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I point at the moon; they stare at my finger When the left don't like the information, they attack the gathering of the facts

We noted, a month ago, the story of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned as General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after a conservative Catholic site used cell phone data to show him using Grindr, a homosexual dating app, and frequenting homosexual bars. But, as is so often the case with the left, the liberals got all upset about the wrong thing, and The New York Times spent 1,599 works to completely miss the point!

Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr

A conservative Catholic media organization, The Pillar, has published several reports claiming the use of dating apps at several churches and the Vatican.

by Liam Stack | August 20, 2021

The reports hit the Roman Catholic Church in rapid succession: Analyses of cellphone data obtained by a conservative Catholic blog seemed to show priests at multiple levels of the Catholic hierarchy in both the United States and the Vatican using the gay hookup app Grindr.

The first report, published late last month, led to the resignation of Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, the former general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference. The second, posted online days later, made claims about the use of Grindr by unnamed people in unspecified rectories in the Archdiocese of Newark. The third, published days after that, claimed that in 2018 at least 32 mobile devices emitted dating app data signals from within areas of Vatican City that are off-limits to tourists.

The reports by the blog, The Pillar, have unnerved the leadership of the American Catholic Church and have introduced a potentially powerful new weapon into the culture war between supporters of Pope Francis and his conservative critics: cellphone data, which many users assume to be unavailable to the general public.

“When there is reporting out there that claims to expose activity like this in parishes around the country and also on Vatican grounds, that is a five-alarm fire for church officials, there is no doubt about it,” said John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a progressive advocacy group.

Note that Faith in Public Life is very much a homosexual rights activist group.

The reports have put church officials in an awkward position: Priests take a vow of celibacy that is in no way flexible, and the downloading or use of dating apps by clergy members is inconsistent with that vow. But officials are also deeply uncomfortable with the use of cellphone data to publicly police priests’ behavior. Vatican officials said they met with representatives from the blog in June but would not publicly respond to its reports.

“If someone who has made promise of celibacy or a vow of chastity has a dating app on his or her phone, that is asking for trouble,” said Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark at a Zoom panel organized by Georgetown University. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Of course, His Eminence the Cardinal is far, far, far more concerned with the fact that some priests have been ‘outed’ as active homosexuals than he is about them being active homosexuals!

“I would also say that I think there are very questionable ethics around the collection of this data of people who allegedly may have broken their promises,” he said.

In American jurisprudence, information about a criminal suspect has to be gathered legally, and Americans tend to look at evidence gathered about people concerning things other than criminal law in the same manner.  But the investigation exposed by The Pillar, however it was gathered, has exposed, yet again, the problem of priests not keeping their vows. The Cardinal somehow doesn’t see that as that big a deal. “(T)hat is asking for trouble”? “(P)eople who allegedly may have broken their promises”? I’m sorry, but that is mealy-mouthing the issue.

The only app explicitly named in the reports has been Grindr, which is used almost exclusively by gay and bisexual men, although The Pillar has made vague references to other apps it says are used by heterosexuals. Only one of the reports directly links an app to a specific person, Monsignor Burrill.

The reports have been criticized by Catholic liberals for tying the general use of Grindr to studies that show minors sometimes use the app as well. That conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia is part of a longstanding effort by Catholic conservatives to blame the church sex abuse crisis on the presence of gay men in the priesthood.

Of course, there it is. I wrote, three years ago, about the problems in the Catholic priesthood, including the fact that a significantly large percentage of priests are homosexual,

the actual number unknown, but most surveys (which, due to the sensitivity of the subject, admittedly suffer from limited samples and other design issues) find between 15 percent and 50 percent of U.S. priests are gay, which is much greater than the 3.8 percent of people who identify as LGBTQ in the general population.[1]The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either … Continue reading

The Church does not want to admit that homosexuality is related to the sexual abuse of minors by priests, but the vast majority of sexual abuse by Catholic priests has been against boys rather than girls. Several different Google searches have failed to turn up any notation concerning the number of victims in the recent Pennsylvania grand jury report divided by sex, something of obvious interest, because such would reinforce the rather obvious fact that most victims of an all-male clergy have been boys. The John Jay report noted that sexual abuse cases studied between 1950 and 2002 indicated that, rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Only willful, deliberate ignorance could contend that such numbers don’t indicate a problem with homosexuality among priests.

The editors of The Pillar, J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon, said their work was motivated by a desire to expose a secretive culture of wrongdoing within the church.

“Immoral and illicit sexual behavior on the part of clerics who are bound to celibacy, but also on the part of other church leaders, could lead to a broad sense of tolerance for any number or kinds of sexual sins,” Mr. Flynn said on the podcast.

They said Newark was the only American diocese they wrote about because it was once led by the former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019 and charged last month with sexually assaulting a child in Massachusetts in 1974.

But their decision to investigate the use of a gay dating app in suburban New Jersey, instead of a city with a large gay population, has raised suspicion that their real goal may have been to undermine Cardinal Tobin, an ally of Pope Francis.

So, now The Pillar is being accused of targeting Cardinal Tobin and his archdiocese, as that somehow exculpates the entire behavioral issue.

A great deal of the Times article concerns how The Pillar obtained their information, and it includes a lot of speculation that is hardly consistent with good journalism.

Father Bob Bonnot, the executive director of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests, said the use of cellphone data to track the movement of Monsignor Burrill had deepened a sense of vulnerability many priests feel.

“It can be terribly threatening,” he said. “It can make all priests uncomfortable and worried.”

It makes them worried about what, that such cell phone tracking might expose their own homosexual hook ups?

I don’t know why so many homosexuals are attracted to the priesthood. My guess is that they know that homosexual relationships are immoral and sinful, and they hope that, by the grace of God and the promise to be celibate, they can live life celibately.

But this really is a celibacy problem, in that priests are forced to live unnatural lives, and while it might be politically incorrect, it is also intellectually dishonest to deny that this is a homosexuality problem as well. We have a priesthood of sexually immature men — what else could they be, having been denied mature sexual relationships by the nature of their careers? — who are far more heavily than the population homosexual in orientation. The statistics we do have indicate that they were preying on boys just entering puberty, not prepubescent children, and that is an indication that sexual orientation as opposed to pedophilia is the primary motivation.

We need a priesthood who understand and participate in normal, adult sexual relationships, and, given that the Church does not, and cannot, recognize homosexual marriages as legitimate, that can mean only one thing: a priesthood in normal, heterosexual marriages.

That will not eliminate all sexual abuse; Jerry Sandusky, were he available for comment — and cared to tell the truth — could tell us all about men in stable, heterosexual marriages who still had a preference for underaged boys. Nor will it prevent the inevitable, some priests being divorced by their wives, and some children or married priests turning out badly.

But it has to be better than what we have now, a priesthood with an out-of-proportion homosexual cohort, and all being denied the most natural of human impulses, that of mating.

This is what we must have, this is what the Catholic Church needs in order to survive to serve the faithful into the future. Denying it, because it is politically incorrect, is denying the truth.

References

References
↑1 The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. This does not support the article’s contention that 3.8% of the population are homosexual.
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Lies, damned lies, and statistics If you have a good case to make, getting caught using skewed statistics doesn't help you make it

There it was, on the left hand side of the Lexington Herald-Leader’s website main page, a story about ‘breakthrough’ COVID-19 cases, which naturally got my attention.

    Fayette County vaccination rates inch up but so do breakthrough COVID cases

    By Beth Musgrave | August 24, 2021 | 5:52 PM

    Lexington’s vaccination rate for those over 18 has hit 70 percent as COVID breakthrough infections — typically far less serious — have increased in those immunized, health and city officials said Tuesday.

    Although 70 percent of those over 18 have been immunized, the overall vaccination rate, which includes those 12 to 17, is about 58.7 percent, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data as of Sunday.

OK, here’s the first statistical problem: the vaccines were not approved for use in patients 12 to 15 years of age until May 10, 2021, so of course the vaccination rate for minors is going to be lower . . . but the Herald-Leader doesn’t tell us that. The vaccines have still not been approved for use in patients under 12, though that is expected soon.

    The city also hit another more grim milestone this week — the number of coronavirus cases in Fayette County has now topped 40,000. In the past four weeks, the city has had more than 4,000 reported cases, with 486 of those new cases from Saturday through Monday, say city and health leaders who held a press conference Tuesday on COVID issues.

    Approximately 28 percent of all August cases have been in fully vaccinated people, according to health department data.

    “But that’s also because more people are getting vaccinated,” said health department spokesman Kevin Hall.

    Still, vaccinated people are much less likely to be hospitalized, Fayette County Health Department data shows.

    Since February, 88 percent of people hospitalized locally have been unvaccinated or only received a single dose of the vaccine. Of the 94 Lexington residents who are currently hospitalized, 79 percent are unvaccinated, Hall said.

And here we go again: “Since February, 88 percent of people hospitalized locally have been unvaccinated or only received a single dose of the vaccine.” The vaccines were not even available to people under 70, who were not health care workers, until March, and even then, supply shortages meant that people under 70 could not get the vaccines in March. Nor does this account for children under 12, who have never been approved for vaccination; including children under 12 further skews the statistics.

More, even the people who were able to receive their first dose in early March — I was not able to get my first dose until April Fool’s Day, due to shortages of the vaccine — could not have gotten the second dose until early April, and would not have been considered fully vaccinated, meaning 14 days after the second dose, until mid-April. Thus, any statistic like the one given us above, using percentages from before almost anyone could have received both doses, is going to be seriously skewed. We’ve noted this previously, when Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) and state Health Commissioner Steven Stack released a wholly misleading graphic on Twitter. I do not disagree with the Governor that people should get vaccinated; I just see these tweets as wholly dishonest. Of course, I see the Governor as totally dishonest on just about everything.

If the case for vaccination is a good one, and I believe it is, why do public officials use skewed, obviously skewed, data to try to make their case? When you are trying to sell people on something — and trying to persuade people to do something they’ve previously been reluctant to do definitely qualifies as selling — getting caught using misleading information sure doesn’t help your case.

Would you buy a used car from Andy Beshear?

Beth Musgrave, from her Herald-Leader biography.

I have previously stated that the Herald-Leader employs journolism[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term … Continue reading as much as journalism, and this is another example of it. According to her Herald-Leader biography blurb, Beth Musgrave, the article author,

    has covered government and politics for the Herald-Leader for more than a decade. A graduate of Northwestern University, she has worked as a reporter in Kentucky, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois and Washington D.C.

If she has covered government and politics for over ten years, I have no doubt that she’s at least reasonably intelligent, and ought to be able to spot the bovine feces which comes from the mouths of government officials. She should not have missed how misleading the statistics presented were, and if she managed to miss it, Peter Baniak, the newspaper’s editor, should have caught it.

I understand: it is the Herald-Leader’s editorial policy to push vaccination and mask mandates, and I absolutely support people choosing to take the vaccine. More, the newspaper is, like medium sized newspapers everywhere, on shaky financial footing. But it takes little energy and few dollars to ask the questions which get statistics which are not biased, not misleading, and this the Herald-Leader does not do.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Haven’t the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer noticed the numbers? Homicides and shootings in the city have dropped significantly

We have previously noted the recent decrease in the number of homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. We noted, on July 9th, that there had been 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. If I recall correctly, that 562 number was my highest projection for the year.

But then, as of the 221st day of the year, 325 homicides had been recorded. 325 ÷ 221 days in the year, = 1.4706 homicides per day, for a projected 537 for the year. That number stayed fairly consistent, as a week later, with ‘just’ 339 homicides in 228 days, Philadelphia was seeing ‘only’ 1.4868 homicides per day, which works out to ‘just’ 543 over the course of 2021.

As of 11:59 PM on Sunday, August 22nd, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there had been 345 homicides in the city. 345 ÷ 234 days = 1.4744 per day, or 538 projected for the year. The big news is that, over the past 31 days, a full month, if not a calendar month, there have been ‘just’ 31 homicides, ‘just’ 1.00 per day. With 131 days remaining in 2021, if that rate could be maintained, there would be ‘only’ 476 killings in Philly for the year. If The Philadelphia Inquirer has noticed that decrease, I haven’t seen it mentioned. It certainly doesn’t seem as though their Editorial Board has noticed.

    In Philly, someone has been shot every day since Jan. 2 as multiple crises plague the city

    January 2nd was the only day in 2021 in which no person was shot in Philadelphia.

    by The Editorial Board | August 23, 2021

    If you’re looking for ways to quantify the depths of the gun violence crisis in Philadelphia, there may not be many bleaker statistics than this: There’s only been one day so far this year — Jan. 2 — when not a single person was shot in the city.

    Since then, nearly 1,500 people have been shot in Philadelphia, including 295 fatalities. At least 50 other people were murdered by an assailant who used a weapon other than a gun.

    Gun violence drives Philadelphia’s murder rate, which is on pace for a record this year, but it’s essential that the city also address three other factors if officials hope to stem a seemingly unrelenting tide of killings — increasing the rate at which murders are solved, fostering more cooperation from witnesses in criminal prosecutions, and rooting out corrupt officers whose bad practices later lead to convictions being overturned.

    In Philadelphia, murderers have a better chance of winning a coin toss than being arrested. Last Wednesday, during the most recent briefing on the city’s response to gun violence, the police presented data showing that through Aug. 15, only 43% of homicides this year led to an arrest. That homicide clearance rate, or the percentage of killings that lead to an arrest, is on par with recent years.

Am I wrong in thinking that the Editorial Board ought to be noting that fewer people are being killed?

But it’s not just that fewer people are being killed. According to data provided by the city, there were 272 shootings during the 31 days of July, and ‘only’ 145 through the first 22 days of August. If that rate of 6.59 shootings per day holds up for the rest of the month, there would be 204 total shootings in August, a 33.33% decrease.

There’s more at the original, but, if you remember when publisher Elizabeth Hughes said she was going to make the Inquirer “an anti-racist news organization“, you won’t be surprised that the Editorial Board turned quickly to a Larry Krasneresque condemnation of the Philadelphia Police Department, noting Mr Krasner’s ongoing attempts to overturn what they claim are false convictions.

    These exonerations, as well as recent reporting by The Inquirer, have shed light on the coercive and illegal tactics detectives used to get false confessions. This month, Krasner charged three former homicide detectives for lying in the 2016 retrial of Anthony Wright, whose murder conviction was vacated due to DNA evidence.

    Also this month, Krasner asked a judge to hold the Philadelphia Police Department in contempt for failing to turnover police misconduct records.

    Philadelphia’s twin crises of gun violence and homicides are multilayered and intertwined. To reduce the number of unsolved murders in the city, the homicide clearance rate needs to go up. For the homicide clearance rate to go up, witnesses need to have faith that the system is actually seeking justice — not simply trying to improve its statistics by throwing another person in prison.

I’m trying to figure out how the Editorial Board are trying to give witnesses “faith that the system is actually seeking justice” by continually slamming the performance of the Police Department, and so far, I’ve got nothing. When the Board say that the Police Department needs to be “rooting out corrupt officers,” the impression the #woke at the Inquirer are giving — and, I suspect, trying to give — is that most of the city police officers are corrupt.

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The unintended consequence of #MaskMandates: schools can’t find enough bus drivers

I have previously noted, on Twitter, how Fayette County is having real problems with manning school buses:

Well, it looks like I haven’t been the only one noticing that!

Bus driver shortages are latest challenge hitting US schools

By Amy Beth Hamson and Lindsay Whitehurst | August 22, 2021

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A Montana school district is dangling $4,000 bonuses and inviting people to test drive big yellow school buses in hopes of enticing them to take a job that schools are struggling to fill as kids return to in-person classes.

A Delaware school district offered to pay parents $700 to take care of their own transportation, and a Pittsburgh district delayed the start of classes and said hundreds more children would have to walk to school. Schools across the U.S. are offering hiring bonuses, providing the training needed to get a commercial driver’s license and increasing hourly pay to attract more drivers.

The shortage of bus drivers is complicating the start of a school year already besieged by the highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19, contentious disagreement over masking requirements, and the challenge of catching up on educational ground lost as the pandemic raged last year.

The Lexington Herald-Leader story I had linked with my tweet noted the shortage of drivers, and that “several” had called out sick the previous week, which was the first week of school, made no mention at all of the mask mandate imposed by the Fayette County public schools. I had previously noted the problem, and pointed out, “Neither story says, of course, that the mask mandate ordered by Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) might be having an impact, but it’s an obvious question: would you want to be a bus driver and face possibly being accosted by angry students and their parents over such. Given the very liberal unemployment eligibility and the government paying people not to work, why sign up to take such abuse?”

Of course, given that the Herald-Leader Editorial Board supported Mr Beshear on his mask mandate, it’s not likely that one of the newspaper’s reporters would mention the mandate as part of the problem. As we have pointed out previously, the newspaper’s Editorial Board aren’t exactly in tune with the voters in the Commonwealth.

Now, what I have guessed to be true has been reported by the credentialed media. The Associated Press report noted that:

In Helena, the company (First Student) has 50 bus drivers and needs 21 more before classes start on Aug. 30, a shortfall (Dan) Redford called unprecedented.

Attendance ended up being light at Helena’s event, but similar demos, like one held recently in Seattle, led to more applications.

The delta variant also drove the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend universal mask wearing in schools, especially for children too young to be vaccinated. But in many areas, there’s a wave of fierce anti-mask protest.

First Student lost some Helena drivers to mask requirements on buses, Redford said.

The left will howl that such potential drivers are selfish in not wanting to wear face masks, but it is what it is: not everyone in the United States agrees with the #MaskMandates, and it isn’t as though we are seeing the left rushing in to fill the bus driver vacancies.

We have already noted how #VaccineMandates are contributing to a shortage of health care personnel. Now, Axios has noted that the ‘pandemic’ and the responses to it have led to a significant shortage of teachers as well.

It seems that some people just will not comply with authoritarian dictates!

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Paul Krugman waxes wroth because you didn’t take your medicine!

We have previously noted Amanda Marcotte’s article on Salon, It’s OK to blame the unvaccinated — they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms. Miss Marcotte was upset, very upset, that the gym of which she was a member responded to Philadelphia’s new regulations to either impose vaccination requirements, complete with “Ve need to see your papers” enforcement, or require all staff and patrons to wear a mask, and the gym chose the latter. She is, she sand, “incandescent with rage” at the willfully unvaccinated.

Of course, Miss Marcotte, while she does have a following, is still relatively unknown, at least as far as the big picture is concerned. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, however, is well known, and if he didn’t use the phrase “incandescent with rage,” you can tell that it it would fit:

So how do you feel about anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers? I’m angry about their antics, even though I’m able to work from home and don’t have school-age children. And I suspect that many Americans share that anger.

The question is whether this entirely justified anger — call it the rage of the responsible — will have a political impact, whether leaders will stand up for the interests of Americans who are trying to do the right thing but whose lives are being disrupted and endangered by those who aren’t.

To say what should be obvious, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in public spaces aren’t “personal choices.” When you reject your shots or refuse to mask up, you’re increasing my risk of catching a potentially deadly or disabling disease, and also helping to perpetuate the social and economic costs of the pandemic. In a very real sense, the irresponsible minority is depriving the rest of us of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Actually, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask are personal choices. Dr Krugman himself, exercised his personal choice to get vaccinated, as did Miss Marcotte, and as did I. What Dr Krugman wants is for the rest of us to not have a personal choice in this matter

Dr Krugman spent 834 words telling us how evil conservatives are, and, reading it, it could have been written by Miss Marcotte! But then there was this:

Recent polling suggests that the public strongly supports mask mandates and that an overwhelming majority of Americans opposes attempts to prevent local school districts from protecting children. I haven’t seen polling on attempts to prevent businesses from requiring proof of vaccination, but my guess is that these attempts are also unpopular.

Really? I’ve pointed out dozens of times that when Republican state legislative candidates in Kentucky ran against Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) executive orders, the voters rewarded the GOP hugely.

But it wasn’t just the Bluegrass State, which President Trump carried by a wide margin. In Pennsylvania, which Joe Biden won, the state legislature put two constitutional amendments on the May 18, 2021 primary ballot, measures which would limit the governor’s executive authority, and both of them passed, 53.3% to 47.7% and 53.2% to 47.8%.

One thing, however, ought to be obvious: if the public really do “strongly support” mask mandates, why aren’t we seeing that out on the streets? I had to go to Lexington again today, and drove through part of the University of Kentucky; had I been able to find a place to park, I would have gotten lunch at the Local Taco. Alas! I couldn’t find a parking space, but the other thing I couldn’t find were students, most of whom are normally more liberal than the population as a whole, wearing masks.

I spotted one, one! lady coming out of Sqecial Media wearing a mask, and she was visibly older than the usual student population.

As I made a right turn off South Limestone Street onto Vine Street to head home, I saw one lawyer-looking type wearing a mask.

That was it. Kentucky was very much a red state, with President Trump winning 62.09% of the vote, but Joe Biden carried Fayette County, 59.25% to 38.50%. In 2019, Attorney General Andy Beshear beat Governor Matt Bevin (R-KY) by 65.51% to 32.95% in Fayette County. If anyplace in Kentucky was going to “strongly support” a mask mandate, it would have been the areas around UK and downtown Lexington.

Lexington, however, isn’t the only place I saw. The NFL Network had the preseason game between the Boston New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles. It’s only pre-season, so the games don’t count, but I was happy to see the Patriots stomp the Iggles, 35-0. What I noticed, because I was deliberately looking for it, was that when the cameras panned the crowd at Lincoln Financial Field maybe, maybe! 1% of the crowd were masked.

In Philadelphia, which gave Mr Biden 81.44% of its votes.

Of course, as we have note previously, the City of Brotherly Love does not have an 81.44% vaccination rate, and the Philadelphia zip codes with the lowest vaccination rates are heavily minority.

Well, I think the pro-public health majority is also getting increasingly angry, and rightly so. It just hasn’t been vocal enough — and too few politicians have sought to tap into this righteous rage. (Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, is trying. He’s pointing out, correctly, that voting for his recall would probably install an anti-vaccine, anti-mask fanatic as governor, with dire consequences for the state.)

So it’s time to stop being diffident and call out destructive behavior for what it is. Doing so may make some people feel that they’re being looked down on. But you know what? Your feelings don’t give you the right to ruin other people’s lives.

How, I have to ask, is Dr Krugman’s life being ruined? He is, or so I have inferred from his column, vaccinated, he is able to work from home, and he is perfectly capable of wearing a mask. His chances of contracting COVID-19 have to be pretty low, but, in the end, it’s not about his chances of catching the virus that have him outraged. No, what has him so angry is that not everybody is doing what he believes they should be doing.

The left are like that these days.

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Resistance is not futile! Federal judge issues injunction against Andy Beshear's mask mandate for private schools

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) obviously expects a complacent and mostly subservient Kentucky state court system to do his bidding, but, too bad for him, there is a federal judicial system as well.

    Judge blocks Beshear’s mask mandate in at least one school, calling it ‘tyranny’

    By Jack Brammer and Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Updated: August 20, 2021 | 9:08 AM EDT

    A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order Thursday against Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s mask mandate for students in a legal case involving about 20 families in a Campbell County Catholic school.

    The ruling does not affect separate emergency regulations approved by the Kentucky Department of Education and the Kentucky Department for Public Health, so mask mandates remain in effect at all public schools in the state and at daycares and preschools.

Governor Beshear’s executive order was always an overreach, in that he applied it to private as well as public schools.

    US District Court Senior Judge William O Bertelsman

    Beshear spokeswoman Crystal Staley said the ruling by U.S. District Judge William O. Bertelsman of Covington “could place thousands of Kentucky children at risk and undoubtedly expose them to the most dangerous version of COVID-19 we have ever seen.” . . . .

    Staley said the court ruled without hearing from the governor and with “absolutely no consideration of the consequences of exposure and quarantine that we will see — especially at a time when we are nearly out of staffed hospital beds statewide.”

Note that Miss Staley did not address the legality of the Governor’s order, but only that doing something like following the law might have negative consequences. It was the same argument the Governor made following oral arguments at the state Supreme Court in his effort to have several laws passed by the General Assembly declared unconstitutional. The Governor could call the General Assembly into a special session to consider new laws which might change things in the way he would like, but, of course, he won’t. On July 10, 2020, Mr Beshear stated that he wouldn’t involve the legislature because they wouldn’t do his bidding. Given that Republican candidates for the legislature ran against his abuse of authority in 2020, and the voters gave the GOP 14 additional seats in the state House of Representatives, and two in the state Senate, the Governor is right about one thing: the legislature would not only not go along with him, but would pass laws, over his veto, which would restrict him even further.

Judge Bertelsman was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and, though he took senior status in 2001, has still handled notable cases, including the defamation lawsuit by Nicolas Sandmann against The Washington Post.

The Louisville Courier-Journal reported:

    Both parties have agreed the order should apply only to schools in the Diocese of Covington, according to Beshear’s spokeswoman Crystal Staley and the parents’ attorney, Brandon Voelker.

    So far, the judge has not granted their request to narrow the ruling, Voelker told The Courier Journal. The current order makes no distinction between where the mandate can and cannot be enforced.

The Diocese of Covington could change its policy, and impose a mask mandate, as Bishop John Stowe of Lexington has done for all parochial schools in the diocese. Bishop Stowe also ordered that all diocesan employees be vaccinated as a condition of employment, and Catholic Center employees must wear masks, even if vaccinated.

    Following the ruling, the Diocese of Covington’s superintendent of schools Kendra McGuire told families they would be returning to a masks-optional policy.

Back to the Herald-Leader’s story:

    Bertelsman said in his five-page order that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that Beshear’s mask executive order violates state law dealing with emergencies.

    He said Beshear’s order would cause harm to children’s emotional well-being and academic growth.

    “Such intangible and unquantifiable harm is irreparable because it cannot be measured or undone,” said Bertelsman. “A temporary restraining order is required to enjoin defendant’s actions and preserve the status quo until the court holds a hearing on the merits.”

    Bertelsman chided Beshear for not following laws passed by the Kentucky General Assembly this year that outlined procedures for the governor to follow in making emergency orders.

    “The executive branch cannot simply ignore laws passed by the duly-elected representatives of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky,” said the judge. “Therein lies tyranny. If the citizens dislike the laws passed, the remedy lies with them, at the polls.”

This is the problem. The Governor challenged several laws passed, over his vetoes, by the General Assembly, and the Governor’s toady, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd, issued injunctions against them. The state Supreme Court took up the cases, heard oral arguments on June 10th, but still has not released its ruling, 71 days, over ten full weeks, later.

Let’s be realistic here: the justices have already taken their decision, and Governor Beshear almost certainly knows the result. I have speculated — and it is speculation! — that the decision has gone against the Governor, and the normally friendly to Mr Beshear court, unable to find any legal justification for his claims, has simply delayed issuing the ruling, to give him a few weeks more. But it’s past time, and the Court needs to issue its ruling, so that these things can be put on more solid legal ground.

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The decrease in the homicide rate in Philadelphia It's still way, way, way too high, but some progress has been made. Will it last?

We recently noted that the gang bangers have slowed down their rates of murders in the City of Brotherly Love. With ‘just’ 339 homicides in 228 days, Philadelphia is seeing ‘only’ 1.4868 homicides per day, which works out to ‘just’ 543 over the course of 2021.

That would still shatter 1990’s record of 500, and 2020’s 499, but it’s a far cry from the 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year, that the homicide numbers for July 8th yielded.

But, with 314 homicides reported as of July 22nd, the 203rd day of the year, and 339 reported on August 16th, the 228th day of the year, Philly has seen ‘just’ 25 homicides in the last 25 days, ‘only’ 1.00 per day. If that rate were to be maintained for the rest of the year, Philly would see ‘only’ 476 murders in 2021.

Screen capture from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, August 17, 2021, 11:33 AM. Click to enlarge.

Of course, that’s still a lot, more than any year between 2007 through 2019. And, with 339 so far this year, 2021 has already exceeded the homicide totals for any full year from 2008 through 2017.

We’re still in the long, hot summer, and will be for another month, but it has to be noted: the decline in homicides in Philly occurred during this long, hot summer.

Screen capture from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, August 17, 2021, 9:00 AM. Click to enlarge.

But there’s a sad part to this post. I began it around 8:50 AM, and a screen capture taken right at 9:00 AM showed ‘only’ 337 homicides. The electricity went out here at 9:11 AM, due to a limb falling on a power line somewhere. When the sparktricity came back on, at 10:52 AM — something I didn’t notice for a few minutes, because I was out on the screened in porch, reading a history of the Tudor monarchs in my Kindle — I saw that the Philadelphia Police Department had to update it a second time this morning, to report two more homicides as of 11:59 PM yesterday.

It’s a great thing that the homicide rate has taken a drop over the last almost four weeks; it would be nice to know what has led to that.

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Comment rescue: We told you so!

Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

Remember: 81 million people allegedly voted for this senile fool. If you don’t want to blame Biden, blame the idiots who elected him.

On Patterico’s Pontifications, I commented:

    neither Trump nor his supporters ever proposed “the result” that you supporters of Biden have handed all of us.

    Being a critic of Trump and his fanatical devotees doesn’t mean being a supporter of Biden, or an apologist for his Afghanistan policy.

    Actually, it means that you own it!

    Our esteemed host wrote, maybe more than a year ago — it was the concluding line of a main post, which, alas!, I didn’t save — that he’d vote for Joe Biden and accept the [insert slang term for feces here] show that would follow, because he thought President Trump was a crook. That, at least, was admitting that he owned the results.

    I told everyone here that perhaps President Trump wasn’t a nice guy, but it was his policies, not his personality, which mattered. So many people here voted for Mr Biden’s personality, ’cause he wasn’t an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like President Trump, but along with the nice guy with the two German Shepherds and the wife with a doctorate, you got an imbecile who wants to not only keep abortion legal, but force taxpayers to pay for them, who can’t tell the difference between males and females, who is pushing through a $3.5 trillion (faux) infrastructure plan, who wants to make vote fraud easier rather than more difficult, is locking up the Capitol kerfufflers without bail, so that they can be punished before they ever go to trial, who is caving in to the idiotic Black Lives Matter philosophy, who has reopened our borders to waves of illegal immigrants, and 8,724,366.7 other idiotic things.

    If you voted for Joe Biden, you voted for all of those things, along with an even worse person to be just a heartbeat away from a Presidency currently held by a 78 year, 8 month, and 27 day old guy in questionable mental health.

The Never Trumpers need to be reminded of just what they sought, of just for whom the voted.

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The failure in Afghanistan was a failure of understanding

American helicopters evacuating personnel from US embassy in Kabul.

I would love to blame the debacle in Afghanistan on President Joe Biden, I really would. And he, as the Commander-in-Chief, is certainly the one responsible for the extremely chaotic way in which we evacuated. The images of American helicopters over Kabul is terribly reminiscent of our copters trying to rescue personnel off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975.

But the sad fact is that this was more like Vietnam than anyone wants to say.

The younger President Bush had little choice: after the attacks which brought down the World Trade Center, we had to respond, and the only possible response was going after al Qaeda, holed up in Afghanistan. Devastating al Qaeda was a mission accomplished relatively quickly, as was smashing the Taliban government which sheltered them and would not turn the al Qaeda people over to us.

But President Bush, and so many other Americans, had seen to what the Taliban had reduced the Afghan people, with women reduced to little more than the property of men, and girls denied education, all to adhere to a fundamentalist form of Islam that I would like to say resembles the 9th century, but, in truth, isn’t that far away from present day Saudi Arabia or Iran.

President Bush, enamored as he was of the arguments of Natan Sharansky, the Israeli politician who wrote The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, believed that replacing the Afghan government with someone with a Western education and more Western outlook, could provide the experience with Western liberalism that Mr Sharansky believed would lead people who had lived under tyranny to so love the experience of freedom and democracy that they would just naturally take to it.

Didn’t work, did it?

It didn’t work in Iraq, either, because Western liberalism is more than just a political system, but a culture, something people need to feel naturally, something in which people need to be reared.

The experience in Iraq, and Afghanistan, was the experience of Islam, in a culture of tribalism. While Iraq’s somewhat more modern government had tamped down some tribalism, it soon became apparent, after Saddam Hussein was deposed, that the local culture of Tikrit, from which Mr Hussein had come, wanted to reassert itself. Remember; Iraq was not a ‘natural’ nation, born out of historical development, but a creation of the British Foreign Office.

We saw that not that long ago, when the plight of the Kurds, divided between Turkey, Iraq and Iran, came to public attention.

Afghanistan? Another faux nation, a collection of tribal regions called a nation-state by a Western system which sees only nation-states as the mechanism for governmental organization. And we have never been able to understand tribalism, understand relatively small groups governed by a leader, whether hereditary or a ‘strongman.’ What concepts we did have of ‘strongman’ government came as the result of political moves based frequently on socialism, on politics, rather than the extended family structures of the Middle East. ‘Strongman’ governments, in our conceptual framework, were governments of thugs like Fidel Castro, not tribal leadership.

What we also failed to understand was the concept of war. We have had many wars in our history, but have lost our way since 1945. Our Allies and we defeated Nazi Germany and Japan by killing and killing and killing some more, and by destroying their countries’ infrastructure and industry to the point where they simply could not fight anymore.

We killed and maimed their fighting aged men, but we did more than that. We killed and maimed civilians, including the younger boys who would eventually grow up to fighting age. Not only did we destroy their militaries, we devastated the next group of soldiers as well.

For awhile we tried to cloak that, targeting railways, transportation hubs, and the industries which produced war materiel, but let’s tell the truth here: many of those bombs fell on the residential areas surrounding those legitimate military targets, and fell on schools, hospitals, and churches as well. In the end, we gave up even pretending, as we launched firebombing raids on Dresden and Kobe and Tokyo.

Somehow, some way, those lessons were lost. We wanted to wage war more nicely, to target enemy soldiers but avoid non-combatant civilians, and we did that just as warfare stopped being nation against nation, but with one side being guerrilla fighters, fighters who not just blended in and hid among the civilian population, but who were fed and clothed and hidden by them. The guerrilla fighter depends upon the civilian population to provide him not with massive supplies, flown in on C-17s as the United States Army does, but on providing them with one or two meals at a time.

In effect, we emasculated the war-fighting ability of our Army, by changing the rules of engagement in a way which favored the guerrillas. Then, on top of that, we assigned the Army, an organization which is supposed to specialize in nation destroying, the mission of nation building.

We should have learned the lesson in Vietnam: that stuff does not work.

So, what had we in Afghanistan? A fool’s errand is what we had!

My older daughter spent the fall of 2017 at Bagram Air Base. She told us — after she got home; she was supposed to be in Kuwait, but knew she’d worry her mother to death if she told us she was in Afghanistan! — that she was startled the first couple of nights, as she heard stuff go boom. Apparently the Taliban was lobbing mortar shells, which the military called IDF — indirect fire — into the buffer zone surrounding the base. It never hurt anyone or anything. After a few days, she learned how to sleep through it.

But think about that: the fall of 2017 was after we had been in Afghanistan for sixteen years, and we couldn’t even secure the ground around the air base enough that the Taliban couldn’t get within mortar range of the buffer zone. Seven years under the younger President Bush, eight years under Barack Hussein Obama, and a year under President Trump, and we hadn’t secured even the area around Kabul.

By then we were training Afghan forces to defend their own country, but we never called it ‘Afghanization,’ because it was too close to ‘Vietnamization,’ and we all know how that worked out.

Afghanization was to turn the country back over to the Afghanis. Well, we’re doing just that, and they are getting back exactly what they had before we went in.

We can blame the chaos of the withdrawal on the current Commander-in-Chief, and he is responsible for the ineptness we see, but the truth is that we were never in a position to do anything but withdraw and leave the country to the Afghans. Other than the hunt for Osama bin Laden, that could have been done during the Bush Administration. President Obama did pull us out of Iraq, but not Afghanistan. President Trump campaigned on getting us out of Afghanistan, but even he delayed things with a scheduled departure date of May of 2021, which would have been, he had hoped, during his second term.

     Oops!

And so it fell to President Biden. Perhaps President Trump would have handled it a bit better, but there’s no way to know. But the failure of the Afghan mission was a failure of understanding, from the younger President Bush all the way down to today. Western civilization cannot be imposed on Muslims, and especially cannot be imposed on Muslims who want to live in the 7th century.

There is, of course, some fault to lay at the stinky feet of President Biden.

    This is Joe Biden’s Jimmy Carter moment

    By | August 15, 2021 | 9:58 PM EDT

    The utterly nauseating and unnecessary abandonment of Afghanistan to its fate recalls a similar humiliation at the hands of Islamist radicals in the Jimmy Carter administration.

    President Biden’s profligate spending policies are unleashing inflation that is sparking voter distrust so noticeable that even NPR is sounding the alarm.

    He is begging OPEC to come up with more oil while interfering with US production. He announced barely a month ago, with great confidence, “The Taliban is not the South — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability.

    “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

    Our president comes across as weak, meek, ineffectual, incompetent and confused. (Momentarily confusing South and North Vietnam doesn’t even make the list of the top 100 senior moments we’ve seen this year from this near-octogenarian, despite the fact that his staff is keeping him hidden to a degree with little if any precedent in the past half-century.)

Saigon evacuation, April 30, 1975.

There’s a little more at the link, but the title is a bit of a misnomer: while the author is attempting to link President Biden’s failures with Jimmy Carter’s, it should be remembered that Gerald Ford was President of the United States when we last had helicopters plucking people away from an embassy. Given that President Ford had been thoroughly hamstrung by a Congress full of Democratic hatred — and Joe Biden was part of that, in the United States Senate at the time — and could give virtually none of the aid that President Richard Nixon had promised should North Vietnam violate the Paris Peace Accords, it’s pretty difficult to blame Mr Ford, but the images are still there.

Vietnam was not a Middle Eastern Islamic state, but, in a way, it wasn’t that different: the Vietnamese people were not Westerners, and the notion that we could convert them to Western democratic thought, and they would come to love it, was ludicrous. South Vietnam had a succession of corrupt leadership in Nguyễn Cao Kỳ and Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. While the Vietnamese people might not have loved the Communists, at least they didn’t see Ho Chi Minh as corrupt or the puppet of foreigners.

In the end, this is the real failure of Mr Sharansky’s, and President Bush’s thinking. No matter how much the prospect of democracy might appeal to some people not used to it, they don’t like being governed by those they see as foreign puppets. No matter how nice a guy George Bush was, or how magnanimous Richard Nixon tried to be, they were still foreign white men. Throw in cultures completely different from Western democracy — dare I say white Western democracy? — and the situation becomes virtually impossible.

We were seduced by the fact that Japan and the Republic of Korea became democracies familiar to us, but it has to be remembered: they were devastated by World War II, and the latter by the Communist invasion of 1950, and had lost not only their entire leadership class, but much of the next generation of young men to grow up. We were never willing to subject Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, to the level of destruction which was rained down on Japan.

Democracy and freedom have to develop as natural parts of the culture, and one thing is certain: it will never develop to anything close to what Westerners would call real democracy in Islamic cultures.