Has your income increased 58.39% since November of 2020? Gasoline prices have increased that much!

With Thanksgiving just a week away, many people have their minds on travel plans, to visit extended family a long way away. Fortunately for us, Thanksgiving travel means a whopping 18 miles, to my sister’s house.

Screen capture by D R Pico, November 16, 2023.

Stephanie Abrams of The Weather Channel gave us an interesting map of fuel prices across the fruited plain, and it shows just what you’d expect: in states where the government wants a deeper bite into your wallet, it’s going to cost you more to visit the relatives!

Here in the Bluegrass State, the average price as shown by the American Automobile Association is $3.037 per gallon, though the station closest to me has $2.959 per gallon for regular posted. I pay close attention to Pennsylvania, where we used to live, and the average price for regular is currently $3.607 per gallon, 57¢ higher than in Kentucky.

Kentucky is right in the middle when it comes to state taxes on gasoline, 26th in the nation at 30.10¢ per gallon, while Pennsylvania is third, charging 62.20¢ per gallon. As you’d obviously guess, the Pyrite State, California, tops the list, taxing its people.

Interestingly, Illinois, which has the second highest tax rate on fuel, at 66.5¢ per gallon, shares a birder with Missouri, with the second lowest, 17.47¢. Continue reading

Couldn’t we build something like this in Kensington?

In the two-part episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine entitled Past Tense, Part 1 and Part 2, a transporter accident lands Commander Benjamin Sisko, Dr Julian Bashir, and Lt Commander Jadzia Dax in San Francisco, in the year 2024. From Wikipedia:

Sisko and Bashir are found by a pair of police officers, who believe them to be vagrants and warn them to get off the streets. They are escorted to a “Sanctuary District”, a walled-off ghetto that is used to contain the poor, the sick, the mentally disabled, and anyone else who cannot support themselves.

Well, who would have thought that it would be so prescient!

Liberal City Builds Walls To Protect Elite, Clears Out Homeless

by Andrew Sanders | Tuesday, November 14, 2023 Continue reading

Money talks When you piss off your donors, they might just choose not to continue to give you money!

The First Street Journal has covered the backlash of deep-pockets donors against the outbreak of anti-Semitism on our college campuses. Now it seems as though the colleges are very upset when those deep-pocket donors exercise their freedom of speech. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Penn’s donor backlash raises questions about how much influence philanthropists should have

Ronald Lauder told Penn president Liz Magill he didn’t want faculty involved in the Palestine Writes festival teaching at the Penn institute that bears his family’s name.

by Susan Snyder | Sunday, November 12, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST Continue reading

You in a heap o’ trouble, girl!

At some point, you’d think that education professionals, all of whom have collegiate degrees, would be smarter than this, but I guess if you did think that, you’d be wrong. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A guidance counselor at a Bucks County middle school had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student, police say

Kelly Schutte had multiple sexual encounters with the teen this year, both in her car and at the teen’s home in West Rockhill Township, according to police.

by Vinny Vella | Friday, November 10, 2023 | 12:52 PM EST | Updated: 2:21 PM EDT Continue reading

Another deep-pockets Ivy League donor tells the pro-Hamas students to go to Hell Go directly to Hell, do not pass Go, do not collect $2,000,000

We noted, just yesterday, that despite the noisy pro-Palestinian demonstrations on our college campuses and in large cities, only about 20% of Democrats support Hamas, and that, even surveying only those in the 18-to-24-year-old age bracket, Hamas enjoyed less support than Israel. The radicals are both the noisy and stupid ones.

As for colleges themselves? We have also noted how some deep-pockets donors are closing their checkbooks and job offers in the face of the anti-Semitism being displayed. Now, yet another college is losing a billionaire donor. From Forbes: Continue reading

Rashida Tlaib and the rest of the Usual Suspects prove the need for a strong, independent, affirmatively Jewish Israel!

We are being told by the people the credentialed media use as spokesthings, like Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the now-censured congresscritter from Detroit and a ‘Palestinian-American,’ if such an oxymoron can actually exist, that all the Palestinians want is their freedom. They don’t hate Israelis specifically, or Jews more generally, but just want their freedom. Mrs Tlaib even tried to claim that the mantra, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” as not being anti-Israeli at all, but no one actually believed her.

However, there’s an obvious question: do the (purported) leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement in the West actually represent the crowds behind them. The tweet I retweeted from @StopAntisemitism is just one of hundreds they’ve posted, documenting people living in the United States and Canada showing us exactly who they are. The Stop Antisemitism site is doing great work in exposing and identifying those people, and letting their colleges or employers know just who they are, and many have found their way to the unemployment line. If you think that’s a bad thing, just imagine how employers would react if one of their employees was caught on video calling for the death of [insert virtually forbidden slang for Negroes here].

Of course, even those stupid enough perhaps to want to say that kind of thing about blacks are generally not stupid enough to say it on tape, which means that they are at least not as stupid as the anti-Semites! Continue reading

Three pages of Nashville shooter’s notebooks leaked

Steven Crowder, host of Louder with Crowder, a daily political podcast and YouTube channel with commentary segments, somehow got possession of photographs of three pages of the ‘Death Day’ notebook of Audrey Hale, the 28-year-old white woman who was so mentally ill that she thought she was a male named ‘Aiden,’ and who killed six people at the Covenant School outside of Nashville, Tennessee. Plenty of other people, including Robert Stacy McCain, have commented on Miss Hale’s notebook — I can’t seriously call it a ‘manifesto’ — and the fact that Miss Hale was just plain off-her-rocker.

Rather, what interests me is the reaction from the authorities: Continue reading

In Which Trudy Rubin Tells Us That She Doesn’t Understand War In calling for a ceasefire, the left are telling us that they want Hamas to win

We have previously mentioned Trudy Rubin, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s columnist who, according to her bio, “tries to make sense of the world’s chaos and conflicts as they affect Americans at home.” Alas! If she is trying to “make sense” of chaos and conflicts, perhaps it would help if she actually understood what war really means. Continue reading

Rashida Tlaib thinks that you are too stupid to understand what Hamas are

I will admit that I have never thought much of the intelligence of the members of the congressional ‘squad’ of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and their fellow travelers. I’ve referred to them as the ‘squadristi’, the singular being ‘squadrista,’ which is what the Italians called Benito Mussolini’s ‘Black Shirts,’ because their policies call for fascistic control.

But Mrs Tlaib seems determined to prove that either she is an ignorant twit, or she believes the rest of us are. The “unbossed congresswoman, Detroiter, Palestinian American Muslima” as she describes herself in her Twitter bio, tweeted:

From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate. My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.

We could all see that the Hamas invaders who attacked southern Israel didn’t seem to have “peaceful coexistence” on their minds on October 7th, did they? Continue reading