RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/ketanji-brown-jackson-a-credentials-d-judge/

Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett could only wish to have experienced a fraction of the media praise being heaped on Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.

If anything, it should be the other way around. President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointees showed immense legal ability and fidelity to the rule of law before joining the Court.

The politically incorrect truth is that President Joe Biden’s nominee, who is set to face Senate questioning on Monday, is a mediocre judge whose politics trump the law.

Let’s look at two cases Jackson handled as a district court judge, her job for eight years until being elevated to the D.C. Court of Appeals last year. The cases are among the highest-profile to have reached her court. They also involve immigration law, an area I write on.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/how_todays_diversity_damages_our_military.html

Diversity sounds great.  That’s part of the problem.  Today’s “diversity,” however, isn’t what it used to be.  Rather than diverse experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives — that promote healthy group decisions and outcomes ‒ “diversity” has come to mean only race, ethnicity, and gender.  Unfortunately, today’s “diversity” is replacing our long, and largely successful, journey towards equal opportunity.  We have moved the goalposts to the end of a new field — a field where equal racial and gender outcomes determine the score.  In this new world, “diversity” has become an end unto itself, undermining the purpose of our military: winning wars.  Here is why it is so damaging.

Today’s diversity advocates measure organizational success by race/ethnicity and gender — factors that have nothing to do with performance or potential.  Yet, they are influencing accessions, advancements, and promotions across the force.  Prioritizing racial and gender goals clearly undermines the importance of performance and merit.  Sadly, today’s military leaders are often downplaying talents, experience, and skills in favor of skin color and gender in their personnel decisions.  The result is a less capable force with less capable leaders.

This new push for diversity also destroys trust. When merit and performance are downplayed in the name of quotas and goals, excellence is undermined.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-news-thats-finally-fit-to-print-hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-post-new-york-times-joe-biden-11647637814?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“The emails make clear that Hunter was cashing in on the Biden name, including as a board member of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. That influence-peddling was a potential political liability for Mr. Biden, which was why the facts deserved an airing before the election. They are still relevant, especially with U.S.-China relations so fraught.”

Talk about burying the lead—for 17 months. The New York Times has finally acknowledged that Hunter Biden’s business dealings are legitimate news. Implicit apology accepted.

The Times waddled in this week with a story on the “tax affairs” of the President’s son, including this gem in the 24th paragraph: “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

You don’t say. This admission comes six months after a Politico writer published a book that also confirmed that the laptop emails were authentic. But the original scoop belonged to the New York Post, which broke its laptop story in October 2020—only to meet a media wall of denial and distortion.

Rather than attempt to confirm the emails, nearly all of the media at the time ignored the story or “fact-checked” it as false. This in-kind contribution to candidate Joe Biden was all the more egregious given other evidence supporting the Post’s scoop. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s. And Hunter’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went public with documents backing up some of the laptop’s contents.

https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/shameless-delusional-cuomo-brothers-continue-to-play-the-role-of-victims/

Cockroaches.

Keith Richards.

The Cuomo brothers.

Yes, Andrew and Chris, those heroes-to-zeroes, have officially earned their place among the rare life forms sure to survive Armageddon.

Nothing can exterminate these two from public life, because nothing Andrew or Chris has ever done is their fault.

Actually, scratch that. The problem, you see (and can’t you just hear Andrew’s pedantic, patronizing voice saying this, lowering down into that slow, conspiratorial whisper?) is ev-er-y-bo-dy else.

And really, the Cuomo brothers believe this. Two delusional, power-hungry, disloyal narcissists, determined to bully weary voters and viewers into submission. It’s all so very dignified and statesman-like.

On Thursday morning, just seven months shy of resigning in disgrace, Andrew gave a lengthy speech explaining what’s gone wrong with the modern Democratic party.

Answer: They pushed him out of it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/this-photo-should-end-the-transgender-athlete-debate/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

On a most basic level, everyone knows that the decision to allow Lia Thomas to compete against women at the collegiate level is wrong. The decision has been rationalized to death with rhetoric concerning the transgender swimmer’s “authentic self,” as if the female swimmers competing under a new glass ceiling had any quarrel with that.

But the photo above should end that debate. In a tolerant and reasonable society that values fairness — fairness for women, which understandably has been an animating issue for progressives and was the motivation for the first bill Barack Obama signed as president — the jarring image of Thomas towering over the defeated women at the 500-yard freestyle yesterday is unassailable evidence of how wrong this charade is.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-democrats-are-building-themselves-a-suicide-machine/

The party has gone along with the American media in advancing a bizarro-world ideology that few support.

T he Democrats are in political trouble, and the media bear much of the blame.

This is not because the media have ceased to be horribly biased in the Democrats’ favor. They remain that, and hopelessly so. Rather, it’s because the media have become more crazy, more self-confident, and less respected than ever, and because this shift has rendered their bias less useful than it once was.

For reasons that remain alien to me, almost the entirety of the American press — as well as much of academia and the entertainment industry — has spent the last five years assiduously adopting an exceptionally weird race-and gender-essentialist ideology that pretty much everyone outside of those institutions absolutely loathes. And, in its infinite wisdom, the Democratic Party has followed suit. The result has been the creation of a narrow, extremely peculiar feedback loop, within which the institutional Democratic Party and its friends in the press have concocted — and then adopted — a set of bizarro-world ideas that are met with confusion and horror once they are released into the general population. Bit by bit, piece by piece, tweet by tweet, the wagon to which the Democrats have hitched themselves is becoming a suicide machine.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/opinion-post/the-critical-mass-of-my-righteous-fury/

The West right now seems absorbed in pushing such idiocies as the finer intricacies of transgender and critical race theories, the claim that defunding the police will help poor blacks (yep, really), a sort of zero-risk, precautionary principle on steroids approach to life and to governing citizens, and the notion that indirect quotas are a good idea as long as you dress them up in the insidiously seductive language of ‘equity’ and ‘diversity’. That means you find some desirable jobs and educational opportunities and then insist there be a near 1:1 correlation between (1) the numbers in the wider society with particular reproductive organs or types of skin pigmentation or preferences in bed, and (2) the numbers from such groups filling these jobs or university places etc – so basically it’s a type of Marxist equality-of-outcome outlook dominating not just universities and the public service but now all big corporations too. 

Moreover, it’s an outlook that indirectly lowers diversity of viewpoint, because conservatives make autonomy and individual choice key. And because they don’t want to play the identity-politics game, they largely don’t get these jobs or places or promotions.  The result over time is a monolithic orthodoxy of outlook, on campus, in the boardroom — heck, even in the Liberal partyroom.  This destructive, navel-gazing wankery in the West is very depressing.  Of course, the rest of the world is busy showing us that the great British philosopher Thomas Hobbes was right.  Humans have, do and always will live in a dangerous world, one chock full of bullies, thugs, religious zealots and hard men who know only the lessons of the schoolyard (by which I mean the schoolyard when I was a kid at a pretty tough state school in Toronto, where bullying meant being beaten up, not today’s schoolyard where ‘bullying’ has been emptied of all content and appears to mean someone has said something that might reduce self-esteem a few points on the ‘might I possibly be offended?’ scale).