RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/10/los-angeles-voted-for-more-crime-and-theyre-about-to-get-it-good-and-hard/

The acerbic wit and writer H.L. Mencken once famously said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” The good people of Los Angeles are about to find out exactly what he meant.

In November’s election, the city’s voters had the poor judgment to elect a George Soros-backed district attorney, far-left “justice reform advocate” George Gascon. They’ll be paying for their mistake for years to come.

The payment is coming due already, thanks to the socialist billionaire Soros. The Cuban-born Gascon had already served as both chief of police and district attorney in San Francisco, where he basically stopped prosecuting many crimes.

He was aided in that by California’s notorious Proposition 47, which after its passage in 2014 redefined many drug and theft offenses as misdemeanors.

How did that work out? The once-beautiful city by the bay’s streets are now filled with homeless drug addicts, the mentally ill and criminals of every stripe. Violent crime, drug use and theft have all soared. Residents and tourists alike must negotiate the city’s vomit- and feces-strewn sidewalks, and dodge people shooting up drugs and accosting passersby for “spare change.”

Break-ins and “property crimes” of all types are now common. Those who voted for this madness in San Francisco are now fleeing the city in droves.

Ask those who have left what kind of “job” Gascon did.

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2020/12/09/victor-davis-hanson-will-biden-give-in-to-the-hydroxy-effect-n2581263

There is as yet no known, easily accessible cure for COVID-19.

Over the past year, lots of old and new drugs and supplements — Ivermectin, azithromycin, Remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, aspirin, Pepcid and others — have shown at least some anecdotal value in ameliorating the effects of early-stage COVID-19. Clinical physicians treating patients in hospitals often disagree with the research scientists conducting trials on the efficacy of all these treatments.

Yet only hydroxychloroquine has prompted furious partisan debate over its possible usefulness. Why?

Probably because Donald Trump endorsed its usage months ago. Almost immediately, the media, the university and government medical community, and the progressive political opposition declared hydroxychloroquine useless and dangerous. A recent media study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that positive news stories about the research and development of COVID-19 vaccines barely outnumbered negative stories about Trump and hydroxychloroquine.

Trump’s presidential endorsement was apparent proof of rank quackery. Yet a few recent second-look studies, especially abroad, suggest that hydroxychloroquine, a dirt-cheap, time-tested anti-malarial drug, can in fact offer help in treating some cases of COVID-19.

This Hydroxy Effect — hysterical disavowal of anything Trump has endorsed — is dangerous to the country at large.

https://spectator.us/arent-celebrating-400th-anniversary-plymouth-colony/

On Saturday November 11, 1620, an ill-fitted cargo ship anchored off the coast of Cape Cod. On board were 102 quarrelsome and hungry passengers. Some 37 were religious dissidents, some servants, and a good many were would-be settlers contracted by the London Merchant Adventurers. Those ‘adventurers’, whom the Protestant dissenters called ‘strangers’ were none too happy about the voyage. They were supposed to be in ‘northern Virginia’, which may have meant Manhattan. But bad weather had driven their ship, the Mayflower, to an unsettled and uncertain place. They considered their contract with the London Merchant Adventurers null and void and were prepared, on landing, to strike out for themselves.

Cooler heads prevailed. Later that day, perhaps with the help of some strong-arm tactics, the leaders of the Leiden, Holland Congregation — the people we call Pilgrims — gained the signatures of most of the men on an agreement to stick together and govern themselves as a ‘civil body politic’. That modest document was the Mayflower Compact, and it carries outsized historical weight. It was the beginning of true self-government in the English colonization of North America. And it gave voice, or at least it whispered, some new ideas. The signatories agreed to elect their government, frame their own laws, respect their differences and discard many of the Old World ideas of hierarchy. The new settlement breathed the fresh air of equality. Masters and servants both signed the compact.

You would think this event would be anchored in American history with the solidity of, say, Plymouth Rock. And you would, in a curious way, be right. In the era of de-plinthed statues of American founders and heroes, Plymouth Rock itself was defaced earlier this year. It was spray-painted with various squiggles and the motto ‘508, MOF’, the meaning of which remains unknown, except that 508 is Plymouth’s area code. We can take it, if nothing else, as a gesture of symbolic destruction. Four hundred years later, the strangers have wreaked their revenge for having been drafted into the Mayflower Compact. Or perhaps it was one of those contingents of Native Americans tagging a boulder that Massasoit too easily ceded to the invaders.

***

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The single biggest change in politics in my lifetime has been the reorientation of the political parties. Historically, Democrats represented the working classes, while Republicans had the backing of the monied classes on Wall Street and the occupiers of office suites in big businesses. Labor versus capital was a simplified definition.

Things have changed. Roles have been reversed. My State of Connecticut is a proxy for wealthy blue states. It is the 5th wealthiest in terms of income and was solidly Republican when I was growing up. This year, it voted 59% for Joe Biden. The three towns in which I have lived for the past fifty years, Greenwich, Old Lyme and Essex – all in the top 12% of Connecticut’s wealthiest towns – voted between 61% and 63% for Joe Biden. November’s vote was not a one-time event. All five House members are Democrats. Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators are ranked eight (Richard Blumenthal) and sixteen (Chris Murphy) in terms of most progressive. The last Republican to serve in the House of Representatives was Chris Shays who lost re-election in 2008. The last Republican U.S. Senator from Connecticut was Lowell Weicker, who lost re-election in 1988. This Democratic Party is not your grandfather’s Party. It has become the Party of the establishment. The only two counties in Connecticut to vote for Donald Trump were Windham and Litchfield, the two most rural counties. In both counties, his margin of victory was four percentage points. Sixty years ago, Connecticut was as solidly Republican as it is solidly Democratic today.

Why has this happened? The shift took place during the 1960s and 1970s, during a period when I became registered as a Democrat. For me, in my late 20s, it was a combination of civil rights and Vietnam, and a feeling that whatever my parents were for I should be against. By the mid 1970s, when markets and the economy turned down, I realized my parents may have been smarter than I had thought – that to succeed financially, intellectually, personally and emotionally, one had to be aspirant, have a positive outlook, be self-reliant and willing to work hard.