RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/who-now-dares-to-confront-the-left/

“Here’s a quick question: name an institution not now in the hands of the Left? Certainly not universities, the media or public service. And don’t dare cite the police as upholders of one-rule-for-all law and order, not when they’re fining petty violators of social-distance diktats while standing idle as protesters in their tens of thousands ignore the same rules.”

“It is past time to fight back. But where do the leaders come from? Not from senior clerics. Not from the pantywaists who occupy most of the centre-right parliamentary seats; whether here, in the US or elsewhere. We are left with Trump, I believe, as in 1940, when we had only Churchill. But, ignoring the Left, have a look at the way conservative commentators constantly snipe at Trump; white-anting his standing. They can’t give him any credit without including a sanctimonious personal insult, in order to establish their own moral credentials. Talk about cutting off your nose…”

The truth is the enemy of those who practice deceit and who find their anchor not in truth but in an agenda. Whether Christian or not, a decent person wants to live in truth. Personally, I define my conservatism as falling out of my own search for truth – the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Let the chips fall where they may.

Here are some truths, among a much longer list. Admittedly, not logical or tautological, but truths in the sense that they correspond with the facts on the ground as we know them or should know them. Some abiding, some more profound than others; some specific to the moment.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/06/covid-19-and-the-problem-with-official-science/

All models are wrong but some are useful, which cannot be said of the casualties projected for a disease that has proven about as lethal as a seasonal flu. Recall that 1969’s Hong Kong flu killed an estimated one million worldwide but did not stop the Woodstock festival. Yet driven by fear and folly we have trashed an entire economy.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.  —Lord Salisbury, 1877

The desideratum in modern governance is evidence-based policy. It is not always achieved or, as we have seen with the coronavirus panic, possible. It is far preferable, however, to policy-based evidence, which was to be found with the rushed production of new evidence that had not met the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration quality assurance processes in a desire to influence Donald Trump’s deliberations over whether to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement (as I describe in my forthcoming essay in Climate Change: The Facts 2020).

In climate science the problem appears irrevocable. Scholars like Roger Pielke Jr in his book The Honest Broker have pointed out that there is no linear relationship between science and public policy: scientific findings rarely lead to single policy conclusions. Despite this, the epistemic community in climate science seems to think that even more scary model-driven scenarios will lead policy-makers to do “the right thing”.

https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-enacts-tariffs-travel-ban-on-chaz

Trump has announced a new set of tariffs and a travel ban on CHAZ, escalating the trade war between the United States and the fledgling nation-state.

“Effective immediately, no travel to or from the foreign country of Seattle,” the president said at a press conference. “Additionally, a 25% tariff will be placed on all goods coming from CHAZ, once they start exporting things.” The president will also be cutting all diplomatic ties with the communist nation, further increasing tensions.

The tariffs aren’t expected to do much, however, as the only thing the people of CHAZ have been able to produce so far is a few beans in the community garden.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/14/class-not-race-divides-america/

Nothing is stranger in these tense days than the monotony of the inexact and non-descriptive mantra of “white privilege” and “white solidarity”—as if there is some monolithic white bloc, or as if class matters not at all.

In truth, the clingers, the deplorables, the irredeemables, and Joe Biden’s “dregs” have very little in common with those who so libel them, but superficially share supposedly omnipotent and similar skin color.

In the past, we saw such tensions among so-called whites in CNN’s reporting of the allegedly toothless rubes at Trump rallies, in the Strzok-Page text trove about Walmart’s smelly patrons, in the callous coastal disregard for the five-decade wasting away of the American industrial heartland, in the permissible elite collective disparagement of Christian evangelicals, and in the anthropological curiosity about and condescension toward such exotic, but presumably backward, Duck Dynasty and NASCAR peoples. 

As a result, we have reached the surreal point at which the nation’s privileged whites on campuses such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, in the top echelon of politics, and the corporate and entertainment worlds, all deplore in the abstract something they call “white privilege” in others who have never really experienced it. 

Of course, whatever such a thing is, they possess it in abundance but give no hint they have any intention of giving it up other than rhetorically or through the medieval concept of hair-shirt penance and Twitter confessionals. On the other hand, they are furious that middle-class whites do not join their theatrics of bending the knee and offering abject apologies for original sins.