Supreme Court clerk, law professor, federal judge, mother of seven: she's oppressed!
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Demanding their right to late-term abortions?
Attention, NYC parents: Greenwich has plenty of playgrounds. Come for a visit, stay for a lifetime
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BOO!
Fitness goons have invaded NYC’s playgrounds
Fed up moms in New York City have had enough of fitness freaks using kids’ playgrounds as makeshift gyms now that workout facilities are operating at limited capacity due to COVID-19.
They’ve labeled the sweaty musclemen — and women — “gross” and “selfish” for increasingly monopolizing equipment designed for toddlers.
According to parents, some don’t wear masks and could pose a health hazard during the pandemic.
“It’s unfair on the children,” said mom of one Ashley Ann Capone, of Astoria Heights, Queens, who regularly visits her neighborhood playground, Sean’s Place, on 38th Street. “They can feel intimidated by them and can’t play properly because of their presence.”
While it’s mostly individuals exercising on their own, a growing number of personal trainers are bringing their clients within the playgrounds.
“My friend recently spotted a trainer with half-a-dozen clients in tow,” added Capone, 35. “They took up half of the available space with little regard for anyone else.
“They use the monkey bars a lot, which poses the danger for little kiddos being kicked in the face.”
I suspect this is a bit more fuss than is necessary, and perhaps we don’t need a fresh influx of hysterical mommies coming to town. But if they want to buy a house ….
I don't know the explanation either, but I have noticed that the more BLM signs in a neighborhood, the more masks
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The most plausible, to me, explanation comes from a Powerline reader’s comment: Democrats watch CNN and mainstream media and so are fed a barrage of Kung Flu horror stories. If so, and the Democrats win next month, we can expect that steady diet of fearmongering to cease, either on November 4th or, more likely, Inauguration day, and we can all calm down.
Court packing's the least of it
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But I don’ wike him!
A Biden win and loss of the Senate will bring us to a one-party state
… What hasn’t received nearly enough attention, however, is the other plan Democrats are hatching to take seize control of the Senate, and make winning the presidency easier, by granting statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
As the Washington Examiner reported: “Key Democratic leaders, already mulling adding more justices to the Supreme Court if they take the White House and Senate, are also eager to add two more states, a move that could shift the Electoral College permanently to liberals.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently that: “Believe me. On D.C. and Puerto Rico, particularly if Puerto Rico votes for it — D.C. already has voted for it and wants it — I’d love to make them states.”
Biden has long supported D.C. statehood, and during remarks at a Hispanic Heritage Month kickoff event in Kissimmee, Florida, he said that Puerto Rican statehood “would be the most effective means of ensuring that residents of Puerto Rico are treated equally.”
So, should Biden win and Democrats take control of the Senate, here’s the game plan:
1) Eliminate the filibuster so Democrats can pass whatever they want with a simple majority.
2) Pack the Supreme Court with far-left liberals to overwhelm any conservative majority.
3) Add four more Democratic Senate seats and 10 more Electoral College votes by making D.C. and Puerto Rico states.
And voilà, Democrats will have cleared the way for them to get their Green New Deal, Medicare for All, minimum-wage raising, pro-union, open-borders, tax-the-“rich” agenda enacted. They will have jammed the court with justices who won’t bat an eye at any Constitution-bending laws Democrats pass. And they will have made it far more difficult for Republicans to win the presidency or a Senate majority in the future.
And as icing on the cake, Democrats will also be able to enact the “For the People Act,” which was the first bill they introduced when they took control of the House last year. This legislation would dramatically expand government regulation of political speech (making it harder for Republicans to raise money), and it would federalize the election process, forcing states to adopt early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, online voter registration, and no-fault absentee balloting (making it easier for Democrats to cheat).
And that’s just fine with the Republican establishment because Orange Man bad.
Poor ol’ rock
University of Wisconsin student government calls for the removal of Lincoln statue and a big rock
The University of Wisconsin-Madison student government recently voted to approve a resolution that supports the removal of the school’s famous Abraham Lincoln statue, arguing it serves as a remnant “of this school’s history of white supremacy.”
The Associated Students of Madison’s resolution, approved Sept. 29, calls for campus fixtures billed as racist by activists to be “reevaluated and then removed and/or replaced based on inputs from BIPOC students.”
Among those items is the university’s historic 111-year-old Lincoln statue that sits atop the common passing area Bascom Hill. Another is Chamberlin Rock, a large glacial boulder that has been a campus fixture for 95 years.
The Lincoln statue has to go, of course, because everyone knows that he was a slave-owning racist, but what did the poor rock do? Turns out, it allowed itself to be called ‘Niggerhead” “by some people” in 1925, and 95 years after it was renamed “Chamberlin”, current students still feel the pain.
Glenn Reynolds thinks student governments should be abolished, I’ll go him one better: defund all public “institutions of higher learning” as punishment for false advertising.
Reverting to norm in Cos Cob?
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192 Bible Street has sold for $2.050 million. I remember being surprised when this same house sold for $3.105 million in ‘06, but at $2 million, it looks pretty good.
Ya know, you may not save much money on your purchase when you use a buyer’s representative, but a good one can save you from a million-dollar-loss on the other end.
Just sayin’.
Happy Columbus Day!
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How dare you travel to the Caribbean, you red-skinned savage, you!
While there have been some faint whispers in the past few years that the story of Christopher Columbus taught in school may not be the full one, misinformation isn’t the exclusive province of the non-woke. The illustration above comes from a purported history of the Iroquois Indians. Hmm: Spanish conquistadors in New England? That’s a heretofore unknown historical tidbit, and besides, they arrived in the New World long after Columbus had left. Tipis in the background? Tipis were used by western-Indians — woodland Indians lived in hogans or Winnebago RVs. And while the image isn’t quite clear, the chicken feathers on the brave warrior in the foreground seem to comprise a war bonnet — again, something worn exclusively by the fellow’s western cousins.
Oh well, happy indigenous peoples day too. Go out and skin an enemy alive; eat some dirt and rocks; and break open the blanket chest!
Here's hoping book publishers go the way of newspapers, and soon
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The children of the NYT hard at work
In: “Sensitivity readers” to vet manuscripts.
It’s a story that has become all too familiar in recent years as publishers and writers struggle to adapt to a new world where cultural appropriation and racial stereotyping are called out online, and where campaigns such as We Need Diverse Books push for a corrective to the lack of books featuring people of colour (POC).
When reviewers first saw Keira Drake’s The Continent, this story of a teenager trapped by a war between two “native” tribes quickly found attention on social media – though not much of it was good. This young adult novel was attacked for its “white saviour narrative” and its stereotypical portrayal of people with “reddish-brown skin” or “almond-shaped eyes”. The author Justina Ireland called it a “racist garbage fire”.
Drake apologised, said she would “address concerns about the novel”, and delayed the release. Her publisher, Harlequin Teen, sent the book out to two “sensitivity readers”, who vetted the manuscript for stereotypes, biases and problematic language. Armed with a list of potential problems and possible solutions, Drake went back to the drawing board.
Here’s one chastened author who hired three separate sensitivity readers to correct her racist manuscript:
I welcomed the opportunity to dig into my creative reserves while still being mindful of hurtful tropes and cliches, such as describing POC hair and skin in terms of food,” says Hecker. “I also feel like these enhanced descriptions made my characters more nuanced and complex. It’s stuff that’s honestly hard to even conceptualise if you haven’t lived it. I think that’s the real value in hiring a sensitivity reader — they have the lived experience, so they can offer perspective on often-overlooked details.”
According to Debbie Reese, an academic who focuses on the representation of Native Americans in children’s books, many authors aren’t as receptive as Hecker. Reese dabbled in being a sensitivity reader in 2016, charging $100 an hour, but stopped.
“I quit doing them because they were exhausting and sometimes authors wanted to argue with me,” she says. “They weren’t open to the feedback. They weren’t trying to understand the feedback. They were insisting on the rightness of what they were writing.”
Sometimes, she find herself highlighting problematic words or phrases such as “low man on the totem pole” – a term which is sometimes used to describe people with little status. “I’d say that was a misrepresentation of an item originating with a specific nation. That hierarchy isn’t applicable. The phrase is used a lot but it is what generally gets called ‘a micro-aggression’.”
But the rise of sensitivity readers has drawn fire elsewhere: Francine Prose asked in the New York Review of Books if we should “dismiss Madame Bovary because Flaubert lacked ‘lived experience’ of what it meant to be a restless provincial housewife”, or if we can “no longer read Othello because Shakespeare wasn’t black”. The author Lionel Shriver believes there is “a thin line between combing through manuscripts for anything potentially objectionable to particular subgroups and overt political censorship”.
“Is it any longer acceptable for characters to be bigoted? Can a character in your novel vote for Brexit?” Shriver wrote in the Guardian, adding: “The day my novels are sent to a sensitivity reader is the day I quit”.
The obvious answer here is to self-publish, but with Amazon’s new “woke” awareness and refusal to list items offensive to BLM and anything labelled racist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, how long before self-published books will be censored?
It’s a phenomenon spreading everywhere. Over at one of the few newspapers still standing, the under-40 crowd at The New York Times fresh from their victory in forcing the firing of Op-Ed editor James Bennet last June, is now demanding that the management monitor and censor everything they write. Here’s the latest, from last week, after a colleague wrote an opinion article attacking the 1619 project as a load of bullshit:
50% persons of color by 2025? Hell, the Times could achieve that by the end of this year; all it takes is for an appropriate number of white reporters resign, now.
What is the world coming to?
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CNN's Jake Tapper shredded Biden Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield for the former vice president and his team running with the idea filling a Supreme Court vacancy during an election year is unconstitutional. According to Bedingfield, the Republican-controlled Senate shouldn't move forward with confirming Judge Amy Coney Barrett because "people are voting."
"He said what [the GOP] is doing is not Constitutional. How is it not constitutional what they're doing?" Tapper asked.
"His point is that the people have the opportunity to weigh in on this constitutional process through their vote," Bedingfield explained. "And we are now in the midst of the election. Millions of people have already cast their votes. And you see that the vast majority of people say they want the person who wins the election on November 3rd to nominate the justice."
"That's a poll. That's not the Constitution," Tapper clapped back.
"By trying – that is their constitutional – there is a process of constitutional advise and consent. The American people get to have their say by voting for president, by voting for senators," she explained. "We are now 23 days from the election –"
"Right, but it's not unconstitutional," the CNN host added.
"Again, millions of votes – they're being, voters are being denied their constitutional right to have a say in this process – " Bedingfield attempted to explain.
"They elected the Senate!" Tapper quipped back.
"They're trying to ram through a nominee who, by the way, is going to change the makeup of the court. And we see, time and time again, poll after poll shows that most Americans vehemently disagree with it," she said.
"Again, Kate, that's a poll," Tapper said. "That is not what the word 'constitutional' means. Constitutional doesn't mean I like it or I don't like it. It means it's according to the U.S. Constitution. There's nothing unconstitutional about what the U.S. Senate is doing."
Poor Tapper, he may find himself in the tumbrel that’s already been summoned for Chuck Todd, who is now being accused of being “a Republican plant” because he interviewed Hugh Hewitt on “Meet the Press”.
As a side note, but following up on Greenwich Time’s new columnist David Rafferty’s ode to liberal tolerance, there’s this from former, now-forgotten liberal Kieth Olbermann describes what he and the Bolsheviks want done to Trump and his supporters once Democrats revolutionize the government.
"And then he, and his enablers, and his supporters, and his collaborators, and the Mike Lees, and the William Barrs, and the Sean Hannities, and the Mike Pences, and the Rudy Guilianis, and the Kyle Rittenhouses, and the Amy Coney Barretts must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it and rebuild the world Trump has nearly destroyed by turning it over to a virus."
Associated Press busy creating Newspeak
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“Court packing” is now “depoliticizing” the Supreme Court.
[Senate candidate Steve] “Bullock said that if Coney Barrett was confirmed, he would be open to measures to depoliticize the court, including adding judges to the bench, a practice critics have dubbed packing the courts.”
On September 30, the AP Style Guide for reporters and editors urged agains the word “riot”. This wouldn’t matter, except that almost every local newspaper in the country uses AP feeds to inform their readers, so what’s hatched up in Washington enters the national “dialogue”.
