RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/diversity-equality-of-opportunity

NASDAQ recently proposed new diversity requirements for the corporate boards of companies listed on the exchange. “Successful companies must cultivate diversity to fuel innovation and to thrive in today’s era of ongoing environmental, social and economic change,” said TechNet president and CEO Linda Moore in support of the proposal. The NASDAQ proposal arbitrarily determines that a minimum of two directors must be female, minority, or LGBT. The criteria are not linked in any meaningful way to the demographic profile of society; they merely reflect the do-gooder biases of NASDAQ executives and influencers.

The proposal, does, however, raise interesting questions about the broader implications of diversity. Whether diversity is valuable to a business—or for that matter, to a student body, university faculty, or knitting circle—depends greatly on the circumstances. Diversity may indeed serve a socially beneficial purpose by elevating underrepresented identity groups, or it may be just good PR, but other personal characteristics—intelligence, experience, qualifications—are usually more relevant to a job. At school, diversity can have educational value by exposing students and teachers to people from a wide variety of backgrounds. In government, diversity addresses concerns, judicious or not, about “fair” representation. The point is that the context matters.

Equality of opportunity could achieve most diversity goals, if the pools of candidates representing various identity groups had comparable qualifications. They seldom do, however, which has led to many forms of affirmative action. Such programs are typically zero-sum because they involve allocating a scarce resource, and in practice they typically end up as exercises in political power and greasing the squeakiest wheels.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/12/21/tulsi-gabbard-rips-cdc-for-absurd-vaccine-prioritization-strategy-n2581909

Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is ripping Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials for prioritizing the Wuhan coronavirus vaccine for 100 million “essential workers” ahead of elderly populations.

“Heartless, arrogant, unelected CDC bureaucrats have decided that the lives of elderly Americans just don’t count. For months the CDC has been telling us that the elderly are the most vulnerable,” she said in a post on Twitter. “But now, they are recommending a 100 million so-called ‘essential workers,’ which means healthy people working at everything from liquor stores to telephone companies, that they can get the vaccine before our grandparents can. That members of Congress like me can get the vaccine before at risk seniors can. People like my aunt, who is imprisoned in her own home because of the danger that if she catches the disease, she could die.”

“This is immoral and bad health policy,” Gabbard continued.

The CDC’s own data and presentations about vaccine prioritization show elderly populations are the most at risk for death. Yet, “experts” are rejecting that science because “racial and ethnic minority groups are underrepresented.”

https://www.openthebooks.com/improper-payments-analyzing-23-trillion-mistakenly

“Six million Social Security numbers are active for people aged 112 ; however, only 40 people in the world are known to be older than 112 years of age.”

1. TOTAL MISTAKES

$175 billion in estimated improper payments reported by the 20 largest federal agencies, averaging $14.6 billion per month. Total (FY2004-FY2019): $2.3 trillion.

2. WORST PROGRAMS

Billion-dollar Boondoggles: $121 billion (approximately 69 percent) in improper payments occurred within three program areas – Medicaid, Medicare, and Earned Income Tax Credit.

3. CLAW BACK

Recapture totaled $21.1 billion of the $175 billion improper payments during 2019 — roughly 14 cents on every dollar misspent. Five-year total: $103.6 billion recaptured/ $747.7 billion improperly spent.

4. TOP 10 WORST AGENCIES

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/21/the-fauci-who-stole-christmas/

“Every WuFlu down in WuFluville liked Christmas a lot…

But The Fauci, who lived in a very busy home-based TV studio north of WuFluville, did NOT!

The Fauci hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!

(The Fauci also hated Easter, high school graduations, weddings, summer vacations, restaurants and bars, churches, college football games, Thanksgiving, and every venue of happiness and human interaction.)

Now, please don’t ask why.

No one except public health “experts” and Chris Cuomo quite know the reason.

It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.

It could be, perhaps, that his homemade face mask was too tight.

But I think the most likely reason of all,

May have been that his insatiable lust for appearances on “The View,” features in glossy fashion magazines, and his unchallenged dominance over 330 million Hosts in WuFluville made his heart two sizes too small.”

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.