As a person who sits in the middle (or even “slightly left of middle”, if you prefer, which I’m sure some of you do), I often run into articles from the left or right of the divide that are poorly researched or make vast assumptions without providing any background or context. It’s been pointed out to me numerous times by Right friends that the Left is incredibly bad about this, and that they twist and turn and manipulate words in order to change the meaning of what’s being said.

This might be true. I am personally of the belief that it is true about the Left, to a point. I don’t think that it only happens on the Left, however. I see enough of it on the Right to make my head spin. To highlight this, I offer you an article from the Washington Examiner.

In it, the author speaks rather strongly about how horrible it is that Harvard Medical School is offering a course on how to treat LGBTQ infants. This is one of several articles on the course that have hit the air in the past week. 

Legal Insurrection offered their own spin on the same information. Fox News jumped on the bandwagon as well. Then there’s this one from Sandra Rose.  All of these articles seem to stem back to a single source, and some even name that source: College Fix. Their article on the topic is pretty pointed. 

I found this mess when I was slumming on TikTok, and ran across a video purporting to be by Dr. Jordan Peterson (it was not, and was subsequently taken down and the user deleted). Since Dr. Peterson is someone I’ve repeatedly been told is an authority I can trust, I watched with some level of horror that a medical school so near to me would be teaching that infants can express sexuality. 

Unlike most people, though, I didn’t take (who I thought was) Dr. Peterson’s word for it. I went investigating. I found all of the above articles first. Then I went looking for specifically Left leaning news outlets. There wasn’t a lot out there, probably because they haven’t been inundated with the news yet. The divide between Left and Right news feeds tends to be about 5 to 7 days, for things which cause people to be “indignantly righteous” about their given cause. The College Fix article only came out a week ago, so we may see more information from the Left in the next few days.

It was only after a lengthy search that I found some more balanced articles. First, AP did a decent job on their write-up, being much more balanced and fact based. They leave aside the moral pearl clutching and stick to the fact that the course catalog and teachers do not actually say what College Fix says they do. Out In Perth is a bit more in your face about it, being a firmly Left leaning news outlet. But in my strong opinion, the best information on this mess is from The Daily Wire. Facts speak for themselves.

What’s the truth? Well, Harvard Medical School has discovered that infants who are born with genital anomalies require special care. There’s some interesting stuff in there, and the course covers such information as what to do when those anomalies are life threatening or may cause serious physical damage or discomfort, long-term. It also touches on how to talk to parents of infants, who are now dealing with exhaustion and concern for their child, and have to figure out whether it’s right, moral, or possible to be made to choose which gender their kid ought to be. This entire section, the one on infants, is one day out of a month long course. 

Whether you’re interested in the comfort or affirming care of LGBTQIA+ individuals as adults doesn’t really play into this. The infants in question, who do exist and have existed for as long as we’ve been pumping out babies, require special medical care. There are all sorts of issues that those children with genital anomalies are going to face, first as infants, then as toddlers, and eventually as adults. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if a gender is chosen for them by their parents or doctors, or they grow up with their anomalies intact until they’re old enough to choose. It’s going to be tough going. Knowing how to care for them is a good thing. 

I am sharing this, because I wanted to highlight a bad habit of the Left as being done by the Right as well. The repeating of information from a single source (a source, I might add, with a bad reputation and who didn’t check all their sources, as well as altering some of their statements and carefully editing replies) is never a good practice, no matter who is doing it. Taking news from a single source and not investigating it further is never a good practice. 

And it doesn’t matter if “the Left does it more”. That’s a schoolyard game play. “Johnny did it first!” It doesn’t matter. If Johnny jumped off a cliff, would you follow him? I’m sure many of you have said that very statement to your own children or grandchildren. 

This is exactly the kind of news reporting that causes the Left to cringe and say how horrible the Right is. It’s time to stand up and either say you’re not with those people, and walk away from them, or to admit that you’re not so different from the Left after all.

Heuristic Hagar

At least 74 Illinois sheriff’s departments vow to defy state assault weapons ban

Just days after Illinois became the ninth U.S. state to ban assault rifles, the state already hit a roadblock to implementing the law: defiant sheriff’s offices.

At least 74 Illinois sheriff’s departments have publicly vowed to defy elements of a recent gun-control law signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, which banned assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and switches. The offices have vowed to not check if weapons are registered with the state or house individuals arrested only for not complying with the law.

As the number of uncooperative sheriff’s offices increased, Pritzker has made his own vow – to ensure those members of law enforcement who fail to “do their job… won’t be in their job.”

The Illinois Sheriffs’ Association issued a statement Wednesday expressing continued opposition to the law. Simultaneously, dozens of sheriff’s offices began to post nearly identical messages promising they would not check for compliance with the law or arrest offenders of the law.

Many of the sheriffs defying the law have described their opposition to the law as akin to civil disobedience to protect the Second Amendment.

“We will not be enforcing it in this county; I will also not house anyone in my jail that has violated this act because we know it to be an unlawful act by the general assembly and the governor,” Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Bullard Sr. said in an online video.

Of course, the Left is going monkeyshit over this, demanding all these sheriffs be fired.

I’d like to see the Venn Diagram of people who think these sheriffs should get fired and those who thought it was wrong for DeSantis to fire Scott Israel after the Broward County Sheriff’s Office fucked up the Parkland shooting response.  I bet it’s a perfect circle.

This reminds me of the fight over concealed carry in Illinois.

After Moore v. Madigan reqired Illinois to addopt CCW, Downstate sheriffs announced that if the state didn’t pass the law by the Court’s imposed cutoff date, they’d default to constitutional carry.

Southern Illinois is not Chicago.

These sheriffs clearly took their duty to uphold and defend the Constitution seriously.

This is good.

This video has been going around:

Full clip pic.twitter.com/6iZgG7RQgl

— BigblackniglI (@NigLlt) January 17, 2023

I have listened to this video several times.

I have no idea what the boy said to the girl.

It really doesn’t matter because at the time the girl threw the first punch, the boy had backed away, was not facing her, and had his hands full.  He was not in any sort of aggressive posture.

The girl put on a pair of brass knuckles before sucker-punching the boy in the side of his head.

A hit like that absolutely has the potential to be lethal.

It looks like she hit him in the temple or side of the eye.

With brass knuckles, that could easily have done enough damage to cause blindness or the loss of the eye.

This was not defensive, this was assault.

The two things to note.

First:

It’s scary how many people in the comment thread think that a girl sucker-punching a boy is with brass knuckles is fine of the boy said something rude to her, and conversely, since she did punch him, he must have deserved it.

It’s that male privilege that you can take a sucker-punch to the dome with brass knuckles and everyone thinks you deserved it.

Second:

Watch the hands.  This girl had time to put on a weapon and close distance while the boy was distracted. Your fight is not over when you decide it’s over but when your enemy decides it’s over.  Just because you back away doesn’t mean your opponent will let you walk away.  Maintain your situational awareness until you achieve safe distance.

You only need to look at the language used in order to understand what the infringers want. There use to be The Temperance Movement. It started in the early 1800’s and advocated for people to stop overindulging in alcohol consumption.

Most of these Temperance Movement members were female. Often they became members because they were dealing with alcoholic husbands and fathers. Alcoholism was generational. With one generation teaching the next to be “hard drinking men”.

At the same time recovering alcoholics were creating their own temperance groups. The difference being that they wanted total abstinence. It was a huge issue.

But the language was of “temperance”. That was the name of the groups. As one pundit put it recently, “It is right there in the name.”

By the beginning of the 20th century, these groups had morphed into demanding a complete prohibition on alcohol at both state and federal levels. Many members were violent, destroying bars and saloons. Destroying alcohol whenever they found it.

They believed in violent action to get their way.

The “Temperance Movement” soon demanded and got a complete ban on alcohol within the United States with a constitutional amendment.

In 1974, Mark Borinsky founded the National Council to Control Handguns. Its original mission statement is not easy to find. The general target at that time was for cheap, inexpensive guns, sometimes referred to as “Saturday Night Specials”. I.e. the target was those that had limited means to purchase higher quality firearms.

Just a few months earlier the Committee for Handgun Control, Inc. was founded. This group put members in other infringement groups to work for a common message. The message was “handguns are bad. Nobody but a criminal needs a handgun.” They advocated for licensing handgun owners, restricting certain handgun types, and creating a nation wide handgun owner and gun registry.

They wanted every handgun registered and every owner of a handgun registered as well.

They even went so far as to get the US Consumer Products Safety Division to define handgun ammunition as a hazardous substance and ban its sale. This required an act of Congress to kick the CPSD back into their place.

Congress was pressured into passing several laws banning “Saturday Night Specials” but they were unable to move any legislation forward on handguns in general.

The CFHC became renamed themselves as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV). Reportedly because the NCCH was not advocating for strong enough gun control laws.

The National Council to Control Handguns become Handgun Control, Inc. in 1980.

The language was very clear, they wanted to ban all handguns.

After the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan Handgun Control, Inc. worked to get more gun control passed.

They were joined by Sarah Brady and using the image of James Brady got the Brady Bill passed, this established NICS and all of the rest of that mess.

In 2001 they rebranded again as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The messaging is clear at this point. They were no longer talking about “handgun control” or “gun control”, they were talking about “stopping gun violence”. Where the formal definition was “gun-related violence”. This is the same word game that the climate extremist use when they talk about lowering carbon emissions which are actually defined as carbon dioxide emissions.

Talking about stopping all those nasty companies from spewing black ugly carbon into the air sounds so much better than talking about a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that plants need to survive. Talking about stopping gun violence by restricting access to guns sounds much better than talking about stopping gun related violence by restricting access to guns.

Today the infringers talk about “Stopping Gun Violence”, “Introducing common sense gun safety regulations”, “Advocating for gun responsibility”, and general “gun safety”. They never step up and admit that they are attempting to ban all firearms from the people of the United States.

Even though more than a few have let that slip, as in “Hell Yes we are coming to take your AR-15s” from the presidential wannabe. Or Pelosie’s “If I had had the votes I would have take them all.” when she got the first federal AWB passed.

In order to push the narrative, the term used for “more gun control laws” is “gun [law] reform”. That sounds so much better than “gun bans”.

This language shows what we know. The laws, as written, are in favor of the right to keep and bear arms. They need more laws to infringe on that right. That’s why they need reform.

We, the people, don’t need gun laws reformed, we need them removed because they are in violation of the Contstitution.

The Guardian holds up the CCIA of New York State, the “Kill Carry” bill of NJ, the AWB of Illinois as examples of state level victories in gun reform.

In recent years, the US has seen a flurry of activity at the state level to combat gun violence, which the American Public Health Associations has classified as an epidemic. According to the Gun Violence Archive, guns claimed the lives of more than 44,000 Americans in 2022, including 24,000 who died by suicide. Gun safety groups say passing new laws like the Illinois assault weapons ban will become even more crucial in the coming months to address this issue: with Republicans now in control of the House of Representatives, the prospects for enacting additional federal gun legislation in the near future appear bleak.

At least they were honest enough to include actual suicide numbers. More people died of suicide by firearm than all other gun related deaths. Remember that gun related deaths includes all justified homicides as well.

That armed robber, moving towards room temperature, is considered a victim of “gun violence” by the gun rights infringers.

They fail to point out that any statistic from the Gun Violence Archive is bogus. The reason is that GVA uses media reporting to determine instances of gun-related violence. This equivalent of one “unnamed source near the investigation” leaking to four different media outlets the same story. And then all four of them report the story is true because they had “independently verified the story” Even though they all used exactly the same source.

As always, they never ever stop. Having gotten the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed, one group had this to say:

“That’s just the beginning, and we’re just scratching the surface there,” said Zeenat Yahya, director of policy for the gun safety group March For Our Lives. “That’s not the end all, be all, but it was really exciting to see that progress.”

They continue to use “gun safety advocates’ demands for more action at the federal level” rather than the older “Gun control extremists demand…”

Everytown brags about the number of infringing laws that were passed by the states.

Still, Yahya agreed that reform at the state level has become “even more important with the Republican control of the House”. In the past year, states have already enacted a number of new gun laws championed by groups like March For Our Lives. According to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, at least 51 new laws aimed at reducing gun violence were passed in 2022, while dozens of bills backed by the gun lobby were defeated.

If they can’t win at the federal level, they attack at the state level, if they are losing at the state level, they attack on the federal level. The only consistent function is they always want more.

And again, notice that anything we, as gun owners, advocate for is “back by the gun lobby” rather than any suggestion of a grassroots advocacy.

Of course they can lie by misdirection:

Last June, the conservative-leaning supreme court struck down a New York law that placed strict regulations on carrying a firearm in public. In response to the court’s ruling, New York legislators enacted a new law that included an extensive list of sensitive places where guns would be prohibited – such as schools, medical facilities and government buildings. The new policy is now facing legal challenges, although the supreme court ruled Wednesday that the law can remain in effect for the time being.

The Supreme Court didn’t rule on anything. They decided not to hear the request for an emergency action. Very different.

Just because they don’t hear a case doesn’t mean they have think the situation is correct, as it sits.

Gun safety advocates highlight New York’s legislative response to the supreme court’s ruling as a key example of how states can proactively address gun violence, even as federal legislation remains stalled.

Yep, they love those F’ You’s that the states are throwing towards the Supreme Court.

“This year, we’ll be doubling down on our efforts to go statehouse by statehouse to continue to pass life-saving laws,” said Monisha Henley, managing director of state government affairs at Everytown. “That is happening no matter what’s going on in DC.”

What hopes for gun reform now Republicans have House control?

State-level victories such as those Illinois and New York likely to become crucial in the battle against gun violence

Now SPACE is racist! Woke Colorado astrophysics professor moans her field is riddled with ‘white supremacy’ and sexism – with colleagues using ‘hypermasculine’ and ‘violent’ language to describe the cosmos

A Colorado astrophysicist has claimed her field is steeped in white supremacy and sexism because ‘hypermasculine’ and ‘violent’ language is used to describe stars.

Natalie Gosnell, an assistant professor at Colorado College, takes an unconventional approach to physics by comparing stars with humans to turn science into an art.

In an interview with the college newspaper she claimed she has struggled to overcome a division between art and science that is rooted in ‘systemic racism.’

Her work aims ‘to cross typical disciplinary boundaries to create art-science pieces that re-inscribe outer space as feminist space,’ she said on her website.

‘Both artists and scientists are just observing things about the world, interpreting those observations, and then sharing their interpretation,’ Gosnell told Colorado College News.

‘As an astrophysicist, I am a product of institutions steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy,’ she said.

Suggestions that academic fields like science and engineering are male-dominated are common and generally accepted but Gosnell goes further by arguing that the language used to describe scientific phenomena is sexist and racist.

The way in which stars burn through their fuel and die is viewed through a ‘hypermasculine’ lens and the metaphors used are often ‘very violent,’ she claimed.

Gosnell, who studies binary star systems using telescopes and imaging, has said she tries to combine art and science because the two fields are more similar than people think.

More recently she was involved in a creative project, The Gift, which was an experimental piece of theater that anthropomorphized blue stragglers and made comparisons between the life spans and interactions of stars and humans.

I have always been a space junkie.

I’ve written before about how I decided to become an engineer because my dad took me to see Apollo 13 in theaters as a kid.

I admired men like Kelly Johnson and Gene Kranz.

Mem who wore skinny ties, smoked Luky Strikes, and broke the sound barrier and put men on the moon with slide rules.

This is space today.

A feminist astrophysics who complains about the sexist language of stars and creates performance art pieces about her research.

I can imagine this in Houston in April of 1970.

“Houston, we have a problem.”

“That’s negative, masculine language. We don’t have a problem. We have an opportunity to do some constructive brainstorming in a safe place.”

“The CO2 scrubbers from the orbiter won’t fit in the lander, we’re running out of air.”

“Excess CO2 is a problem here on earth too.”

“We need to make this (orbiter scrubber) fit in the hole for this (lander scrubber) using nothing but that.”

“That is the sexist language of toxic masculinity.  You men see everything as holes to put your things in.  That’s dehumanizing and oppressive.  Report to HR now.”

[Astronauts die.]

Everything woke turns to shit and the woke are going to kill space science.

The safest part is that the death of space science won’t inspire the next generation of Johnsons or Kranzs, but will inspire the next generation of mediocre scientists to use woke language to get victim status.

Miss. lineman airlifted after being mauled by pack of pit bulls

A lineman was attacked by a pack of pit bull dogs Tuesday afternoon in Carroll County.

According to the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office, police received a call about a pit bull attack off of Highway 35 North near Holcomb around 2:41 p.m.

Ivan Bubba Rawles III, a lineman for Delta Electric, was attacked by five “full-blooded” pit bulls after he finished a service call. His vehicle became stuck after he was reversing down a long driveaway of the house.

Rawles was then approached by the pack of pit bulls after he left his vehicle and began walking back towards the home of the Mabry family.

Police say that Mr. Mabry shot a weapon into the air to attempt to scare the dogs off of Rawles, killing one dog in the process. The Mabry family, along with a neighbor, Mrs. Gillon, who is a nurse, began to aid Rawles until deputies and Medstat personnel arrived at the scene.

He most certainly did not shoot into the air to scare off the dogs and accidentally hit one.  He shot the dog with intent and either lied to the media or lied to the police thinking admitting shooting a dog would get him into trouble.

The sheriff’s office says the victim reportedly suffered deep lacerations and lost a large amount of blood.

The owner of the dogs, David Nicholas Smith, put the four remaining dogs down himself. According to police, Smith was not in compliance with Carroll County’s Pit Bull Ordinance and will face charges upon the completion of the investigation.

That was the only decent thing Smith did with his pitbulls.  He deserves to be charged for having five of them and letting them roam free.

Despite the blood loss, it seems like Rawles will make a recovery and not lose and body parts.

H/T: Miguel

Serial killers now have an artistic option to keep their trophies.

And you guys thought Curby was weird because he chromed skulls. 🙂