RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/03/01/23_billion_paid_to_chicag

20,927 full-time teachers in the Chicago Public School (CPS) system may be headed into Chicago classrooms for the first time since March 2020, after approximately 13,000 Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) members voted to go back.

In 2020, Chicago taxpayers spent $2.3 billion on teacher payroll, while 347,476 enrolled CPS school children logged on from home.

That’s an average annual teacher compensation package of $108,729 ($81,422 in salary, $27,307 in benefits), according to records obtained by OpenTheBooks.com through a FOIA request. CPS teachers also can accrue 244 days of sick leave (more than an entire 175-day school year) or apply it to their pensions.

We found Janice K. Jackson, CEO of CPS, made $322,839 – a $260,000 salary and $62,839 in benefits. The 522 Chicago principals averaged $194,000 in pay and benefits, with the highest earners making up to $219,000. Another 304 acting, interim, assistant, and resident principals averaged $171,315 in pay and perks. Even custodians had compensation packages as high as $101,177 in 2020, with 22 earning up to $75,066 in base pay.

Last year Maurice Swinney, CPS’s “Chief Equity Officer,” made $214,000 managing a group of six employees. The pay vastly exceeded the $177,412 salary of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/enlightened-thinking-in-texas

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Tuesday that the statewide mask mandate and all restrictions on business’ operating capacity would be lifted this coming week. The following day, President Biden called these decisions “Neanderthal thinking.”

In making his announcement, Abbott focused on the fact that Texans have mastered individual habits and practices to mitigate against the risks of contracting the coronavirus. In addition, the state has already protected a majority of its most vulnerable citizens. Any seniors not already vaccinated will have access to one by the end of March, and Texas now has therapeutic drugs that are mitigating the risk of pandemic deaths and hospitalization. At its core, this decision is about personal responsibility and the importance of letting residents weigh health risks against the other risks inherent to their lives. Biden’s response was sadly predictable.

While the state mandates are to be lifted on Wednesday, businesses and people in areas that have had higher case rates are retaining mask requirements and other sensible precautions. Within hours of the governor’s decision, we received notices from our Dallas school and local businesses letting us know there will be no immediate change to the way they operate. This is as it should be and what we anticipated given how hard our city has been hit by the virus.

But it also seems appropriate that small towns and counties in the largest state in the continental United States, some of which have not had a single virus fatality, should be able to return to normal. Simply put, Texas’s governor is treating us like adults, whereas others want us to act like sheep.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17147/storm-over-american-republic

The atmosphere in the United States remains poisonous. Critics claim that stoking in the public is being done on purpose — to create a false narrative that not only is Trump supposedly a “threat to democracy,” but that his more than 74 million supporters are, too. Others, however, claim that the real threat to democracy is actually these serial liars, violators of the Constitution and falsifiers of information.

The right to challenge and criticize, which is an integral part of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, appears seriously threatened. The right to defend oneself against charges also appears threatened, and the legal profession dangerous to practice.

Expressing doubts about the November 3 election is now a liability. Substantiated reports show that it was far from perfect. The American economist Peter Navarro, in his private capacity, drew up three meticulous analyses: “The Immaculate Deception,” “The Art of the Steal” and “The Navarro Report”. They have been zealously disparaged — many think unjustly.

Some authors describe what is happening as a slide towards authoritarianism. They note that many Americans and corporations, while behaving in an increasingly authoritarian manner, accuse their opponents of being authoritarian — in other words, blaming their opponents for what they themselves are doing.

For more than three years Trump was accused, without any evidence apart from a fake “dossier”, of being a Russian agent. The accusations eventually proved baseless, but not before $32 million of taxpayers’ money were spent in what the prosecutors knew from the start was a fraud. They also tried to frame, incriminate and send innocent people to prison. The exercise was, at bottom, nothing more than an attempted coup d’état.

Throughout his entire term, Trump was faced with threats, abuse of power and unremitting attacks. Even though Trump is no longer president, the war against him continues.

If H.R.1 becomes the law of the land, it will entrench those “very things that made the election of 2020 such a mess”. These include, among other things, the flooding of states with millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots, failure to verify signatures, no chain of custody of ballots, same-day voter registration, and ballot-harvesting — many of which are invitations to commit fraud. As a bipartisan report in 2005 from the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III, concluded: mail-in ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” If H.R.1 is passed in the Senate, countless ways of demolishing election integrity will be set in cement.

January 20, 2021. President Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. The scene, however, is devoid of any human presence. The streets of Washington DC are empty. People had been urged to stay at home and Americans throughout the rest of the country asked not to come. The city is under the protection of 25,000 members of the National Guard, heavily armed. High barriers topped with razor wire surround the Capitol area. In the streets planned for the new president’s “parade”, barriers separate the sidewalks from the roadway. The only people visible are men in uniform carrying rifles. A day that is usually a day of celebration in the United States is, this year, strange and sad.

The explanation given by city officials and the FBI was that there was a risk of serious disruption. Other inaugurations had faced disruption, but had never placed the city under siege. On January 20, 2017, during President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, hostile protesters had come to Washington DC, burned cars and smashed windows. The police had protected the ceremony without razor wire and soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of people had cheered the new president.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/06/peak-cancel-culture-dont-bet-on-it/

Last week it was a book by Ryan Anderson and a speech by Donald Trump. This week it is some books by Dr. Seuss. We don’t call it “totalitarianism” for nothing.

Here’s a question that I do not know the answer to: Is the current insanity of “cancel culture” cresting or just getting started? 

Last week in this space, I told you about how Amazon suddenly and without any explanation decided to delist Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment from all its emporia—audible.com and abebooks.com as well as Amazon itself. (The link I provide goes directly to the publisher). 

We published that book at Encounter some three years ago. Why did Amazon, the self-described “world’s largest book store,” finally get around to placing it on their unofficial but still very potent Index Librorum Prohibitorum? Since Amazon has thus far refused to enlighten us, I don’t know.

Yes, the retail giant flagged a new policy that permits it to refuse to sell works that are “inappropriate and offensive” or that trade in “hate speech.” But Anderson’s book is a serious, deeply researched, and humane investigation of a deeply controverted public issue. Some people might disagree with his analysis or his conclusions. Does that make it “inappropriate and offensive”? Does it render it an instance of “hate speech”?

Let’s pause here for a moment. “Inappropriate” and “offensive” describe a wide range of expressions. “Hate speech,” when you come down to it, is really just shorthand for “speech that I do not like.” A free society allows, indeed encourages, robust disagreement. Some may find your expression of certain opinions “inappropriate” and/or “offensive.” But a free society does not interdict in your expressing of them because, while it values comity and good manners, it also values free expression and open debate. 

The Way We Live Now

That said, almost everyone apart from extreme libertarians would admit that there are limits. The expression of some ideas is forbidden in almost all societies. Where are our limits? We know that Amazon thinks it is OK if people express certain kinds of inappropriate and offensive opinions because it cheerfully sells Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, anti-Semitic fantasia deriving from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and various writings by Louis Farrakhan and other anti-white writers. (This is not by any means a complete list of books that some or many consider inappropriate and/or offensive that Amazon sells.) 

Yet Anderson’s scholarly investigation of transgenderism doesn’t make the cut. What does that tell us about “the way we live now”?