RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/woke-inquisitors-in-the-medical-world/

A recent ‘controversy’ reveals how politically correct ideology is harming health care.

Four hundred years ago, Italian astronomer Galileo was persecuted for advancing Copernicus’s theory that the earth and other planets rotate around the sun. This heliocentric theory violated the prevailing belief dating back to Aristotle and engrained in Christian theology that the sun and planets rotate around a stationary earth. Galileo was tried for heresy and placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Science would eventually vindicate Galileo.

Today’s scientists and physicians face a different orthodoxy that explains all disparate health outcomes as the result of structural or systemic racism. Doubters and those who investigate genetic and scientific alternative explanations face their own latter-day inquisition. Just ask Howard Bauchner, editor in chief of JAMA — the Journal of the American Medical Association — who was recently forced to resign. While the remaining JAMA editors offered fulsome praise in a farewell editorial citing his accomplishments, including a commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, make no mistake: He was purged for a thoughtcrime.

Dr. Bauchner’s offense was that he presided over JAMA when it aired a podcast titled “Structural Racism for Doctors — What Is It?” in late February. The podcast featured two white physicians — JAMA deputy editor Ed Livingston and Mitchell Katz, an editor at JAMA Internal Medicine, president and CEO of New York City’s public-hospital system NYC Health + Hospitals, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Katz described structural racism as societal policies or practices that perpetuate racial inequality, as opposed to individuals’ racist beliefs. Dr. Livingston wondered if “structural racism is an unfortunate term to describe a very real problem.” (emphasis added) He worried that people offended by being labeled racist would not address the societal barriers to equal opportunity. JAMA’s tweet promoting the podcast stated, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care? An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors. . . .”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/08/who_loses_when_the_china_bat_cave_implodes.html

The story about Wuhan’s “wet market” is taking on water. We’ve moved well past the “trust but verify” stage. We’re now in the “don’t trust a damn thing they say” stage. In this case, “they” refers mostly to the Chinese Communist Party. But the public’s mistrust has spread to our own government’s public health experts, and to much of the Western media, as well.

We still don’t know where the COVID-19 pandemic originated, but the more we learn, the less China’s official story sounds right. The World Health Organization’s year-long endorsement of Beijing means nothing. At this point, even the WHO is starting to say we need a more thorough investigation. Good luck with that. China has prevented independent scientists from conducting any serious, open inquiry of the pandemic’s origins. That won’t change.

China’s secrecy tells us sometimes, but we can’t be sure what. Remember, U.S. intelligence agencies and the George W. Bush administration made the wrong inference from Saddam Hussein’s secrecy about weapons of mass destruction. Saddam impeded international inspectors to search freely for WMDs, which he possessed previously. There was no proof he had destroyed them. Yet he blocked unannounced international inspections of Iraqi sites that might contain WMDs. The natural inference was that he still had those weapons and was hiding them. American and British intelligence researched that conclusion. The CIA director famously told President Bush it was a “slam dunk.”

It wasn’t. What Saddam was actually hiding was that he didn’t have WMDs. He was hiding that less from his Western enemies and more from his dangerous neighbor, Iran, and possibly from internal enemies in Iraq itself. That mistaken inference is worth remembering as we ponder the still-murky origins of the Wuhan virus. We know China is hiding something. What we don’t know is what it is hiding and why.

Beijing could be hiding that a natural virus escaped from the lab.
Beijing could be hiding that the escaped virus was artificially enhanced, made more contagious and lethal (called “gain of function”).
Beijing could be hiding the fact that China’s military was involved in this gain-of-function project, or at least in some aspects of the lab’s research.
Beijing could be hiding that Chinese political leaders knew, early on, that the virus spread from human to human and that it kept this crucial finding secret for months. During that period, Beijing and the WHO were falsely telling the world that the virus could not spread from human to human.
Beijing could be hiding that Chinese leaders not only knew the virus was contagious, but that they acted on that knowledge by allowing Chinese nationals to travel freely around the world, spreading the disease, while sharply restricting travel within China from Wuhan. And, finally,
Beijing could be hiding anything and everything simply because that’s how totalitarian regimes operate. They always hide information, control the flow, and prevent outside inspections.

Whatever they’re hiding, they have powerful reasons. The Chinese Communist Party knows how high the stakes are if it is found responsible for a deadly lab leak and for keeping that information secret when others could have acted promptly and saved countless lives. Americans will be outraged, as they should be, and Washington will be forced to take serious action.

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

Many majority Democrat cities have fallen victim to progressive prosecutors. Rather than drive down crime, improve public safety, and promote common sense tough-on-crime policies, these zealots campaign on platforms of structural racism, outcome equity, and restorative justice. In these cities, such performances have in fact become a requirement for the office of district attorney (DA). Aspiring DAs must protest the disproportionate prosecution of minorities without examining the underlying causes; they must clamor for the elimination of cash bail in the name of racial fairness; and they must recommend sentence reduction or alternatives to incarceration to mitigate “past injustices.”

Committed to “reimagining” the criminal justice system in the service of “woke” rhetoric, these DAs are neither acting in the public interest to enforce the law nor honoring their oath of office. They forget that their principal duty is to uphold the law, not crusade for changes driven by their political agenda. In the process, they are emboldening offenders, fostering disrespect for the law, unleashing dangerous criminals on society, and – worst of all – robbing victims of due justice. San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, who wears his ideological lineage on his sleeve and currently faces a recall campaign, arrogantly claims that a DA can “challenge the legitimacy of a law by declining to bring charges in certain cases.”

Progressive policies have time and again been proven to be misguided, even inimical to public safety.

A study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF) found that in six jurisdictions with “social justice” prosecutors, reduced conviction rates and fewer guilty outcomes for serious felonies accompanied rising crime rates. It questioned the supplanting of the standard requirement of “competency and experience” for DAs with “ideological zeal.” In his foreword to the study, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III wrote that elected leaders, law enforcement and the media should realize that “leftist ideas of social justice and true criminal justice are not compatible.”

The radicalization of DA offices and the clamor for defunding the police comes as crime rates are skyrocketing and Americans are worried. A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that 49% of respondents said that violent crime was their top concern, ahead of the pandemic, the economy, political correctness, and race relations.