Category Archives: Culture

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A very liberal UCC bishop wants to throw out major parts of the Bible Can anyone really be surprised?

One of the basic, underlying themes of Christianity, across all of the various denominations, is that the Bible is the word of God, given to authors who were divinely inspired by the Lord to bring his word to us mere, fallible mortals. Some Christians — former President Joe Biden, a (supposedly) devout and dedicated Catholic who nevertheless approves of prenatal infanticide, homosexuality, same-sex ‘marriage,’ transgenderism, racial discrimination, and government spying on the Catholics he doesn’t like being the most obvious example — like to ignore the parts of the Bible that they do not like, and some, but almost all accept the premise that the Bible is the Lord’s instructions to mankind.

Note that I wrote “almost all,” because that leaves room for Yvette Flunder, “the senior pastor of the City of Refuge United Church of Christ (UCC) in Oakland, California, as well as the Presiding Bishop of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries,” who apparently does not accept that premise. Many parts of the Bible need to be thrown out, superseded by a third Testament, because she just plain doesn’t like what the first two Testaments say! Continue reading →

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Bernie Sanders simps for the ‘Palestinians’

As it happens, I’m a real (retired) equipment operator and can tell you from years of experience that the operator cannot see through the bucket or blade. We judge by what we can see, over the top of the blade and to its sides. If someone is stupid enough to lay down in front of the D9, he’s dead.

Or in the case of Rachel Corrie, she’s dead.

Let’s Finally Do Something About the Bulldozer That Killed My Daughter

Bernie Sanders is trying to end the shipment of US bulldozers to Israel—like the one that crushed my daughter, Rachel Corrie, to death 23 years ago.

by Cindy Corrie | Income Tax Day, April 15, 2026

Our daughter, Rachel Corrie, was killed in 2003 in Gaza, while trying to protect a Palestinian home facing illegal destruction by the Israeli military. She was 23 years old. The massive, armored Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer that crushed her was manufactured in the United States. It was the same type of militarized bulldozer that US presidents from George W. Bush through to Donald Trump have delivered to Israel.

Today, Senator Bernie Sanders will force a vote in the Senate to try to end this cycle of death by banning the transfer of D-9 bulldozers to Israel. We hope he will not take this stand alone.

In his final months in office, President Joe Biden blocked the shipment of militarized bulldozers to Israel, finally recognizing the role the machines play in Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian homes. But one of President Trump’s first acts upon taking office was to overturn that decision and resume the transfers. In the months since, Israel has only accelerated its destruction of homes, not just in Gaza but in the West Bank too, and now in its invasion of southern Lebanon.

What Mrs Corrie means is that the #woke staffers who ran the White House while President Autopen slumbered through the day blocked the shipments.

What does it say about our country’s values when, in violation of international and US law, we continue to use taxpayer money to supply Israel with machines that kill, and that destroy homes halfway around the world—all while many Americans sleep on the street and young people have given up on one day owning a home for themselves? What responsibility do we bear to change this?

American aid to Israel winds up getting spent back in the United States. The Caterpillar D-9 is manufactured in East Peoria, Illinois, meaning that some of the young people around Peoria have a better chance at actually buying a home for themselves; Mrs Corrie would take that opportunity away from them.

While Cat is the premier manufacturer of large bulldozers, it’s not the only one, and that American aid could be used to buy bulldozers from Komatsu or Volvo or Liebherr.

No policy can bring back those taken from us by these actions—children and other loved ones. But the Senate now has an opportunity to honor the memories of our daughter, other Americans, and thousands of Palestinian civilians killed, and to show that their deaths, and all the destruction, will no longer be condoned and funded. We hope those elected to represent us, the American people, understand the message that voting to block these D-9 bulldozers will send. This will not be a symbolic gesture, but a concrete step toward the protection of human life.

You know what would really be a “concrete step toward the protection of human life”? For the ‘Palestinians’ to stop attacking Israel!

We can feel some sympathy for Mrs Corrie, that her daughter has been killed, but her daughter was killed by her own stupidity. She somehow thought being a human shield for a ‘Palestinian’ house was a good idea, and somehow thought that the bulldozer operator could see through the heavy steel blade. Who knows; maybe he did know that she was there, and didn’t recognize her for an entitled white girl from the United States rather than just another Hamas terrorist.

Young Miss Corrie was a committed pro-‘Palestinian’ activist as well as anti-American protester. The September/October 2003 issue of the hard-left magazine Mother Jones gave us an activist biography of her:

Rachel Corrie grew up in Olympia, where her father worked as an insurance executive and her mother, an accomplished flutist, volunteered at local schools. In September 1997, she entered Evergreen State College in Olympia, a small liberal-arts institution known for its experimental curriculum and its left-wing orientation. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, graduated in 1977 and is often held up as the kind of irreverent, creative personality allowed to flourish at the school. A distrust of authority and a passion for unpopular causes permeate the politics of both students and faculty. In 1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former journalist and Black Panther convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting of a Philadelphia police officer, delivered Evergreen’s commencement address via audiotape from death row, sparking outrage in conservative circles. “The radical ideologies espoused every day at Evergreen State College are of every nasty branch of extremism,” one columnist recently wrote. “Anti-Americanism. Anti-God. Anti-life. Anti-Israel. Anti-capitalISM. Anti-tradition.”

Well, we know from where her activism came; hyperlink to Evergreen State College in quotation added by me. The article noted that she had “burn(ed) a makeshift American flag before Gaza schoolchildren.”

Miss Corrie went to her eternal reward on March 16, 2003; in 2005, upon orders of the Israeli government, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, all Jewish settlers in Gaza were forcibly evacuated, and their settlements dismantled, to the extent of removing the graves of the settlers who had died there. Gaza was the ‘Palestinians’ opportunity to prove that they could live in peace next to Israel, despite Yassir Arafat’s final rejection of a negotiated peace deal that had been accepted by Israel.

But, of course, they could not live in peace, as the rain of rockets launched by Hamas, the freely elected — in 2007, the last free election there — government of the area demonstrated. Sometimes a few, sometimes many, and even sometimes none, but the situation was always tense. Then, on October 7, 2023, came the big attack, and the Israelis said enough is enough; they want war, we’ll give them war. Senator Sanders, himself of Jewish descent, wants to protect the ‘Palestinians’, who themselves want nothing more than to slaughter Jews. 1,199 people murdered and another 251 kidnapped; of the 251 hostages seized, only 166 were returned alive, with 85 either already dead when seized, or killed during captivity. Is it any surprise that Israel decided on total war to eliminate Hamas? And now our good friends on the left are appalled that Gaza looks like Tokyo or Berlin or Hiroshima in 1945.

Senator Sanders is just a simp.

I’ve said it before: Israel should have expelled every last Arab from Gaza, Judea, and Samaria following the 1967 war, when they captured those territories. It would have been a humanitarian disaster, but if it had been done when it should have been done, Israel would have shortened, more defensible borders, and the ‘Palestinians’ would have had 59 years now to re-establish their lives while not under Israeli occupation.

Bulldozers? They are very useful construction tools for cleaning away debris and grading the land into something more useful. That Israel has been buying Caterpillars from the United States, rather than Komatsus from Japan puts dollars back into the pockets of American workers, but simps like the Distinguished Gentleman from Vermont would rather see more American aid to Israel go to workers in foreign countries, because they love them some ‘Palestinians,’ people who would happily kill them is they had the chance.

If Hamas ever won, if the Islamists ever got their way, people like Cindy Corrie and Senator Sanders would be shocked, shocked! to find themselves among the first lined up against the wall, because the Islamists would have little respect for the useful idiots by that point.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, girl! Yet another public school teacher accused of trying to become sexually involved with a student

There was no one more disappointed than I was when The Philadelphia Inquirer and then-Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams started going after the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for covering up sexual abuses by Catholic priests, or the horrible statistics when the John Jay Report, The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950-2002 was released. Priests should be above the sexual abuse, and sometimes outright rape, that was documented.

Alas! it seems that (supposedly) celibate priests have not been the only ones engaging in the sexual abuse of minors. The arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 exposed a whole other world of adult men trying to diddle teenaged girls, and if the left have been trying everything they could to tie it to President Trump — something the Biden Administration could not do when it had possession of the Epstein evidence for four years, despite all of their attempts to disqualify and jail Mr Trump before the 2024 elections — it’s clear that plenty of other miscreants had been enjoying themselves on “Epstein Island.”

Nevertheless, those were the wealthy and powerful, those who thought they could do no wrong. But what we have been seeing more and more these days is not the wealthy and powerful, but ordinary, working-class citizens, heavily tilted towards public school teachers.

KY substitute teacher, assistant coach charged with sexually abusing student

By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | March 30, 2026 | 5:50 PM EDT

Bardstown police arrested a Bardstown High School substitute teacher on Monday and charged her with sexually abusing a student, police and school officials said.

Mary “Hanna” Mattingly, 31, was charged with first-degree sexual abuse and procuring or promoting use of a minor by electronic means, police said.

No, of course the Lexington Herald-Leader did not publish Miss Mattingly’s photograph, despite the fact it was available as a public record and has been available online from several other sources. The First Street Journal does publish those mugshots, and I use them whenever I can find them.

Bardstown City Schools’ Superintendent Ryan Clark confirmed Mattingly was also an assistant high school girls’ soccer coach.

Mattingly was listed in that role on the Kentucky High School Athletic Association website for the last two seasons.

Clark said in a statement that an anonymous letter was received Thursday “alleging inappropriate conduct by a female substitute teacher and a Bardstown High School juvenile.“

“Bardstown City Schools immediately initiated an investigation, removed the individual from her job duties, placed her on administrative leave, and alerted the authorities,” the school district’s statement said.

Several stories noted that Miss Mattingly (allegedly) communicated with the student on more than one occasion, a record of persistence. WBRD reported, “It had been going on for several months,” Bardstown Police Detective Eric Williamson said Wednesday. “Social media was the main avenue for the communication.”

But what none of the stories I could find told us whether the student she contacted was male or female. That is a frequent enough occurrence for me to conclude that the credentialed media do not want anyone to infer that homosexuality is in any way connected to sexual abuse, even though the John Jay Report noted that 81% of the victims of sexual abuse by an all-male clergy were boys. We have previously noted how The Philadelphia Inquirer tried to conceal the fact that a teenaged murderer was transgendered, and you’ll find several more such stories on this site.

I take no inference in the specific case of Miss Mattingly, though I’d note from her photo that she’s pretty enough to have attracted plenty of attention from adult men. Bardstown had a Census Bureau estimated population of 14,104 on July 1, 2024, and isn’t a particularly poor place as small towns in the Bluegrass State go.

Miss Mattingly is listed as being 31 years old, and that means she is certainly old enough to have known better than to mess with a student. There have been enough stories in the media concerning adults in general, and adult teachers specifically, going after minor students, that no one with an IQ above room temperature could have been unaware that attempting a sexual relationship with a minor, with a public school student, was tremendously dangerous. And no teacher of any experience could be unaware that students talk; this stuff can’t be kept secret for long.

Miss Mattingly is, of course, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

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The seriousness of the surge in Catholic conversions

As a somewhat frequent participant in Catholic discussions on Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏, the dumbest rebranding of the 21st century — I’ve been seeing a ton of posts about the surge in Catholic converts. Apparently, the algorithms see what we like, and send more of the same our way!  Many tweets about people’s individual conversions cheered me, but the one by Chrissie Mayr, screen captured at the right, seemed far more important to me. Miss Mayr pointed out what not everyone knows: unlike our Protestant brethren, who basically welcome everyone into their churches as members as soon as they walk in the door, conversion to Catholicism is a process, one which involves serious time and education into the beliefs held and requirements of becoming Catholic.

Miss Mayr told us that she initially found the process of OCIA, Order of Christian Initiation of Adults, intimidating, and it certainly can be.  OCIA is not meant to be intimidating, but I suppose I can see where some might see it that way. But it is intended to show aspiring Catholics what being Catholic really means, and to what they planned to commit. We want aspiring Catholics to understand the sacrament of Reconciliation — confession and absolution — and the need for an examination of conscience. We want aspiring Catholics to understand the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and Apostolic Succession. We want aspiring Catholics to understand the real reverence of the Eucharist, the heart of every Mass. We want aspiring Catholics to not only be proud of being Catholic, but to understand why they should be proud of it.

I’m old enough to remember the surge of “Jesus freaks” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were, essentially, non-denominational Protestants, and the passion and fad of such soon faded. The recent surge in conversion to Catholicism entails as orderliness that the Jesus freaks never had, and we hope that OCIA brings that orderliness and with it, a more durable commitment.

OCIA is a process which has the catechumens coming to Mass every Sunday, not only for the Mass, but for their instruction. This is a subtle, or perhaps not-so-subtle means of instilling in them the habit of getting out of bed on Sunday morning and coming to church. One thing too infrequently acknowledged is that attendance at church is a habit, and the more often you do get up rather than sleeping in, the easier it is to get up the next Sunday. For me, especially during colder weather, there are some Sundays that it’s really hard to get out of our nice, warm, comfortable bed, but it’s a habit, and I do it anyway. On both Palm Sunday, when the bedroom was cool due to the window being open, and Easter, when it was just plain cold, our bed was just so very nice, but yes, I got up anyway, and went to Mass. There’s a point at which you are more encouraged to get up and go to Mass because you want to keep your attendance record spotless.

Will the recent surge in Catholic conversions hold? Will our Church see more Catholics staying Catholic, more Catholics in the pews every Sunday morning? Only the Lord knows the answer to that, but I believe we have reason to hope.

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Citius, Altius, Fortius Girls can't be boys and boys can't be girls, no matter how much a few of them don't like it

The Nation is one of our oldest political commentary journals, dating from 1865, and these days it is charitably described as “progressive,” though far-left and #woke[1]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 would be more accurate. They’re just another bunch who’ve fallen for the idiocy that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

The Olympics Is Repeating One of Its Worst Mistakes

The IOC’s new anti-trans testing regime revives some of the most discredited and discriminatory policies in the history of the games.

Michael Waters | Holy Thursday, April 2, 2026

In 1967, a Polish sprinter named Ewa Kłobukowska sat for a mandatory DNA test. Kłobukowska, a rising track star, had won a gold and a bronze medal at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. Now, a new policy required all women track-and-field athletes to be screened for the presence of X chromosomes. Kłobukowska was probably shocked to learn that the test had placed her on the wrong side of the gender binary. Exactly what happened is hazy—news reports claimed that Kłobukowska was discovered to have “one chromosome too many,” without further explanation—but the consequences were immediate. Kłobukowska was banned from the Olympics. Her sporting career was over.

Now why would the Olympics be running DNA tests back in the mid 1960s, before there was any such thing as “transgenderism”? It’s simple! Female athletes in international competition from the Soviet bloc nations, the USSR and the satellite countries in the old Warsaw Pact, sure looked as though there were some men in drag competing in women’s sports. They were cheating, no surprise during the Cold War and the Soviets’ attempts to persuade the civilized world that Communism was somehow superior.

Track-and-field officials framed this as an unmitigated triumph, proof that DNA testing had weeded out an athlete who was “not truly female.” But even at the time, some onlookers could see that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was going down a dark road of gender policing, weeding out women who had always understood themselves as female based on some arbitrary biological marker. The head of the Polish Olympic Committee, perhaps radicalized by the dismissal of one of his top athletes, called DNA testing a “form of discrimination” as well as something of a gender delusion: How could the IOC hope to split up athletes into biological binaries when “there are no generally accepted criteria of sex for woman athletes”? Sex, after all, is a spectrum.

These critiques did not stop the IOC from expanding its testing requirements. From 1968 on, all women athletes had to sit for chromosome exams ahead of the Olympics. Only at the end of the 1990s, when the chorus of critical voices became unavoidable, did the IOC ditch this sex testing regime.

Translation: when Communism in the USSR fell and their attempts at cheating ended, genetic testing to see if women were actually women was no longer needed. But author Michael Waters revealed his point of argument when he wrote, “Sex, after all, is a spectrum.”

No, it isn’t. Sex falls into two major categories, males and females, and one minor one, those unfortunate individuals who suffer from genetic or developmental defects which make them “intersex.” Our #woke friends on the far-left sometimes claim that gender is a spectrum, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone claim that sex is. Even the World Health Organization, which buys into the gender spectrum idea, differentiates it from sex:

Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

It would seem that Mr Waters is attempting to move the goalposts to make his argument!

Sadly, the article falls behind the paywall just a bit after the parts I’ve already quoted, but, not to worry, I had first found it in my morning feeds from another source, which has the entire article here.

After a couple of paragraphs whining about the tests, Mr Waters continued:

Just as it did in 1968, the IOC is insisting that the new regime is about preventing men from breaching the barriers of women’s sports, saying that “it is absolutely clear that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.” And, just as was true all those decades ago, this excuse doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Instead, the IOC is playing a linguistic jiu-jitsu with us, lumping intersex and trans women into the categories of “biological males,” even though they are not men and do not have the same athletic advantages as men.

We have previously noted how Will Thomas, a very much middle-of-the-pack male swimmer, vaulted to the top of the ranking after he decided he was really a woman and started calling himself “Lia.” We pointed out how, in the Zippy Invitational he was not only utterly destroying the real women in the pool, but his times were in the middle of the pack for the male swimmers. We noted how the last place male swimmer in the 500-yard freestyle had a time 7.21 seconds faster than the first real female finisher in that race.

But, don’t take my word for it: Swimming World magazine ran the numbers in an article entitled “A Look At the Numbers and Times: No Denying the Advantages of Lia Thomas.”

Clearly, this new policy has little to do with science or fairness—and everything to do with the metastasizing right-wing panic against trans women. Instead of dealing with the occasionally messy work of including gender-diverse athletes in a binary sports infrastructure, the IOC seems to have decided that it’s more convenient simply not to try. That the global right has made trans women athletes into a fixation, a proxy for their much wider-ranging campaign to disenfranchise trans people, has proven to be a convenient cover for a return to the 20th century. It’s also only the latest example of the regressive gender politics that have defined the Olympics for their entire history.

Ahhh, it’s not really science but Mr Waters’ view of fairness, fairness for “trans women” rather than fairness to real women, which is his bugaboo, and what he calls “right-wing panic.”

Michael Waters, from his website.

Sports does not really care about sensible conservative or whacko leftist politics; sports simply measures, by various means, strength, speed, quickness, and other physical metrics. The Olympics motto is “Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter”, which is Latin for “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together”, and there is absolutely no denying that, overall, males are faster, can jump higher, and are stronger than females. Through rigorous training, some women will be able to run faster, jump higher, and be stronger than most men, but when it comes to athletic competition the subject is not the males in the middle, but the top women’s performances versus the top men’s performances. As Mr Thomas so well proved, a mid-level male collegiate swimmer is going to outperform a top-level female swimmer. A simple look at the men’s records versus women’s records in track and field demonstrates the physical advantages men have.

The real panic is among our good friends on the left, who are adamant that men and women are equal. That can certainly be true under the law, and in some areas, we are seeing women’s achievements in things such as medical school admissions and collegiate admissions in general outpacing those of men. The top surgeons are heavily men, but as the surge of women in medical schools persists, the time and experience of women in medicine might change just who are at the top surgeons.

But physically? Sorry, Mr Waters, but biology will not be mocked. Not only are males, in general, taller, larger, and stronger than females, the structural differences between the hips of males, optimized for strength and speed in running, versus the hips of women, which have to have larger internal openings to permit babies to pass through, lead to real differences, differences which make a difference when it comes to sports and many other physical activities. The last player on the Washington Wizards team would absolutely dominate in the WNBA. 5’7″ “Spud” Webb once won the NBA dunk contest; very few WNBA players can dunk the ball.

Sexual dimorphism is a real thing, and it’s not subject to politics. Mr Waters actually knows this, but chooses to ignore it over politics. Girls really can’t be boys, and boys really can’t be girls, no matter how much a few mentally ill people think they can.

References

References
↑1 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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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! I'm sure that he only crossed the border to build a better life for himself!

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the Lexington Herald-Leader, now under the leadership of Executive Editor Jeremy Chisenhall, chose not, in two separate stories, to publish the mug shot of Jorge Luis Martinez Ulloa, 31, charged with:

  • one count of kidnapping a minor;
  • two counts of first-degree rape of a victim younger than 12;
  • two counts of first-degree sodomy of a victim younger than 12; and
  • two counts of first-degree sexual abuse of a victim younger than 12.

Fortunately, the Department of Homeland Security has no qualms about publishing photos of illegal immigrants apprehended for serious crimes!

Man accused of kidnapping, sexually abusing minor in Lexington has ICE detainer

By Christopher Leach | Monday, March 30, 2026 | 3:45 PM EDT

Court documents indicate Martinez Ulloa is not a U.S. citizen and was born in Mexico. No other information about his immigration status was available.

Perhaps reporter Christopher Leach didn’t have more information about Mr Martinez Ulloa’s immigration status, but Homeland Security’s tweet stated that he had entered the US at least four times during the Obama and Biden Administrations, and a fifth time at an unknown date.

Lexington police said they were dispatched to the 1300 block of Davenport Drive, in the Cardinal Valley neighborhood, for a juvenile assault victim. Martinez Ulloa was arrested and booked into the Fayette County Detention Center.

Davenport Drive, spelled Devenport on Google Maps, is a neighborhood of mixed single-family homes and smaller apartment buildings. Parts of the Cardinal Valley neighborhood are also known, colloquially, as Little Mexico.

Court documents say Martinez Ulloa grabbed the victim by her arm and neck, trapped her inside his apartment and raped her. The girl was a stranger to Martinez Ulloa and told officials the only way out of his apartment was through a window.

The victim was sent to a local hospital for treatment, police said.

Martinez Ulloa was arraigned in Fayette District Court Monday afternoon. He appeared virtually from the jail. Fayette District Judge Melissa Murphy left Martinez Ulloa’s bond unchanged at $100,000. A preliminary hearing in his case has been scheduled for April 7.

Mr Martinez Ulloa has not been convicted of anything, but it appears than simply being previously deported means nothing to him other than the annoyance of taking another trip north of the border.

Under KRS §510.040, the first degree rape of a child under 12 is a Class A felony, which, under KRS §532.020 carries a sentence of at least twenty and not more than fifty years, or possibly life in prison. Under KRS §510.070, the first degree sodomy of a child under 12 is a Class A felony as well.

If Mr Martinez is guilty of the crimes of which he has been accused, he should spend the rest of his miserable life in the worst prison the Commonwealth has. If the evidence against him is solid, his attorney, the Department of Public Advocacy, will undoubtedly seek some sort of lenient plea bargain; this must be rejected! If he is guilty, he should never see the light of day again as a free man.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, girl!

Color me shocked that The Philadelphia Inquirer published the photo of an accused criminal. Technically, it isn’t a mugshot, so perhaps it’s allowed under a very narror interpretation of the newspaper’s stated mugshot policy. but I couldn’t find the newspaper’s Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — blurb, so I screen captured the image from the article itself. Since the photo caption states it was from a New Jersey state Supreme Court video, there isn’t a copyright issue.

Former South Jersey teacher charged with sexual assault began grooming student when he was 12, prosecutor alleges

Ashley Fisler was charged last week with sexually assaulting a former student at Orchard Valley Middle School in Washington Township.

by Melanie Burney | April Fool’s Day, 2026 | 3:33 PM EDT

A former Washington Township middle school teacher began grooming a student for a sexual relationship when he was 12 and abused him for years, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

The allegations against Ashley Fisler, who was charged last week with sexually assaulting a former student at Orchard Valley Middle School, were detailed during a detention hearing to determine whether she should be released pending trial. Superior Court Judge William Ziegler said he would issue a decision Thursday.

Note that Miss Fisler has been charged but not yet convicted. The newspaper stated that “Pre-conviction mugshots are inherently unfair, depicting suspects as criminals before guilt or innocence has been established.”

Fisler, who is no longer working as a teacher, is charged with six counts of sexual assault of a minor and one count each of endangering the welfare of a child and official misconduct of a public servant.

“This was more than just six isolated acts of sex abuse against a minor,” said Kylie Finley, an assistant Gloucester County prosecutor. “This was a pattern of six years of grooming, manipulation, and abuse by this defendant as a middle school teacher against one of her active and former students.”

Miss Fisler, now 36, left the school system in 2023.

Teachers are all college educated, with at least a bachelor’s degree, and are normally pressured to be working toward their master’s as well. They really can’t be unaware of the scandal by Mary Kay Letourneau, and the fact that Mrs Letourneau spent years behind bars for it. Public schools have orientation lessons for all teachers, and inappropriate relationships are surely discussed. The news of Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in 2019 was national news, and Miss Fisler couldn’t have missed it. You just can’t expect this s(tuff) to stay hidden forever.

Well, if the allegations are true, she’s in a heap o’ trouble.

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Pennsylvania just became a little less safe

Well, of course.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat of course, opposes capital punishment, as do I, but the Governor of the Keystone State does not have arbitrary power to issue pardons or sentence commutations on his own. The most Mr Shapiro could do, as his predecessor Tom Wolf did before him, was to decline to sign any death warrants. But now, the Governor is happy that the state Supreme Court held that mandatory sentences of life without the possibility of parole for second-degree murder violate the state constitution.

We have previously noted this case.

Under Title 18§2502(b), murder of the second degree is a criminal homicide which is committed while defendant was engaged as a principal or accomplice in the perpetration of a felony. That’s pretty simple: the murderer is already committing a crime, so even if he wasn’t necessarily planning on killing someone, he was already on the scene, already planning on committing a crime, and prepared to kill if he thought it necessary.

Whether you’re the guy who fires the fatal shot or not, you’re still a really bad guy, and there’s no good reason for you to ever be put back out on the streets with decent people again.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story on the case can be found here. The opinion of the court can be found here. From the newspaper:

One of the lead lawyers in the case, Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center, said the decision “will have profound ramifications” for the state’s criminal justice system, and that it “represents the culmination of decades of movement-building by incarcerated people and their families and communities.”

Ben Grote, huh? How unserious is Mr Grote? He couldn’t even be bothered to clean up his beta male beard before going before the state Supreme Court. But, alas! he won his case.

Image from main page of Abolitionist Law Center website, screencaptured on October 9, 2024.

Mr Grote works for the Abolitionist Law Center, which we have previously mentioned. What is not mentioned is that the Abolitionist Law Center is opposed to incarceration for anything, opposes all prison sentences, and would, if they could, free every murderer, every rapist, every drug dealer, and every assailant locked up in Pennsylvania’s prisons.

We challenge every point on the criminal punishment conveyor belt including policing, courts, jails and prisons, and various forms of legal supervision, as well as other aspects of the carceral machine.

Boldface in the original.

I might have ignored this story, especially since I was eating the very delicious lamb chops my wife made for supper, were it not for a very lovely lady on Twitter. Miss Long has in her Twitter bio a background illustration saying:

Roses are red,
No lives are blue,
Defund the Police,
Abolish ICE too.

Miss Long posted a series on Twitter, beginning here, praising the Abolitionist Law Center for its work. We already know that the Abolitionist Law Center wants to abolish prisons completely, to give dangerous predators some cockamamie “restorative justice” bovine feces.

Some people are beyond redemption, some people are simply evil and can never be trusted in society. Miss Long and the Abolitionist Law Center would see the gates of prisons thrown open and deranged killers like Wesley Cook let back out on the streets. They don’t even like, as noted above, “legal supervision,” which means probation and probation officers. Miss Long wants to see criminal illegal immigrants, some guilty of murder and rape, left free to terrorize innocent people.

I assume that Miss Long and the others believe that people are just innately good, and if the people we now see as bad guys are just left alone and shown sweetness and light, they’ll all be great people and credits to their communities.

Well, that’s just plain bovine feces. Some people simply need to be removed from society, for society to remain safe and secure for the people who are actually good citizens. I can’t even understand how some people can think differently.

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The rise of anti-Semitism by recent Catholic converts

It has been said that Catholic converts are among the most zealous of all. And so it is with Carrie Prejean Boller, or, as I prefer to call her, Carrie Prejean Hez-Boller, because she has been extremely vocal in her support of the ‘Palestinians’ and their war against Israel.

On March 23, she tweeted:

Israel is a terrorist state committing an absolute death camp in Gaza, and Lebanon. This evil regime must be called out. Zionists want you to think these are “God’s chosen people” causing mass murder of innocent life, all while justifying it.

Absolute blasphemy!

These are God’s enemies.

This is the woman who lost her crown as Miss California over a leaked masturbation tape of herself she sent to her then-boyfriend when she was 17 — something which was technically dissemination of child pornography — and now she is whining that she lost a seat on a ‘religious liberty commission’ due to her continual anti-Semitic remarks.

How, I have to ask, can she be entrusted with any position on ‘religious liberty’ when she calls the Jews of Israel “God’s enemies”?

Now she’s trying to pick a fight with two Catholic bishops, Timothy Cardinal Dolan and Robert Barron which led Richard Hanania to tweet, “This woman seems to think the Catholic Church is some kind of global Walmart where you can just keep demanding to see the manager and yell at him for not being antisemitic enough.” 🙂

It turns out that I am not the only one to notice this:

The Catholic Convert Boom Is Real But A Troubling Pattern Is Emerging

Some new Catholic voices are using the faith for something else entirely.

By Ryan Girdusky • Tuesday, March 24, 2026 • DailyWire.com

As we approach the holiest day of the year for the Catholic Church, tens of millions will prepare to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Americans across the country are preparing to join the faith I have belonged to since birth.

Converts to the faith have played a crucial role over the last two millennia, from St. Paul’s journey to Damascus, to St. Augustine’s departure from a life of debauchery that would make Hugh Hefner blush, to G.K. Chesterton, whose writings still speak to millions nearly a century later, to St. Elizabeth Seton, the first American-born saint.

I firmly believe the Catholic Church is the greatest civil institution ever created. Since its founding, the Church has clothed the naked, educated the young, fed the hungry, tended to the sick, and through divine mercy provided the path to salvation for billions of people.

During the darkest times in human history, the Catholic Church was the only institution that separated the West from barbarism. The very fabric of Western civilization is tied to the history of the Church.

This is absolutely true! Catholicism spurred Western civilization, but Catholicism specifically, and Christianity in general, are dependent upon Western civilization for survival. Christianity is fractured these days, and has been since the rise in Protestantism. Religious tolerance did not come easily with the Reformation, with King Henry VIII persecuting Catholics, and his successor and elder daughter, Queen Mary I, turning right around and persecuting Protestants. Queen Elizabeth I was famously Protestant, but while she was no friend of the Catholics, she didn’t take working against Catholicism to nearly the extent of her father. Tolerance for various Christian denominations grew, albeit slowly. As part of the restoration of the monarchy, King Charles II promised religious tolerance, meant to be between Anglicans and Presbyterians, but it was a policy that included Catholics.

While it’s easy for me to wax poetic about a church I have repeatedly fallen in love with over the years — even with all of its shortcomings — other high-profile converts appear to be using their newfound membership in the Catholic faith as nothing more than a political prop.

It is true, the vast majority of new converts join for all the right reasons. But a small, vocal cadre of political influencers are using their Catholicism to build social media platforms, feigning purity as an E-girl or, even worse, promoting antisemitism. It is people doing the latter who pose the most credible threat to the integrity of all Catholics and create a widespread erroneous belief that Catholicism has an issue with Jews.

More specifically, people like Mrs Boller and Candace Owens Farmer, someone initially conservative and sensible, who then fell into anti-Semitism, and then went full bananas into conspiracy theories — I wonder if she’s fallen into 9/11 Trutherism yet? — are convinced that the Jooooos run the world

Mira Fox wrote:

“As a Catholic, I don’t agree that the new, modern state of Israel has any biblical prophecy meaning at all,” (Mrs Boller) said in the hearing. Later, she doubled down on X. “I’m a proud Catholic. I, in no way will be forced to embrace Zionism as a fulfillment of biblical prophesy,” she wrote.

What she was referring to was the idea of Christian Zionism — the theological belief among some Christians that the Bible supports the existence of the modern state of Israel. Some forms of Christian Zionism support the Jewish state as a necessary, prophesied precursor to Jesus’ return; all Jews must return to Israel before the end of days. Others may simply support Israel because they believe it shares their “Judeo-Christian” biblical foundations. But whatever the reasons, there has historically been widespread political support for Israel among American Christians. And that support has been core to Israel’s relationship with the U.S.

Zionism.

Theodor Herzl was a Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer who was the father of modern political Zionism, with his book Der Judenstaat. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine, which, in the late 19th century was part of the Ottoman Empire, in an effort to form a Jewish state.

Zionism exists because we good Christians forced it on the Jews.

While European Jews might have supported Theodor Herzl’s ideas, few of them actually chose to emigrate to the Holy Land. The ending phrase of the traditional Passover seder, “next year in Jerusalem,” expressed a hope, but it wasn’t one that the Jewish diaspora in Europe took seriously enough to make aliyah — emigrate to Israel — themselves. But then the good Christians in Germany voted for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Even before the outbreak of war in Europe, those same good Germans went along with the despoilation of the Jews. Little by little, their property was confiscated, their businesses driven out, their jobs taken away.

After the war in Europe started, and the Third Reich overran much of Europe, our good Christian ancestors of just two generations ago willingly helped the Nazis find those Jews who were in hiding, in Germany and the occupied countries, helping to load them in the boxcars and be shipped off to a (supposedly) unknown but nevertheless dreaded fate.

Remember: Cuba, the United States, and Canada all denied entry to the MS St Louis, a ship with over 900 Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis in 1939, just before the war began. The surviving Jews in 1945 could count on no more help from the Western Hemisphere than they could from Europe. Many private colleges in the United States imposed Jewish quotas, because ‘too many’ Jews were winning admissions without them.

After the war ended, the surviving Jews chose to make aliyah because there was no place else for them to go! Their homes and property were destroyed and gone, and their surviving old neighbors were frequently the same people who identified them to the Gestapo. The good Christians of Europe had proven to the Jews, once again, that they could not count on their Christian neighbors to help and protect them; the Jews could count only on themselves.

Then, as they tried to make their way to the Holy Land, the British, who were siding with the Arabs because the Arabs had oil, put many of them in ‘displaced persons’ camps, and tried their best to keep the surviving Jews out of the Holy land.

What other conclusion can be drawn? The surviving Jews could count on no one but themselves, and that turned Theodor Herzl’s Zionist dreams into hard-nosed reality. We good Christians created the Zionism of the post-war years, and which continues today!

Like so many other people, now 81 years after World War II, I’ve always found it difficult to understand how the Nazis were able to get so many good and decent Europeans to go along with their round-up of the Jews. I could see how people submitted at the point of a gun, but there were so many Europeans who helped voluntarily, under no compulsion other than their own decisions.

But now? Now I can see it, I can understand it. We have good Americans, citizens of this country, which was a major contributor to winning World War II against both Germany and Japan in part by bombing them back to the Stone Age, whining about Israel’s destruction in Gaza while never mentioning that Hamas and their supporters in Gaza started the war.

I can also understand how some people, including a lot of sensible conservatives, didn’t like or want the United States bombing attack against Iran. I didn’t like it either, though I am certainly happy that the Islamist leadership have mostly been sent to their 72 bacha bazi boys. I want to see us out of that war as soon as possible, and wouldn’t support any ground troops being used there for anything other than the purpose of seizing all of Iran’s fissile material and destroying all of their nuclear armament equipment.

But this ridiculous anti-Semitism, this hatred of Jews and Israel, our easternmost outpost of Western civilization, and our bulwark against the hordes of seventh-century Islamist barbarism, is the ultimate in stupidity. We can argue about the wisdom of the American involvement in attacking Iran, but the notion that we’re somehow controlled by the Jooooos and puppets of Israel is ridiculous and ignorant and just plain stupid.