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If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently?

We have covered the University of Pennsylvania’s transgender swimmer several times, and the question has always occurred to me: if ‘Lia’ Thomas really, really, really wants to be accepted as a woman, why engage in activities which prove him so radically different from real women?

Lia Thomas wins second Ivy League title with record-setting 200m swim

By Ryan Glasspiegel | Friday, February 18, 2022 | 8:30 PM EST

Getty Images. Click to enlarge.

Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer for University of Pennsylvania, won her second Ivy League title this week with a record-setting effort.

Friday night, Thomas won the conference’s 200-meter freestyle competition with a time of 1:43.12, beating second-place Samantha Shelton by over 2.5 seconds.

Thomas’ finish set a new record at Harvard’s Blodgett Pool, besting the previous mark of 1:43.78, and comes a day after she won the Ivy League’s 500-meter freestyle. Her time of 4:37.32 in Thursday’s event was also a Blodgett Pool record.

Thomas swam for three years at Penn as a male, before transitioning to female.

There’s more at the original.

Will Thomas was, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s athletic department’s swimming and diving 2018-19 team roster, a sophomore member of the men’s team. He was “Second-team All-Ivy in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free after reaching the ‘A’ final of the Ivy League Championships and finishing second overall in each of the events.” The 2019-20 roster lists him as Lia Thomas, and states that he “Competed in four of Penn’s eight regular season events (as a male, and) won the 500 free against Villanova (Nov. 15).” The 2017-18 roster notes that he was “Ivy League Championships qualifier in 500 free (A final), 1000 free (A final), 1650 free (A final).”

Penn, an Ivy League school, erased Mr Thomas portrait from those rosters. For the 2021-22 season, he is now listed as Lia Thomas on the roster, complete with his portrait after ‘transitioning’. His individual biography page no longer lists his top times, or his past accomplishments on the men’s team, and simply notes that “All 2020-21 Ivy League winter sports were canceled on November 12 due to a nationwide outbreak of coronavirus COVID-19.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Exposing Gender, Inc.

Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic Decathalon winner who thinks that he’s a woman now, said:

I’ve said from the beginning, biological boys should not be playing in women’s sports. We need to protect women’s sports.

Obviously this is about Lia Thomas who has brought a lot of attention to this issue. First of all, I respect her decision to live her life authentically. 100 percent. But, that also comes with responsibility and some integrity. I don’t know why she’s doing this. For two reasons: 1. It’s not good for the trans community. We have a lot of issues in the trans community that are very difficult and very challenging. We have a suicide rate that’s nine times higher than the general public.

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

I’ve asked it before: how does Mr Thomas, who grew up male, who competed athletically with men, doing well and occasionally winning at the collegiate level, justify in his own mind beating a bunch of real girls? How does Mr Thomas, in his tremendous concern to be accepted as a woman and not a male, justify competing in events which only serve to point out the differences between him and biological women? And now a third question has come to my mind: if someone was actively trying to sabotage the concept that #TransgenderWomenAreWomen, what would he be doing differently from what Mr Thomas is doing right now?

In the Bluegrass State, the General Assembly is working on legislation which would ban biological boys from competing as girls in sports, and other states have been doing similar things. Naturally, what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal gave activists OpEd space to complain about the bill. These legislative attempts might still exist had the world never heard of ‘Lia’ Thomas, but it is unquestionable that his actions have increased the pressure for them.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, which has been beating the drum for the acceptance of Mr Thomas as a legitimate women’s sports contender, reported on his latest victory:

Penn’s Lia Thomas wins third title, breaks another pool record in final day of Ivy swim championship

Penn secured itself as the top freestyle team in the league, as just before Thomas’ feat, junior teammate Catherine Buroker also notched a second Ivy League title in the 1,650-yard freestyle.

by Ellie Rushing | Saturday, February 19, 2022 | 8:41 PM EST

BOSTON ― For the third night in a row, University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas stood atop the medal stand and was named an Ivy League champion.

And in as many days, she broke a third Harvard University Blodgett Pool record, and a second Ivy League meet record in a thrilling 100-yard freestyle race.

It was the closing day of the Ivy League championship, and Thomas was seeded second in the 100 freestyle to Yale University’s Iszac Henig. In the preliminaries, Henig beat Thomas by about a second and established a Blodgett pool record.

Further down:

That performance including Penn securing itself — by far — as the top freestyle team in the Ivy League.

“There’s no secret, it’s just work,” (junior Catherine Buroker) said of that success.

Well, hard work, and having a biological male compete against real women, anyway.

That’s the part which will never go away: Yes, the University of Pennsylvania won the Ivy league Championship in women’s swimming, but everyone will know that Penn’s team might not have done so were Mr Thomas not competing, and many will assume that Penn just would not have won without him competing. As sixteen members of the team noted, in an unsigned letter, Mr Thomas went from being ranked “#462 as a male to #1 as a female”.

Was there ever any more convincing evidence that Mr Thomas is simply different from real women, in ways that actually matter when it comes to competitive sport?

What Will Thomas, in his selfishness, has done is to bring Penn a championship that will forever be questionable in people’s minds, and to convince people who were on the fence about transgender participation in women’s sports that no, it just isn’t fair. What more damage could he have done if he had consciously tried?

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The neo-conservatives beat the drum for war Are you willing to face nuclear annihilation over Ukraine?

It ought to be an established truth: if Bill Kristol and his gaggle of ‘neo-conservatives’ at The Bulwark support something, you just know that it’s wrong:

    The Right’s Argument Against Aiding Ukraine Is Wrong—and Dangerous

    A Russian conquest of Ukraine would be perilous for America and our allies.

    by Reuben Johnson | Friday, February 11, 2022 | 5:18 AM EST

    Kyiv – Conservative opinion in America seems to be hardening around opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine. The United States, the logic goes, has no stake in whether or not Russia invades Ukraine. Ukraine is a European nation and that makes it Europe’s problem.

    This argument is wrong and reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of what is at stake in Ukraine’s confrontations with Russia.

    For starters, modern Europe has never been able to handle its own military confrontations. The only nation in the NATO alliance that can lead the Europeans in a major multinational endeavor is the United States. There is a simple explanation for this imbalance: Because a European state strong enough to lead a coalition against a threat such as Russia would also be strong enough to dominate Western Europe. Which is not a state of affairs helpful to America’s interests.

Ignoring for the moment the pitiful grammar of the final sentence, the obvious question is: so what? At a certain point, it has to be asked what is to be gained here.

On March 31, 1939, finally realizing that Adolf Hitler’s word was worthless, the United Kingdom and France offered guarantees of Polish sovereignty. Two days after the Wehrmacht rolled in, on September 1, 1939, the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany.

But they could do nothing about the invasion: they hadn’t the men or equipment in place, and when it came to actual war, in the spring of 1940, the two nations’ militaries reeled before an attack by Germany on their forces on French soil. In the end, Poland was ‘liberated’ not by the United Kingdom, not by France, but by the Red Army, and that ‘liberation’ meant not freedom, but 45 years of Communist domination.

    Next, what happens in Ukraine does not necessarily stay in Ukraine. Previous invasions of Ukraine by Russia have devastated the Donbas region and the cost has been tremendous. If Russia invades again, the cost of rebuilding Ukrainian infrastructure Russian forces destroy could, in the words of the former Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, “turn Ukraine into a failed state.”

Well, that would then be Russia’s problem, wouldn’t it?

    Finally, tolerating a militaristic expansion of this kind would mean that “European security and stability” is a myth. There is every reason to believe that failing to stop Russia from continuing to try and destroy its much-smaller neighbor does not prevent war with Moscow, but rather makes likely a much larger, wider war in Europe in the future.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, as the Western democracies were worried that the huge Red Army could roll right in and conquer what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany more colloquially, and the Europeans hadn’t the strength to stop it. NATO’s guarantee was that an attack on one was an attack on all, which was, in effect, a guarantee that the United States, with its large forces and its nuclear weapons, would come to West Germany’s defense.

The USSR detonated its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, far earlier than it was estimated they could.

NATO was a military alliance, including the nuclear-armed United States, against the wholly conventionally-armed Soviet Union; that lasted for 4½ months.

Of course, the Soviets had no way of delivering atomic bombs to targets at the time, and only a few of the devices, but they kept building, and building, and building. By 1951, the USSR tested an air-dropped atomic bomb, which meant that the USSR now had deliverable nuclear weapons.

If NATO had kept to itself, and not expanded following the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, NATO might still be a credible deterrent. But NATO expanded into Poland, and the Baltic States, right on Russia’s doorstep. Russia now has the nuclear arsenal to completely destroy the United States; does anyone seriously believe that Joe Biden, or any American President, would put the lives of 330 million Americans in danger of nuclear incineration to defend Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia?

There is a part of the calculation that is going unsaid: while Western sanctions could impose some real costs on the Soviet Union Russian Federation, those sanctions would inevitably be temporary, while conquering Ukraine would be a permanent addition to Russia. Byelorussia is already approaching vassal state status. Xi Jinping is making the same calculations when it comes to conquering Taiwan.

Reuben Johnson, the article author, after several paragraphs on the history of Russian adventurism and the inability of NATO to stop them, got one thing absolutely right:

    All of which means that if Ukraine receives no help from NATO because they are not a full-fledged member, it will send an ominous signal. It would say that decades of partnering with our alliance, participating in its missions, and contributing personnel and equipment to its operations counts for nothing. If you are attacked by the Russians, there will be no boots on the ground coming to your aid. Which would make the status of being any kind of NATO partner nation worth nothing—and could cripple, if not destroy, the alliance.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is just as aware of that as Mr Johnson, and it is an incentive for President Putin to go ahead and act. More, he has an incentive to strike sooner rather than later:

    Which European Countries Depend on Russian Gas?

    by Katharina Buchholz | February 3, 2022

    As the United States and the EU are working on a strategy to replace natural gas supply to Europe should Russia turn off the tap in a standoff with Western powers over Ukraine, Qatar has said that it sees no way that it could replace the needed amount by itself. If new sanctions were to be introduced against Russian President Vladimir Putin personally or his country, this could trigger an energy crisis on the continent due to much of Europe’s reliance on Russian gas, which arrives on the continent via pipelines.

    According to Reuters, close U.S. ally Qatar wants guarantees that natural gas diverted to Europe would not be resold and has urged European countries to resolve their investigation into Qatari gas contracts in order to become a regular customer themselves – which could more permanently shift gas dependencies in Europe.

    Data from the European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators shows which countries’ energy supply would be most at risk in the case of a Russian gas freeze. Among Europe’s major economies, Germany imports around half of its gas from Russia, while France only obtains a quarter of its supply from the country, according to the latest available data. The biggest source of French gas was Norway, supplying 35 percent. Italy would also be among the most impacted at a 46 percent reliance on Russian gas.

    The UK is in a different position, drawing half of its gas supply from domestic sources and importing mostly from Norway and also Qatar. Spain is also not on the list of Russia’s major customers, the biggest trade partners of the country being Algeria and the U.S.

    Some smaller European countries rely exclusively on Russian gas, namely North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Moldova. Dependence also was above 90 percent of gas supply in Finland and Latvia and at 89 percent in Serbia, as per the latest available data.

It’s the middle of February, and cutting off Russian gas to Europe would mean that many Europeans could freeze to death. Any sanctions that the West could impose on Russia for invading Ukraine would take time to work, and, to be brutally honest about it, Russia could withstand a loss of euros coming in for a lot longer than Europeans could survive without heat during the winter. More, alternate sources of fuel coming in would be coming in by liquified natural gas tankers, and sinking just one of them would probably mean that no future shipments would be made; the LNG tankers are privately-owned, no insurance companies would cover subsequent shipments, and many crew would simply refuse to become targets for Russian submarines.

More, as Western Europe tries to move away from fossil fuels, Russia’s position as the primary gas supplier becomes weaker every passing year; it is to President Putin’s advantage to move sooner rather than later.

It seems difficult to blame this on President Biden, because there’s really nothing serious he could do about it, but it is worth noting that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping weren’t putting this kind of pressure on President Trump.

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Bidenomics: Inflation is at a 40-year high, and wages are growing far more slowly than prices

I am old enough to remember the late 1970s and early 1980s. The United States was stuck in what some called ‘stagflation,’ with stagnant economic growth coupled with high inflation. Former Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA) used what he called the ‘misery index,’ the total of the inflation and unemployment rates to hammer President Jimmy Carter right out of office in the 1980 election.

Christopher Rugaber of the Associated Press wrote an article entitled,[1]Article titles in newspapers are more commonly written by the papers’ editors than the authors, so Mr Rugaber may not have written the article title. in The Philadelphia Inquirer, U.S. inflation might have hit a 40-year high in January: Economists have forecast that when the Labor Department reports January’s inflation figures Thursday, it will show that consumer prices jumped 7.3% compared with 12 months ago, saying:

    Economists have forecast that when the Labor Department reports January’s inflation figures Thursday, it will show that consumer prices jumped 7.3% compared with 12 months ago, according to data provider FactSet. That would be up from a 7.1% year-over-year pace in December and would mark the biggest such increase since February 1982.

Well, the unnamed economists got it wrong: it was 7.5%!

    Prices climbed 7.5% in January compared with last year, continuing inflation’s fastest pace in 40 years

    High inflation is undermining a robust recovery, testing policymakers at the Federal Reserve and White House

    By Rachel Siegel and Andrew Van Dam | Thursday, February 10, 2022 | 8:32 AM EST

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

    Prices continued their upward march in January, rising by 7.5 percent compared with the same period a year ago, the fastest pace in 40 years.

    Inflation was expected to climb relative to last January, when the economy reeled from a winter coronavirus surge with no widespread vaccines. Today’s new high inflation rate reflects all the accumulated price gains, in gasoline and other categories, built up in a tumultuous 2021.

    In the shorter term, data released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also showed prices rose 0.6 percent in January compared with December, same as the November to December inflation rate, which officials revised upward slightly.

    As with previous months, higher prices reached into just about every sector of the economy, leaving households to feel the strain at the deli counter, shopping mall and just about everywhere else.

There’s more at the original.

That photo, taken by me on Groundhog Day? On Tuesday, February 8th, 87 Octane regular gasoline was up to $3.259 per gallon locally.

President Reagan, who defeated President Carter by a large margin, saw the Republican Party lose a significant number of seats in the 1982 elections as inflation remained high and recession struck.

    Sharp inflation has undermined an otherwise robust recovery. The economy has rebounded remarkably since plunging into recession almost two years ago. Over the past 12 months, the U.S. economy has added nearly 7 million jobs and average hourly earnings have climbed 5.7 percent. The overall economy has shown relative resilience to new waves of the coronavirus, and stocks have bounced back from their volatile start to 2022.

If wages have risen 5.7%, but inflation is at 7.5%, it’s pretty simple: American workers are falling behind, are becoming poorer in relative terms.

    High inflation has left an indelible mark on the economy, including the highest price increases for housing, food and energy that many workers have ever seen. And questions loom about how or whether policymakers will be able to rein prices back in without slowing the recovery or even causing another recession. The answers will have enormous implications for policymakers at the Federal Reserve and in the Biden administration.

That has always been the problem, and was a large part of the problem that faced Presidents Carter and Reagan; the halting of inflation meant a recession.

The timing is different this year: we are not in a recession, but if there is one, after the elections, and it persists into 2023 and 2024, it could encourage the voters to throw the Democrats out of the White House. The Republicans will point out that the economy was strong, with very low inflation, during President Trump’s term, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and the government’s draconian response to it, much of it ordered by state governors rather than the President.

The President doesn’t really control the economy — no one does — but he normally gets either the credit for a good economy or the blame for a bad one. Come election day, I will be very happy to see Joe Biden get the blame for a bad economy!

References

References
↑1 Article titles in newspapers are more commonly written by the papers’ editors than the authors, so Mr Rugaber may not have written the article title.
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“This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

We have written previously about the University of Pennsylvania’s ‘transgender’ women’s swimmer, Will Thomas, who goes by the name “Lia.”[1]In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their … Continue reading Now the New York Post has printed a story from an unnamed teammate of Mr Thomas’:

That part is incorrect: Mr Thomas, was according to the University of Pennsylvania’s athletic department’s swimming and diving 2018-19 team roster, a sophomore member of the men’s team. He was “Second-team All-Ivy in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free after reaching the ‘A’ final of the Ivy League Championships and finishing second overall in each of the events.” During the 2019-20 season, he “won the 500 free against Villanova (Nov. 15).” That is competitive, if not exactly dominant.

    The anonymous female swimmer gave an interview to the Washington Examiner on Sunday — a day after Thomas, 22, racked up two more wins at a meet against Ivy League rival Harvard University.

    She railed against the NCAA for not acknowledging Thomas had a distinct advantage and accused the board of governors of “not protecting women’s rights.”

    “Women are now third-class citizens,” the swimmer told the outlet.

    “Lia was not even close to being competitive as a man in the 50 and the 100 [freestyle events]. But just because Lia is biologically a man, [Lia] is just naturally better than many females in the 50 and the 100 or anything that [Lia] wasn’t good at as a man.”

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

Mr Thomas’ times have been gradually slowing, so much so that there have been suspicions that he has slowed down deliberately, still winning, but by much smaller margins.

But there’s an obvious question here: who is this unidentified female teammate? There are a couple dozen real women on the UPenn team, and it could have been any of them, but I’ve noticed a pattern here: the stories are all broken by the same two outlets, the Washington Examiner, a conservative website, and OutKick. OutKick said:

    While University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who spent three years at the Ivy League school swimming as a male, has been busy smashing female pool records, friction has been building within the team, according to a Penn female swimmer who said she feared for her ability to find employment after graduating from college for sharing her honest opinion about a transgender teammate. For that reason, OutKick is granting her anonymity to speak out.

Those are reasonable concerns for the teammate, but I have to wonder: has it always been the same teammate who has been the source for these stories? This has sort of jumped out at me as I have read these stories.

But one part of the New York Post story cited above really jumped out at me, a quote from this anonymous woman, who said, “This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

That’s absolutely right: how does Mr Thomas, who grew up male, who competed athletically with men, doing well and occasionally winning at the collegiate level, justify in his own mind beating a bunch of real girls? How does Mr Thomas, in his tremendous concern to be accepted as a woman and not a male, justify competing in events which only serve to point out the differences between him and biological women? I have asked that second question before, and no one has been able to give me an answer.

References

References
↑1 In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their biological sex, not their imagined “gender.” When using Twitter to publicize my stories, I have sometimes had to refer to him as ‘Lia’ to avoid getting banned for ‘deadnaming’ or ‘misgendering’.
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The sweetness and light Joe Biden has brought to Philadelphia

January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th President of the United States, was certainly a busy one on the streets of Philadelphia: five people were murdered in the City of Brotherly Love that day, making a total of 32 for the first twenty days of 2021.

Of course, as we’ve previously noted, 2021 was a banner year, a gold medal winning year, for Philly, as it not only beat the previous homicide record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, but smashed it, destroyed it, completely obliterated it, with 562 souls being sent early to their eternal rewards last year.

Joe Biden was supposed to ring in a new era of good feelings for everyone, after four years of the evil, reich-wing Donald Trump. But somehow, some way, that’s not what the numbers say. From January 20, 2020, to January 20, 2021, President Trump’s last year in office, there were 497 homicides in Philadelphia; from January 20, 2021 to January 20, 2022, there have been 564 killings in the city.

What else has changed? The Mayor, the District Attorney, and the Police Commissioner are all the same people.[1]Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw did not take her position until February 20, 2020, though Mayor Jim Kenney had appointed her on December 30, 2019. Richard Ross, Jr, the previous Commissioner, had … Continue reading The Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, is the same. The state legislature has been controlled by the same party throughout. The gun control laws, always a bugaboo for city officials, were all the same.

But hey, President Biden showed up on Sunday, January 16th, the day before Martin Luther King Day, to help pack 27-pound boxes of food at Philabundance food bank!

The only difference was the amount of blood flowing in the city’s mean streets.

References

References
↑1 Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw did not take her position until February 20, 2020, though Mayor Jim Kenney had appointed her on December 30, 2019. Richard Ross, Jr, the previous Commissioner, had resigned on August 20, 2019, following allegations of sexual harassment and racial and gender discrimination within the department.
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There’s no threat quite like an empty threat!

President Joe Biden didn’t do too well in his recent news conference, leading the White House to issue a clarification on his statements about possible Russian ‘incursions’ into Ukraine. From The Washington Post:

    Biden insists U.S. won’t accept a ‘minor incursion’ by Russia into Ukraine after remarks drew criticism

    by Amy B Wang | Thursday, January 20, 2022 | 8:42 AM EST | Updated: 12:19 PM EST

    President Biden insisted Thursday that the United States would not accept even a “minor incursion” of Ukraine by Russia, as the White House continued efforts to clarify Biden’s remarks Wednesday suggesting that it might.

    “I’ve been absolutely clear with President [Vladimir] Putin. He has no misunderstanding: Any, any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion,” Biden told reporters Thursday at the start of a White House event on infrastructure.

    Such an invasion would be met with a “severe and coordinated economic response,” Biden added, noting that those consequences have been “laid out very clearly for President Putin.”

    “Let there be no doubt at all: If Putin makes this choice, Russia will pay a heavy price,” Biden said.

    In the second news conference of his presidency Wednesday, Biden said he expected Russia to take some sort of action to “move in” and invade Ukraine and that the U.S. response “depends on what it does.”

There’s much more at the original.

I’d like to think that I am not the only one who remembers how President Barack Obama, and the rest of the NATO leaders, breathed a collective sigh of relief in 2014 that Ukraine had declined an offer of NATO membership when President Viktor Yanukovych came to power following 2010 elections. Mr Yanukovych was more closely aligned with Russia, and was deposed in 2014 Maiden revolution, but Ukraine was still not a NATO member when President Putin sent the tanks rolling into eastern Ukraine, and annexed Crimea.

The North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an attack on any member nation is an attack on them all, and the last thing any of the NATO leaders wanted was to go to war against nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine.

And let’s tell the truth here: the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, along with Poland, had to have taken notice: if the NATO leaders were so relieved that they didn’t have to fight Russia over the 2014 invasion, they wouldn’t want to fight Russia if Vladimir Vladimirovich sent the tanks rolling into their countries, either.

    “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera,” Biden said. “But if they actually do what they’re capable of doing with the force they’ve massed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia if they further invade Ukraine.”

    Biden was swiftly criticized for appearing to give a green light to Russia to attack Ukraine as long as it didn’t amount to a full-scale invasion. Soon after, the White House issued a statement seeking to clarify Biden’s comments, saying that if Russia sends its forces across the border, it will be met with “a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our allies.”

Yeah, uh huh, right?

    Putin’s gas weaponization hits a hot spot in Berlin

    Germany is pumping Russian gas back into Poland as Gazprom cuts supply to the EU. As Russia plays its hybrid war games with an increasingly divided EU, the new front appears to be the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline.

    by Jo Harper | December 28, 2021

    Yamal-Europe, Europe’s longest gas pipeline, usually transports Russian natural gas overland to — rather than from — Germany. Now it has spent the last week sending mainly Russian gas from Germany back to Poland. The purpose? To meet a shortfall as temperatures drop to -10 degrees Celsius (14 F) and Russia cuts gas supplies.

    Observers have warned that Russian President Vladmir Putin could use energy as a weapon should the troubled gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 (NS2) go ahead. He is, in fact, already doing so.

    On December 21, Russia halted the supply of gas via Yamal-Europe, immediately spooking markets. The wholesale price in the benchmark Dutch TTF contract for January deliveries rocketed to €160 ($185) from €100 on December 9. High gas demand in Asia is also fed the spike in prices. Consumers in Europe will feel some of the increases in 2022, adding to rapidly rising inflation there.

    According to the Germany Network Agency, two-thirds of the gas imported into Germany comes from Russia and former Soviet countries via the Yamal pipeline, which runs across Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany. Its capacity is 32.9 billion cubic meters of gas per year. In 2020, 23% of Russian gas reached Germany via Belarus and Poland along its 4,107-km (2,552-mi) length.

    Worryingly, the gas price on futures markets is also rising. January 2023 prices are up to €90 per megawatt hour, a clear signal that the market expects European gas supplies to be low by the end of this winter and that little gas will come from Russia over the summer to replenish supplies before winter next year.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is clear: it’s the middle of January, the coldest part of the winter, and if Mr Putin decides to shut off the flow of gas to Europe, the Europeans will knuckle under; none of the NATO leaders want to see their people freeze this winter. And Russia loses leverage every day that passes toward warmer weather.

It doesn’t matter what threats President Biden makes to somehow hold President Putin accountable; it’s the Russian who holds the hammer here. No one wants to go to war over Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin knows that just as well as anyone else.

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Why Are Capitol Police Arresting Protesters?

OK, they’re Very Stupid people, but,  regardless of my opinion of their politics, they are engaged in their 1st Amendment Right to protest peaceably and petition for redress of grievance. On the steps of the U.S. Capitol, pretty much the main point of those provisions. Protesting government. Especially Congress.

There’s a quote at the top of my blog saying “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all,” which is, interestingly, from super-leftist Noam Chomsky (who doesn’t really practice what he says). Perhaps it should be “If we don’t believe in the 1st Amendment for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” Who are they bothering? Are they really doing anything but sitting there and singing and calling out? And freezing, but, that’s their problem. Let them protest. If I was in D.C. I’d be tempted to go sit with them just to get arrested and say “I don’t agree with them, but, they have the Right to do this.”

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The Philadelphia Inquirer props up transgender swimmer Will Thomas

I was surprised to see that The Philadelphia Inquirer allowed reader comments on this article. Since it is, supposedly, a sports article, and the Inquirer didn’t close sports articles to comments when they did so on everything else, maybe an editor hasn’t figured it out yet. As I start this article, at 9:10 AM, there are ten comments up, including two of mine; I wonder how long that will last.

    Lia Thomas swims on for Penn amid controversy

    Lia Thomas competed at home for last time in her Penn swimming career.

    by Scott Lauber | Saturday, January 8, 2022

    Penn swimmer Lia Thomas waits before competing in the 500m free race during a meet at UPenn’s Sheerr Pool in Philadelphia on Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022. Thomas is a transgender athlete who is among the nation’s top swimmers in her events. Photo by Heather Khalifa, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

    In the final home meet of her college career Saturday, Penn swimmer Lia Thomas won two freestyle races and continued along a path to the NCAA championships in March.

    And that would have been the end of the story except for this: Thomas is a transgender woman who is defeating most of her competition.

    So, as Thomas swung her right arm and touched the wall 1.47 seconds before Penn teammate Anna Kalandadze to win the 500-yard freestyle in a tri-meet against Yale and Dartmouth (Yale won the team competition), two female protesters held a “Stand Up 4 Women” sign on the sidewalk on Walnut Street and shouted about an unfair competitive advantage and a tilted playing field – or in this case, Sheerr Pool.

I do not normally like to include photos from the Inquirer, over plagiarism and copyright points, but this one falls under obvious Fair Use guidelines, in that it illustrates the point: does this swimmer look like a woman to you?

There are three other photos of the swimmer in the Inquirer article. The first is mostly unrevealing, but the second and the third show Will Thomas — The First Street Journal always refers to the transgendered by their real names and biologically appropriate pronouns — next to the women in the UPenn swim team, and the differences are obvious; Stevie Wonder could see that he isn’t a woman.

I did have to craft my two comments to not refer to Mr Thomas by his real first name or use the real gender pronoun to escape probable deletion. I asked:

    Did Thomas purposely drag out times to win, but not by so much? In the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio, the one which attracted the greatest attention due to the staggering difference in times, Thomas won the 500- yard freestyle event in 4:34.06 to 4:48.99 for second-place finisher Anna Kalandaze, a 14.93 second margin. Thomas’ time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500-yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Kalandaze’s second-place time.

For someone used to writing in a more formal style, that paragraph is painful, as is my second comment:

    Several articles have noted that Thomas’ wins have been met with crowd silence, while the second-place touches of cis-women swimmers have been greeted with loud cheers. It may be politically correct to assert that the transgendered are the sex they claim to be, but, at least in the natatorium, the crowds appear to see it differently.

    I note that Scott Lauber, the article author, was very consistent in using the name “Lia” and the feminine pronouns to refer to Thomas. I know, I know: that’s the Associated Press’, and the Inquirer’s, stylebook, but it’s a subtle attempt to slant the debate in the politically correct direction.

Doing such is the telling of a deliberate lie — and Mr Lauber knows full well that Mr Thomas isn’t a real woman, but in a newsroom full of the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading he can’t say anything unless he has another job lined up — to push the politically correct notion of gender transition. Every bird, every mammal, and every reptile, can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but somehow, today’s left have educated that ability right out of themselves.

I am shocked that the Inquirer is even allowing such a discussion; none of the readers comments that exist as of the time of this writing accept the notion that Mr Thomas is a woman, and everyone sees the basic unfairness of allowing someone who went completely through puberty, and was fully developed as a male, to just decide he’s female and compete against female athletes in sex-segregated sports.

That’s just basic common sense, but common sense is in very short supply when it comes to the left and their acceptance that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Well, wahhh! Outgoing Governor Ralph Northam is upset because people are blaming him!

As soon as the Virginia highway shutdown became news, the left were out blaming Glenn Youngkin, who won the election last November.

But, oops! Mr Youngkin won’t take office until January 15th. That’s amusing enough in itself, but now Governor Northam is upset that people are criticizing him!

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam says he’s ‘sick and tired’ of his government being criticized for the I-95 traffic pileup that left hundreds stranded for hours

by John L Dorman | Saturday, January 8, 2022

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said Wednesday he was “sick and tired” of hearing criticism of “what went wrong” during the recent snowstorm that left hundreds of people stranded for hours on Interstate 95, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch.

During an interview on WRVA, a Richmond-area radio station, reporter Matt Demlein asked Northam about any updates in assessing how the huge transportation backlog transpired, especially as many were stuck in their vehicles with limited heat, minimal food options, and frigid outdoor temperatures.

The Democratic governor — who is term-limited and will leave office on January 15 — forcefully rejected the line of questioning about the incident, which made nationwide headlines.

“I don’t know why you’re sitting there saying, ‘what went wrong?'” Northam said. “This was a storm that we haven’t seen for a long time. It started with rain, and then turned into a slushy snow of eight to ten inches … more than what was predicted. And then after midnight, turned into essentially an ice rink.” . . . .
“We knew that the storm was coming. We put warnings out. Why don’t you start asking some of these individuals that were out on the highway for hours, one, did you know about the storm? Two, why did you feel it was so important to drive through such a snowstorm?” Northam said. “And three, in hindsight, do you think maybe you should have stayed home or wherever you were, rather than getting out on Interstate 95?

All of those tractor-trailers? They didn’t have a choice: it’s their job to deliver their loads, on time. The other people? Some of them doubtlessly had little choice. But Mr Northam is going to blame them.

You know, in some ways, he’s right: the Commonwealth was not prepared for the type of storm which hits the Old Dominion once in a blue moon, and it’s not really reasonable for the state to spend the money to prepare for something that rare.

But the reality is that he’s Governor of Virginia now because he asked for the job, told people he could do the job, and said that he was the man they should make responsible for running the Commonwealth. Someone who once held higher office once said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” The chief executives love to take credit for things when they go right, even if they weren’t actually the ones making things go right. They also get the blame when things go wrong, and things have gone wrong enough in Virginia that not only did Mr Youngkin defeat Democrat Terry McAuliffe, but Virginia voters flipped the state House of Delegates from Democrat to Republican control.

Time for him to get out of the kitchen.