RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/watch-out-for-a-vaccine-patent-heist-11616959785?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Pharmaceutical companies have come to the world’s rescue with Covid-19 vaccines, but these days no good deed by business goes unpunished. The Biden Administration is now under pressure to support a political campaign to break vaccine patents.

India and South Africa last fall petitioned the World Trade Organization to suspend intellectual property protections on Covid vaccines and treatments, which they say is necessary to expand global access. Fifty-five other countries plus an army of nonprofiits and labor unions have joined the attempted heist.

“Multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies,” Bernie Sanders says. Adds Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro : “We need to make the public policy choices both in the U.S. and at the WTO that puts patients first.”

***Patent-breakers are presenting a false choice between protecting intellectual property and public health. Breaking patents won’t accelerate vaccine production or distribution to poor countries. Pharmaceutical companies are ramping up manufacturing as fast as they can, including in low-income countries.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/27/poonfang-pushover-eric-swalwell-still-on-intel-committee/

Democrats last week tabled a GOP resolution to remove Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from the House Intelligence Committee. Republicans have been pushing for Swalwell’s removal since Axios exposed the Democrat’s capers with Fang Fang, also known as Christine Fang, a spy from Communist China.

As Debra Saunders noted, Fang raised money for Swalwell’s 2014 reelection campaign and also helped place at least one intern in Swalwell’s House office. That was actual collusion, from someone who falsely accused Trump of collusion with the Kremlin. Swalwell suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, but there’s more to the California Democrat who fell for the honey trap, the oldest espionage trick in the book. 

Swalwell faithfully repeated Chinese Communist propaganda practically word for word, and it’s hard to find a case where Swalwell disagrees with China or criticizes their human rights record. The PRC is in fact a genocidal Stalinist dictatorship, a reality Democrats and Republicans alike these days tend to ignore. 

Swalwell blamed the Axios report on President Trump, and that was not his first shot in the blame game. The former prosecutor, who ran for president of the United States, specializes in guilt by accusation. 

In a March 26, 2019 appearance on Fox News, Martha MacCallum asked Swalwell if he had any second thoughts about things he had said in the two years before the release of the Mueller report that found no evidence of collusion. Swalwell drew a blank. MacCallum pressed the case of the infamous Steele dossier. Swalwell turned the tables and asked what in the dossier had been found false.

For Swalwell, Trump’s firing of FBI boss James Comey was prima facie evidence of the president’s guilt. Mueller found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy, and no guilt. Swalwell made repeated claims of substantive evidence he failed to produce and, like the establishment media, he has no second thoughts. 

The California Democrat was the biggest haul in Fang Fang’s operations between 2011 and 2015. That year the FBI warned Swalwell, who supposedly was unaware, that Fang worked for Beijing. The case is strong that Swalwell should not hold office, let alone occupy a place on the intelligence committee, where he is privy to the most sensitive information. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/27/christopher-lasch-vs-the-elites-of-our-time/

Several friends who have been reading the work of Christopher Lasch prompted me to return to the work of this historian and cultural critic. What follows is an adaptation and expansion of some earlier thoughts about Lasch.

***

“No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate.”

“. . .  the bad news goes on and on.”

—Christopher Lasch

With the untimely death of Christopher Lasch in 1994 at the age of 61, America was deprived of one of her most articulate and earnestly plangent social critics. By training, Lasch was an historian of 19th- and 20th-century American culture. For some 30- years, he specialized in anatomizing—exaggerating, some would say—certain “odious facts” about American culture. 

Already in 1965, in his widely admired book The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963, Lasch deplored the “decline of the sense of community” in American society. Subtitled “The Intellectual as Social Type,” this collection of biographical vignettes was meant to register the “peculiarly fragmented character of modern society” by examining the lives and works of social reformers and pontificators from Jane Addams and Randolph Bourne through Lincoln Steffens, Herbert Croly, and Walter Lippmann. It ended with a polemical chapter called “The Anti-intellectualism of the Intellectuals,” in which prominent writers and activists such as Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Dwight Macdonald, and—speaking of odious facts about American culture—Norman Mailer were taken to task for failing to develop any politically effective criticism of American society.

As the 1960s devolved, so did the tenor of Lasch’s complaints. In The Agony of the American Left (1969), he informed us that we now faced “an unprecedented crisis” wrought by capitalism, “giant corporations,” and other familiar villains. Co-opted by such nefarious forces, the American intellectual Left was in “agony” because it had become politically ineffective. He concluded that “It is clearer than ever that radicalism”—which he went on to identify with socialism—“is the only long-term hope for America.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/the-case-for-prosecuting-hunter-biden/

 C harles C. W. Cooke had a post this week that said everything that ought to be said about why it would be fitting to prosecute Hunter Biden’s apparent making of a false statement on the required firearms application form. I want to add a few points about prosecutorial discretion, the potential of an additional gun crime, and our two-tiered justice system.

The Politico story Charlie cites stresses that prosecutions arising out of false statements on Form 4473 are rare. As Charlie rightly observes, that in itself is a problem (a point Kevin D. Williamson also made a few days ago). Still, it is worth widening the lens beyond the narrow false-statements provision in the gun laws because the government actually prosecutes false statements all the time.

There is a general false-statements statute (Section 1001 of the penal code) which can be applied any time someone makes a false statement, including a material omission, to some branch, department, or agency of the federal government. Then there are false statements charges that apply to particular subject-matter areas, such as firearms or taxes. Hence, we have Section 922(a)(6), which, as Charlie explained, applies to false statements made in connection with the acquisition or attempted acquisition of a firearm.

The fact that these narrowly tailored false-statements statutes are invoked more rarely should not be taken to mean that false-statements prosecutions are infrequent. They are not. And a good many false statements that result in indictments involve situations markedly less serious than lying to conceal a disqualification from firearms possession — especially under circumstances where, due to the lie, the disqualified person succeeded in obtaining a gun (and then was lax in safeguarding it).

In the Mueller investigation, for instance, Michael Flynn was prosecuted for misdescribing a conversation, indicative of no misconduct, of which the FBI had a recording and therefore no need to question him. George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan were prosecuted for false statements about the dates of meetings, and in neither situation was an investigation impeded — much less were the prevaricators, thereby, able to acquire dangerous weapons.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/25/d-c-drive-for-statehood-reminds-us-of-whats-gone-wrong-with-our-country/

The campaign for Washington, D.C., statehood has come up yet again. If nothing else, this shows how far out of control the federal government has become.

The drive to make D.C. America’s 51st state isn’t new. But, with a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in Congress, the ruling class is in a mood to consolidate its power, and with the Democrat-media industrial complex demanding that everything must be seen through the lens of race, it’s now an overheated topic.

For decades the pro-statehood forces have complained about being subject to taxation without representation. (We’ll have more to say on this later.) Today’s argument is centered on race. It is “a historically black city,” according to the district government, with 47% of residents black, 41% white.

“This is not about politics. It’s about a fundamental voting and civil rights issue,” says House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney, who is of course a Democrat, the party that’s pushing hard for H.R. 51, which “provides for admission into the United States of the state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.” (We’ll have more about the party’s power grab later, too.)

To hear David Litt, a speechwriter for Barack Obama, tell it, “the D.C. statehood fight is part of an ugly effort to disenfranchise black and brown people.” Opposing views, he says, “echo the last gasps of the Jim Crow era.”

While the Democrats and the media put everything they have into dividing the country, allow us to shine a light on what many are missing: When Washington, D.C., was established as the nation’s capital, the founders didn’t foresee it being a city of permanent residents and the base for an intrusive leviathan command center. It was to be merely the seat of the federal government.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-disgrace-that-was-the-biden-press-conference/ar-BB1eZV0j?li=BBnb7Kz

President Biden called on 10 reporters to answer 30-some questions during his long-awaited first formal press conference on Thursday. But the hour-plus event was a disgrace for some in the press and a dubious performance by the president.

The questions for the president were meek and vague, failing to extract any specific information about policies or solutions to the myriad problems faced by the administration. Take, for example, this activism disguised as a question from PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor on why the president needs to abolish the filibuster in the name of racial equality while combating evil Republicans in their efforts to prevent minorities from voting. Or something like that.

“When it comes to the filibuster, immigration is a big issue, of course, related to the filibuster, but there’s also Republicans who are passing bill after bill trying to restrict voting rights. [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer’s calling it in an existential threat to democracy,” Alcindor, who plays an objective journalist on TV, said to the president after being the second reporter chosen by Biden’s handlers for him to call upon. “Why not back a filibuster rule that at least gets around issues, including voting rights or immigration? [South Carolina Congressman] Jim Clyburn, someone, of course, who you know very well, has backed the idea of a filibuster rule when it comes to civil rights and voting rights.”

That’s not even bias in broad daylight. That’s outright activism in pressing the president on national television to move forward with abolishing the filibuster to advance an agenda she supports. Alcindor also failed to quote Biden’s own words back to him from a speech he called, at the time, one of the most important of his career: “It is not only a bad idea, it upsets the constitutional design and it disservices the country,” Biden argued in 2005 against eliminating the Senate filibuster. “No longer would the Senate be that ‘different kind of legislative body’ that the Founders intended. No longer would the Senate be the ‘saucer’ to cool the passions of the immediate majority.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/26/to-the-parapets-defenders-of-free-speech/

To date, a number of observers have diagnosed and condemned the rancid ideology and insidious aims of the true threat to America: the radical Leftist American Communists or Am-coms. 

In his anti-socialist manifesto, Evan Sayet coined the term and dissected the totalitarian designs of The Woke Supremacy; Lisa De Pasquale satirically skewered the intrinsic insanity and hypocrisy of our self-anointed “moral superiors” in The Social Justice Warrior Handbook: A Practical Survival Guide for Snowflakes, Millennials, and Generation Z; and most recently, Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), a leader of exceptional intellect and moral courage, condemned the intolerance behind the regressive policies and neo-racist practices of the often less-than-non-violent “woke folk.”

But it is not just observers from the center-Right decrying the Am-coms. Granted, this oppressive movement will be called many different things depending on who across the political spectrum is discussing it, but the recognition of its dangers remains. Some of the most poignant critiques have come from intellectually honest journalists who are not on the Right, such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Both ably set forth the Am-coms’ goal of controlling the media and Big Tech to censor political opponents. Taibbi, for example, exposes the “troubling views” of Columbia law professor Timothy Wu, who feels the First Amendment is “obsolete.” In doing so, Greenwald and Taibbi provide the first step in identifying and defeating the Am-coms.

There is no surer way to identify an Am-com than by his lust for censorship.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hearing-demands-0cf?token=

“Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey.”

The repressive objective of the Democratic-controlled Congress is to transfer the power to police and censor political discourse from these tech giants to themselves.

Republican members largely confined their grievances to the opposite concern: that these social media giants were excessively silencing conservative voices in order to promote a liberal political agenda (that complaint is only partially true: a good amount of online censorship, like growing law enforcement domestic monitoring generally, focuses on all anti-establishment ideologies, not just the right-wing variant). This editorial censoring, many Republicans insisted, rendered the tech companies’ Section 230 immunity obsolete, since they are now acting as publishers rather than mere neutral transmitters of information. Some Republicans did join with Democrats in demanding greater censorship, though typically in the name of protecting children from mental health disorders and predators rather than ideological conformity.

As they have done in prior hearings, both Zuckerberg and Pichai spoke like the super-scripted, programmed automatons that they are, eager to please their Congressional overseers (though they did periodically issue what should have been unnecessary warnings that excessive “content moderation” can cripple free political discourse). Dorsey, by contrast, seemed at the end of his line of patience and tolerance for vapid, moronic censorship demands, and — sitting in a kitchen in front of a pile of plates and glasses — he, refreshingly, barely bothered to hide that indifference. At one point, he flatly stated in response to demands that Twitter do more to remove “disinformation”: “I don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth and I don’t think the government should be either.”