RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/house-gop-investigating-john-kerrys-secret-china-negotiations

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are investigating private discussions that White House climate czar John Kerry held with Chinese Communist Party officials.

In a Thursday letter, committee chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., informed Kerry of the investigation and renewed requests for documents and materials connected to his activities as the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC), according to Fox News. Comer made similar requests while Republicans were the minority in the lower chamber, but Kerry ignored them.

While in his current post, Kerry has held a number of private discussions with Beijing officials about the administration’s ambitious climate agenda. The details of those conversations and the origins of the administration’s seemingly lenient stances on Beijing-related environmental issues are of interest to Comer.

“The Committee requests documents and information to understand your role and provide necessary transparency over the SPEC and its activities,” the Kentucky lawmaker wrote. “As a member of the President’s cabinet, you should be representing the United States’ interests. Your statements, however, consistently show disregard for American national security and taxpayer dollars.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/03/millions-fled-blue-states-in-2022-red-states-need-to-remind-them-why/

New Census data show that roughly half of the states had net gains in population in 2022, and the other half net losses, thanks to what’s called internal migration. The winners were almost entirely red states, the losers blue. There’s a huge opportunity for conservatives, if they seize it.

Think about this migration trend for a minute. The map below shows the net migration of hundreds of thousands of people in 2022. (On this map, which is a screenshot from CBS News’ website, the redder a state the more people it lost, and the bluer the more it gained.)

Source: CBS News

Notice anything? If you didn’t, check out the map we created based on how states voted for president in the past six elections. In this case red means they voted for Republican candidates in more than three of those elections; blue means they voted for Democrats most of the time. (Only one state, Iowa, split down the middle.)

I&I Chart

The two maps look almost identical, with red and blue colors switched.

This isn’t a new trend. People have been fleeing leftist strongholds such as California, New York, and Illinois for many years.

What’s interesting about the new data is that they come in the wake of COVID, when the different approaches taken by states could not have been starker. California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and the like used COVID to exercise maximum control over their residents – with mandates, curfews, lockdowns, and school closures.

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.