Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The public support for the Lexington Police Department, and the hits to officers’ morale

I have said it before: in our urban black communities, they dislike the police more than they dislike the criminals in their midst. They are like the Palestinians in Gaza, tolerating, feeding, supporting, hiding, and providing sex for Hamas, no matter how much damage Hamas cause in Gaza, because they hate the Israelis more.

And so the black community in Lexington have made it their mission to hobble, if they cannot eliminate, the city’s Police Department. On Friday, June 25th, they got a little bit of that done, getting the city government to ban no-knock warrants. Continue reading →

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The solution to transgender bathroom issues from an unusual place Who'd have ever guessed that it would come from the Vatican?

In late June of 2016, the Pico family toured the Vatican. Lots of history, tradition and great art, about which thousands and thousands of people have previously written; it’s a subject on which I have little more to contribute.

But there is one very unexpected quirk I saw, just before we left, that addresses a problem for today. Near a public cafeteria were the public restrooms. Entering the men’s room, I noticed the typical urinals along one wall, some in use, and a middle-aged female janitor cleaning, while the restroom was in use. Well, that’s pretty European, I thought.

Then I got to the stalls. Unlike what we see in the United States, the stalls in that men’s room had walls and doors which were essentially floor-to-ceiling, providing complete privacy. And that’s the solution to the stupidity we are seeing in the United States these days. Continue reading →

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What could possibly go wrong?

As we have previously noted, while we might forgive His Majesty King Henry VIII for believing that Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn were somehow responsible for his first two children being daughters, the role of the X and Y chromosomes in determining the sex of mammals, including humans, has been known for over a century. Sex is not somehow “assigned” at birth; sex is determined at conception, depending upon whether the sperm which fertilized the egg carries the X or Y chromosome. We recognize the sex of a newborn child by visual examination of the child, but the characteristics which indicate sex developed long before birth, during gestation, as programmed in by the developing child’s DNA.

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

Continue reading →

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Today’s left really do hate them some #FreedomOfSpeech

We have previously noted the hostility of the credentialed media to what everyone would have thought they supported, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, at least for other people.

Now comes Aaron Rupar, who claims to be a journalist for Vox. Mr Rupar us upset, highly upset, that Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade claims that he read Mein Kampf in school:

Continue reading →

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It only takes a slight omission to completely skew the story Translation: the Associated Press has lied to you!

We have already covered the Lexington-Fayette Urban-County Council’s ban on no-knock warrants in the city, and needn’t go into it further here. Most of our source material came from the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Also on the Herald-Leader website was a ‘national’ story on it, by the Associated Press: Continue reading →

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Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council votes to further hamstring law enforcement and alienate the police

As we noted two weeks ago, the Lexington-Fayette County Urban-County Council wanted to ban no knock warrants. Well, on Friday morning, they got that done:

No-knock warrants officially banned in Lexington: Mayor signs new ordinance into law

By Jeremy Chisenhall | June 25, 2021 | 11:59 AM EDT | Updated: June 25, 2021 | 2:44 PM EDT

Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton has signed into law an ordinance which bans no-knock warrants in Fayette County, she told the Herald-Leader Friday morning.

The Lexington council approved the ordinance Thursday night in a 10-5 vote, but Gorton had the option to sign it or veto it. The council would’ve needed at least nine votes in favor of the ordinance to override the veto. But Gorton signing the document made it law, effective immediately.

Gorton previously voiced opposition to totally banning no-knock warrants in Lexington. But she signed the ordinance into law after hearing from local residents who wanted to ban no-knock warrants during the council’s public comment section Thursday.

Further down:

Rev. Clark Williams is a member of a group of Black faith leaders in Lexington who have pushed for a ban on no-knock warrants for more than a year. He said the enacted ban was a “relief” and the Black faith leaders want to work with those on the other side of the issue.

“I’m hopeful those who are on the other side of the issue can appreciate that we disagreed on the issue, but there is absolutely no reason for this to be viewed as an adversarial situation,” he said. “ … No one in Lexington wants the city to be any safer than we do, and so we all have a vested interest in that.”

If no one wants the city to be any safer than (they) do, why take a very infrequently used tool out of the hands of the police? All that can do is make things safer for the criminals! The Lexington Fraternal Order of Police vociferously opposed this move, as did Police Chief Lawrence Weathers.

The problem is simple: in our urban black communities, they dislike the police more than they dislike the criminals in their midst. They are like the Palestinians in Gaza, tolerating, feeding, supporting, hiding, and f(ornicating) Hamas, no matter how much damage Hamas cause in Gaza, because they hate the Israelis more.

The group of Black faith leaders “will be focusing attention” on how council members voted on the ban, Williams said. They’re also going to shift their focus to other issues of racial equity.

“That was merely just a step,” Williams said of the no-knock warrant ban. “That was not the journey. That was not the battle. That was merely a round in the fight for racial justice and equity.”

It is unsurprising that, having taken one tool away from law enforcement, they want to start hobbling the police in other areas.

In other, wholly unrelated news:

Two teens taken to hospital after shooting in downtown Lexington

By Karla Ward | Juna 26, 2021 | 1:40 PM

Two teen boys were taken to a local hospital Friday night after a shooting downtown.

Lexington police were called to a report about an altercation with shots fired at High and Mill streets at 11:19 p.m. and found the teens shot, said police Lt. Daniel Truex. Their injuries were not thought to be life-threatening.

One of the victims approached officers at the Fifth Third Bank Pavilion and told them he had been shot, while the other injured teen was still at the scene, WKYT reported.

There’s a little more at the original.

According to the Lexington Shootings Investigations page, there have been 58 shootings in the city, though the last one recorded was on June 20th, so the page is a few days out of date. Of those 58 shootings, 42, or 72.41%, of the victims were black. Lexington’s population is 14.6% black. When the group of black faith leaders “shift their focus to other issues of racial equity,” perhaps a good place to start would be addressing why black people are being shot in such disproportionate numbers.

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We can see it coming: the spreading of fear to allow the government to impose new restrictions on our constitutional rights

When the elites see control slipping away, they resort to fear tactics.

“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.” — Glenn Greenwald, “The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun — Even Without the New Laws Biden Wants”.

Mr Greenwald wasn’t writing about COVID-19, but the efforts of the Biden, and past, Administrations to fight terrorism by restricting civil liberties. There is a lot with which I disagree with Mr Greenwald, but on this, he’s dead on target.

Fear, of course, was what governments used to get a free people to go along with restrictions on their constitutional rights. Now that almost everyplace in the United States has lifted restrictions — Pennsylvania’s mask mandate ended today — we are seeing the fearful wanting them back:

Gottlieb says parts of U.S. could see “very dense outbreaks” as Delta variant spreads

By Kimani Hayes | June 28, 2021 | 7:39 AM EDT | CBS NEWS

Washington — As the U.S. continues to navigate its way through the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said areas of the country could experience “very dense outbreaks” with the concerning Delta variant continuing to circulate.

“It’s going to be hyper-regionalized, where there are certain pockets of the country [where] we can have very dense outbreaks,” Gottlieb said Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

The most vulnerable areas continue to be those with low vaccination rates and low rates of immunity from prior infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many southern states have vaccination rates that lag behind the national average.

“I think as you look across the United States, if you’re a community that has low vaccination rates and you also think that there was low immunity from prior infection, so the virus really hasn’t coursed through the local population, those communities are vulnerable,” he said. “So, I think governors need to be thinking about how they build out health care resources in areas of the country where you still have a lot of vulnerability.”

Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, a state where hospital admissions are up 30%, expressed concern about the Delta COVID-19 variant and low vaccination rates in his state.

“The Delta variant is a great concern to us. We see that impacting our increasing cases and hospitalizations,” Hutchinson said on “Face the Nation.” The governor also noted that vaccine hesitancy is high in his state, which he attributed to conspiracy theories, the pause in Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot regimen in April and individuals simply not believing in the efficacy of the virus.

There’s more at the original.

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY), having scheduled the end of almost all of the restrictions for following day anyway, argued before the state Supreme Court that he needs the laws passed, over his veto, by the state legislature earlier this year to be declared unconstitutional, because they would restrict his executive authority to fight a pandemic like COVID-19. One can argue that the restrictions on the Governor’s authority under KRS 39A were unwise, which is what his mouthpiece, Amy Cubbage, did, but unwise is not an argument that a law is unconstitutional. I, however, do not trust the state Supreme Court not to make its usual obeisance to Mr Beshear and let him get away with things again. Despite the best efforts of Republicans, and Kentucky’s voters,[1]In 2020, Republican candidates for the General Assembly ran against the Governor’s orders, and voters rewarded them with 14 additional seats in the state House of representatives, for a 75-25 … Continue reading Governor Beshear has pretty much gotten away with his dictatorial and unconstitutional actions. At this point, the battle is to keep him from being able to do it again. I am not confident that the state Supreme Court will follow the law; they’ve been far too compliant with the Governor’s wishes. But, with the restrictions over, there is no reason at for the justices to ignore the laws passed by the General Assembly other than the argument of what might happen sometime in the future.

It’s easy enough to see coming: just a few cases of the new ‘Delta variant,” and the Governor might once again issue his mandatory mask orders and attempt to close down ‘non-essential’ businesses, because dictators gotta dictate!

References

References
↑1 In 2020, Republican candidates for the General Assembly ran against the Governor’s orders, and voters rewarded them with 14 additional seats in the state House of representatives, for a 75-25 majority, and 2 additional seats, out of 17 up for election, for a 30-8 majority.
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Le #TourDeFrance

The Tour de France is our vicarious French vacation, and we’ve been watching it every year since 2017. I started following Julian Alaphilippe when he won the King of the Mountains in the 2018 Tour.

But one thing always bothered me, and that was how close some of the spectators were to the racers. Then, today, on the first stage of the 2021 Tour, a spectator caused a spectacular accident. I’ll put the YouTube below the fold, so it doesn’t mess up the main page.

Continue reading →