RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/03/27/another-train-carrying-hazardous-materials-derails-whats-going-on-n1681823

Move over “died suddenly,” because “train carrying hazardous materials derails” is quickly becoming the most common story to pop up in our news feeds.

As per local reports, a train belonging to Canadian Pacific, consisting of 70 cars transporting hazardous materials, derailed late Sunday night in North Dakota, approximately one mile southeast of Wyndmere in Richland County at around 11:15 p.m.  According to the report, 31 of the 70 cars derailed, and some were found to be leaking petroleum used in the production of asphalt. No injuries have been reported.

Officials said crews will wait for the cold weather to solidify the leaked material, which is expected to transform into a gel.

Related: Three Train Derailments and a Developing Bio-Disaster — Where Are the Eco-Harpies?

As worries about railroad safety persist in the United States, the recent incident in North Dakota is the latest in a string of train derailments.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/03/28/man-who-stabbed-rand-paul-senate-aide-in-broad-daylight-had-just-been-released-from-prison-n1682037

A staffer for Republican Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was stabbed “in broad daylight” by a man who had just been released from prison the day before. The unidentified staffer is in serious condition in a D.C. hospital.

Washington, D.C., has been growing more unsafe by the day because of local policies that reward criminal acts instead of punishing criminals. And this reality is getting better known because Capitol Hill workers are becoming more frequent victims of the Democrat-run city’s laissez-faire attitude about crime. Indeed, it nearly required a literal act of Congress and a presidential decree to get the woke city council to back off yet another easy-on-crime bright idea to reduce penalties for robberies and carjackings.

The New York Post reported that “the attack occurred on the same street as, and less than a mile away from, Rep. Angie Craig’s (D-Minn.) apartment building, where she was attacked by a crazed suspect with a long rap sheet inside the building’s lobby elevator last month.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3920055-will-the-white-house-dump-fed-chair-jerome-powell/

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wants to oust Jerome Powell. Last week she went after the Federal Reserve chair, saying in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “My views on Jay Powell are well-known at this point. He has had two jobs. One is to deal with monetary policy. One is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both.”

It is hard to disagree with the Massachusetts senator, though Powell is certainly not the only one responsible for bringing us to the brink of recession. Democrats recklessly spent too much, heedless of the overheating economy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been AWOL throughout; and bank supervisors did a lousy job preventing problems even as alarm bells rang.

But Powell is in the driver’s seat and is coming under increased scrutiny. Democrats, worried that a recession could hurt them badly in the elections of 2024, need a scapegoat. But it’s not just Democrats who are critical of Powell’s actions.

Ed Hyman, Wall Street’s top economist and a generally optimistic fellow, wrote clients a cryptic message last week titled: “Not Good.” His email alert came the day after Powell announced another rate hike, of 25 basis points. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/employers-need-to-put-the-squeeze-on-woke-intolerance-stanford-law-school-duncan-steinbach-free-speech-13f4ed90?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Stanford Law School’s career services website boasts the kind of professional opportunities the school’s graduates can expect when they venture beyond the safe spaces of the palm-speckled campus.

Ninety-seven of the nation’s top 100 law firms employ Stanford graduates as partners; 92 have Stanford alums as attorneys. For 48 consecutive years Stanford graduates have clerked on the Supreme Court. Microsoft, Google, Cisco and many other top firms have employed a graduate as general counsel.

So my question to the senior partners of law firms, corporate chief executives, judges and others who will employ these privileged people is: Do you stand with Jenny Martinez or do you cower behind Tirien Steinbach? Do you want your institutions to be places where the law is respected as the authority that mediates our disputes is blindfolded or are you going to continue to connive at the transformation of the law into a tool of the new identity-class struggle? Are you going to keep facilitating the degradation of the most basic of our freedoms—speech—or will you begin the long struggle against the controlling zeitgeist of totalitarianism?

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/26/who-says-that-chance-rules-in-the-affairs-of-men/

Some years ago, while driving into Boston to attend a conference on “Changing and Unchanging Values in the World of the Future,” I noticed a billboard advertising not the latest consumer gadget but a sage observation attributed to Winston Churchill.  “The farther backward you can look,” it said in large black letters, “the farther forward you are likely to see.” 

It seemed more than a coincidence that the conference I was attending was at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University.  Had some representative of that institution contrived to place Churchill’s fortifying admonition at the city gates?

I was disappointed to learn that the message had been arranged, not by the Pardee Center, but by some other civic-minded entity or individual. Nevertheless, if Churchill’s observation is not the motto of the Pardee Center, perhaps it should be.

The past does not provide a window overlooking the future, exactly; nothing short of clairvoyance can promise that. Nor is it even quite true, as George Santayana famously remarked, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (I recently had something to say about that in this space.)

History is not a form of prophylaxis. But knowledge of history does acquaint us with the permanent moral and political alternatives that mankind confronts in its journey through time.

It reminds us, for example, how regularly tyranny masquerades as virtue, how inhumanity is apt to cloak itself in the rhetoric of righteousness. (This is not, as St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians reminds us, a new insight: “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.”)

Above all, perhaps, knowledge of history can serve to temper our presumption. As I reflected on Churchill’s observation and the subject of the conference, I was struck anew by the large quota of optimism that language budgets into our lives.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/03/27/the_real_insurrection_and_the_dirty_politics_of_jan_6_149032.html

The Democrats say that Jan. 6 was the worst attack on American democracy since the Civil War. They call it an insurrection, but if it was indeed the worst since 1865, no one but a fool would dare claim it even remotely approached the scale of the bloody war between the states.

And if you weren’t a fool, you might conclude that Jan. 6 was nothing like an insurrection. It wasn’t violent in the sense of an armed rebellion. It wasn’t organized. And it didn’t seek to overthrow the government, but to protect the Constitution. In more ways than not, it was a defense of American democracy, not an attack on it.

In every particular, Jan. 6 was a pale shadow compared to the Civil War. To start with, it lasted less than six hours, whereas the Civil War lasted four long years. The war between the North and South cost the lives of 620,000 soldiers and another 50,000 civilians. The Jan. 6 incursion at the U.S. Capitol, on the other hand, claimed the lives of just two women protesters, Ashli Babbitt and Roseanne Boyland. Among the defenders of the Capitol, police officer Brian Sicknick died after suffering two strokes the next day, but without a direct known connection to the riot. Two other protesters died of natural causes during the siege, and four law officers died by suicide in the months following the attack. If you count all of those as legitimate casualties of Jan. 6, then the total comes to nine compared to a minimum of 670,000 in the Civil War.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the stark differences between Jan. 6 and the Civil War.

https://www.axios.com/2023/03/25/aoc-tiktok-ban-viral-video

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) first and only TikTok video has gone viral — and in it, she outlines her case against banning the Chinese-owned social media app as its fate hangs in the balance.

Why it matters: With more than 150 million monthly active users in the U.S., TikTok is one of the most popular smartphone apps in the country. Lawmakers are pressing forward with bipartisan efforts to facilitate a ban in the U.S. amid scrutiny surrounding the firm’s relationship with the Chinese government.

State of play: Critics have highlighted the fact that Chinese law requires China’s companies to share information with the government.

TikTok has repeatedly said it operates independently and works with Oracle to ensure its algorithms and content moderation models aren’t manipulated by Chinese authorities.

What she’s saying: The video begins with Ocasio-Cortez listing concerns about Chinese surveillance. She then says that the discussion “doesn’t really address the core of the issue, which is the fact that major social media companies are allowed to collect troves of people’s personal data.”

Adding that the U.S. is one of the “only developed nations in the world” without data privacy protection laws, she argues that the solution is not to ban an individual company but to “actually protect Americans from this kind of egregious data harvesting that companies can do without your significant ability to say no.”
She also pointed out that the U.S. has never banned a social media company from operating within its borders, and that Congress hasn’t received a classified briefing on potential risks even though that’s protocol when it comes to national security issues.
“This case needs to be made to the public,” she says. “Our first priority should be in protecting your ability to exist without social media companies harvesting and commodifying every single piece of data about you without you and without your consent.”

The big picture: Ocasio-Cortez is one of several progressive members of Congress mounting a defense of the app. Her video garnered over 2.2 million views in 15 hours.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/27/the-woke-movement-is-assassinating-mlk-all-over-again/

A week from Tuesday we will mark the 55th anniversary of the day the murderous James Earl Ray took the life of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader should be allowed to rest in peace, but he is being slain yet again, this time by a mob of mediocre minds with rock-bottom character that seeks to overturn his life’s works.

In what is widely acknowledged as his greatest speech, King dreamed that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

King also damned the “dark and desolate valley” and “manacles” of segregation. He identified us all as “God’s children.”

He couldn’t have been clearer about his vision for a color-blind society. And in the 40 years that followed his death, our country moved in that direction, year by year, heart by heart.

But much has changed. The woke mob, critical race theory, and the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) movement have reopened a once-gaping, raw wound that had almost closed. Consider just a few of the many instances in which our “leaders” and institutional luminaries not only reject King’s teaching but actively try to return this country to an era of segregation and ugly, unapologetic bigotry. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-big-business-married-big-government-biden-handouts-subsidies-chips-banking-svb-bailout-social-policy-59096477?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

When liberals look back on the Biden presidency, they may hail its greatest accomplishment as ushering in a new era of corporate government dependency. Without fail, and no matter the industry, the administration has hooked businesses on Washington handouts while attaching conditions that put taxpayers and consumers on the hook for leftist policy preferences.

The latest example is the banking panic. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act provided an implicit taxpayer guarantee for the country’s largest banks. With Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, midsize banks are now arguing they’re also too big to fail and lobbying the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to guarantee all uninsured deposits for two years to prevent more bank failures. In other words, they want the government to backstop poorly managed banks.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has lent support to the idea but demands that a government guarantee be tied to increased regulation. And don’t think she has only stronger capital and liquidity standards in mind. Like-minded officials will surely demand a ban on stock buybacks and dividends, executive compensation caps and perhaps even growth restrictions.

Government help is never free, as semiconductor companies are learning. Chip makers lobbied Congress for enormous subsidies to build plants in the U.S., which they claimed would shore up supply chains and protect national security. Republicans joined Democrats last year in approving some $39 billion in direct financial aid, plus a 25% investment tax credit.

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