RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/power-of-innovative-market-economy-pandemic

It seems like a lifetime, but it was only one year ago that the world learned about a cluster of pneumonia cases linked to a live animal market in Wuhan, China. The cause: a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that leads to a disease called Covid-19. Fast forward one year, and the U.S., as of mid-December, has seen more than 300,000 Covid-19 deaths and more than 17 million confirmed cases—but also remarkable scientific innovation and reasons for optimism.

Much has changed. An economy that was humming along with record-low unemployment was voluntarily shut down in an attempt to mitigate viral spread and the death toll. Unemployment soared to depression levels, and GDP cratered. In many areas, a third of small businesses have permanently closed. Children have missed nearly a year of in-person school, with short- and long-term effects on their social and educational development and economic prospects. The pandemic deepened political fissures and became the leading issue in the 2020 election, likely leading to President Donald Trump’s reelection defeat.

People were admonished to “follow the science,” though the science was unclear and constantly in flux. The pandemic has confounded experts’ recommendations and predictions. Infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are up around the country, regardless of the approaches that different states have taken. New Mexico, for example, adopted aggressive restrictions, including a mask mandate, self-quarantine orders for travelers, and a ban on public gatherings early on. Yet statewide infections and deaths climbed to new heights in October and November.

https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-reform-policing-while-keeping-people-safe

Primed by the Covid-19-induced fiscal shortfall and catalyzed by the “Defund the Police” protests over the summer, the Los Angeles City Council will reduce the city’s police force by 350 sworn officer positions. This reduction comes after a planned $150 million cut from the LAPD’s budget, announced earlier this year. Officials have been scrambling to reorganize the force since.

Police forces across the country have been hit hard by layoffs, early retirements, and resignations. Seattle’s police chief resigned after the city council voted to reduce her force by 100 officers. Chicago’s police department saw its retirement rate jump to twice the normal level this year compared with the last five. Smaller cities weren’t spared: Asheville, North Carolina, had lost 13 percent of its force by September.

Officer ranks have been steadily declining. Between the late 1990s and 2016, the number of police officers per capita nationally dropped by more than 10 percent. Filling vacancies is not easy, as applications for sworn officer positions have dropped by more than half since 2010.

Well-staffed police departments are essential to maintaining public safety. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that increased numbers of officers in the 1990s reduced crime by an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent.

Most Americans—including 81 percent of black Americans—want a strong and effective police presence in their communities.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/21/leftists_hijacking_vaccination_rollout_144895.html

You were warned about this first in July. Now, it’s happening. On Sunday, the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that seniors ages 65 to 74 be moved toward the back of the line for the COVID-19 vaccine.

The reason, says ACIP, is that “racial and ethnic minority groups [are] under-represented” in this age group. Put another way: Seniors are too white.

Vaccines are already being administered to health workers and nursing home residents. The question is this: Who comes next? ACIP wants to push 87 million essential workers — such as transit workers, supermarket employees and uniformed public servants — to the front of the line, forcing 32 million seniors to wait.

Vaccinating a majority of 87 million essential workers will consume the vaccine supply for several months.

Thousands of seniors will die needlessly if this decision goes into effect. ACIP actually admits as many as 6.5% more elderly will die over the next six months but dismisses that loss of life as “minimal.” Not if it’s your grandma.

A person 65 or older is at least 90 times more at risk of dying from COVID-19 than a young working-age person. Vaccinating the elderly first is the obvious strategy to save the most lives. ACIP says its twisted priorities are based in “fairness, equity and justice.” What the committee really means is “wokeness.”

Committee member Peter Szilagyi, from the University of California, Los Angeles, defends ACIP’s move, because “essential workers” include “a high proportion of minority, low-income and low-education workers.”

These left-wing academics are exploiting the pandemic as a launching pad for their redistributionist agenda. The lives of seniors — who need the vaccine the most — be damned.

Harald Schmidt, from the University of Pennsylvania, explains that “older populations are whiter.” He says “society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to … them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/dr-jill-and-dangers-scientism-bruce-thornton/

Essayist Joseph Epstein stirred up the “woke” commissars with an essay jovially advising Jill Biden from insisting on being called “Dr” because she has a doctorate in education. As Epstein pointed out, usually the demand to be called “Doctor” when one is not an M.D. suggests insecurity or unseemly vanity. After all, according to her husband, she sought out the degree because she was “so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden.” No matter. To Epstein’s critics, the “entitled” old white guy was “sexist” and “misogynist,” demeaning Mrs. Biden’s accomplishments in order to keep her in her “handmaiden” place.

Such “woke” dudgeon is so common that it is a dog-bites-man story, reported on only to provide progressives with opportunities for virtue-signaling, attacking their enemies, and feeling superior to the unenlightened. What’s more serious about this spat is the foundational flaw that runs through it–– our failure to separate real science from activities that reflect scientism: Dressing up ideological beliefs or even fads in the quantitative data and forbidding jargon of real sciences like physics or engineering.

Of course, the criticisms were all preposterous: slighting the EdD is an equal opportunity custom long embedded in Academe, where the “narcissism of small differences” is epidemic, especially for the American professoriate, which doesn’t enjoy the wider social esteem that European academics enjoy. Also, doctorates in education exist mainly as a way to boost a school-teacher’s salary, or qualify him to serve as an administrator. For snooty professors in traditional disciplines, the stink of the marketplace clings to the EdD.

But the deeper question is, why does a discipline like education even exist? Does anybody really believe that there are scientific truths from which this discipline derives? The reliance of educational theory on psychology and sociology should set off warning bells. While empirical information shows up in these fields, they are not “scientific,” but comprise philosophical theories dressed up in the numerical data and polysyllabic jargon that characterize real science. Disciplines whose topic is human behavior, interactions, motivations, or consciousness are particularly dubious, because few of these aspects of our humanity can be understood with the rigor and predictability of hard science.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/20/will-republicans-kill-democracy/

Whether it takes a year or 10 years or 100 years for the wheel of history to turn, the Republicans who chose “stability” over democracy will not be remembered kindly, if they are remembered at all.

Republicans are in the process of betraying the United States. Republicans who urge their colleagues not to object when counting the electoral votes, who parrot Joe Biden’s calls for unity, who urge the nation to accept and to move on: these Republicans have decided that nothing is worse than a constitutional crisis. Nothing is worse than turmoil—not even the end of freedom. They are choosing to support an unelected government rather than risk the chaos of leftists rioting in the streets. 

Perhaps, above all, they are choosing a world in which they can continue to rub shoulders at fancy social events in Washington, D.C.. Whether or not the people actually voted to send them there is unimportant. What is important is that they are important. 

The status quo, the thing which President Trump has threatened more than any politician in living memory, is the breath of life even to those politicians who would, all things being equal, prefer free elections and limited government. But all things are not equal. Most politicians, ironically, would choose prominence in a corrupt system over anonymity anywhere else.

Churchill recounted his exchanges with Admiral François Darlan, who was chief of the French Navy at the outbreak of World War II, and who wanted above all to rise to the top political post, Minister of Marine. Darlan repeatedly assured Churchill that, come what may, the French Fleet would never fall into German hands. As France was collapsing under the Nazi invasion in June 1940, Darlan was prepared to order his ships to sail to American and British ports. But, in the last gasp of the Third Republic, Darlan finally achieved his much hoped-for political elevation. He never gave the order to sail, and, when General Georges asked him why, he replied “I am now Minister of Marine.” He wished to remain Minister of Marine in a new government, even under German control. He got his wish.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/20/covid-woke-science-and-death/

In this brave new world of ours, will we be pruning back the elderly altogether by credentialed “ethicists,” whether because of their longevity or race?

Since March, the Left has proclaimed itself the guardian of science in dealing with the COVID-19 epidemic. Its champions are the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Dr. Fauci. All in the past have rendered valuable service to the public, and often life-saving aid.

Yet the mixture of COVID-19, the first national quarantine, and Trump Derangement Syndrome have combined to give us reason to question their judgment. These authorities variously have issued conflicting recommendations to wear, then not to wear, and finally to wear masks. Or they have both criticized and then advised travel bans. 

They variously have expressed skepticism about lockdowns, then strongly urged lockdowns, and then again questioned lockdowns. When states and nations that are tightly locked down sometimes suffer commensurate rates of infection with those that are relatively open, we do not always receive scientifically based explanations. 

More ominously, we still have no idea whether far more have died due to the lockdowns than to the virus itself—given the quarantines have caused greater familial, spousal, and substance abuse, suicides, impoverishment, missed surgeries and medical procedures, educational deprivation, and long-term psychological damage. Amid this void of knowledge, state and local officials have often claimed expertise and implemented Draconian measures that may well have made things far worse.

The reasons for our experts’ ambiguity? 

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/19/the-american-left-has-now-fully-embraced-racism/

For decades, the American left has helped spread various insidious forms of Marxism. Now, it’s openly embracing abject racism.

A Rubicon has been crossed in American political discourse. Long purveyors of Marxism, the nation’s leftists have now come to fully embrace something else; racism. Just in the last week in the areas of medicine, education, and journalism, well-intentioned institutional racists have insisted — as is increasingly their habit — that skin color is and must be the defining element of our public policies.

There is no issue more important to the future and soul of our nation right now than the leftist bigotry threatening the very concept of what it means to be an American.

On the medical side, Dr. Harald Schmidt, a supposed expert on ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times that essential workers, not the elderly, should be the first to receive COVID-19 vaccines. His reason? “Older populations are whiter,” he told the publication. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

To be clear, the term “level the playing field” here means allowing people to die because of the color of their skin.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16870/biden-parenthesis

On relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, Biden holds the strong card of sanctions devised under Obama and applied under Trump. Obama offered only carrots and failed. Trump offered only stick and didn’t achieve his aim of a photo-op with the top mullah, Ali Khamenei, or even Hassan Rouhani. Biden is in a stronger position than Obama or Trump because the Khomeinist regime is weaker than four years ago.

Adopting the Paris Climate Accord is also not easy. Last week, signatories cheekily admitted they had not implemented it.

Many Americans hope that Trump’s tenure will prove to be a mere parenthesis. They don’t know that Biden’s term will also be a parenthesis.

With the Electoral College confirming Joe Biden as the winner of last month’s election, it is almost certain he will be confirmed as the next president of the United States on 6 January.

And, unless something surrealistic happens, he would take the oath of office on 20 January.

What might a Biden presidency look like?

Given the peculiarities of American democracy, such speculation amounts to giving a hostage to fortune. Presidents predicted to lead the nation into disaster turned out to have the safest pairs of hands. Those who inspired romantic dreams dropped into banality as Icarus did when his wings melted.

Some observers believe that Biden’s administration will be a third term for former President Barack Obama. Biden was Obama’s Vice President for eight years, and a large number of people he has picked in his team are Obama alumni.

I think they are wrong.