Author Archives: Dana Pico

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I have no sympathy for this criminal

On Sunday, The Philadelphia Inquirer gave OpEd space to Aaron M. Kinzer, because the editors just love them some criminals:

In prison, a phone was my lifeline. Until I got caught with it.

Congress should overturn the Cell Phone Contraband Act to give incarcerated a a lifeline to the outside world.

by Aaron M Kinzer | Sunday, April 17, 2022

Aaron M Kinzer, from Parents.

Since 2010, when I was incarcerated, I have been at the mercy of the prison phone service industry. I have paid 15 cents to $1 per minute for monitored 15-minute phone calls to hear my mother’s prayers, my spouse’s love, and my children’s laughter. Companies like PayTel and Securis compete for contracts to siphon off money sent from family to people like me.

High prices, monitoring, and restrictions fuel the demand for illegal smartphones. Most incarcerated people don’t use smartphones to sell drugs or order violent attacks. Instead, they connect with loved ones. A more humane justice system would take this into account by providing tablets to inmates or allowing for video visits.

Unfortunately, because of how diffuse our national system of corrections is, this is an issue we’ll have to tackle at the county and state levels. While access to smartphones is still forbidden in jails and prisons across the country, many jurisdictions recognize the value of keeping families connected. New York City and San Francisco no longer require incarcerated people to pay a fee for making phone calls from jail, and other cities and states are considering following suit. Texas has expanded tablet access for sending emails, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons allowed for free calls during the pandemic when visitations were banned.

In prison, a phone is a lifeline, a thin thread holding together fragile family bonds. When I was transferred to a federal minimum-security prison in Virginia, located in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, I thought I would be able to resist the lifeline thrown to me. But after six months of being restricted to the prison phone, I smuggled an illegal smartphone into prison. I knew that if I got caught, I would be placed in solitary confinement, transferred, have more time added to my sentence, or, even worse, be indicted for possessing contraband.

And caught with it he was. Continue reading →

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

I have previously noted a major article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about the city’s open-air drug market near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, complete with a photo of a man who appears to be shooting up right outside the SEPTA station. The photo shows the street littered with trash, and people just plain not caring.

The theme of the article, dated August 17, 2020, was that the COVID-19 crisis might have caused shortages in everything else, but not in the availability of drugs.

I continued to scan the newspaper for stories about how the Philadelphia Police Department had gotten their dander up about the Inquirer article, and had a massive raid to round up the drug dealers and close the drug trade down there, but it just never seemed to happen. Now there’s this, from Fox 29 News:

Philadelphia officials consider resolution designating Kensington a FEMA site

By Shawnette Wilson | April 13, 2022 | 11:30 PM EDT | Updated April 14, 2022 | 7:28AM EDT

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

KENSINGTON – Reported as the worst possible section of the United States, in terms of homelessness and drug abuse, city officials are looking for a federal and state government intervention in Kensington.

“When I was a teenager, this neighborhood was fine,” David Adcox stated. He says it’s different for his two teenage children he’s raising in Kensington, where he has lived about 45 years.“You could hang on the corner and play football. You used to be able to block Somerset off and have block parties,” Adcox added.

He says since the late nineties, things have steadily changed for the worse.

“Drugs happened and it’s been downhill since,” Adcox commented.

Some Philadelphia city officials announced last week they are taking drastic steps to address the open drug use and addiction on the streets of Kensington.

At least as of 8:08 AM on Friday morning, there was no story on the Inquirer’s website main page about this. One would think that the city considering turning this problem over to the federal government would make the news.

“What we’ve been doing has not worked. This has been going on for 10, 20, even 30 years,” Philadelphia Councilmember At-Large Allan Domb said and went to say it’s a humanitarian crisis.

“It’s the worst neighborhood in the United States, as far as homelessness and drug abuse,” Domb added.

Domb, Councilmember Maria Quinones-Sanchez and Councilmember Mark Squilla have announced a resolution requesting that Kensington be declared a FEMA and PEMA site, like areas hit with tornadoes, floods and hurricanes.

It would mean federal and state involvement with resources and financial assistance.

“40 percent might be Philadelphians, but at least 60 percent or more are not. They may have obtained ID’s for Philadelphia, but it’s not right that the city has to take care of this humanitarian crisis when the majority of the people are not from Philadelphia,” Domb explained. “We need to bring people back to the homes where they came from, take care of the population that’s Philadelphia and get them into the right services and help them.”

But, but, but, I thought that Philadelphia was a sanctuary city, welcoming everybody, regardless of immigration status. And Councilman Domb is a Democrat.

Mr Domb has been on the city council since January 4, 2016. Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez has been in office since January 7, 2008, while Councilman Mark Squilla has been there since January 2, 2012. All are Democrats.

Have they not noticed the problem until now?

The Inquirer was all #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 social justicey on August 17, 2020, when Aubrey Whelan’s article appeared — the firing resignation of Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski two months earlier, and “anti-racist” publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes was in place the previous February — yet even the newspaper covered the story at the time. Kensington is a heavily Hispanic neighborhood, with the non-Hispanic black population being relatively low, so perhaps that allowed the Inky to cover it?

The solution is not that complicated: send in the police and clear out the druggies, users as well as dealers. When the next group of dealers move in, as they will, send in the police again.

Philadelphia has been run by the Democrats for the last seven decades; the last Republican Mayor left office when Harry Truman was still President. And while the Democrats have not always been the squishes on law enforcement that they have been for a while, Democratic policies have enabled Kensington to become “the worst neighborhood in the United States, as far as homelessness and drug abuse” are concerned.

If you want to clean the place up, you need conservative policies, and conservative policies are not nice ones. To be a conservative, you have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] at times, because yielding to sympathy has meant allowing the existing problems to fester and get worse. It is better for the city, it is better for the United States, for [insert plural slang term for the rectum here] to be running the government, at all levels, people who will not allow sympathy and lenient policies to turn everything to [insert slang term for feces here], as has happened in all of our major cities.

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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The reason Philly murders are down is that the bad guys are lousy shots * Updated! * They meant to kill more people

The blood was flowing on Philly’s streets early on Thursday!

Shootings across Philly leave 1 dead and 12 injured

An unidentified young man was found shot dead on the 400 Block of Manton Street in South Philadelphia around 2:10 p.m.

by Robert Moran | Thursday, April 15, 2022 | 7:28 PM EDT | Updated: 8:39 PM EDT

Thirteen people were shot — including one fatally — in gun violence across Philadelphia on Thursday, police said.

Around 2:10 p.m. in South Philadelphia, an unidentified young man was found with a gunshot wound to the head outside on the 400 block of Manton Street. He was pronounced dead at the scene by medics. Police reported no arrests.

The 400 block of Manton Street is not a bad neighborhood. Well-kept row houses, some new construction, houses in the $400-$500,000 range, and a South Philadelphia neighborhood that appears to be gentrifying. Continue reading →

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Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye And then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

Alas! I have been severely, severely! taken to task by Robert Stacy McCain for one of my failures!

Mr McCain’s story:

Aspiring Rapper Update: ‘Slowkey Fred’ Busted for Philly Gun Trafficking Ring

by Robert Stacy McCain | Wednesday, April 13, 2022

More federal felony charges than he’s got hit records:

An Atlanta rapper is one of 11 people facing federal charges in connection with an alleged straw-purchasing scheme that trafficked hundreds of guns from Georgia to Philadelphia.

Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced nearly 300 firearms purchased in Georgia from dozens of gun retailers to Fredrick Norman — aka “Slowkey Fred” — and three other suspects, after some were found at crime scenes and in the possession of convicted felons in Philadelphia, according to records and interviews with federal law enforcement.

In an interview with ATF agents in 2020, one of the suspects, Brianna Walker, admitted to buying 50 to 60 guns in order to sell them without a dealer’s license, according to a search warrant affidavit — a violation of federal law. Norman allegedly admitted to buying more than 100, according to federal records.
The federal investigation expanded to include 11 suspects in Georgia and Pennsylvania, all of whom face a conspiracy charge. Kenneth Burgos, 23, and Edwin Burgos, 29 — brothers accused of brokering sales in Pennsylvania — are also charged with dealing firearms without a license, officials said.

In addition to “Slowkey Fred” and the Burgos brothers, the suspects in this interstate gun-trafficking operations also included:

  • Brianna Walker a/k/a “Mars, 23, of Atlanta, GA;
  • Charles O’Bannon a/k/a “Chizzy,” 24, of Villa Rica, GA;
  • Stephen Norman, 23, of Villa Rica, GA;
  • Devin Church a/k/a “Lant,” 24, of Villa Rica, GA;
  • Roger Millington, 25, of Philadelphia, PA;
  • Ernest Payton, 30, of Philadelphia, PA;
  • Roselmy Rodriguez, 22, of Philadelphia, PA; and
  • Brianna Reed, 21, of Shippensburg, PA.

You can read the rest at Mr McCain’s original.

In my defense, not only did I have two family functions yesterday, but The Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, while it still has a three-day-old story about Daniel Whiteman, 36, having been arrested for using a 3D printer to manufacture parts for ‘ghost guns’, had nothing on this story.

I have thus far been unable to find a mugshot of Mr Whiteman, though I suspect he has been appropriately surnamed, but it is not much of a surprise to me that the Inquirer would not be all that motivated to publish a story about defendants named Muhammad Ware, Haneef and Jabreel Vaughn, Roselmy Rodriguez, two separate chicks named Brianna, or a “rapper” faux named “Slowbrain Slowkey Fred”. To do that would be raaaaacist!

The Inquirer even had, on its website main page, a blurb, shown at the right, leading to this story:

Subway attack adds to fears that New York City has grown dangerous

The attack will intensify the disquiet among New Yorkers about violence in the nation’s largest city, including an increasing number of shootings and rising crime in the subways.

by Emmanuel Felton and Joanna Slater, Washington Post | Wednesday, April 13, 2022

NEW YORK — When Nick Laforte heard about Tuesday morning’s shooting at the 36th Street subway station, he first thought of his wife and daughter. Each day, they board the train at that very stop, one bound for Manhattan and the other heading further into Brooklyn.

After a spike of fear, Laforte was relieved to learn both women were safe. But the incident left him deeply uneasy. “It feels like things are getting out of control,” said Laforte, a retiree and Brooklyn native: “I love New York, there’s no place like this.” Still, for the first time, he found himself thinking about leaving.

Tuesday’s shooting in Brooklyn was a commuter’s worst nightmare, with panicked riders fleeing a subway car full of smoke and gunfire. According to local hospitals, nearly 30 people were treated for injuries, 10 of them with gunshot wounds.

The attack will intensify the disquiet among New Yorkers about violence in the nation’s largest city, including an increasing number of shootings and rising crime in the subways, the city’s lifeblood.

There’s more at the original, and here’s the link to The Washington Post’s original, in case the Inquirer’s paywall stops you. But it’s sadly humorous that the Inquirer would be telling us how much more dangerous the Big Apple has become: New York City had seen, through April 10th, 101 murders, compared to 116 on the same date in 2021.

Through the same date, Palm Sunday, the City of Brotherly Love had seen 129 homicides, compared to 138 on the same date in 2021. But while New York City has an estimated population of 8,177,025, Philadelphia has an estimated 1,585,480 residents. With 5.16 times Philly’s population, NYC has seen 28 fewer murders.

In 2021, New York saw 488 total homicides, compared to Philly’s 562. In 2021, NYC’s homicide rate was 5.97 per 100,000 population, while Philly’s was 35.46 per 100,000. Philadelphians were facing a homicide rate 5.94 times that of New Yorkers! Of course, as we already know, and as the Inquirer has admitted, in very internally segregated Philadelphia, you aren’t in that much danger if you are a non-Hispanic white or Asian. Through the first ten days of April, there have been 68 shootings in Philly; 57 of the victims were black, 9 were listed as Latino white, and two were non-Hispanic white. New York City’s subway passengers are a far more diverse and integrated population.

Leave it to the Inquirer to highlight the violence in other cities!

Matthew 7:3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

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One picture which says it all

As we noted on Monday, foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia reimposed its indoor masking mandate. Now The Philadelphia Inquirer has reported that while a few universities have done this, no other major city in the country has followed Philadelphia’s lead.

Philly’s return of masks gets both eyerolls and support from residents. Can health officials bridge this divide?

After two years of changing restrictions and messages, some Philadelphians predict the latest rule change won’t go well.

by Tom Avril and Jason Laughlin | Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Under warm blue skies that seemed at odds with the recent rise of COVID-19, shoppers at Roosevelt Mall seemed united on Tuesday in a quest to finish errands quickly and get back outside in the sun.

But as for opinions on the return of Philadelphia’s mask mandate — which takes effect in businesses including those very same stores on Monday — errand-runners were sharply divided.

Harold Phillips, 50, of Germantown, said the restriction made sense, given that one-third of Philadelphians are not fully vaccinated.

“They should’ve never stopped it,” he said of the mask mandate, as he headed into a Snipes shoe store. “I did the research. I got the shots.”

There’s more at the original, but this is the one picture that says it all. Mr Phillips said that the city should never have ended the mask mandate when it did, but there’s the Inquirer’s caption with the photo: Mr Phillips himself “left his mask in his car while shopping at Roosevelt Mall.” It’s apparent that Mr Phillips didn’t take his stated position that the city should never have ended the mask mandate too seriously, or he’d have been wearing a mask, mandate or otherwise.

The mask mandate does not go into effect until next Monday, because the city wanted to give business owners, who had been living with the mandate from July of 2020 through March 1, 2022, time to “adjust” to the new mandate. Apparently the virus will simply take a week off.

Of course, with that beard, he’d never be able to meet the CDC’s facial hair guidelines for a closely fitting mask anyway.

The Inquirer article continues to note another person on the street, one who did not believe that the reinstated mandate was necessary, and that it would be widely ignored.

The pandemic has been a communications nightmare for public health officials. Conditions keep changing along with new variants and interventions like vaccines or treatments. The hope that vaccination would end the pandemic has been tamped down as time has shown vaccinated people can spread the virus asymptomatically.

At least the Inquirer has admitted what we’ve known for months now: fully vaccinated and boostered people can contract the virus anyway, and they can spread it to others even if they are completely asymptomatic. In January, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.”

If everybody’s going to contract the virus anyway, there’s no reason to impose onerous restrictions on individuals, but, hey, it’s Philly, and authoritarians gotta authoritarian!

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Irony is so ironic: Robert Reich uses his freedom of speech and of the press to attack freedom of speech and of the press

We noted on Saturday, April 9th, that Ellen Pao, a tech investor and advocate, the resigned-before-she-could-be-fired CEO of Reddit, and a cofounder and CEO of the diversity and inclusion nonprofit Project Include, and someone who uses her freedom of speech and of the press to maintain her own website, used her freedom of speech and of the press — in that case, The Washington Post’s freedom of the press — to attack other people’s freedom of speech and of the press. That irony seemed to escape her.

Now comes Robert B Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com, using his freedom of speech, and The Guardian’s freedom of the press, to tell us that if you support freedom of speech and of the press, you’re no better than Vladimir Putin! Continue reading →

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Bidenomics! Americans are 2.5% poorer than they were 12 months ago.

The inflation numbers are out, and they’re ugly!

We have previously noted the January, 7.5%, and February, 7.9%, year-over-year inflation rates, and the March figure was released this morning.

8.5%.

From The Wall Street Journal:

    U.S. Inflation Hit Four-Decade High in March

    Consumer-price index rose 8.5% from year earlier, driven by skyrocketing energy and food costs

    by Gwynn Guilford | Tuesday, April 12, 2022 | 8:45 AM EDT

    U.S. inflation rose to a new four-decade peak of 8.5% in March from the same month a year ago, driven by skyrocketing energy and food costs, supply constraints and strong consumer demand.

    The Labor Department on Tuesday said the consumer-price index—which measures what consumers pay for goods and services—in March rose at its fastest annual pace since December 1981, when it was on a recession-induced downswing after the Federal Reserve aggressively tightened monetary policy. That marks the sixth straight month for inflation above 6% and put it above February’s 7.9% annual rate–well above the Federal Reserve’s target.

    The so-called core price index, which excludes the often-volatile categories of food and energy, increased 6.5% in March from a year earlier—up from February’s 6.4% rise, and sharpest 12-month rise since August 1982.

    On a monthly basis, the CPI accelerated at a seasonally adjusted 1.2% last month, from 0.8% in February, and the fastest one-month increase since 2005.

I understand that government bureaucrats don’t like dealing with “often-volatile” data, but I have yet to understand why “the often-volatile categories of food and energy” are excluded from the core CPI; it’s not as though consumers don’t have to pay for food and energy, every single month.

How often do you buy a refrigerator or a washing machine? How often do you buy even small appliances like toasters or kitchen blenders? Not often, I’d guess, but we’ve been to Kroger a few times already this month.

After several paragraphs telling us why prices are increasing so fast, we get to this:

    “There’s an element of sticker shock when people go to fill up their tank or go to the grocery store. Lower- and middle-income households are already having to make choices about what to buy because they’re having to pay so much more for food and energy,” (Richard F. Moody, chief economist at Regions Financial Corp) said.

Which led to this:

    Solid demand for labor has shifted bargaining power toward workers, putting upward pressure on wages, which could feed into broader price gains. Annual wage growth was 6% in March, the fastest pace since records began in 1997, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s wage tracker.

    Still, wages for most are growing too slowly to offset inflation. This could push workers to demand higher wages, creating a feedback loop that puts upward pressure on inflation.

When inflation is at 8.5%, while annual wage growth was 6.0%, consumers have become automatically poorer in real terms, 2.5% poorer. But hey, this is for what 81,268,924 Americans voted!

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2222 Wallace Street

We noted, on April 5th, a rowhome for sale at 4931 Hoopes Street, in West Philadelphia. The purpose was simple: to demonstrate how bad the neighborhood in which a 13-year-old was shot happened to be. We included four pictures of this disaster listing, for documentation, because photos disappear from zillow.com once a home is sold.

The house is completely unlivable, save as a squatter could make his home there. More importantly, while a house flipper might be interested in the property, he’d quickly forget the notion, because he could never recoup the money that he’d have to spend on the place to get it up to snuff because the property values in the rest of that dilapidated neighborhood are so low. Even if a flipper could buy the place for $1.00, there’s a possibility that he couldn’t make money fixing it up and selling it.

According to the zillow listing, property taxes on this place are $875 a year. If someone fixed it up and resold it, it would be reassessed, and the taxes increase.

2222 Wallace Street; the unit for sale is on the left. Photo from listing on zillow.com. Click to enlarge.

Now, why did I bring this up? There was a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer highlighting another row home for sale, in Fairmont, at 2222 Wallace Street . . . . for $875,000.

There is already a pending offer on this home.

The photos make it look well done, and it’s a beautiful home, though I will confess that were I to have redone this home, I would not have selected the styles that the remodeler chose. Nothing personal; it’s simply not my style.

Taxes? According to the zillow.com listing,[1]I tend to use zillow.com for my real estate searches, and photos of properties for sale normally disappear from the zillow listing. However, realtor.com listings tend to hold on to the photos longer, … Continue reading property taxes on this unit were $10,881 in 2021. That works out to $906.75 a month, which is higher than any mortgage payment I’ve ever had to make on any of the houses I’ve owned. Yet, as we previously noted, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer are aghast that how safe people are in the city depends upon their skin color. While I have no idea what race the family who put in the pending offer on the Wallace Street house are, generally speaking most black and Hispanic Philadelphians can only dream of owning a home in that neighborhood.

I was wryly amused that the Inquirer ran this story, given how the Editorial Board were lamenting that the city is very racially segregated, and that an $875,000 listing is not exactly one which will draw many black or Hispanic prospective buyers. Still, article author Paul Jablow has such stories about once a week.

References

References
↑1 I tend to use zillow.com for my real estate searches, and photos of properties for sale normally disappear from the zillow listing. However, realtor.com listings tend to hold on to the photos longer, and here is the listing on that site.
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To the surprise of absolutely no one, Philly is reinstating its indoor mask mandate The question is: who will obey it?

Cheryl Bettigole, from BillyPenn.

As we predicted on Aprilth, authoritarians gotta authoritarian, and the City of Brotherly Love is reinstating its indoor mask mandate. But there’s a catch:

    Why Philly is bringing back its indoor mask mandate

    by Jason Laughlin | Monday, April 11, 2022 | 2:50 PM EDT

    By resuming the indoor mask mandate, city officials hope to stave off another surge in hospitalizations and deaths that could accompany the current case increase that appears to be caused by the BA.2 omicron subvariant.

    “If we fail to act now, knowing that every previous wave of infections has been followed by a wave of hospitalizations and a wave of deaths, it’ll be too late for many of our residents,” Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said during a briefing Monday.

Why, that almost sounds like ‘two weeks to flatten the curve!’

    Bettigole noted that 750 Philadelphians died in three months over the winter during the omicron wave.

    “We don’t know if the BA.2 variant in Philadelphia will have the kind of impact on hospitalizations and deaths that we saw with the original omicron variant this winter,” Bettigole said. “I suspect that this wave will be smaller than the one we saw in January.”

    Hospitalizations may be the key in determining how long the masks will stay on, Bettigole said.

    “This is our chance to get ahead of the pandemic, to put our masks on until we have more information on the severity of this variant.”

But there’s a catch:

    The mandate announced today won’t go into effect until April 18, city health commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said, to give businesses time to adjust. The move came amid rising COVID-19 cases in Philadelphia in recent weeks.

So, the virus will go ahead and wait a week? If it’s serious enough to infringe on people’s rights, then shouldn’t the mask mandate be reinstated immediately?

The Inquirer article was illustrated with this photo of a worker, a masked worker, removing a “Face Coverings Required” sign just last month; the city rescinded its indoor mask mandate on March 1st, just six weeks ago. After over a year and a half of the mandate, and only six weeks of it being gone, just how much adjustment is needed? Isn’t virtually every indoor business in the city already very familiar with the protocols?

In January, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” Why, I have to ask, is the city imposing restrictions on people when the supposed experts are telling us that it doesn’t matter, almost everyone is going to contract the virus?

As has been the case in the past, the people who will have to enforce the mask mandate are going to be cute college girls working as hostesses in restaurants, shop keepers and bodega owners. The hoitiest and toitiest restaurants in Center City will put up their signs and make the waitresses mask again, but the small cell phone shops and payday loan sharks and bodegas in North Philadelphia? The last thing that they’re going to want to do is piss off an unmasked customer who’s probably packing heat!