RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/11669/defeat-and-dishonesty

Denyse O’Leary, whom I always read with great interest in our Comments section, chides me for diagnosing our present woes but not proposing solutions.

That ought to be easy. In Afghanistan what needed to be done is almost as old as man. As Victor David Hanson pointed out to Tucker, “This is the greatest loss of military equipment in the history of warfare by one power.”

He’s right. Because US government is so drunkenly profligate, the numbers sound blah-blah to jaded American ears. But $85-90 billion is larger than the annual military budget for every nation around the world except the US and China. For those partial to the International Jewish Conspiracy theory of history, what America has just given the Taliban is equivalent to 85 per cent of all the military aid Washington has given Israel since 1948. The Taliban now possess more Black Hawk helicopters than almost all America’s allies; they own near to a tenth of all Humvees on the planet. That’s aside from less obvious items, such as over 160,000 radios and over 16,000 night-vision goggles that will come in mighty handy for wiping out the remnants of resistance in the Panjshir Valley.

The “solution” to this is to do what every army has known to do down through the millennia: a retreat means not just preventing your men from falling into the hands of the enemy but also their weapons – including, if necessary, your allies’ weapons. As many readers will know, at the beginning of July 1940, just a week after France threw in the towel and signed its armistice with Germany, the Royal Navy attacked and disabled the French fleet, then the largest and most powerful in Continental Europe.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/celebrating-our-enemies-twenty-years-after-911-bruce-bawer/

On 9/11, the world was shown, in one horrific, indelible image, precisely what Islam is all about. Today, to write the previous sentence is to be guilty of Islamophobia. How did that come to be? It began in the days after 9/11 itself, when George W. Bush – by repeatedly insisting that the cause of the jihadists had nothing to do with Islam – effectively ruled out of bounds any criticism of that religion, or any honest education and open discussion about it. Instead, Bush – who had gotten it into his head that all religions are basically good, and who was manipulated by advisors who wanted to project American power in a part of the world about which they knew very little – used 9/11 as an excuse to rein in Americans’ civil liberties and go nation-building abroad. It was a massive folly, doomed to failure. Why doomed? Because Islam is utterly irreconcilable with American-style freedom and incapable of reform, at least not without a far more aggressive effort than America was willing to commit to. Unlike America, moreover, Islam has a long memory. Muslims recall their forebears’ foiled attempts to conquer the Christian West at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683; the attacks of 9/11 were part of a history of such actions that goes back to Islam’s earliest days. Yet few Westerners know about this history or are aware that 9/11 was part of it.

Indeed, how many Westerners know, even now, that the word Islam means submission? For a long time, America was the ultimate symbol of the refusal to submit: in World War II, we took on powerful enemies on two fronts and won; during the Cold War, we protected the Free World from Communist takeover. But the Muslim wars we entered into after 9/11 were different. We were hobbled by leaders who refused to name the enemy – and by a corrosive victim culture, born in the academy but rapidly spreading into the mainstream, that divided Americans into oppressed and oppressor classes. It was Muslims who had attacked us on 9/11, and had done so in accordance with their prophet’s directives; but even as our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan labored to overcome social ills in those countries that were the direct result of Islam’s baleful centuries-long influence, our elites began painting Islam as beautiful and peaceful while casting Muslims in the role of America’s ultimate victims.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/10/report-shows-fauci-lied-to-congress-so-why-does-he-still-have-a-job/

COVID-19 czar Anthony Fauci has steadfastly denied that he helped fund gain-of-function research at China’s now-notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology. In recent testimony before Congress, he repeatedly denied ever doing so. But a new 900-page trove of information acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that’s not true.

It’s a huge story. Unfortunately, the mainstream media have essentially ignored it. New York Times? The Washington “Democracy Dies In Darkness” Post? CNN? Sorry, couldn’t be bothered, even though a 2015 study clearly referred to such research taking place.

It took an aggressive, left-leaning online investigative reporting site, The Intercept, to do the Big Media’s work for it by digging up the FOIA material. The mountain of papers are damning, showing clearly that a nonprofit company, EcoHealth Group, channeled federal grants from the National Institute of Health and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to the Chinese government-run Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“The (U.S.) bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans,” the Intercept reported.

“Alter bat coronaviruses” is the key phrase here, since it indicates gain-of-function experimentation, which even the Obama administration had tightly restricted.

Scientists with expertise in both viral research and government grant mechanisms call the latest evidence a smoking gun. A thread of tweets by Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard E. Enbright provides further scientific insight into what was going on.

“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,” Enbright wrote.

Broad Institute molecular biologist Alina Chan told The Intercept that the documents also make the lab-leak theory of the COVID-19 virus even more likely.

John P.A. Ioannidis is Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, as well as Professor  of Biomedical Science and Statistics, at Stanford University.

Imperatives like skepticism and disinterestedness are being junked to fuel political warfare that has nothing in common with scientific methodology.

In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.

One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited, compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science—and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.

As for organized skepticism, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin. Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.  

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/09/how-9-11-exposed-the-depths-of-western-self-loathing/

As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we are being confronted once again, on news broadcasts, in documentaries and online, with that footage. With the images of those planes striking the Twin Towers, of survivors covered in blood and dust, of heroic first responders saving the lives they could amid unimaginable carnage. It still shakes us to this day. But amid all the acts of commemoration and remembrance one thing risks getting lost. That in the wake of that act of barbarism, an attack not just on New York and DC but on the West and what it stands for, there were many members of the British intelligentsia who, after the dust settled, were struck with more or less the same thought: maybe America brought this on itself.

Just two days after an attack that claimed almost 3,000 innocent lives, it fell to the Guardian’s Seumas Milne to say the quiet part out loud. ‘They can’t see why they are hated’, ran the headline. He laid blame for the carnage on the ills of American foreign policy, on its ‘unabashed national egotism and arrogance’. ‘If it turns out that Tuesday’s attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden’s supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons’ teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming’, he thundered. ‘Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority [of Americans] might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.’

Veteran British leftist Tariq Ali, in his 2002 book The Clash of Fundamentalisms, continued in this vein. ‘The subjects of the Empire had struck back’, he wrote. 9/11 confirmed in his mind the ‘universal truth that… slaves and peasants do not always obey their masters’. As spiked’s Mick Hume noted at the time, the well-to-do, Western-educated Saudis who largely carried out 9/11 made for unlikely imperial subjects – and the firefighters and office workers who perished made for unlikely stand-ins for American imperialism. But Ali didn’t let these facts dent his analysis. He didn’t celebrate the attacks, of course, but he did suggest they were all but inevitable. If anything, we should expect more ‘blowback’.

In the London Review of Books a month after the Twin Towers fell, classicist Mary Beard captured what she saw as the prevailing mood. ‘[W]hen the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in’, she wrote. One of these reactions being that, ‘however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.’ There was an outcry in response to her comments, as many people, perhaps understandably, took this to mean that Beard herself thought America ‘had it coming’. She later clarified her point in a Guardian interview in 2007: ‘I wasn’t saying those people deserved to die, but simply that there was a connection, or people perceived a connection, between American geopolitics and what had happened.’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jewish-tradition-national-unity-culture-wars-political-divisions-rosh-hashanah-yom-kippur-11631223490?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The ram’s horn, or shofar, is sounded throughout the Jewish high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as a call for Jews to reflect, reform and repent. Many of us are doing exactly that this month. The lessons associated with these holidays, which both happen in September this year, are more relevant than ever to all Americans.

The U.S. today is less unified and secure, less law-abiding, less respectful of government, and less confident in the future than at any point in my life. It needs to be jolted from its current course by the sound of the ram’s horn to find a better way forward.

The path Jewish tradition offers is through repentance, but not only in the way it is commonly understood. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught, the root of the Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, means to return. For a nation, he explained, it means to return “to our roots, our faith, our history.” This is the best first step the American people can take to overcome division, because it will show how far we have strayed from the source of our national values, unity and purpose.

As the Declaration of Independence says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These words—some of the most important ever written in the English language—are about more than the Founders’ call for independence from England. They are an American covenant entered into by succeeding generations. Too many Americans today have been distracted from the faith and values in the Declaration, causing the nation to suffer greatly.

Alexis de Tocqueville concluded after his tour of America in the 19th century that “liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.” The American ideal that all of us are created equal has been the source of our national unity. But in our time, that faith has been overwhelmed by forces that divide our government, politics, and people.