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The electricity is out in parts of the Bluegrass State

On Friday, March 3rd, a severe windstorm blew through the Bluegrass State. There was some serious damage in several places, but though we had some pretty high winds near where I live, our farm suffered no damage at all. The road leading to our farm saw some trees downed, and one of the parishioners at our church said that her son had seen the roof blown off of his farm equipment storage shed, but, overall, it wasn’t too bad for us.

Then I saw the tweet screen captured on the right.

We didn’t lose power at the farm. It flickered a time or two, but that was it. We did lose the internet for about half an hour.

When I saw Evelyn Schultz’s tweet, I figured that I’d get a more detailed story from what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal, so I went to their website. Following a real belly-laugh at the website opening, in which a daily, except for Saturday, newspaper had a heading which still said it was March 3rd, which I screen captured here at 8:10 AM EST on Monday, March 6th, I found this one:

Updated: Major power outages persist across Kentucky. KU explains long Lexington outages

By Taylor Six | Sunday, March 5, 2023 | 9:05 PM EST

More than 100,000 customers throughout Kentucky were still without power Sunday evening as a result of a Friday windstorm – which one power company labeled as the third most damaging weather event in 20 years for their services.

According to the Kentucky Utilities website, Friday’s weather impacted more than 300,000 customers across their service area and brought down 2,500 power lines. It also broke more than 230 utility poles. This windstorm ranks behind the 2009 ice storm and the 2008 windstorm in terms of the number of customers affected and total system impact.

“We have every resource responding to this event, including an additional 1,500 resources from other utilities,” KU said on its website.

As of 10:30 a.m. Sunday, 70,000 KU & LGE customers were still without power statewide, according to Daniel Lowry, a spokesman for KU. In Lexington, he said about 38,000 were still without power.

Read more here.

As I have mentioned several times previously, electricity is our most vulnerable-to-the-weather utility. Water, sewer and natural gas utilities are run through underground pipes, but electricity is delivered via overhead wires. Even in the newer subdivisions in which electric lines are buried, power comes to substations via overhead wires.

The propane fireplace that is our secondary heat source. It sure is nice on really cold days.

Now, it’s not that cold this morning; my weather station told me that it was 38.8º Fahrenheit at 8:00 this morning, but it was slightly below freezing yesterday, at 30.1º F. I’m guessing that by Sunday morning, the people without power and who depended on electric water heaters, weren’t able to enjoy hot showers in the morning, weren’t able to have a hot breakfast if they had an electric range, and were pretty heavily bundled up in their own homes if they depend on electricity for heat. That, after all, happened to me in early March of 2018,[1]Working from memory, I have previously said that it was January of 2018, but I recently looked at my 2018 diary, and found out that it was actually March 12-15, 2018. when the sparktricity failed for 4½ days following a heavy snow-and-ice storm. Since we were remodeling anyway, we added a propane range, water heater, and fireplace, so if the power fails again, we’ll still have heat, hot water, and cooked meals.

But remember: the Biden Administration wants people to get rid of natural gas utilities and depend exclusively on electricity, all to fight global warming climate change!

It’s March, and with the arrival of meteorological spring, temperatures aren’t bitterly cold in the Bluegrass State. But winter weather is still persisting in large parts of the United States, in the inland west, the northern midwest, and New England. people in those regions, when the power fails, can face life-threatening conditions. More, it isn’t always spring when the power is down; it can happen at any time, including the depths of winter. What the climate activists want is for people to just plain die, because that would be the result of a multi-day power outage in upstate New York or Minnesota or Denver if the left get their way. The truth is simple: they really don’t give a damn about the people!

References

References
↑1 Working from memory, I have previously said that it was January of 2018, but I recently looked at my 2018 diary, and found out that it was actually March 12-15, 2018.
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WWIII Watch: New York Times OpEd says only way for Ukraine to win quickly is for full NATO weapons and troops deployment

My good friend William Teach pointed me to an OpEd in The New York Times. And yes, I stole borrowed the image at the right from him!

America Is In Over Its Head

By Thomas Meaney | Thursday, March 2, 2023

The greatest blunder President Vladimir Putin may have made so far in Ukraine is giving the West the impression that Russia could lose the war. The early Russian strike on Kyiv stumbled and failed. The Russian behemoth seemed not nearly as formidable as it had been made out to be. The war suddenly appeared as a face-off between a mass of disenchanted Russian incompetents and supercharged, savvy Ukrainian patriots.

Such expectations naturally ratcheted up Ukrainian war aims. President Volodymyr Zelensky was once a member of the peace-deal camp in Ukraine. “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” he declared one month into the conflict. Now he calls for complete victory: the reconquering of every inch of Russian-occupied territory, including Crimea. Polls indicate that Ukrainians will settle for nothing less. As battles rage across Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s leaders and some of their Western backers are already dreaming of Nuremberg-style trials of Mr. Putin and his inner circle in Moscow.

Can we tell the truth here? The only way that there could be “Nuremberg-style trials” of Vladimir Putin and his minions is if Russian forces were not only pushed all the way out of Ukraine, but Vladimir Putin’s government fell, and was completely replaced by, if not Western democrats, strongly anti-Putin forces. This means not just Ukraine retaining its sovereignty, but Russia being wholly defeated. Continue reading →

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When supposedly responsible people make irresponsible promises

Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, image from her campaign website. Click to enlarge.

That The Philadelphia Inquirer would not like a law-and-order Democrat like Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff[1]Even though married to a man named David McDuff, Mrs McDuff has not shown him the respect of taking his name. As stated in our Stylebook, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect … Continue reading is not much of a surprise. In an article published on February 15th on the four women running for the Democratic nomination for Mayor, she was listed last — which does happen when listed in alphabetical order — though the Inky did give her more words, 244, than Helen Gym Flaherty, 233, the #woke progressive who will probably be favored by the newspaper’s Editorial Board.

What Mrs McDuff posts as her campaign promises actually sounds reasonable, right up until it hits up against political reality:

Most shootings in Philadelphia are perpetrated with illegal firearms. Though the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania prevents Philadelphia from passing its own gun laws, it is within our legal authority to prosecute individuals possessing guns illegally. The Rhynhart Administration will aggressively pursue those trafficking illegal guns into our city, working in conjunction with law enforcement partners.

Recently, Philadelphia Police have been arresting more people for carrying illegal guns, but prosecutions have not kept pace. As Mayor, Rhynhart will convene a task force with the District Attorney’s Office, the Philadelphia Police, and the courts to review illegal firearm cases and ensure all three arms of the criminal justice system work cooperatively to eliminate illegal firearms from our streets.

The District Attorney is not a subordinate official to the Mayor, but is independently elected on his own, and the current DA, Larry Krasner, does not want to prosecute people for carrying “illegal guns,” and has said so openly:

“With so many guns available,” Krasner says, “a law enforcement strategy prioritizing seizing guns locally does little to reduce the supply of guns, and, if it entails increasing numbers of car and pedestrian stops, has the potential to be counterproductive by alienating the very communities that it is designed to help.” He notes that “people of color are disproportionately stopped in Philadelphia and arrested for illegal gun possession in Philadelphia and statewide.” African Americans, who represent 44 percent of Philadelphia’s population, account for about 80 percent of people arrested for illegal gun possession in the city.

The city’s George Soros-sponsored defense attorney now serving as chief prosecutor apparently cannot conceive of the notion that a higher percentage of blacks than whites are arrested for illegal firearms possession because perhaps, just perhaps, a higher percentage of black Philadelphians than whites are carrying guns illegally. Given that the vast majority of shooting and homicide victims in the city are black, you’d think he could figure that out on his own.

“Focusing so many resources on removing guns from the street while a constant supply of new guns is available is unlikely to stop gun violence, but it does erode trust and the perceived legitimacy of the system,” Krasner writes. “This in turn decreases the likelihood that people will cooperate and participate in the criminal legal system and associated processes, reducing clearance, conviction, and witness appearance rates.”

Krasner highlights an oddity of Pennsylvania law that compounds the racially disproportionate impact of arrests for illegal gun possession. For Pennsylvanians generally, carrying a concealed weapon without a license is a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to five years in jail and/or a maximum fine of $10,000. For Philadelphia residents, the same offense justifies an additional misdemeanor charge. As a local law firm explains, the combination of those two charges is “almost always graded as a felony,” which means “it may carry significant jail time even for defendants who do not have a prior criminal record.”

That Mr Krasner and his office could, if they so chose, not pursue the additional misdemeanor charge went unspoken, but given that city officials have long sought to be able to pass stricter gun control measures for Philadelphia, the whole thing becomes laughable: the District Attorney wouldn’t prosecute them anyway.

Yet Mrs McDuff just airily brushes that concern aside.

Sadly, it gets worse, which was my inspiration for this article. In this tweet, Mrs McDuff says, directly, “As your Mayor, I will reduce this homicide rate, I will cut it in half within my first term, from over 500 to under 250, where it was seven years ago.”[2]Direct quote from her spoken words, rather than the reduced version in the heading of the tweet.

At this point, I would note that even under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, the number of homicides was not cut from the 391 in the year before he took office to “under 250,” 246 to be precise, in his first term, but his sixth year in office, and that Administration had far less of a reduction to get under 250.

Mrs McDuff has promised to do something unprecedented. If she wins, will she decline to run for a second term if she fails to meet that first term promise?

References

References
↑1 Even though married to a man named David McDuff, Mrs McDuff has not shown him the respect of taking his name. As stated in our Stylebook, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect to husbands, and always refer to married women by their married names.
↑2 Direct quote from her spoken words, rather than the reduced version in the heading of the tweet.
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The one-world-government folks want to subject the United States to the United Nations, when they haven’t gotten their way under our laws

The one-world-government folks want to subject the United States to the United Nations, regardless of American law. From The Washington Post:

Almost 200 rights groups call on U.N. to intervene over U.S. abortion access

The U.S. cannot be a global champion of human rights when its own abortion rights are not protected, one activist group said

by Adela Suliman | Thursday, March 2, 2023 | 9:03 AM EST

Almost 200 human rights organizations from across the world have issued an “urgent appeal” to the United Nations to intervene to ensure the United States protects reproductive rights — after a Supreme Court ruling last year overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.

In a letter issued Thursday, nonprofits and civil society groups including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Global Justice Center, as well as dozens of smaller U.S.-based charities have written to the U.N. warning that “people residing in the US who can become pregnant are facing a human rights crisis.”

“(P)eople residing in the US who can become pregnant”? Guffaws! Footnote #1 of the letter, on page 5 of the .pdf file states, “While the remainder of this letter often refers to women and girls as the targets of laws restricting abortion, we recognize that although most people who can become pregnant and require abortion services are cisgender women, people with diverse gender identities are also affected and need abortions.” How can any sensible person take seriously the logic of people who would say something that stupid?

It comes after the Supreme Court ruling last year, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, struck down reproductive protections enshrined in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, igniting a seismic social and legal change in the country by shifting power to regulate abortions into the hands of individual states. A majority of justices argued that Roe v. Wade’s reasoning was “weak” and that the issue of abortion should be considered by “the people’s elected representatives,” in a decision that was a long-sought triumph for conservatives.

At least a dozen states have moved to ban or heavily restrict abortions since Dobbs.

The 196 signatories to Thursday’s letter describe “intensifying harms” occurring in the United States as a result of the legal ruling.

It says approximately 22 million women and girls of reproductive age in the United States are living in states where “abortion access is heavily restricted, and often totally inaccessible,” causing them to face a plethora of public health harms.

Of course, the letter writers think nothing of the harms which come to the unborn children who are slaughtered, all for the convenience of the pregnant woman. I’m reminded of Tuesday’s editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer, in which the Editorial Board urged the City Council to rename Taney Street, named after Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott v Sandford decision, who wrote that blacks are “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Editorial Board, as you might guess, are all in on supporting abortion rights, despite the fact that abortion means that unborn children are, to paraphrase, “so far inferior, that they had no rights which adults were bound to respect.”

“By overturning the established constitutional protection for access to abortion and through the passage of state laws, the US is in violation of its obligations under international human rights law,” it says, detailing violations to the right to life, health and privacy, among others.

U.N. human rights bodies have previously spoken out against last year’s ruling, calling it a “major setback” and a “huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality.”

Apparently “women’s human rights and gender equality” don’t include the human rights of the children aborted, half of whom are girls.

“We sent this letter to draw the world’s attention to the suffering that US abortion law is inflicting on women, girls and others who can become pregnant,” Christine Ryan, legal director of the Global Justice Center, which uses international law to advocate for gender equality, said in an emailed statement.

There’s considerably more at the original, but it’s much the same as quoted above, a cry that women have rights and not-yet-born children have none, along with the call that the United Nations should Do Something to bring the United States into line.

Well, f(ornicate) that! The United Nations has no authority that the United States is, or ought to be, bound to respect.

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The government in the Mile High City wants to run your life for you

In 1971, Jonathan Edwards released a song called Sunshine, and part of the lyrics are:

Sunshine go away today
I don’t feel much like dancing
Some man’s gone, he’s tried to run my life
Don’t know what he’s asking

He tells me I’d better get in line
Can’t hear what he’s saying
When I grow up, I’m going to make it mine
But these aren’t dues I been paying

How much does it cost, I’ll buy it
The time is all we’ve lost, I’ll try it
But he can’t even run his own life
I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine, Sunshine

Well, there certainly are a whole lot of people who want to run other people’s lives! From The Denver Gazette:

Denver imposes natural gas ban on heating, cooling equipment in commercial buildings, multi-family housing

Scott Weiser | Monday, February 27, 2023

New building codes in Denver will ban natural gas furnaces and water heaters in new commercial and multifamily construction starting in 2024 in a move that officials said demonstrates the city’s commitment to reaching “zero” emissions in two decades but which critics warned would be painful and costly to building owners and tenants.

And by 2027, natural gas will not be permitted for any heating or cooling equipment in new commercial buildings, the city’s building officials said in a news release.

These restrictions do not apply to gas stoves.

Sheer bovine feces: if natural gas will not be permitted for the primary application for natural gas, heating, it makes no economic sense to apply for and install gas lines for the much lower use in gas ranges. Continue reading →

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Don’t waste time and money trying for a death sentence which will never be carried out

Sergeant Mark Fusetti is a retired Philadelphia Police officer, who last served on the Warrant Squad, and one of my electronic friends. His major concern right now — other than helping his friend Sam Oropeza gat on the ballot for a Philadelphia City Council At Large seat — is crime in the City of Brotherly Love. The fatal shooting of Temple Police Officer Christopher Fitzgerald, allegedly by a privileged punk kid from Bucks County, has Sgt Fusetti, and many of the other law-and-order conservatives in and around Philly rightly concerned.

There are a lot of responses to Sgt Fusetti’s tweet, and almost all of them call for the death penalty in this case. Continue reading →

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The internal segregation in Philly is only going to increase.

Philadelphia has a ‘diverse’ population — and I’ve come to despise the word ‘diverse’ — as a whole, but, as The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, is one of our most internally segregated large cities.

  • The eight-county region’s Black-white residential segregation is the fourth highest among the 20 biggest metropolitan areas, as defined by the Census Bureau. The region is the sixth-most segregated between Hispanic and white residents.
  • Among the 30 biggest cities, Philadelphia is second only to Chicago in its level of residential segregation between Black and white residents, according to data from Brown University. Between Hispanic and white residents, it’s the sixth-most segregated.
  • Considering every U.S. county that has at least 10,000 people and a Black population of at least 5%, Philadelphia is more segregated than 94% of them.
  • While residential segregation between Black and white residents has declined nationwide over the last several decades, it’s happened much slower in Philadelphia. The city’s position near the top of rankings of segregated places has stayed almost the same since 1980

The newspaper’s Editorial Board were aghast that the internal segregation of the City of Brotherly Love has meant that black and Hispanic residents feel far less safe than white residents. However, sometimes economic stories address the issue in ways that the opinion writers don’t notice: Continue reading →

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Secular liberalism has infected religion, and liberal religion has infected secular politics

And here I thought that Catholic bishops and priests were supposed to be guided by the Bible in which they have professed belief!

On same-gender blessings specifically, (Bishop Helmut) Dieser (of Aachen, Germany) challenged the Vatican’s ban on them, saying priests and other pastoral ministers should be guided by their consciences when deciding on whether to bless couples.

Diocese Promotes Valentine’s Day Blessings with Photo of Queer Couple Kissing

Continue reading →

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Someone needs to check the water supply in Loudoun County Something is making public officials lie through their scummy teeth

It seems that Loudoun County, Virginia, isn’t the greatest place to work or go to school.

Remember the sexual assault by a ‘transgender’ student against a girl in the girls’ bathroom, which came to light when the victim’s father was demanding answers from the school board, and then dragged to the floor and arrested. It was all a big right-wing myth, the credentialed media told us:

The media’s defense of transgenderism fell apart quickly when the rapist was found guilty. Continue reading →