RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/critical_race_theory_as_pseudo_as_pseudoscience_gets.html

Racial relations are a complicated and controversial topic, so many are uncomfortable and even afraid to discuss it.  I consider myself an exception, given my “suitable background”: I am a European-American, based on my geographical place of birth; I am a Middle Eastern American, based on my historical homeland; and I am also an African-American, based on the origin of my species, Homo sapiens sapiens!  I came from a third-world country where I experienced racist hostility toward my ethnicity and fought back in various ways until I immigrated to the United States.  Therefore, the issue of race relations is not at all alien to me.

Recently, reading a seminal book on Critical Race Theory (CRT) gave me a long forgotten and unpleasant feeling from my student days in the ex–Soviet Union.  It was a feeling that I was wasting time and effort in studying inherently wrong subjects that were ideologically driven and lacking in any practical validation and usefulness.  (These subjects were scientific communism, Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and political economy of socialism).  Studying these subjects and experiencing firsthand their practical implementation had expanded my knowledge about the development of human society only to the extent that socialism is a dead end of societal evolution.

My first impression of the book was that CRT is a shining example of politically and ideologically driven yet illogical pseudoscience.  As the title suggests, the subject of this “critical” study is race and the relationship between people of different races, while at the same time, one of its pillars is the assertion that races are artificial, human-invented categories that do not have any biological and genetic basis.

This assertion does not constitute a fact since the question of the existence or non-existence of the biological nature of races has not yet been settled by science.  Instead, it reflects the penchant of some modern anthropologists, biologists, geneticists, and sociologists who question traditional race-based human taxonomy and propose to classify people by geographic origins or ethnic groups. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/10/why-doesnt-the-covidocracy-care-about-vitamin-d-findings/

There’s actually very limited evidence in favor of mass masking, but advocates argue it’s relatively inexpensive (true) and what’s the harm (none if your intent is to create division and distrust among “your” people). But what about something to reduce COVID-19 severity and mortality that’s cheap, easy, and has solid scientific evidence behind it?

Finally someone in official capacity is pushing this treatment. It’s called “vitamin D.” England has announced that more than 2.5 million of its more vulnerable people, namely those in long-term care facilities, will be offered free vitamin D supplements this winter.

Like all vitamins and some minerals, it seems vitamin D has been presented by various sources as a form of snake oil in a capsule – with the (possible) exception of growing hair on a bowling ball. You can find at least one study for practically everything. But we know it’s essential to human life and we know many people aren’t getting enough. That’s especially true among people with darker skin, the elderly, and those living at higher latitudes. Older age and darker skin have both clearly been associated with worse COVID-19 outcomes.

COVID-19 aside, vitamin D insufficiency affects almost 50% of the population worldwide, while an estimated 1 billion people, across all ethnicities and age groups, have vitamin D deficiency. Our ancestors didn’t sit behind monitors and TVs in caves all day long.

A shortage has long been associated with a host of problems. “Emerging research supports the possible role of vitamin D against cancer, heart disease, fractures and falls, autoimmune diseases, influenza, type-2 diabetes, and depression,” notes one paper.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-and-beijing-11607627205?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

“Mr. Trump mentioned that he used to wonder why his Beltway adversaries always use Russia when advancing conspiracy theories about him. He chuckled as he recounted the moment he understood why and said, “They never use China. You know why? ’Cause they’re all getting rich on China.”

Hunter Biden may have wanted to hold 10% for the “big guy,” but did he forget to set aside 37% for Uncle Sam? A tax investigation focused on the Biden family’s highly questionable sources of income may finally force them to answer precisely how such income is generated in the first place.

The Journal’s Ken Thomas and Sabrina Siddiqui report:

Hunter Biden, the son of President-elect Joe Biden, said in a statement Wednesday that the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware is “investigating my tax affairs,” putting his financial dealings in the spotlight, as his father builds his administration.
Hunter Biden said he takes the matter “very seriously” and is “confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately.”
The Justice Department declined to comment on Wednesday.

Exactly one year ago, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and six Democrats chairing House committees unveiled their plan to charge President Donald Trump with impeachment articles which did not claim he had committed any crimes. Mr. Trump’s alleged offense was suggesting that a foreign government look into Hunter Biden dealings which any reasonable person would say deserved examination. A source now tells the Journal that the feds began investigating Biden taxes in 2018. One year ago today, did any of the congressional Democrats know that as they were accusing Mr. Trump of non-crimes, the subject of his scrutiny was already under U.S. criminal investigation?

https://nypost.com/2020/12/09/no-bail-just-part-of-it-las-new-da-totally-eviscerating-basic-law/

Los Angeles’ newly elected district attorney, George Gascon, has a plan for ensuring compliance with the county’s draconian stay-at-home orders: make the city so dangerous that Angelenos will be terrified to step outside.

Gascon belongs to a wave of well-funded left-wing prosecutors who have come to office promising to eliminate racial disparities in the criminal-justice system. They are doing so by eliminating key components of the criminal-justice system itself. Gascon’s office will no longer prosecute a wide range of misdemeanor offenses.

They include:

Trespass. Los Angeles streets, in all but its wealthiest neighborhoods, are already overrun by squalid encampments. Business owners who have managed so far to survive the lockdown regularly have to sweep vagrants off their property in the morning, along with ­feces and drug paraphernalia. The vagrant won’t leave? Don’t bother calling the police. Any arrest an officer makes will simply be dismissed. If a homeowner sees a ­vagrant climbing the fence to his house, he will have to deal with it himself.

Driving without a license or driving with a suspended license. The risk of being hit and possibly killed by a drunk driver or by someone who just can’t operate a car just went up, in a sop to the ­illegal-immigrant lobby.

Disturbing the peace. Los Angeles has seen a spate of shootings at rowdy illegal house parties. Too bad if such a party breaks out on your block. Just hope that no one feels dissed and pulls a gun.

Public intoxication and loitering to commit prostitution. These activities are the prelude to greater problems, as law-abiding residents of high-crime communities know too well. The sister of an assassinated Chicago cop warned in The Chicago Sun-Times this summer that illegal drug and alcohol use on residential streets easily escalates into ­fatal shootings, because the perpetrators “think no one cares.”

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c

Reality is harsh. Let’s face it, our world is imperfect, often even deadly. Not only that, it’s always going to be imperfect. So let’s get to work on enjoying our brief lives as best we can amidst the imperfection, while striving for such incremental improvements to the world as are within our modest capabilities.

If you think that way, you definitely are not “woke.” To be a woke progressive the first requirement is that you must refuse to acknowledge the real world as it exists. You must pretend that the world is something else, something immediately transformable into a fantasy of perfection through coercive collective action. You also must firmly close your eyes to any facts or evidence that might contradict such progressive fantasy, and indeed you must demand that any such facts or evidence be suppressed and never mentioned.

Among numerous illustrations of this point, perhaps the most striking is the current hysteria sometimes going by the name “anti-racism.” Here, the official progressive fantasy is that any under-representation of blacks (or other minority group of your choice) at designated heights of society can only be the result of “systemic racism.” Therefore all must commit to the coerced program of “anti-racism,” whereupon, I presume, perfection will promptly be achieved.

Over the past several months, you cannot have missed the parade of major societal institutions — large corporations, banks, law firms, universities, and so on — caught with insufficient numbers of minorities in their ranks and pledging to rectify the situation immediately if not sooner.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/rep_dan_crenshaw_rips_into_pelosi_for_her_moral_corruption_and_hypocrisy.html

On Wednesday, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (D-Tx), speaking in the House of Representatives, unloaded on Nancy Pelosi, whom he “unequivocally condemn[ed] in the strongest possible terms.” It’s a speech all Americans should hear because it so perfectly captures both Pelosi’s personal corruption and the horrors that the Democrats’ scientifically unsupported lockdowns have unleashed on Americans.

I could have written a post echoing Crenshaw’s statements, but that seemed silly. For that reason, I decided that the smartest thing would be to present Crenshaw’s words unadulterated but to augment them with annotations to drive home the points he so powerfully makes. Everything below this is in Crenshaw’s voice:

I rise today to unequivocally condemn in the strongest possible terms the actions of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Just last week, referring to her obstruction of bipartisan targeted relief bills that we could have voted on, on this floor, she said quote, “Don’t characterize what we did before as a mistake. *** This was not a mistake. It was a decision.” End quote.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hit-with-antitrust-lawsuit-by-federal-trade-commission-state-attorneys-general-11607543139?mod=hp_lead_pos1

WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission and 46 states sued Facebook Inc. on Wednesday, accusing the social-media giant of buying and freezing out small startups to choke competition.

The FTC’s sweeping antitrust case seeks to force Facebook to unwind its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, two of its landmark deals. The states filed a separate and similar lawsuit, alleging a lack of competition has harmed consumers, including by weakening privacy protections.

The lawsuits come weeks after the Justice Department brought a case alleging Google was illegally maintaining a monopoly in its search business. Collectively, the cases reflect U.S. concern about the power of dominant online platforms.

“Facebook’s actions to entrench and maintain its monopoly deny consumers the benefits of competition,” said Ian Conner, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Our aim is to roll back Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct and restore competition so that innovation and free competition can thrive.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, asserted that Facebook “has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users,” and made “billions by converting personal data into a cash cow.”

Facebook fired back by noting the FTC had previously approved the Instagram and WhatsApp transactions.