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Big Brother will be watching you!

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ran his mouth the other day about going from a gasoline tax to a mileage tax:

Vehicle mileage tax could be on the table in infrastructure talks, Buttigieg says

By Thomas Franck | Friday, March 26 2021 | 10:29 AM EDT | Updated 4:57 PM EDT

  • Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation secretary, said a vehicle mileage tax could be on the table in infrastructure talks.

  • He contended that President Joe Biden’s forthcoming plans to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and waterways would lead to a net gain for the U.S. taxpayer.

  • “I’m hearing a lot of appetite to make sure that there are sustainable funding streams,” Buttigieg said. A mileage tax “shows a lot of promise.”

A vehicle mileage tax could be on the table in talks about how to finance the White House’s expected multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure proposal, according to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Buttigieg, who spoke with CNBC’s Kayla Tausche on Friday, also contended that President Joe Biden’s forthcoming plans to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and waterways would lead to a net gain for the U.S. taxpayer and not a net outlay.

“When you think about infrastructure, it’s a classic example of the kind of investment that has a return on that investment,” he said. “That’s one of many reasons why we think this is so important. This is a jobs vision as much as it is an infrastructure vision, a climate vision and more.”

He also weighed in on several potential revenue-generating options to fund the project. He spoke fondly of a mileage levy, which would tax travelers based on the distance of the journey instead of on how much gasoline they consume.

“A so-called vehicle-miles-traveled tax or mileage tax, whatever you want to call it, could be a way to do it,” he said.

Democrats have slowly pivoted away from a gasoline tax in favor of a mileage tax amid a simultaneous, climate friendly effort to encourage consumers to drive electric cars.

This really isn’t all that new: it was in either Oregon or Washington that such was proposed a few years ago, because higher gas mileage cars and electric vehicles were depressing gasoline tax revenues.

But a mileage tax has an obvious drawback: how do you determine mileage, unless the government mandates GPS units on every vehicle, and tracks your travel?

This is what a mileage tax would mean!

Of course, what it would also mean would be backyard mechanics who find ways to disconnect the GPS, so you can leave the damned thing at home for half or more of your trips. Big Brother will insist on GPS units without which your vehicle can’t be started, but it won’t take hackers long to find ways around that. Big Brother would need to find ever more intrusive ways to track your travels, such as satellites which scan vehicles and determine which ones have the GPS disconnected, to send the Geheime Staatspolizei to stop and arrest you.

It could be something simpler, such as having to track your odometer, and file that with your income taxes, but I’ve seen plenty of vehicles in which the odometer did not work. And, in older vehicles, it’s ridiculously easy to disconnect the damned thing.

But, however it works, one thing is certain: for it to work, the government has to be able to watch you, to track your every movement, because mileage taxes can’t work unless they track your mileage!

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Ve need to see your papers!

It seems that President Joe Biden and his Administration are very concerned, very concerned! about how Americans are going to prove that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. There are just so many ways that such could be documented, that I’m surprised that no one has yet suggested the very simple way that the German government found in the late 1930s.[1]I suppose that I have to note here that yes, I am using sarcasm; too many people take things so deathly seriously.

From The Washington Post:

‘Vaccine passports’ are on the way, but developing them won’t be easy

White House-led effort tries to corral more than a dozen initiatives

By Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun and Isaac Stanley-Becker | March 28, 2021 | 11:00 AM EDT

The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as “vaccine passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen.

The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again.

The administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The White House this month took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of announcing updates in coming days, said one official.

I was initially fooled when I saw the tweet by William Teach, which used a photo of an American passport as the illustration. I had originally thought that this was going to be a story about how American passports could be stamped to notify foreign countries that a traveler had been vaccinated.

But nope, I was wrong: the story was about how Americans will prove internally that they had been vaccinated!

The White House declined to answer questions about the passport initiative, instead pointing to public statements that Zients and other officials made this month.

“Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” Zients said at a March 12 briefing.

The initiative has emerged as an early test of the Biden administration, with officials working to coordinate across dozens of agencies and a variety of experts, including military officials helping administer vaccines and health officials engaging in international vaccine efforts.

Count on it: as the Biden Administration wants to continue pushing vaccination, they will concomitantly push employers to require proof of vaccination before allowing people to work. The left have no interest, no interest at all, in enforcing existing law requiring people to prove that they are eligible to work under our existing immigration laws, but, damn it, you’d better be vaccinated!

I had frequently complained about the Obama Administration’s passage of the HITECH Act, which required that all medical records be digitized, so that your next physician could easily obtain your medical records from your past doctors, noting that there will never be enough safeguards that hackers won’t be able to break through them. It would only make sense that, if you are a candidate for a job, that a company, if it could, might want to check your medical records to see if you had even been treated for mental illness or had diabetes or a heart condition that could drive up their medical care costs, or which might indicate that you were more prone to missing time from work due to illness. While I’m sure that would be illegal, there would be ‘dark’ companies which might be willing to provide such a service to established human resources departments.

But now? The Biden Administration wants to have a way in which people can prove they had been vaccinated, and the only reason for that is to punish those who have not.

Those initiatives — such as a World Health Organization-led global effort and a digital pass devised by IBM that is being tested in New York state — are rapidly moving forward, even as the White House deliberates about how best to track the shots and avoid the perception of a government mandate to be vaccinated.

One of the teams working on vaccine passports is the Vaccination Credential Initiative, a coalition endeavoring to standardize how data in vaccination records is tracked.

If there’s a standardization of data in how vaccination records are tracked, then they will be tracked, and the notion that they will “avoid the perception of a government mandate to be vaccinated” will simply be propaganda. If the records can be tracked, they will be tracked, and you can count on the Biden Administration, as well as states with Democratic Governors, who have never shied away from intrusive and unconstitutional mandates to fight COVID-19, to use every tool they have to force compliance.

“The busboy, the janitor, the waiter that works at a restaurant, wants to be surrounded by employees that are going back to work safely — and wants to have the patrons ideally be safe as well,” said Brian Anderson, a physician at Mitre, a nonprofit company that runs federally funded research centers, who is helping lead the initiative. “Creating an environment for those vulnerable populations to get back to work safely — and to know that the people coming back to their business are ‘safe,’ and vaccinated — would be a great scenario.”

This was, of course, the justification for the mask mandates, that you must wear them to protect other people. If you refused to wear a mask, you were harming other people, because the assumption was that you carried the virus. And the vaccination ‘passports’ will have the same underlying assumption: if you have not been vaccinated, you are a carrier.

There’s a lot more at the original, but there is part of one last paragraph I need to quote. An official, speaking anonymously, said that:

some of the considerations include how to adjust for the spread of variants, how booster shots would be tracked and even questions about how long immunity lasts after getting a shot. There’s “a lot to think through,” the official said.

And there it is: it’s not just getting your two-shot vaccine this year, but the government will want to track you, and your movements, every time the CDC decides that there’s another variant out there, and that you require periodic booster shots or re-vaccination.

“It’s for our own good,” we will be told, and there will be plenty of sheeple out there, ready and willing to go along with the Mandates of Our Betters.

I guess that we’ll need a new forearm tattoo every year!

References

References
↑1 I suppose that I have to note here that yes, I am using sarcasm; too many people take things so deathly seriously.
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18th Century Technology: It’s time to stop printing newspapers

The Washington Post, which was saved by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2013, is cheering on the offer by Stewart Bainum Jr. to but Tribune Publishing:

Bainum hopes to offer $650 million for Tribune Publishing Co.

By Elahe Izadi and Sarah Ellison | March 24, 2021 | 6:00 PM EDT

Maryland business executive Stewart Bainum Jr. wants to purchase Tribune Publishing Co. for $650 million — 10 times the amount he agreed last month to pay for one of its newspapers, the Baltimore Sun.

It’s an effort to edge out an already agreed-upon $630 million offer for Tribune from Alden Global Capital, an investment fund known for acquiring and slashing newspaper operations.

Details of Bainum’s plans surfaced in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing submitted Tuesday.

It once seemed as if the Alden deal was all but wrapped up; in Tuesday’s filing, the board recommended that shareholders approve Alden’s offer but also released Banium from a confidentiality agreement he made to negotiate to buy the Baltimore Sun so that he can talk with potential investors about going in together on a counter-offer for all of Tribune.

Alden is a hedge fund that likes to buy up newspapers, cut them to the bone, and make a profit by selling off their real property. But it should be noted that it doesn’t have to be a hedge fund to do that stuff.

Philadelphia Inquirer to sell printing facility, lay off 500 plant employees in bid for long-term economic stability

Proceeds from the sale of the plant will be used to enhance severance packages for laid-off employees beyond the company’s obligations under union contracts.

by Andrew Maykuth and Juliana Feliciano Reyes | Updated: October 9, 2020

The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News Printing Plant in Conshohocken.JESSICA Griffin / Philadelphia InquirerStaff Photographer

The Philadelphia Inquirer will close its sprawling Montgomery County printing plant and shift production of its newspapers to a New Jersey contractor. The cost-cutting move will put as many as 500 employees out of work, but is aimed at ensuring the survival of the media company as consumers turn to digital platforms for their news.The company on Friday told employees that it plans to close and sell the Schuylkill Printing Plant in Upper Merion Township, perhaps by the end of the year. The Inquirer is negotiating with a buyer for the 45-acre River Road property, which includes a 674,000-square-foot manufacturing facility that opened in 1992. The buyer’s identity and plans were not disclosed.

“While the sale is not yet final, we recognize how deeply unsettling and distressing this is to employees at the printing plant,” Lisa Hughes, The Inquirer’s publisher and chief executive officer, said in an internal memo Friday to employees.

“They have served our readers tirelessly, with dedication and devotion to the craft,” Hughes said. “Many of them have spent decades with the company — and all performed their jobs valiantly when the pandemic arrived.”

They may have served valiantly, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to get canned.

Look at that photo, which you can enlarge by clicking on it. There are a lot of expensive-looking vehicles in that parking lot, the parking lot of a building filled with, as the left like to say, people with good paying union jobs. That the Inquirer is now owned by the Philadelphia Foundation, a non-profit ‘public benefit’ corporation. Gerry Lenfest, a billionaire who liked to give away his money, bought out the Inquirer and its companion tabloid, the Daily News, in 2014. While Mr Bezos paid 250 million for The Washington Post, the amount Mr Lenfest had to spend was a fraction of that. Mr Lenfest then turned around and donated the Inquirer to the non-profit.

But even non-profits have to pay the bills, and thus the printing plant got sold, and all of those “valiant” employees, with their good-paying union jobs, got pink slips. The $299.5 million state-of-the-art printing plant that the Inquirer had built in 1992, just sold for $37 million. In one of the bigger ironies, the time capsule buried at the plant in 1992, and scheduled to be opened in 2092, was instead opened on Friday.

It was sometime around 15 years ago, and perhaps longer, that I read an article which pointed out that it would have been less expensive for The New York Times to buy and provide each of its print subscribers with a Kindle, and send distribute the paper online instead, than it was to print the thing. Today, I get my subscribed newspapers — and I admit to liking newspapers far more than broadcast media sources — on my desktop, on my iPad, and on my iPhone.

Before I retired, I used to stop at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe on the way to the plant. I got my coffee, and picked up a copy of the Inquirer, to take to work. Some of the guys used to combitch that they’d have preferred the Allentown Morning Call, as it was closer to local news for them, but I was paying for it, so I got to choose. At any rate, there were many, many times in which, in the sports section, there would be a notice, “This game ended too late for inclusion in this edition.”[1]“Combitch” is a Picoism, not a typo. You should be able to figure out the etymology on your own.

That is the problem with print newspapers: the news is not always that new. Events happen quickly, and print newspapers are hours old before people ever get to read them. Online, corrections and updates can, and are, made frequently.

Why do I appreciate newspapers? Being mostly deaf, it is far easier for me to read the news than listen to it. More, the broadcast/cablecast media give us just the bare bones, not the meat of the stories, and their biases are far more blatant. Even with the biases of the #woke in the newsrooms, the longer treatment of print medium stories usually lets the truth get out.

The old Lexington Herald-Leader building, on Midland Avenue. Now sold, the building logo has been removed.

I was, about the time that Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press, a paperboy for the old Lexington Herald and Lexington Leader. Alas! The current merged paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, now part of the bankrupt McClatchy company, outsourced its own printing to a plant near Louisville in 2016, ceased issuing a Saturday edition in 2019, which meant the end of printing Friday night high school sports stories, and recently sold their own building on Midland Avenue to the Fayette County schools.

And let’s be honest: the print editions of virtually every major, and mid-sized, newspaper in this country, are horrible. The physical size has been reduced, even in as august a paper as The Wall Street Journal, and newsroom staffs have been cut not just to the bare bones, but into the bone as well.

It’s time to simply end the print editions. As much as some people will hate to see them go, they are dying anyway. For newspapers to have any chance to become profitable, they have to cease being newspapers, and adapt to the digital, internet model. No matter how much they try to modernize, newspapers are still 18th century technology, and the 18th century ended a long time ago.

References

References
↑1 “Combitch” is a Picoism, not a typo. You should be able to figure out the etymology on your own.
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The silliness of ‘Earth Hour’

A group of environmentalists wants you to take ‘action’ on what they have named ‘Earth Hour,’ which is 8:30 PM in your local time zone. The image to the right is from their website, and shows a nice family with all of the electric lights out, burning candles, lots of candles, for illumination.

Oops!

Most candles are made of paraffin, a heavy hydrocarbon derived from crude oil. Burning a paraffin candle for one hour will release about 10 grams of carbon dioxide.

As Australian blogger Enoch the Red pointed out after last year’s Earth Hour that an average Australian who tries to replace all the light produced by an incandescent bulb with light cast by parrifin candles will result in about 10 times the greenhouse emissions.

The site claims that you can use candles made from something other than paraffin:

But of course you don’t have to burn paraffin candles. Beeswax and soy candles are mostly carbon-neutral because any carbon they release by burning was only recently absorbed by plants from the atmosphere. The carbon in paraffin, by contrast, has been sitting in the ground for hundreds of millions of years.

Uhhh, if they are concerned with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, doesn’t stating that soy or beeswax candles are mostly carbon neutral ignore the fact that not burning them at all is carbon negative?

It gets even funnier:

Take part in our first-ever Earth Hour “Virtual Spotlight”

👉 How? It’s simple. On the night of Earth Hour, we’ll be posting a must-watch video on all our social media pages – and all you have to do is share it. 

Share it to your Stories or to your wall, re-Tweet it, send it via DM, tag friends in the comments – the choice is yours!

Whether you share it with one person or one hundred, you’ll be helping us place the spotlight on our planet, the issues we face, and our place within it all.

Be sure to follow us on Instagram / Facebook / Twitter to stay updated!

Uhhh, doesn’t watching their must-watch video on all of their social media pages use electricity? Doesn’t sharing those vidiots on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter use electricity?

I copied the image to the left from their website, showing someone using the light from an iPhone to illuminate the earth. But, last time I checked, iPhones need to be recharged, and recharging them uses, you guessed it, electricity, electricity from the power plant! Perhaps they delayed its usage during ‘Earth hour,’ but it will still get used.

The real problem with the climate activists is that they do not understand their own hypocrisy. They want to Save the Planet from CO2 emissions, but the last thing they want to give up is modern life, their computers, their iPhones, their internet, their heating and air conditioning, really anything which differentiates the 21st century from the 14th.

The climate activists think that they are serious people, but it seems as though every action they take, everything they say, demonstrates how unserious they really are.

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The Washington Post dances around the right question, but never actually asks it, because that would be too politically incorrect! If you are not courageous enough to ask the right questions, you will never get the right answers.

We have been saying all along that the credentialed media have been ignoring the soaring homicide rates in our major cities.

Well, it took the mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder to focus their attention, but it looks like The Washington Post finally got around to noticing as well:

Shootings never stopped during the pandemic: 2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades

By Reis Thebault and Danielle Rindler | March 23, 2021 | 11:42 PM EDT

Until two lethal rampages this month, mass shootings had largely been absent from headlines during the coronavirus pandemic. But people were still dying — at a record rate.

In 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, more than any other year in at least two decades. An additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun.

The vast majority of these tragedies happen far from the glare of the national spotlight, unfolding instead in homes or on city streets and — like the covid-19 crisis — disproportionately affecting communities of color.

Last week’s shootings at spas in the Atlanta area and Monday’s shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., killed a combined 18 people and rejuvenated a national effort to overhaul gun laws. But high-profile mass shootings such as those tend to overshadow the instances of everyday violence that account for most gun deaths, potentially clouding some people’s understanding of the problem and complicating the country’s response, experts say.

OK, they are starting to identify the problem. A bit further down:

“More than 100 Americans are killed daily by gun violence,” Ronnie Dunn, a professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University, said, using a figure that includes suicides. “The majority are in Black and Brown communities. We don’t really focus on gun violence until we have these mass shootings, but it’s an ongoing, chronic problem that affects a significant portion of our society.”

Of course, the article and the interviewees are all using the currently politically correct phrase, “gun violence,” as though firearms just pick themselves off the shelf and start shooting people. No one seems to be willing to point out that these shootings are being done by bad people!

Dr Dunn noted that the majority of these homicides “are in Black and Brown communities,” but seems quite unwilling to note that while the majority of victims “are in Black and Brown communities,” it is also true that the majority of their killers are part of the “black and brown communities.“[1]Note that The Washington Post is using the Associated Press Stylebook, which capitalizes ‘black’ when referring to race, and now capitalizes ‘brown’ as well. The First Street … Continue reading

Overall, most homicides in the United States are intraracial, and the rates of white-on-white and Black-on-Black killings are similar, both long term and in individual years.

Between 1980-2008, the U.S. Department of Justice found that 84% of white victims were killed by white offenders and 93% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.

In 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 81% of white victims were killed by white offenders, and 89% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.

In 2017, the FBI reported almost identical figures — 80% of white victims were killed by white offenders, and 88% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.

Back to the Post. Dr Dunn, as you might expect, tried to place the blame on the increased killings on all sorts of things, including increased gun sales:

Researchers say the pandemic probably fueled the increases in several ways. The spread of the coronavirus hampered anti-crime efforts, and the attendant shutdowns compounded unemployment and stress at a time when schools and other community programs were closed or online. They also note the apparent collapse of public confidence in law enforcement that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Covid-19 and the protests over police brutality also led to a surge of firearm sales. In 2020, people purchased about 23 million guns, a 64 percent increase over 2019 sales, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.

Dunn pointed to this flood of firearms as the most detrimental factor in the fight to curb gun violence. When shootings become “the soundscape of inner-city neighborhoods,” he said, “it increases anxiety and stress and creates toxic stress.” Dunn compared the effect to post-traumatic stress disorder akin to what war veterans experience.

What didn’t you see in that? You didn’t see Dr Dunn point to any research which shows that the legally-purchased firearms surge, as a result of the #BlackLivesMatter “Mostly Peaceful Protests™” were at all related to the killings in our inner cities.

When riots and violence are spreading through our cities, and the images and news of that are being purveyed over the network and cable news day in and day out, it’s perfectly natural that some people would believe that they needed additional protection; that’s why gun sales increased. Dr Dunn wants you to believe that it why homicides spiked, but offers no proof that those increased gun sales had anything to do with it.

Have the police linked any of these additional forearms sales to the increased homicide rates? If they have, I’ve managed to miss that story.

One recent study, from the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, called gun violence “a public health crisis decades in the making.” An analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found Black males between the ages of 15 and 34 accounted for 37 percent of gun homicides, even though they made up 2 percent of the U.S. population — a rate 20 times that of White males of the same age.

Here Dr Dunn provides the test. If black males between 15 and 34 account for 37% of homicides by firearm, while making up just 2% of the population, if the increased firearms sales have significantly contributed to the increased homicide rate, then we should see a heavy predominance of black males in that age group making up the increase in applications to purchase a firearm legally. Such would, if perhaps not prove what Dr Dunn is saying, at least provide a strong inference of it.

On average, there was one mass shooting every 73 days in 2020, compared with one every 36 days in 2019 and one every 45 days in 2017 and 2018. The slowdown interrupted what had been a five-year trend of more frequent and more deadly mass shootings.

That gun violence increased overall even as mass shootings declined underscores the fact that those high-profile events account for a relatively small share of firearm deaths. It should draw more attention to the victims and survivors of gun violence across the country, (Mark Barden, a co-founder of the gun violence prevention group Sandy Hook Promise) said.

So, while homicides have increased, mass shooting events have decreased. It’s almost as though the random events of nuts going off and committing these high-profile crimes has nothing to do with the increased homicide rate.

But, of course, it’s the mass shootings which make the news, because, let’s face it: a couple of gang-bangers getting killed in Philadelphia isn’t even news anymore.

If black males between 15 and 34 are the victims of homicide at a rate twenty times that of white males of the same age, then we need to ask why that is, but one thing is certain: it’s not guns. There is something different in the education, culture and experiences of white and black males that is causing black males of those ages to kill each other at such rates, and until we start asking what those differences are, we will never honestly address the issue.

But in our age of political correctness, we cannot ask the questions, without being accused of being the world’s most horrible racist, an accusation which shuts down the questions, and shutting down the questions means shutting off all hope of coming up with the right answers.

Me? I’m less than a month from my 68th birthday, and I’m retired. I have no job from which I can be fired for asking politically incorrect questions, have nothing from which I can be #canceled. I can ask the uncomfortable questions, when no one else seems to be willing or able to do so.

But if other people don’t step up, if other people won’t ask the right questions, we might as well face it: we’ll never have the right answers. But, sadly enough, our friends on the left already know that. They have had the choice between asking the right questions, and hoping to find the right answers, or ignoring the right questions, because by doing that they risk far less for themselves, and the only real price for that is more dead black people on the streets of Washington and Chicago and Philadelphia.

We know what choice they have taken.

References

References
↑1 Note that The Washington Post is using the Associated Press Stylebook, which capitalizes ‘black’ when referring to race, and now capitalizes ‘brown’ as well. The First Street Journal does not go along with that.
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Why is it that the left only notice the killings in mass murders? When it comes to individual murders in our city streets, we hear nothing but crickets

It was, of course, easily predictable, Amanda Marcotte railing against the Boulder, Colorado, mass killings, and, of course, blaming evil reich-wing Republicans for the actions of a demented, Democrat-supporting Muslim:

The NRA way of life is ruining our nation

Decades of gun propaganda has created a nation of sociopaths

By Amanda Marcotte | March 23, 2021

Right on the heels of last week’s horrific shooting spree by a 21-year-old at three Atlanta-area Asian day spas that left eight dead comes another mass murder, this time with a death toll of 10 at a Boulder, Colorado grocery store. The suspect, 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was reportedly armed with an AR-15. While everyone waits for an apparent motive (officials said an investigation would not take fewer than five days to complete) one thing is absolutely certain: Little will be done to address the primary cause of mass shootings. The ease with which any random man with an inchoate grievance can pick up a gun and rapidly snuff out the lives of strangers to make himself feel powerful will remain unchecked.

That’s not because Americans oppose stricter gun control laws. In fact, around 90% of Americans polled consistently support background checks for all gun sales. But when House Democrats introduced a bill earlier this month making background checks universal, all but eight Republicans voted against it. And forget about even turning this bill into law. The filibuster’s continued existence makes it impossible to get it past Republican obstruction in the Senate.

The grim reality is that the entire nation is in the thrall to a minority of extremely insecure mostly white men who, drunk on decades of NRA-fueled propaganda, have decided that having the ability to commit mass murder at a moment’s notice is a crucial component of maintaining their manhood against the ever-encroaching threats from de-gendered Potato Heads and lady video game players. Most of these men claim exoneration because they don’t personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school. Grotesquely, some even use these mass shootings to indulge in public fantasies about how they would totally stop an active shooter, though somehow they never seem to actually get around to doing it. But ultimately, they’ve become complacent in the face of mass murder from decades of being told by right-wing media that there’s a binary choice between preventing murder and watching Michelle Obama personally run off with their testicles in her handbag. Worse, the right has cultivated an overall suspicion of the very concept of concern for the lives of others at all.

And there it is, of course: we evil white men claim exoneration because we don’t “personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school.” That’s a statement in which Miss Marcotte has, in effect, assigned a collective guilt to her greatest of all bugaboos, conservative white men. In the confines of her South Philadelphia apartment, you can picture her bile simply dripping from the walls.[1]No, I don’t know her exact address, and would not publish it if I did.

This is what Miss Marcotte just can’t understand: only the people who are actually guilty of crimes are guilty of crimes, and it’s rather natural that those of us who have not shot up a grocery store do not see that we should lose our individual rights because someone else did.

She has, in past writings, complained that when one false rape claim was discovered, evil conservatives would jump on the bandwagon and claim that no one could ever believe a rape claim, so one would think she would understand that lumping an entire group together like that is an intellectually vacuous idea, but apparently if one thought that, one would be wrong.

I tweeted a couple of hours ago:

The Bill of Rights

And that’s just what Miss Marcotte has noted: the Boulder killings, along with two articles on the killing of eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent, primarily in yet another push for restricting our rights under the Second Amendment.

But, as we noted just a few days ago, the only murders she seems to notice are those in which she can find a political wedge, or blame evil white men.

Roughly 83% of the firearms murders in Philadelphia so far this year have been of black people, and another 10% of the victims were Hispanic. If her South Philadelphia neighborhood hasn’t been the worst place, it’s not the safest, either. There’s no way a news junkie like her could have missed at least some of the stories about the blood in the streets of her adopted home town, yet she has been curiously silent on the subject, at least in her Salon columns.

But in just the last eight days, Monday, March 15th and Monday, March 22nd, ten people, the same number of people who were killed in Boulder, went untimely to their deaths in the city’s mean streets, and Miss Marcotte didn’t write a single word about them, not in Salon. The Boulder massacre happened in Philadelphia as well, just not all in one shooting, but the victims in Miss Marcotte’s adopted home town are no less dead than the ones in Colorado.[2]Since Miss Marcotte has blocked me from seeing her Tweets, I do not know if she mentioned any of those deaths there.

Let’s be brutally frank here: the vast majority of murders in the United States are intraracial, not interracial. The vast majority of the black victims in Philly were killed by another black person, and the left are just deathly afraid to note that, because it could be seen as criticism of black people in general, and that’s raaaaacist. The Philadelphia Inquirer euphemizes it as “gun violence,” as though an inanimate object somehow kills people on its own initiative. Like the One Ring of Sauron, guns have a malevolence of their own, because the left cannot blame the people firing those guns, not unless the shooters are evil white men.

References

References
↑1 No, I don’t know her exact address, and would not publish it if I did.
↑2 Since Miss Marcotte has blocked me from seeing her Tweets, I do not know if she mentioned any of those deaths there.
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Virtue must be signaled!

Robert Aaron Long, 21, a guy with some serious, serious mental problems, shot up three Atlanta metropolitan area ‘massage parlors,’ killing eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent. Four were Korean. Naturally, it’s being called a hate crime by the left, though the details don’t quite match up.

But that doesn’t matter; the Usual Suspects are all over this as a hate crime, as though any deliberate murder isn’t an act of hate. From The New York Times:

Why Some Georgia Lawmakers Want Last Week’s Shootings Labeled Hate Crimes

Violence that left eight dead, including six women of Asian descent, will be the first stress test for a Georgia hate crime law.

By Astead W. Herndon and Stephanie Saul |March 21, 2021

A year ago, Georgia was one of four states that had no hate crime legislation.

But the deadly rampage last week that left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent, is now providing a test of a law passed last year — and a window into the way that the state’s increasingly diverse electorate has altered its political and cultural chemistry.

Georgia, after earlier false starts, passed its legislation following the shooting death of a young Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was stopped, detained and then shot to death by white residents in a South Georgia suburban neighborhood.

Now last week’s shootings, in which Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder, are providing a major stress test for when the legislation can be applied, what it can achieve and how it plays into the state’s increasingly polarized politics.

Political leaders, civil rights activists, and national and local elected officials condemned last week’s attack as an act of bigoted terror, drawing a connection between the majority-Asian victims and a recent surge in hate crimes against Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.

Mr Long has already been charges with premeditated murder. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Georgia not only has capital punishment, but carries it out, having executed 76 people since the restoration of capital punishment in 1976. An obvious question is: why bother to charge Mr Long with ‘hate crimes’ if there’s really nothing more they can do to him?

Law enforcement officials and some legal figures have shied away from labeling the killings a hate crime, saying there is insufficient evidence of motivation. Prosecutors in two separate counties are still weighing whether to invoke the hate crimes law.

If the evidence for a hate crime is weak, charging under the hate crime stature becomes problematic. It adds to the length and expense of any trial, and runs a serious risk of acquittal on such charges.

But that has not stopped the shootings from resonating as bias crimes for many in Georgia, a state that has been at the forefront of the demographic changes coursing through the South.

“I don’t want to draw any conclusions, but it’s obvious to me that if six victims were Asian women, that was a target,” said Georgia State Representative Calvin Smyre, a longtime Democratic lawmaker who helped shepherd the hate crimes bill through the General Assembly.

And there it is: it’s just obvious to Representative Smyre that, because women of Asian descent were killed, they must’ve been targeted because they were Asian. But sometimes, just because someone thinks that something is obvious doesn’t make it true.

Eight people are dead, and Mr Long has been charged with their murder. He is facing life in prison without the possibility of parole or perhaps even a capital sentence on those charges. If he is convicted on those, there’s nothing more a hate crimes rider can do to him.

But virtue must be signaled! My question is: if the killings of the six Asian women was so horrible, and must be charged as hate crimes, does that make the deaths of the other two victims somehow less significant, less important? Are the two non-Asian victims somehow less dead than the six Asian ones?

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With Donald Trump out of office, The Philadelphia Inquirer thinks nothing of publicizing criminality, knowing it won’t be punished

One way that you can tell that Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States is to read The Philadelphia Inquirer:

An undocumented house cleaner loses her job in Philly, but finds her mission

Altagracia Maria Herrera is an undocumented house cleaner who was excluded from most government aid, making the pandemic the first time she felt she didn’t belong in the United States.

By Robin Shulman | Monday, March 22, 2021

Altagracia María Herrera poses for a portrait outside of her home in Northeast Philadelphia on Wednesday, March 10, 2021. Herrera is an undocumented house cleaner who lost all her work during the pandemic. Photo by Heather Khalifa, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer

One night, as the pandemic shut Philadelphia down last March, Altagracia María Herrera, who cleans houses for a living, answered her phone.It was one of her employers, who, in broken Spanish, told her to stay home for the next few weeks, Herrera recalled.

“I understand,” responded Herrera, who was born in the Dominican Republic, lives in Northeast Philadelphia, and is a single parent to two U.S.-born daughters.

Then, over a few days, all her other cleaning jobs evaporated. Herrera had just enough saved to make her $750 rent. “After that, there was no money,” she said. As an undocumented immigrant, she didn’t qualify for relief from Washington — no stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, or ongoing salary funded by Paycheck Protection Program loans.

There’s much more at the original, but one thing is clear: she feels that she doesn’t belong in the United States because she really doesn’t belong in the United States. She is, the story tells us, “an undocumented immigrant,” the mealy-mouthed, Associated Press Stylebook term for an illegal immigrant, someone who is not an American citizen, someone who sneaked across the border illegally, someone who broke the law!

When Mr Trump was President, the Inquirer would never have printed her name, or noted that she lived somewhere in Northeast Philadelphia, or pointed out, in the photograph caption, that she was in the city on Wednesday, March 10, 2021. Why? Because under the Trump Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents might have used the information, tracked her down, arrested and deported her back to the Dominican Repub

Further down, the article tells us that Miss Herrera “followed her dream of a better life and joined a friend in Philadelphia” in 2000. the article does not tell us how she got to the United States from the Dominican Republic, an nation sharing the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

How did she enter? Did she overstay a legitimate visa, and simply not return home? Was she somehow smuggled into the United States via a private boat that landed at night on the Jersey shore or the Outer Banks of North Carolina? Either way, she broke the law!

The story tells us that Miss Herrera had two illegitimate children in the United States, which, sadly, makes them American citizens. The two daughters are now 17 and 15, and almost certainly have sucked up taxpayer dollars by attending Philadelphia’s public schools.

When the pandemic began, Herrera lost all five of her regular cleaning clients and pay of at least $650 a week. One employer said she had lost her job, and in a kind of trickle-down unemployment, could no longer pay Herrera.

Really? Five regular cleaning jobs? That means that either five separate clients were paying Miss Herrera cash ‘under the table,’ meaning that they were not withholding federal income taxes, state income taxes, the city wage tax, Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes, which is illegal, or Miss Herrera had presented falsified documents so that they could pay her legally, but also means she either forged documents herself, or paid someone else for forged documents.

Did Miss Herrera somehow pay her federal, state and local taxes? Did she pay her share of Social Security and Medicare taxes? Did she file her federal and state income tax forms? If she failed to do any of those things, she committed felonies!

The Inquirer article noted that Miss Herrera had an account with Wells Fargo bank. What documents did she present to open an account in her name. Was the account opened after the PATRIOT Act was passed, in which the documentation requirements became more stringent? Regardless, Miss Herrera must have presented some form of identification, and that means she presented forged documents to the bank. That is a felony.

So many people seem to think that crossing into the United States illegally is really no big deal. But living in the US illegally requires the commission of other crimes virtually every day. If someone is in the US, and has to work, he is doing so illegally. If he is working here illegally, and being paid in cash under the table, he is evading income taxes. If someone is paying him in cash that way, and fails to file a Form 1099 for the employed person — which would bring that person to the attention of the Infernal Revenue Service — the employer is committing a felony. There are so many things required to live and work in the United States which require the payment of taxes and having documentation that it really cannot be done legally if a person is an illegal immigrant.

And The Philadelphia Inquirer is covering that up!

“It has become increasingly clear that the restrictions placed on many resources prevent those who have greatest need from accessing them,” said Mayor Jim Kenney. The city is building another fund to lift 100,000 Philadelphians out of poverty over the next five years — and that fund will include undocumented immigrants, said Councilmember Maria Quiñones-Sánchez.

So, the great Mayor of Philadelphia, who has presided over 109 murders so far this year, an increase of 29% over the same date last year, a year which fell just one killing short of the city’s all-time record, is going to give money, including taxpayers’ dollars, to non-citizens, to people in the city and country illegally. He can’t do his job in making the city safer, but he can enable more crime.

That’s just great, isn’t it?

In a wryly humorous link at the bottom of the Inquirer article was an OpEd about ‘vaccine envy.’

There is massive inequity in vaccine distribution. Black, Latinx, and low-income communities are being underserved while continuing to bear the brunt of the virus. For those fortunate enough and healthy enough to just be waiting your turn, it’s easy to get impatient.

According to the Inquirer, Miss Herrera, an illegal immigrant, not only got her first shot of the COVID-19 vaccine earlier this month, but got a new cleaning job as well. She stepped in front of an American citizen, one who hasn’t been able to get the vaccine yet, and she got another job it is illegal for her to have.[1]Despite being in Tier 1C, and just a month short of my 68th birthday, I have not been able to schedule my vaccine appointment yet with the Estill County Health Department, even though my 32 and 29 … Continue reading

This is what is wrong with liberalism, with the left and the #woke. This is why Donald Trump won in 2016, and may well contribute to another populist candidate winning in 2024. When we are allowing blatant violations of the law to not only go unpunished, but seeing our credentialed media publicizing them without any fear of law enforcement stepping in, things have gone very wrong in our country.[2]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

References

References
↑1 Despite being in Tier 1C, and just a month short of my 68th birthday, I have not been able to schedule my vaccine appointment yet with the Estill County Health Department, even though my 32 and 29 year old daughters, both living in Lexington, have gotten their first doses. I cannot blame Philadelphia for that, but the vaccine rollout in Kentucky has been, despite Governor Andy Beshear’s high praises, pretty bad.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Consumers don’t want electric cars, so the government will have to force them

We have millions and millions of people who are just so very worried about global warming #ClimateChange, but, for some odd reason, they don’t seem to be putting their stated principles into action. From The Wall Street Journal:

Electric Vehicles Are the U.S. Auto Industry’s Future—if Dealers Can Figure Out How to Sell Them

Car dealers say they are struggling to square the industry’s enthusiasm with shoppers’ reality

By Nora Naughton | March 7, 2021 | 5:30 AM EST

Car dealer Brad Sowers is spending money to prepare for the coming wave of new electric models from General Motors Co. He is installing charging stations, upgrading service bays and retraining staff at his St. Louis-area dealership to handle the technology-packed vehicles.

But when he considers how many plug-in Chevy Bolts he sold last year—nine, out of the nearly 4,000 Chevrolets sold at his Missouri dealerships—it gives him pause.

“The consumer in the middle of America just isn’t there yet,” when it comes to switching to electric vehicles, he said, citing the long distances many of his customers drive daily and a lack of charging infrastructure outside major cities.

I know of one person in my small parish who drives a plug-in Chevrolet Dolt Bolt. Decent enough looking car, but there are no commercial charging stations in our rural county. I asked him, and yes, he has a station at his house to recharge his vehicle.

Well, good for him: he has put his money where his mouth is, and adhered to his principles. But, I have to wonder: just how many people in our poor, rural county have the money to buy a new Bolt, MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) $36,500.

More, how many people here have the garage or safely dedicated parking space in which to install a charging station?

As auto executives and investors buzz about the coming age of the electric car, many dealers say they are struggling to square that enthusiasm with the reality today on new-car sales lots, where last year battery-powered vehicles made up fewer than 2% of U.S. auto sales.

Most consumers who come to showrooms aren’t shopping for electric cars, and with gasoline prices relatively low, even hybrid models can be a tough sell, dealers and industry analysts say.

That’s part of the reason that the Biden Administration wants gasoline prices to skyrocket, and they already have, though not due to Administration action. But if customers don’t want them, then customers don’t want them.

Auto makers are moving aggressively to expand their electric-vehicle offerings with dozens of new models set to arrive in coming years. Some like GM are setting firm targets for when they plan to phase out gas-powered cars entirely.

Many dealers say that puts them in a delicate spot: They are trying to adjust, but unsure whether and how fast customers will actually make the switch. About 180 GM dealers, or roughly 20%, have decided to give up their Cadillac franchises rather than invest in costly upgrades that GM has required to sell electric cars.

Translation: the dealerships are in business to, you know, actually make money!

Past attempts by car companies to expand electric-car sales have largely flopped, saddling retailers with unsold inventory. Even now, some dealers say they are reluctant to stock electric models en masse.

“The biggest challenge is that dealers have a bit of ‘boy who cried wolf’ syndrome,” said Massachusetts dealer Chris Lemley.

Car companies have promised for years to make electric cars mainstream, but produced only low-volume, niche models, he said. He recalls Ford Motor Co. rolling out an all-electric Focus that sold poorly and stacked up on his lot. It was discontinued in 2018.

As I have been saying for a while now:

Some shoppers also are unsure. Joe Daniel, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said he was determined to buy an electric car, but eventually abandoned his effort after realizing there weren’t enough public charging stations near his apartment in Washington, D.C. Without a place to plug in, the purchase made little sense, he added.

Even if there had been commercial charging stations near his residence, Mr Daniel would have soon discovered another problem:

Charging an electric car at a charging station can take as little as 30 minutes or up to a day depending on a number of factors. The car’s battery size, your battery’s current state of charge, the max charging rate of your vehicle and the charger you’re using, and even the weather — all play a role in how quickly you’ll be able to fill up. A typical electric car like a Nissan Leaf (62-kWh battery) would take about 11.5 hours to charge from empty to full at home on a 240-volt Level 2 charger or could get to about an 80% charge in just 45 minutes if using a public Level 3 DC fast charger.

Emphasis mine.

To solve problems like this, President Biden has said he wants to spend billions of dollars to upgrade the country’s charging infrastructure as part of a push to incentivize battery-powered cars.

Well, of course he does! But upgrading the country’s charging infrastructure doesn’t solve all of the problems:

Tesla Owners Wait in Long Lines to Recharge over Holidays

Institute for Energy Research | January 6, 2020

With over 400,000 Tesla vehicles on U.S. roads, Tesla’s Supercharger stations were overcrowded over the holidays and many Tesla owners faced an hours-long wait to recharge their electric vehicles. At one location in Kettleman City, California, a line of 50 or so Tesla vehicles awaiting a Supercharger stall stretched to about a quarter mile over Thanksgiving weekend. The station is located about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Its 40 stalls were insufficient to accommodate the demand, and the simultaneous recharging of the vehicles lowered the rate of recharging, frustrating customers even more. It takes about 52 minutes to charge a Model 3 to 80 percent at a 120 kilowatt Tesla Supercharger.

How many times have you gone to the gas station, and had to wait behind a vehicle or two to get your turn to fuel up. When it takes around five to ten minutes to pump gasoline into a vehicle, it’s annoying enough, but what if there was just one vehicle ahead of you . . . and it took the driver 52 minutes to recharge his car?

Even if you get to pull right up to the supercharger station, are you going to enjoy spending the better part of an hour to charge up your Tesla or your Bolt?

There’s a lot more at the Journal original, but it all comes down to one thing: as Mr Daniel said above, “For EVs to take off, they need to be as convenient as gas-powered cars—that’s the whole point of this big purchase.”

In the end, the left will find it necessary to force consumers into choices they do not want. The left are pro-choice on exactly one thing.