RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://asiatimes.com/2022/01/worst-us-inflation-since-82-is-huge-underestimate/

Shelter accounts for about a third of American household expenditure, and the cost of buying or renting shelter is up nearly 20% over the past year. Yet the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for shelter reported Jan. 12 by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed an increase of just 4.2 over the past year.

Private surveys conducted by the big rental sites, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com, show increases of 13% to 18% during 2021, and the Case-Shiller Index of US home prices jumped 18% in the year through October.

Who are you going to believe, to paraphrase Groucho Marx – the US government or your own eyes?

Part of the discrepancy involves a simple time lag. The US government looks at the present cost of housing while the private rental surveys register the cost of a new rental. It takes a while for leases to expire and new, higher-cost leases to take effect.

https://www.city-journal.org/new-evidence-connects-police-protests-and-rising-violent-crime

In 2015 and 2016, the coincidence of a major surge in homicides following mass protests over the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, prompted a heated debate about whether the demonstrations, and the anti-police hostility they engendered, helped cause the murder spike. Law enforcement leaders and some public commentators—including City Journal contributing editor Heather Mac Donald—identified a “Ferguson Effect,” whereby public scrutiny reduced police proactivity and led to an increase in violent crime. Supporters of the protests just as fervently derided the idea as imaginary and “debunked.”

Social scientists made a few contributions to this debate, but the research they produced offered limited insight into the causal relationship between scrutiny, proactivity, and crime. Two new studies, however, rely on better data sets and methods to provide strong evidence that highly scrutinized officer-involved fatalities reduce discretionary police activity and lead to an increase in violent crime.

The more-recent study, just published in the Journal of Public Economics by university economists Cheng Cheng and Wei Long, looks at the effect of Brown’s death on police activity and crime on a week-to-week level in St. Louis (which is near Ferguson), and on a month-to-month level in 60 big cities. The St. Louis police department collects high-quality data on self-initiated activity, the authors note, allowing them to assess in specific detail police behavior just before and just after Brown’s death.

Their findings manage somehow to be both unsurprising and shocking. In the immediate aftermath of Brown’s death, self-initiated arrests fell 62 percent. Similar declines are seen across nine out of 11 categories of self-initiated activities, including foot patrol (down 82 percent) and pedestrian checks (76 percent). Notably, the decline in arrests is concentrated among misdemeanor arrests (more discretionary than felonies) and among arrests of blacks (rather than whites). This reduction in police activity persisted for at least the next two years. In the same period, the city experienced a significant rise in homicide and aggravated assault.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18124/shocking-carnage

In America’s most important city, and within Manhattan, there is now a District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, who has redefined evil: in his view, it is the criminal who needs protecting, not the victim. Bragg (pictured) has directed his office to stop seeking prison sentences for criminals who prey on those unfortunate enough to be walking the streets of Manhattan.

One would have thought that after a repeat felon out on a $1,000 bail is alleged to have driven his car into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six people and injuring countless others, those who have sought to dismantle our criminal justice system would have recognized how their actions have created murderous carnage across the nation.

But that is far from the case and the lawless cannot believe their good fortune.

In America’s most important city, New York, and within Manhattan, its most famous borough, there is now a District Attorney who, in changing what his office will prosecute, has essentially redefined evil.

In a staff memo leaked to the media, Alvin Bragg has directed his office to stop seeking prison sentences for criminals who prey on those unfortunate enough to be walking the streets of Manhattan. In addition, he has instructed assistant district attorneys to downgrade felony charges in cases ranging from armed robbery to drug dealing.

If a foreign nation sought to destabilize our society by creating such a scenario we would consider it an act of war.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/democrats-defeated-pandemic-promises/

“It’s time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day” was the much ridiculed answer from Vice President Kamala Harris in an interview with NBC News on Thursday. It has been lampooned in almost every corner of the media and memed all over the internet, and rightly so.

Harris has been plagued her entire electoral career by a sense that she isn’t prepared. This time the test is the pandemic, which is a major problem for her and Joe Biden almost a year into their administration. It’s a term they were elected to almost exclusively on the promise of “shutting down the virus.” But viruses are a non-political problem, despite Biden’s politicizing it during the 2020 election.

Biden leveraged that politicization effectively to oust Donald Trump, whose own rhetoric on Covid was sloppy and absurd. Yet despite a national media that told the country the virus only affects restaurants and beachgoers in Florida and not social justice protesters, and despite Biden’s own seven-point plan that amounted to not much more than demanding and attempting to mandate vaccination on the population, the virus rages on.

There are now record numbers of cases in both blue and red states (hence the media panic and the adjustment of reporting case numbers in hospitals, as the AP is doing). There is a national shortage of tests, long lines at testing sites, and school closures at the behest of Biden’s teacher’s union donors. There’s also an effort to double down on masking kids, a strategy that is likely to radicalize parents even more, as all evidence now points to masking children being unnecessary, as kids already have strong natural defenses against Covid.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/time-cdc-get-clue-rochelle-walensky-comorbidities/

“I’d also advise Dr. Walensky to steer clear of the library. She has the quadruple comorbidity of knowing too much, lying too often, panicking too many and reassuring too faintly.”

“The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with.”

That declaration by the director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, is one of those fall-out-of-your-chair moments. You’re tempted to repeat it several times just to be sure every syllable is in the right place.

Did she mean the deaths of all the people who died of Covid? Seventy-five percent. Or did she mean the people who died with Covid? The preposition, we have learned, matters muchly. “Of” means Covid is the murder weapon. “With” means Colonel Mustard did it with a poker in the library, and Covid was just standing in the corner. Listen carefully to the tape of Walensky on Good Morning America and it sounds like she means “with.” How many people actually died of Covid has been a dark CDC secret from early on.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/idiocy-shared-oppression

“I have no dog in this unfortunate fight, other than to point out that women’s rights and transgender inclusivity clearly are not the same cause, any more than racial equality will be advanced by eliminating carbon emissions. All of which is a good argument for old-school, incremental, single-issue activism, and for leaving the old LGBT pride flag alone.”

It’s not true, and betrays the reality of historical suffering

Has anyone else noticed that the rainbow flag of sexual diversity keeps expanding to include the full possible spectrum of visible colors? I recently saw that something called the Intersex Inclusion Campaign introduced a new “intersex inclusive pride progress flag,” which is the old LGBT pride flag altered from six bars to 12, with the bonus introduction of triangles and a circle. I learned that these fresh shapes and colors symbolize not only the transgender community and the intersex people once crudely called hermaphrodites, but also Black people, Hispanics, and other “brown” folx. In an unforgettable piece of symbolism, the new identity markers now take up more than half the old pride flag, swooping into it (from the left, naturally) in a wedge shaped vaguely like a boar’s head. “A bit invasive,” I thought.

Tablet columnist Wesley Yang has referred to this kind of thing as the “unity of oppression thesis,” “the astroturfed credo of the activist class” which insists, for example, that “LGBTQ parades have to call for freeing Palestine and White House plans for gender equity have to call for the elimination of cash bail.” Kristine Hadeed, a left-leaning writer and apparent member of that class, made a good-faith attempt to explain the phenomenon to Yang on Twitter: “It’s because they recognize that the roots of oppression are intertwined. None of us are truly liberated unless all of us are liberated. Oppressed people uniting for collective liberation is the only way liberation will ever happen.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/13/458-police-officers-died-in-the-line-of-duty-in-2021-the-deadliest-year-on-record/

The year 2021 saw the highest number of police officers killed in the line of duty in modern history, with 458 officers dying over the course of the year.

As reported by Fox News, the number is the highest since record-keeping first began, surpassing the previous high of 1930, which saw 312 officers killed on the job. The report was released on Tuesday by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), pointing out that the numbers reflected an increase of 55 percent over the 2020 total of 295 deaths. The comprehensive report includes officers at every level, including municipal, county, state, and federal, as well as military, territorial, campus, and tribal law enforcement.

The report claims that COVID-19 was the leading cause of law enforcement deaths, with NLEOMF executive director Troy Anderson remarking that “this number appears to be increasing almost daily.” The second-highest cause of death was firearms-related incidents, with traffic fatalities coming in third.

“The magnitude of this type of loss is everlasting in the hearts and minds of those left behind to continue the work of public safety,” Anderson said in a video statement. “While much of this report is delivered through numbers and statistics, it is paramount that we keep in mind that every number here represents someone’s loved one – a life, a son or daughter, a mother or father. A law enforcement officer who made the ultimate sacrifice for a profession that they believed in and died for.”

Although the group mentioned that the numbers in the report were preliminary and not complete, it claimed that 301 officers, roughly 66 percent of the overall total, died of the coronavirus. Sixty-two officers were killed by firearms, with October being the deadliest month for these types of incidents, seeing eight officers killed in the line of duty. Another fifty-eight officers died in traffic-related incidents.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/13/we-are-all-domestic-terrorists-now/

Paul Hodgkins, according to Joe Biden’s Justice Department, is a domestic terrorist.

A working-class man from Tampa, Hodgkins committed what Democrats and the media consider a murderous crime comparable to flying a packed jetliner into a skyscraper or detonating a truck filled with explosives under a crowded federal building. 

Paul Hodgkins entered the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

What exactly did Hodgkins do on that day of infamy? He followed a group of like-minded Donald Trump supporters into the hallowed halls and chambers of the U.S. Senate. In that sacred space, where people far more important and educated than poor Hodgkins, according to those very important and very educated senators, make speeches and whatnot. Hodgkins, a crane operator, traveled alone by bus from central Florida to Washington—he was not chauffeured into the nation’s capital in a black SUV and detail team in the way that very important senators roll into town.

When he entered the sacred Senate chambers, Hodgkins carried with him a weapon so offensive that the mere sight of the device prompted the judge in his case to question Hodgkin’s loyalty to his own country. That weapon was a flag bearing the words “Trump 2020.”

Although Hodgkins did not commit a single violent act on January 6, federal prosecutors nonetheless consider him a domestic terrorist and want him punished accordingly. 

“The need to deter others is especially strong in cases involving domestic terrorism, which the breach of the Capitol certainly was,” a prosecutor wrote in a July sentencing motion, asking a judge to send Hodgkins to prison for 18 months after he pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction. “Moreover, with respect to specific deterrence, courts have recognized that ‘terrorists[,] [even those] with no prior criminal behavior, are unique among criminals in the likelihood of recidivism, the difficulty of rehabilitation, and the need for incapacitation.’”

Judge Randolph Moss agreed with the Justice Department’s assessment. The Obama appointee claimed the four-hour disturbance at the Capitol on January 6 caused political and personal damage that “will persist in this country for decades.” Moss was outraged at the sight of Hodgkins hoisting a Trump flag. “The symbolism of that act is unmistakable. He was staking a claim on the Senate floor, declaring his loyalty to a single individual over a nation,” Moss ranted before sentencing Hodgkins to serve 15 months in jail.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/supreme-court-blocks-bidens-vaccine-mandate-robert-spencer/

The Trump Supreme Court finally worked exactly the way it was designed to work on Thursday, when it struck a massive blow for freedom in ordering a stay on Joe Biden’s handlers’ authoritarian and destructive vaccine mandate for private employers with more than 100 employees. The Court, again oddly inconsistent as it has often been since Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett took their seats, at the same time upheld the mandate for health care workers. Still, the high court’s refusal to rubber-stamp Biden’s mandate for employers is yet another failure for this disastrous administration, and a major victory for the defenders of individual freedom who have been fighting the mandates from the beginning.

The private employer mandate, which was imposed through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), was rejected on a 6-3 vote, with Trump’s three new justices forming the margin of victory. The Court’s order stated with admirable common sense and restraint that “although COVID-19 is a risk that occurs in many workplaces, it is not an OCCUPATIONAL hazard in most. COVID-19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather. That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases. Permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life – simply because most Americans have jobs and face those same risks while on the clock – would significantly expand OSHA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization.”

That is absolutely true, and is a refreshing departure from the seemingly inexorable advance of government power over the lives of Americans. It is a sharp rebuke to the nanny state mentality that has been dominant far too long, and that looks to government to take care of all our needs and wants, and to protect us from all dangers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yeshiva-university-the-jewish-college-basketball-powerhouse-sports-teamwork-nba-division-iii-11642112193?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

The Jewish people can take pride in collective accomplishments across a range of human endeavors. I never imagined that basketball would be one of them, but it’s not the only thing that’s taken me by surprise since I became president of Yeshiva University four years ago.

As 2021 came to an end, so did our Division III basketball team’s remarkable 50-game winning streak. The Yeshiva University Maccabees had not lost a game since Nov. 9, 2019, when they fell to Illinois Wesleyan on Dec. 30. The accomplishment still was notable enough for the National Basketball Association to tweet congratulations, and I’ve spent some time reflecting on what it all means.

When I took this job, I anticipated celebrating student success in rabbinics, law, the humanities, business, tech and science. I never expected the energy and excitement of presiding over a sports powerhouse. For the past few years, I have watched game after game in which young men with great Jewish pride score basket after basket. It is beautiful and breathtaking to see their graceful play and teamwork in action.

Many have asked me if I think these wins are an act of divine intervention. This is the wrong question. As a rabbi—as a Jew, for that matter—I believe that everything in life involves divine intervention coupled with human agency. Even losing. The right question is: How could a small research university produce such a team?