RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/no-biden-reboot-president-outperformed-liz-peek

Joe Biden is not about to pivot. No siree, no reboot for this president’s White House.

Biden is not interested in making any course corrections because, after all, he has, by his own modest estimation, “outperformed what anybody thought would happen.” Further, the president is convinced “we have made enormous progress” and everything is “getting better.”

That’s what he told the country during his recent press conference, which was an eye-opener. Turns out Joe Biden is either seriously delusional or utterly sequestered and misled by his team. Don’t take my word for it; read his own statements.

Addressing his White House’s effort to “shut down” the pandemic, as he promised to do, Biden said, “Am I satisfied with the way in which we have dealt with COVID and all the things that – that go along with it?  Yeah, I am satisfied.  I think we’ve done remarkably well.”

As to the performance of his embattled and unpopular vice president, Biden said of Kamala Harris: “I think she’s doing a good job.” Well, what could he say?

When asked how his administration’s report card might appear to voters as they approach the midterm elections, Biden said it “would look pretty good.”

That’s an interesting assumption, given that a new Politico/Morning Consult poll found 37% of respondents gave Biden an “F” for his first year in office, more than awarded him an “A” or “B.” A poll which, curiously, graded Biden worse that Donald Trump. For Biden voters, that’s the final ignominy.

But, as Biden declared during the presser, “I don’t believe the polls.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/23/critical-race-promoters-are-more-odious-than-marxists/

Of late, Fox News has been hosting a series called “The MisEducation of America” featuring gatherings of critical race theory’s critics—such as Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University—focusing on the danger of teaching racially divisive versions of American history. According to Swain, a black professor of political science at Vanderbilt, forcing kids to do things like play games called “privilege bingo” are “a prime example of how CRT, has seeped down to K-12 education, and it disturbs students.” Further: “All of these critical theories with Marxist roots are destroying American education, and parents have to save their children. But they also have to work to save other people’s children.”

 Although the media and our universities may choose to ignore Swain’s complaint, she is actually understating the problem she and “MisEducation” host Pete Hegseth are featuring. I’m not sure I see “the Marxist roots” of the crusade against white people and their history in quite the same way Swain and Hegseth see it. We are indeed witnessing class warfare but not of the kind that Marx foresaw. It is a war being waged by white elites against the “basket of deplorables,” the predominantly white, working-class, and small-town Americans whom these elites hate and want to divest of human dignity. Similar conflicts are going on simultaneously in other Western countries, featuring equivalent social conflict.

In none of these cases do we find Marx’s appeals to the proletariat to rise up against those who control the means of production. In fact, we are witnessing exactly the opposite. An alliance of corporate capitalists, feminists, the LGBT lobby, and black race hustlers are directing their fire on the working class, which seems to be the least affected by the hegemonic ideology of wokeness. If anything, we are now looking at what Pedro Gonzalez has characterized as “the counterrevolution of the ruling class.” If Marxist theory, which supposedly is “seeping in” has any application, it would be as an analysis of how our elites are suppressing those they are stepping on and trying through increasingly vicious hate speech to isolate.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/23/wokeism-is-a-cruel-and-dangerous-cult/

Wokeism has been described by its critics as the omnipresent use of race—and to a lesser extent, gender—to replace meritocracy and thus ensure equality of result. What follows from implementing that ideology are reparatory actions to reward those of the present by atoning for the injustices done to others in the past. 

Some see it as an update of 1960s cultural Marxism fads. Others scoff that it is just a return to 1980s-style political correctness. 

Still more see it as the logical successor to 1990s-type race, class, and gender obsessions—albeit with a shriller and more dangerous Jacobin, Soviet, and Maoist twist. Wokeism’s hysteria also invites comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism. 

But few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is. 

Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. It tears apart foes and friends alike, whether by fueling media-driven hatred of Donald Trump or faux-deification of the disaster that is now Joe Biden. 

Woke’s Victims 

Defunding law enforcement and defaming police resulted in record numbers of murders in 12 U.S. cities. A wave of violent crime is even hitting America’s suburbs. 

Without much fear of arrest, indictment, conviction, and incarceration, emboldened violent career criminals for the past year have robbed, assaulted, and killed the innocent with impunity. 

The victims at the bus stop, the subway, or in the furniture store do not seem to warrant media or progressive attention, much less sympathy. 

They are the ignored—the unnamed, and the forgotten collateral damage from the grand experiment of redefining crime as a social construct. The guilty are the elite academics, activists, and billionaires like George Soros who are untouched by what they birthed.

We have all seen videos of the vast expanse of flotsam and jetsam strewn by train thieves along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Yet the Wild West mess is still more than just the concrete manifestations of Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón’s unhinged efforts to excuse criminals from legal consequences. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/epistle-paul-washingtonians-lloyd-billing

In a recent hearing, Sen. Rand Paul called out Dr. Anthony Fauci for smearing the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, distinguished medical scientists from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford, as “fringe epidemiologists.” Fauci and NIH boss Francis Collins had “orchestrated a takedown campaign” instead of debating the facts.

“Dr. Fauci doesn’t want to debate,” Paul said. “He wants to squelch debate because ‘he is science’. If you criticize him, you’re criticizing science.” That prompted Paul to author a Fox News commentary in which he cited Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom.

“Most scientists realize that we cannot plan the advance of knowledge, that in the voyage into the unknown—which is what research is—we are in great measure dependent on the vagaries of individual genius and of circumstance, and that scientific advance, like a new idea that will spring up in a single mind, will be the result of a combination of conceptions, habits, and circumstances brought to one person by society, the result as much of lucky accidents as of systematic effort.”

In other words, Paul explained, “the benefits of scientific progress are only realized if science is free from excessive restraint” and “the same arguments against central planning for an economy also hold for science.” When a central planner errs, “the entire economy is threatened.  Likewise, when a central medical planner errs, all patients are threatened.”

According to Paul, Dr. Fauci’s “fundamental decision to ignore natural immunity has led to a cascade of bad decisions, the effects of which have seeped into all of our lives.”  Long before the current pandemic, Fauci authorized secretive trials of toxic drugs such as AZT on foster children in New York City.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/01/23/bari-weiss-smackdown-on-covid-restrictions-sets-twitter-ablaze-n511172

There’s no doubt that Bill Maher is a liberal. But he’s an unusual liberal, for these times, who will recognize certain truths and allow them to be aired on his show, “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
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As we noted on Saturday, Maher took on Justice Sonia Sotomayor for the misinformation she spread about COVID during Supreme Court oral arguments about Biden’s vaccine mandate on private businesses.

But Maher certainly let the genie out of the bottle when he let journalist/podcaster Bari Weiss speak on his show. Weiss used to work for the NY Times before she tossed them over for greater reality.

Weiss didn’t hold back when it came to blasting COVID restrictions, calling what had been done to children in the closing of schools a “catastrophic moral crime.”

“We were told you get the vaccine, you get the vaccine and you get back to normal. And we haven’t gotten back to normal. And it’s ridiculous at this point,” Weiss said. “I know that so many of my liberal and progressive friends are with me on this, and they do not want to say it out loud because they are scared to be called anti-vax or to be called science deniers or to be smeared as a Trumper. I’m sorry, but if you believe the science, you will look at the data that we did not have two years ago, and you will find out that cloth masks do not do anything. You will realize that you can show your vaccine passport at a restaurant and still be asymptomatic in carrying Omicron. And you realize, most importantly, that this will be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.”

https://nypost.com/2022/01/22/nypds-911-log-shows-escalation-of-call-that-left-cop-dead-another-injured/

Records from the NYPD’s emergency call center show how a seemingly routine Friday evening domestic call in Manhattan quickly turned into a deadly situation.

Before Officer Jason Rivera was slain and Officer Wilbert Mora was critically injured by Lashawn McNeil’s .45 Glock, police had little indication that they were walking into an ambush.

The NYPD received a 911 call from Shirley Sourzes, a woman who was having a dispute with her son in a Harlem apartment at 5:09 p.m., according to the call log obtained by The Post.

“HE IS THREATENING TO DO THINGS TO HER,” the log stated. “HE IS IN THE HOUSE NOW.”

But the log indicated the unidentified woman told the dispatcher that no one in the Harlem apartment had a weapon or was injured. McNeil, in fact, was brandishing a gun with an illegal, high-capacity magazine.

Over the next several minutes, dispatchers wrote that the caller said her son was in her home and was “threatening to do things to her.”

For more than an hour, there were no further entries in the log, until a 6:21 record of “SHOTS FIRED” was entered.

Rivera, Mora and a third cop had arrived at 119 West 135th Street’s apartment 1D and spoke to the woman and another one of her sons in the living room before walking down a long narrow hallway to check on McNeil. The alleged killer then swung the door open and opened fire on the officers, according to previous descriptions. He was shot by the third officer as he tried to flee the apartment and remained in critical condition.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/590908-virginias-youngkin-gets-the-desantis-treatment-from-media

He hasn’t been in office for even a week, but Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) is already getting the same treatment from some corners of the media that his Republican counterpart in Florida regularly attracts.

“So much for the silly narrative that Youngkin was some normal R,” wrote Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin to her nearly 650,000 Twitter followers. “As @TerryMcAuliffe predicted, he’s brought DeSantis anti-mask nuttery to VA. Now at war with several school districts. He’s only been in office a few days. Hey, VA this is what you voted for. Best of luck.”

Gov. Youngkin is already proving himself to be a “Trump in fleece clothing,” lamented Monthly magazine contributing editor Anne Kim. “This is not my Virginia.”

“What makes @GlennYoungkin different from other GOP govs who’ve banned mask mandates is the timing — amid the most infectious variant yet, as record numbers of kids are being hospitalized and staffing shortages are crippling schools,” argued NBC’s Heidi Przybyla.

“Hi there. Arlington county parent here (don’t believe you are @GlennYoungkin but correct me if I am wrong). Thank you to @APSVirginia for standing up for our kids, teachers and administrators and their safety in the midst of a transmissible variant,” wrote White House press secretary Jen Psaki to Youngkin.

And despite Virginia exit polls showing that just one in 10 parents say parents should have little or no say over what schools teach, we get headlines like this one from a Washington Post opinion piece, “In catering to selfish parents, Youngkin is failing Virginia’s kids.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/science/2022/01/the-curse-of-scientisms-domining-paradigm/

The last two years have demonstrated the dominance of paradigms in relation to public policy on both the COVID pandemic and climate change. Many years ago, Thomas Samuel Kuhn, in his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that scientific knowledge undergo periodic paradigm shifts. Scientific knowledge, he argued, does not progress linearly and continuously. Scientific truth is not established by objective criteria alone, but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Controversially, Kuhn argued that our understanding of science could not rest on “objectivity” alone.  Science had to take account of subjective perspectives since all objective conclusions were ultimately founded on the subjective world view of researchers and participants.

Like Kuhn, accepting that  scientists can never be truly objective, Karl Popper propounded his central tenet of scientific methodology, “falsifiability”. A hitherto established scientific hypothesis could be invalidated  by even one piece of contradictory evidence.

For Popper, “falsification” was central to the intellectual integrity of the scientific method. Unfortunately, much of the scientific establishment, aided and abetted by governments, has worked to sustain dominant paradigms in the face of contradictory evidence which is simply ignored. Too often, ideology perpetuates paradigms to a point where they become dogma. For example, only research which validates anthropogenic global warming is de facto permitted. Falsification is avoided if the young scientist values his career. So called climate research is about fortifying a preconceived article of faith. So, if the establishment scientist fells the need to cherry-pick the evidence, torture the data and construct pseudo- sophisticated models with inputs, designed to get the correct “ideological” outcome, it is all in a good cause.

What is called, “the science”, has little in common with the scientific method.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/22/the-coming-dethronement-of-joe-biden/

It’s not often that I agree with Joe Biden, but he said something in his nasty, brutish, and long press conference last week with which, if properly understood, I agree. 

Don’t get me wrong. The press conference as a whole was a “total disaster.” Notwithstanding the sycophantic performance of the court eunuchs in the regime media, everybody understands this. (But speaking of “court eunuchs,” what’s the female equivalent? It was Jennifer Rubin, who actually gave Biden an “A-” for the presser, that prompts this vital question and I hope some enterprising savant will contribute the answer.) 

At one point, a reporter, noting a few of the multifarious failures of Biden’s first year in office—runaway inflation; his failure to “shut down the virus”; the smoldering ruin of his legislative agenda; the sharp, persistent partisan divisions that he came to office promising to heal—given all that, the scribe suggested, perhaps Biden had “overpromised.” 

No, no, Biden replied, “I didn’t overpromise, but I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen.” 

Delicious, isn’t it? Peel off and discard the first bit. Biden clearly overpromised. Just utter the word “normalcy” anywhere near the name “Biden” and watch the reaction. But many people jumped all over the second bit. Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), for example, quoted the word “outperformed” and tweeted: “I’m not sure what planet he’s inhabiting but on planet earth his record is a record of failure.” 

That is true. It’s a dismal record of failure, and we’ve only made it through one year. Biden’s even outdone his master, Barack Obama, who before Biden held the world record for worst president in the history of the United States. Biden is far worse, in part, granted, because he continues to follow the blueprint set forth by his clean, elegantly clad predecessor.

But I have to cavil with the idea that Biden has not “outperformed” expectations. He certainly outperformed mine. I didn’t think he would make it through his first year in the White House. But here it is, January 20-something, and the old guy is still in office. Amazing. 

True, there is something of Dr. Johnson’s dog about the whole thing. Presented with the spectacle of female preachers, Samuel Johnson marveled: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

My feelings about Biden are somewhat similar. I have accordingly revised my prediction. I was wrong that Joe Biden wouldn’t make it through his first year. I continue to cling to the conviction he will not remain the occupant of the White House through to the morning of January 20, 2025. The prospect of a second Biden term is, I am convinced, not worth speaking about. In tragedy, Aristotle said, we should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities, but a second Biden term is so improbable as to be well-nigh impossible, and I am not forgetting about what a tragedy such an eventuality would entail for the country and the world. Even CNN seems to be coming around to this realization.

If I am even remotely correct about this, Biden’s situation presents the unnamed committee who actually runs the presidency with a huge and delicate problem. Biden’s behavior long ago passed from embarrassing to dangerous. We can see that all around us. 

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/pandemic-science

In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.

One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited, compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science—and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.

As for organized skepticism, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin. Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.