RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2022/01/26/cdc-covid-messaging-problems-fauci-rochelle-walensky/6563468001/?gnt-cfr=1

CDC chief Rochelle Walensky seeks professional coaching, but public needs more than sleek image. Not hyping threats or demonizing skeptics is a start

Americans don’t trust their public health experts, a serious problem in the best of times but downright dangerous amid a pandemic. Just 44% of Americans trust in the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, while only 40% trust Dr. Anthony Fauci (the nation’s point man on all things COVID) according to an NBC News survey conducted this month. Trust in politicians is even lower.

It’s perfectly understandable why Americans feel this way. At all levels, our public health agencies have been using contradicting claims and supposition masquerading as fact. And it’s not hard to diagnose the root of the problem. To quote the Captain’s speech in “Cool Hand Luke,” “what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Trust and public health

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-college-couldnt-get-away-bidens-high-court-criteria-supreme-court-racial-preferences-justice-breyer-11643236096?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The announcement of Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement has whistled the start of that Washington blood sport known as a Supreme Court confirmation. While the filibuster-free process guarantees President Joe Biden that he has the votes to pick anyone acceptable to all Senate Democrats, this fight is different from any in history in one respect. As a candidate, Mr. Biden pledged to select the next justice first and foremost on race and sex.

“I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a black woman on the Supreme Court, to make sure we, in fact, get every representation,” he said in a South Carolina debate. This reportedly helped win him the key endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip.

With the court set to rule on racial preferences in college admissions, it raises the question of whether it is appropriate for a politician to use a criterion that the court itself has found unconstitutional for public educational institutions and unlawful for businesses.

It also means Mr. Biden’s short list will be much shorter than usual. The three leading candidates are Justice Leondra Krueger of the California Supreme Court, U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and U.S. District Judge Michelle Childs. These are all worthy candidates who could have been considered for any vacancy without declaring that they were qualified by virtue of filling a quota—an unfortunate implication for the ultimate nominee.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-problem-with-holocaust-trivialization

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could … cross the Alps into Switzerland,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a Washington rally this week to protest vaccine mandates. “You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did.”

Kennedy’s suggestion that people suffer more from vaccine mandates than the victims of Adolf Hitler’s reign is particularly disturbing. Holocaust “trivialization,” comparing other events to the Holocaust and thereby minimizing its significance, is not just morally reprehensible — it also complicates U.S. efforts to confront such global challenges as making peace, promoting human rights, and eradicating a pandemic.

Holocaust trivialization is inherently polarizing. Once one side of an issue accuses its opponents of a Holocaust-like action, the two sides retreat to their corners, far more inclined to fight than seek common ground. When protesters in London, Paris, and elsewhere last May compared Israel to Nazi Germany and suggested that it was conducting a Holocaust against the Palestinians, that further complicated efforts to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Over-the-top disparagement of the Jewish state also diverts global attention from the truly despicable human rights abuses by, for instance, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, which holds hundreds of thousands of people in internment camps; Xi Jinping’s China, which holds more than a million Muslim Uyghurs in prisons and “reeducation” camps; Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which stamps out any serious political or grassroots challenge to his rule; and Ali Khamenei’s Iran, which imprisons dissidents and treats women and minorities as second-class citizens.