RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

“You do not disrespect black women from our community…. You do not disrespect Black Lives Matter…. You ever disrespect a black woman again, we’re going to shut you down.”

With these and other words, a group of 10 Milwaukee Black Panthers invaded an Asian-owned nail salon and threatened it.

Later, they returned, and police arrived.  Instead of protecting the Asian owner, a female officer spoke cordially with the Panthers, addressing their leader as “General” and left the store saying, “All right, I’m sure that he got your message, sir, thank you so much.  We really appreciate you coming down.  Thank you though.”

All of this is on video recordings, boastfully posted to Facebook by the leader of the Panthers, who styles himself “King Rick” and who refers to Black female customers as “queens.”  We know this only thanks to Jim Piwowarczyk of Wisconsin Right Now, who notes that the leader of the group is:

“Darryl King Rick Farmer II,” whose Facebook page proclaims him as, “LEADER AND BLACK GENERAL OF THE ORIGINAL BLACK PANTHERS NATIONWIDE AND OTHER COUNTRIES!”

Following these confrontations, the nail salon has been shut down, its retail space vacated, a business (and jobs) no longer in existence.

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.