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Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader hides a mugshot, this time of a convicted felon.

As we have previously noted, the Lexington Herald-Leader adheres to the McClatchy Mugshot Policy. The policy states as one of its reasons is the possibility that a criminal suspect might be acquitted or have the charges dropped, in which case publishing his mugshot would have a detrimental effect on him.

But what if the accused is already a convicted felon, one with “several prior felonies”? Why should he be shielded?

    New Lexington murder indictment was from an infant’s death in 2018. Bond set at $500k

    By Jeremy Chisenhall | August 27, 2021 | 4:41 PM

    Brent Dyer Kelty. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center. Click to enlarge.

    The Lexington man indicted by a grand jury this week is accused of killing an infant three years ago, according to court records.

    Brent Dyer Kelty, 30, has been charged with murder in the death of 4-month-old Landon Mayes, who suffered head trauma. Mayes died on Sept. 8, 2018. Kelty was indicted on Wednesday, according to court records.

    Lexington police investigated the death, but the attorney general’s office presented the case to a grand jury, resulting in Kelty’s indictment. A spokesperson for Attorney General Daniel Cameron said representatives couldn’t comment on why the indictment came three years after Mayes’ death.

    “We cannot share details regarding the investigation,” Elizabeth Kuhn said.

    Kelty was already in jail on unrelated charges, according to jail records. In addition to murder, he was also indicted on a count of being a persistent felony offender. Kelty had been convicted of several prior felonies in Fayette County since 2010, according to court records.

There’s more at the original, but I would think that a man, a previously convicted felon, who has now been indicted for killing an infant, would qualify as accused of committing what should be considered a “high profile crime”.

The First Street Journal does not hold to the policy of shielding such defendants, and their mugshots are matters of public record. If this guy is guilty of killing an infant, there ought to be exactly one sentence: lock him up and throw away the key.

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Some Central Bucks Karens want to force other people to wear masks, but don’t have the courage to identify themselves

We have previously noted the decision by the Central Bucks School Board not to make facemasks mandatory for the upcoming school year. Naturally, when some people oppose a decision by an elected body, they sue!

    Central Bucks parents sue after school board votes against mask mandate

    It asks the judge to order the district to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for mitigating the virus in schools.

    by Maddie Hanna | August 28, 2021

    A group of parents of children with special needs sued the Central Bucks School District late Friday, alleging the district’s plan to start the school year Monday without masks or other COVID-19 mitigation measures violates their rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

    The lawsuit — backed by a fund-raiser started by parents that had amassed more than $35,000 as of Saturday afternoon — follows a 5-4 vote by the school board Wednesday night rejecting a mask mandate and other measures ahead of the new school year.

    It asks U.S. District Court in Philadelphia to order the school district to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for mitigating the virus in schools.

    “Together we have made a phenomenal statement that we need to follow CDC and [American Academy of Pediatrics] guidelines to keep the children, teachers and staff in our schools safe as well as prevent the spread of COVID in our community,” Susan Lipson, a family medicine physician who helped organize the GoFundMe, wrote on its page.

Actually, I’m surprised: Maddie Hanna, the article writer, actually wrote the way a journalist is supposed to write, with the most important information, the lede, first! But further down came the infuriating part:

    Parents suing the district — whom the lawsuit identifies only by their initials because “universal masking is a very contentious issue in the district” — say the plan puts their children “at risk of death and debilitating illness from COVID-19.”

So, we have parents suing the school, attempting to force other people to go along with their wishes, and to override the decision of the elected school board, and they don’t have the guts to identify themselves? I’m going to tell you what to do, but you don’t need to know who I am?

Yeah, that’s pretty infuriating.

The decision by the school board does not prohibit anyone from wearing a face mask. These parents can wear one or three or twelve masks if they want! They may take any virus mitigation efforts they wish, as far as their children and they are concerned.

But that isn’t good enough; they want to force other people to take extreme steps to protect their children and themselves. But they don’t have the courage to admit who they are.

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Tying things together

Why is it that an old, retired man out in the boondocks of eastern Kentucky can see these things, but the credentialed media just can’t put the stories together?

These things are all related, though the local media don’t seem to want to tell people that. Thanks to a tweet from Heather Long, I found this story:

    Ford CEO: Up to 20% of factory workers are out on some days

    By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN Business | Wednesday, August 25, 2021 | Updated: 9:50 AM ET

    Carmel-by-the-Sea, California (CNN)Face masks are required again in major US auto factories and, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley, that has some workers deciding not to show up for work. In some factories, absentee rates can exceed 20%, he said in an interview with CNN Business.

    “When a fifth of your workforce isn’t coming in, in a manufacturing operation where everyone has their job and you don’t know who’s going to be missing every day, man, it’s really challenging,” Farley said.

    General Motors GM: (%), Ford F: (%) and Stellantis STLA: (%), the company that makes Dodge, Jeep and Chrysler vehicles, agreed with the United Auto Workers union in early August to begin requiring masks in their factories again. That mandate has contributed to the absentee problem, Farley said.

    “The economics of staying out of work are getting more attractive during the summer,” he said. “It’s people that are apprehensive. It’s people who say, ‘I don’t want to wear a mask this week.’ It’s a variety of things.”

    Spokespeople for GM, Stellantis and Toyota, which was not party to the UAW agreement but also now requires masks in its US facilities, would not share information about absentee rates in their factories.

There’s more at the original, but it boils down to one thing: even at United Auto Workers’ wages, Americans don’t like to be controlled. And CEO Jim Farley said the quiet part — at least, kept quiet by the media — out loud: people don’t want to be muzzled.

This is why Kentucky voters gave Republican state legislative candidates such a huge advantage, as they campaigned against Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) COVID restrictions, and this is why Pennsylvania voters passed a constitutional amendment limiting Governor Tom Wolf’s (D-PA) executive authority, and this is why school boards across Pennsylvania — Governor Wolf asked local school boards to issue mask mandates, but 415 out of 474 school districts declined — and Kentucky — two-thirds of districts voted against them — decided to keep masks optional.

But the credentialed media won’t put 2 + 2 together and get 4, because they don’t want to get 4. Philadelphia instituted a city-wide indoor mask mandate two weeks ago, but now The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that enforcement is very spotty, if it exists at all.

    Since Philadelphia’s new mask mandate took effect two weeks ago, at least 102 complaints have been filed through the city’s 311 line about businesses not complying.

    But city officials can’t say how many violations have been found, warnings have been issued or even the number of complaints it investigated. They say they don’t keep count, and that any inspection reports regarding mask compliance end up funneled into its cumbersome, often tough-to-navigate restaurant inspection database, ostensibly alongside complaints about cockroaches, filthy restrooms and freon leaks in walk-in freezers.

    Business owners at times have chafed at the pandemic restrictions over the last 19 months, but enforcement of the mask mandate is mostly the same as last year. Merchants and companies are largely responsible for enforcing it within their premises, with relatively little oversight or tracking. (Last summer, city officials said they had completed a few thousand inspections and ordered seven restaurants to temporarily close for not complying, but later stopped tracking those numbers.)

    Jabari Jones, president of the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative, said it’s unfair for businesses to be held accountable for customers failing to wear masks, and he’s heard from many business owners who say they have “kind of shrugged off” the latest rules.

    “There’s just a growing indifference toward some of these mandates,” he said, “because it’s like, ‘Dude, how am I supposed to catch up with all this stuff if you keep changing the rules without any notice or advance conversation with the business community?’”

There’s more at the original, but the point is simple: a lot of people are resisting mask mandates, and even a very blue city like Philadelphia — Joe Biden won 81.44% of the vote there — is seeing the public resist. It is democracy in action, people voting with their bare faces against the orders Our Betters.

The Lexington Herald-Leader will never do the investigative work which would tell us that those food service and bus driver positions are going unfilled because potential applicants do not want to wear face masks, or be subject to mandatory vaccination orders, but that’s certainly part of the problem. The credentialed media, which continually tells us how vital they are to democracy, are not willing to dig deeply into the facts on an issue on which they have already come down firmly on one side.

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Impeach Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd!

Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd. Photo: Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts.

I wrote Impeach Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd! back on March 3, after he issued his illegal and unconstitutional injunctions against laws passed by the General Assembly, and it appears I was right. It took way, way, way too long for the state Supreme Court to rule that the injunctions should not have been issued, and order the injunctions dissolved:

    We find that this matter presents a justiciable case or controversy but that the Franklin Circuit Court abused its discretion in issuing the temporary injunction.[1]Cameron v Beshear, Section B, pages 13 forward. Accordingly, we remand this case to the trial court with instructions to dissolve the injunction.[2]Cameron v Beshear, page 2.

Now, five days later, we find that Judge Shepherd is not going to follow the instructions to dissolve the injunctions!

    KY judge delays following Supreme Court COVID order as Beshear & lawmakers negotiate

    By Jack Brammer | August 26, 2021 11:57 AM

    Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and legislative leaders are working together on a new set of COVID-19 emergency orders, which they hope to present to a Franklin Circuit Court judge before he dissolves an injunction against new laws that will torpedo Beshear’s existing emergency orders and regulations.

    At a status conference hearing Thursday morning, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd said he will follow the Kentucky Supreme Court’s instructions in a ruling last Saturday for him to dissolve the injunction but he will wait until the court hears more about the work between the Democratic governor and the Republican legislative leaders.

    The high court unanimously said the injunction was wrong and that the new laws limiting Beshear’s emergency powers during the coronavirus crisis should not have been blocked. A provision in one of the new laws would limit Beshear’s executive orders to 30 days unless renewed by the legislature.

Just where in the Court’s ruling does it give Judge Shepherd the discretion as to when to dissolve the injunctions?

    Beshear has said he would like to implement a statewide mask mandate, but lawmakers have shown little interest in that suggestion.

Of course they haven’t: getting rid of the mask mandate was what the voters elected the legislators to do!

    David Fleenor, counsel for Senate President Robert Stivers, told Shepherd he did not know exactly when the negotiations between the governor and lawmakers would be completed but said he expects it to be in days, not weeks, quickly adding, “I hope I’m not being overly optimistic.”

The Court specified that the General Assembly makes policy for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, not the Governor,[3]Cameron v Beshear, page 20: “As we have noted time and again, so many times that we need not provide citation, the General Assembly establishes the public policy of the Commonwealth.” yet somehow Judge Shepherd believes he has the authority to hold off on following the Supreme Court’s instructions to dissolve the injunction until he hears more about what, if any, negotiations are ongoing between the Governor and legislative leaders.

That was not part of the Court’s ruling.

Judge Shepherd has told the parties to report back to him on Tuesday, September 7th, 12 days from now, and 17 days since the Supreme Court issued its ruling. Judge Shepherd, who had already suspended the laws which the state Supreme Court noted were passed legally, for 171 days, now thinks he can add another 17 days on top of that. That would be one day short of 27 weeks, more than half a year.

The state House of Representatives needs to impeach this judge when the regular session begins next January, and the state Senate needs to remove him from office and attaint him from ever holding another office in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The state Court of Appeals needs to overrule him and dissolve the injunctions, if the Supreme Court doesn’t beat them to it; I would expect Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R-KY) to immediately appeal Judge Shepherd’s refusal to dissolve the injunctions, and move that he be removed from the case.

References

References
↑1 Cameron v Beshear, Section B, pages 13 forward.
↑2 Cameron v Beshear, page 2.
↑3 Cameron v Beshear, page 20: “As we have noted time and again, so many times that we need not provide citation, the General Assembly establishes the public policy of the Commonwealth.”
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It ain’t just them unedumacated rednecks from eastern Kentucky who oppose #MaskMandates

There are a lot of people in the Bluegrass State who claim that it was only them unedumacated rednecks who are opposed to mask mandates in the public schools. Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) first recommended that local school boards impose masking requirements, but after they declined, with two-thirds voting against them, the Governor decided to make it an order, an order subsequently rescinded when the state Supreme Court sided against him.

But then I saw this in The Philadelphia Inquirer: Continue reading →

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

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

Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr

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

by Liam Stack | August 20, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

References
↑1 The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. This does not support the article’s contention that 3.8% of the population are homosexual.
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Types of Wrongful Death Examples

Wrongful death cases are one of the most tragic types of criminal or civil cases that can occur. Wrongful death is defined as killing an individual through gross negligence, recklessness, intentional misconduct, or other reckless wrongdoing. The hearts of every member of the legal profession go out to those who have suffered this loss. In this post, we’ll go into examples of wrongful death scenarios and how a lawyer can help you if you feel you need to pursue this path.

Two Categories of Wrongful Death

Wrongful death falls under two categories: criminal and civil wrongs. Criminal wrongful deaths involve a third party who intentionally killed another person while committing a crime such as murder or manslaughter. Civil wrongful death involves someone whose negligent actions lead to another person’s injury or death. A wrongful death attorney can help sort it for you.

Examples of Wrongful Death Situations

  • Someone was killed because of an impaired driver.
  • A doctor made the wrong diagnosis and prescribed the wrong medicines at the wrong time or in bad combinations, causing death.
  • A person purchased a defective item. When the thing breaks, a series of immediate events result in death (exploding cell phone, broken car parts, etc.).
  • A personal injury accident resulting from a party where drugs, alcohol, or other substances and reckless behavior were present. Complications from the injury result in death.
  • Someone buys expired food (even just slightly expired) from the grocery store, eats it, is poisoned, and dies.
  • The victim of a mugging, robbery, gang-related conflict, or similar violence that results in death.
  • A person purchases a new and legal recreational substance, except it is tainted from the factory, and the person dies.
  • Someone dies from the accidental discharge of a firearm.
  • A patient in a hospital needs a particular piece of medical equipment to live, and the machine becomes defective, resulting in the patient’s death.
  • Someone held in police or county custody dies due to excessive force.

What’s Needed to Prove a Wrongful Death Claim

In most cases of wrongful death claims, the family and loved ones left behind have an idea of who else may have contributed to the passing. Periodically, wrongful deaths may also result from accidents in which no identifiable party acted negligently but where the victim’s family nonetheless seeks compensation for their loss.

Proving a wrongful death involves first determining whether or not the deceased was killed by an act that violated their civil rights (a crime) or died due to someone else’s negligence (civil). If it can be shown that an individual has been wrongfully killed, then the deceased’s family can recover damages.

How a Wrongful Death Attorney Helps

A wrongful death attorney may help a victim’s family file or investigate their claim with insurance companies, work to gather evidence that supports their argument, or negotiate a settlement. Wrongful death attorneys can also help family members with the financial aspects of their loss, including making funeral arrangements and providing emotional support to grieving families in different stages.

Conclusion

Wrongful death lawsuits can be based on various types of negligent acts, including defective or dangerous products, medical malpractice, criminal convictions, and even police brutality. In all cases, a wrongful death claim should be examined to see if a legitimate claim can be made. If a legitimate claim cannot be made, then the family and loved ones can at least have closure knowing they tried.

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Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen!

In the land of sheeple, those who willingly comply with “Ve need to see your papers!” show their lack of courage. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The “need to show your papers vaccination card” only exists if you willingly comply with it! Hundreds, thousands, millions did, when the Nazis overran Europe.

We like to think that the conquered people at least resisted, and didn’t like, being told “Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen!“, but, seeing how the sheeple in the United States are bending the knee to tyrants, I’m not so sure. We’ve already seen how feminist Amanda Marcotte wants, desperately wants, to have to show her papers vaccination card to get into her spin class, so we know that she’s willing to knuckle under to tyranny.

I’ve quoted enough for you to get the gist: the Inquirer story is tells you what to do if you’ve gotten your vaccination card laminated and you then need to document your booster shot. Not one word is written about the obtrusiveness and invasion of your privacy about having to carry and show the damned thing to get into restaurants and the like.

And if you don’t think that the State has been keeping track of you, think again!

    People vaccinated in the rest of the state can contact the Pennsylvania Statewide Immunization Information System (PA-SIIS) to get their full vaccination record (again, not a vaccine card replacement, but still proof that you have been vaccinated). Operated by the state health department, PA-SIIS is an immunization registry system that collects and organizes vaccine information.

Now we have the ignominy of Jeff Bezos selling handy three-packs of Badge Card Holder 4 X 3 Inches Id Cards Holder Working Card Protector Clear Vinyl Plastic Sleeve with Waterproof Type Resealable Zip (3 Pack), which you can wear around your neck like a good little sheep, and somehow, some way, no one sees anything wrong with this.

I’m sure if the government could figure out how to make the unvaccinated wear six-pointed yellow stars prominent identification badges, the Democrats would require such. But, since it’s proof of vaccination, not unvaccination, the identification cards would have to be issued to and worn by the vaccinated, and they might not like that.

Perhaps a laminated, picture identification to be worn on your shirt, like an employee ID badge. It could even have four spaces, in which a special mark could be placed, indicating how many doses of the vaccine you have had. After all, booster shots down the line will be pushed.

Heck, with that kind of system, we could mandate those badges for everyone, and the marks would tell us who hasn’t had even a single shot. They could be used for everything in society.

Except voting, of course; that would be wrong.

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics If you have a good case to make, getting caught using skewed statistics doesn't help you make it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would you buy a used car from Andy Beshear?

Beth Musgrave, from her Herald-Leader biography.

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

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

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

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

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.