RUTHFULLY YOURS

John P.A. Ioannidis is Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, as well as Professor  of Biomedical Science and Statistics, at Stanford University.

Imperatives like skepticism and disinterestedness are being junked to fuel political warfare that has nothing in common with scientific methodology.

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.  

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/09/how-9-11-exposed-the-depths-of-western-self-loathing/

As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we are being confronted once again, on news broadcasts, in documentaries and online, with that footage. With the images of those planes striking the Twin Towers, of survivors covered in blood and dust, of heroic first responders saving the lives they could amid unimaginable carnage. It still shakes us to this day. But amid all the acts of commemoration and remembrance one thing risks getting lost. That in the wake of that act of barbarism, an attack not just on New York and DC but on the West and what it stands for, there were many members of the British intelligentsia who, after the dust settled, were struck with more or less the same thought: maybe America brought this on itself.

Just two days after an attack that claimed almost 3,000 innocent lives, it fell to the Guardian’s Seumas Milne to say the quiet part out loud. ‘They can’t see why they are hated’, ran the headline. He laid blame for the carnage on the ills of American foreign policy, on its ‘unabashed national egotism and arrogance’. ‘If it turns out that Tuesday’s attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden’s supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons’ teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming’, he thundered. ‘Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority [of Americans] might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.’

Veteran British leftist Tariq Ali, in his 2002 book The Clash of Fundamentalisms, continued in this vein. ‘The subjects of the Empire had struck back’, he wrote. 9/11 confirmed in his mind the ‘universal truth that… slaves and peasants do not always obey their masters’. As spiked’s Mick Hume noted at the time, the well-to-do, Western-educated Saudis who largely carried out 9/11 made for unlikely imperial subjects – and the firefighters and office workers who perished made for unlikely stand-ins for American imperialism. But Ali didn’t let these facts dent his analysis. He didn’t celebrate the attacks, of course, but he did suggest they were all but inevitable. If anything, we should expect more ‘blowback’.

In the London Review of Books a month after the Twin Towers fell, classicist Mary Beard captured what she saw as the prevailing mood. ‘[W]hen the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in’, she wrote. One of these reactions being that, ‘however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.’ There was an outcry in response to her comments, as many people, perhaps understandably, took this to mean that Beard herself thought America ‘had it coming’. She later clarified her point in a Guardian interview in 2007: ‘I wasn’t saying those people deserved to die, but simply that there was a connection, or people perceived a connection, between American geopolitics and what had happened.’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jewish-tradition-national-unity-culture-wars-political-divisions-rosh-hashanah-yom-kippur-11631223490?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The ram’s horn, or shofar, is sounded throughout the Jewish high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as a call for Jews to reflect, reform and repent. Many of us are doing exactly that this month. The lessons associated with these holidays, which both happen in September this year, are more relevant than ever to all Americans.

The U.S. today is less unified and secure, less law-abiding, less respectful of government, and less confident in the future than at any point in my life. It needs to be jolted from its current course by the sound of the ram’s horn to find a better way forward.

The path Jewish tradition offers is through repentance, but not only in the way it is commonly understood. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught, the root of the Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, means to return. For a nation, he explained, it means to return “to our roots, our faith, our history.” This is the best first step the American people can take to overcome division, because it will show how far we have strayed from the source of our national values, unity and purpose.

As the Declaration of Independence says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These words—some of the most important ever written in the English language—are about more than the Founders’ call for independence from England. They are an American covenant entered into by succeeding generations. Too many Americans today have been distracted from the faith and values in the Declaration, causing the nation to suffer greatly.

Alexis de Tocqueville concluded after his tour of America in the 19th century that “liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.” The American ideal that all of us are created equal has been the source of our national unity. But in our time, that faith has been overwhelmed by forces that divide our government, politics, and people.

https://www.westernjournal.com/massive-israeli-study-comes-bombshell-conclusion-natural-covid-immunity/

A new study out of Israel found the natural immune protection developed after a COVID-19 infection does “considerably” more to ward off the delta variant than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

The study found those who were once infected with COVID-19 were less likely to get the delta variant, develop symptoms or become hospitalized with a serious case of COVID than vaccinated individuals who were never infected, according to a report in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

The study also found those who were previously infected with COVID and received one dose of the vaccine were even more protected against the delta variant.

“This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer-lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant,” the study said.

The study pointed out its unique nature.

“This is the largest real-world observational study comparing natural immunity, gained through previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, to vaccine-induced immunity, afforded by the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine,” the study said.

“Our large cohort, enabled by Israel’s rapid rollout of the mass-vaccination campaign, allowed us to investigate the risk for additional infection – either a breakthrough infection in vaccinated individuals or reinfection in previously infected ones – over a longer period than thus far described.”

In the Science report, Meredith Wadman wrote it was a good news/ bad news situation.

“The study demonstrates the power of the human immune system, but infectious disease experts emphasized that this vaccine and others for COVID-19 nonetheless remain highly protective against severe disease and death,” she wrote, noting the risk of the disease is such that people should not seek to be intentionally infected.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/07/former-acting-dni-ric-grenell-gen-milleys-lying-about-who-decided-to-shut-down-bagram/

Ric Grenell, President Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence, on Tuesday said General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has not been truthful about who made the disastrous decision to shut down Bagram Air Force Base before evacuating American citizens and Afghan allies from the war-torn country.

During an interview on Fox News, Grenell took aim at Milley, accusing the four-star general of falsely claiming that the commander in charge of Bagram Air Force Base, General Scott Miller, advised the Biden White House to shut the base down.

“I can tell you that that’s not true. I know that from very first hand information. General Miller did not want to close Bagram but General Milley said that he did,” Grenell told Fox News host Bill Hemmer.

During a press conference on August 18, Milley claimed that CENTCOM commander General Kenneth McKenzie, and General Miller had made the decision to close Bagram Air Force Base.

“Our task given to us at that time, our task was protect the embassy in order for the embassy personnel to continue to function with their consular service and all that. If we were to keep both Bagram and the embassy going, that would be a significant number of military forces that would have exceeded what we had or stayed the same or exceeded what we had,” Milley told reporters.

“So we had to collapse one or the other, and a decision was made. The proposal was made form CENTCOM commander and the commander on the grounds, Scott Miller, to go ahead and collapse Bagram,” Milley continued. “That was all briefed and approved, and we estimated that the risk of going out of HKIA or the risk of going out of Bagram about the same, so going out of HKIA — was estimated to be the better tactical solution in accordance with the mission set we were given and in accordance with getting the troops down to about 600, 700 number.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/google-launches-antiracism-program-teaching-that-america-is-a-system-of-white-supremacy/

Google has launched an antiracism program for employees, featuring training workshops and speaker sessions, that teaches the principles of critical race theory, chiefly that America was founded on white supremacy.

The initiative invokes the familiar language of the radicalized ideology, including “intersectionality,” “white privilege,” and “systemic racism,” according to whistleblower documents obtained by Christopher Rufo of City Journal.

In one segment of the program coined “Allyship in Action,” a group of trainers including Google’s head of systemic allyship Randy Reyes and consultants from The Ladipo Group, ask employees to confront their “power and privilege” and rank themselves according to their racial background and sexual orientation.

A number of videos presented to employees conveyed the message that racism is an irredeemable stain on America’s national fabric and that white people have profited from white supremacy, even if they are innocent of engaging in it personally.

Alongside Google’s former global lead for diversity strategy Kamau Bobb, 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones says in one video that  “the first Africans being sold on the White Lion [slave ship in 1619] is more foundational to the American story” than “the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock,” Rufo confirms. She said she was inspired to spearhead the New York Times’s 1619 Project to prove her hypothesis that every facet of modern day America is rooted in slavery.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/09/stupidity-is-no-get-out-of-jail-free-excuse-for-team-biden/

Team Biden must be held to account for the lethal consequences of its deliberate acts.

Let’s face it. Neither the lethal fiscal and monetary time-bomb implanted in the American economy nor the crimes committed against God and humanity on the world stage in Afghanistan are the result of careless dimwitted “inadvertence.” Those outrages were, instead, in both cases the results of deliberate acts by certified Wokesters.

Take, for example, the injury they are doing to the economy. Butterfingered Wokesters did not “mistakenly” punch the buttons that ignited inflation and set America on the present high-risk, printing-press-money, debt-ridden path toward financial crisis.

Quite the opposite is true.  It is almost as if the Wokesters started off with the strategic goal of doing harm to the economy of the United States – and then meticulously took the tactical steps necessary to complete the job:

dramatically increase taxes that do more economic harm than they raise in revenue for the government to spend (If that is not absurd, what is?);
increase deficit spending and federal debt to unsustainable levels;
print lots of fiat money (about $120 billion a month) by selling the debt to the Federal Reserve;
bribe people to work less and produce fewer goods while consuming more by giving them free money;
put upward pressure on prices (too many free dollars chasing too few goods); and
put the Federal Reserve in the absurd and high-risk position of either continuing to print money and keep interest rates near zero or trying to thread the needle by gradually reducing its purchases of federal debt and gradually increasing interest rates with almost no margin for error and with no ability to stop the Biden Wokesters from messing everything up with another big spending spree.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/09/biden-has-a-whole-of-government-plan-for-everything-except-rescuing-americans-from-afghanistan/

After the Supreme Court decided not to stop a Texas abortion law from going into effect, President Joe Biden promised that he’d “launch a whole-of-government effort to respond to this decision.” No one knows what that means, exactly, but Biden has promised “whole-of-government” solutions for everything under the sun. Everything, that is, except rescuing Americans stuck in Talibanistan.

In his eight short months in the White House, Biden has made the already empty phrase “whole–of-government” a nauseating cliché.

He has a “whole-of-government” agenda to fight COVID, to tackle global warming, to “create good-paying, union jobs for Americans.”

His administration announced a “whole-of-government process that will lift up the voices of federal scientists of many perspectives and backgrounds.”

He promises a “whole-of-government effort” to promote competition in the American economy.

He says he will deliver “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/afghanistan-comes-america-eric-rozenman/

Conventional wisdom—correct this time—asserts that the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan makes the world a more dangerous place. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Islamic triumphalists everywhere are emboldened. Fuses burning over Taiwan, Israel, Ukraine and other hot spots grow shorter.

Less recognized is how our self-inflicted Afghanistan catastrophe may create or increase threats at home. Consider four, three military, one political:

*Suppose you are a general or admiral in the U.S. armed forces. You’ve just been required by your constitutionally superior civilian leaders to head the biggest American military debacle since the fall of South Vietnam. You’ve rescued more than 120,000 but abandoned somewhere between 60,000 and 200,000 more Afghan partners and their family members.

You know that as U.S. ground forces withdrew, the South Vietnamese army fought on, with massive U.S. air support defeating the North’s 1972 Easter invasion. Then a Democratic-controlled Congress cut off funds, fuel, ammunition and air support. You also recall the United States, during the Carter administration, restrained the Iranian military to ease out the Shah. That helped ease in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

And now, Kabul. If you’re still in uniform the next time civilians not just override your best advice, as is their constitutional prerogative, but do so in capricious arrogance, then attempt to deflect blame onto you, how likely will you be to snap to and salute? When President Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Jr. for insubordination over the latter’s conduct of the Korean War, MacArthur choose theatrically to “just fade away.” In a more ambiguous situation, fraught with national danger, will you?

*Suppose you’re not a flag officer but rather a colonel, lieutenant colonel or major. Imagine you implemented the orders to abandon Bagram air base at night and without notice to our Afghan allies, as well as to cut off air support for Kabul’s forces and even halt maintenance contracts for its planes and helicopters.

Further, assume you know about private efforts, like the Commercial Task Force of veterans, ex-diplomats and others that rescued a reported 5,000 or more Afghans from Taliban control. Private Americans, on short notice and from scratch, began doing what civilian leaders—with personnel, months of time and billions of dollars to prepare—proved either unserious or incompetent about doing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/suicide-replacement-migration-bruce-thornton/

The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is also worsening our already dangerous immigration crisis. Tens of thousands Afghans are being brought into the country, with little serious vetting to discriminate between those who served loyally with our troops and intelligence agencies; and those who just want a better life or have more sinister motives. This new influx comes on top of the one million migrants who have crossed our southern border just since Biden’s inauguration. All these new migrants are being dispersed throughout the country at taxpayer expense.

This process of transforming American identity and its defining political principles and virtues has been going on since the feckless 1965 immigration bill, which provided entrance to family members of immigrants, multiplying their numbers by as much as a factor of 8. The political and economic motives for this weakening of our border have likewise long been obvious––voters for progressives, cheap labor for free marketeers.

But another dubious idea has developed to justify our and Europe’s porous borders: Replacement Migrations. Pursuing this short-sighted idea will accelerate the dilution of national identity, an outcome progressives fervently desire as a mechanism for transforming our Constitutional order of divided government, federalism, and unalienable rights into technocratic rule by a “managerial elite.” Those technocrats’ utopian ideals like “equity” an “social justice” will further compromise the rights and freedoms of others.

The pretextual rationale for Replacement Migration is pragmatic: Europe and, in recent years, the U.S. are not reproducing at a rate sufficient to maintain populations through internal growth. The U.S. rate, for example, has declined to 1.64 child per woman from the 2.1 child needed to maintain the population. Combined with medical treatments that extend longevity, this decline in reproduction means fewer younger workers contributing payroll taxes to support greater numbers of those receiving public subsidies. These trends have put programs like Medicare and Social Security on track to run out of money. The UN’s solution is Replacement Migration––importing more-fecund young immigrants, legal or otherwise, to make up the worker deficit.

Hence the erosion of our immigration laws, despite the dangers of lax immigration policies that take in peoples from less advanced regions with cultural, social, and religious customs hostile to the host countries’. In Europe, for example, generous welfare subsidies to migrants combined with restrictions on employment have created a sullen generation of Muslim immigrants exploited by jihadist recruiters working out of some of the many mosques that have arisen across Europe. In addition to the terrorist attacks that follow, migrant participation in crime, especially rape, is much greater than their share of the total population.

Moreover, in many countries, significant numbers of Muslim immigrants are segregated into “no go” neighborhoods or towns where they indulge their cultural and religious practices, such as honor-killing and polygamy, inimical to the liberal democratic principles of their host governments. These developments are the wages of failing to demand assimilation to the host country and its social and political culture.