RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/what_is_an_america_that_holds_prisoners_indefinitely_without_charging_them.html

The U.S. is facing a serious constitutional crisis over the handling of the cases of defendants in the Jan. 6 so-called “insurrection” in Washington, D.C. to protest the presidential election modus operandi and the results.  Those being held for many months without a trial are being denied their habeas corpus rights under the U.S. Constitution and even dating back to English law hundreds of years before our Constitution was implemented.  Not only are they being incarcerated without having had a trial, but there is some evidence that they are being mistreated or are being held 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, which is a punishment accorded only the most dangerous criminals, such as serial killers and terrorists.

What are habeas corpus rights?  According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “[h]abeas corpus is a fundamental right in the Constitution that protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment.  Translated from Latin it means ‘show me the body.’  Habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument to safeguard individual freedom against arbitrary executive power.”  A citizen must be charged and cannot be held indefinitely.  A charge requires a trial, and, if found guilty in a trial, there is a sentence for a specific amount of time.

Even PolitiFact — hardly an unbiased fact-checker — relates, “The vast majority of defendants have been released from custody while awaiting trial, but some [my italics] held in jail have been kept in solitary confinement.”  The fact that exact numbers for how many are held in solitary confinement or for how long suggests to this writer evasion by the Washington, D.C. jail authorities.

Despite the attempt by outlets like PolitiFact to minimize the problem of solitary confinement, a number of GOP senators have voiced their concern about this problem, and even the ACLU — certainly not an outreach arm of the Republican Party — has become involved.  However, the Republican senators who are concerned do not have a specific number.  The lack of definitiveness in this area is alarming.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/the_sissy_generation.html

Just 70-80 years ago we had what was dubbed “The Greatest Generation” – the people who had fought and won World War II.  Now, just a couple of generations down the road, we have unconditionally surrendered to a disease with minuscule mortality (for the vast majority of the population), and which is to a large degree treatable. How did that happen?

Roll back to the first months of 2020, when we just learned about the sinister new virus which was killing people and for which we had neither vaccine nor cure. We were scared – in the 21st century, we don’t expect to encounter something to which our medicine has no answer. A lot of things about COVID-19 were unknown at the time, but one of the first confirmed pieces of information was that this virus spares children.

What great news! Whatever calamity befalls us, children are always our main concern. Now, when we know that they are safe, shouldn’t we, adults, breathe a big sigh of relief, return to normal life and let the doctors do what they always do: treat the sick, research for a cure, work on the vaccine? I can imagine that this would have happened a few decades ago, despite the (incorrect) perception that the mortality rate was maybe small, but still meaningful, a few percentage points. Yet the only developed country that behaved more or less like that was Sweden. The rest of mankind locked themselves up and essentially stopped living normal lives.

The word that we heard the most during this time was ‘safety.’ Coming to work is declared unsafe — sure, we can stop working, no big deal. Going to school is unsafe — cheer up, kids, you are staying home today — and next week, and then month after month after month. Wear your mask everywhere and stay at least 6 feet away (better 20) from everybody. Safety is king!

How did we end up here? As very often happens the course happened first gradually, then suddenly. The worship of safety began long ago and now it’s everywhere. Everything we buy and use, from lawnmowers to toasters to toothbrushes, undergoes elaborate safety checks and is accompanied by instructions for safe operation. And not only is it a legal requirement but, for many people, safety became the most important feature of any device. There is a commercial on TV promoting gutter guards.  A woman asks her husband: ‘Do you climb a ladder to clean the gutter?” “Yes.” “But it’s unsafe!” — enough said, everybody needs to get the damn thing.

Of course, nothing is wrong with being safe, and many things that we do toward that end are good and reasonable — like seat belts, and later airbags in cars. But more and more the idea of ‘being safe’ has morphed into ‘feeling safe’, so the natural desire for safety is now abused beyond recognition. In other times, the idea of banning a group of people from entering some location would be called ‘segregation’; today the leftist students who don’t want to be around anybody with different views demand ‘safe spaces.’ When a controversial speaker is invited to speak at a university, protesters wouldn’t say ‘we hate this guy’ (which would be the truth, but ‘hate’ is a loaded word nowadays, better not to use it); instead, they declare that such an event would make them ‘feel unsafe’.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/ama_becomes_a_shill_of_the_left.html

By now the left-wing agenda in schools is increasingly more evident. Incomprehensible writing of the lowest level is now the norm but with an additional twist — students in the nursing field now spout such ideas as demonstrated in the following:

Dear Professor, I do not understand [why] you took points off for using ‘their’ instead of his or hers.  I used that specific word because I am not just referring to my one gender, regardless of whether it relates to one individual or more than one. I have been told to avoid gender biases. As a result, I disagree with the number of points taken off because I chose not to use his or her, as I was not referring to just one gender.

But this is no surprise for anyone in the educational field today because according to the Left  “white language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards which give privilege to those students who embody those habits of white language already.”

Now the Left has co-opted the medical establishment. In the publication titled: Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts” put out by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the AAMC Center for Health Justice, science is essentially perverted.

In essence, it signals the death of scientific inquiry and serious thinking and ushers in a world where it is “critical to address all areas of marginalization and inequity due to sexism, class oppression, homophobia, xenophobia and ableism.”

According to the AMA, there is “outright resistance and denial that racism exists.”  To promote their left-wing agenda, the AMA asserts that “the field of equity, like all other scholarly domains, has developed specific norms that convey authenticity, precision and meaning.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/10/history-will-grind-out-the-truth/

“History will figure that out on its own.” That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  

In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab—and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself.  

Fauci offered arguments from authority by citing his own expertise, as well as that of “card-carrying” specialists. 

But in truth, there is little evidence that any animal species has been found infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus or a close relative that causes COVID-19 or a similar illness.  

Many federal health experts increasingly believe the virus was man-made. A number argue that it was likely a product of gain-of-function research that was funded in part by a U.S. government grant.  

Others concede that Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak—who was involved in gain-of-function research, often in cooperation with the Chinese—were not candid about the full extent of their ties to the Wuhan lab. But despite Chinese resistance to releasing pertinent data, history eventually will sort the truth out—as it does with most controversies of the moment.  

Five years ago, the New York Times, the Washington Post, most of the mainstream media, and the majority of the bipartisan Washington. D.C. political and government establishments insisted that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.  

In support of such conspiracy theories, they fixated on the so-called Steele dossier. It was a supposedly independent research effort detailing “proof” of Trump-Russian cooperation to rob Hillary Clinton of the election.  

That supposed evidence was the unspoken ground swell for a 22-month, $40-million special counsel investigation of Trump conducted by former FBI head Robert Mueller.  

For over 650 days, the country was consumed with “Russian collusion.” Cable news outlets, public television and radio pundits, along with high-ranking Democratic politicians, almost daily announced the impending end of the colluding Trump Administration. 

They peddled rumors of Trump’s supposed obscene activity in Moscow. They spun tales of mysterious meetings between Trump’s family and Russian operatives, and of Trump surrogates’ supposed trips to meet with Russian colluding officials.  

Christopher Steele, the architect of the “dossier,” had not been to Russia in decades. He was a rank partisan in the pay of the Clinton campaign—and for a time the FBI itself.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/can-people-keep-resisting-big-government-tyranny-bruce-thornton/

Last week voters in Virginia delivered a rebuke to the party of consolidated power and technocratic statism when a Republican political tyro defeated a deep-state Democrat in the election for governor. Like Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, the outcome of this victory signals a growing resistance to the Democrats’ overweening, unconstitutional interference in families, businesses, civil society, and state sovereignty. A message has been sent to the Biden administration, a portent of the greater backlash increasingly likely in next year’s midterm elections.

Yet tempering this optimism and faith in our Constitutional guardrails against tyranny is an ancient question, one at the heart of political philosophy for 2500 years: Do the non-elite, ordinary citizens have the capacity to govern? When government power exceeds its Constitutional bounds, will the people use their votes to rein it in? Or is the idea that the common people can govern as delusional as, to use Socrates’ analogy, the crew and passengers of a ship selecting a captain by a majority of their votes?

What happened in Virginia is one of those periodic reactions of voters to policies that are indifferent or hostile to their  beliefs and principles. Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe encapsulated this arrogant disdain for the people when he said during a debate, “I don’t think that parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” following his defense of an earlier veto of a bill while governor that would have given parents some oversight over sexually explicit books in the schools’ libraries. This statement became the emblem of the progressives’ overreach and technocratic disdain for parents.

And the pushback came not just in Virginia. In state and local elections from Pennsylvania to deep-blue Seattle, voters are standing athwart the progressive transformation of this country and yelling “Stop!” Even progressive flaks like The New York Times have warned that these Republican successes “are a grave marker of political peril,” and that the Dems need to return “to the moderate policies and values” that won in 2018 and 2020.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/11/time-to-pin-a-medal-on-larry-summers-for-his-bidenflation-prediction/

We’re not big fans of economist Larry Summers, but in this case, he should be in line for a Nobel Prize for predicting exactly what is happening with inflation today … and who is to blame for it.

On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation climbed at an annual rate of 6.2%, the biggest such jump in three decades.

And that’s despite repeated predictions from other “experts” that the spike in prices earlier this year was “transitory.” Even now, they are flummoxed. As the Washington Post put it Wednesday, inflation is “lasting longer than policymakers at the Fed and White House anticipated.”

But no one, we repeat, no one, should be surprised by the latest turn of events.

Go back and listen to what Summers was saying at the start of the year, and it’s eerily prescient.

Summers publicly and repeatedly warned that President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “rescue” plan —which was Biden’s first big “achievement” that passed without a single Republican vote — would spark an inflationary spiral.

https://www.city-journal.org/scientific-merit-and-the-equity-cult

Another day, another retraction of a scientific paper for violating the code of diversity. On November 1, astronomer John Kormendy withdrew an article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), after a preprint version that he had just posted on the web drew sharp criticism for threatening the conduct of “inclusive” science. Three days later, the preprint version was scrubbed as well (though a PDF can still be found here.) The paper had passed the journal’s three-person peer-review system and was awaiting publication. Kormendy’s forthcoming book on the same topic had also passed peer review and had been printed for distribution. Now distribution of the book has been put on hold, likely permanently.

Kormendy, an expert on supermassive black holes and professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, acknowledges no errors in his research. “I didn’t do anything [methodologically] wrong,” he told me. “I trust my techniques; I trust the results. I checked for bias in great detail.” Nevertheless, he issued an apology on November 1: “I now see that my work has hurt people. I apologize to you all for the stress and the pain that I have caused. Nothing could be further from my hopes. I fully support all efforts to promote fairness, inclusivity, and a nurturing environment for all.”

What was so hurtful in his article? Kormendy had aimed to reduce the role of individual subjectivity in scientific hiring and tenure decisions. He created a model that predicted a scientist’s long-term research impact from the citation history of his early publications. He tested the results of his model against a panel of 22 prestigious astronomers, many of whom had advised the federal government on scientific research priorities and had served as jurors on high-profile astronomy prizes. That panel rated the research impact of the 512 astronomers whom Kormendy had run through his model; the panel’s conclusions closely matched the model’s results. Kormendy’s paper stressed that hiring decisions should be made “holistically.” Scientific influence was only one factor to consider; achieving gender and racial balance in a department was also a legitimate concern, he wrote.

Formulas for quantifying scientific influence on the basis of a citation record are hardly new. PNAS itself published the proposal for one such well-known measure, known as the “h-index.” But that was in 2005. In 2021, a different standard for evaluating ideas applies: Do they help or hinder females and underrepresented minorities in STEM? Kormendy’s model, tweeted an astrophysicist at the City University of New York, “JUST TOOK ANY TINY STEPS WE ARE MAKING TOWARDS EQUITY AND THREW THEM OUT OF THE WINDOW” (capitalization in the original). An astronomer in Budapest objected that Kormendy had failed to consult with “relevant humanities experts” about cumulative bias against females and minorities. Equally damningly, Kormendy had suggested that the profession should overcome its underrepresentation problem by hiring female and minority scientists, who, in the words of the Budapest astronomer, “match the success rate of the majority (i.e., men).”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-constitution-just-keeps-frustrating-obama-and-the-dems/

Obama helped popularize and normalize the idea that executive overreach was acceptable if the president claimed there was moral imperative to act.

I f it’s not the Supreme Court, or the Electoral College, or states’ rights, or equal Senate representation, or most of the Bill of Rights standing in the way of “progress,” it’s the Treaty Clause. Without it, Barack Obama would already have slowed the oceans’ rise and allowed our beleaguered planet to heal. Just ask him.

This week, the former president, owner of multiple homes — including an $11.75 million mansion on 30 acres in Martha’s Vineyard — had some complaints at the United Nations Climate Change Conference about our profligate habits. Then he said this:

It takes some nuclear-powered audacity for Barack Obama, of all people, to whine about unilateral governance. The only reason Donald Trump was able to “unilaterally” withdraw from any international agreement was that the previous president had enlisted the nation in said agreement without the consent of Congress. The Paris Accord is allegedly the most critical international agreement ever forged by mankind, and yet it wasn’t quite important enough to be subjected to genuine national debate or the checks and balances of American government.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/bidens-influential-lenin-sisters-lloyd-billingsley/

“I’m told I should start with AP, Zeke Miller,” said Joe Biden in Rome last month. Back in August, Biden told reporters “I was instructed” to call on Kelly O’Donnell from NBC. Biden didn’t reveal the identity of his instructors, but it’s not a tough call.

The lead puppeteer is doubtless the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. As Drew Allen notes, this is Obama’s third term, but another leftist star is pulling Biden’s strings on matters more important than a press conference.

During the 2020 campaign, Angela Davis supported Joe Biden as the candidate “who can be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving anti-racist movement.” As parents have noticed, the Biden Junta is all-in with BLM and 1619 Project indoctrination. Embattled parents, smeared by the Biden DOJ as domestic terrorists, might wonder about this person who wields such influence.

In her Women’s March speech in January, 2017, Davis (pictured above) proclaimed “history cannot be deleted like web pages.” That invites review of episodes from Davis’ own history.

Davis gained fame for supporting Black Panther George Jackson, who killed a guard at Soledad Prison. In 1970, Davis brought the arsenal of weapons for Jackson’s brother Jonathan, who charged into a Marin County courtroom and took hostages. In the ensuing shootout, four people were killed and judge Harold Haley’s head blown off.