RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-slams-biden-over-pledge-to-nominate-black-woman-to-supreme-court-identity-politics-is-destroying-our-country/

Former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard attacked President Biden on Monday for making key personnel decisions on the basis of race and gender, citing his selection of Kamala Harris as vice president on the basis of her immutable characteristics and suggesting that the mistake may be replicated with Biden’s nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court.

“Biden chose Harris as his VP because of the color of her skin and sex—not qualification. She’s been a disaster,” Gabbard wrote on Twitter. “Now he promises to choose Supreme Court nominee on the same criteria. Identity politics is destroying our country.”

Gabbard made similar comments regarding the Supreme Court nomination process on Saturday.

Biden “should not be choosing a Supreme Court justice based on the color of their skin or sex, but rather on their qualifications & commitment to uphold our Constitution & the freedoms guaranteed to all Americans in that document which is the foundation of our nation,” Gabbard wrote on Twitter.

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/jp-morgan-library-gilded-age-museums-deia/

John Pierpont Morgan is the glowering face of the Gilded Age. He may have glowered at pesky men with cameras because he was too busy to sit still, but he was also self-conscious because his nose was deformed from rhinophyma. He liked beautiful things, and he was not beautiful.

Born into banking family, Morgan rose to become the greatest financier of his time, building much of his empire on railroads. But he was far more than a shrewd businessman. Fluent in French and German and holding a degree in art history, he became a prodigious collector of books and art, a large portion of which were kept at his house on Madison Avenue and 36th Street — what is now the Morgan Library & Museum.

Given the scale of New York City, the Morgan Library must be counted among Manhattan’s smaller treasures, but the actual library — three tiers of rare and ultra-rare books connected by secret passageways is a wonder to behold. The “museum” portion of the house presents small-scale shows, often with literary themes, and often worth the detour from the city’s more celebrated gigantic warehouses of the arts.

What brings the Morgan Library & Museum to my attention right now is a notice that arrived in my inbox a few weeks ago. The director, Colin B. Bailey, wrote to explain how the Morgan had been moved to respond to the “murder of George Floyd” by undertaking important work “for greater diversity, equity, access and inclusion (DEAI).” In October 2020, the Morgan had launched its “first six-month DEAI Action plan.” First, mind you. But the novelty for me was the “A.” Over here in the world of education, it always just DEI, but I can see that “access” may be a good buzzword for libraries and museums.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/30/the-mysterious-case-of-the-absence-of-evidence/

We live in what might be called a political opinion “bubble.” One of the features of this bubble is the authority of science. This is the idea that the magic words “the science is settled” foreclose further discussion of an opinion. It is often expressed as I f—ing love science, or IFLS.

The reason IFLS exists is to enforce political dogmas with the authority of empirical material science. The flip side of IFLS is the conflation of the absence of evidence with proof or conclusive evidence. Let’s call this I f—ing love evidence, or IFLE. The purpose of IFLE is to discredit facts that might be used to resist a policy or political act. 

A few days ago, USA Today ran an IFLE story under the headline “Fact check: No evidence defunding police to blame for homicide increases, experts say.” 

The “experts say” part of the headline is a sly admission that IFLE really means I am feeling stupid, or IAFS. When someone points out that politicians degraded the anti-homicide infrastructure and an increase in homicide followed, that is evidence of causation. It may not be conclusive evidence. It may be only circumstantial evidence. Maybe it is just a correlation. 

There is a strong correlation between the broken windows policing that George Kelling and James Q. Wilson promoted in the 1980s and a reduction in homicide. During the Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg Administrations from 1994 to 2013, when broken windows policing was forcefully implemented, New York City homicides declined dramatically from above 2,000 in 1994 to 335 in 2013. Homicide rates thereafter remained roughly flat throughout the de Blasio Administration until 2020, the year of the defund the police movement. By 2021, homicides had jumped to almost 500, a 49 percent rise from 2013 levels. 

That’s evidence. Just because it doesn’t support a favored policy preference or factional interest doesn’t change that. “Experts say” is a preemptive defense that not USA Today but its expert sources are the ones suffering from IAFS. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/30/joe-biden-and-the-uses-of-nihilism/

Chaos is the new, the intentional, normal. A pandemic of nihilism has been unleashed upon the land. As in Lord of the Flies, when laws, rules, protocols, traditions, and customs are mocked and dismantled, primitive human nature in the raw is unleashed. 

Madness now reigns in every quarter, from the iconic to the irrelevant to the fundamental. Statues of Lincoln, Douglas, and Jefferson are toppled or defaced. The rules of capitalization have been altered. We are told that 1619, not 1776, was our founding date—and this by a “civil rights” activist-journalist who had no idea of the date that the Civil War began.

Quite quickly after the revolutionary boilerplate, America began reverting to its natural Hobbesian or Thucydidean essence. If you dispute that, look at looted packages along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Try walking the nocturnal streets of Chicago or Baltimore. Visit the sidewalk homeless of San Francisco. Fly over our constipated ports. Drive into our empty new car dealerships. Pull up to our European-priced gas pumps. Shop in the emptying shelves of our Sovietizing food and discount stores. The common theme of the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show, apparently, is that the entertainers must have written lyrics threatening the police, denigrating women, using the N-word . . . and are worth $100 million.

Of course, that is what the elites celebrate, as people struggle to buy food, gas, and cars. The police are under attack and being killed on the street. The public is bewildered about criminals not being punished, workers paid to stay home, and biological men commandeering women’s sports. 

Abnormal is normal; normal is despised and discarded.

Friends and associates of all races and ethnicities are increasingly suspicious of each other. They are fleeing to the ancient refuge of tribal solidarity. Red states are hated, although they function , and are sought out; blue states are praised, even as they fail and residents flee . Our “leaders” are doing their best to confirm the age-old invective of our enemies that e pluribus unum simply cannot work.

Americans keep being pounded with “Vaccination! Vaccination! Vaccination!”—but never with commensurate advice on therapies, affordable drugs, and pragmatic protocols to survive COVID-19, as it often breaks through to the already thrice vaccinated. 

Americans could tolerate the misinformation and the contradictions emanating from the CDC, the NIH, and NIAID. But only if the deceptions were issued with some humility and qualifiers, reminding us of our shared ignorance about the mysterious virus. Instead, pompous and insufferably sanctimonious bureaucrats sent out flurries of false knowledge, as if they were religious edicts, with implied medieval punishments for the apostates. Apologies never follow.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/01/30/bidens-anger-over-high-insulin-prices-is-fake-heres-why-n1554354

On Friday, Joe Biden started yelling in anger during a speech in Pennsylvania while talking about the high price of insulin.

“Imagine being the parent making the minimum wage or twice the minimum wage and having a child with type one diabetes, knowing that if you can’t and have no insurance, knowing if you cannot get that money for the insulin, the child may die,” Biden said. “In addition to your child, it strips you of your dignity, dammit.”

But guess what? Biden isn’t furious. His rage is phony, clearly scripted, probably suggested by one of his handlers who thought that, if he appears more animated and invigorated, it will quell concerns that he cannot handle the presidency — which polls show is indeed a concern for most Americans.

Make no mistake about it: Joe Biden isn’t angry about the high cost of insulin. Why not? Because he is responsible for it.

On his first day in office, Biden froze a Trump drug policy that had been finalized in December 2020, and which would have significantly lowered prescription drug prices, including those of insulin and epinephrine. The freeze was part of a blanket policy of the new Biden administration to reverse and scrutinize anything that Trump had done.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/feminist_hypocrisy_on_display_as_feminists_ignore_transgender_athletes.html

The National Organization of Women is one of the leading “women’s rights” organizations with a stated goal, “Dedicated to its multi-issue and multi-strategy approach to women’s rights and is the largest organization of feminist grassroots activists in the United States.” What are those rights?

Their home page has a flashing banner of “reproductive rights” front and center, which can be assumed to mean abortion on demand, anytime from conception to birth and perhaps even beyond birth, a decision made solely by the mother, without any restriction by law, government, morality, or the aspirations of the soon to be destroyed little girl who might someday want to join the National Organization for Women.

NOW also supports racial justice, which includes men, the evil oppressors railed against by the more militant feminist organizations. Interestingly the public cases of supposed racial injustice mostly involve men, George Floyd, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and others, some of whom ironically have a history of assaulting women. George Floyd, for example served, “Five years in prison in 2009 for aggravated assault stemming from a robbery in 2007 where he entered a woman’s home, pressed a gun into her stomach and searched the home for drugs and money.”

Yet he is a hero to the NOW gang who is defending and lionizing George Floyd, despite being an organization of women and Floyd a victimizer of women. While this seems ironic that NOW would support a brutish man who assaulted a woman, the transgender movement provides another look at hypocrisy on an even much larger scale when it comes to transgender athletes, specifically biologic males competing as females.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/times-square-rite-aid-closes-after-200k-in-shoplifting-losses/

EXCERPTS

Now the neighborhood isn’t feeling so safe anymore due to the city’s new hands-off policy for criminals. In the ground floor of the building on Eighth stands a large, formerly busy Rite Aid where I used to get sandwiches and Snapples on the way to the theater or a movie. Now the place has been driven out of business, effective February 8, thanks to a wave of shoplifting (reportedly costing the store $200,000 in two months) that the city is uninterested in fighting off. Bail-reform laws, combined with the disastrous policies being enacted by Manhattan’s new D.A. Alvin Bragg, are making the city a playground for criminals again. In the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, the Rite Aid store was looted to the tune of $60,000, then boarded up for days. It takes up a huge space, and if it should stay boarded up for long, a 24-hour establishment that helped keep the neighborhood safe will be replaced by a long, scary, vacant dead zone that will surely attract derelicts.

All over the city, chain drugstores have taken to placing items that cost more than a few dollars behind locked plexiglass. Shopping for, say, a jumbo bottle of Tide is like going to a jewelry store. You need to summon a clerk if you want assistance. Then when you get to the counter, you remember that single-use plastic shopping bags are banned. Probably not since the Dinkins era has this city been so dispiriting, so enervating, so generally wretched and off-putting and surly.

Empty storefronts are scarring prime real-estate locations all over Manhattan as businesses grapple with the new realities of the 2020s. Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul continues to repel tourists and office workers by keeping in place a statewide indoor masking mandate. This city has been through a lot, and though new Mayor Eric Adams has taken it upon himself to be its biggest booster, it’s hard to see things returning to normal anytime soon.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-pressure-campaign-on-spotify

All factions, at certain points, succumb to the impulse to censor. But for the Democratic Party’s liberal adherents, silencing their adversaries has become their primary project.

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by “liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of “hate speech” to mean “views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech.” Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/01/30/poll-large-majority-of-americans-not-into-affirmative-action-in-scotus-nominations-n445119

The Democrats are relishing the prospect of Joe Biden chalking up a win for his base this year when he gets the chance to nominate his first person to the Supreme Court. His supporters immediately moved to pressure him to keep his campaign promise to nominate a Black woman to the court and a quick glance at the shortlist of potential candidates shows that he has no intention of disappointing them. But how much of a “win” will this really be in the minds of the public? A new ABC News/Ipsos poll out this week suggests that Biden and his party are once again failing to read the room. On the one hand, many people are losing faith in the Supreme Court because they believe that it’s now driven by political ideology. But when it comes to the topic of presidential nominations, a surprisingly large majority want the President to consider all of the best-qualified candidates rather than immediately winnowing the field to a small list of people based on nothing more than the color of their skin and the lack of a Y chromosome.