Author Archives: Dana Pico

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It wasn’t a difficult prediction to make

I wrote, on September 27th:

As we have noted many times before, The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t care about homicides in the City of Brotherly Love unless the victim is an ‘innocent,’ someone already of some note, or a cute little white girl. So, while a 14-year-old boy being killed would normally be seen as the death of an “innocent,” a planned “hit” on a group of junior varsity football players certainly sounds like there was something to have generated bad blood between at least one of the players and a “clique of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families.” The dead player might not have been involved in whatever dispute the “clique beefers” had, but the obvious assumption is that at least someone among the departing players might not have been quite the “innocent” the Inky would like to make him out to be.

When the Inky stops telling us what a good and noble fellow the dead boy was, we’ll know a lot more.

Subsequent reports in the Inquirer have indicated that yes, this was a gang hit an unfortunate action by a “clique of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,”[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 but that the Philadelphia Police believe that the targeted individual was a 17-year-old black male who had been shot himself in the commission of a carjacking and has been “referenced several times for his criminal activity, and who was not on one of the football teams, but the only victim who was killed, 14-year-old Nicolas Elizalde, was apparently an innocent casualty rather than being part of such a gang clique himself. That means it’s time for the Inky to run a nice story on him!

The mother of Roxborough shooting victim Nicolas Elizalde, 14, has a message: ‘He isn’t a number’

“He was happier than he’s ever been,” Meredith Elizalde said of her son, 14, starting the school year and joining the football team.

by Ellie Rushing and Kristen A. Graham | Saturday, October 1, 2022

Nicolas Elizalde had begged his mother to let him play football for years, but she always said no, too worried about the injuries that can come with the sport.

This year, Nick was starting high school in a new area, and needed a way to make friends. So Meredith Elizalde gave in. And in August, they trekked to the athletic store to buy him a new pair of cleats.

They were the cleats that she saw from afar on Tuesday, as she ran toward the sound of gunfire outside Roxborough High School.

But even before she saw them, she knew.

There are dozens more paragraphs, plus photos, in the Inquirer original, telling us that young Mr Elizalde was a good kid who never got into any trouble. Our heartstrings are pulled when we are told that his corneas were donated to help save the vision of two other people.

But despite what his mother said, young Mr Elizalde is just a number, number 401 in the list of people murdered in the City of Brotherly Love. Most of the people killed in Philadelphia are just as bad a guys as the guys who killed them, and Mr Elizalde, like Tiffany Fletcher just a few weeks earlier, will be forgotten in not much more time, as the number of dead bodies continues to rise. As of the end of Thursday, September 29th, two more Philadelphians were shot in broad daylight walking down the public streets, in an obviously targeted hit — note that the victims started to run as the shooter got out of the car, because they recognized that this was a hit, in a way innocent people most probably would not — and no story in the Inky tells us what we already knew: these were just as much gang-bangers as the guy who shot them.

Josef Stalin purportedly said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” There were 562 people murdered in Philly last year, and if the current year is slightly behind that pace, it’s not behind by much, and unless the daily average of murders falls dramatically, there will be something on the order of 540 to 550 homicides in 2022.

And this is why young Mr Elizalde really is just a number. Why is he just a number? It’s because nobody really cares! Most Philadelphians aren’t out there shooting people, but the people who know who the shooters are still keep their mouths shut, still don’t help the police solve murders.

Some of that is clearly fear, but the police have set up well-publicized anonymous tip lines which could at least get the police pointed in the right direction. Some of it is that so many residents just plain hate the cops and hate law enforcement, as evidenced by the fact that the voters re-elected, by landslide margins, a District Attorney who loves to prosecute cops but does not want to send street criminals to jail. And some of it is a sense that most of these killings are public service homicides, one group of bad guys taking out another group of bad guys. In that, and yes, I recognize that I’m being an [insert slang term for the anus here] for pointing it out, but young Mr Elizalde was simply collateral damage.

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”.
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Now Our Betters want you to charge your Chevy Dolt at work, not a home. That's going to cost you more money.

A 2019 Chevy Bolt electric vehicle caught fire at a home in Cherokee County, Georgia, on Sept. 13. Source: Cherokee County Fire Department. Click to enlarge.

Perhaps I am stepping on William Teach’s toes with this one, but when this article appeared in my Google feed, it was too much of an opportunity on which to pass. I did check first to make sure Mr Teach hadn’t already written on the subject! From Stanford University:

Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go, Stanford study finds

The move to electric vehicles will result in large costs for generating, transmitting, and storing more power. Shifting current EV charging from home to work and night to day could cut costs and help the grid, according to a new Stanford study.

by Mark Golden | Thursday, September 22, 2022

The vast majority of electric vehicle owners charge their cars at home in the evening or overnight. We’re doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study.

In March, the research team published a paper on a model they created for charging demand that can be applied to an array of populations and other factors. In the new study, published Sept. 22 in Nature Energy, they applied their model to the whole of the Western United States and examined the stress the region’s electric grid will come under by 2035 from growing EV ownership. In a little over a decade, they found, rapid EV growth alone could increase peak electricity demand by up to 25%, assuming a continued dominance of residential, nighttime charging.

To limit the high costs of all that new capacity for generating and storing electricity, the researchers say, drivers should move to daytime charging at work or public charging stations, which would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This finding has policy and investment implications for the region and its utilities, especially since California moved in late August to ban sales of gasoline-powered cars and light trucks starting in 2035.

“We encourage policymakers to consider utility rates that encourage day charging and incentivize investment in charging infrastructure to shift drivers from home to work for charging,” said the study’s co-senior author, Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.

There’s more at the original, and there’s no paywall to stymie you.

The authors believe that people should charge their Teslas and Chevy Dolts at work, rather than at home. Great idea, except there is no guarantee that your employer is going to add the infrastructure, and if he does, he’s going to need to recoup that cost: he’s going to charge employees for using the at-work charging stations, for both the installation costs and the sparktricity used.

One of the problems is the extreme egocentrism of the authors. It’s far too easy for people to think of their situations as the only situations. When they have an assigned parking space at a prestigious university, they might not consider that far more people work at places like Seven/Eleven, where management isn’t likely to run the power lines and install the stations for their minimum wage employees — who can’t afford a plug-in electric vehicle in the first place — to use. Perhaps they are unfamiliar with trades employees, who go to different jobsites across their area.

Once 50% of cars on the road are powered by electricity in the Western U.S. – of which about half the population lives in California – more than 5.4 gigawatts of energy storage would be needed if charging habits follow their current course. That’s the capacity equivalent of 5 large nuclear power reactors. A big shift to charging at work instead of home would reduce the storage needed for EVs to 4.2 gigawatts.

Storage capacity is a huge issue: solar plants generate exactly zero electricity at night, which means that charging your plug-in electric car after you get home from work means that most of the charging will be done after sundown. That means you will be drawing power not from the hundred-acre solar farm, but from the batteries to store the electricity the solar farm generated during the day.

More, electricity generated and going into the battery system before going to your home is less efficient than going from the solar plant directly to your home; there is increased energy loss due to the second stop.

Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. The research team compared several scenarios of charging infrastructure availability, along with several different residential time-of-use rates and commercial demand charges. Some rate changes made the situation at the grid level worse, while others improved it. Nevertheless, a scenario of having charging infrastructure that encourages more daytime charging and less home charging provided the biggest benefits, the study found.

It also means that charging your car at work means that you will be paying not the residential power rate, which normally drops after 11:00 PM, but the commercial rate your employer is paying. It will cost you more to charge at work than at home, not even counting the charges the employer will have to put in place to pay for the employee charging stations.

It seems as though the global warming climate change emergency activists all had this great idea, that everyone should drive a plug-in electric car — excluding, of course, the activists who don’t think people should have privately owned vehicles in the first place — but they never really thought through the problems.

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Killadelphia: The politicians all want to “do something” but will never admit what the problem is

Since the shootings at Roxborough High School, in which six gang-bangers “clique beefers”[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 in a stolen SUV ambushed at least one targeted individual, wounding three others and killing an apparently innocent 14-year-old as they were leaving a football scrimmage, the cries of the people and the politicians to “do something” has been deafening. City Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier, who strongly supports the ‘progressive,’ George Soros-sponsored, police-hating defense lawyer who is now District Attorney, Larry Krasner, wants the hapless Mayor, Jim Kenney, to declare a “state of emergency.”

Following Roxborough shooting, Philly City Council members call for a more urgent response to gun violence

Members also called for hearings to study if more Philadelphia hospitals should have trauma centers capable of treating shooting victims.

by Anna Orso | Thursday, September 29, 2022

Philadelphia City Council members on Thursday renewed calls for Mayor Jim Kenney to declare a state of emergency over the city’s gun violence crisis and suggested the administration has been too slow to implement programs designed to stem the tide of shootings.

Their comments came Thursday during Council’s weekly session after a shooting outside Roxborough High School Tuesday left a 14-year-old boy dead and four others injured.

A handful of lawmakers expressed outrage over the shooting, grief for the victims and their families, and frustration that the city’s gun violence crisis has not relented. Last year was the deadliest in recorded history, and more than 400 people have been killed so far in 2022 — 23 of them were children.

“If this is not an emergency,” said Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, “I’m not sure what an emergency is.”

Surveillance video which captured the five “clique beefers” — police believe there was a sixth man, driving the SUV — jumping out of the vehicle and opening fire at their (assumed) target, and all are characterized as being “juveniles.” It is illegal to carry a weapon without a permit in Philadelphia, and carry permits are not issued to minors, so all of them were already breaking the law by carrying firearms in the first place. Someone had stolen that SUV, and the “clique” certainly knew it was stolen; it was dumped in the parking lot of the Dream Boutique Adult Entertainment Center in a low-rent section with more than one strip club in the 6000 block of Passyunk Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia.

Stolen car, and illegally armed teenagers; just what does the distinguished councilwoman think a state of emergency would change?

Gauthier, of West Philadelphia, has been pushing the administration to declare a state of emergency for two years. In September 2020, Council unanimously passed a resolution — after a shooting on a basketball court that left two dead — urging the administration to declare a citywide emergency.

Kenney has resisted those calls, and did so again this week. He said last year that such a declaration would not unlock new funding for the city and “could have an unintended consequence and cause more fear in our communities.”

The mayor has said his administration’s public-safety plan is focused on policing in hot spots, confiscating illegal guns, and scaling up programming for at-risk young people. The city has a more than $200 million anti-violence spending plan for initiatives outside the police department.

Which will, of course, do nothing. But the obvious question is: if the city already has a $200+ million anti-violence spending plan, why isn’t it already working, or, if it hasn’t been started yet, why hasn’t it? In a city like Philadelphia, it’s probably because not all of the grifters have signed up for their share of the loot.

Kevin Lessard, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office, said the administration “continues to address this issue from every possible angle we can to make our neighborhoods safer,” including this week signing an executive order to ban guns from city parks and recreation centers.

How odd that 14-year-old Makie Jones (allegedly) using a “ghost gun”, with an extended magazine, to kill Tiffany Fletcher outside the Mill Creek Recreation Center, as she was struck by a stray bullet from a brief gun battle with other “clique beefers” didn’t realize that it was the wrong thing to do, that he shouldn’t have been carrying an illegal weapon, and that he shouldn’t be shooting at whomever his ‘enemies’ were.

But during a news conference Wednesday, Kenney said state laws that preclude the city from being able to pass stricter gun-control measures hinder progress.

“It’s not an excuse, it’s just a fact of life,” he said. “As long as guns are flowing into this city and this state the way they are, it’s going to be a heavy lift.”

As we have reported previously, Pennsylvania’s firearms control laws are pretty much uniform across the Commonwealth; state law prohibits municipalities from imposing restrictions which are stricter than those provided for under state law. In 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse last year: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders.

So what would stricter gun laws passed in Philadelphia actually do? The bad guys are already breaking the law, and only a fool would believe that goons willing to kill other people, for real or imagined slights, are going to be deterred by a gun control law.

Have you ever been to Philadelphia? Other than the Delaware River, the city’s borders are really just imaginary lines on a map, and you’d never know that you crossed into Philadelphia from one of the neighboring counties if you didn’t see the sign on the street telling you that you had. Philadelphia outlawing guns completely would not stop the bad guys from bringing them across from Conshohocken or Hatboro, couldn’t stop the frequently abysmally slow traffic along the Schuylkill Expressway, with guns in the trunk, and turning off onto Girard Avenue. In the dilapidated houses near the Philadelphia Zoo, who would even notice?

If Pennsylvania banned firearms throughout the Commonwealth, it’s still a short ride up Interstate 95 from Delaware and Maryland and Virginia. Would the state police stop every car entering the Commonwealth and search it for weapons?

You’d think that Mayor Kenney would understand that, but apparently he doesn’t.

One thing is certain: with the low homicide rate outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the problem is not the gun laws. If the problem was the gun laws, then Jim Thorpe and Bloomsburg and State College should be seeing murders are about the same rates as the cities, but that isn’t what has happened.

The problem is the cities themselves, and the people who live in them. Mayor Kenney, District Attorney Krasner, and Miss Gauthier, like so many others on the left, want to blame gun laws, and really, they want to blame anything other than what is really the problem, the culture in our cities which both enables and encourages teenaged and twenty-something boys, primarily black teenaged and twenty-something boys, to think the gangsta life is something to emulate, something to seek out to prove what tough men they are. The Democrats don’t want to put any blame on the (frequently single) mothers and (often absent) fathers for not rearing their children right, but the urban culture which says that it’s perfectly OK for women to screw around and destigmatizes unmarried motherhood is a culture which enables the very things which produce broken children. The left will never tell the people of the neighborhoods who know the things needed to put the bad guys away that they are the problem if they7 won’t give the information to the police.

That will be denounced as sexist, but I really don’t care: it’s still the truth. Every society on earth of which we have any social knowledge developed marriage as a societal norm to contain human sexuality in a responsible form, one in which children could be supported and reared; it is only in the enlightened ‘wisdom’ of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that we have discarded this as so much garbage.

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”.
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Punishment before the trial?

We noted, on September 2nd, the case of Eyvette Hunter, 52, a nurse accused of deliberately killing a 97-year-old patient because he was agitated and difficult. Miss Hunter just had her bail reduced and trial scheduled . . . for next June.

Eyvette Hunter, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Bond reduced for Lexington nurse accused of murder. Trial date set for June 2023

by Taylor Six | Thursday, September 29, 2022 | 5:19 PM EDT | Updated: Friday, September 30, 2022 | 7:30 PM EDT

Fayette Circuit Court Judge Thomas Travis has granted a $50,000 bond reduction for a former Lexington nurse accused of killing a man through an unauthorized injection.

Eyvette Hunter, 52, was indicted on one charge of murder and arrested on Aug. 23, according to court records. Police say Hunter’s maltreatment caused the death of James Morris, a 97-year-old patient who died at Baptist Health Lexington on May 5.

On Thursday afternoon, she appeared in court after her attorney filed a motion to lower her bond, which was set at $100,000. Hunter’s attorney, Daniel Whitley, successfully requested that the bond be reduced 50% to $50,000 full cash, according to court testimony.

Mr Whitley argued before the judge that the previous bail was simply beyond the means of the family, while the prosecutors, Aubrey McGuire and Traci Caneer, were strongly opposed, and stated than Miss Hunter’s bail should be increased, not reduced. Miss Hunter, if her family make bail, will not be required to wear an ankle monitor, given that she has no past criminal record, and is a low flight risk.

Herald-Leader reporter Taylor Six, from her Twitter biography.

A lengthy section follows, containing the Commonwealth’s allegations against Miss Hunter, which are contained in my previous article on the case, so I needn’t repeat them here; you can also read the Lexington Herald-Leader’s account here. It was the conclusion of Taylor Six’s news article which got to me:

Whitley also said that before the commonwealth indicted Hunter for murder, they neglected to consult with a medical examiner, nor did they seek to do any toxicology to determine the levels of Ativan, or any other substance, in his system at the time of death.

The commonwealth has yet to tender any discovery from any witness stating that the alleged victim died due to the use of Ativan, Whitley said in court documents.

A trial date was set for June 12 and is scheduled to last four days.

Now, what does this mean? Does the prosecution not already have enough evidence put together? Did the defense request this extreme delay? The article states, “The commonwealth has yet to tender any discovery from any witness stating that the alleged victim died due to the use of Ativan,” according to the defense. Does this mean that the prosecution is not yet ready to proceed? If the defense attorney’s statement is accurate — and it was apparently made to the judge — then the prosecution has not given to the defense the required material for the defense to prepare.

I have to ask: what purpose is served by scheduling a trial 8½ months in the future? The defendant has already spent more than a month behind bars, and, if despite the bail reduction, she can’t make bail, would wind up spending 294 days, almost ten months, in jail for a crime of which she has been accused but not convicted? The prosecution wanted Miss Hunter’s bail not only not decreased, but increased, because the Commonwealth’s Attorney apparently wants to keep her locked up for those 294 days, to punish her for that almost ten months, before she even goes to trial, before the Commonwealth has to prove its case against her.

What if she is acquitted? The prosecution wants to punish her in advance, just in case they don’t win.

Miss Six did not include, in her article, whether either the prosecution or defense requested the June trial date, or whether this was simply a decision by the court.

One final point: while in previous Herald-Leader articles on this case, Miss Hunter is alleged to have injected James Morris with Lorazepam, while in this one, the drug mentioned is Ativan. While these are two brand names for the same drug, any reader who did not know that could be confused.

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Lexington Herald-Leader warns readers about activities that could be part of “grooming” Funny thing is, this is exactly what the homosexual and transgender activists have been doing

Despite this being the Bluegrass State, Kentucky’s second-largest newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, is unabashedly liberal. We have previously noted their editorial endorsements:

  • 2020: Joe Biden for President, Amy McGrath Henderson for Senate, and Josh Hicks for 6th District Representative;[1]Notably, the editors endorsed Charles Booker over Mrs Henderson in the Democratic primary, saying that he was the more progressive candidate. Mrs Henderson once said, “I am further left, I am … Continue reading
  • 2018: Amy McGrath Henderson for 6th District Representative
  • 2016: Hillary Clinton for President, Jim Gray for Senate, and Nancy Jo Kemper for 6th District Representative
  • 2014: Alison Lundergan Grimes for Senate, and Elisabeth Jensen for 6th District Representative

All Democrats, and all defeated in Kentucky and in the 6th District. It seems that the Herald-Leader Editorial Board isn’t exactly in tune with the voters of the Commonwealth. Note that the 2016 and 2014 Democratic nominees for the 6th congressional district were political novices, and the editors struggled to find much good reason to endorse them. Representative Andy Barr (R-KY 6th District) beat them both by landslide margins.[2]Dr Malcolm Jewell, one of my political science professors at the University of Kentucky during medieval times, defined a landslide margin as 10% or greater.

In fact, with the exception of the 6th district race in 2018, the editors’ endorsed candidates lost by landslide margins. Even in 2018, with Mrs Henderson outspending Mr Barr $8,274,396 to $5,580,477, she lost 51.0% to 47.8%.

In her Senate campaign, Mrs Henderson raised $94,120,557 and spent $90,775,744 compared to Senator Mitch McConnell’s $71,351,350 and $64,787,889, only to lose 38.2% to 57.8%. As it happens, Mrs Henderson had the lowest percentage total against Mr McConnell of any of his opponents save sacrificial lamb candidate Lois Combs Weinberg in 2002.

Of course, the newspaper is big, big, big, on protecting homosexual and transgender rights. So, it was with some amusement that I read this article:

What are some warning signs of sexual abuse or grooming? This is what the experts say

by Aaron Mudd | Thursday, September 29, 2022 | 9:00 AM EDT

It’s not lost on parents that the manipulative behaviors perpetrators use to set children up for sexual abuse are designed to be subtle and often appear innocent.

According to child advocate Janna Estep-Jordan, what many may not realize is that in these unsettling situations, perpetrators are also working the parents, too.

“Perpetrators, they groom a child, but they groom a family as well,” said Estep-Jordan, director of operations and prevention education with Prevent Child Abuse Kentucky, an advocacy group that makes the prevention of abuse and neglect of Kentucky’s children its mission.

Discerning between sexually-motivated manipulation and normal child-adult interactions can be difficult at times, as the National Children’s Advocacy Center points out.

So how do you tell the difference between what’s acceptable and what’s not?

Sounds like a useful article, does it not? I am not going to cite all of Aaron Mudd’s, the reporter’s, points, but some really caught my eye:

  • Treating a child as if they’re an adult. This behavior often begins with humor: the abuser will tell a risque joke to the child with the aim of getting them slowly acclimated to adult topics. If the tactic backfires, the abuser can fall back on gaslighting: “It’s just a joke” or “Don’t be so sensitive.”
  • If the child is of a younger age, Jordan said they may have an age-inappropriate knowledge about sexual relationships. A potential red flag related to this includes children acting out sexual behaviors or recruiting their peers to do the same, Jordan said. The key here is the knowledge of something that a child of that particular age wouldn’t typically know.

I’ve reformatted the second point, which was three separate paragraphs in the original. But when I read these things, what jumped immediately into my mind were the tactics that the homosexual and transgender activists have been using. Heidi Klaassen, a writer for Salon, wrote “Drag is not dangerous: How exposing your kids to drag performance can be a good thing“. There was “DRAG THE KIDS TO PRIDE – A Family Friendly Drag Show,” including children putting money into the thongs of male drag queens dancing.

How is this not treating children like adults, to get them acclimated to adult topics? How is this not providing kids with “age-inappropriate knowledge about sexual relationships?” Yet if conservatives call the homosexual and transgender activists “groomers,” the left wax apoplectic!

I am amused: the very liberal Herald-Leader just warned readers that the very things the far-left sex activists are doing is grooming.

References

References
↑1 Notably, the editors endorsed Charles Booker over Mrs Henderson in the Democratic primary, saying that he was the more progressive candidate. Mrs Henderson once said, “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” while at a fund raiser in Massachusetts.
↑2 Dr Malcolm Jewell, one of my political science professors at the University of Kentucky during medieval times, defined a landslide margin as 10% or greater.
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Killadelphia: I told you so!

I told you so! I said yesterday evening, concerning the shooting at Roxborough High School, “Four shooters, huh? Were we not 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,’ I would have said that, yeah, this was a gang hit, but apparently it was just a beef of some sort between cliques. I suppose that I’ll have to stop using the term ‘gang-bangers’ and replace it with a more politically correct ‘clique beefers.'” Now we learn from Steve Keeley of Fox29 News:

The Inquirer actually admitted that it was a deliberately targeted hit:

At least one teen shooting victim was targeted, officials say

by Erin McCarthy | Wednesday, September 28, 2022 | 3:48 PM EDT

Philadelphia police officials on Wednesday showed video footage that captured the moments when five shooters, all of whom appear to be juveniles, opened fire on a group of Roxborough High School football players after a Tuesday afternoon scrimmage.

Nicholas Elizalde, 14, of Havertown, was killed in the attack, and Philadelphia Police Capt. Jason Smith said he believes Elizalde was “a totally innocent victim.” Investigators believe one or more of the other victims were targeted, Smith added.

“There was possibly some altercation in the lunchroom” earlier Tuesday, Smith said, noting investigators had interviewed three of the five victims and were still looking into several possible motives.

“Do we believe it was targeted? Yes,” Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore said. “Who was the target? We’re still working to determine that.”

The five shooters, one more than had previously been reported, waited near the football field for six minutes, Vanore and Smith said, until the five victims walked by the shooters’ light-colored Ford Explorer.

Then, five people exited the SUV and started firing. Four ran back to the car after the initial volley of gunfire, police said. A fifth shooter continued running down the street, shooting at the 17-year-old victim, who was not a Roxborough football player and whom Smith said he believes was targeted.

“That victim collapses on sidewalk. [The shooter] stands over top of him and continues firing,” Smith said. “The only thing that stopped this individual from firing was that apparently he had run out of bullets and the slide had locked.”

In all, police recovered more than 60 fired cartridges at the scene. They are looking for the five shooters and a sixth individual who drove the SUV.

What the Inky did not have was that the 17-year-old (apparently) intended victim was a previously identified carjacker and “is referenced several times for his criminal activity.” Did those “Law Enforcement sources” tell FOX 29 News but not the Inquirer, or was it the Inky’s usual censorship of the news?

The unidentified 17-year-ols was shot once in his right arm and thrice in his left leg. How, I have to ask, could the shooter have been “stand(ing) over top of (the victim) and continu(ing to) fire,” and still not kill his victim?

Of course, the Inquirer had a feature on how to fudge the truth to your own kids:

How to talk to kids about the Roxborough High School shooting

Tips for how to talk to kids about grief and violence after the Roxborough High School shooting.

by Sarah Gantz and Abraham Gutman | Wednesday, September 28, 2022 | 4:48 PM EDT

On Tuesday, five high school students were shot after a football scrimmage at Roxborough High School. One has died.

Whether you are talking to children directly affected by this latest school shooting, ongoing neighborhood violence, or the death of a loved one, guiding them through this emotional thicket can be tough. You may be asking yourself:

How much should you tell children?

How do you make them feel better?

You know, I’m not going to quote any of the psychobabble from the article; if you want to read it, click on the link. But you know how to talk to kids about the Roxborough shooting? Tell ’em that this is what happens to gang-bangers cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families, and if they want to avoid being gunned down, the best way to do that is to do the right things, not the wrong, and stay away from the wannabe thugs.

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Killadelphia: Not a “gang hit”, but just a “beef” between “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families”

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Ellie Rushing, Jessica Griffin, Ximena Conde, and Chris Palmer wrote, on September 19th:

In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.

(William Fritze, an assistant district attorney who heads the Gun Violence Task Force in the DA’s Office), though, said it’s time to call them what they are: “I think we are now at a point where we can comfortably say there are gangs.”

Beef between rival crews sometimes goes back years. But increasingly, he said, the feuds are fueled by — and chronicled on — social media, particularly Instagram. Members of one group often make posts or livestreams mocking and claiming the shootings of people in rival crews as a way to build street cred.

So, since the learned journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading of the Inquirer tell me there are no real gangs in the City of Brotherly Love, I guess that this wasn’t a gang hit, but simply a beef between a couple of “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families.”

A 14-year-old boy was killed and 4 other teens wounded in a shooting after a football scrimmage at Roxborough High School

Just after 4:40 p.m., players participating in a football scrimmage were walking off the field and heading to a school bus when gunfire erupted.

by Ellie Rushing, Kristen A. Graham, and Robert Moran | Tuesday, September 27, 2022 | 8:32 PM EDT

A 14-year-old boy was killed and four other teens wounded in a shooting after a football scrimmage outside Roxborough High School late Tuesday afternoon, police said, marking the 23rd shooting death of a child this year as Philadelphia continues to face a surge in gun violence.

Just after 4:40 p.m., players participating in a football scrimmage were walking off the field and heading to a school bus on Pechin Street when shooters opened fire from a car and unleashed a volley of bullets on the team, police said.

A 14-year-old boy who suffered a gunshot wound to the left side of his chest was rushed by police to Einstein Medical Center and was pronounced dead at 5:09 p.m.

The boy was a football player on the Roxborough team, but he attended Saul High School, a nearby magnet school that focuses on agriculture, Philadelphia School District spokesperson Christina Clark said.

Further down:

The three-way scrimmage between Roxborough, Northeast, and Boys Latin High Schools’ junior varsity football teams had just finished around 4:30 p.m. and players were grabbing their gear and walking towards the bus.

Suddenly, four shooters ambushed members of the Roxborough team and shot five of them, police said.

Four shooters, huh? Were we not reliably informed by the Inky that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” I would have said that, yeah, this was a gang hit, but apparently it was just a beef of some sort between cliques. I suppose that I’ll have to stop using the term “gang-bangers” and replace it with a more politically correct “clique beefers.”

As we have noted many times before, The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t care about homicides in the City of Brotherly Love unless the victim is an ‘innocent,’ someone already of some note, or a cute little white girl. So, while a 14-year-old boy being killed would normally be seen as the death of an “innocent,” a planned “hit” on a group of junior varsity football players certainly sounds like there was something to have generated bad blood between at least one of the players and a “clique of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families.” The dead player might not have been involved in whatever dispute the “clique beefers” had, but the obvious assumption is that at least someone among the departing players might not have been quite the “innocent” the Inky would like to make him out to be.

When the Inky stops telling us what a good and noble fellow the dead boy was, we’ll know a lot more.
__________________________________________

Updated: Wednesday, September 28, 2022 |  8:59 AM EDT

Shooters remain unidentified, and their motive remains unclear

By Ellie Rushing, Kristen A. Graham, and Robert Moran | 7:20 AM EDT

It remains unclear what led to the shooting outside Roxborough High School, said Capt. John Walker, head of the Police Department’s nonfatal shooting unit, adding that there have been no other recent incidents involving players on these teams.

It was also unclear just how many shots were fired, but there were more than 70 evidence markers throughout the street, noting both shell casings and bullet fragments.

The photo in the Inquirer shows an investigator carrying an evidence marker numbered 74.

Let’s tell the truth here: the surviving victims almost certainly know which “clique of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families” shot them, and their wounds were primarily in their legs:

During Tuesday’s shooting, another 14-year-old boy was shot once in his left thigh, and a 15-year-old was shot in the leg. A 17-year-old was also shot in the right arm and three times in his left leg. All were rushed to Einstein and Temple Hospital, and were in stable condition Tuesday night, police said.

A fifth player suffered a graze wound, but did not require medical treatment, police said.

Translation: their wounds, though doubtlessly painful, are not serious enough that none of them would have been able to be questioned by the police. If the police do not know the identities of the shooters and at least the players’ version of the dispute which led to the attack, then the players simply aren’t talking. They’re following the street code, and expecting that street ‘justice’ will avenge their shootings.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Killadelphia hits 400!

When we noted, just yesterday, that the post-Labor Day surge in homicides in 2021 was not yet showing signs of being repeated this year, we still knew that 2022 would be joining the list of years and mayors in which at least 400 murders had been committed. There was at least some hope that it wouldn’t be the very next day, but there were three more people dead as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, September 26th. Naturally, there were exactly zero stories on this showing on either The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page or specific crime page. Fox29’s Steve Keeley noted the ‘milestone’.

2022 is now Philly’s 19th bloodiest year, a status achieved with more than three months left to go. At a current rate of 1.4870 killings per day, the city is on track for 542.75 murders for the year, still lower than 2021, but very strongly in second-place all time.

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Killadelphia and Killington

We have been noticing that the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love has been taking a slightly different path this year than in 2021’s record-setting bloodbath. At the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend of 2021, there had been 363 homicides in the city, where the number was 372 this year. The statistics slightly skew, because Labor Day was on September 6th in 2021, and September 5th this year.

In 2021, the homicide rate really took off after Labor Day, rising from 1.4578 per day, to 1.7155 per day for the rest of the year, taking the projected number of total murders from 532 to 562.

But this year, that surge hasn’t been seen, and the number of homicides has fallen behind 2021’s awful toll; as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, September 25th, Philly is six homicides behind last year’s same-day numbers. At 1.48134328358209 killings per day, Philly actually has a lower daily death rate than the 1.504032258064516 seen at the end of the Labor Day holiday. At the end of Labor Day, the killing numbers projected out to 548.97, while now they’re down to 540.69 now. That’s still a terrible number, but perhaps, just perhaps, the city can avoid setting a new record for murders this year. Sure, it’s almost certainly going to be above 500, second-place all time, but that’s better than another gold medal.

However, the gold medal is what Lexington, Kentucky has won:

Woody LaPierre, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Lexington ties 2021 homicide record after man dies in Sunday morning shooting

by Taylor Six | Sunday, September 25, 2022 | 9:18 AM EDT | Updated: 3:39 PM EDT

Lexington has tied its record for homicides, set in 2021, with the city’s 37th homicide of 2022 taking place Sunday morning on Oxford Circle.

According to Lexington Police, officers responded to the 1800 block of Oxford Circle where they located 25-year-old Adentokunbo Okunoye, who had been shot around 4 a.m.

When officers arrived, they located Okunoye suffering from a gunshot wound. According to police, he was declared dead at the scene by the Lexington Fire Department.

Police arrested 29-year-old Woody LaPierre and charged him with murder. He is currently being held at the Fayette County Detention Center.

There’s more at the original, but it’s just noting the statistics: with 37 homicides, Lexington has tied last year’s record. In 2021, the 37th murder occurred on December 30th, while the city had seen only 27 killings at this time last year.

At 37 murders in 268 days, one every 7.24 days, Kentucky’s second-largest city is on a path to 50.39 murders for the year. Just four days ago, the number was at least under fifty, at 49.585.

In a bit of good news, the Lexington Police Department has solved the killing of Dietrich Murray:

Man arrested in connection to August murder on Dakota Street, Lexington police say

by Taylor Six | Sunday, September 25, 2022 | 9:54 AM EDT | Updated: Monday, September 26, 2022 | 10:59 AM EDT

James Catlett, photo by Fayette County Detention Center on August 6, 2014, and is a public record.

The Lexington Police Department arrested a man in connection with a homicide that occurred in August on Dakota Street.

Forty-five-year-old James Catlett was arrested on Saturday and charged with murder for the August 31 shooting death of Dietrich Murray, 29, according to police.

Murray was found lying in a Lexington road last month with a gunshot wound and died at the hospital, according to Lexington police.

Lt. Joe Anderson of the Lexington Police Department said the night of the homicide, the police received a report of a shooting at approximately 7:45 a.m. Murray was found in the intersection of North Broadway and Loudon Avenue when officers arrived.

According to court documents, a single spent .380 caliber shell casing was found at the scene of the shooting. Catlett was identified as a suspect and it was determined the shell casing came from a handgun that was in Catlett’s possession during a traffic stop on Sept. 1, according to an affidavit.

It was unclear if Catlett was a suspect in the shooting at the time of the traffic stop.

An eyewitness confirmed Catlett as the shooter through a photo lineup, according to court documents. Police didn’t comment on additional details of the investigation when asked Monday.

There’s more at the original.

As usual, what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal did not publish the mugshots of either criminal suspect, despite the fact that that the Lexington television stations had.

With a guesstimated population of 337,000, Lexington had a homicide rate of 10.98 per 100,000 population in 2021. If the city hits the projected 50 this year, the rate would be 14.84 per 100,000 population. Killington isn’t quite in Killadelphia’s league, but perhaps it ought to quit trying.