This has been the deliberate shattering, in the name of virus control, of what was left of our common life.
Between individual experiences and those on the bigger scale of national or international politics lies most of human society: clubs, church groups, voluntary associations, the whole organic life of communities great and small. All of this relies on peer- to-peer social connection – and it was all abruptly halted by lockdown.
[…]
It’s just difficult to see, because everything now, from our media to Government lockdown policy, seems geared toward ‘just me’ or ‘everything’ – but nothing in between.
Who cares about local life, now our public conversation happens online, at colossal scale, in terms set by Chinese companies and Silicon Valley social justice evangelists and massaged by algorithms?
The answer has to be: us. We care. Even as it’s grown harder to see our life in common, we need it more than ever. The alternative future is an unjust, atomised, deeply inhuman place.
MADISON – Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers gave approval Wednesday for the Ho-Chunk Nation to build a $405 million casino in Beloit, clearing one of the Wisconsin tribe’s major hurdles for the long-sought project.
Last year the administration of then-President Donald Trump approved the project. The Democratic governor announced Wednesday he was siding with that decision, allowing it to move forward.
Wisconsin governors have sole say on casino projects, and Republicans who control the Legislature don’t have an easy way to block them if they oppose them.
The complex just west of Interstate 39/90 would feature a casino, convention center, 300-room hotel and 40,000-square-foot indoor water park on 73 acres, according to the tribe and government officials. It would create 1,500 permanent jobs and 2,000 construction jobs.
While I understand the social ills from gambling, that ship has sailed. Our country is saturated with gambling establishments – both brick and mortar and online. Wisconsin might as well benefit from the jobs and economic benefits.
I will reiterate, again, that Wisconsin needs to abandon it’s racist gambling laws. Right now, only the Native American Tribes are permitted to open casinos. If we are going to have casinos all over the state, why can’t Wisconsinites of other races and ethnicities operate casinos too? We already have gambling in Wisconsin. Let’s let any Wisconsinite reap the benefits instead of just the costs.
The court has largely dodged the issue since issuing two landmark opinions in 2008 and 2010, when it held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms at home for self- defense.
Gun rights advocates and even some of the justices themselves have expressed frustration that the court has declined to further define the scope of the right as lower courts across the country have upheld restrictions.
Three years ago, for example, Justice Clarence Thomas charged that the “Second Amendment is a disfavored right in this court.”
[…]
The new case concerns a New York law governing licenses to carry concealed handguns in public. It requires residents to show they have what the state calls an “actual and articulable” need to do so.
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“The law is consistent with the historical scope of the Second Amendment and directly advances New York’s compelling interests in public safety and crime prevention,” New York Attorney General Letitia James wrote in court papers.
No other Constitutional right requires the citizen to declare an affirmative need – subject to review by a government official – in order to exercise it. Imagine if you had to declare a “need” before being allowed to speak, or practice your religion, or assemble, or get a jury trial, or petition your government, or get a lawyer… and if some government official decided that your “need” did not meet his or her ambiguous threshold, you wouldn’t be allowed to do it.
Nuts, right?
Right.
So why would that standard apply to the rights protected in the 2nd Amendment if it wouldn’t to those protected by the 1st?
I received this tip in email. It illustrates something that is going on all over Wisconsin. For several years, we have seen an organized, grassroots efforts by liberals to take control of local school boards and units of governments. In liberal areas, they just run as liberals. Simple enough. In conservative areas, they pretend to be conservatives to get elected. They lie or hide. There is a glaring instance of this in the City of West Bend.
A couple of years ago, there was a concerted push by left-leaning and pro-government people to take over West Bend’s Common Council. They didn’t do anything illegal. They were just organized, funded, and energetic. At the same time, conservatives were lazy, complacent, and distracted. The result is that conservative West Bend now has a left-leaning city government. I wrote about it last year. In particular, the council is dominated by ex-government union employees who think the best government is the one that serves the employees.
One of the exceptions is District 8 Alderwoman, Meghann Kennedy. Kennedy was appointed to the seat a year ago after Roger Kist resigned for health reasons. She’s a rock star conservative who really annoys the lefties on the council and in city government by asking real questions, opposing tax increases, and voting conservative.
Well, Kennedy is up for reelection. Challenging her is a guy named Cliff Van Beek. Van Beek was born and raised on the east side of Milwaukee, worked in government, and brought his politics with him when he moved to West Bend. He is endorsed by West Bend Firefighter’s union and it’s clear why. Here’s a bit of background on Van Beek:
1. CLIFF VAN BEEK SPENT TIME ON THE TOM AMENT PENSION BOARD AS A MEMBER AND LABOR UNION LEADER.
No wonder the unions support Van Beek. He has a lifetime of experience fleecing taxpayers for the benefit of government employees and their unions. Van Beek and his supporters are now running around town telling people that he is a conservative and mouthing all of the right words to get elected in a conservative community. He claims to be a “fiscal conservative” to anyone who will listen. Don’t be fooled. There’s only one conservative in that race and it’s Meghann Kennedy.
I expect that with a little digging, we would be able to uncover this scenario 100 or more times across Wisconsin. This is how the Left is taking over our schools, cities, villages, and counties – one seat at a time. They are organized and intentional in playing the long game. As we have seen, some of these liberals who get elected to local government then use it as a platform to run for higher office.
Conservatives need to be organized and fight for every local seat or we will cede the state. The ideological battle isn’t being fought in Madison. It’s being fought right down the street. And that’s where conservatives are losing.
The entire senior staff of the San Francisco schools has denounced a black school board member’s tweets that claimed Asian Americans use ‘white supremacist thinking’ to get ahead.
In her tweets, she also referred to Asian Americans as ‘house n***ers’.
On Sunday, 19 top administrators at the district’s central office condemned the 2016 tweets from the board’s Vice President Alison Collins, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
[…]
Their statement addressed Collins’ tweets that she shared on December 4, 2016.
[…]
She also included a reference comparing Asian Americans to ‘house n***ers’.
‘Where are the vocal Asians speaking up against Trump? Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well? Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n****r is still being a n****r. You’re still considered “the help,'” she tweeted at the time.
Spring breakers invading Miami Beach have become so uncontrollable that authorities imposed a curfew on Saturday and declared a state of emergency as SWAT teams were seen moving in to clear people out.
A SWAT vehicle was filmed moving down Ocean Drive – a popular party street – and using an LRAD, also known as a sound cannon, to get people to disperse, video posted to Twitter shows.
The move to control the crowds followed weeks of wild partying in Miami Beach, which is no stranger to uncontrollable spring break throngs of young people.
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The crowds of young people crushing the beach city have sparked worries of a coronavirus ‘super-spreader’ event, while alcohol-fueled partiers have been starting fights in restaurants and in the streets, officials said.
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Franco said in a live video that the crowd breaking appears to be a multi-agency effort, with helicopters from Miami-Dade police, a SWAT vehicle from Coral Gables and officers from other agencies.
In another video posted Twitter, a man wearing Joker makeup waves an American flag while standing on top of a car screaming ‘COVID is over baby’ and throwing money into the air.
Later in the night, Ocean Drive was seen nearly empty after cops made everyone disperse and photos posted by Miami Beach police show street sweepers cleaning leftover debris.
As it pertains to the food supply, blockchain is an efficient and decentralized way to secure a timeline of analytical information from the farm, processor, distributor and retailer so every ingredient’s source is traceable. Harris compared the food supply and its trend toward blockchain as paralleling Spotify, Amazon and Netflix in their users’ relationship with music, books and movies.
“I foresee the day when nutrition labels will each have a QR code so consumers can use their phone to access the history of nearly every ingredient in that item,” Harris said. “In fact, some companies are already supplying this information.”
Geez, the media sure went from “racist sex addict nut kills 8 people” to “all of America is racist” at lightening speed. The way they all darted that direction like a flock of Starlings means that there is a reason. They must need to stoke a story to distract from something else. The border? Giant tax increases? The president’s weak mind? COVID getting better? All of the above?
And here, on March 15,1783, Washington’s officers met for what the historian James Thomas Flexner saw as “probably the most important single gathering ever held in the United States.” That gathering involved mutiny. Mutiny by Washington’s officers.
Some historians call the incident the “Newburgh Addresses”; others know it as the “Newburgh Conspiracy.” Simply stated, it was a chain of events culminating in a meeting to decide whether the officers would trust Congress to redeem overdue pay and pension claims or whether they would open the national treasury with the army’s bayonets. In every successful armed rebellion the generals eventually must decide whether to yield to civil authority or opt for military dictatorship. The choice they make frames that country’s future. For America the hour of decision fell in the last, bitter winter of the war.
Washington’s concern for his camp’s appearance was not for aesthetics alone. Having commanded the army for more than seven years—outlasting three British counterparts—he knew his regiments well. And he sensed that the army’s morale, particularly that of its officers, was as low now as it had been at any other time during the war—even the dark winter days of Valley Forge. He expected trouble. Keeping everyone busy might help.
[…]
He rode to the cantonment. All seemed calm, but a sixth sense sharpened by many crises warned him that it was not. Long-shared camaraderie seemed strained. Officers swept off their hats in salute but avoided his eyes and did not smile. This was new. An unmistakable hostility lurked near the surface. The officers seemed almost embarrassed by his presence.
[…]
Washington shuffled his papers. He had labored over his speech. But it held long, involved, cumbersome sentences. When spoken, the muscle was lost in the flesh of ornate composition. Washington could not match Brutus as a writer.
In desperation he took a letter from a pocket of his regimentals. In it Congressman Jones praised the army and pledged his support. Perhaps this would help. As Washington opened the note, there was a murmur among his officers. Washington took that as impatience. He cleared his throat and attempted to read.
He could not. The script was too small. His eyes could not focus. The dim letters blurred. Helplessly he fumbled in another pocket for his spectacles. As he donned them, the murmur increased. Again he thought it impatience. He adjusted the spectacles. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.”
It was enough. They’d not been impatient. The murmur was one of sympathy, understanding, affection. In their eight years together they had never seen Washington wear spectacles. He had seemed tired and worn before. Now he seemed older and vulnerable. He was only fifty but had aged this week. He had problems they didn’t even know about. If he still trusted the Congress, they could do no less.
Few heard as Washington haltingly read from Jones’s letter. No matter.
When he stopped, the officers crowded about him in reassurance and contrition. Some wept. Others simply stood, stunned and silent, as the general left the room.
Mission head Victor Ghica said “19 structures and a church carved into the bedrock” were discovered in 2020, according to the statement.
The church walls were decorated with “religious inscriptions” and biblical passages in Greek, revealing “the nature of monastic life in the region”, Ghica said.
It clearly showed that monks were present there since the fifth century AD, he added.
The remote site, located in the desert southwest of the capital Cairo, was occupied from the fourth to eighth centuries, with a likely peak of activity around the fifth and sixth centuries, according to the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, in charge of the mission.
Enough already. We have seen these dire warnings for a year now and almost all of them have proven to be wrong. Stop lecturing people about having some fun. They know the risks and are free Americans. Let them be.
Massive crowds of St. Patrick’s Day revelers have descended on Savannah, Georgia, leading the city’s mayor to call it a ‘recipe for a superspreader event’ amid efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic.
Savannah, long known for hosting the largest St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the South, cancelled its parade for the second year in a row, but the city still expected up to 50,000 out-of-town visitors to arrive over the weekend.
On Saturday night, huge crowds were seen swarming the Plant Riverside, a new $375 million hotel and nightlife development whose owners are promoting a six-day festival with live music, a large fountain synchronized to Irish music and green lights illuminating the complex built from a shuttered power plant.
Savannah Mayor Van Johnson said the festival plans were ‘a slap in the face’ to the city’s efforts to curb coronavirus infections by foregoing events that draw big crowds.
Comedian and late-night host Bill Maher said the United States has “lost” to China in the “battle for the 21st century.”
During “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday, Maher argued that China was becoming more dominant on the world stage as the U.S. argues over “culture wars.”
“You know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China. All 1.4 billion of them could give a crouching tiger flying f—,” Maher said, referencing the controversy surrounding six of Seuss’s books that were pulled by Dr. Seuss Enterprises over racist imagery.
“If anything, they are not a silly people. They are as serious as a prison fight,” he said
Maher criticized China’s authoritarian government over controversies surrounding Hong Kong’s autonomy and the nation’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims. However, the host went on to argue that China is able to quickly develop and solve problems as the U.S. debates partisan issues.
“On a national level, we’ve been having infrastructure week every week since 2009, but we never do anything,” Maher said.“Half the county is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a d—, and the other half believes that we have to stop the lizard people because they’re eating babies.”
To the editor: Language and the meaning of words are important. Among many other disagreements I have with Owen Robinson regarding political philosophy and policy, an important pet peeve of mine is the distorted use of language and adjectives used for propaganda purposes. There is no such thing as “sanctuary county.” The term should not be used by the public, by the media or the propagandists. There also is no such thing as “government schools” in our nation. The correct term is “public schools,” financed by taxpayers, locally overseen by an elected school board, with more oversight by the elected Legislature, the governor and the superintendent of Public Instruction. Suggest not using the propagandist language and calling it out when heard.
Stephen Roberts
West Bend
Who gets to decide what the “correct” term is? Isn’t “public school” just as much propaganda (if you want to use that word) as “government school?” The word choice conveys a message and carries a different connotation even though both are accurate.
I choose to call them “government” schools because I think it is more accurate. There are many things that are “public” that are not owned and operated by the government. For example, grocery stores and restaurants are open to public access, but not operated by the government. Utilities are considered a public entities, but not owned and operated by the government. Even some prisons are public institutions, but not owned or operated by the government. So for me, “public school” is too broad a definition. It could include Choice schools and even some Charter schools – institutions that are funded by taxpayers, but not operated by the government.
“Government” schools, however, is a more precise definition for what I am talking about. I’m talking about institutions that are owned and operated wholly by the government. All of the employees are government employees. And it is governed by an elected body. I prefer this more accurate characterization than the gauzy term “public school.”
As time has gone on, evidence has grown on one side of the equation: the harm being done to children by restricting their “circulation.” There is thewell-documented fall-off in student academic performance at schools that have shifted to virtual learning, which, copious evidence now shows, is exacerbating racial and class divides in achievement. This toll has led a growing number ofepidemiologists,pediatricians andother physicians to argue for reopening schools as broadly as possible, amidgrowingevidence that schools are not major venues for transmission of the virus.
As many of these experts have noted, the cost of restrictions on youth has gone beyond academics. The CDC found that the proportion of visits to the emergency room by adolescents between ages 12 and 17 that were mental-health-related increased 31% during the span of March to October 2020, compared with the same months in 2019.A study in the March 2021 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, of people aged 11 to 21 visiting emergency rooms found “significantly higher” rates of “suicidal ideation” during the first half of 2020 (compared to 2019), as well as higher rates of suicide attempts, though the actual number of suicides remained flat.
Doctors are concerned about possible increases in childhood obesity — no surprise with many kids housebound in stress-filled homes — whileaddiction experts are warning of the long-term effects of endless hours of screen time when both schoolwork and downtime stimulation are delivered digitally. (Perhaps the only indicator of youth distress that is falling — reports of child abuse and neglect, whichdropped about 40% early in the pandemic — is nonetheless worrisome because experts suspect it is the reporting that is declining, not the frequency of the abuse.)
Finally, the nationwide surge in gun violence since the start of the pandemic has included, in many cities, a sharp rise incrimes involving juveniles, including many killed or arrested during what would normally be school time. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb where school buildings have remained closed, seven teenagers were charged with murder in just the first five weeks of this year.
That’s why the WIAA is pushing to make harassment of sports officials a misdemeanor, punishable with up to a $10,000 fine to nine months in jail. Currently, it’s up to NASO or the WIAA to take care of officials in Wisconsin.
There is definitely a problem with referees being harassed, but we don’t need to criminalize it more. If a parent actually assaults a ref, that is still a crime. The fact that a game is going on is immaterial.
What we need is more civility. The fact that more people are being jackasses to refs is a manifestation of the larger decline in civility in our society.
Some 78 million vaccine doses have been administered but Mr Biden said this was not a reason to end public health measures.
“The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime everything’s fine, take off your mask, forget it,” Mr Biden said. “It still matters.”
Senior health officials in his administration have warned about the continued spread of the virus – and highly contagious variants of it – hampering the progress of the country’s vaccination programme.
“Now is not the time to release all restrictions,” Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said.
Have you noticed that the “senior health officials” have not been able to give any actual guidance on when things can open? What is it? Herd immunity? X% vaccinated? Hospitalization rate? Death rate? What do we have to do before they give their blessing to open?
The truth is that Biden and the Democrats need the fear and uncertainly to ram through their radical agenda. They will never bless reopening completely. There will always be another strain or a spike. If we leave it to them, we will be wearing masks and killing ourselves alone in our homes forever.
Meanwhile, some governors (not Wisconsin’s) are trying to balance public health with other priorities – economic, educational, cultural, societal – to make decisions.
For me, the vaccination was a gloomy submission to a new world of excessive safety and regulation. I’d tried to fight against it but I lost.
The New Jerusalem, in which we allow the state to boss us around even more, in the name of our own good, is now coming into being.
And so we are just going to be under surveillance a lot more, recorded a lot more and bossed about a lot more. I’m reminded of the great Edwardian satirist Saki’s bitter 1913 novel When William Came about an imaginary German invasion of Britain.
Its hero returns to a transformed homeland from a long expedition to Tsarist Siberia (during which a fierce marsh fever has laid him low and left him in a coma for weeks).
When he finally reaches his London home, his wife apologises that she has to fill in a long police form to report his presence, explaining that it is ‘a stupid form to be filled up when any one arrives, to say where they come from, and their business and nationality and religion, and all that sort of thing. We’re rather more bureaucratic than we used to be, you know’.
Well, and so are we, and it will now get worse, because we have been through a revolution, in which we gave up real freedom for the illusion of safety. For me, almost all I need to know about it is that Mr Blair likes it so much.
From the front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Two stories with the exact same context. One group of legislators proposing legislation for one thing. Another group of legislators proposing legislation for another thing. Yet the newspaper felt the need to call out that “Republicans lawmakers” are proposing something they disagree with but “Wisconsin lawmakers” are proposing the thing they like.
It is almost a meaningless exercise to point this out anymore. It’s blatant. They don’t care.
