RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/time_to_finally_have_that_national_conversation_on_race.html

Not all that long ago, then–attorney general Eric Holder said white people were too cowardly to have a national discussion about race.  Many white dudes spoke up to indicate our willingness to participate in such a discussion, but Eric must have been joking, because he never made any serious effort to get it going.

Since then, we’ve seen any number of indications that black people want such a discussion.  The thing is that we know in advance how it will go: they will say we’re white racist moh-fohs, that it’s hopeless because white racism is stitched into the very fabric of space-time, no justice no peace, white priv, etc.

Now black basketball sports talker Jalen Rose says roundballer Kevin Love is a token white selection to the Olympic squad.  Nobody’s going to disagree with Jalen out loud for fear of being called racist (even if he’s right, which he is), but what about when a less qualified black person gets a job ahead of a better qualified white person, or when better qualified Asians are turned away from Harvard/Stanford/Yale in favor of unqualified or less qualified blacks?

It’s called affirmative action, and if it’s wrong applied to basketball, then it’s wrong everywhere else.  Can we now start talking about token blacks?

Perhaps something useful could come of this.  We could use this topic to start that long overdue national discussion about race.  But a few stipulations would have to apply: no epithets, no invented facts, no riots, no attempts to shame whites, no stomping out with hurt feelings.  We can revile the abomination of Jim Crow so long as we also revile his relative, the abominable Jon Crow, AKA political correctness.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/new_york_democrats_realize_their_politics_dont_appeal_to_minorities.html

New York Democrats trying to figure out why minorities are rejecting all those marvelous progressive policies that White leftists are imposing upon them. Shocked by Eric Adams’s successful race to be the Republican candidate for mayor, the New York Times’s Lisa Lerer examined the fact that progressives – that is, the hard leftists among the Democrats – aren’t winning over minorities.

Lerer’s analysis begins with Adams explicitly denouncing the policies that leftists from DeBlasio to AOC are promoting:

In a contest that centered on crime and public safety, Eric Adams, who emerged as the leading Democrat, focused much of his message on denouncing progressive slogans and policies that he said threatened the lives of “Black and brown babies” and were being pushed by “a lot of young, white, affluent people.” A retired police captain and Brooklyn’s borough president, he rejected calls to defund the Police Department and pledged to expand its reach in the city.

Black and brown voters in Brooklyn and the Bronx flocked to his candidacy, awarding Mr. Adams with sizable leading margins in neighborhoods from Eastchester to East New York. 

Adams’s success is not anomalous, writes Lerer. Instead, it points to

a disconnect between progressive activists and the rank-and-file Black and Latino voters who they [i.e., progressive activists] say have the most to gain from their agenda. As liberal activists orient their policies to combat white supremacy and call for racial justice, progressives are finding that many voters of color seem to think about the issues quite a bit differently.

https://www.newsmax.com/sallypipes/american-progressivism-united-kingdom/2021/06/23/id/1026186/

Fresh off their successful defense of Obamacare before the U.S. Supreme Court, Democrats are looking to expand government control over the country’s healthcare system.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate have requested information on how to create a new public health insurance option. Senate Democrats led by Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., want to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 as part of a $6 trillion budget reconciliation package. And Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is looking to levy price controls on prescription drugs.

They’d be wise to take stock of the latest data chronicling the performance of the government-dominated healthcare systems in the United Kingdom and Canada. For years, Britons and Canadians have struggled to gain timely access to high-quality care. In the wake of the pandemic, things have only gotten worse.

More than 5.1 million English patients were waiting for hospital care in April of this year, according to the National Health Service. That’s nearly one in every ten residents of England. And it’s the highest total since the NHS began keeping track in August 2007.

In many cases, these delays stretch on for months, or even years. More than 385,000 NHS patients have waited more than a year for care. Over 2,700 have been waiting for more than two years.

In Northern Ireland, the situation is worse, with some patients waiting more than seven years for specialty care.

And the waits are likely to grow. This month, the United Kingdom’s Health Secretary estimated that 12 million people were in need of elective surgery. There’s quite a lot of ground to make up. Last year, there were 1.6 million fewer operations in England and Wales than would’ve been expected in a normal year.

Fixing the wait crisis could cost 40 billion pounds, over four years, according to estimates from the British government.

Instead of holding itself to higher standards, the NHS seems poised to move the goalposts. Since 2004, the agency has set a goal of seeing 95% of emergency-room patients in four hours or fewer. Having frequently failed to meet that target, the NHS recently announced it would abandon the policy altogether.

Canadian patients face similar waits. In 2019, 4.8 million Canadians — well over 12% of the country — didn’t have a regular doctor. That same year, patients typically waited more than 20 weeks for specialist care following referral by a general practitioner, according to the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank.

Say the wrong thing in America today, and the forces of “progressivism” will have your head on a pike. That recently happened to Daniel Elder, a composer of choral music. He offered the opinion that arson was not a good tactic for social change and has paid dearly for that bit of heresy.

Quillette has an excellent interview with Elder.

His publisher drafted an apology for him, but Elder declined to sign on. In the interview, he observes, “Someone that arouses the attention of the online mob rarely escapes punishment by prostrating. Stand and face your executioner.”

Elder has stopped writing music and explains that he is hoping for changes in America that will restore the artistic environment. He says, “There are some principles vital to the healthy artistic environment that I have seen under increasing threat—polluted by intolerance and groupthink. This [is] why I’ve claimed I do not currently compose music: I’m waiting for [a] healthy environment of free thought to return, since it’s necessary for deeply communicative art. I’ve chosen to look at my loss as a temporary sacrifice in the interest of helping [bring about] change. And in that changed field, I may thrive again, more than ever. As more people take a stand, I have faith this change is coming … sooner or later.”

Let us hope so. In the meantime, I wonder if anything can be done to help this young man.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/07/12/how-to-think-about-january-6/#slide-1

The Capitol riot was not an insurrection as federal law understands the term

What should be the penalty for insurrection? It is, after all, the most profound domestic threat to not merely national security but national survival.

To hear the Biden Justice Department tell it, the penalty for engaging in what Democrats and their media allies incessantly refer to as an “insurrection” at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, should be about . . . well . . . three and a half years. That would be comfortably within the sentencing range that prosecutors concede applies to the first major defendant to plead guilty in the case, Jon Schaffer, a founding member of the Oath Keepers militia organization. To be more precise, he is looking at 41 to 51 months’ imprisonment. Probably even less than that, because he has agreed to cooperate with investigators.

Three and a half years? For what Attorney General Merrick Garland portentously describes as “the most dangerous threat to our democracy” that he has ever seen in his career? And that, from a longtime former judge and prosecutor who, as a top Clinton Justice Department official, not only guided prosecutions of jihadist attacks that killed hundreds in the 1990s but personally supervised the investigation of the 1995 Oklahoma City federal-courthouse bombing, in which a terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, murdered 168 Americans?

McVeigh got the death penalty. Schaffer will get about three and a half years. The Justice Department expects run-of-the-mill stock fraudsters to do more time than that.

So what gives here?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-bid

BIDEN’S RECKLESS THREAT. For a few minutes Thursday, it appeared President Joe Biden had found a way to pass big, bipartisan legislation in Washington’s deeply divided atmosphere. “We have a deal,” Biden proudly announced in an impromptu press conference after meeting with some of the 21 Democratic and Republican senators who had negotiated a massive, bipartisan infrastructure proposal. Together, Biden said, the group would move forward to spend $579 billion on traditional infrastructure projects — roads, bridges, trains, waterways, broadband — that Republicans favor while including an emphasis on environmental measures that Democrats want.

It was a big moment. And then Biden threw it all away. In a second news conference a couple of hours later Thursday, Biden said that even if Congress passes the bipartisan bill he just touted, he would refuse to sign it unless lawmakers also pass a partisan spending measure — Democrats call it “human infrastructure” — that all Republicans oppose. For that bill to pass, Democrats would have to muster all 50 of their votes in the Senate and then rely on Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie. Then, Biden said, both bills — the deal and the deal-killer — have to come to his desk at the same time for him to sign them.

The bills have to come “promptly and in tandem,” Biden explained. “Let me emphasize that: in tandem.” What if that doesn’t happen? “If they don’t come, I’m not signing,” Biden added. “Real simple.”

Biden’s threat was news to Republicans, even some of the ones who had been negotiating the bipartisan proposal. On one hand, the president sang the praises of bipartisanship, leading Republicans to think he might actually work with them, and then Biden, citing a plan devised by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, reneged on the whole thing.

Republican anger followed. Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer “literally pulled the rug out from under their bipartisan negotiators,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. As for the president, McConnell said, “It was a tale of two press conferences — endorse the agreement in one breath and threaten to veto it in the next.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-6-25-new-york-has-no-idea-whatsoever-how-to-decarbonize-its-electric-grid

Earlier this month, I had a post discussing New York’s so-called Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019, and the various steps taken so far to implement the Act’s stated goals. The main goals are 40% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in New York by 2030, and 85% by 2050. These goals apply not just to the electricity sector (which only accounts for about 25% of energy usage in the U.S.), but to the entire energy economy. My post relied substantially on the work of Roger Caiazza, who has written extensively at his website Practical Environmentalist of New York about the implementation plans for the Act currently under formulation by various state bodies.

The current status is that a series of Advisory Panels have been convened, each covering a particular sector of the energy economy, and tasked to provide advice and guidance as to how to “decarbonize” that particular sector. My prior post covered some of Mr. Caiazza’s comments on the work of Advisory Panels for sectors including Transportation, Industry, Agriculture and Residential. However, at the time of that post (June 3) Mr. Caiazza had not yet commented on the work of the most important Advisory Panel, which is the one dealing with the sector of Power Generation.

There are two reasons that the Power Generation sector must be considered the most important in the overall decarbonization plan. First, it is thought to be the easiest to decarbonize. And second, the decarbonization plans for the other sectors basically come down to requiring those sectors to be converted from using fossil fuels to using electricity. Decarbonize transportation? Require electric cars! Decarbonize residential buildings? Require replacement of natural gas heating and cooking with electric! And so forth. And the advisory panels also have recognized the pre-eminent importance of the Power Generation sector by assigning that sector necessarily more ambitious decarbonization goals than for the other sectors: for the Power Generation sector it is 70% by 2030 and 100% by 2040.