RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/16/soft-science-has-no-place-in-government-policymaking/

‘Science, at its core, is a social phenomenon.” This observation, from Alondra Nelson, the newly appointed deputy director of President Joe Biden’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), certainly qualifies for a prominent place in the Pantheon of Inane Statements. The core of science is, in fact, the scientific method – posing and testing hypotheses; carefully gathering, examining, and generating experimental evidence; and finally, synthesizing all the available information into logical conclusions.

Nelson’s assertion is inauspicious, but perhaps we should not be too surprised by a “squishy” statement from someone whose undergraduate degree was in sociology, and her doctorate, in “American Studies.” What, we wonder, qualifies her to be deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy? And how does it comport with Biden’s commitment always to rely on “science and truth.” We suspect it is an example of how lip-service to science has invaded the domain of real science.

“Hard” sciences are a framework for understanding physical, chemical, sub-atomic, biological, and other natural or even manmade phenomena. The disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and especially mathematics, have nothing to do with society as such, because the phenomena they characterize exist independently of humans. Mathematics is typically the language of this framework, whether it is arcane calculus, probability theory, combinatorics, topology, or some other branch well understood by only a very select group.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/17/democrats-are-forever-slaves-to-wretched-ideas/

A White House aide wants the president “to start acting now” on reparations without congressional approval. But not even the consent of the House and Senate would legitimize reparations. It’s a policy so divisive, and so impossible to implement, that the idea, which is an ugly societal wedge of its own, needs to be dropped and never brought up again.

While decent Americans have moved past racial politics and are starving for genuine unity, senior adviser Cedric Richmond “sees first-term progress on reparations,” reports Axios, which recently interviewed the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

“We have to start breaking down systemic racism and barriers that have held people of color back and especially African Americans,” Richmond said. “We have to do stuff now.”

The U.S. House is considering a bill with 169 cosponsors that “establishes the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.” The panel would “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.” A companion bill has also been introduced in the Senate.

Biden, according to his press secretary, “certainly would support a study of reparations,” and Vice President Kamala Harris has publicly endorsed a committee that would explore reparations. Neither of which is a surprise. Just as they can never let a crisis go to waste, Democrats are unable to resist virtue-signaling, and in some cases outright punitive measures against their countrymen, whether warranted or not.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/03/15/paralyzed-by-fear-johns-hopkins-doctor-notices-something-peculiar-about-the-cdc-n2586291

Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine was bold in his projection that we’ll have herd immunity by April. This has been disputed by those who are nowhere near his level of expertise when it comes to public health, but I get the pushback since it shreds the Democratic Party’s COVID lockdown regime. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Makary says that we’re underestimating natural immunity and with the pace of vaccinations, we’ll reach that critical benchmark towards reclaiming normality by tax season. 

“About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%,” Dr. Makary wrote. With those figures, he estimates that two-thirds of the country has already had the infection. We’re rapidly approaching 100 million vaccinations. It’s not an insane projection, but one he says other health experts are afraid to push for fear of impacting the rate of vaccinations. That’s not their job, he argued. Good health news should be disseminated, not buried. There was pushback, and there will be more when he recently wrote about the vaccine protocols.

The good doctor cited an Israeli study that shows those given the Pfizer vaccine are virtually “bulletproof” four weeks after the first dose. That’s the keyword right there. So, we can be returning to normal if the CDC wasn’t so busy peddling exaggerated threats about the virus and being stricken with fear, which Makary noted with their latest guidelines. Is it ‘follow the science’ or ‘be afraid, be very afraid’?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/secretly-taped-facebook-executive-company-too-powerful-broken-up

A senior executive at Facebook was secretly recorded saying that the social media giant harms the world, that it needs to be broken up, and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg should be removed.

A video released Monday of Benny Thomas, Facebook’s global planning lead, shows him candidly expressing his opinions about his employer to an undercover journalist from Project Veritas, a right-wing activist news outlet founded by James O’Keefe.

“I work for a company that is doing a lot of damage in the world,” Thomas said in the video.

“It’s doing a lot of good, but it’s doing a lot of damage,” he added.

Thomas said that other platforms that Facebook owns, such as Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, “need to be separate companies” because it’s “too much power when they’re all one together.”

“I would break it up, and I would remove [Mark Zuckerberg] as the CEO,” Thomas said.

In a recent survey of 1500 tech industry employees, 77% said Big Tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google have too much power. Only 8% disagreed.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/meghan-markle-george-floyd-muhammad-and-free-speech/

The latest scandal surrounding the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is noteworthy. This isn’t because of the ire that it’s been arousing, however; righteous indignation is literally and figuratively all the rage during these days of “woke.”

No, the element that sets this brouhaha apart from its predecessors is the absence of mass murder. Yes, when the ink dries on the current pages of the Paris-based periodical and the Twittersphere moves on to the next hashtag, there won’t be any corpses to count.

The current storm involves a lampoon of Oprah Winfrey’s March 7 interview on CBS with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Titled “Why Meghan quit Buckingham,” the March 13 cartoon depicts Markle being kneed in the neck by Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, with the explanation: “Because I couldn’t breathe anymore.”

The reference was to the May 25 killing of African-American George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. The insinuation is that Markle, whose mother is black, whisked her husband out of the United Kingdom as a result of her being slowly suffocated by the ostensibly “racist” royal family.
The former member of the “Suits” cast even indicated this during her intimate chat with Oprah that was viewed by more than 60 million people worldwide.

https://spectator.org/covid-vaccines-dr-fauci/

One year into this pandemic, we are seeing signs of hope that life will return to normal sometime this year. States across the country are relaxing COVID restrictions. This is drawing criticism from some, including President Biden, calling such moves “Neanderthal thinking.” Perhaps it takes one to know one, Joe. Who let you out of the basement, anyway? Far from being Neanderthals, millions of people are rightfully celebrating a relative return to normalcy in many states across the country. Godspeed to them, I say.

How did we get here? How did we come to a point where we feel gratitude that our government is “allowing” us to begin to live normally again? COVID itself undoubtedly harmed many people’s health and has sadly killed over half a million of our citizens, but the mitigation policies also have caused much harm to others. Many of us have been shocked to learn that we live in a country where the stroke of an executive’s pen can shutter businesses, force masking, etc., with no legislative input whatsoever.

How did they get away with this type of societal control? Well, every good story of psychological manipulation has a bogeyman (or perhaps I should say “bogeyperson,” to please the woke crowd). Whom did the writers of 2020 pencil in as the monster in this tale? In order to maintain complete control, they intelligently picked the most damning and insidious villain possible. They picked you.

https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4212/Free-Thomas-Caldwell-Now.aspx

Saw an amazing report, the next best thing to man bites dog: Federal judge raps sloppy, run-amuck US attorneys. Even according to Politico of the precious Left, this was a “setback” to the Justice Department’s “widest ranging conspiracy case” related to the January 6 Capitol protest.

What happened is this: Judge Amit Mehta ordered the pre-trial release of Lt. Commander (USN, ret.) Thomas Caldwell (above), 66, to home confinement pending trial on numerous charges spun out of the DOJ fever dream that a handful of Oath Keepers militia (of which Caldwell is not even a member) conspired to lead a pre-planned attack on the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying the fraudulent 2020 election.

That may not sound like much, but he judge’s decision lets a crack of light onto what has been unmitigated darkness. 

Politico:

The decision is a setback for the Justice Department as it seeks to show that some elements of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were part of sophisticated and organized cells intent on violently blocking the transition of power. 

The reason the judge’s decision is a “setback” is because Caldwell is the Justice Department’s “lead defendant” in its fantasy of premeditated insurrection. How, in their hasty and error-filled indictment (see below), did Government lawyers conclude Caldwell was a leader of this supposed army of Trump rebels? Because Caldwell’s social media handle is “Commander Tom.”

That the moniker is just a relic of Caldwell’s Navy days would be funny if the consequences of this sloppy prosecutorial overreach were not so serious.    

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/15/capitol-investigation-seeks-to-criminalize-political-dissent/

In the early hours of March 12, FBI agents in southwestern Florida barricaded a neighborhood to prepare to raid the home of one resident. Christopher Worrell of Cape Coral was arrested and charged with several counts related to the January 6 Capitol melee. Even though Worrell had been cooperating with the FBI for two months, the agency nonetheless unleashed a massive, and no doubt costly, display of force to take him into custody.

Law enforcement agents, according to one neighbor who spoke with a reporter, wore “whole outfits . . . like military and it was crazy. There was like six or seven . . . big black vehicles. They busted down the front door.” The raid included “armed men with helmets and a tanker truck” and was partially executed by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Worrell never entered the Capitol building on January 6; he isn’t accused of committing a violent crime. But a D.C. judge overturned a Florida judge’s ruling to release Worrell pending further review of his case. He remains in jail.

Ginning Up “Domestic Terrorism”

Worrell’s arrest is the latest in what the U.S. Department of Justice warned would be an “unprecedented” investigation leading to sedition charges filed against American citizens. Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged to make the Capitol Breach manhunt his top priority; on his first day in office, he received an update on the investigation from FBI Director Christopher Wray. Garland has compared January 6 to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, including 15 children.

Roughly 300 people have been arrested so far, many of them transported to Washington, D.C. to await trial and dozens denied bail after federal prosecutors argued the defendants, including a high school senior from Georgia, pose a threat to the nation.

The Capitol Breach probe, the department’s official title, is a flagrant political prosecution targeting Trump supporters. Every display—from heavy-handed FBI raids to a militarized Washington, D.C.—is designed to portray the President Trump’s allies as domestic terrorists.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/03/15/the-morning-briefing-military-brass-bravely-launch-operation-tucker-carlson-n1432206

Military Higher-Ups Get Their Fatigues in a Bunch Over Cable News

There I was, minding my own business and avoiding the news as is my wont on the weekends, when a friend texted me about military personnel going after Tucker Carlson on Twitter. I knew that I was going to regret ruining my weekend zen by diving into the brouhaha, but the whole story seemed so ridiculous that I couldn’t stay away from it.

Like an idiot, I jumped online and quickly discovered that some guys who probably prided themselves on their toughness at one point had, indeed, turned into a team of whiny Brian Stelters.

Treacher wrote about it on Saturday, and brought up some excellent points:

I’m no expert on the military, but don’t these guys have anything better to do with their time than cutting wrestling promos on civilians? “You listen and you listen well, Mister Tucker Carlson: We will settle this in the squared circle on Sunday at Wrestlemania 37. I’ll shove that bowtie where the studio lights don’t shine!”

And doesn’t the military have regulations about uniformed personnel making political statements? Isn’t that one of the things you give up when you join? Isn’t that the whole point of having civilian oversight of the military? Aren’t taxpayers allowed to speak up about where their money is going?

I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s nuts. Can you imagine if somebody did this while Trump was president? Just picture a uniformed military officer calling out Anderson Cooper or Rachel Maddow. Every newspaper in the country would be $#!++ing bricks directly onto the front page. Brian Stelter’s head would explode like somebody forgot to poke holes in it before putting it in the microwave. Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.