RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-female-scientists-are-all-right-women-engineering-wage-gap-sexism-discrimination-b186f9d9?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The toy maker Mattel recently honored International Women’s Day by making “role model dolls” of women in science, tech, engineering and math jobs, while lamenting that “girls are systemically tracked away from STEM.” It’s a cliché that these fields are rife with sexism, but at least in academia the data disagree, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

“The literature on women in science, both scholarly and popular, portrays academic sexism today as an omnipresent, pervasive force in the daily lives of tenure-track women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields,” write Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell and Shulamit Kahn of Boston University. Yet their review of the evidence from 2000 to 2020 shows that women in scholarly sciences are doing fine.

Tenure-track women are at parity with their male counterparts in grant funding, recommendation letters and having research accepted by journals, the authors say. In hiring, women have an advantage over men: “Women are less likely than men to apply for tenure-track jobs, but when they do apply, they receive offers at an equal or higher rate than men do.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/the_ruling_classs_stalinist_purge.html

Recent history has shown us the end result of the injustices Joe Biden and his administration are committing.

Like a hammer smashing anyone who seeks to “make America great,” the ruling class pounds Trump, his supporters, and now even Tucker Carlson.  A “great America,” you see, is antithetical to the technocratic police State that the Marxist globalists are busy building.  When individual rights and liberties are respected, self-sufficient Americans do not need government apparatchiks to fashion drab, one-size-fits-all, welfare-dependent, groupthink-dominated futures.  When American families are independent and strong, there are no psychologically unstable, lost, “woke” generations to crave parenting from the State.  When Americans choose God’s truth over the government’s lies, then man-made institutions look frail next to the divine.  Anybody who does not toe the Establishment line must go because totalitarianism cannot survive even a whisper of condemnation.  Lies built from sand can withstand no breeze.

I think this difficult period of American history — during which the Marxist globalists and their appeasers have openly embraced censorship, political persecution, and social “cancelation” — will be remembered as a kind of Stalinist “purge” long in the making.  I should say “Soviet purge,” because Lenin used murder and imprisonment to silence dissent (or potential dissent) just as ruthlessly as his successor.  It was Stalin who really took it to the “intellectuals,” though, and many who ignored Lenin’s brutality out of a self-sabotaging allegiance to communism belatedly learned that any system predicated on total control over individual minds will eventually find anybody with a mind a threat.  

The more general “Soviet purge” has been ongoing for decades, as defenders of liberty — often politically conservative in their outlook and in possession of true religious faith — have been run out of academia, denied promotion within the federal bureaucracy, and kept from having any editorial voices on the pages of the nation’s leading newspapers.  Everybody has been aware that the Marxists’ “long march through the institutions” has been trudging along unabated, but because those who parroted “politically correct” opinions found professional advancement and steady accolades while their colleagues “disappeared,” they held their tongues and said nothing.  Now the “Stalinist purge” begins in full swing, and many who have traded their consciences for cushy lifestyles over these last few decades will learn that totalitarian systems always save their supporters for dessert.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-unions-heavy-grifting/

Over the years, the unions, especially the public employee variety, have heaped abuses on just about all of us. But finally, there are the seeds of resistance.

Tax exempt status

For starters, as 501(c)(5)s, unions have a special tax-exempt status with the IRS that is accorded to “Labor, Agricultural, and Horticultural Organizations.” As Mike Antonucci reports, the National Education Association took in $375 million during the 2019-20 school year, all of it tax-free. Additionally, the NEA sold more than $209 million of its stocks and securities during the year, but the union is also excused from paying capital gains taxes.

Antonucci further explains that the NEA doesn’t operate entirely tax-free. It still must pay income tax on “unrelated business income.” For example, revenue from businesses placing ads in NEA publications, book sales, etc. All told, the union paid $7.2 million in direct taxes of all types on more than $603 million in gross revenue in 2019-20 – an effective tax rate of 1.2 percent.

The NEA also has no sense of hypocrisy. At the same time the union benefits from this egregious tax exemption, it came out with a “playbook” in 2020. In the “Tax Fairness” section of the manifesto, the union maintains that we need to repeal or amend tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, and replace them with a progressive tax system. The NEA also opposes “tax loopholes or giveaways that reduce revenues and shelter corporations and high-income individuals from paying taxes.”

Release time

Then we have the quaint notion of “release time” or, perhaps more accurately, “union time, taxpayer dime,” which is common at all levels of government. This swindle allows public employees to conduct union business during working hours, with the taxpayer footing the bill. These activities include negotiating contracts, lobbying, processing grievances, and attending union meetings and conferences.

A 2020 Goldwater Institute policy report detailed the pervasive nature of release time provisions in union contracts. This bit of thievery costs taxpayers millions of dollars annually and forces them to fund private union activities, which are very often political in nature and work against the interests of the taxpayers. Even more painful is the fact that many local governments don’t bother tracking release time, meaning this corrupt practice is often carried out in secret.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/28/bidenomics-recession-return-to-70s-style-stagflation-or-both/

Americans expecting a better economy to emerge three years after the COVID shutdowns will no doubt be disappointed by the first quarter’s GDP gain of just 1.1% with higher inflation. And it’s even worse than it looks.

Of course, President Joe Biden denied the worsening news, saying, “Today, we learned that the American economy remains strong, as it transitions to steady and stable growth.”

“Strong”? Really? No one believes that. As recently as late March, economists were looking for a first-quarter GDP growth number exceeding 3%. Instead, they got 1.1%, down from 2.6% in the fourth quarter and 3.2% in last year’s third quarter.

See the trend?

It’s no accident. The Fed, responding to 9%-plus inflation during the COVID “emergency,” has jacked up interest rates to 5% from near zero, and is expected to add another quarter point in early May during its meeting.

More ominously, a big part of the Q1 GDP slowdown came from businesses reducing their inventories and, for the fourth quarter in a row, their capital investments. Typically, businesses do that only when they expect really rough times ahead.

https://victorhanson.com/civilizational-killers-part-two-debt-and-inflation/

Debt and its twin inflation destroy civilizations. Ancient coins were sometimes called “redheads” as the raised impressed silhouettes of grandees stamped on “silver” coins were the first to have their silver veneers worn away revealing the “red” bronze beneath.

Our paper money is similarly becoming less and less valuable, the more we print of it. Currently, the U.S. owes 130 percent of its gross domestic product, in total about $33 trillion.

The staggering sum has not stopped annual federal borrowing, which may hit $2 trillion this year. The massive borrowing is unsustainable. Yet anyone who tries to cut the massive indebtedness will be smeared as cruel and insensitive.

America apparently shrugs that when the nation faces insolvency, we will deal with the catastrophe the way it is done in the Third World and in antiquity.

One, the state can always pay off its debts by printing endless money and inflating the economy. Germany did that by intent to pay off war reparations to the victorious allies by printing Reichsmarks to the point that they became utterly worthless.

https://victorhanson.com/civilizational-killers-part-one-perversion-of-the-law/

No civilization can continue if its bedrock values and institutions are eroding—especially if the effort to save them is considered worse than their destruction.

When we look to the civilizational decline of the Greek polis, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, or of Europe in the 1930s we learn that erosion is a result of internal choices, and usually a matter of failing to adhere to time-honored customs and traditions, while evolving to meet new threats.

In the case of the autonomous Greek polis, the culprit was the inability of some 1,500 city-states to create a workable federal system for the common defense of Hellas—when threatened by Philip and Alexander. The Roman Empire was not able to maintain a common culture among its 70 million varied residents, nor to increase productivity to pay for always greater entitlements, or to systematize imperial succession, or inculcate Romanity among an increasingly diverse population.

For the Byzantines, it is hard to criticize an empire that sustained 1,100 years of continuous civilization. But in the fifteenth century, it failed to evolve into a partnership with a dynamic Western Christendom, especially after the damage suffered during the Fourth Crusade, to create a common front against Ottoman Islamism. Nor was a shrinking Constantinople able to attract Europeans into the empire, much less to convert Anatolians into Orthodox Christians.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trans-marathoner-defeats-14000-women-in-race-after-competing-as-man-months-earlier/?

A transgender runner on Sunday defeated thousands of women in the female category of the London Marathon after competing as a man in the New York City race just months prior.

Glenique Frank, a 52-year old male athlete who now identifies as female, finished in 6160th place out of 20,123 entrants, outpacing 14,000 women.

“Girl power!,” Frank said to a reporter after the London event, flexing his biceps and abdomen muscles for the camera. Frank listed all the other races he’s participated in recently. For all of those, he was referred to as “Glen” rather than “Glenique.”

“My beautiful son stood there” on the sidelines to support, Frank said. “He’s having a baby, so I’m going to be a granny.”

Frank then ran off from the camera, wearing a transgender flag as a cape. The spectacle soon received intense backlash from some female professional runners.

“Males in the F category is UNFAIR for females,” Olympic marathoner Mara Yamauchi tweeted in response to the viral video of Frank.

Yamauchi suggested that Frank’s category switch enabled him to transcend his previously mediocre status. Last November, for example, he ran the NYC Marathon in the men’s category and finished 14,096th out of 26,539, according to Yamauchi.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/26/dominion-vs-russian-collusion-and-disinformation/

Fox News is reeling, both financially and with respect to its talent, after being drawn into a long lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. 

The network just settled for an astounding $757.5 million and soon after released Tucker Carlson, the network’s highest-rated host.

The voting machine company had alleged some of Fox’s hosts had either promulgated, or allowed their guests to push, a false narrative that the corporation’s voting machines were “fixed” and misreported the vote count in some precincts of the 2020 presidential election.

In other words, Dominion walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars on the accusation that some raving guests and a few Fox journalists insinuated, falsely, that the machines had thrown the election to Joe Biden.

Yet no one argues that such post facto accusations influenced the election. The postelection dispute instead was over whether a news organization was responsible for all that its hundreds of guests and hosts say that proved later to be not substantiated, false, or defamatory.

Fox settled with Dominion reportedly to avoid messy revelations of its internal texts and to stop the hemorrhaging of its brand.

But by doing so, the network may have inadvertently set a dubious standard that any speculative opinion, voiced in public media, however nutty and later proven to be inaccurate, will be actionable.

If that is the standard, we are going to see a lot more costly lawsuits.

Compare Dominion’s writ with the twin “Russian collusion” and “Russian disinformation” hoaxes.

Lots of journalists and guests on network news, cable, public broadcasting, and internet news sites ran daily with the utter lie that the concocted Christopher Steele dossier was accurate.

Four years later, they were still claiming that Donald Trump had won the 2016 election only by enlisting the aid of the Russians—as an “asset” and puppet of Vladimir Putin.

All that was demonstrably untrue.

No one on these news shows ever produced any information validating the dossier, much less offered apologies to those whose lives they ruined, as in the case of Lt. General Michael Flynn and Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

The steady two-year drumbeat of media and DNC-fabricated untruths neutered the first two years of the Trump Administration.

Robert Mueller’s $40 million, 22-month special counsel “investigation” leaked wild and lurid rumors of Trump indictments to come, and yet ultimately found no proof of collusion.

No matter. The agendas of the Democratic Party’s collaboration with the media were fulfilled. The Trump Administration was wounded, forced on defense to reply to countless new fabrications, and smeared to the point of caricature.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/27/joe-biden-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things/

In one of the most memorable presidential debate moments, Ronald Reagan asked voters if they were better off in 1980 than they were when Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. The obvious answer was, for most, a resounding “no.” Whoever runs against the Democratic nominee next year needs to bring back that question, because it’s a certainty that in the fall of 2024, we’ll still be worse off than we were in pre-pandemic 2020.

And for that, we can thank, or rather blame, Joe Biden.

In a poll taken earlier this year, 41% of Americans said they were financially worse off than they were two years earlier when Biden took office, the highest number in “ABC News/Washington Post polls dating back 37 years.” Only 16% said they were better off, the lowest number since 2009, when only 8% said their financial situations were better.

At roughly the same time in Donald Trump’s term, only 13% said they were worse off than when he became president while a quarter said their finances had improved.

An America struggling under Biden is not a new development. In a survey conducted in the spring of 2022, 52% said they were worse off than a year earlier; 39% said they expected to be worse off in one year than they were when they were asked the question in June.

Last year’s New York Times|Momentive Poll further discovered that “The number of people who expect periods of widespread unemployment or depression to occur in the next five years has risen to 71%, another new high,” while 41% said “now is a bad time to make large purchases.” This was “up from 36% in April and slightly” exceeded “the 39% that number reached in April 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic.”