RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/crime-tourism-is-now-a-thing-in-california-11647894206?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The Golden State has long been a cultural trend-setter and a popular destination for leisure travel. But this is not a story about loading the kids into a metallic-pea Wagon Queen Family Truckster and heading out west. It seems that California is now attracting an entirely new category of vacationers.

Sid Garcia reports for KABC-TV in Los Angeles:

Law enforcement agencies call it “crime tourism” — groups of thieves from South America traveling to California to burglarize homes…
They’re able to easily obtain tourist visas to travel to California by applying online. Once they have a visa they land at LAX and start their crime spree.
Residents in one Camarillo neighborhood say they’re well aware of the South American burglary crews that have been targeting their community and the surrounding areas.
“Several of my friends have been hit repeatedly,” Camarillo resident John McGrath said… According to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, last year alone, they handled 100 cases involving crews from South America.

Betty Yu recently reported for CBS station KPIX in San Francisco that law-enforcement officials believe such crews are operating in northern California as well:

A quiet residential town on the peninsula has seen an increase in burglaries over the past four months. Hillsborough police say a specific group could be behind the troubling trend.
Many of the sophisticated burglary crews are coming from South America for “criminal tourism” and they are targeting wealthy communities, according to a community alert sent Sunday.

https://www.city-journal.org/gas-prices-higher-in-democratic-leaning-states

The average price of one gallon of regular gasoline in the United States rose by a dollar, to $3.31, during Joe Biden’s first year in the White House. Now, supercharged by war in Ukraine, the price has soared to $4.27 per gallon. That average, though, is misleading. The actual price of gas at the pump varies widely by state, with nearly a $2-per-gallon difference between the costliest and the least expensive states. While some of those differences have to do with geographic factors that affect distribution costs, state policies—including taxes and regulations—also play a significant role in the vastly different burden consumers face around the country.

The highest gas prices are found disproportionately in high-tax, heavily regulated Democratic states, while the lowest gas prices show up in so-called red or purple states. California leads the way at a whopping $5.78 per gallon, followed by Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Illinois, Connecticut, and New York among the lower 48 states (Hawaiian and Alaskan geography make any comparisons with the rest of the country difficult). At the bottom sits Kansas, at $3.81 per gallon, followed by Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Iowa.

The price of a barrel of oil accounts for about 56 percent of the cost of this gas. Taxes on average compose about 15 percent of the price, and distribution and marketing costs amount to the rest. State gas taxes are an obvious culprit, but extraordinary fuel standards beyond the national level force up prices, too—as do regulatory constraints on building pipelines and refineries, which inflate distribution costs.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/huntergate-putin-danger-propaganda-liz-peek

What do liberal elites in our country have in common with Vladimir Putin?

People like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai and New York TimesExecutive Editor Dean Baquet know that knowledge is power. They understand that managing the flow of information, silencing critics and providing false narratives is every bit as effective in taking control as armored columns and hypersonic missiles.

This column was meant to be about Vladimir Putin’s hideously effective misinformation campaign, and how we should combat it. He has destroyed Russia’s independent press, sabotaged internet access and consequently hidden the truth about his unprovoked attack on Ukraine from the Russian people.

Hunter Biden’s laptop got in the way.

It is impossible to rail about Putin’s egregious lies to his countrymen without acknowledging that in our own purportedly free nation, we have witnessed the very same tactic. This is not hyperbole, as Joe Biden might say; this is true.

https://americanmind.org/features/replace-the-ruling-class/

America’s managerial elites are seeking demographic transformation by any means necessary.

If you google the words “Great Replacement,” your first hit will likely be a Wikipedia article which identifies the term as “a white nationalist conspiracy theory.” The article is part of two series, one on Islamophobia and one on discrimination. According to Wikipedia, the theory, “disseminated by French author Renaud Camus…states that, with the complicity or cooperation of ‘replacist’ elites, the ethnic French population—as well as white European populations at large—is being demographically and culturally replaced with non-European peoples.”

U.S. outlets repeat this account of Camus’s theory when they raise concerns that Great Replacement talk is being transposed into an American context. A CNN politics report claims that “far right White supremacist groups, conservative media personalities and some Republicans in Congress are trying to inflame nativist feelings among conservative Whites by warning that liberals want immigrants to ‘replace’ native-born Americans.” The Anti-Defamation League published a Great Replacement explainer which announced that “the racist conspiracy theory has well and truly arrived.” Other examples abound.

ADL highlighted three instances of what it considered “Great Replacement” rhetoric: a 2017 Unite the Right rally at the University of Virginia, in which several hundred demonstrators chanted that “Jews will not replace us”; a tweet by Iowa’s Representative Steve King to the effect that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”; and a 2021 segment in which Tucker Carlson argued that the Democratic party is “trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the third world.” After that last remark, the ADL called for Carlson to be fired from Fox News.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/20/conspirators-in-their-own-words/

For the last five years, the Left—defined as the fusion of the mainstream media, Silicon Valley, the radical new Democratic Party, and the vestigial Hillary Clinton machine—has crafted all sorts of conspiracies to destroy their perceived conservative enemies. 

Their method has focused on one major projection: alleging conspiracy on the part of others, which is a kind of confirmation of their own conspiracies to destroy their opponents in general, and Donald Trump in particular. 

Now they have been caught admitting to such nefariousness. Apparently, they still are exuberant about their slick shamelessness and simply can’t keep quiet. Or they believe radically changed conditions, such as the implosion of the Biden Administration, prompt necessary admissions. 

Hillary’s the One 

For nearly five years anyone who objected that the partisan Christopher Steele and his “dossier” were fraudulent, that Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS was a paid opposition hit team, and their joint birthing of “Trump-Russia collusion” was a myth, was smeared as a denialist or conspiracist. 

But examine what has transpired since 2016. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation found nothing. Mueller in congressional testimony was either addled or disingenuous. He even claimed he knew nothing of Fusion GPS or the dossier, the twin catalysts for his own investigation. 

The more Mueller meandered, the more it was clear that his henchman, partisan lawyer Andrew Weissmann, had hijacked the left-wing “All-Star” and “Dream Team” of lawyers and was running the charade. The more the Left boasted of the legal eagles set to tear apart Trump, the more glaring their failure to find any such evidence supporting their conspiracies. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-right-reason-to-oppose-judge-jackson/

As I’ve separately contended, some of the arguments being made against President Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are unworthy. Nevertheless, though it seems certain that she will be confirmed, her progressive judicial philosophy is a meritorious basis to vote against her, for the reasons outlined by Ed Whelan last week.

I could not disagree more with the assertion of a moderate Republican group of Judge Jackson’s supporters that “the question for the Senators is not whether this is a nomination that they would make, but whether the President has put forward a nominee well qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.” (See the letter in Ed’s post, linked above.)

That is more analogous to the question for senators with regard to nominees the president puts forward for executive-branch positions. While such positions involve critical duties, the executive appointee’s task is to carry out the elected president’s policies; thus, the principal confirmation issue is whether the nominee has the intellect, competence, and character that befits the position of trust, not whether we agree with the nominee’s politics or would ourselves have chosen the nominee.

Lifetime judicial appointments are very different, and those to Supreme Court seats are obviously significant — I hesitate to say “the most” significant because I believe a bad district judge, who is a court of one, can do more damage than a bad Supreme Court justice, who deals with many fewer cases and whose meanderings will rarely be decisive.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/theres_a_critical_vacancy_in_the_oval_office.html

“The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history,” said President John Kennedy on April 20, 1961. “Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can possibly survive.”

On that fateful April day, Kennedy honored his commitment to speak to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Many presidents would have ducked it. Three days before, with Kennedy’s authorization and the CIA’s guidance, thousands of Cuban-Americans launched a disastrous landing at what we know as the Bay of Pigs. While Kennedy spoke, the final act of this sad drama was still unfolding.

Today, can anyone imagine President Joe Biden facing a roomful of skeptical editors and owning up to his disastrous blunders in Ukraine. This is no more likely than him learning anything, as JFK did, from the mistakes he has made.

Honesty has never been part of Biden’s nature. For years, America tolerated his lies because he and they seemed inconsequential. He was just one vote out of 100 in the U.S. Senate. And as vice president, a position predecessor John Nance Garner described as “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” Biden remained more or less harmless.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/lia-thomas-and-authentic-self-bruce-bawer/

If the New York Times poses as America’s newspaper of record, presenting every day’s news through the lens of woke ideology and the Democratic Party narrative, the New Yorker is our flagship “serious” weekly magazine. So when the New Yorker runs a sober 5700-word article about what is arguably, in the minds of our woke brethren, the major issue of the day – namely, trans athletes – it merits notice. The text in question, dated March 17, was written by sports journalist Louisa Thomas (hereafter “Louisa”) and focused primarily on University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas (hereafter “Lia”), who at a meet in Atlanta last Thursday became, as ESPN reported, “the first known transgender athlete to win a Division I national championship in any sport.”

Lia was born Will Thomas in 1998 or 1999 and, according to Louisa, “realized she was transgender in the summer of 2018.” But you won’t find the name Will Thomas in Louisa’s article, which begins as follows:

Lia Thomas has been swimming since she was five years old. As a high schooler, she was one of the top swimmers in Texas, an All-American. She followed her older brother onto the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania, and established herself as a strong competitor in distance races; in her sophomore season, at the Ivy League championships, she finished second in three events.

In fact, during all that time, Lia was Will. And Will was a “he.” Lia is a “he,” too, of course. But in the year 2022, under the rules set down by our woke overlords, we are expected to pretend that Will’s decision four years ago to start calling himself Lia, and to identify as a “she,” had the magical effect of retroactively rewriting his entire life, turning Will Thomas into a girl from the moment of his birth

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/03/the-causes-of-war/

“Hence, if the military adventurers of Russia and China are predicating their exploits on some perception of American decline, they are badly mistaken. The only thing they have got right is their view of the lack of resolve of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who have been, so far, the most timid American presidents since Jimmy Carter.”

Someone should remind them, and the Western intellectuals whose leftist thinking influences them, that Jimmy Carter was succeeded by Ronald Reagan. The American democratic system was not principally designed for warfare, but weak presidents usually beget strong ones, and sooner rather than later.

In an intriguing article in the latest edition of the UK online publication The Article, Raymond Keene tries to explain Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as the product of a national trait that runs deep within the Russian psyche: an excess of paranoia. This echoes one of the common assumptions in the media today: Putin must have gone mad.

Keene defines paranoia as a suspicion of a non-existent threat and goes on to argue that Putin has succumbed to such an unwarranted ailment: “I doubt that Russia had ever been less threatened than at the start of 2022, with a complacent, underfunded NATO, secure borders and a stranglehold economic grip on European energy supplies.”