Category Archives: Culture

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When seconds count, the police are only minutes away!

The article from the New York Post doesn’t tell us whether the “suspect” was in the United States illegally, but it no longer matters, because he is stone-cold graveyard dead.

Texas dad fatally shoots carjacker who tried stealing his car with his family inside

By Richard Pollina | Wednesday, May 6, 2026 | 1:39 AM EDT

A Texas father fatally shot a would-be carjacker who tried stealing his car — with his family, including his young children, still inside — after the suspect fled the scene of a multi-vehicle crash across the street.

The chaos began Sunday afternoon when a driver slammed into two cars along Highway 66, about 18 miles outside downtown Dallas, around 3:30 p.m., according to the Garland Police Department.

The driver, whose name has not been released by police, then fled to a nearby gas station, where he was accused of trying to “take several vehicles by force.”

Surveillance footage obtained by Fox 4 showed the suspect approach the victim’s white Impala in the parking lot of a shopping center across the street.

The erratic suspect walked up to the driver’s side of the Impala, immediately prompting the father to jump out of the car.

The father had several children and two adult women in the car during the violent encounter, police said.

The suspected carjacker tried to yank the father away from the vehicle, which triggered a struggle as a young boy and the rest of the family bolted from the car.

Police said the father “produced a firearm” and fired more than 10 rounds at the suspect.

So, what would have happened had the father not taken strong action, if the father had meekly surrendered to the “suspect”? By struggling, he gave the rest of the family the time to get out of the car, possibly saving their lives. Had the “suspect” quickly gained the vehicle, and taken off with kids inside, there’s no telling what could have happened, but none of the possibilities had good outcomes. If he had waited for the police to arrive, the “suspect” could have been off and driving down the highway, putting other, innocent people in jeopardy.

Fortunately, if this had to happen, it happened outside of Dallas, Texas, and the police do not expect any charges to be files against the father. But what if it had happened in Seattle?

‘Clueless’ socialist Mayor Katie Wilson in hot seat after video of 77-year-old beaten in downtown Seattle goes viral

By Andrew Mark Miller, Fox News | Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo, 2026 | 10:14 PM EDT

Seattle’s socialist Mayor Katie Wilson is facing fierce blowback on social media after a 77-year-old man was seen on video being beaten by two individuals in a crime that was captured by closed-circuit television cameras, a tool that Wilson has denounced in the past as something that makes the community feel unsafe and “vulnerable.”

The elderly man was walking down the street in downtown Seattle last month when two men walking by him stopped, without any provocation, shoved him to the ground and beat him, KOMO News reported.

Ahmed Abdullahi Osman, 29, was later arrested and charged with second-degree assault, and police are looking for the second suspect. Osman was reportedly booked into jail the night of the assault and then released back onto the streets before a bail hearing.

“Turning on more cameras won’t magically make our neighborhoods safer, but it will certainly make our neighborhoods more vulnerable,” Wilson said in 2025 after Seattle City Council’s approval of expanding the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) CCTV pilot program, the program used to capture the video of this specific crime, according to KOMO News.

The Mayor doesn’t really want Seattle’s criminal class found and punished, and the fact that the assailant is named Ahmed Abdullahi Osman would certainly contribute to that. The beautiful Seattle, of well-dressed people and good, professional citizens, as depicted in the very liberally-oriented[1]Not only were all of the characters in Grey’s Anatomy bed-hopping frequently, the show also pushed transgenderism and abortion, especially following the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision. Grey’s Anatomy, certainly wouldn’t beat a 77-year-old man, would they, but they were soap opera characters, where Mr Osman is a real person.

“That’s all the bullets we had or we would have shot him more. Quite frankly, we weren’t taking any chances.” — Sheriff Grady Judd

Of course, Her Honor the Mayor would have a difficult decision in the Texas case, because the deceased carjacker is an Hispanic male, while, at least to judge from the not-all-that-clear surveillance photos, is black. Washington state prohibits the sale of magazines which hold more than ten rounds, but does not prohibit the possession of such, and the Texas case indicates that the father “fired more than 10 rounds at the suspect”. The father was clearly not taking any chances with a crazed carjacker where his family were concerned.

In both Garland, Texas and Seattle, Washington, the police were only minutes away; in Garland, the victim was prepared, while in the liberal northwest, he was not.

References

References
↑1 Not only were all of the characters in Grey’s Anatomy bed-hopping frequently, the show also pushed transgenderism and abortion, especially following the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision.
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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Some guys are just as dumb as a box of rocks!

I will admit it; I am at a loss to figure out how people could be this stupid!

Yeah, I get it: some people are simply sexually attracted to minors. But actively trying what this gentleman from the Lone Star State allegedly did, in an environment in which such people are being sought out, prosecuted, and sent to prison for it, is stupid, as in boneheadedly stupid and criminally stupid. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Texas man charged with paying 13-year-old Montgomery County girl for child porn

Mitchell Van Dusen, 31, of Magnolia, Texas, was being held at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in lieu of $500,000 cash bail.

by Robert Moran | Tuesday, April 28, 2026 | 7:40 PM EDT

A 31-year-old Texas man was charged with allegedly paying a 13-year-old girl in Montgomery County to make child pornography, authorities said Tuesday.

Mitchell Van Dusen was extradited last week and was being held at the Montgomery County Correctional facility in lieu of $500,000 cash bail, Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele said.

No, of course the Inquirer didn’t publish the mugshot of the accused, but reporter Robert Moran included a hyperlink which led to the Montgomery County site which included his mugshot, something he has done before.

On July 17, 2025, the girl met with Whitpain Township police to describe online interactions she was having since July 4 of the previous year with an unknown man she met in a chat room on the Discord social platform, according to the affidavit of probable cause.

The girl said she had been receiving money from the man through the Venmo payment app and was exchanging sexually explicit photos and videos with the man, the affidavit said.

There’s more at the newspaper’s original. But if this had been going on for an entire year, it seems to me that there must be more to the story than we have been told. Was this girl smart enough to catch him herself, or was she conned and went to the police after her parents or perhaps a friend found out about it?

We are not told whether Mr Van Dusen is alleged to have shared the child pornography images with anyone else, or whether he was trying to actively make money off of the stuff.

But if he actually did this stuff — and he is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law — he really is as dumb as a box of rocks. He was doing this from Texas, with a girl in Pennsylvania, which means that he is subject to state charges in both Texas and Pennsylvania, as well as federal prosecution.

If he is guilty, if prosecutors have enough information and evidence to win a conviction in a trial, any lenient plea bargain arrangements need to be avoided. He ought to go to prison for many, many years.

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A victory for common sense It shouldn't have taken so long

For our good friends on the left, it is an unwritten rule: not only must they be ‘progressive,’ and ‘woke,’ but they must take the furthest left position possible on any issues in any way related to sex, or they will be enabling MAGA and the evil reich-wing conservatives. Thus, beyond all science and reason, they have forced themselves to take the cockamamie position that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

Vermont is one of our most liberal states, having elected the avowed socialist Bernie Sanders to Congress for decades, but, sha-zamm! it seems that the Constitution applies to them as well:

Vermont pays $566K in damages, legal fees to Christian school it banned from all sports competitions for years

A settlement agreement following mediation was finalized Tuesday after the school was barred from athletics and academic competitions for two years

By Jackson Thompson, Fox News | Tuesday, April 28, 2026 | 7:43 PM EDT

State education agencies in Vermont have paid over $566,000 in damages and legal fees to a Christian school that was banned from all sports and academic competitions for two years after its girls’ basketball team refused to compete against a trans athlete in 2023.

Let me be more explicit than the Fox News story was: the girls’ basketball team refused to compete against a team with a boy claiming he was a girl on it.

A settlement agreement following mediation was finalized on Tuesday that awarded the plaintiffs, including the Mid Vermont Christian School and its law firm Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the $566,000.

When the school took the issue to the courts, the state and its agencies didn’t fold.

ADF Senior Counsel Dave Cortman told Fox News Digital that he was shocked at how firmly the education authorities in Vermont wouldn’t back down from their sweeping sanction on the small Christian school.

“It’s been surprising how much the state has dug in their heels,” he said. “The arguments they’ve made… even saying your beliefs are wrong…

“Their message was, ‘in order for you to follow your religious beliefs, boys are boys, girls are girls, that would actually violate their nondiscrimination policies.’ So the irony of it was, they were discriminating against religious schools.”

We have noted, dozens of times, the cases of Will Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania swimmer who decided he is really a girl and competed on the Penn women’s swim team, and Brayden Fleming, the man male pretending to be a woman playing on the San José State University’s women’s volleyball team. It’s simple: males and females are biologically different, in ways that make a difference when it comes to athletics, but our good friends on the left can’t bring themselves to admit that and still hold on to their beliefs that people can just change their ‘gender’ based on their feelings.

I suppose that the decisions of the public schools isn’t surprising given that 199 public schools in Vermont allow staff to hide student trans status from parents, though I will admit that I cannot see how a student, especially a boy trying to become a girl, could conceal such from his parents, unless they are blind, deaf, and dumb.

Well, the leftist leaders of Vermont’s public education system might not be blind or deaf, but they certainly are dumb.

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A Philadelphia Inquirer sob story about a poor, poor, misunderstood murderer.

The First Street Journal has twice noted the case of Derek Lee, convicted of second degree murder for the killing of Leonard Butler in Pittsburgh. Under Title 18 §2502(b), second degree murder is defined to be “A criminal homicide constitutes murder of the second degree when it is committed while defendant was engaged as a principal or an accomplice in the perpetration of a felony.” The penalty for second degree murder in the Keystone State is specified as life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. 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, even if you were not the person who pulled the trigger.

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.

Derek Lee and a gentleman named Paul Durham broke into Mr Butler’s home. I’ll let The Philadelphia Inquirer give you the details:

In 2014, Lee and Paul Durham pushed their way into a Pittsburgh home armed with a handgun and Taser. Police said they went at the request of the spurned ex-lover of the man living there, Leonard Butler, 44.

Inside, Lee and Durham forced Butler and his girlfriend into the basement. They ordered them to their knees. Lee struck Butler with the gun and used the Taser on him before going upstairs with Butler’s watch.

So, Mr Lee was not only committing a crime, but a violent crime, as he pistol-whipped Mr Butler. This wasn’t just a burglary where the homeowner surprised the criminals, but one in which the criminals were actively attacking the victim.

In the basement, Butler lunged for Durham’s weapon, and in the struggle, Butler was shot and killed.

Both criminals were packing heat that day.

Well, the newspaper is never content at just giving us the facts, but wants to weave a sob story about poor, poor Mr Lee:

Lee grew up in Pittsburgh, a small, wiry boy, the youngest of three children in a close-knit family. He played baseball and basketball, and worked as a youth camp counselor at his grandmother’s church.

His father later moved to Ashtabula, Ohio, splitting the family across state lines. Lee went back and forth between them.

In his teens, Lee’s life shifted. He drifted into street life and graduated high school “by my teeth,” he said.

At that point, at least in the online version of the story, the Inquirer gives us a photo of a smiling Mr Lee, in his graduation gown and holding his diploma.

Have your heartstrings not yet been pulled? Are you not feeling sorry for Mr Lee yet? But the newspaper continues:

When Lee was 18, he and another man shot at a group of basketball players outside a college party. Although five players were injured, none of the bullets from Lee’s gun struck anyone. Lee was convicted of attempted criminal homicide and sentenced to seven to 14 years in prison.

When he was released, Lee’s family welcomed him home with a celebration and his mother’s seven-cheese macaroni. He was 25. He found work as a dishwasher, but struggled to stabilize his life, Lee said.

So, young Mr Lee and his buddies, for whatever their reasons, were armed, and shot into a group of young men outside a party, firing indiscriminately, trying at the very least to shoot some people, and probably hoping to kill some of them. And thus, that good young man, who “worked as a youth camp counselor at his grandmother’s church,” and suffered as the son in a broken home found himself exactly where he belonged: behind bars.

Well, I’m from a broken home, too, but somehow, some way, I never tried to kill anybody due to that.

Mr Lee was then a convicted felon. And that means premeditation when Mr Durham and he broke into Mr Butler’s home, because just by carrying a firearm, Mr Lee was committing a second degree felony under Title 18 §6105.

Then came the burglary and the murder. Mr Lee was a previously convicted felon, in the process of committing more felonies. Apparently his first stint in prison did not teach him the lesson it should have, as the second group of crimes occurred less than a year after he was released from his previous time behind bars.

Why, I have to ask, would any decent people want someone like Mr Lee back out on the streets?

The Inquirer continued with their sob story:

In prison again, Lee said he reached a breaking point. “I just hit that rock-bottom place where I knew I had to do something,” he said.

He turned to religion. He entered a chaplain’s program, and trained service dogs. He also appealed his case himself, and began mentoring incarcerated men serving long or life sentences.

“Society throws away people like us,” Lee said. “It … judges them by one of the worst moments in their life. But I truly believe that people can be redeemed.”

No, Mr Lee, “society” didn’t throw you away: you did that! One of the “worst moments of (his) life”? Mr Leonard didn’t get any further moments in his life; he’s stone-cold graveyard dead because of what Messrs Durham and Lee did.

Naturally, Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, wants to see the murderers previously sentenced under the second degree murder stature given a break:

(Mr Krasner) was joined by several criminal justice advocates, including Saleem Holbrook, executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center, and John Pace, associate director of reentry and engagement at the Youth Sentencing and Re-entry Project. Both men had once been sentenced to life in prison and were later released after U.S. Supreme Court rulings barred mandatory life sentences for juveniles and made those decisions retroactive.

Holbrook stressed that the hundreds of men and women incarcerated under the former law were waiting for an opportunity to be released and show they could contribute meaningfully to their communities.

“(S)how they could contribute meaningfully to their communities”? Yeah, uh huh, right. I have a bridge you can buy, too.

So, what’s the outcome? Mr Lee will have to be resentenced, and his new sentence could still be life, even life without the possibility of parole. But the decision in his case could mean that others in the Keystone State sentenced automatically to life without parole could have their cases reopened for more lenient terms. Some could even be sentenced to time already served, letting actual killers back out on the streets.

The Abolitionist Law Center does not believe anyone should be incarcerated at all, and would if they could 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.

But there’s one person in Mr Lee’s case who cannot be resentenced, and that’s Mr Butler: he was sentenced to death, executed on the spot, and there is no appeal from that.

Despite the efforts of the newspaper to paint Mr Lee as a basically good kid who just made a couple of forgivable mistakes, I remain unmoved. He has already proven himself to be a cancer on civilized life, and should never be allowed to menace decent people again.

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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.