RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/11/americas-u-haul-revolution/

“It’s not a civil war. Call it the U-Haul Revolution. No shots fired. Just people moving for personal freedom and growth.”

Not everyone in Blue State America is moving to a far healthier Red State. It only seems that way. But enough are doing so to say, without a doubt, it is one of the most significant trends in America today. A revolution of sorts.

It’s long been known in demography and population economics that people leave areas known for authoritarian tyranny, stagnation, stultification, crime and excessive regulation in order to find the opposite somewhere else: economic freedom, dynamism, social diversity and good government.

It’s a big reason why literally hundreds of millions of people around the world have expressed their desire to emigrate to the U.S.

But it’s also true within countries, too.

Amid a backdrop of slow overall population growth, a problem in itself, comes the mass exodus of more than a million Americans moving largely from Blue States to Red States, expressing dissatisfaction with high taxes, rampant crime, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, excessive state government regulations, a politically stifling “woke” culture, and lack of economic opportunity and freedom.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/import-americans/

A skills-based immigration system is a possible answer to American demographic decline.

Now that Elon Musk has tweeted that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization,” it must be true. America’s total fertility rate fell in 2020 to just 1.67 births per female, the lowest in history, and well below the replacement level of 2.1. Ten years ago, when I published How Civilizations Die), the United States still made babies at the replacement rate, though (as I noted) this depended on high fertility among two groups of Americans: Evangelical Christians and Hispanics.

Now demographic winter has descended on America, and there is no obvious path to recovery. The only medium-term solution lies in immigration of skilled adults, and the only two prospective sources of large-scale immigration of skilled adults are China and India.

Civilizations die because they want to. Nations that live for the present and eschew a vision of their future do not take the trouble to raise children. Today’s demographic decline has precedents in the hollowing-out of Hellenistic Greece after the Alexandrian conquests, and the decline of Rome several centuries later.

In the modern era, religious commitment has been the strongest predictor of the desire to bring future generations into the world; other writers, notably the British demographer Eric Kaufmann, have made parallel arguments. What demographers call the great fertility transition occurred with urbanization and the end of child labor. In agricultural societies and early modern industry children were cheap labor and considered (as in wrongful death lawsuits) a resource with a definable monetary value. Once national pension systems replaced family care for the aged, and children no longer were expected to work until early adulthood, children offered spiritual rather than monetary value.

https://www.city-journal.org/smash-and-grab-retail

When police busted a shoplifting ring operating out of a liquor store last spring, they calculated that the dozen or so people involved had swiped at least $375,000 worth of goods from retailers such as Walmart, Lowe’s, and Walgreens. The pair heading the ring relied on small-time thieves, including several with drug arrest records, to launch brazen “grab-and-go” operations in which they snatched expensive goods and then raced out of stores and fled in cars with phony license plates. Though police and prosecutors often categorize shoplifting as a nonviolent crime, the gang’s sprees resulted in several physical confrontations, including one in which a gang member assaulted a store employee with a stun gun. This may sound similar to the organized smash-and-grab lootings that have plagued high-end retailers in San Francisco and other Northern California communities recently, but this gang was operating out of Daytona Beach, Florida—and had done so for nearly two years.

In fact, retail crime has been rising throughout the U.S. for the past five years, with organized criminal rings targeting stores everywhere from Woonsocket (Rhode Island) to Greensboro (North Carolina) to Grafton (Wisconsin). The National Retail Federation reported that store losses mounted from $453,940 per $1 billion in sales in 2015 to $719,458 in 2020. The biggest increase over that period happened not during the pandemic but in 2019, when total losses from shoplifting surged to $61 billion, up from $50 billion the previous year. The Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021 moderated losses, largely because stores were closed or had curtailed operating hours. Now that retailing has resumed, crime has spiked again.

Even more troubling, shoplifting no longer fits its traditional mold as a nonviolent crime perpetrated mostly by teens or substance-abusing adults. Nearly two-thirds of the retailers surveyed by the National Retail Federation said that violence associated with store thefts has risen, led by organized gangs that resell the goods they steal. Corie Berry, CEO of Best Buy, recently said that store crime had become so pervasive that it was depressing profits and traumatizing staff. Like retailers, top law-enforcement officials place some of the blame for the crime surge on a widespread lessening of penalties for shoplifting. “As we’ve witnessed brazen smash and grabs, consequences are key,” Laura Cooper, head of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said before Thanksgiving. “Without deterrents and accountability, communities will be victimized, and businesses terrorized.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/is_the_tide_finally_turning.html

Yours truly has been pretty down in the mouth for quite a while, for good reasons.  I mean, look around.  Mask mandates.  Experimental drug mandates.  De facto quarantines.  Literal quarantines.  Destroyed small businesses.  Large businesses unable to fill their shelves.  Men pretending to be women.  Joe Biden in the White House.  Not a lot of happy-face material there. 

I’m getting a sense the tide may be turning.  It sure seems that the super-insulated bureaucratic Deep State is beginning to understand that it is not invincible.  Ironically, there may also be new hope politically if Democrats don’t correct course and remain blind to how self-destructive their Trump obsession will be.

On the COVID front, suddenly we see a rash of what we used to call in the news business “skin-backs.”  In plain English, that would be corrections.  In journalism and politics, that’s particularly painful, so skin-back captures it pretty well.

I think the Covidians have already begun The Big Skin-Back.

So many lies for so long are becoming so obviously lies that they need to get ahead of the story.  Otherwise, their only option is to continue to defend the lies in the face of overwhelming mounting evidence of their duplicity and, after losing battle after battle, completely destroy their credibility, even with mainstream media.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brad-raffensperger-vs-noncitizen-voting-democrats-new-york-eric-adams-republicans-11641848856?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Eric Adams has made his first mistake as New York City’s new mayor, endorsing a City Council bill to let roughly 800,000 noncitizens vote in local elections. Mr. Adams said Saturday he looks forward to “bringing millions more into the democratic process”—assuming a court doesn’t block the plan, which is possible.

In either case, New York’s Democrats are handing Republicans a political issue. Note what Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said on TV over the weekend: “I think that we should have a constitutional amendment, a U.S. constitutional amendment, that only American citizens vote in our elections.”

The host, CBS’s Margaret Brennan, tried to do an instant fact check. “Only U.S. citizens do currently vote in elections, but go on,” she said. This ill-informed response from somebody in the news business suggests average Americans will be blindsided when they hear what New York is doing. It goes way past the experiments with noncitizen voting that a handful of other cities have tried.

San Francisco, notably, opened up elections only for school board, and turnout has been low. In 2020, a city official says, 36 noncitizens registered and 31 voted. In 2018 there were 59 ballots. For context, the current registration form warns that data provided by prospective voters, including name and address, “may be obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/09/what-makes-riots-conspiracies-cabals-and-insurrections-good-or-bad/

“Indeed, men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set the example of doing away with those general laws to which alike can look for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day of danger when their aid may be required.”

—Thucydides, on the stasis at Corcyra

 If the Republicans take the House or perhaps even the Senate, what new norms will they inherit from the Democratic majority of 2019-2021? 

Will Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on national television ritually tear up the text of Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address and grimace while he speaks? Was that Speaker Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) intended vision of her new “narrative” for the 21st-century Congress?

Will the new majority, calling back to 2018, almost immediately begin impeaching an unpopular Biden? And will Republicans likewise dispense with a special counsel’s report, or with formal hearings with an array of witnesses with spirited cross-examinations? 

Will they establish a special committee to investigate the rioting of summer 2020? Perhaps, in the new cannibalistic spirit of the age, will they dig into which national political figures—or colleagues—communicated with the Antifa or Black Lives Matter riot leaders, or offered them bail?

Will Speaker McCarthy veto Democratic committee members and instead appoint his own Democrats—on three criteria: one, that they have previously voted to impeach Biden; two, that either they cannot realistically again run for, or cannot conceivably be reelected to, the House; and three, that in advance they publicly praise and agree with McCarthy on the unwarranted virulence of the 2020 riots?

Will Republicans claim as reason to impeach Joe Biden that he failed to execute the laws as he swore to, by nullifying U.S immigration law? Was he not also guilty of an “abuse of power” and “obstructing Congress,” as he allowed 2 million aliens unlawfully to cross the southern border, during a pandemic without either testing or vaccinations, helping to spread the disease with reckless disregard? Will the new Congress subpoena generals to investigate the surrender and flight from Afghanistan, and especially who ordered it and why?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/philosophy-and-history-science-age-covid-jack-kerwick/

“The science is settled.”

To be sure, those who say such a thing are either illiterate when it comes to science and/or shameless partisan opportunists who are trying to score political points. If they accuse those who challenge their account of “science says” with “denialism” of one sort or another, or if they demand “a quick and devastating take down” of scientists with competing theories and express satisfaction that the demand has been met by such prestigious scientific journals as The Nation and Wired, you can take it to the bank that it is their political agenda that they prize above all.

Just the slightest familiarity with the history of science readily reveals that the science is never settled. Quite the contrary, it is emphatically unsettled as “the science” proves itself to be no less susceptible to flux than the world that it purports to disclose.

In the popular Western consciousness, science is the pinnacle of human cognition. Yet the average person, and, particularly, those who spare no occasion to adorn their property with signs revealing their “belief in science” and portraits of Anthony Fauci, have a profoundly impoverished view of science. Science, for them, begins and ends with the declarations of only those scientists who have received the stamp of approval by the government and the media. And these declarations are treated as dogma.   

Scientists are impartial conduits of objective reality, always and only just calling things for what they are. Thus, anyone who so much as remotely questions the assertions of (government-media approved) scientists are guilty of trying to discredit science itself (as Fauci recently said not so long ago when he charged his critics for challenging, not himself, but science).  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/supreme-court-hears-oral-arguments-biden-covid-19-joseph-klein/

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on January 7th regarding two Biden administration COVID-19 mandates. One case arose from a challenge to a vaccine-or-test-weekly mandate imposed on private-sector employers with 100 or more employees. This mandate was issued in the form of an “emergency” rule by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The other case focused on a vaccination requirement imposed by the Department of Health and Human Services for healthcare workers at health facilities participating in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

The Biden mandate that drew the most skepticism in varying degrees from the Supreme Court’s six conservative-leaning justices is the OSHA private business vaccine-or-test mandate. There appeared to be less inclination on their part to strike down the health care workers vaccine mandate. The three leftist justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan – expressed full support for the Biden administration’s mandates in both instances.

The conservative justices expressed concern during the portion of the oral arguments devoted to OSHA’s emergency mandate order about whether there was proper legal authority for OSHA’s action. They raised questions regarding the implications for the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. They also inquired into whether OSHA had intruded on the states’ ability to exercise their constitutionally-reserved police powers to protect the general welfare and health of their own residents.

The trio of leftist justices defended the OSHA private business vaccine-or-test mandate largely on public policy grounds. Reaching, by hook or crook, what they felt was the right policy outcome to protect the public against the historic COVID-19 pandemic was all that mattered to them.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/the_supreme_courts_mandate_review_may_be_the_last_chance_to_rein_in_agencies.html

As if we needed confidence in yet another American institution destroyed, we were treated with a true spectacle of deceit in last Friday’s Supreme Court’s oral arguments on OSHA’s vaccine mandates. With the hysterical hyperbole of a CNN anchor, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a self-proclaimed “wise Latina woman,” refuted that description by declaring, “We have hospitals that are almost at full capacity with people severely ill on ventilators. We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”

Despite her Yale pedigree, or perhaps because of it, as physicist Wolfgang Pauli famously quipped, she’s “not even wrong.” You must at least be in the ballpark to be wrong, especially when the facts are easily accessed on HHS and CDC websites. As of today, hospital capacity is at 79% with only 18% being used for COVID; there are 140 COVID hospitalizations of children; and cumulative child COVID cases since its inception total just 5520. Ventilator use, which proved deadly at the beginning of the pandemic, is used in only 3% of the cases.

Extending her epidemiological deception to the legislative record, Sotomayor explained, “OSHA proposed regulations, it didn’t act fast enough, and Congress told it to act faster.” The problem is, not only did Congress do no such thing, it did exactly the opposite! Only a month ago, the Senate, with Democrat support, passed S.J. Res 29 to nullify OSHA’s vaccine mandate.

As implacably vacuous as Sotomayor’s hysterics were, Justice Elena Kagan plunged the Court to a level so benighted it made Robert’s “it’s a tax” seem like wisdom from the Oracle of Delphi. While her progressive ramblings are certain to inspire the army of “experts” infesting every crevice of DC’s bloated bureaucracy, they betray a profound contempt for constitutional law:

So who decides? Should it be the agency full of expert policymakers and completely politically accountable through the President? This is not the kind of policy in which there’s no political accountability. If people like this policy, they’ll go to the polls and vote it that way. If people don’t like it, they’ll vote that way. This is a publicly — a politically accountable policy. It also has the virtue of expertise. So, on the one hand, the agency with their political leadership can decide. Or, on the other hand, courts can decide. Courts are not politically accountable. Courts have not been elected. Courts have no epidemiological expertise. Why in the world would courts decide this question?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/leftist_supreme_court_justices_abandoned_the_law_and_made_up_facts.html

In Supreme Court arguments on the OSHA COVID Vaccination Mandate case, the “Wise Latina” revealed at least Sixth Degree Stupidity for all to see. One should not casually suggest that a graduate of law school who has ascended through the ranks to the highest Court in the land is stupid. But that is the inescapable conclusion her performance requires. For those who missed the demonstration of her upward failure, we must present the details. But first, we must look at the question the Supreme Court is supposedly trying to address.

Justice Kavanaugh granted the emergency appeal in NFIB v OSHA, and limited it to legal issues only:

Whether the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Interim Final Rule: COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing; Emergency Temporary Standard, 86 Fed. Reg. 61402, violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 or the First Amendment.

This is a question of law. It does not in any way address how many of what sort of patients tested positive, became ill, were hospitalized, placed in the ICU, required a ventilator, or died. Those are medical questions and are outside the legal “Question Presented.” This is more than a technical distinction. The Supreme Court grant of certiorari specifically states what it will hear arguments about. Briefs for the appeal must address those arguments. But Justice Sotomayor must have missed that detail in law school.