Author Archives: Dana Pico

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LOL! Journolism strikes again at the Lexington Herald-Leader!

And here I wondered if the Lexington Herald-Leader ever paid any attention to my articles!

I noted, on April 23rd, that the Lexington Herald-Leader does not like posting photographs of accused criminals, even when those suspects are still at large and publishing the photo might help the police capture him. But the paper surprised me when they did publish such a photograph:

Kentucky man allegedly tried to kidnap 3-year-old boy, offered $1,000 to buy him

By Bill Estep | April 23, 2021 | 9:41 AM EDT

Ronnie L. Helton was charged in April 2021 with attempting to kidnap a child. Whitley County Detention Center. Photo copied to my site from the Herald-Leader.

A Kentucky man who allegedly tried to kidnap a 3-year-old boy as he played in the yard has been charged in federal court.

A grand jury indicted Ronnie L. Helton, of Corbin, Thursday on one charged of attempted kidnapping.

Helton, 73, was arrested on state charges hours after an April 7 incident in Corbin in which a woman named Kristy Baker told police a man had tried to take her grandchild.

Baker said the boy was playing on a trailer sitting next to a fence around her yard when a man parked across the street and walked over to the child, according to the citation in the case.

The photo of the suspect was posted on the Herald-Leader’s website in the original article; I saved that photo to my computer and my website. I notified, via Twitter, the Herald-Leader of my article, and my point:

Peter Baniak, notified in the tweet as @pbaniak, is the Editor of the newspaper.

Well, I had reason to check on the newspaper’s original article again today, and shazamm!, at least as of 5:36 PM EDT on Sunday, May 16, 2021, the mugshot of the suspect has disappeared. I did a Google search, to see if perhaps the charges had been dropped against Mr Helton, but found nothing to indicate that. Many other media outlets still had the suspect’s mugshot on their websites, but the Herald-Leader took it off of their site, and had done so rather recently.

This leads to a few obvious questions:

  • Why did the Herald-Leader post the suspect’s mugshot in the first place, when they had been previously declining to post police mugshots, including one of a suspect at large, one which the publication just might have aided the Lexington Police Department in his apprehension?
  • Who took the decision to publish this one suspect’s mugshot, despite the fact that the paper apparently did not do so normally?
  • Is the Herald-Leader’s apparent policy the newspaper’s own, or was this dictated by McClatchy?
  • Why did the paper wait at least several days to remove the mugshot after being notified of the departure from normal procedure?
  • Why, since the mugshot was available for several days, did the paper decide lately to remove it?

We have previously noted the newspaper’s editorial positions, and just how out-of-touch the editors are with their readership in central and eastern Kentucky.

The Herald-Leader is not the only media source in central and eastern Kentucky. In my previous articles on the newspaper’s declining to publish mugshots, I was usually able to get the photos from the websites of other Lexington media outlets. Those outlets, normally television stations, which are visually oriented, more complete information to their viewers than the newspaper is to its readers.[1]My subscription is digital only; I live so far out in the sticks that physical delivery of the print newspaper is not available.

Perhaps the editors of the newspaper have no choice; perhaps this was dictated to them by McClatchy. But the newspaper has transformed journalism into journolism, withholding information from its readers, for whatever reasons it has. This is not a good look.

References

References
↑1 My subscription is digital only; I live so far out in the sticks that physical delivery of the print newspaper is not available.
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If you’re scared, say you’re scared!

I’ve heard this meme, if you’re scared, say you’re scared, for a long time, and it was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw this column in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The CDC’s new mask rules promise freedom. But to me they mean fear. | Opinion

I’m sorry to say, I don’t trust people to follow these guidelines safely.

by Alison McCook, For the Inquirer | May 14, 2021

Alison McCook, from her Twitter profile.

On Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made a surprise announcement: Anyone who is fully vaccinated can now stop masking and social distancing, including often indoors.

Though many public health experts had said they thought we would need masks when indoors with strangers for at least another year, the nation’s health protection agency has declared that anyone who received the last dose of their COVID-19 vaccine at least two weeks ago can start living life the way they did before this god-awful thing began. Soon after, Pennsylvania followed suit.

To many people, this is a happy surprise: Freedom! Faces! Parties!

Not me.

I have spent the last 20-plus years as a science journalist. I believe in the vaccines, and that the CDC’s new advice is likely supported by the latest data. I believe in Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who says he feels good about the CDC’s new decision and wants people to feel like we are approaching “normality.” But Thursday’s announcement from the CDC has filled me with fear.

Fear is a horrible emotion, and people are afraid to admit to fear; there’s a definite stigma associated with it. The Inquirer even illustrated the column with a photo of the Rocky statue outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the fictitious Rocky Balboa, played by Sylvester Stallone, is supposed to be an icon of fearlessness. We previously noted the Inquirer’s profile of murdered teenager, and basketball player, Quamir Mitchell, and how his coach, Adrian Burke said of him, “He wasn’t scared of anything.” That’s the kind of thing people want said of them.

But I have to give some credit to Alison McCook, the column author. Given the stigma that is associated with fear, it does take some courage to say, in public, that she was “filled . . . with fear.”

Miss McCook is vaccinated against COVID-19, but, under the definition that to be “fully vaccinated,” one must be 14 days past his final dose, she won’t be fully vaccinated for another nine days, on May 25th, a day she stated she has marked on her calendar.

She does have her reasons. Miss McCook has a seven-year-old daughter, one too young to qualify for a vaccine yet. The Food and Drug Administration authorized, on May 10th, use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for children 12 to 15 years of age.[1]CNN noted that “Five states — Alabama, Iowa, North Carolina, Oregon and Tennessee — either allow some ages in that group to consent for themselves or leave requirements up to … Continue reading

But her greatest fear, her “biggest concern,” is that she simply does not trust that other people will obey the CDC guidelines, and wear masks if they have not been vaccinated. How, she asked, could she know that the person who comes close to her indoors, without a mask, is really one of the vaccinated?

That’s a fear expressed by a whole bunch of people, as we have noted previously. Jill Filipovic McCormick wants you to have to carry some form of #VaccinePassport, and President Biden tried to order people to either get vaccinated or wear a mask, something that might have been better received if he had asked rather than ordered. Given that he has no authority in this matter — the various mask mandates were all issued by state governments, not the feds — all that he can do is shout impotently. The New York Times reported that:

In the informal survey, 80 percent (of epidemiol;ogists) said they thought Americans would need to wear masks in public indoor places for at least another year. Just 5 percent said people would no longer need to wear masks indoors by this summer. In large crowds outdoors, like at a concert or protest, 88 percent of the epidemiologists said it was necessary even for fully vaccinated people to wear masks. “Unless the vaccination rates increase to 80 or 90 percent over the next few months, we should wear masks in large public indoor settings,” said Vivian Towe, a program officer at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

The real problem is that too many in government, the CDC, the Democratic governors, and the political left, all used COVID-19 to stoke fear, to stoke fear to gain authoritarian control. Miss McCook’s fear is real, but it is a fear stoked by attempts to sensationalize this virus for fear’s sake, and for control. We shut down our economy, threw twenty million people out of work, restricted people’s to their homes, closed schools and churches, and millions and millions of Americans went along with it, all because of fear. Miss McCook lost her father, not to the virus itself, but because of the unreasoning fear of the virus, as the nursing home in which he was living was shut down to all visitors.

That fear struck her, and it struck her seven-year-old daughter as well:

 

For some reason, the drive-thru line at the donut shop took forever, and we inched forward for 25 minutes before it was our turn. As I approached the window with the employee handing over orders, my daughter spoke with alarm from the backseat: “Mom, he’s not wearing a mask!” Surely she must be wrong, I thought to myself.

Nope.

As I pulled up to the drive-thru window, the 20-something employee handed us her donut, smiled, and told us to have a nice day. She was right: He had no mask. It wasn’t pulled under his nose or chin, or hanging by its loop from his ear. It was totally absent. (But what if he has a medical reason for not wearing a mask? Yeah, not likely. )

I was stunned. I hadn’t seen a stranger’s teeth up close for months. Unsure what to do, I grabbed the donut bag and sped off, throwing it into the front seat and telling my daughter she couldn’t eat it.

I know that surfaces are not a major source of transmission; it was probably safe for her to eat the donut. But I was angry — I had just been assaulted by a toothy smile, and I wanted her to know that was not okay.

Assaulted? Assaulted? Miss McCook described it in terms almost as though her daughter and she had just barely escaped being raped

So we drove another 15 minutes back towards our local donut shop that has no drive-thru, dodged the indoor diners and got her donut (no sprinkles).

There’s been a lot to be angry about over the last few months. And I’ve always been bothered by people who refused to take COVID restrictions seriously. But at this stage in the pandemic, anyone’s laissez-faire approach sends me into a blind rage. I’ve been seething about that drive-thru for days.

Fear, and rage. This is what the left have been sending out through our society, and this is what Miss McCook has absorbed, and what she has transmitted to her daughter.

I get why people don’t want to abide by the recommendations anymore — believe me. But we are SO CLOSE to putting the worst of this behind us. SO CLOSE, PEOPLE! And every unvaccinated person who throws away their mask, takes a trip without quarantining, or invites friends over for dinner because they’re lonely, is making all of this harder on the rest of us. I’m dying to do those things, too — but because they are doing it, I have to wait even longer before I can. It’s like I’m stuck forever in that drive-thru line, watching cars cut in front of me and move up to the window, while I’m in the same goddamned spot.

According to the New York Times, people in my area are considered to be at a “very high risk” of exposure to COVID-19 (hospitalizations are up 42%), meaning we should avoid nonessential travel. During the five days my kid was off school, more than 4,000 Americans died of COVID. And have you heard of Michigan?

Yeah, I’ve heard of Michigan, and I wrote about it, noting that in masked up, highly restricted Michigan has a population with a higher percentage of vaccinated people, and still more than thrice the rate of new COVID infections of Texas, which had dropped its mask mandate and most other restrictions two months earlier.

I checked in with some other people I know who are mustering up the energy to continue to take COVID seriously, and they are feeling the same white-hot rage at rule-breakers that I am. One unvaccinated parent who also spent spring break at home told me some of her co-workers had recently flown to Jamaica and England. “Have you screamed recently?” she asked. When I told her my kid is always around, she suggested I lock myself in the car. “It will take a few times to let it go,” she added.

I’ll try it. In the meantime, I hope everyone enjoyed their spring break. If you aren’t vaccinated and went somewhere great, please don’t tell me about it.

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Paul Atreides used the “litany of fear” to conquer pain:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I do not know Miss McCook, never met her, and the odds that I’ve even passed her on the street are vanishingly small. And perhaps some will think I’ve been harsh on her in this, but I think not. I honor her honest statements, statements of fear and of rage, statements not many would have had the courage to admit.

But Miss McCook is a victim, a victim of the propaganda spread by the fearmongers of 2020, those who were genuinely afraid, and those who wanted to use COVID-19 to push a political agenda. Fearful is no way to live, and nothing that you want to teach your children.

References

References
↑1 CNN noted that “Five states — Alabama, Iowa, North Carolina, Oregon and Tennessee — either allow some ages in that group to consent for themselves or leave requirements up to individual vaccine providers.” The other states all require parental consent for the administration of vaccines.
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Killadelphia By cooperating with evil, the people of Philadelphia have brought evil upon themselves.

I’ve said it several times: to the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, killings in the city aren’t newsworthy unless the victim is a child, someone who was a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl. We need to stop pretending that #BlackLivesMatter because in the City of Brotherly Love, it’s very apparent that they don’t.

So, I was somewhat surprised looking at the Inquirer’s website this morning and finding 4 wounded in West Philly shooting: The shooting happened on Market Street near 56th Street, and then this one:

2 teens shot in Harrowgate

The shooting happened on the 1900 block of East Wensley Street.

By Robert Moran | May 14, 2021

A police crime scene unit officer investigates a double shooting in the 1900 block of E. Wensley street in the 24th police district. Some 17 evidence makers lay on the street and sidewalk. Friday May 14, 2021. Steven M. Falk, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

Two teens were shot Friday night in the city’s Harrowgate section, police said.

The shooting happened around 6 p.m. on the 1900 block of East Wensley Street. An 18-year-old man was shot several times in the head and torso. He was taken by police to Temple University Hospital and was listed in extremely critical condition.

A 17-year-old male was shot in the left leg. He was taken by medics to Temple and was listed in stable condition.

Police reported no arrests and no other details were available.

That’s it; that’s the entire story. Normally, I don’t reproduce photos from the Inquirer, but this one is very germane to the story. It shows most of seventeen “evidence markers,” which normally means shell casings or bullets found at the scene.

Both stories were by Robert Moran, who “covers breaking news at night in the Philadelphia region,” so yeah, shootings are going to be his beat. Neither of the stories was on the Inquirer’s website main page; I found them listed at the bottom of a main page article I opened.

And then I found another, which was also buried:

A 16-year-old fatally shot in Southwest Philly was weeks away from graduating high school

Quamir Mitchell was a senior at West Philadelphia High School, a standout basketball player, and something of a role model for younger teens in the neighborhood.

by Anna Orso and Chris Palmer | Updated May 14, 2021

The 16-year-old boy fatally shot near a Southwest Philadelphia basketball court Thursday night was a high school senior just weeks away from graduation, a standout basketball player, and something of a role model for younger teens in the neighborhood.

That’s how several people remembered Quamir Mitchell on Friday, the day after he was killed and a 13-year-old boy was wounded in a burst of gunfire near the Deritis Playground — a crime that police said remained something of a mystery in the early stages of the investigation.

Adrian Burke, Mitchell’s basketball coach at West Philadelphia High School, visited the crime scene Friday morning, on the 5600 block of Grays Avenue, to offer a prayer for Mitchell. Burke had known the teen for a decade, recalling his big heart, his love of basketball, his tendency to be “dressed to the nines.”

“He was phenomenal,” Burke said, tears pooling in his eyes. “Just a beautiful kid. He was so strong in his skin, and he knew who he was.”

There’s more at the original, but, like I said, the Inquirer provided more coverage because young Mr Mitchell was a “somebody.”

In a story we previously noted, on Monday, May 10th, the Inquirer did note the weekend’s violence in the city, which had one pretty bad paragraph:

The shootings claimed 25 victims in 14 incidents. The victims, 22 males and three females, ranged in age from 17 to 64, and detectives recovered 121 bullet shell casings, officials said.

That’s pretty bad: at least 121 shots fired, actually hitting ‘only’ 25 people, and killing ‘only’ seven of them. The Philadelphia gang bangers are some pretty lousy shots!

Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said some of the bloodshed was fueled by drug turf battles, arguments, robberies, and retaliation for previous killings — a motive police believe was behind three of the weekend killings.

Smith said investigators need the public’s help to solve the crimes — the arrest rate for slayings this year is just 46%.

“It’s up to the community,” he said. “It’s up to these individuals who are committing these acts of violence. They have to take a step back and say: ‘Wow. Is it really worth it? Are we going to continue going in this direction?’”

Smith asked anyone with information about the crimes to notify the police at 215-686-3334, 215-686-3335, or 215-686-TIPS. Tips can also be left at phillyunsolvedmurders.com, he said. Those who provide tips that lead to the arrest and conviction of a suspect will receive $20,000 from the city, officials said.

So far, no one has been arrested in any of the seven slayings and one man was arrested in one of the nonfatal shootings, said Vanore, who added that detectives are culling through video evidence from the various scenes.

An arrest warrant has been issued in one of the slayings, but the suspect remains at large.

Of course, the Inquirer did not print a photo of the suspect, which could help police find him, if someone in the neighborhood spots him and actually calls the cops, but it is possible that the police did not have a photo of the suspect to give to the newspaper.

There are plenty of people, plenty of people, in those neighborhoods who know who shot the victims, but who won’t ‘snitch,’ because they don’t trust the police, and don’t want to become victims themselves. The neighborhood enables these killings, this violence, by its participation in covering up for and hiding the thugs in their midst. With a District Attorney like Larry Krasner, who is trying to reduce ‘mass incarceration’ at a time when more people need to be incarcerated, it’s hard to blame them.

As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, May 13th, the 133rd day of the year, 192 souls had been sent early to their eternal rewards in the City of Brotherly Love. That’s 1.44 people every day, putting Philadelphia on track for 527 homicides for 2021, which would blow 1990’s 500, and last years 499 out of the water. And yet, with all of that, the Inquirer’s Editorial Board actually endorsed Mr Krasner for re-election, saying, “A complex, relatively recent spike in gun violence isn’t a reason to return to the mass incarceration regime of yesteryear, but a challenge to do better.”

No, it’s most certainly a reason to start locking up the bad guys again. Bad guys in jail aren’t bad guys out on the street, committing more crimes.

Come time for the general election, the Editorial Board will, once again, endorse almost all Democrats, and the voters of the city will elect almost all Democrats, and that process will continue in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Philadelphia is a Hellhole, but it is a Hellhole created by the people living there. They are like the Palestinians living in Gaza, providing food, clothing, shelter and hiding places for Hamas, and then shocked, shocked! when Hamas shoot rockets against Israel, and then the Israeli Defence Force destroys their neighborhoods. By cooperating with evil, the people of Philadelphia have brought evil upon themselves.

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Why June 11th?

We have been saying, all along, that Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) has been playing politics with his COVID-19 executive orders, planning on ending them just in time for the state Supreme Court to simply declare the cases against him moot rather than rule on them.

The state Supreme Court has consolidated the cases against the General Assembly’s new laws restricting Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) ’emergency’ powers under KRS 39A, and a lawsuit against the Governor exercising those powers. The state Court then set June 10th, eight weeks after consolidating those cases, for oral arguments.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

‘Back to normal.’ Beshear removing almost all COVID-19 restrictions in KY on June 11.

By Alex Aquisto | May 14, 2021 | 10:58 AM | Updated 11:55 AM EDT

Kentucky will return to full capacity everywhere and fully lifts its mask mandate in less than a month, ending more than a year of COVID-19-related restrictions, Gov. Andy Beshear announced on Friday.

“We will return to 100% capacity for all venues and events in exactly one month, on June 11 . . . [and] life will be almost fully back to normal,” the governor said in a live update. That day, the state will also rescind its mask mandate for everyone, including those who are unvaccinated, “with the exceptions of places where people are the most vulnerable,” he said.

Beshear is waiting a month to fully lift those restrictions to allow time for adolescents ages 12-15 to get vaccinated. That age group was given the green light by federal health agencies earlier this week to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, and most vaccination sites in Kentucky just began administering doses to those teens on Thursday.

“One months also gives notice and time to everyone else who has not yet received their [dose],” Beshear said.

So, what is so magical about June 11th? It’s a Friday, but what makes conditions different on June 11th than on June 9th? It’s four weeks from today, but who knows what will happen in four weeks?

Ahhh, but it’s one day after June 10th, the day the state Supreme Court will hear oral arguments against the Honorable Mr Beshear’s[1]Some of the commenters on Patterico’s Pontifications have complained about me referring to the Governor as Reichsstatthalter, the German title of Reich Governor, so I decided to use only decent … Continue reading illegal and unconstitutional actions, and he can argue to the Justices, ‘hey, everything’s going back to normal tomorrow, so everything is moot, there’s no case, let’s just drop it.’

But there are a couple of problems with that:

  1. If the cases are simply dropped, if our distinguished Governor decides that his edicts need to be reimposed, the legal process will start all over again, giving him yet more time, once he gets partisan Democratic Judge Phillip Shepherd to give him another injunction against enforcement of the laws.
  2. If the cases are simply dropped as moot, our noble Governor will have gotten away with restricting the constitutional rights of all Kentuckians, with no penalty.

It’s clear: with the support of too many of the sheeple, our rights will have been restricted for fifteen months, and the Governor will walk away smiling. The only thing we will be able to do is defeat him for re-election, and that won’t happen until 2023.

The voters of the Commonwealth of Kentucky gave Republicans, Republicans who were running against our well-meaning Governor’s executive decrees, fourteen additional seats in the state House of Representatives, for a 75-25 Republican advantage, and two more seats, out of just seventeen up for election, in the state Senate, for a 30-8 Republican advantage. The voters wanted to stop Governor Beshear’s actions, but a partisan judge, and an officially non-partisan but practically Democrat-controlled state Supreme Court, allowed him to escape the democratically-elected will of the people.

Yes, this makes me angry.

References

References
↑1 Some of the commenters on Patterico’s Pontifications have complained about me referring to the Governor as Reichsstatthalter, the German title of Reich Governor, so I decided to use only decent and pleasant adjectives to refer to Mr Beshear. Some readers here might think I am using such adjectives sarcastically, and I shall not disabuse them of that thought.
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The left are pro-choice on exactly one thing (Part 2)

@Jenn_Pastrak is a proud Canadian, and says so on Twitter! She is so proud of her positions that, when she got into a Twitter debate with @FreckledLiberty, and started losing it — rather spectacularly, I might add — she wound up blocking her opponent:

Freckled Liberty is an online libertarian, a Jew —oh noes! — and, well here’s her Twitter bio:

Well, Miss Pastrak revealed to the world the difference between Canadians and Americans:

And thus we have it: Americans value freedom and liberty and our constitutional rights; Canadians, or at least Miss Pastrak, values the collective over the individual. That’s why freedom of speech in Canada is not protected, why you can be criminally liable if you say something which hurts someone else’s precious little feelings, why Canadians have no individual rights to not go along with the hive mind. She had the nerve to tweet “anti-vaxxers shouldn’t reproduce,” yet got her precious little feelings hurt when there was was some actual blowback on that. A former American President once said something about staying out of the kitchen if you can’t stand the heat, but I suppose that wouldn’t mean anything to a Canadian, would it? Then again, we have our own Special Snowflakes™ like Amanda Marcotte, perfectly willing to stir up some [insert slang term for feces here], but very ready to block anyone who disagrees with her.

Miss Pastrak did not resist, and she has been assimilated. What is amazing, though, is that she admits it. As an American, I’d be ashamed to admit something like that, but then, as an American, I am used to having my rights, and exercising them. Miss Pastrak would apparently have been right at home in the Soviet Union, where the collective, as defined by the General Secretary of the Communist Party, always trumped the individual. She would have been right there, were she the right age, celebrating sending Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anatoli Sharanskii to the GULag.

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The left are pro-choice on exactly one thing

The Centers for Disease Control, and President Joe Biden, have decided that “fully vaccinated” people, by which they mean people who are 14 days past their final vaccine dose, no longer need to wear masks in public, other than in some specialized and crowded conditions, such as hospitals, nursing homes, or prisons.

The new advice comes with caveats. Even vaccinated individuals must cover their faces and physically distance when going to doctors, hospitals or long-term care facilities like nursing homes; when traveling by bus, plane, train or other modes of public transportation, or while in transportation hubs like airports and bus stations; and when in prisons, jails or homeless shelters.

William Teach noted President Biden’s declarative tweet that “The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do. The choice is yours.” The President, of course, has no authority in any of this: the mask mandates which existed were issued not by the federal governments, save on federal property or in federally licensed transportation modes, but by state Governors.

But for the left authoritarians, that ain’t good enough!

Streiff from RedState noted that “her inner fascist emerges,” as though we didn’t already know about it. I do wonder if the lovely Mrs McCormick[1]Jill Filipovic is married to a gentleman named Ty McCormick, a senior editor of Foreign Affairs. I always show the proper respect for married ladies by referring to their proper names. thinks we should do things the old-fashioned way, as the Germans pioneered it some eighty years ago, or whether she’d like something 21st century, like implantable, scannable microchips.

It’s kind of amusing that the left want everybody to have a #VaccinePassport to be allowed to do almost anything, but are wholly resistant to the concept of requiring identification to vote.

More amusing, though sadly so, are all of the messages from people complaining that there is no enforcement mechanism. One guy tweeted, “I hope you have a plan to track people who are not vaxxed. Otherwise, no one will wear masks. This is scaring me.” There are thousands upon thousands of other like-minded sheeple.

The vaccine itself? Yeah, I’ve had it; first dose on April Fool’s Day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo, something I find mildly amusing. I think it wise to get vaccinated. But I’ll lay in Hell before I carry around a ‘vaccine passport’!

We have reached the state — actually, we reached that point in March of 2020! — that it is more important to fight for freedom and liberty and our constitutional rights than it is to fight this disease! The ‘progressives,’ to whom William Teach refers as “nice fascists”, would surrender all of our freedoms, because they value compliance over liberty.

References

References
↑1 Jill Filipovic is married to a gentleman named Ty McCormick, a senior editor of Foreign Affairs. I always show the proper respect for married ladies by referring to their proper names.
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Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen. When the CDC say that "fully vaccinated" Americans can go maskless, does that mean states will require vaccine passports?

In an attempt to boost President Biden’s status reopen the closed economy, the Centers for Disease Control are stating that Americans can start to take off their masks. From The New York Times:

Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the C.D.C. said.

May 13, 2021 | 2:20 PM EDT

In a sharp turnabout from previous recommendations, federal health officials on Thursday advised that Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus may stop wearing masks or maintaining social distance in most indoor and outdoor settings, regardless of size.

The advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention comes as welcome news to Americans who have tired of restrictions and marks a watershed moment in the pandemic. Masks ignited controversy in communities across the United States, symbolizing a bitter partisan divide over approaches to the pandemic and a badge of political affiliation.

Permission to stop using them now offers an incentive to the many millions who are still holding out on vaccination. As of Wednesday, about 154 million people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, but only about one-third of the nation, some 117.6 million people, have been fully vaccinated.

But the pace has slowed: Providers are administering about 2.16 million doses per day on average, about a 36 percent decrease from the peak of 3.38 million reported in mid-April.

“The science is clear: If you are fully vaccinated, you are protected, and you can start doing the things that you stopped doing because of the pandemic,” the C.D.C. said in a statement on Thursday.

The new advice comes with caveats. Even vaccinated individuals must cover their faces and physically distance when going to doctors, hospitals or long-term care facilities like nursing homes; when traveling by bus, plane, train or other modes of public transportation, or while in transportation hubs like airports and bus stations; and when in prisons, jails or homeless shelters.

In deference to local authorities, the C.D.C. said vaccinated Americans must continue to abide by existing state, local, or tribal laws and regulations, and follow local rules for businesses and workplaces. Individuals are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot or the second dose of either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine series.

Still, the changes are likely to galvanize Americans who have become unaccustomed to appearing in public unmasked — or to seeing others do so.

Note what is being said here: when the CDC say “Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus may stop wearing masks,” they are talking about Americans who are completely indistinguishable from any other American. At least so far, I haven’t seen any proposals from the CDC that getting that second dose of the vaccine be accompanied by a six digit tattoo on my forearm, complete with the date that the final dose was given, so that anyone could tell that I was two weeks past receiving the second dose.

Upon receiving my second dose of the Moderna vaccine, on Cinco de Mayo, the Estill County Health Department indicated the vaccine lot number and the date I received it on a CDC-provided COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card, with a special plastic container in which to keep it, and the record-keeper told me that I should carry it with me.

Well, not just no, but Hell no! She had no real authority, of course, but she was giving me the message that the government would like us all to have: Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen.[1]Ich spreche kein Deutsch. Dies war die Antwort von Google Translate auf “We need to see your documents.”

So, what will the CDC, or President Joe Biden, or Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) try to do now? Yes, I will be considered “fully vaccinated” on May 19th, which just happens to be our 42nd wedding anniversary, but I will look no different then from the way I look now, nor from the way I looked on March 31st, the day before my first dose. Will Governor Beshear order the Staatspolizei to stop everyone they see not wearing a mask, and demand to see their vaccination cards?

As we noted previously, Governor Beshear has been trying to finesse his executive orders, to try to render the legal cases against his illegal and unconstitutional executive orders moot before the state Supreme Court decides on them. He stated earlier that he would ease — not lift — his capacity restrictions on businesses on Friday, May 28st, just before the Memorial Day holiday weekend, and his most recent renewal of the mask mandate expires the day prior to that.

The Governor said that he hoped that the Bluegrass State would have no restrictions at all by July. That, of course, is designed to end all restrictions before the (probable) time the state Supreme Court would issue its rulings on the cases concerning his executive orders, so that the Court could simply dismiss the cases as moot. That would mean that the injunctions by Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd, a Democratic partisan, would expire, so the laws restricting the Governor’s executive orders would go into effect, but, without a ruling, if the Governor decided that he wanted to issue such orders again, he would still have a basis on which to file suit, again with the odious Judge Shepherd, to enjoin enforcement of those laws, and another several months of legal limbo.

Can you tell that I have exactly zero trust in either the Governor or Judge Shepherd?

While it will be a relief when all of these ridiculous restrictions are gone, we cannot forget that our constitutional rights were restricted by government orders, frequently by executive decrees only and not with the consent of state legislatures, and if this can be done once, it can be done again. If tyranny is excused, tyrants will return.
___________________________________________
Update:

From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Beshear: Fully vaccinated Kentuckians can take off their masks in most settings

By Alex Aquisto | May 13, 2021 | 3:54 PM | Updated 4:11 PM EDT

Heralding it as a return to “normalcy” for many, Gov. Andy Beshear announced Thursday that Kentuckians who are fully vaccinated will no longer be required to wear a mask in most indoor and outdoor settings.

The announcement comes on the heels of a recommendation issued earlier Thursday by the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who says it’s safe for vaccinated people to remove their masks and not practice social distancing in most indoor public spaces. Everyone will still need to mask in crowded groups of others, like when using public transportation, in hospitals and in congregate settings such as nursing homes and correctional facilities.

“Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities — large or small — without wearing a mask or physically distancing,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a White House briefing. “If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.”

Beshear, in a brief video update, called the change “outstanding,” and said he would alter Kentucky’s statewide mask mandate to reflect the easing of that restriction. Nearly 1.9 million Kentuckians have received at least their initial dose of a COVID-19 vaccine — 53% of the population age 18 and older, and 43% of the total state population.

“The CDC says it is safe to take that mask off,” and Kentucky will “immediately follow that guidance,” Beshear said. “It means that we are so close to normalcy, and we’re going to be changing Kentucky’s mask mandate to be the same with those CDC guidelines.”

How interesting it is that, among the laws passed by the General Assembly, was House Bill 1, to allow businesses and other organizations to reopen as long as they followed CDC guidelines. Governor Beshear vetoed that bill, which was then passed over his veto, yet he has almost immediately followed the changes in CDC guidelines anyway. It’s almost as though his primary objective was to exercise his power, rather than allow the state legislature to do so.

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↑1 Ich spreche kein Deutsch. Dies war die Antwort von Google Translate auf “We need to see your documents.”
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The #woke really do hate them some Israelis! The left love the people who would kill them first

The Israelis made a huge mistake in 1967-68. When they conquered Gaza, the Sinai, Judea and Samaria, they should have decided, right then, that if they wanted to keep that territory, that they needed to round up and expel every last Arab living in those lands. It would have been harsh, it would have been brutal, and it would have been too reminiscent of the Nazis’ roundup of the Jews, but it would have settled things over fifty years ago. Israel would have the land they want, along with shortened, more defensible borders, while the Palestinians would be problems for Jordan and Syria, not Israel.

The world might not have liked it, the world might have shaken its collective finger in disapproval, but the world would have gotten used to it.

That they didn’t do. Rather, Israel decided to just make life tough on the Arabs living there, thinking that they’d all emigrate to Syria and Jordan and Egypt. That didn’t happen, and now hundreds of thousands of Arabs have turned into millions of Arabs. The Israelis are strong, tough, and smart, but they have proven to be piss poor conquerors.

So, now they are stuck with millions of Arabs who hate their guts, and don’t know what to do about them. The Israelis want the land in Judea and Samaria, and are slowly trying to colonize it, but that isn’t really going to work.

Arial Sharon ordered the Israeli evacuation of Gaza in 2005, turning the land over to the ‘Palestinians’ to do with what they would. The hope was that the Arabs would actually be responsible, and turn Gaza into a peaceful, self-governed Palestinian enclave. Gaza is on the resource-poor side, but it does have the best beaches in the Mediterranean. The Arabs could have built a tourist Mecca serving all of Europe, but, instead, they let their hatred of the Jews fester and flourish, and simply built a stronghold for Hamas.

So, every so often, Hamas shoot rockets into Israel, and Israel returns the favor, in kind and in spades. The majority of the Palestinian population are too f(ornicating) stupid to realize that all they are doing is setting up getting their own homes destroyed, and keeping themselves poor, by providing cover and support for Hamas. The Palestinians couldn’t turn Gaza into a peaceful, self-governed area because they are too stupid to do so, and have proven that for the past 15½ years.

You think the NYT isn’t liberal? This is a screen capture from today’s NYT webpage.

William Teach noted how the Grey Lady, The New York Times, believe we can control the Israelis through our tax dollars. In the land of the left, the Palestinians are the poor, down-trodden good guys while the Israelis are the big, bad bullies of the Middle East. If the Israelis were truly the big, bad bullies, they’d have done what I said they should have done in 1967.

The Biden administration has been timid and restrained, slowing the U.N. Security Council’s engagement on the issue, and it has yet to name an ambassador to Israel. But the stakes are too high for evasions, and President Biden should stand with others on the Security Council to demand a cease-fire before this escalates further.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken helpfully said “it’s vital now to de-escalate.” The administration should also express strong concern about the planned evictions of Palestinians that provoked the crisis. Dithering and vacillation help no one.

Nicholas Kristof, the column author, admitted that the United States have little influence on Hamas, but that our aid to Israel gives us more leverage, and he believes we should pressure the Israelis to back off. The notion that the US should be pressuring Hamas to stop shooting is regarded as silly.

Mr Teach pointed to another article:

Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?

The global woke loathing for Israel is taking an even darker turn.

by Brendan O’Neill | May 12, 2021

Two weeks ago Turkish forces launched a military assault in the Duhok region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Villagers were forced to ‘flee in terror’ from raining bombs. It was only the latest bombardment of the beleaguered Kurds by Turkey, NATO member and Western ally. It did not trend online. There were no noisy protests in London or New York. The Turks weren’t talked about in woke circles as crazed, bloodthirsty killers. Tweeters didn’t dream out loud about Turks burning in hell. The Onion didn’t do any close-to-the-bone satire about how Turkish soldiers just love killing children. No, the Duhok attack passed pretty much without comment.

But when Israel engages in military action, that’s a different story. Always. Every time. Anti-Israel fury in the West has intensified to an extraordinary degree following an escalation of violence in the Middle East in recent days. Protests were instant and inflammatory. Israeli flags were burned on the streets of London. Social media was awash with condemnation. ‘IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child’, tweeted The Onion, to tens of thousands of likes. Israel must be boycotted, isolated, cast out of the international community, leftists cried. Western politicians, including Keir Starmer, rushed to pass judgement. ‘What’s the difference?’, said a placard at a march in Washington, DC showing the Israeli flag next to the Nazi flag. The Jews are the Nazis now, you see. Ironic, isn’t it?

This is the question anti-Israel campaigners have never been able to answer: why do they treat Israel so differently to every other nation on Earth? Why is it child-killing bloodlust when Israel takes military action but not when Turkey or India do? Why must we rush to the streets to set light to the Israel flag but never the Saudi flag, despite Saudi Arabia’s unconscionable war on Yemen? Why is it only ‘wrong’ or at worst ‘horrific’ when Britain or America drop bombs in the Middle East but Nazism when Israel fires missiles into Gaza? Why do you merely oppose the military action of some states but you hate Israel, viscerally, publicly, loudly?

The judgement and treatment of Israel by a double standard is one of the most disturbing facets of global politics in the 21st century. That double standard has been glaringly evident over the past few days. Israel is now the only country on Earth that is expected to allow itself to be attacked. To sit back and do nothing as its citizens are pelted with rocks or rockets. How else do we explain so many people’s unwillingness to place the current events in any kind of context, including the context of an avowedly anti-Semitic Islamist movement – Hamas – firing hundreds of missiles into civilian areas in Israel? In this context, to rage solely against Israel, to curse its people and burn its flag because it has sent missiles to destroy Hamas’s firing positions in Gaza, is essentially to say: ‘Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?’

No other nation would be expected not to respond either to internal disarray – Hamas supporters have rioted in parts of Jerusalem and around Al-Aqsa Mosque – or to foreign attack. Imagine if the Isle of Wight was home to a movement whose founding constitution expressed loathing for all ethnic Britons and which regularly fired hundreds of missiles into Sussex, Kent, Hampshire. Wouldn’t the British military respond? Of course it would. But the woke demonisation of Israel is now so acute that Israel is expected to take the military assaults of the radical Islamists to its south. To Western activists who find the very existence of Israel abhorrent, any effort Israel makes to protect its borders or its citizens is an affront to global peace and decency. They cannot understand why Israel doesn’t hate itself as much as they hate it, and therefore will not allow itself to be punished by its righteous enemies. How dare you live?

The article is so good that I’d like to reprint the whole thing, but that would be plagiarism. But it doesn’t take much awareness at all to see how der Führer was able to get millions, tens of millions of Germans, and of Frenchmen and Ukrainians and Poles and Belgians and Czechs and others in lands they occupied to cooperate in the Shoah — the Israeli name for the Holocaust — in turning in Jews, in exposing Jews in hiding, in helping to put Jews into the railcars, in helping the Einsatzgruppen and the rest of the Schutzstaffel to guard and herd the Jews right into the gas chambers and the mass graves.[1]Three different Dutch have been suspected as being the informants who turned Anne Frank and her family over to the Nazis, but this has never been proven. The Jews are not allowed to defend themselves, don’t you know?

More, it explains how the British, one of the victors against the Third Reich, one of the countries which saw Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and Sobibor first hand, could have erected their own prison camps and set up their blockades, trying to keep the dispossessed Jewish survivors of the from leaving a blasted Europe, a Europe in which they had no homes, to immigrate back to their ancestral homelands in the Levant. The British Foreign Office, eager to retain what was left of their Empire after World War II, were friendly with the Arabs, and the oil under the Arab lands.

Max Boot, from his Twit pic.

As Mr O’Neill noted, the #woke hate them some Israelis, so much so that #NeverTrumper Max Boot, of Jewish descent himself, tries to blame the whole thing on, you guessed it, President Donald Trump, who helped get the ‘Abrahamic Accords’ between Israel and several Muslim nations signed, and who has been out of office for 3¾ months. But, then again, I never expect anything sensible from Mr Boot.

The silliness of the left when it comes to the Palestinians, to the Arabs in general, and to Muslims, is obvious. Israel is the only functioning democracy on the Middle East. Human rights? The left almost unanimously support homosexual and transgender rights, but try being homosexual in the Muslim-ruled nations: if you get caught, Da’ish will throw you to your death off a tall building, Iran will hang you, and other Islamic countries have their own punishments. Six countries, all majority Muslim, impose the death penalty for consensual same-sex sexual acts: Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia.

Women’s rights? Women are, to varying degrees, second-class citizens throughout the Middle East . . . except in Israel. Virtually nothing for which the American and Western left stand is supported in any Middle Eastern country except Israel.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev once said that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope by which the communists would hang them; in today’s left, “LGBT” groups support the Islamic groups which would, were they living under Islamic rule, throw them in jail, at the very least.

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↑1 Three different Dutch have been suspected as being the informants who turned Anne Frank and her family over to the Nazis, but this has never been proven.