RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/08/who_loses_when_the_china_bat_cave_implodes.html

The story about Wuhan’s “wet market” is taking on water. We’ve moved well past the “trust but verify” stage. We’re now in the “don’t trust a damn thing they say” stage. In this case, “they” refers mostly to the Chinese Communist Party. But the public’s mistrust has spread to our own government’s public health experts, and to much of the Western media, as well.

We still don’t know where the COVID-19 pandemic originated, but the more we learn, the less China’s official story sounds right. The World Health Organization’s year-long endorsement of Beijing means nothing. At this point, even the WHO is starting to say we need a more thorough investigation. Good luck with that. China has prevented independent scientists from conducting any serious, open inquiry of the pandemic’s origins. That won’t change.

China’s secrecy tells us sometimes, but we can’t be sure what. Remember, U.S. intelligence agencies and the George W. Bush administration made the wrong inference from Saddam Hussein’s secrecy about weapons of mass destruction. Saddam impeded international inspectors to search freely for WMDs, which he possessed previously. There was no proof he had destroyed them. Yet he blocked unannounced international inspections of Iraqi sites that might contain WMDs. The natural inference was that he still had those weapons and was hiding them. American and British intelligence researched that conclusion. The CIA director famously told President Bush it was a “slam dunk.”

It wasn’t. What Saddam was actually hiding was that he didn’t have WMDs. He was hiding that less from his Western enemies and more from his dangerous neighbor, Iran, and possibly from internal enemies in Iraq itself. That mistaken inference is worth remembering as we ponder the still-murky origins of the Wuhan virus. We know China is hiding something. What we don’t know is what it is hiding and why.

Beijing could be hiding that a natural virus escaped from the lab.
Beijing could be hiding that the escaped virus was artificially enhanced, made more contagious and lethal (called “gain of function”).
Beijing could be hiding the fact that China’s military was involved in this gain-of-function project, or at least in some aspects of the lab’s research.
Beijing could be hiding that Chinese political leaders knew, early on, that the virus spread from human to human and that it kept this crucial finding secret for months. During that period, Beijing and the WHO were falsely telling the world that the virus could not spread from human to human.
Beijing could be hiding that Chinese leaders not only knew the virus was contagious, but that they acted on that knowledge by allowing Chinese nationals to travel freely around the world, spreading the disease, while sharply restricting travel within China from Wuhan. And, finally,
Beijing could be hiding anything and everything simply because that’s how totalitarian regimes operate. They always hide information, control the flow, and prevent outside inspections.

Whatever they’re hiding, they have powerful reasons. The Chinese Communist Party knows how high the stakes are if it is found responsible for a deadly lab leak and for keeping that information secret when others could have acted promptly and saved countless lives. Americans will be outraged, as they should be, and Washington will be forced to take serious action.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/putting_an_end_to_reimagining_the_criminal_justice_system.html

Many majority Democrat cities have fallen victim to progressive prosecutors. Rather than drive down crime, improve public safety, and promote common sense tough-on-crime policies, these zealots campaign on platforms of structural racism, outcome equity, and restorative justice. In these cities, such performances have in fact become a requirement for the office of district attorney (DA). Aspiring DAs must protest the disproportionate prosecution of minorities without examining the underlying causes; they must clamor for the elimination of cash bail in the name of racial fairness; and they must recommend sentence reduction or alternatives to incarceration to mitigate “past injustices.”

Committed to “reimagining” the criminal justice system in the service of “woke” rhetoric, these DAs are neither acting in the public interest to enforce the law nor honoring their oath of office. They forget that their principal duty is to uphold the law, not crusade for changes driven by their political agenda. In the process, they are emboldening offenders, fostering disrespect for the law, unleashing dangerous criminals on society, and – worst of all – robbing victims of due justice. San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, who wears his ideological lineage on his sleeve and currently faces a recall campaign, arrogantly claims that a DA can “challenge the legitimacy of a law by declining to bring charges in certain cases.”

Progressive policies have time and again been proven to be misguided, even inimical to public safety.

A study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF) found that in six jurisdictions with “social justice” prosecutors, reduced conviction rates and fewer guilty outcomes for serious felonies accompanied rising crime rates. It questioned the supplanting of the standard requirement of “competency and experience” for DAs with “ideological zeal.” In his foreword to the study, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III wrote that elected leaders, law enforcement and the media should realize that “leftist ideas of social justice and true criminal justice are not compatible.”

The radicalization of DA offices and the clamor for defunding the police comes as crime rates are skyrocketing and Americans are worried. A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that 49% of respondents said that violent crime was their top concern, ahead of the pandemic, the economy, political correctness, and race relations.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/06/the-lethal-wages-of-trump-derangement-madness/

Think about it: For about five years, anything candidate, president-elect, and President Trump said or did, the media, the Left, and progressive popular culture opposed in Pavlovian fashion.

 Anything that Trump touched was ridiculed or discredited—regardless of evidence, data, or cogency. The merits of a Trump policy, a Trump assessment, a Trump initiative were irrelevant—given the primordial hatred of the Left of all things Trump: the president, the person, the family. 

 Under the reductionist malady of Trump Derangement Syndrome, facts and logic did not matter. Instead, anything not said or done in opposition to Trump empowered the supposed existential Trump threat. Ironically, some of the most deductive and reductionist Trump haters were supposedly professionals, the highly educated, and the self-proclaimed devotees of the Enlightenment. And yet in their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, they suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality—and people died as a result.

 Most Americans did not care much when the apparently sane went completely insane in their irrational hatred of Trump. Few cared whether Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) wished to destroy his career in trying to predicate his crackpot policies in opposition to Trump. Who worried that Anthony Fauci seemed to have tarnished his distinguished career by his anti-Trump triangulations? Did it matter to anyone that the obsessed Lincoln Project grifters were rendered utterly disgraced, or that the NeverTrumpers were left irrelevant and inert by their irrational and uncontrollable venom?

 Yet, existentially hating everything Trump said or did—as opposed to expressing political opposition to him and his policies—did not just implode elite careers. It also turned deadly. The result of such knee-jerk revulsion was a great deal of damage to the country in general and unnecessary deaths of Americans in particular. 

 For over a year, anyone who questioned the official NIH/NIAID/Fauci narrative that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a new viral mutation that had jumped to humans from bats (or pangolins)—perhaps carved up in the Wuhan wet market—was attacked both personally and professionally. Why? Mostly because Trump himself had questioned just that improbable hypothesis. And Trump certainly could not be right. But even if he were, it was still the moral thing to say he was not.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/jordan_peterson_needs_to_get_off_my_lawn.html

Dr. Jordan Peterson has the attention of many around the world, including America, with his psychological insights into the book of Genesis; his clear-eyed appraisal of the excesses of the left; and his three books, Twelve Rules for Life, 12 More Rules for Life, and Maps of Meaning.  His record of wise and careful thought lends to all his pronouncements a certain gravitas.

On May 29 of this year, he tweeted:

The conservatives have to sacrifice Trump and the stolen election narrative.  The liberals have to sacrifice DIE and CRT.  The road to peace requires its pound of flesh from both parties.

(DIE stands for “Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity,” CRT for “Critical Race Theory”.)

I think Dr. Peterson lets himself down whenever he opines on U.S. politics and most especially here.  He has been clear in condemning DIE and CRT as erroneous, divisive, and malign, yet he posits these philosophies as commensurate with support of our 45th president and a desire to thoroughly investigate our 2020 election.  How dare he?  To tens of millions of Americans, Donald Trump is objectively a stalwart champion of the Constitution, the country, and its citizens.  Yet Dr. Peterson here presents him as a should-be pariah, just the other side of the coin to a collectivist, racist, un-American, and hateful ideology.  By so saying, he slanders America, Trump, and us.  Peterson owes us all an apology.  Is he even aware of Trump’s executive orders banning CRT from the federal government?

While Peterson is adept at describing the corruption of the state — usually archetypically referencing ancient Egypt — and recognizes the rot in the academy from the left, he is naïve, ignorant, or willfully blind when it comes to Washington, D.C.  He appears not to see that conservatives and regular Americans have been paying their pound of flesh for decades under both Republican and Democrat governments while the left advanced inexorably until Trump’s arrival.  Peterson mistakes the Uniparty game just described as a hierarchy of competence and prescribes to us the sacrifice of the one man who was brave enough to throw sand in its gears on our behalf.  Peterson cannot apparently see the cardboard placed over the windows of the ballot-counting rooms to block the view of election-observers last year or that Biden was personally involved in Soviet-style political spying on Trump’s campaign.  (Biden reportedly personally unmasked Lt. Gen. Flynn while V.P.)

Dr. Peterson is a Canadian.  One of the chapters in 12 Rules for Life is titled “Set Your Own House in Perfect Order Before Criticizing the World.”  Last I checked, Canada was arresting pastors for holding church services, has little to no international clout or cachet, and re-elected as its premiere an effeminate and unimpressive scion who stated that his country has “no core identity” and was roundly humiliated by Trump in the negotiations of USMCA.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/increasingly-unrecognizable-civilization/?utm_campaign=imprimis&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=130183578&_

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 26, 2021, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Franklin, Tennessee.

I live about 20 minutes south of the Canadian border, which used to be called the longest undefended frontier in the world. People moved freely back and forth across it all day every day. But now it’s been closed for over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to drive her up there, because there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one side to talk to their friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would say. It was like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that both sides are now like East Berlin. 

I don’t know how this happened, but it is just one indication that America, and the West in general, have become almost unrecognizable from what they were not that long ago.

Look at just three things we have lost. 

One is equality before the law, something absolutely essential to a free society. In its place, we now have politicized law. If a policeman fatally shoots someone, whether his name is released to the public depends on whether the shooting is consistent with the preferred narrative of the ruling class. A policeman recently took down a [Black] young woman who was threatening the life of another young woman with a knife, and that policeman was immediately identified—indeed, his photo was posted and he was threatened by NBA superstar LeBron James on Twitter. On the other hand, we know nothing of the policeman who shot dead an unarmed [unthreatening White] woman in the U.S. Capitol on January 6. His name will apparently never be released to the public.

Second, border control. Functioning societies, at least since the Peace of Westphalia three centuries ago, have borders. America has no southern border and no plans to get one. The official position of our government seems to be that any of the seven billion persons on this planet has a right to come and stay in the U.S. for three years, until his or her assigned court date comes up. As the number of people with pending cases continues to grow, that three years will extend out to five or seven or 15 years. If we get all seven billion people to come here, the court system will break down entirely and maybe we can go back to having a functioning border.

And third, dare I bring up the fact that it is a real question whether we can go back to agreeing to have open and honest elections? And if we don’t have open and honest elections, control of our borders, and equality before the law, then we don’t have the conditions for politics or free government. 

And here’s the thing. It is not at all clear to me that many of America’s conservative politicians understand the seriousness of all this. You can see it in the fact that they go around trying to scare people with the specter of a “radical socialist agenda.” For well over a year now, we have been living in a world in which it’s accepted as normal that the state has essentially unlimited power—and in which our freedom to decide for ourselves has been diminished almost to invisibility. Why do these conservative politicians think the words “radical socialist agenda” still scare anyone in a time when the state can tell us whether we can have Aunt Mabel over for Christmas? They are completely out of touch.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-evidence-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt/

Every good prosecutor will tell you that the best case is a strong circumstantial case — and that’s exactly what we have.

O f course, it’s only circumstantial evidence. We may never know the truth.”

If I’ve heard this once, over more decades than I care to admit, I’ve heard it a thousand times. It is the rote dismissal of circumstantially based cases, and it is almost always wrong.

We can no longer afford to be wrong when it comes to the origin — the generation by regime-controlled Chinese scientists, almost certainly by accident — of a pandemic that has caused nearly 4 million deaths globally (now closing in on 600,000 in the U.S.), in addition to geometrically more instances of serious illness, trillions of dollars’ worth of economic destruction, and incalculable setbacks in the educational and social development of tens of millions of children.

I was a prosecutor for a long time, and prosecutors are in the business of proving stuff. Every good one will tell you that the best case is a strong circumstantial case. It is the most airtight and least problematic kind of proof.

Circumstantial cases are a tapestry of objectively provable facts. No one of those facts, by itself, establishes the ultimate conclusion for which all the interconnected facts collectively stand. Instead, each single fact supports a subordinate proposition that must be true in order for the ultimate conclusion to be valid. Stitch enough of those subordinate propositions together and the ultimate conclusion is inexorable.

We have a natural human reluctance to trust circumstantial evidence. In our own lives, we know what we know — or at least what we think we know — because we have lived it. We don’t need to run down a plethora of clues to grasp our own experiences. We can describe them firsthand. If we worked in a lab that came under scrutiny, we could tell everyone how an accident there happened — or assure them that it didn’t happen. Ergo, we reason, what we really need is direct evidence, someone like ourselves who can narrate the goings-on.

Only then, we tell ourselves, can we really know. Even when all the disparate circumstantial trails lead to the same answer, we instinctively ask how we can trust that answer unless and until it has been confirmed by someone who was there.

But that is not how it works in the real world. Once you get beyond the narrow limits of your own experience, everything else is about what you can trust.