RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/beijings-lies-matter-joseph-hippolito/

One year after George Floyd died in the custody of Minneapolis police, one year after riots ravaged the nation in his name, the founder of Black Lives Matter’s chapter in nearby St. Paul quit.

“After a year on the inside, I learned they had little concern for rebuilding black families, and they cared even less about improving the quality of education for students in Minneapolis,” Rashard Turner said in a video May 26. One week later, Turner provided specifics in an interview with Fox News.

“When you call for a moratorium on charter schools, that is a direct attack on black families, on black children,” Turner said. “We know that charter schools are creating opportunities. Anyone who is in opposition to school choice, charter schools, I would say they’re racist.

“I was an insider in Black Lives Matter, and I learned the ugly truth.”

That ugly truth goes beyond BLM’s professional hypocrisy. It extends to an even uglier truth: BLM knowingly plays a pivotal role in China’s quest to attain geopolitical and ideological supremacy by destabilizing the United States.

BLM’s role is so pivotal that many of the group’s leaders and affiliated bodies have relationships with organizations that are connected to China through fronts or diplomatic contacts.

“Black Lives Matter is a Communist organization 100 percent, tied to foreign Communists and directly to the Communist Party of China,” said Trevor Loudon, an author and filmmaker from New Zealand who has studied Marxist movements for more than 30 years.

BLM embodies Mao Zedong’s quest to foment revolution through race, as he succinctly stated:

“The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and thrived with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people.”

Mao took that approach because China had neither an industrialized working class nor an organized labor movement.

https://www.city-journal.org/tulsa-opera-daniel-bernard-roumain

Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain has made a good career leveraging his skin color. He writes pieces with titles like “i am a white person who ____ Black people.” He argues that orchestras should “focus on BLACK artists exclusively” [punctuation in the original]. He has solicited funding for a work written “EXCLUSIVELY for BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] members of ANY orchestra.”

When a percussionist on Roumain’s Facebook page suggested that such a work would be divisive, Roumain told him to “speak less and try to listen and learn and understand more.” BIPOC musicians “FACE racism everyday” from their white orchestral colleagues, Roumain added. In fact, Roumain argues, white musicians’ contracts should be term-limited as reparations for “decades of benefitting from orchestral racism.”

Roumain’s racial-justice profile has earned him a seat on the boards of the League of American Orchestras and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, as well as a faculty position at Arizona State University. He has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall and is working on film, TV, and opera scores.

He likely seemed a natural choice, then, to write a piece to commemorate the centennial of a race riot in Tulsa. That explosion of violence, from May 31, 1921, to June 1, 1921, followed a still-undetermined incident between a 19-year-old black male and a 17-year-old white female. Tulsa officials tried to protect the male from a possible lynching; armed black residents circled the jail where the teen was being held as another line of defense. Gunfire broke out around the jail, killing 10 whites and two blacks. In retaliation, white rampagers looted and set fire to hundreds of homes and businesses in the black section of Tulsa called Greenwood. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to ashes, leaving thousands homeless. A 2001 report by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission confirmed 26 black and 13 white deaths from the riots; unofficial estimates put the death toll at several hundred. Many more were wounded.

Tulsa Opera planned a concert called Greenwood Overcomes as part of the city’s riot centennial events. Eight black opera singers, accompanied on the piano by Metropolitan Opera assistant conductor Howard Watkins, would perform the works of 23 living black composers, as well as traditional songs and spirituals. Tulsa Opera commissioned four new works for the concert, the first commissions in its history.

Roumain received one of those commissions, and it was a peach: writing a short aria for mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. Graves’s Metropolitan Opera debut as Carmen in 1995 received rousing acclaim, drawing international attention to her full-bodied vocal tone and smoldering stage presence. She would be the biggest star of the Tulsa concert; any composer would jump to have her perform his work.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/06/10/covid-19-vaccines-will-not-be-enough-we-also-need-effective-treatments-15596

The COVID-19 vaccines have been nothing short of miraculous. Life is returning to normal in many places. But ACSH advisor Dr. Henry Miller argues that we will still need effective medical treatments for COVID-19.

COVID-19 vaccines are the miracle that has significantly suppressed the pandemic in a number of countries, including the United States, where the current seven-day moving averages of cases and deaths are at levels not seen since March of 2020.  With continued aggressive vaccination, we can further suppress the numbers – getting us closer to pre-pandemic “normality.”

However, for several reasons, vaccines alone won’t be the whole solution.

First, in spite of the overwhelming and growing evidence of the importance, safety, and efficacy of the vaccines, there remains a core of the population who will refuse them.  

Second, millions of Americans are taking immunosuppressive drugs — for cancer or autoimmune diseases, for example — that may attenuate the effect of the COVID-19 vaccines.  A study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine of more than 650 organ recipients — who take drugs to suppress their immune system to prevent rejection of their transplanted organs – found that 46 percent had no antibody response after two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.  In another study, a large group of academic researchers found that patients with conditions such as lupus, psoriasis and inflammatory bowel disease who were taking two types of drugs — glucocorticoids and B cell depleting agents — had a substantially impaired immune response to the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

Third, the proliferation of “variants of concern” – mutants of the original Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2 that are highly transmissible and may exhibit immune evasiveness in vaccinated subjects — in the future will likely compromise to some degree the efficacy of the currently available vaccines.  Increasing the likelihood of this outcome are the continuing significant outbreaks of COVID-19 in many of the world’s low- and middle-income countries, which provide opportunities for new, opportunistic mutants to emerge.

Fourth, in view of the above, the best-case scenario is probably that COVID-19 will not in the foreseeable future completely disappear but will become endemic like influenza virus and the coronaviruses that can cause the common cold. In order to save lives and modulate the severity of future COVID-19 infections, it will be critical to develop safe and effective treatments in addition to vaccines.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/06/09/almost_overnight_standards_of_color-blind_merit_tumble_across_american_society_780262.html

A broad revolution is underway in the United States as traditional standards used to measure achievement and provide opportunity are being rejected by schools, corporations, and governments in favor of quotas based on race and gender.

On just his sixth day in office, President Biden signaled that the nation’s long held principle of equality for all had come to an end, signing an executive order declaring that “racial equity is not just an issue for any one department of government; it has to be the business of the whole of government” — equity referring to the idea that merely treating everybody the same is not enough, and that an equal outcome for all people has to be the goal.

Over the last few months, many Ivy League and flagship state universities have moved away from a seemingly neutral measure long used to assess applicants – standardized test scores – to give minorities a better shot at admissions.

In May, Hewlett-Packard, the technology company with 50,000 employees worldwide, decreed that by 2030 half of its leadership positions and more than 30% of its technicians and engineers have to be women and that the number of minorities should “meet or exceed” their representation in the tech industry workforce. 

That same month, United Airlines announced that half of the 5,000 pilots it would train at its proprietary flight school between now and 2030 will be women or people of color, with scholarships provided by United and JPMorgan Chase helping with tuition. There was nothing in the United announcement showing that there were enough qualified blacks and women in the pipeline so that a black/female quota of 2,500 new pilots could be filled, and nothing about what the company would do if there weren’t enough qualified candidates.

Delta Airlines, Ralph Lauren, and Wells Fargo are among other major American companies to announce hiring quotas recently as a way to redress racial imbalances, according to Bloomberg News. 

These are just some of the many “woke” initiatives embraced by many of the pillars of American society in the year since social justice protests erupted across the country in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Supporters argue that racial preferences and quotas are necessary to end deeply entrenched disparities. Critics say that they are a new form of discrimination, no more justified than old forms that are widely rejected. And while the stated goal of affirmative action was to simply eliminate unfair discrimination, the equity movement is rooted in a far more expansive and pessimistic view of the United States as irredeemably white supremacist, a view meant to continually challenge American institutions and values.

The rapid transition from equality of treatment to equality of outcomes tests one of the basic post-civil rights principles of American life, namely that the same standards should be applied to all people. Once a measure is applied, not to the unique individual but to that individual’s group identity, the idea that there are neutral, common, universally applicable standards gives way to something else, something subjective and political, with different measures applied to different people, depending on their sex, race, or other characteristics.

The issue of standards, moreover, is not just a matter of values or fairness. With the United States falling behind other countries in math and science, most notably China, standards are matters of competitiveness and national security — even as the military, CIA and other federal agencies embrace equity.