A Misapprehension

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The headline suggests it.

How Science Lost America’s Trust and Surrendered Health Policy to Skeptics

Science hasn’t lost our trust, not by a long shot. What—who, really—has lost our trust is government bureaucrats who happen to have science degrees. The misapprehensions begin early in the article.

The rise of Robert F Kennedy, Jr, from fringe figure to the prospective head of US health policy was fueled by skepticism and distrust of the medical establishment—views that went viral in the Covid-19 pandemic.

No, it wasn’t. It was fueled by distrust of the government’s bureaucrats who held medical degrees.

People once dismissed for their disbelief in conventional medicine are now celebrating a new champion in Washington. Scientists, meanwhile, are trying to figure how they could have managed the pandemic without setting off a populist movement they say threatens longstanding public-health measures.

Some did have a disbelief in conventional medicine. However, what most of us began to disbelieve was not conventional medicine but the non-conventional positions of those medical degree-holding bureaucrats in our medicine-centered agencies and their naked power grabs via their diktats of how us average Americans must during—and after—the Wuhan Virus situation, with their credibility further damaged by their manufactured hysteria about the severity of a virus whose lethality was a small fraction of one percent except for the slice of our population already afflicted with severe comorbidities or who were very old.

Those bureaucrats’ contemptuous dismissal of us and their equally contemptuous dismissal of a range of paliatives and alternative cures—many of which actually did, and do, work, and many more of which, if not effective, also did no harm. We insisted on following actual science, while those bureaucrats pursued their personal power, and in some cases, their pocketbooks.

Those bureaucrats also too often dismissed research that supported those alternative treatments and with equal disdain research that called into question the risks of the Wuhan Virus vaccines on offer. Many (most?) of those researches were, in fact, highly questionable. Some were quite sound, though, and the bureaucrats’ shotgun dismissal of all of them—generally without explanation, holding us average Americans as too grindingly stupid or ignorant to understand—further damaged their credibility.

Nor did those degreed bureaucrats care a farthing about our children—the portion of our population uniquely immune to the virus. Lock them out of school these Know Betters demanded, then required, isolate them from their peers, friends, adults other than their parents—even from their grandparents, uncles, and aunts. We’re seeing now the damaging outcomes of that isolation in lost education and especially in their inability to get along with each other.

No, we trust science. We insist that government bureaucrats trust science, as well, and until they demonstrate that they do, those bureaucrats are demonstrating that they cannot be trusted by us.

Legal Protection for Whistleblowers

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Jay Solomon, writing for The Free Press, wants legal protection for whistleblowers, and under the color of that, he also wants protection for journalists who are harboring “confidential,” or some such, sources.

One of the things that makes America exceptional is that journalists here have freedoms that exist nowhere else. … That also requires the freedom to rely on confidential sources to get that information.

The problem with this is that actual whistleblowers already have lots of legal protection for what they run up their chains of command, to Congress, and ultimately to the public. Beyond that, the freedom that that exists nowhere else apparently includes freedom from the laws that ordinary Americans must obey: laws barring receiving and profiting from goods that were illegally obtained by the transferor.

What Solomon wants, what he’s conflating with whistleblower disclosures, even though he should know better, is protection for journalists who publish leaks, those illegally obtained goods (which might—might—be OK), and for leakers who are doing the leaking.

Some sources who talk to journalists are, in fact, whistleblowers. Most, though, are simply acting, on the face of it, illegally, by transferring those goods—which maybe they obtained illegally or maybe they obtained in the legitimate course of their duties—in violation of the terms of their employment or their oaths of office. These leakers also are hiding behind anonymity, supposedly out of fear for their jobs—but that just shows either their recognition of the illegality of their actions or their own lack of moral principles as they put their jobs ahead of their moral obligation to do a right thing, or both. Leakers are entitled to no protection whatsoever.

Moreover, journalistic claims that a source is a whistleblower doesn’t make it so. The journalist must provide evidence that the claimed source is, in fact, a whistleblower, vis., evidence that the source has exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues. Having shown that, the journalist must—at the very least for credibility’s sake—identify the whistleblower. A whistleblower source no longer needs anonymity; he has the legal protections of whistleblowing. The whistleblower work environment might still be uncomfortable, but in that case, refer to “job ahead of doing a right thing” above.

In the particular case at Solomon’s hand, in which a reporter is being held in legal jeopardy over her refusal to reveal the source(s) she used in her reporting in 2017, the reporter throughout her reporting and at all opportunities since, declined to provide any evidence at all that her source(s), which she claims were whistleblowers, were in fact whistleblowers and that those sources had exhausted all of their whistleblowing avenues within the organizations that employed them, before the source(s) talked to the reporter. As a result of the reporter’s refusal to reveal her source(s),

In February, US District Court judge Christopher Cooper held her in contempt of court—and fined her $800 a day—until she turned over her confidential sources. Although he said he “recognizes the paramount importance of a free press in our society and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge,” he added that he was required to strike a balance between press freedom and that Yanping Chen’s “need for the requested evidence overcomes Herridge’s qualified First Amendment privilege in this case.”

Solomon, like the judge (despite his on the whole correct ruling) is conflating whistleblower with confidential source, even though the two are distinctly separate from each other, similar only in their willingness to talk to reporters, but radically different in the legal protections they have.

Press freedom advocates, however, fear that [the judge’s] ruling against Herridge could cripple the ability of journalists to protect whistleblowers and confidential sources to provide critical information to the public.

Solomon, and his press freedom advocates, are making a specious argument with this claim. Whistleblowers need no journalistic protection. Leakers deserve none.

Overarching that, in years past, editors required reporters to have in their articles at least two on-the-record sources that corroborate the claims of their “confidential” sources. The press industry has long since walked away from that requirement, and no one in the industry has been willing since to say what publicly available and concretely measurable standard of journalistic integrity is in use today in place of that erstwhile standard.

Those on-the-record sources are all the protection journalists would need, too, were today’s journalists not too lazy to find and use them.

Lawless Progressive-Democratic Party

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Recall that, in the vote-counting in Pennsylvania’s Dave McCormick (R)-Bob Casey (D) campaign for Senate, Progressive-Democrat Diane Ellis-Marseglia, Bucks County Commissioners Chairperson and member of the county’s Board of Elections had this on the matter of counting illegally cast ballots:

I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country[.]

She then proceeded to have her BoE count those improper ballots. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court then ruled unanimously on merit and 4-3 on procedure that those ballots could not, in fact, be counted because of their lack of proper dating. This was, in its essence, a repeat of its earlier ruling, some weeks prior, that those ballots could not be counted, and it’s that prior ruling which Ellis-Marseglia so contemptuously—and contemptibly—dismissed.

Now we have this from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Casey campaign: they’re suing

10 county Boards of Elections, demanding they count provisional ballots that were already rejected.

Because they agree with the Ellis-Marseglia Principle that court rulings be damned, they’re going to do what they want to do, regardless of law.

This is the bullet that most of us dodged a couple weeks ago and, hopefully, the good citizens of Pennsylvania will dodge this one, too.

It’s also a strong indication that we average Americans need to remain vigilant and active throughout the next several election cycles, too, so we can dodge the hail of bullets that will be coming from Party.

Regulatory Oversight

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The Wall Street Journal outlined what its newswriters think are the four priorities of the incoming FCC chairman Brendan Carr, assuming he gets confirmed. On the whole, those priorities foster reduced government involvement in business decisions and increased business competition. One of those priorities drew my eye, though:

Clearing a path for media consolidation

One consolidation possibility: Meta or Alphabet or Truth Social acquiring one or more of the legacy broadcast media: ABC, or ESPN (OK, that’s a legacy cable medium, but my point stands), or….

That would create some serious consolidation, and I’m not convinced that degree, or consolidation across those milieus, would be a good idea.

Still, let the markets determine the utility of such acquisitions, within government’s optimal oversight: blocking abuse of monopoly power rather than blocking the monopoly itself. Aside from the economic forces involved, the one is a reaction to an actual misbehavior, the other would be a preemptive action regarding a purely speculative outcome.

One of those would remain consistent with the American style of jurisprudence, and that’s to the general good.

Labor Unions, Labor Workers, and Employers

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The lately formed Republican Party coalition, led by President-elect Donald Trump, consists of business-friendly and labor-friendly folks from opposite wings of the party.

Opposite, though, is not the same as opposing, a distinction the misconception of what’s involved masks. For instance:

People close to the transition said Trump’s potential appointments to key labor positions could include old-guard Republican functionaries, corporate executives, or individuals who are closer to the New Right and see themselves as more pro-worker.

Maybe and individuals who are pro-worker.

This makes plain the misconception:

[U]nion officials said Trump’s record is at odds with his pro-worker rhetoric. “It’s going to be a rude awakening for a lot of folks who wanted to take Trump at his word,” said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO, which campaigned for President Biden and, subsequently, for Vice President Kamala Harris. “They talk a big game when it comes to workers, but…they’re going to attack the working class.”

Not at all. It’s entirely possible—useful, too—to be both pro-company and pro-working class while simultaneously opposing today’s unions. This is especially the case with today’s unions, where union management, far from concerning themselves with their membership—those working class folks—concern themselves more with what’s good for them personally.

That misplaced concern includes threatening employers with destruction of their businesses—striking and denying the businesses’ ability to function at all unless and until the union managers get their demands satisfied—and with ripping off workers with their efforts to force unionization in businesses where employees continually reject unions in labor votes. Union management in the past ripped off workers even more blatantly by exacting tribute union dues from workers whether they were union members or not. Court rulings have slowed that particular abuse, but they’ve not eliminated it.

What’s needed, and what becomes possible with the incoming administration, is bringing those pro-business and pro-labor folks into the same room to work out processes that benefit both, without the middle man union management in the room clouding things up and constantly trying to pit the one against the other, rather than helping them collaborate on business-labor policies.