RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/10/history-will-grind-out-the-truth/

“History will figure that out on its own.” That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  

In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab—and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself.  

Fauci offered arguments from authority by citing his own expertise, as well as that of “card-carrying” specialists. 

But in truth, there is little evidence that any animal species has been found infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus or a close relative that causes COVID-19 or a similar illness.  

Many federal health experts increasingly believe the virus was man-made. A number argue that it was likely a product of gain-of-function research that was funded in part by a U.S. government grant.  

Others concede that Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak—who was involved in gain-of-function research, often in cooperation with the Chinese—were not candid about the full extent of their ties to the Wuhan lab. But despite Chinese resistance to releasing pertinent data, history eventually will sort the truth out—as it does with most controversies of the moment.  

Five years ago, the New York Times, the Washington Post, most of the mainstream media, and the majority of the bipartisan Washington. D.C. political and government establishments insisted that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.  

In support of such conspiracy theories, they fixated on the so-called Steele dossier. It was a supposedly independent research effort detailing “proof” of Trump-Russian cooperation to rob Hillary Clinton of the election.  

That supposed evidence was the unspoken ground swell for a 22-month, $40-million special counsel investigation of Trump conducted by former FBI head Robert Mueller.  

For over 650 days, the country was consumed with “Russian collusion.” Cable news outlets, public television and radio pundits, along with high-ranking Democratic politicians, almost daily announced the impending end of the colluding Trump Administration. 

They peddled rumors of Trump’s supposed obscene activity in Moscow. They spun tales of mysterious meetings between Trump’s family and Russian operatives, and of Trump surrogates’ supposed trips to meet with Russian colluding officials.  

Christopher Steele, the architect of the “dossier,” had not been to Russia in decades. He was a rank partisan in the pay of the Clinton campaign—and for a time the FBI itself.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/can-people-keep-resisting-big-government-tyranny-bruce-thornton/

Last week voters in Virginia delivered a rebuke to the party of consolidated power and technocratic statism when a Republican political tyro defeated a deep-state Democrat in the election for governor. Like Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, the outcome of this victory signals a growing resistance to the Democrats’ overweening, unconstitutional interference in families, businesses, civil society, and state sovereignty. A message has been sent to the Biden administration, a portent of the greater backlash increasingly likely in next year’s midterm elections.

Yet tempering this optimism and faith in our Constitutional guardrails against tyranny is an ancient question, one at the heart of political philosophy for 2500 years: Do the non-elite, ordinary citizens have the capacity to govern? When government power exceeds its Constitutional bounds, will the people use their votes to rein it in? Or is the idea that the common people can govern as delusional as, to use Socrates’ analogy, the crew and passengers of a ship selecting a captain by a majority of their votes?

What happened in Virginia is one of those periodic reactions of voters to policies that are indifferent or hostile to their  beliefs and principles. Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe encapsulated this arrogant disdain for the people when he said during a debate, “I don’t think that parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” following his defense of an earlier veto of a bill while governor that would have given parents some oversight over sexually explicit books in the schools’ libraries. This statement became the emblem of the progressives’ overreach and technocratic disdain for parents.

And the pushback came not just in Virginia. In state and local elections from Pennsylvania to deep-blue Seattle, voters are standing athwart the progressive transformation of this country and yelling “Stop!” Even progressive flaks like The New York Times have warned that these Republican successes “are a grave marker of political peril,” and that the Dems need to return “to the moderate policies and values” that won in 2018 and 2020.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/11/time-to-pin-a-medal-on-larry-summers-for-his-bidenflation-prediction/

We’re not big fans of economist Larry Summers, but in this case, he should be in line for a Nobel Prize for predicting exactly what is happening with inflation today … and who is to blame for it.

On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation climbed at an annual rate of 6.2%, the biggest such jump in three decades.

And that’s despite repeated predictions from other “experts” that the spike in prices earlier this year was “transitory.” Even now, they are flummoxed. As the Washington Post put it Wednesday, inflation is “lasting longer than policymakers at the Fed and White House anticipated.”

But no one, we repeat, no one, should be surprised by the latest turn of events.

Go back and listen to what Summers was saying at the start of the year, and it’s eerily prescient.

Summers publicly and repeatedly warned that President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “rescue” plan —which was Biden’s first big “achievement” that passed without a single Republican vote — would spark an inflationary spiral.

https://www.city-journal.org/scientific-merit-and-the-equity-cult

Another day, another retraction of a scientific paper for violating the code of diversity. On November 1, astronomer John Kormendy withdrew an article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), after a preprint version that he had just posted on the web drew sharp criticism for threatening the conduct of “inclusive” science. Three days later, the preprint version was scrubbed as well (though a PDF can still be found here.) The paper had passed the journal’s three-person peer-review system and was awaiting publication. Kormendy’s forthcoming book on the same topic had also passed peer review and had been printed for distribution. Now distribution of the book has been put on hold, likely permanently.

Kormendy, an expert on supermassive black holes and professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, acknowledges no errors in his research. “I didn’t do anything [methodologically] wrong,” he told me. “I trust my techniques; I trust the results. I checked for bias in great detail.” Nevertheless, he issued an apology on November 1: “I now see that my work has hurt people. I apologize to you all for the stress and the pain that I have caused. Nothing could be further from my hopes. I fully support all efforts to promote fairness, inclusivity, and a nurturing environment for all.”

What was so hurtful in his article? Kormendy had aimed to reduce the role of individual subjectivity in scientific hiring and tenure decisions. He created a model that predicted a scientist’s long-term research impact from the citation history of his early publications. He tested the results of his model against a panel of 22 prestigious astronomers, many of whom had advised the federal government on scientific research priorities and had served as jurors on high-profile astronomy prizes. That panel rated the research impact of the 512 astronomers whom Kormendy had run through his model; the panel’s conclusions closely matched the model’s results. Kormendy’s paper stressed that hiring decisions should be made “holistically.” Scientific influence was only one factor to consider; achieving gender and racial balance in a department was also a legitimate concern, he wrote.

Formulas for quantifying scientific influence on the basis of a citation record are hardly new. PNAS itself published the proposal for one such well-known measure, known as the “h-index.” But that was in 2005. In 2021, a different standard for evaluating ideas applies: Do they help or hinder females and underrepresented minorities in STEM? Kormendy’s model, tweeted an astrophysicist at the City University of New York, “JUST TOOK ANY TINY STEPS WE ARE MAKING TOWARDS EQUITY AND THREW THEM OUT OF THE WINDOW” (capitalization in the original). An astronomer in Budapest objected that Kormendy had failed to consult with “relevant humanities experts” about cumulative bias against females and minorities. Equally damningly, Kormendy had suggested that the profession should overcome its underrepresentation problem by hiring female and minority scientists, who, in the words of the Budapest astronomer, “match the success rate of the majority (i.e., men).”