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.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/07/former-harvard-president-says-antiracist-math-curricula-poses-a-national-security-threat/

On Monday, economist and former President of Harvard University Larry Summers shared a letter declaring that the rising trend of “antiracist” mathematical education in America is a threat to the American economy and national security, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Summers, who also served as Secretary of the Treasury in the final years of the Clinton presidency, cosigned the letter with 600 other academics, all condemning this new form of education in K-12 schools. The letter says that efforts to force racial awareness into math have sacrificed the value of a strong education in mathematics in order “to reduce achievement gaps.”

Summers described mathematical education as “an economic and national security imperative,” contrasting the current approach in the United States to the one currently taken by China, where “math standards are not subject to continued erosion by social justice warriors who can’t themselves define exponential growth or solve quadratic equations.”

The bizarre push to make math about race has been funded by billionaire leftists such as Bill Gates, who used the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” a nationwide nonprofit initiative asking teachers and schools across the country to consider the possibility that math “is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.” Among other things, this and other similar efforts have tried to declare that some of the foundational tenets of math in education, such as students showing their work and how they arrived at the correct answer, are racist.

The coalition behind the letter signed by Summers and 600 others, “K12MathMatters,” says that this politicization of math only reduces “access to skills needed for social mobility.”

“While the U.S. K-12 system has much to improve,” the letter reads in part, “the current trends will instead take us further back. Reducing access to advanced mathematics and elevating trendy but shallow courses over foundational skills would cause lasting damage to STEM education in the country.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/how_to_help_j6_defendants.html

My husband, Thomas Caldwell (“Tom”), quite surprisingly to me, is now known as a ‘January 6er or J6er’ criminal defendant.  This term is applied to people who went to Washington D.C. on January 6th, 2021 to hear President Trump speak, to march to the U.S. Capitol, and to peacefully protest there.  That is what more than 500,000 January 6th attendees did that day — including me.  Unfortunately, many were arrested for simply exercising their First Amendment rights.  My husband is one of those.  He never entered the U.S. Capitol, did not commit any violence against anyone or anything, and did not plan or participate in any kind of attack on the Capitol.  Yet, he was wrongly scooped up and thrown in jail for 53 days.  Most of his jail time was spent in solitary confinement.

At the time of his arrest, Tom was 66 years old.  He is a retired Navy officer and a disabled veteran who lives with chronic pain, debilitating spinal conditions, and other ailments, mostly due to his selfless service to our country.  He has no criminal history and has been an upstanding citizen for half a century.  He is a gentle, fun-loving soul.

Tom is innocent of all the charges the DoJ and FBI have thrown at him.  Lies about him have been spread worldwide through the media.

In my husband’s case, he was arrested on January 19th, 2021 after virtually no investigation.  Under political pressure, an extreme rush to judgement ensued.  As a result, many statements and assumptions were made about Tom which are false. The DoJ has backed off on many false accusations, but charges against Tom remain.  My expectation is that they will all be dropped some day (as they should be), or he will be fully acquitted.  Learn more about my husband’s case and help us with our legal battle.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/justice_sotomayor_paraded_her_scientific_ignorance_in_questioning_during_oral_arguments_on_emdobbs_v_jackson_womens_healthem.html

Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, raised eyebrows and cast doubt on her fitness for her elevated office during oral arguments over the pending Mississippi abortion case, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health.

Constitutional scholars were taken aback by her injection of politics:

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception – that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Sotomayor asked. “I don’t see how it is possible.”

And her casual rejection of the Constitution as the arbiter of Supreme Court decision-making:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor even said at one point that the Supreme Court comes up with decisions all the time that aren’t directly grounded in the Constitution. This is a line of argument that, if taken seriously, would justify the Supreme Court swinging free of all restraint and rewriting the nation’s laws on the fly.

But for sheer wrong-headedness, you can’t top the “misinformation” (to use a term the progs currently favor when trying to censor) that she spouted on fetal development.

Writing in Newsweek, Dr. Grazie Poso Christie, exposes her ignorant declarations:

…right after Mississippi’s solicitor general Scott Stewart argued it was no longer appropriate to use fetal viability (the gestational age at which a prematurely-born infant can survive in an intensive care unit) as the point after which states can protect an unborn child from elective abortion. He said this was due—in part—to 30 years of medical advances. In a piqued, incredulous tone, Sotomayor demanded to know just “What are the advancements in medicine?” As Stewart began to list them, mentioning new knowledge of fetal pain, the Justice abruptly cut him off.

Our brief and others document the medical and scientific advances Mr. Stewart was referring to, in language easily accessible to lay people and rigorously sourced in the latest scientific journals and currently accepted medical practices. It’s there for anyone with eyes—or the will—to see.

Sotomayor vigorously rejected Stewart’s reference to advances in our understanding of fetal pain. She claimed that only an eccentric “small fringe” believes fetal pain exists “before 24, 25 weeks.” She could not have been more wrong. A growing body of scientific evidence indicates that a fully developed cortex is not necessary for the transmission of pain sensations, which may be present as early as 12 weeks.

In fact, physicians routinely protect their youngest patients—fetal and premature—from pain. A baby born at 21 or 22 weeks receives anesthesia routinely during any intervention. Anything less would be considered barbaric. (snip)