RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://americanmind.org/salvo/modern-sciences-broken-bargain/

It’s up to us to ensure progress serves our ends.

The founding manifesto of the modern scientific enterprise—Vannevar Bush’s 1945 classic Science: The Endless Frontier—laid down a promise: that federalizing the academic sciences would protect the universities as bastions of free inquiry and curiosity-driven research. Without such support, Bush argued, the academic sciences would be captured and enslaved by government and corporate political interests. That argument was persuasive to the political authorities of the time. Now, seven decades later, that promise stands broken. Science’s “endless frontier” has become Big Science, a self-aggrandizing cartel organized around the aggressive pursuit of federal money.

Science is grounded in Enlightenment virtues. Its core attributes are unfettered freedom of intellect; cultivation of curiosity; skepticism; dispassionate reason; and dedication to evidence. A robust modern science immensely enriches our society. In return, our society affords the sciences enormous privilege and prestige. This mutually beneficial bargain held for many generations. Scientists were free to roam the intellectual frontiers, the public mostly watched from a respectful distance, and both science and society flourished. That bargain is now unraveling, damaging both science and the society that supports it.

Less and less do the sciences serve as bulwarks of reason against political and corporatist aims. To the contrary, the sciences are becoming stridently politicized, acting as a vanguard for an authoritarianism of “expertise”. Increasingly, science is being used as a cloak to shield political agendas from normal scrutiny and debate, thereby betraying the scientific ideal.

These trends, and the reasons for them, are not hard to discern. Scientists’ careers are no longer charted by the esteem of peers, but increasingly by conformity to institutional and political interests. The natural immunity of tenure, which is intended to protect university scientists’ intellectual freedom, is being systematically gutted. Adhering to science’s core virtues, listed above, is becoming a career hazard. In the face of this, fellow scientists either remain silent, or become eager participants in a masquerade of “consensus.” Public trust in science, which turns on the common perception that scientists are avatars of dispassionate and independent inquiry, is becoming increasingly tattered. The COVID-19 spectacle is demonstrating just how fragile that public trust is.

https://reason.com/2021/12/20/against-faucism/

Last week, the CEOs of American Airlines and Southwest Airlines told Congress that they do not think mask requirements make much sense on airplanes, where the air filtration systems are superior to what is typically found in an intensive care unit.

“I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment,” said Gary Kelly, CEO of Southwest. “It is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.”

Unwilling to let anyone undermine the case for keeping a government mandate in place, White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci threw cold water on the idea.

“You have to be wearing a mask on a plane,” he said bluntly on television Sunday.

When ABC News’ Jon Karl asked Fauci specifically if he thought we would ever reach the point where we did not need to wear masks on planes, he responded: “I don’t think so. I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step when you have people—you know, you get a flight from Washington to San Francisco, it’s well over a five-hour flight. Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.”

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/abigail-shrier-on-freedom-in-an-age

A few weeks ago, my friend Abigail Shrier—who you surely remember from this essay or this investigation—was invited to give a speech at Princeton. Abigail is the author of “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” a bestselling book that, for obvious reasons, is also a lightning rod.

This being a college campus in 2021, you can imagine what happened next. The event was moved off campus. It was limited to 35 people. And the police were called in because of threats.

But despite the limited audience, Shrier’s message that night was loud and clear: don’t buckle in the face of the mobs. Don’t become a sock puppet to your institution or employer or social circle. Tell the truth. Speak your mind. Reclaim your freedom.

It’s a speech that deserves to be heard by as many people—especially young people—as possible. So today, we share it with all of you in the hopes that you’ll pass it along.

And if you’d rather listen to Abigail read it, just click here:

…….

The question I get most often—the thing that most interviewers want to know, even when they’re pretending to care about more high-minded things—is:  What’s it like to be so hated? I can only assume that’s what some of you rubberneckers want to know as well: What’s it like to be on a GLAAD black list? What’s it like to have top ACLU lawyers come out in favor of banning your book? What’s it like to have prestigious institutions disavow you as an alum? What’s it like to lose the favor of the fancy people who once claimed you as their own?

So, perhaps I’ll begin by telling you a little bit about myself mainly because I’m not so different from many of you.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-courts-covid-vaccine-test-sixth-circuit-osha-mandate-11640034808?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Justice Antonin Scalia famously wrote that Congress doesn’t hide elephants in mouseholes. But that’s essentially what a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals majority said Congress did late Friday when they lifted a stay on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccinate mandate.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last month stayed OSHA’s “emergency temporary standard” after finding the agency exceeded its legal authority by requiring that employees of private employers with 100 or more workers be vaccinated or tested weekly. The Biden Administration appealed to the Sixth Circuit, where numerous other lawsuits were consolidated.

Judges Julia Smith Gibbons and Jane Branstetter Stranch rescued the mandate by deferring to the Administration. They say Congress gave OSHA the power to issue emergency orders to protect workers from “grave dangers.” The Labor Secretary merely must find “that employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents” that are toxic or physically harmful and that an “emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger.”

Covid meets the dictionary definition of an “agent,” the majority says, ergo OSHA can issue its mandate. The majority also says new variants support OSHA’s determination that Covid still poses a grave danger, and it is not “appropriate to second-guess that agency determination considering the substantial evidence, including many peer-reviewed scientific studies, on which it relied.”

But the question the judges are asked to decide isn’t whether Covid is a grave danger, as Judge Joan Larsen explains in her potent dissent. The question is whether OSHA acted within the law as written by Congress. It certainly didn’t as we read the law.

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

The Biden Pentagon is obsessed with “extremism.” The moment Lloyd Austin was confirmed as Biden’s Defense Secretary, he put the entire military on a 60-day stand down to purge “extremism” in the ranks. Apparently, that stand down was ineffective because Austin is back again, this time with new rules that are again meant to counter “extremism” by preventing troops from engaging in “extremist” activities. The wise and/or paranoid among us believe that those new rules are an effort to clear the ranks of conservatives, especially Trump supporters (and, I bet, DeSantis supporters).

Ostensibly, the newly issued rules for “handling protest, extremist, and criminal gang activities in the Armed Forces,” state some obvious things that troops aren’t allowed to do, such as political violence, supporting terrorism, etc. These general descriptions of bad things allow the Pentagon enormous leeway in penalizing troops who have political views that are inconsistent with the Biden administration’s goals. We already know that, for help figuring out what extremists are, the Pentagon relies on the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hard-left organization that defines anything that’s not leftist as terrorist or extremist.

We also know that the obsession that requires a whole new set of rules is inconsistent with the current data about actual “extremism” in the ranks. Although the U.S. military has around 1.3 million active-duty personal, the AP article breaking the news about the rule changes concedes that only about 0.008% of the military is official “extremist”:

According to the Pentagon, fewer than 100 military members are known to have been involved in substantiated cases of extremist activity in the past year. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/three_retired_generals_loudly_demand_a_military_coup_in_2024.html

Democrats claim that democracy is under attack in America and Democrats must act decisively to protect it. They’ve been trying to end the filibuster, nationalize voting, and pack the Supreme Court. The most ominous “fix,” which hinges on the myth of a “January 6 Insurrection,” sees retired generals argue that the military must purge the ranks of Trump supporters and prepare for a military coup to block a future contested election. This is unconstitutional, illegal, and spells the end of American democracy.

Victor Davis Hanson notes that leftists are loudly worrying about democracy’s end while ignoring all they’ve done to end democracy, such as bringing in millions of illegal aliens, many of whom are being given the vote; destroying centuries-old governing traditions such as the filibuster; packing the court; ending the Electoral College; and more.

If Democrats can kill the Senate filibuster (and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema is the only thing stopping them, not the craven Senator Mitch McConnell), they have the unfettered ability to enshrine vote fraud and pack the Supreme Court. The latter move spells the final—and deeply unconstitutional—progressive rewrite of our Constitution, and ends our constitutional republic.

The wild card in all of this, though, is what would the military do if, in fact, the progressives were able to achieve these goals (or even if they weren’t). Three retired officers have signaled that they want to purge the military of Trump supporters, and then plan a takeover of the military and related federal agencies that coordinate with the military to effect a coup in 2024. Considering the current state of the Pentagon, this may be more than a progressive fantasy.

Thirty years ago, when I was a U.S. Army Infantry Officer, our military was unquestionably a politically neutral, colorblind institution. It was the single most well-integrated institution in our nation and, indeed, was the primary engine integrating our nation.  But progressives have done everything they can to turn the military into a dysfunctional machine warped by racial, sexual, and gender identity divisions. This began with Obama, who injected the toxic myth of white supremacy and the tenets of critical race theory.