Monthly Archives: December 2020

Merry Christmas

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First posted in 2011, I repeat it here.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.
-Ralph W. Sockman

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
-Benjamin Franklin

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
-Hamilton Wright Mabie

Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.  If we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world.
-Calvin Coolidge

Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great and good philosopher and teacher.  Others of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace.
-Ronald Reagan

 

Update:
What do you call a snowman who vacations in the tropics?
A puddle.

 

The Most Important Criterion for Office

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…is race, according to too many members of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Recall that California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has named his Secretary of State, Alex Padilla, to fill Kamala Harris’ (D) seat in the Senate on her assumption of the office of Vice President of the United States. The press has been making a big deal out of Padilla being the first (!) Latino to be a California Senator—as if his brown skin actually matters.

Apparently, though, skin hue does matter to many in Party. San Francisco Mayor London Breed (D):

Definitely, this is a real blow to the African-American community[.]
It’s an unfortunate situation as we are trying to move this country forward and making sure that Black lives truly matter and that African-Americans have a seat at the table, especially African-American women, after what was done in this race on a national level, definitely is unfortunate.

Congresswoman Karen Bass (D):

I will tell you that I do believe that there should be an African American woman in the Congress. When Senator Harris is sworn in as the Vice President, there will be one African American Democrat, one African American Republican, no African American women.

Being qualified for the office, being an American-American, doesn’t matter. The first qualifying criterion is race, and the second criterion is gender.

This is part and parcel with Joe Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party having selected Harris for his Vice President based first and foremost on her race and gender. It’s an extension of Biden’s empirically demonstrated primary criteria for his Cabinet desires.

The bigotry stinks.

Overreach

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Alphabet strikes again.

Google informs children when their parents are monitoring their account activity, the tech giant confirmed this month, with the company claiming that doing so is a way of balancing the interests of both parents and children.

Such “balancing” is not Google’s call. It’s not the decision anyone or any enterprise can make in place of the parents, with the narrowly bounded exception of a child’s endangerment—which in the present context is what parental monitoring is for. More broadly, the degree of privacy a child has—is accorded—while growing up is a parental decision and no one or no thing else’s. Full stop.

Alphabet, in commenting, pointed to both the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the recently passed UK Age Appropriate Design Code as examples of child-privacy advocacy to which it adheres. This is cynically disingenuous (my deliberate redundancy): Alphabet is not a UN agency, nor is it an arm of the British government. Nor is Alphabet subject to UN proscriptions anywhere or to British law outside of Great Britain.

It’s time to rein in this company. It’s intruded too far into the lives of ordinary Americans, this time unconscionably presuming to take the role of parents, usurping that from a child’s true parents.

Panic

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This is what the Left and their Progressive-Democrat governors are panicking over—actual data that give the lie to their claimed need to exercise control over the doings and businesses of their States’ citizens for those citizens’ own good. An exercise that’s actually for the power of that exercise.

The data don’t support their panic-mongering, though. Via a tweet from Carrie Sheffield, a Just the News anchor:

Getting sick is never fun. However, the mortality rate from the Wuhan Virus has always been very low—and getting very lower—for all ages under 70 years. We’ve learned a lot since the virus outbreak last spring, and the mortality rate for that last age group has gotten quite low, also.

Is It Possible?

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Joe Biden so frequently ducks serious question-and-answer periods, even with what passes for today’s press, that even those pressmen are growing mildly discontented. Nearing the end of the latest charade, they started asking other questions:

“Hey guys, there tons of folks looking to ask questions and since this is being done once a week, could we PLEASE go longer or at least hold more frequent briefings,” Sam Stein from The Daily Beast wrote in the chat.
“Any chance you can take a few more questions? There are a lot of folks here with questions,” Zeke Miller from The Associated Press added.
“Is there a point in saying we want to ask questions if you only call on the same small group every week?” said White House reporter Andrew Feinberg.

It would be useful for a couple of things to happen. One would be to have Biden call on reporters without first checking with his handlers and for him to spend a half-hour or an hour just taking and answering questions—far more than the five questions his handlers currently limit the press to.

The other thing would be to have Biden do the question and answer periods without his handlers present—especially without “I’m a Dr” Jill “Edith Wilson” Biden present.