Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The Philadelphia Inquirer does what the Lexington Herald-Leader will not Updated!

I have been generous, shall we say, in my criticism of The Philadelphia Inquirer, so when the paper does something right, it is incumbent on me to note that. The newspaper reported on yet another homicide of a victim in the city:

Dunkin’ Donuts manager shot to death during robbery in North Philly

Police released a video showing the gunman approaching the manager as she opened the store, and pointing a revolver at her as he forces her inside to an office where she hands over money.

by Diane Mastrull and Elizabeth Robertson | Updated June 5, 2021

A Dunkin’ Donuts manager was shot to death early Saturday after a gunman confronted her as she opened the store in North Philadelphia, forced her inside, and demanded she give him all the money, police said.

The victim, a 41-year-old woman, was shot in the head at 5:51 a.m. inside the Dunkin’ Donuts at Lehigh Avenue and Fairhill Street, and was pronounced dead there six minutes later by medics, police said.

Coworkers identified her as Christine Lugo, who lived in the neighborhood and, although she had her own children, was a mother to those she worked with.

“She was an angel, a mother to all of us,” said Larry Evans, one of a few employees who stopped by the restaurant Saturday afternoon to mourn their colleague. “No matter who you are, she give you the shirt off her back.”

Screen capture of Dunkin’ Donuts murder suspect. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original, but this killing was wholly senseless: the store manager gave the robber the cash, so he had that for which he came, but he shot her in the head anyway.

The actual video, which I could not link, is available on the Inquirer’s website. The victim is blurred out, for the sake of decency, and it doess not show the killer shooting her.

The Lexington Herald-Leader? If the paper followed McClatchy’s mugshot policy, it would be up to Executive Editor peter Baniak to decide whether or not to publish the photo of the suspect, but, considering how the paper refused to publish the mugshot of accused murderer Juanyah J Clay, who was then on the loose, quite possibly because Mr Clay is black, I have to wonder: would the paper have published the images the Inquirer did, given that the Dunkin’ Donuts killer is visibly black? The Inquirer is trying to help the police and the citizens of Philadelphia to catch this criminal; the Herald-Leader wouldn’t do that to help catch Mr Clay.

If the suspect is caught, what are the odds that he was treated leniently in a criminal past, by District Attorney Larry Krasner and his predecessors, and could have been behind bars on Saturday morning? If he is identified and caught, and it turns out that yes, he was on the loose when he shouldn’t have been, will the District Attorney of the judge involved be held accountable for Miss Lugo’s death?

Of course, in Killadelphia, Miss Lugo was not the only murder victim in the city. The article noted that:

  • A 16-year-old was shot 13 times, killing him, shortly before 8:30 PM Friday at 55th and Market Streets in West Philadelphia;
  • A 25-year-old man was shot once in the chest at 10th and Cumberland Streets in North Philly, and taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 7 PM; and
  • Later that night, a man in his late 20s was shot multiple times, and killed, while he was sitting in a vehicle at Broad and Belfield Streets in the Logan section.

That was all on Friday night. How many more murders happened in the City of Brotherly Love on the rest of the weekend?

__________________________________

Updated: Monday, 7 June 2016 | 8:25 AM EDT

A photo taken during a block party last year of Dunkin’ Donuts manager Christine Lugo.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Miss Lugo was not scheduled to be working alone on Saturday morning.

The store is usually open 24 hours, offering only drive-through service overnight. But the person who was supposed to work Friday night into Saturday morning called out, assistant manager Terrell Johnson said, which meant Lugo showed up to an empty store, left to open it alone.

Johnson, 38, said he often worked the overnight shift and would meet Lugo in the morning when she came to start her day about 5 a.m. She’d text him when she was 15 minutes away, he said, and he’d meet her outside. Johnson didn’t work the overnight shift this weekend because he had been suspended from work due to a “no-call, no-show,” which he said was a misunderstanding.

Dunkin’ Donuts corporate office wanted to make sure that they got no blame:

In a statement Sunday, Dunkin’s spokesperson Michelle King said store franchisees ”are solely responsible for the day-to-day operations of their restaurants, including staffing decisions.”

That may be true, but what a poor time to be saying so.

The newspaper reported that there was less than $300 in the store when Miss Lugo opened it. She was senselessly murdered, after giving the robber the money, and it was for under $300.

For less than $300! Had he just robbed the store, and not killed Miss Lugo, he’d have been facing what, five years in the slammer? Now, if he gets caught, even with the miserable Larry Krasner as District Attorney, he’s looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in jail.

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Requiescat in pace

Our daughters turned around and headed back to Lexington, rather than coming to our place for the weekend, because traffic was backed up from accidents on Interstate 75 and the alternate, US 25. Then I saw a tweet, previous to this one, from Father Jim Sichko, noting that he’d been on the scene of a terrible, fatal accident, in the Interstate.

Updated: Two adults and four children dead after crash on I-75 in Lexington

By Karla Ward | June 5, 2021 | 02:43 PM | Updated: 10:07 PM EDT

Six people, four of them children, died in a crash involving a driver going the wrong way on Interstate 75 Saturday afternoon.

The head-on collision was reported at mile marker 102.6 in southern Fayette County just before 12:30 p.m.

Lexington police said a 38-year-old woman was driving a dark passenger car southbound in the northbound lanes of I-75 when she crashed into a white passenger car.

The 30-year-old driver of the white vehicle and four children who were riding in it all died, as did the woman driving the dark passenger car, police said in a news release Saturday night.

Police said the woman driving the wrong way died at the scene, as did a child who was found in the front passenger seat of the white car.

The police stated that they had received a report that a vehicle had gotten on I-75 going in the wrong direction at the Lexington/Athens entrance, which is between mile markers 104 and 105. The crash happened at mile marker 102.6, so the woman who was driving the dark car had traveled at least 1½ miles in the wrong direction. And, as you can see from Fr Sichko’s photo, Interstate 75 has very wide shoulders on both sides of the road in that area.

A non-suicidal, non-intoxicated driver who had simply made a mistake in getting on the highway in the wrong direction had plenty of area to get off the traffic lanes. While I cannot know the mind of the deceased wrong way driver, the first thought that jumps into my mind is that this was a deliberate suicide. Too bad she decided to take other people with her.

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The urban #ClimateChange activists cannot see outside their own little worlds.

I do not watch a lot of network television. My go to networks for TV are the various Discovery Channel networks, primarily HGTV, DIY Network, and Great American Country, and I watch a lot of the home building and home search shows.

Of course, all of the house hunters have their wish lists, but one thing is very consistent: people want gas ranges in their kitchens.[1]If you watch the cooking shows on the Food Channel, as my wife and daughters do, you’ll see that all of them, with the exception of Molly Yeh’s Girl Meets Farm, use gas ranges. But what people want is not what the left want to allow them to have. From The Wall Street Journal:

Battle Brews Over Banning Natural Gas to Homes

Cities are considering measures to phase out gas hookups amid climate concerns, spurring some states to outlaw such prohibitions

passed the first such prohibition in the U.S. in 2019.

The bans in turn have led Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kansas and Louisiana to enact laws outlawing such municipal prohibitions in their states before they can spread, arguing that they are overly restrictive and costly. Ohio is considering a similar measure.

The outcome of the battle, largely among Democratic-led cities and Republican-run states, has the potential to reshape the future of the utility industry, and demand for natural gas, which the U.S. produces more of than any other country.

Proponents of phasing out natural gas say their aim is to reduce planet-warming emissions over time by fully electrifying new homes and buildings as wind and solar farms proliferate throughout the country, making the power grid cleaner.

There’s more at the original. What people in general want, the left say is bad, bad, bad! for us. One wonders what the municipal government leaders pondering these measures have in their own homes.

My wife and I live in the country; the nearest town is four miles away, and there are no natural gas lines out this far. When we moved in, in July of 2017, the house was total electric: electric heat pump for HVAC, electric water heater, and an electric range.

Come December of 2017, it got unusually cold in the Bluegrass State, with nighttime lows a few degrees below zero, and daytime highs in the teens. Our poor heat pump was running all the time, and the house was still cooler then we would have liked.

In January of 2018 came what the Weather Channel called Winter Storm Hunter, an ice storm which knocked out the power. Where we live, practically at the end of Jackson Energy Cooperative’s service area, it was 4½ days before the sparktricity was restored.

Mrs Pico went to stay with our daughters, who had a nice, warm apartment in Lexington. Me? I had to stay at the farm, to take care of the critters and the water pipes. Fortunately, it was warmed than it had been the previous month, but, by the time we got power back, it was down to 38º F in the house. I spent a lot of time in bed, under the covers and comforter.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

Our house is a fixer-upper, and we knew that when we bought it. The kitchen was going to be the first remodel project, and my wife wanted, like everyone else, a gas range. Out in the boonies, that meant propane. With the problems of the previous winter, we decided to replace the very old electric water heater with a propane model, and we added a propane fireplace as well.[2]I wanted a wood stove, but my wife vetoed that; too much of a mess, she said. If the power goes out for 4½ days again — and a somewhat nearby neighbor has told me that her power has been out for over a week before — we’ll be warm, able to cook, and have hot water.

Fast forward to early March of this year, and the flooding in eastern Kentucky. The flooding was so bad that the river gauge at Ravenna, the closest one to me, jammed at 38.4 feet, but the level was estimated to have crested at 41.00 ft, topping the worst previous flood, on February 4, 1939, which saw a crest of 39.37 feet. We were more fortunate than some people, in that we did not lose our house,[3]A lot of people around here did lose their homes, so we count ourselves as fortunate. but it was a very near thing: the HVAC system, which is in the crawl space under the house, was flooded and destroyed.

That meant, in early March, no heat.

But, after I stabilized the propane tank, which floated but I had tied in place so it didn’t float down the Kentucky River, as a lot of other people’s tanks had done, I was able to turn the propane back on, and once again, we had heat. The electricity never went out, but the electric HVAC system was totaled.

Were the left to have their way, we’d have suffered through early March without heat.

The left seem unable to think outside of their own comfort zones. When the electricity goes out, the power companies work to restore service in cities first, to get the largest number of people back into service fastest. The city dwellers in San Francisco and Seattle aren’t on the far ends of power lines, and don’t quite see that electric service in rural areas is dependent on long lines, stretched out over poles subject to the weather. They don’t understand how what they want imposes significant burdens on other people.

References

References
↑1 If you watch the cooking shows on the Food Channel, as my wife and daughters do, you’ll see that all of them, with the exception of Molly Yeh’s Girl Meets Farm, use gas ranges.
↑2 I wanted a wood stove, but my wife vetoed that; too much of a mess, she said.
↑3 A lot of people around here did lose their homes, so we count ourselves as fortunate.
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Well, that didn’t take long! Journolism at its finest!

Well, I didn’t have to wait long! Journolism[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term … Continue reading at its finest!

After posting, at 7:42 AM this morning, on the Lexington Herald-Leader eschewing posting the mug shots of black criminal suspects, at 9:02 AM reported Jeremy Chisenhall posted:

$25k stolen in 1 minute. Thieves hit Lexington shops amid national trading card frenzy

By Jeremy Chisenhall | June 4, 2021 | 09:02 AM EDT

Lexington police are looking for the man pictured here who is accused of breaking into a trading card shop and stealing merchandise. Provided by Bluegrass Crime Stoppers.

It only took about 68 seconds for a burglary suspect to smash through the front door of Jimmy’s Kentucky Roadshow Shop, a Lexington trading card store, snatch about $25,000 worth of cards and take off.

The cops and owner Jimmy Mahan were on the scene within minutes in the early morning hours of April 29, but it was too late to stop anything. The “smash and grab” burglar was gone with a bunch of unopened, untraceable card packs.

In another burglary last month, a man kicked in the glass door of a different Lexington card shop and made off with a “large quantity” of baseball trading cards, according to Lexington police. The shop, Baseball Card Warehouse, posted about the break-in on Facebook, saying it caused “a mess and a lot of issues with inventory.”

There’s more at the original.

Now, there are some differences. In this case, the (alleged) burglar can’t be identified in the photo provided, and published in the Herald-Leader, where the mugshots come with individual identification. And the (alleged) burglar is on the loose. But the Herald-Leader also declined to print the mugshot of Juanyah J Clay when he was on the loose, and charged with the far more serious crime of murder.

The more immediate difference is obvious: Mr Clay is black, and this unidentified (alleged) burglar appears to be white. Though not directly part of the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, the precursor article, in the Sacramento Bee, let us know what the concern really is:

Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

While I cannot read the minds of Mr Chisenhall, or of Peter Baniak, Executive Editor and General Manager of the newspaper, it almost seems as though the Herald-Leader is attempting to create a stereotype of its own about who commits crime in our community.

But, nahhh, that can’t be it!

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader (Part 5)

Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader has adhered to McClatchy Company’s mugshot policy.

2 teenagers charged with murder, robbery in the death of another Lexington teen

By Jeremy Chisenhall | June 4, 2021 | 7:00 AM

Michael Rowland. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center.

Lexington police have arrested two teenagers and charged them with the murder of another teen after a fatal shooting in March.

Michael Roland, 18, was arrested Thursday and charged with murder and robbery after the death of 18-year-old Montaye Mullins, according to police. Mullins was shot in the early morning hours of March 11 and found by police at the intersection of Augusta Drive and Raleigh Road.

Mullins was taken to a local hospital where he later died, police said.

Police also arrested a 17-year-old whose name they didn’t release. Lexington police typically don’t disclose the names of defendants who were under the age of 18 at the time of a crime.

There’s more at the original, but what isn’t at the Herald-Leader original is that mugshot; I found that with a simple Google search, and it was on WKYT-TV’s website. WKYT, channel 27, is Lexington’s CBS affiliate. WTVQ, channel 36, the ABC affiliate and the NBC affiliate, WLEX-TV, channel 18, had the mugshot on their websites as well.

As we have previously noted, McClatchy’s mugshot policy is:

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

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

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

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

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

So, the policy was followed, again. The odd thing is, the newspaper has made exceptions to that policy, as noted here, here, here, and here, though in every case in which the policy was broken the criminal suspect was white.

Will the paper adhere to the policy the next time a white murder suspect is arrested? They’ve broken it for people charged with lesser crimes! But, as always, I will continue to monitor it.

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A sad tale illustrates why gun control laws do not work

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has, fortunately for the individual rights of the citizens thereof, a state legislature controlled by Republicans, and current state law prohibits cities in the Keystone State from enacting their own, stricter gun control ordinances.

Naturally, in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, the Democrats who have controlled the city government or the last 69½ years, see the homicide numbers, and think that the answer is: more gun control! The Philadelphia Inquirer keeps up its calls:

But it was a sad story in Thursday’s Inquirer which revealed the futility of it all, without ever mentioning the subject:

Philly father sentenced to 6 to 12 years in prison after his teen son fatally shot his twin brother

Aleem Gillard encouraged his sons to play with a gun in his apartment and one son, Fayaadh, accidentally killed his brother, Suhail, authorities said.

By Julie Shaw | June 3, 2021

A Philadelphia man was sentenced Thursday to six to 12 years in state prison after one of his twin sons accidentally shot the other after he encouraged them to play with his gun in an Overbrook apartment two years ago.

Aleem Gillard, 43, pleaded guilty in February to charges of involuntary manslaughter and possession of a firearm. As a felon, he was not permitted to have a gun.

On Dec. 1, 2019, Gillard’s 18-year-old sons and 16-year-old daughter were in his apartment when his sons were playing with his gun, and one son, Fayaadh, fatally shot his brother, Suhail, in the chest.

Chesley Lightsey, supervisor of the DA’s homicide unit, told Common Pleas Court Judge Lillian Ransom during a virtual sentencing hearing Thursday that the father encouraged his sons to play with the gun. After the shooting, authorities said, Gillard told his surviving son and daughter to lie to police, telling them the teen was shot while going to a corner store. He also had his daughter hide the gun, she said.

The money paragraph was further down:

Aleem Gillard had four prior convictions for illegal gun possession, Lightsey said. In the most recent case, court records show, he pleaded guilty in February 2015 to felony firearm-possession charges stemming from a 2013 arrest and was sentenced to 2½ to five months in jail and 10 years’ probation.

So, Mr Gillard had four prior convictions for illegal gun possession, was not, as a convicted felon, allowed to own a firearm, and was on probation at the time his son was shot, yet he still had a gun! In 2013, Mr Gillard was shot himself, paralyzed, and is confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, yet he still had a gun.

If all of that could not keep Mr Gillard from obtaining yet another firearm, just what other gun control laws would have prevented it? What laws would the bad guys of the City of Brotherly Love, who have already put 221 people in their graves, obey in a city that has people like Mr Gillard, already a jailbird, already a convicted felon, already paralyzed for life, choosing to keep a gun despite all of that?

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I wish that I had written this!

Yes, I have been harping on the promulgation of fear in our society rather a lot lately, but Glenn Greenwald said it better than I ever have!

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

Mr Greenwald wasn’t even talking about the restrictions so many have accepted, to out freedom of peaceable assembly, to our free exercise of religion, to mask mandates and the other things government has imposed on us due to COVID-19, though he certainly could have been. No, he was talking about the Biden Administration and its cranking out of ‘domestic terror’ alerts.

The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun — Even Without the New Laws Biden Wants

Homeland Security just issued its fourth danger bulletin this year. And both the weapons and rhetorical tactics of the first War on Terror are increasingly visible.

Glenn Greenwald | June 2, 2021

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday issued a new warning bulletin, alerting Americans that domestic extremists may well use violence on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. This was at least the fourth such bulletin issued this year by Homeland Security (DHS) warning of the same danger and, thus far, none of the fears it is trying to instill into the American population has materialized.

The first was a January 14 warning, from numerous federal agencies including DHS, about violence in Washington, DC and all fifty state capitols that was likely to explode in protest of Inauguration Day (a threat which did not materialize). Then came a January 27 bulletin warning of “a heightened threat environment across the United States that is likely to persist over the coming weeks” from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” (that warning also was not realized). Then there was a May 14 bulletin warning of right-wing violence “to attack higher-capacity targets,” exacerbated by the lifting of COVID lockdowns (which also never happened). And now we are treated to this new DHS warning about domestic extremists preparing violent attacks over Tulsa (it remains to be seen if a DHS fear is finally realized).

Just like the first War on Terror, these threats are issued with virtually no specificity. They are just generalized warnings designed to put people in fear about their fellow citizens and to justify aggressive deployment of military and law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country. A CNN article which wildly hyped the latest danger bulletin about domestic extremists at Tulsa had to be edited with what the cable network, in an “update,” called “the additional information from the Department of Homeland Security that there is no specific or credible threats at this time.” And the supposed dangers from domestic extremists on Inauguration Day was such a flop that even The Washington Post — one of the outlets most vocal about lurking national security dangers in general and this one in particular — had to explicitly acknowledge the failure:

Thousands [of National Guard troops] had been deployed to capitals across the country late last week, ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized.

Once again on Wednesday, security officials’ worst fears weren’t borne out: In some states, it was close to business as usual. In others, demonstrations were small and peaceful, with only occasional tense moments.

President Biden just said:

Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not al Qaeda, white supremacy.

Here’s the video:

According to the Philadelphia Police Department, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, June 2nd, 221 people had been murdered in the city so far this year. That’s 1.444 per day in the City of Brotherly Love, a rate, which if maintained throughout the year would mean 527 people spilling out their life’s blood in the city’s mean streets.

In Chicago, 266 people have been murdered so far this year, 1.739 every single day, putting the Windy City on track for 635 homicides.

In much smaller St Louis, 78 people have been killed, ‘only’ 0.510 per day, for ‘just’ 186 for 2021.

In just those three cities, that’s a total of 565 people murdered so far this year, and a projected 1,348 for the entire year.

White supremacists? So far they’ve killed exactly zero people in 2021![1]The claim that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed in the Capitol kerfuffle is untrue. The Washington medical examiner found the Officer Sicknick had died of “acute brainstem and … Continue reading Yet President Biden tells us that they are “the most lethal threat to the homeland today.”

Mr Greenwald compares the measures the Democrats are taking today to those under Presidents Bush and Obama following the September 11th attacks, and finds them shockingly similar.

Yeah, I want you to keep reading The First Street Journal, every day, but this is the time in which you should follow the embedded link and read Mr Greenwald’s article on substack. It’s just plain brilliant!

References

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Resistance is not futile. I will not be assimilated.

Is National Public Radio supposed to be an advocacy reporting organization? Is NPR supposed to push a particular political point of view?

NPR’s Laurel Wamsley, who purports to be a journalist, wrote an article entitled A Guide To Gender Identity Terms, in which she presented the “proper use of gender identity terms.”

Issues of equality and acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people — along with challenges to their rights — have become a major topic in the headlines. These issues can involve words and ideas and identities that are new to some.

That’s why we’ve put together a glossary of terms relating to gender identity. Our goal is to help people communicate accurately and respectfully with one another.

Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance. Alex Schmider, associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD, compares using someone’s correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly – “a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.”

This guide was created with help from GLAAD. We also referenced resources from the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Trans Journalists Association, NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, Human Rights Campaign, InterAct and the American Psychological Association. This guide is not exhaustive, and is Western and U.S.-centric. Other cultures may use different labels and have other conceptions of gender.

Yeah, that’s an unbiased group!

But, Mr Schmider did tell the truth in one important way. Using a ‘transgendered persons’ preferred pronouns and sexual identity terms is meant to be “respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.” Miss Wamsley put it as “a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.” At bottom, it is an attempt to coerce “acceptance” by claiming it is only courtesy.

The unasked question is — and the author never added anything in to her article which would have paid any attention to those who disagree — what if someone does not accept the idea that Bruce Jenner is really now a woman, or that anyone can somehow change his sex?

It begins with a falsehood. “Sex,” Miss Wamsley wrote, “refers to a person’s biological status and is typically assigned at birth, usually on the basis of external anatomy. Sex is typically categorized as male, female or intersex.” This is wholly untrue. While we might forgive His Majesty King Henry VIII for believing that Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn were somehow responsible for his first two children being daughters, the role of the X and Y chromosomes in determining the sex of mammals, including humans, has been known for over a century. Sex is not somehow “assigned” at birth; sex is determined at conception, depending upon whether the sperm which fertilized the egg carries the X or Y chromosome. We recognize the sex of a newborn child by visual examination of the child, but the characteristics which indicate sex developed long before birth, during gestation, as programmed in by the developing child’s DNA.

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

Everyone has pronouns that are used when referring to them – and getting those pronouns right is not exclusively a transgender issue.

“Pronouns are basically how we identify ourselves apart from our name. It’s how someone refers to you in conversation,” says Mary Emily O’Hara, a communications officer at GLAAD. “And when you’re speaking to people, it’s a really simple way to affirm their identity.”

“So, for example, using the correct pronouns for trans and nonbinary youth is a way to let them know that you see them, you affirm them, you accept them and to let them know that they’re loved during a time when they’re really being targeted by so many discriminatory anti-trans state laws and policies,” O’Hara says.

“It’s really just about letting someone know that you accept their identity. And it’s as simple as that.”

Well, yes it is . . . and I don’t. When Bruce Jenner tells me that he is now a woman, I do not believe him and I do not accept his claims. To refer to him as “Caitlyn,” to use the feminine pronouns in reference to him, is to concede something I do not and will not concede; it would be both lying to him, leading him to believe that I went along with his claims, and it would be lying to myself.

But, at least Miss Wamsley was sort of asking us to use the terms the transgender would like. It was November 29, 2018, that The New York Times granted OpEd space to Chad Malloy[1]Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be a woman, going by the name ‘Parker’ Malloy. to publish an article claiming that Twitter’s ban on ‘deadnaming’ and misgendering[2]‘Deadnaming’ refers to using the name a person was given at birth, such as Chad Malloy rather than his faux name of ‘Parker’ Malloy, while misgendering means referring to … Continue reading actually promotes free speech rather than stifling it. On October 4, 2019, the Times published an OpEd by staffer Andrew J Marantz, entitled Free Speech Is Killing Us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

Messrs Marantz and Malloy obviously believe that what hey can do about it is simply to ban any publication of speech with which they disagree. If I say that no, Mr Malloy is not a woman, I have not harmed him, at least not beyond hurting his precious little feelings, nor have I prevented anyone else from going along with his claims of being a woman; all that I would be doing is being truthful to myself.

It does not matter how well or how poorly this article is written; neither The New York Times nor any other outlet of the credentialed media would ever publish it, because they have established transgenderism as part of their core beliefs. In publishing Miss Wamsley’s article in its present form, it becomes clear that NPR has done so as well.

To control language is to control the terms of the debate, and the credentialed media clearly believe that if they can just get people to refer to Bradley Manning as ‘Chelsea,’ to get people to use the preferred gender identity pronouns and terms in reference to the ‘transgendered,’ such concessions will go a long way to validating their argument.

But I will not, and I urge others to look at what they are saying, and how they are saying it, and not to go along with the left’s attempts at controlling speech.
______________________________________
Cross posted on American Free News Network.

References

References
↑1 Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be a woman, going by the name ‘Parker’ Malloy.
↑2 ‘Deadnaming’ refers to using the name a person was given at birth, such as Chad Malloy rather than his faux name of ‘Parker’ Malloy, while misgendering means referring to someone by his biological sex rather than his preferred ‘gender identity.’
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Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

When the Centers for Disease Control finally changed their recommendations for mandatory mask wearing on May 13th, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) quickly went along with it. The Kroger Company KR: (%) did not. Kroger had previously announced, on March 4th, that it would continue to require masks of all employees and customers in the Lone Star State when Governor Greg Abbott (R-TX) announced the end to his states mask mandate, beginning March 10th.

Well, Kroger must’ve heard from its customers, because, after announcing that masks would still be required in their stores following the CDC’s changes, six days later, they changed their minds. I would like to think my couple of tweets, which included Kroger as an addressee, that I was taking my business to Meijer’s instead, contributed to their change of mind.

I may still take my business to Meijer’s. Kroger is more convenient to us, by about four miles, but still . . . .However, fear still rules the day in some people. The Philadelphia Inquirer published an OpEd piece by Cameron Adamez, the front-end manager at South Philly Food Co-op, and Mr Adamez wants everybody to keep wearing masks.

With the recent CDC policy changes, public expectations around health during the pandemic are changing. The city has lived more than a year with masks in public and the populace is beset with pandemic fatigue. Now, in many cases, the people are ditching their masks. Generally, that’s a good thing — a sign that we are in the clear. But there are some instances where, regardless of vaccine status, people should keep masks on for the safety of others.

Essential workers like grocery store employees are still at risk and their safety needs to be considered. Stores like Aldi, Trader Joe’s, and Sam’s Club almost immediately dropped their masking requirements for customers. This is a mistake. Grocery stores should consider the safety of their workers and keep masking requirements in place for customers and employees.

If people like Mr Adamez are concerned that their safety might be jeopardized by people not wearing masks, they are completely free to continue to wear their own. He stated, “It is not always possible for workers to avoid contagion entirely,” and this is true, but it is true concerning every communicable disease. His argument would be just as valid if someone entered the store with chicken pox, which is at its most contagious phase a couple of days before the blisters appear. Measles, rubella and rubeola, are also highly contagious, and spread by airborne droplets.

“There is no way to quickly verify if a customer is vaccinated,” he wrote, and that’s true enough. Any store which is going to ask to see your vaccination papers before allowing you to enter is a store which will quickly lose most people’s business. Mr Adamez apparently knows this, and said, “Requiring anyone in a store to wear a mask is a much more reasonable request.”

But is it reasonable? What Mr Adamez is asking is for other people to protect his health. Is it not his responsibility to protect his own health?

In the end, his article is driven by fear, and fear was what the government used to get so many Americans to comply with restrictions on their individual, constitutional rights. For some, that fear will be a long time subsiding. Frank Herbert wrote, in Dune, that “Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.” Mr Adamez, who stated that he was fully vaccinated, has expressed his fear, though he couched it in terms of being concerned for the health of other people.

To me, it’s very simple: if you see someone without a mask, and you are afraid that he might not be vaccinated, and you are afraid you might catch the virus from him, then stay away from him. That is your right. What is not your right is to try to impose responsibilities on him due to your own fears.