Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Oh, life on the farm is kind of laid back Ain't much an old country boy like me can't hack

When I was graduated from high school, in 1971, I just couldn’t wait to get out of small town Mt Sterling, Kentucky, and move to what passed for a big city, Lexington. After stops in Hampton, Virginia and the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware, it was 2002 before I finally realized how good I had things in a small town, and we bought a house in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, population 4,659.

In 2014, we bought our retirement home, a small farm in rural Estill County, Kentucky.

OK, OK, maybe our place isn’t quite like Green Acres, but we have 7.92 acres, 500 feet of frontage on the Kentucky River, and we bought it for the ridiculously low price of $75,000. The house is a bit of a fixer-upper, but yes, it is being fixed up! We have one neighboring family, who mostly keep to themselves.

Life is good.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Want to Move to the Countryside?

The pandemic offers a unique opportunity to fix the housing crisis plaguing rural America.

By Kerry Thomson | December 25, 2020 | 2:58 PM EST

With the Covid-19 pandemic has come the rise of remote work, and rural America is having a moment. Searches on RedFin and Zillow show upticks in interest in rural areas, as more Americans determine to flee the cities for greener pastures.

Finding a house in rural America, however, may be easier said than done. Consider Orange County, Ind.—population 19,840 in 2010—which is in many ways a model for rural America. It has a thriving arts community, a local food co-op and a farmers’ market, interesting ecological and natural features such as the Rise at Orangeville natural spring and Hoosier National Forest, and a rich history, with a name deriving from the Dutch Protestant House of Orange.

And it has wide open spaces—too wide open. There simply isn’t enough housing for the people who want to live there. This counterintuitive housing shortage is having a devastating effect on rural America’s economy.

At first glance, Orange County’s housing shortage doesn’t make sense. One would think building in rural America would be easy. There is plenty of cheap land; zoning rules are generally less restrictive; and employers are struggling to fill job openings. Yet the housing crunch is an enormous struggle. In 2017 there were a mere 79,000 single-family home starts in all of “nonmetropolitan” America, compared with 223,800 in 2005.

One explanation is the unwillingness of banks to extend loans to contractors or developers looking to build housing where there are no comparison properties nearby. And given the relatively small, sometimes stagnant housing markets in rural areas, there are often few such “comps.” Without them, there can be no loans. Without loans, there can be no building.

It isn’t often that we see a huge error in economic thinking in the Journal, but this is one of those times.

The second issue is a lack of investors who see adequate potential return on investment in rural areas. The average home value in Orange County is a little over $100,000. In Bloomington, 50 miles away, the average price is more than twice that. It isn’t hard for contractors to figure out where they can earn a bigger return.

Finally, there is a lack of skilled labor. In the fallout of the 2007-09 financial crisis, which crippled the construction industry, 2.2 million construction workers out of roughly 5.3 million left the industry and never returned. This is a national problem, but given the higher potential return on investment for construction in urban areas, rural areas are lower on the list of destinations for contractors.

On its face, this makes sense, but dig deeper, and you can see the mistakes. Some of those 2.2 million construction workers are still out there, and would be willing to return to work if there was work for them. Twelve years is a long time, and some of those workers have passed retirement age, but a lot of them are still out there.

More, with the huge number of unemployed, there will be many who would happily take a try in the construction industry, if given a chance. Yes, they are mostly unskilled in the construction trades, but the only way to get those skills is to start working, and learn your way up from the bottom. That’s how I did it!

The Journal article simply assumes that there are no construction companies in small towns or rural areas, but that isn’t the case by any means. A lot of the construction companies in small towns and rural areas are small, and not currently very profitable, but given the opportunities to grow, most would certainly take advantage of them.

The housing shortage aggravates many of rural America’s other crises. One is the aging and dwindling population—a trend that could potentially reverse as people find greater flexibility through remote work and the pandemic diminishes the appeal of coastal cities. Who wouldn’t want to live in an affordable community where you know your neighbors and maybe have a national forest as a backyard? But talented young professionals—the type who start businesses that hire people and offer upward earning potential—aren’t going to relocate to rural areas if they can’t find a place to live.

What the Journal article is suggesting is that there is a potential demand for housing in small towns and rural areas. If there is an actual demand, two things will happen: prices will rise, as competition in a reduced supply market pushes prices higher, and those higher prices will spur a greater profitability in construction in those areas.

Kerry Thomson, Executive Director, Center for Rural Engagement, from her LinkedIn profile.

And that will lead to a third thing: other economic development in those areas, as people living in smaller areas and working from home will need more grocery stores and want more restaurants.

Kerry Thomson, the article author and executive director of the Center for Rural Engagement at Indiana University, Bloomington, draws the conclusion that government need to push things, but she has missed the point. If there really is a demand for more small town and rural housing, that demand will push everything that is needed. And if she is incorrect, and that demand really isn’t there, then the government programs she is pushing will be just another pointless government expenditure. She wants the government to push things by “offering a time-limited expansion of rural-specific loan guarantees to banks and lenders. This would provide an incentive to lend to builders in rural areas.”

More, what Miss Thomson wants to do is, in effect, apply large city thinking to small towns and rural counties. She wants to provide those areas with “local government zoning and planning information” and “a tax model to help communities determine the cost and benefit of new homes, among other resources.”  She would add governmental costs to building projects, as planning and zoning commissions require review and approval of construction projects, and add layers of inspections that we normally do not see in small towns and rural areas, things which raise costs, and prices, but do not add value to homes.

New design prototypes could also offer answers. A project to design a prototype for cost-effective, modestly sized homes that appeal to both young professionals and older residents is being piloted in southern Indiana. The homes appeal to both young and old because they are moderately sized and modern, with open floor plans and energy-efficient design features.

One of the great things about small towns is their diversity of housing design. What Miss Thomson has proposed sounds awfully cookie-cutter to me! I spent the better part of a year, through the winter, pouring basements and garage slabs in a subdivision called Quail Hollow, outside of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The whole subdivision was a project by Ryan Homes, and there were five floor plans, each of which could be reversed, from which buyers could choose. A huge, cookie cutter subdivision, and yes, it’s experiences like that which influence me today.

Housing, the author wrote, is one of the most serious issues in rural areas, but she sees it as the “driver” of many of rural America’s problems. In that, she has it all wrong. The primary problem in rural America is the lack of good jobs! What is needed is for manufacturers and entrepreneurs to choose to build their projects in less densely populated areas. That’s not only direct employment, but such creates subsidiary jobs as well. Decent jobs attract decent people, and decent jobs provide the money for people to fix up their existing homes as well as build and buy new ones.

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O, their precious little feelings are hurt again!

A Philadelphia building mural by artist Michelle Angela-Ortiz, painted in a tribute to “LGBTQ activist and Latinx community icon Gloria Casarez,” Philadelphia’s first director of LGBT affairs, was painted over on the “former site of the 12th Street Gym in the Gayborhood.”

Why? The building had been sold to Midwood Investment and Development, a developer from New York City, which planned to build a 30-story housing complex. The new owners planned to demolish the building. Painting over the mural cost the developer money, but would spare the local “gayborhood” from seeing the mural being visibly knocked down.

And now, it’s an act of violence!

Whitewashing Gloria Casarez mural is a violent act against Philly’s LGBTQ community | Opinion

By David Acosta | December 24, 2020 | 12:41 PM EST

On Wednesday, Midwood Properties, a New York-based real estate developer who bought the property which used to house the 12th Street Gym, whitewashed the Gloria Cazares mural before demolition was set to start to make way for a 30-story housing complex. The act was not only deliberate, but it was also done in bad faith without consulting either the artist who created the mural, Michelle Angela Ortiz, or Mural arts.

For months, a group of us — including friends of Gloria; Gloria’s wife, Tricia Dressel; the artist; Mural Arts and concerned neighbors who opposed the project — had been working with Midwood Properties to try and preserve the mural and if not salvageable, to create a new project that honored Gloria’s legacy as well as the legacy of the Black abolitionist Henry Minton who lived on the property and was part of the underground railroad. It is believed that the property still contains tunnels used at the time, a fact that should be investigated so that the property can be designated as historically significant and so as to prevent its impending demolition.

The erasure of the mural feels particularly painful as it was the only mural depicting a Latinx LGBTQ woman of color in a city with 3,600 murals to date and counting. The mural’s position in the heart of the Gayborhood was also significant to the LGBTQ community who see the neighborhood as an important location with historical ties to business, and community-based organizations, and as a place where the LGBTQ community has for decades celebrated not only our community festivals but also some of our most important civil rights achievements.

There’s more at the original, including all sorts of tropes of the #woke:

The optics of literally painting over the mural with white paint is not lost on those of us whose lives oftentimes feel invisible because of the color of our skin, our economic conditions, our sexual orientation and our stories as immigrants.

It was difficult to keep from laughing at all of that. The building was scheduled to be torn down! If the “Gayborhood” wanted the mural saved, they should have gotten the money together and bought the building themselves, before it was sold to a developer.

In what has already been a difficult year for so many, the destruction of the mural is a violent act against all of us who saw our lives and our work represented on that wall.

A “violent act,” huh? The City of Brotherly Love has seen 486 people killed in the streets; that’s violence! But the “Gayborhood” is worried that someone painted over a mural that was going to be destroyed anyway. When the “Gayborhood” gets together to try to work at stopping the slaughter of primarily heterosexual, young black males in Philly, I’ll start to be impressed with their abhorrence of violence.

I have to admit it: when I see the name “Gayborhood,” and realize that the old 12th Street Gym catered primarily, though not exclusively, to homosexuals, and that a 30-story housing complex will be built there, I have to wonder just how much of this is a concern that the population required to support a housing complex of that size will change the complexion of the area. Once the complex is built, there will be a lot of normal people moving in. Being in Center City, they’re likely to be mostly white and mostly liberal, and unlikely to be ill-disposed to homosexuals, but they will still be primarily heterosexual.

If a neighborhood tried to preserve its character by exerting political pressure to stay primarily white, it would be denounced as shockingly racist. Yet, when depressed, minority neighborhoods try to fight ‘gentrification,’ which involves primarily white, well-to-do individuals buying and fixing up run down properties, no, that isn’t racist at all. And if a ‘gayborhood’ is trying to preserve a primarily homosexual culture in their area, is that somehow illegally discriminatory?

The gym closed almost three years ago, because “the gym would have had to pay at least $500,000 to address fire-code violations found by the Department of Licenses and Inspections. He also said real estate taxes on the property have surged in recent years.” I have to wonder: how much degradation did a building vacant and (probably) unheated for almost three years suffer? Had it been broken into and seen homeless squatters camped out inside? It couldn’t be pretty.

The local patrons thought that a liberal government might save it:

But, of course, politics doesn’t somehow erase half a million dollars, or more, of fire code violations. Every commercial building in Philadelphia is subject to those kinds of inspections; do the “LGBTQ community” somehow think that their favorite places should somehow be exempt?

Every community is, and ought to be, subject to the same rules, the same laws, and the same economic laws. There ought not to be some special considerations for one particular group, due to race or sexual orientation or sex, that somehow overcome local building codes or economic problems. And if a mural gets painted over because the building got sold, well, too bad, so sad, but that’s life.

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Killadelphia * Updated!

The Philadelphia Police Department only updates its Current Crime Stats page on normal business days, so the numbers are current as of 11:59 PM on Wednesday, December 23rd, where they show that 482 souls have gone to their eternal rewards due to homicide in the City of Brotherly Love in 2020. Uncharacteristically, The Philadelphia Inquirer has told us the tales since then. Yesterday, there was this:

Shootings leave two young men dead on Christmas Eve, police say

by Catherine Dunn | December 24, 2020 | 9:11 PM EST

A 20-year-old man who was shot multiple times died Thursday morning, Philadelphia police said.

The shooting occurred in the city’s Overbook section, on the 1800 block of Wynnewood Road, about 11:30 a.m., according to police. The man was taken to Lankenau Medical Center, and pronounced dead at 11:46 a.m.

In a statement, police said that a preliminary investigation indicated the victim was outside recording on social media when another man approached him, started a verbal altercation, and then shot the victim. When police arrived, authorities said, they found the victim lying in the grass, with multiple wounds to the torso. . . .

Hours later, at 1:42 p.m., a shooting in Philadelphia’s Kensington section led to the death of another young man.

The victim was about 20 years old, police said. He was shot five times on the 3200 block of G Street, according to information provided by police.

In neither case was an arrest made or weapons recovered. The Inquirer noted that no motive was determined in the first shooting.

Assuming those were the only two homicides on Christmas Eve, well 482 + 2 = 484.

Today is Christmas Day, a day of peace and love and brotherhood, right?

Philly police fatally shoot gunman accused of shooting into a crowd, killing teen and injuring another

by Diane Mastrull | December 25, 2020 | 2:51 PM EST

Christmas morning got off to a grim start in Philadelphia when a street fight escalated to one man firing a gun into a crowd, striking two teenagers in the neck before officers fatally shot him, according to police.

A 15-year-old male whose identity was not released was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital, where a 17-year-old remained Friday in stable condition, police said.

The alleged gunman, 43, was shot in the torso and pronounced dead at Temple, police said. Police did not disclose how many times he was hit, just that two officers fired at him about 12:30 a.m. on the 3300 block of Emerald Street in the city’s Kensington section.

The officers had responded to a call about a disturbance or fight at that location. They were attempting to defuse the situation, police said, when additional family members of the feuding people came out of their houses and gathered on the sidewalk and in the middle of the street. Pushing and punching ensued between the original combatants, police said, when a man pulled a gun from his right rear waistband and fired it, hitting both teenagers.

The officers immediately pulled their service weapons and shot the “alleged” gunman, and I have to wonder if we’ll see protests such as the ones following the shooting of Walter Wallace, because the police killed a violent criminal.

484 + 2 = 486. Yes, the dead criminal counts as a homicide, even though it was obviously justified.

And Christmas Day isn’t even over yet.

Philly’s record is 505 killings in 1990, with 1989 coming in at second place with 489. With six more days remaining in 2020, the city has a very good chance to make second place.

By the time the Philadelphia Police Department updates its figures, on Monday, December 28th, the city might have already moved into second place!

The left will cry for more gun control, as though the guns somehow killed people by themselves. But the 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun used was reported stolen from Virginia. Shockingly, it appears — though I hate to judge a thing like that before all of the facts are in — that a criminal misguided gentleman broke the law in obtaining his weapon.

Updated: December 26, 2020 | 8:45 AM EST

Well, how about that? It turns out that the Christmas Day shooter, Jesus Perez, killed his own son, and wounded a nephew. From the updated version of the Inquirer story:

The family of the man, identified by CBS3 as Jesus Perez, denied that he was armed or would have fired at his own child. “He would obviously never do that,” his brother, Noris Cueva-Nova, said in an email. “He was a respectable, hard-working man who cared deeply for his family.”

The family denied that the guy, from whose warm, dead fingers the police pulled a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun, was armed. I guess it was just imaginary bullets which killed the guy’s son.

Pretty soon we’ll hear that the police shot the two boys, then planted the stolen 9mm in Mr Perez’s hand.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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This is why I have no sympathy for the Palestinians!

Given the chance to build something, and some of the best beachfront property in the world — the Palestinians could have created a real tourist Mecca to bring in literally billions of euros into an otherwise poor land — the irredentists decided that what they really wanted to do was continue to attack Israel. They didn’t care about their families, they didn’t care about Palestinian poverty, they didn’t care about anything but their own seething hatred of the Jews.

The Hamas terrorists are actually few in number, but like guerrilla fighters everywhere, they depend upon the support, tacit or otherwise, of the larger populations around them. The Hamas terrorists live among the Palestinian people, are housed and clothed and fed and supported by them; they are no different from the inner-city thugs in Chicago and Philadelphia and St Louis, hiding from the police and destroying their own neighborhoods with destruction and death.

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Big Brother is watching you, and the left think you need to be watched more closely

In George Orwell’s 1984, every home was fitted with a Telescreen.

The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. . . . .

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.

After nine months now of increasingly draconian controls of our society and our economy in the huge governmental response to COVID-19, we are now being told that the one place into which government cannot reach, our homes, is the place in which our leaders need to exert the most control.

Where COVID-19 spreads most easily, according to experts

The most likely place to contract the virus is not at work or at school.

By Dr. Adjoa Smalls-Mantey | December 24, 2020 | 6:08 AM

COVID-19 is a highly transmissible disease, but evidence shows that small indoor gatherings and households are where the novel coronavirus is spreading the fastest.

For nearly a year, public health officials across the globe have grappled with how to reduce the spread of COVID-19. At times, travel has been restricted, schools and gyms have closed, and some cities, such as San Francisco, are under lockdown. But despite these restrictions, the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths continue to reach record highs.

“I think we want to be careful about blaming one particular environment and scapegoating one particular setting for generating transmission,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an ABC News contributor, epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital.

However, there are some settings where COVID-19 is more easily spread. In New York, for example, contact tracing has shown that 70% of new cases come from small gatherings and households.

“Informal gatherings may have played even the biggest role,” Brownstein said, “because they are harder to police, they’re harder to enforce, and people are probably more lax when it comes to recommendations of mask wearing and social distancing.”

I will admit to some amusement at Dr. Adjoa Smalls-Mantey’s, the author’s, choice of language, that informal gatherings, meetings between friends and family, “are harder to police, (are) harder to enforce” restrictions. In the end, of course, policing things, enforcing rules, is precisely what Our Betters want to do.

Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, Dr Richard Levine[1]Dr Levine is a mentally ill male who thinks he’s somehow a woman, calling himself ‘Rachel.’ The First Street Journal does not go along with such foolishness, and always refers to … Continue reading issued orders that individuals must wear masks and practice social distancing inside their own homes if guests are present. The credentialed media were also full of similar recommendations.

When people gather in small groups with friends and family, they are more likely to let their guard down, not wear their masks and stay together indoors for longer periods of time, which makes it easier to transmit the virus.

In a recent study at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, researchers found that for children and adolescents who tested positive for COVID-19, it was small social gatherings — not school — that was the most likely place they were exposed to the virus.

The children who tested positive in the study were more likely to have attended social gatherings outside of their homes, had playdates or had visitors at their home where mask wearing and social distancing precautions were not taken.

Gladys Kravitz

As we have noted previously, various officials know that they can’t just send the gendarmerie into your house, so they want your neighbors to peer into your windows and snitch on you. Of course, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-New York City) does seem to think that he can send the sheriff’s deputies to your home, so perhaps other of our government officials will try to make my statement that they can’t send the police to your homes a false one. A conspiracy theorist might suggest that Dr Smalls-Mantey’s article is just something to condition the public into thinking that such is regrettably necessary, so that the sheeple will simply accept it, at least if it only happens to their neighbors and not themselves.

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) issued executive orders limiting gatherings in your home of more than eight people, from more than two separate households. I am happy to say that we didn’t obey the Governor’s restrictions any heed on either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Three households, no masks.

If only the government had those telescreens, they wouldn’t have to depend on those Gladys Kravitzes to peer into your windows![2]I had to put a descriptive link to Gladys Kravitz in the article, because my good friend Donald Douglas pointed out that you have to be older than dirt to get the reference.

If we allow authoritarianism to continue for this emergency, in what other emer-gencies will it be used?

Am I just being paranoid here? In 1984, sexual activity is regulated by the government, and Winston Smith’s and Julia’s sexual life is a form of rebellion. And in 2020, Dr Levine issued ‘guidance’ about your sex life, ‘suggesting’ that you must ‘limit’ your number of sex partners, and always ‘discuss’ COVID-19 with any new potential inamorata. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D-Washington, DC) did the same.[3]The left had always claimed that it was evil reich-wing conservatives who wanted to regulate sex, even referencing 1984, but it doesn’t seem to have been conservatives doing this now, does it?

People with actual governing authority have been telling us how we must live our lives, interfering in our jobs, our businesses and trying to impose their authority even in our homes, justifying it as an emergency, of course. But if they are allowed to get away with this for the COVID emergency, just what other ’emergencies’ can they use to justify restricting our rights? The September 11th attacks wound up justifying the PATRIOT Act, and, sadly, that was done by Republican congressmen and senators, and signed into law by a Republican president.

Benjamin Franklin put it best, saying, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” We have surrendered some of our essential liberty, and far too many of our people have agreed with this, because it’s just so necessary, or, as the law would put it, “a compelling government interest.”

This is where we must say, nay, scream, that government cannot do this, and the people will not allow it. More than just scream, we must protest, we must take political action, to unseat the would-be tyrants and petty dictators. If we do not do this, now, we insure that it will happen again, and again, as those who believe they should run our lives for us can always find something to justify it.
_________________________________
Cross-posted on RedState.

References

References
↑1 Dr Levine is a mentally ill male who thinks he’s somehow a woman, calling himself ‘Rachel.’ The First Street Journal does not go along with such foolishness, and always refers to ‘transgender’ individuals by their birth names and sex.
↑2 I had to put a descriptive link to Gladys Kravitz in the article, because my good friend Donald Douglas pointed out that you have to be older than dirt to get the reference.
↑3 The left had always claimed that it was evil reich-wing conservatives who wanted to regulate sex, even referencing 1984, but it doesn’t seem to have been conservatives doing this now, does it?
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Dr Fauci: “You can’t handle the truth!”

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the over-hyped Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the government’s COVID-19 taskforce, has been lying to us. No, this isn’t from some conservative blog, but The New York Times:

How Much Herd Immunity Is Enough?

Scientists initially estimated that 60 to 70 percent of the population needed to acquire resistance to the coronavirus to banish it. Now Dr. Anthony Fauci and others are quietly shifting that number upward.

By Donald G. McNeil Jr. | December 24, 2020 | 5:00 AM EST

At what point does a country achieve herd immunity? What portion of the population must acquire resistance to the coronavirus, either through infection or vaccination, in order for the disease to fade away and life to return to normal?

Since the start of the pandemic, the figure that many epidemiologists have offered has been 60 to 70 percent. That range is still cited by the World Health Organization and is often repeated during discussions of the future course of the disease.

Although it is impossible to know with certainty what the limit will be until we reach it and transmission stops, having a good estimate is important: It gives Americans a sense of when we can hope to breathe freely again.

Recently, a figure to whom millions of Americans look for guidance — Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, an adviser to both the Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration — has begun incrementally raising his herd-immunity estimate.

In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”

In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.

Translation: the guy who has been all over CNN and MSNBC, giving us an air of quiet confidence, had been lying to us, and doing so deliberately. Perhaps he was channeling Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men:

Dr Fauci admitted to trying to sell us a bill of goods:

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

The good doctor wanted to sell us something, but the Times reported that roughly 20% of Americans are unwilling to accept the vaccine.

Think about that: if the incoming President is going to keep Dr Fauci as his COVID guru, and Dr Fauci tells him that 90% compliance is required, but the willingness to take the vaccine tops out somewhere around 80%, then we’ll have a government which will try to force people to take the vaccine, and, if the government can’t, then the government will want to keep the economic and social restrictions in place for who knows how long.

So, why would anybody accept the word of an admitted liar?

In the end, the government’s response has been at least as much about control of citizens as it has been about fighting the virus. Of course, the editors of The New York Times, though they ran the story, will never make that connection for you.

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And now Bill de Blasio wants to trample on the Fourth Amendment as well as the First

We have noted, over and over and over again, that the various actions of state Governors and big city Mayors have been violations of our First Amendment rights of peaceable assembly and free exercise of religion.

Well, now Oberbürgermeister Bill de Blasio (NSDAP-New York City) has decided that that isn’t enough, and now he’s going to violate your Fourth Amendment rights as well:

The Fourth Amendment provides that:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Under Katz v United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), the Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment protected anyplace in which a subject had a reasonable expectation of privacy. If the Oberbürgermeister sends the sheriff’s deputies to anyplace the subject of the visit has a reasonable expectation of privacy, which would seem to include “the home or the hotel of every single traveler coming in from the UK,” those deputies are all going to need warrants.

Note that some people traveling to the New York City from the United Kingdom will be American citizens.

Does travel from one country to another constitute probable cause? Can a city or state impose regulations against free travel from another country, or is that solely a federal power?

Remember how the left were complaining that President Trump was an authoritarian fascist? Well, it isn’t President Trump threatening to send in the gendarmerie to everyone’s home.

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A cure worse than the disease

My good friend Donald Douglas has, Alas! cut back on his posting, but he did have this one important pass-it-on post!

Public Schools Are Losing Their Captive Audience of Children

Posted by AmPowerBlog 10:33 AM

At Reason.

But see this, from L.A.T, a couple of weeks ago, “L.A. Unified will not give Fs this semester and instead give students a second chance to pass.”

And this passage especially is killing me, about the push-back against the “no fail” policy:

In April, L.A. Unified prohibited failing grades for the spring semester and also determined that no student’s grade would be lower than it was on March 13, the final day of on-campus instruction. At the time, many teachers and some principals complained that the policy undermined student motivation and some reported a subsequent drop-off in student effort. 

Stocks surge. Retail rises. Unemployment continues to decline. Post-election markets set record highs while online shopping contributed to recovery. How did this month fare overall? 

Such concerns resurfaced Monday during a faculty meeting at a high school in the San Fernando Valley, according to an English teacher who did not wish to be identified because she was not authorized to speak.

“Yes, it’s COVID time,” the teacher said. “But this soft bigotry of low expectations — including us being banned from demanding students ever comment with their voices or actually show themselves on camera during Zoom — will indeed help our low-income students stay on the bottom of the pile of learning.”

A high school principal from a different campus was more supportive. Given the unprecedented crisis, the principal said, students who earn A’s and B’s should get to keep them but that the only other grade handed out should be a pass. This principal — who also was not authorized to comment — requested anonymity…

Astonishing, really.

Notice how everybody speaks off the record, obviously so they won’t face the guillotine.

There have been plenty of stories about students falling behind during the ‘remote instruction’ pushed by COVID-19:

Schools confront ‘off the rails’ numbers of failing grades

by Carolyn Thompson, Associated Press | December 6, 2020

The first report cards of the school year are arriving with many more Fs than usual in a dismal sign of the struggles students are experiencing with distance learning.

School districts from coast to coast have reported the number of students failing classes has risen by as many as two or three times — with English language learners and disabled and disadvantaged students suffering the most.

“It was completely off the rails from what is normal for us, and that was obviously very alarming,” said Erik Jespersen, principal of Oregon’s McNary High School, where 38% of grades in late October were failing, compared with 8% in normal times.

Educators see a number of factors at play: Students learning from home skip assignments — or school altogether. Internet access is limited or inconsistent, making it difficult to complete and upload assignments. And teachers who don’t see their students in person have fewer ways to pick up on who is falling behind, especially with many keeping their cameras off during Zoom sessions.

Well, color me shocked! Many students are keeping their cameras off during Zoom sessions? When a 9-year-old Louisiana student was suspended after a teacher reported seeing a gun in the boy’s bedroom during a virtual class, yeah, I can see why some families might choose not to have the cameras on. The school board refused to remove the idiotic suspension from his record.

There could be other reasons as well. Perhaps a student is still in his pajamas, or his hair is all funky looking because he hadn’t showered that morning. Given that the students seeing increased failing grades have been ‘disproportionately’ poor, maybe, just maybe, the students are living in homes where their rooms don’t look very good. Would a fourth or seventh grader be embarrassed if his bedroom had peeling paint or wallpaper? Yeah, I’d guess so.

So, what do we have? Students receiving twice and thrice as many failing grades, in schools that haven’t banned failure:

The increase in failing grades has been seen in districts of all sizes around the country.

At Jespersen’s school in the Salem-Keizer Public School district, hundreds of students initially had not just Fs, but grade scores of 0.0%, indicating they simply were not participating in school at all. In New Mexico, more than 40 percent of middle and high school students were failing at least one class as of late October. In Houston, 42% of students received at least one F in the first grading period of the year. Nearly 40% of grades for high school students in St. Paul, Minnesota, were Fs, double the amount in a typical year.

Yet teachers, and their unions, have been protesting plans to return to in-classroom instruction.

We have, of course, noted Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) forcing both public and private schools to close to in-class instruction through at least January 4, 2021, and possibly beyond.

Let me be clear about this: students are losing an entire year of education due to the government’s response to COVID-19. In Kentucky, Governor Beshear has prioritized vaccine for teachers, which would “give the school district ‘a path’ to return to in-person learning for the first time since the pandemic began in March,” but even that depends upon when the teachers could get the immunizations. The Centers for Disease Control noted that:

All but one of the COVID-19 vaccines that are currently in Phase 3 clinical trials in the United States use two shots. The first shot starts building protection. A second shot a few weeks later is needed to get the most protection the vaccine has to offer.

And that:

It typically takes a few weeks for the body to produce T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes after vaccination. Therefore, it is possible that a person could be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 just before or just after vaccination and then get sick because the vaccine did not have enough time to provide protection.

How long between the initial shot and the booster?

Both the Moderna and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines require two shots: a priming dose, followed by a booster shot. The interval between Moderna doses is 28 days; for the Pfizer vaccine, it’s 21 days.

So, if teachers get the initial shot on January 4th, they wouldn’t receive the booster shot until January 25th with the Pfizer vaccine, and February 1st for the Moderna. But there’s more:

The Pfizer vaccine showed efficacy of 95% at preventing symptomatic Covid infection, measured starting from seven days after the second dose was administered. The vaccine appeared to be more or less equally protective across age groups and racial and ethnic groups.

The Moderna vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing symptomatic Covid-19, measured starting from 14 days after the second dose. The vaccine’s efficacy appeared to be slightly lower in people 65 and older, but during a presentation to the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory committee the company explained that the numbers could have been influenced by the fact there were few cases in that age group in the trial. The vaccine appeared to be equally effective across different ethnic and racial groups.

So, now we’re up to February 1st before those receiving the Phizer vaccine are protected, and February 15th with the Moderna. That’s another entire month of in-person classes missed. Will Governor Beshear, or other state Governors around the country keep schools closed until then?

You can count on one thing: that’s what the teachers’ unions will want!

Both vaccines seemed to reduce the risk of severe Covid disease. It’s not yet known if either prevents asymptomatic infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Nor is it known if vaccinated people can transmit the virus if they do become infected but don’t show symptoms.

There is a double-edged sword here. Teachers who are immunized might still carry the virus, and be able to transmit it; no one knows if this is the case yet. The Herald-Leader story noted that:

According to information from the state, (Fayette district spokeswoman Lisa) Deffendall said, “all district employees will be eligible for vaccination; contractors who don’t have direct contact with students are not eligible. Only those on the roster will be eligible for vaccination during the educator distribution period due to the limited availability of the vaccine.”

That means that district employees could pass on the virus to contractors, even if those contractors do not have contact with students.

An important point: none of the vaccines have finished testing on, and been approved for, children. The vaccines might protect the teachers and other school employees, but they aren’t going to protect the students, and that means they won’t stop the virus from being transmitted from home to home.

If you believe that the various Governors have been right, and that the virus is so serious that the schools must be closed to in person instruction, there’s no way we can expect Governors not to keep the schools closed.

Anthony Fauci, the grossly overhyped director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, claimed that even with the vaccines, if the coming vaccination campaign goes well, we could approach herd immunity by summer’s end and “normality that is close to where we were before” by the end of 2021.

(He) said on Wednesday (December 9, 2020) that that estimate is dependent on significant numbers of Americans being willing to be inoculated with one of several vaccines in various stages of development. If 75 percent to 80 percent of Americans are vaccinated in broad-based campaigns likely to start in the second quarter of next year, then the U.S. should reach the herd immunity threshold months later. If vaccination levels are significantly lower, 40 percent to 50 percent, Fauci said, it could take a very long time to reach that level of protection.

“Let’s say we get 75 percent, 80 percent of the population vaccinated,” Fauci said. “If we do that, if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer, i.e., the third quarter, we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we can approach very much some degree of normality that is close to where we were before.”

We’re talking well over a year since this started, well after the end of the 2020-21 school year. The end of the 2019-20 school year was ruined, and the guy to whom so many decision-takers listen is warning that this entire school year might be shot as well.

At some point it needs to be asked: is the cure worse than the disease? At least a year of real education will have been lost, and possibly more, to go along with the millions and millions of people thrown out of work and hundreds of businesses which have been bankrupted by our reaction to this virus.

Our constitutional rights to freedom of peaceable assembly have been trashed, our right to freely exercise our religious beliefs have been trampled upon, our people have been prohibited from attending weddings and funerals and some Governors have even tried to ban Thanksgiving and Christmas family dinners.

Human beings are social animals; we need social contact, we need to interact with other people; that’s why solitary confinement in prisons is such an effective, and awful, punishment. But Our Betters have decided that isolation, that solitary confinement — remember: many people do live alone — is part of the solution to COVID-19. In essence, state Governors have decided that the way to save human lives is to not let us be human beings.

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Mitch McConnell to allow Joe Biden’s cabinet nominees a vote He said he will treat the nominees better than Chuck Schumer treated President Trump's

Perhaps Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) greatest claim to fame was his preventing President Barack Obama from filling the Supreme Court seat previously held by Antonin Scalia by refusing to allow committee hearings or a floor vote on Merrick Garland, the ‘stealth’ moderate whom the President had nominated. Senator McConnell kept that seat vacant until Donald Trump was in office, and the seat went to much more conservative Neil Gorsuch.

The Democrats waxed wroth, and tried to filibuster Judge Gorsuch’s nomination, but that was hardly the first time they tried it: they also filibustered the nomination of Samuel Alito, and though there was no filibuster attempt against Clarence Thomas, his nomination squeaked through by a bare 52-48 margin. Other than Chief Justice John Roberts, who received 22 negative votes, the Democrats have made a significant effort to block every Supreme Court Justice appointed by a Republican President who is currently sitting on the Court: filibustering Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed by a bare 50-48 vote and Amy Coney Barrett was filibustered as well, and confirmed 52-28 with all Democrats voting against her.

In contrast, Sonia Sotomayor was easily confirmed, including nine Republican votes, 68-31, and Elena Kagan had five GOP votes on her way to a 63-37 confirmation vote.

President Trump’s cabinet nominations also received heavy Democratic opposition, and had the Democrats had the Senate majority, they’d probably all have been rejected.

So, it was with some surprise that I read that Senator McConnell was going to allow floor votes on the incoming President’s cabinet nominations:

McConnell says he will allow Biden’s Cabinet nominees a hearing

Max Berley, Bloomberg News | December 21, 2020

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he will allow President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees to get consideration by the upper chamber.

Biden’s nominees “aren’t all going to pass on a voice vote, and they aren’t all going to make it, but I will put them on the floor,” McConnell said in an interview with Scott Jennings, a conservative commentator, published Monday in the Louisville Courier-Journal in McConnell’s home state of Kentucky.

In the interview conducted last week, McConnell said he didn’t intend to “bring the administration to its knees” the way he said that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., did by requiring cloture votes for many of President Donald Trump’s nominees to overcome filibusters.

There’s more at the original, but let’s face facts: it doesn’t matter whom Joe Biden nominates, they’re all going to be purveyors of bad policies. Reject one, and someone else just as bad will replace him.

There is a simple tactic the GOP could use to signal disapproval of the incoming President and his policies: Republican Senators could vote “Present” on confirmation of all but the worst of the worst, which would not block the nominees from confirmation but which would not signal approval either.