RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-larry-krasner-christmas-crime-philadelphia-11640208516?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

On the unseasonably warm night of Dec. 10, a groom stepped outside of his wedding reception for a breath of fresh air. Two men saw him. One drew a handgun, and they demanded the groom’s Rolex watch. The robbery occurred downtown a short stroll away from the Liberty Bell.

Welcome to the holiday season in Larry Krasner’s Philadelphia. Days before the groom’s ambush, the progressive district attorney claimed that “we don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.” The remarks infuriated Philadelphia residents, who are the victims of the crime he said doesn’t exist.

Philadelphia has seen a record 544 homicides so far this year, up from 347 in the entirety of 2019. Police have recorded some 1,785 nonfatal shootings this year. More than 84% of the victims of the gun violence in 2021 were black, according to the Philadelphia Office of the Controller.

Police data also shows some 2,283 gun robberies as of Dec. 19, a 28.6% increase over the same period last year. Retail theft is up more than 20% this year, and auto theft more than 15%, with nearly 11,000 vehicles stolen.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/corruption-just-isnt-what-it-used-to-be/

“Regulatory corruption is much worse than the traditional illicit-payment type, that is to say money passed under the table, for the latter can sometimes actually help to get things done where there are official obstacles to doing them, whereas the former politicises everything and is completely obstructive, uncreative and leads inevitably to the legalised looting of the public purse on a scale that the traditionally corrupt can only dream of, the difference being between wholesale and retail. Moreover, the more traditional kind of corruption is relatively easy to spot and clearly defined, and therefore potentially controllable by means of the law, insofar as anything that is consonant with human nature is controllable by the law, while the intellectual corruption of (say) regulations enforcing positive discrimination exerts a much more baleful effect on society and requires an assault on both freedom and truth.”

A delusion is defined as a fixed false belief that is impervious to reason or evidence and that is out of keeping with a person’s cultural background. The last condition has to be added because, without it, everyone would believe that all those who disagreed with him were deluded. A Muslim would think a Christian deluded, a Christian would think a Muslim deluded, and an atheist would think both deluded. If everyone is deluded, however, no one is. It is therefore dangerous to diagnose delusion in a politician just because you don’t like him.

Nevertheless, twenty years ago I felt that there must be something wrong—medically wrong—with Mr Blair, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I could not quite put my finger on what it was, however. It came to me in a flash, though, like the illumination of Archimedes in his bath: he was deluded!

The communist Chinese-inflicted COVID virus and reactions by American Democrat politicians created devastating changes in the U.S. population in 2021, according to statistics revealed by the U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday.

The U.S. experienced a “historic” decline in the number of children that were born, and Americans fled Leftist, freedom-sucking, gulag-like cities and states where Democrat dictators toyed with their constituents the way a cat plays with a flapping bird before devouring it.

First, Americans gave birth to a “record low” number of babies in 2021, in large part due to the pandemic.

The Wall Street Journal reported that although American population replacement has been going down since the 2008-2009 recession — another Democrat-fueled disaster — with “just 393,000 people in the year that ended July 1, including 148,000 more births than deaths … it was the first year in which growth from births exceeding deaths fell below net arrivals from abroad, according to the bureau.”

And there was also a “historic” migration of citizens, whose Democrat politicians issued mandates, lockdowns, and freedom-sucking COVID edicts ever their populations. And those states notched historic net population losses as droves of Americans fled to more free states.

Look at this map from the Census Bureau.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau

The map shows the states with the worst COVID restrictions and some of the highest crime rates lost American population.

The states with the worst net population loss — New York, California, and Illinois — chased out nearly 700,000 Americans to other states. Florida, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia had a net influx of 713,000 Americans to their freer and less-crowded states.

The Census Bureau reported:

Between 2020 and 2021, 33 states saw population increases and 17 states and the District of Columbia lost population, 11 of which had losses of over 10,000 people. This is a historically large number of states to lose population in a year.

Oregon and Washington, whose leaders imposed ridiculous COVID lockdowns and mandates, shockingly had a virtual net neutral change according to the Census Bureau, but Americans fled the tropical paradise of Hawaii due to its draconian lockdowns and mandates.

The top spot for population loss in 2021 was Washington, D.C., which reported that 2.9% of its population got the heck out of the nation’s capital.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Americans have voted with their feet, and they’ve shown that they will go to places where there is more freedom to conduct their own lives.

https://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2021/12/22/demolishing-democratic-delusions-n2600922

Sen. Joe Manchin’s announcement that he will not support the Democrats’ giant spending bill should not have been a surprise to anyone who has been watching Manchin for the last few months. Yet many Democrats, especially in the White House and in the progressive wing of the House of Representatives, appeared shocked when Manchin told Fox News’ Bret Baier, “I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t.”

They apparently believed Manchin would ultimately come around, and do so before Christmas. When he did not, they were stunned.

Their reaction is the latest manifestation of a mass delusion affecting Democrats in Washington. For nearly a year, since Jan. 20, 2021, they have believed they could enact a nation-changing agenda — shades of FDR and LBJ! — without having won a majority of seats in the U.S. Senate. Somehow, all on their own and without any Republican support, they could bring landmark legislation to a 50-50 tie vote in the Senate, and then have Vice President Kamala Harris break the tie in the Democrat’s favor. They seemed to forget that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson had huge majorities in both House and Senate when they enacted sprawling New Deal and Great Society legislation, respectively.

Even the structure of their massive spending bill, which they called Build Back Better, was shaped by their lack of a Senate majority. Democratic leaders knew how hard it would be to get anything through the Senate — to keep all 50 of their own senators together — so they packed nearly the entire Biden agenda of social spending and climate projects into a one big bill. Then everyone on their side would have to vote for it, wouldn’t they?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/la-sheriff-slams-careless-and-irresponsible-liberal-das-undoing-police-work/

The Los Angeles County sheriff slammed California’s liberal prosecutors on Tuesday, saying they are living in a “woke palace” and not facing the consequences of their decisions to undermine the work of law enforcement officers amid a surge in crime.

Sheriff Alex Villanueva said during an appearance on Fox News that liberal District Attorney George Gascon has declined to prosecute more than 12,000 cases after county deputies apprehended suspected criminals.

“So that is disheartening for any cop to think all their work is being undone by a careless and irresponsible district attorney,” he said. “But they’re not going to stop doing their job. The deputies … keep doing your job, don’t use the excuse of someone else not doing their job to avoid it – and it’s working.”

“So we’re making the effort out there,” he added. “What we need now is, we need responsible district attorneys who are going to file their cases. And if they want to play the role of public defender, they should just quit their job and go over to the public defenders – and everything they say makes perfect sense for a public defender, not a district attorney.”

Villanueva also reacted to San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s claims that calls for action against recent crime spikes are “knee-jerk reactions” and that smash-and-grab looting in California is “not new.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/unicorns-crime-wave-woke-california/

A crime wave haunts blue-state America, and nowhere more so than in super-blue California. Los Angeles police chief Michel Moore is trying to assure residents and tourists that violent crime is not out of control, which is not at all reassuring. Police departments statewide are stressed, and finding able recruits is a struggle. Faced with surging gun violence and a dwindling number of police officers, Oakland has proposed $50,000 signing bonuses to veteran cops.

Since 2014, California voters have unshackled a fast-expanding criminal class that rolls expertly with the dice. Starting with Proposition 47, the state penal code has reduced many felonies to misdemeanors. Shoplifting and petty theft have been effectively decriminalized. Serious crimes go unprosecuted. Elected officials and residents alike prefer virtue theater to civic management.

One eighth of the nation’s residents live in the economic and cultural colossus of California, so what direction the state takes matters. Why its progressive leaders and their constituencies condone violence against persons and property, car break-ins, prostitution, open-air drug dealing, and aggressive begging remains puzzling.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/durham-zeroes-clinton-campaign-could-call-some-aides

Hillary Clinton’s team long fought to keep its ties to Christopher Steele’s dossier from public view, but Special Counsel John Durham is now making clear he has a strong interest in her campaign’s behavior during the Russia collusion probe. He is even suggesting some of her aides could be summoned as trial witnesses.

Durham’s earth-shaking revelation came inside a routine court filing this month in the case of Igor Y. Danchenko, a Russian analyst who was a primary source in 2016 for Steele’s now-infamous dossier. Danchenko has been charged with repeatedly lying to the FBI during the Russia collusion probe and has pleaded innocent.

Durham’s motion asked the presiding judge to determine whether Danchenko’s lawyers —Danny Onorato and Stuart Sears of the Schertler Onorato Mead & Sears law firm — pose a conflict of interest because the firm also represents the Hillary for America campaign as well as several former campaign officials in “matters before the special counsel.”

“The Clinton Campaign financed the opposition research reports, colloquially known as the ‘Dossier,’ that are central to the Indictment against the defendant,” the Durham team stated in the motion. “Accordingly, for the reasons set forth below, the government respectfully requests that the Court inquire into the potential conflict issues set forth herein.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/benshapiro/2021/12/22/the-big-government-covid-19-lie-n1543449

On Oct. 30, 2020, just days before the presidential election, Joe Biden tweeted, “I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m going to shut down the virus.” 

This was a lie.

It was a lie because nobody can shut down the virus. 

Government does not have the power to end disease, as a general matter. When it comes to a wildly transmissible coronavirus specifically, no government can end the virus. Even the sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted as much: “we’re never going to eradicate this … elimination may be too aspirational.”

Which means that government should not aim for elimination; it can aim for some level of control. That control must be balanced with countervailing concerns, ranging from suppression of economic freedom to the effects of social isolation. This means that the lowest-cost intervention was incentivization and distribution of vaccines — a service performed by the Trump administration. The worst form of control would be overbroad, coercive restrictions that fail to achieve their objectives.

And yet it is precisely those forms of control now being sought by Democratic mayors and governors, as well as the Biden administration. To make such tactics even more puzzling, Democrats are pursuing such restrictions in the face of an extraordinarily transmissible variant — some 70 times more transmissible than delta — that has far lower death rates than prior variants. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/21/pentagon-issues-new-guidance-on-extremist-behavior-within-military-ranks/

On Monday, the Department of Defense, in an effort to further crack down on political dissent, is revising its previous definitions of “extremist behavior” in order to deter uniformed members from certain political affiliations, CNN reports.

The Countering Extremism Working Group, a panel that was created for the purpose of ostensibly investigating “extremism” within military ranks, issued a report outlining its findings, claiming that there are indeed some “extremists” in the military. The report alleges that there were roughly 100 instances of uniformed members who either had “extremist” beliefs or joined “extremist” groups in 2021, which the report claims is an increase from previous years.

Among other rules, the new guidance makes it harder for members to join alleged “extremist” organizations while serving. As one anonymous official said, “any way that someone could sort of actively become a member of an extremist organization, we’ve accounted for them. We don’t think there is a way to be a member of an extremist organization in any meaningful way.”

When reporters were briefed on Monday by Defense Department officials, it was clarified that the new rules are less about prohibiting certain behavior and more about more clearly defining what exactly Pentagon leadership considers “extremism” in the first place.

“We were very conscious of not focusing on any particular ideology or any political organization,” another official said, “but focusing exclusively on actions.”

The Pentagon’s press secretary John Kirby further explained that the new guidance intends to “preserve a service member’s right of expression to the extent possible, while also balancing the need for good order and discipline.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/21/whose-body-is-it-anyway/

In the latest edition of the theater of the absurd, White House COVID coordinator, Jeff Zientz, had some “stark” words for the untouchables, i.e., the unvaccinated masses. At the December 17 press briefing, Zientz commented on the incoming Omicron wave, sounding rather ominous and depressing, “. . . the Omicron variant is more transmissible and our medical experts anticipate it will lead to a rise in cases,” said Zientz. “But unlike last winter, we now have the power to protect ourselves. We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work and school for the vaccinated. You’ve done the right thing, and we will get through this. For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.” [emphasis mine]

In one statement, Zietz divided two groups of Americans and pitted them against each other: the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Echoing Dr. Anthony Fauci, Zietz sets himself up as a moral authority who can reward and punish at will. Offering no evidence, no nuance, and constant evasion of questions with meaningless answers, like “it’s still up in the air” and “there are a lot of confounding issues” has become the hallmark of Fauci and this regime. It all sounds like a bad meeting of government bureaucrats nodding their heads, trying to convince a skeptical man that everything is fine: “Yes, we have top men working on this. Top!” 

This is the second year of this absurdity, and it’s pretty clear that the current regime, not just in the United States but globally, is trying to create a social hierarchy based on medical status (which is really just code for obedience). Many cities in America have taken this strategy seriously, as we see in New York and Boston. This is the point where biology and politics merge, but to what end? You can’t really say that the strategy is all perfectly and seamlessly planned because many of these threats are rarely fully implemented, and when they are, the laws surrounding it are incredibly vague. People don’t know if they have any legal rights. It has become a political game, except this is not “politics as usual.”