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An uplifting story in the Lexington Herald-Leader

It seems that a car thief from the greater Cincinnati area helped himself to an early Christmas present: someone else’s car. What he didn’t realize was that he was in f(ornicate) around, find out territory.

Couple tracks stolen car to Kroger and shoots accused thief, Kentucky police say

by Mike Stunson | December 20, 2023 | 9:01 AM EST

The vehicle into which the stolen Ford Focus smashed. It’s just a Chevy, so it couldn’t have been worth much anyway. Screen grab from WKRC.

An accused car thief was shot outside a Kroger when the car owners tracked their vehicle across state lines, Kentucky police say. Continue reading →

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The only way to end protests which stop traffic is to not stop traffic for protesters.

The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal came up with an absolutely brilliant idea, but one which will not work:

Tort Law vs. the Anti-Israel Protesters

If DAs won’t prosecute, victims can sue for false imprisonment.

By The Editorial Board | Thursday, December 28, 2023 | 6:49 PM EST

Idiots block traffic near LAX to demand Gaza ceasefire.

Normally we wouldn’t wish trial lawyers on our worst enemy. But as anti-Israel demonstrations grow increasingly lawless, the plaintiffs bar could help. Why not hit protesters who break the law and keep Americans from getting to their destination with a tort liability suit for false imprisonment?

On Wednesday anti-Israel protesters blocked access to JFK and LAX airports in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. The laws of New York and California, like most states, recognize the tort. While there is no precedent applying this tort to road-blocking protesters, it fits the offense. The purpose of these demonstrations is to block the road to keep people from getting to the airport — deliberately and against their will.

Continue reading →

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SEPTA wants more tax dollars, but just a $1.00 fare increase would wipe out their deficit Shouldn't SEPTA's expenses be paid by SEPTA's riders?

1 dead, 13 injured after 2 SEPTA buses collide at Shelmire Avenue in Philadelphia, July 22, 2023.

The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer, in an effort to persuade the state government to provide more money for the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, undermined their own argument with just two sentences:

And for many Pennsylvanians, public transit is simply not part of their daily life. Nor is it for about 45% of Americans, who have no access to public transportation at all.

The obvious question is: why should people who don’t use SEPTA, and don’t even have a chance to use public transportation, see more of the tax dollars they pay go to SEPTA? Continue reading →

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Once again, The Philadelphia Inquirer pegs the irony meter

I have previously written about the fact that the credentialed media rarely actually lie to us, but tend to conceal facts that might not fit in well with Teh Narrative. Did Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jonathan Zimmerman not know about Stan Wischnowski, or simply forget, or was he told not to mention him?

What universities can learn from former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet

There is a core lesson for higher education in the journalist’s recent essay: The best route to progress is a full and free dialogue — even when it hurts.

by Jonathan Zimmerman | Wednesday, December 27, 2023 | 8:08 AM EST

Earlier this month, I read the single sharpest criticism of the American university I’ve encountered in many years. And it wasn’t even about the American university.

It’s an essay that appeared in the Economist by former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet, who was forced out in 2020 after he published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) calling for the use of the military against violent protesters. Bennet ran the op-ed not because he agreed with it (he didn’t) but because he believed the newspaper had a duty to provoke debate, and — most of all — because he thought his readers could come to reasoned conclusions about it.

That’s the foundation of the small-l liberal creed: Since none of us has a monopoly on truth, we need to let everyone determine it on their own. But in the era of Donald Trump, who thinks he’s right about everything, journalists started to imitate him. They knew the truth, especially about Trump, and their job was to make sure other people knew it, as well.

Continue reading →

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If electric cars are the future, why are investors fleeing companies the build and run EV charging stations?

But, but, but, we’ve been told that plug-in electric vehicles are the wave of the future! From The Wall Street Journal:

Investors Sour on EV Charging Companies

EV charging companies have fallen from lofty valuations as concerns mount about their profitability

by Jennifer Hiller | Boxing Day, December 26, 2023 | 7:00 AM EST

The companies that install and operate electric-vehicle charging networks are in the middle of a building boom, but their share prices are sputtering. Continue reading →

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In New York City, the savages protest in support of savagery

When my good friend William Teach wrote, at 8:25 PM EST on Christmas Day, “What’s the over/under that the @nytimes doesn’t bother to cover this, despite being a NY paper? Maybe a tiny blurb on A25. If these were rioting Jews it would already be on the web front page,” I thought that surely, surely!, even The New York Times couldn’t ignore riots. But, Mr Teach was right: at least as of 8:40 AM EST, there were no stories at all on the front page of the Times website concerning the riots, though there was a story, in the “In Case You Missed It” section about halfway down on the right hand side, “New York City, for Some Jews, Feels Newly Tense : With antisemitism and protests spilling onto the streets of New York, the city’s Jewish population is trying to navigate the new contours of its hometown,” a story dated on December 20th, six days ago.

There was an old joke in the city, from the days when people actually read the dead-trees editions of newspapers, that people on the subways used the Times as a cover to hide from people that they were actually reading the New York Post:

Pro-Palestinian protesters chant ‘Christmas is canceled’ while carrying blood-red mock Nativity scene through NYC — scuffles break out, arrests made

By Larry Celona, Reuven Fenton, Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, and Patrick Reilly | Christmas Day, December 25, 2023 | 8:25 PM EST

They’re out to “cancel” Christmas.

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters converged on Midtown Monday, lugging a blood-red mock Nativity scene and chanting, “Christmas is canceled here.” Continue reading →

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Money talks

Our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, loaded up with the #woke as it is, has yet another story defending the University of Pennsylvania’s departing President, Liz Magill, who was forced out after she made a boneheadely stupid, as in dumb as a box of rocks stupid, statement in testimony to a congressional committee that calls to ‘kill all the Jews’ would be a violation of the University’s rules or code of context depending on the context in which such calls were made. Dr Magill, we are told, was new on campus, there for only 18 months, while Claudine Gay has been at Hahvahd for 15 years, and had a lot more friends and good contacts there. There were anti-Semitic incidents on campus even before Hamas’ October 7th attack, and Penn’s faculty didn’t write the support letters that Dr Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth got.

And, of course, Dr Gay is black, while Dr Kornbluth is Jewish.

“I do not think it’s a coincidence that the lone president who had to walk the plank was the white Catholic,” (Jonathan Zimmerman, a Penn professor of the history of education) said.

There’s more:

One major difference at Harvard was a letter signed by more than 650 faculty calling on the university to keep Claudine Gay; its board announced last week that she would remain. A group of current and former MIT faculty leaders also issued a letter of support for their president, Sally Kornbluth, and the board of trustees there also backed her, according to the Washington Post.

But faculty at Penn wrote no such letter for Magill, a former University of Virginia provost and lawyer who had begun her tenure less than 18 months earlier.

Now, however, the faculty senate is circulating a letter to the board of trustees, already signed by more than 880 faculty members, that opposes “all attempts by trustees, donors, and other external actors to interfere with our academic policies and to undermine academic freedom.”

I’m not certain how the Trustees are “external actors,” given that they are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the safety and financial security of the University. And the donors? We already know that the students and faculty don’t particularly care for the deep-pockets donors giving multi-million dollars gifts to their alma mater, and the donors have no official power. The previously mentioned Dr Zimmerman, who is also an Inquirer columnist — something reporter Susan Snyder‘s original failed to note — who wrote, before October 7th that people ought not to lose their jobs because they have tweeted something the ‘other side’ finds objectionable:

The only solution is to let everyone tweet what they wish, whether you agree with them or not.

I have been fully supportive of people tweeting exactly what they wish, and do not want the anti-Semitic tweets censored, not because I support what they are saying, but because I very much want the anti-Semites to tell us exactly who they are, so that we can avoid them, and avoid doing business with them. I completely support the things we have previously reported about deep-pocket university donors closing their checkbooks due to anti-Semitism on campus, and creating ‘do not hire’ lists of the haters of Jews. Dr Zimmerman was similarly displeased that the deep-pockets donors were using their money to fight anti-Semitism.

Also read: Business Insider, “Billionaire who has previously donated at least $270 million to Harvard will pause donations to univer-sity, CNN reported

“But if the donors have no official power to “interfere with (Penn’s) academic policies and to undermine academic freedom,” they do have one very important power, that being to either contribute or not contribute to the University. You’d think that a University which houses the Wharton School, the oldest and most prestigious business school in the country, which is arguably better known that the University itself, and the one which has produced a very substantial portion of the deep-pockets donors, would understand that.

We do have and should have freedom of speech and of the press, but if people can speak freely, then others have the right to listen to them, and if they disagree, choose not to support them. Yes, the students and faculty at Penn have a perfect right to say or publish anything they want, but the donors have the right to decide not to support them.

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There’s only one way to win: Israel must stop worrying about the hostages #Hamas hold Hamas, the 'Palestinians,' and the Arabs in general are not part of Western civilization, and we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that they think or act or respond as those of us in the civilized world do.

There’s a line somewhere in Herman Wouk’s “The Winds of War,” in which one of the Henry family, Victor or Byron, responds to demands on Germany as, ‘Isn’t that pretty arrogant, demanding that Germany accept a defeat no one has actually inflicted on them?’ I may have been slightly imprecise with the quote, but I did get the sentiment correct.

And so we come to Hamas and the ‘Palestinian’ Arabs. From London’s The Telegraph:

Hamas leader says hostage deal is ‘all or nothing’

Yahya Sinwar has reportedly insisted on a lasting ceasefire and the release of all Palestinian prisoners, including high-profile figures

by Nataliya Vasilyeva • 21 December 2023 • 7:33 PM

Jerusalem — Hamas’s de-facto leader has said he will only agree to a new truce if it guarantees the release of all Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails, according to reports.

Al Arabi Al Jadidi, a Qatari newspaper, on Thursday quoted an unnamed Egyptian official saying the “leadership of Hamas” had rejected Israel’s offer of a temporary truce in exchange for the release of several dozen Israeli hostages.

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, insisted on a lasting ceasefire and all Palestinian prisoners being released, including several high-profile figures, the newspaper reported.

Simply put, the distinguished Mr Sinwar is demanding that Israel accept a defeat that no one has inflicted on them. Good luck with that!

Sinwar also reportedly demanded that Israel halt its combat operations in Gaza before the deal goes into effect.

Hamas later on Thursday said it would reject any deals to free more hostages until Israel stops bombing Gaza.

“If Israel wants its prisoners alive, then it has no other options but to stop the aggression and the war,” said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’s military wing.

Let’s tell the truth here: Hamas are directly threatening to kill the remaining hostages if the Israel Defence Force does not halt operations and let Hamas survive. As the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading left keep whining that the IDF are committing “genocide,” one wonders if it has penetrated their thick skulls that Hamas are threatening the war crime of killing prisoners?

Oh, that’s different, somehow.

There comes a point at which Israel, at which any nation which has some of its citizens held hostage, to force that nation to do something against its own national interests, has to decide that the hostages are simply the unfortunate casualties of war.

The United States learned a hard lesson on this in the 1980s. President Reagan, nice guy that he was, thought that he could win the freedom of American hostages held by the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, through a convoluted arms deal with the terrorists’ sponsor, Iran. And it worked: we got our hostages back.

But we also established a value for taking hostages, and while President Reagan got those captured people back, Hezbollah simply turned around and seized new hostages.

So it is for Israel. Perhaps there could be some sort of cease-fire agreement, and Hamas release all of the hostages they’ve seized, but at the cost of allowing Hamas to survive, and get its top terrorists back. And the next time Hamas tries something — and there will always be a next time with these savages — Hamas will know: there’s real value in seizing civilian hostages.

According to The New York Times, Israel counts 129 people as still being held hostage, though they believe that 21 of them are already dead.

It would have to be a cold-blooded, and horrible, decision to have to take, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ‘war cabinet’ have to decide that these people should all be counted as dead, and not only continue but intensify their attack on Hamas. Israel needs to just plain kill every Hamas leader they can find, regardless of where they are — Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar — and take the actions necessary. Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and all of the top Hamas people need to assume room temperature, to let those younger men who believe they can rise to the top of Hamas that, if they do, they’ll go to meet their 72 virgins.

Israel is a Western democracy, and as conservative as the government are, they are still constrained by the cultural morés of their culture. But Hamas, the ‘Palestinians,’ and the Arabs in general are not part of Western civilization, and we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that they think or act or respond as those of us in the civilized world do.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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St Greta of Thunberg must be appalled! I am wryly amused

Former Democratic presidential nominees Al Gore and John Kerry are surely weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth at the news, but the sensible among us see this as great! From CNN:

The United States is producing more oil than any country in history

By Matt Egan | Updated 5:00 PM EST | Tuesday, December 19, 2023

As the world grapples with the existential crisis of climate change, environmental activists want President Joe Biden to phase out the oil industry, and Republicans argue he’s already doing that. Meanwhile, the surprising reality is the United States is pumping oil at a blistering pace and is on track to produce more oil than any country has in history.

“The existential crisis of climate change”? So many reporters keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it means. We may have some issues with which to deal with global warming climate change, but we’re not all going to die.

Remember: human beings are the most adaptable creatures on earth, and we live everywhere, from arctic wastelands to steaming jungles to bone dry deserts, and we have done so even prior to our modern, industrialized society.

The United States is set to produce a global record of 13.3 million barrels per day of crude and condensate during the fourth quarter of this year, according to a report published Tuesday by S&P Global Commodity Insights.

Last month, weekly US oil production hit 13.2 million barrels per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That’s just above the Donald Trump-era record of 13.1 million set in early 2020 just before the Covid-19 crisis sent output and prices crashing.

Also read: William Teach, “Gore Effect: Maine Forced To Postpone Vote On Forced EVs Due To Power Outage“

As the world’s largest oil producer, that means more American dollars stay in the United States rather than going to Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, and some money from foreign countries comes to the United States. This enriches American companies and American workers, and that ought to be seen as a good thing for the American people.

The US is exporting roughly the same amounts of crude oil, refined fuels and liquid natural gas as Saudi Arabia and Russia. With the Saudi and Russian collusion, on which we have previously reported, to reduce OPEC’s production to raise prices, American production has helped keep those prices down.

“It’s a reminder that the US is endowed with enormous oil reserves. Our industry should never be underestimated,” said Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group.

Record-shattering US production is helping to offset aggressive supply cuts meant to support high prices by OPEC+, mainly Saudi Arabia and Russia. Other non-OPEC oil producers including Canada and Brazil are also pumping more oil than ever before. (Brazil is set to join OPEC+ next year.)

Think about what this means. Russia’s economy is dependent upon oil and natural gas exports, and Vladimir Putin wanted to use western Europe’s dependence upon Russia oil and, especially, natural gas as a weapon against NATO countries which are supporting Ukraine with money and military equipment. Without Russian natural gas, a lot of western Europe countries, much of which are at latitudes higher than our lower 48-state border with Canada, the Europeans would have gotten awfully cold during the past two winters, but American production has prevented Russia from being able to effectively utilize their energy weapon.

The climate activists want us to cease oil production, thinking that that will somehow save the world, and perhaps we can eventually develop energy systems which can truly replace oil for energy production, but, right now, that day has not come. And the United States, with its oil, natural gas, and seriously underused coal reserves, has natural resources which can make Americans in general wealthier. The activists just don’t get it: doing what they want would make Americans poorer.

Then again, if liberals actually understood economics, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore.