RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
April 10 to April 16, 2022 Wealthy, predominantly white and Hollywood-centric areas of Los Angeles have experienced the city’s sharpest upticks in a wide array of crimes, James Varney reports for RealClearInvestigations. Zip codes showing the largest increases include iconic Tinseltown neighborhoods such as Beverly Hills, of “90210” fame, where Beyonce and Jay-Z have their West Coast house; and Bel Air, of “Fresh Prince” Will Smith fame, where Jennifer Lopez now resides. Also affected: Los Feliz, where Angelina Jolie has lived since her divorce from Brad Pitt. Drawing on an analysis of crime and demographic data crunched by criminologist John Lott, Varney reports: - The richer and whiter the LA neighborhood, the greater its increase in both raw numbers of non-homicide crime and its share of total city crime.
- Poor and minority neighborhoods still suffer the largest total number of crimes, including violent crimes such as murder.
- But while the total number of rapes fell in Los Angeles, their share spiked in predominantly white areas.
- Lott’s analysis coincides with the U.S. Postal Service’s suspension of delivery to one neighborhood in Santa Monica over the peril to its carriers – a town where Tom Cruise, Christian Bale and Sandra Bullock reportedly have residences.
- Similar crime encroachments into richer, whiter areas may be occurring in other cities.
- Details on the race or ethnicity of those involved in the crimes were generally unavailable, as were official assessments of whether any were hate crimes.
Even amid a growing exodus, California’s boosters tout the Golden State as a shining progressive beacon for America. But the facts say otherwise, as demographer Joel Kotkin reports in RealClearInvestigations’ new two-article package on California. The once legendary state of American dreams is descending into something akin to modern-day feudalism: - California suffers the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate in the U.S., with blacks and Latinos disproportionately hard-hit.
- With the widest gap between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state, California rates third-highest in inequality in America.
- Its swelling energy costs under its environmentalist policies create a double whammy: Massive utility bills and a dearth of jobs in energy-consuming industries like manufacturing. This makes for a “new Green Jim Crow era,” as one critic puts it.
- With pro-urban-density housing policies, California has the highest housing costs and rents of all states save Hawaii.
- Nearly three in five California high schoolers are not prepared for either college or a career.
- Since 2000, the state has lost 2.6 million people, more than the populations of San Diego, San Francisco, and Anaheim combined.
- With the undynamic state rapidly aging, California’s trading in its surfboard for a walker.
Red state opposition to teaching critical race theory and gender issues grabs most of the attention in America’s education wars, but clashes are also flaring in blue states, led by liberal parents once four-square behind teacher unions and progressive school boards, Bill McMorris reports for RealClearInvestigations. This less noted second front in the struggle over the schoolhouse pits moms and dads against teachers seen as putting adults first in resisting returning to classrooms, despite children’s resilience against COVID and the steep toll of remote learning on kids’ educational progress and mental health. McMorris reports: - Parents are figuratively up in arms, from San Francisco, where voters ousted union-endorsed school board members, to Chicago, Minneapolis, Massachusetts, and other blue enclaves.
- Massachusetts mom Keri Rodriguez, career unionist and Democrat stalwart, uses tactics the labor movement taught her through the National Parents Union she founded.
- Rodriguez: “Only in the education system are parents treated as if we should be passively going along and allow others to not only run the system but run it in a way that's beneficial to adults.”
- Ryan Griffin of the new Chicago Parents Collective says of the unions: “We saw the pandemic used as leverage to get other things. I think those incentives got misaligned.”
- In Minnesota during lockdowns, schools hemorrhaged students and high school graduation rates dropped for the first time in 12 years.
- Washington, D.C., saw performance plummet among its overwhelmingly minority students.
- Even some teachers are fed up with lockdowns and masks.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway With the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post finally acknowledging the authenticity of large swathes of material on Hunter Biden’s laptop, amid reports of an intensifying federal probe into Biden activities reflected therein, the media is taking another look at Hunter’s conduct and how it may implicate the current President. Perhaps the closest nexus between Hunter and father Joe can be found in the alleged commingling of their finances. This piece reports that Hunter Biden’s access to lucrative financial opportunities also came with expectations — including kicking back as much as 50% of his earnings to his dad, text messages on his old laptop show: “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years,” Hunter Biden groused to daughter Naomi in January 2019. “It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.” Pop is Joe Biden. The laptop — infamously abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019 — does not contain any direct evidence of such money transfers, but does show that Hunter was routinely on the hook for his father’s household expenses while Joe Biden was vice president. The expenses are spelled out in an email to Hunter from business partner Eric Schwerin from June 5, 2010, titled “JRB Bills.” They concerned the upkeep of Joe Biden’s palatial lakefront home in the wealthy Greenville enclave of Wilmington, Del. JRB are President Biden’s initials. According to the piece, evidence suggests Hunter’s business partner at Rosemont Seneca Partners had personal access to the then-vice president’s finances, having received VP Biden’s “Delaware tax refund check,” and had discussions with VP Biden about his mortgage and future financial prospects; that Joe Biden at times reimbursed his son for expenses; and that father and son shared at least one linked account, as revealed when Hunter accidentally transferred nearly $25,000 to an escort during a May 2018 drug and alcohol binge, prompting a series of text messages from a former Secret Service agent who interceded noting “this is linked to Celtic’s [Joe Biden’s] account. In a related article, Just the News provides further color on Hunter and Joe’s allegedly commingled finances. In a separate article, the Daily Caller reports: Hunter Biden briefed Chinese energy investors on American natural gas production and sales shortly after a state-run energy corporation entered into a memorandum of understanding with the state of West Virginia. The Chinese Energy Investment Corp. signed a memorandum of understanding with the state of West Virginia in November 2017, which allowed the two sides to enter negotiations to develop shale gas fields. One month later, Biden offered a presentation to Chinese investors discussing various American shale formations that would be profitable investment opportunities. Biden was receiving payments from CEFC China Energy at the time of the presentation, obtained by the Daily Caller from his laptop, although the presentation does not specify which firm received it. In another article, Breitbart chronicles nearly a dozen instances in which Joe Biden was involved with his family’s dubious business dealings. For a repository of reporting on the Biden family’s questionable conduct, readers can consult RealClearInvestigations’ Hunter Biden Reader. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Secret Donors for Dozen '24 Presidential Hopefuls Politico
Jan. 6 Prosecutors Face New Headwinds Wall St Journal
Court Filing: 20+ Feds Embedded on Jan. 6 Epoch Times
Saudi Payback Seen in $2B to Kushner Firm New York Times
Antitrust Critic Raimondo Won’t Disclose Big Tech Contacts Intercept
Study: Gmail Sends More Conservative Emails to Spam Fox News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series It’s been more than 11 years since Congress passed a sweeping safety law designed to prevent the consumption of contaminated food. Nevertheless, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that more than 128,000 people are hospitalized and 3,000 people die from foodborne illnesses each year – a toll that has not lessened during the last decade. This article reports that a main reason is FDA’s failure to put in place safety standards for the water used to grow fresh produce, as mandated by that law, despite knowing that water is one of the main ways fresh fruits and vegetables become contaminated with deadly pathogens. Congress has ramped up FDA funding over the past decade, but deadly outbreaks keep happening and it often takes the agency too long to respond. Politico’s investigation found that the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, the little-known food arm of FDA, has repeatedly failed to take timely action on a wide range of safety and health issues the agency has been aware of for several years, including dangerous pathogens found in water used to grow produce and heavy metal contamination in baby foods. The agency has been slow to acknowledge numerous other chemicals of concern, including PFAS, so-called forever chemicals, which can be found in the food supply and are used in food packaging. FDA has dragged its feet on major nutrition issues, even as diet-related disease rates in the U.S. have continued to worsen. For example, FDA has spent the better part of a decade working on voluntary sodium reduction goals for food companies while many other countries moved ahead with their own years ago. As more motorists seemed to be firing guns last year, the Dallas Police Department began tracking road rage shootings for the first time. The results were alarming: 45 people wounded, 11 killed. In Austin, this article reports, the police recorded 160 episodes of drivers pointing or firing a gun last year; this year, there have been 15 road rage shootings, with three people struck. (Two others were stabbed in altercations stemming from road rage.) The prevalence of such violence, not just in Texas but around the country, suggests a cultural commonality, an extreme example of deteriorating behavior that has also flared on airplanes and in stores. It is as if the pandemic and the nation’s sour mood have left people forgetting how to act in public at the same time as they were buying millions more weapons. The firing squad is being revived as a form of execution. This article reports that South Carolina, Oklahoma and Mississippi have recently authorized its use, though Utah remains the only state that has actually used the method in the last century. The irony, this article reports, is that it may be more humane than the modern method ushered in as the least cruel: death by lethal injection. The U.S. Supreme Court has told death row prisoners that if they want to fight lethal injection in court, they need to propose an alternative. Following dozens of botched, evidently painful lethal injections in recent years, prisoners in at least 10 states have been making a surreal argument: They would prefer the firing squad. … “It’s an almost instantaneous death, it’s the cheapest, it’s the simplest, it has the lowest ‘botch’ rate,” said Corinna Lain, a law professor at the University of Richmond. The article also reports that the firing squad has become a more viable option as big pharmaceutical companies began saying they didn’t want their products to be used to kill, and cut off the supply of drugs. Coronavirus Investigations States that imposed the harshest lockdowns – including New York, California, New Jersey and Illinois – had the most devastating impact on public health, education and the economy, the most wide-ranging study into COVID restrictions in the U.S. to date has found. Nine of the 10 worst responses to the pandemic were in blue states, the report said, with only Republican-run Maryland bucking that trend and coming seventh last. By contrast, 9 out of the top 10 places in the study were Republican-led areas. This artcile also reports that: Florida fared sixth, with its Governor Ron DeSantis condemned in the early days of the pandemic for what critics claimed was a reckless desire to reopen too quickly. Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana and South Dakota were also praised by analysts for their pandemic response which did not cause more Covid deaths. Maine was the only Democrat-run state in the top nine best responses, and came eighth. Other Coronavirus Investigations Inside Nonprofit at Center of Lab-Leak Furor Vanity Fair
Despite COVID, Efforts to Make Protective Gear in U.S. Falter AP
Calif.: Losing Medical Licenses for COVID 'Misinformation' Breitbart |
