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The freedom to tell the truth Swimmer had to wait until she exhausted her eligibility before she spoke out

When I saw the article referenced below, I guessed that University of Kentucky women’s swim team member Riley Gaines was a senior, and her UK biography page confirmed that.

    Swimmer who tied with Lia Thomas says female athletes ‘not OK’ with trajectory of women’s sports

    by Cameron Jenkins | Friday, April 1, 2022 | 10:28 AM EDT

    A University of Kentucky swimmer who tied in fifth place with Lia Thomas during the NCAA swimming championships’ 200-yard freestyle claimed that many female athletes are “not OK” with the trajectory of women’s sports.

The First Street Journal’s Stylebook specifies that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their real names, the names given at birth, and not the made up ones they use. Further, we always apply the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their biological sex. However, we do not change the direct quotes of others.

    “The majority of us female athletes, or females in general, really, are not OK with this, and they’re not OK with the trajectory of this and how this is going and how it could end up in a few years,” Riley Gaines told Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) during an interview on her podcast “Unmuted with Marsha.”

    Gaines’s comments refer to NCAA rules that allow transgender women to compete in women’s competitive sports, Fox News noted.

    Thomas last month became the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division 1 national championship in any sport when she finished first in the 500-yard freestyle race — a moment that many conservatives have criticized as unfair.

    Gaines described to Blackburn during the podcast the emotions she felt when she realized she had tied in the 200-yard freestyle with Thomas.

    “I touched the wall and saw there was a five by my name indicating that I got fifth … I also looked up, and I saw the number five by Lia’s name and so, in that moment, I realized we tied,” Gaines said. “It was kind of like a flood of emotions. I was extremely happy for the girls above me who conquered what was seemingly impossible by beating Lia.”

I have previously noted my belief that Will Thomas deliberately threw his last couple of races, after he had won the women’s 500-yard freestyle championship, but there’s no way I could prove that.

Miss Gaines noted that, in her tie for fifth in the 200-yard race, the organizers had only one fifth-place award, which she understood. The organizers decided, however, that they’d give the award to Mr Thomas, and send Miss Gaines’ her award in the mail. The organizers could have brought Miss Gaines and Mr Thomas out together, holding aloft the single fifth-place trophy together, but putting 6’3″ Will Thomas and 5’5″ Riley Gaines side-by-side would have resulted in a photograph which just further pointed out the differences between Mr Thomas and female athletes.

I might not have paid any attention to this one, but the University of Kentucky is my alma mater. Naturally, I did a site search of the Lexington Herald-Leader’s website for Riley Gaines, and that newspaper, which heavily covers UK athletics, had nothing on Miss Gaines’ comments[1]As of 5:18 PM EDT on Saturday, April 2, 2022.. I was not surprised.

The Kentucky Kernel, UK’s independent student newspaper, did cover the story.[2]Full disclosure: I wrote for the Kernel while in graduate school, 1980-1982.

Why did I guess that Miss Gaines was a senior? Because her UK career is over; she’s exhausted her eligibility, so she can’t get kicked off the team, can’t lose her athletic scholarship. While she’s a very good swimmer, and her first-place finish in the 200-yard freestyle helped UK to its first Southeastern Conference championship in 2021, she’s not a serious contender for a spot on the Olympic team. Hailing from Gallatin, Tennessee, her future career prospects in that conservative state are not likely to be seriously damaged by her saying, in public, what so many other female swimmers have said anonymously.

References

References
↑1 As of 5:18 PM EDT on Saturday, April 2, 2022.
↑2 Full disclosure: I wrote for the Kernel while in graduate school, 1980-1982.
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Some truths just don’t fit Teh Narrative For some on the left, when the truth doesn't fit their political beliefs, they just deny the truth!

Even Bruce Jenner, the winner of the men’s Decathalon in the 1976 Olympics, but is now so f(ornicated) up in the head that he thinks he’s a woman agrees: Will Thomas, the ‘transgender’ swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team who now calls himself ‘Lia,’ is not the real winner of the 500-yard NCAA women’s freestyle championship:

For the past several months, she has been a vocal opponent of Thomas competing against women.

“[Lia Thomas] is also not good for women’s sports,” Jenner told Fox News in January. “It’s unfortunate that this is happening. I don’t know why she’s doing it. She knows when she’s swimming she’s beating the competition by two laps. She was born as a biological boy. She was raised as a biological boy. Her cardiovascular system is bigger. Her respiratory system is bigger.

“Her hands are bigger. She can swim faster. That’s a known. All of this is woke world that we’re living in right now is not working. I feel sorry for the other athletes that are out there, especially at Penn or anyone she’s competing against, because in the woke world you have to say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is great.’ No it’s not.”

Mr Jenner is certainly right about one thing: it is the #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 who are driving this.

Lia Thomas’ NCAA championship performance gives women sports a crucial opportunity

Anyone who cares about the advancement of sports, and women’s sports in particular, should celebrate her win.

By Cheryl Cooky, Purdue University professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies | March 21, 2022 | 3:31 PM EDT

Just Dr Cooky’s title, professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, ought to tell you that she’s a bit kookie! What professions are there for “women’s, gender and sexuality studies” majors other than university professors?

On Saturday, University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas placed last in the 100-yard freestyle swim during the NCAA championships, ending her career in collegiate swimming. A last-place showing at an NCAA swim meet, even a championship one, would not typically garner national headlines. Yet, Thomas has been at the center of controversy regarding her eligibility to compete in women’s events.

After Mr Thomas’ many victories in women’s swimming, who here believes that he didn’t deliberately throw the 100-yard freestyle race, having already won his trophy in the 500, just to try to tamp down criticism that he was proving he isn’t really a woman by dominating these races? He did, after all, win admission to the University of Pennsylvania, a private, Ivy League school which does not award scholarships based on athletic merit. He can’t be stupid; he knows the criticism which has followed his participation on the women’s swim team.

We have previously noted Mr Thomas times in the Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio. In the 500-yard freestyle final, Mr Thomas defeated his teammate, Anna Sofia Kalandaze, who finished second, 4:34.06 to 4:48.99, a 14.93 second margin; Miss Kalandaze defeated the seventh-place finisher by 7.42 seconds, just half of the time she was behind Mr Thomas.

Mr Thomas time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500 yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Miss Kalandaze’s second-place time. His year of taking testosterone suppressants — he has not yet been castrated undergone ‘sexual reassignment surgery — have obviously not done what the NCAA believe it would.

Are we supposed to believe that more than a year of testosterone suppression ‘therapy’ left him reasonably competitive with men’s swimming times just four months ago, but three more months radically reduced his performance, or is it more reasonable to think that he deliberately shaded his times for political reasons?

This controversy came to an apex last week at the NCAA championships when she became the first openly trans athlete to win a Division I championship in any sport. For anyone who cares about the advancement of sports, and women’s sports in particular, her win should be celebrated.

Women’s sports are situated at a paradoxical intersection wherein sex segregation is upheld through claims of biological difference, yet equality is prefaced on being treated the same and given the same opportunities as men. If we are to change this, we need to ask some important questions. How does one advocate for equitable treatment while also adhering to the notion of biological difference? If separate is not equal in the case of schools, bathrooms, restaurants or other social institutions, can separate ever truly be equal in the case of sports? Would gender-based discrimination in sports be eradicated if sports were gender-integrated?

In this, Dr Cooky assumes that males and females are physically equal, even though they are physically different.[2]I wonder: if it is discrimination to differentiate between men and women in sports, would that mean that if two men males wanted to compete together in pairs figure skating or ice dancing, would that … Continue reading Sexual dimorphism is a real thing:

Sexual dimorphism is the systematic difference in form between individuals of different sex in the same species.

For example, in some species, including many mammals, the male is larger than the female. In others, such as some spiders, the female is larger than the male. Other sex-specific differences include color (most birds), song in birds, size or presence of parts of the body used in struggles for dominance, such as horns, antlers, and tusks; size of the eyes (e.g., in the case of bees); possession of stings (various kinds of bees), and different thresholds for certain behaviors (aggression, infant care, etc.).

Sexual dimorphism in humans is the subject of much controversy. Human male and female appearances are perceived as different, although Homo sapiens has a low level of sexual dimorphism compared with many other species. The similarity in the sizes of male and female human beings is a good example of how nature often does not make clear divisions. To give an accurate picture of male and female size differences one would need to show how many individuals there are in each size category. There is a considerable overlap.

For example, the body masses of both male and female humans are approximately normally distributed. In the United States, the mean mass of an adult male is 78.5 kg, while the adult female mean is 62.0 kg. However the standard deviation of male body mass is 12.6 kg, so 10% of adult males are actually lighter than the female average.

These differences have real, physical consequences, with human males being physically taller, stronger, faster and quicker than human females on average. That some women are taller than some men is certainly the case, but it is very much outside the norm. My sisters, for example, with the same father and same mother, are eight and ten inches shorter than me, and far lighter. Dr Cooky can hold the view that men and women are equal, if she chooses, as women do have certain advantages: they tend to live longer, and have lower rates of cardiac disease. Women and men can be equally intelligent, though they tend to choose different academic pursuits.

But athletics, despite the wide variety of sports, is a narrow pursuit, and in athletics, the physical differences are important. Certain sports, such as curling, so not depend on size and speed, but on perception and precision, and men and women can compete on an equal basis. My alma mater, the University of Kentucky, just won their second consecutive NCAA Rifle championship, and rifle teams are sexually integrated.

But sports which depend on physical strength, speed and endurance? No, women and men simply cannot compete on the same level. To Dr Cooky, this is an assault on the concept of equality, but if it is, then truth is an assault on equality.

Those who oppose the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports argue that trans women have an unfair competitive advantage and that as a result they will take away opportunities from cisgender athletes. According to the NCAA, these assumptions are not well founded. Moreover, there is a lack of scientific evidence that conclusively demonstrates a direct link between testosterone and athletic performance.

Why, then, do athletes who are using ‘performance-enhancing’ drugs use testosterone as one of those drugs?

Athletic performance is influenced by a number of factors, including hormones, but also other things like coaching and training, psychological makeup of an athlete, access to resources and equipment, among others. Attempts to ban or limit the participation of trans athletes are not based on science. Instead, they are rooted in societal and cultural definitions of what constitutes gender or what defines a woman. Such questions matter because sports are organized based on the belief of natural differences between men and women, and they are sex-segregated as a result. Yet, this ultimately leads to the discrimination of athletes like Thomas.

Here Dr Cooky concedes that the “psychological makeup of an athlete” makes a difference, and in Mr Thomas case, that “psychological makeup” has been dominant: he went from being ranked 562nd among male swimmers, to first among female swimmers. He is 6’3″ tall, physically massive, and completed puberty as a male.

In the end, Dr Cooky is worried that acknowledging the physical differences between men and women, and that those physical differences have a significant impact on athletics, somehow acknowledges male superiority, something she simply cannot tolerate politically. And thus she, like so many others on the left, are having to take utterly idiotic positions, positions which deny simple truths, because some truths just do not fit within their political paradigm.

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.

↑2 I wonder: if it is discrimination to differentiate between men and women in sports, would that mean that if two men males wanted to compete together in pairs figure skating or ice dancing, would that have to be allowed?
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15-year-old arrested in Philly for shooting two teenaged girls Yazid West is expected to face charges for two other shootings, all over a 13-day span

There are times I just can’t figure out The Philadelphia Inquirer. Yes, the alleged offender, if he is guilty, is a really bad guy, and someone who needs to be off the streets forever. But, just as they did in the killing of Samuel Collington, the Inquirer publicly identified an arrested juvenile suspect.

    A 15-year-old arrested this weekend is a suspect in three shootings this month, Philly police say

    Yazid West has been charged with shooting two teen girls near Temple University. Capt. John Walker said West is also expected to face charges in two other incidents.

    by Chris Palmer | Monday, March 21, 2022

    A 15-year-old boy arrested by Philadelphia Police this weekend is a suspect in three shootings over the past three weeks, authorities said Monday.

    Yazid West was being held on $2 million bail after police say he shot two teenage girls, ages 16 and 17, in a car near Temple University on Friday night. Capt. John Walker said West and his friends had a chance encounter with the girls, who were in a Nissan Altima, around 10 p.m. on the 1400 block of Cecil B. Moore Avenue, and when one of the girls deployed pepper spray out of the car’s window, West responded by firing eight shots at them.

    One of the victims was struck in the leg, police said, the other in the back. Both were taken to Temple University Hospital in stable condition.

    West and several other teens with him, meanwhile, ran away, but Walker said responding officers pursued the group and arrested West about a mile from the crime scene. Surveillance video of the incident shows West committing the shooting, Walker said. He faces charges including attempted murder, aggravated assault, and weapons violations.

There’s more at the original.

It’s important to note: Mr West can be charged as an adult, despite his age, and he should be.

The Inquirer noted that young Mr West was a suspect in two other shootings, on March 5th and 15th. Three shootings, in a span of 13 days — “over the past three weeks,” as Inquirer reporter Chris Palmer put it, was unnecessarily vague — means that Mr West is, allegedly, an extremely volatile and dangerous young man who cannot be trusted to be out on the streets.

  • 1500 block North Gratz Street. Click to enlarge.

    The March 5th incident has Mr West shooting a 14-year-old near Broad Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue, in retaliation for the shooting of a shooting the previous evening, the victim being one of Mr West’s friends. The shooting was captured on surveillance tape.
  • The March 15th incident alleges that Mr West shot into a house in the 1500 block of North Gratz Street, in which the mother had forbidden her son to associate with Mr West and his friends.

North Gratz Street isn’t even a depressed neighborhood. The 1500 block consists of relatively new, practically identical duplexes, and Zillow lists nearby 1729 North Gratz, an older row house, as being for sale listed at $449,999, 1817 North Gratz for $309,000, 1811 West Oxford Street, on the corner of the 1600 block of North Gratz, for $369,000, and 1526 North Gratz, though not on the market, was assessed at $253,000 in 2021.

It would be nice if Inquirer reporters took the time that I have to investigate the neighborhood, to put some perspective on the crimes. The research for the above paragraph took me a whopping ten minutes!

I am reminded of 12-year-old gun-toting Thomas Siderio, Jr, whom the Inquirer is trying to turn into some kind of martyr, even though he (allegedly) shot at Philadelphia Police officers. We know that young Mr Siderio got little parental supervision: his father has been behind bars for the last three years, and that wasn’t his first felony conviction, while his mother also has a criminal record, with two drug cases and other arrests for theft, forgery, contempt of court, and receiving stolen property. The son as primarily lived with a grandmother, but also lived with a great-aunt.

So, will we learn about the parents of young Mr West? He was, again allegedly, a gang-banger wannabe, and had a bad enough reputation that at least one mother forbade her son to associate with him. Where did Mr West live, and who were the adults who were supposed to be supervising him?

But one thing we do know, and that’s the City of Brotherly Love has a real cultural problem, a problem in which adolescents, in which 12 and 14 and 15-year-olds are out on the streets, armed, shooting at people, and their parents or grandparents or guardians are either so clueless that they don’t know about it, or so disinterested that they just don’t care.

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Six West Point Cadets overdose on cocaine and fentanyl on Spring Break

My younger daughter in Basic Combat Training, Fort Jackson, SC, Fall of 2010, in the center.

When my younger daughter was in Advanced Individual Training for her Military Occupational Specialty, MOS, as a 25U, Signal Support Systems Specialist, at Fort Gordon, Georgia, in the fall and winter of 2010, AIT was interrupted for a ten-day break for Christmas. When she got home, she told us that every soldier was warned that they’d be tested for drug use upon their return to Ft Gordon, and that one guy had said, “F(ornicate) it,” he was going to get high while he was on the break. I guess that he wanted out of the Army, because they had only two weeks left in AIT.

And yup, he lit up the scoreboard when he got back, and I don’t know if he received a dishonorable discharge or not, but that kind of thing follows you for the rest of your life.

That was what came to my mind when I heard about several West Point cadets overdosing on fentanyl-laced cocaine over their spring break. From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

Florida Man Recently Arrested in Connection to Overdoses of Six West Point Cadets

Wilton Manors police have named a suspect arrested as 21-year-old Axel Giovany Casseus.

Posted by Leslie Eastman | Monday, March 14, 2022 | 1:00 PM EDT

Late last week, I reported that six West Point cadets on spring break in Florida overdosed on fentanyl-laced cocaine.

There has been an arrest made in connection to this horrific incident.

Florida cops have arrested an alleged drug dealer they say sold the fentanyl-laced cocaine to several West Point cadets who overdosed during a spring break trip this week.

Axel Giovany Casseus, 21, was jailed Saturday in lieu of $50,000 bail, Local10 News reported.

After identifying Casseus, an undercover police officer was successfully able to purchase 43 grams of cocaine from him for $1,000, according to an arrest report, the network reported.

While in custody, Casseus admitted to selling drugs to the West Point cadets and his phone contained correspondence with them, authorities said.

Casseus faces felony charges as two of the six cadets remain in critical condition.

There’s more at the original.

At least two of the cadets who overdosed were members of the Black Knights football team, which might be why the story made the newspapers in the first place.

While I’m happy that Mr Casseus was caught, and I hope that, if he is found guilty, he spends a long, long, long time in prison, my main concern is that United States Military Academy cadets bought and used cocaine in the first place. West Point cadets are supposed to be some of our best and brightest, in an academy which puts them through rigorous and demanding coursework, and teaches honor above everything.

One would think that some of our best and brightest would have been bright enough to figure out that they might just have to pee in the cup when they returned from spring break. One would think that they would have been told that would happen, but even if they weren’t, West Point cadets should have been smart enough to figure it out on their own.

The cadet honor code is simple: “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” These six cadets failed to show much honor in buying and using drugs. The cost to educate a cadet at the Military Academy is over $225,000 over four years, and while the stories do not tell us in which years the overdosed cadets are, they just pissed away $60,000 for every year they were enrolled.

More, they took slots over other deserving candidates, ones which we can hope would not have used drugs.

They have to be gone, of course. The Army cannot tolerate officers who use drugs, officers who may well have to discharge enlisted personnel who fail a whizz quiz. They should be fined for the costs the government incurred in providing their education.

Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion reported that not all six of the cadets were using drugs:

Not all of the cadets were using drugs. Two overdosed while “performing life-saving measures.”

That’s hopeful, but it’s still a potential honor code violation, if they knew that the cadets who were using drugs were doing so, and failed to try to stop them.

I would expect that, after this ‘incident,’ every cadet returning from spring break will wind up peeing in the cup; the Academy would be foolish not to do this. And I have to wonder: were these the only drug-using cadets, or are there more?

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#Bidenomics! Inflation has tripled under Joe Biden Remember: the data used were prior to the latest surge in fuel prices

From Trading Economics:

Annual inflation rate in the US accelerated to 7.9% in February of 2022, the highest since January of 1982, matching market expectations. Energy remained the biggest contributor (25.6% vs 27% in January), with gasoline prices surging 38% (40% in January). Inflation accelerated for shelter (4.7% vs 4.4%); food (7.9% vs 7%, the largest since July of 1981), namely food at home (8.6% vs 7.4%); new vehicles (12.4% vs 12.2%); and used cars and trucks (41.2% vs 40.5%). Excluding volatile energy and food categories, the CPI rose 6.4%, the most in 40 years. Still, the biggest effects of the war in Ukraine and the consequent surge in energy costs are still to come and will worsen with the US ban on oil imports from Russia. The inflation was seen peaking in March but the recent developments in Europe coupled with the ongoing supply constraints, strong demand and labour shortages will likely maintain inflation elevated for longer. source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

It’s the “excluding volatile energy and food categories, the CPI rose 6.4%” part that gets me: it’s still winter — and my area is forecast to get 3 to 6 inches of snow on Saturday — so energy, volatile or otherwise, is a major concern for everybody, and we can’t live very long without food.


Chart source: tradingeconomics.com

You know what I note: the year-over-year inflation rate was 2.6% in February of 2021, Joe Biden’s first full month in office, and then BAM! up it jumps, more than doubling by June, and now it’s tripled.

Then there’s this, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 0.8 percent from January to February, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This result stems from essentially no change in average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 0.8 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U).

Real average weekly earnings decreased 0.5 percent over the month due to the change in real average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 0.3 percent in the average workweek.

Real average hourly earnings decreased 2.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, from February 2021 to February 2022. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 0.3 percent in the average workweek resulted in a 2.3-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.

Production and nonsupervisory employees means the working class:

Production and nonsupervisory employees

Real average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees decreased 0.6 percent from January to February, seasonally adjusted. This result stems from a 0.3-percent increase in average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 0.9 percent in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W).

Real average weekly earnings decreased 0.3 percent over the month due to the change in real average hourly earnings being combined with an increase of 0.3 percent in average weekly hours.

From February 2021 to February 2022, real average hourly earnings decreased 1.9 percent, seasonally adjusted. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with no change in the average workweek resulted in a 1.9-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.

Remember: this inflation has been going on since long before Vladimir Vladimirovich sent the tanks rolling into Ukraine! It has been going on since the dummkopf from Delaware took office. Here’s the five-year chart, also from Trading Economics:

Note that the year-over-year monthly inflation rate never reached even 3% during Donald Trump’s entire presidency, but reached 4.2% in April of 2021, and has been elevated ever since. It cratered during the COVID-19 lockouts, recovered several months later, but was still below 2.0% on Election Day, and below 2.0% when Mr Biden took office.

Then it skyrocketed!

What did we have? We had an economy which had made a significant recovery in the latter half of 2020, after the stupid lockdowns were (mostly) lifted, but before any of the COVID-19 vaccines were available to the general public. The vaccines became available to health care workers in December, and then in January and February were made available in the ‘tiers’ structure. By March, the vaccines became much more widely available, and COVID-19 cases were dropping. Everything good that could have helped President Biden — and I still shudder when I type that! — happened, yet people started to become poorer in real terms due to inflation.

Not everything economic is under the government’s control, but it certainly is interesting how real earnings have decreased under Mr Biden, and inflation skyrocketed almost immediately after he came into office. But it’s true: we aren’t suffering through any more of those mean tweets!

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The fruits of ‘Lia’ Thomas’ labors If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently?

Getty Images. Click to enlarge.

I have asked, many times, what Will Thomas, who now calls himself ‘Lia’, is getting from his record-breaking performances on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team. Yes, he’s piling up victories and records, but everyone will recognize that not only should those records have an asterisk on them, he is doing the one thing he really ought not to want to do, demonstrating the real differences between himself and real women.

Now we have this bill in the Kentucky General Assembly, and the obvious question becomes: would the impetus for this legislation, and similar legislation in other states, have been less were not Mr Thomas doing what he has been doing? I have asked before: If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently?

‘We’re going to get sued.’ KY bill banning transgender girls from girls sports moves forward

By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Wednesday, March 9, 2022 | 6:34 PM EST

With a Lexington Republican lawmaker among those in opposition, a Republican bill prohibiting transgender girls from competing in girls sports at the post-secondary, middle and high school levels moved ahead Wednesday.

Senate Bill 83, approved by the House Education Committee with a 15-5 vote, requires the Kentucky Board of Education and the Kentucky High School Athletic Association to establish that an athletic activity or sport designated as “girls” shall not be open to members of the male sex.

“Ninety-six percent chance we’re going to get sued when we pass this,” said state Rep. Killian Timoney, R-Lexington, who voted against the bill. “I’m not sure I feel like spending money on lawsuits.”

Under the bill, the sex of the student shall be determined by the biological sex indicated on the student’s certified birth certificate issued at the time of birth or adoption, Sen. Robby Mills, R-Henderson, the bill’s sponsor, said.

The proposed legislation does not prohibit girls who think they’re boys from participating in boys’ sports, because there are no unfair advantages there.

Further down:

Critics of the legislation have said they haven’t heard of examples of student-athletes harmed by the inclusion of transgender classmates.

There’s more at the original, but if critics say they haven’t heard examples of girls being harmed, then they haven’t been paying attention; the stories about Mr Thomas have been all over the news, and if Mr Thomas competes for an Ivy League school, and the girls who have been harmed have been in Pennsylvania and the northeast, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the Bluegrass State.

People have been cowed into silence, or anonymity, for the very reasonable fear of losing scholarships or future job opportunities:

Penn’s women’s team roster lists 41 members. The 16 teammates did not identify themselves in the letter, stating that they “have been told that if we spoke out against her inclusion into women’s competitions, that we would be removed from the team or that we would never get a job offer.”

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

Mr Thomas is an extreme example: he’s 6’3″ tall, and was a competitive athlete on Penn’s men’s swimming team, and if not a consistent winner, he nevertheless scored a few victories in Ivy league competition. He went through male puberty, and was fully developed as a male before he succumbed to his mental illness began his testosterone suppression therapy. Mr Thomas went from being ranked “#462 as a male to #1 as a female”.

At least one women’s swim team member has complained that Mr Thomas is still a physically intact male and thinks little of parading around the locker room with his male genitalia exposed.

It is at least arguable that a boy who thought he was a girl and began ‘transitioning’ prior to puberty — something which qualifies as child abuse as far as I am concerned, and ought to be illegal — would have few physical advantages over real girls, and such shouldn’t make a difference on, say, a girls’ soccer team. In a case like that, there wouldn’t be too much opposition on the local level, and the local level is where such matters would be handled . . . were it not for Will Thomas and the legislation he has at least aided in getting passed, if not completely inspired it.

If someone suffers from “gender dysphoria,” it’s really none of my business. If Joe wants to call himself Jane, it’s no skin off my nose, until the point at which he wants to use the power of the state to require me to call him Jane. But Mr Thomas has forced the issue, forced his mental illness ‘transition’ on everybody — with the complicity of Penn, Ivy League, and NCAA officials — and thus he has accomplished what I would have thought the ‘transgender’ community would not have wanted, to point out that ‘transgender women’ really are not real women.

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The Patricians just don’t understand how the plebeians live! The elites push policies that will affect the working class in ways the policymakers just can't comprehend

As the patricians try to force the plebeians into plug-in electric vehicles, another thought came to me as I got our electric bills: it isn’t just gasoline prices which have increased, but electricity costs as well. From The Philadelphia Inquirer, not exactly an evil reich-wing propaganda site:

    Pa. electricity prices will be rising by as much as 50% this week. Here’s how you can save.

    Energy charges are set to increase on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity. There are ways to save. But beware the risks.

    by Andrew Maykuth | November 28, 2021

    Energy costs for electric customers are going up by as much as 50% across Pennsylvania next week, the latest manifestation of across-the-board energy price increases impacting gasoline, heating oil, propane, and natural gas.

    Eight Pennsylvania electric utilities are set to increase their energy prices on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity. Peco Energy, which serves Philadelphia and its suburbs, will boost its energy charge by 6.4% on Dec. 1, from 6.6 cents per kilowatt hour to about 7 cents per kWh. Energy charges account for about half of a residential bill.

    PPL Electric Utilities, the Allentown company that serves a large swath of Pennsylvania including parts of Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester Counties, will impose a 26% increase on residential energy costs on Dec. 1, from about 7.5 cents per kWh to 9.5 cents per kWh. That’s an increase of $40 a month for an electric heating customer who uses 2,000 kWh a month.

    Pike County Light & Power, which serves about 4,800 customers in Northeast Pennsylvania, will increase energy charges by 50%, according to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.

    “All electric distribution companies face the same market forces as PPL Electric Utilities,” PPL said in a statement. Each Pennsylvania utility follows a different PUC-regulated plan for procuring energy from power generators, which explains why some customers are absorbing the hit sooner rather than later, it said.

There’s more at the original.

2022 F-150 charging in a lot nicer garage than I have. It shows you just how much money you have to have to buy one of the fool things. Photo from a Ford sales site. Click to enlarge.

I just got my sparktricity bill, and with most, though not all, of our heating on it, it’s $325.73 for the house and $30.11 for the shop[1]The garage/shop is not heated.. Now, imagine if we were driving plug-in Chevy Dolts, or, for me, a plug-in Ford F-150 Lightning[2]My current vehicle is a 2010 Ford F-150, and it’s an actual work truck; I need a work truck around the farm.: all of the electric charging for the month would be coming in one monthly bill! It will be argued that that might still be a bit less than gasoline, but when a month’s worth of your driving costs comes all at once, that can be quite the shock. Yes, we have the money, and the discipline, to handle that, but when I see these ‘payday loan’ places — and they certainly seem to have metastasized in poor eastern Kentucky — you know that there are a whole lot of people who are not living just paycheck to paycheck, but from paycheck to not quite the next paycheck. Do these people have the money and discipline to save up for that next big electric bill?

We bought a house for my sister-in-law, and got her electric bill — from a different provider — which was $462.80. The house we bought for her is total electric, so that includes the range and water heater, which our bill does not.

Those bills were for February, a cold winter month, so they’ll decrease as spring springs, but I can imagine what it would be like if there were a couple hundred more bucks tacked on to charge electric vehicles. This is something the left, which tell us how wonderful it would be to go all-electric, never consider: Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg have plenty of money, and a big electric bill would, to them, be certainly manageable, but the Patricians just don’t understand the lives, the economics, and the struggles of the working class.

More, it is well known that cold weather decreases both range and charging speed in plug-in electric vehicles. You’ll have to leave your Tesla plugged in longer, and you won’t get as many miles out of it, meaning that it will cost you more in your electric bill to charge your EV in winter, the same time as your heating costs are high.

In 2019, before the panicdemic, the Federal Reserve reported that “Nearly 40 percent of Americans would struggle to cover an unexpected $400 expense, according to a new report by the Federal Reserve — a stark reminder of many people’s financial insecurity even amid solid economic growth.” Yet the people who could handle such an expense are trying to proscribe a ‘solution’ to global warming climate change that would drastically change how the working class would have to handle things . . . if they could at all.

How many Kentuckians, how many working class people, are going to get their electricity shut off because they don’t have the money, or money-management skills, to pay for the plug-in electric vehiclesinto which President Biden and the activists want to force people?

References

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↑1 The garage/shop is not heated.
↑2 My current vehicle is a 2010 Ford F-150, and it’s an actual work truck; I need a work truck around the farm.
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Make no mistake about it: this is exactly what the left want!

Photo at closest gas station to my house, taken on February 2, 2022.

On February 2, 2022, I took the photograph to the right at the mini-mart/gas station closest to our farm, about 2½ miles away, because the price of regular unleaded gasoline had just jumped to over #3.00 per gallon. It had been $2.999 for a while previously.

Photo at closest gas station to my house, taken on February 25, 2022.

Well, $3.139 didn’t last long. 23 days later, it was up 24¢ per gallon.

Earlier on Friday, I saw the price up to $3.699, and took a photo, at the Kroger on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, and tweeted it out. But, in the interest of journalistic integrity — whatever that is! — I thought that I ought to check at the same station as I had for the other two photos, and yup, sure enough, it was $3.699 there as well.

The math is simple: $3.699, up from $3.199, 56¢ per gallon, in just thirty days, is a 17.84% increase. That’s not the inflation rate, which is normally figured out by month, year-over-year, but a 17.84% increase in a month! Even if gasoline stayed absolutely flat until February of 2023, that would be a 17.84% increase in fuel year-over-year. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, does anyone here think that gasoline prices will remain flat?


Look what has happened to inflation since January of 2021, which is when President Donald Trump left office, and Joe Biden replaced him. Inflation had skyrocketed well before the Soviet Russian invasion of Ukraine, well before Vladimir Putin had even hinted that such might happen. The year-over-year inflation rate was 6.2% in October of 2021.

Photo at closest gas station to my house, taken on March 4, 2022.

Don’t think that this isn’t intentional. While the Biden Administration doesn’t really control inflation, and doesn’t control oil prices, President Biden’s policies have been, since the very first day of his administration, when Mr Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline. Mr Biden wants all new automobiles and personal trucks sold in the United States to be zero-emission by 2035.

Of course, very few people actually want zero-emission vehicles, which means plug-in electric cars, at least they don’t want them enough to buy them. In 2020, the plug-in electric vehicle market was 1.8% of all new car sales. In 2021, the total electric vehicle market in the United States was 4%, but that includes hybrids as well as plug-in only.

But if the price of gasoline skyrockets, the left can hope that the increased gasoline costs will drive more people to buy plug-in electrics!

The February inflation numbers are scheduled to be released on Thursday, March 10th; it’s difficult to imagine that they wouldn’t be worse than January’s. The Federal Reserve had been contemplating raising interest rates, to cool down the economy, to tamp down inflation, but if inflation continues the way it has been going, the Fed won’t be increasing interest rates, the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market will do that.

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The war mongers keep beating the drums Do you want to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia?

I get it: almost everyone wants to help Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion. Helping Ukraine is good and noble, and something people just want to do. But there are some good and noble things which might not be all that wise.

My good friend, and contributor to this poor site on days when I cannot, William Teach, noted that there are some people who want the United States to get much, much more involved in the war in Ukraine:

Good Grief, Now They’re Advocating Giving Ukraine Three Squadrons Of A-10s

By William Teach March 4, 2022 – 6:45 am

There have been lots of memes about the coming WWIII. We’ve had people, such as Excitable Adam Kinzinger, push for a no fly zone. I certainly agree with Vox that it would be a monumentally bad idea. Thankfully, NATO and Let’s Go Brandon agree. Sending all those troops over to Europe isn’t the brightest idea. What are a few thousand going to do, when the U.S. already has over 50k in the European theater? Here’s another staggeringly foolish idea:

Transfer three A-10 aircraft squadrons to Ukraine now

“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job,“ spoke U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill in February 1941. Following this powerful speech, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed and Congress approved the lend-lease program. This provided the U.K. equipment and access to United States production capacity. This action was essential to stopping the Nazi advances.

Zelenskyy has been asking for planes. So far, NATO nations have said “nope.”

Sanctions must be accompanied by military success.

Zelenskyy has requested weapons and support in line with Churchill’s philosophy. Ukrainian soldiers have proved their courage and bravery. There is one more step that could be decisive: the transfer of three squadrons of A-10 aircraft to the Ukrainian Air Force.

This aircraft and its gun system were designed to counter an armored assault in Europe. They proved effective in Desert Storm’s target-rich environment, quite similar to the current advancing Russian force. They also became the infantry’s friend in close-air support missions.

The United States Air Force has deployment packages ready to go. The whole transfer to the Ukrainian Air Force could be completed in days after congressional authorization.

If you want to start WWIII, this would be a good way to do so. How do you get the planes there? Who flies them in? How does Russia react when A10’s which were the property of the United States just days before start blowing up Russian military equipment and troops? Furthermore, who will fly the planes? American pilots? WWIII. Ukrainian pilots? Are any trained on them? They aren’t bicycles. What about all the armaments? Shooting American made depleted uranium slugs would be WWIII.

Mr Teach then cited Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4th District) and his tweeted series as to why he has not supported the resolutions moving through the House to support Ukraine.

Mr Massie’s twitter thread is seven tweets long:

  • (2 of 7)The resolution contains an open ended call for additional and immediate “defensive security assistance.” This term is so broad that it could include American boots on the ground or, as some of my colleagues have already requested, US enforcement of a no-fly zone.
  • (3/7) It expands the geographic scope of the US commitment to the conflict in Ukraine by condemning the country of Belarus. We should not be seeking to name new enemies or committing to overturning other governments.
  • (4/7) It calls for “fully isolating” Russia economically. This would hurt low-income US citizens who are already reeling from inflation. Innocent people in Russia, many of whom oppose Putin’s aggression, would suffer under crippling sanctions, possibly turning them against us.
  • (5/7) Crippling sanctions could also drive Putin to become more desperate, inciting him to resort to drastic measures such as escalating the weapons employed or the people targeted.
  • (6/7) The resolution contains a gratuitous statement that Ukraine and NATO will determine the relationship between the two of them. Of course this is true, but why should Congress assert this now when the goal is to de-escalate the conflict?
  • (7/7) It calls for continuing support “as long as the Russian Federation continues to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty.” Depending on the definition of “violate,” this could be a US commitment to forever be actively engaged in a conflict with another nuclear country.

Mr Massie is, alas! not my district’s representative — I live in the 6th District — but he’s one of the best men in Congress. He understands that, emotion aside, starting a war with nuclear-armed Russia isn’t exactly the brightest idea in the world.[1]Representative Massie also voted against the virtue signaling ‘anti-lynching’ bill, noting that the crimes involved in lynching — murder, assault, and kidnapping — are already … Continue reading

As World War II raged in Europe, but before we entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States engaged in some pretty blatant war moves against the Third Reich, sending war materiel to His Majesty’s Government, and later, even to Comrade Stalin’s. Our neutrality was hardly neutral!

It didn’t matter: there was nothing der Führer could do about it. His U-boats went after the convoys, and sent a lot of American Lend-lease largesse to the bottom of the Atlantic. President Roosevelt began “neutrality patrols” to convoy the cargo ships as far as Iceland, and for a while, Germany was deterred from attacking US Navy ships.

Following Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan . . . but not on Germany. Adolf Hitler, in yet another moment of his madness, decided that, on December 11, 1941, Germany would declare war on the United States, a colossal mistake, at a time in which the US, then at war only with Japan, could have concentrated our might in the Pacific.

But, just as the United Kingdom and France, despite their guarantees, could do nothing to help Poland, Germany could do nothing to strike at the United States. When Prime Minister Churchill said, “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job,” he was speaking to a nation untouched, and untouchable, by war, a nation which risked little by ramping up its factories to build tanks and airplanes and rifles.

That isn’t the situation today. Unlike 1939, unlike 1941, the enemy can strike us, can literally kill hundreds of millions of Americans in less than an hour, can destroy every one of our major cities and irradiate our rural areas with a deadly fallout. Yes, that would mean that Russia was destroyed in turn, as the US could and almost certainly would launch an equally devastating nuclear response against the Soviet Union Russia, meaning that Russia would not somehow ‘win’ the nuclear war, but we would just as certainly lose. It would seem most probable that President Putin wouldn’t be insane enough to order a nuclear strike, but, then again, it would seem most probable that he wouldn’t have his troops fire on a Ukrainian nuclear power plant, but that’s exactly what happened. It wound up being a bold and successful move, because after Russian artillery started fires at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, the Ukrainians rushed to put out the fires, and Russian troops then occupied the plant, but it was a plan that could easily have gone very, very wrong. Counting on the former подполковник in the Комитет государственной безопасности to see things the way Westerners do is not a particularly wise strategy. What a man with a strategic nuclear arsenal, if pushed to the brink of military defeat in Ukraine, might do is something which ought to worry us.

Wanting to do more, wanting to do what we can to help Ukraine is not the same thing as wanting to help the United Kingdom, and later the Soviet Union, against Germany, because what we were doing in 1939 and 1940 and 1941 was with little risk to us. It took no real courage for us to give assistance to the UK and USSR then.

Now, it does. But there is a point at which courage stops being courage, and devolves into pure madness, and that point is when you go to war with an enemy with a strategic nuclear arsenal. Just one Soviet Russian Проект 955 Борей SSBN could obliterate every major city on our east coast.

In the movie War Games, the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) computer, initially tricked into starting a Global Thermonuclear War, analyzes all of the variants, and finally says, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Yup, that’s right!

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↑1 Representative Massie also voted against the virtue signaling ‘anti-lynching’ bill, noting that the crimes involved in lynching — murder, assault, and kidnapping — are already against the law in every state in the union.

I am reminded of the federal ‘hate crimes’ trial against the three men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. The georgia state court had already sentenced them to life in prison, two without the possibility of parole, and the third ineligible for parole for thirty years. How much more punishment could we give these guys with the federal hate crimes convictions? It’s not like we can keep their corpses in prison for years and years after they’ve already died.