RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/04/oh-oh-omicron/

Last week, I dusted off my Chinese-flu soapbox and said a word or two about (cue the scary music) the Omicron variant. It sounds like the title of a Robert Ludlum novel, doesn’t it? A friend told me about a parlor game that the journalist Christopher Hitchens and his pals used to play in which the object was to contrive names for Shakespeare’s plays that sounded like the title of a Ludlum novel. Hamlet was “The Elsinore Conundrum.” I am sorry that Hitch is not still with us to try his hand at the Omicron variant. 

So far, I have to say, it’s been pretty much of a dud—unless, that is, you’re the stock market, which has taken a beating this last week or so, in part because of this new kid on the medical block (there is also that much more toxic financial emergency, the Biden Administration, but that’s for another day). The new variant has also been a godsend for scolds, nags, bureaucrats, and meddlesome so-called public health officials nannies who are just itching for another excuse to lock down your world, introduce new travel restrictions, and impose new testing protocols. 

How will it all play out? TSTS—Too Soon to Say, but I suspect this sequel is going to be a flop at the box office. For one thing, although only recently named, there is abundant evidence that Omicron has been around for months. If it had been previously unnamed, that is perhaps because it is no big deal. The South African doctor who first identified the strain noted that while the virus was possibly more contagious than versions named for letters earlier in the Greek alphabet, symptoms tended to be mild, indeed “very mild.” A typical news report notes that “patients mostly suffered from mild muscle aches, scratchy throat and dry cough.” (Remember colds? Remember the flu?) 

So why the panic? Partly, it is because panic is an antidote to boredom. People are heavily bored. Panic also licenses the people who want to run your life to, well, run your life. “Most Omicron cases so far have been mild,” runs one headline, “but experts say it will take weeks to understand how severe the variant can be.” Ah, “experts”! What would we do without them? 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/04/the-omg-variant-and-the-wests-disgraceful-response/

South Africa has practiced and modeled good science and good sense in response to the last COVID panic. Dr. Angelique Coetzee (pronounced koot-see-a) was among the first to alert South African epidemiologists to what has now been named the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Or, as dubbed here, the “OMG! variant.” 

A calm clinician, Coetzee had deduced that what she was seeing in her patients—and successfully treating—was a heretofore unseen COVID variant with attendant mild disease. 

South Africa’s skilled and responsible epidemiologists were quickly alerted and genetic sequencing commenced. And, voilà: A mutation! Also a completely unremarkable occurrence in the annals and course of epidemics. As molecular evolution and virology tell us, viruses—clever little RNA strands that they are—mutate during disease outbreaks without significant impact on the outbreak. 

By the good doctor’s summation, “I’ve seen nothing in this variant that warrants Britain’s extreme response to it.” Ditto that of the rest of the world. 

Coetzee and her colleagues were the ones encountering and treating Omicron. But the cretins at the helm of the international COVID cartel, based in Washington, D.C., had all the answers. Nobody was going to cramp their style, not least a stoic, calm, rational clinician in the thick of it. Ethics and efficacy be damned, travel to and from a poor nation, South Africa, was forthwith suspended. After all, unlike “the world’s factory,” China—free to spread disease with impunity—poor nations are incapable of retaliating.

So, while clinicians on the ground met Omicron with equanimity, Western politicians working the pandemic and armed with not much more than ignorance sprung into Brownian motion. 

Besides, aside from being eminently reasonable and calm, the South Africans were sharing a tidbit the television doctors and the pandemic’s political manhandlers were not keen to share: There were fully vaccinated people among “the new omicron variant sequenced in 77 cases.” 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/the_census_bureau_released_appalling_information_about_the_american_family.html

The nuclear family has always been the backbone of American liberty and prosperity. However, the latest information from the Census Bureau shows that the nuclear family, if not dead, is on life support. Only the smallest fraction of American children are being raised in traditional two-parent households.

Leftists have been waging relentless war on the nuclear family for decades in ways big and small. The big ways began in the 1960s with women’s liberation and no-fault divorce. While both of those may have relieved women from desperately bad marriages and dead-end jobs, they also served to take women out of their role as homemaker and the child’s primary teacher, often transferring those roles to immigrant women when the children were small and public schools when the children were older.

The welfare state also struck a blow at the nuclear family. Many women will acknowledge that, even if they like or love men, the latter aren’t always easy to live with, a problem that can go far beyond leaving up the toilet seat. Having a regular “paycheck” without the man attached can be a real blessing.

Even worse, welfare is structured so that having a father in the family can depress the woman’s income, and so that, the more children a woman has out of wedlock, the more money she gets. This isn’t money that would sustain the middle-class comforts many of us like but, as I happen to know from acquaintances, not everyone wants the middle-class lifestyle. Many people just want a check that will pay for rudimentary shelter, food, and drugs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/prosecution-and-prejudice/

We have prosecutors who won’t prosecute the ‘wrong’ people for their crimes and prosecutors hell-bent on prosecuting the ‘right’ people for what they symbolize.

T here is a flip side to the way progressives have perverted the concept of prosecuting crime. It is, in its way, just as insidious as the now-familiar delirium that non-prosecution is the best prosecution.

The flip side is equally the fallout of politicizing state police power. It flows naturally from the conceit that the point of prosecution is to run interference for the Left’s favored groups while penalizing those who oppose progressives. It has only disdain for the quaint idea that we prosecute for the purpose of upholding the rule of law, so society as a whole can flourish.

The flip side is this: When today’s cutting-edge prosecutors do deign to prosecute, the target is ideas, not acts. The objective is not to neutralize those who prey on society, but to frame their acts as part of a morality play: the progressives cast as the guardians of “our values,” and the criminals drawing out contempt more for what motivates them — or, at least, what progressives say motivates them — than for any evil they have done.

This is exemplified by the Kyle Rittenhouse prosecution.

The fact that Rittenhouse, then 17 years old, shot and killed people was not decisive in making his prosecution a national story. More people are routinely shot in Chicago than were shot in Kenosha on that fateful night. And, though not as sedulously suppressed as news of black-on-black violence is, white-on-white violence is usually far too humdrum for the media-Democrat complex to take much notice.

Rittenhouse was prosecuted not for what he did but for what he represented: a white, non-woke, police-supporting teenager exploiting his Second Amendment right to bear arms and his underlying natural right to use his rifle in self-defense. Worse, he engaged in social-justice interruptus. By contrast, the acts of rioters who violently burned down the town were deemed irrelevant, even benign, by the Powers that Be. After all, they rioted in the holy cause of opposing police who shoot knife-wielding, arrest-resisting felons who happen to be black. It is Rittenhouse — the symbol, not the actor — who matters.

https://quillette.com/2021/12/04/the-decline-of-american-empire-a-kubler-ross-cycle-analysis/

“The United States ought to heed the words of Winston Churchill during the Munich Debate of October 5th, 1938. The people, he said, should be told that “we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history … And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

President Biden has already made it clear that he does not understand those words or appreciate their present importance. For now, Americans remain preoccupied with navel-gazing about Critical Race Theory and endlessly revisiting slavery 158 years after its abolition. Hopefully sometime before China takes Taiwan, Putin takes Ukraine, and Iran develops the Bomb, the United States will reject Acceptance of her eclipse and embrace her own supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour.”

”

How will the United States react domestically should she be dislodged from her role of global top-dog power by China? As well as the obvious economic and strategic ramifications of an end to American imperium, there will be profound emotional and psychological effects on a society that has taken its hegemony for granted for more than three-quarters of a century.

The via dolorosa presently stretched before the United States will likely encompass the replacement of the dollar as the global currency of last resort, the recognition that the South China Seas are no longer navigable by the US Navy, the understanding that Africa has been effectively colonized by China, and the possible swallowing of Ukraine by Russia and Taiwan by China. If the United States maintains its present course, Americans should prepare themselves for a century of humiliating retreats. So, how are these developments likely to play out in an already deeply divided polity and society?

https://quillette.com/2021/11/30/what-is-happening-to-my-profession/

Twenty-one years ago, I wrote a book called PC, M.D. How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine. One chapter explored “multicultural counseling,” a form of therapy that encouraged white clinicians to ask themselves, “what responsibility do you hold for the racist oppressive and discriminating manner by which you personally and professionally deal with minorities?” Another chapter documented flaws in research studies purportedly showing that physicians, as a matter of routine, were racially biased against their patients. I devoted another chapter to the quest for social justice in the field of public health. In the epilogue, which I called “The Indoctrinologist Isn’t In…Yet,” I cautioned: “those who care about the culture and practice of medicine must be alert to the encroachment of political agendas.”

Today, the Indoctrinologists are officially in. These health professionals argued early in the COVID pandemic that, if hospitals were forced to ration ventilators, they should ration based partly on minority status rather than exclusively by standard criteria, such as clinical need or prognosis. They urged vaccine priority for black Americans to compensate for “historical injustice.” And 1,200 of them cheered, via open letter, the message of an epidemiologist from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who told would-be marchers in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that “the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” In each instance, the experts allowed their own moral commitments, not objective metrics of risk, to shape their advice.

The latest manifestation of Indoctrinology is a 54-page document from the American Medical Association called Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative, and Concepts. The guide condemns several “dominant narratives” in medicine. One is the “narrative of individualism,” and its misbegotten corollary, the notion that health is a personal responsibility. A more “equitable narrative,” the guide instructs, would “expose the political roots underlying apparently ‘natural’ economic arrangements, such as property rights, market conditions, gentrification, oligopolies and low wage rates.” The dominant narratives, says the AMA, “create harm, undermining public health and the advancement of health equity; they must be named, disrupted, and corrected.”

https://www.persuasion.community/p/mcwhorter

John McWhorter and Yascha Mounk discuss whether “wokeness” is a religion and how it affects black Americans.

John McWhorter is an author, a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors, a Columbia University linguist, and a columnist for The New York Times. His latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, argues that we must understand wokeness, quite literally, as a religion.

In this week’s conversation, John McWhorter and Yascha Mounk discuss the nature of today’s social progressivism, whether it constitutes a religion, and how we can actually help to reduce racial disparities in the United States.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: What is the unifying principle of the body of thought that is, for lack of a better word, called “woke”?

John McWhorter: There’s a certain kind of person who feels that we should focus our intellectual, moral and artistic endeavors on battling power differentials, especially where white people are the ones in power. To the extent that you are not on board with that being the very center of things, you deserve to be hounded out of polite society, you should lose your job, you should be excoriated in public, you should be treated in an uncivil way in the same way as someone who was an advocate for say, pedophilia would be. These are people who are putting forth a very interesting but fragile proposition that battling power differentials should be the center of everything, rather than, say, one of ten things that should concern you.

The idea is that there is something called “whiteness”, for one, and that we’re talking about white power over people who aren’t. There’s also an idea that being a cis straight person is a kind of power that’s constantly misused. And you could argue that that’s definitely true. I think that in terms of our reckoning, though, since roughly May of 2020, an awful lot of it has been the whiteness issue. And the idea is that whites have always been in power and have abused it, and that our focus must be on decentering that power by any means necessary.