Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Saturday morning

Polar Bear, a 125 to 150 lb male Great Pyrenees tried to move in with us this past spring, but he had a human of his own who lived ¾ mile away. We have two other dogs, and Bear just loved to come and visit them.

We first met Bear when our younger daughter was taking our two for a walk through the fields, down toward the river, and Bear, who was wandering through the fields himself, saw them and trotted up to join them. He’s so big that you don’t have to bend down to pet him; his head is high enough that it’s right at your hand when he’s walking beside you.

He also leans against your hip when he’s walking with you!

Sadly, Bear was killed when he was hit by a car. He usually walked back to his own home, because his human didn’t want us to feed him, or he’d stay with us forever, through the fields, but for whatever reason he had, he chose to walk down the road and was struck. But Polar Bear quickly made us love Great Pyrenees dogs!

Cotton Bear

A lady in Boston, Kentucky, is selling her farm, and she has to rehome her Great Pyrenees, Cotton. We met Cotton a month and a half ago, and committed to take him, but we had to wait until now, because we were already fostering another dog. That dog has now returned to his human, so SSG Pico and I are driving to Boston Saturday morning to pick up Cotton Bear. He’s 5¾ years old, a neutered male, and he seems great, but it might be difficult rehoming a dog that old.

Pamela, his human, was having to keep him in a kennel on her farm, and in her house, because she has a neighbor who might well be described as the slang term for the rectum, so it’s good that we’re getting him out of there. Pamela told me that she just sold her farm, so we’re heading there at just the right time; I just wish we could have brought him home earlier.

We have a fenced-in yard of maybe half an acre, plus 7½ acres more in which he can roam and play, though we’ll keep him inside the fence until he learns that this is his new home. Wish us luck!

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How wealthy New Englanders fight #ClimateChange

We have previously noted how the wealthy New England homeowners featured in the Public Broadcasting System’s famous, long-running This Old House series, from areas which gave the large majority of their votes to the Democrats, still love them some fossil fuels.

It was season 43 for This Old House series, and yet another set of wealthy New England homeowners were remodeling, very extensively remodeling an 1880s Cape Cod style home, outside of Concord, Massachusetts. In the 2020 presidential election, Middlesex County, in which Concord is located, gave 617,196 votes, or 71.00% of the total, to former Vice President Joe Biden, and just 226,956 votes, or 26.11%, to President Donald Trump. That was an even stronger margin than the statewide 65.60% to 32.14% margin.

It’s safe to say that Bay Staters are very strongly liberal Democrats.

Season 43 for This Old House came after the COVID-19 panicdemic had mostly waned, and I saw only one person in the series wearing a face mask, telling me that much of the panicdemic restrictions had been removed. episode 13, “Race to the finish,” first broadcast on January 6, 2022 was well after Mr Biden and his liberal environmental and global warming climate change policies were in place.

So, what did these wealthy homeowners in Massachusetts do? In episode 13, we saw an older gas-fired boiler for the heating system replaced by a new, more efficient, but still natural gas fired boiler. Episode 16, “Cinderella Story,” shows how the homeowners had installed a high end, professional gas stove. There was a corner unit gas fireplace briefly shown, as well as a restored wood-burning fireplace more prominently featured. It seems that the wealthy New Englanders who have supported politicians and policies which would deprive the commoners, the working-class, of gas appliances, aren’t quite so eager to sacrifice their own comfort and own lifestyles.

Of course, I do not know how these particular homeowners voted; perhaps they were among the 26.11% of Middlesex County voters smart enough to vote for President Trump rather than the dummkopf from Delaware. But it sure seems that the climate activists are very busy telling people to do as they say, not do as they do.

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CNN correspondent in trouble for telling the truth Sometimes CNN makes about as much sense as a tampon dispenser in the men's room.

My good blogging friend Robert Stacy McCain likes to note how the once-renowned Cable News Network, CNN, has fallen in the ratings, not just third behind Fox News Channel and MSNBC, but gets fewer viewers than Nickelodeon’s kiddie cartoon Paw Patrol.

Fox News is unapologetically conservative, and MSNBC makes no bones about being leftist. CNN is leftist as well, though the network tries to deny it, and recently fired CEO Chris Licht, who was at least trying to get the network to report less bias and more news.

Well, in today’s more amusing news, a CNN correspondent, Ryan Young, is being criticized for doing something really radical, telling the truth!

CNN under fire for misgendering Dylan Mulvaney: ‘Unbelievably bad’

By Lee Brown | Wednesday, July 12, 2023 | 9:21 AM EDT | Updated: 4:14 PM EDT

CNN is under fire for misgendering Dylan Mulvaney as “he” and “him” in a segment about the “culture war” being waged over the transgender influencer’s partnership with Bud Light.

Correspondent Ryan Young failed to use the 26-year-old influencer’s preferred pronouns in a short segment about the backlash against the beer giant that has led to plummeting sales.

Young also mispronounced Mulvaney’s first name as “Dylvan” while describing the social media star to “CNN News Central” viewers Tuesday.

“He, of course, is the transgender person they were going to sponsor and go along with, with Bud Light,” Young said, using “he” instead of Mulvaney’s preferred “she.”

“But [trans activists] didn’t like how Bud Light didn’t stand by him after all this,” Young said, again failing to use the influencer’s preferred “they.”

Well, that’s a mistake: is Mr Mulvaney’s preferred pronoun “she,” the feminine singular, of “they,” the genderless plural?

Media Matters critic Ari Drennen shared footage of the less-than-2-minute clip, ripping it as an “unbelievably bad CNN segment.”

That Media Matters would see using the correct pronouns to refer to Mr Mulvaney as “unbelievably bad” is unsurprising. Naturally, CNN apologized for having a correspondent tell the truth:

CNN eventually apologized at the end of Wednesday’s episode of “News Central.”

Referring to Mulvaney, Bolduan said: “She was mistakenly referred to by the wrong pronoun, and CNN aims to honor individuals’ ways of identifying themselves and we apologize for that error.”

When Mr McCain noted that CNN was coming in behind Nickelodeon’s Paw Patrol, he neglected to mention that Paw Patrol, and really all of the children’s network’s programming, is more accurate and truthful than CNN. Mr McCain has said that he watches CNN so that his readers don’t have to, which is a fair amount of self-sacrifice. Sometimes CNN makes about as much sense as a tampon dispenser in the men’s room.

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World War III Watch Warmongers gotta warminger!

We noted, just a couple of days ago, that American newspapers were starting to go all-out neoconservative in wanting to expand American and NATO involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s chief warmonger, Trudy Rubin, wants NATO to take in Ukraine, saying:

This is the moment when NATO members, led by Biden, should be laying out a clear path for Ukraine to join the alliance once the war ends. This is the moment, which, if seized, could plausibly lead to Ukrainian victory by year’s end.

The Washington Post’s Max Boot, who is, as we have previously noted, very much pro-war, said:

Yet there is deep and understandable reluctance among Western European states and the United States to admit Ukraine to NATO, because it is at war with Russia and will be for the foreseeable future. This isn’t a stable stalemate like the division of East and West Germany or North and South Korea. This is a dynamic, ongoing conflict that, if NATO were to take in Ukraine, could draw other members into a shooting war with a nuclear-armed Russia.

It’s true, as Scheunemann and Farkas argue, that Article 5 — which holds “that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies” — “does not mandate a specific response by member states.” NATO members could say they are complying with Article 5 by doing what they are already doing: supplying Ukraine with weapons, training and intelligence and imposing sanctions on Russia. But there has always been an implicit assumption that an armed attack on a NATO member would result in military action by other NATO members. If that’s not the case, it would risk watering down Article 5 and reducing the overall effectiveness of the NATO alliance. Do we really want to send a message to Putin that he could invade, say, Lithuania and the West won’t fight to defend that embattled democracy?

Marc A. Thiessen and Stephen E. Biegun, writing in The Washington Post, and very much wanting to increase US/NATO aid to Ukraine, wrote:

No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues. That would be tantamount to a declaration of war with Russia. But it is equally true that after a cease-fire, a durable peace cannot be achieved unless that peace is guaranteed by NATO membership.

Bill Kristol, the neoconservative founder and later destroyer of The Weekly Standard, because as a dedicated #NeverTrumper he couldn’t stand to allow any support of Donald Trump in a magazine marketed to conservatives and Republicans, and who is so pro-liberty that he wants to force people to be vaccinated, wants you to believe that he is a serious person, but by Messrs Thiessen’s and Biegun’s definition, simply is not. Mr Kristol tweeted[1]Mr Kristol’s tweet, shown above, is a screen capture of the original, in case he decides to delete the stupidity he wrote.:

Perhaps the simplest and strongest argument for a clear commitment to Ukraine joining NATO as soon as possible is that it would show Putin he cannot win. It thus would make a quick end to the war more likely. If you’re for peace, you should be for Ukraine in NATO.

There is no reasonable way to read that as anything but Mr Kristol wanting NATO to take in Ukraine while the war is still raging. If “Ukraine joining NATO as soon as possible” is the best way to “show Putin he cannot win,” then showing Vladimir Vladimirovich that he cannot win follows Ukraine joining NATO. If Mr Kristol was somehow thinking that he really meant after the war was over — and I would never put it beyond conception that Mr Kristol could foul up his verbiage — then a path for Ukraine to join NATO after the war only provides more incentive for President Putin to continue the war until Ukraine is conquered, so it can’t join NATO.

Mr Kristol, born into a well-to-do family, now with an estimated net worth of $10 million, was born on December 23, 1952, which had him turning 18 in late 1970. If he really believed that war was a great idea, he was of age to have enlisted in the United States Army to help fight in Vietnam .  .  . but he didn’t. His draft lotter number was 171, so he was kind of on the cusp of being called up to serve, but in any event, never served a single day in uniform. Being Jewish, Mr Kristol could also have volunteered to serve in the Israeli Defence Force, which could have used his service in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, but he didn’t do that, either.

Bill Kristol just loves him some American involvement in wars, but let’s tell the truth here: he supports having other people fight in those wars, not himself and not his children. And now he’s advocating a position in which even his fellow traveler, Max Boot, has said would probably involve the United States directly in a war with Russia, with nuclear-armed Russia.

So many of the neocons, with their World War II thinking, seem to just blithely wave off any threat of such a war going nuclear, but the closer such a war would get to defeating Russia, which the warmongers all seem to think would be the case, then the greater the temptation for Russia to reverse a defeat through the use of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons. If the nuclear threshold is crossed, no one can know when things would stop.

References

References
↑1 Mr Kristol’s tweet, shown above, is a screen capture of the original, in case he decides to delete the stupidity he wrote.
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It doesn’t matter how smart a criminal is, eventually he will do something boneheadedly stupid

Can we tell the truth here? Most criminals get caught because they are just plain stupid.

There can’t be more than 14 people in the country who haven’t heard about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he took to a computer repair shop, and simply abandoned there. Mr Biden is a cocaine addict, so it’s entirely possible that he just forgot about leaving it there, but it eventually became public knowledge that it was left there, and that the contents were made public.

So, if you were a homosexual male who not only drugged and raped random men, but put the evidence on your laptop, would you send the hard drive out for repair?

Former Louisiana Catholic priest pleads guilty to drugging and molesting 17 men, sentenced to prison

Stephen Sauer was sentenced to 25 years in prison for crimes such as sexual battery, rape and video voyeurism

By Greg Wehner | Fox News | Sunday, July 9, 2023 | 9:52 PM EDT

Stephen Sauer, photo by Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and is a public record.

A former Louisiana priest pleaded guilty to drugging and molesting 17 men he picked up in the French Quarter and was sentenced on Friday to 25 years in prison.Stephen Sauer, 61, of Metairie admitted that he targeted men who looked lost or intoxicated. He would then drug the men as he offered them help, sometimes putting drugs in their drinks at bars.

Other times, the former Catholic priest used an eyedropper to feed sleep-inducing substances to men who passed out from alcohol, according to a press release from Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul D. Connick, Jr.’s office.

Investigators with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office learned that Sauer shared the images on a website, and sometimes traded images with others using email.

The DA’s office said many of the victims were from out of state, separated from their friends, or lost when Sauer approached them.

There’s more at the original. And then there’s this, from The Washington Post:

Soccer coach’s lost phone contained videos of him raping boys, police say

By Annabelle Timsit | Monday, July 10, 2023 | 8:43 AM EDT

A soccer coach in Tennessee has been arrested after police said they found hundreds of videos and images of him appearing to rape unconscious boys on a phone he left behind at a restaurant.

Police in Franklin, Tenn., said in a Sunday statement that Camilo Hurtado Campos, 63, recruited boys onto his soccer team and then sexually abused them. They said Campos drugged and raped at least 10 boys as young as 9 years old and recorded footage ofhis crimes.

He is being held in custody on charges of raping a child and sexually exploiting a minor, police said. In Tennessee, rape of a child is a Class A felony that carries a minimum sentence of 25 years in prison. Sexual exploitation of a minor is a Class B felony when the suspect possesses more than 100 images or materials that show a minor engaged in sexual activity. . . . .

Police said employees at a local restaurant found a customer’s phone and went through it to try to reach the owner so they could return it. After stumbling upon “unconscionable videos and pictures of children,” they called the police, the department said.

Detectives found “hundreds of disturbing videos and pictures” on the phone, the department said. “In many of them, Campos recorded himself raping unconscious boys between approximately 9 and 17 years old,” its statement said.

There’s more at the original.

So, Mr Sauer sent his computer hard drive to someone else, to someone he knew would look through it, while Mr Campos kept images on his cell phone, and then got careless and just left it around. An obvious question would be: why would Mr Campos want to carry those images around portably?

Both of the accused are in their early sixties, which raises another obvious question: for how long had they actually been doing this stuff before they were caught? Do men guys suddenly wake up in their late fifties/early sixties and say, ‘I think I’ll take a walk on the wild side’ and ‘Where can I get me some rape drugs?’ Mr Sauer was formerly a Catholic priest, who had served as pastor of Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans from 2008 to 2012. He was a Jesuit, who left the order at his own request in 2020, and Jesuits are not stupid, but well-educated men. All priests are well-educated, as seminary is more than just prayer and contemplation, but an intellectually rigorous collegiate education.

Yet he got caught because he somehow felt compelled to do something just boneheadedly stupid.

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Lock him up, and throw away the key

Adam Jakub Wieser, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Meet Adam Jakub Wieser, or at least meet his mugshot. If Mr Wieser is in fact guilty of the charges against him — and he is innocent until proven guilty — I would hope that you would never meet him in person, unless you happen to be a prison guard.

Charge: Lexington child care center director sexually assaulted 4-year-old in his office

by Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Monday, July 10, 2023 | 8:14 AM EDT | Updated: 12:20 PM EDT

A director at a Lexington child care and education center has been charged with raping a 4-year-old girl in his office, according to a police citation.

Adam Wieser, 27, was charged Friday with first-degree rape and first-degree sexual abuse of a child under 12 in a May 1 incident at the victim’s school. He was in the Fayette County Detention Center Monday, according to jail records.

Sharon Price, director of the Community Action Council which oversees the child care center, said the organization considers the safety and security of Head Start students its top priority. The Community Action Council received a report about the site director at One Parent Scholar House and immediately removed him from the position, Price said.

The Community Action Council made a formal report to the appropriate regulatory agencies, she said. . . . .

On Friday, the council learned that criminal charges were brought against Wieser as a result of the ensuing investigation.

The police citation said Wieser engaged in sexual intercourse with a 4-year-old girl and also had sexual contact with her. He touched her inappropriately, the citation said.

According to the Fayette County Detention Center website, Mr Wieser remains incarcerated, with bail set at $150,000.

Mr Wieser is charged with:

  • KRS §510.040 Rape, First Degree. Rape in the first degree is a Class B Felony, unless the victim is under 12 years old or receives a serious physical injury, in which case it becomes a Class A Felony. Under KRS §532.060, the sentence for a Class A Felony is not less than twenty (20) years nor more than fifty (50) years, or life imprisonment.
  • KRS §510.110 Sexual Abuse, First Degree. Sexual abuse in the first degree is a Class D Felony, unless the victim is under 12 years old, in which case it becomes a Class C Felony. Under KRS §532.060, the sentence for a Class C Felony is not less than five (5) years nor more than ten (10) years imprisonment.

According to the Detention Center’s records, Mr Weiser, who will ‘celebrate’ his 28th birthday this coming Friday, is 6’3″ tall and weighs 215 lb. To a 4-year-old girl, he must have seemed a veritable giant! If he is actually guilty, he could get out of jail when he is still just 48 years old, and even that assumes that he would not have early release credits.

If this gentleman is guilty, he should be sentenced to the maximum of 50 years on the first degree rape charge, and 10 years on the first degree sexual abuse charge, with the sentences to run consecutively. Everything that can be done under the law to keep this man person locked up for the rest of his miserable life needs to be done.

And the last thing that should happen is for the Commonwealth’s Attorney to offer him a lenient plea deal.

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World War III Watch: The liberal newspapers are going all out neocon!

I have said it before: There has been a whole lot of World War II thinking applied to the Russo-Ukraine War — or perhaps I should call it Russo-Ukraine War 2.0, considering Russia’s seizure and annexation of part of Ukraine in 2014 — with the logic that pushed the United Kingdom and France to declare war on Nazi Germany two days after the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, but that is such superficial thinking that I am amazed no one has realized it. In that event, the UK and France could not and did not actually do anything to liberate Poland; the liberation of Poland came in 1944, when the Red Army pushed out the Germans, and ‘liberation’ by the Soviet Union hardly freed the Poles.

And there’s that biggest of differences: no one in Europe, or anywhere in the world, had in 1939 what Russia has now: a strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal. As he was losing the war, Adolf Hitler tried everything he could, used every weapon he had, but, other than the V-1 and V-2 terror rockets, and a short-range bomber force that could reach only parts of England, had no power to strike at his enemies. We do not and cannot know what Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin will do if, in the end, he sees Russia really losing RUW 2.0, but we do know that he could cross that nuclear threshold, and use tactical nukes against Ukrainian troop concentrations and other targets. And once that nuclear threshold is crossed, who can know when things will stop? And if the United States and NATO nations are supplying Ukraine from bases in Poland, how are those bases not legitimate targets if Russia has the weapons to reach them . . . and Russia does.

But that doesn’t really seem to concern a lot of “strategic thinkers” these days:

At the NATO summit in Vilnius: Will Biden seize or squander the chance to end Putin’s war on Ukraine?

Biden must offer Kyiv a clear path to NATO membership after the end of the fighting and ensure it has the weapons to win.

by Trudy Rubin | Sunday, July 9, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

Does Joe Biden want to be remembered as the president who lost Ukraine?

“(T)he president who lost Ukraine”? What, are we back in 1949, and the “who lost China” political idiocy? There was a lot of that around, as though the United States could have sent the Army into China to stop Mao Zedong and the Communists from routing Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, chasing them off the mainland and into Formosa?

That question must be asked as NATO allies prepare to meet at a historic summit in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on Tuesday and Wednesday, which will focus on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued aggression in Ukraine.

This is the moment when NATO members, led by Biden, should be laying out a clear path for Ukraine to join the alliance once the war ends. This is the moment, which, if seized, could plausibly lead to Ukrainian victory by year’s end.

“(P)lausibly,” huh? Nothing in this war has proceeded in anything like what the military “experts” predicted. Russia was not able to brush the Ukrainians aside, but the rosy projections that the Ukrainians could push the Russians back out have not materialized, either. The only things which have really advanced in this war are the mud, the blood, the devastation, and the death.

This is also the moment when Biden should be announcing that the United States will finally expedite the arrival of critical weapons systems — long-range missiles and F-16 fighter jets — that are vital to the success of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

As of this writing, though, all signs are that Biden will squander the moment, and none of the above will happen. As John Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said during a webinar last week, ”Very thin gruel is likely in Vilnius.” If so, Biden and NATO will be gifting Putin big time, even as he reels from a failed mutiny attempt by one of his closest allies.

There’s still a bit of time for Biden to shift gears and surprise us. Here are the vital steps he should take at the summit to help end Putin’s war.

Make clear that the United States and NATO support a Ukrainian “victory” according to Kyiv’s definition, which means regaining all territory seized by Russia, including Crimea. The White House keeps saying we are with Kyiv “as long as it takes,” but never clarifies “takes for what?” Why not say we are with the Ukrainians until they win?

President Putin had sent his troops into the eastern half of Ukraine back in 2014, seizing a large chunk of the territory, including Crimea, which Russia directly annexed. Mrs Rubin now wants the current war to continue until Ukraine not only holds off and then pushes out Russia from the parts of Ukraine that it tried to seize when she invaded in 2022, but also to expel Russia from land it has held for the last nine years, the seizure of which our NATO allies and we condemned in 2014, but which Presidents Obama, Trump, and, initially, Biden actually did nothing about.

Also see: William Teach: Ukraine Totally Vows Not To Use The Cluster Bombs Biden’s Giving Them In Russia

There’s a lot more of Mrs Rubin’s column, in which she advocates sending 300 KM range ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles to Ukraine, which has “promised” not to use them on targets inside Russia, but who can know, in advance, whether that promise would be kept if a desperate Ukraine identified targets inside Russia — or Byelorus — against which the weapons would be useful?

In what almost seems as though the Head Neoconservative sent a memo around to his minions, The Washington Post had several articles on the subject. A straight news piece noted that U.S. leaders insist war with Russia must end before Ukraine joins NATO, and even neoconservative Max Boot, very much a Ukraine supporter, realized that, as much as his “heart” says Ukraine should be admitted into NATO, his “head” says no.

Yet there is deep and understandable reluctance among Western European states and the United States to admit Ukraine to NATO, because it is at war with Russia and will be for the foreseeable future. This isn’t a stable stalemate like the division of East and West Germany or North and South Korea. This is a dynamic, ongoing conflict that, if NATO were to take in Ukraine, could draw other members into a shooting war with a nuclear-armed Russia.

It’s true, as Scheunemann and Farkas argue, that Article 5 — which holds “that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies” — “does not mandate a specific response by member states.” NATO members could say they are complying with Article 5 by doing what they are already doing: supplying Ukraine with weapons, training and intelligence and imposing sanctions on Russia. But there has always been an implicit assumption that an armed attack on a NATO member would result in military action by other NATO members. If that’s not the case, it would risk watering down Article 5 and reducing the overall effectiveness of the NATO alliance. Do we really want to send a message to Putin that he could invade, say, Lithuania and the West won’t fight to defend that embattled democracy?

If Mr Boot was uncommonly cautious, Marc A. Thiessen and Stephen E. Biegun were less so, arguing that only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine.

No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues. That would be tantamount to a declaration of war with Russia. But it is equally true that after a cease-fire, a durable peace cannot be achieved unless that peace is guaranteed by NATO membership.

Even Mrs Rubin said that NATO membership for Ukraine should only come after Ukraine wins its war, or a cease-fire is somehow declared.

But what would that mean? If declaring a cease-fire means that Ukraine would them be offered NATO membership, then any incentive President Putin has for agreeing to a cease-fire is greatly diminished. More, if a ‘path’ to membership is specified, President Putin would know what he needed to do, and when he needed to do it.

We do not know what a post-Putin Russia will look like, but there’s one point I do not see the neocons considering. With all of the comparisons to ‘we should have stopped Adolf Hitler in 1938’ that we see concerning Vladimir Putin, the Nazi leader was 49 years old in 1938, while Vladimir Vladimirovich will turn 71 in three months time. With a Russian military which will have to rebuild following the war with Ukraine, regardless of how that war ends, the argument that we have to deter future aggression from him seems short-sighted. Even if Russia finally wins in Ukraine, and Mr Putin manages to hang onto power for the rest of his miserable life, he could be approaching, or even over, 80 years old before Russia would be ready for another aggressive move, and Russian military leaders of tomorrow, who today are the field-grade officers mired in the Ukraine war, are going to have the experience to know that another such assault against another nation will not go according to plan.

When NATO was formed, there were ‘buffer states’ between NATO and the Soviet Union; today, NATO nations are directly on Russia’s borders, and that fact gets a lot more serious if Ukraine becomes one of them. Many Western analysts say that, since NATO is a wholly defensive alliance, that shouldn’t really be a concern of the Russians, but they are thinking in Western terms, and not with a Russian mindset. When an American ‘analyst’ tells us how the Russians should feel, should think, he’s talking out of his ass, because it’s not necessarily how the Russians will feel about things.

How did we react when the USSR prepared to install nuclear weapons in Cuba? President Kennedy risked a direct military conflict with Soviet naval forces, at a time when the Soviets’ nuclear forces existed, but were vastly inferior to our own.

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Killadelphia: What the Philly media won’t tell us

With the Kingsessing mass shooting being a Philadelphia story, it’s unsurprising that The Philadelphia Inquirer would have several follow-up stories on it.

As soon as the name of Kimbrady Carriker was released, his social media were investigated, and photos of Mr Carriker in female dress led to immediate speculation that he was, like Audrey Hale in Nashville, yet another transgender killer. Well, that led to Philly officials quickly denying it:

While he acknowledged the social media images that appear to show Carriker wearing women’s clothing and jewelry, Asa Khalif, a member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, condemned the “violent” language coming from the “conservative press” about Carriker’s gender identity and shared what the district attorney’s office knows firsthand about Carriker’s gender identity.

“Appear to show”? No, there’s no “appear to show” here, but actually show. Why would Mr Khalif, who supports the homosexual and transgender community, and must surely not be offended by, or see anything wrong, with cross-dressing, want to mealy-mouth things?

“The suspect has not identified themselves as trans. They have only identified themselves as male,” Khalif said at Wednesday’s news conference. “But the language spewed out by the conservative press is violent and is dangerous, and it’s targeting trans women of color. It’s rallying the community to be violent, and we’re better than that.”

I saw a video of Mr Khalif’s statement, and while he stated that Mr Carriker had not identified as transgender or anything other than male, I also noticed that he went out of his way to use “they/them” pronouns to refer to the suspect. Did Mr Carriker express a preference for such to be used? If so, it hasn’t made the credentialed press, but speaking with the District Attorney at his side, he might have been clued in to something the DA’s office knew but hasn’t been made public.

Khalif condemned those who label trans people as “killers.”

“They are the most vulnerable to violence,” he said. “They want to live their lives, and they have every right to do so, and we will not allow conservative bigots to use that type of language to attack trans people.”

District Attorney Larry Krasner expressed similar sentiments.

“There are some people for whom hate is a full-time job,” Krasner said. “And if they can stay away from the facts and talk about nonsense, that’s what they’re going to do.”

Mr Khalif, who tweeted on the Fourth of July, “So when i say Fuck The Police..don’t tell me that’s disrespectful..the violence against black people is beyond disrespectful!”, keeps telling us, through multiple tweets, and retweets that the alleged shooter isn’t transgender. The Philadelphia Inquirer also jumped on that bandwagon:

Conservative media outlets claimed Carriker was transgender based on Facebook photos of him dressed in feminine clothing. However, Carriker is identified as male on public records and district attorney officials said Wednesday that he identifies as male.

I actually avoided making such a claim, writing on Independence Day:

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

But, you know what I also haven’t seen in the Philly media? You know what Mr Khalif, a member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for District Attorney Larry Krasner, hasn’t yet told us? Mr Carriker’s grandmother said that he was homosexual:

Ms Carriker said her grandson was gay and would sometimes dress in women’s clothing, but had not undergone gender transition surgery or treatment.

She said she made it clear to Carriker that she disapproved of him wearing women’s clothes due to her Christian beliefs.

“I saw him one time in female clothes, and from the expression on my face, from that point on, he never came in female clothes around me because he knew how I felt about it,” she told The Independent.

“He was trying to find himself. He didn’t know where he belonged. I used to talk to him about it, but he didn’t like to converse with me about things like that.”

The Philadelphia media, so quick to tell us some of Mr Carriker’s political views, his support for the Second Amendment, admiration of Tucker Carlson, and hating of President Biden, but soft-peddling his support of #BlackLivesMatter and the riots in many cities in the wake of the unfortunate death during the arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd, and telling us that he wasn’t transgendered, never mentioned, at least as far as I could find, that he is homosexual. It took a report from a newspaper in London, England, for us to get that news.

It is not a surprise to anyone who pays attention to the Philly media that they would keep such under wraps.

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Remember you haters! Calling them ‘groomers’ and saying that ‘they’re coming after our kids’ is sexist, homophobic, transphobic and just plain false!

There are times I think that I’ve written on the subject of ‘transgenderism’ too frequently, but it keeps coming up in the news. I wouldn’t care if Jack wanted to call himself Jill, if the ‘transgendered’ weren’t trying to use the power of the state to force other people to go along with their delusions.

You will not find this story many places, and certainly not in the leftist part of the credentialed media. From the New York Post:

California school suspends 2 children for misgendering classmate

By Hannah Grossman , Fox News | Friday, July 7, 2023 | 3:31 PM EDT | Updated

A California school district suspended two children for five days after a misgendering incident took place, and then subjected them to a training called “restorative justice,” according to an email reviewed by Fox News Digital.

The email was sent by a recently departed principal of Herbert Hoover High School located in the Glendale Unified School District. It was first reported by GUSD Parents Voices.

The former principal, Jennifer Earl, described two students who misgendered a transgender student, and then ran away as the teacher attempted to correct them.

There’s some disagreement here. The Post story states that the students correctly referenced a student’s sex “misgendered a transgender student,” but the local Fox 11 report has the suspended student “misgendering” a teacher.

So, what is “restorative justice” in the Glendale United School District? The district has a handy graph of its system, as shown in a photo in the Post. It has “Control” on one axis, defined as “Pressure Limits (and?) Expectations”, which can only mean that the district believes that, in the case of “restorative justice”, high pressure is acceptable, as long as it is accompanied with high levels of “Support – Encouragement – Nurturing”.

Further down:

GUSD explained to Fox News Digital that they make determinations if a misgendering – generally defined as using the wrong pronouns – is considered bullying based on whether a student’s perceived intent.

“A student has never been punished, much less suspended, for accidentally using the wrong pronoun to refer to a peer or staff member. However, a student could be suspended if the action escalated to harassment or bullying,” a spokesperson said.

Translation: if we assume that the school district’s spokescritter is telling the truth, the district decided that the “action escalated to harassment or bullying”.

Now we get to the district’s definition of a re-education camp “restorative justice”

The district’s website explains restorative justice on its website.

Restorative justice is a re-education of students and gaining control over a situation based on the perceived wrongs they committed.

So, even the district uses the term “re-education”. Got it!

First the person making the restorative justice circle will ask “barrier breaking” questions, such as:

“What is the greatest value that guides your life?”

“What gives you the most security?”

“If you could smash one thing… what would you smash?”

If I could smash one thing, it would be the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

“Describe the ideal family.”

Simple: a mother and father, married to each other, living with and rearing their minor children. Anything else, anything else, is less than ideal. This is the system which successful human societies have had for as far back into the past as we have any real knowledge of human sociological structures.

The district’s website continues, “When there is harm or conflict within the established community, restorative responses help to repair the damage. This is done through processes that bring harmed and harmers together to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals. As a result, community is once again restored bringing back a sense of belonging to all.”

So, “restorative justice” exists when the “harmed and harmers” are brought together, but note the rest: “to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals.” Simply put, “restorative justice” cannot be achieved unless the two students who correctly recognized the ‘transgender’ person’s sex who “misgendered” someone agree that the Special Snowflake™ person they correctly referenced “misgendered” is actually the sex the transgender individual claims to be rather than the sex they actually are, and say that they are oh-so-sorry.

Simply put, the Glendale Unified School District is teaching that transgenderism is real, that a person actually can change his ‘gender,’ and if you decline to go along with that notion, you will be punished.

Remember how we have been told that the government may not establish a religion? Well, the Catholic Church, the majority of Protestant Christian denominations, Judaism, and Islam all agree that transgenderism is not something with which their faiths agree, yet the Glendale Unified School District, apparently as required by law in California, are teaching something major which is against the religious faiths of most Americans.