MaxRedline

Says The Guy Who (So Far As We Know) Has Never Had Kids

Pontiff laments ‘denied parenthood’ and people who ‘substitute cats and dogs for children’.

Two Faced.

 

Indian Pyres

Things are pretty bad in India right now; there seem to be funeral pyres all over the place there due to the number of Covid-19 deaths.

This man's trying to get away before the infernos can claim him, as well.  Wish him well.

 

More Lockdowns For California

Oddly, if not for the policies mandated by government in that state, the overall rate of infections and deaths in the USA overall would be in decline at present. But no...that's not how they do things there; they've decided to do their own thing, regardless of the effect on their remaining citizens.

LOS ANGELES—On Saturday, a 53-foot refrigerated trailer was delivered to Continental Funeral Homes on East Beverly Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Alongside it sits a 20-foot trailer that Magda Maldonado began renting in the summer, but that no longer provides the room the 58-year-old funeral director needs for the volume of dead arriving from one day to the next.

Maldonado’s experience, and those of the people she works with, paint a picture of a death industry that is overloaded and overwhelmed. Of bodies piling up in area crematoriums, casket makers facing a shortage of supplies, and gravediggers struggling to keep up with equipment breakdowns.

“Wood is getting scarce, especially pine, which is the most inexpensive,” said Auriel ‘Guero’ Suarez, owner of the Universal Caskets Manufacturing Corporation in East Los Angeles. “In 52 years in the business, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

LA has seen exponential growth in new COVID infections and hospitalizations since the end of October, with nearly 100,000 new cases in the last week alone, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Back at Maldonado's funeral home, the excess corpses are loaded into the two refrigerated trailers because there's no place else to put them.

Unfortunately, East L.A. is largely Latino - and they believe in actual caskets and digging holes in the ground to inter them. Placing the body into a cardboard box, followed by cremation, is simply unacceptable to them. And so the backups continue, with more draconian restrictions already coming down the government pipeline.

 

 

Hope You Had A Pleasant Halloween

Last night's full moon added a lot to the atmosphere, though no trick or treaters showed up in our neighborhood.

In Portland, Oregon, Archbishop Alexander Sample led a procession of more than 200 people to a city park on Oct. 17, offered a prayer, then conducted a Latin exorcism rite intended to purge the community of evil.

On the same day, 600 miles to the south, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone performed an exorcism ceremony outside a Catholic church in San Rafael, where protesters had earlier toppled a statue of Father Junipero Serra.

“We pray that God might purify this place of evil spirits, that he might purify the hearts of those who perpetrated this blasphemy,” Cordileone said. Cordileone said the exorcism prayers in Latin, remarking that “Latin tends to be more effective against the devil because he doesn’t like the language of the church.” 

 

No Mosque

@NYGovCuomo is sending around plainclothes agents to photograph the inside of synagogues to make sure that no one is praying.

It appears that his directive applies only to Christian and Jewish places of worship, as Muslims are exempt.

To be fair, it may be that his intent is directed toward ensuring that Christians and Jews don't die from the Virus, but is willing to let it kill off the Muslims. However, that seems unlikely as he doesn't seem to be bright enough to hatch such a plan.

 

Amish For Trump?

The Amish/Mennonite community held a pro-Trump parade in Fredericksburg, Ohio, on Saturday — replete with horses and buggies, cows, wagons, and maybe a few chickens thrown in for good measure. From horse-drawn carriages to wagons decorated with Trump-Pence banners, to two guys riding steers, it was a sight to behold.

That is definitely unusual.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kroger Krack-Up

CONWAY, Ark. — The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed suit against The Kroger Company for violating federal civil rights law in that an Arkansas location allegedly fired two employees who sought religious accommodations not to wear an apron with a rainbow heart on the bib, symbolizing homosexual and bisexual pride. Both were fired from the Conway grocery store in June 2019 for violations of the store dress code.

“Companies have an obligation under Title VII to consider requests for religious accommodations, and it is illegal to terminate employees for requesting an accommodation for their religious beliefs,” Delner-Franklin Thomas, district director of the EEOC’s Memphis office, said in a statement. “The EEOC protects the rights of the LGBTQ community, but it also protects the rights of religious people.”

That's an interesting turn of events. Apparently it's actually possible to go overboard on the whole "political correctness" thing. Who'd have guessed?

 

More Portland BS

While Portland is a renowned climate action leader, the extreme weather events of the recent past in Oregon and around the world have made it clear that more action – and more intensive action – is required to ensure that we curb carbon emissions now.

 

Green Energy In Oregon

There's just one teensy problem: the power grid's maxed out.

Scott Zollinger was well on his way to building a new barn on his property in Marion County and putting enough solar panels on top of it to offset the cost of electricity for his family’s home. The design plans were drafted. The first payment was made on the solar panels. Zollinger had even applied and been approved for about $30,000 in state and federal tax credits on the $59,000 solar project.

Then he got a report from his utility, Portland General Electric, on the impact his project would have on the electric grid. The report was filled with technical terms, but it ultimately concluded that he couldn’t connect his 24.8 kilowatts of solar power to PGE’s system until significant upgrades had been made to the grid.

The report included a bill for the estimated cost of the upgrades: $539,038.

Jordan Sinn, general manager for Earthlight Technologies, often handles customer interactions for the company’s rooftop solar projects, many of which are in the Willamette Valley areas that now apparently have grid capacity issues. “This is becoming a common thing,” he said. “We’re in an awkward position where we don’t know until we submit quite a bit of paperwork with PGE to find this out. It’s been a bit of a black eye for the solar industry.”

Angela Crowley-Koch, executive director of the Oregon Solar Energy Industries Association, said grid capacity is a problem across the state — in both PacifiCorp and PGE territories.

All is not lost, however; Scott could still do it by going off-grid - although those lithium batteries that would be required to store his "green energy" are really expensive (and not exactly "green" themselves). And then too, he'd also have to purchase and install an inverter along with a few other essential components. So his $29,000 solar project (after credits) would more than double in cost. But at least he'd have his "green energy", so he could feel good about himself.

And we know how important that is.

 

If there are rakes left to step on in Kentucky, the principal at Whitefield Academy will find them. Dr. Bruce Jacobson, head of the private Christian school in Louisville, found himself at the center of a firestorm three weeks ago when he expelled a student because her mother posted a photo on Facebook of her daughter celebrating her 15th birthday with a rainbow cake.

That action was perfectly legal, in and of itself.

But Dr. Jacobson couldn’t leave it there. After the child’s mother Kimberly Alford went to the media, Jacobson released confidential information about the child’s disciplinary record and her sexual orientation to the press.

Now, that's a lawsuit.

The good doctor should have looked up the definition of the word "confidential".