RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yes-the-crime-wave-is-as-bad-as-you-think-murder-rate-violent-killings-shootings-defund-police-11638988699?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The U.S. experienced its largest-ever single year homicide spike in 2020, and crime now polls as one of the top voter concerns. This has many criminal-justice-reform advocates and their media allies scrambling to convince Americans that things aren’t really so bad, no matter what the data say.

At CNN, data journalist Priya Krishnakumar explains “how crime stats lie” by pointing out that 2020’s murder rate was “40% below what it was in the 1980s and 1990s.” The Brennan Center for Justice acknowledges that the homicide trend is “frightening” but insists that murders “have stayed far below their peaks” in earlier decades. In a “fact check” of “the ‘crime wave’ narrative police are pushing,” the Guardian reminds readers that “even after an estimated 25% single-year increase in homicides” in 2020, “Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s, and the homicide rate across big cities is still close to half what it was a quarter century ago.”

True enough: The national murder rate was significantly higher in the 1980s and early ’90s. But the national murder rate reflects an aggregation of all the country’s homicides measured against the national population. When it comes to the recent upticks in killings, this talking point ignores two important realities.

First, we don’t live in the aggregate. The majority of Americans spend their lives in the communities where they live and, if they commute, where they work. Given how hyperconcentrated serious violent crime is—and, therefore, how widely the homicide rate can vary from one neighborhood to the next—the national homicide rate doesn’t provide most Americans with a sense of the dangers they face. A handful of extremely safe Illinois suburbs may counterbalance Chicago’s contribution to the national murder rate, but that’s little consolation to those who live in the South Side war zones.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/capitalismthe-peoples-choice-11639000741?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Politicians and think tanks these days welcome the death of free markets as they support more power for the state. But a new poll from Gallup confirms that the American people still have more faith in capitalism than they do in socialism. Gallup further reports that this support for capitalism over socialism has held steady for more than a decade.

Asked in an October survey—“just off the top of your head”—whether they have a positive or negative image of six different economic and governmental terms, 60% reported “positive” for capitalism against 38% for socialism.

Gallup notes that the negative view of socialism has remained constant “even as Sen. Bernie Sanders and progressive Democratic politicians have pursued an expanded government role in addressing healthcare, poverty and early childhood education.” They might have noted that some of the push these days for more government control of economic life is coming from the political right as well.

The other positives and negatives are also revealing. “Small business” clocked in at 97% positive, and “free enterprise” at 84%. Only 46% of the public had a positive view for “big business,” which dropped from 52% in 2019.

We wonder if that’s because so many big businesses these days no longer support capitalism while stressing left-wing cultural causes. The two terms that scored lowest in public esteem were “socialism” and “the federal government,” which each had only 38% positive.

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/mandate/2021/12/08/id/1047926/

The Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate on Wednesday approved a Republican measure that would overturn President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine-or-test mandate for private businesses, with two Democrats joining Republicans to back the initiative.

The 52-48 vote sends the legislation to the Democratic-led House of Representatives, where it faces strong headwinds, while Biden has threatened to veto it.

The legislation would overturn administration rules ordering businesses with 100 workers or more to require vaccinations or coronavirus testing for millions of employees.

The measure was not subject to Senate rules that require 60 of its 100 members to agree on most legislation, meaning it could pass with just a 51-vote simple majority. Two Senate Democrats – Joe Manchin and Jon Tester – joined 50 Republicans in voting for the bill.

The initiative underscores the intense political opposition facing administration efforts to combat COVID-19 at a time when health officials are trying to contain the highly contagious Omicron variant.

Republicans have said they were inundated with calls from businesses with up to 500 workers that are concerned about having to fire employees who oppose COVID-19 vaccines and testing.

“It’s got Main Street America scared,” Republican Senator Mike Braun, who was spearheading the legislative drive, said before the Senate vote.

The White House said in a statement on Tuesday that employers would face no burden from the mandate because the vast majority of American adults are fully vaccinated and noted that the rule exempts small businesses.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/08/democrats-longtime-unity-sham-is-creating-a-dangerously-intolerant-next-generation/

President Joe Biden kicked off his time in the White House by preaching unity, but it quickly became clear that Democrats’ so-called mission for coexistence just meant “endorse our ideology or get steamrolled and canceled for trying to oppose it.”

Just this week, Biden, whose track record on COVID-19 and pretty much everything else is nothing to write home about, once again claimed that some top-down order would “unite” the divided country.

Ever since the rise of former President Donald Trump, Democrats have screamed at the top of their lungs about how conservatives and any other Trump allies are the worst people ever to inhabit the country. Leftists, aided by the corrupt corporate press, complained for four years that the Trump administration sowed division, and they advocated for impeachment and radical change. Their version of tolerance included letting boys into girls’ bathrooms and sports and calling anyone who dared question their methodology or candidates racist, sexist, bigoted, and homophobic.

Following Biden’s transition to the White House, the left’s disregard for unity became even more apparent, especially concerning COVID-19 vaccines. The Biden administration started by promoting the COVID shot as a good choice for Americans and even promised there would be no mandates. When Biden told Americans earlier this year, however, that “our patience is wearing thin” and “your refusal has cost all of us,” it became clear that anyone who stands in the way of his agenda, even though federal courts have temporarily suspended all of Biden’s civilian vaccine mandates, is the enemy.

Not only is Biden’s “unity” not uniting the country, but it’s certainly not making younger generations any more tolerant.

In a recent poll of 850 private and public college, university, and trade school students spread across the United States, Generation Lab and Axios found “Young Dems more likely to despise the other party.” While just 5 percent of young Republicans said they wouldn’t be friends with someone who votes differently than they do, 37 percent of the young Democrats polled said they would end friendships based on voting records. An even higher number of Democrats, 41 percent, claimed they wouldn’t support a business they knew had political allegiances to other parties while just 7 percent of Republicans said the same.

https://www.city-journal.org/mayor-de-blasio-vaccine-mandate-is-ill-conceived?skip=1

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio will end his tenure at midnight, December 31, 2021, but he seems intent on inflicting one last insult on New Yorkers before he goes. De Blasio announced a mandate for the city’s approximately 184,000 private businesses, requiring them to ensure that their employees have at least one vaccine dose by December 27. The announcement seems more like a politically motivated stunt to show that de Blasio is taking, as he described it, a “bold, first-in-the-nation” measure than a medically necessary policy.

While de Blasio claims to be taking “a preemptive strike” against a potential winter Covid-19 surge brought on by the new omicron variant, cold weather, and holiday gatherings, no evidence yet suggests that a surge is imminent. New cases are high in upstate and western New York, not in New York City. The city’s seven-day average of cases is half the statewide average and one-third the average in high Covid-19 parts of the state to the north and west of the city and the mid-Hudson region. Meantime, the city’s seven-day percentage of positive Covid tests—a measure of high transmission—has been relatively stable, at one-half the statewide figure and one-third to one-quarter the level in New York’s upstate and western regions.

No one really knows how severe a threat omicron poses. It’s unclear if omicron is more transmissible or virulent than earlier variants, or if it can evade vaccination or natural immunity. Preliminary reports from South Africa indicate an increase in omicron cases but no corresponding growth in Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths. Even Anthony Fauci has said that he is encouraged that, so far, omicron does not seem to cause severe disease.

A surge is unlikely in New York City, which has higher vaccination rates than the rest of the state and the country. New York Department of Health data show that the percentage of New York City residents fully vaccinated ranges from a low of 60 percent in Brooklyn to a high of 77 percent in Manhattan, while the proportion of those receiving at least one dose ranges from 67 percent to 88 percent. On a per capita basis, New York is among the most heavily vaccinated states. South Africa, by contrast, has vaccinated only 25 percent of its citizens.