RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/orthodox-jews-leaving-brooklyn-florida-taxes-lockdowns-school-choice-11628265034?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

What would motivate a Hasidic rabbi and his followers to leave a Brooklyn enclave where they’ve lived for generations and establish a quickly growing community in Wimauma, Fla., a semi-rural area near Tampa Bay?

The same reasons that have led to an unprecedented wave of Orthodox Jewish families moving to South Florida: education choice, low taxes and good governance. Most Orthodox families send their children to private Jewish schools because public school is simply not an option—religious instruction is as important to them as academics. But the tuition burden can be immense.

That’s why many young families up north are enticed by Florida’s robust menu of state-supported private-school scholarships, worth on average about $7,500 a year, as well as expanded benefits for children with a wide range of disabilities. These programs make private-school tuition far more affordable in Florida than in New York and New Jersey. Legislation recently signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis has made even more families eligible for these options, further fueling the migration.

Jews started moving south even before the pandemic. Figures from Florida’s Education Department show enrollment in Jewish day schools statewide grew in 2020 to 12,482 students from 10,623 in 2018. The number of such schools grew to 64 from 50 during that time. The pandemic supercharged demand for Jewish day schools in South Florida.

Rabbi Moshe Bernstein, chief financial officer of Yeshiva Toras Chaim Toras Emes in North Miami Beach, one of the largest South Florida Jewish schools with a current enrollment of more than 1,000 students, projects nearly 300 new students next year. The school will need to accelerate a planned expansion of its campus to accommodate them. Toras Emes has received so many out-of-state inquiries about admission that its website added an option in its admission drop-down menu labeled “Considering a Move To Florida?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-much-for-fully-paid-for-congressional-budget-office-senate-infrastructure-bill-11628287619?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

One claim about the Senate’s infrastructure bill is that it would be, as the authors said, “fully paid for.” The Congressional Budget Office rudely blew apart that myth on Thursday, not that the authors seem to care.

CBO’s budget gnomes found that the $1 trillion spending bill will add $256 billion to the federal deficit over 10 years. But it’s worse than that. CBO also explained that the bill will increase the government’s contract authority by an additional $196 billion over the 2021 budget baseline. The estimate is complex, but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculates the mix of costs and savings will result in nearly $400 billion in deficit spending over a decade.

A couple of examples highlight the fiscal flim-flam. The bipartisan group of Senators tried to claim as “savings” some $53 billion in unemployment benefits that states won’t spend as anticipated. But CBO notes that the “lower outlays” had already been counted in its baseline and so don’t now amount to a “reduction in spending.”

CBO also didn’t credit $106 billion in supposedly unused Covid paid- and family-leave tax credits, and only a portion of what Senators claimed were $67 billion in savings from a Covid employer tax credit. Of the $210 billion of “unused” Covid funds Senators ultimately claimed they were “repurposing,” CBO gave them credit for about $21 billion.

CBO also didn’t buy the claim that spending in the bill will yield a magical return of 33% on investment, producing faster economic growth and additional tax revenue of $53 billion. Some infrastructure spending on particular projects might improve economic productivity. But $66 billion more for Amtrak and related rail projects? You’ve got to be kidding.

In a better age, the CBO numbers would have been big news and sent the Senators back for a rewrite. But in 2021, when deficits don’t matter because they’re monetized by the Federal Reserve, the report barely caused a ripple of media attention, never mind concern.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/06/americas-generals-lied-lost-wars-and-looted-the-people-they-pledged-to-serve/

Military leaders failed to properly account for their own efforts, misled the public, and then racked up cushy paychecks after the war. They deserve to be punished.

Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in June that he wanted to understand “white rage,” why “thousands of people” tried “to assault this building and … overturn the Constitution of the United States of America.”

If Milley really wants to understand the “rage” of the American people he should start by asking why he and his fellow generals can’t win any wars. As a Marine Corps officer who served at the tail end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I saw firsthand the rapid ideological transformation pervading the military in the wake of these disasters in the Middle East.

Unable to win wars overseas, the military’s leaders went “woke.” Currying ideological favor is easier than trying to end insurgencies. It is also necessary if military leaders want to keep the gravy train of taxpayer funding. Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy and his devastating critique of George Bush and Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2016 election put the military-industrial complex on high alert. Trump was pushing the American right-wing away from the expensive and unending foreign interventions the military-industrial complex needed in order to justify its existence.

For too long, America’s generals have relied on a “stab in the back” thesis to justify their failure on the battlefield. The narrative set in after Vietnam and has calcified today. Former national security adviser and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster tweeted on July 8 in regards to the sweeping march of the Taliban that the “US media is finally reporting on the transformation of Afghanistan after their disinterest and defeatism helped set conditions for capitulation and a humanitarian catastrophe.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/06/our-use-of-nuclear-weapons-76-years-ago-was-a-moral-and-strategic-imperative/

Americans are no strangers to times that “try men’s souls,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Paine. By mid-1945, we had been at war for three-and-a-half years, enduring the draft, mounting numbers of casualties, and rationing, with no end in sight. Many Americans were weary, not unlike our feelings now, after a year-and-a-half a year of privations and anguish related to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

That sense of anxiety got me thinking about how WWII was suddenly – and to many, unexpectedly – resolved. Today marks one of the United States’ most important anniversaries, memorable not only for what happened on this date in 1945 but for what did not happen.

What did happen was that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 Superfortress bomber, dropped Little Boy, a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That historic act hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week, after the Aug. 9 detonation of Fat Man, a plutonium-based bomb, over Nagasaki. These were the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare.

I have two peripheral connections to those events. The first is that when Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, my father, a sergeant in the U.S. Army infantry who had fought in the Italian campaigns of WWII, was on a troopship, expecting to be deployed to the Pacific theater of operations. Neither he nor his fellow soldiers relished the prospect of participating in the impending invasion of the Japanese main islands. When the Japanese surrendered (on Aug. 14), the ship headed, instead, for Virginia, where the division was disbanded. (I was born two years later.)

My second connection was that during the 1960s, three of my M.I.T. physics professors had participated several decades earlier in the Manhattan Project, the military research program which developed the atomic bombs during the war. In class, one of these professors recalled that, after the first test explosion (code-named Trinity), he was assigned to drive Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the project, to view the result. They arrived to find a crater 1,000 feet in diameter, and six feet deep, with the desert sand inside turned into glass by the intense heat. Groves’ response? “Is that all?”

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/kendi-and-diangelo-dont-debate-people?token=

If social media is any indication, many people seem to be of the opinion that people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo should want to “debate” people like me and Glenn Loury. These people are roasted endlessly on social media for not engaging in “debate.”

It isn’t fair. I completely understand why they don’t.

I get the feeling people are moved by debates between people like William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal (this documentary likely helps stoke this) or the famous one between Buckley and James Baldwin.

But given the way people like me or Glenn Loury have discussed people like Kendi and DiAngelo on line and in print, how reasonable is it to expect them to “debate” us? I wasn’t nice to White Fragility last year and meant it, as that review needed to be written – but fully get why DiAngelo thereafter did not want to appear with me on Morning Joe. I didn’t write that review expecting DiAngelo to put on the gloves and “debate” me – I knew full well it meant that sometime in the future we’d be in a talk show green room carefully avoiding eye contact. Glenn has called Kendi an “empty suit” in our conversations and it has gotten around; I guarantee that I would never appear on the show of someone who called me that.

Some may be thinking that people like that are responsible for defending themselves in public competition, that this is the burden of the public intellectual. But the question is why they are supposed to do this in a live, back-and-forth sparring match.

Life is short. Why should someone spend even an hour or two of their time engaging with someone who has given all indication that they heartily disapprove of their work and even find them off-putting personally? Whether it was about winning or losing, who does this?

* * *

I have been on the other side of this sort of thing now and then. A long time ago, a certain black commentator I will not name asked me to guest on his radio show. I agreed to do it because we had gotten along fine in the past. But then I happened to catch on Twitter that he was planning to roast me, with his fans all salivating at the prospect of seeing evil race traitor me getting what I deserved. I pulled out. For a little while after, the fans and the host accused me of refusing to debate.

Nah. I can debate quite comfortably when necessary, thank you very much, when there are rules and everybody has to behave – I think of here and here. But it never occurred to me that I was at all unusual in skipping being professionally ridiculed. It wasn’t that I think of myself as beyond debate, and it sure as hell wasn’t that I thought I couldn’t defend my views against (whoops, can’t say who he was!).

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-a-vaccine-mandate-is-not-like-requiring-seat-belts/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second

Mainstream bioethics thinking is growing increasingly authoritarian. Princeton’s notorious utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer now joins Ezekiel “Mandate” Emanuel in an internationally syndicated column urging that everyone be legally required to take the COVID jab.

Singer justifies this imposition by comparing the proposal to laws that require people to wear seat belts in cars. From, “Why Vaccination Should be Compulsory:”

We are now hearing demands for the freedom to be unvaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19. Brady Ellison, a member of the United States Olympic archery team, says his decision not to get vaccinated was “one hundred percent a personal choice,” insisting that “anyone that says otherwise is taking away people’s freedoms.”

The oddity, here, is that laws requiring us to wear seat belts really are quite straightforwardly infringing on freedom, whereas laws requiring people to be vaccinated if they are going to be in places where they could infect other people are restricting one kind of freedom in order to protect the freedom of others to go about their business safely.

Good grief. There is a huge difference between a law that requires wrapping a cloth belt around one’s body while in a moving car and injecting chemicals into one’s system. Yes, both acts involve attempts to promote public safety. But the former’s interference with liberty is de minimus, while the latter is one of the most potentially portentous that can be asked of people.

In free societies, legal mandates must be reasonable. A national vaccination mandate — which would be unprecedented — fails that test.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/05/democrats-hypocrisy-is-now-impossible-to-ignore/

Earlier this week, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, a partisan Democrat, released a bombshell 165-page report that another partisan Democrat, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, previously sexually harassed at least 11 women in the workplace. According to the report, Cuomo engaged in nonconsensual touching, groping and kissing, in addition to making generally inappropriate comments toward numerous women. What’s more, in James’ words from a press conference earlier this week, “in doing so,” Cuomo “violated federal and state law” and created a “toxic workplace environment.”

Cuomo has nonetheless denied the allegations and thus far refused to resign. He has done so notwithstanding a direct plea from President Joe Biden—a man similarly known for decades, perhaps an entire political career’s worth, of inappropriate touching of women— for him to do precisely that, as well as a strongly worded statement from New York State Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (another fellow Democrat) that Cuomo “can no longer serve as governor.” In a galling display of a lack of self-awareness, a May 2013 Cuomo tweet was also recently unearthed for all to see: “There should be a zero tolerance policy when it comes to sexual harassment & must send a clear message that this behavior is not tolerated.” Apparently #BelieveAllWomen, the Left’s preferred hashtag during the 2018 Justice Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation saga—and a deeply discomfiting mantra, at that, for all who claim to care about basic norms of fairness—only applies to Republicans, and not Democrats, accused of serial sexual misconduct. Uncle Joe would certainly know all about that. Does anyone in Washington even remember Tara Reade?

Democratic hypocrisy does not stop, of course, at personal sexual misconduct. On Thursday, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., the newest addition to the socialist, America-bashing House “Squad,” recorded a wild interview on CBS in which she advocated for defunding the police while conceding that she, a sitting U.S. congresswoman and thus nothing if not profoundly privileged, maintains a private security detail. “I’m going to make sure that I have security because … I have had attempts on my life,” Bush argued. She then artfully added, roughly 20 seconds later: “So suck it up, and defunding the police has to happen. We need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets.”

Huh?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/05/why-wont-the-government-release-officer-fanones-bodycam-video/

At least one federal judge handling several Capitol protest criminal cases is paying attention to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s show trial about the events of January 6.

Judge Thomas Hogan, 83, who has served on the D.C. District Court for nearly 40 years, referred to public testimony given last week by four law enforcement officers while he scolded a husband and wife over their involvement in the protest. 

“[H]e begins by talking about the violence, and makes clear he listened to the police officers who testified before Congress last week about their experience, and notes the recent suicide of [a Metropolitan Police Department] officer,” Zoe Tillman, a reporter for BuzzFeed, live-tweeted during the couple’s sentencing hearing on Wednesday.

Set aside for a moment how the inflammatory and unsubstantiated accounts by those officers will taint an already highly biased jury pool in Washington, D.C. when trials begin next year; it’s clear the January 6 select committee already is influencing court proceedings. Judge Hogan, and presumably others, will take witness testimony at face value and use it as proof that Capitol defendants, even the nonviolent ones, contributed to “violence” that day.

Which is why, as we have argued repeatedly at American Greatness, the government and U.S. Capitol Police should agree to release more than 14,000 hours of surveillance video captured by security cameras on January 6. If the four-hour melee indeed compares to the worst terrorist attacks against Americans, and ranks among the worst days in U.S. history, the public deserves to see what happened, minute-by-minute, inside and outside the building.

But it’s not just Capitol complex security video that the government is trying to conceal from the public. In a recent filing, Joe Biden’s Justice Department argued against the release of footage recorded by officer Michael Fanone’s bodycam on January 6. The D.C. Metropolitan Police narcotics officer was one of the four cops who testified last week. 

Fanone, 40, said he was not supposed to be on Capitol Hill that day but that he put on an official, unworn uniform—including a body camera—for the first time in 10 years to help assist his colleagues control the chaos. Fanone also testified he was afraid he would be killed that day—either shot with his own gun or torn limb from limb by Trump fanatics. In one outburst, Fanone called insurrection deniers in Congress “disgraceful” and claimed they were “betraying their oath of office.”

Fanone is working hard to become a household name. He’s been on a part-pity, part-publicity tour for the past seven months, detailing his harrowing experience and stalking Republican members of Congress. He’s become a regular on CNN; following his testimony last Tuesday, Fanone headed to the CNN studio for an interview with Don Lemon. The two ended the segment with an embrace and expressions of love for each other.