RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/01/dr-scott-atlas-science-killed-itself-over-covid-19/

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American people have been told to “follow the science.” Yet for a year and a half, they’ve heard contradicting messages from self-appointed prophets of “the science” like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We learned that politicians who claimed their decisions were science-driven often ignored scientific findings that didn’t fit certain political narratives. We discovered that scientists are fallible human beings, and some would let personal interests and political views cloud their judgment.

Is science itself one of the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic? I asked Dr. Scott Atlas at the 13th annual Freedom Conference hosted by the Steamboat Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization. Formerly a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, Atlas is now a senior fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institution.

Atlas has been under constant attacks by the left and the corporate media since he served as a special adviser to former President Trump and a member of the White House coronavirus task force from August to November 2020. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran hit pieces on Atlas, questioning his qualifications despite his distinguished career and scholarship.

Google-owned YouTube also removed a 50-minute video of Atlas’s interview with the Hoover Institute. Twitter took down his tweet that questioned the effectiveness of masks.

‘Science’ Destroyed Its Own Credibility

Atlas has refused to be silenced. He has a lot to say about how the scientific field and Americans’ trust in it have been tremendously harmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Science has been not just a victim,” he told me, “but actively participated in the self-destruction of its credibility.”

To prove his point, Atlas referred to the now infamous letter published in Lancet, which denounced the lab-leak theory as a “conspiracy” that created “fear, rumors, and prejudice.” Facebook “fact-checkers” used the letter to censor discussion of the lab-leak theory for more than a year.

It then surfaced in The Daily Mail that Peter Daszak, president of Eco Health Alliance, orchestrated a group of scientists to write the letter without disclosing the EHA’s close financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Now many scientists accept that the WIV lab-leak theory is just as probable as the natural origin theory.

Atlas also faulted leading scientific publications such as Nature and Lancet for playing “important roles in enabling, encouraging, and enforcing the false narrative.” In June, journalist Ian Birrell cited one source who estimated the publisher of Nature had sponsorship agreements worth millions of dollars from Chinese institutions.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/08/31/biden-administration-erased-afghan-weapons-reports-from-federal-websites/?sh=3cd7779f16ba

The War in Afghanistan has always been a black box, but the Biden administration just made matters worse.

According to an admission obtained from the State Department, Biden officials recently directed federal agencies to scrub their websites of official reports detailing the $82.9 billion in military equipment and training provided to the Afghan security forces since 2001.

The scrubbed audits and reports included detailed accounting of what the U.S. had provided to Afghan forces, down to the number of night vision devices, hand grenades, Black Hawk helicopters, and armored vehicles.

Reports further quantified 208 aircraft and helicopters; 75,000 war vehicles – including 22 Humvees, 50,000 tactical vehicles and nearly 1,000 mine resistant vehicles; and 600,000 weapons – including 350,000 M4 and M16 rifles, 60,000 machine guns, and 25,000 grenade launchers.

The State Department admitted to removing the reports but justified the move as a way to protect Afghan allies. According to a spokesperson:

“The safety of our Afghan contacts is of utmost importance to us. The State Department advised other federal agencies of to [sic] review their web properties for content that highlights cooperation/participation between an Afghan citizen and the USG or a USG partner and remove from public view if it poses a security risk.”

It’s worth noting that the Biden administration already put these partners at risk when officials provided lists of Afghan nationals to the Taliban in a misguided attempt to clear them for evacuation. The Taliban, a known terrorist organization with a history of murdering Afghan citizens working alongside U.S. forces, should never have been trusted with those names.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/31/follow-the-science-toward-tyranny/

Modern science as a discipline carries within itself the seeds of tyrannical rule, for the scientific method requires controlled experiments. But human beings want to be free and reject rules they did not create. Applied directly to society, the methods of natural science would destroy the ways of a free nation.

Of course free men and women use science to uncover knowledge and apply it to improve the human condition. Today the crucial distinction between following science and using it is lost on people and politicians. Without observing that difference, Americans might readily confuse their need for science with a dangerous embrace of the tyranny it demands when imprudently applied to human behavior.

Now comes the U.S. Supreme Court espying tyranny in a bureaucratic Center for Disease Control (CDC) regulation preposterously claiming to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Perhaps the court caught some anti-tyranny virus, for just 48 hours before, it denied the bureaucracy the ability to preserve and enhance the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program—which allows “Dreamers” to remain in the United States illegally and indefinitely. Whatever the epidemiology of its jurisprudence, the court’s unsigned per curiam opinion in Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS has exposed the tyranny of the administrative state. Both the CDC and the DACA examples illustrate the extent to which the federal government is governed not by an elected congress or president, or even the unelected courts but by the administrative state, the nexus of bureaucracy, academia, and media that effectively rules America on behalf of increasingly leftist policies. 

The allegedly anti-COVID regulation is quicker to analyze and ridicule and better illustrates the vices of the administrative state.

First, the CDC justification for regulation of any activity that might contribute to the spread of disease rests on one assertion: because COVID. But government agencies must justify their powers on the basis of a law. In this instance, the court declared, “It strains credulity to believe that this [1944] statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.”  Specifically, the CDC “has imposed a nationwide moratorium on [housing] evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination.”  

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/tech_tyrants_elevate_biden_to_dear_leader_status_with_criticism_forbidden.html

Shana Chappell, whose son U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui was murdered in Afghanistan thanks to the Biden administration’s fecklessness, took to social media to say exactly what she thought of Biden, including questioning the legitimacy of his presidency. It was classic free speech of the type the First Amendment protects…so Instagram (which Facebook owns) suspended her. It later reinstated her, assuring that it was all a mistake when we all know that the only mistake was that Facebook/Instagram got caught. The mere fact that Facebook/Instagram took this step — and thought it could get away with it — is a perfect example of the fact that the Tech Tyrants are functioning in the same way as North Korean censors, banning any speech critical of the “Dear Leader” and his policies.

Kareem Nikoui was a young man who wanted to serve his country and his family was proud of him for that. Had he died in battle at Bagram Air Force Base defending American interests, they would have wept for his loss but consoled themselves with the thought that he died for the greater good.

Thanks to the Biden administration’s criminally bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, though, Kareem Nikoui did not die serving his country. Instead, he was murdered because the Biden administration, having deliberately handed Kabul over to the Taliban, made the Taliban—America’s enemy—responsible for security around the Kabul airport:

In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha—including McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command—spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar. “We have a problem,” Baradar said, according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”

Throughout the day, Biden had remained resolute in his decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan. The collapse of the Afghan government hadn’t changed his mind. McKenzie, aware of those orders, told Baradar that the U.S. mission was only to evacuate American citizens, Afghan allies and others at risk. The United States, he told Baradar, needed the airport to do that.