RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/chicago-mayor-brandon-johnsons-first-100-days

Brandon Johnson has reached the 100-day mark as mayor of Chicago. His actions and statements in that time suggest that the city will face continued decline. He remains beholden to the group most responsible for his election: the Chicago Teachers Union. And when it comes to the twin dangers shadowing Chicago’s future—crime and fiscal irresponsibility—he has set the stage to make them even worse.  

Johnson was a former member of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), and the union provided him with crucial support that enabled him to vault past better-known candidates into the mayoral runoff. He has wasted no time in repaying his benefactor. He named Jen Johnson (no relation), the CTU’s former chief of staff, to be his deputy mayor of Education, Youth, and Human Services—a position that has traditionally taken part in negotiations with the union. But even before union negotiations for the next contract began, the mayor unilaterally gave the union a gratuity, extending parental leave to 12 weeks. That’s one less arrow in the city’s quiver for negotiations.

Mayor Johnson also fired Allison Arwady, the city’s health commissioner. Arwady was unpopular with the teachers’ union because she aided Lori Lightfoot in executing one of her best policies—reopening public schools during Covid. School closures have caused widespread learning loss in children, particularly ones in the most vulnerable communities that Johnson purports to serve. Nothing better illustrates Johnson’s likely course on education policy: he will serve special interests at the expense of Chicago’s children. When asked why he fired Arwady without having even met with her, Johnson gave no answer other than to quote a cryptic rap lyric. Chicagoans should expect no transparency when it comes to the mayor’s relations with the union, which has essentially taken over city government.

Shortly before Johnson became mayor, a large group of teenagers came downtown on a weekend evening, vandalized stores, and harassed and beat up passersby. Mayor Lori Lightfoot condemned the violence. Johnson, in contrast, labeled the behavior unacceptable but also sought to excuse it, saying that it was not constructive to “demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” Asked after he had become mayor when crime would come down, Johnson responded that one could not expect results until poverty and the trauma of communities were addressed. This claim flies in the face of all that we know about crime control. Many communities poorer than Chicago’s have nothing like the city’s levels of crime. Moreover, proven strategies are available for reducing crime, like simply filling the many vacant positions in the Chicago police force. But Johnson is more interested in making crime a prop for his progressive talking points about inequality.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/09/trump-is-a-vulgarian-but-hes-a-competent-vulgarian/

EXCERPT

Apropos Western civilisation, Sheridan writes: “Trump was right to argue the ideological left had blighted schools. He was right to champion communities left behind by globalisation, right to want to secure borders. There were also many things he was wrong about.”

What “many things”? Please tell.

What things of substance did Trump do that were wrong? Getting NATO countries to stump up more for their own defence? Moving America’s embassy in Israel to West Jerusalem? Here’s some more things that apparently Trump did right according to Sheridan: creating a booming economy pre-COVID, calling out China and imposing selective tariffs, increasing US defence spending, the Abraham Peace Accords and “appointing three brilliant judges to the US Supreme Court.”

Why wouldn’t people vote for Trump if they read of his achievement’s in Sheridan’s many articles, supposedly decrying Trump. Professor so-and-so has a very brusque and crude manner and even though he is on the brink of discovering how to commercialise nuclear fusion, we can’t possibly have him on the faculty. Hmm? If you can handle a bit of Trump’s rough and tumble language, it’s all gravy from there on.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/alex_soros_announces_shifting_priorities_to_confront_the_threat_of_a_maga_victory_that_stands_to_undermine_the_war_in_ukraine.html

Alex Soros wants to set the record straight: what might look like a retreat in Europe is really just a shifting of priorities to head off the swelling tide of freedom and populism in the West, or what Soros calls the “MAGA-style Republican” movement and President Donald Trump.

Soros, heir of notorious Nazi collaborator George Soros and chair of the Open Society Foundations, authored a brief essay recently published by Politico; from the article:

News reports that the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Soros are ‘leaving Europe’ are misleading. We are not leaving.

When looking at the current state of Europe, however, it’s clear that our foundation needs to change….

So, as OSF retools the way it works globally, we are shifting our priorities in Europe accordingly. Yes, this means we will be exiting some areas of work as we focus on today’s challenges, as well as those we will face tomorrow. And yes, we will also be reducing our headcount significantly, seeking to ensure more money goes out to where it’s most needed.

As Soros also writes, “we need to be ready and able to respond to an uncertain and dangerous future” which is… ? Well, the threat isn’t a “what” but rather a who. In one of the last paragraphs, we find this:

As someone who spends up to half their time working on the Continent and thinks former United States President Donald Trump — or at least someone with his isolationist and anti-European policies — will be the Republican nominee, I believe a MAGA-style Republican victory in next year’s U.S. presidential election could, in the end, be worse for the EU than for the U.S. Such an outcome will imperil European unity and undermine the progress achieved on many fronts in response to the war in Ukraine.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/05/can-bidens-jobs-number-be-trusted-any-more/

President Joe Biden has staked so much on his claim that he’s “created” 13.5 million jobs since taking office that it’s worth asking if his Labor Department is now goosing job growth figures to help him out.

On Friday just before the holiday weekend, Labor released its estimates for job growth in August – which it said worked out to 187,000, beating economists’ forecasts.

But at the same time, the government cut the job growth numbers for the previous two months by a total of 110,000.

As a matter of fact, Labor has quietly cut its initial job growth estimates for every month this year.

Based on its initial estimates, the economy should have created 2.2 million jobs in 2023. Now Commerce says that number is less than 1.9 million. In other words, it’s exaggerated job gains by more than 300,000 – or 19%.

“Every single month this year has seen its payroll numbers revised down. It’s difficult to stress how unusual this is as it’s so statistically unlikely. There is clearly something wrong with the estimations being done by President Joe Biden’s Department of Labor,” said EJ Antoni, an economist at the Heritage Foundation.

Earlier this year, we noted that Biden’s jobs record could be even more exaggerated because of the way the Labor Department fills in gaps in its survey data. We wrote that:

Jonathan Pingle, chief U.S. economist at UBS, told the Journal ‘that the level of nonfarm payroll employment at the end of 2022 was likely too high by several hundred thousand, and that the overstatement might have carried into 2023.’

The White House touted the August jobs news, with Biden declaring that “America is now in one of the strongest job-creating periods in our history — in the history of our country.”

He also bragged that “more than 700,000 people joined the labor force last month, which means the highest share of working-age Americans are in the workforce now than at any time in the past 20 years.”

He added, “People are coming off the sidelines, getting back to their workplaces.”

But that’s not what’s happening at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/austins-nightmarish-escalating-crime/

On the heels of the death of George Floyd, hundreds flooded to the streets, convincing city officials that cutting the budget of our police officers would be a necessary step in “making things right.” But now, years later, we’re seeing the effect of such a campaign, which is not only hurting thousands of fellow officers, but also the cities that they desperately tried so hard to protect.

One of those cities is Austin, Texas. That’s right, one of the sparkling jewels of that great state has now fallen to a higher level of violence. It’s seen a massive increase in homicide over the past few years; and its police presence has dwindled, to the point that the city’s own Police Chief has had enough.

Thomas Villarreal, president of the Austin Police Association, recently appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss the hazardous actions of city officials. He discussed how the city cut a massive $150 million from the police budget three years ago, and how the force hasn’t bounced back since.

“We just continue to have a city council that doesn’t show its police officers that [it] cares about them,” he explained.

Villarreal continued, “Back in December 2017, we had a city council vote down a police contract for the first time in the history of negotiating contracts. And, you know, we pushed forward to 2018, tried to get back under contract. Our city decided to go through what they called reimagining police oversight. And then, you know, we got back under contract.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/reparations-for-everyone/

For all the blather about reparations and who owes what to whom, we ought to step back and consider who among those who reside in the United States have been aggrieved, how recently, for how long, what was the impact at the time, are there ramifications today, and what is the overall assessment?

Many ethnic and racial groups at various times throughout our history made significant contributions, which across the broad swath of today’s population, remain virtually unknown.

Focusing on the Chinese

European Jews arriving in the 1890s and again in the 1910s were kept out of every corporation of prominence, denied housing, shunned by the guilds, and kept at a distance socially by “polite” society. The Irish were once considered vermin. So, pay their descendants reparations? The Chinese workers in the 1890s along the Pacific coast – Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle – were poorly treated. Pay them as well?

In the 1800s, for example, the Central Pacific Railroad in California (that hotbed of reparations proposals) employed as many as 12,000 Chinese as young as age 12. The pool of these workers represented America’s largest industrial workforce. Nine out of 10 people employed by the Central Pacific Railroad were first-generation Chinese in America – not merely of Chinese ancestry.

Precious little had been recorded or even noted about this vital workforce, while European and American workers of the same era had been described and characterized at length.

In 2012, the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project assembled a massive collection of oral accounts, documents, photos, and other paraphernalia on this area of American history. This Chinese railroad workforce, it has since been determined, provided the lion’s share of the most labor-intensive tasks: cutting through granite or blasting through it when needed and effectively laying track across the far western states.

@billmaher

: “The woke believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan.”

BILL MAHER: I’m always trying to make the case that liberal is a different animal than woke. Because it is. You can be woke with all the nonsense that now implies, but don’t say that somehow it is an extension of liberalism. It is most often an undoing of liberalism. You can have your points of view and your positions, but don’t try to piggyback on what I have always believed.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/04/the-tyranny-of-google/

EXCERPT:

Google turns 25-years-old today. Back then, it was a given that technology would change the world for the better. And by studying the practices of the founders, we could improve ourselves, too. So, how well does this assessment of Google hold up today?

In its early years, Google embodied technical excellence and good taste. Its original (and for a while, only) service was a web search engine based on a simple borrowed idea. The search results were rated according to the density of in-bound links, just as academic papers are ranked by the number of times they are cited. This method gave us results far superior to those of its rival search engines.

Google also benefited from having a certain mystique. Its front page – google.com – was immaculately clean and uncluttered. The service was very fast and helpful, too, correcting your misspellings. Initially, Google seemed to have no interest in serving us any other products or services, or apparently, even making money. Occasionally, the front page featured a whimsical cartoon. Google seemed to embody the kind of a shiny, hopeful liberal idealism expressed in Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s boyish founders, would be our companions to the future, just as Kirk and Spock had been.

At one point in his book, Jarvis allows himself a dark thought: What would happen if Google fell from its saintly standards and tried to screw us? We needn’t worry, he assures us: ‘Google could lose our trust the moment it misuses the data it has about us or decides to use our growing dependence on it as a chokehold to charge us (as cable companies, phone companies and airlines do).’

Such optimism seems very naïve today. It is still true that Google does not charge us, as consumers, directly. But multiple authorities across several continents have judged that it does operate a chokehold on competition, and this costs us all a lot.

For example, in 2022, the EU levied a record fine against Alphabet, Google’s umbrella company. Having once vowed never to detain people on their journey to another destination longer than necessary, Google now seeks to keep people on its own properties for as long as possible. According to the European Commission, Google abused its market dominance to give an illegal advantage to its shopping service. Google also dominates dozens of markets that once had thriving competition, from smartphone platforms to web browsers, all of which serve as funnels to deliver us to its advertising business. Google also participated in a secret wage-fixing cartel against US technology workers that suppressed wages by some $3 billion, according to one complainant in a class-action lawsuit.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/04/what-the-left-did-to-our-country/

In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.

With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.

The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.

After getting elected through temporarily pivoting to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.

To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were racist. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist transformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and racist nation.

The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.

Yet Obama’s unfufilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary transformation of the Democratic Party and country.

It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans vote and conduct their legal system.

Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.

How was all this possible?

Covid had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.

https://mrctv.org/blog/craig-bannister/august-unemployment-rate-jumps-employment-june-and-july-revised-downward

In August, the unemployment rate jumped 0.3 points, from 3.5% 3.8%, as the number of long-term unemployed increased, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Friday.

The nation’s unemployment rate jumped 0.3 percentage point to 3.8% in August, as the number of unemployed persons increased by 514,000 to 6.4 million.

Among the unemployed, the number of job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs increased by 294,000 to 2.9 million in August, offsetting a decrease of 280,000 in July.

The rise in the unemployment rate, coupled an increase in job losers, highlights ongoing challenges in the economy. Meanwhile, the number of persons employed part-time for economic reasons remained unchanged.

Key economic measures for August:

The number of unemployed persons increased by 514,000 from July.
Increases were recorded in both the number of persons unemployed less than 5 weeks, at 2.2 million, and the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more), at 1.3 million.
The long-term unemployed accounted for 20.3% of all unemployed persons.
Labor force participation rate rose by 0.2 percentage points, to 62.8%.