Make Up Your Own Clever Title

     Sorry, Gentle Readers. The “Future Columns” folder is about to explode, and as the UXB squad has professed a complete lack of interest in my peril, I’m just going to slather it all over you.

     (Don’t you feel special?)

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1. Alternative explanations dept.

     These days, it’s unwise to settle for the first plausible explanation of some phenomenon. Take the following “incomprehensible” development:

     Despite the Chinese’s massed air formations near Taiwan or Russia’s 100,000 troops poised for war near the Ukraine border, there’s a bigger threat seemingly on the defense secretary’s mind; namely, extremism in the ranks.

     Columnist Brent Sadler has his preferred explanation:

     [W]hy did Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on only his 12th day in office issue directives to hunt for extremists in the ranks? The only plausible explanation is political.

     Sorry, but that one doesn’t hold water. Let’s imagine that the “extremists” in the military, however defined, are all identified and expelled. What then? Would they be less dangerous then – or more, having been freed from military discipline?

     Alternate explanation: With Russia and China gearing up for imperialist wars, and Iran boldly proclaiming its determination to acquire nuclear weapons, thinning the ranks for any reason will provide the Usurpers with an excuse for not living up to America’s security commitments to its allies and client states. Moreover, the troops remaining after the purge will be cowed, unlikely to voice their objections to such passivity.

     I could be wrong, but we’ll see.

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2. Chronicles of Black-Run America.

     Who is it, demographically, that perform the most murders? And who is it, demographically, that do so in “drive-by” shootings?

     Congratulations! I was sure you’d know. So how do we explain this?

     Seattle, Washington’s most populous city, had a record number of drive-by shootings in 2021. By July, the city’s drive-by shootings had doubled over the year before.

     It’s a problem.

     So why are Washington Democrats offering up a bill in the state legislature to lower the penalties for drive-by shootings? Well, there’s woke and then there’s just plain stupid. Washington state Democrats are vying to become the best stupid they can be, bless ’em.

     Currently, Washington law holds that a drive-by shooter should get an aggravated enhancement if he is arrested and prosecuted—and that’s a big if. Such an enhancement could land a drive-by murderer a life prison sentence.

     But under a bill proposed for the upcoming Washington state legislature by white, woke ex-con state Rep. Tarra Simmons and her co-sponsor David Hackney, the reduction in penalties is a move toward “racial equity.” That’s right, drive-by shooting prosecutorial outcomes are racist. Never mind all the black and brown people who are the disproportionate victims of drive-by shootings.

     Reducing the disincentives to an act practically guarantees that the frequency of such acts will increase. More “black and brown” drive-by shootings will occur…and more “black and brown” victims will accumulate. Cui bono?

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3. Chronicles of BRA, Continued.

     Yes, Virginia: there is a war being waged on whites in this country:

     An MDH document titled “Ethical Framework for Allocation of Monoclonal Antibodies during the COVID-19 Pandemic” states that “race and ethnicity alone, apart from other underlying health conditions, may be considered in determining eligibility for mAbs [monoclonal antibodies].”

     Minnesota is turning away patients — white patients. The left is still pretending minorities require more help because they were not given adequate help due to racism. That’s nonsense. Some minorities are obese which causes many of their problems, and they are — almost always — obese because of personal choice.

     Please read it all – and follow the links.

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4. Two from the Era of Lawlessness:

     There are days it all seems too terribly clear:

     Nearly $1 million in merchandise was stolen during a smash-and-grab burglary at a boutique shop in Florida, according to the store owner.

     Thirteen luxurious Hermes handbags were stolen during the night of Dec. 14 from an Only Authentics window display in Palm Beach, said Virgil Rogers, the store owner, in a Palm Daily News report.

     The store is “the world’s most trusted independent dealer of Hermes and Chanel handbags and accessories,” according to its website.

Handbags sold by the store cost at least $550, and the most expensive handbags sell at $480,000.

     Those handbags will assuredly be offered on eBay or similar resale channels. The thieves who stole them know better than to flaunt their acquisitions openly. So they’ll go for the bucks, which are harder to “smash and grab” than merchandise, especially in this era of payment by credit card. But there may be no remedy in Internet-order retailing:

     A UPS truck driver was tied up and robbed at gunpoint Tuesday morning at 3:30 am in northwest Atlanta.

     According to police, the UPS tractor-trailer was stopped at a red light when an armed man jumped into the vehicle.

     The armed suspect forced the victim to drive to a specific location where he proceeded to tie up the driver and steal cargo.

     The Fast and the Furious is no longer just fiction, though it’s not being perpetrated by slick drivers in fast Hondas.

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5. The Children Were Our Future.

     We’ve offered them up to a ravenously hungry and evil god:

     Like schools across the country, [Liberty High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania] has seen the damaging effects of a two-year pandemic that abruptly ejected millions of students from classrooms and isolated them from their peers as they weathered a historic convergence of academic, health and societal crises. Teenagers arguably bore the social and emotional brunt of school disruptions.

     Nationally, the high school-age group has reported some of the most alarming mental health declines, evidenced by depression and suicide attempts. Adolescents have failed classes critical to their futures at higher rates than in previous years, affecting graduations and college prospects. And as elected leaders and public health officials scrambled to bring students back to school last winter and spring, the focus on having the youngest and most vulnerable students return to in-person instruction left many high school students to languish, with large numbers missing most or all of the 2020-21 academic year….

     Throughout the fall, the effects of the coronavirus pandemic have rippled through Liberty, a diverse regional high school in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, in the city of 75,000 where the famous Bethlehem Steel was founded.

     It was clear from the outset that children’s overall socialization would suffer from the isolation and confinement idiotically imposed upon them in the name of “public health.” What was less foreseeable, if only slightly, was that their cognitive development would suffer as well:

     Dr. Mark McDonald cited an Aug. 11 study by Brown University (pdf) that found that “children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic,” during an interview with host Cindy Drukier on a Dec. 25 episode of NTD’s “The Nation Speaks.” NTD is a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.

     The masks, “Zoom schools,” and lockdown mandates have led to “deprivation overall, of social contact, [of] not being able to see faces, being stuck at home all day long, [and this] has actually caused brain damage to the youngsters,” he said.

     (Please also read Ace’s comments on this horror.)

     We will pay for having put our minors on Cthulhu’s altar. The bill won’t be long in coming.

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6. Shut Up, Citizen!

     Please, please spread this around widely:

     New York State Democrat Senator Brad Holyman proposed a new law to hold social media platforms accountable for knowingly promoting disinformation, violent hate speech, and other unlawful content that could harm others.

     Anyone who makes “A false statement of fact or fraudulent medical theory that is likely to endanger the safety or health of the public” will be held criminally liable.

     Yes, it’s a New York bill – and once again, the rationale is “public health,” as if the widely trumpeted, government-issued lies have made or kept anyone healthy. But don’t imagine that New York is alone in the campaign against freedom of speech:

     The House of Representatives has passed a bill that seeks to eradicate blasphemy against Islam. The bill, H.R. 5665, is truly remarkable as it amounts to Congress making a law respecting the establishment of Islam and reducing the United States government into a tool of the world’s ayatollahs.

     The actual text of the bill not only seeks to eradicate blasphemy against Islam around the world – and solely against Islam at that – but even requires the federal government to reorganize some portions of the State Department along the lines of an Islamic religious institution which will be responsible for interpreting the Quran. For example, the text of the bill mandates that “[t]he Secretary of State shall establish within the Department of State an Office” and the “purpose” of the office is described as “[m]onitoring and combating acts of Islamophobia and Islamophobic incitement that occur in foreign countries.” That is, the State Department is required to create an office that is a cross between George Orwell’s Big Brother and the Taliban.

     What happened to the clause in the First Amendment that forbids Congress to make laws “respecting an establishment of religion?” Have we decided that Islam is not a religion after all?

     Time to inventory the ammo again.

***

7. They Can’t Put A Man Into Orbit, But…

     You have to wonder who makes the decisions at NASA these days:

     Between heaven and Earth, where do aliens fit in?

     That’s the question that NASA hopes theologians at the Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI) in Princeton, New Jersey, can answer, in a recent effort to understand how humans will react to news that intelligent life exists on other planets.

     University of Cambridge religious scholar Rev. Dr. Andrew Davison, who also holds a doctorate in biochemistry from Oxford, is one of the 24 theologians enlisted to help with the project, the Times UK reported last week.

     In a recent statement on the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity blog, Davison says his research so far has already seen “just how frequently theology-and-astrobiology has been topic in popular writing” during the previous 150 years.

     Davison’s upcoming book, “Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine,” due out in 2022, according to the Times, will cover part of CTI and NASA’s joint spiritual exploration, in which his “most significant question” is how theologians would respond to the notion “of there having been many incarnations [of Christ]” in the universe, he added in the blog post.

     Mind you, at this time there’s no generally accepted evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. (Concerning whether there’s intelligent life on Earth, the subject remains controversial.) But supposing that there is intelligent life elsewhere, and that evidence of such is found and validated, why would the reactions of religious people matter? Do the bulging foreheads at NASA think we’d demand an interstellar expedition to evangelize to them…or to wipe them out as heretics?

     NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is supposed to concern itself with transit through the skies and more recently, travel beyond them. But the shaping of popular opinion has never been in NASA’s orbit. Given this atop its multitude of recent failures, the agency is ripe for dissolution.

     I could see this sort of lunacy in an Islamic country, but here in the U.S.? God preserve us, especially from our overpowering vanity.

***

     And with that, the “FUT COL” folder is finally empty! Don’t make me refill it with only today and tomorrow left to the year. I’d like to get some fiction done.

     Later, Gentle Reader.

5 comments

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    • Janet Elliott on December 30, 2021 at 8:35 AM

    Mr. Porretto,

    I usually don’t comment, but I feel the need to do so on one of your ‘assorted’

    in your ‘Make Up Your Own Clever Title’ article.

    In section 5 (The Children Were Our Future), yous site a study by Dr. Mark McDonald at Brown who believes

    “children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic,”

    I am going to take your word that this is what Dr. Brown says in his study because the pdf link only links a screenshot and I admit I am too lazy to actually find the study.

    My opinion – It is actually not you I have the beef with, but with Dr. Brown, and by extension, you, because you site his study. It might be a misunderstanding of the study on my part, but I don’t see how children born during the pandemic could possibly be effected by ‘masks, zoom schools and lockdown mandates’ (all school related I must assume).  Children born at the very earliest of  the pandemic will only be 18-20 months old at this point in time. They are not yet anywhere near being school age yet.  They might possibly be affected if their parents kept them from play dates, but nothing more.  In my opinion, children that were born from 2014-2015 would be affected the most by not having the opportunity to attend kindergarten and 1st grades during the pandemic.  These are some of the most formative years of a child’s education.

    Your reply would be greatly appreciated.

    1. Your point is a good one. Though cognitive tests for the extremely young have been developed and are gaining the confidence of psychometricians, one- and two-year-olds would probably not be as badly affected by the lockdowns et cetera as somewhat older kids. I’ll look into this further.

  1. I have a grandchild who would have normally been attending kindergarten. Instead, he has been at home (taught the pre-school tasks by his capable mother), with some twice a week playdates/learning with an aunt whose children are similar ages.

    He may be fine intellectually, but he is not getting the interactions he would normally. As he is not vaccinated, he is not able to fully benefit from normal activities at parks, playgrounds, and libraries. I do hope that OH comes to their senses (unlikely, unless forced by federal refusal to fund states that limit citizen access to amenities based on shot records).

    This was a nice post; I’ve been checking out the links, which are to stories that I hadn’t noticed.

    • Daniel K Day on December 30, 2021 at 1:10 PM

    NASA has turned into the space-agency version of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks.
    Since this is a family-oriented blog, I’ll refrain from comment on the bill to outlaw “blasphemy” against Islam.

    1. (chortle) An excellent metaphorical comparison, Daniel. You win the Internet for today!

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