RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-miss-for-politicized-science-the-lancet-roe-v-wade-abortion-supreme-court-samuel-alito-11652480176?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The public’s confidence in scientific institutions has suffered greatly during Covid-19 as lockdowns and mask mandates outlived the underlying evidence. Don’t expect that to improve as an ostensibly prestigious medical journal tries to politicize medicine with an editorial denouncing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

The Lancet exhorts this week that, “The fact is that if the US Supreme Court confirms its draft decision” overturning Roe v. Wade, “women will die. The Justices who vote to strike down Roe will not succeed in ending abortion, they will only succeed in ending safe abortion. Alito and his supporters will have women’s blood on their hands.”

Allow us to offer some peer editorial review. The Court’s draft decision doesn’t end abortion in America. It returns the question to the states, where the public and elected representatives would debate and vote.

Many states would continue to allow the procedure throughout pregnancy. Some may ban it in most instances. Others would likely end up closer to where public opinion is: Allowing abortion early in pregnancy and in certain instances later, such as cases of rape or when the life of the mother is compromised.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-disagreement-became-disinformation-misinformation-nina-jankowicz-governance-board-czar-11652450632?mod=trending_now_opn_2

The preoccupation with “misinformation” and “disinformation” on the part of America’s enlightened influencers last month reached the level of comedy. The Department of Homeland Security chose a partisan scold, Nina Jankowicz, to head its new Disinformation Governance Board despite her history of promoting false stories and repudiating valid ones—the sort of scenario only a team of bumblers or a gifted satirist could produce.

Less funny but similarly paradoxical was Barack Obama’s April 21 address lamenting online disinformation, in which he propounded at least one easily disprovable assertion. Tech companies, the former president said, “should be working with, not always contrary to, those groups that are trying to prevent voter suppression [that] specifically has targeted black and brown communities.” There is no evidence of voter suppression in “black and brown communities” and plenty of evidence of the contrary, inasmuch as black and Latino voter participation reached record levels in the 2020 election.

One of the great ironies of American political life in the 2020s is that the people most exercised about the spread of false information are frequently peddlers of it. Their lack of self-understanding arises from the belief that the primary factor separating their side from the other side isn’t ideology, principle or moral vision but information—raw data requiring no interpretation and no argument over its importance. It is a hopelessly simpleminded worldview—no one apprehends reality without the aid of interpretive lenses. And it is a dangerous one.

The roots of this self-deceiving outlook are complicated but worth a brief look.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/05/13/teleworking_members_of_congress_cost_taxpayers_70_million_since_start_of_pandemic_830922.html

While President Joe Biden urged “Americans to get back to work” and said “people working from home can feel safe to begin to return to the office” Democratic members of Congress think that doesn’t apply to them, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The news outlet reveals how a large number of Congressional offices continue to sit empty in Washington D.C., ostensibly because of Covid-19. We estimate that these closed offices cost American taxpayers $139,548 each day.

The Free Beacon reports that “dozens” of House offices sat vacant on the day of their visit in March, with signs informing visitors that staff was teleworking. They also reported 12 vacant Senate offices.

Each House office is given about $944,671 per year to cover administrative expenses and pay its’ staff’s salaries. The Senate’s allocation is based on the size of the Senator’s state, but the average allocation is roughly $3.3 million.

That comes out to $2,588 per day per House office, and $9,041 per day per Senate office. That totals $31,056 per day, with a very conservative estimate of 12 House offices working from home, and $108,492 for the 12 Senate offices working virtually.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/midge-the-magnificent/

I first met Midge Decter during the mid-1980s through neoconservative publishing circles in New York, a world as distant from today’s as it was, in turn, from the time of the Second World War. Though no one back then knew it, those years would turn out to be the sunset of the so-called small magazines, and with it, the end of the New York intellectuals—whose ranks, ironically, we had all moved there to join. “We” were a tight band of interns and journeymen, orbiting around small but influential journals like The Public Interest and Commentary, the American Spectator and The New Criterion, wider venues like the Wall Street Journal, Time, and book publishing houses, and other places where thinking and scribbling helped to pay the rent.

Back then, before the internet ushered in the Götterdämmerung of many things literary, those felt like glory days. This was true above all for the young men and women who had landed in these places by dint of political contrarianism—especially those recently graduated from elite campuses, where political conformity had pushed them out of stifling academia, and into the freer intellectual life of Manhattan. “In New York you can be a new man,” goes a rap in Hamilton, and that’s exactly what young, lower-case new-right types felt in the city during the mid-1980s. At that moment, Reaganism had surpassed punk for cool, and neoconservatism in its classic sense—meliorative, questioning, bookish—was ascendant, and spreading.

Beyond politics, our band also enjoyed a personal network tighter and more welcoming than most young writers today can imagine. We had access to influential thinkers and doers. We enjoyed entrée to magazines and journals in which we could stretch out our thoughts at muscle-building length—not in “750 words or under,” as is depressingly usual now. We had freedom to voice opinions that had been scolded or forbidden on the quad. We had mentors like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz and Gertrude Himmelfarb. And we were graced by something else just as rare: indomitable, luminous, rascally Midge Decter.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/garland-vs-parents-11652388388?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

“Even beyond the question of Mr. Garland’s candor in his testimony to Congress, is there any way to look at this re-engineering of Justice priorities as anything other than partisan, ideological and threatening to liberty?This column may have to make it an annual habit to express gratitude to the man who kept Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court.”

How far has the U.S. Department of Justice gone to investigate parents who were angry with local school boards and administrators? A new report from two Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee suggests that federal powers are being misused just as First Amendment defenders feared.

Readers may recall the revelations that came to light last fall. A Journal editorial noted in October:

It took a few weeks, but the National School Boards Association has apologized for sending a letter to President Biden suggesting that “threats and acts of violence” at school board meetings might be “domestic terrorism.” The NSBA now admits there was “no justification for some of the language included in the letter,” which could have parents investigated under the Patriot Act for trying to influence what their children are taught.
The retraction comes after tremendous blowback. First came parents at school board meetings with T-shirts saying “Parents are not domestic terrorists.” Then 21 state school board associations distanced themselves from the letter. The Ohio, Missouri and Pennsylvania state associations cut ties altogether.
It turns out that when Chip Slaven, the NSBA interim executive director and CEO, and president Viola Garcia sent the letter, they did so without consulting their own board. But according to one of Mr. Slaven’s emails, they did work with White House staff.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/13/the-democrats-war-on-children/

Democrats often like to preface policy debates with phrases like “it’s about the children,” as if such patronizing mantras could sanctify even the worst ideas. The sad truth, however, is that one look at what the Dems have done since 2020 shows their real concerns are anything but the children.

From abortion to school shutdowns to runaway inflation to baby-food shortages, seemingly everything the Dems do these days has an adverse effect on children. After all, they control Congress and the White House.

To take the most egregious example, look at the just-defeated deceptively titled Women’s Health Protection Act, which had unanimous support from Democrats, with one brave exception: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who voted against it.

For public consumption, Democrats claimed the bill was a self-defense against the expected overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark that made abortion an American right, even though there’s no mention of that in the Constitution.

It wasn’t. The Democrats’ bill went much further, in essence making abortion legal all the way up to delivery. It was infant-murder-on-demand legislation, having nothing to do with so-called “therapeutic” abortions for medical purposes or women’s health.

It was also the most anti-child law imaginable. The truth is, 29 states already allow full-term abortions for nearly any reason at all. The congressional bill simply would have forced the other 21 states to do the same.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.co

Apart from the final seventeen months of the Woodrow Wilson Administration, when the President suffered a stroke, we have never had a President appear unable to carry out his responsibilities – until now. To be honest, that assessment of Mr. Biden, while I believe it to be true, is based on observation rather than empirical evidence. In the case of President Wilson, the cover-up of his infirmities was due to his doctor, Cary Grayson and his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. Dr. Grayson did brief Wilson’s cabinet and the question of succession arose, but the doctor refused to sign any official notice of inability, so Vice President Thomas Marshall remains a footnote, and the Presidency was allegedly managed by Mrs. Wilson.

At 78, Mr. Biden became the oldest person to be inaugurated President, eight years older than Donald Trump and nine years older than Ronald Reagan. In both cases, political opponents called into question their mental acuity; so, it is unsurprising that concerns for Mr. Biden have been raised. Four years and ten months after leaving office, Mr. Reagan sent a letter to the American people telling them he was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. In the summer of 2018, eighteen months after taking office, Mr. Trump took (and passed) the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test. Thus far, Mr. Biden has refused to take a similar test.

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/faucis-royalties-and-the-350-million?utm_source=/profile/24758236-adam-andrzejewski&utm_medium=reader2&s=w

Last year, the National Institutes of Health – Anthony Fauci’s employer – doled out $30 billion in government grants to roughly 56,000 recipients. That largess of taxpayer money buys a lot of favor and clout within the scientific, research, and healthcare industries.

However, in our breaking investigation, we found hundreds of millions of dollars in payments also flow the other way. These are royalty payments from third-party payers (think pharmaceutical companies) back to the NIH and individual NIH scientists.

We estimate that between fiscal years 2010 and 2020, more than $350 million in royalties were paid by third-parties to the agency and NIH scientists – who are credited as co-inventors.

Because those payments enrich the agency and its scientists, each and every royalty payment could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure.

Recently, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com forced NIH to disclose over 22,100 royalty payments totaling nearly $134 million paid to the agency and nearly 1,700 NIH scientists. These payments occurred during the most recently available period (September 2009 – September 2014).