Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to ramp up sympathy for the drunk driver who killed three men

Jayana Webb mugshot, via Fox29 News.

On early Monday morning, March 21, 2022, 21-year-old Jayana Webb killed 29-year-old Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Brendan Sisca, 33-year-old State Trooper Martin Mack, and 28-year-old electrician Reyes Rivera Oliveras. No, Miss Webb didn’t pull a gun and shoot them; she used a Chevy Captiva.

    On I-95, four lives converged in a crash that left three dead and a young person facing steep consequences

    Communities are mourning the deaths of two Pennsylvania State Police troopers and a ‘happy’ man. The driver’s friends are reckoning with her alleged crimes.

    by Ryan W. Briggs , Rodrigo Torrejón, and Max Marin | Friday, March 25, 2022 | 7:52 PM EDT

The story begins with brief biographies of the slain State Troopers and Mr Oliveras, which you can see if you follow the link to the Philadelphia Inquirer original. I have omitted quoting that part here, because I don’t want to cross the line into plagiarism. It’s further down that the infuriating part begins:

    Then there was Jayana Webb, 21, a track star-turned-hair stylist, barreling toward them in a silver Chevy Captiva.

    At 12:47 a.m., Webb wrote on Twitter that she had been stopped “doing 110 in a 50″ mile-per-hour zone. While state police have neither confirmed nor denied the stop, multiple news outlets reported that Mack and Sisca stopped the woman for speeding on the interstate that night.

    Around the time of the tweet, state police said the troopers were abruptly redirected to assist a man apparently attempting to cross the highway near Lincoln Financial Field. The troopers bolted south, and found Oliveras.

In other words, Miss Webb was about to get away with going 60 MPH over the speed limit. That’s more than just speeding; that’s reckless driving. Unfortunately, reckless did not translate into wreckless.

    Webb, who prosecutors said admitted to drinking Hennessy cognac that night, proceeded south on I-95 and crashed into the three men at such a speed that the impact ripped the doors off their stopped state police SUV and sent the troopers flying over a highway divider.

The troopers and Mr Oliveras were in the left hand median; to have struck them, Miss Webb had to have been driving down the “hammer” lane, the left-hand passing lane. She got away with speeding, and she was speeding again.

    All three men were pronounced dead shortly afterward. Webb and a passenger survived, and, according to police audio recordings, attempted to walk away but were escorted back to the scene.

    The ensuing investigation shut down I-95 for nearly eight hours, as investigators attempted to piece together what happened. But days later, why Oliveras was on I-95 at 1 a.m. Monday, and how Webb came to be speeding toward him and the troopers, remain largely a mystery.

It’s not a mystery how Miss Webb came speeding toward the scene: she got away with the initial stop by sheer dumb luck, and then used that luck to prove how dumb she really is.

    Webb now faces three counts of third-degree murder and potentially decades in prison. Her friends are reckoning with how a popular and promising young entrepreneur ended up in jail without bail over the deaths of three men.

“(A) popular and promising young entrepreneur”, huh? Here the Inquirer is trying to humanize her, to make her sympathetic character, not a killer, not a murderess, but just some poor thing who happened to make a mistake.

    Image of tweet, via Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

    By the time Webb’s mugshot hit national news, she had already shown indications of reckless driving. Tweets from before the crash quickly emerged in which she bragged about drinking and driving. One January post read: “If you ask me, I’m the best drunk driver ever.”

    Some in her social circle, meanwhile, were in shock. How could Webb — a track-and-field star with no past DUIs and a hair-braiding business — be responsible for the deaths of three people?

    Some said Webb deserves what’s coming. Others, sometimes posting under the hashtag “#TeamJay,” said Webb made a terrible error, egged on by a pervasive culture of casual drunk driving.

    “What she did was not right,” said a friend, who spoke to the The Inquirer on condition of anonymity due to the high-profile nature of the case. “But at the same time we’re all human and we all make mistakes.”

Jayana Webb perp walk, via Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original, and it’s utterly disgusting. The Inquirer let us know what a wonderful person she really was, someone who just happened to get caught up in a culture of drinking, partying hearty, and driving drunk. Remember: the Inquirer also tried to make a martyr out of 12-year-old Thomas Siderio, Jr, who fired a shot at Philadelphia Police officers, and wrote about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes as though he was an innocent kid just walking to school, when he was not.

It’s really not her fault, you know, she just made a mistake.

A mistake that left three men, three men with families, three apparently hard-working men, stone cold graveyard dead.

The joy that Miss Webb apparently found in doing 110 MPH on I-95, in “tearing up Kelly Drive,” was not mirrored in her face during her perp walk. Even soft-hearted and soft-headed District Attorney Larry Krasner can’t let this slide, though he’ll probably go for sentences less than the maximum. The penalty for third-degree murder in Pennsylvania is 10 to 20 years in prison. Three consecutive 20-year sentences puts her behind bars until she’s 81 years old, but we all know that Mr Krasner won’t go for that. Watch for a lenient plea bargain from the District Attorney.

Me? I have exactly zero sympathy here. If Miss Webb is found guilty, she should get out of jail when Troopers Sisca and Mack and Mr Oliveras come back to life.

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A very minor omission in The Philadelphia Inquirer The difference between journalism and journolism

I use the term ‘journolism’ to refer to heavily biased reporting. It’s not a misspelling: my of 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. Many times biased journalism comes not from stating something false, but the omission of pertinent information, and boy, did Philadelphia Inquirer writers Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla do that here!

    Chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

    Philly had its largest one-year population decline since 1975: See charts that show the factors

    The drop in total population follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia.

    by Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla | Friday, March 25, 2022

    Philadelphia lost almost 25,000 residents in a year, according to new census data looking at a full year of the pandemic released Thursday.

    The drop in total population between July 2020 and July 2021 is the largest one-year decline since 1975 and follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia, which topped 1.6 million residents in 2020. The losses were driven primarily by the residents who moved out of the city, which exceeded the number of people moving into Philly.

    In the U.S. Census Bureau’s 12-month snapshot, Philly saw the highest disparity since 2001 between people moving in and those moving out. That difference led to a net loss of more than 28,000 residents, doubling what census numbers showed for the year prior.

There’s a lot more at the original, which you can read by following the link embedded in the headline.

The article gives some of the reasons for the city’s guesstimated population loss:

  1. A desire to flee crowded urban centers, something which will disappoint the global warming climate change activists, who see pushing more people into urban areas as a way to decrease CO2 emissions due to automobile traffic.
  2. Young adults moving back in with parents, in part due to the recession caused by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Philadelphia persisted with restrictions after many other areas had dropped them, though much of that occurred after the data for this study was collected.
  3. More affluent residents leaving to second homes; the article makes no mention as to why such people wouldn’t be counted among current population numbers if they did not sell their city homes.
  4. City dwellers leaving cosmopolitan life in exchange for green space. The COVID-19 shutdowns and lockdowns produced a greater desire for having your own backyard.
  5. Immigration into the city decreased while President Trump was in office, but the article suggests that it will increase again now that Joe Biden is in office.
  6. A significant narrowing of the gap between live births and deaths.

The article writers noted that the population estimates are not as accurate as the actual census counts, so the data are at least questionable.

But despite the “few possible factors driving the Philly departures” given, one was conspicuous in its absence: the writers never mentioned Philadelphia’s huge crime rate! 2020, the first year of the panicdemic pandemic, saw the city’s homicide numbers jump from 356 in 2019 — which was already the highest since 2007 — to 499, good for second place all time, and only one short of the record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. Then, in 2021, that record was blown to smithereens, with 562 murders.

The police were hobbled by a social and racial justice prosecutor who is more interested in finding malfeasance among the police than he is with prosecuting actual criminals, the idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protests which further alienated the population from the police, and the Inquirer itself, which, under “anti-racist” publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes and new Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar, has editorial policies very much in tune with District Attorney Larry Krasner’s philosophy of soft-peddling crime stories because they might negatively impact and stereotype the black community in the city.

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 115 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, March 24th, three more than the same date last year, meaning that Philadelphia is on a path to come very close to, and possibly exceeding, the 562 record. Fortunately, the latest man killed was a criminal attempting to rob a Dollar General store, shot dead by the store manager after the would-be robber made threatening moves with what turned out to be a toy gun in his jacket pocket.

As Robert Stacy McCain would say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

    In other gun violence Thursday night, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the head and right side of his body around 9:10 p.m. in the city’s Wissinoming section, police said.

    The shooting occurred in the area of Mulberry and Devereaux Streets. The teen was taken by police to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital. He was reported in extremely critical condition.

    Police received preliminary information that two males suspected in the shooting also attempted a gunpoint robbery a short time earlier in Mayfair.

Philadelphians see stories like this every day, perhaps not in the Inquirer, but the local television stations carry the stories. In a city in which the quality of life is spiraling downward, in which the voters have just re-elected a softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney, in which Dollar General store managers feel the need to carry a firearm to protect his employees and himself because, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, how is it that three well-educated and well-paid Inquirer reporters can simply omit the fact that Philadelphia is wracked with crime and violence as one possible reason that people are moving away?

Well, perhaps I’m being unfair in blaming the three reporters; it’s entirely possible that they did include it, but Editor Gabriel Escobar or one of his minions blue penciled it.[1]Yes, I know: I’m showing my age! But, whoever is responsible is showing the journolism of the Inquirer, while Mr Escobar and Miss Hughes and the Lenfest Institute which owns the paper scratch their heads, wondering why the newspaper is losing readers.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I know: I’m showing my age!
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Some truths just don’t fit Teh Narrative For some on the left, when the truth doesn't fit their political beliefs, they just deny the truth!

Even Bruce Jenner, the winner of the men’s Decathalon in the 1976 Olympics, but is now so f(ornicated) up in the head that he thinks he’s a woman agrees: Will Thomas, the ‘transgender’ swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team who now calls himself ‘Lia,’ is not the real winner of the 500-yard NCAA women’s freestyle championship:

For the past several months, she has been a vocal opponent of Thomas competing against women.

“[Lia Thomas] is also not good for women’s sports,” Jenner told Fox News in January. “It’s unfortunate that this is happening. I don’t know why she’s doing it. She knows when she’s swimming she’s beating the competition by two laps. She was born as a biological boy. She was raised as a biological boy. Her cardiovascular system is bigger. Her respiratory system is bigger.

“Her hands are bigger. She can swim faster. That’s a known. All of this is woke world that we’re living in right now is not working. I feel sorry for the other athletes that are out there, especially at Penn or anyone she’s competing against, because in the woke world you have to say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is great.’ No it’s not.”

Mr Jenner is certainly right about one thing: it is the #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 who are driving this.

Lia Thomas’ NCAA championship performance gives women sports a crucial opportunity

Anyone who cares about the advancement of sports, and women’s sports in particular, should celebrate her win.

By Cheryl Cooky, Purdue University professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies | March 21, 2022 | 3:31 PM EDT

Just Dr Cooky’s title, professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, ought to tell you that she’s a bit kookie! What professions are there for “women’s, gender and sexuality studies” majors other than university professors?

On Saturday, University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas placed last in the 100-yard freestyle swim during the NCAA championships, ending her career in collegiate swimming. A last-place showing at an NCAA swim meet, even a championship one, would not typically garner national headlines. Yet, Thomas has been at the center of controversy regarding her eligibility to compete in women’s events.

After Mr Thomas’ many victories in women’s swimming, who here believes that he didn’t deliberately throw the 100-yard freestyle race, having already won his trophy in the 500, just to try to tamp down criticism that he was proving he isn’t really a woman by dominating these races? He did, after all, win admission to the University of Pennsylvania, a private, Ivy League school which does not award scholarships based on athletic merit. He can’t be stupid; he knows the criticism which has followed his participation on the women’s swim team.

We have previously noted Mr Thomas times in the Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio. In the 500-yard freestyle final, Mr Thomas defeated his teammate, Anna Sofia Kalandaze, who finished second, 4:34.06 to 4:48.99, a 14.93 second margin; Miss Kalandaze defeated the seventh-place finisher by 7.42 seconds, just half of the time she was behind Mr Thomas.

Mr Thomas time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500 yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Miss Kalandaze’s second-place time. His year of taking testosterone suppressants — he has not yet been castrated undergone ‘sexual reassignment surgery — have obviously not done what the NCAA believe it would.

Are we supposed to believe that more than a year of testosterone suppression ‘therapy’ left him reasonably competitive with men’s swimming times just four months ago, but three more months radically reduced his performance, or is it more reasonable to think that he deliberately shaded his times for political reasons?

This controversy came to an apex last week at the NCAA championships when she became the first openly trans athlete to win a Division I championship in any sport. For anyone who cares about the advancement of sports, and women’s sports in particular, her win should be celebrated.

Women’s sports are situated at a paradoxical intersection wherein sex segregation is upheld through claims of biological difference, yet equality is prefaced on being treated the same and given the same opportunities as men. If we are to change this, we need to ask some important questions. How does one advocate for equitable treatment while also adhering to the notion of biological difference? If separate is not equal in the case of schools, bathrooms, restaurants or other social institutions, can separate ever truly be equal in the case of sports? Would gender-based discrimination in sports be eradicated if sports were gender-integrated?

In this, Dr Cooky assumes that males and females are physically equal, even though they are physically different.[2]I wonder: if it is discrimination to differentiate between men and women in sports, would that mean that if two men males wanted to compete together in pairs figure skating or ice dancing, would that … Continue reading Sexual dimorphism is a real thing:

Sexual dimorphism is the systematic difference in form between individuals of different sex in the same species.

For example, in some species, including many mammals, the male is larger than the female. In others, such as some spiders, the female is larger than the male. Other sex-specific differences include color (most birds), song in birds, size or presence of parts of the body used in struggles for dominance, such as horns, antlers, and tusks; size of the eyes (e.g., in the case of bees); possession of stings (various kinds of bees), and different thresholds for certain behaviors (aggression, infant care, etc.).

Sexual dimorphism in humans is the subject of much controversy. Human male and female appearances are perceived as different, although Homo sapiens has a low level of sexual dimorphism compared with many other species. The similarity in the sizes of male and female human beings is a good example of how nature often does not make clear divisions. To give an accurate picture of male and female size differences one would need to show how many individuals there are in each size category. There is a considerable overlap.

For example, the body masses of both male and female humans are approximately normally distributed. In the United States, the mean mass of an adult male is 78.5 kg, while the adult female mean is 62.0 kg. However the standard deviation of male body mass is 12.6 kg, so 10% of adult males are actually lighter than the female average.

These differences have real, physical consequences, with human males being physically taller, stronger, faster and quicker than human females on average. That some women are taller than some men is certainly the case, but it is very much outside the norm. My sisters, for example, with the same father and same mother, are eight and ten inches shorter than me, and far lighter. Dr Cooky can hold the view that men and women are equal, if she chooses, as women do have certain advantages: they tend to live longer, and have lower rates of cardiac disease. Women and men can be equally intelligent, though they tend to choose different academic pursuits.

But athletics, despite the wide variety of sports, is a narrow pursuit, and in athletics, the physical differences are important. Certain sports, such as curling, so not depend on size and speed, but on perception and precision, and men and women can compete on an equal basis. My alma mater, the University of Kentucky, just won their second consecutive NCAA Rifle championship, and rifle teams are sexually integrated.

But sports which depend on physical strength, speed and endurance? No, women and men simply cannot compete on the same level. To Dr Cooky, this is an assault on the concept of equality, but if it is, then truth is an assault on equality.

Those who oppose the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports argue that trans women have an unfair competitive advantage and that as a result they will take away opportunities from cisgender athletes. According to the NCAA, these assumptions are not well founded. Moreover, there is a lack of scientific evidence that conclusively demonstrates a direct link between testosterone and athletic performance.

Why, then, do athletes who are using ‘performance-enhancing’ drugs use testosterone as one of those drugs?

Athletic performance is influenced by a number of factors, including hormones, but also other things like coaching and training, psychological makeup of an athlete, access to resources and equipment, among others. Attempts to ban or limit the participation of trans athletes are not based on science. Instead, they are rooted in societal and cultural definitions of what constitutes gender or what defines a woman. Such questions matter because sports are organized based on the belief of natural differences between men and women, and they are sex-segregated as a result. Yet, this ultimately leads to the discrimination of athletes like Thomas.

Here Dr Cooky concedes that the “psychological makeup of an athlete” makes a difference, and in Mr Thomas case, that “psychological makeup” has been dominant: he went from being ranked 562nd among male swimmers, to first among female swimmers. He is 6’3″ tall, physically massive, and completed puberty as a male.

In the end, Dr Cooky is worried that acknowledging the physical differences between men and women, and that those physical differences have a significant impact on athletics, somehow acknowledges male superiority, something she simply cannot tolerate politically. And thus she, like so many others on the left, are having to take utterly idiotic positions, positions which deny simple truths, because some truths just do not fit within their political paradigm.

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 I wonder: if it is discrimination to differentiate between men and women in sports, would that mean that if two men males wanted to compete together in pairs figure skating or ice dancing, would that have to be allowed?
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15-year-old arrested in Philly for shooting two teenaged girls Yazid West is expected to face charges for two other shootings, all over a 13-day span

There are times I just can’t figure out The Philadelphia Inquirer. Yes, the alleged offender, if he is guilty, is a really bad guy, and someone who needs to be off the streets forever. But, just as they did in the killing of Samuel Collington, the Inquirer publicly identified an arrested juvenile suspect.

    A 15-year-old arrested this weekend is a suspect in three shootings this month, Philly police say

    Yazid West has been charged with shooting two teen girls near Temple University. Capt. John Walker said West is also expected to face charges in two other incidents.

    by Chris Palmer | Monday, March 21, 2022

    A 15-year-old boy arrested by Philadelphia Police this weekend is a suspect in three shootings over the past three weeks, authorities said Monday.

    Yazid West was being held on $2 million bail after police say he shot two teenage girls, ages 16 and 17, in a car near Temple University on Friday night. Capt. John Walker said West and his friends had a chance encounter with the girls, who were in a Nissan Altima, around 10 p.m. on the 1400 block of Cecil B. Moore Avenue, and when one of the girls deployed pepper spray out of the car’s window, West responded by firing eight shots at them.

    One of the victims was struck in the leg, police said, the other in the back. Both were taken to Temple University Hospital in stable condition.

    West and several other teens with him, meanwhile, ran away, but Walker said responding officers pursued the group and arrested West about a mile from the crime scene. Surveillance video of the incident shows West committing the shooting, Walker said. He faces charges including attempted murder, aggravated assault, and weapons violations.

There’s more at the original.

It’s important to note: Mr West can be charged as an adult, despite his age, and he should be.

The Inquirer noted that young Mr West was a suspect in two other shootings, on March 5th and 15th. Three shootings, in a span of 13 days — “over the past three weeks,” as Inquirer reporter Chris Palmer put it, was unnecessarily vague — means that Mr West is, allegedly, an extremely volatile and dangerous young man who cannot be trusted to be out on the streets.

  • 1500 block North Gratz Street. Click to enlarge.

    The March 5th incident has Mr West shooting a 14-year-old near Broad Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue, in retaliation for the shooting of a shooting the previous evening, the victim being one of Mr West’s friends. The shooting was captured on surveillance tape.
  • The March 15th incident alleges that Mr West shot into a house in the 1500 block of North Gratz Street, in which the mother had forbidden her son to associate with Mr West and his friends.

North Gratz Street isn’t even a depressed neighborhood. The 1500 block consists of relatively new, practically identical duplexes, and Zillow lists nearby 1729 North Gratz, an older row house, as being for sale listed at $449,999, 1817 North Gratz for $309,000, 1811 West Oxford Street, on the corner of the 1600 block of North Gratz, for $369,000, and 1526 North Gratz, though not on the market, was assessed at $253,000 in 2021.

It would be nice if Inquirer reporters took the time that I have to investigate the neighborhood, to put some perspective on the crimes. The research for the above paragraph took me a whopping ten minutes!

I am reminded of 12-year-old gun-toting Thomas Siderio, Jr, whom the Inquirer is trying to turn into some kind of martyr, even though he (allegedly) shot at Philadelphia Police officers. We know that young Mr Siderio got little parental supervision: his father has been behind bars for the last three years, and that wasn’t his first felony conviction, while his mother also has a criminal record, with two drug cases and other arrests for theft, forgery, contempt of court, and receiving stolen property. The son as primarily lived with a grandmother, but also lived with a great-aunt.

So, will we learn about the parents of young Mr West? He was, again allegedly, a gang-banger wannabe, and had a bad enough reputation that at least one mother forbade her son to associate with him. Where did Mr West live, and who were the adults who were supposed to be supervising him?

But one thing we do know, and that’s the City of Brotherly Love has a real cultural problem, a problem in which adolescents, in which 12 and 14 and 15-year-olds are out on the streets, armed, shooting at people, and their parents or grandparents or guardians are either so clueless that they don’t know about it, or so disinterested that they just don’t care.

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So, who failed here? It seems that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson isn't the only one being soft on child porn sentences

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record of sentencing child pornography case offenders to below the minimum in federal sentencing guidelines looks like something that even Joe Biden wouldn’t have been stupid enough to ignore before nominating her to the Supreme Court, if he knew about it, so the obvious question becomes: who in the Administration failed to discover this during the vetting process?

That, at least, was what I thought when I first heard about this pattern of sentencing. Then I read this article, and it isn’t pretty:

Fact check: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson child porn sentences ‘pretty mainstream’

Monday, March 21, 2022 | 9:02 PM EDT

Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson open this week amid a flurry of misleading allegations by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley that the nominee has a “long record” of letting child porn offenders “off the hook” during sentencing.

“In every single child porn case for which we can find records, Judge Jackson deviated from the federal sentencing guidelines in favor of child porn offenders,” Hawley tweeted Thursday, highlighting nine cases from her time as a federal District Court judge.

How, I have to ask, are Senator Hawley’s “allegations” that Judge Jackson “has a ‘long record’ of letting child porn offenders ‘off the hook’ during sentencing” “misleading”? Did she, or didn’t she impose more lenient sentences on convicted child porn offenders?

While court records show that Jackson did impose lighter sentences than federal guidelines suggested, Hawley’s insinuation neglects critical context, including the fact that the senator himself has voted to confirm at least three federal judges who also engaged in the same practice.

Oh, so she did do what the distinguished gentleman from Missouri said that she did.

Federal appeals court Judges Joseph Bianco of the Second Circuit and Andrew Brasher of the Eleventh Circuit, both Trump appointees, had each previously sentenced defendants convicted of possessing child pornography to prison terms well below federal guidelines at the time they were confirmed with Hawley’s support, an ABC review of court records found.

Asked about the votes Monday by ABC News, Sen. Hawley made clear he has never supported a high court nominee with a similar record in child porn sentencing cases. “Not for this court I haven’t, not for the U.S. Supreme Court,” Hawley told ABC’s Rachel Scott when asked whether his criticism of Judge Jackson presented a double standard.

Hawley said he would not consider a below-guidelines child porn sentence “acceptable” from a nominee and suggested that he was not aware of the times Judges Bianco and Brasher and a third judge, Carl Nichols of the D.C. District Court, had rendered such judgments.

Apparently ‘what aboutism’ is the defense being used to support Judge Jackson on this. If Senator Hawley knew about such in the record of previous nominees for whom he voted, then shame on him, but it is obvious that nominees for lower courts don’t receive the same type of delving into their records that Supreme Court nominees do.

Skipping down a few paragraphs, we come to this:

“If and when we properly contextualize Judge Jackson’s sentencing record in federal child porn cases, it looks pretty mainstream,” wrote Doug Berman, a leading expert on sentencing law and policy at The Ohio State University School of Law.

“Federal judges nationwide typically sentence below the [child porn] guideline in roughly 2 out of 3 cases,” Berman noted on his blog, and “when deciding to go below the [child porn] guideline, typically impose sentences around 54 months below the calculated guideline minimum.”

Professor Berman continued to note that below-range sentences are frequently requested by prosecutors, including some on the cases before Judge Jackson, and that many judges determine that the guidelines are “unduly harsh,” especially when it comes to “first-time offenders.”

And that is the problem!

Let me be clear here: child pornography offenders, whether first-time or otherwise, are sick bastards who need to be locked up for as long as the law allows. Forget the purely advisory sentencing guidelines, just throw them in jail, and hide the key for as long as it can be hidden. Under 18 USC §2252A, a person who is convicted of knowingly possessing child pornography can be sentenced up to 10 years in prison or up to 20 years in prison if the minor depicted in the image is under the age of twelve. A person who is convicted of distributing or receiving child pornography faces a 5 to 20 year prison sentence, and prior convictions can lead to longer sentences.

Ten years, twenty years, is not too harsh a sentence for these offenses; such sentences are, in fact, too lenient. Judges should have multiple count conviction sentences run consecutively, not concurrently.

Of course, read the wording here: when prosecutors recommend specific sentences, it almost always means that this is part of a plea bargain arrangement. In child pornography cases, either the defendant was caught to the child porn, or he wasn’t. Witnesses aren’t required, save for procedural and chain-of-custody, simply the evidence. If the evidence is solid, have the defendant either plead to the maximum, or go to trial. We have previously noted how, locally, Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn has allowed lenient plea bargain arrangements even in murder cases, and while that’s too small a sample, the truth is that it happens everywhere in this country.

Prosecutors love plea bargains! Guaranteed convictions make them look good, and reduce the amount of work they have to do, but we need to hold prosecutors, judges, and probation and parole officials accountable, accountable for the proper punishment of criminals and for the safety of the public.

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Fear is the career killer

A libertarian styling herself Freckled Liberty on Twitter has been adamantly opposed to taking the COVID-19 vaccine, and mocking, daily, Joe Biden’s statement, “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated — for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.” She has been counting down, every day, ‘day 88 of unmasked and unvaxxed “winter of severe illness and death’: still not vaxxed, still not masked, still not ill, still not dead. 💃🏼”

Now it seems that her friends and family won’t attend her wedding ceremony, because they’re just too scared. If her friends and family are vaccinated, and can obviously choose to wear N95 masks if they feel the need, there’s just no need to be fearful, but after almost two years of fear messaging, it seems that a lot of people have internalized it. From The New York Times:

    As Offices Open and Mask Mandates Drop, Some Anxieties Set In

    Using local guidelines, many companies are loosening Covid safety rules, leaving workers to navigate masking and social distancing on their own.

    By Emma Goldberg and Lananh Nguyen | Friday, March 18, 2022

    Employers are embracing a workplace atmosphere reminiscent of prepandemic times — elevators jammed, snack tables brimming, face coverings optional — even as a new subvariant of the Omicron coronavirus spurs concerns about health and safety. Across the country, office occupancy has hit a pandemic high, 40 percent, reached just once before in early December, at the same time that indoor mask mandates drop.

    Also see: William Teach: NY Times Is Super Excited By Things We’ll Keep In Post Pandemic Life

    After several false starts in calling workers back, company leaders now seem eager to press forward. A flurry of return-to-office plans have rolled out in recent weeks, with businesses including American Express, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft calling some workers back to their desks. Many of those companies followed state and local governments in easing Covid-19 restrictions, arguing that ending mask mandates could make workplaces more pleasant. But some workers, especially those with compromised immunity or unvaccinated children, feel uncomfortable with the rush back to open floor plans.

    “Masks have created a real psychological barrier to getting back to office culture,” said Kathryn Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City, a business group. “As long as things are going in a positive direction with Covid, I think the relaxation of mandates will work for the vast majority of people. As soon as we see a reversal, I think we’ve got trouble.”

    The Partnership’s January survey of New York City employers found that 38 percent expected to have more than half of their workers back in the office on an average weekday by late March. As employees come back, they’re facing a patchwork of Covid safety protocols. Just one-quarter of U.S. workers are covered by vaccine mandates in the workplace, according to Gallup data from last month.

    This has left many workers to navigate masking on their own, making Covid safety measures a matter of office etiquette rather than protocol. Some have negotiated new remote work arrangements with their bosses as rules have eased, or even left their companies in search of jobs at workplaces that made them feel safer.

It would seem obvious: if a worker is afraid that he will contract the virus, he can voluntarily get vaccinated, as most people are, for free, and he can continue to wear a face mask, even an N-95 mask.

That palpable fear seems almost measurable, given that 38% of NYC employers anticipate having more than half of their office workers at heir desks by the end of March, when that number should be 100% anticipate having 100% of their workers back. If, as the Times stated, just a quarter of workers were covered by vaccine mandates on their jobs, such still doesn’t mean that most workers aren’t vaccinated. From USA Facts:

  • In New York (state), 17,370,136 people or 89% of the state has received at least one dose.
  • Overall, 14,759,477 people or 76% of New York’s population are considered fully vaccinated.
  • Additionally, 6,556,874 people or 34% of New York’s population have received a booster dose.

From the more sensible New York Post:

    When it comes to masking, New Yorkers still choose fear over facts

    By Heather Mac Donald | Saturday, March 19, 2022 | 8:08 AM EDT | Updated: Sunday, March 20, 2022 | 2:45 AM EDT

    Just when you thought the abyss between red-state and blue-state sensibilities could not grow wider comes post-pandemic America to reveal further cleavage.

    Residents of my 34-story Manhattan apartment building are still wearing masks in the elevators, halls and lobby, even though the building’s internally imposed mask mandate has been lifted. At least half of my neighbors in Yorkville wear masks outdoors, even though Gov. Hochul suspended the indoor mask mandate for New York City weeks ago.

    It has always been the case, no matter the rate of indoor transmission, that inhaling a large enough viral dose outdoors to become infected is almost impossible. One might have imagined that even progressives would be ready to say: “Enough of this! We’ll take our chances. Let’s get back to normal life!” But it turns out that many people have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for fear and risk aversion, especially when linked to control.

    COVID metrics are, from a blue-state perspective, depressingly low when even the New York Times has given up on frontpage crisis-mongering. For weeks, the Times has buried its COVID stories deep in the paper, if it prints them at all, because there is only good news to report. Currently, an average of five people per day are hospitalized with or from COVID in New York City, out of a pre-pandemic population of 8.5 million. That is essentially zero risk. Deaths with or from COVID are too negligible to mention.

We already know that:

  • Vaccination does not prevent a person from contracting or spreading the virus;
  • Vaccination does seem to lessen the severity of the disease if one does contract the virus; and
  • The cloth masks that most people wear do not prevent the transmission of the virus.

It would appear that New Yorkers have learned the first lesson, but not the second or third.

But at some point there will be some obvious results: workers who cower in fear, whether in a masked-up cubicle in the office, or working remotely over Zoom and the internet, are going to get left behind. They will miss out on ‘networking,’ they will miss out on sales and new clients, and they will miss out on promotions. What office business would promote a worker who won’t come in to the office? What business would promote a masked-up employee over one who isn’t hiding his face? What office business can return to normal if its employees refuse to return to normalcy?

Fear, Frank Herbert wrote, is the mind killer, but in business, fear is the career killer.

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The New York Times tells us that “America Has a Free Speech Problem”, without noting that they are part of the problem

In 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The Times was all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.

So, the Times is all for Freedom of Speech and of the Press, right? Friday saw this from the Editorial Board:

    America Has a Free Speech Problem

    by The Editorial Board | Friday, March 18, 2022

    For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

    This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.

    How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.

    Many Americans are understandably confused, then, about what they can say and where they can say it. People should be able to put forward viewpoints, ask questions and make mistakes and take unpopular but good-faith positions on issues that society is still working through — all without fearing cancellation.

There’s a lot more from the original, but either the Editorial Board have a very short memory, or they are hypocrites.

    Free Speech Is Killing Us

    Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

    By Andrew Marantz[1]Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the … Continue reading | October 4, 2019 | 6:01 AM EDT

    There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit — along with the consumers obsessed with these products, and the investors who stood to profit from them — tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress.

    No one believes that anymore. Not after the social-media-fueled campaigns of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump; not after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va.; not after the massacres in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a Walmart in a majority-Hispanic part of El Paso. The Christchurch shooter, like so many of his ilk, had spent years on social media trying to advance the cause of white power. But these posts, he eventually decided, were not enough; now it was “time to make a real life effort post.” He murdered 52 people.

That the editors of the Times considered this an important article is demonstrated by the title graphic, a bit more ornate than is typical. It was spread full sized across the screen, taking up both the width and depth of my fairly large-sized monitor. This was a can’t-not-notice display, something the editors use to grab your attention.

A couple more paragraphs down, and Mr Marantz said this:

    The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?

Mr Marantz’ article continued with several suggestions, which boiled down to one thing: the government should set up some sort of approved publication space to tell us the truth. What a great idea!

Mr Marantz’s OpEd piece followed, eleven months after, Chad Malloy’s[2]Chad Malloy is a male who believes that he is really a woman, and goes by the made-up name of ‘Parker Malloy.’ article claiming that a restriction on speech actually promotes freedom of speech:

    How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech

    Trans people are less likely to speak up if they know they’re going to be constantly told they don’t exist.

    by Parker Malloy[3]While The First Street Journal’s Stylebook states that the pronouns and name appropriate to a person’s sex at birth are to be used, we do not change direct quotes, and in The New York … Continue reading | November 29, 2018

    In September, Twitter announced changes to its “hateful conduct” policy, violations of which can get users temporarily or permanently barred from the site. The updates, an entry on Twitter’s blog explained, would expand its existing rules “to include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.” A little more than a month later, the company quietly rolled out the update, expanding the conduct page from 374 to 1,226 words, which went largely unnoticed until this past week.

    While much of the basic framework stayed the same, the latest version leaves much less up for interpretation. Its ban on “repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone” was expanded to read: “We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

    The final sentence, paired with the fact that the site appeared poised to actually enforce its rules, sent a rumble through certain vocal corners of the internet. To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur. But to many on the right, it reeked of censorship and “political correctness.”

    Twitter is already putting the policy into effect. Last week, it booted Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist who runs the website Feminist Current. Ms. Murphy hasn’t exactly supported trans people — especially trans women. She regularly calls trans women “he” and “him,” as she did referring to the journalist and trans woman Shon Faye in a 2017 article. In the run-up to her suspension, Ms. Murphy tweeted that “men aren’t women.” While this is a seeming innocuous phrase when considered without context, the “men” she was referring to were trans women.

There’s more at the original.

The policy to which Mr Malloy referred would apply to this site as well, as we do not lie here: males are males and females are females, and the sexes simply cannot be changed.

That, however, is not my point in this article. My point is that the Times very deliberately published OpEd pieces calling freedom of speech sometimes harmful — sometimes meaning when conservative opinions are expressed — and celebrating the silencing of some speech. Were I to submit this article to the Times, or any other organ of the credentialed media, for publication, it would be disallowed because I referred to Mr Malloy as Mr Malloy, while the stylebooks used by almost all organs of the credentialed media insist on using the honorifics, pronouns and names preferred by the ‘transgendered’ rather than doing something really radical and telling the truth.

Back to the editorial first cited:

    However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists and feel its burden. In a new national poll commissioned by Times Opinion and Siena College, only 34 percent of Americans said they believed that all Americans enjoyed freedom of speech completely. The poll found that 84 percent of adults said it is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.

    This poll and other recent surveys from the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation reveal a crisis of confidence around one of America’s most basic values. Freedom of speech and expression is vital to human beings’ search for truth and knowledge about our world. A society that values freedom of speech can benefit from the full diversity of its people and their ideas. At the individual level, human beings cannot flourish without the confidence to take risks, pursue ideas and express thoughts that others might reject.

    Most important, freedom of speech is the bedrock of democratic self-government. If people feel free to express their views in their communities, the democratic process can respond to and resolve competing ideas. Ideas that go unchallenged by opposing views risk becoming weak and brittle rather than being strengthened by tough scrutiny. When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence.

Also see: William Teach: NY Times Is Suddenly Very Concerned Over Loss Of Free Speech

Really? Tell me more, please! As we previously noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in one of its first stories on Will Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania swimmer who now claims to be female, calls himself “Lia,’ and swims for Penn’s women’s team, deleted all of the comments from readers noting that Mr Thomas is male, not female, documenting some of those deleted comments with screen captures. The Inquirer had previously closed comments on most articles but left them open on sports stories, and Mr Thomas’ swimming victories are sports stories.

Oops! I guess that didn’t work for them!

The Times’ Editorial Board can tell us all they want how they support freedom of speech and of the press, but the truth is that they support their freedom of speech and their freedom of the press. Editors and publishers in general absolutely hate the fact that the rise of the internet took away their ‘gatekeeping’ function, and now anybody can publish whatever he wishes, without having to first be approved by someone else.

References

References
↑1 Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”
↑2 Chad Malloy is a male who believes that he is really a woman, and goes by the made-up name of ‘Parker Malloy.’
↑3 While The First Street Journal’s Stylebook states that the pronouns and name appropriate to a person’s sex at birth are to be used, we do not change direct quotes, and in The New York Times’ original Mr Malloy is referred to by his false name.
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Show me the money!

Jerry Maguire was a 1996 film starring Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding, Jr, which made memorable the phrase, “Show me the money!” Now Moderna is shouting the same thing.

    Moderna seeks FDA authorization for 4th dose of COVID-19 shot

    Drugmaker Moderna has asked the Food and Drug Administration to authorize a fourth shot of its COVID-19 vaccine as a booster dose for all adults.

    by Zeke Miller, The Associated Press | Friday, March 18, 2022 | 8:29 AM EDT

    WASHINGTON — Drugmaker Moderna asked the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday to authorize a fourth shot of its COVID-19 vaccine as a booster dose for all adults.

    The request is broader than rival pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s request earlier this week for the regulator to approve a booster shot for all seniors.

    In a press release, the company said its request for approval for all adults was made “to provide flexibility” to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and medical providers to determine the “appropriate use” of a second booster dose of the mRNA vaccine, “including for those at higher risk of COVID-19 due to age or comorbidities.”

    U.S. officials have been laying the groundwork to deliver additional booster doses to shore up the vaccines’ protection against serious disease and death from COVID-19. The White House has been sounding the alarm that it needs Congress to “urgently” approve more funding for the federal government to secure more doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, either for additional booster shots or variant-specific immunizations.

And there you have it: those ‘free’ COVID-19 vaccine shots were all paid for by someone, and, as we all know, it was the federal government. The vaccine manufacturers, naturally, want in on the government’s distribution of electrons distributed from government accounts cash, and Moderna one-upped Pfizer. But while Moderna went straight to the boosters for everyone in their application, Pfizer’s Chief Executive Officer laid the groundwork for his company to do the same:

    Pfizer’s CEO says a fourth COVID-19 vaccine dose is probably necessary for everyone

    The Pfizer executive said a fourth dose would provide long-term protection. But not all public health experts agree it’s necessary for everyone.

    by Jason Laughlin | Monday, March 14, 2022

    Another round of shots will be needed to provide more long-lasting protection against COVID-19, vaccine-maker Pfizer’s chief executive said in a weekend interview, but opinions vary on who really needs that fourth dose.

    “Right now, the way that we have seen, it is necessary, a fourth booster,” said Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s CEO, in an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, explaining that another dose could protect against future variants and waning immunity, which is why people who are fully vaccinated and boosted have been getting mild cases of COVID.

In other words, “Show me the money!”

    Some health experts have questioned whether it is realistic or necessary to have a vaccine that prevents even mild illness — when from the start the main goal of the vaccine has been to prevent serious cases and hospitalizations.

    Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a member of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, has said people who have had the existing vaccine series likely won’t have to worry about serious illness and death from COVID for years, even if they skip additional shots. Preventing serious illness and death should be the goal of the country’s vaccination program, he said, not staving off COVID entirely.

It’s simple: if the CEOs can keep “staving off COVID entirely” as the goal, it will mean more revenue for their company. More, it’s risk-free money! 42 U.S. Code § 300aa–22 states that “No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings.” The law continues to require that the vaccines covered must have proper paperwork — meaning: documents warning patients that side effects can occur — and that manufacturers must use proper care of the production cycle to remain immune, or, in other words, do not deviate from proper procedures.

What vaccine producer wouldn’t love this?

Then there’s the third problem for the vaccine producers:

    Millions still haven’t gotten COVID shots. What does that mean for the future of the vaccination effort?

    The slowdown raises questions about how long resources should be spent on outreach and whether the strategies of the last year are still effective in persuading the unvaccinated.

    by Justine McDaniel and Erin McCarthy | Friday, March 18, 2022

    It’s 2 p.m. on a Wednesday in Chester, and nurses Susan Pollock and Carol Von Colln are inside a Delaware County vaccine clinic doing what they spend a lot of time doing these days: waiting.

    Last spring, Americans were in a frenzied rush to get the COVID-19 vaccine; this spring, business has slowed to a crawl. Now, whenever someone walks in, “we’re ready to throw a party,” Von Colln said.

    That day, they vaccinated eight people in six hours.

    It’s a scene playing out across the region and the United States as the number of shots being given each day is at an all-time low — even though a third of Americans are still unvaccinated.

It was the subtitle that got to me, “The slowdown raises questions about how long resources should be spent on outreach and whether the strategies of the last year are still effective in persuading the unvaccinated.” “Persuading the unvaccinated”? No, the “strategies of the last year” were primarily to try to force people to take the vaccines, by threatening them with the loss of their jobs if they declined vaccinations, and imposing requirements for people to show their vaccination records to enter some public spaces. President Biden said, “The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do.” Of course, the mask mandates that existed took no distinction between those who were vaccinated and those who were not.

Full disclosure: I have been vaccinated myself, a choice I took freely, and I believe that others should take the same decision I did. While no vaccine is 100% without risk, the benefits of being vaccinated outweigh the risks. But I respect the right, and yes, “right” is precisely the word I mean to use, of other people to choose whether or not to take the vaccine. That’s a right that the left, and neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, don’t seem to want you to have.

Remember: the left are pro-choice on exactly one thing!

There’s a lot more at the original, but it shows why the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna want another booster: almost all of those who have thus far chosen not to get vaccinated are unlikely to change their minds, so more money from the government to those producers depends upon getting those who have taken three shots so far to get a fourth.

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A Philadelphia crook is laying on a slab in the morgue Updated! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

As we noted yesterday, Philadelphians have been applying for concealed carry permits in droves, due to the city being unable to protect them from the bad guys. Now, another Philadelphian has protected his property:

    West Philadelphia resident fatally shoots trespasser who tried breaking into car

    A West Philadelphia resident on Wednesday night shot and killed a trespasser who had thrown a brick through the resident’s car

    by Rodrigo Torrejón | St Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2022 | 7:49 AM EDT

    A West Philadelphia resident on Wednesday night shot and killed a trespasser who had thrown a brick through the resident’s car, according to reports.

    Shortly after 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, police responded to a call of gunshots on the 4400 block of Fairmount Avenue, 6ABC reported. When officers arrived, they found a 23-year-old man lying on the 700 block of 44th Street, with multiple gunshot wounds.

    The man, whose name was not released, was taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead soon after.

    Police said that the 23-year-old had scaled a fence and trespassed onto the Fairmount Avenue property, into an enclosed rear yard and threw a brick into the driver side window of a Alfa Romeo SUV, 6ABC reported. After hearing the noise, the 49-year-old homeowner, whose name was also not released, came out to confront the man and shot at least three times.

The legal punishment for vandalism is not death; the legal punishment for stealing a car is not death. But sometimes the legal punishment for stupidity is death! When you break into someone’s property — and climbing a fence into someone’s “enclosed rear yard” definitely constitutes breaking into someone’s property — bad things can happen to you. As Robert Stacy McCain would put it, ‘play stupid games, win stupid prizes.’

From 6ABC News:

    Before receiving word of gunshots, (Chief Inspector Scott) Small said police got several calls about a man wearing a mask trespassing on the rear or properties in the area and one call about a man breaking into a vehicle.

    “We believe these calls are related to the shooting,” Small said.

And the money line:

    The 23-year-old is known by police and his last known address is two blocks from where he was shot, Small said.

“Is known by police,” huh? That’s the euphemism for “he was a frequent crook we’ve arrested several times.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Crazy people are dangerous.

This leads to the obvious question: why wasn’t the 23-year-old frequent flyer already behind bars? Did the police not have enough evidence to get him convicted of something in their previous encounters with him? Did the cops let the guy go with just a warning a couple of times? Did Larry Krasner, who has been Philadelphia’s District Attorney since the deceased was 19 years old, decline to prosecute, or offer the criminal lenient plea bargains which kept him from being locked up for a long sentence, or kept him out of jail completely? There’s some obvious speculation here, but one thing is certain: Philadelphia’s criminal justice system did this guy no favors! Had he been behind bars last night, he wouldn’t have been happy, but he’d at least have been able to look forward to getting out of jail sometime, and getting on with his life.

Instead, he’s lying on a slab in the morgue right now.

I’ve said it before: former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani showed us the way. When he was in charge, New York City strictly enforced the law against the entry-level crooks, giving them an early look at the inside of the penitentiary, giving them early incentive to straighten up and fly right before they got themselves into really serious trouble. It didn’t always work: some of them continued with a life of crime after every stint behind bars, but at least while they were locked up, they weren’t out on the streets preying on innocent civilians.

Well, this guy won’t be breaking into people’s back yards, won’t be smashing car windows, and won’t be stealing laptops or whatever else was left in those cars. Instead, he’ll be pushing up daisies somewhere. This is what “social justice” and “racial justice” law enforcement gets us: criminals out on the streets, and some criminals in early graves.

Updated: Friday, March 18, 2022:

The Inquirer story has been updated to note that the deceased is named Nijer James-Murphy, and that the unnamed homeowner is a good guy:

    While the District Attorney’s Office will determine if the shooting is a justifiable homicide, preliminarily, it appears the homeowner acted in self-defense, (Philadelphia Homicide Capt. Jason) Smith said.

    “He has a valid permit, his gun is registered to him, he has no priors, he called the police, he turned the gun over, and he is cooperating. He’s done all the things that a good, outstanding citizen should do,” he said.

Well, that settles it: Mr Krasner, sponsored by George Soros, and thoroughly eaten up with ‘social justice’ and ‘racial justice’ and a hatred for the police, would seem likely to want to charge the homeowner with something. After all, the deceased is listed as a black male in the city’s shooting victims database. The question is: where would the District Attorney find twelve honest citizens, twelve people in the city without criminal records, to serve on a jury which would convict a man defending his property in his enclosed backyard from a thug like Mr James-Murphy?

Let’s face it: the city ought to throw the homeowner a parade!