RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://americanmind.org/salvo/liberty-falling/

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently sounded the alarm on the “profound risk” posed by social media platforms to the mental health and well-being of children across the country.  Murthy believes that “immediate action” must be taken to protect children. He’s right. Multiple studies clearly demonstrate the association between heavy social media use and an increased risk for anxiety, depression, loneliness, and even suicidal thoughts.

According to a new paper published in Psychological Reports, heavy social media use is also associated with a reduced preference for freedom. According to the authors of the paper, two psychologists based at Swansea University, a public research university in Wales, habitual social media users may use platforms like TikTok and Instagram to escape from the challenges and unpredictable nature of the real world.

The authors discuss users’—particularly younger users—burning desire for constant social media-driven stimulation, the negative feelings associated with excessive social media engagement, and how these negative feelings affect one’s desire to be truly free. 

Before discussing the link between social media dependency and a reduced preference for freedom, it’s important to realize just how bad the dependency problem is. Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, compulsively check their social network profiles, spending an average of three-and-a-half hours online every day. That works out to one full day every week, four days per month—and 48 days per year. When it comes to compulsive social media use, Millennials are bad. But the generation after them is even worse. Gen Zers spend an average of four hours on social media every day. That’s five days each month—and 60 days per year.

The word addiction often gets thrown around recklessly. But it’s safe to say that millions of Millennials and Gen Zers are addicted to social media. Addiction is strongly associated with a number of mental health issues, including depression and anxiety.

https://www.based-politics.com/2023/06/21/is-dr-fauci-still-getting-a-government-paycheck/

Many believed Dr. Anthony Fauci was retiring in December 2022, based on comments the former Coronavirus Task Force leader made last year.

But Rand Paul isn’t so sure. The senator thinks Fauci might still be working on the government’s dime.

According to Fox News, on Tuesday Senator Paul’s office sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), asking for “additional information regarding Dr. Fauci’s employment status and receipt of taxpayer-funded benefits.”

Fox News reported, “Paul noted that Fauci said in various media interviews late last year that he was ‘not retiring’ but was going to the ‘next chapter’ and ‘moving on from [his] current positions,’ which also included being President Biden’s chief medical advisor.”

Paul said in the letter, “While many interpreted these statements to mean Dr. Fauci would be ending his employment with the federal government in December 2022, it is not clear if that is in fact the case.”

“This raises questions about Dr. Fauci’s current employment status and whether he is still receiving certain taxpayer-funded benefits associated with active public service, such as legal counsel and protective services,” he added.

Fauci and Paul went toe-to-toe many times over the doctor’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, including famously over the potential origins of the virus.

Paul posited more than once that there was evidence that COVID-19 possibly was created in a lab in Wuhan, China where gain-of-function research took place funded by the U.S.

Fauci originally denied such claims, though later the NIH admitted such research had been conducted and the U.S. government footed the bill. Paul would also accuse Fauci of covering up the potential funding.

Paul was called a conspiracy theorist at the time when making his accusations, but by March of this year even the FBI admitted that a lab leak of the type the senator described was “most likely” the origin.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-prosecutes-another-case-of-self-defense

You may have heard of the latest installment in New York City’s new fad—arresting people for defending themselves and others against violent criminals on the city’s decrepit subway system.

Last week, while riding a northbound J train through once-posh Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 20-year-old Jordan Williams and his girlfriend were accosted by Devictor Ouedraogo, a 36-year-old ex-con who had served three and a half years in prison for an attempted robbery. After completing his term, Ouedraogo was released to the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), suggesting that he is or was an illegal immigrant.

According to eyewitnesses, Ouedraogo was verbally and physically harassing other passengers in the subway car before approaching Williams and his girlfriend, who remains unnamed and has not commented on the incident. After Ouedraogo propositioned his girlfriend, Williams verbally warned him to back off. Ouedraogo allegedly responded by punching both Williams and his girlfriend in the face.

In what sounds like a legal exercise of the right to self-defense under New York law, Williams then reportedly rose to protect himself, his girlfriend, and others from Ouedraogo, who fought back. During the altercation, Williams pulled out a pocketknife and stabbed Ouedraogo, who stumbled out of the subway at the next stop. He received medical attention but later died at a hospital. As with Jordan Neely, the homeless drug addict with a criminal record who died after being restrained in a chokehold by Daniel Penny last month, no autopsy of Ouedraogo has been released, fanning speculation that the results could indicate serious drug abuse.

Williams and his girlfriend continued their subway ride, but NYPD officers apprehended them at a station down the line shortly afterward. Williams was arrested and charged with manslaughter and “criminal possession of a weapon.” (Knives are forbidden on city transit, though this has not stopped knife incidents from increasing 126 percent over last year.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-lefts-fantastic-beasts-progressives-abortion-voting-book-ban-842c0d65?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

President Biden’s re-election announcement video warned that “MAGA extremists are lining up” to repeal “bedrock freedoms.” Uh oh—what freedoms? The extremists plan on “dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love, all by making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.”

It was a perfect expression of the paranoid state in which American progressivism finds itself. Leave aside for a moment the line about “dictating what healthcare decisions women can make,” a euphemistic reference to abortion. The other threats on Mr. Biden’s list—“banning” books, “telling people who they can love” and voter suppression—are literally nonexistent. Mr. Biden isn’t engaged in the time-honored political craft of exaggeration. He’s seeing things that aren’t there.

Liberal commentators have been ridiculing conservatives for fearing negligible or nonexistent threats for as long as I can remember: communist infiltration during the Cold War, Islamic extremism in the 2000s, illegal immigration in the 2010s, gender ideology in the 2020s. The right might or might not have exaggerated the urgency of these problems. But they were, or are, problems. That isn’t the case with an array of issues Democratic politicians and progressive intellectuals are exercised about in 2023. You often feel they’re so invested in the idea of a delusional right that they can’t perceive their own penchant for dreaming up nonexistent threats.

Mr. Biden is worried about book bans. The American Library Association recently claimed in a report that 2,571 books were “challenged” in American libraries last year. These challenges the ALA calls “attempted book bans,” nearly all of which involve a request by a patron that a public library or school library remove a book from its shelves because it is obscene or otherwise offensive. I’m not sure such requests are improper—young-adult fiction has become sexually avant-garde and shockingly coarse over the past two decades. Anyway, to ask that a taxpayer-supported library not facilitate children’s access to a sexually explicit book isn’t to “ban” it. An interested patron may buy it and read it in public if he wishes.