Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The incomparable genius of Larry Krasner! Albert Einstein supposedly said, "The definition of a fool is someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting different results."

Murder is not normally an entry-level crime. When someone goes out armed and shoots someone else, the odds are very high that the shooter previously had ‘encounters’ with the police, and often a significant rap sheet.

Rudy Giuliani knew this, and that’s why, as Mayor of New York City, he instituted what’s known as ‘broken windows policing,’ cracking down on the minor crimes, to try to get the little guys on the path to becoming bad guys straightened out before they became major bad guys, and to end the social norms that allow crime. If one window is broken out in a building, and left unrepaired, the theory states that the rest will soon be broken as well, because it becomes acceptable for punks to throw rocks to break out the other windows.

Well, George Doros-funded, cop-hating District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia) doesn’t believe in that!

    ‘A terrible crisis’: Krasner discusses Philly’s gun violence after officer’s son gunned down

    Homicides in the city have already hit 38 this year, two more than at the same time last year, Krasner said. “This is truly a terrible crisis that we are suffering through,” he said.

    by Mensah M Dean | Monday, January 24, 2022

    The son of a Philadelphia police officer was shot and killed early Monday morning in North Philadelphia, the 38th homicide already this month and one reflecting “a terrible crisis” for the city, District Attorney Larry Krasner said.

    The 23-year-old man, whom police identified as Hyram Hill, was shot in the 1400 block of West Allegheny Avenue at 4:38 a.m. in what appeared to be a robbery. Paramedics rushed him to nearby Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:01 a.m.

    Hill had been shot multiple times in his left chest, right arm, abdomen and back, police said Monday afternoon. In the morning, Joanne Pescatore, Krasner’s newly appointed supervisor of the Homicide and Non-Fatal Shooting Unit, said he had been shot nine times. . . . .

    “This is a slight increase from terrible to terrible,” Krasner said. “That’s where we are with homicides. This is truly a terrible crisis that we are suffering through.”

    The district attorney said the gun-violence toll ― which accounted for the majority of 562 homicides last year, a record ― has convinced him that his office should focus on such violent crimes rather than lesser crimes such as prostitution and marijuana possession.

    “This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society,” he said. “We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.”

Really? Perhaps, just perhaps, if law enforcement, from the police through the prosecutor, would treat the crimes that “matter less” than homicide seriously, people like the cretin who gunned down Hyram Hill would have been behind bars Monday morning, not out robbing someone, and not putting nine bullets into an apparently innocent victim.

Remember Cody Allen Arnett, the multiply-convicted felon who was let out early by the Kentucky state Parole Board, who then went out and forcibly raped a Georgetown College coed? Now he has a life sentence, but if he’d been kept behind bars when he should have been, if he hadn’t been treated leniently, his victim would never have been raped.

Remember Vincent Pinkney, who could have been behind bars, if he had been treated seriously, and instead was out on the street to murder a Columbia graduate student? How about Latif Williams, who (allegedly) murdered Samuel Collington near Temple University, in a botched carjacking? He had been released by a soft-headed judge on an unsecured bond, but could have been in custody when Mr Collington was killed.

Then there was Hasan Elliot, 21, a known gang-banger, whom Mr Krasner treated leniently:

  • Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
  • Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to meet his meetings with his parole officer.
  • Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges; he was released on his own recognizance.
  • After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, and prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

On Friday, March 13, 2020, Mr Elliot shot and killed Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV. Had Mr Krasner’s office treated Mr Elliot seriously, he would have been behind bars on that Friday the 13th, and Corporal O’Connor would still be alive.

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering Temple University Hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.

The Philadelphia Police saw that as well, and a group of police officers blocked the entrance to the emergency room at Temple University Hospital to deny Mr Krasner and his entourage entrance to visit Corporal O’Connor’s family.

Yet Mr Krasner, who just hates locking up the bad guys, wants to continue with the same policies which have contribute to Philadelphia’s huge homicide rate. Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019. As of January 23, 2022, the jail population was even lower, 4,519 inmates. Mr Krasner sees this as a good thing; I see it as 2,000 more punks out on the street victimizing law-abiding people.

It ought to be obvious even to the densest person: a criminal who is in jail is not out on the streets committing more crimes. But District Attorney Krasner would leave the lower-level bad guys out, walking around free when he could have them behind bars, and then be shocked, shocked! when one of them blows away the son of a police officer.

An intelligent man, which Mr Krasner purports to be, ought to have learned from what treating Hasan Elliot leniently did, and changed his policies accordingly; a stupid man would have just continued with the failed policies of his own, and others, that have let violent crime fester and grow.

There’s really only one conclusion: Larry Krasner is one stupid man!

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“This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

We have written previously about the University of Pennsylvania’s ‘transgender’ women’s swimmer, Will Thomas, who goes by the name “Lia.”[1]In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their … Continue reading Now the New York Post has printed a story from an unnamed teammate of Mr Thomas’:

That part is incorrect: Mr Thomas, was according to the University of Pennsylvania’s athletic department’s swimming and diving 2018-19 team roster, a sophomore member of the men’s team. He was “Second-team All-Ivy in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free after reaching the ‘A’ final of the Ivy League Championships and finishing second overall in each of the events.” During the 2019-20 season, he “won the 500 free against Villanova (Nov. 15).” That is competitive, if not exactly dominant.

    The anonymous female swimmer gave an interview to the Washington Examiner on Sunday — a day after Thomas, 22, racked up two more wins at a meet against Ivy League rival Harvard University.

    She railed against the NCAA for not acknowledging Thomas had a distinct advantage and accused the board of governors of “not protecting women’s rights.”

    “Women are now third-class citizens,” the swimmer told the outlet.

    “Lia was not even close to being competitive as a man in the 50 and the 100 [freestyle events]. But just because Lia is biologically a man, [Lia] is just naturally better than many females in the 50 and the 100 or anything that [Lia] wasn’t good at as a man.”

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

Mr Thomas’ times have been gradually slowing, so much so that there have been suspicions that he has slowed down deliberately, still winning, but by much smaller margins.

But there’s an obvious question here: who is this unidentified female teammate? There are a couple dozen real women on the UPenn team, and it could have been any of them, but I’ve noticed a pattern here: the stories are all broken by the same two outlets, the Washington Examiner, a conservative website, and OutKick. OutKick said:

    While University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who spent three years at the Ivy League school swimming as a male, has been busy smashing female pool records, friction has been building within the team, according to a Penn female swimmer who said she feared for her ability to find employment after graduating from college for sharing her honest opinion about a transgender teammate. For that reason, OutKick is granting her anonymity to speak out.

Those are reasonable concerns for the teammate, but I have to wonder: has it always been the same teammate who has been the source for these stories? This has sort of jumped out at me as I have read these stories.

But one part of the New York Post story cited above really jumped out at me, a quote from this anonymous woman, who said, “This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

That’s absolutely right: how does Mr Thomas, who grew up male, who competed athletically with men, doing well and occasionally winning at the collegiate level, justify in his own mind beating a bunch of real girls? How does Mr Thomas, in his tremendous concern to be accepted as a woman and not a male, justify competing in events which only serve to point out the differences between him and biological women? I have asked that second question before, and no one has been able to give me an answer.

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↑1 In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their biological sex, not their imagined “gender.” When using Twitter to publicize my stories, I have sometimes had to refer to him as ‘Lia’ to avoid getting banned for ‘deadnaming’ or ‘misgendering’.
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To our credentialed media, truth is racist! And they just can't handle the truth!

As always, I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page on Monday morning, and it tells me that, as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, January 23, 2022, 37 souls had been sent untimely to their eternal rewards. IT also tells me that ‘only’ 36 people were murdered in the city’s streets on the same date in record-breaking 2021, and ‘just’ 34 in 2020, which saw 499 killings.

That ugly 37 number was three higher than the last time the Police Department updated the homicide numbers, for Thursday, January 20th, yet The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page and crime page show no stories on homicides over the weekend, and the crime page has several stories that are days old.

And so I found this, a Washington Post story, but reprinted in the Inquirer:

    Homicide rates have soared nationwide, but mayors see a chance for a turnaround in 2022

    For a decade, Atif Mahr mentored young people, preaching the virtues of anti-violence even as the streets of his north St. Louis neighborhood echoed ever more often with the crack of gunfire.

    by Griff Witte | The Washington Post | Sunday, January 23, 2022

    For a decade, Atif Mahr mentored young people, preaching the virtues of anti-violence even as the streets of his north St. Louis neighborhood echoed ever more often with the crack of gunfire.

    Then one day last October, those bullets tore a jagged hole in Mahr’s own family. His daughter Isis was dropping off a friend when a gunman unloaded on her car. The soccer standout, who had been saving money to pay her way through nursing school, was 19.

    “I always feared it,” Mahr said. “I never imagined it.”

    Isis’s death filled him with hurt. The reaction from the community, however, gave him hope.

    The past two years have been dreadful for public safety in U.S. cities as homicide numbers soared – in some cases to record levels. Experts say a constellation of factors is to blame, including the coronavirus pandemic’s scars and a breakdown in trust between police and the communities they serve during the social unrest of 2020. But as 2022 kicks off, city leaders from coast to coast say the stars may be aligning in a very different way.

    Flush with federal pandemic-relief funds, mayors are pumping money into crime prevention programs that have demonstrated early promise. Police chiefs are using advanced data to target places and people for intervention, even as they attempt to mend badly strained neighborhood ties. And communities such as Mahr’s, tired of burying their own, are rising up against those most responsible for the deaths. The result, some officials and experts say, may be a golden opportunity to break the trend of spiraling violent crime.

    “People have said ‘Enough is enough,'” Mahr said. “They’re ready to fight back.”

There’s more at the original. Here’s the link to the Post original.

The main thrust of the story refers to St Louis, Missouri. As we noted a few days before the New Year, KSDK proudly noted that homicides in 2021 had fallen back to “pre-pandemic” levels, with ‘just’ 192 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards, compared to 263 in 2020, and 194 in 2019. The 2021 year-end total wound up being 196.

Being the numbers geek that I am, I actually did the math — and we know that math is racist, so that’s obviously a problem — and the numbers worked out to a homicide rate of 8.54 per 100,000 for white males, and 205.48 per 100,000 for black males in the Gateway City. Like Josef Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.”

Both the Philadelphia and St Louis numbers represent too small a sample size to make any meaningful statements about trends in homicides, though with 37 murders in 23 days, Philly is on pace to another record number, 587 homicides. Even if the city’s killings slowed down to 2020’s pace, it would represent a bloodbath in the City of Brotherly Love.

And the Inquirer? The city’s newspaper, third oldest continuously published daily in America, is doing its job in steadfastly ignoring the deaths. We can find stories, from five days ago, about the cute white woman killed when some miscreant bludgeoned her to death with a pipe, and, also five days ago, about the man being charged with a firearms violation for fatally shooting the criminal trying to steal tha catalytic converter from his car. The story, from ten days ago, about the retired postal worker who defended himself with his legally-owned firearm, still shows, but there’s nothing there about the vast majority of the killings, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the victims were people about whom there was nothing exceptional about their killings.

I have mentioned, many times, Inquirer publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ statement that she was making the newspaper into an “anti racist news organization,” but I failed to delve into just what “anti racist” meant. From National Public Radio:

    ‘Not Racist’ Is Not Enough: Putting In The Work To Be Anti-Racist

    by Eric Deggans | August 25, 2020 | 12:03 AM EDT

    When the topic of racism comes up, I often think of a billboard in the small town of Harrison, Arkansas.

    It was a sign promoting a white supremacist radio station called White Pride Radio. The sign’s message, emblazoned next to the picture of a cute-looking white girl with a cute-looking dog, read “It’s not racist to [heart] your people.”

    My takeaway: Even white supremacists don’t want to be called racist.

    Which might explain why, for people dedicated to fighting racism, simply saying you’re “not racist” doesn’t feel like quite enough. To effectively defeat systemic racism — racism embedded as normal practice in institutions like education and law enforcement — you’ve got to be continually working towards equality for all races, striving to undo racism in your mind, your personal environment and the wider world.

    In other words, you’ve got to be anti-racist.

I have to ask: does “undo(ing) racism” in my “personal environment” mean that I must move from the 99.07% white county, even though it’s a poverty-stricken county in eastern Kentucky? We didn’t choose the place where we bought our retirement home due to the county’s demographics, but because it was what we wanted, for a very low price. I guess that doesn’t make me ‘anti racist’ enough!

What anti racism has come to mean, in the hallowed halls of American journalism, is to not tell the truth. The Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, led the way in that company’s decision to stop publishing mugshots of criminals, by stating:

    Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

Miss Hughes’ article pointed out that she was:

  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

In simpler terms, under Miss Hughes’ leadership, the Inquirer will take decisions in its news coverage and editorial decisions based not only on whether the information being considered for publication is factual and well-sourced, but on whether it might reinforce negative stereotypes against a particular racial group. It makes itself obvious in the fact that the Inquirer simply does not report, save in the briefest terms, about the individual homicides in the city.

It also makes itself known in what the Inquirer says about the bloodbath in the city’s streets. It’s never about bad people shooting others, but “gun violence,” as though guns magically levitate themselves and fire away at innocent people, without any human agency at all. The editorial policy, as well as the political policies of the city’s Democratic leadership — and Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President! — has been to ignore the fact that the vast majority of both victims and perpetrators in city homicides, and in crime in general, have been black.

What has anti racism really become? At least in Philadelphia, it has become the acceptance of an urban black culture in which the killing of young black men by other young black men is just plain expected. The problem cannot be seriously addressed because it cannot even be admitted, because to admit it would be racist!

I am not the only one who has made fun of the notion that math is racist, but the Inquirer, along with many of our major, and not-so-major, daily newspapers, have adopted a policy which says, at bottom, that truth is racist, that facts are racist.

Elizabeth Hughes knows this, Inquirer editor Gabriel Escobar knows this, Lexington Herald-Leader editor Peter Baniak knows this, they all know this, but they knuckle under to political correctness anyway, because they just can’t handle the truth.

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The wealthy love them some fossil fuels!

The [ughh!] Magnolia Network is, this Saturday morning, running reruns of This Old House, season 41, originally broadcast in 2019-2020, a major, expensive, remodel of a home in Westerly, Washington County, Rhode Island. Westerly is a beach resort town which in the 2020 election gave 55.6% of its votes to Joe Biden; Washington County as a whole voted 58.57% to 39.20% for Mr Biden.

And what did the obviously wealthy homeowners, in liberal Rhode Island, in a show originally meant for the liberal Public Broadcasting System, choose for this project? One episode shows the installation of a 1,000 gallon underground propane tank, for their heating system, their water heater, their range, and their fireplace.

The remodeled kitchen; note the gas range. Click to enlarge.

The homeowners chose comfort, the homeowners chose fossil fuels!

Now, it is entirely possible that Scott and Shayla Adams, the homeowners,[1]The homeowners’ names were given on both the show and the website, so I am not doxxing them. were among the smarter people in Westerly, and voted for President Trump; I have no way of knowing that. But in one of our more liberal states, in very blue New England, we’re seeing reasonably wealthy homeowners eschewing the calls of the global warming climate change activists to go all-electric, and choosing what they believe is the better choice for themselves.

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↑1 The homeowners’ names were given on both the show and the website, so I am not doxxing them.
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The sweetness and light Joe Biden has brought to Philadelphia

January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th President of the United States, was certainly a busy one on the streets of Philadelphia: five people were murdered in the City of Brotherly Love that day, making a total of 32 for the first twenty days of 2021.

Of course, as we’ve previously noted, 2021 was a banner year, a gold medal winning year, for Philly, as it not only beat the previous homicide record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, but smashed it, destroyed it, completely obliterated it, with 562 souls being sent early to their eternal rewards last year.

Joe Biden was supposed to ring in a new era of good feelings for everyone, after four years of the evil, reich-wing Donald Trump. But somehow, some way, that’s not what the numbers say. From January 20, 2020, to January 20, 2021, President Trump’s last year in office, there were 497 homicides in Philadelphia; from January 20, 2021 to January 20, 2022, there have been 564 killings in the city.

What else has changed? The Mayor, the District Attorney, and the Police Commissioner are all the same people.[1]Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw did not take her position until February 20, 2020, though Mayor Jim Kenney had appointed her on December 30, 2019. Richard Ross, Jr, the previous Commissioner, had … Continue reading The Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, is the same. The state legislature has been controlled by the same party throughout. The gun control laws, always a bugaboo for city officials, were all the same.

But hey, President Biden showed up on Sunday, January 16th, the day before Martin Luther King Day, to help pack 27-pound boxes of food at Philabundance food bank!

The only difference was the amount of blood flowing in the city’s mean streets.

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↑1 Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw did not take her position until February 20, 2020, though Mayor Jim Kenney had appointed her on December 30, 2019. Richard Ross, Jr, the previous Commissioner, had resigned on August 20, 2019, following allegations of sexual harassment and racial and gender discrimination within the department.
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There’s no threat quite like an empty threat!

President Joe Biden didn’t do too well in his recent news conference, leading the White House to issue a clarification on his statements about possible Russian ‘incursions’ into Ukraine. From The Washington Post:

    Biden insists U.S. won’t accept a ‘minor incursion’ by Russia into Ukraine after remarks drew criticism

    by Amy B Wang | Thursday, January 20, 2022 | 8:42 AM EST | Updated: 12:19 PM EST

    President Biden insisted Thursday that the United States would not accept even a “minor incursion” of Ukraine by Russia, as the White House continued efforts to clarify Biden’s remarks Wednesday suggesting that it might.

    “I’ve been absolutely clear with President [Vladimir] Putin. He has no misunderstanding: Any, any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion,” Biden told reporters Thursday at the start of a White House event on infrastructure.

    Such an invasion would be met with a “severe and coordinated economic response,” Biden added, noting that those consequences have been “laid out very clearly for President Putin.”

    “Let there be no doubt at all: If Putin makes this choice, Russia will pay a heavy price,” Biden said.

    In the second news conference of his presidency Wednesday, Biden said he expected Russia to take some sort of action to “move in” and invade Ukraine and that the U.S. response “depends on what it does.”

There’s much more at the original.

I’d like to think that I am not the only one who remembers how President Barack Obama, and the rest of the NATO leaders, breathed a collective sigh of relief in 2014 that Ukraine had declined an offer of NATO membership when President Viktor Yanukovych came to power following 2010 elections. Mr Yanukovych was more closely aligned with Russia, and was deposed in 2014 Maiden revolution, but Ukraine was still not a NATO member when President Putin sent the tanks rolling into eastern Ukraine, and annexed Crimea.

The North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an attack on any member nation is an attack on them all, and the last thing any of the NATO leaders wanted was to go to war against nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine.

And let’s tell the truth here: the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, along with Poland, had to have taken notice: if the NATO leaders were so relieved that they didn’t have to fight Russia over the 2014 invasion, they wouldn’t want to fight Russia if Vladimir Vladimirovich sent the tanks rolling into their countries, either.

    “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera,” Biden said. “But if they actually do what they’re capable of doing with the force they’ve massed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia if they further invade Ukraine.”

    Biden was swiftly criticized for appearing to give a green light to Russia to attack Ukraine as long as it didn’t amount to a full-scale invasion. Soon after, the White House issued a statement seeking to clarify Biden’s comments, saying that if Russia sends its forces across the border, it will be met with “a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our allies.”

Yeah, uh huh, right?

    Putin’s gas weaponization hits a hot spot in Berlin

    Germany is pumping Russian gas back into Poland as Gazprom cuts supply to the EU. As Russia plays its hybrid war games with an increasingly divided EU, the new front appears to be the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline.

    by Jo Harper | December 28, 2021

    Yamal-Europe, Europe’s longest gas pipeline, usually transports Russian natural gas overland to — rather than from — Germany. Now it has spent the last week sending mainly Russian gas from Germany back to Poland. The purpose? To meet a shortfall as temperatures drop to -10 degrees Celsius (14 F) and Russia cuts gas supplies.

    Observers have warned that Russian President Vladmir Putin could use energy as a weapon should the troubled gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 (NS2) go ahead. He is, in fact, already doing so.

    On December 21, Russia halted the supply of gas via Yamal-Europe, immediately spooking markets. The wholesale price in the benchmark Dutch TTF contract for January deliveries rocketed to €160 ($185) from €100 on December 9. High gas demand in Asia is also fed the spike in prices. Consumers in Europe will feel some of the increases in 2022, adding to rapidly rising inflation there.

    According to the Germany Network Agency, two-thirds of the gas imported into Germany comes from Russia and former Soviet countries via the Yamal pipeline, which runs across Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany. Its capacity is 32.9 billion cubic meters of gas per year. In 2020, 23% of Russian gas reached Germany via Belarus and Poland along its 4,107-km (2,552-mi) length.

    Worryingly, the gas price on futures markets is also rising. January 2023 prices are up to €90 per megawatt hour, a clear signal that the market expects European gas supplies to be low by the end of this winter and that little gas will come from Russia over the summer to replenish supplies before winter next year.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is clear: it’s the middle of January, the coldest part of the winter, and if Mr Putin decides to shut off the flow of gas to Europe, the Europeans will knuckle under; none of the NATO leaders want to see their people freeze this winter. And Russia loses leverage every day that passes toward warmer weather.

It doesn’t matter what threats President Biden makes to somehow hold President Putin accountable; it’s the Russian who holds the hammer here. No one wants to go to war over Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin knows that just as well as anyone else.

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Another murderer treated leniently in Lexington Black lives don't really matter in Lexington

From WKYT-TV, because the Lexington Herald-Leader ignored the story:

    Suspect in killing of Lexington teen pleads guilty

    Malachi Jackson, from WLEX-TV. Click to enlarge.

    By WKYT News Staff | Published: Jan. 19, 2022 at 2:12 PM EST

    LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – The suspect in a Lexington murder case has pleaded guilty.

    According to the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, Malachi Jackson pleaded guilty Tuesday to first-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault, and first-degree criminal attempt to commit robbery.

    Police say Jackson shot and killed Kevin Olmeda, 15, on Garden Springs Drive in 2018. They believe the shooting stemmed from a drug-related dispute. Olmeda was a student at Lafayette High School.

    Jackson had been facing a murder charge.

    The commonwealth attorney says the recommended sentence is 15 years for manslaughter, 10 years for assault, and five years for criminal attempt to commit robbery.

We have previously mentioned the Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney, Lou Ann Red Corn, and noted her office’s acceptance of lenient plea bargain arrangements. And, Malachi Jackson, who was 16 at the time, killed 15-year-old Kevin Olmeda, purportedly over a drug dispute. Young Mr Jackson was arrested the night after the shooting, and has been locked up since May 23, 2018. This means that he has already served 3¾ years behind bars.

“Murder is not usually an entry-level crime. If you can’t lock up perpetrators of so-called “minor” offenses then you’re going to have a lot more murders. Nobody seems to care, as long as it’s just people killing each other in the ghetto, but then a UCLA student gets murdered, and some people start paying attention.” — Robert Stacy McCain.

First degree manslaughter is a Class B felony, carrying a sentence of 10 to 20 years, with a mandatory 85% of the sentence which must be served before parole is granted. The Commonwealth’s Attorney recommended 15 years on the manslaughter charge, 10 years on assault, and five years for attempted robbery. If the judge accepts those recommendations, and sets the sentences to run consecutively, Mr Jackson could be out after serving 15½ years, 3¾ of which have already elapsed. If the judge elects to have the sentences run concurrently, Mr Jackson could be out after serving 12¾ years, or just nine more years, when he would be only 31 years old.

In nine more years, Kevin Olmeda will still be stone cold graveyard dead.

Why did Lou Ann Red Corn go along with a plea bargain? Why didn’t she just laugh in Mr Jackson’s attorney’s face and take him to trial for murder? Murder is a capital offense in Kentucky, though, since Mr Jackson was a minor at the time he killed Mr Olmeda, the death penalty would not be on the table. However, the potential sentences could be life without parole, 25 years to life, or 20 to 50 years behind bars. Miss Red Corn could have seen this miscreant locked up until he was an elderly man.

Instead, she has opened the possibility that he could be back out on the streets as young as age 31.

I’ve said it before: black lives really don’t matter in Lexington, and Mr Olmeda’s black life was snuffed out when he was just 15 years old. Does Lou Ann Red Corn not care about that?

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The Philadelphia Police solve one murder

The killing, the 33rd of the year in the City of Brotherly Love, was, as most are, totally senseless.

    A man accused of beating a woman to death with pipes inside an Old City office was charged with murder

    Jeffrey Stepien, 48, is accused of killing Samantha Maag, 31. He is being held without bail after being charged with murder.

    by Chris Palmer | Thursday, January 20, 2022 | 2:39 PM EST

    Jeffrey Stepien, photo from 6ABC in Philadelphia. Click to enlarge.

    A 48-year-old man has been charged with murder for beating a woman to death inside an Old City office building on Wednesday, according to police.

    Jeffery Stepien was being held without bail and has also been charged with possessing an instrument of crime, according to court records.

    He is accused of attacking Samantha Maag, 31, of Gloucester Township, Camden County, who police said was seated at a reception desk on the eighth floor of an office building on the 300 block of Chestnut Street around 2:15 p.m. when Stepien attacked her from behind, striking her in the head with a pipe.

    Maag was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 3:16 p.m. Attempts to reach her relatives Thursday were not immediately successful.

Of course, The Philadelphia Inquirer did not publish Mr Stepien’s mugshot, even though it was freely available, and published by both WPVI-TV, Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated Philadelphia station, and KYT-TV, Channel 3, the CBS owned-and-operated affiliate.

Samantha Magg, photo from KYT-TV. Click to enlarge.

Mr Stepien has a prior criminal record, for simple assault (18 § 2701 §§ A(1)), “attempts to cause or intentionally, knowingly or recklessly causes bodily injury to another”, and recklessly endangering another person (18 § 2705), both of which are second degree misdemeanors, to which he was sentenced to the maximum, one to two years in the penitentiary. He pleaded guilty to the offenses, and the case was disposed of on May 5, 2011, so this was not an instance of a criminal who could have still been behind bars.

Police stated that Mr Stepien had rented space in the Old City office building, and may have been living there at the time, and may have been angered about being asked to move out of a non-residential space, but the crime remains under investigation. It was captured on surveillance video.

This makes two stories in the Inquirer, and I have to wonder: will there be more? After all, the victim was not just another gang-banger, but an innocent, and a cute white woman, both of whom tend to generate Inquirer stories.

Mr Stepien is being represented by the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which had no comment at press time. They will, of course, try to get him off with as little jail time as possible, but, if Mr Stepien is convicted of this, he should spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars at SCI Phoenix maximum security prison.

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The Karening of the left

The media were all atwitter — pun very much intended — about a story by National Public Radio’s Nina Reines[1]The wife of Dr H David Reines goes by Nina Totenberg, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar … Continue reading which claimed that Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch was refusing to wear a facemask around Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is a Type I diabetic, and thus at greater risk of serious symptoms if she contracts COVID-19, and that Chief Justice John Roberts had asked Mr Gorsuch to mask up.

The Justices themselves refuted the story, first with a joint message from Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch, and then from the Chief Justice. The much nicer Dana has more on this in Patterico’s Pontifications.

Despite the fact that the lovely Mrs Reines’ report has been discredited, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Helen Dunne[2]The wife of Michael Dunne goes by Helen Ubiñas, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar … Continue reading has run with it anyway.

    After NPR’s longtime Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg highlighted his behavior in a story this week, there was a lot of righteous outrage directed at Gorsuch.

    On social media, people called him all kinds of names: selfish, childish, petty. No argument here, and I suspect the pointed backlash spoke more to the sheer exhaustion from people tired of vaccine opponents and anti-maskers as the pandemic stretches into a third year.

So, it’s that the left are tired of people who don’t fall into line with their views. Got it!

Mrs Dunne continued to tell us about the denials of Mrs Reines’ story by Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch, and the Chief Justice, which is confirmation that she knew about those denials when she wrote her story, and then proceeded to tell her readers that she just didn’t believe them, saying “the statements read like textbook damage control”.

    Plus, “warm colleagues and friends” don’t need to be asked, by anyone, to do what needs to be done to protect one another. And they sure don’t need clarifying statements.

If someone has lied about them, they most certainly do.

    In an opinion piece for CNN, Kara Alaimo wrote that Gorsuch’s behavior was a shocking display of male entitlement.

    Agreed, and let’s take that a step further: It’s white male entitlement, because as it happens, Sotomayor, a fellow Puerto Rican, is the only woman of color on the bench. And, whew, the optics!

What a bunch of bovine feces! Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch are equals on the Court.[3]Justice Sotomayor, appointed by President Barack Obama, is senior to Justice Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump, but that seniority does not confer any difference in rank. The Chief Justice … Continue reading

    But while all eyes and ire seemed to land on Gorsuch, mine lingered longer on the other justices, because from the hallowed grounds of the White House to the more common spaces of our everyday workplaces, bad behavior can’t exist without enablers, not easily anyway. Even when — perhaps especially when — the enabling comes in the form of silence or inaction.

At which point, Mrs Dunne then includes the obligatory slam on President Trump.

    That problematic colleague at your office couldn’t continue to be a problem if the enablers didn’t dismiss or downplay their behavior.

    And as such, Gorsuch wouldn’t be able to act so coldheartedly without the implied or explicit consent of his fellow justices, including Sotomayor apparently, who — if that statement is any indication — gave him a pass to keep the peace. (But then the burdened are often expected to set aside their own comfort and safety.)

Yes, the ‘burdened’ are expected to take care of themselves! Mrs Dunne, and the left in general to a large extent, seem to believe that such ‘burdens’ can be shifted onto other people. Using her logic, even if COVID-19 somehow disappeared, every American ought to wear a face mask, all the time, during flu season, because who can know which passerby or office colleague is immunocompromised? Every adult ought to have to wear a facemask around children during RSV season, in the RSV can be a hospitalization-serious event.

Heck, why wait until flu and RSV seasons; viral and bacterial infections can occur at any time during the year, so, according to Mrs Dunne’s reasoning, we ought to all wear masks, all the time, because someone more susceptible to whatever might come along.

    But then, from supermarkets to the Supreme Court, we now live in a world where we continue to make adjustments and accommodations for people who have no regard for the greater good, who have to be asked and begged and cajoled to do the right thing because we value the appearance of harmony over the intentional practice of collective humanity.

What is the “greater good” of which the author writes? To me, individual rights and the preservation of such are the greater good, while Mrs Dunne seems to be rather opposed to anyone who has ideas of which she disapproves. She didn’t like it when Kyle Rittenhouse was not sent to jail for refusing to let armed thugs chase him down and beat him to death.

According to Mrs Dunne, it’s not just the guy who refuses to wear a diaper on his face who’s boorish, but everyone else who fails to wag their fingers and scold him is complicit, is enabling, as well. That some of us might support his right, and our rights, to not wear a mask in public seems not to have occurred to her. Mrs Dunne’s first name really ought to be Karen.

References

References
↑1 The wife of Dr H David Reines goes by Nina Totenberg, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar disrespect to him.
↑2 The wife of Michael Dunne goes by Helen Ubiñas, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar disrespect to him.
↑3 Justice Sotomayor, appointed by President Barack Obama, is senior to Justice Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump, but that seniority does not confer any difference in rank. The Chief Justice outranks the Associate Justices, which gives him some executive authority over the Court and its functions, but he is not the supervisor of the other Justices.