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FEBRUARY 15,  2022

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

BROADENING OUR PERSPECTIVE AND MAKING US BETTER PEOPLE – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   The University of Bristol in the U.K. is offering guidance to its staff on “using pronouns at work,” which includes not only the usual “he/him,” “she/her” and “they/them,” but so-called “neopronouns” as well.  According to The Telegraph, neopronouns are defined as “third-person pronouns that are not officially recognised in the language they are used in.” Like “Ze/Zir/Zirs,” for example.  They also include “emojiself pronouns,” icons which “represent gender in written and spoken conversation.”  Then there are pronouns for what are known as “xenic” individuals, those whose gender “does not fit within ‘the Western human binary of gender alignments.'”  One of these is called “catgender,” where a person strongly identifies with cats “or other felines” or “may experience delusions relating to being a cat.”  I'm so glad I understand.  Now I can interact with the lady next door who answers every question with "meow."  I will show respect.  Cats make good neighbors.

February 15, 2022       Permalink

THE PARENTS' REVOLT SPREADS TO THE URBAN HEARTBEAT OF THE AMERICAN LEFT – SAN FRANCISCO:  NO, I MEAN IT.  I'M BEING SERIOUS – OVERNIGHT – FROM THE NEW YORK POST:   

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco residents recalled three members of the city’s school board Tuesday for what critics called misplaced priorities and putting progressive politics over the needs of children during the pandemic.

Voters overwhelmingly approved the recall in a special election, according to tallies by the San Francisco Department of Elections.

“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” Mayor London Breed said in a statement. “San Francisco is a city that believes in the value of big ideas, but those ideas must be built on the foundation of a government that does the essentials well.”

Breed will now appoint board replacements to serve until another election in November.
The election was the first recall in San Francisco since 1983, since a failed attempt to remove then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein.

The school board has seven members, all Democrats, but only three were eligible to be recalled: school board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins.

Opponents called the recall a waste of time and money, as the district faces a number of challenges including a $125 million budget deficit and the need to replace retiring Superintendent Vincent Matthews.

Parents in the politically liberal city launched the recall effort in January 2021 out of frustration over the slow reopening of district schools, while the board pursued the renaming of 44 school sites and the elimination of competitive admissions at the elite Lowell High School.

The mayor, one of the most prominent endorsers of the recall, praised the parents, saying they “were fighting for what matters most -– their children.”

The three members, including Faauuga Moliga, defended their record, saying they prioritized racial equity because that was what they were elected to do.

The pressures of the pandemic and distance learning have merged with politics nationwide, making school board races a new front in a culture war as resentments over COVID-19 reach a boiling point. Republicans are increasingly looking to the education fight as a galvanizing issue that could help them sway voters.

In San Francisco, one of the nation’s most liberal cities, the recall effort split Democrats. Breed, a Democrat, had criticized the school board for being distracted by “political agendas.”

COMMENT:  This happened in San Francisco?  Yeah?  Pinch me, please pinch me.

February 15,  2022     Permalink

FEBRUARY 14,  2022

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

MORE TRUTH COMES OUT – FROM SPIKED-ONLINECOM:   The Black Lives Matter movement has raised billions of dollars over the past several years. But no one seems to know how most of that money has been spent.  On 20 December 2020, The Economist noted that $10.6 billion had been pledged to causes and organisations affiliated with BLM. According to that article and further reporting from the right-leaning Daily Signal, BLM’s corporate donors included Amazon, Gatorade, Microsoft, 23andMe and Tinder, while recipients ranged from the small-scale Unicorn Riot guerilla media firm to the sizeable Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF).  As far as I can tell, no comprehensive or even partial audit of what happened to this staggering sum of money has ever taken place. Indeed, given the sheer number of corporate and NGO players involved, conducting one would be incredibly difficult.  Another journalism failure.  You'd think the major, mighty, lefty news organizations would be curious about the finances of BLM, and who actually benefits.  You'd think wrong.  Why should results matter when the ideology is so inviting?

February 14, 2022       Permalink

MORE ON THE NEW HILLARY MESS – OVERNIGHT:  Even though the mainstream media is trying to avoid the story, it just won't be avoided.  It is leaking out through a number of alternative outlets.  A great analysis from Rich Lowry in the New York Post: 

From the perspective of several years ago, it’s the stuff of an implausible political thriller or a conspiratorial YouTube account. One presidential campaign spies on another as part of a broad effort to get government agencies to pick up the baton and launch a high-stakes investigation of the new president that hampers his first years in office and consumes massive public attention.

Where could such a thing happen? Maybe Brazil or Equatorial Guinea? Well, we now know it happened in these United States.

The latest from special counsel John Durham is that a tech executive connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign mined Internet contacts between Russia and the entities connected to Donald Trump in a search for material to try, as Durham put it in a court filing last week, to “establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia.”

Durham’s probe is a righteous effort to get to the bottom of a matter that deranged American politics for two solid years but has been derided or ignored by the mainstream press, with baleful consequences.

Russiagate did more than its share to undermine the norm that losing campaigns should accept the result of free-and-fair elections and to erode confidence in institutions at the highest levels of our government. One way to minimize the harm is to insist on accountability. The people who were most invested in Russiagate for the longest, though, are least interested in revisiting its origins, let alone in apologizing for their own credulousness or malice.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign allegedly paid an internet company to “infiltrate” servers in order to link former President Donald Trump to Russia in 2016.

COMMENT:  Read the rest.  It's well worth it.  The quality of our journalism today is scandalous.  The leadership of journalism today is equally bad.  There was a time when we could count on certain senior journalists to set a high standard and maintain a respectable tone.  There are still some like that around, but fewer and fewer each year.

Now the press is challenged, once again, on its credibility – the one quality that must never be compromised.  Pulitzer prizes were won by newspapers for their "investigative reporting" into President Trump's "collusion" with Russia, something that clearly never happened.  Will the Pulitzers be returned?  I doubt it.  And now the press is confronted with serious charges about Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, and many outlets are resisting even reporting the story.  How long do some prominent journalists believe the public will accept this kind of deceit and hypocrisy?  The public is not as stupid as many in journalism think it is.  If polls on press credibility are accurate, the people are making their choices, the right choices.

February 14, 2022       Permalink