RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gregbyrnes/2023/02/03/helium-supply-chain-failure-worries-hospitals-crime-labs-welders-and-even-balloon-retailers-n1667789

The United States is beginning the third year of a helium supply-chain crisis. Some experts think it will last until at least 2024. Consumers may have noticed some party retailers going out of business, with helium prices in a few markets almost doubling. A Texas retailer reports tanks went from $195 to $365, and they can only get half tanks because of shortages. The Party City chain, where balloons were a key profit center, has filed for bankruptcy.

But helium shortages mean more than fewer fun diversions like blimps, party balloons, or Daffy Duck floating down Broadway.

Last year the Miami-Dade Police crime lab and the Medical Examiner’s Office had to pay $1,800 per tank for helium to run instruments to identify deadly drugs and complete autopsy blood tests. Helium is used by semiconductor manufacturers and welders, and of critical importance, it is used to cool MRI machines in hospitals.

Without a reliable supply of helium in medical care, the public may face hard choices: rationing, sky-high pricing, or limiting tests patients can get. All could be on the horizon. This may not represent a complete regression to third-world medical care, but the supply chain failure is not without consequences for public health and safety. That this is happening in one of the most natural resource-rich countries in the world is more than strange. If one consequence of Biden’s green energy policy is the collapse of this vital supply chain, what can Congress do to reverse course?

The U.S. is one of the world’s largest sources of helium, but with supply not meeting demand, prices are skyrocketing. Helium is captured as a byproduct of natural gas drilling, which has been targeted by the Biden administration as part of its war on fossil fuels. Currently, the United State’s helium reserve is in Amarillo, Texas, a state replete with natural gas.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2023/02/03/joe_manchins_wifes_commission_received_200m_from_omnibus_bill_878323.html

Included in the $1.7 trillion omnibus package supported by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was a provision to give $200 million to the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency headed by Manchin’s wife, Gayle.

The Appalachian Regional Commission operates as an economic development partnership between the federal government and 13 Appalachian states, distributing infrastructure grants in those states.

Its head, Gayle Manchin, makes $160,000 in her role as its federal co-chair, according to a Fox News report. She was confirmed by the Senate in 2021.

The $200 million in funding is a $5 million increase from last year.

“The West Virginia senator previously helped craft earlier legislation, following his wife’s 2021 appointment, that allocated $1 billion in funding over five years for the ARC,” Fox reported. Sen. Manchin was a key Democratic negotiator of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which doubled the commission’s funding level.

Gayle Manchin defended the spending increase in 2021, claiming this funding is necessary to, “more adequately meet the overwhelming needs of communities impacted by job losses resulting from the decline in the coal industry. These grants will be instrumental to the long-term diversification and economic growth in Appalachia.”

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

“On Thursday the University of North Carolina board of trustees vote 12-0 to create a new school committed to free expression in higher education.”    Editorial, The Wall Street Journal   January 26, 2023

 As is always true, many problems confront our nation, but one is in the forefront of what divides us: culture. It is the culture wars that strike at the heart of what it means to be an American, a nation of people from every corner of the world, individuals with myriad beliefs but with one common objective: to live freely. But what happens when definitions of freedom are in conflict – when, for example, the wishes of teenagers, empowered by teachers, run counter to the desires of parents? When we disagree as to the founding principles of our nation, or when merit is subservient to racial diversity in college admissions?

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” is a saying attributed to Albert Einstein. It is applicable in the “Woke”[1] world we inhabit: Does it make sense to persist in pouring money into the gaping jaws of public education, in hopes that this time money will cure failing schools? Why do teachers, administrators, and the curriculum escape blame when students score poorly on international tests? Does it make sense to blame the weapon above the one who pulled the trigger in a mass shooting? And why are criminals so often released without bail, even after having committed armed robbery, and why is the mental health of the gunman not considered a cause for the crime. And why were interest rates kept artificially low, even as federal debt expanded exponentially?

https://thespectator.com/topic/the-ever-shifting-excuses-about-hunter-bidens-laptop/

Hunter Biden’s defense about his incriminating laptop sounds like an old joke about a trial lawyer who was accused of letting his dog bite a stranger. The lawyer’s first line of defense was that “it couldn’t happen because my dog was tied up that night.” When told there were witnesses who had seen him walking the dog, he said, “Okay, we were out walking but my dog doesn’t bite.” If that fails, then, “Well, yes, my dog did give you a little nip, but it wasn’t a bad one.” Then, “Granted, you had to go to the hospital for surgery, but you provoked my sweet pup.” If all else fails, “What do you mean I own a dog?”

That, in essence, is how Hunter Biden and his family have defended themselves against the damning information on the laptop that he abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. Or, as his lawyers might say, “allegedly abandoned in the alleged state of Delaware.” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine has aptly labeled the computer the “laptop from hell,” and Hunter is none too eager to admit ownership or culpability. Neither is his family, who see both legal and political peril in the computer’s contents.

Just look at this long list of Hunter’s defenses, one crumbling after the other, like the lawyer with a dog.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/jiggerypokery_wokery.html

I must admit that I have grown fond of this new adjective, woke.  It saves me the time of pointing out how delusional, disingenuous, intolerant, illiterate, and religiously fanatical the woke minions tend to be.  Ultimately, to be woke means both “deceived” and “deceiving,” and for these reasons, it slides nicely into a linguistically fun Scottish phrase, jiggery-pokery, used to describe dishonest behavior.  Taken together, jiggery-pokery wokery is amusing enough to belittle the woke legions’ cult-like comportment and cut it down to size for its mindless silliness. 

Yet it is not silly, is it?  As amusing and bemusing as its zealous adherents appear, their devotion to wokeism’s edicts (I won’t call them “principles”) is deadly serious.  Any small business–owner who has had the misfortune of struggling to earn a living near the scene of some perceived injustice providing the pretense for Antifa and Black Lives Matter arsonists to unleash a new criminal campaign of burning, looting, and murdering in the name of “justice,” knows that once the woke go berserker, no innocent person or private property is safe.  The woke love to destroy whatever they touch — culture, infrastructure, social cohesion, rational thought.  To be woke is to embrace chaos and injury as a philosophy.

From an anthropological perspective, wokeism is fascinating because its practitioners believe they are creative freethinkers while they act as lobotomized sheep.  Whatever the woke wizards posing as priests tell their needy followers, the woke herds accept as truth.  Russia stole the election from Hillary!  Man-made global warming causes earthquakes!  Black police officers killing a black suspect is proof of “white supremacy”!  These assertions, thrown out to their intended audience with all the intellectual depth of a viral internet meme, are never questioned or analyzed.  They are quickly accepted as doctrinal “truths” to be defended at all preposterous costs.  Anyone caught noticing inconsistencies — say, wondering why “my body, my choice” does not deserve consideration in a debate over forced experimental mRNA injections — is immediately branded a heretic and thrown to the wolves for not displaying sufficient jiggery-pokery wokery.  In the cult of the woke, the wokiest wonks know to comply.

https://dianebederman.com/and-god-saidchoose-life-for-you-and-your-children/

Something has gone very wrong. We have stopped choosing life; for ourselves and our children – including the unborn. We are intentionally killing the weak. We are sacrificing our children like Moloch. Why? How did we get here? When will it stop?

Who are the people who promote this culture?

La Maison Simons, commonly known as Simons, is a fashion retailer in Canada, headquartered in Quebec City, Quebec. It is a family business currently operated by Richard and Peter Simons. The business was established in 1840 by the son of a Scottish immigrant to Quebec as a dry goods store. In the 1960s, the focus of the business changed to a department store, incorporating youth-oriented brands.

It is so youth oriented that the powers that be at that company sat around the table one day and asked “What can we do to get our product noticed?” Hey, why not promote medically assisted aid in death to the sick and elderly! What a great idea! So they did. Every time you purchase something from Simons you can look at it and be proud they promote the killing of people.

And those publicists/marketers at Balenciaga. They sat around their table and asked themselves, how can we promote our product? Hey, let’s reach out to pedophiles and sado-masochists with an ad that shows children the beauty of bondage. What a great idea!

And BMO uses Drag Queens for promoting their wares. Why? Oh it’s about inclusivity.

And then we have VISA. It’s so important that a Drag Queen tells us to use our debit card. Why? Why are Drag Queens and their culture being normalized in commercials that children see?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-stench-of-fascism/

The stench of fascism and betrayal is suffocating our democracy, but nobody wants to talk about it. We sanitize our language so that classified documents strewn over unsecured garages and centers of Chinese influence are talked about as though it’s a matter of carelessness and not design. The indisputable brute fact is this: our commander-in-chief and his family have made themselves wealthy by taking bribes from foreign powers, chief among them our mortal enemy Communist China. Nobody seems to be asking, but how exactly were the inexplicable decisions to turn Afghanistan over to China and the Taliban made, and what American interest was served by this?

In classic fascist fashion, the Biden administration has suborned the intelligence community and the Department of Justice to censor and harass its political opponents. These include school parents and Capitol trespassers whom it libels and imprisons as “domestic terrorists” and (unarmed) “insurrectionists.” In typical fascist moves, it has suborned corporate America into spying on its political opponents with the goal of cancelling them and silencing their opinions. Just this week AT&T shut down the fastest growing and fourth largest cable news network, Newsmax TV, depriving 13 million viewers of access to its reporting. This attack on the First Amendment came on the heels of Twitter’s exposure of the way the FBI had put its platform on the federal payroll and dictated its censorship of tweets that could have changed the results of the last presidential election. The same fascistic arrangement was made with other tech social media giants like Facebook.

The Democrats have targeted their chief political opponent Donald Trump, who received 74 million votes in the last election, with the longest, most determined, and most vicious campaign of character assassination in modern history, and possibly ever. They have warned other potential presidential contenders like Governor Ron DeSantis that they will get the same treatment. They have smeared Republicans as racists, white supremacists and white nationalists, and has done this in the service of rigged elections in its drive to establish a one-party state.

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.