RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-female-scientists-are-all-right-women-engineering-wage-gap-sexism-discrimination-b186f9d9?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The toy maker Mattel recently honored International Women’s Day by making “role model dolls” of women in science, tech, engineering and math jobs, while lamenting that “girls are systemically tracked away from STEM.” It’s a cliché that these fields are rife with sexism, but at least in academia the data disagree, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

“The literature on women in science, both scholarly and popular, portrays academic sexism today as an omnipresent, pervasive force in the daily lives of tenure-track women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields,” write Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell and Shulamit Kahn of Boston University. Yet their review of the evidence from 2000 to 2020 shows that women in scholarly sciences are doing fine.

Tenure-track women are at parity with their male counterparts in grant funding, recommendation letters and having research accepted by journals, the authors say. In hiring, women have an advantage over men: “Women are less likely than men to apply for tenure-track jobs, but when they do apply, they receive offers at an equal or higher rate than men do.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/the_ruling_classs_stalinist_purge.html

Recent history has shown us the end result of the injustices Joe Biden and his administration are committing.

Like a hammer smashing anyone who seeks to “make America great,” the ruling class pounds Trump, his supporters, and now even Tucker Carlson.  A “great America,” you see, is antithetical to the technocratic police State that the Marxist globalists are busy building.  When individual rights and liberties are respected, self-sufficient Americans do not need government apparatchiks to fashion drab, one-size-fits-all, welfare-dependent, groupthink-dominated futures.  When American families are independent and strong, there are no psychologically unstable, lost, “woke” generations to crave parenting from the State.  When Americans choose God’s truth over the government’s lies, then man-made institutions look frail next to the divine.  Anybody who does not toe the Establishment line must go because totalitarianism cannot survive even a whisper of condemnation.  Lies built from sand can withstand no breeze.

I think this difficult period of American history — during which the Marxist globalists and their appeasers have openly embraced censorship, political persecution, and social “cancelation” — will be remembered as a kind of Stalinist “purge” long in the making.  I should say “Soviet purge,” because Lenin used murder and imprisonment to silence dissent (or potential dissent) just as ruthlessly as his successor.  It was Stalin who really took it to the “intellectuals,” though, and many who ignored Lenin’s brutality out of a self-sabotaging allegiance to communism belatedly learned that any system predicated on total control over individual minds will eventually find anybody with a mind a threat.  

The more general “Soviet purge” has been ongoing for decades, as defenders of liberty — often politically conservative in their outlook and in possession of true religious faith — have been run out of academia, denied promotion within the federal bureaucracy, and kept from having any editorial voices on the pages of the nation’s leading newspapers.  Everybody has been aware that the Marxists’ “long march through the institutions” has been trudging along unabated, but because those who parroted “politically correct” opinions found professional advancement and steady accolades while their colleagues “disappeared,” they held their tongues and said nothing.  Now the “Stalinist purge” begins in full swing, and many who have traded their consciences for cushy lifestyles over these last few decades will learn that totalitarian systems always save their supporters for dessert.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-unions-heavy-grifting/

Over the years, the unions, especially the public employee variety, have heaped abuses on just about all of us. But finally, there are the seeds of resistance.

Tax exempt status

For starters, as 501(c)(5)s, unions have a special tax-exempt status with the IRS that is accorded to “Labor, Agricultural, and Horticultural Organizations.” As Mike Antonucci reports, the National Education Association took in $375 million during the 2019-20 school year, all of it tax-free. Additionally, the NEA sold more than $209 million of its stocks and securities during the year, but the union is also excused from paying capital gains taxes.

Antonucci further explains that the NEA doesn’t operate entirely tax-free. It still must pay income tax on “unrelated business income.” For example, revenue from businesses placing ads in NEA publications, book sales, etc. All told, the union paid $7.2 million in direct taxes of all types on more than $603 million in gross revenue in 2019-20 – an effective tax rate of 1.2 percent.

The NEA also has no sense of hypocrisy. At the same time the union benefits from this egregious tax exemption, it came out with a “playbook” in 2020. In the “Tax Fairness” section of the manifesto, the union maintains that we need to repeal or amend tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, and replace them with a progressive tax system. The NEA also opposes “tax loopholes or giveaways that reduce revenues and shelter corporations and high-income individuals from paying taxes.”

Release time

Then we have the quaint notion of “release time” or, perhaps more accurately, “union time, taxpayer dime,” which is common at all levels of government. This swindle allows public employees to conduct union business during working hours, with the taxpayer footing the bill. These activities include negotiating contracts, lobbying, processing grievances, and attending union meetings and conferences.

A 2020 Goldwater Institute policy report detailed the pervasive nature of release time provisions in union contracts. This bit of thievery costs taxpayers millions of dollars annually and forces them to fund private union activities, which are very often political in nature and work against the interests of the taxpayers. Even more painful is the fact that many local governments don’t bother tracking release time, meaning this corrupt practice is often carried out in secret.