RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence

“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” So tweeted then–surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.” Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.” About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients’ wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses. Public-health officials’ advice in the early days of Covid-19 was consistent with that understanding. Then, on April 3, 2020, Adams announced that the CDC was changing its guidance and that the general public should hereafter wear masks whenever sufficient social distancing could not be maintained.

Fast-forward 15 months. Rand Paul has been suspended from YouTube for a week for saying, “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work.” Many cities across the country, following new CDC guidance handed down amid a spike in cases nationally caused by the Delta variant, are once again mandating indoor mask-wearing for everyone, regardless of inoculation status. The CDC further recommends that all schoolchildren and teachers, even those who have had Covid-19 or have been vaccinated, should wear masks.

The CDC asserts this even though its own statistics show that Covid-19 is not much of a threat to schoolchildren. Its numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018–19 flu season—a season of “moderate severity” that lasted eight months—than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months. What’s more, the CDC says that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related. Yet the CDC declares that schoolchildren, who learn in part from communication conveyed through facial expressions, should nevertheless hide their faces—and so should their teachers.

How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change—and in a remarkably short period of time—or just the guidance on wearing them?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/the-hundred-year-road-to-crt/

While critical race theory has rightfully garnered much attention of late, it is simply the latest step in advancing what is known as cultural Marxism. Many people lay the origins of America’s left turn to the 1960s, but in fact, it actually dates back to the Progressive Era, a time of social and political reform that started over a hundred years ago. While eliminating some government corruption and granting suffrage for women were positive steps, the early 20th century movement ushered in an era of radical thought that has never left us. What follows are a few stand-out points of the far-left’s invasion into education.

“The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible.” These radical words were uttered in 1909 by Woodrow Wilson as president of Princeton, four years before he became the 28th president of the U.S. (When Wilson won his election in 2012, socialist Eugene Debs received 6 percent of the vote.)

In 1916, education reformer John Dewey began professing what we now call “social justice.” At the same time, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist came upon the scene. He believed that it was most effective to spread revolutionary ideology slowly and incrementally. By doing it gradually, he thought that enough people would eventually be won over to Marxist thought. His approach eventually became known as the “long march through the institutions.”

In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School, came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—hated capitalism and traditional morals. (Marcuse’s dreary One-Dimensional Man was omnipresent when I went to college in the late 1960s.) The professors did not stay in their homeland long, however. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and unfortunately, they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

The 1940s saw the country involved with World War II, and we then focused on regaining domestic tranquility in the 1950s. But things became unhinged in the 1960s. Radicals ruled many college campuses and Saul Alinsky, the uber-leftist community organizer, was hired by the National Education Association as a trainer. John Lloyd, an NEA insider at the time, warned that to understand the union one must learn about Alinsky. Reading Rules for Radicals, will help one “understand NEA more profoundly than reading anything else,” he said, because the organization was modeled on Alinsky’s precepts, which the union used to train its staff.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/american-armageddon/

Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago. 

The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life. 

The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year—with complete impunity. 

There is zero effort to stop them. Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.

Have we ever had a president who made no pretense about destroying federal immigration law and asking of Americans what he does not of illegal aliens? 

Joe Biden has also conceded that his hold on housing evictions deliberately defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably did not have the legal authority to ignore the court, but did not really care. 

As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.

America has also never quite seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism. 

At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment, and record worker shortages, Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords—even after a prior year of such free housing. 

In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed. 

Such insanity means not only that labor-short employers cannot provide goods and services to American consumers. The new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and idle than to get a job and be productive. 

Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/12/mask-mandates-a-product-of-the-cancel-culture/

Another “progressive” politician has ordered the people she believes are her subjects to wear masks indoors. For safety’s sake? Let’s not fool ourselves.

As if following the Petty Tyrants chapter from the Democratic Party playbook, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced Tuesday that Oregonians, vaccinated or not, will again have to cover their faces in all indoor public spaces. Because she’s smarter and just more sensible than those living under her rule.

The mask mandates (and lockdowns) are a direct outcome of the spread of our cancel culture. People aren’t “canceled” in an effort to civilize our society and de-coarsen language. They are canceled because it gives the “cancelers” power. It’s their perverted way of telling others “we can control what you say.” It allows them to feel important and powerful, to advertise their moral superiority, to pump their egos. They want others to fear them, and take a twisted pleasure in seeing their victims grovel and beg to be accepted back into their good graces. That this behavior is now widely accepted is deeply alarming.

Mask mandates are driven by a similar need to exercise authority over others, and to draw in the rarified air only the most brilliant and discerning among us are allowed to breathe. Those handing down the mandates, as well as the pundits, assorted nags, and tight-haired school marms who are demanding them, are convinced, and nothing will persuade them otherwise, that they are the master class, deserving of their place at the top.

The thinking behind lockdowns comes from the same place. The only reason we haven’t been sent into another round of detention is the fear some politicians have of an electorate fed up with rules limiting their movement.

For instance, were California Gov. Gavin Newsom, his self-granted pandemic emergency powers still in effect, not facing a recall election next month, he surely would have been reissuing diktats over the last four weeks. (And at the same being more surreptitious about breaking his own rules than he was last fall, when he was caught at Napa Valley’s French Laundry restaurant attending a crony’s barefaced birthday party indoors.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-wants-opec-to-drill-oil-fossil-fuels-11628715632?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

We thought we’d seen everything, but there it was Wednesday morning in black and white on the White House website: Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, imploring the cartel of oil exporting nations to pump more oil. Talk about a political climate change. This is the same Biden Administration that has spent six months doing everything it can to crush U.S. oil production.

“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic,” Mr. Sullivan’s statement said. “While OPEC+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough.”

Someone pass the smelling salts to Tom Steyer, the climate crusader who surely fainted when he heard that one. Oil production is beneficial? Fossil fuels are essential to economic growth? The world needs more petroleum to be burned to release more CO2 into the atmosphere?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/our-under-incarceration-problem/

Contrary to what you will hear in the mainstream media or on college campuses, the United States does not have an “over-incarceration problem”; it has an under-incarceration problem. Ill-conceived anti-prison policies rooted in platitudes, lies, and misleading statistics have unleashed thousands of criminals onto the streets. As a result, our nation is grappling with a de-incarceration crisis that is costing lives and eroding the rule of law.

Any honest discussion of incarceration levels must start with the acknowledgement that the majority of crimes committed in America are never reported or solved. In 2019, only 41 percent of violent crimes, 34 percent of sexual assaults, and 32 percent of property crimes were reported to the police. Of the crimes that are reported, only 61 percent of murders, 46 percent of violent crimes, 33 percent of rapes, 24 percent of arsons, and 14 percent of burglaries and auto thefts result in an arrest. Such low reporting and clearance rates ensure that any incarceration number flowing from them will be definitionally too small.

Convicted criminals also rarely serve most of their sentences. On average, state-prison inmates (who comprise the vast majority of the U.S. prison population) serve only 44 percent of their sentences. Murderers serve 58 percent, burglars serve 42 percent, and drug-traffickers serve only 40 percent of their sentences. This rampant dishonesty-in-sentencing is an insult to crime victims. It’s even more outrageous because many criminals already have artificially low sentences, thanks to sweetheart plea deals.

At the federal level, mandatory-minimum sentences have resulted in stronger and more enduring prison sentences. Recently, however, even these sentences are being eroded by retroactive sentencing reductions and new avenues for judges to skirt the mandatory-minimum requirements. The 2018 First Step Act, in particular, delivered the greatest blow to our federal criminal-justice system in recent memory. This jailbreak law unleashed thousands of gang members and drug traffickers back onto the streets and helped many career criminals avoid tough sentences.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/authors/john_murawski/

The national racial reckoning over reparations and critical race theory is taking over the world of medicine and health care. Prestigious medical journals, top medical schools and elite medical centers are adopting the language of social justice activism and vowing to confront “systemic racism,” dismantle “structural violence” and disrupt “white supremacy” in their institutional cultures.

Is U.S. health care against her? Lately medical journals,  drawing on critical race theory, implicate the profession in untold numbers of black and brown deaths.

Klaus Nielsen

Some activist physicians describe the present-day health care system with such ominous terms as a “medical caste system” or “medical apartheid,” the latter locution taken from the title of a 2007 book about America’s history of medical experimentation on enslaved blacks and freedmen.

“Modern American medicine has historical roots in scientific racism and eugenics movements,” according to a February article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “How Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities.” “Black communities became medical training grounds and a source of profit, reinforcing the American medical caste system that we have today.”

Rare is the doctor who is willing to publicly question claims of white privilege and implicit bias in the healthcare system, and already several doctors who have publicly pushed back have been demoted and have filed legal actions alleging retaliation. This year the medical profession received an unequivocal message when two editors of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association resigned under pressure over a podcast that aired opinions expressing skepticism that the United States is plagued by systemic racism.

While racialized politics has infused every corner of American life, the moral stakes in the health care arena go far beyond, say, the perceived slights called microaggressions. The medical literature, lately drawing on critical race theory, depicts the health care industry itself as a historical source of illness in — and even killing of — black and brown bodies. That would make medicine analogous to policing and criminal justice, the other social institutions directly blamed for maiming and murdering black people.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/10/ny-lt-governor-kathy-hochul-to-replace-cuomo-after-he-resigns-in-disgrace/

New York’s lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, is set to replace disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo after he steps down over multiple sexual harassment allegations.

Hochul is considered to be a “moderate” Democrat, and will be the first female governor of New York.

Cuomo announced his resignation one week after New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced in a 168-page report that “the governor engaged in conduct constituting sexual harassment under federal and New York State law.”

The governor said on Tuesday that his resignation will be effective in 14 days.

The AG’s report came after a five month investigation into sexual harassment allegations from eleven women, including former staffers and one current staffer.

“I take full responsibility for my actions. I have been too familiar with people. My sense of humor can be insensitive and off-putting. I do hug and kiss people casually — women and men. I have done it all my life,” Cuomo said.

“In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone. But I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn,” he added. “And I should have. No excuses.”