explaining himself. Perhaps he thinks that the law allows for the CDC’s actions. Perhaps he thinks that it doesn’t, but that it’s not obvious enough to warrant intervention. Perhaps, like Kavanaugh, he thinks that the law does not allow for the CDC’s actions, but that the Court did not need to get involved immediately given that the order was about to expire. Whatever Roberts thinks, though, and however it intersects with his philosophy, his preference for restraint cannot survive the new position that President Biden has taken, which is to have flatly rejected the court’s opinion, and to have said publicly that, while it expects to lose, it is seeking “the ability to, if we have to appeal, to keep this going for a month — at least — I hope longer.”