RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-city-violence-surging

For two decades, many New Yorkers had assured themselves that a return to the crime and squalor of the early 1990s was unlikely. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who presided over a 62 percent drop in major felonies from 1994 through 2001, proved that violence was not an urban inevitability. His successor, Michael Bloomberg, drove crime down further, through the 2008 recession and beyond. Both mayors set a benchmark for what was possible, preemptively discrediting any future mayor’s excuse that crime was beyond his capacity to overcome.

That assumption about the permanence of the crime drop was wrong. New York City in 2020 experienced an unprecedented one-year increase in homicides and shootings. Through December 27, 2020, the number of murders was up 41 percent from 2019 and 53 percent from 2018. Shooting victims were up 103 percent from 2019 and 109 percent from 2018; shooting incidents rose 97 percent and 104 percent. In gang-ridden precincts, the spike was even more startling. In Brooklyn’s Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods, there were 170 percent more shooting victims in 2020 than in 2019 and 151 percent more shooting incidents. Murder was up 94 percent in these parts of Brooklyn.

It wasn’t just gang areas that were afflicted. On December 29, a roving pack of young bicyclists in midtown Manhattan attacked a BMW, smashing a bike on top of the car and jumping on its windshield. The same group went after a cab minutes later. Office workers in the area have been chased by similar flash mobs.

https://www.newsweek.com/biden-administration-china-ties-reveal-deeper-disturbing-truth-opinion-1572589

The associations between members of the Joe Biden administration and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked individuals and entities are incredibly disturbing.

Personnel is policy. By dint of such ties, and past dutiful service to administrations that pursued the very policies of engagement and accommodation that enabled Communist China’s rise, we can surmise that the president, and the architects of his agenda, will likely be uniquely soft on China.

That the fledgling Biden presidency has, by political necessity, sought to create a veneer of toughness toward China with rhetoric—while from its earliest days, literally and figuratively bending over for it with a battery of weak policies—would seem to reinforce this view.But as disturbing as the backgrounds are of those Biden staffers who will be developing and executing this likely uniquely detrimental policy, what is perhaps even more disturbing is just how common such backgrounds are among those who would be tapped for such positions.

Any president from the bipartisan political establishment, though increasingly based on the Democratic side, would likely be selecting nominees for senior roles touching on China from a pool of candidates at best two degrees separated from the CCP—and more than likely positively predisposed to ever-greater interaction and integration with it. China exploits this.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17124/biden-emergencies

Often, the emergency is declared as a means of blocking targeted persons and governments from moving money, contraband, and property.

Most Americans probably have no idea that the United States is in the midst of ongoing “national emergencies” over matters in Nicaragua, Burundi, or the Central African Republic — but we are…

We are increasingly being subject to rule-by-decree…. President Biden just declared that the decades-long crisis on the Mexican border is not a problem. No debate, no vote, no ratification — just the stroke of a pen. Who objected? Any protests or marches? If organizations were to protest or march, would they be called “white supremacists” or “insurrectionists?”

Remember: with Mexico, everything — cartels, “coyotes,” smugglers, drugs, traffickers, sexual violence — is A-OK. Mexico = good. Libya = bad.

If you are against a Biden policy, does that mean you are against the government? Does that make you suspect in some way?

Some “emergency” decrees dropped down the Memory Hole; others manufactured, seemingly, from thin air.

President Joe Biden has reversed and cancelled the national emergency declared by President Donald Trump concerning the border security, humanitarian and COVID-19 crisis at the southern border of the United States. Nothing to see here. Move along.

In fact, on his very first day in office, Biden terminated that emergency, which he said had been a mistake from the get-go. Ironically, Biden has re-opened the exact same Texas facility the Trump administration used in order to detain the overflow of illegal aliens at the border. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticized Biden the same way she criticized Trump. At least she is consistent. Perhaps you remember the claims of children in cages and drinking from toilets? That must have all been a terrible misunderstanding.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/wikipedias_leftist_bias_called_out_by_its_cofounder_

The left’s capture of Wikipedia and its transformation into a progressive propaganda organ has had profound political consequences. Founded on the premise of “NPOV,” or neutral point of view, the free online encyclopedia now downplays now often omits entirely points unfavorable to the left, while pushing left wing tropes. It’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, is angry at the betrayal of its original promise. Carrie Sheffield writes at Just the News:

Last May, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger wrote an op-ed on his personal website titled “Wikipedia is Badly Biased” claiming that Wikipedia’s neutrality policy — known as  “NPOV,” or neutral point of view — “is dead.”

Now, when schoolchildren visit the Wikipedia website to look up answers to questions about the meaning of socialism, “they’re going to find an explanation that completely ignores any conservative, libertarian, or critical treatment of the subject,” Sanger told “Just the News AM” television program. “And that’s really problematic. That’s not education. That’s propaganda.” 

Sanger referred to a Fox News report last week by Maxim Lott, which noted, “The two main pages for ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ span a massive 28,000 words, and yet they contain no discussion of the genocides committed by socialist and communist regimes, in which tens of millions of people were murdered and starved.”

That’s poisonous, even if, as the article points out, some of the damaging information comes out in other sub-articles not found on the main page, where most children go to learn about a subject. Sanger traces the fall of Wikipedia, to the point today, where “Wikipedia started getting rid of citations from conservative sources, ‘even conservative sources that were cited in order to explain the conservative point of view.’” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/garland-heralds-return-of-the-obama-justice-department-radical-as-ever/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Biden is not so much presiding over Obama’s third term as he is the doddering passenger riding in first class while Obama’s faithful pilots navigate.

I t appears that the Justice Department under soon-to-be attorney general Merrick Garland will be the Biden administration in microcosm. Judge Garland, like President Biden, is the “pragmatic moderate” sign you hang on the front door, to give mainstream America confidence that the woke Left is not running the asylum. On paper, Garland, like Biden, has the right credentials for that job. When you observe him up close, though, as we had a chance to do during his confirmation hearing this week, that confidence takes a big hit.

Naturally, it’s important to set expectations accurately. This is a left-wing Democratic administration. Even if Garland were as advertised, you are out of luck if you were expecting a constitutionalist Justice Department, one that is solidly pro–law enforcement, deferential to individual liberty, and committed to equal protection under the law.

Biden is not so much presiding over Obama’s third term as he is the doddering passenger riding in first class while Obama’s faithful pilots navigate. Democrats did not yearn for a President Biden; they yearned to beat President Trump and restore the status quo ante. Biden’s job is to give his people what they want: Obama policy and practice.

Consequently, this Justice Department is going to be political and racialist. Garland may not strike you as either of those — in that stealthy way, he’s perfect for the job.

The judge emphasized that his top priority is domestic terrorism. But not all domestic terrorism. It is domestic terrorism as Democrats are defining it — viz., white supremacism, as instantiated by the rioting at the Capitol on January 6.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/28/was-covid-19-our-neutron-bomb/

In the 1970s and 1980s, furor arose over our possible use of the “neutron bomb” that macabrely would “kill people, but not destroy property.” The logic of the perverse weapon was that on allied and friendly European ground, outnumbered defensive NATO troops might radiate and destroy invading masses of Soviet armored troops by periodic detonations of low-yield thermonuclear shells, rockets, and bombs. 

The ensuing blasts of heat would sear flesh, but would lack commensurate repercussion power to destroy most structures and buildings, and leave far smaller toxic radiation trails. In eerie Strangelovian terms, once the enemy was finished off, returning friendly troops and populations could sort their way among the mass dead to find their infrastructure intact—without “collateral” damage or fear of serious radiation sickness. 

In some ways, COVID-19 was our neutron bomb. When we reach the now politically incorrect, taboo term “herd immunity” through vaccinations and antibodies, and when the virus ceases to be a pandemic, the lethal tally may have exceeded 600,000 Americans. 

If so, the nation will have lost more countrymen than were killed in World War I and World War II combined—with thousands more suffering disabilities, from “long haul Covid” to stress and psychological impairment from losing livelihoods and lockdown cabin fever. 

Americans have additionally suffered likely over $15 trillion or so in economic damage from the lockdowns, lost labor, soaring healthcare costs, and the silent killers of substance, familial, and spousal abuse, along with missed medical procedures and surgeries, aborted K-12 schooling, depression, and suicides. It will take years and millions of hours of scholarship to tally all the losses and damage. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/01/biden-lied-and-105334-people-died/

” Biden deserves none of the credit for the gains we’ve made against COVID-19 since he took office. But if he wants to blame Trump for every virus death that happened before Jan. 20, he should take the blame for every one that’s happened since.”

During one of his presidential debates last year when about 220,000 people had died from COVID-19, Joe Biden said that “anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.” So should Joe be looking for another job, now that more than 100,000 have died in just the two months that he’s been president?

Biden said, after all, that he had a plan on “day one” as president to tackle the disease. He was going to move “heaven and earth” to save lives, etc., etc. But since Jan. 20, there have been 105,334 deaths attributed to the coronavirus as of Saturday, according to the COVID Tracking Project. That means that one-fifth of all the COVID-19 deaths have occurred just since Biden took office.

Now Biden is busy casting blame for why the disease continues to claim lives, while repeatedly lying about what he inherited from President Donald Trump in order to make his own efforts seem more heroic.

On Thursday, Biden again claimed that he inherited no vaccination plan when he came into office.

“Were moving in the right direction,” he said, “despite the mess we inherited from the previous administration, which left us with no real plan to vaccinate all Americans.”

It’s been a constant refrain of his administration.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/voting-rights-at-the-supreme-court-11614553224?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Election laws have become a dangerous political flashpoint, as Americans recently learned the hard way. On Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear a potentially landmark case (Brnovich v. DNC) that offers an opportunity to restore the Voting Rights Act to its original purpose.

At issue is Arizona’s requirement that voters cast ballots on election day in their assigned precinct and its ban on ballot harvesting by outside groups. A majority of states require in-precinct voting, and 20 or so limit ballot harvesting, which allows third parties to collect ballots in bunches. Both rules are intended to bolster ballot integrity.

Democrats say this violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits states from adopting voting qualifications, standards, or practices that result in “denial or abridgement” of the right to vote “on account of race or color.” But they provide no evidence that Arizona’s rules limit minorities’ ballot access.

Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to stop states from disenfranchising blacks with underhanded methods like poll taxes and literacy tests. But Democrats now argue that any state regulation that makes it a little harder for anyone to vote violates the law—even if it applies equally to minorities and whites.