RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/12/mask-mandates-a-product-of-the-cancel-culture/

Another “progressive” politician has ordered the people she believes are her subjects to wear masks indoors. For safety’s sake? Let’s not fool ourselves.

As if following the Petty Tyrants chapter from the Democratic Party playbook, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced Tuesday that Oregonians, vaccinated or not, will again have to cover their faces in all indoor public spaces. Because she’s smarter and just more sensible than those living under her rule.

The mask mandates (and lockdowns) are a direct outcome of the spread of our cancel culture. People aren’t “canceled” in an effort to civilize our society and de-coarsen language. They are canceled because it gives the “cancelers” power. It’s their perverted way of telling others “we can control what you say.” It allows them to feel important and powerful, to advertise their moral superiority, to pump their egos. They want others to fear them, and take a twisted pleasure in seeing their victims grovel and beg to be accepted back into their good graces. That this behavior is now widely accepted is deeply alarming.

Mask mandates are driven by a similar need to exercise authority over others, and to draw in the rarified air only the most brilliant and discerning among us are allowed to breathe. Those handing down the mandates, as well as the pundits, assorted nags, and tight-haired school marms who are demanding them, are convinced, and nothing will persuade them otherwise, that they are the master class, deserving of their place at the top.

The thinking behind lockdowns comes from the same place. The only reason we haven’t been sent into another round of detention is the fear some politicians have of an electorate fed up with rules limiting their movement.

For instance, were California Gov. Gavin Newsom, his self-granted pandemic emergency powers still in effect, not facing a recall election next month, he surely would have been reissuing diktats over the last four weeks. (And at the same being more surreptitious about breaking his own rules than he was last fall, when he was caught at Napa Valley’s French Laundry restaurant attending a crony’s barefaced birthday party indoors.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-wants-opec-to-drill-oil-fossil-fuels-11628715632?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

We thought we’d seen everything, but there it was Wednesday morning in black and white on the White House website: Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, imploring the cartel of oil exporting nations to pump more oil. Talk about a political climate change. This is the same Biden Administration that has spent six months doing everything it can to crush U.S. oil production.

“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic,” Mr. Sullivan’s statement said. “While OPEC+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough.”

Someone pass the smelling salts to Tom Steyer, the climate crusader who surely fainted when he heard that one. Oil production is beneficial? Fossil fuels are essential to economic growth? The world needs more petroleum to be burned to release more CO2 into the atmosphere?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/our-under-incarceration-problem/

Contrary to what you will hear in the mainstream media or on college campuses, the United States does not have an “over-incarceration problem”; it has an under-incarceration problem. Ill-conceived anti-prison policies rooted in platitudes, lies, and misleading statistics have unleashed thousands of criminals onto the streets. As a result, our nation is grappling with a de-incarceration crisis that is costing lives and eroding the rule of law.

Any honest discussion of incarceration levels must start with the acknowledgement that the majority of crimes committed in America are never reported or solved. In 2019, only 41 percent of violent crimes, 34 percent of sexual assaults, and 32 percent of property crimes were reported to the police. Of the crimes that are reported, only 61 percent of murders, 46 percent of violent crimes, 33 percent of rapes, 24 percent of arsons, and 14 percent of burglaries and auto thefts result in an arrest. Such low reporting and clearance rates ensure that any incarceration number flowing from them will be definitionally too small.

Convicted criminals also rarely serve most of their sentences. On average, state-prison inmates (who comprise the vast majority of the U.S. prison population) serve only 44 percent of their sentences. Murderers serve 58 percent, burglars serve 42 percent, and drug-traffickers serve only 40 percent of their sentences. This rampant dishonesty-in-sentencing is an insult to crime victims. It’s even more outrageous because many criminals already have artificially low sentences, thanks to sweetheart plea deals.

At the federal level, mandatory-minimum sentences have resulted in stronger and more enduring prison sentences. Recently, however, even these sentences are being eroded by retroactive sentencing reductions and new avenues for judges to skirt the mandatory-minimum requirements. The 2018 First Step Act, in particular, delivered the greatest blow to our federal criminal-justice system in recent memory. This jailbreak law unleashed thousands of gang members and drug traffickers back onto the streets and helped many career criminals avoid tough sentences.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/authors/john_murawski/

The national racial reckoning over reparations and critical race theory is taking over the world of medicine and health care. Prestigious medical journals, top medical schools and elite medical centers are adopting the language of social justice activism and vowing to confront “systemic racism,” dismantle “structural violence” and disrupt “white supremacy” in their institutional cultures.

Is U.S. health care against her? Lately medical journals,  drawing on critical race theory, implicate the profession in untold numbers of black and brown deaths.

Klaus Nielsen

Some activist physicians describe the present-day health care system with such ominous terms as a “medical caste system” or “medical apartheid,” the latter locution taken from the title of a 2007 book about America’s history of medical experimentation on enslaved blacks and freedmen.

“Modern American medicine has historical roots in scientific racism and eugenics movements,” according to a February article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “How Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities.” “Black communities became medical training grounds and a source of profit, reinforcing the American medical caste system that we have today.”

Rare is the doctor who is willing to publicly question claims of white privilege and implicit bias in the healthcare system, and already several doctors who have publicly pushed back have been demoted and have filed legal actions alleging retaliation. This year the medical profession received an unequivocal message when two editors of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association resigned under pressure over a podcast that aired opinions expressing skepticism that the United States is plagued by systemic racism.

While racialized politics has infused every corner of American life, the moral stakes in the health care arena go far beyond, say, the perceived slights called microaggressions. The medical literature, lately drawing on critical race theory, depicts the health care industry itself as a historical source of illness in — and even killing of — black and brown bodies. That would make medicine analogous to policing and criminal justice, the other social institutions directly blamed for maiming and murdering black people.