RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inflation-gas-prices-rent-electricity-bills-rise/

Zachary Lloyd makes $14,800 a year as a graduate teaching assistant at Florida State University — right around the poverty line for a single adult. So the 25-year-old was looking forward to a pay increase starting this fall that would net him about $1,000 more, just about covering his higher costs for groceries, fast food and gasoline.Then his lease came up for renewal, and Lloyd learned his management company was raising the rent on the Tallahassee apartment he shares with a fellow student by $250 a month.

“I was shocked when I opened the letter today — it was almost 18%, which is not covered by a pay raise,” he told CBS MoneyWatch.

Lloyd is facing a dilemma distressingly common among America’s 120 million renters. With the cost of rent, transportation and utilities all rising at double-digits, many households are forking over last year’s pay increases, and then some, just to make ends meet.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/lysenko_a_cautionary_tale_for_the_west.html

“Follow the Science” seems to have replaced “Go with God” as humanity’s go-to prayer. At least, the left would have us think so. But science is a much more complicated construction than leftists want you to realize, and there was a not very distant time and place where “Follow the Science” led to the needless death of millions.

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who rose to prominence (and eternal infamy) in the 1930s. Lysenko was, you might say, an unelected bureaucrat in the Soviet system—if you can say that when the system itself is an unelected dictatorship. He was an agronomist and biologist. I almost said geneticist, but he surprisingly didn’t believe in genes. That is remarkable because he lived over 50 years after the epic (and accurate) studies and theories of the Augustinian Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel.

Lysenko, like most scientists, would have labored in relative faceless, harmless obscurity (see Dr. Bunsen Honeydew) and eventually had his science thoroughly repudiated, except that the State catapulted him to prominence and authority. (I know what you’re now thinking here—that I’m writing about the charismatic Dr. Anthony Fauci—but actually not so. Hang in there). Stalin himself loved this guy and his foundationless theories, and essentially put him in charge of Soviet agriculture—a placement that would leave millions of Ukrainians and Russians dead from starvation.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/the_power_of_terrible_ideas.html

While many have criticized the current enthusiasm for judging the past by the standards of the present (and condemning those past leaders who did not meet them), few have noted how many currently dominant beliefs are totally disconnected from reality and have a profoundly destructive impact.  I propose to discuss two of them here: ideas about the nature of mental illness which have produced what Charles Krauthammer called “an army of broken souls foraging and freezing in the streets” and the conviction that our planet is in existential danger from human-induced climate change. The latter has led to a wholly unwarranted, hugely expensive crusade to eliminate fossil fuels.  The chief effect has been to strengthen the leverage of those countries, many of them enemies of the West, that continue to produce these fuels, which remain essential to the functioning of industrial societies.

In the 1960s, a mad idea was born, the notion that there is no such thing as mental illness. Incredibly, it would become the foundation for public policy.  The idea sprang independently from two maverick psychiatrists at opposite ideological poles, on the right U.S. psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, an unsparing libertarian, and on the left the British Ronald Laing.  Szasz disposed of mental illness by verbal sleight of hand: “Mental illnesses do not exist; indeed they cannot exist because the mind is not a bodily part or bodily organ.”  (Never mind that the brain is the bodily organ that malfunctions in mental illness.) Psychiatry is “a form of quackery because it offers cures for which there are no diseases.”  Laing treated schizophrenia, the most disabling mental illness, as a “voyage of discovery”; “we find that a person who is labeled insane is often the sanest member of his or her family.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/23/the-real-reset-is-coming/

Joe Biden believes the Ukraine war will mark the start of a “new world order.” 

In the middle of the COVID global pandemic, Klaus Schwab and global elites likewise announced a “Great Reset.” 

Accordingly, the nations of the world would have to surrender their sovereignty to an international body of experts. They would enlighten us on taxes, diversity, and green policies. 

When Donald Trump got elected in 2016, marquee journalists announced partisan reporting would have to displace the old, supposedly disinterested approach to the news. 

There is a common theme here. 

In normal times progressives worry that they do not have public support for their policies. 

Only in crises do they feel that the political Left and media can merge to use apocalyptic times to ram through usually unpopular approaches to foreign and domestic problems. 

We saw that last year: fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, junk the Electoral College, and nationalize voting laws. 

These “new orders” and “resets” always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes. 

So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/03/yes-ketanji-brown-jackson-accused-america-war-daniel-greenfield/

Fact checks were an Orwellian farce before all this. Now they’re just editorials that try to tell you that black is white and white is black.

The media’s hysterical efforts to spin Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record has escalated into an insistence that she didn’t say the things she said.

Jackson had filed a petition on behalf of Gitmo terrorists (she claims that federal public defenders don’t pick their clients, but she continued to be involved in Gitmo cases on a pro bono basis even after moving on to a law firm) and in a petition on behalf of the terrorists, which named President Bush, Rumsfeld and others, accused the United States of America of acts that “constitute war crimes and/or crimes against humanity”.

There’s zero ambiguity in this regard. It’s there in black and white.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/24/a-big-no-on-ketanji-brown-jackson/

We’ve now listened to three days of a scheduled full week of testimony by Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. And to be honest, we’ve heard enough. Anyone who truly cares about the Constitution and the rule of law should reject Jackson.

Jackson has a winning smile and pleasant demeanor. Those are nice personal traits, but not ones that necessarily elevate you to the Supreme Court.

Still, she’s also a Harvard Law grad, clerked for Justice Steven Breyer, worked as a public defender, served on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia from 2013 to 2021, and was confirmed by the Senate to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit just last year.

But do those credentials really matter? Maybe they should, but unfortunately they’re mostly political window dressing.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/freedom-for-freedoms-sake/

Do we have a goal in mind as we begin a new global war?

“In standing up to Russia and China, are we standing up for freedom of speech and equality before the law, or for “antiracism” and “equity”? Are we mobilizing the totality of our cultural and economic might in the name of traditional nationalism and traditional religion, or of globalism and woke identity politics?”

EXCERPTS

“….. I was in a graduate school class on revolutionary film in Cold War Latin America. Images of Che and Fidel were juxtaposed against those of black civil rights protesters being fire-hosed and Bull Connor’s shepherds snarling and taking down marchers. Much time had passed, but the feeling was the same.

Eventually the intuitions became thoughts; the raw emotions took the shape of ideas. The way I saw America wasn’t how others saw it. The ideas I thought represented America were not the same ones that others held.

In the Cold War, domestic and foreign dissent over America’s role as guarantor of the postwar order of liberal internationalism overlapped like concentric circles and amplified one another. In the nineties, both voices of contention were dissembled beneath the veneer of victory and history’s “end.”

The esprit de corps and bipartisan consensus around arming and defending Ukraine is eerily reminiscent—for many of us, I suspect—of the same “consensus,” composed mostly of the two political parties and mainstream talking-head media outlets, that enabled the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and before that, the war to liberate Kosovo from the Serbs and the Serbian identity, and, before that, the first Gulf War. The heady heights of liberal internationalism, however, can easily yield to the depths of self-doubt. As much as it pains me to acknowledge the incisiveness of beatniks and hippies, the question still looms, just as urgently—if not more so—a half-century later: What are we fighting for?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/its-ok-im-not-a-biologist-either/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

These days, questioning the efficacy of a vaccine is a nihilistic, anti-scientific assault on society itself. And yet refusing to define the meaning of “woman” — a question a peasant in the medieval world could have correctly, and straightforwardly, answered — is treated as a completely normal moment by the press. Ketanji Brown Jackson says she “not a biologist,” admitting that the definition of “woman” is physiological and not psychological, to avoid offending progressives. She, of course, knows well what a woman is. The fact that such a silly question can’t be directly answered reflects the insanity of the political moment. There is a chasm between arguing that a “society should make accommodations for transgender Americans” and “men can get pregnant,” and yet Democrats are now going with the latter.

Jackson’s answer is also a reminder that the liberals’ rock-ribbed belief in “science” often relies on reverse-engineered junk science concocted to prop up trendy new theories. Liberals are no more interested in science than anyone else. Scaremongering over GMOs, which are not only completely harmless but a lifesaving technological advancement, is anti-science. Opposing fracking, which is as safe as any other means of extracting fossil fuels, is anti-science. Please tell me more about your homeopathic organic cures, enlightened Democrat. However inconvenient it is for proponents of abortion, denying that life begins at conception — “I have a religious view that I set aside when ruling on cases,” went Jackson’s crafty answer — is also anti-science. As is the notion that a person’s perspective can determine whether something is alive or their gender. And you don’t have to be a biologist to understand why.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/judge-jacksons-curious-agnosticism-on-who-is-a-woman/

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson spent much of yesterday contradicting various progressive pieties and embracing the theoretical basis and methodological assumptions of originalism, so it seems telling that the two places where she was unable to cross the red lines of leftist ideology were in defining who a woman is and defining when human life begins. As Maddy notes, it is particularly odd for Judge Jackson to put off the question of defining a woman by saying she’s not a biologist, given that the biological answer is the easiest way of all to answer the question (one wonders how many progressive biologists would duck the question by saying it’s not a biological inquiry).

It’s also deeply ironic, given how much of the hearing was devoted to encomia to Jackson specifically as the first black woman nominated for the job. The irony runs deeper: Jackson herself repeatedly used the word “woman” in her own testimony. She told Senator Dianne Feinstein that “Roe and Casey are the settled law of the Supreme Court concerning the right to terminate a woman’s pregnancy.” When Feinstein asked her, “What it would mean to have four women serving on the Supreme Court for the first time in history?” Jackson responded:

Thank you, Senator. I think it’s extremely meaningful. One of the things that having diverse members of the court does is it provides for the opportunity for role models. Since I was nominated to this position, I have received so many notes and letters and photos from little girls around the country who tell me that they are so excited for this opportunity, and that they have thought about the law in new ways. Because I am a woman, because I am a black woman, all of those things people have said have been really meaningful to them. And we want, I think, as a country for everyone to believe that they can do things like sit on the Supreme Court. And so having meaningful numbers of women and people of color, I think matters. I also think that it — it supports public confidence in the judiciary when you have different people, because we have such a diverse society.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/ketanji-brown-jackson-biden-supreme-court-pick-andrew-mccarthy

Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats incessantly remind us that the historic milestone marked by Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination is that she would become the Supreme Court’s first Black woman.

Yet, how historically significant can it be if she can’t say what a woman is?

For all her appeal – and in 12 grueling hours of testimony on Tuesday, Judge Jackson’s intellect and charm were on full display – the nominee is dodgy. Though a highly accomplished – indeed, a historic – woman, she testified that she can’t “provide a definition” of what a woman is.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., even tried to help, spoon-feeding her the wisdom of an iconic progressive, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that “physical differences between men and women … are enduring. The two sexes are not fungible.” But Jackson was unmoved – if there is a difference between men and women, she’s claims she is unable to discern it.

See what seven years at Harvard can do for you!