RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/ultra-buck-passer-and-liar-white-house-joseph-klein/

On May 10th, President Joe Biden delivered a speech on inflation in an effort to get ahead of the expected bad news the next day concerning the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The president said that fighting inflation was now his “top domestic priority” even though it was not that long ago when he dismissed the steep price increases Americans were experiencing as merely “transitory.”

President Biden is calling inflation “a real tough problem to solve.” Too bad that the president has no clue on how to solve the “real tough problem” that he had a big hand in creating.

President Biden’s speech was long on passing the buck to others and short on offering real solutions. The president refused to accept any responsibility for the inflation that began surging early in his term.

Instead of following the advice from the sign on President Harry Truman’s desk in his White House office, “The Buck Stops Here,” Biden took to heart President Truman’s quip: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”

Indeed, President Biden tried to spin his own disastrous economic policies into something positive. He shamelessly boasted, “I think our policies help, not hurt.”

At a Democratic National Committee fundraiser on May 11th, Biden said that “until we got elected and we changed presidents, I think people started to lose faith in the capacity of the American government to deliver — to deliver, to make life better for people.”

The American people are not fooled. A majority has lost faith in President Biden’s capacity to perform his job and make life better for the American people. About two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the way President Biden is handling the economy, according to a poll reported by CNN earlier this month.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-house-subpoena-wars-jan-6-committee-congress-kevin-mccarthy-jim-jordan-nancy-pelosi-11652479291?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Partisanship on Capitol Hill is as bitter as we can recall, and it’s about to get worse. The Jan. 6 special committee has unleashed the subpoena power of the House against fellow Members.

The committee on Thursday issued commands to five GOP Members of Congress to testify about events surrounding the Jan 6 Capitol riot. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.)and Reps. Scott Perry (Pa.), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Andy Biggs (Ariz.) and Mo Brooks (Ala.) have refused to answer committee questions, so they’re getting unprecedented subpoena treatment.

House subpoenas to Members are typically reserved for investigations by the Ethics Committee focusing on allegations of corruption. The Ethics Committee has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, and its investigations (if not always its judgments) are traditionally bipartisan.

The Jan. 6 committee has two GOP Members, though they were chosen by Speaker Nancy Pelosi after she rejected two of Mr. McCarthy’s candidates. The Minority Leader then declined to nominate anyone else. Republicans are sure to see the subpoenas as a case of turning the investigative power of the House against the opposition party.

If Democrats think this will be a one-time-only event, they are dreaming. If Republicans retake the House in November, you can guarantee that Mr. Jordan, as likely Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, will find some reason to subpoena Democrats about oh, say, what they knew about the Russian collusion narrative or Democrats who objected to the electoral vote counts in 2000, 2004, or 2016.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-lawsuit-will-shine-a-light-on-twitter-censorship-soical-media-big-tech-facebook-speech-11652634888?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Do social-media companies collude with the federal government to suppress speech? On April 29, Judge William Alsup issued a ruling in a case I brought against Twitter that could become a watershed in holding social-media companies accountable for censorship.

This problem became acute at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic. On Jan. 29, 2020, Twitter declared: “We’re committed to playing our part to amplify authoritative, official content across the globe.” Facebook essentially forbade discussion that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab. Today debate over the lab-leak theory is allowed, but free discussion of the side effects and efficacy of Covid vaccines isn’t.

Censorship by these vastly powerful companies is antithetical to the advancement of science and basic democratic principles, both of which require open debate. But the companies and government have closely guarded the secrets of how they work together—including whether and how they target dissenters like me.

After March 2020, I became a prominent skeptic of the U.S. coronavirus response, arguing that neither “nonpharmaceutical” interventions like masks nor vaccine mandates were likely to change the course of the epidemic. Much of what I wrote, though controversial at the time, is now conventional wisdom. Twitter—open to the public, available globally, and a crucial platform for journalism—was my primary outlet.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/yet-another-anti-conservative-study-was-fake-news/

Virtually all social-science hypotheses that attempt to find dark psychological reasons for conservatism haven’t held up at all under peer review.

Yet another major study claiming conservatism is caused by mental problems has been conclusively proven to be junk science.

The now-debunked study suggested conservatism is associated with conspiratorial thinking and “negativity bias.” But it proved impossible to replicate when tested by other researchers.

“We find no consistent evidence that negativity bias promotes right-wing ideology; promotes ‘closed’ values or personality traits, such as need for closure or (low) openness to experience; or interacts with political engagement,” researchers doing the debunking wrote in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature. “To support these null results, we conduct a series of data quality and robustness checks that suggest our data is comparable in quality to that of previous work and our results do not hinge on particular operationalizations or modeling choices. Indeed, our results are consistent with several recent studies that fail to replicate associations between physiological indicators of threat sensitivity and political ideology.”

Perhaps nothing confirms that the root of the crisis in science is government control as much as watching people with doctorates make mistakes that should be obvious to a freshman. The critical error of endlessly privileging hypotheses that coincide with progressive political preferences has become sadly common.