Tag Archives: rights

No Clue

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And doesn’t care. That’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, as he made clear in his…testimony…before the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis last Thursday. Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) questioned Fauci regarding when Wuhan Virus (my term, not Jordan’s or Fauci’s) situation would be ending and CDC guideline restrictions lifted.

Fauci insisted that the restrictions would begin to be relaxed

When we get the level of infection in this country low enough that it is not a really high threat[.]

Despite repeated questions from Jordan to define “low enough,” Fauci remained evasive, repeatedly refusing to be specific, to identify the number…what metrics, what measures, he would use to define “low enough.”

The clear meaning is that Fauci has no idea at all of when or under what conditions the CDC would recommend the Biden administration stop usurping Americans’

ability to go to houses of worship, a curfew in Ohio last fall, and restrictions on having guests at their homes.

Nor does Fauci care that he has no idea.

Jordan’s time for questioning in the hearing was five minutes (per House rules for hearings), and that’s how long the video at the link lasts. It’s well worth the hearing; it’ll give a clear understanding of Fauci’s uselessness in government.

Accuracy and Truth

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In one of their Tuesday editorials, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote about the shooting of Daunte Wright in the Minnesota town of Brooklyn Center. They seemed to be on the right track in their insistence for due process both for Wright and for the police officer who, according to body camera video and audio, fatally shot him.

Sadly, the editors blew up their thesis with this, regarding post-shooting events:

On Monday night protesters looted businesses….

Accuracy, and truth, die at the hands of political correctness.

Protesters don’t loot. Criminals loot.

Protesters don’t riot. Rioters riot.

It’s…dismaying…to see the Newspeak dictionary spread so far.

Soft on Crime

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Especially in Los Angeles County, where County District Attorney George Gascón rules.

Gascón has proposed legislation that would bar felonies committed while a juvenile from being counted as “strikes” under California’s Three Strikes law when the person commits a felony as an adult. Superficially, it seems like a good idea. After all, Gascón argues, the child’s brain isn’t fully developed.

A sister of a gang-related murder victim exposed the flaw in that argument, though. Aja Courtney:

Anybody who has children understands that children know at very early ages what’s right from wrong[.]

Indeed. Virtually from the time the child can walk—and whose new-found mobility lets the child especially explore the matter—he learns the difference between right and wrong. The child starts developing, early on, an understanding of the distinction between the more complex concepts of fair and unfair; these are fully developed in children before they reach puberty.

Then Gascón blew up his own argument while being too absorbed with his own virtue to recognize it:

A juvenile system is based on rehabilitation, not on punishment…criminalization of young people leads to higher levels of recidivism, which means that it creates more insecurity in our community.

And when the juvenile commits a felony as an adult, that rehabilitation effort plainly has failed. Furthermore, young people aren’t criminalized by having the strikes continue to count. They criminalize themselves by continuing to commit crimes.

In the end, too, releasing a man back to the community—or to another community—before he’s been rehabilitated is what creates more insecurity in our community.

Spreading Disinformation

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Jay Bhattacharya, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, (mostly) correctly called out and decried YouTube for censoring and spiking a public-policy roundtable hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and in which Bhattacharya had participated.

Among other things discussed by the participants was the wisdom of requiring children to wear masks in the face of the Wuhan Virus situation. The panel said the requirement was foolish and counterproductive, and this was too much for the Know Betters. YouTube

removed the video “because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

Bhattacharya, though, in his op-ed cited study after study supporting the panel’s position: requiring children to wear masks is deeply suboptimal, and is so across a wide range of dimensions.

Never mind.

Never mind that the panelists, in addition to Bhattacharya, who is a physician, economist, and Stanford Medical School professor, consisted of Sunetra Gupta, infectious disease epidemiologist and epidemiology professor at Oxford; Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Scott Atlas, radiologist, health care policy advisor, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. They’re only experts; they know nothing.

Their position is contrary to The Narrative. How dare anyone contradict Settled Narrative.

I said above “‘mostly’ correctly called out…YouTube” because YouTube is wholly owned by Google, and Google is wholly owned by Alphabet. The latter two are run by Sundar Pichai.

It is, in fact, Alphabet and Sundar Pichai who are peddling disinformation under the guise of preventing “misinformation,” using YouTube as the vehicle for their machination.

Once again, Pichai is pushing the Left’s Newspeak dictionary and doing so at the direct and deliberate expense of objective discourse.

This also is a prima facie case for treating Alphabet, et al., as public accommodations—or as common carriers—and limiting their ability to discriminate or to censor.

Pesky Democracy

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We’ll have none of that here. Much too noisy. Much too disordered. Much to great a risk to our rule.

And so the People’s Republic of China has extended its despotism further into Hong Kong.

China has sharply reduced the number of directly elected seats in Hong Kong’s legislature in a setback for the democracy movement. The changes were announced Tuesday after a two-day meeting of China’s top legislature.
In the new make-up, the legislature will be expanded to 90 seats, and only 20 will be elected by the public. Currently, 35 seats, or half of the 70-seat legislature, are elected.
China’s top legislature approved amendments to Hong Kong’s constitution on Tuesday that will give Beijing more control over the makeup of the city’s legislature.

Those 20 will be carefully selected by the PRC’s Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress:

Local national-security officials will also get effective veto power over election candidates, allowing authorities to bar opposition figures from elected office.

This is not the behavior of a civilized, much less enlightened, nation. It is, though, of a piece with the barbarism of genocide against the Uyghurs, the occupation of Tibet and the South China Sea, and the threats of war against the Republic of China.