RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/29/caught-with-their-hands-in-the-cookie-jar/

If you have a number of children, as I do, you might be familiar with something like the following scene: A child is caught red-handed doing something he shouldn’t, say, stealing a cookie from the cookie jar. When confronted, he immediately begins to deny guilt and deflect blame.

“My sister ate the cookie! I was just reaching my hand in to make sure it was gone so I could tell you,” the child might exclaim, while dusting cookie crumbs off of his shirt. If pressed about his obvious guilt, he might become angry and lash out.

This is just the sort of behavior we are witnessing from the election-rigging Democrats over the past several weeks. They scream “insurrection” and “coup” at 74.2 million Trump supporters who supposedly bear collective guilt for the actions of a few hundred rioting LARPers at the Capitol, who were immediately denounced by virtually everyone on the Right (in sharp contrast to leftist rioters over the summer, who were coddled and encouraged by the Democrats). 

Meanwhile, these same election riggers have launched a “domestic terrorism” witch hunt against Trump supporters, in a clear and obvious attempt to suppress political opposition to the new regime.

Like the child with his hand in the cookie jar, the more guilty the Democrats are of “winning” a blatantly rigged election versus Donald Trump, the louder they must scream about their noble crusade to save “democracy” from “fascism.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-good-vaccine-deed-11611963112?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Donald Trump spearheaded the warp speed development of vaccines for COVID  and deserves the most praise……rsk

Johnson & Johnson and Novavax this week reported that their vaccines were effective in clinical trials, and what fortunate timing. The U.S. urgently needs a supply boost. But at this juncture it’s also worth noting how former Operation Warp Speed chief Moncef Slaoui positioned the Biden Administration for a vaccine triumph.

One of Mr. Slaoui’s inspired ideas was to diversify the federal government’s vaccine bets with six manufacturers when nobody knew which, if any, would work. The vaccine candidates used different technologies—Moderna and Pfizer -BioNTech (mRNA), J&J and AstraZeneca (adenovirus), and Novavax and Sanofi -GSK (recombinant protein).

The J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines were hobbled by trial delays in the fall. But J&J reported Friday that its vaccine was 66% effective at protecting people from moderate to severe disease in a global trial, and 85% against severe illness. Early trial data from AstraZeneca suggests similar efficacy. Novavax reported Thursday its shot appears to be nearly 90% effective.

The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are about 95% effective, so it’s fortuitous that their trial results came first so their shots could inoculate the elderly and others most at highest risk. But even if somewhat less effective, the other vaccines may be good candidates for young people and boost supply this spring.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&i

We’re barely a week into the Biden presidency, and it’s been a literal blizzard of Executive Orders, so many that nobody can even keep up with them. Trying to review them in at least a general way, I can’t find a single one that is a good idea. They range from bad to catastrophic.

The overall summary is that the dopes have taken full control. All adult supervision has now been banished from the vast federal government, and the wokest (and stupidest) of the woke progressives are to have the full run of the place. Resources are now infinite, tradeoffs among competing priorities are no longer necessary, and all human problems are to be solved and perfect fairness and justice instituted within a matter of weeks if not days. Best of all, the Bidenistas think that all this will work because they are so “smart.”

At Jacobin magazine, writer David Sirota captures the spirit of the moment in a piece titled “There’s Really No Need to Compromise, Joe.” The specific focus of the piece is advocating for immediate legislation to pass out checks for $2000 each— as opposed to any smaller amount — to most every American. But the bigger theme is that compromise is not needed because now there are no more limits on how much money the federal government can pass out, nor is there any cost or other downside to just throwing out money as fast as possible. The route to improving your and everyone else’s life is endless big handouts of free money from the Feds:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/speech-and-sedition-in-2021-11611962910?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Most Americans learn in school about flagship political excesses in U.S. history like Joe McCarthy’s 1950s inquisitions, the post-World War I Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Yet a recent Washington Post opinion piece purports to explain “what the 1798 Sedition Act got right.”

The law banned a wide range of political speech and publication. It was passed by the ruling Federalists to suppress the rival Democratic-Republicans, whom they saw as seditious. The Post piece argues that though their solution was “flawed,” the Federalists had reason to worry about “unregulated freedom of the press.”

We highlight this as one example among many of the emerging appetite for viewpoint suppression among journalists, intellectuals and Democrats in the wake of the Trump Presidency. They increasingly see domestic enemies wherever they look, and are devising ways to use levers of power to restrict, regulate and boycott opposition. It’s an extraordinary and ominous turn in a democracy.

***

Many calls to sanction opposition media come from voices that claimed to be most alarmed by Donald Trump’s attacks on the free press. Margaret Sullivan, the Post’s media columnist, wrote this week that “corporations that advertise on Fox News should walk away,” declaring that the outlet’s “role in the 400,000 U.S. lives lost to the pandemic and in the disastrous attack of Jan. 6” has been “deadly.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/01/marginalising-conservatives-until-we-vanish/

Pithy quote:

It is divisive by definition to recognize there can be two or more points of view, which is not a bad thing if people of good will anoint their disagreements with the oil of civility. But when a dominant group insists on its version and silences those who dare to differ in part or whole, as we are seeing today, purges and show trials are not too far down the road.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/01/the-science-is-settled-lefties-are-fearful-scolds/

“We all know that modern liberals can’t argue a case and that their stock standard response to ideas other than what they have been told to believe is flinging insults — ‘racist’, ‘homophobe’ ‘bigot’ etc — and decamping to the coda of a farewell ‘shut up’. Well there’s a reason they’re that way, poor things, as a team of US and New Zealand researchers have just laid out.”

There is more than a modicum of truth in the old joke that the definition of a ‘racist’ is anyone who is winning an argument with a leftist.  When a woke leftist’s evidence and logic don’t stack up, a bit of name-calling (‘racist’, ‘bigot’, ‘deplorable’, etc.) will enable them to seize the presumed moral high ground and thereby claim victory, at least to their own satisfaction.  Moral one-upmanship is the woke leftist’s go-to position: ‘I’m good, you’re bad, so just shut-up’. If you’re of the Left, it’s the all-purpose, not-so-sotto-voce debate clincher. 

Such ‘virtue-signalling’ by the morally self-righteous Left is supported by anecdotal evidence galore but now there is hard scientific evidence for its empirical reality, as demonstrated with regard to the ‘moralisation’ of COVID-19 by the lockdown-Loving Left.  Researchers from New Zealand’s University of Otago and two universities in the US recently published the results of their study , ‘Moralization of Covid-19 Health Response: Asymmetry in Tolerance for Human Costs‘, in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. It’s a doozy.

People who see the SARS-COV-2 virus as an “urgent and visible threat”, the researchers find, moralise the social distancing policies, especially lockdowns, claimed to contain and eliminate the virus.  Lockdown is framed by such moralisers as a “question of right or wrong”, and so “staying at home and complying with mask mandates”, for example, are presented as matters of “ethical duty and commitment to the common good”.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-limbaugh/2021/01/29/the-lefts-ongoing-campaign-to-denigrate-trump-supporters-n1416757

If the first week of leftist insanity gushing from President Joe Biden’s executive pen doesn’t vindicate Donald Trump’s supporters in full measure, I don’t know what could. Scratch that. There is much more to come.

Trump supporters have long touted the former president’s impressive policy achievements as proof they were wise in supporting him and correct that an outsider could get results.

We’ve learned in the past few months who is running this country: the media, the social media oligarchy, cancel culture and leftist dark money being poured into the system. These forces have weaponized identity politics and empowered the Democratic Party to regain control and move this country leftward at warp speed, which means destroying prosperity and jobs.

Trump haters have been salivating for years over an opportunity to finally bring him crashing down in disgrace, and take his allegedly evil supporters along with him — never to rise again and impede their progressive agenda.

They tried for Trump’s entire term to overturn the results of the 2016 election. They engaged in a coordinated effort to undo what the voters had done, corrupting our security agencies and our government institutions to lead a soft, sophisticated coup that makes Jan. 6 look like amateur hour.

With assists from the media and the rest of the leftist political and cultural establishment, these forces escaped accountability and proceed as cavalierly as ever, as if nothing ever happened. In a particularly in-your-face move, these bullies have designated one of the central players in the coup, Rep. Eric Swalwell, to be an impeachment manager in their post-term impeachment gambit.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/29/bidens-worst-executive-order-went-almost-entirely-unnoticed/

In the flurry of President Joe Biden’s executive orders was one that was almost entirely overlooked but could easily end up having the biggest impact.

The order also seems harmless enough, going by the seemingly innocent title “Modernizing Regulatory Review.” Except this order isn’t about modernizing regulations. It’s about unleashing the regulatory state with a ferocity never before seen in this country.

Biden’s order – which didn’t get released to the press until late in the evening of his first day – aims to effectively toss the cost-benefit analysis that for many decades has served as at least a modest brake on the ambitions of regulators. In the past, regulations where the cost of compliance far exceeded the benefits could be stymied by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Biden wants the review process instead to be “a tool to affirmatively promote regulations” and “to ensure swift and effective federal action” on everything from the pandemic, to the economy, to racial inequality, to the “undeniable reality and accelerating threat of climate change.” In other words … everything.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/28/how-equity-will-destroy-america/

Back in 2019, as the race for the Democratic nomination for president was shaping up, the field was heralded as the most diverse in history. But when the dust settled, it was the old white guy who had once palled around with segregationists who came away with the prize. The Joe Biden administration is making up for his paleness now by making race and identity the grand unifying principle of its approach to everything. If they succeed, the results will be a disaster.

The administration has identified four emergencies facing the nation that it seeks to prioritize. One is racism itself; the other three are COVID-19, the economy, and climate change. In all of these areas, Biden has promised to keep a laser focus on equity. It is important to realize that equity is not equality. The latter concerns itself with opportunities, the former with outcomes.

How do we know this? It’s right there in Biden’s executive order on equity. The order states, “Affirmatively advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our Government.” It is telling that equal opportunity comes last and that equity comes first. Equity basically means that it is the job of the government to make sure that little or no disparities exist when comparing the outcomes of different demographic groups. It is an insane and dangerous fallacy.

Setting aside the notion that our government (and we ourselves) should be treating people as individuals, not as representatives of their demographic groups, there is a deeper problem with equity. This is that different demographic groups on average prioritize different things. Broadly speaking, a big reason why Asian students outperform white students is that their parents look at education in very different ways.