RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-democrats-frivolous-three-pronged-att

Progressives’ main arguments against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee don’t withstand scrutiny.Doing some commentary over the weekend about President Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, I was struck by not just the emptiness but the outright deceptiveness of the three main Democratic lines of attack against her. These are early days, so perhaps Barrett’s opposition will find something of substance that gains some traction. For now, the main salvos against her are frivolous:

(1) President Trump has a litmus test for nominees, who must take predetermined positions that support his policy agenda; (2) Relatedly, Judge Barrett will “destroy” the Affordable Care Act, consideration of which comes up on the Supreme Court’s oral-argument docket the week after Election Day; and (3) Barrett, a devout Catholic, is on a crusade to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973).

I will take these in order.. Litmus Test

There is no evidence that President Trump has imposed a litmus test on judges whom he would nominate to the Supreme Court. That Democrats say there is a litmus test, tirelessly, on every media platform available to them, is not proof of anything other than a campaign to drive a fact-free political narrative into the public’s consciousness. Specifically, there is no evidence that Judge Barrett, in order to be nominated, had to agree to take the Trump administration’s position of staunch opposition to Obamacare and abortion. As I noted on the Corner earlier today, it is not unusual for Trump-appointed judges to rule against the administration.

https://www.thegoodgopher.com/home/the-good-gopher-satire-liberals-confident-that-current-utopian-state-of-democrat-led-cities-reveals-the-paradise-to-come-once-biden-elected

“The Garden of Eden isn’t a fairy tale after all! It’s been reimagined all over the nation in cities like Portland, Seattle, and Chicago!”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/26/barrett-will-sail/

As I write, President Trump has just confirmed what the rumor mill has been disgorging with increasing confidence over the last few days: Judge Amy Coney Barrett is his pick to replace the feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died at 87 a little over a week ago, as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The wheels of government tend to turn slowly, but Donald Trump has once again demonstrated that if need be, they can be made to turn with dizzying speed. 

He did it last spring when he mobilized the awesome resources of American business to produce a mountain of medical materiel in record time to meet the emergency sparked by the Chinese virus. 

And he just did it again by nominating Judge Barrett to meet the political emergency threatened by anti-democratic forces massing to upset the 2020 election. 

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has already announced that Barrett’s confirmation hearings will begin October 12. With the Republicans holding a 53-47 majority, and with no more than two likely defections (at most), she is likely to be seated before the election on November 3. It is imperative that the Supreme Court, which may be called to rule upon various electoral anomalies, be sitting with its full complement of nine justices. 

Barrett graduated first in her class from Notre Dame Law School and then held two clerkships, the second for Justice Antonin Scalia. She was in private practice briefly before returning to teach law at Notre Dame, where she still teaches. In 2017, President Trump nominated her for the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. 

I became aware of Judge Barrett in 2018 after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. Her name appeared on a shortlist of candidates for Kennedy’s replacement. In the event, President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, whose disgraceful treatment during his hearings by Democratic senators and the media is still horrifying to contemplate. 

Will Barrett face the same level of unhinged vituperation? I think it unlikely, though I remember a conversation I had with a well-informed legal observer in the immediate aftermath of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “Well, the public was so repelled by that spectacle that Trump’s next nomination is likely to go more smoothly,” I said. 

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The hope was that exposure to the West would cause China to develop free market economies and more freedom for its people. Yet, as Kevin Rudd and Daniel Rosen wrote in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, “China’s economic norms are diverging from, rather than converging with, the West’s. Long promised changes detailed at the beginning of the Xi era haven’t materialized.” China’s defense spending has risen ten-fold in the past two decades, while the U.S.’ slightly more than doubled. The U.S. still spends more than three times what China spends, but the gap is narrowing. China has built at least seven artificial islands in the South China Sea and has conducted war games in that area, through which an estimated one-third of global trade passes. In consolidating power, Xi Jinping has become the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.

In 2013, on visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia, Xi unveiled his “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), a center piece of China’s foreign policy. The “belt” refers to the old “Silk Road,” which extended from Xi’an in Central China to the Mediterranean Sea, just west of Aleppo. The “road” refers to 21st Century sea routes. Today, according to Wikipedia, 138 countries in Asia, Africa the Middle East, the Caribbean, South America and Europe have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China’s BRI. The stated purpose is to connect Asia with the Middle East, Africa and Europe to improve regional integration, increase trade and stimulate economic growth. This has been done through loans to countries and direct investments in ports, roads, rail lines, airports, “…one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived” is the way the Council on Foreign Relations put it in January of this year.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-9-23-the-taboo-on-reporting-the-r

When you read something, you generally notice the things that the writer explicitly mentions, while you rarely take note of what the writer omits. So at first it’s easy to skip over the omission, in nearly all reporting about violent crime in the United States, of the information about the race of the perpetrator or suspect. Still, if you read enough about this subject of violent crime, at some point you just can’t help noticing this universal omission. Indeed, should you once start to look for information on the race of criminals or suspected criminals, you will quickly realize that something weird is going on.

Is it appropriate that this subject of race of perpetrators almost never gets mentioned? Perhaps there is some legitimate concern about not wanting to potentially tar all members of a race with the suspected bad conduct of a relative few. But that concern would not explain the extremes to which the suppression of this information gets carried. Even when the race of the perpetrator is known and could be helpful to the public in potentially assisting the police in identifying a suspect, you won’t find the information in a media report of the crime. Clearly there is a powerful taboo at work. Maybe it’s a rule officially prescribed and enforced by media higher-ups; or perhaps it’s one of those unspoken orthodoxies that reporters must follow in order to avoid being “canceled” by their erstwhile friends and colleagues.

This subject turns out to be important. The reason it is important is that the general suppression of information about the race of suspects enables narratives to arise that run directly contrary to facts, but the facts have been so effectively suppressed that no one knows them. The obvious narrative at issue here is the narrative that police across America unfairly target young black males in enforcement of the criminal laws.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-science-is-an-experiment-certain-to-fail-11600972161?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Trump has ordered an end to training on “white privilege” and “critical race theory” in the federal bureaucracy. The directive is a good first step toward removing identity politics from federal operations. Next up should be the millions of taxpayer dollars devoted annually to cultivating race- and sex-based grievance in the sciences. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all embraced the idea that science is pervaded by systemic bias that handicaps minorities and women. Those agencies have taken on the job of extirpating such inequity on the theory that scientific advancement depends on a “diverse” scientific workforce.

Earlier this year the NIH announced a new round of “Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research.” Academic science labs could get additional federal money if they hire “diverse” researchers; no mention was made of relevant scientific qualifications. This latest grant solicitation expanded the agency’s social-justice agenda into novel territory. Besides the usual preferences for blacks, Hispanics and women, the NIH would fund student researchers who were or had been homeless, who were or had been in foster care, who had been eligible for free school lunches, or who had received WIC payments (a food program for low-income mothers) as a child or mother.

The federal science agencies have absorbed the vocabulary of academic victimology—from “intersectionality” to “heteronormativity” and “stereotype threat.” Intersectionality holds that people who can check off more than one victimhood box are particularly burdened by American bigotry. Science labs angling for the latest NIH diversity supplements will increase their chances of federal funding by hiring a woman who is also an underrepresented minority, disabled or from a “disadvantaged background.”

The National Science Foundation is currently doling out $29 million through its “Advance” program. Advance seeks to use “intersectional approaches in the design of systemic change strategies” to combat bias in the STEM fields. Successful applications will recognize that “gender, race and ethnicity do not exist in isolation from each other and from other categories of social identity.” The NSF funders are particularly concerned about policies that “do not mitigate implicit bias in hiring, tenure, and promotion” and that lead to “women and racial and ethnic minorities being evaluated less favorably.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16542/transition-integrity-project-nils-gilman

It seems that criticizing the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) and their plan to disrupt and steal the 2020 presidential election can be dangerous.

So — the leadership of TIP has spoken. Now you know their thinking, their motives and their true objectives. It seems Nils Gilman wants Michael Anton executed.

The brutality and viciousness of Marxism and its adherents is on display. Those that may have held reservations or harbored some doubt on my analysis of what TIP really had in store for the election now have their answers.

If Gilman advocates executing someone by firing squad for daring to question TIP, what other penalties and extraordinary measures were discussed by the supposed bipartisan arbiters of the electoral process? How is this “normal?”

Are you disturbed by how your news information is “curated?”

It seems that criticizing the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) and their plan to disrupt and steal the 2020 presidential election can be dangerous. Michael Anton, a former Trump administration official and now of the Claremont Institute, published an article titled, “The Coming Coup” that seems to have caught the attention of TIP co-founder Nils Gilman. According to the journalist Natalie Winters:

“Gilman, who serves as Vice President of Programs at the Chinese Communist Party-linked Berggruen Institute, took to Twitter to express his desire that Anton be executed in the same fashion as Robert Brasillach.

“Specifically, he insisted ‘Michael Anton is the Robert Brasillach of our times and deserves the same fate.'”

I’ll save you the effort of searching for Brasillach — he was a French author and journalist who advocated for the fascists and was executed by firing squad in 1945. So — the leadership of TIP has spoken. Now you know their thinking, their motives and their true objectives. It seems Gilman wants Anton executed.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/prager-u-video-i-love-america-too-much-stay-silent-prager-university/

Nestride Yumga experienced real corruption and civil rights abuses in Africa. Then she came to America, the land of opportunity, education, and freedom. So when Black Lives Matter protests declared America guilty of systemic racism and injustice, she knew she had to defend her adoptive country, and she did it with courage. Don’t miss this video!

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/coronavirus-policing-wildfires-effective-response-requires-collective-common-sense/#slide-1

Experts, not commonsense citizens, have been failing America.

Without common sense in government, civilization cannot continue.

After the summer protests and rioting in many large cities, activists demanded a defunding, or at least radical pullbacks, of the police. So-called crime experts often concurred. So some city governments ignored public warnings and diminished their police presence despite a sharp rise in crime in many cities. Looting and arson were often ignored.

If you call 911 in a large American city, there is no guarantee that anyone will answer promptly and send out police to aid the endangered. So gun sales have soared. Some people who never before owned weapons, or who even opposed the use of firearms, are now terrified to remain unarmed. Self-protection often outweighs abstract ideology.

According to a recent Gallup poll, most black Americans favor maintaining or increasing police presence. Often, city officials who support cutting back on law enforcement still expect their own homes and property to be constantly policed. The same is often true of activist elites who live far from the inner city.

Large swaths of the American West are now charred by out-of-control wildfires. Some governors and many federal bureaucrats blame the conflagrations on climate change. But those who actually live within forests, or on mountains and foothills, that are historically vulnerable to wildfires know that the epic droughts of 2013–15 killed or dried out millions of acres of trees and vegetation.

https://americanmind.org/features/ending-the-blm-revolution/blue-truth-matters/

It’s time to release the data that can exonerate police.

The Black Lives Matter movement trades on Americans’ ignorance about the demographics of criminal offending. As long as that ignorance prevails, BLM’s anti-cop narrative will continue destroying the institutions of law and order.

Activists and their media enablers present racial disparities in police activity—be it stops, arrests, or officer use of force—as prima facie evidence of police bias. They generate those racial disparities by comparing policing data to population ratios.

In New York City, for example, a little over 50% of all pedestrian stops conducted by the New York Police Department have a black subject. But blacks are slightly less than a quarter of the city’s population. Voilà! Proof of racism, declare the mainstream media, Democratic politicians, and virtually the entirety of academia.

Census data is the wrong benchmark for evaluating police behavior, however. The proper benchmark is crime rates, because policing today is data-driven, deploying officers to where criminals prey on their victims.