Author Archives: Dana Pico

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President Biden wants to tax working-class people to subsidize new electric cars for their bosses Sadly, this headline isn't an April Fool's Day joke.

2020 Chevy Dolt Bolt.

President Biden, along with all of the other 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, promised to require that all new cars after a certain model year — 2035 for Mr Biden, 2030 for some of the others — would be ‘zero emission,’ which primarily means plug-in electric vehicles, all to fight global warming climate change.

Well, Mr Biden was elected, and he wants to try to put his promise into action, but even the liberal New York Times notes the problems:

Biden’s Push for Electric Cars: $174 Billion, 10 Years and a Bit of Luck

The president is hoping to make electric vehicles more affordable to turn a niche product into one with mass appeal.

By Niraj Chokshi | March 31, 2021

President Biden is a muscle-car guy — one of his most prized possessions is a 1967 Corvette that he got from his father. But he’s trying to make this an electric vehicle world.

So, his fossil-fueled Corvette is OK for he, but not for thee! Got it!

The $2 trillion infrastructure plan that he unveiled on Wednesday is aimed at tackling climate change in part by spending up to $174 billion to encourage Americans to switch to cars and trucks that run on electricity, not gasoline or diesel. That is a large investment but it might not be enough to push most Americans toward E.V.s.

Despite rapid growth in recent years, electric vehicles remain a niche product, making up just 2 percent of the new car market and 1 percent of all cars, sport-utility vehicles, vans and pickup trucks on the road. They have been slow to take off in large part because they can cost up to $10,000 more than similar conventional cars and trucks. Charging E.V.s is also more difficult and slower than simply refilling the tank at far more prevalent gas stations.

This is what prompted me to write on this article. Not only does the Times note that plug-in electrics are ‘niche products,’ but this is the first one I’ve seen from the liberal side of the credentialed media which has noted the problems with recharging the vehicles. The article noted that charging them was “slower” than filling your fuel tank with gasoline, though it was a journalistic failure to note how much slower. As we noted here, they can take the better part of an hour to charge at a high-capacity public station:

Charging an electric car at a charging station can take as little as 30 minutes or up to a day depending on a number of factors. The car’s battery size, your battery’s current state of charge, the max charging rate of your vehicle and the charger you’re using, and even the weather — all play a role in how quickly you’ll be able to fill up. A typical electric car like a Nissan Leaf (62-kWh battery) would take about 11.5 hours to charge from empty to full at home on a 240-volt Level 2 charger or could get to about an 80% charge in just 45 minutes if using a public Level 3 DC fast charger.

Then there was this:

Tesla Owners Wait in Long Lines to Recharge over Holidays

Institute for Energy Research | January 6, 2020

With over 400,000 Tesla vehicles on U.S. roads, Tesla’s Supercharger stations were overcrowded over the holidays and many Tesla owners faced an hours-long wait to recharge their electric vehicles. At one location in Kettleman City, California, a line of 50 or so Tesla vehicles awaiting a Supercharger stall stretched to about a quarter mile over Thanksgiving weekend. The station is located about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Its 40 stalls were insufficient to accommodate the demand, and the simultaneous recharging of the vehicles lowered the rate of recharging, frustrating customers even more. It takes about 52 minutes to charge a Model 3 to 80 percent at a 120 kilowatt Tesla Supercharger.

How many times have you gone to the gas station, and had to wait behind a vehicle or two to get your turn to fuel up. When it takes around five to ten minutes to pump gasoline into a vehicle, it’s annoying enough, but what if there was just one vehicle ahead of you . . . and it took the driver 52 minutes to recharge his car?

Mr. Biden hopes to address many of those challenges through federal largess. He aims to lower the cost of electric vehicles by offering individuals, businesses and governments tax credits, rebates and other incentives. To address the chicken-and-egg problem of getting people to try a new technology before it is widely accepted, he hopes to build half a million chargers by 2030 so people will feel confident that they won’t be stranded when they run out of juice. And he is offering help to automakers to get them to build electric vehicles and batteries in the United States.

It will take “federal largess,” because, as The Wall Street Journal noted, consumers aren’t buying them because most consumers don’t want them. The plug in electrics are simply not as convenient as gasoline powered automobiles.

And American consumers want larger vehicles; that’s why trucks and SUVs dominate the American market. Plug in electric vehicles like the Chevy Dolt Bolt are smaller, because manufacturers need to reduce size and weight to increase range.

The federal government and some states already offer tax credits and other incentives for the purchase of electric cars. But the main such federal incentive — a $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of new electric cars — begins to phase out for cars once an automaker has sold 200,000 E.V.s. Buyers of Tesla and G.M. electric cars, for example, no longer qualify for that tax credit but buyers of Ford and Volkswagen electric cars do.

Mr. Biden described his incentives for electric car purchases as rebates available at the “point of sale,” presumably meaning at dealerships or while ordering cars online. But the administration has not released details about how big those rebates will be and which vehicles they would apply to.

Let’s be honest here: new car buyers are wealthier than most Americans. In 2019, the last year before the pandemic hit, there were 40.8 million used cars sold, versus 17 million new vehicles, because used vehicles are much less expensive. President Biden’s plan calls for, in effect, taxing lower-income earners more to give a financial benefit to higher-income people, taxing working-class people to help pay for their bosses’ cars. What an absolutely great idea!

There’s considerably more at the Times original, but it’s pretty much what I have been saying all along: a whole lot of people do not have garages or secure, dedicated overnight parking spots in which they can have their own vehicle charging stations. Naturally, the Times looks at it from the perspective of a wealthier urban area, but when I look around the poorer area in eastern Kentucky where I live, I see older, not-as-well-kept-up homes, many of which have inadequate, 100 amp electric service — and not a few probably still have old fuse boxes instead — and I see people who have little prospect of buying a new car, having to depend on used vehicles.

Siemens US2 Versicharge electric car charger

President Biden’s ideas suffer from the same thing as the rest of the climate change activists: they are the wealthier elites who have no flaming idea how poorer people have to live their lives, how poorer people have to struggle. When around 40% of Americans would struggle with an unexpected $400 expense, how can we expect them to spend $599 for a Siemens 30 amp, 240 volt car charger? If they don’t have the tools, knowledge and skill to install a NEMA L 14-30P receptacle on a 40 or 50 amp circuit themselves, how are they going to come up with the money to pay a real electrician to install that for them?

I’ve said it before: the Democrats, who have for generations purported themselves to be the party of working people, have no idea what a working-class life is like. The Patricians driving the climate change agenda aren’t the people who have to worry about having enough money to buy the kids new blue jeans because what they have are worn out, don’t have to buy cheap Kroger brand products at the grocery store because the name brands cost more, and don’t have to worry if the electric bill gets too high due to colder weather in the winter. It’s just so easy for the elites to say that something won’t cost the plebeians all that much when they don’t themselves have to worry if the price of milk has risen.

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Majority white schools reopening faster than in heavily minority districts

This, to me, is not a surprise. The public school teachers’ unions are strongest in our largest cities, the teachers’ unions just love ‘remote’ education, where they don’t have to deal with unruly students and some can ever ‘teach’ from home, and it is in our major urban areas where public school populations are more heavily minority. From The Wall Street Journal:

School Districts With Majority of Black or Hispanic Students Less Likely to Provide In-Person Instruction, Research Shows

By Jennifer Calfas

School districts with a majority of white students are more likely to be offering in-person instruction options than those with a majority of Black or Hispanic students, according to new research released Wednesday.

I tend to pay outsized attention to foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, where The Philadelphia Inquirer reported last week “Philly schools to distribute computers to students as coronavirus could force closure for the rest of the school year“.

The Philadelphia School District is planning to distribute computers to children who lack them, and aims to put a new distance learning plan in place by the second week of April, Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said Tuesday.

“We’re going to get the technology out to any child that says they need the technology,” Hite said at a news conference.

The news came as advocates called on the state to require districts to provide education for all students, including English-language learners and children with disabilities, during coronavirus-outbreak shutdowns.

Pennsylvania schools are now closed through April 6. Learning has been optional in Philadelphia — school system officials had made online resources available to students, as well as paper packets, but because of state concerns that all kids have access to technology, no assignment could be graded or made mandatory.

The demographic breakdown is that Philly’s public schools are 48.08% black, 22.77% Hispanic, 14.31% white, 9.11% Asian, and 5.45% multi-racial. The city’s public ‘charter’ schools are more heavily black, 59.55%.

Of course, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers have been fighting return to school plans all winter and spring. Outside of Philadelphia, WHYY reported, on January 7, 2021, that “many schools have been open for weeks or months despite substantial community transmission.”

Back to the Journal:

The findings from the American Enterprise Institute and the College Crisis Initiative of Davidson College, which are tracking reopening plans across 8,600 school districts, show how reopening decisions are affecting children and communities differently and exacerbating disparities for students of color.

Three percent of school districts with a majority of white students were operating on fully remote schedules, compared with 24% of school districts with a majority of Hispanic students and 18% of districts with a majority of Black students, based on districts’ plans as of March 22. Seven percent of all school districts tracked by these organizations offered remote-only instruction, according to the findings.

About 10% of Black students and 20% of Hispanic students overall attended school districts with remote-only options, compared with 5% of white students.

The new findings, which are tracked and updated weekly based on changes announced on school district’s websites, echo similar disparities cited in surveys and studies from organizations, media outlets and the U.S. Department of Education over the past year. About 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 of the school districts tracked in the new research have a majority of Hispanic and Black students, respectively. About half of the districts have a majority of white students, said Nat Malkus, a resident scholar and deputy director for education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Let’s tell the truth here: private schools have been doing everything they can to reopen for in-person classes, and private school populations are heavily white. Roughly 69% of private school students are white, though non-Hispanic whites make up only about 51% of school-aged children enrolled in schools. So, when The Wall Street Journal reports that public school districts have been reopening faster in white-majority districts, the newspaper is actually undercounting the return of white students to the classroom.

As always, there’s more at the original, but one thing is clear: in majority white areas, the very liberal teachers’ unions are more in tune with the people and parents in their districts, and non-Hispanic white students have been getting back into the classroom faster than those ‘BIPOC’ students the left claim to serve.[1]BIPOC stands for ‘black, indigenous, and people of color.

References

References
↑1 BIPOC stands for ‘black, indigenous, and people of color.
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Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader (Part 2)

As we noted in Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader? something, something I attributed to being so #woke and #BlackLivesMatter and politically correct that the editors did not want to show the picture of a black man accused of murder, Juanyah Jamar Clay, because he is black. If there was another reason, I couldn’t think of it, because the Herald-Leader was willing to expend the bandwidth to include a useless article illustration of crime scene tape.

Well, Mr Clay has been apprehended, and, once again, the paper decided against posting his photo on their website:

Lexington teen arrested, charged with murder 1 day after police name him as a suspect

By Jeremy Chisenhall | March 31, 2021 | 8:55 AM EDT | Updated 9:07 AM EDT

Juanyah J Clay, from the LEX18 website. Click to enlarge.

A Lexington homicide suspect was arrested Tuesday after police publicly identified him just one day earlier.

Juanyah Jamar Clay, 19, was arrested and booked at the Lexington-Fayette County Detention Center Tuesday evening after police said he was wanted for the alleged murder of 26-year-old Bryan D. Greene. Greene was found shot to death in January inside his residence at Eastridge Apartments, police said.

Clay was concealing three handguns on him at the time of his arrest, according to an arrest citation. He also had nearly 3.7 ounces of marijuana, more than 10 Percocet pills, cash and a digital scale with him. The officer who filled out Clay’s arrest citation said all the items were indicative of drug trafficking.

According to jail records, Clay faces eight charges: murder, carrying a concealed weapon, giving an officer false identifying information, receiving a stolen gun, tampering with a prison monitoring device, trafficking in less than 8 ounces of marijuana, trafficking in opiates, and violating conditions of release.

Clay had previously been charged with burglary and violating conditions of release in 2019, according to court records. That case remained open in court, but Clay had been released on a $15,000 surety bond.

Translation: Mr Clay is a bad dude!

He was already out on bond, so he was already facing criminal charges. He knew that carrying illegal drugs, and a firearm — in this case, three handguns — and tampering with an ankle monitor were all additional crimes, but he did it anyway.

As in yesterday’s article, the current one has an illustration, albeit a different one, of a Lexington police officer stringing yellow crime scene tape. The Herald-Leader obviously had no concern with using the bandwidth for a photo, but, once again, chose not to use Mr Clay’s picture. The illustration added exactly nothing to the story, where using Mr Clay’s photo would have qualified as newsworthy. Given that I had notified both the herald-Leader in general and the article author, Jeremy Chisenhall, specifically, by Twitter, of the lapse of responsible journalism here, it doesn’t seem likely that this was a simple omission, but a deliberate decision.

I have previously noted that we should simply stop printing the dead-trees editions of newspapers, but if newspapers really want to survive into the digital age, they need to do something really radical like practice journalism. The Lexington Herald-Leader is failing to do so.

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Zeigen Sie uns Ihre Papiere!

We can see where Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) wants to go with this one! Our wannabe dictator tweeted:

The “^AB” at the end of the tweet indicates that it was written by the Governor himself, not one of his minions.

Note that the article from the Louisville Courier-Journal was entitled Kentucky Libertarian Party compares ‘vaccine passports’ to star IDs Jews wore in Holocaust. Vaccine passports, not the vaccine itself.

The Libertarian Party of Kentucky compared coronavirus “vaccine passports” to star-shaped identification badges people of Jewish descent were forced to wear during the Holocaust in a tweet this week, drawing outrage from across the nation.

The post, sent just after 5 p.m. Monday, compared “vaccine passports” – credentials that would show whether a person has received the coronavirus vaccine and would theoretically grant access to businesses and other spaces that will require proof of vaccination before entry – to “the stuff of totalitarian dictatorships” that the party considers a “complete and total violation of human liberty.”

“Are the vaccine passports going to be yellow, shaped like a star, and sewn on our clothes?” the party wrote on Twitter.

The tweet had been reposted more than 4,000 times as of Monday afternoon, with many reposts adding messages disavowing its message. Nearly 7,000 comments were left in response as well, including one from Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt that called the post an “ignorant and shameful comparison” and another from Jewish actor Seth Rogen, who (explicitly) suggested the party take its message elsewhere.

I had, of course, suggested something other than the sewn on yellow stars, something that couldn’t be mistakenly left at home.

Perhaps the Governor’s ideas would sound better in the original German: Zeigen Sie uns Ihre Papiere!

Governor Beshear’s tweet indicates what we might expect from him: he will probably try to issue executive orders mandating that people carry their vaccination records, and, with the General Assembly’s 2021 session ending on March 30th, and Democratic state judges willing to support his authoritarian dictates, Kentuckians will have little protection other than massive public resistance to this bovine feces.

Will you have to update your vaccine passport? The Washington Post noted on Monday that we do not know for how long the vaccine will be effective:

But based on clinical trials, experts do know that vaccine-induced protection should last a minimum of about three months. That does not mean protective immunity will expire after 90 days; that was simply the time frame participants were studied in the initial Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson trials. As researchers continue to study the vaccines, that shelf life is expected to grow.

In the real world, the protection should last quite a bit longer, though the length of time still needs to be determined with further studies, experts said. . . . .

Immunity could also depend on what happens with future variants. If a person were exposed to a variant capable of evading vaccine-induced antibodies, for instance, a vaccine might not be as effective as initially expected, said Lana Dbeibo, an infectious-disease expert at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Although researchers do not yet have all the answers, previous knowledge of other coronaviruses, as well as emerging research about the current strain, may provide clues.

Looking at studies on natural immunity from the coronavirus, experts hypothesize that protective immunity from the vaccines will last at least six to eight months. And if immunity from SARS-CoV-2 ends up being similar to other seasonal coronaviruses, such as “common colds,” it is even possible the vaccines could provide protection for up to a year or two before requiring a booster, the experts said.

So, what? Should we have to have our booster shot record on the passports as well? How often? Six to eight months? Maybe up to two years?

But, what the Hell, it’s only one more bit, one tiny little bit, of government control over our individual lives, right?

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Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader?

I recently wrote about the death of print newspapers, lamenting their one-foot-and-three-toes-on-the-other-in-the-grave impending demise, and hoping for a more positive future in the digital and internet world. I noted one major advantage of digital newspapers: they aren’t stuck with print deadlines, but can continually update stories, and they have much more room to publish photographs.

That was in my mind when I read this one in the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Suspect named after Lexington man found shot to death in his apartment, police say

By Jeremy Chisenhall | March 29, 2021 | 12:49 PM | Updated March 29, 2021 | 3:45 PM

A 19-year-old has been named as a suspect in the killing of a Lexington man shot to death in his apartment earlier this year, police said Monday.

Juanyah J. Clay, 19, was wanted on a murder warrant, Lexington police said.

Clay is accused of killing 26-year-old Bryan D. Greene, a man police found dead at the Eastridge Apartments on Alumni Drive on Jan. 30.

There’s a bit more at the original, including where anyone who spots Mr Clay can notify the Lexington Police Department of his whereabouts.

But while there’s a wasted photo of a Lexington Police Department crime scene, with an officer stringing yellow crime scene tape around a site, what there isn’t is a photograph of the suspect.[1]I checked the site again at 1:10 PM EDT, about ten minutes prior to publication of this article.

Juanyah J Clay, from the LEX18 website. Click to enlarge.

Naturally, I wondered: was there no photograph of Mr Clay available to the Herald-Leader? So, naturally, I checked, with a simple Google search for juanyah j clay, and shazamm! not only was his photo available, it was available in other Lexington media. WLEX-TV, Channel 18, the local NBC affiliate had the story with Mr Clay’s picture, in an article dated six minutes before the in in the newspaper, and updated three hours after the LEX18 article. WKYT-TV, Channel 27, the local CBS affiliate, also had an article, with the same photo. WTVQ, Channel 36, the local ABC affiliate had the story, and the photo, as did WDKY, Channel 56, the Fox affiliate.

The Lexington city government website had the photo, as did the Lexington Police Department’s Facebook page.

It seems that everybody had Mr Clay’s photo, everybody except the Herald-Leader. And every story, including the one in the Herald-Leader, had a very similar statement to that on the newspaper’s site:

Police asked anyone with information on Clay’s whereabouts to contact Lexington Police by calling (859) 258-3600. Anonymous tips can be submitted to Bluegrass Crime Stoppers by calling (859) 253-2020, online at www.bluegrasscrimestoppers.com, or through the P3 tips app available at www.p3tips.com.

Now, if people who might happen to spot the suspect are asked to call it in, including in the newspaper’s article, and the newspaper’s website had enough bandwidth available for a generic crime story photo, why didn’t the Herald-Leader include Mr Clay’s photo instead? Wouldn’t Mr Clay’s photograph be much more useful to people who might just happen to see him on the streets than a picture of crime scene tape?

That’s the big question, why? And being the very politically incorrect observer of media bias that I am, one answer springs immediately to mind. Having written about the horrible damage the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter activists have done in the newsrooms of The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, I instantly thought: to have published the photo of a murder suspect who happens to be black might be seen as racist by the reporter or his editors.

Is there another explanation for this egregious failure of journalism? If there is, it hasn’t occurred to me. Perhaps someone else can give me a better answer, but right now, I’m calling it the way I see it: the newspaper cares more about political correctness than it does journalism.

References

References
↑1 I checked the site again at 1:10 PM EDT, about ten minutes prior to publication of this article.
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Fighting Fascist Governors

Not content just to order Kentuckians to wear face masks everywhere, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) wants to push other states to enforce such as well.

Governor to governor: Beshear will ask Holcomb not to lift Indiana’s mask mandate

As of now, Indiana’s mask mandate will expire in early April. Gov. Beshear says that’s concerning for Kentucky.

By Brian Planalp | March 29, 2021 at 5:59 PM EDT | Updated March 29 at 6:08 PM

FRANKFORT, Ky. (FOX19) – Gov. Andy Beshear on Monday said he will personally ask Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb to reconsider dropping the state’s mask mandate.

Holcomb announced last week his state’s mask mandate will become a mask advisory on April 6. Each Indiana business will have discretion to require masks in their premises.

Beshear has said he will re-up Kentucky’s mask mandate for another 30 days until the end of April.

So, just what action did Governor Holcomb take?

Eric Holcomb announced Tuesday a number of forthcoming changes, including a change in the mask mandate.

Indiana’s mask mandate will become a “state mask advisory” on April 6, the governor announced. Under the advisory, masks will be recommended.

Masks will still be required in schools through the end of the academic year, he added.

Face coverings will still be mandatory in all state buildings and facilities, and in all COVID-19 vaccination and testing sites though.

Also starting April 6, Gov. Holcomb said restaurants, bars, and nightclubs customers will not be required by the state to stay seated. Six feet of spacing between tables and non-household parties is still recommended, however.

“When I visit my favorite restaurant or conduct a public event, I will continue to wear a mask,” Gov. Holcomb said. “It is the right thing to do. Hoosiers who take these recommended precautions will help us get to what I hope is the tail end of this pandemic.”

Local governments and private businesses can choose to enforce stricter guidelines, the governor said.

In other words, Mr Holcomb will go from ordering everybody to wear a mask to asking people, recommending to people, that they wear masks in public contact situations. That’s what should have been done from the very beginning.

As we noted previously, Governor Beshear vetoed Senate Bill 1, which placed a maximum thirty day limit on the Governor’s executive orders, beyond which they could not be renewed without the consent of the General Assembly, our state legislature. The legislature, in which the Republicans hold ‘super’ majorities in both chambers, overrode Mr Beshear’s vetoes, at which point the Governor filed suit to declare the General Assembly’s actions unconstitutional.[1]Republican candidates campaigned against the Governor’s executive orders during the 2020 election campaigns, and the voters of the Commonwealth rewarded the GOP with a 75-25 majority in the … Continue reading

Sadly, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd, a long-time opponent of the previous Governor, Matt Bevin, a Republican, issued a temporary restraining order against the new laws. Judge Shepherd is elected only by the voters in Franklin County, where the state capital of Frankfort sits, and is much more Democratic in party organization than the Commonwealth as a whole. In effect, the voters of Franklin County have exercised an outsized influence over regulations for the entire state.

Judge Shepherd has yet to rule in the lawsuit, so, with the injunction in place, the laws passed by the General Assembly are being held in abeyance without any legal decision as to their constitutionality.

Once Judge Shepherd does rule, state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican, will appeal the decision when it goes against the legislature — which we all know it will — to the state Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals is a friendlier venue for conservatives, but their decisions can then be appealed to the state Supreme Court, which is officially non-partisan but is, in practice, controlled by Democrats.

What will happen? The Democrats will drag out the legal battles for months, hoping that the epidemic is over by then, which means that the Governor will be exercising dictatorial power throughout it.

But while the Reichsstatthalter tries to exercise dictatorial power, the public are turning against it. I was in a store last Wednesday, one which I will decline to name to keep the Reichsstatthalter from sending the Geheime Staatspolizei to stomp down on the owner, in which there was no ‘mask required’ sign on the door, and in which none of the staff I observed were wearing masks. And this story from the Lexington Herald-Leader, included several photos of people working on the clean-up efforts in Beattyville and Lee County from the devastating floods earlier this month, and most of the people shown in group situations were not wearing masks. To paraphrase the old expression, the “people are voting with their feet,” in the Bluegrass State, the people are voting with their bare faces.

Personally? If I am entering a facility in which the private property owner is requiring a face mask, I wear a face mask. If the private property owner does not so require, I do not. If there is such a requirement, but it is being ignored by others, I don’t wear the mask. And I never wear one outside, but, to tell the truth, in my mostly rural setting, I am almost always well more than six feet away from other people.

It does make some sense to wear a mask, though perhaps not as much as the left claim. However, it also makes sense to fight tyranny, because our rights, once lost, are difficult to regain. If masks not being mandatory increases the risks of contracting the virus, then that is one of the costs of liberty and freedom.

I have said it many times before: if Governor Beshear had asked Kentuckians to wear masks, he would have gotten a lot more compliance and a lot less resistance. But when he goes in for dictatorial controls, ordering churches to close,[2]After we were so graciously allowed to return to church, I saw going to Mass as having become almost as much of a political act of resistance as a religious one. Though I was a very regular attendee … Continue reading and then sending state troopers to record the license numbers and vehicle identification numbers of cars in church parking lots, on Easter Sunday of all days, and deliberately excluding the legislature from his decision-taking process, he has to be resisted, he has to be fought.

References

References
↑1 Republican candidates campaigned against the Governor’s executive orders during the 2020 election campaigns, and the voters of the Commonwealth rewarded the GOP with a 75-25 majority in the state House of Representatives, an increase of 14 seats, and a 30-38 advantage in the state Senate, an increase of two seats in an election in which only 19 of the seats were up for election. Governor Beshear likes to claim that the polls show the public support his measures, but in the only poll that actually counts, the one on election day, the voters decisively rejected his actions.
↑2 After we were so graciously allowed to return to church, I saw going to Mass as having become almost as much of a political act of resistance as a religious one. Though I was a very regular attendee at Mass before, I have not missed a Sunday since then.
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Big Brother will be watching you!

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ran his mouth the other day about going from a gasoline tax to a mileage tax:

Vehicle mileage tax could be on the table in infrastructure talks, Buttigieg says

By Thomas Franck | Friday, March 26 2021 | 10:29 AM EDT | Updated 4:57 PM EDT

  • Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation secretary, said a vehicle mileage tax could be on the table in infrastructure talks.

  • He contended that President Joe Biden’s forthcoming plans to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and waterways would lead to a net gain for the U.S. taxpayer.

  • “I’m hearing a lot of appetite to make sure that there are sustainable funding streams,” Buttigieg said. A mileage tax “shows a lot of promise.”

A vehicle mileage tax could be on the table in talks about how to finance the White House’s expected multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure proposal, according to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Buttigieg, who spoke with CNBC’s Kayla Tausche on Friday, also contended that President Joe Biden’s forthcoming plans to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and waterways would lead to a net gain for the U.S. taxpayer and not a net outlay.

“When you think about infrastructure, it’s a classic example of the kind of investment that has a return on that investment,” he said. “That’s one of many reasons why we think this is so important. This is a jobs vision as much as it is an infrastructure vision, a climate vision and more.”

He also weighed in on several potential revenue-generating options to fund the project. He spoke fondly of a mileage levy, which would tax travelers based on the distance of the journey instead of on how much gasoline they consume.

“A so-called vehicle-miles-traveled tax or mileage tax, whatever you want to call it, could be a way to do it,” he said.

Democrats have slowly pivoted away from a gasoline tax in favor of a mileage tax amid a simultaneous, climate friendly effort to encourage consumers to drive electric cars.

This really isn’t all that new: it was in either Oregon or Washington that such was proposed a few years ago, because higher gas mileage cars and electric vehicles were depressing gasoline tax revenues.

But a mileage tax has an obvious drawback: how do you determine mileage, unless the government mandates GPS units on every vehicle, and tracks your travel?

This is what a mileage tax would mean!

Of course, what it would also mean would be backyard mechanics who find ways to disconnect the GPS, so you can leave the damned thing at home for half or more of your trips. Big Brother will insist on GPS units without which your vehicle can’t be started, but it won’t take hackers long to find ways around that. Big Brother would need to find ever more intrusive ways to track your travels, such as satellites which scan vehicles and determine which ones have the GPS disconnected, to send the Geheime Staatspolizei to stop and arrest you.

It could be something simpler, such as having to track your odometer, and file that with your income taxes, but I’ve seen plenty of vehicles in which the odometer did not work. And, in older vehicles, it’s ridiculously easy to disconnect the damned thing.

But, however it works, one thing is certain: for it to work, the government has to be able to watch you, to track your every movement, because mileage taxes can’t work unless they track your mileage!

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Ve need to see your papers!

It seems that President Joe Biden and his Administration are very concerned, very concerned! about how Americans are going to prove that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. There are just so many ways that such could be documented, that I’m surprised that no one has yet suggested the very simple way that the German government found in the late 1930s.[1]I suppose that I have to note here that yes, I am using sarcasm; too many people take things so deathly seriously.

From The Washington Post:

‘Vaccine passports’ are on the way, but developing them won’t be easy

White House-led effort tries to corral more than a dozen initiatives

By Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun and Isaac Stanley-Becker | March 28, 2021 | 11:00 AM EDT

The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as “vaccine passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen.

The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again.

The administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The White House this month took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of announcing updates in coming days, said one official.

I was initially fooled when I saw the tweet by William Teach, which used a photo of an American passport as the illustration. I had originally thought that this was going to be a story about how American passports could be stamped to notify foreign countries that a traveler had been vaccinated.

But nope, I was wrong: the story was about how Americans will prove internally that they had been vaccinated!

The White House declined to answer questions about the passport initiative, instead pointing to public statements that Zients and other officials made this month.

“Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” Zients said at a March 12 briefing.

The initiative has emerged as an early test of the Biden administration, with officials working to coordinate across dozens of agencies and a variety of experts, including military officials helping administer vaccines and health officials engaging in international vaccine efforts.

Count on it: as the Biden Administration wants to continue pushing vaccination, they will concomitantly push employers to require proof of vaccination before allowing people to work. The left have no interest, no interest at all, in enforcing existing law requiring people to prove that they are eligible to work under our existing immigration laws, but, damn it, you’d better be vaccinated!

I had frequently complained about the Obama Administration’s passage of the HITECH Act, which required that all medical records be digitized, so that your next physician could easily obtain your medical records from your past doctors, noting that there will never be enough safeguards that hackers won’t be able to break through them. It would only make sense that, if you are a candidate for a job, that a company, if it could, might want to check your medical records to see if you had even been treated for mental illness or had diabetes or a heart condition that could drive up their medical care costs, or which might indicate that you were more prone to missing time from work due to illness. While I’m sure that would be illegal, there would be ‘dark’ companies which might be willing to provide such a service to established human resources departments.

But now? The Biden Administration wants to have a way in which people can prove they had been vaccinated, and the only reason for that is to punish those who have not.

Those initiatives — such as a World Health Organization-led global effort and a digital pass devised by IBM that is being tested in New York state — are rapidly moving forward, even as the White House deliberates about how best to track the shots and avoid the perception of a government mandate to be vaccinated.

One of the teams working on vaccine passports is the Vaccination Credential Initiative, a coalition endeavoring to standardize how data in vaccination records is tracked.

If there’s a standardization of data in how vaccination records are tracked, then they will be tracked, and the notion that they will “avoid the perception of a government mandate to be vaccinated” will simply be propaganda. If the records can be tracked, they will be tracked, and you can count on the Biden Administration, as well as states with Democratic Governors, who have never shied away from intrusive and unconstitutional mandates to fight COVID-19, to use every tool they have to force compliance.

“The busboy, the janitor, the waiter that works at a restaurant, wants to be surrounded by employees that are going back to work safely — and wants to have the patrons ideally be safe as well,” said Brian Anderson, a physician at Mitre, a nonprofit company that runs federally funded research centers, who is helping lead the initiative. “Creating an environment for those vulnerable populations to get back to work safely — and to know that the people coming back to their business are ‘safe,’ and vaccinated — would be a great scenario.”

This was, of course, the justification for the mask mandates, that you must wear them to protect other people. If you refused to wear a mask, you were harming other people, because the assumption was that you carried the virus. And the vaccination ‘passports’ will have the same underlying assumption: if you have not been vaccinated, you are a carrier.

There’s a lot more at the original, but there is part of one last paragraph I need to quote. An official, speaking anonymously, said that:

some of the considerations include how to adjust for the spread of variants, how booster shots would be tracked and even questions about how long immunity lasts after getting a shot. There’s “a lot to think through,” the official said.

And there it is: it’s not just getting your two-shot vaccine this year, but the government will want to track you, and your movements, every time the CDC decides that there’s another variant out there, and that you require periodic booster shots or re-vaccination.

“It’s for our own good,” we will be told, and there will be plenty of sheeple out there, ready and willing to go along with the Mandates of Our Betters.

I guess that we’ll need a new forearm tattoo every year!

References

References
↑1 I suppose that I have to note here that yes, I am using sarcasm; too many people take things so deathly seriously.
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18th Century Technology: It’s time to stop printing newspapers

The Washington Post, which was saved by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2013, is cheering on the offer by Stewart Bainum Jr. to but Tribune Publishing:

Bainum hopes to offer $650 million for Tribune Publishing Co.

By Elahe Izadi and Sarah Ellison | March 24, 2021 | 6:00 PM EDT

Maryland business executive Stewart Bainum Jr. wants to purchase Tribune Publishing Co. for $650 million — 10 times the amount he agreed last month to pay for one of its newspapers, the Baltimore Sun.

It’s an effort to edge out an already agreed-upon $630 million offer for Tribune from Alden Global Capital, an investment fund known for acquiring and slashing newspaper operations.

Details of Bainum’s plans surfaced in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing submitted Tuesday.

It once seemed as if the Alden deal was all but wrapped up; in Tuesday’s filing, the board recommended that shareholders approve Alden’s offer but also released Banium from a confidentiality agreement he made to negotiate to buy the Baltimore Sun so that he can talk with potential investors about going in together on a counter-offer for all of Tribune.

Alden is a hedge fund that likes to buy up newspapers, cut them to the bone, and make a profit by selling off their real property. But it should be noted that it doesn’t have to be a hedge fund to do that stuff.

Philadelphia Inquirer to sell printing facility, lay off 500 plant employees in bid for long-term economic stability

Proceeds from the sale of the plant will be used to enhance severance packages for laid-off employees beyond the company’s obligations under union contracts.

by Andrew Maykuth and Juliana Feliciano Reyes | Updated: October 9, 2020

The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News Printing Plant in Conshohocken.JESSICA Griffin / Philadelphia InquirerStaff Photographer

The Philadelphia Inquirer will close its sprawling Montgomery County printing plant and shift production of its newspapers to a New Jersey contractor. The cost-cutting move will put as many as 500 employees out of work, but is aimed at ensuring the survival of the media company as consumers turn to digital platforms for their news.The company on Friday told employees that it plans to close and sell the Schuylkill Printing Plant in Upper Merion Township, perhaps by the end of the year. The Inquirer is negotiating with a buyer for the 45-acre River Road property, which includes a 674,000-square-foot manufacturing facility that opened in 1992. The buyer’s identity and plans were not disclosed.

“While the sale is not yet final, we recognize how deeply unsettling and distressing this is to employees at the printing plant,” Lisa Hughes, The Inquirer’s publisher and chief executive officer, said in an internal memo Friday to employees.

“They have served our readers tirelessly, with dedication and devotion to the craft,” Hughes said. “Many of them have spent decades with the company — and all performed their jobs valiantly when the pandemic arrived.”

They may have served valiantly, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to get canned.

Look at that photo, which you can enlarge by clicking on it. There are a lot of expensive-looking vehicles in that parking lot, the parking lot of a building filled with, as the left like to say, people with good paying union jobs. That the Inquirer is now owned by the Philadelphia Foundation, a non-profit ‘public benefit’ corporation. Gerry Lenfest, a billionaire who liked to give away his money, bought out the Inquirer and its companion tabloid, the Daily News, in 2014. While Mr Bezos paid 250 million for The Washington Post, the amount Mr Lenfest had to spend was a fraction of that. Mr Lenfest then turned around and donated the Inquirer to the non-profit.

But even non-profits have to pay the bills, and thus the printing plant got sold, and all of those “valiant” employees, with their good-paying union jobs, got pink slips. The $299.5 million state-of-the-art printing plant that the Inquirer had built in 1992, just sold for $37 million. In one of the bigger ironies, the time capsule buried at the plant in 1992, and scheduled to be opened in 2092, was instead opened on Friday.

It was sometime around 15 years ago, and perhaps longer, that I read an article which pointed out that it would have been less expensive for The New York Times to buy and provide each of its print subscribers with a Kindle, and send distribute the paper online instead, than it was to print the thing. Today, I get my subscribed newspapers — and I admit to liking newspapers far more than broadcast media sources — on my desktop, on my iPad, and on my iPhone.

Before I retired, I used to stop at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe on the way to the plant. I got my coffee, and picked up a copy of the Inquirer, to take to work. Some of the guys used to combitch that they’d have preferred the Allentown Morning Call, as it was closer to local news for them, but I was paying for it, so I got to choose. At any rate, there were many, many times in which, in the sports section, there would be a notice, “This game ended too late for inclusion in this edition.”[1]“Combitch” is a Picoism, not a typo. You should be able to figure out the etymology on your own.

That is the problem with print newspapers: the news is not always that new. Events happen quickly, and print newspapers are hours old before people ever get to read them. Online, corrections and updates can, and are, made frequently.

Why do I appreciate newspapers? Being mostly deaf, it is far easier for me to read the news than listen to it. More, the broadcast/cablecast media give us just the bare bones, not the meat of the stories, and their biases are far more blatant. Even with the biases of the #woke in the newsrooms, the longer treatment of print medium stories usually lets the truth get out.

The old Lexington Herald-Leader building, on Midland Avenue. Now sold, the building logo has been removed.

I was, about the time that Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press, a paperboy for the old Lexington Herald and Lexington Leader. Alas! The current merged paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, now part of the bankrupt McClatchy company, outsourced its own printing to a plant near Louisville in 2016, ceased issuing a Saturday edition in 2019, which meant the end of printing Friday night high school sports stories, and recently sold their own building on Midland Avenue to the Fayette County schools.

And let’s be honest: the print editions of virtually every major, and mid-sized, newspaper in this country, are horrible. The physical size has been reduced, even in as august a paper as The Wall Street Journal, and newsroom staffs have been cut not just to the bare bones, but into the bone as well.

It’s time to simply end the print editions. As much as some people will hate to see them go, they are dying anyway. For newspapers to have any chance to become profitable, they have to cease being newspapers, and adapt to the digital, internet model. No matter how much they try to modernize, newspapers are still 18th century technology, and the 18th century ended a long time ago.

References

References
↑1 “Combitch” is a Picoism, not a typo. You should be able to figure out the etymology on your own.