Author Archives: Dana Pico

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A “solution” from a leftist stuck in 1930s thinking

When I spotted this article on my feed, I went to the New York Magazine original, because I prefer to cite from the original. Alas! the original is hidden behind a paywall, but it doesn’t matter, since MSN is providing it for free!

The Democratic Party Is Wasting Its Grassroots Energy

Opinion by Sam Adler-Bell | Sunday, April 24, 2022

Sam Adler-Bell, from his Twitter biography.

When I was young, my activist friends and I would often speak of something we called the movement. “This will be good for the movement,” we’d say.” Or, “They do good movement work.” He was a “movement lawyer”; she, “an artist dedicated to the movement.” I assumed this expression referred to something real: international socialism, maybe, or the trade unionism. I wasn’t sure. Surely, I thought, there must be a movement out there to which we all belonged, and to whose future victory our meager efforts — as environmentalists, labor organizers, anti-war activists — were contributing. But that wasn’t so. Later, I realized the term was more like an incantation, the expression of a wish that all this various activism might one day coalesce into something worthy of the name. For the time being, “the movement” was a linguistic gesture with no referent, a half-ironic shibboleth with which we signaled our belonging and our willingness to nurture each other’s precious illusions and beliefs. Playfully we toasted “to the movement,” unsure whether our cheeks reddened out of shame at our cynicism or our sincerity.

I’m reminded of these episodes when I contemplate the sorry state of the Democratic Party. No doubt, the Democrats’ gruesome midterm prospects are, as the social scientists say, overdetermined. Midterms tend to punish the president’s party anyway, and basically every other input is bad: Biden is unpopular, inflation soars, and Putin’s war has pushed food and fuel prices even higher. It’s a bad hand, and none of the plausible last-ditch, Manchin-approved policy interventions or executive orders seem like aces.

But surveying the landscape from a few hundred feet higher, another striking deficit looms into view: There appears almost no grassroots energy or urgency of any kind on the Democratic side. After four years of fever-pitched marching and movement-building by anti-Trump resistors, antifascists, Democratic Socialists, and Black Lives Matter militants, the sudden quiet from the country’s left flank has been deafening. Where, I find myself asking, is the movement?

By contrast, the conservative grassroots are ablaze. The parents, pundits, and propagandists behind the “critical race theory” crackdown, and now, the moral panic over LGBTQ educators, have been startlingly successful — not only at creating media spectacles, but at recruiting activists, electing school board members, and passing laws. Anti-abortion measures, meanwhile, sweep the country in anticipation of a possible repeal of Roe v. Wade. And, all along, one-term president Trump has defied political gravity, attracting crowds to his rallies and playing de facto party boss from his spray-tan Tammany Hall in Palm Beach. The right, in other words, is on the march. The left is nonexistent.

Could it possibly be that the left had nothing other than hatred for Donald Trump? Their policy was never more than Get Trump, to the point that it devolved into Trump Derangement Syndrome.

A couple paragraphs further down:

Democratic efforts to capture the energies of the 2020 BLM uprisings were similarly demoralizing for all involved. Mayors made fitful, largely self-defeating gestures at constraining their police forces, while party leaders gave a pathetic half-hug to the movement and tip-toed around its politically inconvenient slogan. The abolitionist critique — that the problem is not merely police departments, but a social order that requires them — was then metabolized by elite liberalism into a surfeit of yard signs, nonprofit donations, and various Robin DiAngeloisms of the board room. (Not to mention a $6 million house for a few of the BLM movement’s most savvy self-promoters.)

While it’s true that I concentrate most heavily on Philadelphia, 2021, the year after the evil reich-wing President Trump left office, and as all sweetness-and-light Joe Biden moved into the White House, the homicide rates skyrocketed, setting new records in Philly and jumping dramatically in other major cities, cities which have been controlled by the Democrats for decades. Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office when Harry Truman was President! The effects of the ‘defund the police’ attempts were huge increases in violent crime. While newspapers like The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer kept their reporting on such to a minimum, the more visually oriented television news media put the stories in front of viewers, and in most places residents get their news from television, not the paper.

Mr Adler-Bell’s seeming throw-away line that the problem is “a social order that requires” police departments is wholly naïve”: he seems to think if there are no police and no laws, everything will be peaches but the cream, that there will be no violence and no theft.

And the trouble is, at the moment, (when it comes to movement mobilization) the right is doing it better. Movements of the right are reaching deeper into communities, finding them in the places where they already gather, and strengthening the solidarity they already feel for one another — in many cases, channeling it toward cruelty. As Schlozman told me, “the great rediscovery” of people like Christopher Rufo and Ron DeSantis “is that parents know other parents, and right-wing parents know other right-wing parents, and they can talk to each other, and that is a great reservoir of connection to be politicized.”

Here’s where Mr Adler-Bell gets it way, way wrong. What he forgets is that parents are almost exclusively heterosexual, and while some are sympathetic to the homosexual rights movement, and even transgenderism, they almost exclusively support it for other people. Homosexuality or transgenderism is not something normal parents wish on their own children, because those things are prescriptions for a difficult life. Those with gender dysphoria are looking ahead to unnatural hormone treatments and surgical intervention which produces only a simulacrum of the opposite sex; it doesn’t turn males into real women, nor females into real men. Those who are homosexual are looking ahead to more difficulty in finding long-term mates, and the traditional expectations of middle-class life, a home with children in a suburban home just appear alien to many of them.

Then you get people like Will Thomas, the biologically male swimmer who has decided that he’s a woman named ‘Lia,’ going out and dominating women’s collegiate swimming, and demonstrating for the public at large to see that no, he isn’t really a woman. Even for very liberal parents, there may be a lot of support for Mr Thomas’ case, but it’s not something that they want for their own children!

The civic bonds on which Trumpism is built are often the inheritance of past injustice (as Gabriel Winant once provocatively put it, “Whiteness itself is a kind of inchoate associational gel …”), but they are real. And while the right builds a movement, the Democrats attempt to call one into being — by giving more and more money to insular activist NGOs that speak an alienating language to people in places where they do not frequent, among people they do not already know.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, in publisher Lisa Hughes’ ‘ant-racist’ mode, has tamped down on reporting about the violence in the city, but the public know about it anyway. When Mr Adler-Bell complains about “whiteness”, he’s forgetting one important thing: white liberals are very much part of the white community, and in some of our very liberal but nevertheless internally racially segregated cities, those white liberals can see, just as well as we evil conservatives that much of the crime and violence in the cities is not all that big a problem in the white areas. Even the Inquirer has said that the key to reducing violence in the city is greater racial integration. “Whiteness,” it seems, has an actual value

The alternative — and you’ll be just shocked to hear me say this — is the only one that has ever worked. That is, the labor movement: a movement of the left that mobilizes and draws us together on the basis of our most basic associations and material interests. As Tammi and Marvin once put it, “Ain’t nothing like the real thing.”

Here Mr Adler-Bell again misses the mark. The unionization movement has long been in decline in this country, because the nature of work has changed. We are, sad to say, no longer a nation of large industrial production, but one of financial, information technology and consumer service workers. It takes a whole day’s training to replace a clerk at Seven-Eleven, not the months or even years of training in some industrial jobs. Automobile companies, for example, no longer need trained welders, but people who can run the computers which run the welding robots.

The response to COVID-19 has exacerbated it: people working from home are difficult to unionize because they are largely setting their own working conditions.

But there’s something much more subtle happening that Mr Adler-Bell has missed. Retirement plans have gone from the defined pension benefits ideas — and I personally know of people who had really great company pension plans which all fell apart when the Pennsylvania steel industry collapsed — to individual contribution with company match 401(k) plans. 401(k) plans are great: you can take them with you if you change jobs, rolling them over to your new company’s plan, rolling them over into an individual retirement account, or sometimes just leaving them with your old company’s plan. But the key factor is that most of them make money by investing your retirement funds into stocks and bonds. All of a sudden, employers are no longer the enemy, but a company workers want to see prosper, because there’s no cutting off your own nose quite like wishing failure on a company in which you are invested! Employees and companies are no longer enemies, but partners.

401(k) plans have made us all capitalists!

Mr Adler-Bell does not like that at all! His writing “the Marxist in me” tells us that he is at least sympathetic with socialist goals, if it isn’t quite an admission that he is an out-and-out socialist, but 401(k) plans and frequent job switching and remote work are things which contribute to individualism among people, not socialism. I may have discussed my 401(k) investment options with co-workers, but my choices are mine and their choices are theirs. If my investments are out-performing one of my friends, I would tell him about it, and leave the choice up to him about whether to change his investment strategy, but those would still be individual choices, not some sort of union/worker solidarity.

Mr Adler-Bell seems stuck in the 1930s, when Walter Duranty was sending us glowing propaganda reports about that workers’ paradise, the Soviet Union. He dreams of a labor movement that never was, based on a vision of a society that doesn’t exist.

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Why Philly cancelled its #MaskMandate : it was entirely politics!

I do not normally like to reproduce photos from The Philadelphia Inquirer, due to copyright issues, but this one definitely falls within “fair use” criteria. The caption, reproduced along with the photo via screen capture, states:

Masked Sixers fans watched pregame warm-ups before the Sixers’ Monday playoff game against the Toronto Raptors, during Philadelphia’s short-lived revival of an indoor mask mandate.

Except, of course, that’s not what the photo shows at all.

The photo captures the faces of five people at the game, during pre-game warmups. Three are clearly wearing face masks, a fourth has one, but it’s tucked under his chin, while a fifth spectator doesn’t have a mask visible anywhere on his person, though it’s possible he has one available somewhere. The boy with the red mask is wearing his slightly below his nose, so it’s useless there as well.

This photo was as much propaganda as much as anything else. It was published along with this story:

Why some health experts worry that Philly’s switch on masks may backfire

Philadelphia’s mask conundrum, which saw the city reverse a new mandate days after imposing it, may undermine public confidence, experts warn.

by Tom Avril and Sarah Gantz | Saturday, April 23, 2022

As Philadelphia’s health commissioner during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Stuart H. Shapiro knows what it’s like to run a big-city health department during a crisis. The evidence keeps changing, yet the guidance has to be updated in a way that inspires public cooperation and trust.

That’s why it was smart for Philadelphia to establish clear COVID-19 benchmarks in February, spelling out what levels of cases and hospitalizations would trigger requirements such as masks and proof of vaccination, he said. But now that those metrics have been cast aside as of Thursday, Shapiro worries that the abrupt reversal may backfire.

Also read: Philadelphia is the only top 10 U.S. city where lawmakers are still meeting virtually

“It’s totally confusing,” he said. “It takes away confidence in science-based criteria.”

Another former health agency chief, previously skeptical of Philadelphia’s decision to become the only big city to resume an indoor masking requirement, praised its decision to replace its mask mandate with a strong recommendation to mask up.

“They did the right thing at the same time, which is to highly recommend the use of masks,” former Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen tweeted Friday. “Remember if you wear a mask to please wear a well-fitting N95 or equivalent.”

There’s more at the original.

If you look at the photo closely — and you can click on it to enlarge the image — you’ll see that of the three people actually wearing the masks that none of them are wearing N95 or equivalent masks; they’ve got cloth masks, while the gentleman wearing a mask below his chin appears to have a surgical mask.

The article is basically full of excuses as to why Philadelphia was the only major city to reimpose a mask mandate, and then cancel it four days in. But while it gives us an excuse, the real reasons are two-fold, and obvious:

  1. The indoor mask mandate was being significantly ignored, as witnessed by this video taken the same day as the photo above; and
  2. The Democrats are facing a potentially disastrous election for them, and the public, and the voters, are just plain tired of the restrictions.

On Friday, Philadelphia health commissioner Cheryl Bettigole rejected any suggestion that the quick reversal on the mask mandate could hurt the health department’s credibility.

“I very much take seriously my obligations to say things that are true to Philadelphia and to keep my promises,” Bettigole said. “I had said when I announced this that if we didn’t see hospitalizations rising that we needed to rethink this and that we shouldn’t have a mandate in that case.”

COVID hospitalizations in the city rose earlier in the week, following an increase in cases, but both numbers have since declined slightly. Everyone hopes that widespread vaccination, along with the immune response induced by prior infection, will make severe COVID a thing of the past.

Note that the last quoted sentence is not indicated as a quote from Dr Bettigole, but appears to be a political statement by the article writers.

In the past, the decisions and announcements on COVID restrictions came on Mondays. The reinstated mask mandate was announced on Monday, April 11th, the health department supposedly taking the weekend to consider data which were obvious, something I predicted on April 5th, to take effect the following Monday, April 18th. Yet the mandate was lifted on the evening of Thursday, April 21st. Whatever health data existed from the first four days of the mandate was hardly sufficient to justify changing the decision, but the information on the political aspects was right in front of their noses. That Philadelphia was the only major city to reimpose the mandate was information that they did have, as it was blared all over the city’s media outlets.

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At Ohio State University, the students want wrongthink punished

The freedom of speech comes with the freedom of other people to read or listen to, or not read or listen to, what you have said. The freedom of speech also comes with the assumed risk that those who do read or listen to your words can and just might criticize what you have written or said.

It seems, however, at least at Ohio State University, it also comes with the risk that you might be reported to the authorities.

OSU Student Faces Criticism For Saying Black People Are Superior: ‘I Full-Heartedly Believe That’

Danteé Ramos | Earthy Day, April 22, 2022 | 4:04 PM EDT

An Ohio State University (OSU) student leader is facing criticism after saying that he’d “love” to live in a world if “Black people were taught that they are superior.”

According to OSU’s student newspaper, The Lantern, On March 23, John Fuller, a junior, who was a member of the Ohio State University Undergraduate Student Government General Assembly at the time of the meeting, made comments while proposing resolutions targeting all anti-critical race theory legislation to the General Assembly.

“By taking away the teaching of one race as superior to another, that is inherently white supremacy because white people learn from birth that they are superior. There is nothing that they need to be taught in school that tells them that,” Fuller said.

“I just wanted to say that and make this very clear, the only people who are taught that they are superior to another race are White people,” Fuller said. “And I would absolutely love to live in a world where Black people were taught that they are superior.”

He added that he “full-heartedly” believes that Black people are superior.

OSU’s Undergraduate Student Government President, Jacob Chang, told the student newspaper The Lantern that Fuller’s comments were “diverging from our values.”

So, Mr Fuller was criticized for saying out loud that he “full-heartedly” believes that black people are superior. That is the risk he takes by speaking in public, and the freedom of speech of others to criticize what he said certainly exists. But then comes the money line in the story:

“The comments made during the General Assembly session is fundamentally, like, diverging from our values as the student government of Ohio State,” Chang said. “Therefore, it is our responsibility to report a case like this. I think we need to stand in solidarity with all people of color and anyone who suffers from racism, but we need to do it from a space that is unilaterally empowering everyone around them instead of like single out one group.”

OSU’s student newspaper, The Lantern, reported that after Mr Fuller made his comments, the Speaker of the student General Assembly dismissed him, and that members of the Assembly forwarded video and audio of his comments to the university’s Office of Institutional Equity.

They did? Apparently members of the Assembly believed that Mr Fuller’s comments ought not only to be disapproved, but punished as well. From The Lantern:

The resolution condemning all anti-critical race theory passed in the General Assembly, Chang said. The resolution is crucial to ensure that critical race theory is taught at public universities, but the way Fuller made it about “empowerment and another form of like supremacy” that was “inherently racist,” he said.

Chang said the next step is to hope the university takes action on the case against Fuller.

“No matter what race you are from, what background you are from, you cannot say stuff like that,” Chang said.

If you yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and that yell leads to a crushing stampede to the exits, in which people are injured, you can be held legally liable. But Mr Chang and at least some members of the student government want to see Mr Fuller somehow punished for making a statement of which they disapproved which injured no one, unless perhaps it was someone’s precious little feelings. More accurately, they would like to see Mr Fuller punished somehow for “full-heartedly” believing that black people are superior to other races.

What might such punishment entail? Neither article tells us, but it isn’t difficult to speculate. Mandatory ‘re-education’ classes to reform his beliefs? A forced statement that he doesn’t really believe what he said? Could it even lead to academic probation, suspension or expulsion? We just don’t know, but the fact that the student government wants Mr Fuller punished somehow for what he believes and said he believes is chilling. Ohio State is a public university, which would mean that the state would be taking action against a student for exercising his freedom of speech.

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A very Democratic city!

We have frequently noted the ridiculous lack of law enforcement in Philadelphia when it comes to illegal drug use.

Now we get Steve Keeley, a reporter for Fox 29 News:

This means that junkies are shooting up heroin and fentanyl and who knows what else in public, on the train platform. This isn’t even the Allegheny Avenue station we’ve written about before, but 30th Street, thirteen stops away from Allegheny Avenue, near the Amtrak station and Drexel University. This isn’t Kensington, this isn’t the slums. This is near Powelton Village.

Of course, some of the junkies could have gotten on the train in Kensington, shot up while riding, and then gotten off at 30th Street, but why would they? It costs money to ride the train, and 30th Street isn’t really a neighborhood itself, but the middle of the train, trolley and Amtrak lines.

But hey, this is for what the good people of Philadelphia voted!

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Gentrification is a good thing!

On its website main page Thursday morning, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in plugging a new story, Philadelphia’s gun violence crisis through the eyes of those experiencing it, there was a link to an older story, Philly blocks besieged by shootings have long endured poverty, blight, and systemic racism. Dated September 16, 2021, I had seen it before. The story documents some of the blocks with the highest number of shootings, and tells us what we already knew:

But in Philadelphia, the epidemic of gun violence has been intensely concentrated in just a handful of neighborhoods and several dozen blocks — like the one where Johnson was killed, according to an Inquirer analysis. These shootings have left behind a breathtaking level of fear and trauma among a fraction of the city’s residents, nearly all of whom are Black and brown.

I admit to being wryly amused by the Inquirer’s stylebook, seemingly copied from the Associated Press, which decided that, in reference to race, “black” should be capitalized, but “white” should not. The stylebook led to “black” being capitalized and “brown” being left in lower case. Social justice, racial justice, and just generally being #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 leads to some real stupidity.

As unchecked gun violence has reached unprecedented heights this year, it has continued to disproportionately batter these same communities, where residents also endure higher poverty levels, lower life expectancy, and more blighted housing, the analysis shows.

Naturally, the “anti-racist” Inquirer wants to blame everything but race, unless it’s the racism of white people!

After several paragraphs noting violent areas, including the blocks around the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, about which we have written previously, and around which the Philadelphia Police Department has mostly ignored the open-air drug markets, I came to these two paragraphs, two I found very important:

The vast majority of the city’s developed[2]By “developed,” article authors Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, Anna Orso, John Duchneskie, and Jessica Griffin meant blocks not devastated by crime and neglect, blocks in which the … Continue reading blocks with housing — more than three-quarters of them — haven’t experienced a single shooting since 2015. Entire swaths of Center City, Northeast Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill and Roxborough, far whiter and wealthier than the rest of the city, have not seen a shooting for years.

Neighborhoods like Graduate Hospital, Fishtown, and University City — where years of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity — are just a few minutes’ drive from shooting hot spots. But they rarely experience gun violence.

“(Y)ears of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity”, huh? Let’s not beat around the bush here: the writers managed to avoid the word itself in their long article, but the word is gentrification.

Gentrification is the process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and businesses.[3]“Gentrification”. Dictionary.com.Lees, Slater & Wyly 2010[page needed] define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a … Continue reading It is a common and controversial topic in urban politics and planning. Gentrification often increases the economic value of a neighborhood, but the resulting demographic displacement may itself become a major social issue. Gentrification often shifts a neighborhood’s racial or ethnic composition and average household income by developing new, more expensive housing and businesses in a gentrified architectural style and extending and improving resources that had not been previously accessible.[4]West, Allyn (5 March 2020). “Baffled City: Exploring the architecture of gentrification”. Texas Observer. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2020., [3][5]Harrison, Sally; Jacobs, Andrew (2016). “Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design”. The Plan. 1 (2). doi:10.15274/tpj.2016.01.02.03.

The gentrification process is typically the result of increasing attraction to an area by people with higher incomes spilling over from neighboring cities, towns, or neighborhoods. Further steps are increased investments in a community and the related infrastructure by real estate development businesses, local government, or community activists and resulting economic development, increased attraction of business, and lower crime rates. In addition to these potential benefits, gentrification can lead to population migration and displacement. However, some view the fear of displacement, which dominates the debate about gentrification, as hindering discussion about genuine progressive approaches to distribute the benefits of urban redevelopment strategies.

But it appears that the residents of these poorer neighborhoods don’t want wealthier, and let’s be honest here, whiter people moving in:

In a plan for a safer, vibrant 52nd Street, worried West Philly neighbors see gentrification looming

Angst is roiling minority neighborhoods as they struggle to balance the opportunities and the threats created by gentrification. “West Philly is the new Africa,” one resident warned at a community meeting. “Everyone wants the property that’s in West Philadelphia.”

by Jason Laughlin | February 21, 2020

The topic of the community meeting — a plan to beautify 52nd Street, to make it safe, welcoming, and prosperous once again — was, on its face, nothing but good news for West Philadelphia’s long-declining business corridor.

Yet the audience of about 50 residents and retailers, mostly African American, grew increasingly agitated as urban designer Jonas Maciunas flipped through a PowerPoint presentation of proposed improvements. Many weren’t seeing a vision of a neighborhood revitalized from Market to Pine Streets. Instead, in the talk of redesigned intersections, leafy thoroughfares, and better bus shelters, they heard the ominous whisper of gentrification.

“It just seems that when white people decide to come back to a certain neighborhood, they want it a certain way,” said Carol Morris, 68, a retired elementary school teacher.

Morris’ declaration opened the floodgates of fear and anger that recent night at the Lucien E. Blackwell West Philadelphia Regional Library. Maciunas and Jesse Blitzstein, director of community and economic development for the nonprofit Enterprise Center, which is spearheading the project, were peppered with skeptical questions ranging from the validity of surveys showing community support for the improvements to the maintenance of trees that would be planted.

There’s more at the original.

As we have previously noted, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer have told us that racial segregation is very much part of the problem in city residents feeling unsafe, and Philadelphia is one of the United States’ most internally segregated big cities. But that very same Editorial Board, less than two years ago, were very wary about gentrification. To be fair — and I so rarely am when it comes to the Inquirer — the Board have at least mixed feelings when it comes to gentrification.

While Philadelphia and the Inquirer haven’t been so blatant as to say so directly, the liberal city of Lexington[6]Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. has. As we have previously noted, Lexington said, directly, that it was concerned about gentrification, and, “Most new owners being more affluent and differing from the traditional residents in terms of race or ethnicity.” The city was concerned about white people moving into heavily black neighborhoods.[7]Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger neighborhoods.

Philadelphia is not concerned about black residents moving in and integrating nearly all-white neighborhoods, and that is what the Inquirer’s Editorial Board said ought to happen. But somehow, liberal cities don’t seem to want that to happen in reverse, don’t seem to want white people moving into majority black neighborhoods.  Yet, as the Inquirer noted:

Neighborhoods like Graduate Hospital, Fishtown, and University City — where years of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity — are just a few minutes’ drive from shooting hot spots. But they rarely experience gun violence.

Gentrification seems to reduce violence!

Gentrification ought to be something every city wants. Not only do revitalized properties raise property values around them, but when white ‘gentrifiers’ move into a majority black neighborhood, they are clearly white people who have no racist attitudes toward blacks, people perfectly willing to have black neighbors. Is that not a good thing?

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 By “developed,” article authors Chris Palmer, Dylan Purcell, Anna Orso, John Duchneskie, and Jessica Griffin meant blocks not devastated by crime and neglect, blocks in which the housing was not dilapidated, but they couldn’t quite bring themselves to say that.
↑3 “Gentrification”. Dictionary.com.Lees, Slater & Wyly 2010[page needed] define gentrification as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city to a middle class residential and/or commercial use”.
↑4 West, Allyn (5 March 2020). “Baffled City: Exploring the architecture of gentrification”. Texas Observer. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2020.
↑5 Harrison, Sally; Jacobs, Andrew (2016). “Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design”. The Plan. 1 (2). doi:10.15274/tpj.2016.01.02.03.
↑6 Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
↑7 Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger neighborhoods.
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Much of the public are just plain fed up with masking!

We have previously noted Ana Cabera Neilson’s tweet, in which she said:

Just boarded a flight to Atlanta. I think I’ll stick with my mask a little longer. (I’d say it’s about 50-50 on this flight. Everyone treating each other respectfully)

That’s the way things should be: take your own decisions on what you wish to do, and respect other people’s choices on how they wish to behave.

Of course, the Usual Suspects are appalled. New York Times OpEd columnist Paul Krugman tweeted:

A prediction about masking: Soon we’ll be seeing many incidents in which those who choose to protect themselves with KN95s etc face harassment, even violence. Because this was never about freedom.

The distinguished Dr Krugman tends to go extreme when it comes to his dislike of conservatives, so this is no surprise, but I’d be surprised if there are more than a few isolated incidents of such. Virginia Kruta had the best response:

More likely: if we even notice that someone else has chosen to wear a mask, the worst they’ll get from us as we go about our business is an eye-roll.

Also read: Robert Stacy McCain: The Weird Logic of COVID-19 Panic

Alas! To the snowflake left, even an eyeroll might be called harassment, a ‘micro-aggression,’ and even a threat of violence. My darling bride, of 42 years, 11 months, and two days, has accused me of rolling my eyes in the past. 🙂

Joy Ann Reid of MSNBC let slip her real reasoning, saying, “did announcing the end of the mask mandate literally in the middle of the flight kind of let those a-holes win?”

That’s pretty much all it has ever been: the ‘progressives’ wanting to keep restrictions for as long as possible, because they didn’t want to let conservatives win.

In the City of Brotherly Love, where the voters gave Joe Biden a whopping 81.44% of their votes, there are plenty of signs that that very Democratic city is just as fed up with mask mandates as anyplace else. The authoritarian dictators there reinstated an indoor mask mandate, beginning on Monday, April 18th. Indoor spaces can go mask-free if the space owners verify that everyone entering has been vaccinated; if this step is not taken, then everyone, vaccinated or otherwise, must wear a mask.

But SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, is not under the city’s authority, and SEPTA’s executives decided to drop masking requirements in its stations and conveyances:

Here’s how SEPTA decided to lift its mask requirement after a federal judge canceled the national mandate

The Justice Department said Tuesday that it may appeal the ruling, but only if the CDC wants to extend the mask requirement.

by Thomas Fitzgerald and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, April 19, 2022

On Monday afternoon, SEPTA officials rushed to digest and respond to a federal judge’s order obliterating the national mask requirement for passengers on public transportation.

At first, the agency said it would “for now” continue to require masks in its stations and on its commuter trains, subways, buses, and trolleys.

But after 9 p.m., SEPTA announced riders could feel free to slip off their masks if they wished.

It joined NJ Transit and other peer transit systems in Washington, Boston, and Atlanta, as well as Amtrak, the national passenger railroad, in dropping mask mandates. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle kept their requirements in force.

And Tuesday evening, the Biden administration said it will appeal the judge’s ruling if the CDC wants to extend its masking directive, which was due to expire May 3.

If filed, an appeal could complicate SEPTA’s decision if either the judge herself or the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals issues a stay of Monday’s order voiding the federal mask rule.

There is a legal point here. A District Court Judge’s ruling does not set a legal precedent, but if the Court of Appeals rules on the question, that does set a precedent . . . and judges appointed by President Donald Trump comprise the majority on the 11th Circuit. The Biden Administration might choose to let the decision stand rater than risk a precedent-setting decision that goes against them, in case there is another COVID surge later in the year.

The money line was further down:

In the end, SEPTA’s executive team and board members decided it made little sense to keep in place the terms of a federal mandate that no longer existed, officials said. And above all, there was a concern for employees, who had already been subject to abuse and harassment while asking riders to mask up during the pandemic.

“We didn’t want our frontline workers, who’ve been heroic, to be in a challenging spot,” said CEO Leslie S. Richards. “Our customers certainly know about the court decision, and they know we can’t really enforce it.”

That’s right: the public know! And the city was leaving enforcement of the reinstated mask mandate up to cute coeds working as restaurant hostesses and bodega owners more worried about armed robbers to enforce the mask mandate.

What needs to be stressed now, to those who have objected to the mask mandates on the basis of freedom and individual rights is that other people also have individual rights, and those who wish to continue to wear masks have every right to do so. We should respect them, in ways they did not respect us.

The New York Times reported that the Department of Justice has appealed the judge’s ruling. I guess that we’ll see what happens.

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The proper response to the end of the airliner mask mandate: you do you! Do as you please, and respect the choices of others who do as they wish

The tweet shown at the right is actually a screen capture rather than an embedding of the original, just in case her superiors ordered Ana Cabrera Neilson to take it down.

Just boarded a flight to Atlanta. I think I’ll stick with my mask a little longer. (I’d say it’s about 50-50 on this flight. Everyone treating each other respectfully)

Mrs Neilson’s Twitter biography lists her as “@CNN Anchor and Correspondent, Mom, Wife, Runner, Traveler, Gardener, Dog lover, Skier, Huge Denver Broncos Fan, Proud @MurrowCollege alumna, RT ≠ endorsements.” I suppose that I will have to forgive her for being a Broncos fan; no Oakland — never Las Vegas! — Raiders fan can ever truly like someone who likes the Denver Broncos.

What Mrs Neilson wrote is the way things ought to be! She does her thing, other people do theirs, and they leave each other alone.

Of course, for the Karens among us, we had one styling himself fandelos responding:

Actually, if it’s 50/50 masks, then no, not “everyone is treating each other respectfully”. Waved mandate aside, those without masks are showing zero respect for higher risk individuals who are undoubtedly on their flight.

I get it: those Americans who have been thoroughly imbued with fear by the government are still filled with it. But the facts are pretty obvious: Americans are mostly done with masking and fear. Jamie Apody, a sports reporter for WPVI-TV, Channel 6 in Philadelphia, tweeted that she didn’t see many people at the Toronto Raptors vs Philadelphia 76ers first round NBA playoff game taking the city’s indoor mask mandate seriously, including what a 16 second video of a mostly mask-free crowd.

My good friend William Teach reported that the Biden Administration are considering an appeal of District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s order. Personally, knowing that the decision was before a brilliant and highly-qualified judge, who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, I am surprised that the Justice Department didn’t have an emergency appeal and request to stay the judge’s order ready to go the moment the judge’s decision was handed down. Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t be: the Biden Administration are full of people with their ears to the political ground, and they know that Americans are simply tired of the panicdemic restrictions. Already fearing huge losses in the 2022 elections, the last thing they want to do is piss off more voters. If this is not appealed, the mask mandate is gone, and the Administration can, and will, blame a federal judge appointed by President Trump for it if cases increase.

Though he was addressing another issue, Glenn Greenwald noted that fear was crucial for state authority, and fear is what governments, at all levels, have been using to control the public. But most Americans have gotten well over their fear of COVID-19, and that means most Americans are no longer susceptible to government fear-borne mandates. To alter a common phrase, Americans have voted with their bare faces against the mandates.

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Bidenflation: We’re lucky we bought when we did!

As I have previously noted, we bought a house for my sister-in-law in December. Because we were not going to live in the house ourselves, the interest rate, 3.75%, was 1.00% higher than if we had lied about it and said that we would reside there. Technically, it’s rental property for us, though we do not expect to make a profit on it. When we go to our eternal rewards, the ownership will pass to our children and our nephew.

We negotiated the interest rate in November, and closed in early December.

Today, in reading an article, Report: Majority of renters can’t afford to buy in their city, in The Washington Post, I saw referenced one I had missed last week:

Mortgage rates hit 5 percent, ushering in new economic uncertainty

Rates have risen faster than many economists had expected, and they are starting to temper the housing boom

By Kathy Orton and Rachel Siegel | April 14, 2022 | Updated April 14, 2022 at 2:41 p.m. EDT

Mortgage rates swelled above 5 percent for the first time in more than a decade — an unexpectedly rapid ascent that has begun to temper the U.S. housing boom and could usher new uncertainty into an economy dogged by soaring inflation.

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, the most popular home loan product, hit the threshold just five weeks after surpassing 4 percent, according to Freddie Mac data released Thursday. The average has not been this high since February 2011.

The run-up comes as the Federal Reserve has launched a major initiative to rein in the highest inflation in 40 years. Fed officials are betting that higher interest rates will slash inflation and recalibrate the job market. But their plan also rests on the assumption that higher rates will cool demand for housing, especially while homes themselves are in such short supply.

There’s more at the original.

From the first article cited:

  • The average home in the U.S. costs seven times the average national household income.
  • Homeownership is unaffordable for the majority of renters in 71 percent of metro areas.
  • In 13 metro areas, 10 of which are in California, at least 90 percent of renters are priced out of owning a home. The three metro areas outside of California are in Cape Cod, Hawaii and Boulder, Colo.
  • In the D.C. metro area, 70 percent of renters can’t afford to buy a home, according to Porch’s analysis. Their calculations found that the average home is priced at $526,296 and that 30 percent of households rent in metro areas. Those renter households have a median income of $56,400, while the median income needed to buy the average house in the area is $64,055.

There’s one obvious flaw here: the paper is comparing income to the “average” home, but may homeowners, including yours truly, first bought what would be considered a ‘starter’ home, which will cost well under the average home price. People buying more house than they could afford, along with the sub-prime lenders encouraged by the government, triggered the crisis in 2007-2008.

The key is to not enable people to buy more house than they can afford.

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Killadelphia Perhaps Commissioner Outlaw ought to worry about her primary job first?

We already knew it was a bloody few days in the City of Brotherly Love, but the city didn’t update its figures on Friday, due, I suppose, to the Good Friday holiday. Now they have, and it’s ugly.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page states that there have been 140 homicides in the city as of 11:59 PM EDT on Easter Sunday, April 17th. That’s 11 more dead bodies since the previous Sunday, and 8 of them occurred since the end of Wednesday, April 13th, 8 murders in 4 days.

So, about what has Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw been worried?

Please join me in welcoming @Phillypolice‘s first Chief Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Officer, Ms. Leslie Marant! Ms. Marant’s position and office have been established to oversee diversity and inclusion efforts at every level of our organization. A lifelong Philadelphian, she …is uniquely qualified to succeed in this position. Having demonstrated tireless dedication and passion to the field of DEI work, she is the former Chief of Staff for the Universal Education Company, as well as the former Chief Council to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. She has earned a B.S. in Finance & HR Admin, and a Juris Doctor & Master of Laws, Trial Advocacy from @TempleUniv. We will benefit enormously from her experience as we continue to build and rebuild trust with the communities we serve. Welcome!

The Commissioner’s statement quoted is from three separate tweets. The image of the tweet on the right is a screenshot taken by me at 9:15 PM EDT on Monday; click on the image to take you to the original tweet.

“(D)iversity and inclusion”? It would seem that “diversity and inclusion” efforts have not been exactly successful in the city’s shootings and killings! Perhaps Commissioner Outlaw should worry about her primary job, bringing criminals to justice, first?

According to the city’s Shooting Victims database, there had been 49 people shot from Thursday through Sunday, 33 of them black, 12 listed as Hispanic white, and 4 as non-Hispanic white. That brings April’s total to 133 shooting victims, 104 of them non-Hispanic black, 12 Hispanic white, and 6 non-Hispanic white. No other racial/ethnic groups are listed as shooting victims.

Philadelphia’s population, according to the 2020 census, was only 38.3% non-Hispanic black, yet, thus far in April, they’ve been 78.20% of the shooting victims. Yet the main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website had exactly one story on the shootings and killings this morning, and it was dated on Saturday, April 16th. The publisher, Lisa Hughes, the Executive Editor, Gabriel Escobar, and their minions don’t want to report at all on shootings and killings in minority communities, because that would be raaaaacist!

By this afternoon, the Inquirer’s Editorial Board weighed in:

50 shootings during the weekend warns of a deadly summer in Philly | Editorial

As summer approaches, and with the city once again on pace to record more than 500 homicides this year, officials must act now to stem the possibility of bloodshed later.

by The Editorial Board | Monday, April 18, 2022

When it comes to gun violence in Philadelphia, it’s long been clear that warm weather can have serious consequences.

A 2018 New York Times analysis found that days when the temperature exceeds 50 degrees have nearly 70% more shooting victims in our city than days when the weather is 49 or below. A similar trend, the Times found, plays out in other cities that also experience seasonal weather changes.

It should hardly have come as a surprise, then, that an unexpected stretch of sunny April weather during the holiday weekend also saw the number of incidents of gun violence tick up dramatically in the city. During a 24-hour stretch from Thursday to Friday, the city averaged a shooting an hour, and of the two dozen people who were shot, five were killed. All told, from Thursday to Sunday, the city saw a total of 50 shootings. During that four-day stretch, the high temperature in the city did not dip below 52 degrees.

The weather has been cool in the northeast on Monday, so maybe there won’t be as many shootings and killings, but the forecast is for a warming trend, to finally get back to spring normal temperatures.

The Editorial Board, a self-described “group of journalists who work separately from the newsroom to debate matters of public interest,” but who seem to have a strong commonality of #woke leftist views, continue with typical liberal pablum ideas: opening more swimming pools this summer, the School District offering in-person educational programming for all students over the summer, and a roster of summer programs.

While restoring programs and reopening pools are important steps for cooling tensions, the stakes and the scale of this crisis demand the same kind of bold intervention that we’ve seen from Mayor Jim Kenney on COVID-19. That means finding more ways to fight gun violence, not telling residents and colleagues that you’ve done all you can.

Apparently Commissioner outlaw believes that hiring a Chief Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Officer is the way to go! Yeah, that’ll sure calm down the gang-bangers!

Call me a cynic if you will, but somehow I’m not confident that the city’s wannabe gangsters are going to be all that interested in summer school.

If the city is once again unable to open all of its pools, then avoid hitting poorer neighborhoods with most of the closures. If library hours and programs cannot be fully staffed, find ways to support branches in our most vulnerable communities. If trash collection once again falls behind, prioritize neighborhoods where residents have smaller homes and fewer cars, leaving them without options to store and transport their waste. Hold the Police Department accountable, track and transparently evaluate anti-violence programs, and ensure the implementation of recommendations from the “100 Shooting Review.” Integrate violence prevention into everything the city does, as this board called for at the outset of the year.

Apparently to The Editorial Board, “poorer neighborhoods” is a synonym for black and Hispanic neighborhoods. As we have previously noted, the Board are very, very concerned about the racial disparity in the danger faced by Philadelphians, and blamed it on Philly being one of the most internally segregated cities in the country. Curiously enough, if you read their editorial carefully, you might come to the conclusion that the Board want white residents to feel as endangered as black residents do, sort of a socialist leveling down rather than raising up.

The fact is that there are a lot of poorer white Philadelphians as well, and they aren’t shooting each other at the same rate black city residents have done. However, neither the Editorial Board, nor the Mayor, nor the District Attorney, nor the Police Commissioner can admit that the homicide rate in Philadelphia is a racial problem more than an economic one. There is something in the culture of urban black communities that is leading the young men males of those communities to carry guns and blast away, but it is apparently wholly raaaaacist to point out that statistically obvious fact.

But you cannot address a problem if you are unwilling to acknowledge the problem, and the while liberals of Philadelphia are unwilling to face the problem because it is so very politically incorrect.