Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Telling the people most at risk for contracting #Monkeypox how to avoid it is just way, way, way too politically incorrect!

It seems that some people have suggested that the name “Monkeypox” somehow discriminates against blacks and homosexual males, and should be changed, which immediately became the subject of jokes:

The apparently odd notion that, with Monkeypox, an infection that is being spread primarily, though not exclusively, by male homosexual sex, should make them question whether they really need to copulate with that cute guy at the end of the bar just never seems to occur. Continue reading →

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Recession! The Biden Administration won’t admit it, but people know it

To absolutely no one’s surprise, second quarter Gross Domestic Product figures came in showing real economic contraction. From The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. GDP Fell at 0.9% Annual Rate in Second Quarter

The economy contracted after shrinking earlier in the year, held back by rising inflation and interest rates—marking a recession in many eyes

by Harriet Torry | Thursday, July 28, 2022 | 8:47 AM EDT

The U.S. economy shrank for a second quarter in a row—a common definition of recession—as businesses trimmed their inventories, the housing market buckled under rising interest rates, and high inflation took steam out of consumer spending.

Gross domestic product, a broad measure of the goods and services produced across the economy, fell at an inflation and seasonally adjusted annual rate of 0.9% in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That marked a deterioration from the 1.6% rate of contraction recorded in the first three months of 2022.

The report indicated the economy met a commonly used definition of recession—two straight quarters of declining economic output.

The official arbiter of recessions in the U.S. is the National Bureau of Economic Research, which defines one as a significant decline in economic activity, spread across the economy for more than a few months. Its Business Cycle Dating Committee considers factors including employment, output, retail sales, and household income — and it usually doesn’t make a recession determination until long after the fact.

The GDP report offered some discouraging signs, and underscored the challenges facing U.S. businesses, consumers and policy makers—including high inflation, weakening consumer sentiment and supply-chain volatility.

Emphasis mine.

So, the Biden Administration, eager as it is to use a subjective rather than objective measure of inflation, gets some political cover from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private organization headquartered in — drum roll, please! — Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Wikipedia:

In September 2010, after a conference call with its Business Cycle Dating Committee, the NBER declared that the Great Recession in the United States had officially ended in 2009 and lasted from December 2007 to June 2009. In response, a number of newspapers wrote that the majority of Americans did not believe the recession was over, mainly because they were still struggling and because the country still faced high unemployment. However, the NBER release had noted that “In determining that a trough occurred in June 2009, the committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity. Rather, the committee determined only that the recession ended and a recovery began in that month. A recession is a period of falling economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. The trough marks the end of the declining phase and the start of the rising phase of the business cycle.”

So, the eight economists who decide if the U.S. is in a recession using these markers declared that the 2007-2009 “Great Recession” ended 15 months after they saw the signs that it did. That’s the political cover the Biden Administration believe will take them through November 8th, election day.

But it won’t work. With a 9.1% annualized inflation rate in June, Americans don’t need dry statistics to tell them when we’re in a recession; they can feel it, in their wallets, and in their bones.

The Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors raised their base interest rates another 0.75% just yesterday, in an attempt to fight the high inflation rate, and signaled that another rate hike would probably occur.

The very low unemployment rate is what is giving the Democrats hope that this isn’t a ‘real’ recession.

GDP is measured in dollars, and spending increased across the board, as it does almost every quarter. That’s why inflation is calculated in, to keep spending numbers from obscuring actual economic growth. Yes, inflation completely wiped out the growth in spending, but there’s more to it than just that: while inflation was 9.1% in June, wage growth was much smaller, 5.1%. Consumers spent more, but their wages did not keep up with what they had to spend; the average American is poorer, in real terms, than he was a year ago.

Bidenomics has been a disaster for Americans, but, not to worry, at least he’s not sending out any mean tweets!

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And here you have all of the information that you need to understand the violence in Philadelphia!

I hadn’t expected this, though I suppose that I should have.

We have previously noted the murder of 73-year-old James “Simmie” Lambert by a group of Philadelphia teens and even younger brats. What I didn’t mention on this site was that the 13-year-old girl who was questioned but not arrested was herself shot in a not very nice neighborhood, the 5800 block of Osceola Street.

Well, it seems like the ‘hood doesn’t like that some of the kids who beat Mr Lambert to death have been criminally charged:

Family of 73-year-old man fatally beaten with traffic cone says they’re being harassed, judge issues stay away order

On three occasions in the last two weeks, a group of kids has gathered outside the home of the 84-year-old sister of James Lambert Jr.

by Ellie Rushing | Wednesday, July 27, 2022

The family of the 73-year-old man who was fatally beaten by teens with a traffic cone last month said they have been harassed and taunted by kids showing up outside their house in recent weeks.

On three occasions in the last two weeks, a group of kids has gathered outside the home of the 84-year-old sister of James Lambert Jr., who died last month after two teens hit him multiple times with a traffic cone.

Tania Stephens, Lambert’s niece, said the kids stood outside her mother’s Strawberry Mansion house, pointing and laughing, making the family feel intimidated and harassed.

In response, Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Joffie C. Pittman III on Tuesday approved a stay-away order requested by the District Attorney’s Office, ordering all defendants, their families, and any third parties related to them to stand down or face arrest.

Yeah, that’s going to make a difference!

According to Lonny Fish, the lawyer representing Gamara Mosley, one of the two 14-year-olds charged with third-degree murder in the case, some of the girls photographed outside the home are believed to be sisters of a 13-year-old girl who was present during the incident, but was not charged with any crimes. It is their understanding, Fish said, that the kids had been on their way to the pool nearby and stopped by the house spontaneously.

Would that be the same 13-year-old girl who was shot on Osceola Street? Osceola Street is about four miles from the Strawberry Mansion section of Philly, and a bit more than five miles from Cecil B Moore and 21st Street, where Mr Lambert was murdered.

Makes me wonder: were any of these girls on the way to the pool the same girls whose violence and vandalism caused the city to close the pool at McVeigh Recreation Center for the summer? Granted, it’s about 3 miles from McVeigh to Strawberry Mansion, but certainly not a distance that healthy teenaged girls couldn’t walk.

The girls were friends of Mosley’s up until her arrest, he said, but Mosley’s family has nothing to do with the visits to Lambert’s relatives’ home, which he called “indefensible” and wrong.

“My client is 14, and she’s incarcerated right now,” Fish said. “Whatever it is, it’s not at the behest of any of the people supervising my client.”

It may well be that young Miss Mosley and her family had nothing to do with the harassment of the Lambert family, because they’d certainly be stupid to do anything like this and jeopardize the inevitable request by her mouthpiece to transfer the charges to the juvenile justice system. Then again, there’s not a lot of evidence that there’s much intelligence in a family that let Miss Mosley out playing in the streets at 2:30 in the morning.

Some of my Philly friends are just shaking their heads at the violence happening in the City of Brotherly Love, but the story from The Philadelphia Inquirer really tells you all that you need to know: too many people are on the side of the criminals and juvenile delinquents! That’s how District Attorney Larry Krasner, who’d rather keep the bad guys on the streets than behind bars, got elected and then re-elected, and that’s how he’ll get re-elected again in 2025 if he chooses to run again.

Philly has more than just bad adults; the city has horrible mothers and fathers — if the fathers are even around — rearing children who are delinquents because they want to be delinquents, because they think it’s just so cool to be gangsters and wannabes. No government programs will ever help when the kids are subjected to rotten parents from the beginning.

I have told everybody what is needed to solve the city’s problems, but it’s just way, way, way too politically incorrect for anyone to consider.

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The myth of “banning books”

Other than the Library of Congress, which is supposed to receive two copies of every copyrighted work, every library in the country exercises some discretion as to what books, magazines and other material to purchase and add to its collection. Discretion is what the Central Bucks School Board has mandated:

Central Bucks approves contentious library policy targeting ‘sexualized content’ in books amid community opposition

The policy, said the superintendent, would create a process for the selection of new books and for parents to challenge “gratuitous, salacious, over-the-top, unnecessary, sexualized content.”

by Oona Goodin-Smith | Tuesday, July 26, 2022

By US Census, Ruhrfisch – taken from US Census website [1] and modified by User:Ruhrfisch, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=808255

Facing heated community opposition, the Central Bucks School District on Tuesday approved a contentious library policy that takes aim at challenging books with “sexualized content” — guidelines the district’s superintendent says ensure students are reading “age-appropriate material,” but that the Pennsylvania Library Association calls one of the most restrictive in schools across the state.

In a 6-3 vote, after a rally and more than an hour of public comment — most of which was vehemently opposing the policy — and questions by some board members about its origins, the Republican-dominated board voted to advance the policy that’s raised alarm among civil rights groups. . . . .

Wielding signs reading “dictators ban books, not democracies,” and “love not hate makes CB great,” dozens of parents, students, community members, educators, and advocates rallied outside the Doylestown school district headquarters Tuesday night ahead of the vote, calling for the board to strike the policy. Many repeated their remarks during public comment before the school board. Only a couple speakers voiced their approval for the policy.

“This is not a ban, this is not censorship, it’s common sense,” said one mother, who said she was “against minors being exposed to sexually explicit content.”

Full disclosure: before I retired, I did some work in Bucks County, and specifically in the Doylestown area, where the Central Bucks School District is located, though none for the schools specifically.

A very obvious point: attendance at school is compulsory for children in the United States, and the public schools have, in effect, a captive audience. Thus, when schools take decisions on what books and other materials are to be housed in their libraries, they are exposing that captive audience to those materials.

Another very obvious point: while the Central Bucks School Board can limit what materials are bought and housed in the schools’ libraries, they have exactly zero authority over library choices in any other place, or over bookstores, or amazon.com, or any other place which buys, sells, lends, or distributes anything. If the students in the district want to read about sex, it’s widely available, in other places, including, sometimes for free, over the internet. Central Bucks is not exactly a poverty-stricken area; it’s difficult to imagine that more than a handful of homes of school-aged children lack internet access.

The public schools do not exist, and should not exist, for sexualizing children. There should be no normalizing of homosexuality or ‘transgenderism,’ or of promiscuity. That’s what concerns normal parents, and that’s what concerned the elected school board. If some parents want their children to learn about abnormal sexuality, hey, that’s on them!

Karen Downer, president of the NAACP’s Bucks County branch, noted that books most frequently flagged for sexual content “tend to include certain themes,” including the history of Black people, LGBTQ topics or characters, and race and racism. The books also are often written by marginalized authors, she said.

Does Miss Debbie Downer mean books which stir up racial strife or that push the normalization of homosexuality? Guess what? Those should not be part of school libraries! If some parents want to stir up racial strife — and, despite bordering Philadelphia at its extreme southeastern end, Bucks County’s population are only 4.7% non-Hispanic black, 6.1% Hispanic, 5.5% Asian, and 82.4% non-Hispanic white — that’s their business, but it should not be what the public schools teach.

“The policy is vague and overbroad,” said Richard T. Ting, an attorney with the ACLU.

“We’re also talking about library books, …not required reading for classwork. This is just books in the library that are there for students, and students should be free to choose what they read. Families should be able to discuss those things with their kids, as well. It shouldn’t be up to a few people … to decide what everyone else gets access to.”

But that’s just it: in any library, “a few people .  .  . decide what everyone else gets access to,” as far as their collection is concerned. Any materials not present in the school libraries can be found elsewhere, often by an internet search, so that people don’t have to leave home to do so. If families wish to discuss “those things,” with their children, they can find “those things” on amazon.com, and download them onto their computers or Kindles immediately.

Let’s face it: the “groomers” want to normalize the abnormal, and want to use the public schools to help them with that. Let’s face it: the “groomers” want to normalize the abnormal, and want to use the public schools to help them with that. Not just no, but Hell no!

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Cardinal Wilton Gregory gains a very nice church and grounds to sell

St Mary Mother of God Church, Washington DC. Photo by Farragut, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

We noted, just yesterday, how the parish of St Mary Mother of God in Washington DC had lost the right to have the Tridentine, or Traditional Latin Mass. The website Crux, which claims to be an independent and objective news site covering the Catholic Church, has more:

DC parish rues Latin Mass ban, warns of financial and membership losses

By John Lavenburg | Monday, July 25, 2022

NEW YORK – The community at St. Mary Mother of God appealed to Cardinal Wilton Gregory during an archdiocesan synod listening session not to ban the Traditional Latin Mass at the parish, mainly because it would mean potentially losing about half of the parishioners.

That appeal failed. The listening sessions concluded in May, and Gregory announced July 22 that the Traditional Latin Mass would be restricted in the archdiocese to three non-parochial churches. The plan goes into effect on September 21.

For St. Mary’s, the change will be more than simply replacing a Mass in the Old Rite with a Mass in the New Rite. Parish vitality – in both the pews and community – is now a question mark, and closure isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

Skipping down, here’s the money line:

The present St. Mary’s church was built in 1890 and has served downtown Washington, D.C. ever since. Currently, it serves three distinct communities. It has about 200 Traditional Latin Mass parishioners, 120 parishioners who attend Mass in the ordinary form in English, and about 100 Chinese parishioners who are ministered to autonomously.

Assuming that those numbers are reasonably accurate, that means that St Mary’s could lose roughly 48%, almost half, of its parishioners, parishioners who contribute roughly 60% of St Mary’s collections.

In the 25-minute homily, De Rosa also called it “unjust” that none of the people involved in this decision ever visited the St. Mary’s Traditional Latin Mass parishioners. De Rosa requested that Gregory visit the parish in the spring, and was told by Father Anthony Lickteig, the episcopal vicar for clergy, that “the Cardinal will not be able to visit St. Mary’s at this time due to his schedule,” according to a copy of the email obtained by Crux.

In other words, His Eminence, Wilton Cardinal Gregory, Archbishop of Washington, just plain didn’t care about the 200 parishioners who attend the Tridentine Mass at St Mary’s. You can try to explain it any other way you wish, but that’s what it all comes down to, he just didn’t care.

According to Fr De Rosa’s letter to his parishioners, the Tridentine Mass will now be celebrated at the Franciscan Monastery in Brookland, which is 3.8 miles from St Mary’s, about a 16 minute drive along US Route 1 North, not too far to drive, which means that many of the Old Rite parishioners might not be too put out, and able to make the trip.

It also means that for most of the Tridentine Mass parishioners, it won’t be too difficult to abandon their home parish.  And it means that Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the Archbishop of Washington, will have a very nice church building and grounds to sell, when parish membership dwindles to 220 people.

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Biden Administration propaganda on the “R” word When is a recession not a recession? When there's a Democrat in the White House!

The Bureau of Economic Analysis is scheduled to release the first guesstimate of real gross domestic product for the second quarter on Thursday, July 28th; the second guesstimate is scheduled for Thursday, August 25th, and the third for Thursday, September 29th. The first guesstimate on third quarter GDP is scheduled for Thursday, October 27th, just 12 days before the mid-term congressional elections.

The second quarter numbers will be bad. How can we tell? The White House, which certainly has the advance numbers, is trying to redefine what indicates a recession, away from the standard and simple two straight quarters of decline in GDP, to “a holistic look at the data.”

A clue: whenever anyone uses the adjective “holistic” to describe something, you know that bovine feces is about to follow.

The initial estimate of first quarter GDP was -1.4%, but by the third report, it was down to -1.6%. With the one negative quarter in the books, if the second quarter also shows economic contraction, everyone would say we’re in a recession .  .  . and the White House can’t have that!

Well, Thursday isn’t here yet, but the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta had its own early guesstimate:

Latest estimate: -1.6 percent — July 19, 2022

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2022 is -1.6 percent on July 19, down from -1.5 percent on July 15. After this morning’s housing starts report from the US Census Bureau, the nowcast of second-quarter real residential investment growth decreased from -8.8 percent to -10.1 percent.

The next GDPNow update is Wednesday, July 27. Please see the “Release Dates” tab below for a list of upcoming releases.

It’s only a guesstimate, but, then again, so is the ‘official’ first estimate of the Bureau of Economic Analysis! While -1.6% could be off slightly, it’s highly unlikely that it would be off enough to signal actual growth rather than economic contraction.

In other words, a recession, the dreaded “r” word the Biden Administration wants desperately to avoid.

So, they’ll redefine away from the “r” word, and hope that the credentialed media will go along with it. The trouble is that the credentialed media are no longer the only media in town, and you can bet your bottom euro that the Republicans will pound, pound, pound on that word.

It won’t even be difficult, because inflation has hit, hard. As we previously noted, inflation has been creeping inexorably up, hitting 9.1% year-over-year in June. Naturally, President Biden wanted to dispute the figures, calling them “out of date,” but nevertheless telling Americans he was going to do something about it.

In one regard, he’s right: fuel prices have declined since their maximum on June 14th, but they are still significantly higher than they were at this time last year, and the inflation figures are based on the same month the previous year. The national average for regular gasoline was $4.467 per gallon on Wednesday, July 20th, certainly down from $5.014 in mid June, but it was $3.16 at the end of July last year. That’s a 41.36% increase in one year, and 83.60% over the $2.433 in July of 2020. The overall 9.1% inflation number might come down a bit from June’s, but not a lot.

It was back in 2016 that I first noted Heather Long’s article on CNN Money:

The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

I pointed out than that while the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate was 4.9%, the U-6 unemployment rate for August, 2016 was 9.7%,[1]U-6 unemployment is defined as “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working … Continue reading not too far off of the ‘common people’s’ estimate that it was “9%, or higher.”

The point is simple: what the public feel is more important than what government officials say. If President Biden and his minions keep telling people that inflation is coming down, but the public keep seeing the prices of everything increase, who are they going to believe, the government, or their own eyes?

The Democrats will try to mealy-mouth the definition of recession, but when recessions come, people feel them, feel them in their bones. The price of everything is going up, and credit is tighter. Rents are increasing, and home purchase prices continue to rise. When people have to put more and more of their paychecks into the gasoline tank, that means less and less in their wallets for other things.

References

References
↑1 U-6 unemployment is defined as “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.
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Have Pope Francis and Cardinal Wilton Gregory forgotten the duty of pastoral care?

I have said it many times before: no priest, no bishop, and no pope, should ever want fewer Masses said, and fewer parishioners in the pews.

But, alas! what seems to me to be so very obvious is not that obvious to His Holiness Pope Francis, and to some of the bishops.

Catholics in D.C. mourn loss of Latin Mass after decree bans practice

by William Wan | Sunday, July 24, 2022 | 4:23 PM EDT

Standing before his parishioners holding the sacred bread of Communion in his hands, Father Vincent De Rosa, the pastor of St. Mary Mother of God Parish, solemnly intoned in Latin, “Ecce Agnus Dei.”

The English translation of those words: Behold the lamb of God.

Those kneeling in the church responded with ancient words of their own, “Domine, non sum dignus.” Lord, I am not worthy.

An air of earnest contemplation hung over Sunday Mass, tinged by sadness.

This would be one of the last weeks the church’s parishioners would be able to celebrate using a traditional Latin form that traces its roots back more than a millennium.

Last year, prompted by ideological wars between conservative and liberal wings, Pope Francis said he wanted to limit use of the old Latin form of Mass.

This week, the consequences of that papal letter — issued halfway across the world — landed here in Washington with heavy consequences for this small parish in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood.

By Sept. 21, the parish was told, they were to cease use of the Latin rituals that had been part of St. Mary’s history almost since its founding in 1845.

There’s a good deal more, and for those who would be stopped by The Washington Post’s paywall, the article can be found here for free. But now, I’ll jump to the final three paragraphs:

De Rosa urged this flock to cling to truth, unity and their faith throughout the seismic changes to come for their parish.

Roughly 60 percent of the church’s collection money comes from parishioners who attend its 9 a.m. Latin mass on Sundays, said Sylvester Giustino, who serves on the parish finance council.

“I do worry about our parish and what happens in September,” he said. “I’m planning to stay. St. Mary has become a home to me. But for others who leave, I can understand that too. We’re not just losing the Latin Mass. We are going to be losing a lot of families and people who have been part of this community for years.”

A photo accompanying the article showed the church about half full for the 9:00 AM Tridentine Mass, and the parishioners neatly dressed, perhaps more neatly than in many other Novus ordo[1]New order Masses, those held in the vernacular, or local languages. masses. More than half of St Mary’s offerings come from that Mass, and while the article does not tell us that the vernacular Masses at St Mary’s are either better or worse attended, it seems that many of the Latin Mass parishioners are serious Catholics.

Why, then, would Wilton Cardinal Gregory, the Archbishop of Washington, want to alienate those Catholics? Some will, undoubtedly, attend the Novus ordo Masses offered, but it is also true that some will not. The Cardinal’s order does not affect three non-diocesan parishes, where the Tridentine Mass can continue in use, and perhaps some of the Latin Mass adherents will travel to one of those.

This is the Bible I have at home. Bought in 1977 or 1978, the binding is broken and the cover and pages show wear.

But some will not.

At home, my copy of the Bible is a New American Catholic Bible, a thorough retranslation from the most original manuscripts that could be found. The use of modern English makes it easier for someone who speaks modern English to understand.

But many Christians today, Catholic and Protestant alike, appreciate the Douay-Rheims and the King James Bibles, because there’s something about the Elizabethan era early modern English used which conveys a greater sense of nobility, of the grandeur of God. I certainly cannot testify to it, but I have to wonder: do the Catholics who prefer the Tridentine, or Traditional Latin, Mass do so because of a greater sense of grandeur?

There has been no suggestion, anywhere, not even by Pope Francis, that the Tridentine Mass is somehow doctrinally or spiritually invalid, and Pope Benedict XVI confirmed that in Summorum Pontificum, Article 1. Pope Francis, opposed as he is to the use of the Tridentine Mass, has allowed it to continue, though under far greater restrictions; that, alone, confirms that he has not attempted to invalidate the Traditional Latin Mass.

So, why restrict it at all?

The answer is not religious, but political. More conservative factions within the Church just don’t like Pope Francis’ liberalization moves, and far, far, far too many bishops, including The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington, have been ignoring the biblical condemnation of homosexual behavior in favor of allowing various parishes, such as St Paul’s in Lexington, and His Holiness the Pope has used the restrictions on the Tridentine Mass as a weapon against the conservatives. Fewer Latin Masses means fewer conservative Catholics in the pews.

But that logic is silly. I attend a Novus ordo Mass, and always have. It has been less of a choice than it might have been, in that I haven’t lived anywhere near a parish which offered a Latin Mass, but even though I attend a Novus ordo Mass and parish, I’m as conservative a Catholic as there is. The real issue, to me, is that His Holiness the Pope is, in effect, kicking some Catholics out of the Church. Those who attend the Tridentine Mass are making more of a sacrifice to attend Mass: they are having to learn ritual responses not in their native language, and are frequently having to travel further[2]For me, that would be a journey of 70 miles. to attend Mass.

Some will move over and attend a vernacular Mass, and some will travel further to find a Tridentine Mass. But it is inevitable that some will attend Mass less frequently, and some may wind up staying away from church completely. Driving away parishioners is not good pastoral care.

References

References
↑1 New order Masses, those held in the vernacular, or local languages.
↑2 For me, that would be a journey of 70 miles.
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The poor Special Snowflakes™ are getting their precious little feelings hurt!

We have previously noted how today’s left, who in past years were the most vociferous defenders of absolute freedom of speech, have now gone in very much the opposite direction. The New York Times and The Washington Post went to court in 1971 to fight President Richard Nixon’s attempts to prevent publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers, winning their case  in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).

Well, that was then, and this is now. One of the Times Editorial Board members, Greg Bensinger, opined that Twitter under Elon Musk will be a scary place, because, Heaven forfend! it might allow Donald Trump back on the platform, and that:

central to (Mr Musk’s) vision for the service is for it to be an “inclusive arena for free speech,” but users should understand what that phrase means: It means free speech for people like Mr. Musk, a billionaire and the world’s richest man. Even as Twitter’s board on Monday was debating his offer of $54.20 per share, which it accepted, Mr. Musk was setting the tone for his leadership by tweeting that Securities and Exchange Commission officials were “shameless puppets.”

Loosening content moderation, as Mr. Musk appears poised to do, won’t make Twitter a better place; that will make it far more toxic. Under the notion that more speech is the best antidote to harmful speech, earnest users can probably expect to be shouted down even more frequently by trolls and bots. (I am hopeful Mr. Musk was serious when he said he’ll “defeat the spam bots or die trying!”)

Female Twitter users, in particular, ought to worry about whether Mr. Musk will bring his apparent disdain for women to the company he is about to own. Twitter is already a toxic place for women who use it, particularly those of color.

This was hardly the first time that the Times, that staunch defender of freedom of speech and of the press when it comes to their First Amendment rights, has wanted them stifled when it came to other people. The Times also gave major OpEd space to Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, to tell us that Free Speech Is Killing Us, and to Chad Malloy[1]Chad Malloy is a male who thinks he is a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker” Malloy. to tell us How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech.

It’s not just the Times. From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

Twitter to Ban Use of ‘Groomers’ After Pressure From Liberal Outrage Mongers

“Right-wing users have spent months targeting LGBTQ users on Twitter with offensive accusations of ‘grooming,’ contributing to a climate of harassment and violence,” Media Matters alleged in an article demanding that Twitter take action.

Posted by Stacey Matthews | Saturday, July 23, 2022 | 2:00 PM EDT

Since leftists control most popular social media platforms, when their woke acolytes demand they get more aggressive with the thought and speech policing of conservatives, those platforms respond accordingly by tightening the reins and dropping the hammer on the allegedly offensive accounts, often on the ones that are influential and have large followings.

Such was the case earlier this week thanks in part to an aggressive online campaign started by the left-wing frauds at Media Matters for America (MMFA) and inspired by earlier actions taken by Reddit to crack down on the use of the word “groomers” when it is being used to describe, well, people who sound an awful lot like groomers.

According to Media Matters, allegations of grooming against educators—especially those who are using platforms like TikTok to openly brag about indoctrinating children with LGBTQ-themed sexualized content—by popular Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok and ConceptualJames have led to a rise in violence against members of the LGBTQ community because according to them, “groomers” is a “slur” and code-word used by the right “to brand gay and transgender people as child molesters, evoking an earlier era of homophobia.”

There’s more at Miss Matthews’ original.

Let’s face it: the left are getting their precious little feelings hurt when conservatives do something really radical like tell the truth.

An obvious question: if Twitter is going to ban the use of the word Groomer — and the hashtag #Groomers is still up on Twitter — why wouldn’t Twitter similarly ban calling other people misogynist or homophobes or transphobes? The answer is obvious: Twitter’s leadership actively supports the homosexual and transgender agenda! Twitter, and as we noted on Saturday, the Associated Press, want to force debate to the left by forcing the use of the language preferred by the left. The left don’t like the truth because they can’t handle the truth, and they are deathly afraid of other people hearing the truth.

References

References
↑1 Chad Malloy is a male who thinks he is a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker” Malloy.
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Resistance is not futile. I will not be assimilated.

My good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter William Teach noted this morning how some on the left are claiming that, by allowing contrarian views to be presented, the media are hurting the fight against global warming climate change.

“The devastating heat wave in Europe this week is a reminder that we need to take urgent action to slow human-caused warming, but the media is still giving air to the opinions of people who do not believe there is cause for alarm, which makes the problem seem less dire than it actually is,” said David Rapp, a psychologist and professor at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) who coauthored the research.

The argument that climate change is not man made has been incontrovertibly disproven by science again and again, yet many Americans believe that the global crisis is either not real, not of our making, or both, in part because the news media has given climate change deniers a platform in the name of balanced reporting, according to the researchers.

The left, who used to be so very strongly for freedom of speech and of the press, sure aren’t for it anymore, and want to push the credentialed media into restricting language, so they can shape the debate in ways in which they see an advantage. We have previously noted how The New York Times has given OpEd space to Andrew Marantz, a writer for The New Yorker, to claim that “Free Speech Is Killing Us: Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?” Twitter now bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something the Times gave Chad Malloy[1]Chad Malloy is a male who believes he is actually a woman, and who goes by the faux name “Parker” Malloy. OpEd space to claim that such censorship actually promotes freedom of speech. We have pointed out how National Public Radio’s Laurel Wamsley gave space for Alex Schmider, associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD — yeah, a real unbiased source there! — to compare “using someone’s correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly – ‘a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.'”

Mr Schmider did tell the truth in one important way. Using a ‘transgendered persons’ preferred pronouns and sexual identity terms is meant to be “respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.” Miss Wamsley put it as “a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.” At bottom, it is an attempt to coerce “acceptance” by claiming it is only courtesy.

The unasked question is — and the author never added anything into her article which would have paid any attention to those who disagree — what if someone does not accept the idea that Bruce Jenner is really now a woman, or that anyone can somehow change his sex?

It begins with a falsehood. “Sex,” Miss Wamsley wrote, “refers to a person’s biological status and is typically assigned at birth, usually on the basis of external anatomy. Sex is typically categorized as male, female or intersex.” This is wholly untrue. While we might forgive His Majesty King Henry VIII for believing that Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn were somehow responsible for his first two surviving children being daughters, the role of the X and Y chromosomes in determining the sex of mammals, including humans, has been known for over a century. Sex is not somehow “assigned” at birth; sex is determined at conception, depending upon whether the sperm which fertilized the egg carries the X or Y chromosome. We recognize the sex of a newborn child by visual examination of the child, but the characteristics which indicate sex developed long before birth, during gestation, as programmed in by the developing child’s DNA.

It’s kind of amusing that some couples have “gender reveal parties” is sex isn’t “assigned” until birth. 🙂

When you read or hear someone talking about sex being assigned at birth, you know automatically the pure bovine feces is about to follow.

From National Review:

AP Stylebook Issues Guide for Transgender Coverage

by Abigail Anthony | Friday, July 22, 2022 | 7:23 PM EDT

The Associated Press Stylebook, which for decades has served as the default style manual for most news organizations, has issued a “Topical Guide” for transgender coverage that encourages writers to use “unbiased language” and to “avoid false balance [by] giving a platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.”

There it is again: the AP does not want the media to present the view that people cannot really change their sex.

Yet the guidance appears to explicitly embrace the language and claims of transgender activists, a move likely to steer newsrooms away from objectively framing the issue.

The AP Stylebook has issued prior guidance related to gender and sexuality, and some of that is repackaged in the Topical Guide. But it does include some updates, together providing an extensive reference for journalists.

The Transgender Coverage Topical Guide explains: “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time.” The guide encourages writers to refer to subjects according to their preferred gender identity. The guide condemns “deadnaming,” or referring to a transgender person’s previous name, because that “can be akin to using a slur and can cause feelings of gender dysphoria to resurface.”

Of course, sex cannot change, and sex is recognized at birth, not assigned at birth.

The guide describes the term “sex” by explaining “a person’s sex is usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants, sometimes inaccurately” and further advises writers to “avoid terms like ‘biological male,’ which opponents of transgender rights sometimes use to oversimplify sex and gender, is often misleading shorthand for ‘assigned male at birth,’ and is redundant because sex is inherently biological.”

It is certainly true that “biological male” or “biological female” are redundant, but the formulation has been pushed by the fact that there are those in the world who claim to be the sex they are not. That the Topical Guide claims that “biological male . . . is often misleading shorthand for ‘assigned male at birth,’” is inherently stupid, because it assumes that sex is ‘assigned’ at birth.

There’s more at the original. There are those who claim that referring to a ‘transgendered’ person by the names, pronouns, and honorifics they claim, rather than those which represent what they actually are, is a simple matter of courtesy, and courtesy is important.

But is it courteous to ask someone to lie, especially to lie to himself? That is what the Associated Press, what the ‘transgendered,’ are asking; they are asking people who know that Bruce Jenner isn’t really “Caitlin,” that Ellen Page isn’t really “Elliot,” that Will Thomas isn’t really “Lia,” to lie to the public and to themselves, to perpetuate, through language, something they do not believe.

Well, I refuse. At The First Street Journal we have our own Stylebook, a Stylebook used by almost no one else,[2]Unlike the Associated Press Stylebook, for which subscribers must pay, and which is why I have been unable to provide the hyperlink to the original, our Stylebook is free and open to anyone who … Continue reading but here we do not lie.

To be “courteous,” to use the terms the ‘transgender’ activists and the Associated Press and the credentialed media want you to use is to concede the argument, is to surrender on what you know to be true.

Don’t concede, don’t surrender. Be true to what you know to be true.
________________________________

Cross-posted on American Free News Network.

References

References
↑1 Chad Malloy is a male who believes he is actually a woman, and who goes by the faux name “Parker” Malloy.
↑2 Unlike the Associated Press Stylebook, for which subscribers must pay, and which is why I have been unable to provide the hyperlink to the original, our Stylebook is free and open to anyone who chooses to use it. If you do wish to use it, all we ask is appropriate credit.