RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/racial-gerrymandering-supreme-court-allen-v-milligan-john-roberts-clarence-thomas-gingles-alabama-7b595b78?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Chief Justice John Roberts has wisely led the Supreme Court away from the political thicket of partisan gerrymandering, writing in Rucho v. Common Cause that he sees no “judicially discernible and manageable” standards to police it. But with an opportunity to clarify the law on racial gerrymandering, the Chief passed.

This is unfortunate, given the muddled status quo. The upshot of Thursday’s 5-4 split in Allen v. Milligan is to send Alabama back to the drawing board to create a second black-majority U.S. House district. Yet other states have tried that approach, only to be admonished by the Court that their maps were drawn with too much emphasis on race.

Alabama has seven House seats, with a black majority in one. That divides out to 14%. Yet the state’s voting-age population is 26% black. Alabama argued that when it redrew its House map after the 2020 census, it enacted only “race-neutral adjustments for small shifts in population.” But a federal district court ruled that the Voting Rights Act (VRA) requires a second majority-black district, for 29% representation.

Section 2 of the VRA says voting practices must be “equally open” and can’t give racial minorities “less opportunity” to “elect representatives of their choice.” The precedent for vote dilution is Gingles (1986), which set up a multipart test. The minority group must be “sufficiently large and compact” and “politically cohesive.” The “totality of circumstances” must suggest the political process isn’t equally open.

The trick is that Section 2 also explicitly says it creates no right for any group to have its members “elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.” Other High Court rulings have called racial gerrymandering “odious,” applying strict scrutiny if it’s a “predominant” factor for mapmakers. Alabama said its critics could draw two black-majority districts “only by starting with a ‘nonnegotiable’ racial target and backfilling with other redistricting criteria.” Sure sounds “predominant.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/a_government_at_war_with_its_people.html

Warfare requires deception.  The federal government habitually lies to the American people.  Consider that an admission that it sees itself at war with those it claims to serve.

You might have noticed that the word “propaganda” has been somewhat retired from polite conversation.  Occasionally, some State-allied news corporation will apply the term to a public statement coming from inside Russia, but otherwise, the idea that governments promote falsehoods cloaked as official truths has quietly disappeared.  

Instead, ordinary information enjoyed and shared among regular people is now targeted for classification.  An alliance of national governments, international institutions, and propaganda engines disguised as disinterested nonprofits has sprung up to toss “unacceptable” thoughts into garbage piles for “mis-,” “mal-,” and “dis-” information trash bins.  As with everything else in modern society, the cult of expertise has even given us “disinformation experts” to decide what knowledge belongs where.  

The small coterie of “disinformation experts” recognized and promoted by governments then monitor what the common people are saying among themselves, cast their nets around anything “unacceptable,” and stigmatize those words and thoughts as deserving of censorship.  Perhaps one day soon there will be academic degrees in “disinformation” or special licenses distinguishing State-approved professionals as qualified to tell the rest of us what is real.  As a rule of thumb, if you want to know what kinds of knowledge governments fear their citizens possessing, look to the subjects that require numerous layers of authority validation before access is granted or titles are conferred.  Now the knowledge that governments fear their citizens possessing is simply information outside their control.  

In this way, officials have flipped the script on propaganda.  Rather than the people calling out governments for their lies, governments pre-emptively defame their citizens as liars.  How do governments know when their citizens are “lying”?  Easy.  They just isolate anybody who contradicts publicly announced official truths.  Like a puff of smoke vanishing in the wind, government propaganda disappears because anyone who recognizes it as such is guilty of spreading “mis-,” “mal-,” or “dis-” information.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/07/remembering-the-horrors-of-d-day/

Seventy-nine years ago this week, the Allies assaulted the Normandy beaches on D-Day, June 6, 1944. 

Their invasion marked the largest amphibious landing since the Persians under Xerxes invaded the Greek mainland in 480 B.C. 

Nearly 160,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers stormed five beaches of Nazi-occupied France. The plan was to liberate Western Europe after four years of occupation, push into Germany, and end the Nazi regime.

Less than a year later, the Allies from the West, and the Soviet Russians from the East, did just that, utterly destroying Hitler’s Third Reich. 

Ostensibly, the assault seemed impossible even to attempt. 

Germany had repulsed with heavy Canadian losses an earlier Normandy raid at Dieppe in August 1942. 

The Germans also knew roughly when the Allies were coming. They placed their best general, Erwin Rommel, in charge of the Normandy defenses. 

The huge D-Day force required enormous supplies of arms and provisions just to get off the beaches. Yet the Allies had no means of capturing even one port on the nearby heavily fortified French coast. 

To land so many troops so quickly, the Allies would have to ensure complete naval and air supremacy. 

They would have to tow over from Britain their own ports, lay their own gasoline pipeline across the English Channel, and invent novel ships and armored vehicles just to get onto and over the beaches. 

More dangerous still, the invaders would ensure armor and tactical air dominance to avoid being cut off, surrounded, and annihilated once they went inland. 

German Panzer units—battle-hardened troops in frightening Panther and Tiger tanks, with over three hard years of fighting experience on the Eastern Front—were confident they could annihilate in a matter of days the outnumbered lightly armed invaders. 

Such a huge force required 50 miles of landing space on the beaches. That vast expanse ensured that some landing sites were less than ideal—Omaha Beach in particular. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-dangerous-contempt-for-work/

Large numbers of younger American workers, especially Gen Z’ers, those born between 1997 and 2012, are demonstrating some dangerous attitudes about work and employment. The problem isn’t a lack of jobs. Nearly half of small businesses recently reported having unfilled job openings, nearly twice the half-century historical average. And 41% say they have raised compensation. Overall, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 10 million unfilled jobs at the end of April, followed by 399,000 new jobs in May.

A more likely explanation is changes in mores and attitudes towards work. “Funemployment,” for example, according to Investopedia describes “those who lost their jobs and choose to use their newfound freedom to pursue leisure activities such as traveling, going to the beach, and being physically active until they find a new job.”

Taking one’s time to find a new job while drawing unemployment benefits is nothing new, but usually those who do so are working for cash to increase their income. The “funemployed” are spending money on “leisure activities,” and many live with their parents.

Then there are those who still work but practice “quiet quitting,” basically goldbricking on the job by doing only the bare minimum. Gallup estimates that half of the workforce practices “quiet quitting,” especially Gen Z’ers and younger Millennials. This attitude was facilitated during the Covid years, when the trillions of dollars in federal and state money sloshing through the economy made it affordable to blow off employment or risk one’s job. And don’t forget, during the lockdowns many employees got hooked on working from home, where supervision is lax and goofing off on the company’s dime is easy.

But again, changing attitudes toward work are more pertinent than money when it comes to a lack of respect for honest labor. According to 74% of managers in a Resume Builder survey, Gen Z’ers are “difficult to work with. . . . About half (49%) of [managers] find it difficult to work with Gen Z’ers all (11%) or most of the time (39%). Additionally, 16% say they find it difficult a lot of the time, while 20% say some of the time and 10% say not much of the time. Only 4% said they almost never find it to be difficult.