RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/de-blasio-vaccine-mandate-looks-unlawful-shots-covid-19-private-employees-new-york-bill-11638916746?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio this week announced that all private-sector employees in the city will be required to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by the end of the month. The mayor calls his plan “Key to New York,” and its function is to lock hundreds of thousands of residents out.

The constitutionality of Mr. de Blasio’s mandate will turn primarily on Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), in which the Supreme Court upheld a smallpox vaccination law. The justices held that state governments have the power to exercise “self-defense” against infectious disease on behalf of the community, so long as the measures were “reasonable” and not “arbitrary.” But Mr. de Blasio’s measure goes far beyond the holding or reasoning of the precedent, to say nothing of the past century of constitutional doctrine.

Jacobson involved smallpox, which before its eradication was one of the most fearsome diseases known to man. It killed 30% of those infected. It disproportionately affected children and commonly left them disfigured by lesions. Covid-19 is serious, but it’s in a different league.

The town of Cambridge imposed a one-time fine of $5 (equivalent of roughly $160 today) on those who refused vaccination. The details of Mr. de Blasio’s scheme haven’t been announced—he promises “guidance” next week. But if it resembles President Biden’s federal mandates, it will impose mounting, ruinous fines. It isn’t the mild inducement the court upheld in Jacobson—it is pure coercion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/12/20/classical-music-without-quotas/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

I recently left the Metropolitan Opera in New York after a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. A friend who was with me had never seen the work before and suddenly blurted out how amazing it is that anybody could view such an art form as elitist or somehow difficult to access. True, it was past midnight, and we had started this journey through Wagner’s lightest work at around 6 p.m. In other words it was only around twice the length of the average Hollywood film these days. Yet opera has a reputation for elitism that cinema does not — which is strange, because, as my friend noticed, everything about the work we had just seen was not just egalitarian but wildly so.

The mastersingers themselves, you will recall, are all members of various trade guilds. The art of song-making is revered in the town of Nuremberg, but equally revered are the trades from which the masters come. Hans Sachs is a cobbler and is admired by all for his hard work and mastery of shoemaking as much as for his mastery of songwriting. Equally admired are the bakers, the tailors, and all other craftsmen. In Wagner’s Nuremberg, everybody who masters his trade is revered.

It was a moving thing to hear, this reflection on the simple egalitarian nature of Meistersinger. Because opera lovers today — like all lovers of classical music — are to some extent made to feel as though we’re guilty of something. In the English-speaking countries, most politicians and other public figures will actively avoid mentioning whether they like classical music. Those of us who are less shy about our love of these works have been made to feel that we are the problem. The fact that other attendees at this particular performance of Meistersinger included a pretty good cross section of age groups and other demographics could do nothing to dull this particular apprehension: the sense that we who enjoy going to concert halls and opera houses have in some way become an embarrassment to the venues that tolerate us.

It has been like this for years, with bureaucrats of the musical world and maestros increasingly bemoaning the whiteness and the elderliness of their audiences. Any reasonable person would have long ago made his peace with certain facts of artistic life. There are some art forms that you appreciate as a child, some that you learn to appreciate as you grow older. The retired have more time and disposable income than the young do, and there is nothing wrong in itself with the elderly enjoying particular pleasures or forming the backbone of particular audiences. Throw in as many access opportunities as possible (one reason some of us got into the art form), subsidize tickets, or give free tickets to the young, and you’ve done most of what you can do, other than encourage schools to actually teach music properly. But that is beyond the remit of the orchestral venues themselves.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/06/the-demonization-of-rosanne-boyland-begins/

Yet another lie animating the phony narrative about the events at the Capitol complex on January 6 is about to be exposed: the falsehood that Rosanne Boyland, a Trump supporter from Georgia, died of an accidental drug overdose that day.

As American Greatness has reported for months, incriminating video footage and firsthand witness accounts instead support numerous allegations that D.C. Metro and Capitol police contributed to, if they did not directly cause, Boyland’s death in the late afternoon of January 6. 

Boyland’s family reportedly has hired an attorney to investigate the circumstances of her death at the age of 34; the D.C Medical Examiner’s Office issued a report in April disclosing the cause of death of four Trump supporters who died on January 6 during what the coroner called “an unprecedented incident of civil insurrection.” It determined Boyland had succumbed to “acute amphetamine intoxication.”

But it’s increasingly obvious that the ruling is untrue. (The same D.C. Medical Examiner’s office intentionally delayed the results of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick’s autopsy; even after confirming Sicknick had died of a stroke caused by blood clots, the coroner nonetheless insisted the chaos at the Capitol protest “played a role in his condition.”)

With the potential release of three hours of security camera footage that recorded exactly what happened inside the lower west terrace tunnel—the location where Boyland died—on January 6, law enforcement officials could face fierce public scrutiny for their behavior that day. It’s only a slice of the 14,000 hours of surveillance video captured by the Capitol Police department’s closed-circuit television system that Joe Biden’s Justice Department is hiding under protective orders, deemed “highly sensitive” government material.