RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/

Under the heading “Justice for the Victims of Witch Hunts, Old and New,” the Wall Street Journal describes a movement by European activists, including Human Rights Watch, to rehabilitate the many thousands executed for witchcraft from the 1400s to the early 1800s. They are playing belated catchup with the American colonies.  In 1697 the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a Day of Contrition of fasting and remorse for the 1692 Salem witch trials and in 1711 formally exonerated those convicted and paid restitution to their heirs. The current activists are hoping to influence non-Western countries like Saudi Arabia, India, Ghana, and Papua New Guinea, where accusations of witchcraft still lead to torture and death.

But before human rights groups here and in Europe focus their attention far in the past and far afield, they would do well to seek apologies, restitution, and justice for the victims of witch hunts much closer in time and space: victims of the sex abuse in day care hysteria that in the 1980s and early ’90s swept the U.S. (and manifested itself to a much lesser extent in Canada, New Zealand, and Europe). One victim, Frank Fuster, remains in prison. He has now served 36 years of a sentence of six life terms and 165 years. (In 2014 the Florida Parole Commission sent him a letter telling him his initial parole interview was scheduled in 120 years.) All this for crimes that existed only in the fevered imagination of his accusers.

These were witch trials just as surely as the much earlier versions, complete with accusations of Satanic rituals tied to the supposed abuse of preschoolers. Robert Rosenthal, the attorney who won reversals on appeal in a number of these cases, still marvels at public credulity: “These cases made normal people abandon their disbelief. In another situation, would they believe this crazy stuff about pentagrams and Satan? But here they believed it.”

https://www.aol.com/news/fauci-death-toll-pandemic-anniversary-132621394.html

All the mixed messages, conflicting statistics and predictions and suggestions came from Dr. Fauxi himself….rsk

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that had he known a year ago what the death toll from Covid-19 would be, “it would have shocked me completely,” and blamed the politicization of safety measures and “mixed messages” out of Washington for the high number of fatalities.

In an interview on NBC’s “TODAY” show on the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus outbreak being declared a global pandemic, host Savannah Guthrie noted that Fauci said exactly one year ago that 27 people in the U.S. had died from Covid-19 and asked what he would have thought then of today’s death toll of more than 531,000.

“I have to tell you quite honestly, Savannah, it would have shocked me completely,” said Fauci, who recounted that he warned at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing that day that things would get much worse before they get better.

“It was March 11, 2020, that I said that, but I did not in my mind think that ‘much worse’ was going to be 525,000 deaths,” he said.

Asked what went wrong, Fauci pointed to the “divisiveness in our country.”

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-the-threat-to-a-progressive-755

THE ELECT: THE THREAT TO A PROGRESSIVE AMERICA FROM ANTI-BLACK ANTIRACISTS
Serial excerpt No. 4: They will object that they are “dismantling structures” – while enjoying making people cry and dismantling nothing.

DISMANTLING HEGEMONIC STRUCTURES?

To tar The Elect as crazy is lazy. Dumb, even. It recalls Hungarian physician Max Nordau who deemed Wagner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Schopenhauer as degenerates seized by hysteria and self-involvement. While Die Walküre and War and Peace are hardly grape soda, none of us would join Nordau today. He wasn’t up to the challenge of his times.

I want us to be. But this will require understanding The Elect in an initially counterintuitive way, just as getting Schopenhauer meant letting go of the easier pleasures of Ruskin. The “advanced” way of getting the Elect is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they are.

One thing that will discourage a general perception of them in this way is that they themselves will resist the charge so heartily. This is understandable. For one, it will feel unwelcome to them because they do not bill themselves as such, and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. Then, it also implies that they are not thinking for themselves. However understandable their objections, though, we must not let them distract us, as we roll up our sleeves and fashion a way of living among people devoted permanently to this new, yes, religion.

For one, The Elect will insist that what they are doing is not founding a replacement for Protestantism, but acting upon what I have seen phrased as “an enduring white responsibility for deconstructing our own privilege and the systemic pervasiveness of white supremacy.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/542300-maybe-a-biden-hologram-can-handle-his-public-speeches

Joe Biden isn’t a hologram. But the relative absence from the public stage of a newly elected U.S. president and leader of the free world is sparking no small amount of speculation and chatter about the brave new world of possibilities offered by technological advancements and the unprecedented control over information on the internet.

So far, under Biden, there have been none of the extended press availabilities to which we got accustomed under President Trump. No impromptu sessions with the media where he fields questions and attacks, dealing with dozens of wide-ranging topics. President Biden even skipped the traditional live, in-person February address to Congress. We’ve only seen him primarily in the form of various “proof of life”-like video clips distributed on the internet, where he reads scripted remarks from a teleprompter. 

Even some officials who work in the Biden administration told me they can’t help but wonder why. And it has them mulling over farfetched speculation that, upon further examination, starts to look almost like it is not completely outside the realm of the possible.

In June 2019 I published a story on “deep fake” technology. It explored how artificial intelligence (AI) computer technology has put special effects, once reserved as expensive and time-consuming accomplishments of Hollywood films, in the hands of most anybody with a computer and the desire to use it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/11/predictable_train_wrecks_on_crime_and_immigration__145383.html

If you think really hard, perhaps you can imagine more disastrous policies than throwing open our country’s southern border and abandoning criminal-law enforcement in city after city. The consequences are already emerging, and they are grim. It is important to examine them without ideological blinders so we can change course before more damage is done.

Our border policies are national fiats handed down by the Biden administration. The abandonment of criminal enforcement, by contrast, is a local decision, made by supine city councils and district attorneys, many of them “social justice Democrats” backed by progressive elites and Black Lives Matter.

The problem with these policies is not their moral motivation. Helping the poor from Central America is a worthy cause. So is reducing the incarceration rate of young males from minority communities. The problem lies in their practical effects. It is those effects, not sugarplum dreams, that matter in judging public policy.

The most consequential effect of open immigration and lax criminal enforcement is to undermine the safe, stable environment law-abiding citizens need to go about their lives, free from predation. Providing that environment — and signaling clearly that you intend to provide it — is the first responsibility of government.

That means punishing crimes. The goal is not vengeance. Nor is it solely to provide justice for the victims, important as that is. It is also to send a strong message to would-be criminals: Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. Right now, we are sending the wrong message and, by doing so, we are encouraging law breaking on a massive scale.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-prescription-get-the-vaccine-wait-a-month-return-to-normal-11615401516?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is chief medical advisor to Sesame Care and author of “The Price We Pay.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has lost a lot of credibility during the Covid-19 pandemic by being late or wrong on testing, masks, vaccine allocation and school reopening. Staying consistent with that pattern, this week—three months after the vaccine rollout began—the CDC finally started telling vaccinated people that they can have normal interactions with other vaccinated people—but only in highly limited circumstances. Given the impressive effectiveness of the vaccine, that should have been immediately obvious by applying scientific inference and common sense.

Parts of the new guidelines are absurdly restrictive. For example, the CDC didn’t withdraw its advice to avoid air travel after vaccination. A year of prevaccine experience has demonstrated that airplanes aren’t a source of spread. A study conducted for the defense department found that commercial planes have HEPA filtration and airflow that exceed the standards of a hospital operating room.

The guidelines do approve of vaccinated people meeting with low-risk unvaccinated ones—but only with people from the same household and in a small private setting. So much for restaurants, birthday parties and weddings.

An unpublished study conducted by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer showed that vaccination reduced transmission by 89% to 94% and almost totally prevented hospitalization and death, according to press reports. Immunity kicks in fully about four weeks after the first vaccine dose, and then you are essentially bulletproof. With the added safety of wearing a mask indoors for a few more weeks or months—a practical necessity in public places even if not a medical one, since you can’t tell on sight if someone’s immune—there is little a vaccinated person should be discouraged from doing.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/10/the-progressive-imaginarium/

“T-Bone” lives in the progressive Imaginarium.   

Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) conjured him up as his fake pal from the ’hood. The “Bone” would now and then materialize to prep the yuppie Booker on his street cred.  

“T” was the umbilical cord of authenticity with the underprivileged black community for Booker—the vegetarian, Rhodes scholar, Stanford- and Yale-educated, privileged child of two IBM executives.  

“Corn-pop” also resides in the Imaginarium. Good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton occasionally would summon the “Pop.” Supposedly he was one tough, African American, razor-wielding gangster that the youthful Mighty Joe Biden won over.  

But first, as a lifeguard of an inner-city swimming pool, defiant, and armed with his own 6-feet of chain, Joe told us he taught Pop the meaning of obedience.  

In his impromptu séances, Joe has conjured up lots of Imaginarium denizens. Along with Corn Pop, there was the anonymous bully—son of a donut shop owner—whose head Joe slammed down on the counter. The felony? The brute had insulted his sister and the Biden family name.  

Never believe that after a half-century in Washington politics, the multimillionaire beltway Biden has gone soft. He’s still the authentic white, working-class brawler. The scion of coal miners, Biden boasted of wanting to take Donald Trump behind the proverbial gym for a trademark Biden whomping.  

Jussie Smollett’s alt-white bullies also dwell in the Imaginarium. They were hunting for nonwhite prey with bleach and a noose. Unfortunately, they picked on the wrong guy and met the knight Jussie in the wee hours of the morning in Chicago’s subzero temperatures.  

The diminutive Smollett fought them both off—while still holding his sandwich and using his cell phone. 

Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, checked into the Imaginarium, along with their TV interview host and fellow Montecito mansion-dweller Oprah Winfrey.  

The royal couple’s new $15 million home is not far from Oprah’s $90 million estate. Recently in an interview, the two detailed all the racial slights they suffered from the apparently inveterate racist British royal family. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/newsom-recall-logs-nearly-two-million-signatures-lloyd-billingsley/

The campaign to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom has collected 1,950,000 signatures, Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports, far more than the 1.4 million signatures needed to qualify the recall for the ballot. A full 1.6 million signatures were collected entirely by volunteers, and according to organizer Orrin Heatlie, 31.5 percent of the signers were “other than Republicans.” As the recall effort surges, Democrats turn up the volume against it.

“Right-wing Republicans in CA are trying to recall Gavin Newsom for the crime of telling people to wear masks and for listening to scientists during COVID,” tweeted Sen. Bernie Sanders. “Extremist Republicans have done enough to undermine democracy already. We must all unite to oppose the recall in California.”

Joe Biden opposes the recall, and the effort is “inappropriate,” according to California Rep. Karen Bass, once on Biden’s short list for vice president. Bass, a Fidel Castro fan, told reporters Newsom has done “the best he could.”

When Newsom shut down the state in March of 2020, he hailed the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, his one-time aunt. The legislature granted Newsom extraordinary powers and he has since ruled as an autocrat. Newsom imposed draconian regulations, spent more than $1 billion on masks from a Chinese company, then cavorted with lobbyists sans mask at the upscale French Laundry restaurant.

Californians were already suffering under the repressive Assembly Bill 5, a virtual declaration of war on independent workers. Despite a plea from California’s leading economists and political scientists, Newsom declined to suspend the measure during the pandemic. As businesses shut down, the governor and Democrat-dominated legislature gave Californians no relief from the nation’s highest income and sales taxes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/what-pollsters-should-be-asking-about-the-covid-stimulus-bill/

“In this environment, a party with a slim and fleeting majority can ram through multi-trillion-dollar bills with massive inherent costs dumped on an entire country without any genuine debate. It is tragic — and certainly not something to celebrate — that we have an ignorant citizenry cheering on passage of bills that come with generational consequences.”

For starters: ‘Do you support a bill that sends only 7 percent of its funds to help alleviate the effect of COVID?’

T here is overwhelming bipartisan support for the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.” No doubt about it. Every poll says so. The latest Morning Consult poll, for instance, informs us that Americans support the bill by a wide 75–18 percent margin. Among Democrats, it’s 90–5. Among the GOP, it’s 59–35. Among independents, it’s 71–20.

As the Washington Post’s lead “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler put it recently on Twitter, presidents dream “of getting numbers like this for a major piece of legislation — especially if no one from the opposition party votes for it.”

Indeed, they do. But the dream can be made reality only if the media abdicate their responsibility of critically reporting and properly highlighting the partisan boondoggles in trillion-dollar legislation. How popular would the “American Rescue Plan” be if pollsters asked voters grown-up questions rather than push-polling for Democrats?