Author Archives: Dana Pico

Posted on by

The silliness of ‘Earth Hour’

A group of environmentalists wants you to take ‘action’ on what they have named ‘Earth Hour,’ which is 8:30 PM in your local time zone. The image to the right is from their website, and shows a nice family with all of the electric lights out, burning candles, lots of candles, for illumination.

Oops!

Most candles are made of paraffin, a heavy hydrocarbon derived from crude oil. Burning a paraffin candle for one hour will release about 10 grams of carbon dioxide.

As Australian blogger Enoch the Red pointed out after last year’s Earth Hour that an average Australian who tries to replace all the light produced by an incandescent bulb with light cast by parrifin candles will result in about 10 times the greenhouse emissions.

The site claims that you can use candles made from something other than paraffin:

But of course you don’t have to burn paraffin candles. Beeswax and soy candles are mostly carbon-neutral because any carbon they release by burning was only recently absorbed by plants from the atmosphere. The carbon in paraffin, by contrast, has been sitting in the ground for hundreds of millions of years.

Uhhh, if they are concerned with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, doesn’t stating that soy or beeswax candles are mostly carbon neutral ignore the fact that not burning them at all is carbon negative?

It gets even funnier:

Take part in our first-ever Earth Hour “Virtual Spotlight”

👉 How? It’s simple. On the night of Earth Hour, we’ll be posting a must-watch video on all our social media pages – and all you have to do is share it. 

Share it to your Stories or to your wall, re-Tweet it, send it via DM, tag friends in the comments – the choice is yours!

Whether you share it with one person or one hundred, you’ll be helping us place the spotlight on our planet, the issues we face, and our place within it all.

Be sure to follow us on Instagram / Facebook / Twitter to stay updated!

Uhhh, doesn’t watching their must-watch video on all of their social media pages use electricity? Doesn’t sharing those vidiots on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter use electricity?

I copied the image to the left from their website, showing someone using the light from an iPhone to illuminate the earth. But, last time I checked, iPhones need to be recharged, and recharging them uses, you guessed it, electricity, electricity from the power plant! Perhaps they delayed its usage during ‘Earth hour,’ but it will still get used.

The real problem with the climate activists is that they do not understand their own hypocrisy. They want to Save the Planet from CO2 emissions, but the last thing they want to give up is modern life, their computers, their iPhones, their internet, their heating and air conditioning, really anything which differentiates the 21st century from the 14th.

The climate activists think that they are serious people, but it seems as though every action they take, everything they say, demonstrates how unserious they really are.

Posted on by

The Washington Post dances around the right question, but never actually asks it, because that would be too politically incorrect! If you are not courageous enough to ask the right questions, you will never get the right answers.

We have been saying all along that the credentialed media have been ignoring the soaring homicide rates in our major cities.

Well, it took the mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder to focus their attention, but it looks like The Washington Post finally got around to noticing as well:

Shootings never stopped during the pandemic: 2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades

By Reis Thebault and Danielle Rindler | March 23, 2021 | 11:42 PM EDT

Until two lethal rampages this month, mass shootings had largely been absent from headlines during the coronavirus pandemic. But people were still dying — at a record rate.

In 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, more than any other year in at least two decades. An additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun.

The vast majority of these tragedies happen far from the glare of the national spotlight, unfolding instead in homes or on city streets and — like the covid-19 crisis — disproportionately affecting communities of color.

Last week’s shootings at spas in the Atlanta area and Monday’s shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., killed a combined 18 people and rejuvenated a national effort to overhaul gun laws. But high-profile mass shootings such as those tend to overshadow the instances of everyday violence that account for most gun deaths, potentially clouding some people’s understanding of the problem and complicating the country’s response, experts say.

OK, they are starting to identify the problem. A bit further down:

“More than 100 Americans are killed daily by gun violence,” Ronnie Dunn, a professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University, said, using a figure that includes suicides. “The majority are in Black and Brown communities. We don’t really focus on gun violence until we have these mass shootings, but it’s an ongoing, chronic problem that affects a significant portion of our society.”

Of course, the article and the interviewees are all using the currently politically correct phrase, “gun violence,” as though firearms just pick themselves off the shelf and start shooting people. No one seems to be willing to point out that these shootings are being done by bad people!

Dr Dunn noted that the majority of these homicides “are in Black and Brown communities,” but seems quite unwilling to note that while the majority of victims “are in Black and Brown communities,” it is also true that the majority of their killers are part of the “black and brown communities.“[1]Note that The Washington Post is using the Associated Press Stylebook, which capitalizes ‘black’ when referring to race, and now capitalizes ‘brown’ as well. The First Street … Continue reading

Overall, most homicides in the United States are intraracial, and the rates of white-on-white and Black-on-Black killings are similar, both long term and in individual years.

Between 1980-2008, the U.S. Department of Justice found that 84% of white victims were killed by white offenders and 93% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.

In 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 81% of white victims were killed by white offenders, and 89% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.

In 2017, the FBI reported almost identical figures — 80% of white victims were killed by white offenders, and 88% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.

Back to the Post. Dr Dunn, as you might expect, tried to place the blame on the increased killings on all sorts of things, including increased gun sales:

Researchers say the pandemic probably fueled the increases in several ways. The spread of the coronavirus hampered anti-crime efforts, and the attendant shutdowns compounded unemployment and stress at a time when schools and other community programs were closed or online. They also note the apparent collapse of public confidence in law enforcement that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Covid-19 and the protests over police brutality also led to a surge of firearm sales. In 2020, people purchased about 23 million guns, a 64 percent increase over 2019 sales, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.

Dunn pointed to this flood of firearms as the most detrimental factor in the fight to curb gun violence. When shootings become “the soundscape of inner-city neighborhoods,” he said, “it increases anxiety and stress and creates toxic stress.” Dunn compared the effect to post-traumatic stress disorder akin to what war veterans experience.

What didn’t you see in that? You didn’t see Dr Dunn point to any research which shows that the legally-purchased firearms surge, as a result of the #BlackLivesMatter “Mostly Peaceful Protests™” were at all related to the killings in our inner cities.

When riots and violence are spreading through our cities, and the images and news of that are being purveyed over the network and cable news day in and day out, it’s perfectly natural that some people would believe that they needed additional protection; that’s why gun sales increased. Dr Dunn wants you to believe that it why homicides spiked, but offers no proof that those increased gun sales had anything to do with it.

Have the police linked any of these additional forearms sales to the increased homicide rates? If they have, I’ve managed to miss that story.

One recent study, from the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, called gun violence “a public health crisis decades in the making.” An analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found Black males between the ages of 15 and 34 accounted for 37 percent of gun homicides, even though they made up 2 percent of the U.S. population — a rate 20 times that of White males of the same age.

Here Dr Dunn provides the test. If black males between 15 and 34 account for 37% of homicides by firearm, while making up just 2% of the population, if the increased firearms sales have significantly contributed to the increased homicide rate, then we should see a heavy predominance of black males in that age group making up the increase in applications to purchase a firearm legally. Such would, if perhaps not prove what Dr Dunn is saying, at least provide a strong inference of it.

On average, there was one mass shooting every 73 days in 2020, compared with one every 36 days in 2019 and one every 45 days in 2017 and 2018. The slowdown interrupted what had been a five-year trend of more frequent and more deadly mass shootings.

That gun violence increased overall even as mass shootings declined underscores the fact that those high-profile events account for a relatively small share of firearm deaths. It should draw more attention to the victims and survivors of gun violence across the country, (Mark Barden, a co-founder of the gun violence prevention group Sandy Hook Promise) said.

So, while homicides have increased, mass shooting events have decreased. It’s almost as though the random events of nuts going off and committing these high-profile crimes has nothing to do with the increased homicide rate.

But, of course, it’s the mass shootings which make the news, because, let’s face it: a couple of gang-bangers getting killed in Philadelphia isn’t even news anymore.

If black males between 15 and 34 are the victims of homicide at a rate twenty times that of white males of the same age, then we need to ask why that is, but one thing is certain: it’s not guns. There is something different in the education, culture and experiences of white and black males that is causing black males of those ages to kill each other at such rates, and until we start asking what those differences are, we will never honestly address the issue.

But in our age of political correctness, we cannot ask the questions, without being accused of being the world’s most horrible racist, an accusation which shuts down the questions, and shutting down the questions means shutting off all hope of coming up with the right answers.

Me? I’m less than a month from my 68th birthday, and I’m retired. I have no job from which I can be fired for asking politically incorrect questions, have nothing from which I can be #canceled. I can ask the uncomfortable questions, when no one else seems to be willing or able to do so.

But if other people don’t step up, if other people won’t ask the right questions, we might as well face it: we’ll never have the right answers. But, sadly enough, our friends on the left already know that. They have had the choice between asking the right questions, and hoping to find the right answers, or ignoring the right questions, because by doing that they risk far less for themselves, and the only real price for that is more dead black people on the streets of Washington and Chicago and Philadelphia.

We know what choice they have taken.

References

References
↑1 Note that The Washington Post is using the Associated Press Stylebook, which capitalizes ‘black’ when referring to race, and now capitalizes ‘brown’ as well. The First Street Journal does not go along with that.
Posted on by

Why is it that the left only notice the killings in mass murders? When it comes to individual murders in our city streets, we hear nothing but crickets

It was, of course, easily predictable, Amanda Marcotte railing against the Boulder, Colorado, mass killings, and, of course, blaming evil reich-wing Republicans for the actions of a demented, Democrat-supporting Muslim:

The NRA way of life is ruining our nation

Decades of gun propaganda has created a nation of sociopaths

By Amanda Marcotte | March 23, 2021

Right on the heels of last week’s horrific shooting spree by a 21-year-old at three Atlanta-area Asian day spas that left eight dead comes another mass murder, this time with a death toll of 10 at a Boulder, Colorado grocery store. The suspect, 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was reportedly armed with an AR-15. While everyone waits for an apparent motive (officials said an investigation would not take fewer than five days to complete) one thing is absolutely certain: Little will be done to address the primary cause of mass shootings. The ease with which any random man with an inchoate grievance can pick up a gun and rapidly snuff out the lives of strangers to make himself feel powerful will remain unchecked.

That’s not because Americans oppose stricter gun control laws. In fact, around 90% of Americans polled consistently support background checks for all gun sales. But when House Democrats introduced a bill earlier this month making background checks universal, all but eight Republicans voted against it. And forget about even turning this bill into law. The filibuster’s continued existence makes it impossible to get it past Republican obstruction in the Senate.

The grim reality is that the entire nation is in the thrall to a minority of extremely insecure mostly white men who, drunk on decades of NRA-fueled propaganda, have decided that having the ability to commit mass murder at a moment’s notice is a crucial component of maintaining their manhood against the ever-encroaching threats from de-gendered Potato Heads and lady video game players. Most of these men claim exoneration because they don’t personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school. Grotesquely, some even use these mass shootings to indulge in public fantasies about how they would totally stop an active shooter, though somehow they never seem to actually get around to doing it. But ultimately, they’ve become complacent in the face of mass murder from decades of being told by right-wing media that there’s a binary choice between preventing murder and watching Michelle Obama personally run off with their testicles in her handbag. Worse, the right has cultivated an overall suspicion of the very concept of concern for the lives of others at all.

And there it is, of course: we evil white men claim exoneration because we don’t “personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school.” That’s a statement in which Miss Marcotte has, in effect, assigned a collective guilt to her greatest of all bugaboos, conservative white men. In the confines of her South Philadelphia apartment, you can picture her bile simply dripping from the walls.[1]No, I don’t know her exact address, and would not publish it if I did.

This is what Miss Marcotte just can’t understand: only the people who are actually guilty of crimes are guilty of crimes, and it’s rather natural that those of us who have not shot up a grocery store do not see that we should lose our individual rights because someone else did.

She has, in past writings, complained that when one false rape claim was discovered, evil conservatives would jump on the bandwagon and claim that no one could ever believe a rape claim, so one would think she would understand that lumping an entire group together like that is an intellectually vacuous idea, but apparently if one thought that, one would be wrong.

I tweeted a couple of hours ago:

The Bill of Rights

And that’s just what Miss Marcotte has noted: the Boulder killings, along with two articles on the killing of eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent, primarily in yet another push for restricting our rights under the Second Amendment.

But, as we noted just a few days ago, the only murders she seems to notice are those in which she can find a political wedge, or blame evil white men.

Roughly 83% of the firearms murders in Philadelphia so far this year have been of black people, and another 10% of the victims were Hispanic. If her South Philadelphia neighborhood hasn’t been the worst place, it’s not the safest, either. There’s no way a news junkie like her could have missed at least some of the stories about the blood in the streets of her adopted home town, yet she has been curiously silent on the subject, at least in her Salon columns.

But in just the last eight days, Monday, March 15th and Monday, March 22nd, ten people, the same number of people who were killed in Boulder, went untimely to their deaths in the city’s mean streets, and Miss Marcotte didn’t write a single word about them, not in Salon. The Boulder massacre happened in Philadelphia as well, just not all in one shooting, but the victims in Miss Marcotte’s adopted home town are no less dead than the ones in Colorado.[2]Since Miss Marcotte has blocked me from seeing her Tweets, I do not know if she mentioned any of those deaths there.

Let’s be brutally frank here: the vast majority of murders in the United States are intraracial, not interracial. The vast majority of the black victims in Philly were killed by another black person, and the left are just deathly afraid to note that, because it could be seen as criticism of black people in general, and that’s raaaaacist. The Philadelphia Inquirer euphemizes it as “gun violence,” as though an inanimate object somehow kills people on its own initiative. Like the One Ring of Sauron, guns have a malevolence of their own, because the left cannot blame the people firing those guns, not unless the shooters are evil white men.

References

References
↑1 No, I don’t know her exact address, and would not publish it if I did.
↑2 Since Miss Marcotte has blocked me from seeing her Tweets, I do not know if she mentioned any of those deaths there.
Posted on by

Virtue must be signaled!

Robert Aaron Long, 21, a guy with some serious, serious mental problems, shot up three Atlanta metropolitan area ‘massage parlors,’ killing eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent. Four were Korean. Naturally, it’s being called a hate crime by the left, though the details don’t quite match up.

But that doesn’t matter; the Usual Suspects are all over this as a hate crime, as though any deliberate murder isn’t an act of hate. From The New York Times:

Why Some Georgia Lawmakers Want Last Week’s Shootings Labeled Hate Crimes

Violence that left eight dead, including six women of Asian descent, will be the first stress test for a Georgia hate crime law.

By Astead W. Herndon and Stephanie Saul |March 21, 2021

A year ago, Georgia was one of four states that had no hate crime legislation.

But the deadly rampage last week that left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent, is now providing a test of a law passed last year — and a window into the way that the state’s increasingly diverse electorate has altered its political and cultural chemistry.

Georgia, after earlier false starts, passed its legislation following the shooting death of a young Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was stopped, detained and then shot to death by white residents in a South Georgia suburban neighborhood.

Now last week’s shootings, in which Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder, are providing a major stress test for when the legislation can be applied, what it can achieve and how it plays into the state’s increasingly polarized politics.

Political leaders, civil rights activists, and national and local elected officials condemned last week’s attack as an act of bigoted terror, drawing a connection between the majority-Asian victims and a recent surge in hate crimes against Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.

Mr Long has already been charges with premeditated murder. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Georgia not only has capital punishment, but carries it out, having executed 76 people since the restoration of capital punishment in 1976. An obvious question is: why bother to charge Mr Long with ‘hate crimes’ if there’s really nothing more they can do to him?

Law enforcement officials and some legal figures have shied away from labeling the killings a hate crime, saying there is insufficient evidence of motivation. Prosecutors in two separate counties are still weighing whether to invoke the hate crimes law.

If the evidence for a hate crime is weak, charging under the hate crime stature becomes problematic. It adds to the length and expense of any trial, and runs a serious risk of acquittal on such charges.

But that has not stopped the shootings from resonating as bias crimes for many in Georgia, a state that has been at the forefront of the demographic changes coursing through the South.

“I don’t want to draw any conclusions, but it’s obvious to me that if six victims were Asian women, that was a target,” said Georgia State Representative Calvin Smyre, a longtime Democratic lawmaker who helped shepherd the hate crimes bill through the General Assembly.

And there it is: it’s just obvious to Representative Smyre that, because women of Asian descent were killed, they must’ve been targeted because they were Asian. But sometimes, just because someone thinks that something is obvious doesn’t make it true.

Eight people are dead, and Mr Long has been charged with their murder. He is facing life in prison without the possibility of parole or perhaps even a capital sentence on those charges. If he is convicted on those, there’s nothing more a hate crimes rider can do to him.

But virtue must be signaled! My question is: if the killings of the six Asian women was so horrible, and must be charged as hate crimes, does that make the deaths of the other two victims somehow less significant, less important? Are the two non-Asian victims somehow less dead than the six Asian ones?

Posted on by

With Donald Trump out of office, The Philadelphia Inquirer thinks nothing of publicizing criminality, knowing it won’t be punished

One way that you can tell that Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States is to read The Philadelphia Inquirer:

An undocumented house cleaner loses her job in Philly, but finds her mission

Altagracia Maria Herrera is an undocumented house cleaner who was excluded from most government aid, making the pandemic the first time she felt she didn’t belong in the United States.

By Robin Shulman | Monday, March 22, 2021

Altagracia María Herrera poses for a portrait outside of her home in Northeast Philadelphia on Wednesday, March 10, 2021. Herrera is an undocumented house cleaner who lost all her work during the pandemic. Photo by Heather Khalifa, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer

One night, as the pandemic shut Philadelphia down last March, Altagracia María Herrera, who cleans houses for a living, answered her phone.It was one of her employers, who, in broken Spanish, told her to stay home for the next few weeks, Herrera recalled.

“I understand,” responded Herrera, who was born in the Dominican Republic, lives in Northeast Philadelphia, and is a single parent to two U.S.-born daughters.

Then, over a few days, all her other cleaning jobs evaporated. Herrera had just enough saved to make her $750 rent. “After that, there was no money,” she said. As an undocumented immigrant, she didn’t qualify for relief from Washington — no stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, or ongoing salary funded by Paycheck Protection Program loans.

There’s much more at the original, but one thing is clear: she feels that she doesn’t belong in the United States because she really doesn’t belong in the United States. She is, the story tells us, “an undocumented immigrant,” the mealy-mouthed, Associated Press Stylebook term for an illegal immigrant, someone who is not an American citizen, someone who sneaked across the border illegally, someone who broke the law!

When Mr Trump was President, the Inquirer would never have printed her name, or noted that she lived somewhere in Northeast Philadelphia, or pointed out, in the photograph caption, that she was in the city on Wednesday, March 10, 2021. Why? Because under the Trump Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents might have used the information, tracked her down, arrested and deported her back to the Dominican Repub

Further down, the article tells us that Miss Herrera “followed her dream of a better life and joined a friend in Philadelphia” in 2000. the article does not tell us how she got to the United States from the Dominican Republic, an nation sharing the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

How did she enter? Did she overstay a legitimate visa, and simply not return home? Was she somehow smuggled into the United States via a private boat that landed at night on the Jersey shore or the Outer Banks of North Carolina? Either way, she broke the law!

The story tells us that Miss Herrera had two illegitimate children in the United States, which, sadly, makes them American citizens. The two daughters are now 17 and 15, and almost certainly have sucked up taxpayer dollars by attending Philadelphia’s public schools.

When the pandemic began, Herrera lost all five of her regular cleaning clients and pay of at least $650 a week. One employer said she had lost her job, and in a kind of trickle-down unemployment, could no longer pay Herrera.

Really? Five regular cleaning jobs? That means that either five separate clients were paying Miss Herrera cash ‘under the table,’ meaning that they were not withholding federal income taxes, state income taxes, the city wage tax, Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes, which is illegal, or Miss Herrera had presented falsified documents so that they could pay her legally, but also means she either forged documents herself, or paid someone else for forged documents.

Did Miss Herrera somehow pay her federal, state and local taxes? Did she pay her share of Social Security and Medicare taxes? Did she file her federal and state income tax forms? If she failed to do any of those things, she committed felonies!

The Inquirer article noted that Miss Herrera had an account with Wells Fargo bank. What documents did she present to open an account in her name. Was the account opened after the PATRIOT Act was passed, in which the documentation requirements became more stringent? Regardless, Miss Herrera must have presented some form of identification, and that means she presented forged documents to the bank. That is a felony.

So many people seem to think that crossing into the United States illegally is really no big deal. But living in the US illegally requires the commission of other crimes virtually every day. If someone is in the US, and has to work, he is doing so illegally. If he is working here illegally, and being paid in cash under the table, he is evading income taxes. If someone is paying him in cash that way, and fails to file a Form 1099 for the employed person — which would bring that person to the attention of the Infernal Revenue Service — the employer is committing a felony. There are so many things required to live and work in the United States which require the payment of taxes and having documentation that it really cannot be done legally if a person is an illegal immigrant.

And The Philadelphia Inquirer is covering that up!

“It has become increasingly clear that the restrictions placed on many resources prevent those who have greatest need from accessing them,” said Mayor Jim Kenney. The city is building another fund to lift 100,000 Philadelphians out of poverty over the next five years — and that fund will include undocumented immigrants, said Councilmember Maria Quiñones-Sánchez.

So, the great Mayor of Philadelphia, who has presided over 109 murders so far this year, an increase of 29% over the same date last year, a year which fell just one killing short of the city’s all-time record, is going to give money, including taxpayers’ dollars, to non-citizens, to people in the city and country illegally. He can’t do his job in making the city safer, but he can enable more crime.

That’s just great, isn’t it?

In a wryly humorous link at the bottom of the Inquirer article was an OpEd about ‘vaccine envy.’

There is massive inequity in vaccine distribution. Black, Latinx, and low-income communities are being underserved while continuing to bear the brunt of the virus. For those fortunate enough and healthy enough to just be waiting your turn, it’s easy to get impatient.

According to the Inquirer, Miss Herrera, an illegal immigrant, not only got her first shot of the COVID-19 vaccine earlier this month, but got a new cleaning job as well. She stepped in front of an American citizen, one who hasn’t been able to get the vaccine yet, and she got another job it is illegal for her to have.[1]Despite being in Tier 1C, and just a month short of my 68th birthday, I have not been able to schedule my vaccine appointment yet with the Estill County Health Department, even though my 32 and 29 … Continue reading

This is what is wrong with liberalism, with the left and the #woke. This is why Donald Trump won in 2016, and may well contribute to another populist candidate winning in 2024. When we are allowing blatant violations of the law to not only go unpunished, but seeing our credentialed media publicizing them without any fear of law enforcement stepping in, things have gone very wrong in our country.[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading

References

References
↑1 Despite being in Tier 1C, and just a month short of my 68th birthday, I have not been able to schedule my vaccine appointment yet with the Estill County Health Department, even though my 32 and 29 year old daughters, both living in Lexington, have gotten their first doses. I cannot blame Philadelphia for that, but the vaccine rollout in Kentucky has been, despite Governor Andy Beshear’s high praises, pretty bad.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

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

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

Do the mandatory face mask orders really protect us from #COVID19? Empirically, that's not the case in one Kentucky county

Search and rescue volunteer, Nate Lair, drives a boat through downtown Beattyville after heavy rains led to the Kentucky River flooding the town and breaking records last set in 1957. March 1, 2021
Alton Strupp / Louisville Courier-Journal

Remember this picture? This is my nephew, Nate Lair, a volunteer fireman in Lee County, who was doing rescue work in Beattyville following the flooding earlier this month. Mr Lair is a trained Emergency Medical Technician as well as a fireman — and no, I don’t use the politically correct term “fire fighter” just because some women work as firemen — so he’s not exactly ignorant when it comes to medicine.

I was teasing him yesterday about killing everyone he rescued, because he wasn’t wearing a mask, something not only shown in the photo, but something I know he just does not do. He’s a fiercely independent sort.

Then he told me that, despite nobody wearing masks during the rescues, Lee County was one of two counties in the Bluegrass State that were in the “green” for COVID positive tests!

Well, he was off a bit, but not by much. The most recent statistics, as indicated by the map at the left from the state website (which you can click to enlarge) has Lee County in the yellow, “Community Spread,” between 1 to 10 average daily cases per 100,000 population, at 3.7.

But Lee County has a population of only 6,881 people! That means just 6.881% of 100,000 people. Doing the math, multiplying the 3.7 per 100,000 rate by 0.06881, I come up with 0.254597, or one confirmed COVID case over the last four days.

Which raises the obvious question: if masks are somehow saving us all from doom from COVID-19, but in less-than-healthy conditions during and after one of the hardest hit areas in the state by the flooding, in which people were more concerned with saving themselves, their jobs, and cleaning up their property, than they were with wearing face masks, why isn’t Lee County in the “red“? Why aren’t the people in and around Beattyville, the “poorest white town in America” from 2008 to 2012 according to CNN, dropping like flies due to the novel coronavirus?

Could it possibly, just possibly, be that these face masks really don’t do much of anything when it comes to the reduction of COVID-19?

Posted on by

Consumers don’t want electric cars, so the government will have to force them

We have millions and millions of people who are just so very worried about global warming #ClimateChange, but, for some odd reason, they don’t seem to be putting their stated principles into action. From The Wall Street Journal:

Electric Vehicles Are the U.S. Auto Industry’s Future—if Dealers Can Figure Out How to Sell Them

Car dealers say they are struggling to square the industry’s enthusiasm with shoppers’ reality

By Nora Naughton | March 7, 2021 | 5:30 AM EST

Car dealer Brad Sowers is spending money to prepare for the coming wave of new electric models from General Motors Co. He is installing charging stations, upgrading service bays and retraining staff at his St. Louis-area dealership to handle the technology-packed vehicles.

But when he considers how many plug-in Chevy Bolts he sold last year—nine, out of the nearly 4,000 Chevrolets sold at his Missouri dealerships—it gives him pause.

“The consumer in the middle of America just isn’t there yet,” when it comes to switching to electric vehicles, he said, citing the long distances many of his customers drive daily and a lack of charging infrastructure outside major cities.

I know of one person in my small parish who drives a plug-in Chevrolet Dolt Bolt. Decent enough looking car, but there are no commercial charging stations in our rural county. I asked him, and yes, he has a station at his house to recharge his vehicle.

Well, good for him: he has put his money where his mouth is, and adhered to his principles. But, I have to wonder: just how many people in our poor, rural county have the money to buy a new Bolt, MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) $36,500.

More, how many people here have the garage or safely dedicated parking space in which to install a charging station?

As auto executives and investors buzz about the coming age of the electric car, many dealers say they are struggling to square that enthusiasm with the reality today on new-car sales lots, where last year battery-powered vehicles made up fewer than 2% of U.S. auto sales.

Most consumers who come to showrooms aren’t shopping for electric cars, and with gasoline prices relatively low, even hybrid models can be a tough sell, dealers and industry analysts say.

That’s part of the reason that the Biden Administration wants gasoline prices to skyrocket, and they already have, though not due to Administration action. But if customers don’t want them, then customers don’t want them.

Auto makers are moving aggressively to expand their electric-vehicle offerings with dozens of new models set to arrive in coming years. Some like GM are setting firm targets for when they plan to phase out gas-powered cars entirely.

Many dealers say that puts them in a delicate spot: They are trying to adjust, but unsure whether and how fast customers will actually make the switch. About 180 GM dealers, or roughly 20%, have decided to give up their Cadillac franchises rather than invest in costly upgrades that GM has required to sell electric cars.

Translation: the dealerships are in business to, you know, actually make money!

Past attempts by car companies to expand electric-car sales have largely flopped, saddling retailers with unsold inventory. Even now, some dealers say they are reluctant to stock electric models en masse.

“The biggest challenge is that dealers have a bit of ‘boy who cried wolf’ syndrome,” said Massachusetts dealer Chris Lemley.

Car companies have promised for years to make electric cars mainstream, but produced only low-volume, niche models, he said. He recalls Ford Motor Co. rolling out an all-electric Focus that sold poorly and stacked up on his lot. It was discontinued in 2018.

As I have been saying for a while now:

Some shoppers also are unsure. Joe Daniel, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said he was determined to buy an electric car, but eventually abandoned his effort after realizing there weren’t enough public charging stations near his apartment in Washington, D.C. Without a place to plug in, the purchase made little sense, he added.

Even if there had been commercial charging stations near his residence, Mr Daniel would have soon discovered another problem:

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.

Emphasis mine.

To solve problems like this, President Biden has said he wants to spend billions of dollars to upgrade the country’s charging infrastructure as part of a push to incentivize battery-powered cars.

Well, of course he does! But upgrading the country’s charging infrastructure doesn’t solve all of the problems:

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?

Even if you get to pull right up to the supercharger station, are you going to enjoy spending the better part of an hour to charge up your Tesla or your Bolt?

There’s a lot more at the Journal original, but it all comes down to one thing: as Mr Daniel said above, “For EVs to take off, they need to be as convenient as gas-powered cars—that’s the whole point of this big purchase.”

In the end, the left will find it necessary to force consumers into choices they do not want. The left are pro-choice on exactly one thing.

Posted on by

At what point will we start treating crime seriously? At least in the Bluegrass State, that point has not yet been reached

Kevin James Wright Kentucky Registered Sex Offender. Photo from state sex offender registry.

Kevin James Wright, 44, of Winchester, was arrested on March 18th, and is facing 20 child pornography charges after he was allegedly caught uploading images by Kentucky State Police, when they executed a search warrant and seized the equipment Mr Wright had used. Mr Wright is no stranger to such charges, having been charged and convicted in 2015 of 40 child pornography and distribution offenses.

He pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to three years in prison, along with being required to register as a sex offender.

Wright’s most recent arrest resulted from an undercover Internet Crimes Against Children investigation conducted by the state police Electronic Crime Branch, officials said. His arrest in 2015 was also the result of an Electronic Crime Branch investigation, state police said. . . .

All 20 of Wright’s charges were possession of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor, according to state police. That’s a Class D felony, punishable by one to five years in prison for each count.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that he was still locked up in the Clark County Detention Center on Friday.

Now, how could Mr Wright’s alleged offenses have been prevented? By having him sentenced much more severely on the first forty counts!

Mr Wright is obviously stupid; he got caught this year the same way he did in 2015. Given his previous conviction, only an idiot would not have known that the State Police would be checking up on him for the same offenses. I have long been persuaded that most criminals who get caught get caught because they are stupid.

Mr Wright’s stupidity aside, one thing is obvious: his previous conviction and sentence was not enough to have deterred him from (allegedly) having committed the same type of crime again.

What happened when an Oregon judge ignored a sex offender’s record?

But it isn’t just Mr Wright who’s an idiot. The obvious question is: why was a man male who was convicted on forty counts including possession and distribution of child pornography sentenced to just three years in prison? Why was it not thirty or forty years? Even if it had been only ten years, he would still have been in prison this year, when he (allegedly) committed the offenses with which he has now been charged? Heck, if he had been sentenced to just ten years in 2015, it would have been better for him, because he’d be looking at getting out of prison in 2025. Now, unless he is allowed to another sweetheart plea bargain arrangement, he’s looking at remaining in jail well after 2025.

As we noted two days ago, treating criminals leniently doesn’t always work out well.

Cody Alan Arnett was convicted for two robberies in Lexington, on August 7, 2015, and sentenced to five years in prison for each offense. As early as June 26, 2018 he was recommended for parole, and was scheduled to be released on August 1, 2018. This would mean that he served a week less than three years for his (supposedly) consecutive five year sentences. Within two months of his release, Mr Arnett was arrested for the forcible rape at knifepoint of a Georgetown College coed, at a time in which he could have and should have still been in prison. Mr Arnett had five violent felony offenses on his record. Had the state parole board kept Mr Arnett in prison, where he belonged, he wouldn’t have been free to rape a young woman.

Mr Arnett has not been tried yet for the rape; the COVID-19 pandemic put a hiatus on trials. But his parole was revoked, and he will not be eligible for parole from his previous convictions until November of 2022. He could be locked up until as late as August 5, 2030, even without that trial ever happening.

Just how many children did Mr Wright endanger by downloading child pornography? Possession of child pornography is illegal because, by creating a market for it, children are raped to create more and more of it. And while the charges against Mr Wright, as reported by the Herald-Leader, do not include distribution of child pornography, his offenses in 2015 did.

I can only hope that, if convicted on the new charges, a Kentucky judge will have Mr Wright locked away for multiple decades. He will have proven, if convicted, that his obsession is not reducible by prison sentences, and that the only way to stop him from committing these crimes again and again and again is to have him locked away, with no opportunity to commit them again.

But one thing is absolutely certain: no lenient plea bargain arrangement should be accepted. If he will not plead guilty in exchange for a long, long sentence, don’t give him a short one. Take him to trial, get him convicted, and sentence him harshly.

Posted on by

Amanda Marcotte doesn’t care about murders unless they are politically useful

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter photo was taken in a bar.

My good friend Amanda Marcotte — OK, OK, she’s not actually my good friend; she hates my evil reich-wing guts and has blocked me on her Twitter account — left Brooklyn and moved to South Philadelphia a couple of years ago. One would think that the über-feminist would be concerned about the huge homicide rate in her adopted home town, but if she is, she certainly hasn’t written about it in Salon.

The City of Brotherly Love saw 499 people give up their last breath in 2020, just one under the record of 500 set in 1990, the depths of the crack cocaine wars. That’s an average of 1.363 murders per day!

Well, guess what: with 77 days elapsed thus far in 2021, Philly is slightly ahead of that mark, at 1.377 per day. But 2020’s 499 mark was ‘achieved’ a bit later in the year; while 106 people were murdered in Philly’s mean streets by 11:59 PM EDT on March 18th, ‘only’ 80 had done so by the same date last year, and the same date last year included another day, due to 2020 being a leap year. City homicides increased as the weather warmed up, as is usually the case.

Miss Marcotte never noted the near-record homicides from last year, when even The Philadelphia Inquirer, which seems to run homicide stories only when something unusual happens, the victim is a ‘somebody’ or an innocent or, of course, a cute little white girl.

Instead, she continued in her usual #TrumpDerangementSyndrome ways.

However, her most recent two stories are about murders. Murders in Georgia, that is: Sarah Everard and the Atlanta spa shootings show how victim blaming continues even after #MeToo and Atlanta spa shootings and the Capitol riot: Gun control is the best tool to fight terrorism.

The murders in the Atlanta burbs have their trumped up racial element, because six of the eight ‘massage parlor workers’ were of Asian ethnicity. Miss Marcotte just loves to blame interracial murders on conservatives or Donald Trump, or really anybody she doesn’t like. She was pretty gleeful about the #BlackLivesMatter protests after the killing of convicted felon George Floyd, attending at least one herself, openly lamenting that “It’s true that anti-lockdown protesters who pack high-powered rifles and scream in cops’ faces haven’t hurt anyone, at least not yet.“

Also see: The Other McCain: Atlanta: The ‘Yellow Fever’ Theory

She wrote:

“Noobs are forever.” That’s what my partner[1]While Miss Marcotte has long been proud of living with Marc Faletti absent the benefit of clergy, her Wikipedia biography lists Mr Faletti as her “Husband.” jokingly said to me this weekend, after the two of us attended the strikingly huge Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in Philadelphia on Saturday.

We were talking about the phalanxes of newcomers to the movement — often identifiable by their well-meaning but tone deaf signs — who had joined with more seasoned BLM protesters who have been at this for years. We’d both been to BLM protests before, most notably an enormous one in New York in 2014, after an NYPD officer choked Eric Garner to death. But there’s no question that something has shifted, and lots of people who had previously stayed out of the movement now felt compelled to pick up signs and march in the streets against police brutality.

The result is not just that protests seem bigger, but almost more numerous, spreading out not just to every large city but also the suburbs and small towns of America. (The Texas town where I went to high school, which has a population of 6,000, saw a protest on Saturday that drew hundreds of attendees.) There have been many and varied protest movements in the era of Donald Trump, with some — like the Women’s March or the climate strikes — being more successful than others. But BLM seems to be rising above, becoming the protest movement that is doing the best at harnessing the larger anger out there about Trump and his supporters and enablers.

Black Lives Matter is capturing those who have just woken up and, more than any other progressive movement, is turning that noob energy into action.

I will admit it: not being an aging hipster like Miss Marcotte, 43, I had to look up the meaning of ‘noob.’

I spent some time perusing her Salon articles on the George Floyd protests, and one thing struck me: she was far more concerned about the political value of the protests, and their ability to hurt President Trump, than she ever was about that fact that Mr Floyd was killed.

Naturally, as a writer who can work from home, with a partner who can apparently do the same, she absolutely supported the lockdowns, and contrasted them with the #BlackLivesMatter/Antifa protests:

Liberals never wanted “forever quarantine.” That’s a straw man erected by Donald Trump and his supporters. What liberals wanted was an temporary and necessary lockdown to buy time for the federal government to ramp up a testing regime and other health care capacity to deal with the virus.

Trump refused to use the time to do any that, and so it’s no wonder the progressives — who are just as fed up with staying home as conservatives — are exploding in the streets right now. Of course the primary reason for the protests is police brutality, and the motivating incident was the police murder of George Floyd. But the anger fueling the movement has many causes, including three and a half years of the Trump presidency and rage at the federal government for failing us so miserably with the coronavirus response.

Perhaps the left not wanting a “forever quarantine” is laid a bit hollow by President Biden wanting everyone to wear masks until “everyone is, in fact, vaccinated,” and well into 2022. That people might protest the lockdowns because, unlike her partner and her, they can’t work from home and many have lost their jobs, well, who cares about them? Mr Faletti and she apparently saw nothing wrong with breaking Governor Tom Wolf’s (D-PA) orders against large gatherings to join the protest marches.

Oddly enough, I couldn’t find much from her on the actual killings of George Floyd, who was high on a toxic dose of Fentanyl and methamphetamines, or Breonna Taylor, who was killed when her bedpartner started shooting at police and they returned fire, or Walter Wallace in Philadelphia, who was charging at the cops with a knife; all that concerned her was the political advantage to be gained.

And that, to me, explains her stony silence about the murder rate in her adopted home town. While Chicago sees more total murders, Philadelphia’s murder rate is significantly higher, 31.60 per 100,000 population compared to the Windy City’s 28.38, but the uncomfortable fact is that the vast majority of both murder victims in Philly, and their killers, where known, are black, and that does not yield any political benefit for the liberals’ positions.

Of course, I’ve used Miss Marcotte’s writings as a small example of what the left do writ large. I’ve said it before: in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in many of our larger cities, black lives don’t matter unless they are taken by a white person.

References

References
↑1 While Miss Marcotte has long been proud of living with Marc Faletti absent the benefit of clergy, her Wikipedia biography lists Mr Faletti as her “Husband.”