Whenever there is a truth you cannot tell, that is a truth you must tell! "The truth is not always a pleasant thing." -- General "Buck" Turgidson in Dr Strangelove"

But, but, but, we are told that homosexuality has nothing, nothing at all, to do with pedophilia!

Well-known music activist, entrepreneur charged with child porn possession

by Kevin Shea | Tuesday, March 26, 2024 |4:51 PM EDT | Updated: Wednesday, March 27, 2024 | 7:06 AM EDT

A man active in several organizations related to Princeton University and its alumni has been charged with possessing child pornography, the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office confirmed.

Roy ‘Trey’ Farmer, 53, faces one count of possession of child sexual abuse material, a third-degree felony. Investigators arrested him Friday at a condo he owns Princeton, across from the university’s main entrance.

Farmer was in the Mercer County jail Monday, awaiting a detention hearing court Wednesday in Superior Court of Mercer County in Trenton. A prosecutor’s office spokesperson said the office will argue he be detained pending trial.

So, who is Roy “Trey” Farmer? The Princeon Alumni feted him in an article two years ago. He has been very financially successful, and an international traveler and philanthropist. Then there’s this:

With his career cemented and with more time to pursue other interests, Farmer’s connection to Princeton and alumni has grown even stronger. Currently, he is chair of the Committee on Regional Associations (CORA); board member of Princeton Internships in Civic Service (PICS); president of the Princeton Club of Southwest Florida; vice president of the Bisexual, Transgender, Gay and Lesbian Alumni organization (Princeton BTGALA); president of the Princeton University Glee Club Foundation, and co-chair of the upcoming 150th anniversary celebration of the Princeton University Glee Club.

Emphasis mine.

The John Jay Report, The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950-2002, made it clear that:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Some people, including the homosexual-supporting Fr James Martin, SJ, and printed in the Jesuits’ America magazine, tried to make the excuse that homosexual priests were no more likely to be abusers than heterosexual ones, but that the victims were simply victims of availability, but that has virtually no credibility. When the majority of victims are boys in early puberty, ages 11-to-14, comprise the largest victim demographic, and males 15-to-17 are the second largest, you know that the abusers are looking at what is attractive to them, not just, to put it crudely, a hole to use.

Male victims tended to be older than female victims.

Anyone not trying to protect homosexuals would see that as evidence of a selection bias: the chickenhawks trolling for teenaged male meat. It could be argued that the true pedophiles, those going after prepubescent children, might not be as sexually selective,[1]Even that seems questionable to me: I note that Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach now spending the rest of his miserable life behind bars — his earliest possible … Continue reading but the hebephiles, those interested in 11-to-14-year-olds, and ephebophiles, those interested in 15-to-17-year-olds, were clearly sex selective.

Whenever there is a truth that cannot be told, that is a truth that you must tell! In the current political climate, people cannot say anything even slightly condemnatory about homosexuals, so good liberals, and not even just the #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading liberals, jump through all sorts of hoops to avoid telling a simple truth. The truth, it has been said, will set you free, and when it comes to the truth about homosexual predation in the Catholic priesthood — and not just the priesthood! — telling the truth can set you free from your job. I’m retired; I have no job from which I can be fired, so I can speak freely without worrying about the consequences.

This site has twelve previous articles referencing the John Jay Report, 26 noting the credentialed media like to conceal the sex of the victim of child sexual abuse, and 39 with the hashtag #homosexuality, and these types of things really come to my attention only when there is crime involved. We also noted the twist in the case of the murder of homosexual activist Josh Kruger in Philadelphia, in which his killer claimed that Mr Kruger had been having a sexual relationship with him when the killer was just 15, and Mr Kruger 35.

It is quite obvious that homosexuals are not all child abusers, but it is also becoming obvious that a disproportionate percentage of them are. What is that percentage? We don’t really know, and might never know, because nobody with the expertise is willing to do the research! Doing that research puts the researcher on the fast track to the unemployment line.

There is a great, untold truth here, and everyone is afraid to tell that truth.
__________________________________________

I had begun this post on Wednesday, March 27th, but hadn’t published it then, because I had some other things to do. Then, during the evening, I caught this from the Twitter site the left loves to hate, Libs of TikTok. Here’s the story from the credentialed media:

Woman pleads guilty, gets sentenced after voyeurism at JB Hunt Corporate Office

The 2022 incident caused an arrest and felony charges for video voyeurism and tampering with physical evidence.

by Spencer Bailey | Tuesday, March 26, 2024 | 4:05 PM CDT | Updated: Wednesday, March 27, 2024 | 2:29 PM CDT

LOWELL, Ark. — A woman arrested for video voyeurism after allegedly taking a picture of a coworker in a bathroom at the JB Hunt Corporate Office in 2022 has pleaded guilty and been sentenced.

Natalie Hannah Pershall, 46, was arrested and booked in the Benton County Jail on May 22, 2023, after an investigation by the Lowell Police Department (LPD).

Court documents say the incident took place on July 31, 2022.

The victim told police that she was using the women’s bathroom at work when she noticed someone reach around the stall divider all the way to the back wall. The woman believed the person in the next stall, whom she identified as Pershall, took a picture.

During the investigation, Pershall told detectives she was in the bathroom due to a panic attack and dropped her phone, which caused the victim to think she was being photographed.

Officers attempted to recreate both scenarios, but Pershall’s could not be replicated due to the positioning of the stall and the divider.

Police found evidence that Pershall had wiped data from her phone and computer in the days after the incident, including internet searches on how to “nuke a hard drive.”

This prompted authorities to issue a search warrant to access Pershall’s iCloud information through Apple.

Police were able to recover a picture taken on Pershall’s phone that showed “an unidentified subject with their pants down sitting on a toilet while they were photographed.”

There’s a bit more at the original, but you know what you won’t find at the original? You will not find any information that “Natalie Hannah Pershall” was born Cameron Pershall, and changed his name in 2016.

Despite police recording Pershall as male, local media referred to him as a woman in headlines. Records show Pershall first filed to change his name from Cameron to Natalie in 2016.

Historic social media indicates Pershall had a blog where he offered insights on culture and wrote horror stories. In one 2015 post, he referred to himself as a “little girl”.

Police stated Pershall was booked as male and that biological reality takes precedence over ideology in Arkansas.

Several other not-so-credentialed sites also published that information about Mr Pershall. But, for the professional media? This was a truth that could not be told.

The Associated Press Stylebook[3]Of course, you cannot get the AP Stylebook unless you pay for it, because the Associated Press doesn’t want to publicize how it adds bias to stories. states that people should not be identified as transgender unless it is pertinent to the story:

The adjective “transgender” describes people whose gender identity does not match the sex or gender they were identified as having at birth. Identify people as transgender only if pertinent; don’t use “transgendered” or call someone “a transgender.”

Thus we continually see stories which refer to Dr Richard Levine, a United States Assistant Secretary of Health as “Rachel” Levine, and never mention that he is actually male, unless his transgender ‘status’ is central to the story.

Perhaps it’s just me, but for some odd reason I think that a male claiming to be a woman is pertinent to a story about that person committing a voyeurism sex offense, but somehow the credentialed media in reporting Mr Pershall’s conviction didn’t see it that way. I wonder why.

“The truth shall set you free” is an old saying, but I tend to prefer a line from General; “Buck” Turgidson in Dr Strangelove, “The truth is not always a pleasant thing.” For the woke left, the truth about homosexuals having a higher rate of child sexual abuse and pornography, and about the idiocy and perversions of the ‘transgendered’ are things that they know, but want to keep as hush-hush as possible, because there are some truths which upset the liberal apple cart, some truths which expose the left’s almost mindlessness about going as far left as possible on anything even remotely connected to sex, perhaps for fear of giving aid and comfort to we wicked conservatives and Christians, because it tramples upon their entire worldview.

And that is why we must tell the truth, must tell the truths that the left want to hide. What they hide are their weaknesses, and to fight leftists, we must expose those weaknesses.
__________________________________
Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

References

References
1 Even that seems questionable to me: I note that Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach now spending the rest of his miserable life behind bars — his earliest possible release date would be when he is 98 years, 8 months, and 14 days old — had plenty of opportunities in and around the Penn State campus, yet all of his dozens of identified victims were boys. He used a charity he began to ‘groom’ boys around the ages of 8 to 10.
2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

3 Of course, you cannot get the AP Stylebook unless you pay for it, because the Associated Press doesn’t want to publicize how it adds bias to stories.

Decades of nice, kind, and sympathetic government has turned Kensington into what it is today

It was just Monday that we noted that Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right: “Nice guy” policies have led to disaster in Philly. And on the same day, The Philadelphia Inquirer gave OpEd space to a homosexual and HIV activist who uses “they/them” pronouns to decry one of Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins’ policies:

Mayor Cherelle Parker is losing progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS

If the mayor and the Kensington Caucus make it harder or impossible for people in Kensington to access clean syringes, they will have thousands of new HIV infections on their consciences.

by Jose DeMarco | Monday, March 25, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

Jose DeMarco, photo via Philadelphia Gay News.

In 1991, ACT UP Philadelphia, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, started the first syringe exchange program in Philadelphia, which became Prevention Point Philadelphia. Research by George Washington University has demonstrated that Prevention Point’s syringe exchange program has prevented tens of thousands of cases of HIV over its 30-year history. Collectively, this has saved taxpayers over $182 million a year, or $1.8 billion over the lifetimes of those who avoided contracting HIV.Syringe exchange reduces the spread of HIV by removing barriers to accessing prevention tools. Just like providing free access to condoms reduces the spread of HIV/AIDS without encouraging more sexual behavior (just safer sex), syringe exchange makes drug users less likely to contract and spread HIV without increasing drug use (and in many cases, being part of decreasing drug use).

In Philadelphia, we have started to see a slight increase in HIV rates in the last several years, especially among people who inject drugs. This can be attributed to the spread of fentanyl in the illegal drug supply, which breaks down faster in the body, requiring more injections to avoid dangerous withdrawal symptoms. With limits placed on the number of syringes Prevention Point can exchange, but demand creeping up, more Philadelphians are returning to sharing or reusing syringes, a practice that had dropped dramatically when Prevention Point opened.

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and the Kensington Caucus’ push to move Prevention Point from Kensington and end city funding for syringe exchange will create more barriers to accessing clean syringes, but it will not create any new barriers to accessing injectable drugs in Kensington. The impact on quality of life for neighbors will be minimal. People in active addiction need opioids and want clean syringes; if the drugs stay and the clean syringes leave, they will reuse syringes.

They will reuse syringes, huh? Wouldn’t that mean there’d be fewer used needles littering the city? And wouldn’t that be a good thing?

So, who is Jose DeMarco? From the Philadelphia Gay News:

When Philadelphia received federal funding to end the HIV epidemic, Jose Demarco and his friend, Michael Hinson — both prominent HIV/AIDS activists — worried the money would not materialize in a way that would benefit Black and Brown people.

“He and I immediately thought, ‘Oh, no, this money will never get to our communities. It will only go to the large organizations,’” said Demarco, who is HIV-positive. “So I pulled together a symposium of people of color — trans, lesbian, queer — and we had this meeting about the money and just about queer life in general and about HIV.”

“That’s when we decided that this is a really good thing — that we should be organizing queers of color,” he said. “So Michael and I put our heads together and came up with this group,” Black and Latinx Community Control — a committee of LGBTQ+ people of color working to end HIV and regain control of healthcare in their communities.

Am I the only one who sees Mr DeMarco’s efforts as based upon his own racism and, if it’s actually a word, heterophobia? Well, regardless of his motivations, noble or perhaps less so, what he wishes to do is enable continued drug abuse. I have put it very bluntly: “I’m enough of an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to ask: why do we want to keep junkies alive?”

That was written over three years ago, noting at the time that a federal appeals court had rejected plans for a supervised injection site in Philly, something which the City Council also rejected in every council district except one, because, in the end, most people realize that making drug use safer only enables and encourages it.

And drug use is what turned Kensington from a decent working-class area into a disaster area so bad that the Mexican government uses it as an example to its own people of why they should not use drugs.

Mr DeMarco wants a nice, kind, and sympathetic government, but decades of nice, kind, and sympathetic government has turned Kensington into what it is today, and what even the Democratic voters of the City of Brotherly Love have rejected. They’ve seen too much of what the city has become.

I get it: Mr DeMarco has HIV himself, and doesn’t want to see others contract it. But, as he admitted in his Inquirer OpEd piece, HIV rates are already increasing among the junkies, even with the clean syringe giveaway program. If he really wants to see that reversed, he needs to get on board with the harsh measures it will take to reduce the number of addicts, not make life easier for junkies.

Hold them accountable!

We have had 37 previous posts entitled Hold Them Accountable, in which I have called for prosecutors, judges, and parole officials to be held accountable for crimes committed by people who could and should have already been behind bars. Well, at least one parole official has had at least the grace to resign for her actions, though it is my belief that she should be behind bars herself.

Prisoner Review Board member resigns after paroled offender accused of killing 11-year-old boy, stabbing the child’s mother

By Andy Rose and Sarah Dewberry, CNN | Monday, March 25, 2024 | 8:24 PM EDT

The Illinois governor announced the resignation of a member of the state’s prisoner review board on Monday, 10 days after a man who was released on parole was charged with attacking a former girlfriend and killing her 11-year-old son.

LeAnn Miller recommended the release of 37-year-old Crosetti Brand and conducted the hearing that resulted in him being granted parole, according to the governor’s office. CNN has reached out to Miller for comment.

Brand is accused of stabbing Laterria Smith, 33, and killing her 11-year-old son, Jayden Perkins, as the child was trying to defend her in their Chicago apartment on March 13, officials said during a news conference held two days later.

Further down:

Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling said the violent attack “should not have happened,” because Brand had previously violated protection orders. “He has three orders of protection violations against him,” Snelling said.

Snelling said Brand had been released on parole the day before the attack, noting the suspect was “still serving a 16-year sentence for home invasion where he caused injury.”

This was the suspect’s second stint on parole, Antoinette Ursitti, the chief of Chicago’s Bureau of Detectives, said during the March 15 news conference.

Ursitti said Brand was put back in custody on a parole violation after he threatened the 33-year-old victim, with whom he’d had a prior relationship, via text messages and showed up at her house.

I’m sorry, but just how f(ornicating) stupid do you have to be to have released a guy like that? If the accusations against Mr Brand are accurate, then it is clear that LeAnn Miller is personally responsible for young Jayden Perkins murder, and the wounding of Laterria Smith. No, she didn’t put the knife in Mr Brand’s hand, but she put him out on the street where he could get one, and from where he could get to their apartment.

Review Board Chairman Donald Shelton resigned later in the day.

The CNN article gives us more than one failure of the parole hearing, including the fact that the Board did not know that Miss Smith had filed for another order of protection, and the fact that she “presented insufficient evidence of an emergency,” and that the requested order was denied. Of course, an order of protection is just a piece of paper, and an (alleged) killer like Mr Brand wouldn’t be stopped by such a thing.

What would have stopped Mr Brand? Keeping him behind bars until the last possible minute of his sentence! Who knows, maybe serving the full sixteen years would not have stopped Mr Brand from going after Miss Smith after he did get out, but at least for now, she’s not have been attacked, and her sone would still be alive.

Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right. "Nice guy" policies have led to disaster in Philly.

Philadelphia Inquirer website main page, March 25, 2024.

This site has previously noted the open-air drug market in the Kensington section of Philadelphia; with published photos of junkies shooting up right on the street in front of SEPTA’s Allegheny Avenue train station, it’s pretty difficult not to notice. The government of Mexico has actually used photos of Kensington in ads to discourage drug use in Mexico! And Philly’s George Soros-sponsored, police-hating, and softer-than-Charmin-on-crime District Attorney Larry Krasner has actually filed suit to stop efforts to fight crime in Kensington and on SEPTA.

But, rather than far-left Helen Gym Flaherty, whom hard-leftists Will Bunch, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, The American Prospect, have supported, and only slightly-less-leftist Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed, the actual voters in the City of Brotherly Love voted for the tougher-on-crime Cherelle Parker Mullins[1]None of the female candidates for Mayor in Philadelphia had shown enough respect to their husbands to have taken their husbands’ names, though they certainly appreciated their husbands’ … Continue reading. And thus the Inky is having to take note of Mrs Mullins efforts to do one of the promises on which she campaigned: clean up Kensington!

How Kensington Avenue’s open-air drug market went international — and the city’s fight to take back the neighborhood

Kensington’s plight now serves as a cautionary tale for foreign governments, a punching bag for Republican presidential candidates, and a source of macabre clickbait on the internet.

by Max Marin | Monday, March 25, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

Kiara Lynn Garcia was just doing what young people in Kensington are told to do: get out.

After graduating from college in 2019, she took her international relations degree and flew farther than most of her childhood friends could dream — 8,000 miles, to Shenzhen, China, where she began her career teaching English as a second language.

But in her first year abroad, as the pandemic raged, a viral video reached Garcia’s friend circle in China and catapulted her back home.

The clip showed a man driving under the familiar blue shadow of the El train, filming droves of people nodding out in the streets, some openly injecting drugs, others itching at gruesome wounds or asleep in front of shuttered stores. “This is not a horror movie,” the videographer narrated in Mandarin. “This is real life.”

In a way, it’s laughable. Reporter Max Marin continues to document all of the videos on YouTube and elsewhere about how terrible Kensington has become, how it’s an international spectacle, but never mentioned that Miss Garcia opted to live under a Communist dictatorship than in her blighted neighborhood.

Amusingly enough, the article’s subtitle, and a paragraph in the article, frets about the conditions in Kensington being “a punching bag for Republican presidential candidates,” because the newspaper wouldn’t want to be in any way supportive of evil Republicans!

Kensington’s problems did not develop overnight, but have been growing and festering for a long time . . . and Philly’s last Republican Mayor left office when Harry Truman was President of the United States! Michael Nutter was Mayor, and Charles Ramsey Police Commissioner, from 2008 through 2015, and four days into 2016, and they were at least reasonably tough on crime, but Jim Kenney was Mayor for the subsequent eight years, and while Mr Kenney was very vigorous in getting a sugary drink tax pushed through — those Seven/Eleven Big Gulps were just a terrible, terrible problem! — and loved issuing authoritarian degrees concerning COVID-19, firing what city employees he could who refused to take the vaccines, he did little else, and problems soared. For his last year in office, he was only little less than AWOL. Why shouldn’t Republican candidates blame Kensington’s problems on Democrats, because Democrats have had a complete lock on the city’s problems for 72 years now.

The challenge is enormous. More than one-third of the city’s homeless people live in Kensington. The zip code 19134 saw 1,270 fatal overdoses between 2015 and 2022, more than double any other neighborhood. Kensington endured a historic surge of drug-fueled gun violence during that same period, with more than 1,400 shootings, including 300 within a five-minute walk of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. Residents lodged more quality-of-life complaints with the city’s 311 system than any other part of the city over the last three years — contending with abandoned cars, crumbling buildings, and human feces in the streets.

Kensington and Allegheny Avenues are the hub of Kensington, and the SEPTA elevated train station is located there.

More than a third of the 2,500 narcotics and drug-law violations recorded by police in 2023 occurred in Kensington. The concentration of drug crime in the neighborhood is extreme, calculating to 376 violations per square mile, compared with just 16 violations per square mile in the rest of the city.

There’s a nice graphic that goes with that last paragraph, but let’s tell the truth here: the Philadelphia Police haven’t really been pursuing “narcotics and drug-law violations” in that neighborhood, and the arrests that they’ve made there barely scratch the surface of the problems. A junkie shooting up in the street, or passed out on the sidewalk is a narcotics and drug-law violation,” all by himself, but the cops don’t arrest for that. The Philly Police could scoop up hundreds of narcotics violations every night, passed out on sidewalks, asleep in doorways, or crashing in the SEPTA train station, but don’t because they know that the District Attorney and his minions wouldn’t prosecute them anyway.

Many stakeholders fear that a crackdown without a long-term plan will simply end in displacement, causing a catastrophic surge in overdose deaths and increased burden on surrounding neighborhoods. As developers sweep up land in upper Kensington’s drug market, some longtime residents, 45% of whom live in poverty, say they are wary that a dramatic wave of gentrification is next, bringing high rents and property taxes that will force them out, too.

SEPTA station on Kensington Avenue, in the background, with homeless tents on the sidewalk, 2022. Photo from Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

The city has not been trying to crack down on crime there for decades; perhaps, for all of their ‘fears,’ it’s time to try to see if that works. After all, nothing else has.

Yes, a lot of the residents are poor, but fearing greater wealth helps to keep them poor. As we noted last week, keeping a neighborhood poor keeps away grocery supermarkets, meaning that the poor are having to pay higher prices for lower quality food at corner bodegas. Deliberately keeping a neighborhood poor only makes the residents even poorer.

The Inquirer article is a very long one, the type of thing only possible in the digital age of newspapers, the type of thing that I have said is the way newspapers — albeit possibly only in digital form — can survive and thrive in the age of the internet, and it’s well worth a read. Mr Marin spends many paragraphs telling readers how the neighborhood went from a reasonably prosperous, working-class neighborhood to a synonym for poverty, death, disease and druggies, and while the loss of industry helped start Kensington’s downward slide, it was drug abuse, decades of drug abuse — Mr Marin dated that from the K&A Gang bringing in methamphetamines in the 1970s — which turned it into what it is today.

Drugs destroyed Kensington, and only fighting drugs, fighting them with everything the city can muster, can reverse and revitalize the neighborhood. Philly can try all of the other drug treatment programs it wants, but, in the end, vigorous and harsh law enforcement, targeting users as well as dealers, has to be a major part of it. Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right. “Nice guy” policies have led to disaster in the city.

References

References
1 None of the female candidates for Mayor in Philadelphia had shown enough respect to their husbands to have taken their husbands’ names, though they certainly appreciated their husbands’ money, and most of the articles cited do the same thing; The First Street Journal does not show their husbands the same disrespect, though we do not change the direct quotes of others.

New car buyers are choosing hybrids over plug-in total electric cars

My older daughter has a 2018 Toyota Prius Hybrid, and it has been a pretty good car for her. I’ve driven it — we actually had it on the farm for nine months while she was deployed — and it’s pretty nice. Her car is named “Veronica,” while our younger daughter’s car is named “Betty.”

From Business Insider:

Hybrid cars now have ‘very few compromises’ says Ford executive — and sales are booming

by George Glover | Saturday, March 23, 2024 | 6:03 AM EDT

  • Sales growth for hybrid cars is outpacing growth for electric vehicles this year.

  • Ford is one automaker reaping the benefits, with demand for its Maverick truck spiking.

  • “Hybrids now have very few compromises compared to their gas alternatives,” Ford’s Andrew Frick said.

It’s shaping up to be a comeback year for hybrid cars — and that’s partly because they’re now nearly as good as their conventional vehicles, according to a Ford executive.

“Hybrids now have very few compromises compared to their gas alternatives,” Andrew Frick, head of Ford’s the Detroit automaker’s gas and hybrid vehicle division, told The Wall Street Journal this week.

If you have trouble accessing the Business Insider story, it is available for free here.

Hybrids have a traditional engine that charges batteries to power one or more electric motors, which makes them more efficient than gas-only vehicles. Many do not need to be plugged in like EVs, although some models can also be charged like one.

Frick’s comments come as demand for hybrid vehicles soars, partly due to drivers’ worries about charging electric cars. Those concerns have dented sales of EVs in recent months.

Another benefit of hybrids is that they’re a lot cheaper than their fully electric rivals. Buyers were paying $42,500 on average for hybrids in late 2023, according to data from Edmunds, compared with $60,500 for EVs and $47,500 for gas cars.

My daughter’s Prius gets about 49 MPG, which is pretty good, and she’s put a lot of miles on it, 163,000+ the last time I saw. No, it’s not zero emission, the way the global warming climate change activists, and the Biden Administration, are pushing, but it’s proven both economical and efficient. She can, if she chooses, run it in full electric mode, or leave it in normal operation, using the gasoline engine when the batteries need to be charged. Unlike some hybrids, her Prius does not have an exterior charging port, so she doesn’t have the option of using it as a straight electric vehicle, and plugging it in at night to recharge. That’s kind of a good thing, because it means that I don’t have to run a 220-volt, 50 ampere circuit to her garage to install a charging station. 🙂 But a plug-in option could be an advantage for many urban car buyers.

I already have full 200-amp service in my garage, so I could easily install a charging station here if I needed one.

My daughter’s Prius can easily make a several hundred mile journey, even a several thousand mile trip, and she doesn’t have to worry about needing to find a commercial charging station and spend an hour recharging every couple hundred miles. It’s a practical vehicle which gets great mileage and eliminates almost all of the concerns about fully electric vehicles. Just pull into a regular filling station, get a fresh tank of gasoline and a Wawa coffee, and back on the road in ten minutes.

Total electric vehicles are fine, for the right application: urban dwellers who will always be driving only around town, and who have garages or dedicated and secure parking areas in which they can safely install at-home vehicle chargers. But for many people, they simply are not practical, no matter what Joe Biden and the rest of the authoritarian climate activists say.

You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Once again, The Philadelphia Inquirer censors part of the story.

Can someone tell me why I am paying $285.48 per year for a newspaper which censors the news?

When I first saw this photo in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Thursday, I immediately asked myself, “Self, is that really a girl?” So, I read a story I might normally have skipped.

Bensalem teen faces 15 to 40 years in prison for killing a 12-year-old girl and showing her corpse on Instagram

Ash Cooper admitted her guilt Thursday and was sentenced to prison.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Thursday, March 21, 2024 | 3:41 PM EDT | Updated: 6:02 PM EDT

A Bensalem teen who shot and killed a 12-year-old girl, then displayed her corpse in an Instagram video call as she sought help in hiding her crime will spend 15 to 40 years in prison after admitting her guilt Thursday.

Ash Cooper, 18, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and related crimes in the shooting death of Morgan Connors in the trailer Cooper shared with her father in the Top of the Ridge Trailer Park in November 2022.

In accepting the guilty plea, Bucks County Court Judge Jeffrey L. Finley decried Cooper’s actions and lamented Morgan’s death.

“It’s a horrible tragedy,” he said. “A tragedy no family should ever have to undergo.”

It turns out that “Ash” Cooper is actually Joshua Cooper, as reported by London’s Daily Mail. The Inquirer did leave a clue, in that the hyperlinks in the newspaper’s story took us to stories noting that the killer was named Joshua Cooper at the time those stories were published, but if you read reporter Rodrigo Torrejón’s story, there isn’t the first indication that the murderer is actually a male.

The Daily Mail also told us things that the Inky decided to omit:

Cooper, who was 16 at the time of the murder, also allegedly told police she and Connors were in a sexual relationship. . . .

During the investigation, officials discovered Cooper was accused of sexual assault in a previous unrelated case. She was found guilty in juvenile court.

The victim was in court on Thursday as Cooper received his sentence.

So, not only was young Mr Cooper, 16 at the time, having sex with a 12-year-old, but he was previously convicted of a sexual assault on a different person. How is it that the Daily Mail, from 3,500 miles away had this, but the Inquirer couldn’t get that information from a bordering county?

Well, of course the reporters at the Inky knew. The first story on the murder appeared on November 26, 2022, and the second on March 6, 2023, at which point he was still identified as Joshua Cooper. Now, after that time, we find out that young Mr Cooper is ‘transitioning’, trying to become a girl, and no one asks, “Is he really transgendered and ‘transitioning,’ or is he just doing this to stay out of adult men’s prison?” As you can see from the Daily Mail’s photo, Mr Cooper is not exactly a big guy, and perhaps he had watched NCIS, and saw the scene in which Leroy Jethro Gibbs tells a couple of young college kids, “Believe me, son, you will not do well in prison.”

Were I to ask the editors of the newspaper why they concealed the fact that young Mr Cooper is ‘transgender,’ and referred to him in exclusively feminine terms, they might tell me that hey, that has nothing to do with the murder. I would reject that argument, since it’s obvious that the previously convicted sex criminal was also f(ornicating) young Miss Connors — the London newspaper noted that court records stated that the victim’s body “was found laying facedown with her pants around her ankles” — and that the victim’s state of undress indicated that something sexual had occurred. More, the fact that Mr Cooper is claiming to be a girl will have a huge impact on to which prison he will be sent for hopefully the full forty years. One of us wonders on how the newspaper will cover that story.

Ok, OK, this was bad, but really, I’m sure that were about to turn their lives around, any day now!

We have previously noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer gave OpEd space to child activists Donna Cooper and Anton Moore, to tell us that people’s brains are not fully mature until their mid-20s, and how, rather than incarceration, we should provide those juveniles accused of non-violent offenses with more opportunities for reform. But, rather than being all sympathetic, I instead noted retired Sgt Marc Fusetti’s tweet, which pointed out that two of the three initially arrested for the Burholme shooting had been treated leniently, for non-violent offenses as juveniles, and then went out and, allegedly, of course, shot eight people at the SEPTA bus stop in a targeted hit. I also noted that the Philadelphia Police Department already had a mugshot of the fourth suspect, 17-year-old Asir Boone, which meant that he, too, had a previous ‘encounter’ with law enforcement.

Well, the Burholme shooting net gets wider and wider!

Police arrest 15-year-old they say staked out Northeast shooting victims, texting gunmen ‘go’ as targets walked by

Jeremiah Jefferson is the fifth person to be arrested and charged in a shooting that left eight teens injured in the Northeast.

by Ellie Rushing | Thursday, March 21, 2024 | 5:08 PM EDT | Updated: 7:14 PM EDT

Jeremiah Jefferson, mugshot via Philly Crime Update.

A 15-year-old who police say acted as a lookout for the gunmen in the Burholme shooting, standing inside a nearby Dunkin’ and texting “go” to the shooters as their targets walked by has been arrested, police said Thursday.

Jeremiah Jefferson is expected to be charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, and related crimes for his alleged role in the shooting at a bus stop in Northeast Philadelphia earlier this month that left eight students injured. He is the fifth person to be charged in connection with the March 6 shooting.

Jefferson was inside the Dunkin’ next to the gas station, while his friends with guns were seated in a blue Hyundai parked outside, said Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore.

Young Mr Jefferson was allegedly on the lookout for the intended victim in the shooting, described his own clothes so the shooters wouldn’t aim at him, sent photos of the two intended targets, and then, in a final text, simply said, “Go”.

If young Mr Jefferson has a juvenile record, that information has not yet been released, or, more probably, leaked. About the only good thing about this is that, at 15-years-old, there’s at least a reasonable hope that he hasn’t knocked up some girl and further polluted the gene pool, because this fine young gentlemen, if he did that of which he is accused, is dumb as a box of rocks. The last thing Philly needs is more stupid babies born.

Police on Thursday also announced that they intended to charge (Anhile) Buggs, (18), with a separate homicide that occurred in mid-February on the 5800 block of Rising Sun Avenue. In that shooting, 20-year-old Kristopher Dowling was killed just before 9 p.m. while he was walking with a friend to get pizza.

Dowling’s mother, Ivory, said police told her Buggs, who is from Olney, had been driving around the Lawncrest area with others, searching for someone to shoot as part of a back-and-forth feud between groups from Lawncrest and Olney.

The retaliation had been ongoing for years, she said — it was one of the reasons why she moved her family from Lawncrest, their home of 19 years, to Abington two years ago.

That’s two planned and premeditated shootings for Mr Buggs. Let me be clear about this: there’s no reforming this gentleman, and he needs to never see another sunrise outside of prison. His accomplices in the Burholme shootings? They, too, are waste cases, completely lost souls who might, if they’re lucky, find the Lord while they’re in prison, but they, too, should never get out. They are too evil, and too stupid, to ever walk among free society again.

When a reporter has more of an agenda than an understanding of economics and business.

We have twice reported on the decisions of Wawa to close down some stores in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia. The late Josh Kruger complained bitterly about such.

This crime is not new, and The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the Headhouse Square Wawa “will become the sixth Center City Wawa to shutter since 2020.”

So, you would think that an article in the newspaper on food ‘deserts’ in some Philly neighborhoods would at least mention crime. But, if you did think that, you would be wrong.

About 40 million people in the United States don’t have access to a full-service grocery store

The 2023 update of the Limited Supermarket Access Study examines the lack convenient access to health food options across the nation — and in Philadelphia.

by Lynette Hazleton | Thursday, March 21, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

What food is available has everything to do with the food stores that are available.

When the food store is a full-service supermarket, like the ShopRite in Parkside, it usually means you will have the access to a wider variety, higher-quality and lower-cost food, explained Michelle Schmitt, a senior policy analyst at The Reinvestment Fund (TRF) as she walked around the bustling 15-year-old supermarket.

As you can see, the article wasn’t produced by the regular Inquirer staff, but the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the non-profit which owns the newspaper. I have previously noted that, as a subscriber, I sometimes receive begging for donations letters from the Leftist Lenfest Institute.

When you don’t have the same access to high quality food as you do to chips, fast food and soda, it can contribute to an unhealthy eating pattern that can ultimately lead to chronic disease.

How is it that Lynette Hazelton, the Philly native who reported this story, couldn’t bring herself to note that the densely-populated rowhouse neighborhoods which make up a significant part of the city’s neighborhoods don’t really have room for a huge Giant Food Mart? Yes, there are corner bodegas in most of the neighborhoods, where you can get those chips, fast foods, soda, beer, lottery tickets, and the occasional bullet in your chest. But the kinds of supermarkets that Miss Hazelton envisions take up around ten acres when parking lots are included.

Schmitt is the main author of the 2023 update to the Limited Supermarket Access (LSA) study which determines who is and is not well served by their grocery store. The official definition for limited supermarket access is 500 people in a low income tract where urban members are more than a mile and rural shoppers are more than 10 miles to a full service store. It is the fourth update since 2010 and the first to include Alaska and Hawaii.

The big take away: about 40 million Americans live without easy access to healthy food options.

Take Parkside, Belmont and Mantua neighborhoods of West Philadelphia. Together they are home to roughly 48,755 residents. Virtually all the blocks are very densely populated, 66% Black and almost half the people had an annual income of $25,000 in 2021, the latest data available.

This was some sloppy writing. Did Miss Hazeltom mean that $25,000 was the median income?

While this is the neighborhood many traditional stores would overlook, it is the type of neighborhood that the LSA study showed was in desperate need of a supermarket.

OK, why would “many traditional stores” overlook those neighborhoods? The author noted that “Virtually all the blocks are very densely populated,” which means less available area to put in a ten-acre supermarket. The neighborhoods are mostly poor, and grocery stores “operate on razor-thin profit margins. The industry average is between one and three percent, far below other retail sectors. With such lean margins, grocery stores rely on high sales volume and inventory turnover to thrive.” Then you throw in Philly’s crime rate, and the obvious question is easy to determine: how could a supermarket make a profit there?

Supermarkets were once associated with suburbs, and by the 1970s seven out of every ten food dollars were spent there. But also supermarkets did not place their businesses in low-income communities which lead to real consequences.

This paragraph alone tells you just how poor Miss Hazelton’s article was. The source she hyperlinked told her that grocery stores in Philly were mostly the ‘corner grocery store’ type, operating in the rowhouse neighborhoods, yet somehow, she couldn’t figure out that those neighborhood structures dictated the kinds of grocery stores that were there. In more rural areas, we had “general stores” before supermarkets were developed, and many lament that so few of those old general stores exist. Alas! The old general store that was near where I now live went out of business, became someone’s auto repair shop for a while, and is now a small volunteer fire station. Kroger and Giant and Aldi forced those old country general stores out of business, but in the suburbs and rural areas, there was the physical room for supermarkets.

Perhaps it’s as simple as the reporter having more of an agenda than an understanding of economics and business.

Political speech by public school teachers

The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment.

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Having been incorporated by the Supreme Court to apply to state and municipal governments as well, it presents a high bar to governments to restrict speech. However, one place in which governments, and employers, can restrict speech is when the speaker is at work; no one reasonably holds that an employee could harm his employer through his at-work speech. We also have laws prohibiting government employees from political activities while working at their jobs.

Well, this story caught my eye:

Central Bucks says teacher’s anti-Israel social media posts don’t violate policies. Some parents say he’s ‘brainwashing’ kids.

Youssef Abdelwahab, a Spanish teacher and adviser to Central Bucks West’s Muslim Student Association, has posted extensively on social media criticizing Israel.

by Maddie Hanna | Saturday, March 16, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

A Central Bucks West High School teacher did not break district rules with his anti-Israel advocacy, district officials said this week after reviewing complaints by parents that his social media posts spread antisemitic content and inspired a Muslim student group to do the same.

Complaints about Youssef Abdelwahab, a Spanish teacher and adviser to the high school’s Muslim Student Association, were investigated by the Central Bucks School District, according to acting superintendent James Scanlon, who said he couldn’t provide details on personnel matters.

“There were no policy violations,” Scanlon said.

Several parents criticized Abdelwahab during a school board meeting Tuesday night, accusing him of “brainwashing” students through an Instagram account set up for a business he runs selling durag head coverings with designs inspired by kaffiyehs, a traditional Arab headdress viewed by supporters of the Palestinian cause as a symbol of fighting for Palestinian rights. Abdulwahab’s critics have also circulated a 45-page letter addressed to Scanlon that called for his firing.

So far, that’s just news, and while I completely and unambiguously support Israel, I also support Mr Abdelwahab’s First Amendment rights to believe and say and publish whatever foolishness he wants.

But I do not support him being allowed to do so in school.

Very far down:

Teachers’ speech has been controversial in Central Bucks in recent years. The new Democrat-led board recently rolled back a policy enacted by the previous Republican majority that barred teachers from advocating to students about “partisan, political or social policy issues.” The measure was criticized as targeting Pride flags and support for LGBTQ students.

Odd how it doesn’t seem to have been criticized as having prohibited teachers supporting Donald Trump or conservative policies. Those have as little place in the public schools as supporting homosexuality and transgenderism.

The letter to district officials charged that Abdelwahad had violated that policy while it still was in effect, alleging that he “advocated to students” through his Instagram account and his role with the Muslim Student Association.

The letter highlighted a poster at the high school for a Feb. 27 event hosted by the association encouraging students to protest the state’s financial support for Israel. The poster invited students to “collectively write a letter to PA state treasurer listing ways we can better use the $$ here in PA, rather than for killing more innocents in Gaza.”

Under the direction of another teacher, Central Bucks students wrote letters in support of Israel, according to a former Central Bucks West student who spoke at Tuesday’s meeting. “The situation is deeply insensitive to our Palestinian students,” said the former student, Ginny Morgan, who came to the U.S. as a Syrian refugee and described being bullied and targeted by jokes about 9/11 while a student in the district.

It ought to be obvious: teachers should not be pushing students politically in either direction.

Morgan also pushed back on criticism of students wearing kaffiyehs, which the letter to Scanlon described as popularized by former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Wearing a keffiyeh is “hate speech that is made to evoke a fear reaction in Jewish and Israeli students when they see it,” the letter said, citing case law to contend that student free speech — while largely protected — is not unlimited in public schools.

So, it seems that precious little feelings on both sides are being hurt. But unless the school is going to mandate uniforms, students can wear kaffiyehs if they wish . . . and kippahs as well, though the article did not mention them. The two are different in one respect: a kaffiyeh is a political symbol, while a kippah is a religious one. High school students are not exactly known for their sense of moderation.

If Mr Abdelwahad is stupid enough to support the rapists and murderers in Hamas, out-of-school, that’s his right. But the district does need to be monitoring more closely the political speech of teachers and staff while in school.
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