Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Mask mandate fights in Pennsylvania

If you sent your kids to a private school, the private school decided that face masks would be optional, and you disagreed with that decision, wouldn’t you stop paying tuition and send your kids to public schools, where they had a mask mandate?

A Northeast Philly private school defied the city’s mask order. Philadelphia took it to court.

Calvary Christian Academy did not require masking, enable social distancing, or require those exposed to COVID-19 to quarantine, the city said in court filings.

by Kristen A Graham | Tuesday, November 2, 2021

For nearly two months, a Northeast Philadelphia religious school flouted the city’s mandatory masking order.

And though staff and children are now wearing masks after the city asked a judge for an emergency injunction, leaders of the church that runs Calvary Christian Academy have vowed to fight for the right to keep masks optional.

It’s another salvo in an increasingly bitter political battle over mask-wearing in Pennsylvania and schools across the country.

Since the beginning of the school year, CCA, a prekindergarten-through-12th-grade school on Philmont Avenue in the city’s Somerton section, “did not require masking, did not enable social distancing among the students, and did not require members of the school exposed to COVID-19 to quarantine,” according to court documents.

Though both Philadelphia and Pennsylvania issued mandatory masking orders this summer amid the continuing pandemic and rising case counts, CCA told parents in a Sept. 6 letter that despite government orders, “we will keep the current COVID protocol in place, which states that masks are optional.”

Some parents complained about CCA’s mask-optional policy at the beginning of the school year. Separately, the school came to the attention of health department workers monitoring COVID-19 containment through a number of cases reported at the school — 23 between Sept. 7 and Oct. 5.

Calvary Christian Academy is not the most expensive private school out there, but it isn’t exactly cheap, either. Tuition is $4,450 for Calvary Church members, and $5,850 for non-members,[1]It’s quite common for parochial schools to have lower tuition rates for parishioners, and parishioners are expected to make contributions to the church. in the elementary school, $4,950/$6,350 for the junior high, $5,450/$6,900 for grades 9-11, and $5,850/$7,300 for seniors. If you were a Calvary parent, and disapproved of the optional mask policy, you could save a bunch of money by using the public schools.

Of course, for Calvary parents, that would mean sending their kids to the city’s disastrous public school system.

CCA staff told a city worker in late September they believed the school did not need to observe health department regulations because “CCA was a private religious school,” court filings show. The school also failed to submit to the city information about close contacts of CCA staff and students who tested positive for COVID-19.

Naturally, the city fought, and on Friday, October 29th, Common Pleas Court Judge Joshua Roberts signed an order requiring all personnel, students as well as staff, to wear masks. The school will reluctantly comply, while continuing the legal battle to overturn the judge’s order.

But, as the Inquirer reported on Thursday, October 28th, the mask mandate isn’t being strictly enforced in some public schools.

Sometimes when Lily Beard is running late for her second-period class, the only open seat is in front of a group of boys who don’t wear masks.

“They’re always coughing and being disgusting behind me,” said Lily, a ninth grader at Council Rock South High School, where, she said, it seems as if half the kids aren’t wearing masks.

“It’s completely unfair that we can’t go to school and learn and be safe.”

Then, don’t run late!

Of course, young Miss Beard is, one supposes, fully vaccinated, and the photo accompanying the article showed her mother and her wearing black, commercially-made masks. If the vaccines are supposed to protect the vaccinated, and masks protect the mask wearers, shouldn’t that be enough for the fearful?

Miss Beard complained that only about half of the students were wearing masks regularly, which tell you one thing: they don’t want to wear masks, and there’s no reason why their rights not to wear a mask should somehow be trumped by Miss Beard’s claim that they should.

Then, on Tuesday morning, the Inquirer raised the obvious question: at what point would Our Betters decide that the ‘pandemic’ was over?

Everyone’s asking when the pandemic will be over. Here’s how we’ll know.

If COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations did eventually reach levels usually associated with the flu, would that be a reasonable benchmark for saying the pandemic was over?

by Tom Avril, Jason Laughlin, and Laura McCrystal | Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Throughout each day, Cheryl Bettigole receives granular, neighborhood-level updates on the numbers we’ve all been hearing for months. The percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19. Transmission rates. Hospitalizations, deaths, and progress with vaccines — in Philadelphia and beyond.

The lines on the graphs often bounce around like the stock market. Yet at some point the city’s acting health commissioner and policymakers throughout the country have to reduce it all to a pivotal yes-or-no question:

Is it OK to resume life as normal?

“Things are trending in the right direction,” Bettigole said last week. “But we’re not past COVID.”

It is now generally accepted that COVID will always be with us in some form, much like seasonal coronaviruses that cause the common cold. But thanks to vaccines and the lingering immunity that many have acquired through infection, the share of the population protected from severe disease continues to grow.

That trend has infectious disease experts predicting that sometime in the not-so-distant future, perhaps a matter of months, the disease will become “endemic” — still circulating, yet not out of control.

What level is low enough to know we’ve crossed that line? And who decides what is normal?

That last is the real question: just who gets to decide what’s “normal,” when the government will stop trying to run people’s lives?

The public are already deciding some of that for themselves. Roughly 2,300 New York City firemen and EMTs called out sick on Monday, in apparent protest over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vaccine mandate. With 10,591 uniformed firemen, 4,274 uniformed EMS workers and 2,096 civilians, if 2,300 called out, that’s 13.56% of the workforce. As we have reported here, at least a couple of Kentucky school districts are lifting their mask mandates. My own observations at Lowe’s and Kroger indicate that mask wearing, even when the stores request it, is not being honored by roughly half of the customers.

But, what we will see is that while masking policies will fall away, because people are going to simply refuse, political leaders are going to continue to press for mandatory vaccinations, claiming that, if the virus is ‘endemic’ it still needs to be fought by requiring vaccinations. The Patricians will not want to give up control over the plebeians.

References

References
↑1 It’s quite common for parochial schools to have lower tuition rates for parishioners, and parishioners are expected to make contributions to the church.
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The Lexington Herald-Leader makes another exception to the McClatchy Mugshot Policy . . . for a cute (?) white girl * Updated! *

Emily Darnell lives in Paducah Kentucky, at the far western end of the Bluegrass State. A story about a non-lethal stabbing, a domestic violence episode in the county seat of McCracken County, wouldn’t normally attract much interest in the Lexington Herald-Leader, but in this very ordinary case, it was ‘important’ enough for one of the newspaper’s reporters to write about it himself:

    Kentucky woman charged after boyfriend stabbed during fast food argument

    by Christopher Leach | Tuesday, November 2, 2021 | 7:39 AM EDT | Updated: 7:44 AM EDT

    A Paducah woman has been charged with second-degree assault after allegedly stabbing her boyfriend in an argument over fast food, according to the city police department.

    Police were called to a home on Goodman Street at 11:05 p.m. Sunday where they found a wounded man walking away from the home, according to a department Facebook post. He accused his girlfriend, Emily Darnell, 23, of stabbing him with a kitchen knife.

    According to police, the victim said he was asleep when Darnell woke him up, wanting to go to a fast food restaurant. The man declined and went upstairs to get away from Darnell.

There are a couple more paragraphs in the original.

Ordinarily this is not a story which would have caught my attention, other than Miss Darnell’s mugshot; the photo to the right is a screenshot of the picture at the bottom of the referenced story, taken at 9:14 AM EDT. We have noted, many times, that the Herald-Leader follows the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, but is very is inconsistent in its application:

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.

Any exception to this policy must be approved by an editor. Editors considering an exception should ask:

  • 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.

According to the Paducah Police Department, Miss Darnell “was arrested on a charge of second-degree assault/domestic violence and booked into McCracken County Regional Jail”, but no note has been made, anywhere that I could find, which stated that she had been convicted of anything. She had been previously arrested, on May 3, 2020, for “menacing” and Indecent Exposure, 2nd degree, but I found no records of a conviction.

So, I have to ask: under the three conditions that editors for McClatchy Company newspapers are supposed to ponder when publishing mugshots, was Miss Darnell’s arrest considered? Is she an “urgent threat to the community”? Is she “a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?” Is she “a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?” The policy states that an editor has to approve the decision to print such.

What my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal refused to print the mugshot of a previously convicted felon arrested for shooting two people in Lexington, a local teacher accused of raping a minor, and even accused murderers still on the loose, yet they had to show the mugshot of a woman who is not local, and has been accused of a domestic violence assault.

Would I be alone in thinking it’s because she’s a cute (?) white girl?

————————————–

Benjamin William Call, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Update: 12:55 PM EDT

Sometimes it really gets too funny. At 11:55 AM EDT, the Herald-Leader published the story “Judge won’t lower bond for man accused of fatal assault in Lexington parking garage,” about the request of the attorney for Benjamin Call, accused of beating John Tyler “Ty” Abner to death. As usual, I looked up Mr Call’s mugshot, a matter of public record, and published it here. Yet, as of 12:51 PM EDT, the newspaper’s website still has Miss Darnell’s mugshot attached to the story about her, despite me having notified both the Herald-Leader in general, and reporter Christopher Leach individually, via Twitter, of their odd choice to publish her mugshot.

The article on Mr Call being denied a bail reduction from $750,000 to $150,000 noted that Fayette District Court Judge Lindsay H Thurston stated:

    This court cannot ignore the seriousness of the allegation that has been placed against you. It is murder. It is a Class A felony. It is the most serious allegation in the Commonwealth.

Yet the Herald-Leader is doing what little it can to protect Mr Call’s privacy. Editor Peter Baniak needs to do a better job.

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Tomás Ó’Cualáin is very angry that he contracted the virus!

Tomás Ó’Cualáin tells us that he is a physician and a neuroradiologist, and very much a supporter of vaccination against #COVID-19.

Yet, despite his precautions, Dr Ó’Cualáin has contracted the virus, and he’s angry, very angry, about it:

Dr Ó’Cualáin[1]His last name might actually be Folan. has told us that he has done everything, everything! by the book, gotten vaccinated, wearing not just the cloth or cheap masks most people get, but the supposedly more protective N95 masks, avoided unnecessary social contact, and his wife even got vaccinated while she was pregnant, despite the fact that while some health care professionals recommended it, we don’t know yet if the vaccines cause problems with the development of unborn children.[2]Note: the Tweet to the left is actually a screenshot of his original, but it is linked to his original; if you click on it, it will take you to the original.

He continued:

The rules just seem completely made up and arbitrary as to who is allowed to get boosters and when.

Meanwhile peoples lives & their chronic health hangs in the balance.

Don’t even get me started on the people who refuse to get vaccinated. My thoughts on them aren’t fit to post.

Dr Ó’Cualáin tells us that his thoughts on those who refuse the vaccines aren’t fit to post, but, actually, he did post them, in an earlier tweet:

Nurse fired for not being a proponent of science in a science-based field which necessitates that you science.

Makes video about how she is a victim.

Her patients would have been the victims.

Get out of Medicine & Nursing if you don’t science.

You don’t belong here.

Quote Tweet
Gillian McKeith @GillianMcKeith · Oct 30
Nurse fired for not accepting the you know what. Religious exemption denied.. Freedom is everything and you must never give it up #coercion https://twitter.com/HiDearZaki2/status/1454386707378417666/video/1

It would seem that the good physician is gleeful that a nurse got canned for sticking to her principles and beliefs.

It seems that the good doctor really, really doesn’t like unvaccinated people, which turns out to be a bit on the ironic side, given that he retweeted this image. Hypocrisy, anyone?

Now I don’t know what regulations kept the doctor from getting a COVID booster, but that can be what happens when governments are allowed to write the regulations. But we also don’t know from whom he contracted the virus. We already know that vaccinated people can contract the virus — Dr Ó’Cualáin did! — and that vaccinated people can transmit the virus.

But, while I am wryly amused by the doctor’s hypocrisy, his self-attested story tells us something else: despite being vaccinated, despite isolating himself from others as much as possible, despite wearing all of the personal protective equipment that he can, despite doing everything that the ‘experts’ have told us we just have to do, he still contracted the virus.

Yet, throughout the United States, actual cases of COVID-19 have declined dramatically, even though vaccinations have plateaued, even though most people have long since given up wearing masks, and even though many people are simply ignoring mask requests in places in which they are made. Why, it’s almost as though all of the restrictions that have been placed on people haven’t actually worked, haven’t actually done anything to prevent or lessen the spread of the virus.

References

References
↑1 His last name might actually be Folan.
↑2 Note: the Tweet to the left is actually a screenshot of his original, but it is linked to his original; if you click on it, it will take you to the original.
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Good news from the Bluegrass State

This is great news on the opening day of COP26

Governor Jim Justice (R-WV) is a bit of a scumbag, owing millions of dollars to the Commonwealth of Kentucky for violations at his old, closed down coal mines here, money he hasn’t paid. Well, now he’s going to start to make it right, and to do so, he’s going to reopen four coal mines in the Bluegrass State, to do the required strip mine reclamation work, and produce coal to help pay for it.

    Official: Companies will hire workers, resume production at four Kentucky coal mines

    By Bill Estep | November 1, 2021 | 3:32 PM EDT | Updated: 3:40 PM EDT

    Companies tied to West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice plan to resume coal production at several surface mines in Eastern Kentucky, including two where state regulators argue Justice missed deadlines to finish reclamation, according to the president of the companies.

    Jim Justice’s son Jay, president of the Justice Companies, said companies have begun work to start producing coal at the Bevins Branch and Beech Creek mines in Pike County, the Bull Creek mine in Knott County and the Infinity mine in Harlan County.

    When all four are up and running, they will employ 120 people in mining jobs and another 30 in support positions, Jay Justice said.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the important part that I see is that 150 jobs will be created, and the left should be pleased: coal mining jobs are normally good paying union jobs!

Eastern Kentucky has become a very poor region as the coal mining industry slowly waned; 150 new jobs will certainly be welcome. More, coal mining creates downstream jobs, for the railroads and trucking, to haul the coal that is produced.

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What, does Indianapolis think it’s Chicago?

A brief Associated Press story in The Philadelphia Inquirer caused me to check the Indianapolis Star:

IMPD: Man dead after shooting on Hovey Street in Indianapolis

Brittany Carloni, Indianapolis Star | Hallowe’en, October 31, 2021 | 7:44 AM | 11:05 AM EDT

A man died early Sunday morning after a shooting northeast of downtown Indianapolis, according to police.

The homicide Sunday marks the 213th criminal homicide in Indianapolis this year and 232 overall homicides, according to numbers provided by Indianapolis Police.

The man’s death was originally believed to be the 215th criminal homicide in Indianapolis this year, which would have tied the city’s record in 2020, according to an IndyStar analysis.

Indianapolis Police subsequently sent out a news release Sunday morning that said two previously reported homicides at the 2800 block of Shadeland Avenue on Oct 5 were reclassified.

IMPD has reclassified five criminal homicides in the last week.

There’s more at the original.

The address of the homicide, 3227 Hovey Street,[1]Unlike many newspapers which give only the block number, the Star printed the exact address. isn’t some jammed together rowhome like the City of Brotherly Love, but what appears to be a single family starter home in a neighborhood of the same type. Zillow tells me that it’s a 2 bedroom, 836 ft² house worth $66,500.

Naturally, I did the math. 213 criminal homicides in 304 days works out to a projected 256 homicides for the year. The 2020 census put the city’s population at 887,642, which would make the projected homicide rate at 28.80 per 100,000. 2020 set the city’s record at 215, for the entire year, which worked out to a homicide rate of ‘just’ 24.22 per 100,000.

As of October 29, 674 people had been murdered in Chicago. With a population of 2,746,388, and 815 ‘projected’ homicides for 2021, the Windy City’s murder rate works out to 29.68 per 100,000, so Indianapolis is still behind. Philadelphia, naturally, says, “Hold my beer!” and checks in at 34.36 per 100,000, while St Louis, at an astounding 64.10, just laughs and calls them all pikers.

It will surprise exactly no one that, in 2020, homicide victims in Indianapolis were mostly black males. The chart at the left, from Fox 59 News, does not separate out the thirty homicides which were listed as not criminal, but shows that 65.31% were black males, and another 9.80% were black females. That’s 75.11% of all homicides in the city were of black victims . . . among a population that is only 28.55% black.

I get it: to some on the left, math is raaaaacist, so using math to point out a huge racial disparity will be denounced as racist as well.  But, in the end, facts are facts, and it’s time that someone asks why black lives don’t matter to other black people.

References

References
↑1 Unlike many newspapers which give only the block number, the Star printed the exact address.
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If you won’t pay for the newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer thinks that you should be taxed to support it anyway.

It is well known by both of this website’s regular readers that I like to cite newspapers as my sources. Part of the reason is that I am mostly deaf; I simply don’t get my news from television, because it is much easier for me to read the news than listen to it. And newspapers usually cover stories in greater depth than television stations.

More, I have been an adamant defender of the First Amendment, and its protection of freedom of speech and of the press. The government should not have any control of, or censorship authority over, the media, whether it’s a big corporate entity like The Washington Post,, or an individual blog like The Pirate’s Cove.

Which makes this begging OpEd in The Philadelphia Inquirer all the worse:

    A call to action as a key deadline looms for the federal proposal to help local news

    Support for the sustainability of local journalism, what should be viewed as the very glue that helps hold our democracy together, may be seen as expendable as the Build Back Better act is finalized.

    by Jim Friedlich[1]Jim Friedlich is CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns The Inquirer. | Saturday, October 30, 2021 | 6:00 PM EDT

    Deadlines are a fact of life for the reporters, editors, web producers, visual journalists, and others at the heart of America’s free press. But today we face a deadline of a different sort. The number of newsroom employees in the United States has fallen by almost 60% since 2000. Since 2004, over 2,100 newspapers — including 70 daily papers — have stopped publishing altogether.

    In the next few days, Congress will decide the fate of a federal bill called The Local Journalism Sustainability Act, designed to help reverse these trends.

    The Local Journalism Sustainability Act has been the subject of earlier advocacy by The Lenfest Institute, the nonprofit owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Earlier versions of the bill included proposed tax credits for consumers buying news subscriptions, for small businesses advertising in local news publications, and — most critically — for news organizations hiring and retaining journalists.

    This provision is now part of the Build Back Better bill, the major legislation pushed by the Biden administration. The current version of the bill has jettisoned the subscription and advertising tax credits to reduce cost to the American taxpayer. But the bill retains its most important and direct support, a refundable payroll tax credit of up to $25,000 per journalist to help local news organizations hire and retain reporters and editors, the lifeblood of local news coverage and the democracy it helps sustain.

There’s more at the original, but let me be the first to say: not just no, but Hell no! How can newspapers be independent of the government if they are going to require government largesse to operate? How can we trust coverage, by the Inquirer or any other credentialed media organization, if those media are dependent upon $25,000 for every journalist’s and editor’s salary?

No, Uncle Sam would not be paying the salaries directly, but tax credits would come right off the news organizations’ tax liabilities, and would be very much reducing the newspapers’ costs of employing people.

Mr Friedlich noted that, over the past 17 years, over 2,100 newspapers, including 70 daily newspapers, have gone out of business. To quote from the source he linked:

    When the 127-year-old Siftings Herald in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, printed its final edition on Sept. 15, 2018, there were only 1,600 subscribers in a community of 10,000 residents. The community was one of the poorest in the state. For decades, the paper had been published daily, Monday through Friday. But as both subscriber and advertising revenue dropped, publication was first reduced to two days a week in 2016, and then in early September 2018, the owner, the Gatehouse chain, announced the simultaneous closure of the Siftings Herald and two other papers in nearby counties. A former editor, now a columnist at the Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, took note of the closures, writing, “The watchdogs of school boards, city councils and quorum courts are gone. The chroniclers of high school sports teams are missing. To say that this is a sad thing for these counties is to understate the case.”

    For more than two centuries, newspaper editors and reporters, more often than not, served as arbiters of our news, determining what made front-page headlines read by millions of people in this country. They were the prime, if not sole, source of credible and comprehensive news and information, especially for residents in small and mid-sized communities.

If there were only 1,600 subscribers in a community of 10,000 residents, it’s pretty obvious: the majority of the community didn’t care enough to subscribe. Whatever value the residents of Arkadelphia saw in the Siftings Herald, it wasn’t enough to actually pay for it. What Mr Friedlich is asking is that people who don’t care enough about a particular newspaper to subscribe to it should have to pay for it anyway, through their taxes.

In 2019, Ralph Cipriano of Philadelphia: magazine wrote of the Inquirer:

    As of May 7th, the circulation of the daily Inquirer, which once stood at 373,892 copies in 2002, was down to 101,818.

Using the same metric as was used to describe the Siftings Herald, to which only 16% of the residents subscribed, with a circulation of 101,818 daily copies, in a city of 1,603,797 souls, the Inquirer is doing much worse, with only 6.35% of Philadelphians buying it.[2]Full disclosure: I do pay for a digital subscription to the Inquirer.

And it’s actually worse than that: the Philadelphia metropolitan area has roughly 6,108,000 people, meaning that the Inquirer’s circulation is paid for by a whopping 1.67% of what ought to be its service area.

If the Inquirer is valued that little by the people of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, why should all of those people who don’t find it worth the cost of paying for it be taxed to support it?

Journalists have always had an exaggerated opinion of their status. Because freedom of the press is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, the so-called Fourth Estate tends to see itself as somehow specially privileged, and owed support. And for centuries, the public did support newspapers, because they were the source of information from near and far.

The above mentioned quote from one of Mr Friedlich’s linked sources is important:

    For more than two centuries, newspaper editors and reporters, more often than not, served as arbiters of our news, determining what made front-page headlines read by millions of people in this country. They were the prime, if not sole, source of credible and comprehensive news and information, especially for residents in small and mid-sized communities.

What is an ‘arbiter’? Arbiter is defined as:

  1. a person with power to decide a dispute : JUDGE
  2. a person or agency whose judgment or opinion is considered authoritative

This is how the credentialed media see themselves, and they were, for centuries, the gatekeepers, the decision takers of what would, and would not, be published. With the arrival of that internet thingy that Al Gore invented, that gatekeeping function passed away. The First Street Journal may not have the circulation of the Inquirer, but as long as I pay my site hosting bills, the editors of the Inquirer cannot stop me from publishing.

It was 2004, when the sites Powerline and Little Green Footballs destroyed that lofty air of authority the credentialed media enjoyed, when, working only on the low resolution television screens of the day, they managed, independently, to spot the forgery with which Dan Rather and CBS News tried to turn the presidential election against the younger President Bush.

Seventeen years later, the Inquirer has announced, in public, by its publisher, Elizabeth Hughes, that it would not publish the unvarnished truth, but only those things which passed muster through the lens of being “an anti-racist news organization,” censoring information which might reflect poorly on “people of color.”

Why should people pay for a newspaper which has announced that it will deliberately slant the news?

It’s hardly just the Inquirer. We noted, just three days ago, how The New York Times, supposedly the ‘newspaper of record’ for the United States, ignored a rather large New York City story, because the editors didn’t want to admit that resistance to COVID vaccine mandates was leaving the trash piled high on the streets in two boroughs. This site has pointed out, many times, how my ‘local’ newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, censors news that is freely available on the local television stations, because of political considerations rather than any journalistic imperative to actually report all of the news.

If the Inquirer is to survive, it must make itself a newspaper, whether in print or digital only, that the people of the Philadelphia metropolitan area find valuable enough for which to pay. If it can’t do that, it does not deserve to survive.

References

References
↑1 Jim Friedlich is CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns The Inquirer.
↑2 Full disclosure: I do pay for a digital subscription to the Inquirer.
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Mask mandates in the Bluegrass State They don't seem to have made much difference

The Lexington Herald-Leader does not publish a Saturday edition, but at least subscribers can get some updated content on Saturdays. In a story from Friday, we find out that the Bluegrass State’s COVID-19 vaccination rate isn’t as high as previously reported:

    Data duplication error means Kentucky’s COVID vaccination numbers just went down

    By Alex Acquisto | Friday, October 29, 2021 | 9:31 AM EDT

    A major pharmacy chain unintentionally logged a few hundred thousand COVID-19 vaccinations twice, Gov. Andy Beshear announced Thursday, which means many fewer Kentuckians than previously thought have received their first dose.

    Kroger locations across Kentucky, where vaccines are administered through its pharmacies, reported 431,100 duplicate doses to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s federal vaccine database. Those doses — 252,500 of which are thought to be first doses — will be removed Thursday evening and final numbers will be released Friday.

    “The CDC has confirmed in their system that some COVID vaccination data has been counted twice,” the governor said Thursday in a news conference, adding, “This was not intentional by anyone,” but “What it does to our numbers hurts a little bit.” Three other states have made similar errors, Beshear said, but he declined to say which ones.

There is more at the original, but I will admit to being amused.

Jerry Tipton, one of the newspaper’s sportswriters — and it’s the coverage of University of Kentucky sports which keeps the paper alive — had an article this morning on the mask mandate for entrance into Rupp Arena for UK’s exhibition game against Kentucky Wesleyan.

    As fans waited for players to make a “Blue Carpet” entrance to this year’s Big Blue Madness, a security guard noticed Pamela Buboltz’s mask had slipped off her nose. The guard motioned for her to pull it up.

    Buboltz made eye contact with an onlooker (blush). Her gaze seemed to convey a mix of annoyance and can-you-believe-this? She shook her head from side to side after adjusting her mask.

    “No one is wearing a mask,” she said when the onlooker asked about the exchange. “Look around. I see five people (wearing masks). They don’t work anyway.”

There’s more at the original, and Mr Tipton cited examples which ran the gamut.

I noted, on Twitter, on October 5th:

Both signs are still up, the one on the right “strongly encourag(ing)” fully vaccinated shoppers to wear masks beside the outer doors, and the one with no option other than to wear masks beside the inner doors. This is at the Kroger on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky. And while there looked to be roughly 80% compliance three weeks ago, yesterday it was down to, by my guesstimate, 50%. Even a few of the employees, along with a non-employee vendor, weren’t wearing masks, or had them below their chins, where they were of no use.

I, of course, did not wear a mask, and there was no one from the store entrance either encouraging people to mask up or inquiring about vaccination status.

But this was the most important story:

    Two school districts in counties near Lexington are lifting their mask mandates

    by Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Friday, October 29, 2021 | 1:05 PM EDT

    Two Kentucky school districts in counties adjoining Lexington have announced that they are lifting their mask mandates.

    In Nicholasville, Jessamine Superintendent Matt Moore said that masks in school will be optional starting Wednesday.

    Moore said several factors went into making the decision including county data, student and staff cases and quarantines, the number of vaccinations in the community, and the success of the Test to Stay Program, which allows students who test negative for COVID to stay in class even if they have been exposed.

    “I also communicated that, if the data does not trend in the desired direction, JCS would transition back to requiring masks,” Moore said.

    Beginning Monday, Nov. 8, masks and face coverings will be optional for students, staff, and visitors in Madison County Schools at Richmond.

There’s more at the original.

Thanks to the Kentucky General Assembly overriding Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) veto, the decisions on mask mandates in the public schools are the province of local school boards, and not the state. The Governor lamented that he lacked the authority to issue a mask mandate now, and said that, if he had the authority, he would “immediately implement” an indoor mask mandate. The Governor also said that he hoped businesses would put in place mask mandates themselves. Well, Kroger has the signs up doing just that, but Kentuckians are not complying, and the store is not attempting to enforce the requirement.

But the most important sentence in Mrs Spears article is this:

    In recent weeks, Madison County Schools has seen a significant decline in the number of active cases and quarantine cases among students and staff. That decline is in line with the number of cases in the county, officials said in a statement.

If the Madison County schools, which had a mask mandate since the beginning of school, is seeing a decline in cases “in line with the number of cases in the county,” where there is no mask mandate, doesn’t that say that the mask mandates have made no difference?

On September 1st, Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford was shocked and appalled that UK football games was inviting Mr Delta to a tailgate party:

    Then UK announced its COVID protocols for the football season at Kroger Stadium in an Orwellian orgy of double speak: The rules say if you are not vaccinated, you have to wear a mask at all times, even outside! Pinky promise you’ll abide by our honor system! You do have to wear a mask in indoor spaces. Maybe. If we check. Wouldn’t you like to see a UK usher knock on the door of a luxury box to ask some poobah UK donor enjoying a nice bourbon to pull up their mask?

    I’m not sure how to rank science versus football in the SEC, but it seems that UK could have followed the lead of a peer like Louisiana State University. The Tiger Stadium can seat 103,000 people and they’re asking for vaccination status or negative test results. Yes, there will be lines, but also less likelihood to turn games into superspreader events. Then again, maybe LSU has a slightly more celebrated football history and can afford to turn away a few irate fans.

Except the ‘superspreader’ event Mrs Blackford feared never happened. As this graph from The New York Times shows, the South has the lowest “average daily cases per capita” of any region in the country.

On September 1st, the day Mrs Blackford published her column, Kentucky had a moving seven day daily average of 4,320 new cases per day; on October 29th, that average had dropped to 1,214. That’s a 71.90% drop, with UK football games featuring only a small percentage of fans wearing masks, with the vaccination numbers lower than previously reported, and with Kentuckians mostly ignoring masking mandates and requests.

Yes, while I am vaccinated, I have been mostly ignoring the ‘safety protocols’, and I have criticized them. But I can also get kind of numbers geeky, and this article was about the actual numbers. What the worry warts have been telling us has simply not been the case!

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About those plug-in electric cars

A 2019 Chevy Bolt electric vehicle caught fire at a home in Cherokee County, Georgia, on Sept. 13. Source: Cherokee County Fire Department. Click to enlarge.

General Motors GM: (%) has stopped dealers from selling additional Chevy Dolt’s Bolts and has warned Dolt Bolt owners only to charge the vehicles to 90% of capacity and park them outside because of fire risk.

That’s from The Philadelphia Inquirer, not some evil reich-wing source. From Bloomberg:

    GM Tells Bolt Owners to Park 50 Feet Away From Other Cars

    By David Welch and Dana Hull | September 15, 2021 | 3:58 PM EDT | Updated: 6:40 PM EDT

    General Motors Co. urged some owners of Chevrolet Bolt electric cars to park and store the vehicles at least 50 feet away from other cars to reduce the risk that a spontaneous fire could spread.

    The Detroit automaker has recalled all of the roughly 142,000 Bolts sold since 2016 because the battery can catch on fire. GM has taken a $1.8 billion charge so far for the cost of the recall and has been buying cars back from some disgruntled owners. The company expects to recoup much of the cost from battery supplier LG Corp.

    The new advice is likely to rankle owners who are already limiting their use of the Bolt to avoid overheating the battery and risking a fire. The parking guidance — recommending a distance of 50 feet from other parked cars — is especially difficult for owners in urban areas. GM has confirmed 10 fires. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said the agency has found 13 fires in Bolts, but the company hasn’t confirmed the additional three are part of the current recall issue.

    The Bolt normally can go 259 miles on a charge, but that has been limited by GM’s guidance to avoid a fire. The automaker told Bolt owners to limit the charge to 90%, plug in more frequently and avoid depleting the battery to below about 70 miles of remaining range. They’re also advised to park their vehicles outside immediately after charging and not leave them charging indoors overnight.

There’s more at the original.

So, if owners have to charge their electric vehicles to 90%, not 100%, of capacity, they’re automatically losing 10% of the stated range on the vehicles. If they’ve spent the money to install an in-garage charger, to charge up overnight, now they have to charge outside, possibly having to leave their garage doors open, and leave their vehicles outside in the weather. Kind of defeats the purpose in having a garage in the first place!

President Biden wants to force us all into plug-in electric cars, but the technology isn’t up to the goal. Will it get better and safer? Maybe, but remember: storage of sparktricity in a battery isn’t an engineering issue, but one of developing the chemicals which can store a charge. Who knows? There may be no other chemicals, or at least none safer, which can do that!

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Black lives don’t matter in St Louis! "The truth is not always a pleasant thing." -- General 'Buck' Turgidson

Tishaura Jones, the Mayor of St Louis, Missouri, is very, very worried about “gun violence.” “Gun violence” is the euphemism that the left use to describe people shooting and killing each other, without blaming bad people, but blaming inanimate objects, as though firearms simply levitate and fire at people all by themselves. From CNN:

Gunshots rang out as St. Louis mayor was discussing gun violence prevention. She didn’t flinch

By Raja Razek and Jennifer Feldman, CNN | Saturday, October 30, 2021 | Updated: 5:43 EDT

Tishaura Jones, from her campaign website.

Gunshots rang out Friday as St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones was discussing gun violence prevention during a news conference — and she did not flinch.“My son and I fall asleep to the lullaby of gunshots in the distance every night,” Jones said, responding to a question on whether she felt safe. “It’s a part of my life now and that shouldn’t be.”

Before the news conference, Jones and Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas were participating in a roundtable on how gun violence is affecting their cities.

Lucas later shared Jones’ sentiments regarding the prevalence of gun violence.

“The sound of gunshots is a regular occurrence in too many areas of my city as well; something I grew to know from youth. Today’s shots reminded us of the reality so many of our sisters, brothers, and babies face each day and the need for change,” Lucas wrote in a tweet.

National gun violence rates were 30% higher during a 13-month pandemic period when compared with the same period the year before, a study published last week in the journal Scientific Reports showed.

“We found a strong association between the Covid-19 pandemic time frame and an increase in gun violence in the U.S. compared to the pre-pandemic period,” wrote the authors from Penn State College of Medicine.

There’s more at the original, but I would also note that the lawlessness following the death of George Floyd, on May 25, 2020, also occurred during the same time frame. How the study ‘corrected’ for that factor is not explained.

However, if there is a “strong association” between the COVID-19 pandemic time frame and an increase in “gun violence”, might we not conclude that the lockdowns and other measures ordered by people like Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) led to that increase in “gun violence”? When you have some people thrown out of work, and others forced to work while wearing masks and under a continual drumbeat of fear, when you have people barred from visiting extended family, churches closed, weddings cancelled, are you not ripping at the entire fabric of society?

But there’s more, and it takes an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like me to mention it. While we have noted the skyrocketing homicide rates in our major cities, Mayor Jones’ St Louis provides data most cities do not; the St Louis Metropolitan Police Department breaks down homicides by race. The chart at the left, reproduced by this author from the SLMPD figures, shows that, as of October 29th, 149 out of 161 total murder victims in the Gateway City were black; that’s 92.55%! As far as #BlackLivesMatter is concerned, it seems that black lives don’t matter as far as other black people are concerned, not in St Louis. If Mayor Jones’ “son and (her) fall asleep to the lullaby of gunshots in the distance every night,” maybe it ought to be a problem she recognizes and understands.

The first seven columns of this chart are from the Police Department’s report. The Population column is from the 2020 census figures and the murder rate column is calculated by the current number of homicides, multiplied by 1.20065789, to get homicides in 304 days up to 365, divided by the population, and calculated in the standard fashion, homicides per 100,000 population. The calculations were done via Microsoft Excel functions.

The population figures in the census data I found were not broken down by race and sex, but if we assume that black males make up 49% of the total black population, 63,609, and the annualized number of homicides of black males will wind up at 146 (it works out to 146.480263), black males in St Louis are subject to a homicide rate of 229.53 per 100,000 population! White males, on the other hand, are subject to a homicide rate of ‘just’ 7.78 per 100,000 population.

Mayor Jones got it wrong: the problem in the Gateway City isn’t “gun violence,” but black people, primarily black males, killing each other.

Me? I’m retired, so I can’t be ‘canceled,’ can’t lose my job because someone doesn’t like my political positions. I suppose that some will call this racist, but it’s just simple math; the numbers are the numbers. I could, perhaps, see my website listed as a ‘hate site,’ and lose links that way, but it’s a potential loss I am willing to bear, because I am doing something radical like telling the truth. But, as General ‘Buck’ Turgidson said in Dr Strangelove, “the truth is not always a pleasant thing.” and the left just can’t handle the truth.

The homicide rate is a huge problem, but the left pretending that it’s just “gun violence,” that the availability of guns is the problem, ignore the disparity in “gun violence” between the races. If it was simply the availability of firearms, then the homicide rates between the races should be almost identical; St Louis shows that those rates are widely, widely different.

You cannot address a problem if you are unwilling to properly identify the problem, and the problem is that there is something in the urban black culture in the Gateway City which leads to violent behavior. We’re not allowed to say that, of course, because it is massively politically incorrect, but it is true nevertheless.