RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/time-to-end-outdoor-mask-edicts-11619383852?mod=opinion_major_pos6

When fighting a crisis like Covid-19, health officials can never take for granted the public’s willingness to comply. The measures imposed—social distancing, wearing masks—require sacrifice. As conditions improve, policy makers must show they’re willing to ease restrictions as swiftly as they imposed them, and a critical early test will be on wearing masks outside.

Wearing masks and restricting large gatherings were essential to controlling the pandemic’s worst peaks. But infection levels are dropping and vaccination rates rising. This is the time to revisit rules on masking and distancing in low-risk outdoor settings like parks and sports venues. Easing these rules would move more activity outdoors, which reduces viral transmission.

In states such as Texas and New Hampshire, governors have lifted restraints on the size of outdoor gatherings and the need for masks. Connecticut, Rhode Island and others have announced plans to relax outdoor requirements in May. But the policy process in Washington is moving too slowly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance still prescribes social limits while outside. Many governors are reluctant to step out ahead of the agency. About half of states still require people to wear face coverings in all public settings.

The virus won’t be eliminated. Some 40,000 Americans are hospitalized and some 55,000 cases are diagnosed each day. But more than 80% of Americans over 65 are protected by a vaccine, and infection rates are declining rapidly in most states—including Michigan, this month’s worst-hit. Vaccines are available to anyone over 16 in every state. Soon the problem will be a surplus of doses.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-corporations-use-the-chinese-model-11619476547?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The opposition of market capitalism to state-oriented socialism and communism was the basic conflict in 20th-century political economy. But like many an economic and political theory, this durable model for delineating the possibilities—free markets vs. a “command economy”—cannot survive today’s Chinese state.

Capitalism and communism, opposed in ideology, turn out to be compatible in the real world. And perhaps the conceptual opposition is also collapsing in the West, as capitalism goes woke and sneaker commercials become indistinguishable from AOC campaign materials except by their production values.

“Leftism” as we know it crystallized in the 19th century largely under the aegis of Marxism, which described capitalism as an exploitative and murderous ideology that lionized greed. Leftists’ solution, as expressed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “The Communist Manifesto,” was government control of the economy under the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

But the dictators turned out to be people rather than an abstract historical force, so it wasn’t a solution to human greed after all. Turning over all manufacturing and agriculture and trade to the party simply meant concentrating all the wealth and power in a few hands. It made the Soviet government, for example, a new oligarchy.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/27/anyone-remember-bidens-unity-pledge-he-sure-doesnt/

Those foolish enough to believe that President Joe Biden would usher in a new era of peace and harmony in America must be sorely disappointed by how his administration has performed so far. If anything, people are more polarized than ever, and by constantly appeasing the far left of his party, Biden is only making matters worse.

This week, the polling firm TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence launched a new “TIPP Unity Index” to track just how divided the nation is.

The finding is that a mere 33% say the country is united, while 61% think it’s divided. In other words, the only thing Americans agree on right now is that they don’t agree on much. At the extremes, 35% say the country is “very divided,” while only 15% believe it’s “very united.”

That translates into an initial TIPP Unity Index rating of 37.8, the report says. Anything below 50 signals disunity.

“The United States requires greater unity now more than ever,” writes Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica, “and our current leaders’ actions must transcend mere words and genuinely reflect the spirit.” (The TIPP poll has been the most accurate on presidential races for the past five elections.)

This new unity index will be a perfect way to measure whether Biden does anything to bring us together on his watch.

So far, he’s failed completely.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/25/the-new-antiracism-is-the-old-racism/

What will be the future of the mass hysteria spawned last summer? No one knows. 

But its destination, if unchecked, will be ethnic tensions and sectarian strife at best akin to those in Brazil and India—or at worst Lebanon, Syria, and Rwanda. 

Until just a few years ago, racial differences, according to polls, were more or less receding. Intermarriage between racial groups is at historic highs. 

But by 2014-2015, with the birth of Black Lives Matter, its courting by the Obama Administration, and the emergence of the electronic social media mob and cancel culture, such progress seems to have ended. We have ceased seeing race as increasingly incidental, rather than essential to who we are. 

The benchmarks of the Black Lives Matter and affiliated woke movements are overt racism, systemic untruth, and the hypocritical privilege of their elite architects.  

We are now well beyond the race-based set-asides of the last 50 years, predicated on the evolving concepts of proportional representation and disparate impact. These multitrillion-dollar endowed Great Society principles eventually mandated that admissions and hiring reflect the proportional ethnic and racial makeup of the population. 

All that is now ossified and considered not enough. In its place is a damnation of all things “white” with a new definition of diversity as simply all those, without any other affinities, who claim to be bound proudly together by being nonwhite.

Antiracist Racism

Indeed, it is startling how abruptly our frenzied elites have renounced assimilation (a word now banned by the Biden Administration in matters related to immigration). Integration is also passé‚ at least for those not rich.

Ironies abound. Recently, in the state of Washington, something called the African American Reach and Teach Health Ministry (AARTH) adjudicated vaccination appointments on the basis of race only. I suppose if a 75-year-old indigent white widow showed up, she would be turned away on the basis of her “unearned privilege”—or the organizers say could be put on a “standby list”?

Black intellectuals now use the stereotypical language of the old Jim Crow segregationists. Some vie in an apparent contest to see which woke trailblazer can be crowned the most overt racist antiracist. 

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/04/26/andrew_cuomo_made_225000_and_is_top-paid_governor_ever_774227.html

With a $225,000 salary, New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo is the country’s highest paid governor.

That’s as he collects $4 million for writing a book during the Covid-19 pandemic about his graceful leadership during the pandemic — allegedly with the help of his staff, possibly violating labor laws against using public resources for personal gain.

And it’s as he is fighting sexual harassment allegations and scandal from misleading the public about how many people died from Covid in nursing homes.

But the $225,000 is not even his top pay.

In 2018, The New York State Commission on Legislative, Judicial, & Executive Compensation gave the legislature and the governor pay raises.

At the time, state lawmakers made $79,500 and Cuomo made $179,000.

Cuomo’s salary was increased to $200,000 in 2019, $225,000 in 2020 and $250,000 in 2021. But in November 2020, he deferred his latest raise, keeping his salary at $225,000, still the highest in the nation.

When awarding the raises for lawmakers, the commission in 2018 stipulated that the raise would limit outside income to no more than 15 percent of their legislative salary.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/new-un-ambassador%E2%80%99s-misguided-shot-america-183555

More than once of late, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has declared that America’s “original sin” of slavery “weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.”

The problem isn’t just that Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a career diplomat who served as President Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, is wrong about the nation’s founding.

Nor is the problem just that she stated her views not only before the United Nations General Assembly but also before the National Action Network of the Rev. Al Sharpton – who, over the years, has used inflammatory anti-Jewish rhetoric, promoted black teenager Tawana Brawley’s fabricated story that she was raped by white men, was sued successfully for defamation, and has not always paid his taxes.

The greater problem is that in promoting her views, Thomas-Greenfield seems oblivious to the broader challenges that America faces on the world stage at this precarious moment for freedom and democracy.

No, America is not perfect, and yes, America has struggled mightily with race from its earliest days. Slavery was central to the southern economy through two-thirds of the nineteenth century; a civil war that ended slavery was followed by the legalized bigotry of Jim Crow; the civil rights movement triggered a violent white backlash; and racism remains deeply embedded in the hearts of all-too-many Americans.

http://Who’ll Condemn the Atrocities on Biden’s Watch? By IRA STOLL, Special to the Sun | April 26, 2021 https://www.nysun.com/foreign/wholl-condemn-the-atrocities-on-bidens-watch/91486/

President Biden is being showered with congratulations for his statement recognizing the Armenian genocide. It’s bitterly ironic, because human rights abuses on similar scale unfolded while Mr. Biden was vice president and remain under way.

“Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination,” Mr. Biden said. “Let us renew our shared resolve to prevent future atrocities from occurring anywhere in the world.”

Said the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, “our hearts are full of joy that President Biden has taken the historic step.” The Senate majority leader, Charles Schumer, tweeted, “This is a step I have long pushed for presidents to take: President Biden is our first president to formally recognize the Armenian genocide.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, “Calling this atrocity what it was — genocide — is long overdue because we must recognize the horrors of the past if we hope to avoid repeating them in the future.”

What use were Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, Warren & Co. between 2011 and today, when the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, backed by Iran and Russia, killed half a million Syrians and created 11 million refugees? “Syria Used Chemical Weapons 3 Times in One Week, Watchdog Says,” was the headline the New York Times put over an article that ran inside the newspaper.

How many times in a week would Syria have to use chemical weapons for the story to make it onto the front page, or for Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, and Warren & Co. to support American action decisive enough to bring the use, which has been ongoing for years now, to an end?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/24/slow-motion-suicide-of-the-west/

Some people thought James Burnham’s identification of liberalism with civilization’s suicide was hyperbolic. In light of American institutions’ embrace of anti-Americanism, what would they say now?

I have been thinking a good deal recently about Arnold Toynbee’s much-quoted observation that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” As an historical proposition, I’d say that it was like the story of the curate’s breakfast egg. “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!” “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you!” the curate replied. “Parts of it are excellent!”

And yet we all see the pertinence of Toynbee’s point. While there are, as a matter of historical fact, plenty of civilizations that succumb to invasion, occupation, and subjugation, there are also many that wither from within from a failure of self-confidence, of (for the Bergsonians out there) élan vital, of what your philosophy graduate student likes to call thumos: spirit, gumption, “heart,” manliness. 

The fact that no one can even speak of “manliness” today without looking over his shoulder these days is an index that thumos is on the endangered species list (along, as it happens, with sperm counts in the Western world). Why this should be is a fraught question—something whose answer is “overdetermined” as our Freudian friends like to say. 

One major reason, I submit, is that the dominant ideology of the modern West is an ideology of suicide, what the philosopher James Burnham identified as “liberalism.” 

It goes without saying that when it comes to terms being “overdetermined,” “liberalism” is right up at the top. The word has its root in līber, free, which is why it used to be said that tolerance was a defining characteristic of liberalism. Edmund Burke was a liberal in this sense, as was Matthew Arnold, David Hume, James Madison, and other founding fathers.

But that was a long time ago. Nowadays, “liberalism” is distinguished above all by its illiberalism and intolerance. Thus the ideology of “wokeness” and the prevalence therein of the rhetoric of “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces.” If being offended is grounds for interdicting speech then the goal is not tolerance, comrade, but conformity. And it is a short step from that realization to a bureaucracy whose primary aim is the enforcement of that conformity. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17307/jury-trial-mob-violence

Oliver Wendell Holmes correctly pointed out: due process simply cannot be achieved for any defendant in the presence of hostile crowds ready for violence if a verdict of not guilty is rendered.

The ACLU, if the shoe were on the other foot, would be demanding a new trial — if the defendant were black, and white crowds were demanding a conviction or else. But the ACLU is no longer a neutral civil liberties organization. It has become a partisan claque that espoused due process for “me but not for thee.” Real civil libertarians, who demand due process for all, including guilty police officers, must now take over where the ACLU has left off.

Whether guilty or not, Chauvin must be given a new trial at which the jury is sequestered, as it should have been from the beginning of this one. As an alternate juror candidly acknowledged, she had “mixed feelings” about jury duty, because of concerns about “disappointing” either side and the possibility of “rioting.” There is no reason to believe that the unsequestered jurors who actually decided the fate of Chauvin were oblivious to this concern.

The appellate courts should use this case to establish a clear rule that jurors must always be sequestered in racially charged cases where outsiders are threatening violence in the event of a not guilty or reduced verdict…. In the absence of sequestration, the legitimate protests of the outsiders may well deny the defendant his equally legitimate right to a fair trial. That is unacceptable under the Constitution.

“I very seriously doubt if the petitioner … has had due process of law … because of the trial taking place in the presence of a hostile demonstration and seemingly dangerous crowd, thought by the presiding Judge to be ready for violence unless a verdict of guilty was rendered.”

No, this is not your author complaining about the lack of due process in the trial of Derek Chauvin in 2021. It Is the great Oliver Wendell Holmes describing the trial of Leo Frank, a Jew convicted of murder in 1913 and eventually lynched by a mob that included prominent officials, after the governor commuted Frank’s sentence from death to life imprisonment.