RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/stand-up-for-police-and-for-new-york?wallit_nosession=1

During the mayoral tenures of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, crime in every form plummeted throughout New York City. The mandate to clean up the mess that Gotham had become worked, and cops were proud to play a key role in removing the decades-old image of “the ungovernable city.” By the time I was sworn in as a New York City police officer in 1997, the city’s revival was well underway.

That year—with the city’s murder rate reduced 66 percent since the start of the decade—businesses were investing in the Big Apple, parks were transforming into green respites amid the concrete panorama, and Disney had arrived in Times Square, all confirming that New York had become a family-friendly place. The NYPD’s improved technology in tracking crime and maintaining public-order statistics allowed the department to allocate police resources more effectively, despite some drawbacks. Less measurable were the sweat, toil, tears, and blood—too much blood—that had been spent by members of the NYPD in serving the city. In the face of this enormous effort and sacrifice, all who took the time to notice witnessed the tangible result: every community in the city was safer than it had been.

That all began to change in January 2014, when Bill de Blasio, who had run a campaign highly critical of the police, became mayor. Throughout most of his mayoralty, de Blasio benefited from the NYPD’s continued success in keeping crime down, especially in his first term, under the guidance of Commissioner William J. Bratton. But he gradually shifted the public narrative from highlighting the success of the NYPD to vilifying the department. By 2020, especially in the aftermath of riots in June, the city’s crime rate was accelerating upward, even as more public officials portrayed the NYPD as an institution that could not be trusted, staffed by badge-wearing rogues serving a systemically flawed government.

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/06/21/despite-vaccine-triumphs-sciences-performance-during-the-pandemic-has-been-decidedly-mixed

While Western labs hit a home run, the public health community made unforced errors, and China threw deadly bean balls.

For the health sciences, these are the best of times and the worst of times. The best have been dramatic achievements emerging from American and European labs. The worst have been lab practices in China and the secrecy surrounding them.

The powerful tools developed by Western scientists were consistently used to save lives, most dramatically with the development of vaccines that have succeeded in suppressing the pandemic in those places where their use has been widespread. The same tools, in the hands of Chinese virologists, were used to experiment with deadly pathogens. We don’t know if they were trying to develop biowarfare agents or tools to combat future pandemics, and we don’t know crucial information about the origins and early spread of the virus because Beijing is hiding it.

We do know the deadly toll. According to Johns Hopkins statistics, there have been 177 million known cases of COVID-19 worldwide and 3.8 million deaths. Beyond that is the devastating impact on mental health, schooling and economic activity worldwide.

A third group of scientists, public health specialists in the U.S., falls between the best and worst. Tasked with immense responsibility and under intense time pressure, they achieved mixed results, at best, in their primary task: protecting Americans’ health and safety.

As we emerge from our bunkers, people naturally want to assign responsibility for the high costs they incurred. Were all those costs necessary? Could we have done better? Who deserves blame—or praise? Some have piled that blame on “science,” when they really mean mistakes by public health officials. Those same officials, hoping to escape responsibility, have depicted themselves as the very embodiment of modern science and technical proficiency.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/following_the_scientists_who_were_destroying_america_just_to_spite_trump.html

For the past year and a half of COVID, we have been told by those supposedly in the know, to “follow the science.”  Those who question the science are at best called names, like “deniers” or “racists”, and at worst, lose their jobs and reputations, and are banned from social media.

One gets an appreciation for what scientists of centuries ago endured as they questioned science dogma of the day such as the Earth being flat or the Sun revolving around Earth. Such censorship was attributed to the medieval scientific mindset centuries ago long before the enlightened age of Facebook, Twitter, and CNN.

Last year’s outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus allowed the world to travel back in time to an age where sailors feared sailing off the edge of the world into a pit of monsters or nothingness. Instead of being called “flat Earthers” they are called anti-maskers or anti-vaxers. How did we get to such a place where science can’t be questioned, at least science deemed incontrovertible by the government and media?

It started with the climate change movement. Back in the 1970s we faced a crisis of global cooling. A few decades later it changed to global warming, where the planet would heat up enough to melt the polar icecaps, flooding coastal cities. When these fatalistic predictions failed to pan out, the movement created a new name, climate change, that conveniently covered both warm and cool temperatures, rain, drought, storms, and all other forms of weather, attributing normally changing weather to something nefarious

Scientists are supposed to follow the scientific method, observing natural phenomena, collecting data, forming a hypothesis to explain these observations, then refining the hypotheses as new data emerges. Instead, with both climate science and COVID the process has been reversed, ignoring or jiggering the data to conform with a predetermined hypothesis, rejecting new or contrary data simply because scientists did not like or approve of the source of the contrary data.