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American Greatness
The Fall of a Great American City: The Societal and Political Decay of Pittsburgh
It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Thursday morning and a homeless man is curled up against the decorative angled brick below the archways of the large pane windows that line the office building known as the Fort Pitt Commons.
For context, it is important to understand that 40 years ago this Pittsburgh building was a turn-of-the-century industrial warehouse that was converted into a breathtaking six-story structure with exposed brick, natural beams, an atrium lit by a skylight and various-sized balconies overlooking all floors.
The structure was so well architecturally regarded the year it opened it won the David L. Lawrence Building of the Year for its contribution to Pittsburgh’s Renaissance – and inside still retains the glory and uniqueness that earned that praise.
Outside along the sidewalk however is a different story; on most days feces and needles litter the sidewalks on either side of the building, and the smell of urine is omnipresent. So are the tents, which line two of the four sides of the building.
American Thinker
Clarence Thomas Gets It
Ever since the end of June, Americans in the media have been chattering about the implications of the Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. This case, in which several Asian-American students sued the university for racial discrimination, ended with the court ruling for the plaintiffs and banning race-based preferences in college admissions.
Already people have had time to argue every question under the sun — is what happened good or bad? More important than most people think, or less important? How aggressively will lower courts enforce it? And so forth.
Yet the result itself was unsurprising; most people expected that the five solid originalists on the Court would rule that the U.S. Constitution and the Civil Rights Act do in fact forbid discrimination on the basis of race. (The Court’s final split was 6-3; Chief Justice Roberts joined the conservatives in the majority, leaving only Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson to dissent).
The decision is unlikely to be overturned in the future, or even to generate the sort of electoral backlash among Democrats that Dobbs v. Jackson did last year, since race-based preferences are just too unpopular.
Bearing Arms
Chicago concealed carry holder shoots robbers in self-defense, but may be out of a job for his actions
Chicago police say a concealed carry holder fended off a pair of robbers over the weekend, but even though he was acting in self-defense he’s likely going to be out of work as a result of his life-saving actions.
According to authorities, the rideshare driver was targeted early Saturday morning as he dropped off a fare.
The 26-year-old driver had dropped off a passenger about 1 a.m. in the 1500 block of South Millard Avenue when two people – a man, 20, and an 18-year-old woman – walked up to him and announced a robbery, according to Chicago police.
The male suspect took the victim’s cell phone, then fired shots as the two robbers tried to flee the scene, police said.
The driver, who has a valid concealed carry license, returned fire, striking the man in the leg and grazing the woman in the arm, police said. The driver was not injured.
Both suspects were taken into custody, while the rideshare driver has not been arrested or charged with a crime. Because both Uber and Lyft have driver disarmament policies requiring contracted drivers to go unarmed while on the job, however, it’s almost certain that the driver is or will soon be out of a job.
Daniel Greenfield
On December 12, 2016 (or D12), the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign endorsed a call by Christine Pelosi, the daughter of then House Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi, as well as other electors to receive an “intelligence briefing” on how “Russian interference was performed to help Donald Trump get elected” from Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
Hillary Clinton and her senior campaign officials were aware that they had concocted the lie that the Russians had gotten Trump elected, outsourced it to a former British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, who produced the infamous Steele dossier, and distributed it through the FBI and were exploiting it to subvert the Electoral College and hijack the presidential election.
The Clinton campaign was endorsing a move to influence members of the Electoral College to set aside their duty and corrupt the electoral votes. Electors are bound to vote in accordance with the ballot count. There was no purpose to a “briefing” on the conspiracy theories that were manufactured by the Clinton campaign except to persuade them to corrupt the vote.
The Wall Street Journal correctly described the move as an “Electoral College Coup”. Pelosi’s daughter and other Democrat electors were requesting “a briefing on all investigative findings, as these matters directly impact the core factors in our deliberations of whether Mr. Trump is fit to serve as President of the United States.” And they were asking it from Clapper who would go around pushing the Steele dossier and defending its conspiracy theories as based on facts.
Animal Magnetism
The picture of human origins just keeps getting more and more complicated. Recently, in China, another ancient skull has been uncovered, and it appears to be something we haven’t seen before.
An international team of scientists has described an ancient human fossil in China unlike any other hominin found before.
It resembles neither the lineage that split to form Neanderthals, nor Denisovans, nor us, suggesting our current version of the human family tree needs another branch.
The jaw, skull, and leg bones belonging to this yet-to-be classified hominin, labeled HLD 6, were discovered in Hualongdong, in East Asia, in 2019. In the years since, experts at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have struggled to match the remains to a known lineage.
