RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/14/killing-art/

I recently had occasion to quote Charles Péguy’s observation, from a 1905 essay called “Notre Patrie,” that “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” 

The cowardice in question can be intellectual or moral as well as physical, something that is vividly illustrated by Holland Cotter’s moist, mincing, over-the-shoulder-glancing review for the New York Times of a small but exquisite exhibition of paintings by the great Venetian Renaissance painter we know as Titian (d. 1576). The exhibition, “Titian: Women, Myth & Power,” is ending its three-city run at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The show centers around six large, mythological paintings commissioned by the future Philip II of Spain in the 1550s. 

Based on themes drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the six paintings, reunited in this exhibition for the first time, are among Titian’s most celebrated, and for good reason. Painted between 1551 and the early 1560s, they show Titian at the apex of his powers. Cotter recognizes and affirms the greatness of the paintings but he is nervous, very nervous. You’ll know why when I tell you that pride of place is given to the Gardner’s own, newly restored work, a depiction of the Rape of Europa, a story illustrated by many artists, including Rubens, Guido Reni, and Goya, but not a theme likely to find approbation among contemporary feminists, the audience to which the Times is chiefly concerned to cater. 

The story is a familiar one. Europa, out picnicking with friends, is approached by Zeus in the shape of a bull (this story’s metamorphosis). He charms her, abducts her, and whisks her away to Crete where, as Ovid himself put it in another poem, cetera quis nescit. 

https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2021/07/new-research-suggests-crispr-can-destroy-virus-that-causes-covid-19/

Scientists have discovered a way to stop the COVID-19 virus from replicating in infected human cells, marking major progress towards a definitive treatment for the deadly illness and accentuating the potential of genetic engineering to cure viral diseases.

The study explores the use of CRISPR, a genome editing tool, and builds on research that started at Australia’s Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in 2019, when Dr. Mohamed Fareh and Prof. Joe Trapani showed that CRISPR could be used to eliminate abnormal RNAs that drive children’s cancers.

At the beginning of the pandemic, and in collaboration with Director Prof. Sharon Lewin and Dr. Wei Zhao from the Doherty Institute, the scientists reprogrammed the same CRISPR tool to suppress replication of the RNA virus SARS-CoV-2 — and importantly, its “variants of concern” — in a test tube model. SARS-CoV-2, which is short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, is the virus that causes COVID-19.

“The CRISPR approach is for a treatment,” lead scientist Lewin told the Alliance for Science. “There are currently no good antiviral drugs available for COVID-19. CRISPR can efficiently destroy the virus.”

At the core of the research is an enzyme (CRISPR-Cas13b) that binds to target RNAs and degrades the part of the virus’ genome needed to replicate inside cells.

The scientists applaud the specificity, efficiency and rapid deployment properties of reprogrammed Cas13b, which provides a blueprint for antiviral drug development to suppress and prevent a wide range of SARS-CoV-2 mutants. The same properties can be readily deployed to fight off other pathogenic viruses.

“The flexibility of CRISPR-Cas13,  which only needs the viral sequence, means we can look to rapidly design antivirals for COVID-19 and any new emerging viruses in less than a week,” Fareh said. There were signs that this approach could also be applied to a host of existing viruses, signalling a game-changer for how they are currently treated, he added.

“Unlike conventional anti-viral drugs, the power of this tool lies in its design-flexibility and adaptability, which make it a suitable drug against a multitude of pathogenic viruses including influenza, Ebola, and possibly HIV,” Fareh said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/the-typical-covid-death-rate-for-the-fully-vaccinated-effectively-zero/

Back in the spring, we here at NRO ran a piece by Andrew Michta titled, “The Zero-Risk Western Society.” We could re-run this piece every week — in fact, maybe we should; note to self — and it would still be pertinent. Taking the broad view of our COVID-19 response, Andrew noted “we seem to have become a people no longer capable of accepting any level of risk, while we demand an absolute certainty that those we elect to office provide safety, even at great cost.”

Risk is at the heart of everything that’s been wrong with our pandemic response to date — managing it, calculating it, communicating it.

Today, policy-makers have to reckon with those tradeoffs once more as the Delta variant contributes to a surge in infections, and the media’s corona-coverage amplifies incidents of “breakthrough” cases. The trends are alarming and frustrating. But so would be a heavy-handed government revival of lockdowns (the Biden administration has vowed not to take this step, while leaving wiggle room), travel restrictions (Chicago is flirting with them), and other measures thought to be behind us. Thankfully, data from the Kaiser Family Foundation help put this renewed COVID-19 panic in perspective.

A few takeaways: Among those states reporting data on “breakthrough” cases for the fully vaccinated, the case rate is well below 1 percent. The hospitalization rate ranges from “effectively zero” to .06 percent. And there’s this: “The rates of death among fully vaccinated people with COVID-19 were even lower, effectively zero (0.00%) in all but two reporting states, Arkansas and Michigan[,] where they were 0.01%.”

That number again, “Effectively zero.”

Are there caveats? Sure, there are caveats. The information is incomplete and a few weeks old, and some asymptomatic cases and individuals who did not get tested are surely missing. The study also notes that these hospitalizations and deaths “may or may not have been due to COVID-19.” As Caroline Downey from the news team reports, the CDC (with similar caveats) likewise says that as of early August, the agency had received reports of roughly 7,500 vaccinated patients with severe and/or fatal breakthrough infections, or less than .01 percent.

Fiddle with the numbers even a lot, and the reality is the same: The vast majority of cases are those who are not fully vaccinated. Those who are face a vanishingly small risk of deadly infection.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/the-imminent-inevitable-taliban-victory/#slide-1

Twenty years, and we are still where we were on September 10, 2001.

A ccountability for the Capitol rioters is not enough, we’re told. Progressives insist there must be a national reckoning for the January 6 “insurrection” because punishing the rioters is insufficient to defeat the real enemy — white supremacism and its endorsement of terrorism when necessary to achieve its vision for society.

It is a cartoon depiction of reality. No belief system is held in more disdain in the United States than white supremacism. To most of us, it is a perversion of the core conviction that we are all created in God’s image, all equal in human dignity, and must thus all be equal in the eyes of the law. For the Left, though, white supremacism is a convenient abstraction; one that gives opportunists the foundation needed to build a “systemic racism” dystopia, their path to influence and profit.

What is remarkable, then, is the perdurable blindness of progressives to a much more threatening breed of ideologically driven violence in furtherance of a supremacist, incorrigibly discriminatory vision for society. Not white supremacism but sharia supremacism. They’ve never wanted to acknowledge it, much less come to grips with it.

As a result, the inevitable is coming to pass, in all the horror some of us have long warned about. The Taliban are right on schedule in their quest to retake Afghanistan by September 11, the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities executed by al-Qaeda — a jihadist network to which the Taliban knowingly and willfully gave sanctuary as it plotted against, and repeatedly attacked, the United States.

I’ve noted that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are poised, by the anniversary date, to be as strong as they were in the three years leading up to 9/11 — during which, with its safe havens assured by the sharia-supremacist regime, the jihadist network bombed U.S. embassies in eastern Africa and nearly sank a U.S. Navy destroyer. Actually, I understated the matter. As they swallow up more provinces by the day, the Taliban are capturing northern regions that they did not rule when last in charge. It is all part of a longstanding plan to take over Afghanistan while U.S. forces are still a retreating presence, thus projecting the image of the Taliban chasing out a humiliated enemy — an image President Biden seems even more anxious to mint than was President Trump.

/https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/13/critical-race-theory-aims-to-murder-the-souls-of-white-children/

CRT aims to annihilate the souls of white people, to morally paralyze them via a protracted process of induced guilt, shame, embarrassment, and extortion.

A friend of mine told me a true apocryphal story. He is an old-fashioned “liberal” and a strong advocate of public education.

The Covid-19 lockdowns left him additional time to inconspicuously sit in on his sixth-grade son’s online classes. One afternoon, he observed an assignment in an English class in which all the white students were required to place their arms beside a brown paper bag.

The teacher, a white woman, asked if they noticed a difference in color between their skin and the brown paper bag. The white students verbally assented. The teacher then asked if the color of the bag looked close to the skin color of some classmates who identify as black.

The teacher then announced: “If your skin color is different from the color of the paper bag, then you are part of an American problem known as ‘systemic racism’ that does irreparable harm to all black and brown people. Further, if you identify as white, you enjoy something called ‘white privilege,’ which means you are practicing racism every day without knowing it.” The teacher then went on to ask the class if they had ever heard the term “reparations.”

Out of some sense of visceral paternal protection, my friend slammed down his son’s computer and told him to go to his room. He told me that he stood there, shaking with incredulity.

This Is Called Murdering Someone’s Soul

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/13/the-justice-departments-troubling-discovery-delays/

It’s been almost seven months since the FBI conducted a pre-dawn raid at the Virginia farm of Thomas and Sharon Caldwell. Dozens of armed agents broke down their front door, ransacked their home, and arrested Tom Caldwell on January 19. A week later, a grand jury indicted Caldwell and two other alleged Oath Keepers for various crimes related to their participation in the Capitol protest on January 6.

Despite the fact Caldwell never entered the building, carried no weapon, and assaulted no one, the Justice Department sought to keep the 66-year-old former Navy lieutenant with service-related disabilities in jail awaiting trial. Caldwell, a decorated military veteran, has no criminal record.

Nonetheless, on February 12, Judge Amit Mehta ordered Caldwell to remain behind bars: “What Mr. Caldwell is accused of is conspiring with others to plot an insurrection against the government of the United States, particularly the Congress of the United States, while it was attempting to certify the Electoral College vote,” Mehta said during Caldwell’s detention hearing. 

“So the concern with Mr. Caldwell is less what he specifically did on January 6th, like others,” Mehta continued. “It doesn’t look like he actually entered the Capitol building, didn’t assault any police officers. But what he did prior to January the 6th is clearly engage in planning and preparation for conduct that others were engaged in and that others participated in, in the incursion that took place at the Capitol and the violence that followed.” 

Caldwell interrupted the hearing to plead for mercy. “I beg your indulgence, sir. But my life hangs in the balance.”

Caldwell spent 50 days in jail before Mehta reversed himself on March 12 and released Caldwell to very limited home detention.

It now appears Mehta is having additional second thoughts about the Justice Department’s handling of the Capitol breach probe. In dozens of pre-trial detention motions filed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department, the evidence against January 6 defendants rests solely in the hands of the government. Detention hearings act instead almost as ex-parte criminal trials where federal judges in Washington, D.C. declare guilt or innocence based largely on what federal prosecutors present in court, occasionally sending defendants to jail for months before a trial can begin.

Caldwell was one of more than 100 Americans ensnared in what the top prosecutor managing the first stage of the January 6 investigation called a “shock and awe” campaign to intimidate Americans out of coming to the nation’s capital to protest Joe Biden’s inauguration. But that short-term political goal doesn’t seem to be working as a long-term legal strategy for the Justice Department.

Mehta, who has denied bond to three other Oath Keepers now incarcerated in the D.C. jail for months awaiting trials that won’t begin until 2022, expressed his displeasure with the government this week during a status hearing for Caldwell and 16 other defendants in the Oath Keepers conspiracy case.

Mehta said it was “troubling” to learn that the full trove of discovery material won’t be accessible to defendants until early 2022. That means defendants like Caldwell will have to wait at least a year before all the evidence related to their case will be available to defense attorneys.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/the_four_horsemen_of_the_biden_apocalypse.html

In the waning days of the Trump administration, the country was showing signs of economic improvement, people were feeling more confident about battling COVID, and the border was relatively secure as the wall was finally being constructed.

What a difference seven months can make.  It has been a horrific 207 days since President Joe Biden and his radical administration were unleashed on the country.

In effect, a political apocalypse is approaching.  In the New Testament Book of Revelation, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are revealed to be “Conquest, War, Famine, and Death.”  In the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel, the four horsemen are referred to as “sword, famine, wild beasts, and plague.”

In the era of Joe Biden, the four horsemen of our political apocalypse are the border invasion, the economic catastrophe, the assault on our families, and the use of the COVID plague to eliminate our constitutional rights.

1. Invasion.  Biden inherited a secure border and immediately decided to destroy the progress of President Donald Trump and create an unmitigated disaster for Americans.  The border wall was foolishly stopped, the policy of “catch and release” was reinstituted, the “Remain in Mexico” policy was ended, and illegal aliens were given an invitation to enter the United States.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fear-and-self-loathing-at-american-express-11628884963?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

This has been the year of woke and weak corporate CEOs trying to signal virtue by endorsing leftist politics and attacking Republicans. But now we have a bizarre case of a business attacking itself. The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo writes this week in the New York Post about a lecture hosted by American Express. He reports that at the Amex corporate event a guest speaker argued that the system of capitalism was founded on racism and that “racist logics and forms of domination” have shaped Western society from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Mr. Rufo quotes the insufferable lecturer telling Amex employees, “You are complicit in giving privileges in one community against the other, under the pretext that we live in a meritocratic system where the market judges everyone the same.”

Well, it’s true that the company’s advertisements have touted the privileges enjoyed by consumers who use its ubiquitous green cards. But the history of American Express is the story of a company that has thrived by offering its many services to a broader and broader clientele. The firm’s website says it has more than 100 million cards in use—accepted by millions of merchants. Sure, it has generally served a higher-income segment than Visa and Mastercard, but there are options for all kinds of consumers.

Mr. Rufo describes how American Express employees had to define themselves:

In a foundational session, the outside consulting firm Paradigm trained AmEx employees to deconstruct their own intersectional identities, mapping their “race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity [and] citizenship” onto an official company worksheet.

https://www.nysun.com/national/beyond-bretton-woods-it-was-as-close-to-economic/91617/

The formula to ensure prosperity is simple: Add a low-rate, broad-based flat tax to spending restraint, free trade, and sound money, and there you have it.

The Great Depression was born out of xenophobic protectionism, embodied in the 1930 passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, plus 1932’s massive increases in tax rates on our country’s most productive members. The economy collapsed as never before.

Gold being then, as it still is, the first refuge of the cautious, became a safe haven. There were runs on banks as depositors demanded gold in exchange for deposits or currency. The value of gold as measured in goods and services soared, meaning that there was a tremendous fall in the price level. Money back then was gold.

President Roosevelt was swept into office in March of 1933. Instead of reversing Hoover’s tariff and tax increases, Roosevelt made gold the scapegoat. In his first month in office, he legislated the so-called Bank Holiday Act, which prohibited banks from buying or selling foreign currencies or specie — especially gold; eliminated all gold clauses in contracts, public or private; and finally made holding gold by Americans illegal.

Gold ceased to be currency in the United States. This was the first step in ridding the monetary system of gold.

In late 1933, to make matters worse, Roosevelt followed his gold confiscation by devaluing the dollar against foreign currencies by some 60% and raising the official price of gold to $35 an ounce from $20.67. This was an enormous wealth tax on former gold holders. The depression settled in, lasting until 1945.

The anomaly was that while gold was removed from the U.S. economy, it still remained the official settlement medium internationally.