RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/justice-breyer-joins-rbg-warning-dems-against-daniel-greenfield/

It wasn’t all that long ago that the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) were as fired up about packing the Supreme Court (and destroying its legitimacy utterly) as they currently are about rigging all the elections through HR 1 and eliminating the filibuster. The matter had gone far enough that the dictionaries were being revised as the media loudly insisted that “court-packing” was just a term that Republicans had recently made up.

Then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the patron saint of Democrats, warned them it was a terrible idea.

“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” Ginsburg said, speaking to NPR.

“I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court,” Ginsburg noted.

Funny how RBG referred to court-packing and not judicial reform, or whatever euphemism the lefty media had settled on.

Anyway, back to remind the Democrats that court-packing is a terrible idea is the oldest surviving Democrat on the court.

 Justice Stephen Breyer on Tuesday said liberal advocates of big changes at the Supreme Court, including expanding the number of justices, should think “long and hard” about what they’re proposing.

His talk, Breyer said, “seeks to make those whose initial instincts may favor important structural (or other similar institutional) changes, such as forms of ‘court-packing,’ think long and hard before embodying those changes in law.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/higher-superstition-bruce-thornton/

More and more frequently we so-called advanced moderns believe things to be true that an illiterate farmer in 1800 would have known to be false. As every year passes, the self-proclaimed progressive “brights”–– those who “follow the science” rigorously, they claim, when making and supporting public policies–– endorse as proven facts beliefs and policies that are driven by ideological or venal self-interest rather than truth.

If they continue, the consequences will be the bankruptcy of our culture, economy, and political freedom.

Take this statement from CNN, a loud champion of “science”: “It is not possible to know a person’s ‘gender identity’ at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.” Such a statement back in 1800 would have been dismissed as the ravings of a crank or the sales-pitch for some patent snake-oil. The sex of a child, with the exception of some rare birth defects, is obvious at the moment of birth, both empirically and by medical science.

But the current fad of believing that transient psychological states are what create sex identity has led to harmful outcomes, from the physical and psychological trauma caused by hormone therapy and physical mutilation, to the impact on female athletes that follows from allowing  biological males to compete against females, to the risks to women from admitting biological males into homeless or battered women shelters, or public rest-rooms and school showers.

Our economy is hostage to the same fetishizing of “science,” leading to dubious economic proposals that ignore the real science of mathematics. The first problem is thinking that economics is a science, rather than a species of philosophy that uses numerical data in its theoretical and speculative research. Any discipline that takes into account human behavior cannot be a true science able to correctly predict similar outcomes from the same methods and evidence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccine-passports-prolong-lockdowns-11617726629?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
Mr. Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya, a physician and economist, is a professor at Stanford Medical School.

As tens of millions are inoculated against Covid-19, officials in places as diverse as New York state, Israel and China have introduced “vaccine passports,” and there’s talk of making them universal. The idea is simple: Once you’ve received your shots, you get a document or phone app, which you flash to gain entry to previously locked-down venues—restaurants, theaters, sports arenas, offices, schools.

It sounds like a way of easing coercive lockdown restrictions, but it’s the opposite. To see why, consider dining. Restaurants in most parts of the U.S. have already reopened, at limited capacity in some places. A vaccine passport would prohibit entry by potential customers who haven’t received their shots. It would restrict the freedom even of those who have: If you’re vaccinated but your spouse isn’t, forget about dining out as a couple.

Planes and trains, which have continued to operate throughout the pandemic, would suddenly be off-limits to the unvaccinated. The only places where restrictions would be relatively eased would be those still fully locked down, such as many live-event venues and schools. Yet even there, the passport idea depends on keeping the underlying restrictions in place—giving officials an incentive to do so for much longer as leverage to overcome vaccine resistance.

The vaccine passport should therefore be understood not as an easing of restrictions but as a coercive scheme to encourage vaccination. Such measures can be legitimate: Many schools require immunization against common childhood illnesses, and visitors to some African countries must be vaccinated against yellow fever. But Covid vaccine passports would harm, not benefit, public health.

like a public utility, given its extensive reach and power. 

Here are the pertinent details grabbing people’s attention, especially in Silicon Valley: 

Some aspects of Mr. Trump’s account resemble a constitutionally protected public forum. But it seems rather odd to say that something is a government forum when a private company has unrestricted authority to do away with it. The disparity between Twitter’s control and Mr. Trump’s control is stark, to say the least. Mr. Trump blocked several people from interacting with his messages. Twitter barred Mr. Trump not only from interacting with a few users, but removed him from the entire platform, thus barring all Twitter users from interacting with his messages Under its terms of service, Twitter can remove any person from the platform—including the President of the United States—“at any time for any or no reason.” 

Today’s digital platforms provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech, including speech by government actors. Also unprecedented, however, is the concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties. We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms. 

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/04/06/the-ruined-generation-n2587409

The Internet was supposed to bring with it a renaissance, a new enlightenment and a brighter future. It was to be a time when people became smarter, having access to the collective knowledge of humanity at their fingertips, and with the invention of the smart phone, in their pocket, always. What could go wrong? A lot, it turns out. Actually, just about everything. The promise was not kept. All we ended up with was a bunch of narcissists desperate to share pictures of the food they’re eating and demanding validation for their existence from everyone else.

Scroll through social media and you’ll be inundated with selfies and pictures of food. Did something really happen, did you really eat a meal if you didn’t tell the world about? It’s not that these people think you need to know where and what they’re eating, they need you to know. They want the likes and comments, they crave those more than the nutrition in the food. Hell, they probably choose where to eat based on how the food looks more than the taste or cost.

There is an entire segment of our population who now lives for the validation they receive from others. They need it. It’s not just because they like it, it’s because they have no self-worth without it.

It used to be that if you didn’t like someone, or they didn’t like you, you’d simply avoid them and the problem wasn’t only solved, it disappeared. Now people you’ve never met, will likely never meet, and probably would dislike if you did, demand you not only acknowledge their existence, but you celebrate it as well. If your beliefs, deeply held religious or simply a matter of taste, hinder the approval they desire you are labeled an “ist” or a “phobe” of some sort, then God protect you.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/05/media-politicians-still-spreading-the-big-lie-about-officer-sicknick/

Three months ago this week, Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, 42, died. The 12-year veteran of the force passed away the day after hundreds of Trump supporters mobbed the Capitol to protest Congress’ certification of the 2020 Electoral College.

The United States Capitol Police department issued a statement on January 7, just hours after he died. “Officer Brian D. Sicknick passed away due to injuries sustained while on-duty,” the press release read. “Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and was injured while physically engaging with protesters.  He returned to his division office and collapsed. He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.”

Sicknick’s death is a central rallying cry to bolster the narrative that the events of January 6 amounted to a “deadly insurrection” and the perpetrators must be punished accordingly. To produce compelling optics, Sicknick’s remains lay in state in the Capitol rotunda—a somber memorial attended by Joe Biden and his wife as well as lawmakers from both political parties—the weekend before House Democrats launched their second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

In fact, the allegation Trump allies murdered Sicknick with a fire extinguisher is still included in the bill of particulars against the president. “The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher,” the trial memorandum claimed, without evidence, citing only a January 8, 2021 New York Times article as proof.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/for_once_in_an_airline_mask_story_the_right_person_got_punished.html

Yet another story about airlines behaving badly broke on Monday. This time, a family of four got kicked off a flight because the 2-year-old toddler was eating. However, unlike all the other grotesque examples of panicked mask fascism, this story has a happy ending: The flight attendant who caused the ruckus was the one who ultimately got kicked off the plane, and the family was allowed back on.

As a preliminary matter, the evidence is very strong that little children neither get nor give COVID to those around them. And as a factual matter, putting masks on a child who has just turned two is cruel. The family’s situation was also very difficult: Not only did they have a baby who had just turned two, but they also had a special needs child who has seizures and the mother is seven months pregnant. Also, it may matter that the family was obviously Jewish (for the father was wearing a yarmulka), a point I’ll address a little later.

In the case of this family, people surrounding the family objected to the flight attendant kicking the family off when the toddler wanted to eat something. Eventually, the flight attendants, for reasons that aren’t clear, kicked everyone off the plane.

This story, however, has a happy ending: Everybody but the bullying flight attendant was allowed back on the plane.

But back to that point about the family being Jewish This is the third time in two years that flight attendants have kicked Jewish families off planes for weird or inappropriate reasons.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/boulder-new-york-dc-and-myth-evil-white-male-don-feder/

These white supremacists are diabolically clever. Lately, they’ve taken to disguising themselves as Syrian Muslim refugees, black men on parole for killing their mother and homicidal Farrakhan supporters.

After the Atlanta massage parlor shootings, the racial-guilt industry went into overdrive. The shooter was routinely described as a white male who had targeted Asian women. (Aside: Very few Bulgarian dwarfs work at massage parlors.)

The man who confessed to the killings denied that he was motivated by race. He claimed he was suffering from sex addiction and wanted to get temptation out of the way. Insane, vile — but not necessarily racist.

Still, the left wasn’t going to give up on its evil-white-man/victims-of-color scenario. Biden, who’s yet to visit the border, rushed to Atlanta to denounce anti-Asian hate crimes. The administration announced it was redirecting $49.5 million in COVID spending to combat the “rising tide of anti-Asian violence.”

According to the FBI’s 2019 Uniform Crime Reports (the most recent available), the perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes are twice as like to be black than white. Since African Americans are 12.3% of the population, the disparity is even more pronounced.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/05/justice-clarence-thomas-trump-twitter-ban-479046

The decision by social media giants Twitter and Facebook to ban former President Donald Trump from their platforms appears to have drawn the ire of one of America’s most prominent jurists: Justice Clarence Thomas.

As the Supreme Court issued an order Monday declaring moot a lawsuit over Trump’s blocking of some Twitter users from commenting on his feed, Thomas weighed in with a 12-page lament about the power of social media firms like Twitter.

“Today’s digital platforms provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech, including speech by government actors. Also unprecedented, however, is control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties,” Thomas wrote. “We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.”

Thomas singled out the owners of Google and Facebook by name, arguing that the firms are currently unaccountable personal fiefdoms with massive power.

“Although both companies are public, one person controls Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), and just two control Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin),” Thomas wrote.