RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/the-mask-debacle

Recent days have witnessed the emergence of a new rift in our pandemic debate. Strikingly, this time the dispute is not just partisan, but also splitting the Democratic Party. While Democratic governors appear to see where political winds are blowing, some blue cities are moving in the opposite direction. And many states that are dropping adult mask mandates are retaining them for kids, resulting in the absurd prospect of indefinite masking for a less vulnerable population for whom masks have more significant downsides.

How did partisan warfare over mask mandates become such a central feature of the pandemic? The familiar answer is that the mask wars are just another symptom of national polarization. When Donald Trump casually denigrated cloth masks as president, the stage was set for a Democratic backlash—turning masks into not just a public health measure, but also a talismanic symbol of virtue signaling on one side and a rallying cry about freedom for the other. But polarization is only part of the story. Mask mandates are a microcosm of a key failure of our pandemic response: the poor climate for public discourse fostered by an elite culture whose overconfidence led to a prolonged strategy of undermining open discussion in a vain attempt to prove that complex questions could have only one universal and immutable answer.

From the beginning of the pandemic, technocratic elites have offered us a dubious bill of goods. Aided and abetted by the media and by many academics, politicians proffered—indeed, likely believed—the idea that the pandemic would go away if everyone just did as they were told. “If everyone wore a mask for two weeks …” became a telltale refrain, a claim that was neither true nor possible. Pundits celebrated President Joe Biden’s ill-fated “hundred days of masking,” which promised “just 100 days to mask, not forever.” This habit of exaggeration and blind optimism among elites helps explain gaffes like Biden’s bizarre claim during his campaign that every single pandemic death could have been averted by better leadership.

https://www.nysun.com/national/us-truckers-gear-up-for-cross-country-anti/92089/

Just as the three-week trucker protest in Canada looks to be fizzling, drivers across the border in America are beginning to ramp up their own demonstration against vaccination requirements and other Covid-related restrictions.

Calling themselves the “People’s Convoy,” the group of U.S. truckers now say they plan to depart Adelanto, California, on February 22 and make their way to the nation’s capital before President Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1.

The organizers have set up a web page and various social media accounts in an effort to raise funds on behalf of the effort, including a Facebook page that has 110,000 followers. An earlier version of the page was removed by the platform for what the company said was violations of its terms of service.

A statement posted Friday to Facebook listed some high-profile supporters, including the anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. and his group Children’s Health Defense, and a former Trump national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

In a video posted on the group’s website, truck driver Mike Landis says the group is hoping to convince the Biden administration to rescind a national state of emergency related to Covid that was extended on February 24, 2021, and is in effect through March 1.

https://www.city-journal.org/eric-lander-ousting-shows-sensitivity-increasingly-trumps-expertise

The best way to understand a society, social anthropologists say, is to start by studying its most bizarre, irrational, and self-defeating practice. If you can figure that out, everything else in the culture begins to make more sense.

In that light, consider President Biden’s firing of his top science advisor, Eric Lander. Lander was engaged in launching a $7.5 billion research agency to apply novel genomic methods to the treatment and reversal of cancer. At a White House press conference on February 2, the president called the agency “a central effort of the Biden-Harris administration.” Its aim, he said, was “to cut the cancer death rate in half in the next 25 years” and with this and other steps “to end cancer as we know it.”

In Lander, the president had an unusually well-qualified executive. Though trained as a mathematician, not a biologist, Lander has built the Broad Institute in Cambridge into a leading research group that has pioneered advanced genomic techniques. He had the special knowledge and managerial competence required to execute Biden’s ambitious anti-cancer program. Yet on February 7, a mere five days after Biden called for halving cancer deaths, Lander was forced to resign over a second-order management issue: that he had treated some of his female staff harshly.

Given all that Lander might have accomplished toward defeating cancer, why would Biden fire him over something so trivial in comparison? The reason has to do with the increasingly vicious tribalization of American politics. When people start to think of themselves as embattled groups, any member of the opposing group is seen as a fair target for assassination. Lander, to the manifest detriment of cancer research, was a victim of tribal warfare prosecuted by radical feminists, a lobby that Biden lacked the courage to challenge.

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/american-celebrity-culture-has-become-exhausting/

How was your Super Bowl party? I spent mine investing all my money in crypto and then blowing it on Peacock subscriptions.

For once it was the commercials that were the most memorable part of the game — not Matthew Stafford’s lightning arm, not even 50 Cent entering the halftime show upside-down like a bat. And that was because every ad was a broadside of celebrities. Not a fan of Bud Light Seltzer? Wait until it’s pitched to you by Guy Fieri and a race of Eloi-like doppelgangers (spoiler: you still won’t be a fan of Bud Light Seltzer). And how can I not order Uber Eats after watching Gwyneth Paltrow smell her own vagina candle while Trevor Noah eats deodorant?

I’m old enough to remember when movie stars starred in movies; now they’re hawking Doritos and cheap flights to Istanbul. Welcome to the most annoying feature of modern American life: everyone is a celebrity now. Well, not everyone. Maybe just half the country — 165 million out of 330 million sounds about right. Either way, the days when we quaintly referred to “celebrity culture” are past; it’s just “culture” now.

The United States has always had an appreciation for fame. George Washington was arguably our first real celebrity, the beloved hero of the Revolution, the man who could have been king if he’d wanted. Before him, Benjamin Franklin had achieved fame of a sort thanks to his epigrammatic Poor Richard’s Almanack, one of the most popular books in the American colonies. Afterward came Andrew Jackson, who rode into the White House on his reputation as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans.