Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Let ’em Loose Larry wants to lock up police officers The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make it about race

Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner, the anti-police defense attorney who was elected District Attorney for Philadelphia thanks in large part to the huge donation from George Soros, explicitly believes in “decarceration,” saying on his campaign website:

When Philadelphia voters elected Larry Krasner as its District Attorney in 2017, he promised to end the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past, work to support victims and the community, and hold the powerful accountable. He has kept his promises. It hasn’t been easy. Larry inherited an office committed to incarceration regardless of the cost, even when this policy endangered and devastated our communities.

But in just three years, he has upended the office culture and implemented policies that put people first. Under Larry’s leadership:

  • The county jail population has decreased by 40% and this summer fell to its lowest level since 1985.
  • The amount of time people will spend in prison has dropped by over 18,000 years.
  • Years under probation or parole have decreased by 57% overall, 65% for drug offenses and 70% for property offenses in the most oversupervised big city, Philly, and the second most oversupervised state, Pennsylvania.

Keeping people out of prison has been Mr Krasner’s goal, except, of course, if the person in question is a police officer. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Ex-Philly police officer sentenced to 11½ to 23 months in prison in landmark fatal shooting case

Eric Ruch was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of Dennis Plowden Jr. in 2017.

by Max Marin | Thursday, November 17, 2022 | 4:05 PM EST

Eric Ruch, Jr, photo by Philadelphia Police Department, published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 2022.

A former Philadelphia police officer was sentenced Thursday to 11½ to 23 months in prison for the 2017 fatal shooting of Dennis Plowden Jr., a conviction prosecutors called the first for an on-duty killing in recent city history. But the penalty fell years below the minimum state sentencing guidelines for the voluntary manslaughter conviction that a jury handed Eric Ruch in September, leading Plowden’s family members and criminal justice reform advocates to say he got a sweetheart deal. District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office said convictions on identical charges have yielded 5½-to-11-year sentences on average since he took office in 2018.

In sentencing Ruch, Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott said that he had demonstrated good behavior since he was charged two years ago and she believed a longer sentence would not offer him rehabilitation.

”Nothing he is going to do in prison is going to make him a better person,” McDermott said to a courtroom packed with family, friends, and colleagues of Ruch and Plowden.

McDermott suggested she would have let Ruch, 34, walk out of court with no prison time would it not diminish the severity of the voluntary manslaughter charge, which calls for a minimum of 4½ years in prison, according to state sentencing guidelines.

Naturally, Mr Plowden’s family “expressed sharp disappointment” that the sentence was as light as it was, and the distinguished Mr Krasner was displeased.

McDermott said the sentence came with parole eligibility and carried no financial penalties. A spokesperson for Krasner said the office is “reviewing options” and has 30 days to appeal the sentence to the Superior Court.

In a statement, Krasner noted that the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission recommendations allow a judge to reduce a sentence by one year below the minimum recommendation. “This sentence falls far below state guidelines,” he said.

In other words, Let ’em Loose Larry doesn’t want to let former Officer Ruch loose! KYW News Radio’s Kristen Johanson reported that the District Attorney’s Office, in what is phrased as a personal statement from Mr Krasner, will “be reviewing” their options to try to get Mr Ruch locked up longer.

In September, a jury found Ruch guilty of voluntary manslaughter for shooting and killing Plowden, a 25-year-old who was in the process of surrendering to officers following a high-speed car chase in the Ogontz neighborhood. Over the course of a five-day trial, witnesses said Plowden emerged from his crashed vehicle in a daze and was on the ground in a seated position when Ruch fired a single shot at his head. The bullet tore through Plowden’s left hand before entering his skull — a hand he was raising to surrender, prosecutors argued.

That jury had acquitted Mr Ruch of the more serious charge of third-degree murder. In charging Mr Ruch with third-degree murder, the District Attorney’s Office was saying that the officer was motivated by malice, and a wanton disregard for the danger to life posed by his action.

Ruch and five other officers, including his former partner, testified that they thought Plowden was reaching with his right hand for a gun while on the ground, and that Ruch feared his life when he pulled the trigger. “The hand you can’t see is the hand that can hurt you,” the former officer testified.

But Plowden didn’t have a gun on him. Officers disputed their department’s own crime scene sketch that showed Ruch had cover behind police cars when he shot Plowden. And witnesses — even though some agreed Plowden’s right hand was concealed when Ruch fired — acknowledged that the man was dazed and defenseless at the time of the fatal shot.

Now comes the bias of the Inquirer:

Police originally said Plowden, who was Black, was driving a 2013 Hyundai sedan that was connected to a murder investigation. They later determined that he had no connection to the case, and prosecutors questioned whether Ruch even knew about the wanted vehicle when he initiated the stop.

The Inky only rarely publishes photos of accused or convicted criminals, but, as shown, and linked, above, the newspaper published the photo of Mr Ruch. You are supposed to note that the former officer is white. And in the paragraph above, they want you to know that Mr Plowden was black. The Inquirer, which publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes stated is an “anti-racist news organization,” wants to make sure you see a racial angle in this story!

There would have been no shooting had Mr Plowden not fled the police in the first place.

Judge McDermott clearly believed that the former officer did not really deserve to go to jail for what was a mistaken judgement in the field, in the heat of the moment, facing a suspect who had led police on a high-speed chase. Left unexplained in the Inquirer article was why Mr Plowden fled in the first place.

According to the previous story in the Inquirer, former Officer Ruch was convicted on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, and was taken into custody at that point. This means that Mr Ruch has already served 57 days of his 11½ to 23 month sentence. This means, that if Judge McDermott’s sentence is upheld, he could be released from jail as early as September 7, 2024. I’d note here that former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathlee Kane, sentenced to 10 to 23 months for perjury, official oppression and some other offenses, was released two months early for good behavior. Mr Ruch could get out even earlier than September of next year if he keeps his nose clean in jail. I hope he does.

As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department is undermanned by hundreds of officers, and the situation is only going to get worse. Mr Krasner, who absolutely hates police officers, is doing his best to make the Philadelphia Police Department less attractive to potential recruits, by letting them know that he’ll do everything he can to get hem convicted and imprisoned, something he does not want to do for actual criminals.

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Do the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer have no mirrors in their homes? The newspaper is far, far, far more concerned with the killings of cute little white girls

I know, I know, I’ve said it before: to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes declared to be an “anti-racist news organization,” black lives really don’t matter.

Now, the Editorial Board are shocked, shocked! that a mass shooting in crime-ridden Kensington, over a week ago, has been greeted with perfunctory remarks, but mostly just shrugs.

A mass shooting must never be business as usual

After nine people were shot in Kensington, the ho-hum response sends a message that City Hall doesn’t care.

by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, November 15, 2022

There was a time when a mass shooting in Philadelphia would be cause for both alarm and action. But after nine people were shot in Kensington a little over a week ago, barely anyone batted an eye.

Maybe since the mass shooting was in Kensington — one of our city’s long-forgotten and grievously underserved communities — it was somehow deemed OK.

Yet what happened was absolutely horrific. Three or four people jumped out of a car on a busy Saturday night and sprayed at least 40 bullets into a crowd near the entrance to the Market-Frankford Line on Allegheny Avenue.

Police and rescue personnel swarmed in. Bloodied bodies were scooped up and rushed to the hospital. No arrests have been made. Mayor Jim Kenney issued a formulaic tweet decrying the grisly events and sending thoughts to the impacted families.

There’s more at the original. But you know what isn’t in the Inquirer, either on its website main page or specific crime page?[1]As of 8:30 AM EST. Anything, anything at all about the murder documented in Fox 29’s Steve Keeley via tweet.

The mass shooting the Editorial Board mentioned was bad, but no one actually died in it; gang-bangers, oops, sorry, “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families”[2]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading can fire off lots and lots of rounds, but are simply horrible marksmen.

But a 53-year-old black man was not just shot, but killed, was deliberately murdered at the intersection of North 50th Street and Westminster Avenue, and the Inky doesn’t care enough about it to have even a paragraph on it.

North 50th Street and Westminster Avenue, via Google Maps, July 2019. Click to enlarge.

Of course, that intersection, while not exactly the worst in Philly, isn’t exactly the greatest place to live, either. 5002 Westminster Avenue is currently for sale, for a whopping $95,000, in a zillow.com listing which says the three bedroom, two bath, 1170 ft² townhouse “needs some work,” and doesn’t include any photos. Another listing, for 5030 Westminster Avenue, shows a three bedroom, one bath, 1,256 ft² rowhome for sale listed at $135,000, and the few photos there shows a residence which has been at least partially fixed up.

And while the murder of a local, of a Philadelphian, didn’t make the paper, this story was on their website:

Idaho police: No suspect in slaying of 4 college students

Police in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, say they have not identified a suspect or found a weapon in the weekend slayings of four University of Idaho students in a rental house near campus

by Rebecca Boone and Nicholas K Geranios, Associated Press | Wednesday, November 16, 2022

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Police in the college town of Moscow said Wednesday they have not identified a suspect or found a weapon in the weekend slayings of four University of Idaho students in a rental house near campus.

Authorities continue to believe the attack was targeted but walked back a previous statement that there was no threat to the public.

“Investigators are working to follow up on all the leads and identify a person of interest,” Moscow Police Chief James Fry said at a news conference. “We do not have a suspect at this time, and that individual is still out there. We cannot say that there is no threat to the community.”

“We need to be aware of our surroundings,” Fry said.

Idaho murder victims, via CNN. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original, but the Inquirer published 582 words, exclusive of the headlines and bylines, about the murders of four college students 2,574 miles away. I have to wonder: is there anything, anything at all, which would lead the Inky to give that much space to four murdered students in Idaho, and none to a 53-year-old Philadelphian?

I’ve said it before: the Inquirer really is much more concerned about the killings of cute little white girls.

So, why was there so little real concern about the ‘mass shooting’ in Kensington? Perhaps the Editorial Board need to look in their own mirrors, because the newspaper they run doesn’t really care about shootings and murders in the heavily minority areas — Philadelphia is very racially and ethnically segregated internally — of their own city, and it shouldn’t take a 69-year-old white former Pennsylvanian now living 600 miles away to notice it.

References

References
↑1 As of 8:30 AM EST.
↑2 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups“
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They all looked scared

I wish I could more fully remember the scene from the movie The Right Stuff in which Scott Glenn, playing Alan Shepard is describing some people and says, in a normal tone of voice, “they all look” and then changes his tone to a sinister “scared.” Why? Because all of a sudden the people who have been pushing more and more support for Ukraine just started defecating in their pants. From The Wall Street Journal:

Missile Blast in Poland Risked Russia-NATO Clash Before Both Sides Dialed Back

Ukraine air-defense likely fired the missile, officials said, and responses from Biden and the Kremlin showed a shared wish to avoid escalation

By Daniel Michaels, Laurence Norman and Drew Hinshaw | Wednesday, Nov 16, 2022 | 12:54 PM EST

BRUSSELS—The explosion of a stray air-defense missile in Poland on Tuesday offers an unsettling reminder of how close Russia’s war in Ukraine is to NATO territory, and with that the risk of confrontation between nuclear powers.

But fast efforts by both sides to ease rising tensions indicate that despite the conflict’s brutality and mounting toll, neither Russia nor NATO countries want fighting to spill west of Ukraine.

The first sign of efforts to prevent escalation came hours after the missile crashed in Poland and killed two people, when President Biden said that preliminary information indicated that the missile strike was unlikely to have been fired from Russia and pledged to investigate the incident.

Hours later, top officials from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said the missile was likely a Soviet-made weapon fired by a Ukrainian air-defense system, and that there was no evidence it was directed there intentionally.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, as the Western democracies were worried that the huge Red Army could roll right in and conquer what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany more colloquially, and the Europeans hadn’t the strength to stop it. NATO’s guarantee was that an attack on one was an attack on all, which was, in effect, a guarantee that the United States, with its large forces and its nuclear weapons, would come to West Germany’s defense.

The USSR detonated its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, far earlier than it was estimated they could.

NATO was a military alliance, including the nuclear-armed United States, against the wholly conventionally-armed Soviet Union; that lasted for 4½ months.

Of course, the Soviets had no way of delivering atomic bombs to targets at the time, and only a few of the devices, but they kept building, and building, and building. By 1951, the USSR tested an air-dropped atomic bomb, which meant that the USSR now had deliverable nuclear weapons.

If NATO had kept to itself, and not expanded following the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, NATO might still be a credible deterrent. But NATO expanded into Poland, and the Baltic States, right on Russia’s doorstep. Russia now has the nuclear arsenal to completely destroy the United States; does anyone seriously believe that Joe Biden, or any American President, would put the lives of 330 million Americans in danger of nuclear incineration to defend Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia?

And now we’ve seen that first military “accident” from the Russo-Ukrainian War spill into a NATO country, and the policy-makers are all looking scared. They should look scared. They should look scared fecesless.

Further down:

(NATO Secretary-General Jens) Stoltenberg — a relentless critic of Russian aggression — sought to stress that events never got out of hand.

“NATO is prepared for situations like this,” he said, first by trying to prevent them, and if that fails, by working “to ensure they don’t spiral out of control.”

Russia also demonstrated a desire to contain the incident. Its Defense Ministry said Wednesday that precision strikes were carried out on targets only on Ukrainian territory and no closer than about 20 miles from the Ukraine-Poland border.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday offered some rare praise for the U.S. — while criticizing some Europeans — in his comments welcoming what he described as the “restrained and much more professional reaction of the American side and the American president” to the news.

Speaking to reporters, Mr. Peskov dismissed European and Ukrainian comments Tuesday blaming Russia as “another hysterical and frenzied Russophobic reaction,” which he said wasn’t based on any solid data.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said on Twitter on Wednesday that Kyiv was ready to participate in a joint investigation into the incident and requested immediate access to the site.

NATO ambassadors on Wednesday held an emergency meeting in Brussels to discuss the missile incident and to coordinate the alliance’s next moves. The incident also dominated a meeting of European Union ambassadors, who unanimously agreed “that Russia bears direct responsibility for yesterday’s tragedy, for the death of two Polish citizens,” said Poland’s ambassador to the European Union, Andrzej Sadoś.

The “alliance’s next moves” need to be to resist the pressure to increase military and economic aid to Ukraine. We’re going to see that pressure coming, from those who are stuck in World War II conventional thinking, to resist Russia more strongly, forgetting that the lessons of a war which ended 77 years ago among parties which were still limited in what they could do militarily by weaponry and geography might not be all that applicable to a situation in which Russia has the capability to rain down nuclear fire on every NATO country in 30 minutes after taking a decision to do so.

It’s no fun, no fun at all, to think that Russia could just start a war like this, could get away with killing thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians, could get away with devastating that benighted country, but at some point people have to consider that all of the rules and old ideas have changed with the development of strategic nuclear arsenals.

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NIMBY! The peasants are revolting!

One of the problems for the global warming climate change activists is that even those who support their causes and want to see far more renewable and non-carbon dioxide (CO2) emitting power sources seem to want those non-CO2 emitting power sources to burden other people’s lives, not their own. From a subscriber-only article in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Ocean City fights offshore wind cable planned to run under beach, through town

The plan to run an electric power transmission cable from 98 offshore wind turbines to land in Ocean City has drawn local opposition, but also supporters.

by Frank Kummer | Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Miles of power cables already snake through Ocean City to power its 5,000 households and light its famed boardwalk.

But the plan to run one cable under the beach to bring electricity generated by 98 offshore wind turbines onshore has sparked controversy. City and Cape May County officials, as well as other communities and homeowners, have lined up against it; other homeowners, environmental groups, and unions support it.

Note that: the plan is to run the cable under the beach, not over it. Once built, it would never be seen, save for some necessary maintenance access points.

Emotion is high enough that a virtual public hearing this week on running the cable under public property drew 244 viewers and dozens of commenters.

The Danish wind power company Ørsted has state approvals to build the utility-scale Ocean Wind 1 wind farm and run one of two electric power transmission cables from it under the beach at 35th Street, across the city, and along the bay north of Roosevelt Boulevard Bridge. The line would ultimately connect to a substation at the former B.L. England coal-fired plant on the Great Egg Harbor River in Upper Township, Cape May County.

The cable would run under four parcels totaling little more than a half acre of city-owned property for which the company would pay $200,000 for the “diversion” of public land, which is 13 times its appraised value. A public hearing was required because the land, including the beach, is considered part of the state’s Green Acres program aimed at protecting open space.

Four parcels, totaling less than an acre of city-owned land. Further down:

The proposal has met resistance from some residents who not only object to the cable but to the 850-foot-high turbines they believe will be visible from shore. Some just want the project moved farther out to sea.

However, Suzanne Hornick, of Protect our Coast-NJ, said her group doesn’t want the wind farm “in any way, shape or form.”

NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard!

So, the environmentalists who are wanting us all to drive plug-in electric vehicles — assuming we will be allowed to have personal vehicles at all — and live generally poorer, and who support wind and solar electric generating facilities aren’t so happy when those, in this case, wind-generated power facility, might be built where they might spot the tops of the windmill blades on a clear day, or have any way to get the power generated by such a facility to shore.

And then there’s this:

Voters defeat Michigan wind energy project, toss supportive officials

By Garret Ellison | gellison@mlive.com | November 9, 2022 | 4:56 PM EST

TRUFANT, MI — Rural voters delivered a crushing blow to plans for a 375 megawatt wind farm in mid-Michigan, where several local renewable energy ordinances were defeated across three townships and multiple officials were thrown from office for supporting the project.

On Tuesday, Nov. 8, midterm voters resoundingly rejected ordinances enabling the Montcalm Wind project by Apex Clean Energy, a developer attempting to erect 75 turbines on farmland in Montcalm County northeast of Grand Rapids.

I don’t normally use photos from news articles, but this one falls under Fair Use guidelines, as the photo shows a sign which specifically says “Not in My backyard!

Zoning ordinances in Maple Valley, Douglass and Winfield townships were voted down by substantial margins amid growing animosity toward wind and solar energy projects among rural residents in Michigan who see them as a potential threat to health and property values.

A Belvidere Township solar energy ordinance also fell amid the wave of referendums.

Seven township officials in Montcalm County were recalled over their support for the $463 million wind project, which would have generated $118 million for leasing property owners and $80 million for local governments and schools over 30 years, according to an Upjohn Institute report.

Voters recalled Winfield Township supervisor Phyllis Larson, clerk Colleen Stebbins and trustee John Black. Douglass Township supervisor Terry Anderson, clerk Ronda Snyder and trustee Tom Jeppesen were recalled. Maple Valley Township supervisor John Schwandt was recalled.

Voters told the Greenville Daily News on Tuesday that turbines are an “eyesore” and several cited disputed claims about their impact on wildlife such as migrating birds.

There’s more at the original, and this one isn’t behind a paywall like the Inquirer article cited above.

Everybody wants cleaner energy sources, but it seems that most people don’t want to see or hear those cleaner energy sources. Just from where do they believe the electricity will come, fairy dust and unicorn farts? People want cleaner-running cars, but most people want other people to buy the Teslas and Chevy Dolts, not themselves. While electric car sales are increasing, the electric vehicle share of the US market is still just 4.6%. The environmentalists demand sacrifice, but it seems that they want Other People to sacrifice, not themselves!

Looks like the peasants are revolting!

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Missing the elephant in the room Sociology professors Kelsy Burke and Emily Kazyak manage to miss the most important datum in their attack on Republicans

Sometimes the credentialed media send out computer information which tells readers that an article is biased even before you read it. From The Washington Post:

Americans’ support for transgender rights has declined. Here’s why.

The culture war over transgender rights is part of a fight over competing notions of gender and sexuality, including issues like abortion and sex education

Analysis by Kelsy Burke and Emily Kazyak | Tuesday, November 8, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

During the 2022 midterm election campaign, Republican public officials targeted transgender rights in what NPR and other news media have called the new front in the culture wars. Last month’s Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey appears to offer confirmation, finding increased polarization on all measures of LGBTQ rights. In particular, Americans’ support for transgender rights has declined.

The article headline isn’t too terribly biased, but if you look at the tab for the page, the article title was, as first saved on the computer, “Why do Republicans attack transgender rights?” And the url for the article is https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/08/ transgender-republican-evangelical-bathrooms/. You can get around the Post’s paywall and read the article for free on the Microsoft network, but the msn.com version does not show the tab change; that can only be seen at the Post’s original.

Clearly, an editor at the Post changed the title the authors submitted electronically from Lincoln, Nebraska.[1]Article headlines in newspapers are normally written by an editor, so this isn’t anything abnormal.

Then there is the Post’s biography of the article authors, as shown in the screen capture to the right. Let’s face it: when sensible people see that one of the authors is an “associate professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies,” their eyes roll.

Take one measure: whether laws should require transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex assigned at birth, not their current gender identity. In 2016, only 35 percent of all Americans favored these “bathroom bills,” the first of which was proposed that year in North Carolina. In 2022, after numerous other states proposed similar laws, the number of Americans supporting them rose to 52 percent.

I always laugh when I see the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” No, sex is determined at conception, by whether the sperm cell which fertilizes the egg is carrying an X or a Y chromosome. This is something we’ve known for 100 years.

People chuckled when they read that His Majesty King Henry VIII blamed his wives for having girls rather than boys, because we now know that it is the father, not the mother, who actually determines the sex of the offspring.

But today? Today the silliness of the left is that sex is somehow “assigned” at birth, rather than recognized at birth. Good heavens, think of all of the troubles good King Henry could have avoided if he’d simply “assigned” Mary and Elizabeth as boys.

While I do wonder whether the Post has a stylebook preference or mandete for “sex assigned at birth” as a phrase, it’s very obvious that the good professors who wrote the article would have used it regardless; it is used several times throughout the article, and the transgender activists prefer it, because it makes it sound as though sex is something other than biologically determined and unchangeable.

The jump was especially pronounced for White evangelicals and Republicans. In 2016, only 41 percent of White evangelicals and 44 percent of Republicans supported the requirement that transgender people use bathrooms that aligned with their sex assigned at birth. By 2022, that number doubled to 86 percent and 87 percent, respectively.

Other groups also increased their opposition to transgender rights, but the rise was less dramatic for Democrats and Americans who are unaffiliated with religion. Only 27 percent of Democrats favored bathroom bills in 2016, compared with 31 percent in 2022. Among nonreligious respondents, support for requiring transgender people to use the bathroom that aligns with their sex assigned at birth increased from 21 percent in 2016 to 34 percent in 2022.

In other words, as people became more educated on the subject, they realized the silliness of transgenderism.

These numbers suggest that transgender issues are increasingly being lived out in polarizing ways among Americans — in other words, that the “culture wars” narrative holds true. As sociologists, we have sought to dig deeper than the quantitative findings to understand why Americans hold such diverging beliefs.

The article continues with their findings based on surveys, and they tell us the obvious: being conservative, Republican and religious makes you more likely not to accept the arguments of transgenderism. I’ll omit that for this article, because I cannot simply copy-and-paste the whole thing; that would be plagiarism, and you can read it yourself. However, while they want to blame people who are “politically conservative” and “White evangelicals”, they somehow never mentioned the most obvious and glaring bit of news about transgender people that people saw: the case of University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will Thomas, a male who claimed to be a woman named “Lia”, and went from being ranked #562 when competing as a male his first three years, to #1 as a female his senior season. Mr Thomas absolutely destroyed the real female competitors at the Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio. While some people are surely sympathetic to Mr Thomas psychological plight — it has to be traumatic to actually believe that you should be a different sex — he also awoke people who may not have paid much attention to transgenderism that this was a male, who had been a male athlete and gone through male puberty, and was simply different from real women.

You didn’t have to listen to Republican messages to realize that something was horribly wrong with the Will Thomas story.

Their politically liberal bias — and no, I do not claim to be unbiased myself — is blatantly obvious in their concluding paragraph:

Though these findings obviously relate to transgender people, they implicate cisgender people, too. The culture war over transgender rights is part of a war over competing notions of gender and sexuality, and how those should be regulated in the social world. Thus, in 2022, we have observed simultaneous political attacks on transgender people, reproductive freedoms, and sex education. Americans are divided because we have fundamentally different vantage points over whose identities deserve protection and which experiences are to be prioritized and believed.

Yeah, we get it: this was a biased article, listed as an “analysis” rather than an OpEd piece, and the conclusion, along with the original title, was meant to attack Republicans. But leaving out the huge input of the “Lia” Thomas story pretty much invalidates the authors’ conclusions. If, as the authors began, “Republican public officials targeted transgender rights in what NPR and other news media have called the new front in the culture wars,” such ‘targeting’ bore political fruit because Mr Thomas so thoroughly fertilized the ground.

References

References
↑1 Article headlines in newspapers are normally written by an editor, so this isn’t anything abnormal.
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There can be no negotiated peace with the ‘Palestinians’

For a devout Catholic, it’s the (too short) trip of a lifetime. My older daughter, an Army Reservist currently deployed to the Middle East, has a four-day out-of-country pass, and I’m meeting her in Jerusalem. I told a couple of my fellow parishioners that I’d miss Mass next Sunday, but that actually means I’ll miss Mass at my home parish; my plan is to attend Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre!

That only brought my attention more to this article which appeared on my feed this morning, in which the activists said the quiet part out loud.

‘Defeating Israel means defeating the US,’ Canada, EU -Brussels activists

by Michael Starr | Monday, November 7, 2022 | 9:09 AM

Defeating Israel is part of a process to defeating the United States of America, the European Union and Canada, the leader of a Palestinian protest in Brussels declared in new footage released on Thursday by the NGO Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.

“Defeating Israel means defeating the US. Defeating Israel means defeating Canada, these settlements who [sic] exist on the backs of the indigenous and the black people. Defeating Israel means defeating this colonial institution [European Parliament], means payback for all Africans, Algerians, Moroccans, Sahraoui,” said Samidoun Europe coordinator and Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement (Masar Badil) member Mohammed Khatib at the March for Return and Liberation for Palestine last Saturday.

Translation: the “Palestinians” don’t just hate Israel and the Jews, they hate all of Western civilization.

Khatib — who previously lead the organization of protests against the 125th anniversary of the first Zionist Congress event in Basel, Switzerland in late August — has also been described by Palestinian and Arab media as a spokesman and activist for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.

“Second and third generations are in Brussels,” Khatib said in front of the EU parliament. “We’ve built this city and we still face fascism and racism. So we will say no to this not only in Palestine but here in Europe, there in the United States and in all Arab countries. Together, as comrade Georges Abdallah said, ‘we must gather together and we will win only together.'”

Abdallah is an imprisoned PFLP member and Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions, co-founder. Protestors called for the release of several terrorist organization members and raised posters of dead terrorist figureheads.

I have said it before: Israel faced two logical choices at the end of the Six Day War in 1967:

  1. Israel could return the land it captured to Jordan, Syria and Egypt quickly; or
  2. Israel could expel the entire Arab population of those lands, and annex the territory.

Instead, the Israelis chose a third alternative: keeping the lands under military occupation, hoping that the unpleasant conditions would ‘encourage’ the Arabs to emigrate. The Israelis should have learned from their own history in Europe: regardless of how tough the Nazis made staying put in their homes in Germany, and then occupied France and Poland, few chose to emigrate, choosing instead to just tough it out, as most Jews had done before them in the many pogrami that they had borne in the past, because things would get better eventually. What the Nazis did them was so far out of human experience that no one in Europe, Jew or Gentile, could conceive of it.

The Israelis of 1967-68 should have realized it: if Jews for generations had decided to stay in their homes and tough out the bad times, the Arabs in Judea and Samaria could do that as well.

The result? Fifty-five years of occupation have created three generation of angry Arabs, and sympathy among the liberal dolts in the West for their poor, poor plight.

Terrorist paraphernalia was readily apparent in previously released footage. Some marchers wore headbands showing allegiance to Lions’ Den, a terrorist group that has been responsible for several recent terrorist attacks and battles with IDF soldiers. One prominently displayed banner depicted the launch of rockets, and another poster depicted a gunman with a Carlo submachine pistol, a firearm favored by Palestinian terrorists.

“Participants saluted the Palestinian resistance, including Mohammed Deif, leader of the Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza,” Samidoun declared last Sunday. Deif is a leader of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.

Khatib urged protest participants to join Masar Badil, Samidoun or similarly-minded organizations. The two groups organized the march.

“We will not accept any more, as Palestinians, this rhetoric of a two-state solution as a way to support Palestine,” said Khatib. “Only one free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

Let’s tell the truth here: many “Palestinians” have never accepted the “rhetoric of a two-state solution”, as evidenced by Yassir Arafat’s angry rejection of the supposed compromise he negotiated with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton. Mr Clinton later said that it was the biggest mistake Mr Arafat could make, a “colossal historical blunder,” because he’d never be able to negotiate a treaty more favorable to the “Palestinians” than the one he had before him.

Of course, Yassir Arafat knew that if he had signed a peace agreement with Israel, the irredentists would kill him.

And nothing has changed. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came up with a plan to simply evacuate all Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip, which was done in August and September of 2005. Israel said to the “Palestinians”, in effect, ‘Here it is; do with it what you will.’

Gaza is resource-poor, and it depends upon Israel for public utilities, but it also has the best beachfront property in the entire region, and the “Palestinians” could have turned it into the greatest beach resort for well-to-do Europeans, bringing in tons of money. Instead, they chose Hamas to lead them, to create just more poverty, and a base from which to occasionally lob rockets into Israel. The Israel Defence Force responds, with bombing and artillery strikes against the suspected terrorist hideouts, which are blended in with the civilian population, and Western leftists then blame Israel, because leftists are just plain stupid.

Well, in honor of my upcoming visit, the Israelis wisely voted the center-right Likud Party, along with its conservative allies, into a Knesset majority, meaning the return of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Mr Netanyahu knows the “Palestinians” for what they are: a population which hates Israel and the Jews and, if most of the people aren’t the guerrilla fighters, are still willing to be led by Hamas and the other hardline factions which are still pushing for military victory over Israel, and simply are not interested in any peace agreement. The demonstrators in Brussels, a wealthy city in a peaceful and prosperous country in which many of the Arabs live, simply proves the point once again. That Israeli voters gave Likud and its allies a 65-55 majority in the Knesset — and remember: Israel has two million Arab citizens, and approximately 54% of the adults voted, very few of whom would have voted for conservatives — meaning that Israeli Jews must have given the Likud bloc a tremendous majority of their votes. The Israeli Jews are showing now that they very much understand that there can be no negotiated peace with the Arabs, at least not with the “Palestinians” as they are now.

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Ho hum! Another mass shooting in Philadelphia It was just Kensington, so who really cares?

It was August 17, 2020, when The Philadelphia Inquirer published the article “Even the pandemic doesn’t slow down Philadelphia’s drug markets: It’s unclear why COVID-19 hasn’t had much effect on Philadelphia’s drug market. But that’s not to say the drug supply here is or was predictable, even before the pandemic.” The article included a photo of what appears to be a young male shooting up — his back is to the camera — out in public, in broad daylight, on Kensington Avenue, right by the SEPTA train station. The street, one of Philly’s thoroughfares, is shown as being littered with trash. I noted that I was waiting for news that Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw organized a major sweep to clear the area, at least temporarily, of the drug dealers and junkies infesting the area, but I never heard of one.

After shooting in Kensington, some accuse city leaders of not doing enough to improve area’s conditions

Five people were critically wounded in an attack one political leader called the latest example of Philadelphia’s failure to address the depths of Kensington’s public health catastrophes.

by Ellie Rushing | Sunday, November 6, 2022

A shooting of nine people overnight in Kensington, a section of Philadelphia beset by gun violence and an open-air drug market, renewed community leaders’ criticisms of city leadership and heightened calls for a plan to address the neighborhood’s compounding crises.

The shooting Saturday near the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, ground zero for the city’s opioid epidemic, left all of the victims seriously wounded after police said at least three people jumped out of a car and fired more than 40 shots into a crowd shortly before 10:45 p.m. Eight men and one woman, ranging in age from 23 to 40, were struck and taken to Temple University Hospital.

Four of the men remained in critical condition as of Sunday evening, police said.

No arrests have been made and no weapons were recovered. Additional details were scarce, including what may have motivated the shooting.

Screen capture from The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 19, 2022.

I would say that the motivation is obvious: one gang clique of young men[1]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading put out a hit on another clique of young men, and the police simply need to figure out which clique was targeted and which clique was responsible. It’s quite possible that not all of the people wounded were among the specifically targeted, and that even none of the wounded were among the targeted clique; these fine but misunderstood young gentlemen apparently accept that there will be some collateral damage as they set out on their missions.[2]Will Bunch, the Inquirer’s most off-the-wall leftist columnist, wrote: These twin blows came at the very end of a brutal autumn in which the right’s unified messaging — in so many ways the … Continue reading

Actually, I feel kind of sorry for Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing. Her byline is on so many of the crime stories in the newspaper that it’s got to be at least a little bit depressing!

As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department believe that three of the teenaged suspects in the Roxborough High School shooting murdered another young man the previous day.

There is no neighborhood as burdened by shootings as Kensington, a section of the city plagued by an open-air drug market and high rates of deep poverty. Along the Kensington-Allegheny corridor, there are sprawling homeless encampments, and people in addiction openly use drugs.

Law enforcement officials have said dealers sell heroin, crack, and other drugs on more than 80 blocks in the neighborhood.

If the police know of these drug sale areas, why aren’t they sweeping through and arresting the dealers? Oh, that’s right:

Law enforcement officials say they cannot arrest their way out of the crises there.

They could at least try, since the city is apparently not doing anything else to solve the problems.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tweeted:

In other words, the Commissioner knows that the people of that neighborhood, and the city in general, do not believe that the Philadelphia Police Department really care about Kensington. Given that the Inquirer can report that drugs are being sold openly on “more than 80 blocks” there, and the police aren’t doing anything about it, what other impression would people have?

Of course, if the police did make a bunch of drug busts, District Attorney would refuse to prosecute the arrested seriously.

Miss Rushing wrote about the frustrations of Philly’s worst, most crime-ridden neighborhood, without showing any understanding about her subject. Kensington is the way it is not because of poverty, but because of the culture in that area, a culture which says that it’s perfectly fine to go out and blast away at your perceived enemies. Eastern Kentucky is just as poor, if not poorer, than Kensington, but while there is certainly crime here, and Kentucky’s firearms law are less restrictive than Pennsylvania’s, we don’t have the mass shootings or rampant killings seen in the City of Brotherly Love.

Miss Rushing was one of the Inquirer writers who told us that there were no gangs in Philadelphia, just those “cliques of young men”, and if she didn’t write those specific words herself, her name is still on it, demonstrating for us that those writers, Jessica Griffin, Ximena Conde, and Chris Palmer along with Miss Rushing, are simply in denial of what is going on in their fair city.

That, or they actually do know the truth, but are unwilling, or unable due to their editors’ dictates, to actually say it out loud.

The “city leaders” from Miss Rushing’s headlines really can’t do much to “improve (Kensington’s) conditions” because the people there are responsible for them. Yes, many of them are poor, but that doesn’t mean that they have to use drugs or tolerate drug use among others. The area’s open-air drug markets exist because the residents of Kensington allow them to exist. The filthy homeless camps and junkies strung out and laying wasted in the middle of the sidewalks exist because the neighborhood allow them to exist. The area is full of crime because the people who know who committed the crimes won’t tell the police, so crime continues, and gets worse, because there are few consequences.

Kensington’s consequences are the fault of Kensington’s people. The “city leaders” cannot change that; only the people themselves, hopefully encouraged by church pastors, block captains, and the mothers in the area concerned about their children, can change things.

References

References
↑1 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups“
↑2 Will Bunch, the Inquirer’s most off-the-wall leftist columnist, wrote:

These twin blows came at the very end of a brutal autumn in which the right’s unified messaging — in so many ways the Powell Memo brought to life — is embraced by the icons of mainstream media like the New York Times, Washington Post or NPR. The fearmongering over cherry-picked crime stats or supposed migrant caravans, or an emphasis on high inflation over low unemployment, or cheap gas over deadly climate change that’s hatched in conservative think tanks and promulgated on Fox News has proved catnip to journalists so eager to prove their balanced objectivity — that they aren’t in the tank for Biden coming off the Donald Trump nightmare.

With 449 homicides in Philly so far this year, on a pace for 529 for the year, and total shootings at a higher pace this year than last. I’m not sure how “cherry-picked” those crime statistics are. The Inky’s writers seem to be living in denial.
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How can the American left so blithely want to increase the chances of a nuclear war?

The argument is always the same: “if we don’t do this now, it will harm American security in the future.” If only people realized that what we are doing now is already harming American security! From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Trudy Rubin, from her Twitter biography.

If they win, MAGA Republicans will push to abandon Ukraine and harm U.S. security.

GOP candidates, along with Musk and Trump, echo Kremlin talking points in pushing to end Ukraine aid and force Kyiv to negotiate with genocidal Putin

by Trudy Rubin | Sunday, November 6, 2022

The ad during the first World Series game between the Phillies and the Houston Astros was terrifying — and totally misleading.

It denounced Joe Biden for sending billions in aid and weapons to Ukraine while U.S. cities were awash in crime and undocumented immigrants. “Joe Biden says his fight in Ukraine could lead to nuclear Armageddon. World War III,” the ad’s narrator intoned. “I say no mas.”

Trudy Rubin is a long-time columnist for the Inquirer, and a member of the newspaper’s Editorial Board. Someone so intimately familiar with the City of Brotherly Love cannot be unaware that her home city actually is “awash in crime and undocumented immigrants”. As her own newspaper reported, there was another mass shooting in the Kensington neighborhood, which the Inky recently described as “a section of Philadelphia beset by an open-air drug market and higher concentrations of poverty and addiction” and saying “no neighborhood has been as burdened by shootings.” With 445 homicides and a total of 2004 shooting victims as of Monday, October 31st, it would certainly seem to me that Philly is “awash in crime”.

Does Miss Rubin dispute that President Biden and the Democratic majority in Congress have sent billions of dollars in aid and equipment to Ukraine? Does she deny that President Biden and his Administration have talked about “World War III” and nuclear war? One wouldn’t think she would, considering that she linked the Washington Post article documenting it!

More than 1.1 million viewers “liked” the ad when it surfaced on Twitter.

Well, Heaven forfend! 1.1 million people are opposed to increasing the probability of nuclear war? A scandal, I say, a scandal!

The ad’s sponsor was a virulently anti-immigrant, dark money group called Citizens for Sanity, which is linked to Steven Miller, former President Donald Trump’s close White House aide and anti-immigration tsar. Yet the attack on U.S. aid to Ukraine — in language that could have been taken from the Kremlin’s own playbook — was especially disturbing.

While there’s a lot more in Miss Rubin’s column, this is the money line: being opposed to American aid to one side in a conflict where the other side has a strategic nuclear arsenal capable of incinerating every large American city is “especially disturbing.”

This has, of course, been much of the Democrats’ and the neoconservatives’ playbook: if you are opposed to a policy which increases the probability of nuclear war, why you must be pro-Russia and Vladimir Putin’s stooge! Apparently, the seemingly unusual notion that some people might not like the idea of increasing the probability of nuclear war without supporting or being sympathetic to Russia just never enters their minds, or at least will not until after the election!

The advertisement is a preview of what to expect if Tuesday’s elections return a MAGA-heavy GOP majority to the House of Representatives, let alone the Senate. And it is a gift to Vladimir Putin, who hopes his battlefield losses in Ukraine will be offset by MAGA victories in the U.S.A.

The Inquirer is, as you might have guessed, wholly in the bag for the Democrats, and the Editorial Board absotively, posilutely hate Donald Trump and “Make America Great Again” Republicans. Much of the idea behind Miss Rubin’s column is an appeal to vote, if not for Democrats, against Republicans.

I do not know if the columnist has any control over where related article blurbs appear on the newspaper’s website, but the one pictured at the left showed up immediately below her last quoted paragraph, and it leads to another of Miss Rubin’s columns:

Putin’s nuclear threats and strikes on civilians rule out negotiations or an off-ramp

Biden should expedite arrival of air defenses for Ukraine and make clear to Putin that nuclear use would be catastrophic for Russia.

by Trudy Rubin | Thursday, October 13, 2022

On Tuesday morning, as news broke of Russia’s vicious missile strikes on civilian targets all across Ukraine, I texted a friend in the badly hit city of Kharkiv.

“We will not be intimidated,” Oleksiy quickly texted back. (I am using only his first name because he is now serving with the Ukrainian army.) “Kharkiv is ready for this.” He told me he was cooking borscht on a makeshift outdoor grill as we spoke because a barrage of Russian missiles had knocked out electricity in the city. The Russians had also targeted a children’s playground, civilian apartment blocks, and a downtown crossroads at morning rush hour.

That reminded me of a part of Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, in which one of the characters in the novel mused how interesting it was that Nazi propaganda told people that Allied bombs missed military targets but fell unerringly on schools, churches, and hospitals.

A couple of paragraphs down, she continued:

Ukrainians believe they are in an existential struggle for the very survival of their homeland. They are willing to pay a very high price for victory. Now is not the time for cease-fires or negotiations, which would only give the Russians a breather to rally their flailing troops. . . . .

Ukrainians like Oleksiy say any peace talks are impossible until Russian forces are driven out of most or all of their country. What kind of negotiations can be held with a Russian leader who insists that the Ukrainian state has no right to exist because it is part of Russia? Putin insists that Russia will never return the roughly 20% of Ukraine that it has annexed via fake referendums — including the Black and Azov Sea coastal areas that are key to the Ukrainian economy.

What follows that is what the columnist wishes that President Biden would say, which is, in effect, unconditional surrender. No, she doesn’t use those two words, but the effect is the same. A face-saving way out for Russia or a negotiated cease-fire? Not in Miss Rubin’s world.

But the last time the words ‘unconditional surrender’ were used as national policy meant that the nations against which they were directed, Germany and Japan, had to be beaten into complete submission, bombed until Hell wouldn’t have any more, and thoroughly militarily defeated. Germany and Japan, however, did not have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them on their enemies’ home soil, and really, no way to attack the United States at all; Vladimir Putin has those things.

If there is to be no easy way out for Russia, and no negotiated cease-fire or settlement, that means the war in Ukraine must continue until one side or the other is militarily defeated. If that happens, there are only two options:

  1. Russia wins, in which case Ukraine not only loses its freedom and independence, but sees hundreds of thousands more of its civilians killed and much of its infrastructure and economy destroyed; or
  2. Ukraine wins, in which case a huge amount of Russia’s military equipment is lost, damaged, or destroyed, and many, many thousands of its soldiers killed, along with President Putin driven with his back against the wall, and little reason not to try to use tactical nuclear weapons against advancing Ukrainian troops and military bastions.

Even Miss Rubin noted that Mr Biden “warned recently that Putin’s nuclear threats raise ‘the prospect of Armageddon.'”

Such a casual remark, at a campaign fund-raiser, scares rather than educates, and conveys uncertainty to Putin.

Ma’am, it ought to scare people; the threat of nuclear war ought to scare everybody!

In Dr Strangelove, when Ambassador Alexei de Sadeskii reveals the existence of the ‘Doomsday Machine,’ President Merton Muffley asks him, “I’m afraid I don’t understand something, Alexei. Is the Premier threatening to explode this if our planes carry out this attack?”, at which point the Ambassador replies, “No, sir, it is not a thing a sane man would do.” It isn’t, but Miss Rubin, and President Biden, and the whole cavalcade of neocon warmongers are now somehow depending upon the sanity and Western logic that Mr Putin has yet to demonstrate that he has.

And if they’re wrong, if they manage to provide enough weapons and money and materiel for Ukraine to beat back the Russians, and Vladimir Vladimirovich does decide that ‘battlefield’ or ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons are the only way to reverse a military defeat, what happens then? Perhaps Miss Rubin isn’t worried about Citizens Bank Park and the Liberty Bell being incinerated in nuclear fire, but I am, and the escalation of the use of nuclear weapons, once that threshold is crossed, is something we can never know when it will stop.

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The plague of public-sector unions

It was actually a minor line in an article by Robert Stacy McCain about Democrats not accepting election results that didn’t go their way, but one I found very important:

Government employee unions are a conspiracy against taxpayers, and when the people of Wisconsin elected (Scott) Walker to fight these unions, Democrats refused to accept the legislative consequences.

As it happens, I still have a Scott Walker t-shirt, from his failed campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Yeah, it’s pretty worn and threadbare, but it’s still good for work around the farm in hot, humid Kentucky summers.

Economically, unions in the private sector have to, in the end, be partners with the unionized businesses, because businesses can fail. If the unions demand so much that the business cannot make a profit, the business fails and the unionized employees’ wages drop to $0.00 per hour. And as much as some union leaders hate business, see themselves opposed to corporations, they do realize that a $0.00 per hour wage is possible if they drive the business out of business. Sometimes those private sector unions don’t get it right, as the bankruptcy and failure of Hostess brand demonstrates.

But public-sector unions are different, because the public sector cannot be driven out of business! Where private companies are trying to sell their products to customers who have the ability to choose to buy or not buy their goods, the public sector takes in its revenue through taxation, which is enforced by the law, and ultimately, by law enforcement. If public-sector unions demand so much that the government agencies cannot afford it under their current revenues, the government has the option of raising taxes, to increase its revenues at, in the end, the point of a gun.

Governor Walker tried fighting the public-sector unions, and succeeded, sort of, for a brief time. Governor Matt Bevin (R-KY) tried to get the Commonwealth’s rising retirement indebtedness under control, and the teachers’ unions went absolutely ape, and campaigned so vigorously against him that he lost his bid for re-election, in a very red state, to the odious — anyone who can simply suspend our constitutional rights and get away with it is by definition odious — Andy Beshear, 709,577 (49.20%) to 704,388 (48.83%), a margin if just 5,189 out of 1,442,390 ballots cast.

Public-sector unions have so much power because they are workers in an ‘industry’ that cannot fail, and they are bargaining for contracts with people who have little experience in business and no pressure to keep the ‘company’ in business. That’s why Virginia has become a ‘blue’ state, as wealthier federal government workers have metastasized into northern Virginia, and why public-school teachers are paid significantly more than the median income in the districts that support them.