Monthly Archives: February 2022

Did Biden Refuse the Invitation or the Challenge?

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President Joe Biden (D) and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a phone call Saturday. Over the course of the call, Zelenskyy invited Biden to travel to Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, according to the Ukrainian description of the call. Zelenskyy

invited him [Biden] to visit Ukraine: “I am convinced that your arrival in Kyiv in the coming days, which are crucial for stabilizing the situation, will be a powerful signal and contribute to de-escalation.”

It’s telling that

[t]he White House statement on the call with Zelenskyy does not mention the invitation to Kyiv.

Why is Biden so reluctant to accept the invitation? Or is he ducking away from the challenge?

A Putin Supposed Draw-Down

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Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to be withdrawing some of his troops from the “exercise” he’s been holding along the Belarus-Ukraine border.

Russia announced Tuesday that a select number of units participating in military exercises will return to their bases, sparking hope the Kremlin may not invade Ukraine in the coming days.

I have some possibilities for the claimed withdrawal.

Maybe the “select number of units” are being withdrawn because they performed poorly in these invasion rehearsals.

Maybe the “select number of units” are being held back to act as exploitation reserves in the coming invasion.

Maybe the “select number of units” are being withdrawn as a stage show to get the West to let our guard down even further.

Putin’s, Lavrov’s claimed willingness to negotiate further could well be nothing more than a repeat of the 1941 Japanese government “negotiations” with the US, differing only by Putin’s firmer control of his military than the then-Japanese government had.

What are my Pronouns?

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The Wall Street Journal actually had a lengthy article on how to answer that question when asked. That prompted a series of Letters in the WSJ‘s Letters section. The article and responding letters tended in the right direction, but not completely so, IMNSHO.

The correct initial response is simply to ignore the question altogether and get on into the conversation. If pressed, the correct response then becomes to state clearly that the questioner and I do not know each other well enough to be on a first name basis, and from that, we don’t know each other well enough for his question to be anything other than a rude imposition of a level of familiarity that doesn’t exist. Then I close my response with, “Mr Hines works just fine.”

Bureaucrats Exercising Personal Power Because They Can

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The Biden-Harris administration is urging Americans in Ukraine to get out of that nation as fast as they can go. Biden-Harris even trotted out his National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, to issue a panicky plea for our citizens to get out—because Biden-Harris intends to strand those who don’t make it out just as thoroughly as he did in Afghanistan.

Enter Biden-Harris’ State Department bureaucrats.

The US State Department is requiring American citizens fleeing Ukraine into Poland to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination, according to a press release issued Saturday.
US citizens are allowed to enter Poland through its land border with Ukraine, but the State Department says those evacuating “must present a valid US passport and proof of COVID-19 vaccination.”

On top of this [aside: this seems a tacit Biden-Harris administration admission that vaccines against the Wuhan Virus don’t proof folks against subsequent infection as Biden-Harris had originally touted.]

Travelers are also encouraged to present a negative test result from a PCR or antigen COVID-19 test, which will facilitate entry into Poland[.]

This is just Biden-Harris’ bureaucrats exercising power for the sake of the exercise.

Even stipulating, arguendo, that the threat of the unvaccinated spreading the Wuhan Virus is real or has serious consequences, there are just too many ways for State to handle American “travelers'” who lack vaccination/negative test proof after their entry into Poland from Ukraine for this demand to be anything other than the ego trip of power.

State’s statement containing these barriers requirements can be read here.

Questions Abound

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Enfield Public Schools District, in Connecticut, posted a “health” curriculum lesson for the District’s 8th grade classes.

…a “Pizza and Consent” assignment, where eighth-grade students were given a handout stating that pizza can be used as a “metaphor for sex,” which instructed students to list their favorite and least favorite pizza toppings “in relation to sex.”
“Here are some examples: Likes: Cheese = Kissing,” the assignment states. “Dislikes: Olives = Giving Oral,” stated the assignment given to eighth graders within the Enfield Public Schools.

Now build your pizzas, boys and girls.

The lesson was discovered and objected to last Monday (7 February as I write this) by Parents Defending Education, which objection finally prompted the District Superintendent Christopher Drezek to go before the school board and address the matter.

The simple truth was it was a mistake. And I know that there are some who may not believe that. I know there are some who don’t necessarily maybe want that answer. In this particular case, I didn’t even get a chance to because the person who made the mistake jumped ahead of it before I was even notified that it had happened.

He went on to claim that there was no hidden agenda in this.

The unnamed (in the article) District Health and Physical Education Coordinator, according to Parents Defending Education, emailed parents and apologized for the error [emphasis added].

The incorrect version, as opposed to the revised version of this assignment was mistakenly posted on our grade 8 curriculum page, and was inadvertently used for instruction to grade 8 Health classes. I caught the error after our curriculum revision in June, but failed to post the intended version. I own that, and apologize for the error[.]

The incident begs a number of questions, though.

  • Why was the supposedly erroneous version created in the first place?
  • Why, then, was it “mistakenly” posted to the 8th grade curriculum page in the second place?
  • If the 8th grade curriculum page was the wrong target, for which curriculum page was it actually intended?
  • If the Coordinator caught the mistake so long ago, why didn’t he remove the “error?”
  • Why didn’t the Coordinator post the correct lesson at that time?

And this question: what is Drezek doing about his Coordinator and the person(s) who created the “lesson” and posted it? He needs to demonstrate the lack of any hidden agenda.