RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/10/exporting-our-worst-product-wokeness/

Is “woke” the new abnormal?

Something America ought to export to other — more normal — societies? Because it’s been such a success in America? Like Crystal Pepsi and the Ford Edsel? 

George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen thinks so. Wrote so, in a recent column for Bloomberg News. He also wrote a book about “The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.”

But what does he mean by that?

Historically, it has been taken to mean the opportunity to pursue one’s dreams, workwise and otherwise. To build the kind of life that suits — on the merits. 

To live — and let live.

For the Woke, this is a nightmare.

Wokeism is about ending that dream — and replacing it with a collective nightmare, in which almost everyone is a victim and those who aren’t are the victimizers. A world in which who you are is defined by who you look like, who you sleep with — and above all, the politics you espouse. It is a world of plural first-person pronouns and the fungibility of objective reality; of homogenous “diversity” — and you’d better not question it.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-administration-guidance-prioritizes-race-administering-covid-drugs

Guidance issued by the Biden administration states certain individuals may be considered “high risk” and more quickly qualify for monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals used to treat COVID-19 based on their “race or ethnicity.”

Older age, obesity, pregnancy, chronic kidney disease, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are among the multiple medical conditions and factors associated with what are considered “high risk” individuals by the FDA.

Some states, including New York and Utah, have made it clear they will prioritize certain racial minorities over other high-risk patients when it comes to the distribution of particular COVID treatments.

Last week, New York’s Department of Health released a document detailing its plan to distribute treatments such as monoclonal antibody treatment and antiviral pills.

The plan includes a section on eligibility for the scarce antiviral pills that people must meet to receive the treatment, including a line stating a person needs to have “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.”

One such “risk factor” is being a race or ethnicity that is not White due to “longstanding systemic health and social inequities.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-makes-bidens-vaccine-mandates-obsolete-covid-healthcare-osha-evidence-supreme-court-11641760009?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Montagnier was a winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus. Mr. Rubenfeld is a constitutional scholar.

Federal courts considering the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates—including the Supreme Court at Friday’s oral argument—have focused on administrative-law issues. The decrees raise constitutional issues as well. But there’s a simpler reason the justices should stay these mandates: the rise of the Omicron variant.

It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Both mandates—from the Health and Human Services Department for healthcare workers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for large employers in many other industries—were issued Nov. 5. At that time, the Delta variant represented almost all U.S. Covid-19 cases, and both agencies appropriately considered Delta at length and in detail, finding that the vaccines remained effective against it.

Those findings are now obsolete. As of Jan. 1, Omicron represented more than 95% of U.S. Covid cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading. As the CDC put it on Dec. 20, “we don’t yet know . . . how well available vaccines and medications work against it.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/01/09/the_progressive_logic_of_build_back_better__and_its_dangers_147003.html

“Build Back Better” is far more consequential than the earlier COVID relief packages. That’s why Democrats are so angry at those who blocked its passage and so determined to push it forward.

Why is BBB more important than the COVID legislation? Because pandemic relief was essentially a massive stimulus program, with the usual smorgasbord of treats for favored groups, but little more than that. Although BBB is also a massive stimulus, its real importance lies in the permanent entitlement programs it would launch, everything from universal pre-K and Medicare expansion to mandated paid leave from private employers.

Those are major building blocks in the Democrats’ long-term plan to construct a full-fledged social-welfare state along European lines. Achieving that ambitious, transformational goal — while making irreversible changes in how America governs itself — is why the party is fighting so hard and why the left is so furious about the Senate stalemate, personified by West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, a Democrat who refuses to go along, either to pass the bill or eliminate the filibuster to pass President Biden’s non-budget initiatives.

Enacting these massive, new entitlements is one reason the House bill is rightly called “progressive.” The second, equally important reason is that nearly all Democrats, except Manchin and his Arizona colleague Kyrsten Sinema, are willing to break the Senate’s longstanding rules and procedures to achieve their desired outcome. This determination to override traditional governing procedures and the institutions that embody them has been a hallmark of capital-P Progressivism since Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette came roaring into the Senate in 1906.

By 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was running for president as the Progressive Party nominee. Woodrow Wilson, the man who gained the Oval Office by TR’s third-party candidacy, had embraced progressivism while a professor (and later college president) at Princeton. Wilson and progressive public intellectuals such as Herbert Croly explained their rationale far more candidly than their political descendants do. The Constitution, they rightly noted, encumbered our national government with its enumerated powers, decentralized federalism, multiple veto points for any new policies, and strong protections for private property, contracts, and minority-party rights. Progressives argued that those restraints may have been fine for the 18th and 19th centuries but not for the 20th, which needed a far more active state.

https://dianebederman.com/socialism-and-the-death-of-medical-care/

There is no doubt in my mind that socializing medical care will be the death of medical care. Government may have good intentions, but government has a track record of exploding budgets and a terrible track record for implementation.

This is a follow up to my post about my family health team clinic and the doctor who is now under investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The College responded to my concerns quickly. But trying to discover who oversaw the actions of the Family Health Team Clinic; well that took on a long life of its own because of government bureaucracy and the socialization of medical care.

A reminder. I told my doctor I didn’t trust him and then I received a registered letter September 30 telling me that he would no longer be my doctor and no other doctor in the clinic would see me based on Best Practice standards of the clinic. There are no Best Practice standards. The clinic lied; well Kim Bell, the administrator. But I was without a doctor the middle of Covid and I am a senior. To put this in perspective, there are at least 10 people looking for a doctor at any time.

This is the story of my crusade of almost two months trying to find out who oversaw these 184 family health team clinics serving 3,000,000 people in 200 communities in Ontario with a population of 14 million citizens.

I finally found out when I received an email November 17, from Fernando Tavares A/Program Manager, Interprofessional Programs Unit from PCOInquiries Interprofessional Programs Primary Health Care Branch,OHIP, Pharmaceuticals and Devices Division,Ministry of Health (what a title!)

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-york-city-mayor-signs-law-allowing-non-citizens-to-vote/

New York City Mayor Eric Adams enacted a measure Sunday that will allow more than 800,000 non-citizens in the city to vote in municipal elections.

The new law, which the city council passed a month ago, will grant voting rights to any adult who has been a lawful permanent resident in the city for more than 30 days. If it survives a legal challenge, New York City will be the first to institute such a law. Under the law, legal non-Americans would be able to vote for a number of elected positions including mayor, comptroller, public advocate, borough president, and council member.

However, the law would disqualify eligible individuals from voting for president or members of Congress in federal races and state gubernatorial elections, among others. Undocumented immigrants would not be granted the right to vote under the measure.

A handful of localities across the United States, including eleven towns in Maryland and two in Vermont, permit non-citizens to participate in their elections.

“I believe that New Yorkers should have a say in their government, which is why I have and will continue to support this important legislation,” Adams said in a statement Saturday.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/walensky-dodges-on-how-many-u-s-covid-deaths-are-actually-caused-by-covid/

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, CDC director Rochelle Walensky failed to clarify how many of the 836,000 U.S. patients whose deaths were attributed to Covid in the last two years had underlying medical conditions.

“How many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to Covid are from Covid or how many are with Covid but they had other co-morbidities. Do you have that breakdown?” anchor Bret Baier asked.

“Yes, of course, with Omicron we’re following that very carefully, our death registry takes a few weeks to collect and Omicron has been with us for just a few weeks but those data will be forthcoming,” Walensky replied.

Throughout the pandemic, public-health officials have harped on the alarming fatality rate of the virus but have not clarified whether Covid death record-keeping reflects accompanying risk factors that may have been present in victims.

For example, some mainstream news outlets published scientific studies last week recognizing the long-indisputable fact that obesity is a Covid comorbidity, making people likelier to suffer seriously from the disease. A CDC study from December, which surveyed juvenile (under age 18) cases of Covid that necessitated hospitalization, “approximately two thirds of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 aged 12–17 years had obesity.” In addition, “compared with patients without obesity, those with obesity required higher levels and longer duration of care.”

https://www.city-journal.org/manhattans-new-anti-prosecution-district-attorney-alvin-bragg

Less than a week ago, New Yorkers closed the book on a year that saw 485 murders—a slight rise over 2020, which saw a massive increase over 2019. Along with marking the end of Bill de Blasio’s tenure as mayor, 2021 also became the fourth consecutive year in which Big Apple homicides increased. Four straight years of homicide increases: that has never happened in my lifetime. Depressing as the crime data have been as of late, many Gothamites rang in the New Year with optimism about new mayor Eric Adams, a former cop who ran on an explicitly anti-crime platform. But New Yorkers are quickly learning that last year’s election outcomes weren’t universally anti-crime.

On January 3, newly minted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg distributed a memo setting out a number of radical changes to the office’s approach to law enforcement. For starters, he was doing away with the whole “enforcement” thing for a host of offenses: fare evasion, trespass, traffic infractions, resisting arrest, prostitution . . . the list goes on. With some exceptions, these offenses (among others) will no longer be prosecuted in Manhattan. Many other misdemeanors will now be met with diversion into “programs,” completion of which will also trigger non-prosecution.

More serious charges, like robbery and burglary, will be downgraded in many cases, according to the memo. If someone robs a convenience store with an empty gun, a Manhattan prosecutor must now charge the offender with petit larceny (a Class A misdemeanor) instead of robbery in the first degree (a Class B felony). Never mind that in a situation like that, the clerk, if armed, would be well within her rights to shoot the crook dead—such conduct is no longer deemed serious enough to warrant the kind of prison sentence that would normally accompany a robbery conviction.

https://www.city-journal.org/racial-essentialism-corrupts-medicine

The progressive Left is openly attempting to codify racial categories into education, culture, law—and now medicine. New York State has authorized health-care providers to include race in a set of risk factors to determine who qualifies for the limited quantity of life-saving Covid-19 treatments. New York City’s official guidance to providers also reads: “Longstanding systemic health and social inequities may contribute to an increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.” As a result, health-care providers in the city will now “consider race and ethnicity when assessing individual risk,” prioritizing nonwhite patients over their white counterparts.

Skin color is far too broad a category to offer any meaningful insight at the individual level. Using race as a proxy to assess an individual’s risk would make sense only if there were evidence that it genetically puts one at higher risk of severe Covid. No such evidence exists. The virus does not appear to selectively target those of African descent, for example. African countries generally have far lower Covid death rates than Western ones.

Of course, the New York Health Department is not claiming otherwise. Under the influence of woke ideology, it is using oversimplified racial categories to correct for alleged systemic inequities that fall along racial lines. On progressive thinking, this compromising of medical practice allegedly achieves a greater social good. Racial prioritization is not perfect, say progressives, but it is justified on a group level since whites have better outcomes than “people of color” in the aggregate.

But even this rationale doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Not all nonwhite groups suffer more than whites on average from Covid. According to CDC data last updated on November 22, Asian-Americans have a 20 percent lower rate of Covid hospitalizations and a 10 percent lower rate of Covid deaths. There is no justification for prioritizing Asians over whites for Covid therapeutics.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/01/24/the-1619-false-history-project/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

What Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times left out

Imagine a Native American history curriculum that focused entirely on four massacres of Natives by whites — beginning with the first encounter between Spanish conquistadores and the Inca emperor Atahualpa and culminating with Wounded Knee — and never touched on American Indian life before 1491, the many Native military victories, or the roughly 5.2 million Natives alive in the U.S. today. Would anyone see this as truly representative, or useful to students of any race, or worth teaching in the schools?

The 1619 Project, from the New York Times, must face the same questions. The project focuses on casting the era of historical slavery as an alternative founding for the United States, with its authors arguing that slavery was responsible for nearly everything that “truly made America exceptional.” Slavery, they write, was the primary reason for the Revolu­tionary War and was responsible for much or most of early American wealth, building “vast fortunes for white people North and South” and making “New York City the financial capital of the world.” Multiple 1619 essays, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others, attribute to historical slavery and racism everything from the competitive capitalism of the U.S. to contemporary patterns of traffic. Slavery, in this narrative, is both the American original sin and the source of all our baraka — everything that makes this a unique and desirable country.

Honorable, non-racist centrists and conservatives face a serious question as we confront this material. How would a nuanced but thorough telling of American history, one that did not seek to minimize slavery, differ from 1619’s? Aren’t these journalists and radical academics — progressive friends often ask, in something approaching anguish — just telling hard truths? The short answer is a clear no.

The 1619 essays almost universally ignore or minimize four critical pieces of context that any unbiased school curriculum would include. These are the truly global prevalence of slavery and similar barbaric practices until quite recently; the detrimental economic impact of the Peculiar Institution on the South and on the American national economy; the nuanced but deeply patriotic perspectives on the United States expressed by the black and white leaders of the victorious anti-slavery movement that existed alongside slavery; and the reality that much of American history in fact had nothing to do with this particular issue. Not teaching about slavery or Jim Crow segregation in schools would be a deeply immoral act of omission, but it is almost equally bizarre to define these decades-past regional sins as the main through-line of American history.