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.

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.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-deepen-the-washington-swamp-special-counsel-hearing-corruption-washington-documents-committees-11675288301?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Here’s one way to divide America’s politics. Republicans and conservatives think the Washington Swamp is real. Democrats and progressives don’t believe it exists. This division of belief matters more than the existence of UFOs because whether the Swamp is real looks likely to be an issue in the 2024 presidential election.

President Biden gives his State of the Union speech next week, and no doubt he’ll describe his Washington as a city of bounty and benevolence.

Ron DeSantis disagrees. It was hard not to notice how, in his inaugural speech last month, the Florida governor went out of his way to describe Washington differently—unaccountable, a mockery of the rule of law, dismal, floundering, a binge.

These Swamp thoughts are set in motion by what might seem two unrelated news stories this week. But for those of us who believe, the Swamp covers a lot of damp ground.

The first was about the Justice Department and director of national intelligence telling the Senate Intelligence Committee they wouldn’t talk in detail to the committee about the Trump or Biden classified documents. The reason? It would get in the way of the special counsels appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Come again? The committee’s Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) had it exactly right about this mega-stonewall: “That just cannot stand.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-freedom-is-getting-more-fragile/

In January of 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”  Sixty-six years later, the truth of that observation is all around us. If we don’t reject the politicians and policies that compromise our freedoms, this generation may be the one who will live through that extinction.

The erosion of our freedom is not a paranoid figment of the libertarian imagination. Recently the Cato Institution released its Human Freedom Index for 2022, and found that globally, freedom has declined. The Land of the Free has dropped seven points since last year, and now ranks 23rd of 160 nations.

Politicized and unscientific Covid mitigation protocols account for some of this decline. Such policies furthered the loss of freedom by violating “the rule of law and the freedom of movement, expression, and assembly,” which are among Cato’s criteria for measuring freedom. But here in the U.S. we have seen the degradation of our freedoms long before Covid.

The gross violations of the rule of law, for example, accelerated after the 2016 election. The accusation that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to fix the election was fomented by our intelligence, investigative, and surveillance agencies. The special prosecutor took two years to debunk the charge.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton, who patently violated the laws regulating the handling of classified documents, as well as willfully destroying evidence, was given a pass by FBI Director James Comey weeks before the election, even though Clinton’s violations were much worse than those of General Petraeus and others who were disgraced, prosecuted, and some incarcerated.

Six years later, Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound was invaded by a heavily armed battalion of FBI agents, who searched his home and rifled his wife’s underwear drawer, and scattered documents on the floor for a staged photo. Trump ended up in a still ongoing investigation. A few months later, classified documents were found in Joe Biden’s think-tank office and at his home and garage. In his case, there were no raids by armed agents, no leaked staged photos for the media, and no participation by the FBI at all. Biden’s aides and personal lawyers handled the whole show, and there is still an embargo on sharing details with the voters.

Such examples could be multiplied, such as the kid-gloves used by the DOJ and FBI in handling BLM and Antifa rioters and anti-prolife vandals and arsonists, compared to the Stasi thug-tactics employed against the January 6 and prolife protestors.