Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The truth? The truth? They can’t handle the truth!

I have had my differences with Patrick Frey, the Los Angeles County assistant district attorney who blogs as Patterico. A devout #NeverTrumper, I believe that he allowed his hatred of President Trump to outweigh the huge policy problems of having Joe Biden in the White House.

Nevertheless, unlike some of the conservative #NeverTrumpers, he actually remained (mostly) conservative.

Law Professor Ends Her Career By Speaking Uncomfortable Truths About Race

As a second professor ends his own career by listening.

Patterico | March 14, 2021

Let’s handle the latest Big Racial Controversy in a different way. Instead of reading a predictable, cookie-cutter story summarizing the Big Racial Transgression and the aftermath, let’s watch the transgression unfold first, and imagine how we should react if we saw this happen but didn’t know how it had played out. I’ll give you the cookie-cutter summary afterwards. (You already know if you read the headline.) Try to ignore the commentary in the next two tweets and just watch the videos.

Here’s the transcript.

PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: They were a bit, jumbled?
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Yeah.
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: [Laughs] That’s the best way I can put it. It’s like, OK, let me reason through that, what you just said, kind of thing.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Right, right.
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: Yeah, unfortunately. And you know what? I hate to say this, I end up having this, you know, angst, every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Hmm, mmm. [Nods]
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: And it’s like, “Oh, come on.” Get some really good ones, but there’s also usually some that are just plain at the bottom, and it drives me crazy.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Yeah, and, and —
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: So I feel bad.

There is more: namely, the other professor’s response.

You can follow the link embedded in the article title to read more; the entire thing is around 2,600 words long, but, very briefly, Mr Frey discusses the obvious impacts of Affirmative Action, that admitting lesser qualified students based on race means that those students, being less well-prepared, are more likely to underperform or fail.

In the meantime, Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, has apologized for the private remarks of two nursing professors. At least as far as I can tell from The Philadelphia Inquirer article, there were no racially based comments made, but simply general assessments of their students.

In the video, two members of the nursing faculty at Widener University are discussing their students’ academic progress in blunt terms.

“They’re going to bomb this next test,” one said to the other, who responds, “I think so, too.”

“I don’t care though. Let ‘em fail.” the first one said.

The conversation was meant to be private, according to the university, but the professors mistakenly shared it with their nursing class, causing conversation on social media accounts and outrage among some students, parents and alumni in the Widener community. . . . .

“They do not know anatomy at all,” Francis says on the video, expressing concern that students would “move on” and not “represent the school well.” Marquis said she got so mad at students last year before the pandemic hit that she decided to make her “heart failure” questions harder.

I’m just an evil reich-wing conservative, but it seems to me that when a nursing professor assesses that her students “do not know anatomy at all,” that’s not being mean and cruel and vicious, but a real assessment on something nurses are supposed to know. That statement isn’t one for which the University should apologize, but one which should concern the school about how poorly the students are doing.

If a waitress messes up an order, a customer might not get the food he wanted. If an accountant makes a mistake, the books won’t balance. But if a registered nurse makes a mistake, a patient can die! Depending upon specialty, a nurse has to be able to accurately administer chemotherapy, which is basically the administration of poison into the body in a dose designed to kill cancer cells but not quite kill the patient. A nurse has to be able to accurately assess a patient. A nurse has to be able to read orders and spot errors that a tired doctor might have made.

But now, the most important educational concern is that the school not hurt someone’s precious little feelings. That’s far more important than actually educating students, and granting degrees only to those who have learned the material.

The truth is not always a pleasant thing, but the truth is that not all people were created equal, that some were simply born smarter than others, some simply worked harder than others, some are simply better prepared for academic challenges than others. But as long as we pretend differently, as long as we fail to recognize the plain truth right in front of our faces, we are going to get poorer performances from people who asked for admissions and jobs and roles for which they were simply not well-prepared.

Mr Frey’s article noted the differences between performance in law schools based on race, differences which are very real. My part noted two Widener University professors, and race does not seem to be a part of the equation; the problem was that most of their students, regardless of race, weren’t performing, and weren’t performing in a field of study which could lead to them having other people’s lives in their hands.

The acceptance of mediocrity leads to mediocre performance; the acceptance of the lesser leads to poorer performance.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer laments job losses by women due to COVID-19 But somehow the paper doesn't tell readers that those job losses were pushed by Democrats and women

Being in The Philadelphia Inquirer, even in the business section, it was going to be an opinion piece, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have some good statistics:

Job or kids? One in three working moms forced to choose as pandemic enters Year Two.

Kids at home, chores, and full-time career? Philly’s burnt-out moms quit jobs in droves, setting women back for years. Solutions? Flex time, backup childcare and $39 billion in federal relief.

by Erin Arvedlund | Sunday, March 14, 2021

After 15 years in a high-paying finance job, Joanna Lepore knew she’d have to quit, for a once-unthinkable reason — she has children.

“I never had any intention of leaving my job,” said the married mother of two kids under 10 years of age living in Haddonfield. But working remotely — while home-schooling her son and watching her toddler daughter shut out of day care — burned her out.

With child care and schools closed, the veteran of the Wall Street investment firm PIMCO left her job onboarding clients in August, just before the remote school year resumed. Her husband is employed in food distribution and works outside the home.

Lepore, 38, has lots of company. Women have borne a greater share of job losses during the pandemic. One in three working mothers is considering leaving the workforce or downshifting careers, which could stunt their incomes for decades, surveys show. Women already shoulder more responsibility for the domestic and emotional work in a family — disparities heightened by COVID — and typically make less than men — 82 cents on the dollar.

There’s more at the original, but the subtitle tells you much of what you need to know: the very #woke Erin Arvedlund Beattie, who “cover(s) all things personal finance and investing, as well as Wall Street frauds and other miscreants,” wants changes in how businesses operate and, of course, taxpayer money to address the issue.

Day care centers, Mrs Beattie told us, saw enrollment greatly decline, while expenses for new equipment and more thorough cleaning increased; “up to 40%” of dat care centers eventually shut down. What she did not say is that, in many cases, state and local governments ordered day care centers closed. In the Bluegrass State, Governor Andy Beshear ordered all daycare centers closed by the end of business on Friday, March 20, 2020. A lawsuit finally got a Boone County judge to set aside that order, on July 2nd, 15 weeks later, but, of course, the Governor appealed, and just two weeks later the state Supreme Court voided all of the state court injunctions against the Governor’s orders, saying that it would decide all of the cases. The Court scheduled oral arguments for September 17th, and did not issue its decision until November 12th, upholding the Governor.

Many states had similar government action concerning day care centers. That Mrs Beattie neglected to mention this in her reasons that so many day care centers have closed down is pretty poor journalism.

Mrs Beattie had a subtitled section “Schools must open”:

Alison Perelman calls the “emotional labor” of working from home the toughest double-duty — attending to a child educated on Zoom, motivating family to stick to a routine, undertaking household chores, and cooking endless meals.

”This falls predominantly on women,” Perelman says. ”As we’ve all made peace with the one-year anniversary, it’s now a hinge point where women are opting out. And once we all start to return to the workplace, it’s not clear to me that because women were first out, will we be first back in?”

As executive director of the political advocacy group Philadelphia 3.0, she’s incredulous that the Philadelphia School District has announced only vague plans to reopen in September.

“Why do we not know? This alone is a catastrophe for working women with dependents, and it’s only part of the tsunami destroying their careers,” said Perelman, who has a 6-year-old.

“For women, there’s no going back to work without school.”

However, the greatest resistance to reopening schools fully comes from the teachers’ unions, which are roughly ¾ female. More, President Biden’s criteria for reopening are nowhere close to a full reopening, according to The Washington Post:

Since making his 100-day goal, Biden and his aides have repeatedly loosened their definition of an open school, making it easier to meet his target.

Schools where children are in buildings even one day a week will count as “open.” Opening “most” schools means 51 percent, a metric the nation has probably already reached. And high schools, which are the most likely to be online only, aren’t counted in the measurement at all.

If in-person instruction is only one or two days per week, that isn’t going to get mothers back to work.

Let’s be honest here: the public schools perform a function that teachers are loath to admit, that they serve as free day care centers for children for most of the workday. Opening up paid day care centers because the kids aren’t in school becomes an added expense for working families, primarily, as Mrs Beattie pointed out, working mothers. At some point, calculations have to be made: is it costing more for mothers to work than they bring home from work?

Back to Mrs Beattie’s original for one final point:

Ellen Yin, one of Philly’s top restaurateurs, had to fire 150 workers last spring, roughly 90% of her staff.

“Our industry has large numbers of undocumented workers and immigrants, many of whom never had income before,” she said. “They don’t qualify for unemployment, and that weighs on us.”

There is little which pisses me off more than this: If “one of Philly’s top restaurateurs” has been employing “large numbers of undocumented workers,” she shouldn’t be receiving our sympathy but prison time! At a time when we have 9,972,000 million people officially unemployed, along with 8,493,000 more who have dropped out of the workforce and are thus not counted as officially unemployed, based on February 2020 numbers, 18,465,000 people who ought to be working but aren’t, the last thing we should be worrying about are jobs for illegal immigrants!

As William Teach noted, COVID-19 cases have begun to fall in Florida, even though Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) rolled back restrictions much sooner than in most states, raising the obvious question: did the restrictions actually reduce the spread of the virus, or did they simply force a recession for no useful reason?

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Killadelphia!

I noted, just three days ago, that with 89 homicides in just 67 days of 2021, that the City of Brotherly Love, at that point killing off 1.328 people per day, ought to hit 100 homicides on March 16th.

Well, it seems that the good natured and kind hearted people of Philadelphia have taken that as a personal challenge; at the end of the 70th day, March 11th, 96 people have bitten the dust there, raising the rate to 1.371 per day. That means it should only take three days to kill off the four people needed to reach 100 homicides, which now means the end of March 14th.

At least on its main page, at 10:45 AM EST, The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t have a single story about any of the murders, about any of the seven homicides over the past three days. I guess none of the victims was a ‘somebody’ or a cute little white girl.

I’ve said it before: in Philadelphia, black lives don’t matter. The Philadelphia Tribune reported that, of the 499 homicides in the city in 2020, 86% of the victims were black, in a city in which less than 44% of the population are black. That black lives don’t matter is evidenced by the silence of the Inquirer when they are snuffed out. The #woke staffers who forced the resignation of Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski for his headline “Buildings Matter, Too” during the #BlackLivesMatter protests don’t seem to bother reporting on young black men being murdered because, well because young black males being murdered in Philadelphia simply isn’t news anymore. It would be a bigger story if a weekend day passed in the city without a killing.

I’m guessing that the Inquirer will have a story once that 100 homicides milestone is reached. That’s about all you can expect from them.

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The credentialed media want to muzzle Glenn Greenwald They're finding out just how well that works

I have never been a particular fan of Glenn Greenwald. Born in the United States, he now resides in Rio de Janeiro with his “husband,” and has been a mostly left-wing journalist throughout his career. His participation in helping the odious Edward Snowden reveal classified documents was repugnant.

But if there is one thing I definitely do appreciate about Mr Greenwald is his devotion to Freedom of Speech and of the Press.

Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor its Writers: to Bar Critiques of Journalists

This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines. This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent.

by Glenn Greenwald | March 11, 2021

Glenn Greenwald

On Wednesday, I wrote about how corporate journalists, realizing that the public’s increasing contempt for what they do is causing people to turn away in droves, are desperately inventing new tactics to maintain their stranglehold over the dissemination of information and generate captive audiences. That is why it journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.

That same motive of self-preservation is driving them to equate any criticisms of their work with “harassment,” “abuse” and “violence” — so that it is not just culturally stigmatized but a banning offense, perhaps even literally criminal, to critique their journalism on the ground that any criticism of them places them “in danger.” Under this rubric they want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people’s reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them.

Any independent platform or venue that empowers other journalists or just ordinary citizens to do reporting or provide commentary outside of their repressive constraints is viewed by them as threats to be censored and destroyed. Every platform that enables any questioning of their pieties or any irreverent critiques of mainstream journalism — social media sites, YouTube, Patreon, Joe Rogan’s Spotify program — has already been systematically targeted by corporate journalists with censorship demands, often successfully.

Back in November, the media critic Stephen Miller warned: “It’s only a matter of time before the media tech hall monitors turn their attention to Substack.” And ever since, in every interview I have given about the success of Substack and every time I have written about journalist-led censorship campaigns, I have echoed that warning that they would soon turn their united guns on this platform. Miller’s prediction was prompted by a Columbia Journalism Review article entitled “The Substackerati” which claimed that Substack was structurally unfair because “most” of “the most successful people on Substack” are “white and male; several are conservative” and “have already been well-served by existing media power structures.”

I will admit to having little contact with Substack. I knew that Patrick Frey, who has blogged for free as Patterico since 2003, and Bari Weiss, who was forced out at left The New York Times by the hatred of the young #woke in the newsroom. Mr Frey is an educated, (mostly) conservative, his hatred for Donald Trump notwithstanding, heterosexual married white male, but Miss Weiss is a mostly liberal lesbian.[1]A couple of commenters I consider to be anti-Semitic on The Other McCain have sought to educate me that she can’t be white, because she’s a Jew.

Thus, I never realized that Substack is a bastion of conservative white males. Mr Greenwald continued to note that most successful Substack writer is a somewhat obscure female History professor at Boston College.

In fact, looking at the list of ‘Substackerati’ Mr Greenwald used, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Heather Cox Richardson, along with Messrs Greenwald, Frey and Miss Weiss, I find three who are homosexual, and the majority liberal.

Mr Greenwald continues to note what has really bothered the currently credentialed media:

That is precisely why they are so furious. They cannot stand the fact that journalists can break major stories and find an audience while maintaining an independent voice, critically questioning rather than obediently reciting the orthodoxies that bind them and, most of all, without playing their infantile in-group games and submitting to their hive-mind decrees. In fact, the more big stories you break while maintaining your independence from them, the more intense is the contempt they harbor for you: that explains, among other things, their willingness to watch Julian Assange (who has broken more major stories than all of them combined) be imprisoned for publishing documents.

That they are angry and upset is irrelevant. It only matters because these resentments and fears that they are losing their monopolistic power over public thought are translating into increasingly concerted and effective censorship campaigns.

The credentialed media heaped scorn on the recently deceased Rush Limbaugh, virtually celebrating in his death due to cancer, because he was the one who began the breaking of the ‘gatekeeping’ function of the media. When the only way for a contrary voice to be heard was if an editor approved, the editors had the power (mostly) to restrict the terms of debate. Mr Limbaugh, by virtue of his tremendous talent — “talent on loan from God,” he used to say — expressed to an audience of as much as thirty million the things that many people already believed, but rarely heard outside of their circle of friends. Then Al Gore invented this internet thingy, and debates started in America Online chatrooms, and then moved to independent blogs. Powerline and Little Green Footballs, working solely from images on low-definition television screens, were able to expose how CBS News used forged documents to try to turn the election of 2004 against the younger President Bush, and were able to get their findings out to millions of people. They went around the gatekeeping function of the credentialed media.

The older editors of major media sources realized, albeit grudgingly, that their power was lost. But as the young #wokes forced out older and wiser heads like James Bennet and Stan Wischnowski, even though they were liberal themselves, the young #woke lost that institutional memory which should have informed them that the gatekeeping function is gone.[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

And now they think they should somehow get it back. Their success in using #CancelCulture to cow others into silence seems to have emboldened them.

But it’s an effort doomed to failure. As we previously noted, the HuffPost was bought out by BuzzKill BuzzFeed, and now Verizon Media has laid off about 30% of what was supposed to have been HuffPost’s independent newsroom. BuzzFeed has had its own financial problems, cutting salaries a year ago due to COVID-19 and having laid off 15% of its workforce in 2019.

The First Amendment to the Constitution protects the Freedom of the Press, but all that means is that the government cannot control the press, cannot censor it, and cannot punish people for printing things the government do not like. Unfortunately, far too many in the media believe that it confers on them some sort of special status, that it means they are somehow beyond criticism. Mr Greenwald, and a few of the other ‘Substackerati,’ have had the temerity, the unmitigated gall to criticize other reporters, so naturally the credentialed media are striking back. There’s nothing they can do about The First Street Journal and me, and my frequent criticisms of what I sometimes call The Philadelphia Enquirer, because, sadly, 🙁 there’s no one paying me to write and publish what I do.

But Substack? The media know that Mr Greenwald and others are making money due to their Substack affiliation, and they can put pressure on Substack to rein in those horrible, horrible free voices.

The fictitious Police Commissioner of New York City, Frank Reagan of Bluebloods, once said on his show that the freedom of the press is limited to those who actually own a press. In a way, that’s true enough, but with the internet, almost anybody can now own a printing press. Writers on the internet are successful or failures based on their individual merits as writers and self-publicists, and not upon the judgements of newspaper editors.

References

References
↑1 A couple of commenters I consider to be anti-Semitic on The Other McCain have sought to educate me that she can’t be white, because she’s a Jew.
↑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.
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The HuffPo is biting the dust

While I have often noted that print newspapers are 18th century technology, the contraction of media outlets isn’t restricted to print.

BuzzFeed Announces Deep Cuts To HuffPost Staff After Acquisition

BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost from Verizon Media in February.

By Sara Boboltz | March 9, 2021 | 12:31 PM EST

BuzzFeed announced layoffs for the HuffPost newsroom on Tuesday, three weeks after acquiring HuffPost from Verizon Media in February.

Hillary Frey, the site’s executive editor, and Louise Roug, the executive editor for international, will be departing in the restructuring effort.

HuffPost Canada will also shutter operations later this month.

A deal between BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Verizon Media was first made public in November. Verizon Media stated at the time that BuzzFeed and HuffPost would operate as “separate, distinct news organizations” with their own websites and editorial staff while BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti led the combined company.

Translation: Verizon Media lied to them!

The HuffPost Union, organized as part of the Writers Guild of America, East, slammed the restructuring effort in a statement:

Today, we learned that 33 of our colleagues — nearly 30% of our unit — will be laid off. We are devastated and infuriated, particularly after an exhausting year of covering a pandemic and working from home. This is also happening less than a month after HuffPost was acquired by BuzzFeed. We never got a fair shot to prove our worth. These layoffs reiterate the importance of forming a union and advocating for our colleagues. We are glad that we are protected by a collective bargaining agreement and that our colleagues will receive severance. Our union will continue fighting to make HuffPost a more just and equitable workplace, including pushing for clear and accountable commitments to hiring and promoting more people of color and for transparency around pay equity.

It really is just so exhausting working from home! 🙂 It means that you have to make your own coffee in the morning rather than having a $7.25 per hour clerk at 7/Eleven doing it for you.

Now let me be clear here: I don’t like seeing anyone losing his job, but let’s be honest here: the HuffPost was as #woke and biased a ‘publication’ as any around. There was no special reporting there, and nothing you can see on their website front page is not available elsewhere — frequently with better writing — for free. And given the contempt the media have for working class men and women in ‘flyover country,’ it’s difficult not to feel some schadenfreude.

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Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is really just the fall guy (fall gal?). The real problem is Mayor Jim Kenney

March 8th is the 67th day of the year. As of March 8th last year (which was actually the 68th day, 2020 being a leap year), the City of Brotherly Love had seen 67 homicides, or 0.985 killings per day. It was also the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, just before the lockdowns — you remember, 15 days to flatten the curve? — and the school closures and millions of people being thrown out of work.

But on the 67th day of 2021, 89 souls were sent early to their eternal rewards in Philadelphia’s mean streets, 1.328 per day. Doing a little math here, it should take only eight more days, until March 16th, for Philly to reach 100 homicides.

On the 8th, The Philadelphia Inquirer published an OpEd defense of Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw:

Danielle Outlaw put in an untenable position by Kenney administration

In order to ensure the overall safety of Philadelphia’s citizens and their neighborhoods, emergency management in Philadelphia County should be immediately reassessed.

by Joseph Certaine | March 8, 2021

Amid calls last month for Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw to tender her resignation for mishandling the response to summer protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, it’s important to consider that she is not the only person at fault here.

Commissioner Outlaw, who had only been on the job for a few months when the protests began, was put in an untenable position by this administration. From my view, as a former managing director, the Kenney administration allowed the new police commissioner to handle large-scale protests without some of the best practices and institutional knowledge that previously determined how the city handled crisis situations.

At that paragraph break, the Inquirer included the boldfaced blurb:

» READ MORE: Danielle Outlaw’s failure should push Kenney to ask for her resignation — but she didn’t fail alone | Editorial

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw.

Well, of course the editors did that! But, as we noted previously, the editors want to punish the puppet, not the puppet master. The editors love them some Democrats, and endorsed Mayor Jim Kenney for re-election in the 2019 primaries, and if they endorsed a different candidate, Anthony Williams, for the Democratic nomination in 2015, it was still a close choice for them between Messrs Williams and Kenney.

The apparently odd notion that many of Philadelphia’s problems stem from Philadelphia’s poor leadership does not seem to have occurred to them. The apparently even odder notion that many of Philadelphia’s problems stem from Philadelphia’s leaderships leftist policies, well, they couldn’t say that, or they’d get another revolt among the #woke in their newsroom.[1]Apparently the idea of firing the forty employees who called out sick in protest, even though the inquirer could replace them all, within a day, from smaller newspapers across the country, is another … Continue reading

Mr Certaine continued, further down:

Why is it that the Kenney administration was not prepared for the uprising that occurred after George Floyd’s murder? Why aren’t questions being asked about preparedness in general? Why is the Fire Commissioner appointed as County Emergency Management Coordinator?

Why? I can answer that question, but the #woke won’t like it. The Kenney administration was not prepared because Mayor Kenney and his minions are far more concerned about leftist political positions than they are with protecting the city and its people.

The last Republican mayor of Philadelphia left office left office on January 7, 1952. Harry Truman was President at the time, and the last two Mayors, Mr Kenney and Michael Nutter, hadn’t been born yet! The City Council is controlled by Democrats, and the labor unions, and that has been the situation for decades. If the policies of the Democrats, if the policies of the liberals actually worked, Philadelphia ought to be an urban paradise, because the wicked ol’ reich-wing conservatives haven’t had any power to obstruct them.

Philadelphia is a disaster zone, a man-made disaster zone, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, because the voters of the city keep electing people who want to make the disaster even worse. Commissioner Outlaw is a convenient fall guy (fall gal?), but she’s still just a puppet.

References

References
↑1 Apparently the idea of firing the forty employees who called out sick in protest, even though the inquirer could replace them all, within a day, from smaller newspapers across the country, is another apparently odd notion which never occurred to the editors. The idea of telling the Special Snowflakes™ to buck up and do their jobs, or they’d find someone who would, that, too, never seemed to happen.
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Capitol Police request a two-month extension of National Guard deployment

Well, of course they did!

Capitol Police request extension of National Guard to protect Congress

By Dan Lamothe | March 4, 2021 | 9:15 PM EST

The U.S. Capitol Police have requested a 60-day extension of some of the 5,200 National Guard members activated in the District in response to security threats and the Jan. 6 assault on Congress, opening the door to a military presence in the nation’s capital into spring, defense officials said Thursday.

Acting chief Yogananda Pittman submitted the request to the Defense Department for an extension, the Capitol Police said in a statement on Thursday evening, without saying for how long.

You know what was known by Thursday evening? By Thursday evening, we knew that the alleged plot by purported militants to assault and breach the Capitol that day never happened.

The inauguration? That passed peacefully, without incident. The impeachment trial? Nothing happened.

The ‘new’ date for the assault which never happened is, supposedly, March 20th.

Now, did the attack not happen because of the troops and precautions, as the left will claim, or did it not happen because it was never a real threat in the first place?

The current National Guard mission ends on March 12th; the proposed extension would take the mission well into May.

At what point will the left decide that we do not want to have our nation’s capital looking like that of a banana republic?

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When you tolerate tyranny, you will get more tyranny When you accept tyrants, you will get more tyrants.

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY)

If Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) had asked Kentuckians to wear face masks to slow the spread of COVID-19, I would have willingly complied. Had Mr Beshear, seeing that the General Assembly passed new laws to rein in his claimed ’emergency’ executive authority, gone along with the new state laws, and asked the state legislature to approve extensions of his executive orders, I wouldn’t be writing this column. Had the Governor tried to work out his differences with the legislature, as Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd asked him to do, I wouldn’t be so upseet.

Instead, the Governor responded, “See you in court,” showing his utter contempt for democracy.

Am I upset? Hell, yes, I am, totally pissed off, actually shaking in rage.

Beshear: KY won’t repeal its mask mandate anytime soon. 28 new COVID-19 deaths.

By Alex Acquisto | March 4, 2021 | 4:42 PM EST | Updated: March 4, 2021 | 5:28 PM EST

Reiterating that Kentucky will not be repealing its mask mandate anytime soon, Gov. Andy Beshear announced 1,068 new cases of COVID-19 in Kentucky on Thursday, as well as 28 virus-related deaths.

Earlier this week, Republican governors in Texas and Mississippi lifted coronavirus restrictions, repealing their states’ mask mandates and reopening businesses to full capacity. Kentucky will not do that, Beshear said.

“We’re going to continue to lose people until we’re fully out of the woods and everybody is vaccinated,” he said in a live update. “That’s the reason we’re not going to do what Texas or Mississippi has done. Those decisions will increase casualties when we just have maybe even a matter of months to go.”

Well, f(ornicate) him!

The Governor claims that the public support him on this, and keeps producing polls which say so. But, in the only poll that counts, the one on election day, the Republicans who ran against his dictatorial decrees were rewarded with 14 additional seats in the state House of Representatives, and two additional seats, out of only 19 up for election, in the state Senate. At every step along the way, Governor Beshear has excluded the state legislature:

Beshear was asked at Friday’s (July 10, 2020 — Editor) news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

Translation: the General Assembly might not do exactly what I want them to do, so I’ll just go around them!

And here I thought that it was supposed to be the evil reich-wing Donald Trump who was the fascist! From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation.

A contempt for electoral democracy?  Yup, that’s there, showing utter contempt for the legislators elected by the people of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Individual interests and rights subordinated to what the Governor defines as the good of the state?  Yup, that’s there, too.  He even makes his propagandistic appeals as his Twitter feed is full of things like #TogetherKy and #TeamKentucky.

Of course, our Governor’s motives are good ones, right? That’s what Judge Shepherd said, when he granted Mr Beshear’s motion for a temporary injunction and partially stayed the effectiveness of three new laws the legislature approved, overriding the Governor’s veto.

The judge said all parties in the case “are acting in good faith to address public policy challenges of the utmost importance” but “the governor has made a strong case that the legislation, in its current form, is likely to undermine or even cripple, the effectiveness of public health measures necessary to protect the lives and health of Kentuckians from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

So, dictatorship is just fine as long as it’s a benevolent dictatorship.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote:

Viktor Yanukovych is the kind of dictator we love to hate. A kleptocrat who chose a bribe from Russia over his people’s future in the EU. A thug who sent other thugs to beat up protesters, until he was finally ousted by his own people. A man who left his country bankrupt while pictures of his palatial estate and private zoo are broadcast around the world. We vilify dictators like this. And, yet, there remains a dream, for far too many development experts, business people and others around the globe that a strong leader with authoritarian powers is needed to move poor countries into the developed world.

I am watching Ukraine implode from a West Africa nation where corruption is perceived to be growing, development is stalled and the economy is heading downhill. From high-level government appointees to members of civil society, I hear: “What we need is a benevolent dictator. … ” The sentiment is generally followed by praise for Paul Kagame, who has created a remarkably clean and efficient Rwanda after that country’s genocide, or Lee Kuan Yew, the “father of Singapore,” who corralled government corruption and thrust his nation into the first world.

The desire for benevolent dictatorship is not confined to developing nations. I hear it even more often from America’s business community and those working on international development – often accompanied by praise for China’s ability to “get things done.” The problem is that the entire 20th century seems to have produced at most one largely benevolent dictator and one efficient but increasingly repressive leader, both in tiny countries.

Meanwhile, we have seen scores of Yanukovych-like kleptocrats, Pinochet-style military dictatorships that torture dissenters in secret prisons and “disappear” those who disagree, and North Korean-style totalitarians whose gulags and concentration camps starve and murder hundreds of thousands or even millions of their countrymen.

Occasionally, dictators begin benevolently and grow worse. The world is littered with Kwame Nkrumahs, Fidel Castros and Robert Mugabes who rose to power with great popularity, built their nations, then turned their people’s hopes to ash through corruption, personality cults and violence. One Lee Kuan Yew and a Kagame teetering from benevolence toward repression, versus every other dictatorship of the 20th century? Those are not odds to bet your country on.

There is no doubt that Governor Beshear is personally popular in the Bluegrass State. He has been right out in front, on television almost every day, with his soothing words and handsome, non-threatening visage. The Governor wrote:

This is a war. We have lost more Kentuckians to COVID-19 than in battles during World War I, World War II and Vietnam combined.

That’s true enough, but there is one very stark difference: those Kentuckians who gave their lives on the battlefield were fighting, and dying, for democracy, for liberty, and not for dictatorship and despotism. Regardless of how benevolent Mr Beshear and his sycophants think he has been, irrespective of how necessary they have thought the Governor’s actions to be, they were, and are, still fundamentally and morally wrong, still an assault on our syste4m of government, far more than the 800 or so rioters in the Capitol kerfuffle, because the Governor has, so far, gotten away with his despotism.

Patriotic Kentuckians must do everything we can to fight Governor Beshear, we must do everything we can to frustrate his taking away of our rights. We must demonstrate, we must protest, we must obstruct his edicts, and we must never, ever accept anything less than liberty.

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The huge disconnect between the government and the governed Wealthy Justin Trudeau is so worried about #ClimateChange that he'd freeze Canadians

Our great neighbor to the north, the second largest country in the world by area, has had what we Americans would consider a very liberal government. Canadians have restrictions on speech imposed upon them, and all sorts of laws and regulations of which American ‘progressives’ can only dream about.

One of the liberal policies imposed on Canadians by their government is a ‘carbon’ tax to discourage fossil fuel consumption. But, as the term neighbor to the north implies, the climate is somewhat cooler up there, and downright cold in the winter. From the Toronto Sun:

Carbon tax punishes Canadians for staying warm

Kris Sims| March 4, 2021

Cold enough for ya?

All of Canada’s capitals were below the freezing mark during the latest cold snap.

Even Victoria had its ploughs pressed into service as snow smothered the cherry blossoms. Edmonton was at -34 C (-29º F), Regina dipped to -39 C (-38º F), and call-the-army Toronto hit -13 C (9º F). The Maritimes shivered through -14 C (7º F) and something called “ice fog.”

Without natural gas, propane and furnace oil, millions of Canadians would have been freezing in the dark.

Those silly Canucks use the metric system; conversions to Fahrenheit in the article by me.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is jacking up the carbon tax over the next nine years which will punish Canadians for the grave sin of wanting to stay warm.

As one of the writers of the federal carbon tax legislation recently explained on the TV show Counterpoint, Trudeau’s carbon tax is meant to “punish the poor behaviour of using fossil fuels.”

At $30/tonne, natural gas currently carries a federal carbon tax punishment of 5.8 cents per cubic metre, the tax on propane is 4.6 cents per litre and furnace oil is taxed at 8 cents per litre.

What will life be like when Trudeau increases the carbon tax to $170 per ton?

The article continues to tell people what life will be like once that carbon tax has been increased, and I’ll skip over that part, because quoting the whole thing would be copyright infringement, but you can follow the link to see the numbers for yourself.

Those counting on carbon tax rebates to magically put more money back in their pockets should take heed of the British Columbia carbon tax example on which the federal program was based. Rebates in B.C. evaporate when a two person working family hits an income $59,000 per year, far below the provincial average.

The carbon tax advocates in the United States have pushed rebates for the poor, but obvious questions arise:

  • What documentation and filings will be required to get such rebates; and
  • How frequently will such rebates be paid

Without documentation, how will the government know to whom and how much the rebates should be sent? Would the government impose some sort of quarterly tax filings on lower-income people?

If the rebates are paid quarterly, how much good does that do for people living paycheck-to-paycheck?

Carbon tax cheerleaders, typically the well insulated and academic political set, say Canadians should simply go electric instead of using oil, natural gas and propane to stay warm. The fact is electric heat is not affordable for many households and our power grids don’t have the juice to both heat our homes and charge our electric vehicles.

Electric systems can fail. In January of 2018, an ice storm that the Weather Channel called Winter Storm Hunter knocked out sparktricity to our humble abode. Being January, it was rather cold out, as you might expect.[1]As much as the Weather Channel tried, the idea of naming winter storms never caught on beyond their network

The power was out for 4½ days. My wife went to stay with our daughters, in Lexington, but I had to stay at home, to take care of the critters. By the last day, it was down to 38º F — that’s 3 C to the Canadians! — inside the house.

Well, never again, we said, and as part of our remodeling, we had propane installed into our previously all-electric house. Mrs Pico wanted a gas range, and we went ahead and added a gas hot water heater and propane fireplace.

Well, we just got hit by historic flooding, and while the electricity never went out, the flooding destroyed our electric HVAC system; it reached into the crawlspace, but not into the house itself. I tied the propane tank to a nearby tree, so that if it floated, at least it couldn’t float away! I had to turn off the propane at the tank at that point.[2]We were very lucky; about three more inches, and the record flood waters would have reached the wooden sills and floor joists

Well, it did float, and turned upside down. It was only through the goodness of the Lord that the supply line didn’t snap. As the flood waters receded, I was finally able to muscle the tank back upright, though sitting on the ground rather than the concrete blocks on which it originally sat. I checked the gas line, and tested it, and it was OK. Now, that propane fireplace is heating our house again. It was 30º F outside this morning, but the house is warm. We have an HVAC contractor coming by on Monday to give us an estimate, because, being completely inundated by muddy flood waters, the system is almost certainly destroyed. The point is simple: if we didn’t have the propane backup, we’d have no heat for perhaps weeks!

We live in Kentucky, and the normal highs and lows for this time of year are 50º and 32º F. What are they in Calgary or Whitehorse or Iqaluit?

Yes, I did spend one winter in Maine when I was a third grader, but that’s a long-ago, remote experience. Nevertheless, I seem to have a greater appreciation for what poorer Canadians, what people living outside of Ottawa and Toronto and Montreal have to go through in their lives than the Right Honourable Mr Trudeau, the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. I do not know how an American who has never set foot in Canada can understand more about Canadians than a native son, but apparently I do.

Perhaps if the Prime Minister were to leave Ottawa and live out in the boondocks of Saskatchewan, where some off-gridders have to use propane to power their refrigerators, he might learn something about his own countrymen.

References

References
↑1 As much as the Weather Channel tried, the idea of naming winter storms never caught on beyond their network
↑2 We were very lucky; about three more inches, and the record flood waters would have reached the wooden sills and floor joists