RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/02/florida-vs-new-york.php

As states increasingly segregate into red and blue, California, New York, Texas and Florida are the heavyweight contenders. (Although, don’t forget poor Illinois.) A year ago I had the good fortune to hear Governor Ron DeSantis give a speech to a Minnesota group in Naples, Florida. DeSantis said something that I thought couldn’t possibly be correct: that Florida has more people than New York, with a state budget only half as large. Afterward, I looked it up, and it was true. No wonder DeSantis romped to an overwhelming re-election!

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal editorial board compared “New York vs. Florida, by the Numbers.” The comparison tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the relative merit of conservative and left-wing governance:

Take a look at the nearby chart comparing some key indicators of governance in a pair of states that not long ago were about the same size—New York and Florida. As recently as 2013 the two states had similar populations, but so many people have moved to the Sunshine State that it’s now roughly 2.6 million people larger.

Here are the numbers. Read them and weep, if you are a liberal. Click to enlarge:

We see the same thing across the country. Red states are succeeding, blue states are failing. What is hard to understand is why so many blue state liberals don’t understand that their states are dying. Politicians, I get: decline is always a relatively slow process, so they calculate that they will be gone before their states finally circle the drain. But what about the people who live in blue states, who don’t intend to flee to more successful locations, and who will be left holding the bag? I can only assume that they are not familiar with the data.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ohio-residents-erupt-town-hall-wheres-pete-buttigieg

Voicing their concerns at a town hall on Wednesday night, Ohio residents impacted by this month’s toxic train derailment asked where Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was.

“Where’s Pete Buttigieg? Where’s he at?” one man asked Mayor Trent Conaway.

“I don’t know. Your guess is as good as me,” the mayor replied. 

He told attendees that Tuesday was the first time he had “heard anything from the White House.”

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan is on the ground in East Palestine on Thursday to discuss the agency’s efforts leading on the environmental response, a spokesperson for the Transportation Department told Fox News Digital in an email.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11745765/East-Palestine-Ohio-residents-demand-urgent-testing-toxic-train-wreck.html

‘We basically nuked the town’: Hundreds of residents in Ohio village demand urgent testing of their homes after train wreck released toxic chemicals into the air – and officials tell them it’s safe to return
About 50 cars, including 10 carrying hazardous materials, derailed in a fiery crash in East Palestine at about 9pm on Friday, February 3
Some train cars were carrying hazardous chemicals and houses were evacuated while authorities carried out a ‘controlled release’
But residents are suing Norfolk Southern and fear their health is still at risk 

Residents evacuated from an Ohio village where a freight train derailed before huge clouds of toxic gasses were released in an explosion fear they could still be in danger nearly two weeks later, despite authorities telling them it’s safe to return home.

About 50 cars, including 10 carrying hazardous materials, derailed in a fiery crash in East Palestine at about 9pm on Friday, February 3.

Houses were evacuated after vinyl chloride was slowly released from five of those cars. Authorities then ignited the gases for a ‘controlled release’ of the highly flammable, toxic chemicals in a controlled environment, creating a dark plume of smoke.

Officials warned the controlled burn would send phosgene and hydrogen chloride into the air. Phosgene is a highly toxic, colorless gas with a strong odor that can cause vomiting and breathing trouble and was used as a weapon in World War I.

Despite the threat, safety officials insisted it is safe for residents who were evacuated to return to their homes just days later.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/17/the-cbo-exposes-bidens-5-45-trillion-lie/

While spending the country into ruin, President Joe Biden likes to portray himself as a fiscal conservative who has cut the deficit in half in the past two years. But a new report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office shows just how big a lie this is — a 5 1/2 trillion dollar lie, to be exact.

During his State of the Union speech last week, Biden not only claimed that “my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history,” he also claimed that he’s a miser compared to Donald Trump. “Under the previous administration, the American deficit went up four years in a row. … Nearly 25% of the entire national debt that took over 200 years to accumulate was added by just one administration alone — the last one,” he said. 

“They’re the facts. Check it out. Check it out.”

Well, we checked it out. And it is perhaps the most flagrant of all Biden’s lies. The evidence shows that Biden is, in fact, the most fiscally reckless president in history.

Days after Biden’s speech, the CBO released its latest 10-year forecast for the federal budget. What it reveals is that Biden sharply increased the deficit last year, this year, and next year, and he has set the country on course to add a total of $5.45 trillion to the federal deficit over the following decade.

How do we know this? Because two years ago, when the CBO released its 2021 budget forecast, it did so before any of Biden’s policies had been enacted. That report assumed that the laws in place at the end of President Donald Trump’s term remained in effect for the next decade. So, it serves as a baseline against which we can measure the impact of Biden’s policies.

Here’s what the numbers show:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-leftist-ideologies-always-fail/

I want to discuss, in the brief space I have, the roots of modern Leftist philosophy, and why they believe government and force are the essentials to a more perfect society. There is an inherent contradiction in their system which would nullify it, but the Leftist’s fundamental understanding of human nature is in error, and thus any arrangement based on it is doomed to failure. And has.

Modern leftism has an interesting history, but one I cannot fully elucidate here. Though it has predecessors (Locke, Helvetius), its current manifestation is rooted in Darwinian materialism (one foundation of Marxism). According to this hypothesis, humans evolved, naturally and by chance, from “lower” forms of life. Pure, undiluted Darwinism, thus pure leftism, is atheistic—no God created or controlled the process. That means human beings are nothing more than blobs of matter in motion. The only difference between you and a cockroach is a different configuration of molecules, and that’s totally by chance. You can no more help being a human than a cockroach can help being a cockroach. There is, of course, some verity to this.

However, since humans are nothing but groups of molecules in motion, we can react only to whatever environmental forces surround us. There is no freedom of choice in such a system. And no free will implies we are not responsible for what we do. Criminals aren’t guilty of “crimes”; it isn’t their fault, they respond exclusively to environmental factors. Also, poverty has been said to be a root cause of crime. Thus, by changing the environment (a “war on poverty”), human behavior can be modified. Put an apple tree in an environment of good water, soil, sunshine, etc., and bigger, tastier, juicier apples will be produced. The apples have no “choice” in the matter, they only respond to their surroundings. Since humans are, like apples, only molecules formed, by chance, into what we are, then, like apples, we will react only to whatever external stimuli we receive. People thus aren’t “good” or “bad” except as their environment dictates.

Leftist intellectuals believe that humans (especially them) have evolved to the point where they can control the evolutionary process, if only we will give them power. They will create a Utopia, by good laws and education, so that everybody can be in a “good” environment and respond accordingly.