RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-fauci-and-the-origins-of-covid-11620419989?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Before Covid-19 ravaged the world, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded coronavirus research that included work at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The idea was to study the ability of such viruses to attack humans, but could a Fauci-funded experiment actually be the source of the deadly global infection? In an exhaustive account of the viral possibilities published this week by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nicholas Wade argues that the Chinese lab is the most likely source of the world-wide agony.

Left-leaning journalists who don’t like where this story is going may struggle to dismiss the author given his establishment credentials. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes him this way:

Nicholas Wade is a science writer, editor, and author who has worked on the staff of Nature, Science, and, for many years, the New York Times.

The former Timesman writes:

The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped… it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.

Mr. Wade describes a key Chinese researcher whose work received support from Dr. Fauci’s institute via a U.S. group called EcoHealth Alliance:

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady,” mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses…

https://www.city-journal.org/bidens-war-on-merit-puts-americas-scientific-edge-at-risk

President Joe Biden has now taken the push for “diversity” in STEM to a new level. His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator. The typical head of DOE’s Office of Science in the past has had managerial authority in the nation’s major physics labs and has been a physicist himself, Science reports. The new nominee’s only managerial experience consists of serving since 2020 as an interim associate dean of UC Merced’s graduate division.

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is, however, a black female who has won “accolades for her work to promote diversity in science,” as Science puts it. Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion. Her nomination requires Senate confirmation; if Berhe will not commit to hiring and grantmaking on the basis of scientific expertise alone, irrespective of race and sex, senators should vote her appointment down.

As head of the Office of Science, Berhe would be asked to choose strategic directions for DOE-funded science. Should the agency try to expand understanding of fundamental particle physics or of the physics of the universe? How much attention should be given to solid-state lighting, semiconductors, or artificial intelligence? With regard to energy conservation and clean energy, should DOE pursue geothermal or biomass, tackle storage issues, or seek greater energy efficiency through insulation and refrigeration? Each day, the Office of Science turns out dozens of “one-pager” descriptions of projects and proposals. It is unlikely that a soil geologist (with an M.S. in political ecology) will have the knowledge to evaluate proposals for, say, advanced scientific computing research or nuclear physics, or make the policy judgments that those “one-pagers” require.

It is fitting that Berhe teaches at the University of California, Merced. UC Merced was created as a diversity campus, in the hope of minting more Hispanic graduates with a UC degree. No one advocating for this new institution, located in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, made the case that California needed more university research capacity. Berhe herself benefited from UC’s obsessive diversity push, having received a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program for promoting “underrepresented minority” graduate students.

A physicist wonders if Berhe “can know merit when she sees it.” Preference beneficiaries “think that merit is a myth and hierarchies of achievement are arbitrary and based on power and oppression,” this professor observes, based on years of watching academic admissions and hiring. Berhe argues that the lack of race and sex diversity in STEM is due to exclusion, rather than to the absence of a proportional number of competitively qualified “diverse” candidates in the hiring pipeline. Her co-authored articles include: “Leaky Pipeline vs. Vicious Obstacle Course: metaphors for the persistent exclusion of minoritized scholars from STEM,” “A critical feminist approach to transforming workplace climate in the geosciences through community engagement and partnerships with societies,” and “Hostile climates are barriers to diversifying the geosciences.” She will undoubtedly further elevate the importance of race and sex as criteria for federal research awards.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/07/the-biden-economy-begins-and-it-doesnt-look-pretty/

The latest jobs report shows that President Joe Biden is already leaving his imprint on the economy. Job growth was “unexpectedly” slow, and unemployment climbed, despite a massive shortage of workers.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the jobs numbers for April, the press seemed stunned. Only 266,000 jobs were created, which is 800,000 below forecasts. The job creation number for March had to be revised down by 146,000. And unemployment ticked up for the first time since the lockdown.

The New York Times said that “Jobs Report Shows Surprising Slowdown in Hiring.” Another said “New Jobs Report Shocks Experts With Unexpected Hiring Lag.”

Biden himself felt the need to defend himself on Friday, saying that the economy is improving despite the lousy numbers, tried to convince the public that the recovery would be a slog (while also bragging about how great he’s doing), and said more government help is needed.

The fact that anyone is surprised by the jobs numbers, or that anyone thinks more government intervention is needed, would shock us if we weren’t so used to rampant economic illiteracy.

First, the economy didn’t need rescuing. It was recovering faster than anyone expected long before Biden got the keys to the White House. The GDP snapped back. The jobless rate fell quicker than expected. The cash payments included in the CARES Act and the follow-up that President Donald Trump signed were giving consumers plenty of money to spend.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/05/07/team_biden_flogs_russian_interference_in_us_vote_no_matter_what_its_intel_agencies_say_776083.html

In his big speech last week, President Biden complained about “Russia’s interference in our elections” but his intelligence community, led by his appointee Avril Haines, right, says there wasn’t any.

The Biden administration is misquoting its own intelligence findings on Russia in what some former U.S. intelligence officials say is a subtle but significant effort to continue to delegitimize the Trump presidency.

In his speech before a joint session of Congress last week, President Biden complained about “Russia’s interference in our elections,” even though his intelligence czar had released a report the previous month formally dismissing the idea Moscow had interfered in the 2020 election or the 2016 election.

In an “Intelligence Community Assessment” on foreign threats to U.S. elections released March 10, Biden’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence, run by Democratic appointee Avril Haines, made a distinction between efforts to influence and efforts to interfere with American elections. Although this sounds like semantics, in the field of international norms, it represents a crucial difference.

The ICA defined “election influence” as “overt or covert efforts by foreign governments or actors” to indirectly affect an election through “candidates, political parties, voters or their preferences, or political processes.” In contrast, it defined “election interference” as the far more serious matter of foreign states targeting “the technical aspects of the election,” including “casting and counting ballots, or reporting results.”

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/antiracism-is-racist-on-its-own-terms?token=eyJ1

Perhaps the central animating principle underlying the Woke agenda is that equity in outcomes must supplant equality in rights, treatment under the law and general life opportunities.

The Woke ideal is for all to be represented in every aspect of society proportional to their group—the diversity of skills, abilities, interests and myriad other factors inherent to every individual be damned. All policies must revolve around this singularly preeminent goal.

At least this is what the Woke tell us.

So-called “antiracism” is at the core of the Wokeism that has overtaken much of the federal government, our corporate boardrooms and our schools. Antiracists suggest that one can judge a policy as antiracist by whether such policy contributes to achieving “equity”—and a person as antiracist by whether he actively supports such policy. Get with the Woke program, in other words, or you are “Jim Eagle.” In some ways, then, antiracism might be thought of more as a tactic to bully people into submission to racialist progressivism than it is a true philosophy or worldview.

But for the sake of argument, let’s entertain the antiracists’ stated views. Let’s also set aside that alongside Woke true believers are cynics who likely believe they can exploit Wokeism to accrue more power, narrow opportunists who think they can profit by aligning themselves with the Woke and cowards generally fearful of the vengeful Woke mob.

Antiracists believe it is wholly justifiable to engage in outright discrimination and bigotry—abrogating rights, treating us as unequal under the law and rigging opportunities—to the extent it advances the cause of “equity.” This experiment in social engineering is a recipe for disaster, eroding liberty and justice, fomenting societal rancor and division, and ultimately leaving us a poorer, less secure country.

But even setting these points aside, there is a fatal flaw among the antiracists that ought to be emphasized: Antiracists are racist on their own terms to the extent their favored policies contribute to inequity. In fact, many such policies seemingly will, and historically have.Consider policing, for example. Antiracists see the criminal justice system as systemically racist, in large part because minorities are incarcerated at disproportionate rates—rejecting or ignoring that those rates might reflect disproportionate underlying criminal activity. Therefore, antiracists argue that equity demands a raft of policies aimed at weakening the power of police forces, up to and sometimes including abolishing them outright. But it is only logical that if the authorities are to back off, if not disband altogether, then crime-ridden areas will get significantly worse.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=db371f8e73

JP Morgan Chase — it’s hard to find a more “woke” company than that one. Under celebrity CEO Jamie Dimon, JPM in its corporate pronouncements consistently positions itself at the most exquisitely correct end of the politically correct spectrum.

But reality can be tough. In its email of a couple of days ago, the Global Warming Policy Foundation links to JPM’s 2021 Annual Energy Paper. The Paper comes from JPM’s Asset and Wealth Management Group. The lead author is a guy named Michael Cembalest, who appears to have his ear right down on the ground of the global energy business. The bottom line is that all the talk about “deep de-carbonization” of the world economy any time soon is a ridiculous fantasy. Fossil fuels are not going away for a long time, if ever. Carbon emissions into the atmosphere are increasing? You’d better get used to that.

Once again, this “deep de-carbonization” thing is a case of the really “smart” people deceiving you, or maybe themselves; or more likely, both.

For starters, let’s consider some of the extreme wokeism that issues from the executive suites in JPMville. This is not limited to matters of “climate,” but extends as well to other usual topics, like for example “systemic racism.” On that subject, here is JPM CEO Jamie Dimon, as quoted in Forbes in October 2020:

“Systemic racism is a tragic part of America’s history. We can do more and do better to break down systems that have propagated racism and widespread economic inequality, especially for Black and Latinx people. It’s long past time that society addresses racial inequities in a more tangible, meaningful way.”

Meanwhile, over in the climate arena, JPM’s high-level pronouncements totally buy into the idea that we’re going to save the planet by financing a bunch of wind turbines, or something. Last October, JPM put out a big statement with the pompous title of “How one of the world’s biggest banks plans to tackle climate change.” Excerpt:

Climate change is among the most urgent problems facing humanity; businesses and governments have an imperative to act. Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, which aims to restrict a rise in the world’s average temperature, would enable us to take a giant step towards a safer, greener, more sustainable future. . . . For the world to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, there needs to be an acceleration of emerging technologies that are not yet widely commercially available or economically viable. . . . Our company, JPMorgan Chase, announced this month that we will start aligning our financing portfolio to meet the Paris goals.

Then just a couple of weeks ago, on April 15, JPM followed up by announcing a big new plan to “Advance Climate Action and Sustainable Development” with some $2.5 trillion in investments:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/is_joe_biden_taking_his_patent_advice_from_the_likes_of_chelsea_clinton.html

Joe Biden is living up to Bob Gates’s dictum as being “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

What’s he up to now?  Well, after claiming credit for Operation Warp Speed to develop COVID vaccines, his latest bad idea is his plan to end patent protections on them.  He’s declared he wants to give them away for free, to help with the COVID crisis in India.

According to the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration came out on Wednesday in support of waiving intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines, siding with international efforts to bolster production amid concerns about vaccine access in developing nations.

The United States had been a major holdout at the World Trade Organization over a proposal to suspend some of the world economic body’s intellectual property protections, which could allow drugmakers across the globe access to the closely guarded trade secrets of how the viable vaccines have been made. But President Biden had come under increasing pressure to throw his support behind the proposal, drafted by India and South Africa and backed by many congressional Democrats.

It’s a terrible idea, which will put a damper on innovation everywhere.  Big Pharma is one of the very few industries left that consistently innovates in the U.S. with its life-saving meds.  But when companies cannot profit from their innovations, they don’t make them.

Where’s he getting this bad idea from?  One place to look is in the writings of Chelsea Clinton, an essay of which ran with curious timing.  Here’s what she wrote in the leftist Atlantic Monthly, dated May 5:

President Joe Biden must help, by removing patent barriers and making vaccine technology available to other countries.

…and…

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/bidens-war-against-wealthy-exposes-him-jason-d-hill/

Some criminals who steal other people’s money to finance their own private lifestyle, or those of the public, often move by stealth and subterfuge. They deploy moralistic language via rhetorical obfuscation. By the time they work over our moral conscience, we grant them the benefit of the doubt because we believe, in some perverse way, that the criminal had a coercive right to what he was taking away from us.

Joe Biden is such thief. He has stated outright that it is time for the richest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. He has not exactly identified by what means and by what right it is your or anyone else’s fair share of what someone else has earned. But it does not matter. Like all financial appropriators, private or public, one is expected to accept an appropriator’s assertion as the legitimate basis of a claim, or, in this case, an outright mandate.

The appeal to moral conscience is mawkishly sentimental. Biden intends to finance a country’s badly-needed faltering infrastructure and welfare spending totaling about $4tn. The various packages under these $1.8tn American Families Plan and $2tn infrastructure plans would provide funds for childcare and free pre-school education facilities, along with humongous programs to rebuild the country’s transport system and public-sector housing. They all are a part of a systemic effort to effect action on what Biden perceives as the climate crisis. The plan would also allocate $200bn for free universal preschool education, and $109bn for free community college education—regardless of income for two years.

This is to be paid for by making corporate America and the wealthiest 1% pay just their fair share, Biden repeated, as he spoke at a community college on Monday, May 3, in Norfolk, Virginia.

Astute readers will realize the move towards socialism by stealth here.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/the-biden-dojs-targeting-of-rudy-giuliani-could-backfire-spectacularly/?utm_source=

“President Biden is incorrigible. With his ample record of not knowing when to leave well enough alone, he probably doesn’t know better. Merrick Garland is supposed to know better.”

One would have hoped the new AG would have the good sense to steer away from score-settling prosecutions that are apt to blow up in the president’s face.

 ‘D on’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” If nothing else, former President Barack Obama is a shrewd man. Hence, this evergreen assessment of his vice president, after years of close observation. It is most manifest in Joe Biden’s ineffable glibness. Beneath it, the now-president can’t quite conceal the uncomfortable awareness that, though he somehow manages Magoo-like to land on his feet, he has always been in over his head. And he knows that you know.

If you get that, you’ll understand the latest Ukraine kerfuffle.

Yes, I know, the press says it’s all about Rudy. We’ll get to that part. At bottom, though, the story is about two other men. The first is Biden — specifically, his unique capacity to turn good fortune into farce. The second is Attorney General Merrick Garland.

It was too much to expect that Garland’s seasoned moderation would counterbalance the woke warriors of his Department of Social Justice. The president’s grandiose hallucinations aside, the Biden administration is not the New Deal reincarnate. It is not going to move epic progressive legislation across the finish line. If it’s going to appease its restive left flank, it will have to sic federal prosecutors on police departments, high-school locker rooms, and the Little Sisters of the Poor. We get that. But one would have hoped that AG Garland would have the good sense to steer the administration away from patently politicized, score-settling prosecutions that are apt to blow up in the president’s face.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-joe-sanders-11620340410?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The White House this week proposed to strip drug companies of their vaccine patents, an act hailed by adulators as “moral leadership.” It’s better seen as the encapsulation of the Biden presidency—a case study in fictional narratives, executive overreach, recklessness, and kowtowing to the left.

The biopharmaceutical industry in under a year accomplished a modern miracle—designing a breakthrough vaccine to counter Covid-19; engineering a ground-up production process; and climbing a logistical Everest. It was a triumph of innovation, investment and capitalism, a moment that deserves to be celebrated.

Instead, the Biden administration supports a proposal in the World Trade Organization that would “waive” the intellectual-property rights of the companies that accomplished this feat, giving away their technology to every drugmaker in the world. Put another way, Mr. Biden is freely handing American invention to China—the country that routinely steals it, and whose Wuhan lab might have been the source of the virus.

The move is in keeping with the administration’s refusal to acknowledge the history of the vaccine achievement. Team Biden continues its willful disregard of Operation Warp Speed, in part because it is too petty to give credit to any person, company or initiative connected to the Trump administration.