RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“There’s a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing.”

                                                                                                                                Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

                                                                                                                                Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852

It is not that I am without concerns, for everything that happens today is a ‘crisis.’ We live on a planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years. Over that time, it has been warm enough in Connecticut, where I live, to host dinosaurs and cold enough to place it under thirty feet of ice. By the time of the last ice age, man had been around for tens of thousands of years. He adapted. Yet today’s changing climate is said to present an existential challenge for the planet. “Woke” governments and large businesses demand diversity, equity and inclusion, but what they really mean are uniformity, unjustness and exclusion. Universities, once places for inquiring minds, have become venues for intellectual conformity. In sports, men, as transgender women, compete against biological women. Merit has fallen victim to social equity. What gives? The United States was founded on principles of personal liberty and the rule of law, derived from the Enlightenment. Should we let what has taken 250 years to create devolve into darkness?

We should not. We need to lighten up. The political atmosphere has become nasty. In an essay (“Old Glory, new anger”) in the August issue of The Spectator, Peter Wood wrote: “There is the wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters.” As for the Right, he noted: “Their complaint lies far deeper as they see the purposeful destruction of American values by an elite that bullies and derides them.”  Friends and family members are no longer able to air political differences without one being called a racist and the other a toady. If we are to survive as a free, decent and independent people, composed of myriad races, religions and nationalities, political leaders, the media and universities must promote tolerance and mutual respect. To achieve this, they must encourage traditional American values, like family formations and public schools that teach. They must reaffirm the values of common sense, responsibility, hard work, merit and reintroduce civility and humor.

The political spectrum is linear, with autocracy at one end and anarchy at the other. Understanding that, we should know where on that line our own political philosophies lie. Fundamentally, our differences are simple. Progressives believe equitable progress is best achieved with more government involvement. Conservatives believe in what Margaret Thatcher said in Gdansk in 1988: “Economic freedom and personal freedom go hand in hand.” The first depends on the ability of a few hundred senior bureaucrats. The second relies on millions of people making millions of decisions. There are gradations of belief. A few extremists are clustered at either end, believing in either the benevolence of autocracy or the benignity of anarchy. Mainstream media would have us bunched (along with them) at extremes – the “woke” on one end and “deplorables” at the other. Most of us, however, lie within a few degrees of the center. But anger divides us, and communication is difficult.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=21c1dc7597

There has been a lot of talk recently about “systemic racism” in the United States. At first, I was skeptical of the term, particularly because those who throw the term around rarely name an example of specific conduct by anyone that intentionally disadvantages blacks. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that there actually are quite a number of instances of major societal institutions engaging in systemic conduct that is clearly known to differentially disadvantage blacks. In every case I can think of, the conduct that systemically disadvantages blacks is a sacred cow of the left promoted for the benefit of some other progressive interest group.

For today, I’ll discuss two of the most clear-cut examples. One has been going on for a long time, while the other is new. Because both involve sacred cows of the political left, the harmful systemic effect on blacks just gets ignored.

Opposition to School Choice

Over the course of the last year or so, the two big national teachers unions (National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers) have been mostly in the news for their advocacy to keep schools closed and kids at home. That’s bad enough, but hopefully will end soon. But then the teachers unions will revert to their previous and perennial priority number one, which is the opposition to school choice — otherwise known as keeping minority kids trapped in failing urban public schools.

Here in New York, charter schools saw major expansion under the strong advocacy of Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013). But current Mayor de Blasio, who was backed by the teachers union, has done everything in his power to stall and halt the expansion of the charters, and thereby keep as many kids as possible trapped in the failing unionized schools. Moreover, the state legislature, also at the behest of the union, has imposed a cap on the number of charters. That cap has been reached in New York City, meaning that no more charters can open; and the legislature has failed to raise the cap. A charter school advocacy group called the New York City Charter School Center lists 6 new charters ready to open but unable to do so due to the cap. Meanwhile, applications by students to attend the charters exceed available slots by factors of 2:1 in Manhattan and Brooklyn, 3:1 in the Bronx, and 4:1 in Queens.

Data on school performance overwhelming show that the charters wildly outpace the unionized public alternatives. In a post back in 2017 I quoted this statistic from 2016 comparing the regular public schools to Success Academies, one of the top charters:

Test scores released by the state Friday show 94% of Success Academy students passed the 2016 math exam and 82% passed the reading exam. . . . By comparison, 38% of students in traditional public schools met state reading standards this year, up from 30.4% in 2015. And 36.4% of city kids passed math tests in 2016, up from 35.2% in 2015.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/07/when-in-doubt-blame-a-republican-for-covid-deaths/

Throughout the COVID crisis, we’ve witnessed an amazing display of leftist logic. No matter the circumstances, Republicans were always at fault.

When the coronavirus first swept the nation in early 2020, the deaths were concentrated almost entirely in the country’s liberal enclaves: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania.

And we know a big reason: Democratic governors in those states panicked and ordered nursing homes to take sick elderly out of hospitals, even if they were positive for COVID. The result was that nursing homes turned into death camps.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was even caught red-handed lying about the number of nursing home deaths to cover up this tragedy.

Yet at the time, blame for every COVID death in the country was pinned on the supposed ineptitude of President Donald Trump (rather than communist China, where the blame ultimately rests).

That was almost exactly how candidate Joe Biden framed it, as a matter of fact. “If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive,” Biden said during the presidential campaign, as the death toll reached 200,000. “All the people. I’m not making this up. Just look at the data.”

Trump did, to be sure, send lots of mixed messages about COVID. But so did Democrats.  Biden himself attacked Trump’s supposed xenophobia after he quickly slapped a travel ban from China – before we knew of any cases in the U.S. Top Democrats, along with the sainted Anthony Fauci, were publicly downplaying the disease early on, telling people not to worry, not to bother with masks, and get out and party.

Never mind. Now that Biden’s in charge, he and the rest of the liberal chorus is blaming … Republican governors for the current rise in COVID cases.

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

In our cities exists a culture of violence, and we ignore it at our peril, for we are all potential victims.

University of Chicago student Max Lewis was commuting to school on the Green Line Elevated Train when a bullet tore into his spine. A good Samaritan nurtured and consoled him until the paramedics came. An active and vibrant twenty-year-old, Lewis could only move his eyes when he awoke in his hospital bed. And with that, he communicated that he wanted the plug pulled. He did not want to live as a vegetable. He was ready to greet death.

Another life in a long list of lives tragically snuffed out by a “stray” bullet on Chicago’s southside. The police have no idea from where the bullet was fired. But was it a stray bullet? Did someone target the Elevated train the way people have targeted airline pilots with lasers, hoping to blind them on their approach and witness a plane crash?

As I read the demographics of victims of Chicago’s gang violence, I wonder, as have others, if there are predators out there hunting people for sport the way game hunters wantonly kill for sport. There are simply too many women and children, too many innocents, on the victims list.

I stumbled upon this notion when, during the George Floyd riots, carloads of young blacks descended on my exurban community and smashed their way into the upscale shopping mall. Armed police stood in place as the vandals looted the stores and unnecessarily damaged showcases and fixtures while helping themselves to whatever they desired.

Having successfully looted the stores as police looked on, the vandals loaded up their vehicles and drove toward the freeway. As one car veered out of the shopping area, someone fired a random shot into a group of shoppers.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/08/16/bill-de-blasio-and-the-decline-of-new-york-city/#slide-1

The next mayor will have to contend with a legacy of wreckage

New York City is shrinking. Or rather: It was shrinking. Quite a while ago. Then it started to grow. Then it grew dramatically. But after eight years of Bill de Blasio as mayor, it is contracting once again, as the economic and population surge that took the city from the slough of despond to new heights over the course of four decades has been reversed. This is not the result of COVID. It is the result of a disastrous mayoralty and the ideas, prejudices, and idiocies that have animated it. De Blasio’s legacy as he prepares to leave office is just that: a city in decline.

Bill de Blasio has governed with a potent mix of old and new — the bad old and the horrible new. He has pushed wretched new ideas that have blighted the education system and poisoned the streetscape. And he has revivified incompetent policies driven by ideological priors — ideas so long discredited that their failure had been forgotten and had to be experienced yet again by young New Yorkers who weren’t alive when the city was nearly destroyed by them and were therefore unable to heed the warnings of those of us who did live through their nightmarish implementation.

To tell the story of de Blasio’s New York, we need to go back to the city’s great devastation.

In 1970, 7.9 million people lived in New York City. Ten years later, that number had dropped by a staggering 800,000. Over the course of the ’70s, residents voted with their feet and got the hell out of Dodge — fleeing an increasingly lawless and chaotic municipality whose feckless authorities stood by and let the place fester and rot.

This unprecedented depopulation was the consequence of a budgetary free fall that led the city to the verge of bankruptcy in 1975 — a managerial catastrophe that wreaked havoc on garbage collection, public safety, schooling, even on the grass in its parks. Its leaders, Nathan Glazer once quipped, stopped doing the things they knew how to do (like picking up the garbage) and started trying to do things no one knows how to do (like ending poverty). The expansion of social-welfare programs came at the expense of the prosaic quotidian tasks necessary if any city is to be livable.

Here’s just one example. In his book The Fires, Joe Flood tells the story of how Mayor John V. Lindsay (whose time in office ran from 1966 to 1973) sought to redirect city money so that he could spend it on social programs. He hired the RAND Corporation to study the city’s fire department: “NYC-RAND’s goal was nothing less than a new way of administering cities: use the mathematical brilliance of the computer modelers and systems analysts who had revolutionized military strategy to turn Gotham’s corrupt, insular and unresponsive bureaucracy into a streamlined, non-partisan technocracy.”

Using RAND’s efficiency experts and their findings as fodder and justification, Lindsay’s people closed dozens of fire stations because of supposed redundancies. Meanwhile, the department’s inspectors stopped ensuring the good working order of the city’s hydrants. The result: Enormous swaths of the Bronx burned down in the 1970s because there were no nearby fire trucks to put out the fires and no water in the hydrants when they did show up.

The staggeringly dark popular-culture portrayals of New York in the 1970s — Death Wish, Taxi Driver — didn’t feel excessive. They felt like documentaries. In 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, subway hijackers demand $1 million for the safe return of their hostages. “This city doesn’t have a million dollars!” shouts the mayor. It was a joke, but it was no joke.

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

Since then, his career has been a downhill trajectory into bureaucratic mediocrity and bullying.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has an impressive resume but nothing in it meant that he was qualified to be the ultimate decision-maker for a contagious disease, especially one that his actions helped create. It’s high time his wings are clipped before more Americans die.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is brilliant. At least according to his fawning Wikipedia entry, which says he graduated number one in his medical school class at Cornell, and then did two years of internal medicine residency at their prestigious hospital, following which he was invited to train and work at the NIH (unfairly, in my opinion, called a yellow beret.)

Understanding Fauci’s career there requires some backstory. The U.S. Public Health Service (“USPHS”) evolved from the medical branch of the Coast Guard. Its head, called the Surgeon General of the United States, is technically a vice-admiral in the Coast Guard. Important people serving in various parts of the USPHS (NIH, CDC, FDA) are officers, for they are in one of eight “uniform services” of the US government. The NIH, one subsidiary, does specialized medical research and, in some cases, provides healthcare for patients who are of research interest.

Before 1973, all male physicians, regardless of age, served in one of the uniform services of the federal government. Most were drafted into the Army, with a smaller number into the other armed forces. However, physicians could fulfill their Selective Service obligations by joining the NIH. Understandably these positions were very highly sought after in the late 60s, during the Vietnam war. Only the top 1% were invited to join. A slot at the NIH ordinarily led to a career in research or in medical academia. Many, like Tony, trained and then stayed at NIH for their careers.

I treated gonorrhea in Vietnam for the U.S. Army. Tony did a fellowship in Immunology at the NIH. Immunology is a subspecialty of internal medicine dealing with autoimmune diseases like systemic lupus; allergic disorders like asthma; and in Tony’s case, vaccine development.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/texas-governor-orders-review-of-whether-gender-transition-surgery-constitutes-child-abuse/

Texas governor Greg Abbott on Friday directed the state Department of Family Protective Services to issue a determination on whether gender-transition surgery on children constitutes child abuse.

“Subjecting a child to genital mutilation through reassignment surgery creates a ‘genuine threat of substantial harm from physical injury to the child,’” Abbott wrote in a letter to the department. “This broad definition of ‘abuse’ should cover a surgical procedure that will sterilize the child, such as orchiectomy or hysterectomy, or remove otherwise healthy body parts, such as penectomy or mastectomy. Indeed, Texas already outlaws female genital mutilation of a child, and presumably that also constitutes child abuse.”

Abbott’s directive comes after federal judges temporarily blocked an Arkansas law banning gender-transition procedures for minors late last month.

The law, which was the first of its kind, forbids doctors from providing gender-transition hormone treatment, puberty blockers, or sex-reassignment surgery to minors. It was set to take effect on July 28.

However, U.S. District Judge Jay Moody ruled that the ACLU was likely to win its challenge against the law and that allowing the measure to take effect would hurt transgender youths currently undergoing the procedures.

The state argued that it has a legitimate interest in banning the procedures for minors; Republican attorneys general from 17 states urged the judge to uphold the ban.

Those who back the legislation say they aim to protect children from irreversible procedures they could later regret.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-joe-biden-has-done-should-be-too-much-even-for-john-roberts/

The best defense of John Roberts has always been that, rather than being weak or easily influenced, he comes from a judicial school of thought — popular among conservatives in the 1980s and before — that holds judicial restraint as its highest value. In recent years, many conservatives (including myself) have come to believe that the judicial branch has a strong role to play in enforcing the Constitution as written, as well as in policing the statutory limits that Congress has placed on the executive branch. But, before originalism took over (as it should have), this was not always the case. Indeed, insofar as conservatives were likely to criticize the Supreme Court during the middle of the last century, it was not for coming to the wrong decisions per se, but for being “activist” at the expense of the other branches. Viewed through a certain light, John Roberts’s jurisprudence can be seen as an expression of this older view. Yes, he’s sometimes willing to step in if the question is particularly obvious or the infraction particularly egregious. But, in general, he’d rather exhibit a light touch.

Until recently, it has been possible to square John Roberts’s approach to the eviction moratorium with his general approach to his job. But, as of this week, that is no longer the case. We don’t actually know what Roberts thinks of the statutory question underlying the CDC’s eviction moratorium, because he didn’t write anything explaining himself. Perhaps he thinks that the law allows for the CDC’s actions. Perhaps he thinks that it doesn’t, but that it’s not obvious enough to warrant intervention. Perhaps, like Kavanaugh, he thinks that the law does not allow for the CDC’s actions, but that the Court did not need to get involved immediately given that the order was about to expire. Whatever Roberts thinks, though, and however it intersects with his philosophy, his preference for restraint cannot survive the new position that President Biden has taken, which is to have flatly rejected the court’s opinion, and to have said publicly that, while it expects to lose, it is seeking “the ability to, if we have to appeal, to keep this going for a month — at least — I hope longer.”

https://www.newsmax.com/sallypipes/healthcare-canada/2021/08/05/id/1031237/

Demonstrators in 50 cities across the country took the streets last month to demand a government takeover of America’s health system.

The Democrats who control Washington are trying to give those activists what they’re asking for, albeit in piecemeal fashion.

In recent weeks, they’ve proposed lowering Medicare’s eligibility age and adding dental, vision and hearing benefits to the entitlement. Democrats in Congress have also offered a plan to provide federally funded health coverage to low-income people in the 12 states that have yet to adopt Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

This drive to put the government in charge of an ever-greater share of our healthcare system is misguided. For evidence, look no further than Canada, the country where I grew up and started my career.

Our northern neighbor’s government-run health insurance scheme saddles patients with long waits for low-quality care — when it doesn’t ration care outright.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, long delays for treatment were a fact of life for Canadians. In 2019, the median wait time for specialist care following referral from a general practitioner was nearly 21 weeks, according to the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver think tank.

In 2020 — a year in which more than 1.2 million Canadians were waiting for care — the median wait for specialist care grew to 22.6 weeks. In 1993, the median wait was 9.3 weeks.

These long waits are costing lives. Between April 2019 and December 2020, more than 10,000 patients died while waiting for a specialist appointment, a procedure, a diagnostic test or a surgery, according to a recent report from the Canadian think tank SecondStreet.org. Given the dearth of government data, it’s likely that the death toll is higher still.

And there’s no way around the waits. Canada bars private health insurance for anything deemed “medically necessary” by the government. So people who want or need timelier care effectively have to leave the country.

Canadians pay dearly to wait in line. The country’s single-payer system is far from free. Fraser estimates that the average Canadian family of four pays more than C$14,400 (US$11,545) in taxes for their shoddy public insurance coverage.