RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-kathy-hochul-budget-tax-increase-cap-and-trade-business-11674066745?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

New York is bleeding taxpayers and business, so how does Gov. Kathy Hochul open her first legislative year? By proposing to raise taxes some more. That’s the economic news buried in the $227 billion budget she unveiled this week that includes a higher payroll tax plus a new CO2 cap-and-trade program.

The Governor is directing state officials to develop an economy-wide carbon trading system that will force businesses to pay for their CO2 emissions. This is a stealth tax increase. The state will establish a cap on statewide emissions that will decline over time to reduce emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 and 85% by 2050. The state will auction allowances to fuel distributors, utilities, manufacturers and other businesses to offset their CO2 emissions.

Allowance prices will increase over time as the cap declines, meaning businesses will have to slash their emissions or pay more to offset them. Ms. Hochul seems to think the program will prod businesses to electrify operations and reduce fossil-fuel consumption. She fails to consider that many can’t.

Natural gas accounts for 45% of the state’s electricity and will continue to be needed to balance intermittent wind power. Utilities and other companies will have to buy credits at increasing cost and then pass the cost to customers. The result will be higher energy costs across the board.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/what-rational-educated-people-no-longer-do/

Who will speak up for civilization—or should I say “civilization”, since it is generally agreed by the enlightened these days that there is no such thing because it cannot be defined with exactitude. The word ought therefore always to be put in quotation marks to alert the reader to the unreality of the very concept.

It is only to be expected, therefore, that rational, intelligent and educated people will not speak up for what does not exist, let alone make any sacrifice on its behalf. It is only natural that objective realities such as social justice, equity, inclusion and the environment, should be the object of their deepest moral concern, and that actions intended to favour them should be welcomed.

When young activists glue themselves to paintings or the walls of public galleries in order to save the planet, then, it is again not surprising that much commentary can be found in praise of their idealism and self-sacrifice. They mean well, therefore they do well. Moreover, the situation is so grave, the crisis so pressing, that almost any action is justified that alerts mankind to its peril and brings it to its senses. Poor old civilization would not get a look in even if it existed.

Of course, one might question the activists’ choice of artworks to which to glue themselves. I personally would not claim the works of Andy Warhol, for example, as being among the finest products of Western civilization, but I do not here wish to act as a kind of Lord Duveen to the environmentalist activists, advising them as to which works to affix themselves for most impact. I do not wish to encourage them in any way, for it seems to me that before long they will have to move on from reparable to irreparable damage if their protests are to continue to have advertising impact. The public soon grows inattentive to sensations that are repeated more than a few times.

I was struck by the argumentation of the two young women who threw a tin of tomato soup at Van Gogh’s picture of sunflowers in the National Gallery in London and then glued themselves to the wall below it. They were singularly unattractive young women, not so much physically as in their evident and humourless self-righteousness, which they managed to convey by the expression on their faces and the manner of their speech. They were, so to speak, the ends-justify-the-means made flesh, these female Savonarolas of climate change.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/biden_family_values_hunter_biden_refused_to_pay_employee_unless_she_showered_naked_for_him.html

So where’s the #MeToo movement on this one?

Hunter Biden threatened one of his cash-strapped young female staffers with withholding her pay if she didn’t FaceTime him for sex.

Shocking texts between the President’s son, 52, and his young assistant, who was 29 at the time, show Hunter asking for video sex sessions and sending her cash via Apple Pay after she pleaded that she was struggling to make rent.

The woman, who DailyMail.com has chosen not to identify, worked as an assistant at Hunter’s law firm, Owasco, in 2018 and 2019. She is the fourth employee he is known to have had a sexual relationship with.

Documents on his abandoned laptop show Hunter put his lover and brother’s widow Hallie Biden on his company payroll, as well as her sister Liz Secundy, with whom he also had an affair, texts reveal.

That’s from the Daily Mail. Here’s more from PJMedia:

Texts show that Hunter demanded the impecunious coquette FaceTime (FT) him so he could watch her shower and “do what she does when she is alone” if she wanted her pay. Messages show it took him several months to send the woman her wages.

The unnamed woman worked as Hunter’s assistant at his company, Owasco. She tried to contact Hunter when her direct deposit payment of $837.06 didn’t arrive and her insurance was turned down by a dentist. She told Hunter she couldn’t afford to pay her rent.

It appears Hunter failed to pay her for several months.

It took two months for Hunter to send her a paltry $500 — and an apology for “treating her so poorly.” He claimed he had “‘really no money’ due to ‘alimony tuitions and other sh*t like girls insurance etc.’”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/01/race-everywhere/

Recently an unarmed 29-year-old African American, Tyre Nichols, was brutally beaten to death by five Black Memphis police officers. They were charged with murder. All belonged to a special crime unit known as the Scorpions.

Both the victimizers and victim were Black. The Memphis police chief is Black. The assistant police chief is Black.

Nearly 60 percent of the police force is Black. The white population of Memphis is about 25%.

The now-disbanded Scorpion unit of mostly Black officers was created as a response to grassroots appeals to stop spiraling crime in mostly Black neighborhoods.

The death of Tyre Nichols could be attributed to many things: a basic lack of humanity on the part of the officers, poor police training, lax administrative supervision, and lowered hiring standards.

Instead, no sooner was the beating death announced than accusations of “systemic racism” surfaced.

Van Jones, the former Obama Administration green czar and recent recipient of Jeff Bezos’ $100 million “courage and civility award,” pronounced on CNN that the Black police oppressors were acting out white racism.

Some claimed that charging the five Black officers with murder was itself racist. Others alleged that creating the unit in the first place to reduce Black-on-black crime was racist.

Yet, when everything becomes racist, then nothing in particular can be racist.

About the same time, the city of San Francisco, along with the state of California, was exploring paying out huge cash reparations to its African-American residents for the ancestral sin of slavery.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/newark-n-j-resolution-proclaims-world-hijab-day-and-this-year-thats-particularly-grotesque/

Yesterday, Wednesday, Feb. 1, was No Hijab Day, a Western feminist expression of solidarity with Muslim women in the United States who are supposedly oppressed and discriminated against (by those fictional but omnipresent MAGA-hat-wearing thugs) because they wear the hijab. Accordingly, Newark, N.J. city council President LaMonica McIver is set to introduce a resolution declaring Wednesday World Hijab Day in the City of Newark. McIver, of course, has all the proper Leftist intentions: celebrating “diversity,” standing against “hatred,” and all that. But this year in particular, her gesture is nothing short of grotesque. In Iran, women are dying for the freedom not to wear the hijab. And in Newark, witless Leftists are celebrating the symbol of their oppression.

Back on Sept. 16, 2022, in Tehran, the Iranian morality police arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, for not wearing her hijab properly. Amini later died in a hospital in Tehran, and numerous Iranians charged that she had been tortured to death while in custody. All over the country, protesters took to the streets to protest not against the hijab laws, but against the repressive and brutal Islamic Republic itself. Other women, and male protesters as well, were killed as the Iranian regime ruthlessly applied the Qur’anic injunction to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60). The protests went on for months until the regime began summarily executing protesters, and even then some indomitably courageous Iranians continued to take to the streets to demand their freedom.

It is against that backdrop that the Newark World Hijab Day resolution will be introduced. For innumerable women in Iran, the hijab is the most visible sign of their second-class status, and of the brutality of the regime that will imprison them for years or even kill them outright for daring to venture out in public without wearing it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-rise-of-transgenderism-leaves-civilization-undefended/

If you’re like me you’ve probably had it with being afraid of the sheer rise in power that the transgender movement has amassed in little over two years. It has many people scared, truly scared. Scared of saying (I’m going to say it): Biological men can never be real women; men cannot have babies; referring to oneself as “they” is beyond grammatically infelicitous, it renders one a nonsensical and a conceptual non-entity; the transgender affirmation of adolescents, which means agreeing to visiting a host of atrocities on a child’s body and plying it with irreversible drugs, is child abuse; trans women (biological men) have no business participating in (real) women’s sports. There I’ve said it all—at least as much as I care to for now. Why are people scared of offending trans people?

Misgendering another person, I am told, is the worst offense you can commit against another human being—as bad as rape and murder. No kidding. How did a small minority of people get to command the language, protocols, norms and framing methods of an entire culture in so short a space of time? Who handed all that power to them, and why?

The issue goes deeper if we look at the logical terminal point of radical transgenderism. It is a form of moral decadence. Why? Because ultimately it culminates in people signing up at the gender unemployment line. To unemploy yourself from your gender or, some would say, to recuse yourself from it, is to emancipate yourself from the moral dimensions that come with your sex identities. For the sake of rhetorical expediency, I shall say, yes: to unemploy oneself from one’s gender identity as well. I have heard it said often that young people are suffering from civilizational exhaustion, and that that is the reason they are relinquishing their binary sex identities. It’s my generation, however, and the ones preceding it that have a right to be exhausted. The millennials and Generation Z that have no business feeling civilizational exhaustion. It is Gen Z that has inherited a technologically advanced civilization built for them. You’d expect more adults to be coming out as trans if this were even a plausible explanation for the rise of transgenderism. This is not the case.