RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Can one state implement a law enacted by another?

Can it enforce regulations set by bureaucrats in another?

If it does, isn’t the state ignoring the will of its people? And isn’t that unconstitutional? The commonsense answers are evident. But the practice of outsourcing is widespread in emissions regulation.

Besides Washington D.C., as many as 14 states – the CARB states, so called after the California Air Resources Board – apply the bluebook, California’s stringent air pollution control laws. In most of them, lawmakers have neither legislated on the matter nor consulted citizens.

This anomaly is being challenged as unconstitutional by Peters Brothers Inc., a trucking firm based in Lenhartsville, Pennsylvania. The family business owns a fleet of refrigerated trucks. Recent changes in California emission standards have imposed unexpected heavy expenses that were never deliberated by Pennsylvania’s legislators and citizens. The Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association (PMTA), another trucking company, and two truck dealers are also petitioners in the case. The case has been taken up by the pro bono Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which takes a special interest in separation-of-powers cases.

In Peters Brothers Inc, et al. v. Pennsylvania Dept of Environmental Protection, et al, filed last month in the Commonwealth Court, Harrisburg, the PLF argues that only the Pennsylvania General Assembly can make laws for the state: the legislature speaks for, and is accountable to, the people it represents. The lawsuit’s direct challenge is to 25 Pa. Code § 126.501, which incorporates in Pennsylvania standards set by bureaucrats in California.

But it digs deeper. The Pennsylvania Environmental Quality Board, which adopted regulations from California, claims it has rule-making authority under the Pennsylvania Air Pollution Control Act (PAPCA). The lawsuit asserts that this is invalid. It argues that if indeed the General Assembly, in framing PAPCA, gave the board, a state agency, the power to adopt California regulations, the Assembly has violated the non-delegation doctrine: a legislature cannot, after all, give away its law-making power.

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-army-secretary-doesnt-want-2nd-gen-military-recruits-for-fear-of-a-warrior-caste/

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, who got her start as a Clinton intern, has a lot of thoughts on the military.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said she expects within weeks to begin drafting a proposal for a recruiting overhaul so sweeping that Congress might need to pass legislation to enact all of it.

Depending too much on military families could create a “warrior caste,” Wormuth said. Her plans seek to draw in people who have no real connection to the military and to broaden the appeal of service.

There are sixth and seventh-generation military families. There is a ‘warrior caste’ insofar as you have families who have fought for this country since the War of Independence. They showed up, they bled, and now they’re to be replaced by drag queens and identity politics quotas.

“The Army is strategically deploying recruiters to communities across the country based on demographics, ethnicity, race, and gender,” Wormuth had claimed in a written statement.

Here’s what that ends up looking like.

In pursuit of REDCAT quotas, a message from the United States Army Special Operations Command urges soldiers to “select the ethnic group code that includes the most accurate description of ethnic background or combination of ethnicities in their ethnic background.”

At the Virginia National Guard, past recruitment was aimed at making the Guard “match the demographics of the state within 1% of the REDCAT” and when that failed, developing a “target for underrepresented groups each FY by comparing census data” and then “if the demographics are not within the 1% target develop three (3) COAs to attain the objective by 28 February of each year.”

Rather than getting the best people or even adequately qualified people, the goal is to match the force to the census data in a completely senseless exercise so that the people they do get are 20% black, 7.2% Asian, and 0.6% American Indian, or develop a plan to get those Asians.

Wormuth claims that, “the Army is also on track to meet its directed level of 5,800 officer commissions while increasing diversity representation within the combat arms branches.”

Who needs a warrior caste when you can pick your fighters by race?

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27086/the-politics-of-pronouns

This article is a chapter from my new book, Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier–Reality Is, scheduled for release at the end of 2023.

CHAPTER 25: The Politics of Pronouns

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite themselves. The globalist war on the nation state cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses psychological, informational warfare to destabilize Americans, and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. The primary target of globalist predators is America’s children. 

A child’s ability to test reality is a reference to his ability to identify the world of facts. It is a human psychological survival skill. When little Johnny tells his Mommy he is a bird that can fly, it is his Mommy’s responsibility to keep Johnny in objective reality, and explain to Johnny that he is a child, not a bird, and he cannot fly. If instead of objective reality, Mommy or Daddy encourages Johnny’s subjective reality, and escorts him to the top floor of their apartment building to fly, Johnny will fall to his death. Objective reality always prevails.

Objective refers to a reality that is outside of your mind (world of facts), and subjective refers to the inner reality of your mind (world of feelings). Conflict between objective reality and subjective reality generates cognitive dissonance––tension in your mind created by holding inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes. The tension is often so intolerable, it causes people to change their thoughts and behaviors to eliminate the pain. Cognitive dissonance is an important dynamic of psychological warfare.

The catastrophic consequences of encouraging children to live in subjective reality, conflicts with parental responsibilities and protections. Children are being intentionally indoctrinated to believe that objective reality does not exist. Hans Christian Anderson’s famous folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” published almost 200 years ago, dramatizes the difference between objective and subjective reality, and exposes why reality is the final frontier. In objective reality the emperor is naked. In subjective reality the emperor is wearing new clothes. Weaponized education tries to persuade children the emperor is wearing new clothes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/michigan-republican-sets-the-record-straight-on-hate-crime-bill-that-could-criminalize-using-wrong-pronouns/?

Michigan’s hate-crime bill is subjective and illogical and could criminalize the use of biologically accurate gender pronouns, state representative Andrew Beeler told National Review, pushing back against local supporters of the legislation who have dismissed claims that it threatens free speech.

The bill would punish speech that “intimidates another individual” with up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Democrats blamed misinformation last week after several outlets reported that the bill would criminalize the refusal to use preferred pronouns. The bill doesn’t dismiss an individual’s First Amendment right to constitutionally protected activity but does criminalize speech if a “reasonable” person feels “intimidated,” a standard state Republicans say is too vague.

“This entire bill hinges on how you define ‘intimidation,’” Beeler said. “I’ll define it the way that the bill defines it: The full definition is, ‘willful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened,’ etc. If you intimidate by that definition, anyone in the protected classes, you are subject to criminal prosecution and a potential felony.”

Although Michigan’s 1988 hate-crime law already makes it illegal to intimidate based on race, religion, sex, or nationality, the new bill expands protections for gender identity or expression, which it defines as “having or being perceived as having a gender-related self-identity or expression whether or not associated with an individual’s assigned sex at birth.”

A standard of reason, by which juries determine whether or not a person acted with average care and consideration, is difficult to apply when Michiganders can’t agree on basic truths about the nature of gender, Beeler said.