RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-would-we-do-without-experts-11625092784?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

It’s getting harder to believe Dr. Anthony Fauci’s claim that his government agency never funded “gain-of-function” research to engineer new viruses at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Meanwhile, Thursday brings a timely reminder of who ultimately oversees that lab in Wuhan.

It’s the Chinese Communist Party, which this week celebrates its 100th anniversary. Lowlights along the way include the killing of tens of millions of Chinese citizens in the 1950s and ’60s. The party’s current governance is also not without its flaws.

The Journal’s James Areddy writes:

A former Chinese Communist Party academic, now a critic of the regime, is urging the U.S. to abandon “naive” hopes to engage with Beijing, while warning that the country’s leadership is more fragile than it appears.
In a forthcoming paper timed to the party’s centennial Thursday, Cai Xia, a former professor at Beijing’s Central Party School, says that four decades of U.S. bridge-building has merely entrenched a Chinese leadership inherently hostile to the U.S. And under President Xi Jinping, China no longer finds engagement useful, Ms. Cai wrote.
“Wishful thinking about ‘engagement’ must be replaced by hardheaded defensive measures to protect the United States from the CCP’s aggression—while bringing offensive pressures to bear on it, as the Chinese Communist Party is much more fragile than Americans assume,” Ms. Cai wrote. Her 28-page paper is slated for publication this week by the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank at Stanford University.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nihs-diversity-obsession-subverts-science-11625090811?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The National Institutes of Health supports a multidisciplinary neuroscience initiative to expand understanding of the brain. Research applications include treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and depression. On June 10, NIH director Francis Collins announced a new requirement for participating in the brain initiative. Neurologists, molecular biologists and nanophysicists seeking NIH funding must now submit a plan showing how they will “enhance diverse perspectives” throughout their research. Scores on the “plan for enhancing diverse perspectives” will inform funding decisions.

This new requirement is part of Dr. Collins’s continuing effort to atone for what he calls biomedical science’s “stain” of “structural racism.” The NIH already supports more than 60 “diversity and inclusion initiatives,” but those have apparently failed to eradicate NIH’s own “systemic and structural racism.”

Each “plan for enhancing diverse perspectives” must show how the principal investigator will “empower” individuals from groups “traditionally underrepresented” in biomedical research, such as blacks, the disabled, women and the poor. Institutions are also covered by the diversity mandate. Researchers working on an NIH neuroscience grant should be drawn from institutions that are traditionally underrepresented in biomedical research, including “community-based” organizations.

Dr. Collins provided no evidence for “structural racism” other than demographic data on NIH’s grant applicants and recipients. Black applicants are “present in far fewer numbers compared with their representation in the US population, 13.4%,” according to Dr. Collins’s announcement. In 2020 black scientists made up 2.3% of the 30,061 funding applications the NIH received. Less than 2% of NIH grants go to black principal investigators.

To Dr. Collins and his academic peers, such disparities are virtually irrefutable evidence of discrimination, though grant reviewers don’t see an applicant’s race. But the use of population data as a benchmark for assessing institutional racism ignores racial disparities in academic skills, achievement and study practices that the NIH didn’t cause and couldn’t possibly do anything to remedy.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/06/30/is_the_cdc_still_relevant_783507.html

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the premier federal agency in charge of scientific public health research and information dispersal. It is a large, bureaucratic organization with a budget last year of $11.1 billion. For more than a year it has been the leading voice for COVID-19 recommendations and requirements for Americans.

The CDC is supposed to base those recommendations on scientific research, yet over the past 15 months it has been extremely slow in updating those recommendations as the science about COVID-19 advances. As a result, the agency is losing its credibility with the American public.

When the pandemic broke out in the United States, the CDC focused on the potential of surface contact transmission. It said hand sanitizers were the primary weapons to combat the viral spread. In March, 2020, the CDC said masks were not recommended for the general public. One month later, the CDC reversed course completely and virtually required masks for any activity outside the home. It wasn’t until May 2021 that the CDC actually admitted that the virus was spread by aerosolized particles and that surface spread was negligible.

The CDC also forced Americans to eliminate nearly all social and economic activities and quarantine at home. Businesses shut down, schools closed, teaching went virtual, and all “non-essential” interactions were banned. This was in spite of the real science data that showed by the summer of 2020 that there were categories of people who were at high risk for catching the virus and dying and that large segments of society are at very low risk. It became very clear that the elderly and those people with medical conditions such as high blood pressure and obesity were most susceptible to the virus. Yet the CDC did not differentiate between those people at high risk and those who had a very low probability of a serious illness. All Americans were essentially treated the same by the agency.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/30/incremental_outrageousness_is_killing_america_146008.html

Critical race theory has exploded into public consciousness. Millions of American parents are just coming to realize that our schools have become woke indoctrination centers preaching divisiveness, bigotry, discrimination, and disdain for American history. Most of them are wondering how we got here.

The answer is simple: Slowly. Incrementally. One step after another, over the course of decades. It’s hardly just K-12 education. An incentive system of “incremental outrageousness” has taken every aspect of American culture dangerously far from reality into the orgy of radical leftist hatred known as progressivism.

How did it happen without anyone noticing?

Turns out, we’ve reached the endgame of a strategy the radical left put in play in the 1960s: the long march through the institutions. The onslaught began in higher education—an institution particularly well suited for a takeover because it functions without external market signals. Success in academia hinges entirely on peer approval. Faculty members make all decisions concerning the hiring, firing, and promotion of junior colleagues, curriculum design, publication in prestigious journals, the appropriate paths for research, and the availability of public and private research funding.

The surest way to succeed as an academic is thus to flatter the senior folks charged with making decisions about your career. The best way to do that (within the bounds of legality and propriety) is to “build upon” their work—that is, by taking it one step further in the recommended direction. Senior academics select the direction. Junior academics bolster the prestige of their seniors whenever they make a new “scientific discovery” along the designated path. In one fell swoop these junior academics show how important past work has been and tie their own egos, prestige, and careers to those of their seniors.

This process calcifies conventional wisdom while divorcing each new “discovery” from everything other than the step that immediately preceded it. Each small step in the approved direction represents a small step away from the reality that originally grounded it.

Incremental outrageousness. Consider, for example, the well-grounded observation that it might be worthwhile to study history from the perspective of the peasants and/or the conquered rather than of royalty and/or the victorious.  Fast-forward a few decades and many incremental steps. Now, perspective implies sympathy; those who study the oppressed are compassionate, while those who study the oppressors are cruel. Fast-forward a few more decades. Critical theory reduces all human interactions into conflicts between oppressors and oppressed.