RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/epistle-paul-washingtonians-lloyd-billing

In a recent hearing, Sen. Rand Paul called out Dr. Anthony Fauci for smearing the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, distinguished medical scientists from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford, as “fringe epidemiologists.” Fauci and NIH boss Francis Collins had “orchestrated a takedown campaign” instead of debating the facts.

“Dr. Fauci doesn’t want to debate,” Paul said. “He wants to squelch debate because ‘he is science’. If you criticize him, you’re criticizing science.” That prompted Paul to author a Fox News commentary in which he cited Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom.

“Most scientists realize that we cannot plan the advance of knowledge, that in the voyage into the unknown—which is what research is—we are in great measure dependent on the vagaries of individual genius and of circumstance, and that scientific advance, like a new idea that will spring up in a single mind, will be the result of a combination of conceptions, habits, and circumstances brought to one person by society, the result as much of lucky accidents as of systematic effort.”

In other words, Paul explained, “the benefits of scientific progress are only realized if science is free from excessive restraint” and “the same arguments against central planning for an economy also hold for science.” When a central planner errs, “the entire economy is threatened.  Likewise, when a central medical planner errs, all patients are threatened.”

According to Paul, Dr. Fauci’s “fundamental decision to ignore natural immunity has led to a cascade of bad decisions, the effects of which have seeped into all of our lives.”  Long before the current pandemic, Fauci authorized secretive trials of toxic drugs such as AZT on foster children in New York City.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/01/23/bari-weiss-smackdown-on-covid-restrictions-sets-twitter-ablaze-n511172

There’s no doubt that Bill Maher is a liberal. But he’s an unusual liberal, for these times, who will recognize certain truths and allow them to be aired on his show, “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
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As we noted on Saturday, Maher took on Justice Sonia Sotomayor for the misinformation she spread about COVID during Supreme Court oral arguments about Biden’s vaccine mandate on private businesses.

But Maher certainly let the genie out of the bottle when he let journalist/podcaster Bari Weiss speak on his show. Weiss used to work for the NY Times before she tossed them over for greater reality.

Weiss didn’t hold back when it came to blasting COVID restrictions, calling what had been done to children in the closing of schools a “catastrophic moral crime.”

“We were told you get the vaccine, you get the vaccine and you get back to normal. And we haven’t gotten back to normal. And it’s ridiculous at this point,” Weiss said. “I know that so many of my liberal and progressive friends are with me on this, and they do not want to say it out loud because they are scared to be called anti-vax or to be called science deniers or to be smeared as a Trumper. I’m sorry, but if you believe the science, you will look at the data that we did not have two years ago, and you will find out that cloth masks do not do anything. You will realize that you can show your vaccine passport at a restaurant and still be asymptomatic in carrying Omicron. And you realize, most importantly, that this will be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.”

https://nypost.com/2022/01/22/nypds-911-log-shows-escalation-of-call-that-left-cop-dead-another-injured/

Records from the NYPD’s emergency call center show how a seemingly routine Friday evening domestic call in Manhattan quickly turned into a deadly situation.

Before Officer Jason Rivera was slain and Officer Wilbert Mora was critically injured by Lashawn McNeil’s .45 Glock, police had little indication that they were walking into an ambush.

The NYPD received a 911 call from Shirley Sourzes, a woman who was having a dispute with her son in a Harlem apartment at 5:09 p.m., according to the call log obtained by The Post.

“HE IS THREATENING TO DO THINGS TO HER,” the log stated. “HE IS IN THE HOUSE NOW.”

But the log indicated the unidentified woman told the dispatcher that no one in the Harlem apartment had a weapon or was injured. McNeil, in fact, was brandishing a gun with an illegal, high-capacity magazine.

Over the next several minutes, dispatchers wrote that the caller said her son was in her home and was “threatening to do things to her.”

For more than an hour, there were no further entries in the log, until a 6:21 record of “SHOTS FIRED” was entered.

Rivera, Mora and a third cop had arrived at 119 West 135th Street’s apartment 1D and spoke to the woman and another one of her sons in the living room before walking down a long narrow hallway to check on McNeil. The alleged killer then swung the door open and opened fire on the officers, according to previous descriptions. He was shot by the third officer as he tried to flee the apartment and remained in critical condition.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/590908-virginias-youngkin-gets-the-desantis-treatment-from-media

He hasn’t been in office for even a week, but Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) is already getting the same treatment from some corners of the media that his Republican counterpart in Florida regularly attracts.

“So much for the silly narrative that Youngkin was some normal R,” wrote Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin to her nearly 650,000 Twitter followers. “As @TerryMcAuliffe predicted, he’s brought DeSantis anti-mask nuttery to VA. Now at war with several school districts. He’s only been in office a few days. Hey, VA this is what you voted for. Best of luck.”

Gov. Youngkin is already proving himself to be a “Trump in fleece clothing,” lamented Monthly magazine contributing editor Anne Kim. “This is not my Virginia.”

“What makes @GlennYoungkin different from other GOP govs who’ve banned mask mandates is the timing — amid the most infectious variant yet, as record numbers of kids are being hospitalized and staffing shortages are crippling schools,” argued NBC’s Heidi Przybyla.

“Hi there. Arlington county parent here (don’t believe you are @GlennYoungkin but correct me if I am wrong). Thank you to @APSVirginia for standing up for our kids, teachers and administrators and their safety in the midst of a transmissible variant,” wrote White House press secretary Jen Psaki to Youngkin.

And despite Virginia exit polls showing that just one in 10 parents say parents should have little or no say over what schools teach, we get headlines like this one from a Washington Post opinion piece, “In catering to selfish parents, Youngkin is failing Virginia’s kids.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/science/2022/01/the-curse-of-scientisms-domining-paradigm/

The last two years have demonstrated the dominance of paradigms in relation to public policy on both the COVID pandemic and climate change. Many years ago, Thomas Samuel Kuhn, in his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that scientific knowledge undergo periodic paradigm shifts. Scientific knowledge, he argued, does not progress linearly and continuously. Scientific truth is not established by objective criteria alone, but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Controversially, Kuhn argued that our understanding of science could not rest on “objectivity” alone.  Science had to take account of subjective perspectives since all objective conclusions were ultimately founded on the subjective world view of researchers and participants.

Like Kuhn, accepting that  scientists can never be truly objective, Karl Popper propounded his central tenet of scientific methodology, “falsifiability”. A hitherto established scientific hypothesis could be invalidated  by even one piece of contradictory evidence.

For Popper, “falsification” was central to the intellectual integrity of the scientific method. Unfortunately, much of the scientific establishment, aided and abetted by governments, has worked to sustain dominant paradigms in the face of contradictory evidence which is simply ignored. Too often, ideology perpetuates paradigms to a point where they become dogma. For example, only research which validates anthropogenic global warming is de facto permitted. Falsification is avoided if the young scientist values his career. So called climate research is about fortifying a preconceived article of faith. So, if the establishment scientist fells the need to cherry-pick the evidence, torture the data and construct pseudo- sophisticated models with inputs, designed to get the correct “ideological” outcome, it is all in a good cause.

What is called, “the science”, has little in common with the scientific method.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/22/the-coming-dethronement-of-joe-biden/

It’s not often that I agree with Joe Biden, but he said something in his nasty, brutish, and long press conference last week with which, if properly understood, I agree. 

Don’t get me wrong. The press conference as a whole was a “total disaster.” Notwithstanding the sycophantic performance of the court eunuchs in the regime media, everybody understands this. (But speaking of “court eunuchs,” what’s the female equivalent? It was Jennifer Rubin, who actually gave Biden an “A-” for the presser, that prompts this vital question and I hope some enterprising savant will contribute the answer.) 

At one point, a reporter, noting a few of the multifarious failures of Biden’s first year in office—runaway inflation; his failure to “shut down the virus”; the smoldering ruin of his legislative agenda; the sharp, persistent partisan divisions that he came to office promising to heal—given all that, the scribe suggested, perhaps Biden had “overpromised.” 

No, no, Biden replied, “I didn’t overpromise, but I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen.” 

Delicious, isn’t it? Peel off and discard the first bit. Biden clearly overpromised. Just utter the word “normalcy” anywhere near the name “Biden” and watch the reaction. But many people jumped all over the second bit. Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), for example, quoted the word “outperformed” and tweeted: “I’m not sure what planet he’s inhabiting but on planet earth his record is a record of failure.” 

That is true. It’s a dismal record of failure, and we’ve only made it through one year. Biden’s even outdone his master, Barack Obama, who before Biden held the world record for worst president in the history of the United States. Biden is far worse, in part, granted, because he continues to follow the blueprint set forth by his clean, elegantly clad predecessor.

But I have to cavil with the idea that Biden has not “outperformed” expectations. He certainly outperformed mine. I didn’t think he would make it through his first year in the White House. But here it is, January 20-something, and the old guy is still in office. Amazing. 

True, there is something of Dr. Johnson’s dog about the whole thing. Presented with the spectacle of female preachers, Samuel Johnson marveled: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

My feelings about Biden are somewhat similar. I have accordingly revised my prediction. I was wrong that Joe Biden wouldn’t make it through his first year. I continue to cling to the conviction he will not remain the occupant of the White House through to the morning of January 20, 2025. The prospect of a second Biden term is, I am convinced, not worth speaking about. In tragedy, Aristotle said, we should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities, but a second Biden term is so improbable as to be well-nigh impossible, and I am not forgetting about what a tragedy such an eventuality would entail for the country and the world. Even CNN seems to be coming around to this realization.

If I am even remotely correct about this, Biden’s situation presents the unnamed committee who actually runs the presidency with a huge and delicate problem. Biden’s behavior long ago passed from embarrassing to dangerous. We can see that all around us. 

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/pandemic-science

In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.

One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited, compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science—and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.

As for organized skepticism, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin. Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/01/george-orwells-1984-gets-trigger-warning-daniel-greenfield/

Irony is not only dead, it was beaten to death in a back alley by a woke mob.

The Left is not only trying to usher in the very Ministry of Information that George Orwell was satirizing in 1984 in order to fight “disinformation”, it’s actually slapping a trigger warning on 1984.

Staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

No doubt. That’s probably the point.

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘There’s a certain irony that students are now being issued trigger warnings before reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. Our university campuses are fast becoming dystopian Big Brother zones where Newspeak is practised to diminish the range of intellectual thought and cancel speakers who don’t conform to it.”

What would Orwell have made of this?

After 1984 became so influential, everyone tried to appropriate Orwell. And 1984 regularly featured in the lists of celebrated ‘Banned Books’ though, invariably, these were books that were rarely actually banned. Unlike Animal Farm, whose specific historical analogies to the Soviet Union and the betrayal of the revolution were explosive at the time, 1984’s dystopia appears more generic and open to political appropriation even though it is once again a restatement of the betrayal of leftists who embraced Soviet totalitarianism with doublethink.

But the metaphorical power of 1984 has always been greater than its grounding in the struggle between liberals and Communists during the dawn of the Cold War.

Now, 1984 is getting its own trigger warnings because it’s “offensive and upsetting”. The new variant of leftism is more ideologically concerned with emotion and the hunt for heresy than with anything else. It doesn’t find tyranny problematic, but it hates having its feelings hurt.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/joe-biden-doesnt-know-what-youre-talking-about/

No U-turns for President Biden ahead of midterms

President Biden begins his second year in office with a 42 percent average job-approval rating. Republicans hold a one-point lead over Democrats in the congressional generic ballot (and the generic-ballot question often underestimates GOP support). The Gallup organization reports that in the final quarter of 2021 Republicans took a five-point lead in party identification for the first time since 1995. As of this writing, 28 House Democrats have announced their retirements, with more expected to follow. Biden’s agenda is stalled in Congress, the Supreme Court blocked his employer vaccine mandate, the coronavirus pandemic continues, and inflation is higher than at any point in the last 39 years. The country — not to mention the president — could use a reset.

We’re not getting one. Instead, on January 19, we got Biden’s combative, discursive, and delusional mess of a one-hour-and-51-minute press conference. Among the reasons the occasion was notable — and notorious — was that it forced the White House to clarify later Biden’s comments on not one but two issues: Biden’s ambiguity over America’s response if Russia launches a “minor incursion” into Ukraine, and Biden’s repeated assertion that the Senate’s failure to pass his election-takeover bills throws the legitimacy of the midterm elections into doubt. To watch Biden at the lectern was to experience shock and dismay interspersed with moments of alarm and dark humor. No wonder he hides from the media. It was the worst presidential press conference since Donald Trump stood next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018.

Biden’s message to the 64 percent of the public that says the country is headed in the wrong direction: Everything is fine. Biden’s message to the 42 percent of the public that says economic conditions are poor: You must be joking. “We created six million new jobs — more jobs in one year than at any time before,” Biden said. “Unemployment dropped — the unemployment dropped to 3.9 percent.” Yes, Biden conceded, there is “frustration and fatigue in this country.” But that is due to the pandemic. As for inflation, Biden went on, it will subside when the Federal Reserve tightens the money supply (true), when Congress passes “my Build Back Better plan” (false), and when his anti-monopoly executive orders take effect (also false). “I didn’t overpromise,” Biden said. “But I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/how-progressive-prosecutors-are-betraying-the-constitution/

They’re perverting the principle of prosecutorial discretion to mutilate the laws.

T he job of a judge is to apply the law as it has been written by the legislature. For the last half-century, that has been the most effective argument mounted by constitutional conservatives against activist courts. The judge is not at liberty to legislate. That is, the judge may not revise the laws, under the guise of clearing up nonexistent ambiguities, or filling in nonexistent gaps, or — if we may be blunt about what activist judges actually do — distorting the law to fit the jurist’s subjective sense of fairness and justice.

In a democracy, what is fair and just is left to the judgment of the legislature — the representatives answerable to the people whose lives are directly affected by the laws the legislature enacts. Legislatures are limited only by the Constitution, not by judicial sensibilities.

These principles have been so energetically touted that lawyers can recite them from memory. More importantly, they resonate with the public — to the point that, at confirmation hearings, even progressive judicial candidates pretend to be bound by the law as written. Indeed, it is the historical achievement of the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia that seventies-style judicial freewheeling is no longer de rigueur. Judges must at least go through the motions of wrestling with the text of statutes and constitutional clauses. If they fail to acknowledge the binding law (even if only as a pretext for trying to circumvent it), higher courts are virtually certain to reverse their rulings.

So here is the question: Why do we not demand that prosecutors meet this same standard?

In big cities all across the country, criminals are running amok due to the derelictions of the hard Left’s “Progressive Prosecutor Project” (a label I am proud to have had a hand in). But what are these derelictions? To hear critics tell it, they won’t enforce the laws. That’s true, but doesn’t quite nail it.

It’s not like these folks don’t show up for work every day — these anti-prosecution district attorneys, such as Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, George Gascón in Los Angeles, and, newly added to the cabal, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan. To the contrary, progressive prosecutors work very hard. They have to. Like activist judges, they seek to legitimize their machinations by masquerading them as law.

When we look at what the statutes actually say, however, we find that progressive prosecutors are not applying the laws enacted by the people’s representatives. They are unilaterally decreeing new laws — the same mischief over which activist judges endure ridicule and reversal.

No, no, progressives counter, there’s a big difference: Unlike judges, our prosecutors have been elected. Some, in fact, such as Krasner, have been reelected. They are politically accountable. If the people who live under a prosecutor’s nonenforcement policies do not approve of the inevitable surges in crime, they can oust that prosecutor in the next election.

There is some force to that argument. Maybe we should just shrug our shoulders and say, “If Philadelphians want Larry Krasner, then they deserve Larry Krasner . . . good and hard.” But ballot box aside, many people in Philadelphia and other Democrat-dominated crime sanctuaries are voting with their feet. They are moving to communities that, because the rule of law still holds sway, are strong and stable. Shouldn’t that rush to the exits be part of the “elections have consequences” ledger?

In any event, the main flaw in the “they’re elected” defense of progressive prosecutors is constitutional. Executive officials are not elected to make the laws but to enforce them. In this regard, separation of powers is not merely a legal technicality. The Framers understood that the quickest path to a democratic republic’s destruction would be the accumulation, in a single set of hands, of the powers to legislate and to enforce the laws. To have ordered liberty, the two must be kept apart. The alternative is despotism, in which the rulers either repress their opposition or, as we are seeing with progressive prosecutors, foster a modified anarchy where the laws go unenforced except to the extent they can be weaponized against political foes.

It is no answer to unconstitutional action that the offending official has been elected. Among the Constitution’s main purposes is to stave off tyranny of the majority. If a prosecutor, mayor, or governor acts lawlessly, it is not a defense that if the people don’t like it they can oust him or her next time around.

Progressives and the prosecutors they’ve heavily invested in are well aware of this. That’s why they usually resist the urge to claim that being elected is a license to mutilate the laws. Rather, in their exquisite chutzpah, they insist that the mutilation is really just the upholding of a foundational constitutional principle: prosecutorial discretion.

This is exactly what Alvin Bragg has just done.