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May 2024

Motherhood is the most important job in the world And it’s one fewer and fewer want Don Feder

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/don-feder/

When President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day a federal holiday in 1914, the average American woman had six children. During the baby boom, the number was 3.62. Today, it’s an anemic 1.6, which should set off alarm bells.

Motherhood is the most important job in world. But it’s a job fewer and fewer want to do.

In 2023, 3.6 million babies were born in the United States, compared with 4.16 million in 1990.

The total fertility rate is the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime. We haven’t had replacement-level fertility (2.1) since 1973.

Still, the United States is experiencing another baby boom compared to most of the industrialized world.

In Italy, the fertility rate is 1.21. The average Italian child has no brothers, sisters or cousins.

In South Korea, it’s 0.72. The nation will lose more than half of its population in each generation. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un can disband his army. In a few years, he’ll be able to just walk in and take over.

Last year, Japan lost 595,000 people. This is the 13th consecutive year of population decline. More than 20 million Japanese are 75 and older, a record high. The number of vacant homes also hit an all-time high of more than 9 million, or 13.8% of the housing supply.

FBI: Assaults Against Law Enforcement at Highest Level in Ten Years By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/15/fbi-assaults-against-law-enforcement-at-highest-level-in-ten-years/

The latest data from the FBI reveals that the number of assaults committed against law enforcement officers is at the highest level in at least 10 years.

According to the Daily Caller, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program recorded 79,091 different cases of assault against officers in the year 2023. The most common occurrences were during police responses to assaults against non-officers, with 6,783 such cases. The second-highest occurrence was during responses to drug violations, with 4,879 assaults taking place under such circumstances.

At least 466 officers were assaulted and injured by assailants with firearms, which is also the highest rate of such assaults in the last 10 years. The report also reveals that 194 officers were feloniously killed between 2021 and 2023, thus marking the highest rate of such murders in any three-year period in the last 20 years. The year 2023 saw 60 officers killed, while 61 were killed in 2022, and 73 were killed in 2021.

In 2023, there were 57 offenders who committed felony murder of law enforcement officers. Of those 57 culprits, 32 had previous violent arrests; 54 of the 57 culprits were men, while 8 allegedly suffered some form of mental illness.

Regionally, the South saw the highest number of officers killed in the line of duty in 2023, with 20; this marked a decrease of about 38% from 32 line-of-duty deaths in 2022.

The persistently high rate of violence against police officers is a continuation of the widespread anti-police sentiment that started in 2020, after an African-American named George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His accidental death, falsely believed to be a murder, sparked nationwide race riots and led to numerous far-left politicians calling for a “defunding” of the police. Although political attempts to do so have either failed or been repealed in recent years, anti-police rhetoric remains high, and has also led to a wave of early retirements as well as recruitment struggles for many police departments.

The Biden Reelection Strategy Bidenites believe they can reelect an unhealthy, unpopular, and unsuccessful president by any means necessary. And they may be right. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/16/the-biden-reelection-strategy/

Joe Biden polls at or below 40 percent approval. Historically, such unpopularity has made it almost impossible for a president to be reelected.

His age advances by the hour. His voice falters, his memory fades, and his gait is reduced to short steps, with his arms, winglike and in tandem, offering balance.

Biden is not so much an octogenarian as an unhealthy and prematurely aging 80-year-old. It is America’s irony that he is fit for almost no other job in the country other than President, which apparently allows for a 3-day-a-week ceremonial role while others in the shadows run the country.

So how does Biden become renominated and reelected, as polls show he is behind in almost every critical swing state on nearly every issue?

Answer: not by campaigning, not by championing his record, and especially not by doubling down on his neo-socialist and now unpopular agendas.

Instead, his campaign is focused on four other strategies to beat Donald Trump.

First, left-wing local, state, and federal prosecutors are tying Trump up in court on crimes that have never been seen before and will never be again after the election. All the cases are politically motivated, with many coordinated with the White House.

Even if Trump is not convicted by blue-state prosecutors, in blue-state courtrooms, in front of blue-state juries, he will lose critical campaigning time.

Trump may end up paying out $1 billion in legal fees and fines. At 76, the monotonous days in court are designed to destroy him financially, physically, and mentally.

Biden and his operatives know that, in the long term, they may have fatally damaged the American legal system with such judicial sabotage. But short-term, they hope to destroy Trump before the ballots are cast.

Second, in his fourth year, Biden is suddenly selling government favors to special-interest voting blocs, or hoping to bring short-term relief to voters at the expense of long-term damage to the nation.

For elite college students and graduates, there are now billions of dollars in student-loan cancellations, despite a Supreme Court ruling declaring such targeted contractual amnesties illegal.

The Woke Gobbledygook That Passes for Erudition in Medical Journals Wesley Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-woke-gobbledygook-that-passes-for-erudition-in-medical-journals/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Our most august medical journals are in danger of becoming more woke ideological-advocacy publications than disseminators of learned scientific studies. This is particularly true of the New England Journal of Medicine, which regularly publishes progressive gibberish pushing “equity” that is often nearly impossible to understand.

Here’s the latest example. From “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize — Focusing on Health Care Equity”:

We believe that health care–centric goals — equity in patient experience and clinical outcomes — should be the primary equity-related targets for clinicians, health care administrators, health plans, and payers. The health care sector is best positioned to improve the effectiveness and equity of the care it delivers and has the most control over these factors. To be clear, providing equitable health care includes addressing HRSNs [individual health related social needs] as part of treating illnesses shaped by structural SDOHs [structural social drivers of health]. But provision of acute and chronic care is often inequitable, with suboptimal quality, even for patients without unmet HRSNs.

The key word is “equity,” but can anyone explain what the heck that means? Speak plainly, for goodness’ sake! Oh, here it is:

Screening patients for HRSNs and referring those with such needs to indicated services can be helpful but doesn’t address underlying structural SDOHs, such as income inequality, structural racism, and a lack of robust social services; structural drivers create much of the downstream need captured in HRSN screening.

My brain is itching!

Illegals accused of beating cops in New York’s Times Square offered slap-on-the-wrist plea deals By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/illegals_accused_of_beating_cops_in_new_york_s_times_square_offered_slap_on_the_wrist_plea_deals.html

On what planet does assaulting a police officer merit a mere six months in the slammer?

Only Planet New York.

According to the Daily Mail:

Six of the migrants accused of assaulting two New York City Police Department officers in Times Square have been offered plea deals – including one who was re-arrested while out on $15,000 bail. 

Ulises Bohorquez, Yohenry Brito, Edgarlis Vegas, Darwin Andres Gomez-Izquiel, Wilson Juarez, Yorman Reveron and Kelvin Servita Arocha appeared in New York Supreme Criminal Court on Tuesday in front of Judge Laura Wood.

The Venezuelan migrants were charged with second-degree assault and the obstruction of a government admin following the attack on January 27 which was caught on video and all have pleaded not guilty.

They were offered this:

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has offered plea deals to Bohorquez, Brito and Gomez-Izquiel for them to serve a year in prison in return to pleading guilty to second-degree assault.

Arocha and Juarez have been presented a deal where they serve six months in prison for pleading guilty to obstructing a government admin.

Yorman Reveron was also offered a deal of two years in prison in exchange for pleading guilty to second degree assault.

The rest of us would go to prison for ten years if we assaulted a police officer, but these illegals are special.

The Xi-Macron Romance – and Big Nukes Dreaming of the end of American preeminence. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-xi-macron-romance-and-big-nukes/

China’s president Xi wound up his five-day European tour just as an emperor should, with a red carpet welcome and full military honors in Budapest.

The Hungarians, known Euro-contrarians, welcomed Xi’s pledge to invest billions to build an EV plant in Hungary, and didn’t bat an eye when told it meant they now belonged to China’s imperialist Belt and Road Initiative.

Xi’s trip went better than expected. France’s president Emmanuel Macron, whom I call “Little Cookie” for reasons you will find fully explained in my new book on France, Raising Olives in Provence, backed away from his aggressive statements about China’s unacceptable economic takeover of Europe.

Instead of berating Xi, he took the Chinese dictator to a childhood haunt in the Pyrenees, thinking perhaps he was Donald Trump, who gave Xi the Mar-a-Lago treatment when the two first met in May 2017. He was left to beg Xi to reduce the huge trade imbalance between China and the EU ($314.72 billion in 2023), or else – or else, nothing.

Macron could make no credible threat of tariffs, because he doesn’t yet speak for the EU, although on most days he thinks he does.

Little Cookie and Xi could agree on one thing, however: Both would like to end American “hegemony,” and see both the EU and China play larger roles on the world stage.

“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The title of this essay comes from Stanley Kramer’s 1963 mad-cap comedy. With his dying words Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) mentions a stash of loot buried under the “Big W.” The movie is about a bunch of crazies’ search for the money, reminding one of today’s political scene and the race for the Presidency.

We are not living a Hollywood film; but an alien from another planet would be excused for laughing. The ridiculousness of what is being said and done justifies a belly laugh. Writing recently in City Journal, Heather MacDonald noted: “Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatic, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. ‘The university would rather see us dead than divest,’ said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X.” Yascha Mounk, an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins, wrote in a recent issue of The Spectator of some “absurdist moments” at Columbia. Student protesters demanded the university deliver food and drink to them: “When a surprised journalist asked why the university should have such an obligation towards people engaged in blatantly illegal activity, she insisted they had a moral right to ‘basic humanitarian aid.’”

Max Boot, writing in The Washington Post, quoted the Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawaii, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.” Really? Do the citizens of Ireland, Puerto Rico and Hawaii know they are colonized? Who besides Haitians and Koreans have colonized Haiti and Korea in recent years? And Mr. Boot asks: “What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was the name used by some indigenous groups for Central and North America.” Do wizards at Columbia expect descendants of settlers to abandon the farms, towns and cities they and their ancestors have now lived on and in – in some cases for 400 years – so progeny of those long dead can occupy them?

More than seven million illegal (sorry, undocumented) migrants have crossed the southern border since Biden took office, roughly triple the number under President Trump. But this is not a crisis, according to the Biden White House. It is a “challenge,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Biden To Ruin Thousands Of Miles Of Land For Green Energy Scheme James Taylor

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/15/biden-to-ruin-thousands-of-miles-of-land-for-green-energy-scheme/

The Biden administration has announced plans to despoil thousands of miles of land throughout the United States with new corridors for wind and solar transmission lines. In addition to stretching across thousands of miles of land in length, the Department of Energy reports the transmission-line projects may be up to 100 miles wide. The transmission lines, which are necessary to deliver wind and solar power from rural wind and solar projects to distant population centers, will destroy an enormous amount of open spaces and wildlife habitats. The Energy Department is tapping into $4.5 billion to make the project happen.

States whose lands will be affected include Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Much of the land will be in migratory bird corridors and sensitive ecological habitats.

The scope of land development for these projects highlights some of the many environmental shortcomings of wind and solar power. Land conservation used to be a primary component of environmentalism. However, wind and solar power are the worst offenders among energy sources. Scientists at Harvard University report that converting existing electricity generation from conventional sources to wind power would require covering one-third of America’s landmass with wind turbines. That number would grow to one-half of America’s land mass under the Biden administration’s plans to electrify transportation vehicles. Necessary transmission lines, like the ones just announced by Biden’s DOE, would defile immense amounts of land in addition to the wind turbines themselves.

The Trial Still in Search of a Crime Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2024/05/15/cohen-testimony-cross-x-n4929037

Even after five weeks, the Trump bookkeeping case in Manhattan is a “Potemkin Village,” according to law professor Jonathan Turley. That means it has all the appearance of being real, but upon closer inspection, there’s no there there. Indeed, the indictment of former President Donald Trump on 34 counts of bookkeeping errors, statute-expired misdemeanors that have been miraculously spun into a series of felonies, is the Seinfeld of criminal cases. But a jury could still find him guilty. “It’s Trump,” Manhattan jurors could say to themselves. “Of course, Cheeto-man must be guilty of something.” 

But after the prosecutors told Judge Juan Merchan that their case-in-chief was wrapped, though not officially rested yet, after Michael Cohen’s direct examination on Tuesday, there’s still confusion over what crimes Trump is alleged to have committed. It’s not a good look for the prosecutors and it’s disqualifying for a judge to allow this farce. If wizened legal minds can’t figure out the game prosecutors are playing, then what is the jury supposed to do with this smoke-and-mirrors monstrosity?

The running theory is that “election denier” District Attorney Alvin Bragg believes that Donald Trump stole the election from Hillary Clinton, and, to further that aim, paid lawyer fees to Michael Cohen who carried out the task of getting nondisclosure agreements from people telling bad stories and paying them to keep quiet. That part of the story isn’t illegal. What prosecutors allege is Trump knew that by putting these in the books as lawyer fees, he was committing a federal campaign finance violation. 

At least that’s what we think is going on. We’re left to wonder because the conspiracy they’ve told the jury they’ll reveal to prove fraudulent intent isn’t charged. Indeed, the case so far has shown that Trump had a hands-off policy on money issues, letting his CFO handle all of it. The case is a teetering Jenga-like mess with a sexy mattress actress and provable liar thrown in for background color. 

Jews at Haverford sue Haverford College in federal court Andrew Bernard

https://www.jns.org/jewish-students-sue-haverford-alleging-antisemitic-civil-rights-violations/

A Jewish group at Haverford College in Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit on Monday in federal court alleging that the highly-ranked private liberal arts school violated students’ civil rights and created a pervasively hostile environment for Jews on campus.

The plaintiffs in the case are five students—one of them named—who are all part of the group, which consists of faculty, students, alumni and parents. The five say that the college has engaged in discrimination against pro-Israel Jewish students in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The suit is the latest in a wave of legal actions against colleges and universities that Jewish students have filed in court or with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University are among the institutions that have been sued by Jewish students for antisemitic discrimination in the wake of Oct. 7.

Jews at Haverford is represented in Monday’s suit by the Deborah Project, a public interest law firm that defends the civil rights of Jews on campus.

In its suit, the group details what Jewish students at Haverford have experienced since Oct. 7 and how administrators have responded—or failed to do so—to their complaints about antisemitic violations of Haverford’s conduct policies. (Haverford told JNS it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.)