Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Six killed in Highland Park shooting, and everybody knows about it; ten killed in Philly, and no one cares. Could it possibly be because the Highland Park victims were 'innocents', and Philly's murder victims are mostly not?

Robert Crimo III, via Twitter.

This morning’s news is all about the shootings in Highland Park, Illinois, at a Fourth of July parage, allegedly committed by Robert Chimo III, who was arrested without incident. The left, of course, concluded that because he surrendered and was arrested alive, he was the recipient of some kind of ‘white privilege.’

But, while Mr Crimo (allegedly) killed six people, in a story which has swept across the nation, at least ten people were murdered over the holiday weekend in the City of Brotherly Love, and nobody cares. Of course, The Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t have anything on the Highland Park shootings, either, but that’s probably because the city had its own bullets flying at the Independence Day parade on the Ben Franklin Parkway.

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, 267 people were killed as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, July 4th. The previous update, done last Friday and including those killed as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, June 30th, was 257 murders. The PPD only updates that page on normal business days.

What did we have? As closely as I could get the information –primarily from Fox 29 reporter Steve Keeley’s tweets — one person was murdered on Friday, and four on Saturday. I saw stories listing two murders on Sunday, so, if those counts are accurate, that means three more killed on the Fourth of July.

Two police officers shot on the Ben Franklin Parkway amid Philadelphia’s July 4th celebrations

by Justine McDaniel, Chris Palmer, Jason Nark, and Kristen A. Graham | Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Two police officers were shot and injured in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum while on duty at the city’s Independence Day celebrations on Monday night. The incident caused stampedes of people watching fireworks on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to flee what they believed was an active shooting.

Investigators were still seeking to determine where the shots were fired from, how many were fired, and whether the shots were intentionally fired toward police or the officers were struck by stray gunfire. Police said no one else was shot.

It is possible, I suppose, that the shots fired were at random, but that they struck two Philadelphia Police Officers, and no one else, seems rather improbable.

No arrests had been made and no suspects were in custody as of 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said at a news conference outside Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

Each officer suffered a graze wound, one to the forehead — the bullet was found in the police officer’s hat — and one to the shoulder. Both were treated and released from Jefferson within about two hours after the shooting, which happened just after 9:47 p.m.

“We’re all just extremely grateful that this wasn’t worse than what it was,” Outlaw said.

If they recovered the bullet in the officer’s hat, the police now have the ballistic evidence needed to tie it to a particular weapon, so if they catch some cretin with the weapon on him, he can be prosecuted.

Neither The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page nor its specific crime page had a single story on any of the ten, ten! homicides in the City of Brotherly Love over the long holiday weekend. Oh, there were older stories about a 16-year-old being sought after what appears to be an accidental shooting in Upper Darby Township, and four items on a senseless, apparent ‘road rage’ murder, in Springfield Township, but not a single item on any of the weekend killings in Philly itself.

Publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes set forth several principles she stated were necessary to make the Inquirer an “anti-racist news organization,” including:

  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

Apparently the result of that is to simply not report on city homicides at all!

The story about Robert Crimo will be across the national news for days, because the left will use it to argue to further restrict our constitutional rights. He’s easy to use, because he’s white, though apparently #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading, in that he actually has a tattoo above his left eyebrow that reads “Awake.” The Washington Post noted that he was a small-time rapper — see the “aspiring rapper” definition in the Urban Dictionary — and none of the major newspapers I checked had Mr Crimo’s photo with the stories, perhaps to avoid Ann Coulter’s tweet, “One gun control law I think we could all get behind is no guns for anyone with a face or neck tattoo.”

More, Mr Crimo’s victims are from a mostly white and Hispanic community; only 1.53% of the population are black, according to the 2020 census, and ‘innocents,’ in a randomly targeted assault. The editors of the Inky know that most, if not all, of the ten murders over the last four days are just as much bad guys as the guys who killed them; Philly’s 100 Shooting Review Committee Report noted that two thirds of the shooting victims had criminal records, most with violent felony records, most with prior firearms charges. The majority of the arrested shooters had violent felony records as well, had prior firearms charges, and PWID – possession of drugs with the intent to distribute – charges. Naturally, Publisher Hughes and Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar don’t want to say too much about Philly’s murders, save in the release of aggregate numbers, because that would not fit Miss Hughes’ “anti-racist” directives at all.

The truth shall set you free, but if you are looking for the truth, you will not get it from The Philadelphia Inquirer.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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What happens when “racial inequities” are the choices of minority populations?

The newspaper I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. has been very, very worried about “racial inequities” afflicting “underserved communities”, especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 panicdemic. Now, more than two years later, they’re still worried.

Racial inequities in vaccination are emerging again, this time among Philly’s elementary age kids

From vaccines for kids to COVID treatments, old inequalities appear to be reasserting themselves.

by Jason Laughlin | Sunday, July 3, 2022 | 9:00 PM EDT

The Black Doctors Consortium was among the first in the city to offer newly approved COVID shots for young children in June, setting up clinics at its health center in a mostly Black neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

Despite the neighborhood’s demographics, most of the 100 families that showed up were white. When it comes to children’s vaccinations in Philadelphia, that’s not uncommon.

More than a year and a half since COVID vaccines became available, ensuring equitable access to all Philadelphians, regardless of race or income, remains a challenge. The demographics for vaccinations among children under 5 have not yet been collected, but among 5 to 11-year-olds, who have been eligible since last fall, about 37% of Philadelphia’s white children are fully vaccinated, compared to 25% of Hispanic children and 22% of Black children. Vaccination rates among Asian children are much higher than the rest in that age group — 57%.

White and Asian Philadelphians are more likely to have received booster doses, too, with 38% of white city-dwellers and 48% of Asian residents having received additional shots. Just over a quarter of Black and Hispanic Philadelphians have received a booster.

OK, let’s look at that. The article title and subtitle — possibly written by an editor rather than the article author — refer to “racial inequities” and “old inequalities”. But the clinic described is in a “mostly black neighborhood” in North Philly, so it’s not as though access ought to be a problem. There should be a lot of black families within walking distance of the clinic. More, the shots are free, so expense is not a factor. Add to that the fact that the Black Doctors Consortium plans to have their clinics that stay open until 7:00 PM, so that working parents have more of a chance to get their kids there, and there is no reason that children from “underserved communities” would be getting vaccinated at lower rates other than the conscious decisions being taken in those communities by parents.

Other health care workers noted child vaccinations may seem less of a priority because children are not in school, are away at camps, or are with their families on summer vacations. Others may not feel the need to vaccinate children because the virus is typically milder for kids.

So, personal choices.

“There are not enough people still involved in pushing for residents to bring their children to get vaccinated,” said Quetcy Lozada, vice president of community engagement and organizing for Esperanza, a Hispanic community organization in the Hunting Park neighborhood.

The end of mandates, and reduced rates of infection and death have made the virus feel less urgent, she noted, though the virus has waned before only to surge again.

“As the city started to open up, and folks were able to come back to their places of work and their places of worship, and the mask mandates started to become less and less required, the sense of urgency I think also became a little bit relaxed,” she said.

There are other ‘reasons’ given in the article as to why people are just not choosing to get their children vaccinated at the rates the health care professionals say they should, with, of course, an emphasis on ‘misinformation’ in the public and on social media, and the statement that the black community in the city simply don’t have as much trust in the health care system. But in every case, it all condenses down to one thing: the high muckety-mucks simply haven’t been persuasive enough, haven’t sold everybody on the need to get their kids vaccinated.

This raises the obvious, if nevertheless hugely politically incorrect question: if this particular issue has led to “racial inequities” and “inequalities” in minority communities, is it not possible, just possible, that other “racial inequities” and “inequalities” in minority communities are the result not of those communities somehow being discriminated against, but personal choices and decisions being taken in those communities?

Is it possible that the decisions being taken by individuals lead to an aggregate effect that might not be to the benefit of a community as a whole? Too often the left, the “progressives,” are left scratching their pumpkin heads trying to figure out why such things are so, and coming up with all sorts of excuses to blame everything other than the obvious.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Even hormones and surgery are not enough! Without realizing what they've done, The Philadelphia Inquirer told the truth

The extremely #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading and ‘transgender’-positive newspaper that I have sometimes called The Philadelphia Enquirer[2]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. takes the position that the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be, rather than their biological sex, and on Sunday published yet another article in support of that idea, never realizing that they were actually pointing out that the ‘transgendered’ are not the sex they wish they were:

Voice therapy can help trans people sound like themselves and feel safer

Voice therapy can be valuable for addressing the mental health challenges many transgender people experience.

by Abraham Gutman | Sunday, July 3, 2022

When Fenix Cobbledick speaks in an unfamiliar place for the first time, they often feel scared.

They have spent countless hours and thousands of dollars on hormone therapy, laser facial hair removal, and growing out a feminine haircut to make their appearance more accurately reflect their identity.

Note right away the stilted, incorrect grammar of the article, as Inquirer writer, Abraham Gutman, confirming to the newspaper’s stylebook, uses Mr “Cobbledick’s”[3]I assume that “Fenix Cobbledick” is a faked name, but I have been unable to find Mr “Cobbledick’s” real name in my research. preferred pronouns, “they/them”. It is jarring to the mind, as normal people read the plural pronouns and think that those pronouns refer to more than one person.

But even as they changed their body, Cobbledick, a 31-year-old nonbinary trans woman, felt at risk when they opened their mouth to talk.

“I love my singing voice. It’s beautiful; it’s just deep. And maybe one day we’ll live in a world where I don’t have to hide that voice,” Cobbledick said. “But we don’t live in that world.

Translation: Mr “Cobbledick” is a man male who thinks he’s a woman . . . maybe. I’m not certain how one can be both a “trans woman” and “nonbinary”. If one is “nonbinary,” how can he claim to be either a man or a woman?

From Moss Rehab:

Fenix Cobbledick (they/them) (featured above) started hormone estrogen therapy through the Einstein Pride Program three years ago. A teacher at the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts who identifies as nonbinary, Fenix is currently being treated by Hussein Safa, MD (he/him), who serves as medical director and attending physician in the Pride clinic. When discussing future potential gender-affirming services such as facial feminization surgery and laser hair removal with Dr. Safa, Fenix thought voice therapy would help achieve a more androgynous voice and better vocal control.

“Because I’m 5’10”, muscular and forthright, people overwhelmingly perceive me as male – and that is disheartening,” explains Fenix. “When Dr. Safa said the Pride program was partnering with a MossRehab speech therapist in providing voice therapy, I said I was interested. I’ve read enough to understand that I wouldn’t be able to train my voice properly without the guidance of an expert.”

Back to the Inky:

Voice therapy may be valuable for addressing the mental health challenges many transgender people experience. As a common identifier of gender, voice can contribute to gender dysphoria — an unease that arises from one’s gender not matching the sex they were assigned at birth.

“Voice is really integral to identity and listeners assume a lot about a person by their voice alone,” said Alyssa Giegerich, a speech-language pathologist at Einstein MossRehab, who specializes in gender-affirming voice therapy. “Our voice goals are to align the way that someone is perceived with their identity.”

Translation: humans, like every other mammal, can tell the difference between males and females, even without seeing them, by just hearing their voices. Even someone like me, who is mostly deaf, can tell the difference. I may not always be able to understand someone’s speech, because I’ve lost the ability to hear certain consonants, but I can still tell, from the tone of someone’s voice, whether they are male or female. In meeting their “voice goals,” “to align the way that someone is perceived with their identity,” is to note that no matter how many hormones they’ve taken, and regardless of how many surgical mutilations they have undergone, it’s still not enough to get other people to not recognize a ‘transgendered’ person’s biological sex. Normal people can just tell!

Hormone therapy, voice coaching, or surgery can help a person when their gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. They are among the interventions known as gender-affirming care.

Yet more stupidity from the Inky. “Sex assigned at birth” is a wholly stupid phrase. As we have known for over a century, the sex of mammalian offspring is determined by the XX (for females) or XY chromosome pair, and the Y chromosome is only available through the sperm of the father. The sex of the offspring is determined at conception, and not at birth. In humans, the sex of the offspring is recognized at birth, through observation of the genitals of a normal baby — in some rare cases, this is not possible, but those cases are the result of genetic or developmental defects — and every sighted human being with normal knowledge can tell the sexes apart through observation at birth.

No one “assigns” a sex to a newborn which does not match observed biological sex, at least no one of normal intelligence and reasonable sanity.

But the #woke and ‘transgender’ activists have been attempting to push this “sex assigned at birth” meme for years now, hoping to have normal people swallow the cockamamie notion, and somehow normalize ‘transgenderism.’

I’m sure that Mr Gutman and his editors at the Inquirer never meant to point out yet another reason why the ‘transgendered’ will never be the sex they claim to be, rather than the sex they actually are, but that is the result, for any reader with anything like an objective eye.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

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

↑2 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑3 I assume that “Fenix Cobbledick” is a faked name, but I have been unable to find Mr “Cobbledick’s” real name in my research.
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What is ‘gatekeeping’?

From The Gods Must Be Crazy, one of my all-time favorite movies. Click to enlarge.

We have previously mentioned the ‘gatekeeping’ function that the credentialed media used to enjoy. Now it seems as though “gatekeeper” and “gatekeeping” are internet insults. From Business Insider:

The internet really hates ‘gatekeeping,’ social media’s new go-to insult. The truth is you’re probably a gatekeeper, too.

by Sirena Bergman | Sunday, July 3, 2022 | 7:00 AM EDT

Being a gatekeeper is just about the worst thing you can be accused of online.

Every few years, the internet cycles through a new buzzy clap-back phrase that’s instantly recognizable by its lifecycle, speeding from valid criticism to Twitter cliché until it hits the mainstream, finding its way into op-ed headlines and political discourse before being relegated exclusively to ironic use due to its cringe-inducing outdatedness.

You may remember the “check your privilege” phrase, circa 2012, which was counterbalanced by calling those using it “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.” Then came the age of calling out “virtue signalers,” who were swiftly put in their place with a well-timed “this you.”

Now, the 2020s have ushered in their own social-media-specific takedown. So abhorred is the concept of “gatekeeping” that it’s been lumped in with “girlbossing” and “gaslighting” to spawn a meme.

I will admit it: I am so uncool that I had to look up “girlbossing” and “this you.”

In its simplest form, “gatekeeping” is having access, opportunity, or knowledge — and then keeping it all to yourself. Gatekeepers, at least according to the internet, pull the ladder up behind them and exclude those with fewer opportunities from their space.

A great deal follows, including defining gatekeeping as simple privacy, such as ‘celebrities’ not sharing every little thing about themselves, though as Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, the former Mrs Depp, learned the hard way, sharing everything might not be a particularly good idea.

But it can also be less specific, referring to people who maybe aren’t hiding something tangible but are telling others they’re not entitled to an opinion or behavior (whether warranted or not).

The most obvious example of that, today, are the pro-prenatal infanticide forces telling men that they cannot have an opinion on the subject — unless it is pro-abortion, of course! — because males cannot get pregnant. But it has been used in countless other ways, such as blacks saying that non-black Americans cannot have an opinion on anything happening in primarily black neighborhoods.

Calling out gatekeepers is a core tenet of extremely-online Gen-Z culture which, spurred by the pandemic and the evolution of social media, has come to uphold the democratization of, well, everything, as the ideal.

This part is just silly, because it’s “Generation Z” who have been behind much of the censorship of social media: clamping down on ‘unapproved’ information about COVID-19, and Twitter’s banning of ‘deadnaming‘ and ‘misgendering‘. I have had to be careful in my article titles about Will Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania swimmer who claims to be a woman named “Lia,” to keep from being banned; my good friend William Teach has been suspended from Twitter a couple of times, and had one account completely killed, because Twitter doesn’t like people doing something really radical like tell the truth.

Of course, the notion of “generation Z” and all of the other named generations is entirely a #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Western notion, and I hesitate to use it at all, but, alas!, it has become part of culture, and when the article I reference uses that kind of shorthand, it’s difficult to ignore it.

On social media, people have been accused of gatekeeping marginalized identities, science, mental health, zines, “the truth,” Kate Bush, and on, and on.

Accusing someone of gatekeeping online is so common that it’s now a trope in and of itself, one that is often mocked and subverted in irony.

So, what gatekeeping do I do? This site uses a spam blocker, which is almost always successful; I have attempted to close the gate against unrestricted advertising. We have a Comments and Conduct Policy, plainly accessible from both the website main page and subsequent article pages, although I’ve almost never had to actually enforce it. Maybe if more people actually read The First Street Journal, . . . .

As minor as this site is, we are, in effect, a publisher, and publishers can choose what to publish. We almost never actually censor anything, as I believe that what people say says more about the individual saying things than the writer may realize.

Is that ‘gatekeeping’? Yes, it pretty much is. But unlike the credentialed media of old, my refusal to publish something here does not prevent someone from saying what he pleases, because not only are there millions of websites out there, but starting your own site is simple, easy, and inexpensive. Some sites, like blogger.com, are so inexpensive that they are free.

I will accept the internet dismissal of OK Boomer for what it is, a reference to the fact that we boomers built the greatest economy and freest nation in the world, which the Special Snowflakes™ are trying to destroy! 🙂

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Killadelphia The June shooting statistics are in!

The statistics are out for the Philadelphia Shooting Victims database, and they’re just about as ugly as you’d imagine.

There were 249 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love last month, at least as far as those wounded seriously enough to have sought medical attention. Who knows if there were more victims just grazed, or more shooting incidents in which no one was struck?

In a city in which the population are 18.7% black males, black males suffered 71.89% of the gunshot wounds, and 73.33% of the fatal shootings. While the city government and The Philadelphia Inquirer want to blame gun control laws not being strict enough, I have to ask the obvious question: since those gun control laws apply equally to everyone, black or white, male or female, Hispanic or otherwise, why wouldn’t the number of wounded and killed closely match the percentage of the population by each demographic group?

The Philadelphia Police Department reported a total of 48 homicides for the month, so there were three homicides which did not involve firearms. Through the end of June, 257 homicides, or 1.4199 per day. That puts the city on pace for 518 murders this year. Working the math differently, basing it on the pace of homicides last year, I come up with a projected 533 homicides for the year. Either figure puts the city solidly in second place all time.

Philly’s leaders, Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, should be so very proud of the jobs that they have done!

Note: even though Hispanics can be of any race, all of the victims listed as “Latino” in the database are also listed as white. June is not the only month in which this has occurred, and I suspect that this is a result of very poor gathering of data.

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For print newspapers, tempus is fugiting The solution to being 18th century technology is not becoming 19th century one-party newspapers!

Mickey East, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky during the 1970s, when I was a student there, used a bastardized phrase to encourage his students to get their work done, “Tempus is fugiting.”

According to Wikipedia, the expression “Tempus fugit” comes from line 284 of book 3 of Virgil‘s Georgics, where it appears as fugit inreparabile tempus: “it escapes, irretrievable time”.

Well, time flies for newspapers, which I have previously called 18th century technology, because people are abandoning printed materials.

U.S. newspapers continuing to die at rate of 2 each week

Despite a growing recognition of the problem, the United States continues to see newspapers die at the rate of two per week, according to a report issued Wednesday on the state of local news.

by David Bauder, Associated Press | Friday, July 1, 2022 | 10:26 AM EDT

NEW YORK — Despite a growing recognition of the problem, the United States continues to see newspapers die at the rate of two per week, according to a report issued Wednesday on the state of local news.

“A growing recognition of the problem,” huh? The problem is that time has flown by, and technology has overtaken the print medium. Yes, I subscribe to newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Lexington Herald-Leader, for my use as source material for my poor site. As I have previously mentioned, my hearing is seriously compromised, and I can read the news far more easily than I can watch and hear the news on television. More, when reading the news, if there’s something which was poorly worded or unclear, or that I somehow missed, I can go back to reread that portion, to lock it down correctly. To me, especially as a (poor) writer, trying to ascertain that I am getting things correctly, that’s important.

But, let’s face it: my subscriptions to those newspapers, and all the рублей I am spending — The Wall Street Journal in particular is not cheap, and though this site has changed, I had originally planned to concentrate more on economics — are all digital; I not only don’t get the print editions, but out in the rural area in which I live, I cannot get home delivery of the dead trees edition. Heck, I can’t even get the United States Post Office to deliver the mail to me, so I have to rent a post office box!

However, it’s more than that. Before I retired, I used to pick up a copy of the Inquirer from the Turkey Hill in Jim Thorpe, to take to the plant. The guys combitched[1]The word “combitch” is a Picoism, for which I would bet you can figure out the etymology. Feel free to use it yourselves, with an appropriate credit appreciated. that I should have picked up the Allentown Morning Call instead, because that was closer to local news, but it was, and is, a junk paper. Now that it’s been bought out by the hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, I’m pleased that I didn’t spend much money at all on the Morning Call.

Amusingly enough, for an owner of dead trees newspapers, Alden’s website opens up to an image of trees!

One of the issues with buying the Inquirer for the plant was that there were frequently sports stories which noted that ‘this game ended too late for inclusion in this edition.’ In the 21st century, we can always get our news up-to-date, by checking that internet thingy that Al Gore invented. And that illustrates the major problem for print newspapers: they are always several hours behind, in a world in which the news is reported minute-by-minute. I have no idea whether the Associated Press story referenced above will appear in the print edition of the Inquirer, from which I sourced it, but time stamped at 10:26 AM as it was, it cannot appear earlier than Saturday’s dead trees edition!

Areas of the country that find themselves without a reliable source of local news tend to be poorer, older and less educated than those covered well, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications said.

The country had 6,377 newspapers at the end of May, down from 8,891 in 2005, the report said. While the pandemic didn’t quite cause the reckoning that some in the industry feared, 360 newspapers have shut down since the end of 2019, all but 24 of them weeklies serving small communities.

Actually, even out in the sticks, we have not one but two local weekly newspapers, the Citizen’s Voice & Times and the Estill County Tribune, but who can know how long they’ll both survive?

An estimated 75,000 journalists worked in newspapers in 2006, and now that’s down to 31,000, Northwestern said. Annual newspaper revenue slipped from $50 billion to $21 billion in the same period.

Even though philanthropists and politicians have been paying more attention to the issue, the factors that drove the collapse of the industry’s advertising model haven’t changed. Encouraging growth in the digital-only news sector in recent years hasn’t been enough to compensate for the overall trends, said Penelope Muse Abernathy, visiting professor at Medill and the report’s principal author.

As I have previously reported, The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and 17th largest newspaper as measured by circulation, still thinks that the taxpayers should be taxed to support journalists, to the tune of a refundable payroll tax credit of up to $25,000 per journalist to help local news organizations hire and retain reporters and editors.

In other words, the publishers of the Inquirer believe that the taxpayers ought to pay up to $25,000 of the salary of reporters and editors! Does ABC News or CNN have to beg for the taxpayers to subsidize their journolists'[2]This was not a typographical error. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure … Continue reading salaries?

True “daily” newspapers that are printed and distributed seven days a week are also dwindling; The report said 40 of the largest 100 newspapers in the country publish only-digital versions at least once a week. Inflation is likely to hasten a switch away from printed editions, said Tim Franklin, director of the Medill Local News Initiative.

One of the newspapers to which I subscribe, the Lexington Herald-Leader, does not publish a Saturday edition, and what I see online on Saturdays makes it look like the reporters and editors are pretty much off on Saturdays.

But there’s more to it. When I look at the digital editions of the Herald-Leader and the Inquirer, since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization it has become obvious: if those were your only sources of news, you’d not be blamed for thinking that six Supreme Court Justices are the only people in America who don’t support an unlimited abortion license. These newspapers have been wholly one-sided in their reporting on the subject.

What my, sadly late, best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal just published a fairly long story on the disappearance of Democratic voters in eastern Kentucky. You’d have to be a Kentuckian to really understand it, but it points out the problem for the newspaper: a paper which used to circulate widely throughout the counties east of Lexington — and I delivered the morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in Mt Sterling, two counties away from Lexington, when I was in junior high and high schools — has few subscribers now, because there is little or no local delivery, but also because the newspaper has become so thoroughly urbanized to the city that it really has nothing for the more conservative counties to the east. As we have previously reported, the newspaper has consistently endorsed the candidates, all Democrats, strongly rejected by the voters in every county of their (former?) service area other than Fayette. If you don’t give something for the readers in the outlying counties, can you really expect to have many subscribers there?

In Pennsylvania, the Inquirer is steadfastly liberal and Democratic in orientation, publishing all sorts of OpEds and barely-disguised opinion pieces camouflages as regular news articles slamming Republicans and conservatives, yet, while Joe Biden carried the Keystone State by 80,555 votes in 2020, that was only due to his 471,050 vote margin in Philadelphia; absent Philadelphia County, President Trump had a margin of 389,495 votes. Much of Pennsylvania was strongly “red” and even Philly’s collar counties were only slightly “blue.” But the Inky gives those more conservative voters no reason to be actual readers of the newspaper.

Newspapers have more than a single problem. Yes, print newspapers, despite fancy colored printing and photographs, are simply updated 18th century technology, and the reduction in print subscribers has meant a dramatic downturn in advertising revenue. But they also have a 19th century problem: in becoming so highly slanted, they have reverted to the one-party newspaper style of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In the 19th century, there were competing newspapers in every city of any size, and if readers of one particular political stripe did not like the slant of one newspaper, they could turn to another.

Today, few cities have more than one newspaper, but newspapers do have competition, from television news. If MSNBC and CNN are slanted to the left, Fox News and the One America News Network are slanted to the right, and consumers can do something really radical like choose the sources they prefer. That newspapers face serious competition from television news and the internet is obvious; when they respond by pissing off half of their potential readership, they compound their problems.

References

References
↑1 The word “combitch” is a Picoism, for which I would bet you can figure out the etymology. Feel free to use it yourselves, with an appropriate credit appreciated.
↑2 This was not a typographical error. 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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It seems that some “men” are really immature little boys

I’m not certain that there has ever been a Supreme Court decision which has ever provoked the mass hysteria and insanity that has attended Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision which overturned Roe v Wade. We’ve seen all sorts of whacky comments that the decision means the end of the right to use contraception, marry someone of a different race, and same-sex ‘marriage.’

But this story, from the supposedly very serious Washington Post, pretty much takes the cake!

Men rush to get vasectomies after Roe ruling

By Meena Venkataramanan | June 29, 2022 | 3:12 PM EDT

Thomas Figueroa always knew he didn’t want children. Growing up in Central Florida, he remembers his classmates getting pregnant as early as middle school, and had considered getting a vasectomy for the past few years.

But after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, he rushed to schedule one. He registered Monday for a vasectomy with Doug Stein, a Florida urologist known as the “Vasectomy King” for his advocacy of the procedure. Continue reading →

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Killadelphia Idiocy, fueled by alcohol, leaves a young woman dead, and a man who'll, hopefully, spend the rest of his miserable life in prison

We have often said that The Philadelphia Inquirer does not care about murder victims unless they are an innocent, a ‘somebody,’ or a cute white girl. One second she was happy and alive, and the next she had a bullet in her brain.

Bystander killed in shooting at Northeast Philadelphia bar

The woman was later identified by a relative as Jailene Holton

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Wednesda, June 29, 2022 | 10:12 AM EDT

Jailene Holton, via Steve Keeley, Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

A bystander was killed after a disgruntled customer sprayed bullets into a Northeast Philadelphia bar late Tuesday night, police said.

Around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, three men were kicked out of the Philly Bar and Restaurant, on Welsh Road, after causing a disturbance at the bar. While two of the men left without issues, one had to be forced out.

That man, after being thrown out, walked to a pickup truck about 200 feet away and then shot at least 15 times into the front of the bar. Five of the bullets went through the window and one struck a 21-year-old woman in the head. Continue reading →

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Some people just can’t tell the difference between comic books and reality

I devoured the Conan the Barbarian books when I was a teenager, starting out with the Lancer Books twelve volume edition. Robert E Howard wrote his original books between 1930 and 1936, and L Sprague deCamp, Lin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg added to it. Published in the 1960s and 70s, the men were strong and brave, while the hero bedded an assortment of nubile, slim but nevertheless voluptuous — how does that work — ladies after slaying countless forms.

Conan was a character which simply could not be left alone, and many authors used Conan as a character, through several publishers, during the 1980s and 90s. The difference? While there were plenty of helpless ladies to be bedded, there were also warrior women, women who could kick ass just as well as any man.

I also read plenty of comic books. In the 1960s, the female superheroines tended to have what I’d call ‘distance powers,’ able to beat the bad guys, but from a distance, not from fisticuffs. Supergirl and Wonder Woman were obvious examples of the latter, while the Invisible Woman might have been able to trip someone unseen — especially before Stan Lee had her discover that she could also create invisible force fields — and the Wasp and Scarlett Witch and Jean Grey worked their wonders from range.

Gradually, the superheroines gained the ability to match, and beat, male villains hand-to-hand. And in the CW Supergirl series, Supergirl beat her cousin Superman in a fair fight.

Well, I have come to the conclusion that today’s American left grew up reading the same things I did, but they did more than read them; they swallowed them whole, and came out believing that women were the physical equal or men in strength, speed, quickness, size, and endurance. Every girl is Supergirl; ever woman is Wonder Woman! So, heck, it’s perfectly normal and reasonable to have males and females competing against each other, and it’s always fair, right? Continue reading →