RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-states-incomes-economic-growth-bureau-of-economic-analysis-465ce23?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden will never admit it, but he has Republican-led states to thank for the resilient U.S. economy and labor market. Witness how an earnings surge in right-leaning states is helping compensate for sluggish growth in progressive ones.

New state personal income data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis highlights how aggregate worker and proprietor earnings in red states grew significantly more in the last year than in the blues. The disparity owes to GOP-led states adding more jobs, including in higher-paying industries like tech and finance, along with faster-growing wages.

Earnings nationwide rose 5.4% on average between the first quarters of 2022 and 2023, but much less in New York (2.6%), Indiana (2.6%), California (2.9%), Connecticut (3.4%), Rhode Island (3.6%), Maryland (4%), New Jersey (4.3%), Oregon (4.5%) and Illinois (4.6%). Apart from Indiana, these states are run by Democrats—and most have been for years. They boast high taxes and a high cost of living, which along with Covid lockdowns spurred increased out-migration during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, earnings in the same period surged in North Dakota (9.7%), New Mexico (9.6%), Nevada (9.1%), Florida (9.1%), Nebraska (8.6%), Hawaii (8%), South Carolina (8%), Alaska (7.9%) and Texas (7.7%).

How to explain this? California suffered from tech layoffs. Hawaii, Florida and Nevada benefited from a tourism resurgence after Covid’s Omicron wave ebbed. Higher oil and gas prices and production boosted earnings in New Mexico, North Dakota and Alaska, though less so in Texas, which has a more diverse economy.

States with higher earnings growth also tend to have lower tax rates as well as fast-growing populations. Consider neighboring Utah (7.2%) and Colorado (4.9%), which have similar economies but diverging political climates as Colorado becomes more like California. Could that be affecting its earnings growth?

https://www.thefp.com/p/trans-activists-killed-my-scientific-paper?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I am a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. I have been a professor for 34 years, and a researcher for 40. Over the decades, I have studied controversial topics—from IQ, to sexual orientation, to transsexualism (what we called transgenderism before 2015), to pedophilia. I have published well over 100 academic articles. I am best known for studying sexual orientation—from genetic influences, to childhood precursors of homosexuality, to laboratory-measured sexual arousal patterns. 

My research has been denounced by people of all political stripes because I have never prioritized a favored constituency over the truth. 

But I have never had an article retracted. Until now.

On March 29, I published an article in the prestigious academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Less than three months later, on June 14, it was retracted by Springer Nature Group, the giant academic publisher of Archives, for an alleged violation of its editorial policies.

Retraction of scientific articles is associated with well-deserved shame: plagiarism, making up data, or grave concerns about the scientific integrity of a study. But my article was not retracted for any shameful reason. It was retracted because it provided evidence for an idea that activists hate.

The retracted article, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” was coauthored with Suzanna Diaz, who I met in 2018 at a small meeting of scientists, journalists, and parents of children they believed had Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). 

ROGD was first described in the literature in 2018 by the physician and researcher Lisa Littman. It is an explanation of the new phenomenon of adolescents, largely girls, with no history of gender dysphoria, suddenly declaring they want to transition to the opposite sex. It has been a highly contentious diagnosis, with some—and I am one—thinking it’s an important avenue for scientific inquiry, and others declaring it’s a false idea advocated by parents unable to accept they have a transgender child.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/09/missouri-v-biden-july-4-ruling-is-poetic-justice-case-of-tipple-for-the-judge/

At some point in this column, I have probably had occasion to quote these famous lines from Walter Scott’s poem “Marmion”:

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave

When first we practice to deceive.” 

In another, better world, I like to think, the Bidens and their protectors and puppet masters would ruefully be contemplating Scott’s admonitory observation.

In this world, however, I suspect that—until quite recently, anyway—they had smugly sided with J.R. Pope’s sly amendment to Scott’s moralizing couplet:

“But when we’ve practiced for a while 

How vastly we improve our style.”  

I note that Pope’s amusing title for his opuscule is “A Word of Encouragement.”

Many of us feel a great contradiction at the heart of the Biden phenomenon.

On the one hand, he—“Big Guy” Joe—and his entire Snopes-like family—coke-head Hunter, “Dr.” Jill, the litter of grasping, on-the-make siblings—all seem like ciphers, the veritable incarnation of Gertrude Stein’s description of Oakland, CA: “there’s no there there.”

Indeed, from this point of view, Joe’s painful mental and, increasingly, physical vacancy seems to be the objective correlative for the entire Biden enterprise. It’s as if the nasty brother of the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz suddenly came to life and occupied the White House. “If I only had a brain,” he snarls softly to himself, frightening everyone around him.

And that “as if” brings me to the extraordinary “other hand.” Joe Biden is president of the United States, still, if just barely, the most important political office in the world. Amazing. How could that be? Talk about going from zero to one!

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/dc_should_be_renamed_for_benedict_arnold.html

There is no doubt in my mind that if General George Washington were alive to see how the permanent political class had defiled his good name, he would raze D.C. to the ground.  “But George,” I imagine Martha pleading, “there surely are some good people in the nation’s capital who still serve the Republic.”  

“I don’t think so.  They celebrate baby murder, educate children inside brothels, tax the people to death, corruptly enrich themselves, and send the poorest to fight foreign wars for vague reasons.”

“In that case, wait here; I’ll go grab the torches.”  Martha was a patriotic and courageous first lady, who was never so insecure that she required strangers to address her as “Doctor.”

If the denizens of D.C. had even the slightest inclination toward honesty, they would rename their little swampland after Benedict Arnold, a man whose capacity for betrayal they all secretly emulate.  The filthy cesspool of narcissists and thieves rules over most of North America and a good chunk of the globe, but it is despised by pretty much anyone on the planet not making a buck from the crony Capitol-ism that fuels the whole rotten system.  

Whatever courses through the Leviathan’s veins, it stinks to high heaven.  Of course, now that cocaine has been legalized in the West Wing, who knows what kinds of other intoxicants the Leviathan is hopped up on these days?  The whole of D.C. has the twitchy personality of a boozing streetwalker bouncing back and forth from coke to ketamine.  It is little surprise that the “ruling class” refuses to close the border to fentanyl.  A whole city addicted to power and pharmaceuticals can’t welch on the same drug-dealers who fill both the campaign coffers and party stashes of the city’s most decadent deadbeats.

Speaking of fentanyl, the Drug Enforcement Administration has a public safety campaign under the catchy slogan “One Pill Can Kill,” as part of D.C.’s continuing efforts to solve real-life problems with Twitter hashtags.  One open border can kill, too, but saying that out loud is neither “politically correct” nor financially viable to an upper-crust corporate oligarchy that survives on cheap, illicit labor.  The residents of Benedict Arnold are nothing if not patent hypocrites, but it still seems incongruous for the same bureaucrats who glorify abortifacients to demonize opioids.  The Planned Parenthood priesthood spends most of its time cheering, “One pill can kill — yay!”  On the other hand, Planned Parenthood’s child-sacrificing disciples — many of whom love opioids as much as Hunter Biden does — pretend to worry about the drug epidemic killing Americans in staggering numbers.  Warnings from the same deviants whose open border policies and fixation with child dismemberment have taken more American lives than any foreign military sound sinisterly hollow.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/07/07/fareed_zakaria_to_biden_why_are_you_giving_ukraine_the_same_weapon_that_you_called_a_war_crime_if_russia_used_it.html

In an interview with President Joe Biden, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria asked the president why he changed his mind on providing Ukraine with cluster bombs, a weapon that his administration said would “constitute war crimes” if Russia used them.

FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST FAREED ZAKARIA GPS:  You have news today.  
 
The news is that the administration is going to provide cluster munitions to the Ukrainians. These are weapons that 100 nations ban, including some of our closest NATO allies. When there was news that the Russians might be using it, admittedly against civilians, your then-press secretary said this might be — constitute war crimes.  What made you change your mind and decide to give them these weapons?  

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/10/heres-how-you-know-conservatives-are-winning/

If you want a good indication that conservatives are, at long last, scoring a few actual victories these days, look at the apoplexy it’s causing those on the left.

A prime example is a piece written by Jill Lawrence, a former editor at USA Today, which posted on July 4 on MSNBC and carried the scary title: “Seeing the erosion of our freedoms makes it hard to celebrate this Fourth of July.” It is a remarkable display of fearmongering, incoherence, and illogic.

“The Supreme Court, conservative governors and gerrymandered state legislatures are racing to shrink fundamental rights and freedoms,” Lawrence writes. “The result is that tens of millions of Americans are being deprived of rights that other Americans have. The scale of the disparity is frightening and growing.”

Ok. So, how about some examples?

Well, the “marquee setback,” according to Lawrence, was the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

But wait, that ruling actually restored a right — the right of the people to decide through democratic means how the lives of unborn children should be treated. It also upheld several of the founding principles Lawrence claims are being attacked, such as the “right to life,” and “equal protection” — unless, of course, you assume that the unborn have no such rights.

Never mind that. To Lawrence, abortion is “a right so significant it was until recently a constitutional right.”

Really? This right is “so significant” that it wasn’t discovered (or, more accurately, invented) until 186 years after the Constitution was ratified?

Lawrence cites other examples of threats to what she describes as “America’s most sacred promises”:

The Supreme Court’s ruling that a web designer can’t be forced to create products that violate the basic tenants of her faith.
The Court’s decision banning the use of race in college admissions.
The fact that some states are restricting puberty blockers and sterilization procedures for gender-confused children, removing pornography from public school libraries, and forbidding teachers from “transitioning” children behind their parents’ backs.