Posted on

The Un-Unhinged Left

See the source image
Transgender athlete Rachel McKinnon, a biological male who identifies as female, won the women’s Masters Track Cycling World Championships sprint title for the second year in a row in 2019.

I have this question.  You can join a political movement, but how do you join a sex?  The seasoned actor Alan Alda used to call himself a proud feminist, but would it be reasonable for him to announce that he is now a woman, if he was so inclined?  The thought came to mind after reading about some celebrity leftists coming to the conclusion that the ultimate of identity politics, self-identity, has its limits.  The prospect of former men, now declaring themselves to be women, shattering women’s NCAA and Olympic records and sidelining women who were born women may have revitalized the obvious truism that chromosomes matter in physical activities.  At some point, politics must face reality.

J.K. Rowling was one of the first lefties to the realization of the reality.  She noticed that trans-ideology was the invasion route of men into women’s athletics and the obliteration of the athletic prowess of “menstruators”.  As such, she has come under withering fire from hyper-activist “trans”-women.  Other brave female voices have joined her as they too confront “cancellation” from the usual sources.  That’s why they are courageous.

May be an image of 2 people, people standing and text that says 'ERLIME'
Bette Midler and Macy Gray

Recently Bette Midler tweeted the following: “WOMEN OF THE WORLD!  We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name!  They don’t call us ‘women’ anymore; they call us ‘birthing people’ or ‘menstruators’, and even ‘people with vaginas’! Don’t let them erase you!  Every human on earth owes you!”

The singer Macy Gray was succinct when she stated in an interview, “I will say this and everyone’s gonna hate me, but as a woman, just because you go change your parts, doesn’t make you a woman, sorry.”

See below:

NY Times columnist Pamela Paul, no right-winger by any stretch, echoing Gray, said, “Even the word ‘women’ has become verboten.”  And further, “In its place are unwieldy terms like ‘pregnant people,’ ‘menstruators’ and ‘bodies with vaginas . . . . [this is a] bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.”

The Left may be unhinged in many of their social, economic, and political views, but they aren’t so crazy as to accept the move to make women’s sports an offshoot of men’s sports.  Call these brave voices the un-unhinged Left.

May be an illustration of indoor and text

RogerG

*Bette Midler’s tweet: https://twitter.com/BetteMidler/status/1543979948611981313?s=20&t=O37Tc0ny2mm7Zx2ooddPzg
*Macy Gray’s comment on Piers Morgan’s “Uncensored” show: https://youtu.be/K3eWYEaOqDk
*Paul’s statement: https://news.yahoo.com/pamela-paul-criticized-anti-trans-192133188.html
*Great piece by columnist Madelein Kearns on the subject: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/trans-skepticism-goes-mainstream/

Posted on

Too Much Faith in Government. Highland Park Is Proof.

Police officers walk through the crime scene the day after a mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill., July 5, 2022. (Photo: Cheney Orr/Reuters)

Biden’s poll numbers are in the toilet.  The celebrity-activist base of the Democratic Party screams at White House operatives in Zoom sessions to do something about the coming red wave in November.  They complain that Biden seems mentally adrift, the administration is slow, the messaging is off – which is true to some degree.  But here’s the kicker: their problems have little to do with presentation but has everything to do with the message itself.

What ties the crowd on the left together is a fanatical belief in government’s ability to accomplish anything.  Thus, we have the peddling of the $5-trillion Build Back Better in an economy heating up after COVID, inflation, shortages, a full-frontal assault on affordable energy, ending wars in catastrophe, crime spiking all over, schools as lefty indoctrination centers amidst plummeting test scores, and a childish and obsessive campaign to eliminate inequalities in socio-economic numbers (statistical disparities).  The problem is not the form of message presentation.  It’s the message! Ideas certainly have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences.

The Highland Park shooting is a case study in the error of following false political gods.  It didn’t take long for the bright stars of the Illinois political firmament – Gov. Pritzker and the state’s two Senators – to blame the gun.  So, they trot out the banal litany of rhetoric about “gun violence”, “assault weapons”, “weapons of war”, and high-capacity magazines while they ignore their own culpability.  Yes, culpability: their responsibility for not enforcing their own laws or recognizing that many of their go-to ideas are pointless.

The new so-called “bipartisan” federal gun control law parallels much in Illinois state law.  Illinois has a comprehensive red flag law, a gun ownership permit system, universal background checks, bans on straw purchases, and a prohibition on conceal carry at most public gatherings.  Highland Park chimes in with their bans on “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines”.  The state and town are covered in gun laws, and none of it stopped the killer’s rampage.

And where did all of this end up?  The killer still purchased his gun, in spite of documented run-ins with police, a red flag law, and a robust list of prohibitions in the state’s gun-purchase check system.  The streets of Chicago would remind anyone of Baghdad at the height of the insurrection in 2003.  15 people were murdered in the city on the day of the Highland Park shooting.  Other Democrat-run fiefdoms with similar Byzantine entanglements of gun laws have become war zones.  2022 has already witnessed “250 murders in Philadelphia, 175 murders in Los Angeles, and 102 murders in Washington, D.C.” (see below for source)

The reason for the progressive failure is something that never crossed the mind of the participants of the Zoom call between Biden hirelings and the party’s high-profile activists.  It is the simple fact that laws must be faithfully executed (in the words of the US Constitution) before they become real.  It’s the human factor.  With Democrat governance comes permissive law enforcement, particularly in the form of non-prosecution, selective prosecution, or reduced prosecution.  Honestly, it could be that their favorite gun laws can’t be enforced without running afoul of their other cherished ideals, like reduced incarceration rates.  Regardless, we end up in the same place: urban hellscapes.

In the end, the miscreant in Highland Park still got his hand on a gun for a sniper’s nest to kill July 4th revelers.  Pritzker and company should first examine their own derelictions before they harass the general public with more laws that they’ll fail to enforce or won’t make any difference.

Simply passing a law and then a retreat to their uptown soiree and exclusive gated community won’t cut it.  For me, passing laws that they refuse to enforce is grounds for impeachment.  Are you listening people of Illinois?

RogerG

*Source:

An excellent column on the gun issue and HIghland Park:  When Gun Laws Don’t Prevent Gun Crime | National Review

Posted on

People Don’t Know Roe and Dobbs

Pro-life demonstrators celebrate outside the United States Supreme Court as the court rules in the Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization abortion case overturning Roe v. Wade in Washington, D.C., June 24, 2022. (Photo: Michael Mccoy/Reuters)

Journalism is a disgrace.  Their job is to inform.  They don’t.  They have become a platform for their collective biases and prejudices, which are about as well-informed as the general public that they serve.  Thus, when opinion polls are conducted on the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe, glaring contradictions stand out in public perceptions of Roe, Dobbs, and abortion.  We may as well disregard the polls except as proof of the press’s dereliction of duty.

Take the recent Harvard-Harris poll after the announcement of the Dobbs decision.  We certainly can hold two ideas in our heads at the same time, but what if they are contradictions? In the Harvard-Harris poll, 55% opposed the overturning of Roe, yet 72% would limit abortion to 15 weeks.  So, they want abortion possibly up to birth which is the essence of Roe and the later Casey decision, but then say that they don’t.  Go ahead, try to square that circle.

Let’s further pick apart Roe and Casey and Dobbs and the poll. Roe has a “health of the mother” standard wrapped into a trimester scheme.  Casey replaced that concoction with an admonition against placing an “undue burden” on a woman’s choice.  Either way, there’s enough room to authorize abortion at birth.  That’s Roe/Casey, and where 55% are. . . until they aren’t.

Then we have Dobbs.  It affirmed the constitutionality of the Mississippi law that allowed abortion up to 15 weeks, where 72% of the public stands.  55% or 72%, which is it?

The American press, what a mess, what an embarrassment.

RogerG

*The Harvard-Harris poll here: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/HHP_June2022_KeyResults.pdf
*More on the poll in Charles Cooke’s column here: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/harvard-harris-americans-dont-know-what-roe-did/

Posted on

Running Out of Puff

May be an image of 1 person, outdoors and text that says 'MAR NIWING 35 VEHIGLE WEMISSION GNP POLICE CE POLICE FXI8 FXI8EEN EEN'
UK police EV

Yes, that’s right. The UK’s Daily Telegraph reported on July 5 “Electric police cars ‘running out of puff’ on way to emergencies”. It’s the kind of thing that Democrat politicos wish for America. Just think, as an angry neighbor is about to go postal and you call 911, the 5-to-6-minute response time turns into . . . never. The cops’ EV ran out of juice on the way. It’s time to call the coroner.

It seems that all the EV’s accessories such as a/c, heater, radio, computers, lights, and siren run off the same battery as the one powering the wheels. The existential crisis of climate change turned into the existential crisis of a dead family member.

Following Biden’s lead, who is following the lead of California, who is following the lead of the UK – a pied piper of delusionals – the “best and brightest” have either outlawed the production of diesel and gas vehicles by date certain (2030 in the UK) or a target date of 2030 or 2035 is set for achieving 100% EV fleets. Utopians are habitual central planners and love numbered targets to force other people into meeting, no matter the disruption or loss of life.

Officers responding to emergencies in EV’s report the well-founded worry of not getting to the crisis. Batteries drain, charging stations haven’t kept up with the government mandates for EV’s, god-awful charging times (45 minutes to 8 hours), and the grid providing the power is being made more precarious at the same time by the same clowns.

It’s a cascade of absurdities. Going all-electric is quickly turning into all-farce, and a deadly one at that.

RogerG

Posted on

Happy Birthday America

See the source image
July 4th fireworks over the Jefferson Memorial in DC

The United States is a credal nation, a creed that we haven’t always lived up to, but what nation ever has?  The creed of liberty is a high bar, a perfection that blemished human beings may never fully achieve.  But it’s the striving that counts.

Liberty is not the sole possession of any one race, ethnicity, or gender.  It’s a universal moral aspiration as shown by the waves of humanity risking life and limb to get here.  The fact that our nation more than any other has a decent sense of liberty as its North Star welcomes all who wish to follow our laws in getting here.  We are not a nation of immigrants.  We are a nation of liberty-loving human beings.

We must remind ourselves that liberty is not license.  Liberty without morals is like faith without works.  It’s dead!  Today, we run the risk of liberty becoming license, and the securing of the blessings of liberty is under assault by a noxious ideology that pits one group of Americans against another.  We must resist this infection from the 19th and 20th centuries that undermines the blessings that have attracted millions.  Americans beware of false mental idols that incite incessant group warfare. Every generation has its challenge.  That’s today’s challenge.

God bless America.

I couldn’t settle on one rendition of Irving Berlin’s classic, originally composed in 1918. Here’s Kate Smith with a stirring performance from World War II.

RogerG