Monthly Archives: February 2023

Idiocy

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The Washington Post published an op-ed about the cost of eggs, and how they’re really cheap, and both WaPo and the writer were serious. Why eggs are cheaper than you think goes the headline. Then, with a straight face,

If you look at old cookbooks, you will notice that the authors seem to view eggs and chicken as almost a luxury good. My 1950 “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook book” contains recipes for making mock chicken dishes—out of veal. Go back further and the 1896 Fannie Farmer cookbook sternly informs readers that, “eggs, even at twenty-five cents per dozen, should not be freely used by the strict economist.”

The writer then went on in great length about how much incomes have risen in those 125 and more years since, the time committed to cooking has decreased in those 125 and more years since, and on and on.

All true, too.

However.

We don’t live those 125 and more years ago; we live today, and we’ll live tomorrow. Yesterday is gone. And as even the writer of this WaPo op-ed admits:

…the price of eggs has spiked so much—from $1.79 in December 2021, to $4.25 a year later….

That price spiked far higher—over $11 the dozen—in some places. That’s today’s money for today’s eggs. The real world is today, not yesterday. Regardless of those old timey prices, we’re still paying today’s inflated prices for our eggs, and for all of our food, for which eggs are only a stand-in in this context.

This is the idiocy of the Left.

Lies of a Progressive-Democrat President

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President Joe Biden (D) has long claimed that his tax-raising plan and his IRS would not target anyone making less than $400,000 per year. He repeated that claim in his State of the Union speech last Tuesday.

Under my plan, nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in taxes.

Never mind. His IRS’ latest proposed rule:

The proposed SITCA [Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement] program is designed to take advantage of advancements in point-of-sale, time and attendance systems, and electronic payment settlement methods to improve tip reporting compliance.

Not even that vaunted and highly successful barkeep, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, pulled down 400 stacks in a year when she was working saloons in New York City.

The IRS claims the program is “voluntary,” but watch what happens to the hapless waitress or waiter, or any other low-wage person for whom tips are a significant fraction of his income, who doesn’t report his tips in a manner that suits the revenooers.

Biden has lied again.

Separately, I’ll no longer include my tip on the charge card receipt that’s increasingly often offered to patrons as a “convenient” way to tip wait staff on their presentment of my bill. Instead, I’ll return to an earlier practice of leaving my tip on the table as cash. The busboy is more trustworthy than this President and his IRS. That’s an appallingly low bar for the busboy, but I do not mean the comparison as faint praise for him. Far from it. I may go a step farther, and pay the whole bill with cash.

A Couple of Questions

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In an article centered on ballot paper shortages in the 2022 mid-term elections in Harris County, Texas (County Seat: Houston), and De Kalb County, Georgia (County Seat; Decatur), accepting $2 million of Zuckerbucks in the 2020 Presidential election, there was this bit from KHOU 11 regarding the Harris County shortage:

“After reviewing help desk logs and calling presiding and alternate election judges, the county estimated 46 to 68 voting centers ran out of their initial allotment of paper[.]” However, comparing ballot paper packets distributed to the total number of votes cast, KHOU 11 “discovered 121 voting centers did not initially receive enough ballot paper to cover voter turnout[.]”

And Governor Gregg Abbott’s (R) tweeted reaction:

Harris Co. election ballot paper shortage far bigger than initially estimated. It’s so big it may have altered the outcome of elections. It may necessitate new elections. It WILL necessitate new LAWS that prevent Harris Co. from ever doing this again.

Invalidating the just completed elections and holding replacement ones may be beyond the Governor’s authority, but the thrust of his beef is valid. And beside my point here. The problem—and questions—flow from this:

[W]hile [Harris c]ounty Elections Administration Office told KHOU 11 that historical data was used for determining ballot supply needs for voting locations, the news outlet found that 52 voting centers received less ballot paper in 2022 than the number of ballots cast in 2018.
Election Administrator Clifford Tatum had told county commissioners that supplemental paper supplies were sent by his office throughout Election Day. When KHOU 11 asked Tatum where the supplies were sent, he didn’t provide any details.

The larger problem and my questions are these:

Where did they get the supplies?

If historical records actually were used, why weren’t those supplies sent at the outset instead of being withheld?

It Takes a Village?

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One is trying to come for the children of Idaho (among other places).

School districts throughout Idaho have been adopting policies to keep parents in the dark about their children’s gender identity and sexual orientation at the instruction of the Idaho School Boards Association (ISBA), according to school district policies and email correspondence obtained through FOIA requests by Parents Defending Education, which were shared with Fox News Digital.
Policies adopted on “Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation” in the Buhl, Challis, Marsh Valley, Middleton, and Wilder school districts say an employee could be demoted or even fired for violating a student’s confidentiality on LGBTQ issues.

The village will raise our children; all we parents are for is getting children for village use.

No, it doesn’t take a village to use raise our children. It takes parents, ideally, two of them, to raise our children, and it takes parents to bring our children to the moral and religious state that John Adams so rightly said our republic desperately needs for survival.

Some Wuhan Virus Statistics

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…from the JAMA Network, measured in the 12 months from August 2021. First, some mortality rates for children:

  • 3 per 100 000 for those younger than 1 year [with their unformed immune systems]
  • 6 per 100 000 for those aged 1 to 4 years
  • 4 per 100 000 for those aged 5 to 9 years
  • 5 per 100 000 for those aged 10 to 14 years

This works out to a mortality rate of around 0.5 per 100,000 for children 14 years old and younger. For 15-19 year olds—the remaining category of “children”—the mortality rate was 1.8 per 100,000.

The leading causes of death among children in 2019, pre-Virus, included these, and their rates, which were changed, if at all, only by the rate of lockdown and school closure:

  • perinatal conditions (12.7 per 100 000)
  • unintentional injuries (9.1 per 100 000)
  • congenital malformations or deformations (6.5 per 100 000)

The Virus represented only 2% of all the causes of child deaths in the report’s period.  In contrast, the mortality rate from the Virus for all Virus cases—which includes adults—was 109 per 100,000 population.

The risk to children from side effects of the various Wuhan Virus vaccines is very small, even as some of those side effects can be quite severe. The risk to children from going unvaccinated is just as small, if not smaller. That makes the risk to children from vaccine side effects not worth the gain in mitigating mortality from an “unprotected” infection. Furthermore, since the vaccines introduce parts of the Virus particles into the body to stimulate an immune reaction and antibody construction, that would seem to make the vaccines especially risky for those babies, who have no effective immune system to be stimulated and so cannot counteract even the partial Virus particles.