RUTHFULLY YOURS

 https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/12/22/the_50_states_total_debt_just_surpassed_15_trillion_808467.html

The debt of all 50 states totaled $1.5 trillion at the end of 2020, severely underfunding pensions and other postemployment benefits. That’s according to Truth in Accounting’s 12th annual Financial State of the States report, which ranks states based on their financial status.

This year’s surveys the fiscal health of the 50 states during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The five best states were Alaska, North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, and South Dakota, while the five worst were Hawaii, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut.

At the end of 2020, 39 states didn’t have enough money to pay their bills, the report found.

Collectively, the 50 states’ unfunded pension liabilities were $926.3 billion.

That means for every $1 of pension benefits promised to its workers, states have only set aside 64 cents on average.

That becomes a problem when enough workers retire to exhaust the pension savings and states can no longer can cut pension checks.

On top of that are other postemployment benefits, or OPEB, for which the 50 states underfunded by $638.7 billion.

For every $1 of those promised benefits, mostly for retiree health care, states have only set aside 8 cents on average.

Unsurprisingly, even with federal assistance, state debt got worse at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and the short recession that followed in early 2020.

https://www.city-journal.org/mount-sinai-blueprint-for-woke-medicine?skip=1

Last year, administrators at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine published an article describing the school’s long-standing “cultural change initiative.” Appearing in the journal Academic Medicine, the article is unequivocal in its charge. “We have to go out there and seek the truth,” it declared, “part of which is accepting that, if we are White, we are a big part of the problem. We are part of the reason that structural racism imprisons and oppresses people of color every day, everywhere they go, and no matter what they do.”

The Icahn School of Medicine recently announced an “Anti-Racist Transformation in Medical Education” (ART in MedEd) program, designed to guide other medical schools through their own version of the school’s “culture transformation initiative.” If Icahn’s own efforts are any indicator, these schools will receive a crash course in how to insert concepts like “white fragility,” “microaggressions,” and “white supremacy culture” into medical education.

According to the Academic Medicine article, Icahn achieved its own transformation in part through “Chats for Change,” a “series of monthly activities that spark conversations centered on racism and bias.” Chats for Change, the article notes, covered topics like “My Micro-Aggressions: Received and Delivered,” “White Fragility,” and “Roots of Racism.” Recently, the talks have become even more blatantly ideological, having been redesigned to include “braver and safer” content, such as: “What is Critical Race Theory, and what’s the big deal?”; “What are white supremacy culture characteristics intended to achieve?”; “What is the existence and significance of whiteness?”

Many of the chats make dubiously sourced assertions. For example, the “White Fragility” chat asks, “Why are so few white folks prepared to [engage in challenging conversations] and what will it take to make meaningful change?” The description of “The Invention of Whiteness” claims that “Whiteness is a socially significant structure that constricts life chances, opportunities, and privilege in American society.” Another talk asks why Critical Race Theory is “so triggering for so many white people.” Perhaps most telling is the chat on “White Supremacy Culture,” which is, according to a description, “the forbidden fruit. Take a bite and it will give you more knowledge and power than those who are hoarding that power are willing to share.” The ultimate goal of the conversation is to determine “whether there are ways we can help our colleagues and leaders embrace this concept”—of the pervasiveness of white supremacy, presumably—“without feeding too much into their fragility and right to comfort.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2021/12/22/hmm-is-durham-planning-to-charge-team-hillary-n1543621

Democrats’ and Republicans’ prosecutorial styles are as different as night and day.

Democrats announce their (plainly political) intentions ahead of time — “We will impeach Donald Trump” or “We will disqualify Brett Kavanaugh” or “I will indict Donald Trump” — then convene massive investigative bodies (on the taxpayers’ dime) of partisan lawyers and politicians to search for a prosecutable crime. The investigation is milked for everything it’s worth, featuring weaponized DOJ no-knock midnight raids, leaks a-plenty, and media accomplices to publicize every insinuation, humiliation, and accusation. Even if no real crime is ever found in the end (and it seldom is), Democrats will nonetheless continue with their announced plans, such as twice impeaching the most-investigated president in history. And in the process, they will have made life hell for their political enemies as well as anyone who ever gave them the time of day — which was probably the point all along.

Republicans, on the other hand, don’t convene special investigations unless the evidence of a crime is already smacking everyone in the face. But rather than talk constantly to the media and keep the story alive as a constantly present narrative, people investigating Democrats drop quietly into the background and do their work unobtrusively, only surfacing to comment when they’ve actually found something worth prosecuting.

Which brings us to the Durham investigation of the Russia Collusion Hoax that the leftwing establishment perpetrated against President Donald Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/22/the-poison-fruits-of-identity-politics-in-the-military/

For many years, the U.S. military has been among the most trusted of American institutions, certainly the most trusted part of the U.S. government. It has maintained that status despite its failure to achieve success in the post-9/11 wars. Americans seem to have accepted the argument that this failure has more to do with the political constraints placed on the military than on the military’s doctrine, planning, and execution. They have continued to accept the military’s self-image as a profession rather than a self-interested bureaucracy, and have supported its professional ethos understood as duty, honor, and sacrifice.    

But attitudes toward the military seem to be changing. According to a recent survey conducted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, the number of Americans who express a great deal of confidence and trust in the military has dropped from 70 percent to 45 percent in just the past three years, including an 11 percent drop since February.

Among those who expressed a low degree of confidence in the U.S. military, 13 percent cited “political leadership” as a reason. Although only a plurality, that figure seems to indicate that views of the military have been affected by the toxic political polarization that has afflicted the body politic in recent times.

For instance, the survey indicates that Americans in general are losing confidence in the military. In 2018, 87 percent of Republican respondents said they had a great deal of confidence in the military. In 2021, that number had declined to 53 percent. In 2018, 59 percent of Democratic respondents and 66 percent of independents expressed a great deal of confidence in the military. In 2021, those figures dropped to 42 percent and 38 percent respectively.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/22/please-stop-the-coup-porn/

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, three retired generals, Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba, and Steven Anderson warn of a supposedly impending coup should Donald Trump be elected in 2024. 

The column seemed strangely timed to coincide with a storm of recent Democratic talking points that a reelected Trump, or even a Republican sweep of the 2022 midterms, would spell a virtual end of democracy. 

Ironies abound.   

From Election Day in 2020 to Inauguration Day 2021, we were told by the Left that democracy was resilient and rightly rid the nation of Trump.    

The hard Left, for one of the rare times in U.S. history, was now in complete control of both houses of Congress and the presidency.   

Spiking inflation, supply-chain shortages, near record gas prices, open borders, the flight from Afghanistan,  multi-trillion-dollar deficits, and polarizing racial rhetoric all followed. 

In response to these events, Joe Biden’s popularity utterly collapsed. His own cognitive challenges multiplied the unpopularity of his failed policies.  

In reaction, the Left again pivoted. It suddenly announced that should it lose congressional power in 2022 or the presidency in 2024, democracy was all but doomed. 

Apparently, what changed Democrats’ views was that democracy was working all too well in expressing widespread public disgust . . . with the Left. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/arsonist-head-illinois-towns-fire-department-daniel-greenfield/

Why settle for a metaphor, when you can literally appoint an arsonist to head the fire department?

There were high emotions and high drama at a fire district board meeting in Illinois Monday, as a once-convicted arsonist was named acting fire chief of the volunteer fire department, KTLA sister station KTVI in St. Louis reports.

The board removed John Rosencranz as chief of the Prairie Du Pont Volunteer Fire Department and replaced him with Assistant Chief Jerame Simmons. The two were seated at the same table when the change was made.

Board members said they had good reasons for making the change but they have not made those reasons public.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/our-potemkin-democracy-bruce-thornton/

Lately we’ve heard a lot of anxious talk about threats to “our democracy.” Here at home, Hillary Clinton surfaced to warn that a Donald Trump win in 2024 “could be the end of democracy,” recycling the tired “Trump is a danger to democracy” cliché. Abroad, the Biden administration recently convened a virtual Summit for Democracy comprising over a hundred world leaders, many of whose countries, like the Democratic Republic of Congo hardly qualifies as  democratic. There Biden intoned the creaking, hoary formulas of the “rules-based international order,” as he called for a “vision” and the “courage to once more lead the march of human progress and human freedom forward.”

This totemic use of the word “democracy” serves mainly partisan political and ideological interests, rather than a serious understanding of the complex history and dangers of democracy per se. As such, “democracy” functions as a feel-good marketing tool like “organic” or “all natural,” and merely confuses our response to the challenges of tyranny.

In terms of our foreign policy, the Summit for Democracy reinforces the disastrous democracy-promotion policies of the last 20 years, which ended so ignominiously in Afghanistan this year. The parochial arrogance of thinking that nations and peoples not part of the Western tradition want to imitate us ignores the reality of the true diversity comprising different cultures, mores, faiths, and ideals about how we live, and for what we will kill and die. The label “democracy,” then is like the Western suits and ties donned by international political leaders: an often-insincere, superficial concession to the Western powers that created and dominate the modern world, and that other nations want to exploit, weaken, or supplant.

Hence the futility of Biden’s promise to “launch an initiative to spend up to $424 million for programming around the world that supports independent media, anti-corruption work and more,” according to the Associated Press. Even if such plans materialize, we all know they’ll do nothing meaningful other than line the pockets of government functionaries, international activists, and NGO’s.