RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-plan-for-an-entitlement-society-11624918494?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The federal government’s system of entitlements is the largest money-shuffling machine in human history, and President Biden intends to make it a lot bigger. His American Families Plan—which he recently attempted to tie to a bipartisan infrastructure deal—proposes to extend the reach of federal entitlements to 21 million additional Americans, the largest expansion since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

For the first time in U.S. history—except possibly for the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, for which we don’t yet have data—more than half of working-age households would be on the entitlement rolls if the plan were enacted in its current form. Contrary to Mr. Biden’s assertion that his plan “doesn’t add a single penny to our deficits,” his plan would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

The American Families Plan proposes several new entitlement programs. One promises students the government will pick up the entire cost of community-college tuition; another promises families earning 1.5 times their state’s median income that Washington will cover all daycare expenses above 7% of family income for children under 5; still another promises workers up to 12 weeks of federally financed wage subsidies to take time off to care for newborns or sick family members.

The American Families Plan would follow longstanding government practice and make temporary emergency programs permanent. In March, Congress enacted the American Rescue Plan, which expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies and refundable tax credits for child care and low-wage workers. The expansions were sold as temporary measures to combat the effects of pandemic lockdowns. A month later, Mr. Biden asked Congress to make them permanent.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-the-entitlements-stupid-11624920486?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Sen. Joe Manchin’s public support Sunday for at least $2 trillion in new spending in a partisan budget bill is a huge win for the political left. This means a giant tax-and-spend bill this year is likely, and the biggest expansion of the entitlement state since the 1960s is now possible.

The entitlements are by far the biggest long-term economic threat from the Biden agenda. Tax increases can be repealed by a future Congress. Spending on infrastructure will slow as funding falls. The courts may block his racial preferences. But entitlements that spend automatically based on eligibility are nearly impossible to repeal, or even reform, and they represent a huge tax-and-spend wedge far into the future.

The media won’t talk about this, and Republicans are so far missing in action. But Americans need to understand the stakes.

***

Hoover Institution scholars John Cogan and Daniel Heil document nearby the entitlement expansions of the Biden Families Plan. It’s an important piece that lists how far the progressive left wants to go in expanding government’s reach into American family life. Federal child care, government paid family leave, free community college, a $3,600 tax credit per child, a permanent expansion of ObamaCare premium subsidies, universal pre-K, permanent expansion of the earned-income tax credit to workers without children, and more.

We’d highlight two points. First is the dishonesty about costs. Entitlements always start small but then soar. The Biden Families Plan is even more dishonest than usual.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/amazons-woke-smokescreen?token=eyJ1c2VyX2l

A few years ago, my friend Dan Ahdoot was auditioning for a sitcom on Fox. And things were looking good; he’d heard from his agent that he made it to the last round. Then, he got a call from one of the creators of the show, a friend of his who was calling to say sorry: Dan wasn’t going to get the part. The reason, he said, was that he wasn’t “diverse.”  

Dan is Iranian. He has photos of his parents in Tehran before the revolution and the eyebrows to prove it. (Don’t worry, I asked Dan if I could objectify him.) But Fox apparently didn’t see Iran as “diverse.” 

Given that Dan is not just Jewish but also Persian and therefore in possession of more than the usual amount of chutzpah, he then thought to ask: What about Afghanistan? Was Iran’s neighbor sufficiently diverse?

The showrunner said he’d find out and give him a call back. 

In the meantime, Dan says he hopped onto his Wikipedia page and inserted a little edit: He was now an “Iranian Afghan Jew,” despite the fact that nobody in Dan’s lineage is from, nor has ever visited, Afghanistan.

The showrunner called back and pronounced that, according to the poobahs over at Fox, Afghanistan was indeed diverse. 

I thought of this story when I read Amazon Studios’ new inclusion policy, vaunted by stenographers in the mainstream media. It announces a goal, by 2024, of having 50% of creative roles in its movies and shows filled by women or people of color.

https://spectator.org/science-progress-publishing-journals/

“We must choose between science and science fiction.”

When you hear “Science says … ,” there’s no such thing. It’s bullying rhetoric, like “Everyone knows … ” or “It’s common wisdom that … ” Sometimes we can turn to authorities like the CDC or the WHO, but they are hardly omnipotent nor without political agendas. At one time they were at least essentially apolitical, but no more. Likewise for smaller institutions like colleges or universities, or for individuals. Of late, Anthony Fauci has come to mind.

Fact is, there’s strong evidence the progress of science is slowing — masked by relatively few high-profile advances (such as cell phones) and click-bait journalism with “breakthroughs” that never materialize. And there’s evidence of a decline in the quality of the scientific literature, even as it’s accompanied by an explosion in quantity. Publication seems to be doubling every nine years. Yet as I’ve noted previously here, the Alzheimer’s arsenal is effectively empty. Cancer progress has been achingly slow — the “War on Cancer” goal was to cure all types by 1976. And now over 50 years since Apollo 11, we actually don’t have the ability to return people to the moon.

The standard in observable advances is supposed to be published, peer-reviewed literature. But never mind that sometimes, as with COVID-19, it can take a long time for that to appear. Further, a recent study indicates that there may be a bias that makes publications in prestigious journals less reliable precisely because of what it takes to get in one, plus the desire of those publications to print the most cutting-edge or simply exciting material.

We have long known that the vast majority of published studies are never replicated because of such culprits as fraud, bias, negligence, and hype. In 2005, Stanford Professor John Ioannidis published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” the most downloaded paper ever in the Public Library of Science, better known as PLOS. Not incidentally, he has also become notorious for his minority views on COVID, including criticisms of case prediction models and the efficacy of lockdowns. Insisting on empiricism can make you very unpopular.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/06/28/worlds-leading-childrens-book-authors-group-apologizes-over-condemnation-of-antisemitism/

The only worldwide professional organization for children’s book authors and illustrators issued a fervent apology on Sunday to Muslim and Palestinian members over a recent condemnation of antisemitism that did not discuss Islamophobia, and announced the resignation of the diversity officer who had posted the messaged.

The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) has over 22,000 members in the US and around the world. Its members include such prominent writers as Judy Blume, who serves on its board of advisors.

The original SCBWI statement on antisemitism, published on June 10 acknowledged that Jews “have the right to life, safety, and freedom from scapegoating and fear.”

Noting the recent precipitous rise in antisemitism and antisemitic violence, the statement said, “Silence is often mistaken for acceptance and results in the perpetration of more hatred and violence against different types of people.”

“As proof, it saddens us that for the fourth time this year we are compelled to invite you to join us in not looking away and in speaking out against all forms of hate, including antisemitism,” it stated.

“As writers, illustrators, and translators of children’s literature, we are responsible for promoting equity and humanizing people in our work — all children and all families,” the group said.

On Sunday, SCBWI executive director Lin Oliver issued an apology, saying, “I would like to apologize to everyone in the Palestinian community who felt unrepresented, silenced, or marginalized. SCBWI acknowledges the pain our actions have caused to our Muslim and Palestinian members and hope that we can heal from this moment.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/wheres-the-equity-for-black-murder-victims/

That their disproportionate numbers don’t exercise progressives more remains one of the paradoxes of our time.

T he idea of equity, as everyone knows, is all the rage.

It holds that any racial disparity is evidence of racism and also a stinging indictment of American society.

What, then, of the yawning disparity between black victims of homicide and everyone else? Why isn’t this at the top of the nation’s agenda, treated with the same urgency as the alleged crisis of racist policing?

It’s been the focus of studies — usually from gun-control outfits, several of which I cite in this piece — and local activists and journalists. But it hasn’t achieved anything like the liftoff of Black Lives Matters, or the opposition to voting reforms in Republican states, or the pervasive effort to snuff out microaggressions and the like from universities, corporate America, and every other corner of American society.

No, it just doesn’t rate.

And we are talking about a disparity that couldn’t be any more stark — black men are killed, usually gunned down, in cold blood at vastly higher rates than any other group in society (albeit overwhelmingly at the hands of other black men). If you are a progressive who believes that any racial disparity is a function of institutional racism, this is a devastating commentary on racial discrimination in America, but it is met with a relative shrug and certainly none of the passion of, say, the resistance to the Georgia voting law.

Of course, it’s worse than that. Progressives have made this disparity worse. It is their narratives, their policies, and their elected officials who have enabled the current surge in murder, making a long-standing phenomenon even more pronounced.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/27/the-cruel-progressive-creed-undoing-civilization/

Debt is suffocating us. Our currency is on its way to being Lebanonized. 

Most major American cities are broke, dirty, unsafe, and run by either corrupt incumbents, neo-Marxists, or both. The law is optional,  and applied asymmetrically on the basis of race and ideology. The past is found guilty by the laws of the present and so it is being undone.

The military budget is on a trajectory to be the smallest in terms of GDP allotment since World War II; its careerist officers, for their own short-term interests, are now demonizing and will soon be driving away the very demographic that has suffered percentage-wise the greatest casualties in recent wars and was once unquestionably the foundation of the military. 

There is no U.S. border; it is an abstract construct that millions will illegally cross in the next few years, ostensibly because they will become future soldiers in the progressive wars for America to come. The idea of merit that built America is a dirty word, replaced by medieval tribalism of hiring and promotion by superficial appearance. 

In just five months, Joe Biden created a desert and called it progress.

Progressivism is billed as many things. But its foundational brand is devotion to supposedly “scientific” principles to improve the human condition. That Enlightenment project demands greater social welfare expenditure and therapeutic education to “improve” human nature itself. And all this can sometimes require necessary force.

Such utopian dreams of mandated equity attract all sorts to the cause. There are the naïve who feel socialist redistribution, if at last done right just this once, can really, really create social equity and inclusion. Many of the sympathetic rich assume they will be exempt from the tough medicine that follows from their own guilt or sense of civic duty. Some are opportunistic and parasitical careerists piggy-backing on the chaos. Others are social and psychological zealots who find meaning and relevance as wannabe soldiers marching to utopia.

But inherent in such 20th-century hubris is the concession that there will be lots of collateral damage in reordering society. When imposing abstract, but uncompromising theories onto the otherwise unenlightened people, eggs will have to be broken to bake the new omelet. And from what we have seen in the last few months, the progressive toll is becoming every bit as excruciating as our woke custodians are indifferent to it. 

As a general rule, anytime anyone anywhere announces that he has a master plan to reorder society and “fundamentally transform” or “reset” it by creating larger government, more rules, and an elite hierarchy to oversee compliance for the recalcitrant, then run. You can rest assured ultimately the architect will change the language, demonize and marginalize new opponents, given the omelette always needs more eggs. They will subvert institutions, and, if need be, resort to violence to ensure change.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17505/supreme-court-first-amendment

[The decision] sends a powerful message that the Supreme Court is still in the business of protecting offensive speech, even as big tech, universities and many progressives have tried to justify pervasive censorship of speech with which they disagree.

[T]he most dangerous form of contemporary censorship comes not from the government, but rather from private parties who themselves have the First Amendment right to censor speech with which they disagree. In other words, what we are experiencing is an attack not on the First Amendment itself, but rather on the culture of free speech that the First Amendment is designed to protect.

Today many such institutions punish students and applicants for social media statements they may have posted when they were the same youthful age as the cheerleader. Nor is the punishment always based on neutral or objective standards. It tends to be imposed far more on conservative students who have violated political correctness norms of the left. It is rarely, if ever, imposed on left-wing students, especially students of color, who make statements that are deeply offensive to conservatives and/or white heterosexual men. The constitutional reach of the First Amendment permits such selective punishment by private institutions, but the culture of freedom of expression does not.

In an 8-1 decision, the United States Supreme Court reminded a nation that seems to have forgotten freedom of speech about the importance of the First Amendment.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a thoughtful decision denying public schools the power to discipline high school students for talking the way high school students tend to talk among themselves outside of school. A 14-year-old cheerleader had made the mistake of sending a rant to a few friends, one of whose mothers was a coach.