On December 29, 2020,
in Uncategorized,
by magoo1310
It’s Monday, December 28th, 2020…but before we begin, courtesy of James Nichols, Legal Insurrection informs us Xi Jinping isn’t even waiting until January 20th, as…
“In 2015, Dayna Bowen Matthew, the dean of George Washington University Law School, published a paper concerning racial disparities in health care. She traced those disparities back to the Founding Fathers and argued their persistence today reflects the “structural violence” of American society.
Matthew was 1 of 11 people who helped draft the Centers for Disease Control’s ethical framework for allocating COVID-19 vaccines. She is also listed as a “health equity” consultant to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which voted in November to vaccinate essential workers before the elderly, partly on the grounds that the elderly skew white—only to pull back Sunday in the face of outrage from across the political spectrum.
The committee openly acknowledged that its initial plan would result in more deaths than “vaccinating older adults first.” But, the panel said, the plan would reduce racial disparities—something they deemed more important than saving lives—because essential workers, unlike adults over 65, are disproportionately black and Hispanic, the two groups that have borne the brunt of the pandemic.
How did the committee reach that conclusion? According to meeting minutes, presentation slides, public statements, and even civil-rights directives, the now-scuttled plan didn’t come out of thin air. Rather, it reflects the reductive, racialist worldview that is rapidly gaining ground in education, media, nonprofits, and now the U.S federal government—a worldview with concrete policy implications and concrete human costs.
That policy agenda was seeded by outside consultants like Matthew, who told the New York Times that racial inequality “requires us to prioritize by race.” But it was also seeded by the CDC itself, which in September hosted a series of trainings on “racism, sexism, and other systems of structured inequality,” in direct violation of President Trump’s executive order barring such programs from government agencies. And it was even seeded by the chairman of the CDC committee, José Romero, who said in July that minorities “need to be moved to the forefront” of the vaccination line.
The result was an explicitly race-conscious plan that would have prioritized shrinking the case gap between races over saving the most lives…”
Thus does life once more…
…imitate art:
Meanwhile, AOC proves yet again, when it comes to Progressives, some animals are definitely more equal than others:
In a related item courtesy of White House Dossier, USA Today reports…
“A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s executive order restricting the federal government and its contractors from offering diversity training that the president labeled “divisive” and “un-American.”
U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted a preliminary nationwide injunction inthe lawsuit filed by LGBT rights groups in Novemberin the Northern District of California, saying the groups were likely to prevail on their First Amendment claims.
“Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success in proving violations of their constitutional rights,” Freeman wrote in a 34-page order Tuesday.“Moreover, as the government itself acknowledges, the work Plaintiffs perform is extremely important to historically underserved communities.”…”
Soooo…because their work is extremely important, the plaintiffs have a First Amendment right to subject unwilling citizens to mandatory political indoctrination at taxpayer expense!!!
A bit of tortured jurisprudence emanating from the same vein of venality from which Roe v. Wade was so mendaciously mined.
Since we’re on the subject of The Left’s penchant for prevaricative propaganda, writing at the WSJ, Chilton Williamson, Jr. relates how…
“It is impossible to read Mark Twain in the 21st century without being aware, each time one encounters it, of the single most unspeakable word in the English language today; a word that in Twain’s time was as common as mud and therefore completely unremarkable on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The issue concerning the appropriateness of designating “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” in their original and unexpurgated state as assigned reading in English classes in the public schools has troubled teachers and administrators since at least the 1990s.
I am not concerned here with the question of whether the bowdlerization of these texts is defensible, a moral imperative, or an offense against literature—New South published a sanitized edition of the two books in 2011—but rather with the paradoxical character of postmodern political correctness. That character was exposed, also in 2011, when the Virginia Department of Education adopted a textbook, “Our Virginia: Past and Present” by Joy Masoff, which contained the claim that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two under the command of Stonewall Jackson.”That prompted anger and indignation on the left and an advisory to teachers from the department to ignore the passage.
Yet it is a historically confirmed fact that many Southern blacks, freemen as well as slaves, fought on the side of the Confederacy, as attested to by the historian William Freehling and documented by Harvard’s Prof. John Stauffer in an essay for TheRoot.com.Even so, many Civil War historians continue to deny it for ideological reasons.
The dispute over the existence of black Confederate soldiers is a clear instance of how radical progressives, in their war on America, have been pursuing two contradictory aims at once.First, they have worked tirelessly to expose what they view as the fundamentally and indelibly racist character of America from its inception. Thus the central purpose of the “1619 Project,” conceived by Nikole Hannah-Jones and subsequently developed by the New York Times magazine: to rewrite, edit and otherwise “correct” the history of the American Republic.Second, they have sought to sanitize America’s cultural achievements and thereby satisfy the moral demands of the present time, all for the good of future generations.
No one has noticed, or at any rate pointed out, the basic contradictoriness of exposing, emphasizing, and displaying our national sins on the one hand, while on the other trying to obliterate every trace of them from historical record.
The illogic of the program is part of the political left’s historical confusion with regard to propaganda, which is about spreading fantasies while condemning realities. Leftists have worked since the French Revolution to expose the evil history of the Western world, even as they have attempted to impose a blackout on it. That contradiction has been a perennial source of insecurity for revolutionaries, who have—perhaps unconsciously—sensed that their program is ultimately self-defeating. It may be a partial explanation for the viciousness and violence with which they have imposed it when and where they have been able to do so…”
Viciousness and violence which has been responsible for…through the deliberate depredations of Communism, abortion, a wholly-unnecessary ban on DDT and other pet Progressive causes…the deaths of well over 200,000,ooo people…
But take it from The Left: Socialism is…
Speaking of untimely demises, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger sagely suggests, in conjunction with a cast of exclusively Progressive politicians…
“Two rare events occurred this week and no one alive is likely to see either of them again. The first was the celestial conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, in which the planets appeared closer together than they have in almost 400 years. The second was a sincere political apology.
Gen. Gustave Perna, head of Operation Warp Speed, apologized for miscalculating the number of doses of anti-Covid vaccine available to the states. Listening to Gen. Perna’s apology, one thought: Gee, he actually means it. While apologizing, Gen. Perna said something else that caught one’s attention: “I want to take personal responsibility for the miscommunication. I know that’s not done much these days, but I am responsible.”
A question raised by Gen. Perna’s remarks is whether a distinction needs to be made between issuing an apology and accepting personal responsibility for what one did. Time was the two normally occurred in conjunction, but maybe no longer.
It has become difficult this year to tell which is greater—the number of people infected with Covid-19 or the number of politicians issuing apologies for violating their own Covid restrictions. Perhaps Johns Hopkins statisticians could include a hypocrisy tally in their coronavirus metrics—a list of U.S. politicians who tell everyone to stay home while they go out.
Equally striking is the instantaneousness of these apologies and a quality one can only describe with a made-up word—their heartfeltedness…”
Turning from made-up words to manufactured results, the Journal‘s Editorial Board opines on the latest instance in which…
“In 2020 scientific publications have leapt into the political fray. Scientific American gave its first ever Presidential endorsement to Joe Biden, declaring that Donald Trump “rejects evidence and science.” The New England Journal of Medicine said in a pre-election editorial that “our current leaders have undercut trust in science.”
But if populist politicians undercut trust in science, sometimes they are aided by science’s own institutions. Consider the controversy over a now-retracted paper in the prestigious science journal Nature Communications, which shows how political fashions can dictate what research outcomes are acceptable.
In November three NYU Abu Dhabi researchers came under fire for an article questioning the popular academic view that young women scientists are better off with female mentors. Their “science of science” study analyzed the impact of millions of scientific papers with junior and senior authors and drew conclusions about the effect of mentorship on careers.
“While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia,” the paper says in the abstract, “our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career.”
The authors—two of whom are women—pointed to possible explanations for their findings, including that “historically, male scientists had enjoyed more privileges and access to resources than their female counterparts.”
Yet some scientists erupted on social media at what was perceived as an attack on policies promoting gender equality. One Boston University biologist told Science magazine, “Treating gender itself as a binary is also damaging in today’s climate.” On Monday Nature Communications retracted the article, writing that it wants to make sure “that the review process takes into account the dimension of potential harm.”
The authors wrote that “we believe that all the key findings of the paper with regards to co-authorship between junior and senior researchers are still valid.” Yet they also “feel deep regret” that they “caused pain on an individual level and triggered such a profound response among many in the scientific community” and agreed to the retraction.
Note that the study presumably would not have caused “potential harm” if it supported the view that junior and senior scientists should be paired based on gender. But because a vocal constituency disapproved of the findings, they were discarded…”
Members of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisitionwho found Galileo Galilei “vehemently suspect of heresy” for supporting the heliocentric model of the solar system which Copernicus and many before him had known to be true for centuries…
…would be so proud!
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…
…Brendan Clark…
…Speed Mach…
…and the lovely Shannon:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the FUBAR Follies, courtesy today of the contemporary equivalent of Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan, as a…
“…“There was miscommunication between the ground staff and the pilots,” the unnamed official told the Post. “The flying pilots also did not look at the passengers’ manifest.” Though a flight attendant reportedly informed passengers that the plane was heading to Pokhara, not Janakpur, nothing could be done, as the aircraft was already airborne.
“It’s an occupational error…or a human error you can say,” Basnet explained. “Our internal committee will recommend an appropriate system not to repeat the mistake in the future.”
For what it’s worth, Tri Ratna Manandhar, former director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, claimed that a commercial Nepali flight has not flown to the wrong place since 1993.“
To err is human, but this is so totally FUBAR the pilots had to be Dimocrats!
Magoo
Video of the Day
As Tucker relates, Dimocratic Socialists jump from one manufactured existential threat to another with the frequency of Joe Biden groping and sniffing any available underage female.
Tales of the Darkside
What Groper Joe is REALLY telling this group of Black misleaders is, unlike guilt-ridden, woke White Liberals, Hispanics don’t believe Blacks are owed a thing!
Last Call
Phil Niekro: April 1, 1939 – December 26, 2020. When he was on, he was well-nigh unhittable.
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