Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The numbers just don’t add up

Now we are finding out, 2½ years after the panicdemic began, and 1½ years after vaccines started to become available, that a lot of children contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus, or were exposed enough to it to develop anti-bodies, than we ever thought, and almost all were either only mildly sick, or didn’t get sick at all.

No, my source is not some evil reich-wing publication, but the very much pro-vaccine, and pro-vaccine-and-mask mandates Philadelphia Inquirer!

Many more children have had COVID-19 than you might think

The CDC’s figures come from blood samples that were taken for non-COVID reasons.

by Tom Avril | Friday, August 19, 2022

With so many people using at-home COVID-19 tests, if they’re testing at all, experts acknowledged long ago that the true number of cases is higher than what is officially reported.

New CDC data suggest that among children, the true number is a lot higher.

The evidence comes from the blood samples of children who had their blood drawn at commercial labs for non-COVID reasons, such as measuring levels of cholesterol or lead. Among 26,725 blood samples collected in May and June, nearly 80% contained a type of antibody that the immune system produces only in response to infection — not in response to the vaccines.

Assuming that percentage holds true for all U.S. children, the CDC estimated that at least 57 million youths had been infected with the coronavirus by the end of June, four times the cumulative total of reported cases at that point. Even that figure could be an underestimate of cases dating to the beginning of the pandemic, as the levels of these telltale antibodies drop to undetectable levels in most people within a year.

Breaking that down in more detail, the e American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association reported that, as of June 30, there were 13,768,212 known cases of COVID-19 reported, which was 18.73% of all reported cases (73,493,180).

But there’s more to the numbers. If “at least 57 million youths” have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2, that’s roughly 78% of the under 18 population, approximately 73 million, for the entire United States!

The proportion of children with COVID-positive blood samples was slightly lower in Pennsylvania (73.2%), New Jersey (72.5%), and Delaware (75.7%), but still well above official reported totals, said Craig Shapiro, an infectious diseases specialist at Nemours Children’s Health in Delaware.

“The fact that more than 75% of those samples were positive for antibodies does tell us that we’re definitely underestimating the number of children who’ve been infected,” he said.

In other words, the restrictions we put on children, on attending school, on forced masking, were not necessary and did not work!

Comparable data for adults are available only as late as April, but even then, nearly 60% of adult blood samples contained the antibodies that indicate infection.

While some of these infected people may have tested themselves at home and did not report the results, others probably had no idea they were infected and never got tested, Shapiro said. Their immune systems, in many cases bolstered by vaccination or previous infection, may have snuffed out an infection before it caused any symptoms.

Or, perhaps, as was the case with me, they got slightly sick, and had an experienced registered nurse — my wife — say, “You’ve got COVID,” but when tested twice, four days apart, while ill and while recovered, tested negative anyway. There can be both false positive and false negative tests for COVID. Full disclosure: at that point I was fully vaccinated, but this was before boosters were recommended.

But with school already underway in some parts of the country, Shapiro cautioned that vaccination rates are still too low. As of Aug. 17, fewer than one-third of children ages 5 to 11 had gotten both doses of a vaccine, according to the CDC. Among those ages 6 months to 4 years old, fewer than 2% were fully vaccinated.

What we have not seen, however, is a huge mortality, or even hospitalization, rate for children. If fewer than one-third have been fully vaccinated, yet there are indications that more than three-quarters have been infected at some point, then just what evidence is there that vaccination has been lowering the severity of the disease, at least among children, in those who do contract the virus?

That, after all, has been the latest claim. No, vaccination does not seem to prevent someone from contracting the virus in the first place, and no, vaccination does not seem to prevent a vaccinated person who does contract the virus from transmitting it to another person, but, we have been told, vaccination does show a strong correlation in reduced severity of illness among those who do contract the virus.

Now, at least among children, even that claim might not be supportable.

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You in a heap o’ trouble!

Meet J’Lynn Hersey! Just four weeks after his 18th birthday, young Mr Hersey managed to rack up an impressive list of criminal charges:

  • KRS §508.010 Assault, First Degree, a Class B felony, 1 count
  • KRS §512.020 Criminal Mischief, First Degree, a Class D felony, 3 counts
  • KRS §512.030 Criminal Mischief, Second Degree, a Class A misdemeanor, 2 counts
  • KRS 512.040 Criminal Mischief, Third Degree, a Class B misdemeanor, 2 counts
  • KRS §508.060 Wanton Endangerment, First Degree, a Class D felony, 5 counts
  • KRS §520.095 Fleeing or Evading Police via Motor Vehicle, First Degree, a Class D felony, 1 count
  • KRS §520.095Fleeing or Evading Police on Foot, First Degree, a Class D felony, 1 count
  • Leaving the Scene of an Accident, Failure to Render Aid or Assistance, 1 count
  • No Operator’s License, Moped, 1 count
  • Failure to Appear, Citation for Misdemeanor
    • KRS §508.010 Assault, First Degree, a Class B felony, 1 count
    • KRS §508.060 Wanton Endangerment, First Degree, a Class D felony, 2 counts
    • KRS §527.100 Possession of a Handgun by a Minor, a Class A misdemeanor for a first offense, Class D felony for a subsequent offense, 2 counts
    • KRS 512.040 Criminal Mischief, Third Degree, a Class B misdemeanor, 2 counts

Under KRS §532.060, the sentence for a Class B felony is not less than ten (10) years nor more than twenty (20) years imprisonment, and the sentence for a Class D felony is not less than one (1) year nor more than five (5) years imprisonment. Under KRS §532.090, the sentence for a Class A misdemeanor is imprisonment for a term not to exceed twelve (12) months.

Young Mr Hersey could be spending a good, long time as a guest of the Commonwealth, at least if Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn doesn’t use ‘mediation’ to let him off lightly. It would seem that young Mr Hersey, if he is guilty of the charges against him — and he is innocent until proven guilty — has a serious lack of respect for the law:

18-year-old faces charges for two recent shootings in Lexington, police say

by Alex Acquisto | Friday, August 19, 2022 | 7:47 AM EDT

J’Lynn Hersey, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

A young man arrested earlier this month for a shooting on East Short Street has been charged with crimes related to another shooting.J’Lynn Hersey, 18, has been charged in a shooting that occurred on Aug. 11 in the 800 block of Nickwood Trail and left one man injured, the Lexington Police Department announced Thursday.

Hersey was previously taken into custody and charged in a shooting on East Short Street near Elm Tree Lane on Aug. 12. In that incident, he allegedly fired multiple shots from his car at another vehicle and then fled from police on foot.

Around 9:10 p.m. on Aug. 11, officers responded to a shots fired call on Nickwood Trail. Police arrived to find a 27-year-old man suffering from a gunshot wound. He was taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries, police said.

In addition to the charges stemming from the shooting on East Short Street, Hersey has been charged with first-degree assault, two counts of wanton endangerment, three counts of first-degree criminal mischief, two counts of second-degree criminal mischief, and two counts of third-degree criminal mischief.

What my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal chose not to publish Mr Hersey’s mugshot, but WKYT-TV, Channel 27, showed it, as did WTVQ-TV, Channel 36, WLEX-TV, Channel 18, and the city’s press release. Despite the McClatchy Mugshot Policy’s[1]McClatchy Mugshot Policy: Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean … Continue reading concern about ‘disproportionate harm to people of color,’ the people of Lexington knew what Mr Hersey looked like. The newspaper claims a daily readership — not circulation — of 159,826, which assumes that three people read each copy, while the total number of households of the three television stations which showed Mr Hersey’s mugshot was for the 6:00 PM newscast is 95,000.[2]Calculated as an 18.7% ‘share,’ where one rating point equals 5,082 homes. The Herald-Leader did not keep readers from knowing that the suspect is black. And let’s tell the very politically incorrect truth here: anyone who read the suspect’s first name, J’Lynn, simply assumed that he is black.

I asked, just yesterday, if The Philadelphia Inquirer’s policy of concealing race from news stories doesn’t actually contribute to the stereotype that most criminals are black. In Philly, it seems like they are! But as I showed here and here and here and here, just over the last month, a lot of criminal suspects in Lexington are white. By concealing mugshots, the Herald-Leader just might be strengthening the stereotype that they are trying to kill.

Back to Mr Hersey: does anyone really believe that this guy — assuming that the charges against him are valid — is really a candidate to be reformed? Or is he more likely to commit other violent crimes after he gets out of prison? We can’t know that, in advance, but we do know one thing: as long as he’s behind bars, he won’t be shooting up Lexington’s streets. And the next time he does shoot up the city’s streets, someone could wind up stone cold graveyard dead.

References

References
↑1 McClatchy Mugshot Policy: Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness. In fact, some police departments have started moving away from taking/releasing mugshots as a routine part of their procedures.

To address these concerns, McClatchy will not publish crime mugshots — online, or in print, from any newsroom or content-producing team — unless approved by an editor. To be clear, this means that in addition to photos accompanying text stories, McClatchy will not publish “Most wanted” or “Mugshot galleries” in slide-show, video or print.

  • Is there an urgent threat to the community?
  • Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
  • Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

If an exception is made, editors will need to take an additional step with the Pub Center to confirm publication by making a note in the ‘package notes‘ field in Sluglife.

↑2 Calculated as an 18.7% ‘share,’ where one rating point equals 5,082 homes.
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You can’t inspire fear forever

We have mentioned, many times before, how the COVID-19 panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; ‘panic’ is exactly what this has all been about — has promoted fear far more than combatting the virus. Though he was talking about national security rather than the virus, Glenn Greenwald got it absolutely right when he noted the importance of fear to government power:

Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.

Even with the panicdemic 2½ years old now, and most people having learned to live with the possibility of COVID-19, we keep seeing the articles stoking fear among the populace. This one is from The Guardian, the left-wing British newspaper:

‘Most have thrown their hands up’: has the US forgotten about Covid?

As Americans go about their daily lives, severely affected Covid patients are wondering if others are moving too quickly from the worst days of the pandemic

by Maya Yang | Friday, August 19, 2022 | 6:00 AM EDT

Despite signs that indicate the latest Covid-19 surge is slowing down, an average of 400 deaths in the US is still reported on a daily basis.

Various mask and social distancing mandates across the country are becoming anything but strictly enforced.

Actually, it’s not that “various mask and social distancing mandates” are not being “strictly enforced,” but that most have been eliminated.

But as Americans and many of their elected officials go about their daily lives, many healthcare professionals still on the frontlines of the pandemic and severely affected Covid-19 patients are left wondering whether the rest of us are moving too quickly from the worst days of the pandemic.

Have we simply forgotten about Covid-19?

At this point, I am reminded of the original pilot episode of Star Trek, “The Cage.” Captain Christopher Pike has become the captive of the Talosians, who have the ability to project extremely lifelike illusions into their captives minds, when he discovers that the Talosians cannot read his mind when it is consumed by extreme rage and hatred. Vina, a human who has been a captive of the Talosians for 18 years, confirms what the Captain has discovered but points out that it really doesn’t matter, because people cannot just keep that up for long.

And thus we have discovered about fear: the human mind gets used to the constant inputs, and people have become so used to the overblown fears pushed by government officials and others that those fears simply don’t take hold any longer.

My wife is a registered nurse, working in a hospital, and yes, she has taken care of COVID patients. Yes, she is vaccinated and boosted, but I have also seen the changes in her behavior. When COVID-19 first arose, and she had a COVID patient, she’d come home, head immediately to the shower, and wouldn’t allow me to pick up her doffed clothes; she would put them in the washing machine herself. Even before the vaccines became available, that behavior slowly lessened, and now it’s entirely gone. She is directly exposed to COVID-positive patients, and then comes home, taking no special precautions with me, or the rest of our family. When our older daughter tested positive for the virus while at Fort Bliss, before being shipped out to the sandbox, she had to isolate for a few days, but none of us bothered with getting tested or anything, nor did any of us feel ill, even though my wife and I had been traveling with her, in a car with the windows rolled up, to take her to Knightdale Army Reserve Center, a ten-hour drive, from which she departed.

Data obtained earlier this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that the rate of new infections has been decreasing, with the country reporting an average of 107,000 new cases a day. This marks a 12% decrease compared to infection rates two weeks ago.

Even though hospital admission rates have been increasing across the US this summer as a result of highly infectious variants, the amount of patients currently hospitalized with Covid-19 has plateaued at 43,000 patients, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

By contrast, more than 160,000 virus-positive patients were hospitalized during last winter’s surge. Nevertheless, the daily average of 400 deaths across the country since spring remain a concerning figure for healthcare officials.

Translation: while cases rose again, they’ve started to fall.

As the pandemic stretches on and vaccines roll out, numerous restrictions are being eased. States have been lifting strict capacity limits and large-scale mask orders while many others are no longer requiring proof of vaccination to travel or to enter dining facilities.

This was happening months ago. Here in the Bluegrass State, the voters of the Commonwealth gave huge majorities to Republicans running against Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) and his draconian orders. One of the first things they did when the legislature returned to session in January of 2021 was to pass laws greatly restricting the Governor’s ’emergency’ authority. Mr Beshear vetoed those bills, and the legislature just as quickly overrode his vetoes. Through various legal maneuvers, the Governor obtained a court order from a highly partisan state judge, holding the new laws in abeyance, but finally, on August 21, 2021, the state Supreme Court finally, finally! put an end to the Governor’s shenanigans.

That was a year ago come this Sunday.

Last week, the CDC issued new guidelines that loosened its recommendations on social distancing and quarantining. Individuals who were exposed to Covid-19 no longer have to quarantine unless they develop symptoms or test positive.

Unvaccinated people who have been exposed should test on the fifth day of exposure and wear a “high-quality mask”. Additionally, the CDC no longer recommends screening asymptomatic individuals who have not had a known exposure to the virus.

“This guidance acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where Covid-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,” CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti said in a statement.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what the nattering nabobs of negativism say about the virus, the American people are (mostly) done with fear. Oh, there are a few whiners, like The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, telling us that she is immunocompromised, and that:

Disabled/medically vulnerable people also live in society. We have to go to work, to the doctor, we have to grocery shop and go to school, we ride the same trains and busses as everyone else. It’s terrifying how many ppl want sick & vulnerable people to die or be locked away

Miss Lorenz’s attempted guilt trip didn’t work, because the American people are done with fear over this. They have seen the economic devastation the lockdowns imposed, they have seen the social consequences of forced separation and masking, and they have seen that, in the end, while the vaccines seem to have the effect of making the disease caused by the virus less severe, neither the vaccines nor masks prevent either the contraction or transmission of the virus.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer conceals a truth that everyone already knows Is the Inky actually perpetuating a stereotype it wishes to avoid?

We have noted, many times before, that The Philadelphia Inquirer censors the news because publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes demands it. But it has to be asked: does their deliberate censorship actually reinforce the stereotype they are trying to avoid?

‘I’m grateful to be alive.’ Victim of West Philly rec center shooting heals as three accused gunmen face charges.

Tahmir Pinckney, Azyear Sutton-Walker, and Marlon Spurell, who are all 22 years old, were arraigned overnight Thursday on charges including attempted murder and jailed on $3 million bail each.

by Chris Palmer and Mensah M. Dean | Thursday, August 18, 2022 | 1:15 PM EDT

Photo via 6ABC News Click to enlarge.

Three of the men accused of opening fire during a drive-by shooting outside a West Philadelphia rec center this week — an incident that left five people wounded, two of them critically — have been charged with crimes including attempted murder, aggravated assault, and conspiracy, court records show.Tahmir Pinckney, Azyear Sutton-Walker, and Marlon Spurell, who are all 22 years old, were arraigned overnight Thursday and jailed on $3 million bail each, court records show. All were being represented by the Defender Association, which declined to comment Thursday morning.

Police said the men were among six people who began shooting out of a white Dodge Durango around 7 p.m. Tuesday on the 300 block of North 57th Street, just steps from the Shepard Recreation Center, where dozens of people were outside playing basketball, football, or otherwise enjoying a summer evening.

The Inquirer doesn’t print mugshots, because Miss Hughes believes that being an anti-racist news organization just won’t allow that.

But the Inky isn’t the only news source in town, and the television stations did show the mugshots. Television news is, of course, is a medium much more dependent upon the visual, so it’s understandable that, regardless of how #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading the management are, pictures have to be published. The Inquirer, which has a far smaller circulation than the television stations have viewers, certainly didn’t keep the public from seeing the mugshots, and noting what Miss Hughes desperately wants not noted, that the suspects were all black — something most people would have inferred anyway, given the names of the suspects — but at a certain point, one has to ask: is the Inky, by censoring all mugshots, contributing not only to the stereotype that most criminals are black, but actually pushing a message, that all criminals are black?

I’m sure that’s not the intention of the journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading who work for what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[3]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt., but it has to be considered a possibility. The stereotype that most criminals are black certainly exists, and by censoring the news where race is concerned, isn’t the Inky contributing to that stereotype? When the newspaper declines to publish something like this, won’t most of the readers simply assume what the Inky refuses to tell them? I’m guessing that there are at least some criminals in the City of Brotherly Love who are white, but the newspaper doesn’t tell us that.

The original article title in the Inquirer was “Tahmir Pinckney, Azyear Sutton-Walker, Marlon Spurell charged over West Philly shooting near Shepard rec center,” which you can see if you hold your cursor over the tab of the Inky article. An editor changed that, which wasn’t a terrible idea, since part of the article focused on the victims, but at least it wasn’t front-and-center on the newspaper’s website main page. Their names, however, were prominently featured in the subtitle.

The Enquirer Inquirer did tell us, in a sort of offhand way, that both the shooters and the victims were gang-bangers, without using the word “gang”:

an ongoing feud between groups of young men — with the shooters in the car on one side of the dispute, and the victims on the other. One of the victims shot Thursday had also been shot several weeks ago,

At least some of the targeted victims were armed themselves, and returned fire.

Mr Spurell was awaiting trial — or, more probably, having the charges dropped by Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner — on a drug trafficking charge from four months ago, while Mr “Pinkney pleaded no contest to a drug charge in 2019 and was sentenced to a year of probation.” I’m actually surprised that the newspaper told us that, because it will lead more readers to assume that the arrested men are actually guilty; these are some bad dudes!

The Inquirer includes short, first person, biographies of its writers at the bottom of its articles. I have to wonder: how does Mr Palmer focus on how criminal justice and law enforcement are “evolving and impacting communities during a moment of reform”? How does Mr Dean “report on law breakers, those they impact, and how the criminal justice system interacts with both” when he is required to censor part of the news? Both reporters are actually contributing to the stereotypes that Miss Hughes wants to avoid, though I’ve no doubt that such is required by editorial guidelines, regardless of what their personal inclinations might be.

Wouldn’t actually telling the whole truth serve better?

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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“There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them,” said no Republican leader, ever.

Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, an extreme supposed champion of the working class in 19th century France, purportedly said what serves as my headline, which came to my mind when I read this from Robert Stacy McCain:

Cast your mind back to November 2012, when you went to the polls to vote for Mitt Romney. Chances are, Mitt wasn’t your first choice for the GOP nomination. Probably, he wasn’t your second or third choice, either. You probably weren’t too excited to go vote for Mitt on Election Day 2012, and might not have been too optimistic about his chances of beating Obama, but you voted for him anyway, because he was the Republican nominee and you’re a Republican voter. If millions of conservatives could vote for Romney — who has always been a moderate, if not indeed a liberal — then why couldn’t moderate Republicans support Trump? Why is it that the demands of party loyalty seem to be a one-way street like this? And, by the way, shouldn’t it matter that Trump was far more popular and successful than GOP Establishment choices like Romney and John McCain? The Republican presidential candidates got about 60 million votes in both 2008 and 2012, but Trump got 63 million in 2016 and 74 million in 2020. Why such hatred from “Republicans” toward a man who increased the GOP vote by more than 10 million?

Think about what Donald Trump advocated to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He advocated control of our borders, something every other Republican candidate did. He differed in one respect: he actually proposed a way to do it, building a wall along our border with Mexico, to make simply walking across the border far more difficult. He took strongly pro-life positions, as almost all of the other Republican candidates did. He advocated tax cuts, as all of the other Republican candidates did.

What was different about Mr Trump? He spoke in terms that the Republican primary voters saw as not just mouthing platitudes, but believed that he would actually do something to achieve the goals he set forth.

The result? We saw thousands of supposed Republicans marshal against him, including both the elder and younger President Bush, the ‘neo-conservatives’ like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, the subsequently scandal-ridden “Lincoln Project,” and, sadly, Patrick Frey. Mr Trump used strong, strong, language, and he wasn’t a particularly nice guy, but the great mass of Republican voters saw in him someone who would actually fight for the things he advocated. It helped that Mr Trump was running against the wholly uninspiring Hillary Clinton, and he flipped stated like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin red. The Keystone State, despite normally being called a ‘battleground state,’ had not been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.

The nation was stunned, and the Republican ‘leadership’ were most particularly stunned. How could this boorish brute win the presidency? I mean, the guy couldn’t even be bothered to button his suit coat during his inauguration!

The Republican ‘leadership’ would have been much happier had they lost the election with Jeb Bush as the nominee, than win it with Donald Trump. My guess is that they’d have rather lose the election with Jeb Bush than win it with Ted Cruz as well, because Mr Cruz can be a bit on the bull-in-a-china-shop side himself.

But the Republican voters loved Mr Trump, even if the ‘leadership’ did not.

And so we come to Representative Liz Cheney Perry(R-WY). Mrs Perry, who did not respect her husband, Philip Perry, enough to take his name, but to whom I will not show a similar disrespect, decided that President trump should be impeached, even as his term was coming to an end, due to the college-keg-party-gone-wild that is the Capitol kerfuffle. More, she allowed herself to be appointed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to the committee to investigate the kerfuffle, when Mrs Pelosi would not accept the Republican members nominated by the House Minority Leader. Mrs Pelosi wanted a kangaroo court, and got one, with a couple of pro-impeachment Republicans for window dressing.

In 2020, not only did President Trump carry Wyoming, but by percentage of the vote, the Cowboy State was his strongest state; he defeated former Vice President Joe Biden 193,559 (69.94%) to 73,491 (26.55%). The same voters who gave the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney 68.56% of the vote in her 2020 re-election campaign gave Mr Trump even more votes, 193,559 to 185,732.

Back to Mr McCain:

Tuesday, I said that Liz Cheney might lose by a 30-point margin, which was wrong — it was 38 points! She lost more than 2-to-1 and didn’t even get 30% of the vote in Wyoming’s Republican primary. Her contempt for the electorate — her fathomless hatred for Republican voters — was expressed quite clearly in her concession speech:

“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all,” she said before an audience of what few supporters she has. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”

Hardly finished with her delusional Civil War era comparisons, Cheney went on to equate her ongoing fight with former President Donald Trump to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Battle of the Wilderness.

“As the fires of the battle still smoldered, Grant rode to the head of the column. He rode to the intersection of Brock Road and Orange Plank Road, and there, as the men of his army watched and waited,” Cheney said. “Instead of turning north back towards Washington and safety, Grant turned his horse south toward Richmond and the heart of [Confederate Gen. Robert E.] Lee’s army. Refusing to retreat, he pressed on to victory.”

That scene, portrayed vividly in Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, indeed captures what made Grant different from any of his predecessors commanding the Army of the Potomac, who had a habit of getting into a fight with Lee, losing thousands of men in a battle, and then retreating to the fortifications of Washington. But how does it function as an analogy for Liz Cheney’s defeat? That is to say, who is the enemy she proposes to defeat if she presses “on to victory”?

Do you get the point? The enemy is you, the Republican voter!

This is the part that’s important: the Republican Party, like any political party, is made up of the mass of Republican-registered or identifying voters, but for Mrs Perry, for the (supposedly) Republican #NeverTrumpers, for the disaffected neoconservatives, what the vast majority of the Republican Party want is not only not what they want, but what is anathema to them. As I said, they’d rather lose with a polite milquetoast than win with a strong fighter.

The problem for them is simple, even if they don’t understand it: the mass of the Republican Party have moved beyond them. Mrs Perry has made noises about running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but look how the left view them:

As I have noted previously about Bill Kristol and the “Lincoln Project”, the left may look upon them as useful for the moment, but they’ll never actually trust them, while Republicans will never trust them either. Mr Kristol destroyed the opinion magazine he founded, The Weekly Standard, by refusing to allow any articles which supported President Trump, thus alienating a significant portion of his readership, still supports a few, few! conservative positions, positions which are anathema to the Democrats. Given the opinions of some of them, like Max Boot and Mr Kristol, to force people to take the COVID-19 vaccines, the Libertarian Party won’t want to have anything to do with such authoritarians, either. They have nowhere to go!

This is, in the end, a good thing. The mass of the Republican Party have moved toward populism, an ideology which holds that the great mass of the people are not being seriously listened to by the political elites. There’s some of that in the Democratic Party as well, as exemplified by the ridiculous “Occupy Wall Street” movement and some of their far-left but nevertheless back-bench politicians like the anti-Semitic squadristi,[1]The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to … Continue reading but, at least thus far, the left of the Democratic Party have nevertheless fallen into line with the (purportedly) more moderate elements to support President Biden.

The Republican elites are looking for their people, so they might lead them, but the mass of the party have no interest in being led along the garden path of squishy go-along-to-get-along Republicanism. They want leaders who will fight, who will fight the left, and that’s why Mrs Perry lost.

References

References
↑1 The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, his paramilitary/thug force in fascist Italy. I think referring to the ‘Squad’ as Squadristi is completely appropriate.
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The problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time

Larry Krasner, the police-hating defense attorney sponsored by George Soros to become District Attorney in Philadelphia, really, really doesn’t like putting criminals in jail. He is a strong believer in “restorative justice,” and his office issued, on May 26, 2022, a paper claiming that their “restorative justice” programs have worked just spectacularly well.

So it is no surprise that Mr Krasner doesn’t like it when independent studies show that his policies have led to increases in crime!

New study by former DA links Philadelphia’s high homicide rate to a drop in criminal sentencings

Deprosecution practices started well before DA Larry Krasner’s time in office, research shows

by Kristen Johnson | Monday, August 15, 2022 | 7:25 AM EDT

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia’s high homicide rate may be linked to a rise in deprosecution practices, according to a recent study by the former district attorney of Chester County.

For the third year in a row, homicides in Philadelphia are at an all-time high, and fewer criminal acts are being charged or sought in the city.

According to prosecution research — specifically, sentencing data — former Chester County DA Tom Hogan found prosecutions had dropped 70% over the course of about five to six years in Philadelphia.

“The results that we come up with is that there was an increase of roughly 74 homicides per year from 2015 to 2019 in Philadelphia associated with deprosecution,” he explained.

Hogan, who is also a former criminal defense attorney, served as DA of Chester County from 2012 to 2020. He now works in private practice and is seeking a Ph.D. in criminology next year at the University of Cambridge.

He partnered with the University of Pennsylvania for this study and spent months researching deprosecution. The study found the spike started well before Philly’s current top prosecutor, Larry Krasner — who has faced criticism for his progressive practices — and actually began during DA Seth Williams’ time in office.

“The sentencings decrease by 35% in 2015 over prior trends,” said Hogan. “Then what you see by 2019 is sentencings in Philadelphia are down almost 70%, so that is a huge drop.”

The report makes it clear that the trends in reduced prosecutions and sentencing began under District Attorney Seth Williams, who was himself convicted in federal court. Faced with 29 counts, Mr Williams pleaded guilty to one count of bribery and was sentenced to five years in prison. Due to the completion of a drug rehabilitation program and time off for good behavior while in prison, he was released in just under three years.

Mr Krasner, who campaigned on reducing prosecutions for drug arrests, reviewing old cases to look for prosecutorial misconduct, and holding the police accountable, was elected in 2017, and took office on New Year’s Day of 2018.

So, what happened? While Mr Williams was District Attorney, homicides showed a slight increase from Lynne Abraham’s previous tenure, going from 302 to 306 in 2010, Mr Williams’ first year, then to 326 and 331, before dropping to 246, 248, 280, 277, and a final jump to 315 in Mr Williams last year. Michael Nutter began his two terms as Mayor in 2008, bringing Charles Ramsey along with him as Police Commissioner.

Under Mr Krasner, and Mayor Jim Kenney, homicides immediately jumped to 353 in 2018 and 356 in 2019. But here’s the kicker:

The study does not include 2020 or 2021 data due to anomalies caused by the pandemic and civil unrest.

Thud!

Homicides soared to 499, one short of the record of 500, in 2020, and then not only broke that record, but completely shattered it, rising to 562 in 2021. The study doesn’t include the worst of Mr Krasner’s term!

It’s August 17th, noy quite 2/3 through the year, so we don’t know what 2022’s final numbers will be, but as of 11:59 PM EDT on Tuesday, August 16th, the city is six murders ahead of the same date last year, 345 to 339, a 1.770% increase.

There are a couple of different ways to do the numbers. 345 ÷ 228, the number of days elapsed in the year, = 1.513 murders per day, multiplied by 365 = 552 projected killings. However, if you multiply 562, last year’s total murders, by the current 1.770% increase, the total jumps to 572.

Mr Krasner, of course, does not want to accept any responsibility for the huge surge in homicides:

Hogan said making fewer sentencings was a “policy choice” that started with Williams but “increased dramatically” under Krasner.

When asked, Krasner criticized the study.

“[Hogan] is a traditional prosecutor. He is not a scientist in his field,” said Krasner. “He does not deserve to be a scientist and we respectfully disagree.”

Uh huh, right:

Tom Hogan is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He writes on the issues of the criminal justice system, public safety, terrorism, quantitative analysis, and politics. Hogan has been published in numerous academic journals. In addition, he has been published in and/or quoted by media outlets including City Journal, RealClearPolitics, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Prior to becoming affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, Hogan has served in multiple roles. He practiced law at a major international law firm and litigation boutique, representing Fortune 500 companies and individuals in complex civil litigation and criminal investigations. He served as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice. He was elected twice as the Chester County District Attorney in Pennsylvania, a county with over 500,000 citizens. He was the chair of the Liberty Mid-Atlantic HIDTA group, coordinating drug law enforcement for state and local organizations across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. He has worked with elected officials at the federal, state, and local level on drafting legislation and addressing critical policy issues.

Hogan received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and his legal degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. While practicing law, he also received a Master of Science degree in Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania, concentrating on statistical issues and data science in the criminal justice system. He has taught lawyers, law students, and graduate students from multiple disciplines on issues including criminal procedure, trial advocacy, ethics, officer-involved shootings, and statistical problems.

In other words, Mr Hogan actually is an expert in his field. But, because Mr Krasner doesn’t like the numbers, he has decided that “He is not a scientist in his field,” and “He does not deserve to be a scientist.”

What Mr Hogan found was a strong statistical correlation between reduced prosecution and sentencing, with the greatly increased homicide rate. It’s an old, old truth: correlation does not prove causation, and the correlation Mr Hogan found does not prove that Mr Krasner’s soft-on-criminals policies have caused the homicide rate to increase. However, we have long accepted strong correlations as almost certain causes when it comes to things like smoking causing lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, even though not all smokers develop lung cancer or COPD.

But we already know that Mr Krasner’s lenient policies have caused the death of one Philadelphia Police Officer.

One of the people treated leniently by Mr Krasner and his office, and who wasn’t in jail on Friday, March 13, 2020, was Hasan Elliot, 21. How did the District Attorney’s office treat Mr Elliot, a known gang-banger?

  • Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
  • Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to make his meetings with his parole officer.
  • Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges; he was released on his own recognizance.
  • After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

On that Friday the 13th, Police Corporal James O’Connor IV, 46, was part of a Philadelphia police SWAT team trying to serve a predawn arrest warrant on Mr Elliott, from a March 2019 killing. Mr Elliot greeted the SWAT team with a hail of bullets, and Corporal O’Connor was killed. Had Mr Elliot been in jail, as he could have been due to parole violations, had Mr Krasner’s office treated him seriously, Corporal O’Connor would have gone home safely to his wife that day. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering the hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.


Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 president John McNesby also has criticized Krasner, saying his policies led to the killing of O’Connor. “Unfortunately, he’s murdered by somebody that should have never been on the street,” McNesby said. McNesby also said FOP members and police officers formed a human barricade to block Krasner from entering the hospital Friday to see O’Connor’s family.

James O’Connor is stone-cold graveyard dead because District Attorney Krasner and his minions, in their abhorrence of mass incarceration, let a repeat offender, one with a record of carrying firearms, using and selling drugs, and flouting his required probation meetings, off the hook. He was a guy who needed to be incarcerated, and who didn’t even need to be tried again to get him locked up, but Mr Krasner and his office left him out on the streets, even though the police had him in physical custody on January 29, 2019.

Did the lenient treatment do Mr Elliot any good? Had Mr Krasner and his minions treated Mr Elliot seriously, he’d have been in jail on that fateful Friday the 13th, but he’d also be looking at getting out of prison eventually. Now, Mr Elliot, and four of his goons, are looking at spending the rest of their miserable lives in prison.

Amazingly enough, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer actually endorsed Mr Krasner for re-election in 2021, saying:

A complex, relatively recent spike in gun violence isn’t a reason to return to the mass incarceration regime of yesteryear, but a challenge to do better.

Yes, it actually is a reason to return to mass incarcerations! Despite Mr Krasner’s, and the Editorial Board’s, assertions, we know one thing with 100% certainty: a criminal locked up in SCI Phoenix can’t shoot someone in Strawberry Mansion or Kensington.

I have said it before: mass incarceration isn’t the problem. The problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time. Tom Hogan has just proved that.

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Economics aren’t #woke

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain recently wrote about an article in Jezebel which claimed that normal men were going “unpartnered” because women’s “relationship standards” had been raised. Women might be willing to occasionally copulate with said lonely guys, but they weren’t really interested in anything more serious. I found the math strained, because unless you include homosexual males, the very people who ought to be excluded in an article about how normal men are having more difficulty finding women with whom to have serious relationships, the number of “partnered” men ought to equal the number of “partnered” normal women. Given that women slightly outnumber men, and that women live longer than men, the math Jezebel cited just doesn’t work out.

I was reminded of Mr McCain’s article when I read this one in The Wall Street Journal.

Inflation Widens Married Couples’ Money Lead Over Their Single Friends

Rapidly rising prices and more than two years of living in a pandemic increase the financial stress on those without pooled assets

by Julia Carpenter | Tuesday, August 16, 2022 | 7:14 AM EDT

It is better, financially, to be married than single, as has almost always been the case. But the money gap between young married couples and singles has widened, thanks to inflation and rising home prices.

The median net worth of married couples 25 to 34 years old was nearly nine times as much as the median net worth of single households in 2019, according to the most recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. In 2010, married households’ median net worth was four times as much. And now, after a spell of rapid inflation and more than two years of pandemic living, single people are getting left further behind, say economists at the Fed and elsewhere.

“This 25-to-34-year-old age is a time of transition, it’s a time of household formation, and I think it matters whether or not you can pool your financial resources with someone else,” said Lowell Ricketts, a data scientist for the Institute for Economic Equity at the St. Louis Fed.

Married people are being tested by inflation, too. It is just that they have a larger, shared cushion, often with two incomes and pooled assets. They hold a greater concentration of wealth and considerably less debt, according to research from the St. Louis Fed.

Having combined assets was particularly helpful over the past decade as many households’ wealth was compounded by rising housing prices and a strong stock market.

As people marry later, the number of sole-person households is growing, which means more single people are tackling multiple financial challenges entirely on their own. Over the past four decades, the number of sole-person households has nearly doubled, according to data from Freddie Mac. And by delaying marriage, many now struggle to access money milestones at the ages previous generations achieved them.

The article continues to tell us the woes of a 27-year-old single woman in Columbus, Ohio, who recently got a raise, which is allowing her to start saving a bit, but, for her, home ownership is still out of the question. The Journal’s photo of her slicing zucchini in the small, cramped, and cluttered kitchen in her rental apartment says a lot: she has a roof over her head and food on her table, but she’s still living a fairly modest lifestyle. To relate this to Mr McCain’s article, I will note that the woman in question does not really meet contemporary standards of physical attractiveness.

Further down:

When it comes to building wealth via homeownership, finding a smaller starter home—once the gateway for single people becoming homeowners—remains especially difficult as prices remain high, say economists. Housing affordability in June 2022 hit its worst level since June 1989, and home prices are up 44% over the past two years, according to data from real-estate brokerage Redfin Corp. With housing prices so high and starter-home inventory so low, more single people are struggling to find affordable houses to buy.

So, what happened in 1989? An economic downturn happened, a housing market crash. Interest rates soared again, and housing prices had to fall, or houses just wouldn’t sell. An economic downturn which eventually cost the elder George Bush the presidency in the 1992 election. We saw the same thing in the early 2000s, as housing just plain skipped the 2001-2 recession — I was amazed at how much concrete we were selling for homebuilding even as the unemployment rate soared — but the sub=prime mortgage lending market collapsed in 2007-8, and people who had bought during the bubble, with adjustable-rate mortgages were defaulting at record paces.

I can see something similar in the not-too-distant future.

The Journal article continues along the theme of singles, and primarily single women, being priced out of the housing market.

This is where married couples have one of their largest advantages. Applying for a mortgage, these couples can work together to create an attractive application as well as amass the necessary money for a healthy down payment.

Single women face additional hurdles to generating wealth.

The gender wage gap begins to widen as early as three years after college graduation, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. Women also live significantly longer than men, which puts added pressure on them to finance their retirement years solo.

“These are scary times for anyone, but they’re particularly scary times, I think, for the reasons we have cited, for single women,” said Jill Gianola, a financial planner and the founder of Gianola Financial Planning.

This, you see, is the problem: social customs may have changed, customs which no longer have others asking, “What’s wrong with him?”, or her, if they don’t get married by the time they’re 22. But economic laws aren’t #woke, economic laws don’t care that you want to party hearty until you’re thirty. The reality of economics and the passage of time mean that if you are delaying adulthood, you are also delaying your economic advance. It might be more fun to take your whole paycheck and spend it wastefully, but those are years in which you should be building your career and setting yourself up for financial success later in life.

There was more in the Journal article, this time about a married couple, a couple which appear to have married a bit late, but one which were able to work out the husband’s pre-existing $10,000+ credit card debt by virtue of being serious and by the fact that they were paying for one residence for the two of them. When economic problems arise, there are two of them to work things out.

The way people behaved in our economy and our society in the 1950s might seem just horribly, horribly old fashioned and just not with it, but the simple fact is that they worked for people, because they made economic sense.

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How Daniel Panneton used 1,183 words to tell us that he’s a great researcher who doesn’t understand a single thing about his subject

Daniel Panneton’s Twitter bio. Click to enlarge.

Daniel Panneton tells us, in his Twitter biography, that he is a “Museums worker and online hate researcher”. He also tells us that he is very afraid to let the Unapproved see his tweets. I looked, but was unable to find a significantly more detailed biography of Mr Panneton. A writer for The Atlantic, he has had published several other articles from which anyone who can read can discern his very much #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading leftist bias.

And now? This obviously well-read has decided that traditional Catholics are now evil reich-wing Protestants! I’m pretty sure that both Catholics and our separated brethren wouldn’t see it that way.

How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary

The AR-15 is a sacred object among Christian nationalists. Now “radical-traditional” Catholics are bringing a sacrament of their own to the movement.

By Daniel Panneton | Sunday, August 14, 2022 | 8:00 AM EDT

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

While some people might not understand that a crucifix is more commonly Catholic than Protestant, almost no one would mistake that a rosary is a Catholic symbol. What Mr Panneton has missed is that no one who prays the rosary these days is out shooting people.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled sanctum rosarium alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.The theologian and historian Massimo Faggioli has described a network of conservative Catholic bloggers and commentary organizations as a “Catholic cyber-militia” that actively campaigns against LGBTQ acceptance in the Church.

Considering that the Bible is very explicit in its condemnation of homosexual activity, and the Catechism affirms that,[2]§2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of … Continue reading it is the duty of all Catholics to fight against the approval of homosexual activity. To Mr Panneton, this is just wholly, wholly wrong.

These rad-trad rosary-as-weapon memes represent a social-media diffusion of such messaging, and they work to integrate ultraconservative Catholicism with other aspects of online far-right culture. The phenomenon might be tempting to dismiss as mere trolling or merchandising, and ironical provocations based on traditionalist Catholic symbols do exist, but the far right’s constellations of violent, racist, and homophobic online milieus are well documented for providing a pathway to radicalization and real-world terrorist attacks. The rosary—in these hands—is anything but holy. But for millions of believers, the beads, which provide an aide-mémoire for a sequence of devotional prayers, are a widely recognized symbol of Catholicism and a source of strength. And many take genuine sustenance from Catholic theology’s concept of the Church Militant and the tradition of regarding the rosary as a weapon against Satan. As Pope Francis said in a 2020 address, “There is no path to holiness … without spiritual combat,” and Francis is only one of many Church officials who have endorsed the idea of the rosary as an armament in that fight.

I will admit to some amusement that this article was published on Sunday, August 14th, the same day as this Gospel reading in our Catholic Churches:

Luke 12:49 “I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!
50 But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished!
51 Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division;
52 for from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.
53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

Mr Panneton has managed to wholly misunderstand what Pope Francis has said. “Spiritual combat” means to fight, with prayer, for the right ideas.

However, this is where the author truly shows how little he understands about his subject. There is no greater enemy of the “Church Militant” than Pope Francis, who has been doing his best to stamp out the Tridentine, or Traditional Latin, Mass.

Daniel Panneton, photo from his protected Twitter profile.

In mainstream Catholicism, the rosary-as-weapon is not an intrinsically harmful interpretation of the sacramental, and this symbolism has a long history. In the 1930s and ’40s, the ultramontane Catholic student publication Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique regularly used the concept to rally the faithful. But the modern radical-traditionalist Catholic movement—which generally rejects the Second Vatican Council’s reforms—is far outside the majority opinion in the Roman Catholic Church in America. Many prominent American Catholic bishops advocate for gun control, and after the Uvalde school shooting, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, lamented the way some Americans “sacralize death’s instruments.”Militia culture, a fetishism of Western civilization, and masculinist anxieties have become mainstays of the far right in the U.S.—and rad-trad Catholics have now taken up residence in this company. Their social-media accounts commonly promote accelerationist and survivalist content, along with combat-medical and tactical training, as well as memes depicting balaclava-clad gunmen that draw on the “terrorwave” or “warcore” aesthetic that is popular in far-right circles.

Like such networks, radical-traditional Catholics sustain their own cottage industry of goods and services that reinforces the radicalization. Rosaries are common among the merchandise on offer—some made of cartridge casings, and complete with gun-metal-finish crucifixes. One Catholic online store, which describes itself as “dedicated to offering battle-ready products and manuals to ‘stand firm against the tactics of the devil’” (a New Testament reference), sells replicas of the rosaries issued to American soldiers during the First World War as “combat rosaries.” Discerning consumers can also buy a “concealed carry” permit for their combat rosary and a sacramental storage box resembling an ammunition can. In 2016, the pontifical Swiss Guard accepted a donation of combat rosaries; during a ceremony at the Vatican, their commander described the gift as “the most powerful weapon that exists on the market.”

The militarism also glorifies a warrior mentality and notions of manliness and male strength. This conflation of the masculine and the military is rooted in wider anxieties about Catholic manhood—the idea that it is in crisis has some currency among senior Church figures and lay organizations. In 2015, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix issued an apostolic exhortation calling for a renewal of traditional conceptions of Catholic masculinity titled “Into the Breach,” which led the Knights of Columbus, an influential fraternal order, to produce a video series promoting Olmsted’s ideas. But among radical-traditional Catholic men, such concerns take an extremist turn, rooted in fantasies of violently defending one’s family and church from marauders.

You know, this reminds me of Amanda Marcotte’s argument in her 2008 book, It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. Miss Marcotte had been arguing, for a long time — and still does — that evil reich wing conservatives don’t just want to ban prenatal infanticide, but artificial contraception as well. But when it came to actually documenting her claim, the only thing with which she could come up was Quiverfull, a belief set more than an organization, the adherents to which, according to a 2006 guesstimate, range in “the thousands to the low tens of thousands”.

Miss Marcotte managed to conflate maybe 10,000 families to a nationwide assault on contraception, and now, Mr Panneton is conflating the rosary, something millions of Catholics have, and something I have hanging from the rear-view mirror of my very masculine Ford F-150, as meaning I have an AR-15 that I’m ready to use to kill queers, abortionists, illegal immigrants, liberals, girly boys and Novus Ordo Catholics.

There’s more at Mr Panneton’s 1,183-word original, but it’s a lot of the same, the conflation of a small number of people into a national menace, and the possession of a rosary as a visible symbol, practically a swastika, showing just how horribly evil we are.

I have a rosary hanging from the rear view mirror of my F-150.

Of course, some of his sources are silly ones, such as citing Salon to prove that Catholics are a “growing contingent” of Christian nationalism, and Media Matters for America complaining that Twitter should take action against people calling groomers, groomers. About the only thing he failed to mention was Libs of TikTok.

The author’s tactics are familiar. The New Yorker noted a complaint by a black United States Postal Service worker that he was the subject of racial discrimination because some other workers wore caps with the Gadsden flag, and some have even called the thirteen-star Betsy Ross flag a symbol of hate. The old “OK” hand sign has been labeled a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.

There are two things going on here. One is that the left are trying, once again, to control what speech or expression is acceptable, in an attempt to limit the terms of debate by limiting how the debate may be held. If Mr Panneton had his way, if I drove to a county commissioner’s meeting with the rosary visible in my F-150, I would be ostracized and, who knows, perhaps even escorted off the property by the police for having the alt-right symbol of a rosary.

But there’s more. Mr Panneton’s motives are really pretty clear: he wants to attack Catholicism itself, by trying to make actual Catholics into Enemies of the Republic, people who, if seen with a rosary, ought to be shunned as Nazis, reported to the police, and fired from their jobs. After all, we are all heavily armed, right?

Nevertheless, he’s being pretty stupid. Other than topics of sexual morality, which are explicitly set down in the Bible, Catholic priests and theologians tend to be pretty liberal politically. Perhaps alienating people who be (mostly) your allies isn’t the wisest thing he could do.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2

  • §2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
  • §2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
  • §2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
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Taylor Lorenz is just hopping mad!

Remember Taylor Lorenz? As we have noted previously, Miss Lorenz is The Washington Post author over whom the newspaper was paying owner Jeff Bezos’ hard earned dollars to Twitter to promote an article doxing a conservative on Twitter? The image to the right is a screen capture, but if you click on it, it will take you to the original tweet.

Miss Lorenz spent a lot of time investigating the Twitter account Libs of TikTok. LoTT’s schtick is to find the silliest things leftists put on the social media site Tik Tok, and snark them for sensible people on Twitter. Basically, LoTT is mocking people for their own exposed stupidity. My good friend Amanda Marcotte of Salon loved that LoTT was doxed, doubtlessly hoping that Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate salesperson and LoTT creator would lose her job, and her posting last April was a hope that Mr Musk’s buyout of Twitter results in the whole thing being killed.

Elon Musk is buying Twitter for a sum of money so large as to be meaningless to all normal people. That’s enraging many or most Twitter users, but it also feels appropriate. After all, that platform is largely controlled by trolls. So why shouldn’t one of the biggest trolls on the platform own it outright? It’s a little like Snoop Dogg buying Death Row Records. Of course, trolls never wrote “Gin and Juice.” They are just draining the life out of our democracy.

As I argued a couple weeks ago, when Musk first started making sounds about buying Twitter, his plan to let the already obnoxious troll problem spiral out of control will likely sound the death knell for the social media behemoth. Trolls are good for business on social media, up to a point. But if they take over too much, they run all the normal people off. Then the trolls leave too, because they’re hapless and forlorn without non-trolls to troll. Soon it’s just a ghost town, like Donald Trump’s utterly pointless platform Truth Social.

That’s rather amusing, given that Miss Marcotte had posted 22 separate Twitter threads dated April 25th through 10:40 AM on the 26th, to promote her own sites and writing.[1]Miss Marcotte has me blocked, but all I have to do is hit [Ctrl][Alt][N] and it takes me to the private browsing screen, in which I am not logged in on Twitter, and I can see what she has posted. She used her willingness to post profanity on the now-defunct website Pandagon to build an ‘edgy’ audience, so it’s difficult not to laugh at her calling other people trolls. It was just last Thursday that she complained that conservatives wanting to keep sexually loaded works out of school libraries means that they want to ban and burn books.

LOL!

Well, Miss Lorenz was not very concerned about other people’s privacy, or potential harm to them, when she doxxed Miss Raichik, but she certainly is concerned about potential risks to herself! Very, very concerned about the new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control over COVID-19, which basically says that there’s no need for serious restrictions, Miss Lorenz tweeted:

Miss Lorenz is, herself, immunocompromised. She wrote:

Disabled/medically vulnerable ppl shouldn’t have to risk their lives to participate in society, nor are most even given that choice. Disabled people also have to work, go to school, grocery shop, go to the doctor’s office. We are human beings in the world just like everyone else. As someone working in media who’s immunocompromised and medically vulnerable I really wish we as an industry hired more disabled writers and did more to center vulnerable people in our coverage, esp on COVID. What’s happening right now is so horrific on such a massive scale

I would point out here that the CDC are not run by evil reich-wing Republicans, but that the current administration is under all sweetness-and-light liberal Joe Biden. She did note that, sort of, when she said that such a view is “championed by liberals and large media institutions.” The truth is simple: even if the left were not as tired of silly mask rules — and we did note how Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney is firing the last vaccine holdouts, even though the vaccines neither prevent people from contracting SARS-CoV-2 nor transmitting it to others — as are conservatives, there’s an election coming up in 12 weeks, and the Democrats are doing everything that they can to cut their anticipated losses.

I do not want Miss Lorenz to contract the virus, but the fact is that almost everybody eventually will. Realistically, I can more reasonably hope that when Miss Lorenz contracts it — if she hasn’t already — her symptoms will be very mild or even non-existent. But her fears are not enough to override the desires of the vast majority of people in this country, people who have long ago thrown away their silly masks.

References

References
↑1 Miss Marcotte has me blocked, but all I have to do is hit [Ctrl][Alt][N] and it takes me to the private browsing screen, in which I am not logged in on Twitter, and I can see what she has posted.