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

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

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

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

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

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

Transfer three A-10 aircraft squadrons to Ukraine now

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

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

Sanctions must be accompanied by military success.

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Massie’s twitter thread is seven tweets long:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yup, that’s right!

References

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

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

Robert Stacy McCain noticed this before I did, but I have an excuse: I was working in my shop, finally repairing a small sidewall workbench in my shop. It’s narrow, primarily used as a sanding station — and too often, a flat surface on which to stack things — and had been damaged and sagging due to last year’s floods. The bench is narrow because I had to leave room for vehicles to pull into the garage. I added support where the plywood bench was sagging, leveling it out, and then added some edge banding using scrap hardwood I had, and if you really care, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

Mr McCain noticed that Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times was making the Russian invasion of Ukraine about race, because that’s just what she does.

    Infamous Race Hustler Uses Ukraine War to — You Guessed It — Hustle Race

    by Robert Stacy McCain | March 2, 2022

    The brilliance of Critical Race Theory is that it enables practitioners to see racism literally everywhere:

      Left-wing New York Times reporter and controversial 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones was slammed online after accusing journalists covering the Russian invasion into Ukraine of “racialized analysis and language” in their reporting, indicating their “sympathy” for white victims of conflict and refugees in particular while claiming Europe is a fictional continent intended to separate it from non-“civilized” nations.

      On Sunday, Hannah-Jones, author of the debunked New York Times 1619 Project, called on fellow journalists to “look internally” regarding acknowledging their racial biases in their coverage of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

      “Every journalist covering Ukraine should really, really look internally. This is why I say we should stop pretending we have objectivity and in instead acknowledge our biases so that we can report against them,” she wrote. “Many of us see the racialized analysis and language.”

      She added, “And honestly, these admissions of shock that this is happening in a European country are ahistorical and also serve to justify the lack of sympathy for other invasions, other occupations and other refugee crisis involving peoples not considered white.”

      Later in the day, Hannah-Jones called the European continent a “geopolitical fiction” intended to separate it from Asia and which led to the “alarm” over an invasion of people who “are like us.”

Further down:

    Would you like me to tell you the most perfect thing here? The author of this Breitbart article is Joshua Klein. You know that this race-hustling stuff has become a losing game for the Left when you see Jews calling it out. And while we’re on the subject of ethnic politics, why do you think there was such a shift of Latino voters to the GOP in 2020? It’s because they are likewise getting fed up with this BLM/CRT nonsense.

    Keep in mind that it’s not as if prejudice against Jews and Latinos doesn’t exist in America, or in the Republican Party for that matter. It’s just that sensible people, whatever their ethnicity or position within the Universal Oppression Matrix, can recognize a scam as obvious as the one being foisted upon us by such “intellectuals” as Nikole Hannah-Jones.

    At a time when we’re teetering on the brink of World War III, nobody wants to listen to this kind of blatant race-hustling.

Well, it seems that Mr McCain was wrong: at least the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer thought people would want to listen to this kind of blatant race-hustling:

    Infuriated, not shocked: People from the Middle East are noticing that now you care about war in Ukraine | Opinion

    A Syrian refugee and Palestinian in Philadelphia hope the Russian invasion to Ukraine will make people care about their people’s suffering.

    by Abraham Gutman | Thursday, February 3, 2022 | 9:24 AM EST

    The horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to an outpouring of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. But Ukrainians are not the only people who suffer under oppression. And people from the Middle East, who are used to their plight for justice going ignored, are noticing the difference.

    Moumena Saradar, now 45, was born and raised in Damascus. In 2011, when a brutal civil war started, she was too worried about the safety of her five children to stay. One morning, a sniper started shooting in her neighborhood. “The bullets were just a few feet away from my kids when they were going to school,” she recalled over the phone this week. “We are lucky that they are still alive.”

    Her family went to Egypt in 2012. It was hard starting a new life, especially after they left everything back home. They registered as refugees with the United Nations, and were chosen to come to the United States. But her struggle was not over. “It wasn’t easy at all. We were going through one year of interviews with different agents, officers, background checks — but luckily we made it and we came here in summer 2016.”

    Philadelphia has been her home ever since. She works as a medical translator and as a part-time Global Guide in the Penn Museum, walking visitors through the Middle East exhibit.

    While Saradar waited for refuge, people didn’t talk about Syrian refugees the way they talk about the people leaving Ukraine. On the campaign trail in 2015, Donald Trump suggested Syrian refugees might be terrorists in disguise, and promised, “If I win, they’re going back.” The sentiment wasn’t his alone. By November 2015, governors in 30 states publicly demanded that resettlement of Syrian refugees halt, and the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution — with the not-so-subtle title American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act — to limit the number of refugees from Syria.

    Today, the refugee discourse feels completely different. A recent Data for Progress poll found that 63% of voters — including half of Republican voters — believe the United States should accept Ukrainian refugees. When the White House announced that it was prepared to do that, right-wing politicians and media didn’t pounce — as many did just a few months ago, when the refugees the United States was preparing to accept were from Afghanistan.

There’s more at the original, but the article fails to consider the obvious: the invasion of Ukraine is categorically different from the internal strike that has afflicted so many nations in the Middle East. Ukraine is a sovereign nation, that was invaded by the military forces of another sovereign nation, and the nearest equivalent we have to that was the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

Ukraine, though there were Russian separatists in control of parts of two eastern provinces, was not an internal civil war, marked by multiple groups, using terrorism against civilians as one of their primary weapons, and Ukraine didn’t have an equivalent of Da’ish, more commonly known as the Islamic State, trying to impose a radically harsh version of Shari’a, Islamic religious law, on the lands it controlled.

Syria, from where Moumena Saradar came? That was a civil war, encouraged at least in part by the United States during the Obama Administration, and its then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as part of the Arab Spring. The Arabic revolts toppled many authoritarian rulers, only to see them mostly replaced by other authoritarian rulers, but Bashir al-Assad managed to hang on to power in Damascus, leading eventually to the Syrian Civil War, which is still going on today, eleven years after it began. Given the chaos of the civil war, the poor record-keeping in the country, and the difficulties in getting records from the Syrian government, is it any particular surprise that the United States was being cautious concerning the Syrian refugees allowed to enter?

Of course, the United States was involved: the US had several units in Syria, troops sent in under President Obama, though it was supposedly a secret, a secret that isn’t a secret any longer. President Trump wanted to pull all American forces out of Syria, but met with some resistance by the Pentagon, and he didn’t get all American troops out by the time he left office.

Ukraine is part of Europe — the Europe that Miss Hannah-Jones claims is a fictional entity — and Ukraine is right next door to Poland. When the refugees escape Ukraine, they are directly escaping into a NATO nation. If the European nations don’t accept the Ukrainian refugees, they would be bottling them up in Ukraine, in the path of Russian troops.

    One reason for the difference, Saradar says, is the way the crisis is covered by the media. And she has a point. Pundits and reporters have drawn a racist contrast between Ukraine and places in the Middle East that suffered war. News viewers have heard that Kyiv is a “civilized city” and that the civilians at risk have “blue eyes and blond hair.” An article in the British newspaper the Telegraph about the war in Ukraine opened with: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts.”

Kyiv absolutely was a civilized city, a European civilized city, in ways that Damascus and other Middle Eastern capitals simply are not. Many of the European nations which have accepted Middle Eastern refugees are experiencing significant cultural shocks, as Arab Middle Easterners are bringing in customs and morés which are far more different from those of Europeans than would be those from Ukrainian refugees.

    Jude Hussein, 24, has also noticed the difference. She is a member of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Millennial Advisory Commission who was born in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the territory of the West Bank that is under Israeli occupation. I asked her how it felt to see an outpouring of support to Ukrainians after the Russian invasion. “It wasn’t shocking, but it was infuriating,” Hussein responded. “The same human-rights violations that are happening now in Ukraine have been happening for decades in Palestine.”

    This is a dynamic Hussein has gotten used to. “When Europe is on the line, whether it is a violation of human rights or international law, the world has their eyes wide open and they are willing to act on such violations. But when it comes to the Middle East, and Palestine, especially as brown people, the world always shies away.”

The Inquirer article included a photo of Miss Hussein, who certainly doesn’t look all that “brown” to me! The caption on the photo shows Miss Hussein, “a Palestinian American, celebrating International Palestinian Solidarity Day in Philadelphia on November 29, 2021.” In other words, she was demonstrating against Israel, an American ally, and the only truly democratic and civilized nation in the Middle East.

    She’s right: Less than a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pennsylvania started looking at ways to divest from Russian companies — including removing Russian vodkas from state liquor stores. Gov. Tom Wolf called the removal of Russian products “a show of solidarity and support for the people of Ukraine, and an expression of our collective revulsion with the unprovoked actions of the Russian state.”

    This was the same Tom Wolf who in 2016 signed a bill that prevents the state from contracting with businesses that boycott Israel. At the time, the governor said that Pennsylvania “will not encourage economic punishment in place of peaceful solutions to challenging conflicts.”

Let me be frank here: the United States does, and should, favor Israel, and ought to disfavor her enemies. The Arab nations and cultures sponsor terrorism and anti-Americanism, as part of their cultures, and we ought to be much more suspicious about admitting refugees from those nations — were I President, the number of such refugees admitted to the United States would be zero — into the United States. They do not add to our nation, but increase division, just as Miss Hussein was doing when she was demonstrating against Israel.

Ukraine is not our enemy, and Ukrainians don’t hate the United States and the West. The Ukrainian refugees ought to be settled in Europe, not the United States, and this ought to be seen as a European problem, not ours. But I have no problem at all with Western democratic governments, and people, recognizing that Ukrainian and Middle Eastern refugees are not identical.

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“I’m from the government and I’m here to help!”

Remember the halcyon days of 2020 and 2021, in which Philadelphia, among most major cities, allowed restaurants which had been otherwise closed to indoor dining, to expand, where they physically could, to outdoor dining facilities? A challenging problem in a city which experiences severe winters, outdoor dining and increased carry-out ordering enabled many restaurants to survive.

Philly quietly added surprise fees and ‘burdensome’ rules for restaurant streeteries

“It’s a bureaucratic mess,” said Councilmember Allan Domb. “This is basically the administration saying ‘we don’t want outdoor seating.’”

by Max Marin | Tuesday, Match 1, 2022

Philadelphia city officials quietly released regulations governing the city’s new streetery law after months of anticipation, and some restaurant owners say the proposed red tape could spell doomsday for outdoor dining across the city.

Read more: Hundreds of restaurants got excluded by Philly’s new ‘streetery’ zones — some by less than a block

Many restaurant owners realized new rules passed by City Council in December would require them to clean up access-blocking patio structures and get designs approved by the city for outdoor dining structures built over parking spaces.

But in implementing that law, Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration is adding new regulations that create significant and unexpected hurdles for restaurateurs still struggling to recover from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

There’s a lot more at the Philadelphia Inquirer original, but the new regulations all boil down to one thing: the city charging more money, for permits, for bonds, and for construction requirements.

The timeline:

  • March 16, 2020: City orders all non-essential businesses closed
  • September 8, 2020: Indoor dining allowed at a maximum of 25% of seating capacity
  • November 20, 2020: City again bans all indoor dining in restaurants
  • January 16, 2021: City again allows indoor dining at a maximum of 25% of seating capacity
  • June 2, 2021: City removes seating capacity restrictions
  • August 12, 2021: City imposes mask mandates for all indoor businesses
  • January 3, 2022: City requires proof of vaccination for all restaurant employees and patrons
  • February 16, 2022: City drops vaccination proof requirements, continues mask mandates

All of these restrictions were either imposed or relaxed as the city saw surges in COVID-19 infections, the original, the Delta variant, and lastly, the Xi Omicron variant. Omicron peaked very rapidly, and with a far greater number of cases, than either Alpha or Delta, with more than thrice the average number of daily cases in Philly — because vaccinations and masks were virtually useless against Omicron — but one thing is obvious: if COVID-19 has been going through all of these mutations, there is no particular reason to think that Omicron will be the last. The odds are that there will be a Pi variant — though maybe some will call it the Putin variant, given today’s news — which may or may not be serious, but if another serious variant arises, wouldn’t the availability of outdoor dining be something Philadelphia would want?

Even without a new variant, there are still plenty of people panicked by COVID-19, and would choose to dine outdoors if the option is available. Given that the city believe that masks are still necessary indoors but not outside, why wouldn’t the city want to encourage the continuation of outdoor dining where feasible?

But nope! The city are going to go for the dollars rather than make it easier for the outdoor dining areas to continue. There’s a reason why, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” is dismissed as a skeptical meme.
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Update: 3:15 PM EST

Philadelphia ends its indoor mask mandate

“The metrics that we’re following have reached the level where the Health Department feels it is safe to stop enforcing the indoor mask mandate,” a health department spokesperson said.

by Jason Laughlin | Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022 | 3:00 PM EST

The end of Philadelphia’s indoor mask mandate came Wednesday with a promise to ease virtually all remaining COVID-19 safety rules in the city in the coming days, signaling a big step toward normalcy in the city after almost two years of lock downs and restrictions.

Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole hesitated to say COVID had reached an endemic stage, but acknowledged that Wednesday’s announcement marked a new stage in the pandemic.

“I think talking about regaining as much normal life as we can … is better framing for me,” she said. “I’m hoping we have enough immunity in the city that we really are at an end point.”

Philadelphia was the only place in the state still maintaining a general indoor-masking requirement.

There’s more at the original, but it sure sounds to me like Commissioner Bettigole didn’t approve of the decision, but was overruled by Mayor Jim Kenney.

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Killadelphia: Is it too early to start talking about trends in city homicides? It's not just Philadelphians killing each other; it's The Philadelphia Inquirer committing suicide.

I have (mostly) resisted the math when it comes to killings in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, because it seemed too early in the year to draw conclusions based upon the numbers. January and February being winter months, when murders are normally less probable, seemed to me to be poorer indicators than they might be, but the city has reached early numbers which are staggering.

As of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, February 28th, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported that there had been 84 homicides in the city, compared to 77 on the same date in 2021, and 60 in 2020. There had also been 60 murders as of February 28th in 2007.

That’s where the numbers start to get dicey: in 2007, Philadelphia finished the year with 391 homicides, while 2020 saw 499. In 2007, 15.35% of the year’s total killings were by the end of February, while in 2020, it was only 12.02%. 2007 was a reasonably normal year, while 2020 saw the beginning of the COVID-19 panicdemic pandemic and the death of the drug-addled convicted felon George Floyd in a legitimate arrest that went wrong, leading to the summer of fire and hate. In 2021, 13.70% of city homicides had been committed by February 28th, very close to the midway point between the rates in 2007 and 2020.

The chart at the right shows the percentages of the murders in the city as of February 28th by year, for every year since 2007, and they are all over the board. 2011 and 2014 saw over 18% of the homicides as having been committed by that date, while 2010, 2016, and 2020 saw percentages in the 12 to 13% range. The average works out to 14.52% as of the end of February.

If the average holds true, Philadelphia is on pace for 578.52 homicides in 2022, which would break last year’s all-time record of 562 by a 2.85% margin (for 578 murders) to 3.02% (for 579). If 2020’s percentage, the lowest on the chart, is the metric, it would be 698.84 killings, 613.14% if last year’s percentage turned out to be the number, but ‘only’ 448.96 if the highest percentage on the chart, 2011’s 18.71%. 449 homicides would still put 2022 into 5th place since records were kept beginning in 1960.

For 2022 to see only 400 murders, a full 21.00% would have had to already have occurred, a number far higher than anything in the historical record, and for the final number to be 500, 16.80% of the homicides would have already happened.

I admit it: I can be a numbers geek at times, and numbers tell part of the story, but not the whole thing. And with three homicides just yesterday, as of 9:30 AM EST on Tuesday, March 1st, there isn’t a single mention of any of the three homicides that occurred yesterday in the city on either the main page or the crime and justice page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website. To the editors of the Inquirer, which used to call itself a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People.”

Instead, what we have is an “anti-racist news organization,” one which seems to be dedicated to reporting only those stories which cannot be seen as reflecting poorly on any minority group. The “public ledger” function has clearly gone, as the newspaper’s website main page maintains stories from several days ago, but can’t bring itself to mention that three murders occurred in the city yesterday.

Why? The Inquirer is very, very good at covering stories in which the victim was clearly an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or, most importantly, a cute little white girl. When Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation was murdered. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. On December 2, 2021, the Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy. The newspaper even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.

Oh, it’s not as though the Inquirer doesn’t publish stories about black victims, at least when it comes to black victims who are ‘innocents’. The murder of Samir Jefferson merited two stories, and four stories about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes.[1]I did note my suspicion that young Mr Stokes might not have been quite the innocent the Inquirer, and writer Anna Orso, made him out to be. A story is merited if the victim was a local high school basketball star, and cute little white girls killed get tremendous coverage: a search of the newspaper’s website for Rian Thal returned 4855 results! But for the vast majority of black victims, Inquirer coverage is a couple paragraphs, mostly in the late evening, and which have disappeared from the main page of the newspaper’s website by morning, if even that much.

Why? it’s simple: reporting about black bad guys getting killed by other black bad guys, in the words of the Sacramento Bee, “perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.” In her “apology to black Philadelphians and journalists,” publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes did not use those specific words, but the effect has been the same: no reporting of stories which might tell readers what they already know: that the vast majority of the murder victims, and their killers, in the City of Brotherly Love are black males who have been involved in the gang or criminal lifestyle.

This is what happens when the Inquirer, the third oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the country, goes from being a “public ledger” to worrying about being a “white newspaper” in a “black city.”

Philadelphia isn’t even a “black city.” The 2020 census found that just 38.3% of the city’s population were non-Hispanic black, and Hispanics, who can be either black or white, made up 14.9%. Between non-Hispanic whites, 34.3%, Asians, 8.3%, and “other groups,” 4.3%, the city is 46.9% non-black, and it doesn’t take a terribly large percentage of the Hispanic population being white to get the city to majority non-black. The non-Hispanic white population of the city have certainly declined, but they are hardly gone.

Those are just numbers, but that the newspaper called Philadelphia a “black city” underscores the problem; though highly segregated by neighborhood, Philly overall has a very ‘diverse’ — and I have come to hate that word — population. Today, by Miss Hughes order, the “Independent Newspaper for All the People” has become a newspaper for the “black city” that Philly really isn’t. In a time in which Philadelphia has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, and newspaper circulation is falling, how much sense does it make to tell half or more of the city’s population not to bother to subscribe?

Of course, the Inquirer isn’t just a Philadelphia newspaper; it serves the suburbs in a fairly large metropolitan area, and that area is very much majority white:


It seems as though Miss Hughes has told about 80% of the potential metropolitan area subscribers not to bother; the newspaper isn’t for them.

I am a big fan of newspapers, having been a paper boy starting in junior high school, delivering the Lexington Herald and Lexington Leader in my hometown of Mt Sterling, Kentucky. I used to, before retirement, pick up the dead trees edition of the Inquirer to take to the plant every day before work when I lived in the Keystone State, and I’m a digital subscriber even today, now that I have retired back to my home state. Being mostly deaf now, print media is important to me. And something I very much regret is seeing what was once one of the nation’s premier newspapers not only having gone downhill in terms of circulation — something happening to almost every print newspaper these days — but seemingly committing suicide by its editorial policies.

References

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The future of journalism? Today's journalism students will be tomorrow's reporters and editors

I have frequently referred to journolism, which some might think is a misspelled. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity; I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Now, thanks to a tweet from David Huber, an editor and writer at The College Fix, I found this, from the Columbia University student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator:

Letter from the Editor: Why we published op-eds arguing against the mask mandate on campus

by Senem Yurdakul, Editorial Page Editor | Monday, February 28, 2022 | 2:02 AM EST

On February 8, we published a piece titled “Why can’t we move on from COVID-19?” The decision to publish the piece came after days of conversations among our staff on public discourse, freedom of speech, and our responsibility to our community.

Our mission at the Opinion section of Spectator is to reflect and direct campus and community discourse. But what does that even mean?

Reflecting campus discourse means being present in the spaces where discourse arises and evolves. It means being members of different student organizations, participating in class discussions, and listening to the people around us when they share their experiences as members of the Columbia community. It means avidly reading Columbia Confessions to find the opinions students might not otherwise find acceptable to voice out loud or with their names attached. It means witnessing the contemporary politics of our campus unfold around us, choosing not to remain bystanders, and bringing what we see into public dialogue.

It also means being aware that campus discourse resumes in our absence and acknowledging that there are spaces that we do not have access to, narratives that aren’t familiar to us, and stories that aren’t ours to tell. It is about coming to the office for all staff meetings and asking “Whose voices are we missing?” It is about knowing that just because certain opinions are not articulated in public, it does not mean that they are absent from campus discourse.

Heaven forfend! A student, at Columbia University, a liberal Ivy League school in liberal New York City, noting that there are people other than the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading who have opinions that should be noted? As I responded to Mr Huber, “Not to worry: when they graduate and go to work for the @PhillyInquirer, they’ll find out that dissenting opinions are wholly unwelcome by editor Gabriel @escobarinquirer, publisher Lisa Hughes, and the rest of the #woke staff.”

But there’s more: Miss Yurdakul recognized that there are “certain opinions”, held by Columbia students, which are “not articulated in public.” Translation: expressing those opinions in public will result in negative consequences for those who speak them; that’s why sixteen University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team members had to keep their identities concealed. Of course, further down, Miss Yurdakul states that they “draw strict lines between hate speech and free speech,” so it’s entirely possible that, were the UPenn situation part of Columbia’s, those expressing the opinion that Will Thomas should not be allowed to compete athletically as a woman might be rejected.[2]A site search for “Lia Thomas” turned up only one story about Mr Thomas’ participation in the Ivy League championships, and offered no opinions. The article did note the controversy … Continue reading

When we received Gabe Weintraub and Matt Keating’s pieces in our inbox, it was a clear indication to us that there is a present and ongoing discussion on masks within the student body. To have ignored these pieces because of their controversial takes would have been in direct defiance of our mission to reflect campus conversations. To have ignored the letters to the editor we have received by Ned Latham and Leslie A. Zukor in response to Weintraub and Keating’s pieces would have undermined our commitment to fair representation.

Miss Yurdakul put it out there: there is clearly a serious disagreement on Columbia’s campus about the mask mandates, but it is a debate which does not raise “hate speech” questions.

When, there is a second layer of our mission: directing campus discourse. When we publish an op-ed, letter to the editor, or column, we provide a platform for the writer’s story, voice, and argument. The engagement we have received in the past few weeks has allowed us to understand that the voices we amplify directly impact campus dialogue. That is a level of influence that we take incredibly seriously. We know that while our platform allows us to provide space for voices that are often institutionally marginalized and silenced, it can also create an echo chamber or worse, highlight harmful ideas if our process is hasty or heedless. As editors, we aim to ensure that our journalism does not harm our readers, our community, or our writers. We draw strict lines between hate speech and free speech. Our pieces undergo three rounds of editorial edits, three rounds of copy edits, and two rounds of edits by our managing editor and editor in chief. We are always asking ourselves and our writers what our reasons for publishing a piece are.

There are two very important parts of this paragraph. First, the Columbia Daily Spectator has far, far more editorial reviews than we see in the credentialed media these days; broadcast media have to get the news on too quickly, while newspapers have been cutting reportorial and editorial staff to the bone. When the Daily Spectator staffers get out into the real world, looking for journalism jobs, not only will they find disappointing salaries at the entry level, and bemoaning the fact that their opportunities are only at the Allentown Morning Call or the Lexington Herald-Leader, rather than The New York Times or Washington Post, but they’ll quickly see that what few editors there are, are a harried bunch who provide little oversight and too-cursory glances at their work. You can see this in the poor editing, incomplete journalism, and lousy grammar in so many newspapers.

But the second part is that they “aim to ensure that our journalism does not harm our readers, our community, or our writers.” This is what has led so many newspapers to censor the truth, to not report the news, or not report it fully, if telling the whole truth might, in the words of the Sacramento Bee, “perpetuat(e) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.” The McClatchy Mugshot Policy worries that publishing police mugshots “disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness,” so they have a policy against it, and the Herald-Leader seems to make its exceptions to the policy when the charged offenders are white, to actually skew the truth.

Miss Yurdakul continued to state that they would continue to provide a platform for the opinions of others, which seems to be more than the Herald-Leader or Inquirer do, but I have to wonder about what the limits of what she, and others, at the Columbia Daily Spectator would impose? Would the Daily Spectator accept an opposing OpEd piece on whether biological males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports as ‘transgender women’, or would that be regarding as “harm (their) readers, (their) community, or (their) writers”? Would it be considered “hate speech”, and be put beyond the pale?

The New York Times had had, for decades now, the masthead blurb, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, but the Times, among other great, and not-so-great, newspapers across this country have taken editorial decisions that some things, some actual news, some news that’s just politically incorrect, simply isn’t fit to print these days.

We’re seeing it every day, when The Philadelphia Inquirer declares itself to be “anti-racist” and then just plain doesn’t give its readers the news.

Miss Yurdakul, and her compatriots at the Columbia Daily Spectator, and at journalism schools across the country, are going to be the next people hired into the nation’s newsrooms, and some of them will last and become editors. Will they maintain Miss Yurdakul’s commitment to publish opposing viewpoints, to actually inform the public of the debates that are going on out there, or will they follow today’s line, and censor news that doesn’t fit their political views, and their ‘social justice’ goals?

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 A site search for “Lia Thomas” turned up only one story about Mr Thomas’ participation in the Ivy League championships, and offered no opinions. The article did note the controversy over Mr Thomas, and that Columbia’s head coach Diana “Caskey said that Ivy League communications has asked her not to comment on Thomas’ performance and eligibility.”
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Bidenflation If inflation was 'only' 7.5%, what items went up less than that to counterbalance those which increased more?

We recently reported on the price of a gallon of milk in the Bluegrass State, and how it had increased 121.21% since President Trump left office. Grocery prices in general have risen. We also noted that January inflation, year-over-year, rose 7.5%, which was higher than the average hourly wage increase of 5.7%. Two days ago, I tweeted that regular gasoline had jumped 20¢ per gallon.

Now comes The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Utility bills are soaring in the Philly region and so is customer outrage

Peco gas bills are up 38% from last year. PGW’s are up 17%. “I have never paid this much for heat in the winter.”

by Andrew Maykuth | Sunday, February 27, 2022

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

Byron Goldstein closely monitors the energy usage at his Glenside home. So when he got a $651 bill from Peco Energy for combined electric and gas usage in January, 37% more than the $477 he paid the previous January, he knew something was off.

Goldstein discovered that Peco’s gas supply charge skyrocketed since January 2021, accounting for most of the increase. Goldstein, 74, was unsatisfied by the company’s response to his phone calls, so he filed a formal complaint to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, urging the state regulator to roll back Peco’s “outrageous and irresponsible” price increase.

He was not alone. Across the Philadelphia area, thousands of utility customers opened their bills in recent weeks to learn that the cost of heating their homes had soared much more than the 7% inflation rate. Social media platforms lit up with posts from unhappy customers, directing their wrath at energy companies, regulators, and politicians.

“I have never paid this much for heat in the winter,” wrote a Philadelphia resident posting on Nextdoor.com, where several threads contained hundreds of comments venting about the price increase.

There’s more at the original, but it needs to be noted: these price increases came before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

According to charts in the Inquirer original, natural; gas prices are actually significantly lower now than they were in 2008, but they’ve jumped significantly this winter:

The price has indeed gone up: A typical Peco customer who used 150 hundred cubic feet (ccf) of gas was billed $171.25 in January, up 38% or $46.90 from January 2021, according to PUC data. A Philadelphia Gas Works customer who used the same amount of gas was billed $261.71 in January, up 17% or $37.91 from a year ago.

Electricity bills also went up in Pennsylvania on Dec. 1, though not as much as gas bills.

With price increases like these, just how real does that reported 7.5% inflation rate feel?

The Inquirer reported, last December, that cable television and internet service rates from Comcast have increased, as have prices from AT&T and SlingTV.

The Wall Street Journal reported that NBC had a 42% drop in viewership for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, compared to the 2018 games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, something I attribute to NBC’s ‘free’ coverage being dominated by curling and other lower-interest events, while the events people are most interested in, ice skating and Alpine skiing, were being shown more often on Peacock, an internet streaming service which, naturally, has a subscriber fee. That’s just more money out of people’s pockets, or they miss out, a form of inflation that goes unaccounted.

The obvious question, at least to me, is: if inflation was ‘only’ 7.5%, what items went up less than that to counterbalance those which increased more?

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NIMBY! Not in my back yard!

It seems that the left are much happier with liberal principles when they are applied to other people, on other neighborhoods!

Why does a wealthy California town say it opposes affordable housing? To save mountain lions

The town’s decision drew quick scorn as a brazen attempt to evade even minimally denser development in one of California’s most exclusive locales.

by Liam Dillon, Tribune News Service | Saturday, February 26, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

The well-heeled Silicon Valley suburb of Woodside, Calif., has come up with a novel way to block plans that would potentially bring in more affordable housing: Declare itself Cougar Town.

Earlier this month, officials in the enclave of 5,500 people announced that all of Woodside was exempt from a new state housing law that allows for duplex development on single-family home lots.

The reason? The entire town is a habitat for potentially endangered mountain lions.

Really? As in cougars — and I mean cougars, the animal, not the Urban Dictionary cougars — roam the streets of Woodside?

Woodside’s decision drew quick scorn as a brazen attempt to evade even minimally denser development in one of California’s most exclusive locales. The bucolic, woodsy town near Stanford University and the heart of Silicon Valley has a median home value of $4.5 million. Among its residents have been the founders of technology giants Intuit, Intel and Symantec as well as Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who reportedly spent $200 million to build a Japanese-style 16th-century imperial palace across 23 acres.

San Mateo County, where Woodside is located, gave Joe Biden 291,496, or 77.89%, of its votes, while just 75,584, 20.20%, to President Trump. That’s much higher than the statewide advantage Mr Biden enjoyed, 63.48% to 34.32%. While I couldn’t find the breakdown for Woodside individually, it’s safe to say it’s a pretty liberal area.

The mountain-lion card is not playing well with advocates, who note the jarring irony of enormous mansions inhabited by few juxtaposed against the housing needs of many.

“Right now, you could have five people in a 5,000-square-foot mansion sharing one kitchen, and it’s OK,” said Sonja Trauss, executive director of YIMBY Law, a San Francisco group that advocates for local governments to approve more housing. “But once you have two kitchens, it’s suddenly a problem for the mountain lions?”

Why am I thinking of Comrade Kaprugina in Dr Zhivago, saying, “There was living space for thirteen families in this one house!”

Yuri Andreievich Zhivago replies, “Yes. Yes, this is a better arrangement; more just.” Of course, Yuri Andreievich understands what happens if he doesn’t toe the Bolshevik line. The left might think that zoning for cheaper houses, more “affordable” housing, is “more just,” but it’s obvious that the folks who’ve driven the median home value to an insane $4.5 million aren’t very interested in having neighboring homes, and neighboring people, who will bring down the values of their own housing, their own community.

We see it all over, in the tony areas of Philadelphia like Society Hill and Rittenhouse Square, where the well-to-do white liberals are quite happy to vote for Democratic politicians and liberal policies, as long as the poorer, black and Hispanic residents of the City of Brotherly Love are kept down in Kensington and Strawberry Mansion. Philadelphia is highly ‘diverse’ as far as overall population figures are concerned, but far more internally segregated on a by-neighborhood basis.

Business Insider noted:

California remains the state with the highest poverty level in the US, according to a September 2021 report from the US Census Bureau.

In the report, three-year poverty level averages were calculated for each state and the District of Columbia using the supplemental poverty measure, which found that 15.4% of California residents lived in poverty from 2018 to 2020. Only the District of Columbia had a higher rate of poverty — 16.5%.

The supplemental poverty measure expands on the official poverty measure, which was developed by Social Security economist Mollie Orshansky in the 1960s, by accounting for cost of living, work and medical expenses, tax credits, and government programs designed to assist low-income families and individuals.

If the Pyrite State has the nation’s highest percentage of poverty, it also has some of our wealthiest citizens, a lot of whom live in Hollywood, in Bel Air, and in Woodside. Seth Rogen is a Canadian comedian, actor, screenwriter, film producer, and voice actor who, according to the site Celebrity Net Worth, has a net worth of $80 million, and was excoriated for a mindless tweet in which he said that living in a big city, one has to simply accept that leaving valuables in your car means that people will break in and rob it. When you’re worth $80 million, you can afford to replace stuff. Mr Rogen isn’t homeless. He lives on a 10-acre estate in the West Hollywood Hills, having sold, for $2.16 million, another West Hollywood home behind high hedges and a tall, metal fence. ‘Twould seem that, despite his seemingly cavalier attitude toward petty robbery, Mr Rogan, a self-described left-winger, does care about security for his property and himself.

One wonders how many “affordable” duplexes Mr Rogan has had built on his 10-acre estate, to help the less fortunate in Los Angeles County.

As I have previously noted, the hypocrisy of the left is astounding! They are great at telling other people what they should do, but not so great at putting their money where their mouths — or keyboards — are.

 

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What have the #ClimateAction activists done to reduce their own carbon emissions?

“I’ll believe ‘carbon pollution’ is dangerous when people like Biden stop putting out so darned much themselves,” William Teach said. Why, I have to ask, don’t the people telling us we must reduce our CO2 output ever do anything to reduce their own? Why wouldn’t someone from the Show Me State, such as Mr Teach’s frequent commenter Elwood P Dowd, want to show us just what and how much he has done, personally, to reduce his own carbon footprint?

What I have done isn’t much: we replaced our light bulbs with LEDs, not to reduce our energy consumption, but because when we bought the place, it had incandescent bulbs that were burning out anyway. In addition, as we remodeled the kitchen, we installed canister lights, and the much lower temperature LEDs are far safer in canister lights.

I installed a clothesline outside, which means that, in decent weather, our bedding and my clothes gets dried using solar and wind power. Admittedly, I did this because my darling bride (of 42 years, 9 months, and 7 days) likes the way the bedding smells after line drying, rather than any concern over global warming climate change, but it still saves on over an hour in the 220-volt, 30-amp electric dryer.

Of course, many of the urbanites who like to lecture us on reducing our CO2 output don’t have yards in which they could install a clothesline, or, if they did, are stuck with homeowners’ associations which won’t permit it. But it is amusing to me that none of them ever seem to even think about it or mention it.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

When I added windows, I added double-paned insulated ones; you can see the large windows I installed in our kitchen remodel to the left.

It replaced one much narrower double hung window. I added another window in our living room, along a wall which had only one, and the room needed more light. As I had walls open, I added insulation to exterior walls. When we put in new kitchen appliances, we were buying energy efficient ones.

Perhaps my motives weren’t pure enough for the warmunists — Mr Teach calls them ‘warmists’ in his long-term, daily ‘If All You See‘ posts — but, in the end, my wife and I still did these things, and we’ve spent a considerable amount of money doing so; that kitchen window was over $700 just by itself.

Oil lamp and candles on the kitchen counter. Photo by Dana R Pico, on January 16, 2022, when power was lost due to a snowstorm.

Of course, we also added propane, to a house which was previously all-electric, because when the sparktricity goes out in our end-of-the-line farmhouse, it can be out for several days. I’m sure that has us near the gates of Hell as far as the global warming climate activists are concerned, but, then again, we didn’t freeze when we lost power for 46 hours in the middle of January.

So, what has the man from Missouri done, what has the Hirsute One done, to reduce their carbon footprints (feetprint?) that they tell the rest of us we must do? We already know that Mr Teach’s frequent commenter ‘Hairy’ is keeping his current, fossil-fueled automobile, and has no plans to trade it in for a plug-in electric, but, then again, he has told us he’s in his 70s and doesn’t ever plan on buying another vehicle. Being less than two months from my 69th birthday, I can understand that!

I don’t expect our high-flying government officials like the ‘Climate Tsar’ John F Kerry — a very wealthy man who made his money the old-fashioned way; he married it! — to stop flying around the world in his private jet, a Gulfstream IV, registration number N57HJ. But maybe, just maybe, some of the otherwise regular people advocating all sorts of restrictions on other people could spend a little time telling us what sacrifices they have made, what things they have done, to put their money where their mouths — or keyboards — are.

But at some point, those global warming climate change activists need to do more than just lecture others; they need to lead by example. That so few of them do says a lot about how seriously they take global warming climate.

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Philly continues the tyranny

The heavily politicized Center for Disease Control have finally eased some of their masking guidelines, but, of course, the petty little dictators in the City of Brotherly Love want to keep Philadelphians wearing the symbols of authoritarian control.

CDC loosens COVID-19 masking guidance, but Philly is keeping its mask mandate for now

The city’s health department said it would review the CDC’s new guidance, but the safety restrictions in place in the city are based on local conditions and “months of data specific to Philadelphia.”

by Jason Laughlin and Kasturi Pananjady | Friday, February 25, 2033

A change in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance for mask-wearing Friday means federal authorities no longer recommend indoor masking as a COVID-19 precaution for much of Southeastern Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia.

Whether that will change masking policy set by the health department in Philadelphia, the only place in the region with an indoor mask mandate, is uncertain.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, which loves mandates and dictatorial control of the plebeians, illustrated their article with a photo of sheep “guests at the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall last December,” all dutifully masked up.

We have previously reported on the city’s Health Commissioner, Dr Cheryl Bettigole, saying, on Groundhog Day, that Philadelphia lifting COVID-19 restrictions was “probably several months away.”

“Our team is actively discussing what an off-ramp looks like,” Bettigole said when asked about easing restrictions. “If you think about where we are with this particular wave and case rates right now, we’re probably several months away from a place where we will have the kind of safety to drop all the current restrictions.”

The city did end its vaccine mandate for indoor dining on the 14th, but retained the mask mandate. To me, it’s obvious: the city was depending upon cute college coeds working as hostesses to enforce the vaccine mandate, and who can know how reliable that was, especially if confronted by a large, scary man. But masks? It’s obvious to anyone who can see whether someone is wearing one; they are the very visible symbols of submission.

The Philadelphia Department of Public Health said it would review the CDC’s new guidance, but the safety restrictions in place in the city are based on local conditions and “months of data specific to Philadelphia,” said Matt Rankin, a spokesperson for the department.

“At this time we plan to continue the implementation of these current response levels as the pandemic unfolds,” he said. . . . .

The CDC changed its guidelines for masking Friday because easy access to vaccines and testing, better treatments for COVID-19, and widespread immunity have “moved the pandemic to a new phase,” the agency said in a news release. The agency’s recommendations were also being widely disregarded, with states increasingly ending COVID precautions despite 95% of U.S. counties falling into the CDC’s old definition of substantial or high transmission. The new guidelines break COVID-19 risk levels into categories of high, medium, and low by county. Indoor masking is recommended only at the high risk level.

Very widely disregarded. I have previously noted the masks required sign at the entrance to the Kroger grocery store on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, and, shopping there just Friday morning, I saw what has been the case all along: significant disobedience to the sign. I certainly wasn’t wearing a mask, and neither were at least three-quarters of the other shoppers. Why should they? We already know that the face masks most people use just don’t stop Omicron, and the so-called experts recommend a N-95 mask. That recommendation was on January 10th, and now, just 46 days later, the CDC are relaxing their masking guidance? One wonders if they listen to each other?

Of course, elected politicians do listen to their constituents, and they know that the public are just plain tired of all of the authoritarian decrees, and those decrees were subject to widespread disobedience; that’s why so many places had weakened or dropped their mandates well before the CDC decided that they must find their people, so they could lead them.

Philadelphia? Completely controlled by the Democrats, to the point where the last Republican mayor left office while George VI was still King of England, so the Democrats running the city aren’t in the least bit worried about losing in the general elections; any real action comes in the Democratic primaries. In 2008, there were 57 entire precincts in which Republican presidential nominee John McCain didn’t get a single vote; in 2012, there were 59 entire precincts in which Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney didn’t get a single vote. In 2020, Joe Biden carried Philadelphia with 81.44% of the vote. You can see why Democrats in Philly aren’t concerned.