RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/10/the-cultural-roots-of-conservatism/

Here in mid-October, we are at or even just past the apogee of that “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” John Keats celebrated in “To Autumn.” Harvests are arriving everywhere. The “maturing sun” has conspired “to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; / To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.”

Which brings me to the word “cultural.” I remember the first time I noticed the legend “cultural instructions” on the brochure that accompanied some seedlings. “How quaint,” I thought, as I pursued the advisory: this much water and that much sun, certain tips about fertilizer, soil, and drainage. Planting one sort of flower nearby keeps the bugs away but proximity to another sort makes bad things happen. Young shoots might need stakes, and watch out for beetles, weeds, and unseasonable frosts . . . 

The more I pondered it, the less quaint and the more profound those cultural instructions seemed. I suppose I had once known that the word “culture” comes from the capacious Latin verb colo, which means everything from “live, dwell, inhabit,” to “observe a religious rite”—whence our word “cult”—to  “care, tend, nurture,” and “promote the growth or advancement of.” I never thought much about it. 

I should have done. There is a lot of wisdom in etymology. The noun cultūra (which derives from colo) means first of all “the tilling or cultivation of land” and “the care or cultivation of plants.” But it, too, has ambitious tentacles: there’s the bit about religious rites again and also “well groomed,” and “chic, polished, sophisticated.” 

Cicero’s Cultivation of the Soul

It was Cicero, in a famous passage of the Tusculan Disputations, who gave currency to the metaphor of culture as a specifically intellectual pursuit. “Just as a field, however good the ground, cannot be productive without cultivation,” Cicero wrote, “so the soul cannot be productive without education.” Philosophy, he said, is a sort of “cultura animi,” a cultivation of the mind or spirit: “it pulls out vices by the roots,” he said, “makes souls fit for the reception of seed,” and sows in order to bring forth “the richest fruit.” 

http://Cancel culture reaches working-class America.

From the organized campaign vilifying Harry Potter author JK Rowling for standing up for women’s actual biological experience to decades of Democrat attempts to paint Republicans as every type of bigot; cancel culture, the totalitarian leftist movement to destroy those with whom they disagree, isn’t just international or national. In Bayonne, NJ, it’s local. Making matters worse in the following chain of deplorable events is the fact that the online mob driving it, safe behind blocked phone numbers, closed social media groups (magnifying the worst impulses of already bad agents), and anonymous emails, has targeted local businesses already on life support due to COVID-19 and the resultant economic restrictions. The decomposing cherry on this putrid pie is both the silence from the only people with anything to gain from fueling the hate and the rotten stink of a possible coverup. 

Our story begins with Michael Shatravka, a Bayonne resident with a checkered teenage and young adult past who, after a literally bone-shattering motorcycle accident, made the decision to do better. Shatravka, stuck in physical therapy for over a year, chose not to hate the world for his past bad decisions. After relearning how to walk and talk, Shatravka entered the world of acting for three years and then created his own videography and photography company as well as obtaining his real-estate license. Along the way, he met and married the love of his life and decided he didn’t like the direction in which Bayonne’s public schools were heading because they were, according to his observation, leaving too many kids behind who might fall into the same bad decisions he himself almost succumbed to.

Shatravka’s business life, his entrepreneurial and community minded can-do attitude, and the business life of Buon Appetito, the charming old-world style Italian restaurant on Bayonne’s main drag, came under fire late this September. Shatravka, through his videography and editing business, was contracted by the community eatery to make a commercial. Little did Buon Appetito (beloved by so much of Bayonne for their tasty and large portions) or Shatravka know that the mere existence of his 2020 virgin Board of Education run would set the brave soldiers of the couch-potato keyboard brigade on their cancel culture crusade. Locked in their sights were two targets — Shatravka’s videography business and Buon Appetito, whose ownership may not have even know of Shatravka’s BoE run and who may not even share his perspective. For Shatravka and other businesses like Buon Appetito, the only thing that matters is having a vibrant home town where people can agree or disagree over good food and enjoy each other’s company.

Not so for Bayonne’s cancel culture crusaders who began calling, emailing, and posting on social media to boycott Buon Appetito unless the eatery disavowed all connections for Shatravka and withdrew the commercial his business made them. The message was sent – associate with anyone on the Make Bayonne Great Again ticket, the slate of three BoE candidates including Shatravka and one of the two main municipal Board of Education slates, even in ways that has nothing to do with the BoE election, or people, possibly from Bayonne Mayor Jimmy Davis’s political camp would come after your businesses.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/10/07/great-barrington-declaration-solution-endless-covid-lockdowns-15074

The proposal in the Declaration is certainly worth considering. If I was a policymaker, I would investigate how to implement it. As COVID cases spike in Europe, which once had the coronavirus under control, it’s becoming clear that our current on-again, off-again approach to containment isn’t working as intended. It may be time to try something new. 

Let’s be honest. As we approach late autumn and then winter in the northern hemisphere, nobody knows what’s going to happen. We may see another surge in coronavirus cases, or we may not. We may see flu season exacerbate the effects of COVID, or we may not. We just don’t know.

Making the situation worse is that this uncertainty is absolutely killing the economy. Go downtown in any major American city. It’s a ghost town. We can’t live like this indefinitely. Is there some other approach that we can take as a society to minimize the harm of COVID while maximizing productivity and happiness? A group of successful and respected infectious disease experts says yes, and they have written a statement that they have called the Great Barrington Declaration.

The authors refer to their approach as “Focused Protection,” the gist of which is “to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” Not that this really matters (because public health policy shouldn’t be a popularity contest), but more than 10,000 scientists and medical practitioners have signed it.

Are the authors right? I certainly think so. Back in May, we reported on a Swedish epidemiologist who believed that lockdowns did nothing other than delay the inevitable; i.e., they simply push new infections down the timeline. Therefore, while lockdowns can be useful to avoid overwhelming hospital bed capacity, they may not lower the overall number of cases. In other words, we’re destroying the economy while essentially accomplishing nothing.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/hillary-clinton-orchestrated-russia-collusion-farce/

The Clinton campaign dreamed up, paid for, and peddled the Trump-Russia collusion farce.

Did she or didn’t she?

Of course she did. In late July 2016, Hillary Clinton, in an effort to divert attention from the email scandal that was haunting her presidential bid, directed her campaign to peddle a political narrative that Russia’s suspected hacking and leaking of Democratic Party emails was in furtherance of a conspiracy between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to swing the election to Trump.

That is, as I argued in Ball of Collusion, the Clinton campaign dreamed up, paid for, and peddled the Trump–Russia collusion farce. And in promoting it, President Obama’s former secretary of state had a willing and able partner in the Obama administration — very much including its intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus.

Democrats Change Their Tune

It was amazing to watch Democrats play Twister this week, as National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe added documentary corroboration to the disclosure he’d made the week before. In that first revelation, via letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ratcliffe explained that, because our spy agencies have very effective foreign-intelligence-gathering methods, they were able to “obtain insight” into a Russian intelligence analysis that concluded Clinton orchestrated the damaging political narrative. That is, Clinton actually did what she accused Trump of doing: She colluded with Russians (through yet another foreigner she recruited to meddle in the 2016 presidential campaign: the ludicrous former British spy Christopher Steele) in order to damage Trump’s campaign and cinch the election for herself. 

https://canadafreepress.com/article/locking-down-the-constitution

These Governors have enabled a slow-rolling insurrection by Black Lives Matter and the Antifa Brownshirts to come into being; and they will likely throw the coming presidential election into chaos

California governor Gavin Newsom has moved the covid lockdown goalposts for a second time. Per last week’s decree, larger counties in the state must “address inequity in communities such as low-income, Black, Latino, Pacific Islander and essential workers.”

Counties with a population greater than 106,000 must follow an equity metric to ensure that their most disadvantaged neighborhoods don’t lag behind. Counties with less than 106,000 residents must submit a plan that defines their disproportionately affected population and show plans to invest in at least interrupting disease transmission in these populations. (CAP Radio, Oct. 8, 2020 )

Mr. Newsom does not see a great need to allow Californians to go back to work any time soon

It appears Mr. Newsom does not see a great need to allow Californians to go back to work any time soon. It also appears that he is enjoying his new, dictatorial powers. And, if recent history is any guide, he has little reason to fear that the courts will interfere with his exercise of those powers. 

This past May, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, found California’s covid-19 restriction that limited indoor church attendance to 25 percent of building capacity or no more than 100 persons to be “consistent with the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.” The Court’s majority did not issue an opinion, but in a concurrence with the ruling, Chief Justice Roberts argued that, because the restriction did not discriminate against religious organizations but, instead, applied equally or more forcefully to “lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances,” it did not violate the Free Exercise Clause. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/08/one-step-closer-to-despotism/

Donald Trump’s order on Twitter Tuesday night to declassify documents related to the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign suggests that he’s lost faith in Attorney General William Barr and John Durham, the prosecutor tapped to investigate the origins of Crossfire Hurricane. 

Previously, the rationale for Barr’s failure to declassify Crossfire Hurricane documents en masse was that Durham needed to keep a close hold on them to build his case. But with less than a month to go before the 2020 election, the U.S. Attorney’s 18 month-long investigation has only secured one plea deal from an FBI lawyer. In the meantime, corrupt U.S. officials who spied on the Trump campaign and framed him as a Russian agent are basking in the sun. Former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former CIA Director John Brennan are on book tours; Showtime made a mini-series about former FBI Director James Comey; and the Democratic candidate for president is Joe Biden, an avatar for a potential third Barack Obama term. 

A subsequent presidential retweet featuring a photo-shopped image of the late comedian Chris Farley shouting at a complacent-seeming Barr confirms that the commander-in-chief has lost his patience—“For the love of God,” the caption reads, “ΑRREST SOMEBODY.”

Trump knows that at least one of his senior officials is fighting him. CIA Director Gina Haspel reportedly is refusing to turn over documents that may further illuminate the Agency’s role in the anti-Trump plot. Haspel was London station chief in 2016 as Crossfire Hurricane agents and their confidential sources moved in and out of the British capital to target Trump campaign officials visiting the United Kingdom.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/falling_pennies_and_pandemic_declarations.html

Something is fishy about the COVID numbers…on a foundational level.

Regarding deaths of American citizens in 2020, the departure from the truth about them is fundamentally in the concealing, counting, and recording of numbers.  What we’ve seen in the numbers reporting this year is subject to a timeless trick of deceptive reasoning with statistics and control.

The trick, performed by, let’s say, Tricky Tester, first names as “novel” something that almost no one has heard of.  Its actual oldness or novelness does not matter.  Only the position of being able to control the testing and reporting matters.

Tricky Tester, being in control of the means of testing, conveniently allows no anonymous testing to be added to the reporting.  It would be logistically almost impossible to count anonymous tests, anyway.  Therefore, only those who wish to be known by and associated with the institutions doing the testing will then self-select for being tested for it.  Without anonymous self-tests, there are no results from people who don’t want to be associated with the testing facilities or suffer the possible consequences of doing so (like the well advertised threat of involuntary medical quarantine and isolation, notwithstanding whether the result is accurate or false).  The plausible ubiquity of the molecular strand being tested for, then, can never be known.

So beyond scientifically controversial, if not meaningless, testing such as PCR, beyond the debate over comorbidities, and beyond other scientific chips in the narrative’s armor — meaning no disrespect to hardworking professional microbiologists here — what invalidates the claim of a new virus being causal to 210,000 deaths is the framing of the untenable argument itself.  For unspoken in the argument’s premise is the fact that one doing testing wilI find microorganisms, strands of DNA, and what people call viruses in dying and dead people, and in all people.  It is a given. 

The sly Tricky Tester can pick one molecular strand as “the cause.”  Once selected as “the one,” it will be found in cases of morbidity because it exists in people.  The presence in human beings of such molecular strands, which will inevitably be detected, is called the human microbiome, and the human virome in particular, which are well-documented.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/an-alternative-to-lockdowns-declaration-offers-trump-a-chance-to-lead-on-science/

It’s baseless to assume that the benefit of lockdowns outweighs their harm.

O n October 4, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya gathered at Great Barrington, Mass., to pen a declaration that, in just five days, has gained some 15,000 signatures from doctors and health scientists. The declaration calls for a smart alternative to the lockdowns and social-distancing rules that Joe Biden insists are based on “the science.”

Other experts have been quick to offer criticisms, of course. But that’s how science works. It rarely speaks with one voice. And this is why the declaration matters: It snatches the science card from Biden and everyone else who claims the science should dissuade us from returning to normal life.

Trump now has the chance to take the science card himself — legitimately. He doesn’t need to pretend all scientists agree, or appeal to his own impressive recovery from COVID-19. Instead, he should remind everyone of the true cost of shutting down schools and businesses and churches.

Barrington reminds us that the burden of proof was always on those who called for Draconian lockdowns. That’s because of the severe costs of these measures. As their declaration notes, the “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.” These include cancers that go undetected because of reduced screening, worse outcomes from cardiovascular disease, deteriorating mental health, and increased harm to at-risk children. All of these risks are especially acute for the young and the less affluent.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/no-durham-report-or-indictments-before-election-day/

The Justice Department’s decision does not mean there will be no more “Russiagate” disclosures.

A xios is reporting that Attorney General Bill Barr has informed the White House and top Republicans that there will be no report or indictments filed by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham prior to the November 3 election. Durham, of course, is the prosecutor Barr assigned to investigate the genesis of the Trump–Russia probe launched during the 2016 campaign by the Obama administration.

The lack of imminent charges or a pre-election narrative report is not surprising to anyone who has watched this saga. The attorney general’s reported decision to alert government officials about it is not surprising in light of President Trump’s recent Twitter barrage, railing about the lack of arrests and prosecutions despite what he describes as “THIS TREASONOUS PLOT.” Indeed, as Axios elaborates, the president, in a Fox Business interview yesterday, complained that he believes Barr has “got all the information he needs” to file charges, yet insists on getting “more, more, more.” The president added that he doesn’t believe more is needed. “To be honest,” Trump huffed, “Bill Barr is going to go down as either the greatest attorney general in the history of the country, or he’s going to go down as, you now, a very sad situation.”

For what it’s worth, at the risk of belaboring an argument I’ve long made (most recently in a column at The Hill yesterday), many things that are in the nature of abuse-of-power simply are not violations of the criminal code. That worked to the president’s advantage during the Ukraine kerfuffle, as Democrats struggled in vain to turn his pressure on an ally for domestic political advantage into a crime. But it also applies to abuse of the executive branch’s investigative discretion. Trump’s own invocation of “treason,” which quite obviously does not apply, illustrates the difficulty of finding a penal code provision that fits the abuses of power at issue. Executive officials have vast discretion in opening investigations, especially when a foreign power is involved. It is very easy to spot overreach; it’s very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the overreach was criminal corruption.

“Past vaccines have taken a decade or longer to develop, and more than half over the past 20 years have failed during clinical trials. But four vaccine candidates have entered the last phase of clinical trials before approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Technological breakthroughs that were already in progress got a boost from a bureaucratic one in May, when the Trump administration launched “Operation Warp Speed.” The initiative organized government agencies and private companies around the goal of developing, manufacturing and distributing hundreds of millions of vaccine doses with initial doses available by early 2021.

Leading the operation is Moncef Slaoui, a Moroccan-born Belgian-American scientist who shepherded vaccine development at the U.K. drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline from 1988 to 2017. His interest in immunology and vaccine development is personal: When he was growing up in Casablanca, his younger sister died of whooping cough. He earned a doctorate in molecular biology and immunology at the Free University of Brussels, then immigrated to the U.S. for postdoctoral work at Harvard and Tufts medical schools.

In 1988 he landed a job in GSK’s vaccine division. There he helped develop one of the world’s thickest vaccine portfolios, including inoculations for meningitis, human papillomavirus and rotavirus. The company developed 14 successful vaccines during Mr. Slaoui’s tenure. When the Trump administration tapped him to run Operation Warp Speed, liberals predictably criticized him because he came out of private industry.