RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woke-model-minority-myth-11614035596?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The North Thurston Public Schools in Lacey, Wash., made headlines in November when their “equity report” classified Asian-Americans along with whites instead of as “students of color.” Apparently the Asian-Americans were doing too well academically to be students of color. After what the district said was “an overwhelming public response,” it admitted its “category choices” had “racist implications” and dropped the equity report from its website.

To normal Americans, it makes no sense. How are Asian-Americans not “people of color”? But give the North Thurston folks credit for following progressive logic to its conclusion. Modern progressive theory more or less divides the nation between the oppressors, defined as whites, and the oppressed, defined as everyone else. In this framework, achieving success puts you on the side of the oppressors and thus makes you white or “white-adjacent”—even if your family came from China or India.

Calling it progressive to send children of color the message that achievement is white is an irony lost on the woke. Bigoted laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or actions such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II were once thought among the worst stains on American history left by anti-Asian racism. But these days the characterization of Asian-Americans as the “model minority” triggers the woke.

https://www.nysun.com/national/justice-thomas-in-a-fiery-dissent-illuminates/91427/

The refusal of the Supreme Court to take up a challenge to Pennsylvania’s last minute changes to its ballot deadlines in the 2020 election was done without explanation by the majority. All the more clear is the case for reforming our national law on Election Day — the need for it to be a single date with results that can be announced after the polls close. It’s not election week, month, or season. It’s Election Day.

In 2020, six states failed to meet this standard. These states unfairly threw the process of counting the electoral college and popular vote into chaos. Forty-four states managed, despite the pandemic. In 1845, Congress enacted the Presidential Election Day Act to establish a “uniform time for holding elections for electors.” It declared that “the Tuesday after the first Monday in November” is the day on which all states must appoint electors.

Since the 1848 election, states have been able to meet this deadline despite the 1918 pandemic, World Wars I and II, and hurricanes. A single election day and prompt reporting is part of the peaceful transfer of power. The idea is that voters should not have to wait days or weeks to hear election results. The longer the vote-counting takes, the more exceptions made during the counting process, the less confidence voters have in the outcome.

This was certainly the case in 2020. And the press was complicit in the disruption by refusing to call election results due to the “red mirage.” This was an idea first pushed by a Democratic consulting firm funded by Mayor Bloomberg saying that on election night it was highly likely that President Trump would appear to have won in a landslide, but would ultimately lose when all the mail-in ballots were counted over the next week.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/clarence-thomas-blasts-the-supreme-court-for-ducking-the-pennsylvania-election-challenge/

EXCERPT;

The Court this morning turned away the remaining challenges to the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan. Some of these challenges were legally meritless, and none of them offered any legitimate grounds to change the outcome of the presidential election, but the Pennsylvania case in particular raised a serious, recurring issue of election law: whether state courts or state executive officials can use the general, open-ended terms of state constitutional provisions to throw out specific rules passed by state legislatures governing federal elections. Articles I and II of the Constitution reserve to state legislatures the power to set rules for federal elections.

That’s exactly what happened in Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania supreme court used the Pennsylvania Constitution’s general guarantees of “free and equal” elections and “free exercise of the right of suffrage” as an excuse to invalidate the state legislature’s explicit deadline for mail-in ballots to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day — the same time the in-person polls close. That deadline was enacted in 2019 and left untouched in revisions to the mail-in ballot rules during the pandemic in 2020. The Court should have heard the case before Election Day, in order t0 ensure that the rules of the road were set in advance. Refusing to hear the case either before the election or after the election guarantees that the issue remains unsettled for the next election.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, wrote a dissent blasting the Court for repeatedly ducking this issue (Alito added his own dissent).

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/02/22/conspiracy-theo

Today’s conspiracy theories, like their predecessors, frequently target Jews. This age-old hatred was on shameless display during the Capitol riots, where one thug wore a “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt. He was not alone. A Rutgers University report found that at least half a dozen neo-Nazi or white supremacist groups were involved in the riot. Still more extremists without any formal affiliation joined them, according to research by Robert Pape and Keven Ruby.

Among right-wing groups like the Proud Boys, anti-Semitic tropes are commonplace. They are staple features of QAnon conspiracy theories, which mark Jewish names with triple parentheses to label them as usurpers and predators. Some groups borrow from Nazi propaganda and denounce Jews as “not members of the white race.”

Anti-Semitic vitriol like this is not new. What’s new is its rationale, which is now divorced from medieval and early modern religious doctrines. Indeed, anti-Semitism is now part of a broader ideology of illiberalism that endangers America’s long-standing principles of individual rights and tolerance.

Historical Anti-Semitism

In the Middle Ages and the early modern era, anti-Semitism was largely a product of religious tensions coming from an overwhelmingly Christian society and directed by the Catholic Church, not only at Jews but at Christians they deemed heretics. That’s changed dramatically as the West has become more secular. The old curse of “Jews as Christ killers” has waned. So has the bizarre “blood libel” that Jews kill Christian children to drain their blood and mix it into unleavened bread for Passover.

These ideas weren’t just noxious; they were deadly. They not only excluded Jews from an overwhelmingly Christian society, but they justified lethal attacks. Among the most prominent were those that accompanied the First Crusade (1096–1097). As Christian warriors left for Jerusalem, they massacred whole Jewish villages in the Rhineland. Their compatriots in France did the same.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/justice-clarence-thomas-dissents-from-supreme-court-on-election-case-we-need-to-make-it-clear_3706242.html

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a dissenting opinion regarding the high court’s decision not to take up a case challenging the Pennsylvania Nov. 3 election results.

The court on Monday announced it won’t take up lawsuits challenging a Pennsylvania state court decision that relaxed ballot-integrity measures, including a move to extend the ballot-receipt deadline during the November election by three days due to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Former President Donald Trump and Pennsylvania’s GOP urged the court to take up a review of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling.

“This is not a prescription for confidence,” Thomas wrote on Monday, adding that “changing the rules in the middle of the game is bad enough.” Thomas, considered by many to be the most conservative justice, said the court should have granted a review.

“That decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election. But that may not be the case in the future,” Thomas wrote (pdf). “These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable.”

Other than Thomas, Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch also dissented.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/biden_whether_from_spite_or_dementia_has_ignored_texas.html

Over a week after a massive storm hit, Texas is slowly warming up, the snow is melting, and power is returning. What Texas hasn’t seen is President Biden. Instead, he’s been enjoying an easy schedule, playing computer games with his granddaughter while Kamala Harris handles the phone calls to foreign leaders. If he were a Republican, rather than a Democrat, the media would be castigating him as the worst leader ever. Instead, though, the media is praising him for not showing up, lest he look too much like Trump.

The Valentine’s Day storm that hit Texas wasn’t the worst snowstorm ever, but it was certainly one of the worst storms to hit a state that always does things in a big way. Immediately after the storm hit, 4 million people were without power, and almost half the state’s population without reliably safe drinking water. Roughly 35 people died in Texas because of the storm.

A reader sent us pictures from a major grocery store in central Texas, showing that the shelves were stripped as bare as they were during the height of lockdown panic last year:

Thankfully, things are improving:

A warming trend brought welcome relief. In Tennessee, where Memphis was walloped with 10 inches of snow, temperatures soared into the high 50s on Sunday. In battered Texas, Houston’s temperature climbed into the 70s, and Austin was almost there.

[snip]

About 20,000 Texas homes and businesses remained without power Sunday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us, a utility tracking website. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/21/questions-the-gop-should-ask-merrick-garland/

Senate confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s pick for Attorney General, begin Monday. The wanna-be Supreme Court justice instead is poised to take the reins of a Justice Department tainted by egregious political prosecutions from James Comey’s Crossfire Hurricane to the destructive Robert Mueller special counsel probe. 

Despite years of assurances, only one Justice Department employee has been held criminally responsible for the lawless investigation into Donald Trump and his presidential campaign, which included the use of illegally-obtained FISA warrants to spy on Trump associates. On his way out the door, former Attorney General William Barr refused to litigate flagrant instances of election fraud that potentially swayed the outcome of the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.

Unpunished for acting as the law enforcement arm for the Democratic Party, the Justice Department is now accelerating its hunt for Americans who dared to support Donald Trump in 2020. The Justice Department launched its “Capitol breach” investigation last month; Michael Sherwin, the acting U.S. Attorney for the D.C. office, which is overseeing the entire effort, warned the probe will be “unprecedented” in scope and scale.

More than 200 people have been arrested already and charged with various crimes for their involvement in the January 6 chaos. Most offenses deal with trespassing, disorderly conduct, or disrupting an “official” government proceeding.

Nonetheless Garland, in his inflammatory opening statement, will assure the Senate Judiciary Committee that he intends to prioritize the agency’s nationwide manhunt. “From 1995 to 1997, I supervised the prosecution of the perpetrators of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, who sought to spark a revolution that would topple the federal government,” Garland’s prepared statement reads. “If confirmed, I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6—a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/brucecarroll/2021/02/21/new-studies-suggest-one-covid-vaccine-shot-may-be-enough-n1427147

There has been some very good news this week about the prospects of returning back to normal from the COVID pandemic earlier than thought. The first ray of sunshine is that herd immunity may be just weeks away in the United States.

This morning comes news that one of the reasons we are speeding toward herd immunity is that the various COVID vaccines are providing enough protection with just one dose.

Covid-19 survivors who have gotten a first dose of Covid-19 vaccine are generating immune responses that might render a second shot unnecessary, potentially freeing up limited vaccine supply for more people, several new research papers suggest.

The research, while preliminary, found that the previously infected people generated protection against the disease quickly and at dramatically higher levels after a first shot of the current two-shot regimens when compared with people who were vaccinated but hadn’t been sick.

“Everyone should get vaccinated. Not everybody needs two shots,” said Viviana Simon, a professor of microbiology at New York’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and an author on one study. “As long as we can’t deliver as much vaccine to everybody who wants it, I think it’s an important consideration.”

This is important news which, if it holds up under more study and scrutiny, would help offset the bumpy vaccination rollouts many countries seem to have faced over the last few weeks.

Giving just one dose means health officials could redeploy excess doses to more people and speed the reach of vaccinations, which vaccine experts and health authorities say is crucial as new forms of the virus increase transmission. Limited initial supply has contributed to the bumpy rollout of the vaccine and forced governments to favor high-risk individuals ahead of others.