You didn't see this because it never happened: trust us

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We live in two different universes

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While some of us (well, I) fret that expectations for Biden’s performance at the upcoming debate are so low that all he has to do is avoid crapping his pants and he’ll be declared the winner, over at MNBC they have the opposite worry:

Is it any more improbable than her claim that socialism will bring prosperity?

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‘Squad’ Democrat Claimed She Cured Woman’s Tumors With Her Hands In Autobiography

Democratic Missouri Rep. Cori Bush claimed that she has cured serious medical conditions using faith healing in her 22022 autobiography.

Bush, who is affiliated with the group of far-left congressional Democrats known as “The Squad,” recounted healing a brain bleed in a small child and curing a woman of tumors through faith healing methods in her 2022 autobiography titled “The Forerunner,” The New York Post reported Saturday. The congresswoman is surrounded by individuals who claim to have similar faith-based powers, including her bodyguard who believes he is 109 trillion years old and possesses the ability to conjure tornadoes as well as a pastor who claims supernatural healing powers, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

“One woman whom we met had several visible tumors on her torso,” Bush recalled in her autobiography. “She was due to have surgery but lacked health insurance and [was] living in the park. One of the tumors was particularly painful to her. I laid hands on her and prayed, and I felt that my hand was no longer touching a tumor. It shrank along with the others on her body.”

Bush spent years working as a faith healer for Kingdom Embassy International churches, a group that says it has resurrected the dead and cured people of AIDS, cancer and paralysis, the Free Beacon reported. Charles Ndifon, the head pastor of the church, says he healed Bush of COVID-19 through a 30-minute-long phone call.

In another instance of faith healing described by Bush in her book, the congresswoman claims to have given a disabled child the ability to walk.

“The child had a bleed in her brain, shortly after she was born, and so couldn’t walk. She had never taken a step in her life,” Bush wrote. I carried the child from the prayer room in the back of the church out into the sanctuary . . . ‘Walk,’ I said gently to the three-year-old girl, ‘you will walk.’ And this girl took her first step. Then another, and another. She walked.”

In addition to her medical and economic theories, Cori has some deep thoughts on global warming and foreign policy, all of which, no doubt, are worth listening to; one day, I will.

Fascinating article on the ingenuity of man

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Doctors, lawyers, and criminals; I’m just surprised that no real estate agents are involved — yet.

MS-13, Russian mobsters use migrants in elaborate injury scam — even getting spinal surgery to pull it off: sources

It’s the melting pot of all scams.

Russian gangsters, MS-13 members, and a cadre of corrupt surgeons, lawyers and lenders are pulling off the latest big con in the city: bogus personal-injury lawsuits where immigrants go under the knife to help their twisted ruse.

Migrants and other desperate New Yorkers are pressured into getting unneeded spinal fusion surgery and other operations to boost the value of their fake-accident claims, according to court records, insurance investigators and law-enforcement sources.

Doctors cash in on the sick swindle by performing back and neck fusions, allowing fraudsters to swipe billions through bogus insurance filings, according to court filings and sources.  

The racket typically involves a healthy person taking a seemingly minor tumble on the street or at a construction site, then claiming a devastating injury that requires multiple surgeries. A crooked surgeon fuses healthy vertebrae with screws and plates, leading to a lawsuit against a business or landlord or both. Settlements start at $1 million each but can go much higher

“One-five is now on the cheap side,” said an insurance industry lawyer who asked for anonymity.

These scams rely on law firms that take on hundreds of such cases, along with high-profile doctors, sketchy lending firms that hard-sell migrants into borrowing to cover the costs, and an army of “runners” who recruit victims and orchestrate their falls, according to legal papers and sources familiar with the mix of schemes. 

The set-up is fed by a seemingly endless supply of low-income dupes willing to risk their health for a quick score.

“They’re regularly recruiting migrants and homeless people and in some cases are proactively arranging for them to come to New York,” a private investigator told The Post.

So-called “shot callers” pocket most of the windfall settlements, while those who pose as injured receive as little as $1,000 each, according to testimony in one case. Their share gets shriveled by sky-high interest on loans they’re told they need for medical and legal expenses. Others can collect up to six figures.

Russian hoodlums are suspected of running lending firms that fund trip-and-fall lawsuits and surgeries — often at hugely inflated rates to goose settlement figures, sources told The Post. “They’re well-versed in this kind of thing,” said a recently retired NYPD supervisor. 

MS-13 leaders provide a pipeline of Hispanic migrants, some who are brought to New York specifically to fake injuries, sources said. They said the gang ropes in unsuspecting border crossers with offers to drive them to the city, pay for meals and provide spending cash before pressuring them into phony accidents.

A private investigator said an MS-13 informant at a construction company revealed plans for a worker to fall off a ladder — and it happened just as the tipster said it would, said the sleuth, who declined to say where or when the fraud occurred to protect the identity of his source. 

Setting up fake falls is “so successful for MS-13,” he said. “Rival gangs are now trying it.”

But MS-13 leaders are not experienced in white collar crime and don’t know how to pull off phony injury fraud, according to gang expert Lou Savelli, who founded the NYPD gang unit and now consults for police and other law enforcement agencies. “That’s where the Russians come in,” he said. “They have the lawyers.”

NYPD investigators found one integrated Russian-led operation — with doctors, lawyers, lenders and physical therapists all in the same office building, said a former police supervisor who declined to give further details. “It was one-stop shopping. Everyone was in the same place,” he said, adding that authorities were unable to build a case against the group. 

The Russian-MS-13 partnership “is a perfect marriage for them,” said a second ex-NYPD source.

 Insurance insiders claim losses have tripled since the pandemic, with payouts so massive they’re driving up the cost of living for all New Yorkers. 

One insurer, Tradesman Program Managers insurance firm of Poughkeepsie, a carrier covering contractors and construction companies in the city, says it forked over $142 million in 2022, three times the $36 million it paid out in 2018. It claims it has been hit with 650 allegedly fraudulent suits over the last four years.

“We’re talking billions collectively across the city,” said an insurance executive who asked not to be identified.

Much more at the link.

Aside from the billions of dollars being stolen from insurance companies, the cost of which is passed on to customers, the sad part of this story is that the (willing, if stupid) patient-participants get next to nothing for undergoing an operation that can leave them with lifelong pain.

One “victim" who sat down on a sidewalk and then was persuaded to participate] was directed to Dr. Michael Gerling, an orthopedic surgeon and former NYU Langone director in Brooklyn who describes himself as New York’s “top spine surgeon”…. Gerling performed two surgeries: a lumbar and a cervical fusion, she added. Neither procedure did anything but create more pain, according to Ortiz.

“The pain is unbearable since the operation on my lower back,” she told The Post. “I feel like a 60-year-old woman in the situation I find myself in. I don’t know how I will continue working.”

This article holds personal interest to me because a spinal surgeon has recommended I undergo spinal fusion; after looking into the procedure, its lengthy recovery time, and the chances of a full restoration of my ability to walk more than 100’ without pain, I’ve decided to live with things as they are. As these victims are learning for themselves, I wouldn’t do it if they paid me.

Or, "the clueless discover what it means to live with beach erosion along a flooded coastline"

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Wealthy beach lovers left devastated as they're forced to slash price of luxury seaside homes by MILLIONS: 'It's unbelievable'

Wealthy beach lovers are left devastated as they're forced to slash prices of their luxury seaside homes by millions due to climate change.

Climate experts believe the rise in sea levels and unforgiving storms, intense rainfall and coastal flooding and erosion are the culprits putting homeowners in a precarious position - and the unpredictability of it all.

The areas with some of the priciest real estate that have been hit the hardest include, Dana Point, California, to Long Island, New York, and Nantucket, Massachusetts, CNBC reported.

>>>>
In September, a beach front home on Nantucket that listed for $2.3 million, fell to a staggering $600,000 after their shoreline lost 70 feet to erosion. The owner, Lynn Tidgewell said, 'this rate of erosion was not typical,' and 'dropped the price significantly in the knowledge that any prospective buyer was taking a risk.'

Tidgewell said she purchased the Nantucket property on Sheep Pond Road in 2021 for $1.65 million, as town records confirm. 

At the time, the property was more than a 100 feet from the top of a coastal bank, and a geological study estimated the home would last at least two decades, if not more, at the current rate of erosion.

She said she 'took the gamble due to the magnificent beauty of the location,' but after two years started to notice the land near her house started to disappear, claiming approximately 15 feet of her backyard.

In the few years she lived there, she said her home was impacted by other storms including Hurricane Lee that took another 20 feet in September, and a staggering 70 feet was swallowed up between then and December, the news outlet reported.

Buried many paragraphs deep in this hysterical article about the “unpredictability” of this erosion can be found this nugget of reality:

Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard have among the highest rates of beach erosion statewide, according to the Trustees of Reservations State of the Coast 2021 report.

The report also cited parts of the south coast of Nantucket have receded as much as 1,800 feet since the 1800s. 

In fact, the natural forces of erosion have been going on since the earth was formed, and will continue to operate no matter how many Teslas are purchased by the rich. When I studied geology back in the early 70s, one of my professors loved to rant about the folly of building along the shores of barrier islands that constantly shift, grow, and shrink over time, or on cliffs exposed to the tremendous forces of the ocean, and expecting middle class taxpayers to subsidize and protect the rich from the consequences of their actions. That was before the global warming hysteria had heated up, of course, when it was still possible to conduct rational, objective discussions of geological forces and their role in shaping the earth. I miss those days.

Chief Dan George need not apply, but Rachael Dolezal is welcome to.

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Three years after Evanston proudly became the first local government in the US to start paying reparations to its black citizens – in this case technically to atone for decades of ‘institutional racism’ in local housing – it is being sued in a federal court for exhibiting exactly the sort of prejudice it decries.

A conservative activist group, Judicial Watch, has filed a legal challenge to Evanston’s controversial $20 million (£15.7million) programme, claiming that it discriminates against non-black people – including whites, Hispanics and Asians – as they are ineligible for the $25,000 (£19,600) handouts.

To qualify for this extraordinary largesse, recipients must be black Americans – or their direct descendants – who lived in Evanston as adults between 1919 and 1969, the year when the town finally ended what it admits was an official policy of ‘racial segregation’ in housing. The lawsuit also claims that the reparations should be limited to people who can actually prove that they suffered discrimination.

Using money from taxes levied on cannabis businesses – the drug is legal in Michigan – and a special levy on the sale of homes worth more than $1.5 million (£1.2million), Evanston has so far set aside $10 million (£7.9million) and paid half of that to 193 residents.

The radical initiative, adopted in 2019 after a city council vote rather than a public referendum, doesn’t specifically mention slavery, which was abolished in the US in 1865, but it hardly needs to. Many of Evanston’s 12,000 black residents (16 per cent of its 75,000 population) are descended from slaves.

Nationally, six in ten African-Americans believe their ancestors were slaves. And their belief that they deserve reparations runs deep – few black children aren’t taught about the pledge by Civil War Union General William Sherman in 1865 that every freed slave family should be given up to 40 acres and a mule. They also know the US Government never honoured that promise.

Reparations campaigners argue that even if slavery ended, discrimination lived on in myriad ways. In Evanston, housing included restrictive covenants and a policy known as ‘redlining’, in which banks refused mortgages to black people if they tried to buy homes in white areas.

This now-illegal practice – once widespread across the US – forced most of Evanston’s African-American community to live in just one small, poor neighbourhood, the ‘5th Ward’ on the west of town. Evanston officials say successive generations of black people have suffered as a result of not being able to invest in valuable homes.

Critics deride reparations as tokenistic white guilt – but Evanston’s liberal leaders are basking in plaudits from activists calling their town the ‘new Montgomery’ – after the Alabama birthplace of the civil rights movement. Officials insist this is only the start of their reparations plans. The project’s driving force, local black campaigner Robin Rue Simmons, has been touring the US and was even asked to address the United Nations as demands for reparations grow around the world.

‘The moral urgency of the issue does not allow us to just keep on talking,’ intoned Evanston’s earnest Democrat mayor Daniel Biss. ‘And it can be scary to go first... but someone’s got to go first.’

However, it could prove a short and very expensive experiment, if Judicial Watch gets its way.

The Washington-based group, intent on nipping the concept of reparations in the bud, has filed its lawsuit on behalf of six named plaintiffs who say they lived in Evanston over the relevant period and would have otherwise qualified for the reparations but for the fact they’re not black.

They and their backers say the reparations scheme breaches the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which states all Americans are given equal protection under the law. Ironically, the amendment was added to protect freed slaves after the Civil War.

‘This programme redistributes tax dollars based on race,’ said Judicial Watch president, Tom Fitton. ‘That’s just a brazen violation of the law.’

He called his civil rights lawsuit a ‘historic defence of our colour-blind Constitution’.

>>>>Evanston’s reparations creators insist they’re undaunted.

‘This lawsuit is not a surprise,’ said Rue Simmons at a meeting last week.

[A]fter some people complained that it was ‘demeaning’ to be told how to spend their money – initially it had to be spent on housing – there are no restrictions on how it is used. One recipient splurged the lot on installing a lavish marble bathroom in her home.

>>>>

Kelly Burke, a white kindergarten teacher who has an allotment in the 5th Ward but lives in another part of town, admitted she was sticking her neck out when she said: ‘I’m all for equality and helping people, but Native Americans have as much right to reparations as anyone, as do all aboriginal people across the planet.

‘I’m of German and Irish ancestry, and my people were brought here as indentured servants. Hasn’t everyone suffered discrimination? Everyone is liberal in Evanston and wants to do the right thing, but then people stop and say, “Who’s going to pay for it?” ’

>>>>

Retired African-American rubbish collector Toylee Stanley insisted that, when he and his young family arrived there in 1970, ‘if you could pay, you could live wherever you wanted in Evanston’ – although his wife then reminded him that the first house they tried to rent suddenly became unavailable as soon as they turned up.

Reparations are ‘OK’, said Mr Stanley, as long as they don’t involve a big cash handout.

‘Sometimes if you get things easy, you don’t take care of the things you should take care of,’ he explained. ‘People got a handout during Covid and they didn’t want to work any more.’

The rest of the US, and beyond, is watching keenly to see what happens with the Evanston lawsuit.

Powerline's Steven Hayward, who reads the NYT so that the rest of us don't have to, reports an amazing, one-time occurrence at the Babylon Bee's inferior

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even a stopped clock can be right, for one second, twice a day

A HICCUP AT THE NY TIMES

“Churchill once remarked, I think with Stanley Baldwin in mind, that “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

“That could be a good description for today’s Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times. Kristof is usually a reliable liberal, but now and then he goes off the reservation. Today’s column:

What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?

As Democrats make their case to voters around the country this fall, one challenge is that some of the bluest parts of the country — cities on the West Coast — are a mess.

Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction? . .

We [liberals] are more likely to believe that “housing is a human right” than conservatives in Florida or Texas, but less likely to actually get people housed. We accept a yawning gulf between our values and our outcomes. . .

[M]y take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes. . . Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.

For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools — including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.

Hayward: “Despite all of Kristof’s caveats and pandering, I expect many Times readers will be upset by this column.”

The mark of genius in a man (or woman) is the extent to which they agree with you

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Just two days ago, discussing the failure of Chicago’s schools, I asserted that a big part of the problem in Chicago and in most of our schools lay with the parents of the children, and not just the schools themselves. Then today, this:

Paula Bolyard: The Real Reason Johnny Can't Read: Bad Parenting.

There is no “science of reading.” There is no “science of teaching math” or any other academic skill or study. If someone can identify a district where every single student reads at a proficient level on state tests, I will change my view. I await the evidence.

Like No Child Left Behind and Common Core before it, the "Science of Reading" is just another excuse to line the coffers of education bureaucrats and textbook publishers. 

A story at AMP Reports titled "'Science of reading’ movement spells financial trouble for publisher Heinemann" notes that "The educational publisher raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue during the 2010s selling reading programs based on a disproven theory [the now disfavored Common Core]. The company now faces financial fallout, as schools ditch its products." More: 

The three biggest educational publishers — Heinemann’s parent company, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with McGraw Hill and Savvas — are all now marketing their core reading programs as aligned with the science of reading.

Lather, rinse, repeat. 

My home state of Ohio has allocated "$86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials, and $18 million for literacy coaches." 

More money down the drain that will do next to nothing to improve the reading ability of children. 

According to The Nation's Report Card, reading scores have been essentially flat since 1992, despite billions (perhaps trillions) of dollars spent implementing the Next Big Thing in education. Scores dipped a few points during and after the Covid lockdowns, but overall, there has been little change over the last half-decade. 

>>>>

[T]here is no magic bullet when it comes to teaching reading. It's really not complicated, despite states coercing kindergarten teachers with 20 years of classroom experience to get master's degrees, which has been a huge boon for online universities that receive government funding. Follow the money, and it always ends up in the hands of government bureaucrats while they insist it's "for the children." 

Back in the '70s, most children didn't learn to read until first grade. [True in my own experience at Riverside School in 1958 — Ed]. My first-grade class had 30 students, and we all learned to read without drama, specialists, IEPs, or "interventionists."  Mrs. Hole patiently taught us using the "Tip and Mitten" book series. We sat in circles, and she used flip charts to instruct us on phonics. She sorted us into reading groups—kids who needed a little extra help got more attention from the teacher—and we learned to read. I know you will find this hard to believe, but we didn't even have computers back then!!!!! We also didn't have homework. It was expected that kids would be read to at home and that parents would encourage literacy. 

This wasn't some upper-crust prep school, either. A majority of the kids in my school had parents who were second-generation immigrants, most of whom were blue-collar workers without college degrees—families with names like Ikeda, Georgeopolis, Ciarniello, and Kibelbek (my maiden name). It wasn't unusual for two languages to be spoken in these homes, including mine. In fact, my father was held back in first grade because he couldn't speak English well enough. These days, he'd be placed in an ESL program and encouraged to learn to read in Slovak. 

As a homeschooling mom, I taught both my boys (one a stealth dyslexic and the other with ADD) to read in kindergarten. We started using a phonics-based program in September, and by Christmas, they could read. THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. 

Talk to any primary school teacher, and they will tell you that the problem isn't that teaching reading is complicated.

The problem isn't that they need a magic bullet program with "science" in the name to unlock the secret to teaching what American children have been learning to do since the first settlers arrived here. 

The problem is that many students come to school unprepared to learn. Their parents are checked out, fathers are absent, the kids stay up playing video games all hours of the night, and their diets consist mostly of highly processed junk food. Many of them have experienced neglect and witnessed violence and drug use by the time they enter kindergarten. 

Pouring billions of dollars down the toilet to pay for fancy new teaching methods is not going to address the real problem. Putting one in ten American children on dangerous stimulant drugs is not going to solve the problem because the problem is cultural. 

A few weeks ago, I saw a video on Facebook showing a high school student who couldn't read but received passing grades every year until he finally graduated. Most people, including the mother, blamed the school (and COVID) for failing to teach him, but what about that mother? Where was she during his thirteen years of public education? Was she overseeing his homework, looking online at his test scores, attending parent-teacher conferences, and feeding him a healthy breakfast before school? Was she reading to him and making him read aloud to her? 

Illiteracy doesn't happen in a vacuum. Sure, there are some terrible teachers out there, and a lot of schools are spending more time on woke ideology than the three Rs, but there is no excuse for a child with even a below-average IQ to be unable to read. Again, it's not rocket science. It's time we start pointing out that bad parenting is why Johnny can't read. 

All the government boondoggles in the world cannot fix bad parenting. 

I’ll add that my parents read to us every day beginning when we were, I dunno, two? Three?, had bookshelves (with books) in almost every room, and we had no television in the house until Little Gideon made such a fuss about it that my father finally relented and allowed us to put a portable in the laundry room, with strict rules that limited viewing to one hour, later extended to two, after homework was done (Gideon’s obnoxious whining was also the impetus that brought sugared cereal onto the breakfast table, but that’s another story). To this day, all of us still read for entertainment, as well as learning.

UPDATE: Of course, not everything is the fault of schoolchildren’s parents:

Oh, just shut up

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Twitchy: Like Peace and Quiet? Congrats, The Atlantic Says You're a Racist

Take a trip down memory lane with us. Back in 2017, the Left was all up in arms about noise pollution. The loud sounds of the city -- the places they want us all to live, because climate change -- were racist. No, really.

But because everything is racist, and logical consistency is anathema for the Left, silence is also racist.

Just ask the folks at The Atlantic:

Miss Gonzalez:

New york in the summer is a noisy place, especially if you don’t have money. The rich run off to the Hamptons or Maine. The bourgeoisie are safely shielded by the hum of their central air, their petite cousins by the roar of their window units. But for the broke—the have-littles and have-nots—summer means an open window, through which the clatter of the city becomes the soundtrack to life: motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music. Ceaseless music.

I remember, the summer before I left for college, lying close to my bedroom box fan, taking it all in. Thanks to a partial scholarship (and a ton of loans), I was on my way to an Ivy League college [Brown —Ed]. I was counting down the days, eager to ditch the concrete sidewalks and my family’s cramped railroad apartment and to start living life on my own terms, against a backdrop of lush, manicured lawns and stately architecture.

I didn’t yet know that you don’t live on an Ivy League campus. You reside on one. Living is loud and messy, but residing? Residing is quiet business.

I first arrived on campus for the minority-student orientation. The welcome event had the feel of a block party, Blahzay Blahzay blasting on a boom box. (It was the ’90s.) We spent those first few nights convening in one another’s rooms, gossiping and dancing until late. We were learning to find some comfort in this new place, and with one another.

“Then the other students arrived—the white students.”

I just hadn’t counted on everything that followed being so quiet. The hush crept up on me at first. I would be hanging out with my friends from orientation when one of our new roommates would start ostentatiously readying themselves for bed at a surprisingly early hour. Hints would be taken, eyes would be rolled, and we’d call it a night.

“One day, when I accidentally [sic] sat down to study in the library’s Absolutely Quiet Room, fellow students Shhh-ed me into shame for putting on my Discman.”

I soon realized that silence was more than the absence of noise; it was an aesthetic to be revered. Yet it was an aesthetic at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were.

Within a few weeks, the comfort that I and many of my fellow minority students had felt during those early cacophonous days had been eroded, one chastisement at a time. The passive-aggressive signals to wind our gatherings down were replaced by point-blank requests to make less noise, have less fun, do our living somewhere else, even though these rooms belonged to us, too. A boisterous conversation would lead to a classmate knocking on the door with a “Please quiet down.” A laugh that went a bit too loud or long in a computer cluster [emphasis added] would be met with an admonishment.

In those moments, I felt hot with shame and anger, yet unable to articulate why. It took me years to understand that, in demanding my friends and I quiet down, these students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy.

>>>

I loved the learning that I did in college—academic and cultural. And I managed to have a lot of fun, in the spaces that the students of color claimed as our own. We had our own dormitories, our own hangouts; we even co-opted a room in the computer center where we could work the way we preferred, with Víctor Manuelle or Selena playing in the background. Some white students resented that we self-segregated. What they didn’t understand was that we just wanted to be around people in places where nobody told us to shush.

When i moved back to Brooklyn after college, I found that the place had changed. Neighborhoods that had been Polish and Puerto Rican and Black [when did the Polacks replace the bog trotters as honorary blacks? Just askin’ — Ed] were suddenly peppered with people who looked better-suited to my college campus than to my working-class home turf. Many of them needed the affordable rents because they had opted into glamorous but poorly paying white-collar jobs [glamorous jobs like working as Lincoln Center ushers? MOMA ticket takers?] . Alas, these newcomers hadn’t moved here to live alongside us; they’d come to reside.

The first time it happened was the night before Thanksgiving. Three or four of us—all people of color—were eating takeout in my best friend’s studio apartment. [At what time of night?] The radio was playing, and we were debating, as we often did, who was the best rapper alive. There was a knock at the door and when we opened it, my friend’s neighbor, a 20-something woman new to Brooklyn, was standing there, exasperated. “Did your mothers not teach you the difference between inside voice and outside voice?”

>>>>

Attempts to regulate the sounds of the city (car horns, ice-cream-truck jingles) continued throughout the 20th century, but they took a turn for the personal in the ’90s. The city started going after boom boxes, car stereos, and nightclubs. These were certainly noisy, but were they nuisances? Not to the people who enjoyed them. [And their pleasure rules]

>>>>

I find many city noises nerve-racking and annoying: jackhammers doing street maintenance, the beeping of reversing trucks, cars honking for no good reason. Yet these noises account for a small minority of all noise complaints.

Nearly 60 percent of recent grievances center on what I’d consider lifestyle choices: music and parties and people talking loudly. But one person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy. As my grandmother used to say, “I’m not yelling, this is just how I tawk!”

All properly-woke universities have responded to complaints of self-centered individuals like Gonzalez by creating segregated dormitories and colored peoples study halls, where they may whoop, shout, and dance about with abandon, but rudeness and inconsiderateness of others is not restricted solely to “people of color” — cretinism comes in all shapes, sizes and race — so why not designate one dorm as a “Blutarsky House”, or several, depending upon demand, and let them have at it, while serious students get on with their work?

As for this privileged woman’s insistence that her “lifestyle choices”; her preference for drenching her neighborhood in noise, takes priority over the desires of others, this Atlantic reader offers a fitting riposte:

Bridge to nowhere (UPDATED)

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biden brain trust

RIP to Biden's Gaza Pier As He Chalks Up Another Foreign Policy Disaster

Proposed and administered by the State Department, not the military, denounced as folly by retired (and thus free to speak out) military commentators, what few supplies did make across the ship-to-shore ramp were immediately seized by Hamas. $320 million dollars, gone in the blink of an eye.

UPDATE. The Bee’s usual powers of prophesy have been demonstrated again.