Las Vegas has been almost elbow-to-elbow lately with pandemic-weary tourists looking for excitement and entertainment, after casinos rose from 35% to 50% occupancy March 15 under state health guidelines.
Capacity limits in Las Vegas casinos drop again Saturday — allowing 80% occupancy — while person-to-person distancing goes from 6 feet (1.8 meters) to 3 feet (0.9 meters). Masks are still required.
“People were just yearning to go someplace and let loose,” said Alan Feldman, a former casino executive who is now a fellow at the International Gaming Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Among the first arrivals were people ages 60 and older who were recently vaccinated with time and disposable income, he observed.
Analysts said pent-up demand, available hotel rooms and $1,400 pandemic recovery checks from the federal government have contributed to the rush.
Former Olympian and transgender reality star Caitlyn Jenner said she does not believe ‘biological boys who are trans’ should compete in girls’ sports in school.
In a brief interview with TMZ in Malibu as she was getting into her car, Jenner, who recently announced her bid to run for Governor of California, said: ‘This is a question of fairness, that’s why I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girls’ sports in school.
‘It just isn’t fair and we have to protect girls’ sports in our schools.’
It’s great to see Wisconsin’s summer fun returning! So the good folks who run EAA can host an event that attracts hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world, but Cedarburg can’t have their little Strawberry Festival. It’s not about the science. It’s about priorities and will.
OSHKOSH, Wis. (AP) — The aviation event that draws hundreds of thousands of people to Oshkosh returns this summer after the coronavirus pandemic forced organizers of EAA AirVenture to cancel last year’s gathering.
[…]
Masks will be strongly recommended if attendees are unable to socially distance. Proof of a COVID-19 vaccine will not be required to attend. The convention runs from July 26 through Aug. 1.
By canceling the Strawberry Festival, the organizers are not preventing the spread of COVID-19. All they are doing is robbing their community of an influx of economic activity that is desperately needed after a year of lockdowns and business restrictions. The board is strangling their own community with the fear of a preventable and treatable virus. It is not rational or compassionate. It is stupid and cruel.
Wisconsin’s summers are legendary for the bevy of local festivals, fairs, concerts, and events that draw people together with the bond of humanity. Citizens must demand that their events and traditions continue. If local organizers balk, then they should be replaced with people who actually care about the health of the community beyond the virus. We could all certainly use more community and human interaction after this long, long winter of isolation.
OREGON, Wis. – As demand for firearms in Wisconsin continues its year-long surge, fewer new buyers are going through any sort of formal training process, according to Max Creek Outdoors Owner Steve D’Orazio.
“If we had ten new people walking in, we’d have one person signing up for some type of training,” D’Orazio said. “It scares me. It scares me because again, people are coming in thinking they need a gun in their home for their own protection, but they’re not so much interested in training like they were in the past. I have a problem with that.”
[…]
“It’s awful, and it’s awful for me to say, but when there’s a shooting, whether it’s locally or in other parts of our country, more customers are walking through our door,” D’Orazio said. “It’s bringing more fear into their home. I think they’re replacing that with putting a gun in their home.”
With first-time gun owners purchasing out of fear, D’Orazio says some quickly realize they regret their purchase.
“What we’ve seen here at the shop over the last several weeks is customers coming back asking for them to buy the gun back or putting it on a consignment program where we’ll sell the gun for them,” he said. “That tells me they woke up one morning and said ‘I need a gun in my home’, and two or three weeks later, they’re thinking ‘I don’t need a gun in my home’.”
Good for Biden. This has been too long in coming. Now call out the genocide being perpetrated on the Uighurs.
President Joe Biden on Saturday issued the document Armenian Americans have pursued for decades: a declaration that the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian civilians was genocide.
It’s a deceptively simple action, carrying no force of law. Yet it’s a bold move for Biden, who has gone beyond what any American president has ever been willing to do. Until now, presidents have declined to formally apply the term “genocide” for fear of sparking a backlash from Turkey, which vigorously denies it. According to the Turkish account, World War I-era violence between Muslim Ottomans and Christian Armenians led to large casualties on both sides. According to most historians, however, the evidence is clear the Turks engaged in a years-long ethnic cleansing campaign that included forced death marches and mass starvation.
Doctor John McAdams passed away last week. He leaves behind a legacy as a warrior for freedom of thought and speech in an era that desperately needs more warriors like him.
In the spring of 2003, I received an email from an old friend asking if I wanted to start a weblog, or blog, with him. The internet was in its toddler phase. It was before Facebook and Twitter existed. Internet Explorer was the most popular browser, Yahoo was the most popular search engine, and the first iPhone was still four years in the future.
Blogging was just coming into its own as a way for amateurs to share their thoughts with the world. It was a revolution in media access where a pajama-wearing basement-dweller could rival media giants with the power of thoughts, well-constructed arguments, and the right mix of style and character. For a few years, the Wisconsin blogosphere was a vibrant avant-garde exploring cultural and political discussions hitherto controlled by the mainstream media or consigned to sloshy conversations at the end of the tavern bar. We were of different ages, backgrounds, circumstances, philosophies, and motivations, but were united in the celebration of this new medium of free expression. We ventured out of our homes to meet each other in person at blog summits and casual gatherings. It was at was one of these blog events that I first met the Marquette Warrior in person.
Doctor John McAdams was a conservative professor at Marquette University during the time of the radical leftist takeover of that once Jesuit center of learning. His blog was titled “Marquette Warrior” with the stated goal of providing “an independent, rather skeptical view of events at Marquette University,” and it certainly fulfilled that mission.
Doctor John McAdams passed away last week. He leaves behind a legacy as a warrior for freedom of thought and speech in an era that desperately needs more warriors like him. McAdams was jovial, witty, occasionally crass, extraordinarily intelligent, and unapologetically conservative. His professorial tone and pleasingly lax physique belied his steely spine. McAdams was not one to casually suffer affronts to liberty or what he thought was right. While he fought a long, brawling ideological battle with his employer and the leftists reshaping his beloved university with many advances and setbacks, he will be best remembered for taking that fight to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and winning a landmark ruling that will protect academic liberty for generations.
McAdams has been blogging about incidents at Marquette University for over a decade when, in 2014, he blogged about yet another incident of woke indoctrination that has become commonplace throughout academia. A graduate student was teaching a class when she lectured her students that gay marriage was ethically and morally correct and that any arguments against it were automatically homophobic and immoral. When a student objected that it was at least worthy of debate — especially in an ostensibly Catholic university — the instructor shut down debate as illegitimate.
McAdams blogged about the incident arguing that irrespective of one’s views on gay marriage, a university classroom was supposed to be a place where divergent ideas could be debated openly and honestly. That is the difference between education and indoctrination. Education invites scrutiny and debate. Indoctrination rejects all discussion as inappropriate and immoral.
That post by McAdams began a story that would end in his unequivocal victory. In retaliation to the blog post, Marquette University suspended McAdams and offered him the opportunity to return to the classroom only if he would prostrate himself before the university overlords and beg for forgiveness. But McAdams was made of stiffer stuff. He fought. He fought hard. And he won.
McAdams fought the university all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In the landmark 2018 ruling of McAdams v. Marquette University, the court ruled that the “University breached the Contract by suspending Dr. McAdams for exercising his contractually-protected right of academic freedom,” and ordered him reinstated. McAdams humbly returned to the classroom for the remainder of his life.
Dr. McAdams’ fight was a fight for all Wisconsinites. When others were swept away by the Legions of Woke, the lonely Marquette Warrior was the rock upon which they broke. He will be sorely missed.
Tech moguls who made their fortunes from Facebook, Twitter and Netflix have donated at least $7.5 million to groups tied to BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who has in turn publicly backed their policy goals, according to a new report.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and Patricia Ann Quillin, the wife of Netflix’s billionaire CEO, all gave generously to Cullors’ PAC and associated charities, according to the New York Post.
Cullors for her part has strongly advocated for ‘net neutrality’, a policy that financially benefits online content providers such as Netflix and social media sites.
And the cozy relationship has even seen Facebook and Twitter censor perceived criticism of Cullors, with Facebook going so far as to block users from sharing a DailyMail.com article detailing a controversy over her expensive real estate holdings.
CEDARBURG — The 2021 Strawberry Festival has been canceled. The Festivals of Cedarburg Board made its decision Wednesday night based on current CDC guidelines and COVID-19 trends. The festival was scheduled for June 26-27.
“It wasn’t an easy decision to make,” said President Jim Pape in a press release. “We’re all looking forward to a sense of normalcy, to summer days when we can get out of our homes and gather together again. With vaccines becoming more and more prevalent, Strawberry Festival seemed like it might be the perfect opportunity for that — a smalltown early summer outdoor festival. But we need to make sure we’re doing it safely, and current statistics and restrictions just make it too difficult to predict what conditions will be like in June.”
Strawberry Festival was also canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Festivals of Cedarburg decided to turn it into a mini virtual festival. Almost 1,000 people logged into the Virtual Strawberry Festival.
There are large gatherings going on all over the country and there is no evidence that COVID has an easy time spreading through them. Baseball games? Fine. Riots? No COVID there. Tourist attractions? Open and doing just fine. Elections? Good.
Furthermore, everybody over 16 in Wisconsin is eligible for a vaccine and they are readily available. In fact, there are areas where they have vaccines sitting around waiting for people. By the time June comes, there will be absolutely no reason that anyone who wants a vaccine shouldn’t have one.
Finally, if you don’t want to attend a festival or keep you shop open during it – don’t. Don’t go! The fact that you are worried about an event doesn’t mean that you get to cancel it for everyone else. If there’s anything we have seen, it’s that there is an enormous demand for anything that is open. Every time something opens, it’s mobbed. Restaurants that have opened to capacity are filling it. And the people who want to stay home for good or bad reasons are perfectly able to do so. Our society shouldn’t cater to their FOMO.
These board members aren’t following any science or common sense. They are just lazy, fearful hacks who don’t want to get off their butts and continue Cedarburg’s marvelous traditions. Shame on them.
Who is on the board? I have no idea. They don’t put their board members on their website. But you can find their generic contact information here if you are in the mood to be ignored.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the fatal cop shooting of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant shows police violence ‘disproportionately impacts black and Latino people’ during Wednesday’s press briefing.
She suggested the shooting was an example of racial bias after Columbus police released bodycam footage showing the teen lunging at another girl with a knife.
[…]
On Wednesday Columbus police released more graphic footage showing Bryant lunging at another girl with a knife.
Doctor John McAdams passed away last week. He leaves behind a legacy as a warrior for freedom of thought and speech in an era that desperately needs more warriors like him. McAdams was jovial, witty, occasionally crass, extraordinarily intelligent, and unapologetically conservative. His professorial tone and pleasingly lax physique belied his steely spine. McAdams was not one to casually suffer affronts to liberty or what he thought was right. While he fought a long, brawling ideological battle with his employer and the leftists reshaping his beloved university with many advances and setbacks, he will be best remembered for taking that fight to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and winning a landmark ruling that will protect academic liberty for generations.
“Isolation is really one of the toughest things for people with addiction. It’s easier to drink and to use if people aren’t noticing you. I think it’s easier to hide out,” Pierquet-Hohner said.
From September of 2019 to September of 2020, there was nearly a 30 percent increase in drug overdose deaths across the country. In Wisconsin, the rise was 27.9 percent over that same time period.
“People when they take a substance like an opioid, it sends off pleasure responses in the brain that sort of tell people, ‘oh. this feels good,’” Dr. Elizabeth Salisbury-Afshar said. She’s an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
We’re turning a corner. The cultural and policy implications are paramount. Will government officials force people to get vaccinated, or, at least, make participation in modern life impossible without it? Will the social nagging and shaming kick up a notch? I think “yes” to both questions.
In a larger sense, if vaccines are available to anyone who wants one and you have yours, why do you care if someone else doesn’t? We used to be OK with letting people accept their own risks. Are we now shifting to a culture where personal risk is centrally managed by our government?
Many U.S. states and cities have a growing surplus of Covid-19 vaccines, a sign that in some places demand is slowing before a large percentage of the population has been inoculated, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News.
The data indicate as many as one in three doses are unused in some states. Appointments for shots often go untaken, with few people signing up.
[…]
Federal officials are in the early stages of rethinking distribution. Vaccines have so far been doled out based on population.
“We’re going to go through stages, as we vaccinate higher and higher portions of populations, where it will make sense for us to continue to watch where vaccines are needed, how vaccines are distributed, the best way to reach more people,” Andy Slavitt, senior adviser for the White House’s Covid Response team, said at the end of March.
He was one of the good ones… one of the best… a warrior to the core… and he will be greatly missed. RIP, Marquette Warrior.
He wasn’t scared of the fight; he was willing to take it on. He had a cause, and he had principles and he had courage, and he was willing to stand up for what he believed in. Mostly, I think, he couldn’t stand how afraid conservative students were to share their beliefs and how liberal thought was an orthodoxy on campus. I admired him then. I came to admire him all the more as he took on the politically correct totalitarians at Marquette, stood up for conservative students even at peril to himself, and toiled away in the blogging and writing trenches, offering a rare conservative counterpoint in the towers of academe and in Wisconsin media.
And so it was with great sadness that I learned that, according to the Marquette Wire, Prof. McAdams has passed away. He continued blogging almost to the end. His last blog post was in March. Last August, he wrote, “There is no reason to believe that the basic instinct of university bureaucrats — to pander to politically correct leftists — has changed at all.” He was standing up for a conservative student in that post – again.
I see that riot season has begun in earnest. The facts don’t matter. If it wasn’t Wright in Brooklyn Center, it would have been something else. This is an organized movement that is just seizing any opportunity to destabilize our nation.
The third night of Daunte Wright protests turned violent as demonstrators clashed with police in Minneapolis while Portland’s police union building was set on fire during the riot.
At least 60 people were arrested at protests in Portland, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago overnight on Tuesday.
Curfews had been in place for Brooklyn Center, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Crystal, Columbia Heights, New Hope and Maple Grove from 10pm local time, but had done little to stem the demonstrators.
You will see, for example, a lot of signs and slogans sponsored by the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Their stated goal is the violent overthrow of capitalism. They state:
The idea that the capitalists’ grip on society and their increasingly repressive state can be abolished through any means other than a revolutionary overturn is an illusion.
This is just one of a dozen or more organizations that you see at these riots that are bent on overthrowing our society. This is the same tactic used by communists and insurgents all over the world for hundreds of years – and they are using it effectively.
Nothing says “unity” like a bunch of superrich elites lecturing the rest of America to “shut up and get in line.” Make no mistake… big business and big government love each other. They don’t like it when the little people talk back.
More than 100 corporate leaders joined in a Zoom call on Saturday to discuss ways they could counter new voting regulations that some see as a move to reduce electoral participation.
Their call was convened in response to new rules in Georgia, signed into law by the governor on March 31, which critics say brings back Jim Crow-era restrictions.
Executives who have said they would sign on include ones from: Pepsi, PayPal, Starbucks, AMC Entertainment, Merck, Hess and T. Rowe Price, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Here’s a neat poem by diplomat and Milwaukean George F. Kennan called “Three Score and Ten”:
When the step becomes slow, and the wit becomes slower,
And memory fails, and the hearing declines;
When skies become clouded, and clouds become lower,
And you find yourself talking poetical lines;
When the path that you tread becomes steeper and darker;
And the question seems no longer whether, but when –
Then, my friend, you should look for the biblical marker,
The sign by the road that reads: Three Score and Ten;
At this point you’ll observe, if you care to look closely,
You’re no longer alone on the highway of life;
For there trudges behind you, and glowers morosely,
A bearded old man with a curious knife;
At first you defy this absurd apparition
(For it’s old Father Time, with his glass and his scythe);
You swear you were never in better condition –
The body more jaunty, the spirit more blythe;
And you laugh in his face, and you tell the old joker;
“You must be mistaken; I’m feeling just fine,”
But the wretched old scarecrow just picks up his poker
And gives you a jab and says: “Get back in line”;
So you swallow your pride, and you march with your brothers;
You do all the things you’re instructed to do;
But you’re sure this compulsion, just right for the others,
Could not have been really intended for you;
And you turn to the thought of your erstwhile successes –
How brilliant, how charming, how worthy of fame;
‘Til a small voice protests and the conscience confesses
What an ass you once were and how empty the claim;
Then the ghosts of the past find you out in your sadness,
And gather about, and point fingers of shame –
The ghosts of stupidities spawned by your madness –
The ghosts of injustices done in your name;
And you grieve with remorse for the sins you’ve committed:
The fingers that roamed and the tongue that betrayed;
But you grieve even more for the ones you omitted:
The nectar untasted, the record unplayed.
But the cut most unkind, and the cruelest teacher,
Is the feeling you have when, as sometimes occurs,
The wandering eye of some heavenly creature
Encounters your own, and your own catches hers;
And you conjure up dreams too delightful to mention,
And you primp and you pose, ’til it’s suddenly seen
That the actual object of all her attention –
This burning, voluptuous female attention –
Is a fellow behind you who’s all of nineteen.
So you swallow your pride, and you scurry for cover
In the solaces characteristic of age:
You tell the same anecdotes over and over,
Forget the same names, and reread the same page;
And at length you concede, though with dim satisfaction,
That it’s not on yourself that your peace now depends –
That for this you must look to a different reaction:
To the weary indulgence of children and friends.
Yet, if given the chance to retread, as you’ve known it,
The ladder of life – to begin at the spot
Where the story picked up, and before you had blown it
Would you take it, dear friends?
I suspect you would not;
So let us take heart; we are none of us friendless;
And fill up your glasses, and raise them again
To the chance that an interval, seemingly endless,
“This is an epidemic, for God’s sake, and it has to stop,” Biden said in a Rose Garden speech.
Sit back and think of all of the government overreach we have experienced in the last year under the auspices that we had to do it to fight an “epidemic.” The government shut down businesses; forced people to stay home; forced people to wear masks; suspended civil rights to assemble, petition government, due process, speedy trials, etc.; changed election laws; funneled trillions of dollars to special interests and corporations; restricted interstate travel; nd on and on and on. The government did all of that to fight an epidemic.
So by calling violence committed with guns an “epidemic,” does that give Biden, Evers, and others the same cover to do the same thing to fight it? Could the government suspend carry laws, force gun registrations, and more to fight it? If not, why not? Do you think they won’t try?
There is a reason that Biden’s handlers put that word in his mouth.
An Associated Press analysis of state data reveals that the coronavirus pandemic has ripped away several systemic safety nets for millions of Americans — many of them children like Ava. It found that child abuse reports, investigations, substantiated allegations and interventions have dropped at a staggering rate, increasing risks for the most vulnerable of families in the U.S.
In the AP’s analysis, it found more than 400,000 fewer child welfare concerns reported during the pandemic and 200,000 fewer child abuse and neglect investigations and assessments compared with the same time period of 2019. That represents a national total decrease of 18% in both total reports and investigations.
