Archive for the ‘News/opinion’ Category

Opinions on Haiti, Woke Raytheon, A Matter of Honor, Catholics Demanding Refunds and a name for What’s been happening to my wife Under the Fedora

Posted: July 11, 2021 by datechguy in blogs, business, catholic, Church doctrine, culture, entertainment, News/opinion, under the fedora
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Saw this at Don Surber’s site this morning on the assignation of the president of Haiti:

Why do I get the feeling the Clintons and their fake foundation are entangled in this mess?

Maybe it wasn’t an assassination.

Maybe it was Arkancide.

My best friend at work is a 70 year old Hattian man who is a naturalized citizen. When I asked him about the assassination last week he offered a similar opinion on what happened over there.

My first employer out of college was Raytheon and I worked there with secret clearance for three years during the climax of the cold war (until I opened my comic book store). now I’m thinking that I might want to take that off my resume after this:

ATTENTION EMPLOYEES, MOVE OUT OF THE WAY BY GETTING ANOTHER JOB NOW:  Raytheon CRT Training: White Employees “must work on ‘recognizing [their] privilege’ and ‘step aside’ for minorities”.

The company will then go the way of every company that hires for reasons other than competence. And they deserve it.

As this is a defense contractor as long as the left has power their bottom line is not endangered but I’ll bet a lot of 80 year old Russian spies are wishing they had managed to pull this off 30 years earlier.

My favorite show when I was seven years old was the Richard Greene series The Adventures of Robin Hood which was televised on WMUR about 30 minutes before I had to wake up for school. While they had it on the air I never was late getting up.

I was reminded of the show or rather a particular line I saw this story out of Boston:

Judge William Young has just announced in court that he is withdrawing the Opinion he issued dismissing the case brought by a Boston parents group over the so-called Boston “Zip Code Quota Plan.” For background see our posts:

The key bit:

“This was my opinion, my signature’s on it, I was misled”

“The opinion is wrong, it’s wrong because the facts on which it was based … an opinion I issued under my signature is factually incorrect”

“I’m inclined to withdraw the opinion, I’ve never done that [before in 35 years]”

“I work very hard on my opinions, and this one’s no good.”

The clerk will enter the note: “The opinion entered in this case is withdrawn on the ground the court is satisfied it is factually inaccurate in certain material effects.”

Any judge appointed in Massachusetts over the last 35 years is likely a liberal but a person of that age might not like the idea of their personal honor being tarnished. In the old days even a villains didn’t want to be seen as breaking their word in public.

Give it a few years more and I’m sure the state with only those brought up woke to choose from will not have to worry about this problem again.

One of the things I constantly argue is that things will not change until there are consequences for the left, like this:

Anthony and Barbara Scarpo noted how the Academy of the Holy Names in Tampa even named its auditorium “Scarpo Family Theatre” after their huge pledge in 2017, saying they were helping it raise $9 million in total.

But now the parents want their money back — including tuition paid for their two daughters — in outrage at how the school turned its back on Catholicism to go “woke,” their 13-count, 45-page lawsuit claims.

The Scarpos claim they were betrayed by the school suddenly “embracing the new, politically correct, divisive and ‘woke’ culture where gender identity, human sexuality, and pregnancy termination among other ‘hot-button issues,’ took center stage,” the lawsuit said.

I couldn’t help but remember when my oldest had been offered a big scholarship at the Anna Maria College but when we visited it it turned out to be “Catholic” in name and fundraising only (although the president in response to my letter to the bishop claimed otherwise. Which thanks to this story turned into yesterday’s lead post twelve years later.

A lot of catholic institutions make a lot of money off of donors who don’t know that their Catholic identity is only visible when asking them for checks.

Finally I just got this link via email concerning Long Haul COVID-19 Syndrome (LHCS) a sample:

The Long Haul COVID-19 Syndrome (LHCS) is an often debilitating syndrome characterized by a multitude of symptoms such as prolonged malaise, headaches, generalized fatigue, sleep difficulties, smell disorder, decreased appetite, painful joints, dyspnea, chest pain and cognitive dysfunction. The incidence of symptoms after COVID-19 varies from as low as 10% to as high as 80%. LHCS is not only seen after the COVID-19 infection but it is being observed in some people that have received vaccines (likely due to monocyte activation by the spike protein from the vaccine). A puzzling feature of the LHCS syndrome is that it is not predicted by initial disease severity; post-COVID-19 frequently affects mild-to-moderate cases and younger adults that did not require respiratory support or intensive care.

The symptom set of LHCS in the majority of cases is very similar to the chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS)/myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, although in LHCS, symptoms tend to improve slowly in the majority of the cases. Furthermore, the similarity between the mast cell activation syndrome and LHCS has been observed, and many consider post-COVID-19 to be a variant of the mast cell activation syndrome. LHCS is highly heterogenous and likely results from a variety of pathogenetic mechanisms. Furthermore, it is likely that delayed treatment (with ivermectin) in the early symptomatic phase will result in a high viral load, which increases the risk and severity of LHCS.

This describes what happened to my wife (who is still out of work since March and things are starting to get tight around here) perfectly. But I note that some people who have gotten this because of the vaccines.

Now I don’t blame the developers, these vaccines were done in a hurry because of the emergency and this was a new disease but it’s one more thing to consider when deciding if you want to get the shot or not.

Having already had COVID I don’t see the need myself, I’ve already got the antibodies.

DaTechGuy’s Two Generation Rule We Demonize Police At Our Peril

Posted: July 5, 2021 by datechguy in culture, News/opinion
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Martin: You risk your skin catching killers and the juries turn them loose so they can come back and shoot at you again. If you’re honest you’re poor your whole life and in the end you wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star.

High Noon 1952

One of the things that my study of history has told me is that radical horrible change usually takes two generations to really have the impact to destroy a society.

For example when you removed prayer from the public schools it wasn’t a big deal for the first few years because all the adults , all the teachers and all the students still knew and remembered the cultural lesions that they entailed.

One generation later things were a lot worse but not completely gone because even though the kids were not being taught the cultural lessons their teachers had been and the adults running the land had been brought up with them so there was still some restraint on disaster.

But by the 2nd generation neither the teachers nor the students they had were exposed to the cultural lessons that the older generation still remembered and that generation that had embraced the rejection of those lesions found themselves wondering why police were required in classrooms, why drug gangs were running rampant in cities and that teens and twenty somethings could not cope in a world so much easier than the one they grew up in.

Generations of kids not brought up with a moral code (and also not brought up with mothers in the house but instead raised by daycare strangers who aren’t teaching any moral code) have led to a society willing to walk away from basic freedoms and responsibilities because they were never given an understanding of them.

Thus we went from a generation that was told they were entitled to a trophy for showing up to being entitled to EVERYTHING.

But now with Critical Race Theory on the rise and the teachers Unions embracing it nationally with its demonization of police it’s about to get a lot worse in a few years.

For generations we treated police officers with respect in our schools, in our culture. Kids dreamed of being police officers to “Serve and Protect”. Now we have labeled police as villains, as evil racists as beyond the pale and we are giving that message to our kids in public schools.

Tell me how many of those kids that you are teaching this to now will decide that law enforcement is a good career option in ten years or in twenty?

Cities defunding police is a bad idea, the left and media targeting police to the point where they are retiring en masse is even worse but when you teach your kids that police officers are bad then it won’t matter how much you fund police, you won’t have people willing to do the job.

And it won’t just be the kids who aren’t taught this running away. Children of police officers who know the truth, who see their fathers and mothers doing an honorable job to protect their communities are watching what’s being done to their parents and will decide that despite pay and incentives it’s not the place for them.

If you think the cities are in bad shape just wait till we have two generation of this funneling though the system and cities desperate for any kind of police presence wave standards that are taken for granted today.

If this isn’t nipped in the bud now this is the future we are creating for our children and grand children, but not of course for those of the elites or the Build Large Mansions squad. They and the backers who are financing this will make sure they have enough for gated communities with well armed security so that they and theirs will not have to suffer the consequences of their actions.

Unexpectedly of course.

Stopping cities from Defunding the Police is important but it isn’t the primary battle, it’s a smoke screen a feint by the left and our enemies who fund them.

Stopping our culture form demonizing the police in the classroom and to our kids is the make or break fight we have to win as a society, because if we don’t we won’t have a society left to protect.

Chicago has a street gang problem not a gun problem

Posted: June 27, 2021 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, News/opinion, politics
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Gang temple in 2016 on Chicago’s South Side

By John Ruberry

Last week President Joe Biden and attorney general Merrick Garland announced the latest get-tough on illegal gun sales effort.

Unless I missed it, there was no mention from either men of the major underlying reason for most murders in big cities such as Chicago: out of control street gangs.

While it’s America’s third-largest city Chicago, with about 2.7 residents, has more gang members than any other–about 100,000. 

I’m having a heck of a time finding recent statistics on the percentage of shootings in Chicago that are gang-related–so my guess is that they are no longer being tabulated. Perhaps that has something to do with the monumentally stupid deciscion by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to eliminate Chicago’s gang crimes unit in 2012. His successor, leftist ideologue Lori Lightfoot, is unlikely to bring it back. Fortunately for decent Chicagoans there are less than two years left in her term.

However, while speaking of Chicago’s gang culture in 2015, then-Chicago Police superintendant Garry McCarthy said, “It’s very frustrating to know that it’s like seven percent of the population causes 80% of the violent crime.”

What about the shootings?

“Eighty-three percent of the shooting victims in Chicago are black,” Fox Chicago’s Mike Flannery said on his Flannery Fired Up show this weekend, “and about 96 percent are black and brown.” Of course not all shooting victims are gang members. Some are small children.

With such a small population committing so many violent crimes, it’s pretty easy to determine the most-direct way to attack violent crime in Chicago and other big cities. But big city mayors, all of whom are Democrats, don’t seem to be spoiling for this necessary fight against street gangs.

In Chicago it’s worse. Chicago magazine, in a 2011 article that has been sadly overlooked, “Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance,” exposed several job-fair type meetings between aldermanic candidates and people representing street gangs. The messsage the organizer of those meetings, Hal Baskin, a candidate for the City Council that year and a former gang leader who died in 2018, received was clear to him. “Who do I need to be talking to so I can get the gangs on board?”

Gangs not only are part of the criminal culture of Chicago, but they are part of the political one as well. Which partly explains why politicians in Chicago regulary decry “gun violence” but not gang violence. Gangs and politics go back decades, including the time when Chicago was overwhelmingly white. While not a gang in the modern sense, the Hamburg Athletic Club, which did not peddle drugs, was involved in politics. The “Hamburgers” were blamed for some of the violence of the bloody 1919 Race Riot in Chicago, part of the tragic “Red Summer” that year. Three years after the riot future Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was the president of the Hamburg Athletic Club. 

In 1984 while running for president, Jesse Jackson publicly thanked the infamous El Rukn gang for their help in a voter registration drive. The gang’s founder, Jeff Fort, is now an inmate at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Jackson’s half-brother, Noah Robinson, is serving a life sentence for murder and racketeering schemes that involved the El Rukns. 

In the 1990s the Gangster Disciples gang, which was started by Larry Hoover, now a lifer at the supermax, founded a political organization, 21st Century V.O.T.E. They were organizing a national gang summit at the Congress Hotel in Chicago, where I was working at the time. Man oh man, that was a wretched experience. Oh, Al Sharpton was there. Isn’t that special!

Back to 2011:

According to that Chicago magazine article there were similar gang-pol gatherings before 2011. 

I have no proof but I suspect such meetings still occur. After all we are discussing Chicago, one of the most corrupt cities in America. 

Chicago’s aldermen are notoriously crooked, since 1973 over thirty members have been sentenced to federal prison. Do the math, that’s one “public official” locked away every 18 months.

So, how many Chicago public figures have ties, however casual, with gangs? We’ll probably never know. 

One current Chicago alderman who sees the truth on gangs is Raymond Lopez of the Southwest Side’s 15th Ward. “If you really want to get to what is at the heart of a lot of this [the violence], it is gangs, and it is the borderline collapse of the family unit in many of our neighborhoods,” Lopez told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview. “Lightfoot] has avoided calling out gangs in our community as a source of violence in our city.”

In a Tweet, Lopez offered indirect support to the “broken windows” theory of policing. Big time criminals also commit petty crimes. “In less than 24 hours, a new gang ‘family’ moved onto a block, they immediately opened a fire hydrant after settling in, and just moments ago took to shooting at a passing vehicle.” Lopez Tweeted two weeks ago. “The property owner can expect a call from me tomorrow. I want them gone. Now!”

Instead of “defunding the police” the far-left is now parsing their words, calling their approach “reimagining the police.” I’m calling for reimagining law enforcement. Federal authorities, to crush the gangs that have destroyed American cities, they need to aggressively utilize wiretaps, informants, and offering those who testify against gangs participation in the witness protection program.

Street gangs nation wide need to be neutered by the feds. Just like they did to the mafia.

It would take many years for such a crackdown to succeed but that should take care of the urban gun violence problem.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

The Realties of Portland, Sodomy, Media, Lemon and Sen Whitehouse Under the Fedora.

Posted: June 23, 2021 by datechguy in media, News/opinion
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Yesterday I talked about the ads that Ted Wheeler ran in the NYT about coming to Portland and noting that times readers just might be dumb enough to buy what he’s selling.

But the LPGA isn’t:

The LPGA moved the Portland Classic to a suburb for the first time in 50 years due to safety concerns in the city.

The event usually takes place at the Columbia Edgewater Country Club in Northeast Portland.

Reality doesn’t care what the left’s meme of the day is.

Speaking of reality Joy Behar is apparently in trouble for making a joke about the reality of what being “Gay” is and I don’t see what the problem is myself:

I thought this entire month was supposed to be dedicated to how wonderful Sodomy is and how proud we are supposed to be of those who practice it and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a bigot. Why it’s almost as if reminding people what it actually is and actually entails might actually cause them to have a viscreal reaction that could change their mind about it.

It reminded me of when years ago the left did all they could to keep a broadcast of an abortion off the air because it’s hard to sell the idea that a baby isn’t a baby at 14 weeks when you see it dismembered.

Speaking of reality the left has done all it can to keep the American people in a liberal echo chamber but something jumped out from citizen free press which is a spot I visit daily for news:

The earliest date I could find for Citizen Free Press in the Wayback Machine was June 3rd of 2017 which means in that in four years they have outstripped ABC, NBC & the LA times and is on the verge of passing the Hill in monthly page views to break into the top 10 on this list. That’s without any cross promotion from any major media which does all it can to suppress what they cover.

The echo chamber may resonate but the reality is that millions every month are getting the information they are trying to suppress and the more the MSM remains an echo chamber the more likely alternate sites like Citizen free press will be sought out and grow.

Speaking of reality we keep hearing about how racist America is from places like CNN in general and from people like Don Lemon in particular to wit:

Lemon declared in a recent Washington Post interview that former President Donald Trump was “the necessary wake-up for America to realize just how racist it is.” Lemon, who recently penned a book, “This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism,” fancies himself an authority on the subject. 

It will come as no surprise however that he chooses to live in a town that is 3% black far away from the the various black lives matters protest that he has supported over the last several years and the violence of the communities that he downplays. I suspect that’s because reality doesn’t care about the rhetoric from a millionaire who talks about being oppressed when it comes to black lives mattering he’s referring to his own.

Finally I’m got a message for the American Thinker who used the title Sheldon Whitehouse has a racism problem. He does not. Yeah he’s a racist but it’s not a problem at least not for him. Anyone on the right who thinks that the Sheldon Whitehouse story is going to generate any outrage or traction from the left is fooling themselves.

Think for a second, if they didn’t follow thorough on Ralph “Blackface” Northam if it risked an election in Virginia and had no problem putting congressman Eric Swalwell back on the intelligence committee in the house when he’s banging a Chinese Spy what on earth would make anyone think that the left/media/democrat complex would say boo to Sheldon Whitehouse when he is the 50th vote for them in the Senate

The reality is that Marxists are always about power, ALWAYS.

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