[Update] Suck It Up, Sotomayor

I’m not seeing the problem here.

Gorsuch Is Only Justice to Refuse to Wear a Mask for High-Risk Sotomayor, NPR Says
Justice Neil Gorsuch is reportedly the only member of the Supreme Court to refuse to wear a mask to help protect his colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose diabetes puts her at high risk for severe illness from COVID-19. NPR reports that after Sotomayor made clear she felt vulnerable amid an Omicron-driven surge in cases, Chief Justice John Roberts asked the other justices to wear a mask on the bench. All of them did except Gorsuch, who also happens to sit next to Sotomayor, according to NPR. As a result, Sotomayor has attended weekly conferences remotely.

If masks work, why can’t Sotomayor just wear one and do her damned job?

Maybe she can demand the other justices eat dietetic candy to protect her from diabetes.

Added: This is pretty funny. The reason I even heard about Gorsuch refusing to mask up to “protect” the moron is this:

Supreme Court rejects bid to block mask mandate on airplanes
The emergency application was filed by a father on behalf of himself and his 4-year-old autistic son, both of whom claim to be medically incapable of wearing masks for extended periods.

Their request was filed to Justice Neil Gorsuch, who handles emergency applications arising in several Western states, and he referred the matter to the full court. The justices denied the request without comment or noted dissent.

Gorsuch personally referred a mask mandate challenge to the full court, but didn’t even bother dissenting on the cert denial. I’m pretty sure he only referred it just to piss off Sotomayor.

Added 2: Apparently the mask conflict was made up by NPR, and isn’t true. I dunno.

All Your Child Are Belong To Us

Sometimes I run across something so bizarre that — especially these days, as the left-wingers devolve into full-blown psychosis — it’s hard to tell if it’s real or satire. I accidentally found one this morning. It’s published on the San Francisco Chronicle, so that’s one indicator that it’s insane but real. If it ran in the Babylon Bee, I’d have taken it for brilliant satire.

Likewise, the author has a history of crazed writings. And he’s affiliated with New America, a group dedicated to “big, bold ideas” for end game hive communism.

Opinion: Want true equity? California should force parents to give away their children
Fathers and mothers with greater wealth, education or other resources are more likely to transfer these advantages to their children, compounding privilege over generations. As a result, children of less advantaged parents face an uphill struggle, social mobility has stalled and democracy has been corrupted.

He works through it incrementally.

The rich should give their children to the poor, and the poor should give their children to the rich. Homeowners might swap children with their homeless neighbors.

In his “Republic,” Plato adopted Socrates’ sage advice — that children “be possessed in common, so that no parent will know his own offspring or any child his parents” — in order to defeat nepotism, prevent the amassing of great fortunes and create citizens loyal not to their sons but to society.

How ’bout, Fuck you? You want to see that tragedy of the commons?

In fact, a suggestion from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in a recent Supreme Court hearing on a case that could overturn Roe, inspired me to write this column. She posited that abortion rights are no longer necessary because all 50 states now have “safe haven” laws that allow women to turn their babies over to a fire or police department after birth.

But voluntarily surrendering kids isn’t good enough.

My proposal would merely make mandatory such handovers of babies to the state.

Why?

But you shouldn’t pay those critics any mind. Because they just can’t see how our relentless pursuit of equity might birth a brave new world.

This dangerously demented dude thinks that Huxley’s Brave New World should be a model for our society. To achieve “equity.”

If you haven’t read the novel, and that synopsis doesn’t quite do it for you, I’ll run down the basics.

Joe Mathews wants you to live in a “utopia” with a genetically engineered caste system of masters and slaves (I suppose he assumes he’d be an Alpha). A “utopia” in which everyone to drugged in complaceny lest they all suicide or turn to violent chaos. A world in which 70% of all women are sterilzed just to make sure no one breeds across caste lines. A “utopia” that appears to be dependent upon an external “savage” class for food and genetic diversity.

Holy shit. Many years ago, I pointed out that 1984 was a cautionary tale, not a how-to manual; a sentiment I’m pleased to see others also noting that (it would be nice to believe my quip inspired those others, but it’s a fairly obvious point).

The pro-1984 advocates have nothing on let’s build a master/slave commie hive for equity Mathews. I suppose I should be relieved that he apparently hasn’t read Hellstrom’s Hive. He’d probably love dispensing with women completely and living a happy life as a mindless drone insect. Come to think of it, I think he’s working on that.

Equity in a Brave New World. Remember: when these nutjobs babble about “equity,” this is what they mean.

Honesty Compels Me To Admit It


Marxist Los Angeles DA George Gascón Charges 26-Year-Old Transgender as Juvenile in Sex Assault of 10-Year-Old Girl
Soros-backed Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón is under fire for charging a 26-year-old transgender (bio male) as a juvenile after he pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl.

In 2014, 17-year-old James Tubbs grabbed a 10-year-old girl by the throat at a Denny’s in Palmdale, California and sexually assaulted her in a bathroom stall.
[…]
Gascón doesn’t want to send Tubbs to jail because he fears he will be victimized and assaulted over his gender identity.


Yes, a terrible part of me insists on whispering, “Finally; a punishment that fits the crime.”

[Update] Someone Chose Poorly

I see the rest of the world is posting stuff for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so I thought I’d bring back this little Air Farce fail from five years ago.

That was an official flyer posted at Robins AFB, Georgia. I’ve always suspected some NCO with a sense of humor like my own* talked an unwitting butterbar into that.


* Someday I may tell the whole story of my personal best in goading dumbass officers into dumbass decisions. I was drunk, sarcastic, and totally lacking in respect for the Captain. And he was a dumbass; almost fatally so. Literally.

Added: I did tell that story a couple of years ago. Scroll down to the bottom of that post. Fun times.

And just in time for the mid-terms, everyone stopped dying “of” ChinCOVID.

HHS dropped the requirement (see pages 4, 12) for hospitals to report “COVID-19 deaths.”

Actually, they dropped the reporting requirements for several things; ED overflow, ICU overflow, PPE, etc. Apparently ChinCOVID just went away and stopped being politically useful panic-inducing pandemic.

Who woulda thought it?

Consider The Source

More details on the Congregation Beth Israel perp.

Malik Faisel Akram; Brit citizen. And…

Meeting with press in Philadelphia, President Joe Biden said that the deceased suspect had previously been arrested 15 years ago and was jailed for 10 years. He noted that he may have stayed in a homeless shelter after landing in the US.

Biden said that Akram obtained the weapon used on Saturday “on the street,” possibly within the homeless community, but he was still getting more information, according to Fox News.

“This was an act of terror,” Biden said, praising the FBI.

I’ve no idea how much of that is real, and how much is Biden’s senility speaking. The FBI isn’t calling it the obvious. They won’t even admit this had anything to do with the Jewish community, despite the fact that a Brit citizen traveled to a Texas synagogue to take Jews hostage, and called yet another rabbi on the phone to negotiate.

Hmm… served ten years in prison. Doesn’t sound like a conviction the UK, where sentences tend to be rather short.

I still wonder about Akram claiming to be the “brother” of Aafia Siddiqui. I’d like to hear a recording, or read a transcript of that. Rather than a blood relationship, I suspect he meant to assert spiritual or ideological “brotherhood.”

“The laws of physics don’t apply to goats…”

Cool video of a goat.

That reminded me of something from many, many years ago, in Turkey.

I was in the Air Farce, stationed on a Turkish mountaintop. One day a few of us were riding up to the site, and we had a new kid with us, just reporting in. As we drove higher into the mountains, the kid noticed cows on the mountainsides. He wondered how the heck they stood up straight on those steep hills.

I wish I could take credit for this, but another joker told him, “They’re mountain cows.”

Kid: “Mountain cows? What’s a mountain cow?”

Joker: “Special breed of cow. They have a genetic mutation that makes the legs shorter on one side so they can stand up straight.”

Kid: “Really? I never heard of them.”

Naturally we all chimed in to assure him it was so. With straight faces. Which got a little tougher with the next part.

Joker: “Yeah, and they come in two varieties; clockwise and counterclockwise, depending on which set of legs are shorter. So the two kinds can never interbreed since they go in opposite directions.”

I nearly lost it at “clockwise and counterclockwise.”

Worst part in that the gullible kid bought it. I think it was a couple of months before he realized we were… pulling his leg.

“The FBI last night downplayed the terrorist attack saying they are “still looking for a motive.””

The Texas synagogue hostage situation yesterday.

I guess the guy must have screamed “Allahu akhbar!”

I dunno. I kinda thought an apparent Pakistani (Added: British?) declaring brotherhood with a terrorist, and demanding her release in exchange for the Jewish hostages he’d taken on the Sabbath, was fairly obvious. But I’m handicapped by knowing that not all terrorists are conservative white Americans.

Face Masks Make You More Attractive?

These guys think so.


Beyond the beauty of occlusion: medical masks increase facial attractiveness more than other face coverings
The sanitary-mask effect (Miyazaki and Kawahara in Jpn Psychol Res 58(3):261–272, 2016) is the finding that medical face masks prompt an image of disease and thus result in lower ratings of facial attractiveness of the wearer. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, medical masks have been found to increase attractiveness (Patel et al. in Plast Reconstruct Surg Glob Open 8(8), 2020) although this could have been a general effect of occlusion. To further explore this issue, female participants were presented with a series of male faces of low or high attractiveness that were occluded with a medical mask, cloth mask, book or not occluded and asked to rate them on attractiveness. The results show that faces were considered as most attractive when covered by medical masks and significantly more attractive when occluded with cloth masks than when not occluded.


Maybe if the wearer is so unattractive that hiding the face helps (yeah, that would be me). But I think they found something else.


Finally, participants showed high levels of agreement with the statements “Face masks have become part of everyday life in the past year” (M = 4.62, SD = 0.94) and “The use of face masks is effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19” (M = 4.26, SD = 0.89). This meant that investigating correlations of attractiveness differences with mask-wearing attitudes was not possible.


What they really discovered is that people stupid enough to think masks work and everyone should wear them all the time thinks masks make people more attractive. Well, they’re psych types; naturally they can’t see their own findings.