Author Archives: Dana Pico

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I take no joy in seeing Washington Post employees getting laid off

I’ve said it before: I really love newspapers! I delivered the Lexington Herald and the Lexington Leader — now combined as the Lexington Herald-Leader — when I was in junior high and high schools, and, being hearing impaired, I find it much easier to read the news than to watch and listen to it on television. More, television news stations are in the business of presenting stories which happen right away, stories which have a strong visual component. Only newspapers have the capacity to dig more deeply, to present more information than people can get from a thirty-second story on television; that’s just the nature of the different media forms. With the switch to a mostly digital format, newspapers are no longer stuck with assigned story length, save in the actual print editions.

More, running a conservative blog as I do, I like to cite credentialed media publications with a liberal reputation as my sources; this insulates me from criticism that my sources are somehow untrustworthy because they are conservative themselves.

And this is why I have been discouraged to learn about the pending layoffs at The Washington Post, and why I don’t share in the schadenfreude of others like Breitbart:

‘Mood Is Really Grim’ at Imploding Washington Post

by John Nolte | Thursday, December 15, 2022

More bad news is coming from the imploding Resistance Force that calls itself the Washington Post.

On Wednesday, Breitbart News informed you that the Washington Post, a far-left propaganda outlet devoted to spreading lies and conspiracy theories, has lost 500,000 subscribers since January 2021. This drops its subscription base to just 2.5 million.

The Post also announced to its staff of entitled Resistance Babies on Wednesday that layoffs were coming to its 2,500-person workforce. No numbers were yet available on the layoffs. All we know is that it will be a single percentage (1 to 9 percent) of the current workforce.

The response from our journalist elites was exactly what you’d expect from entitled babies:

There’s a lot more at the original, and Breitbart is not behind a paywall, so I’m not asking anything big for you to check out the rest yourselves. The Post’s own story is behind the paywall, so if you aren’t a subscriber, you won’t get more than a couple of paragraphs, unless you haven’t tried to access Post stories recently; you do get a couple of freebies every month.

The Washington Post announces more job cuts next year

The announcement comes amid a season of layoffs throughout the media industry and weeks after the paper said it will eliminate its stand-alone magazine

By Elahe Izadi and Sarah Ellison | Wednesday, December 14, 2022 | 2:31 PM EST | Updated: 6:21 PM EST

The Washington Post will continue to eliminate jobs early next year, Publisher Fred Ryan said Wednesday, weeks after the paper announced it will shutter its Sunday magazine and lay off 11 newsroom employees.

Ryan said at a companywide meeting that the cuts will probably amount to a “single-digit percentage” of the company’s 2,500 employees but did not provide specifics. He added, though, that the company will add new jobs to offset the loss of positions that are “no longer serving readers,” and that The Post’s total head count will not be reduced.

Later, in an email to staff, Ryan said that the plan to cut jobs “in no way signals that we are scaling back our ambitions” but that “like any business, The Post cannot keep investing resources in initiatives that do not meet our customers’ needs.”

The publisher walked out of the meeting after dozens of employees raised their hands and peppered him with questions. Plans for job cuts will be finalized “over the coming weeks,” Post spokeswoman Kathy Baird said in a statement.

The development comes during a difficult season for media workers, as companies across the industry have laid off workers and instituted hiring freezes. Citing “economic head winds” as a factor last month, The Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, announced the newspaper will end its weekly stand-alone magazine, along with the jobs of its 10 staffers. The magazine’s last issue will publish Dec. 25. The company also eliminated the job of Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman. None of those employees were offered new roles at the paper.

During Wednesday’s employee meeting, Ryan cited a difficult economic environment, particularly for companies reliant on advertising, and he acknowledged that “for those people whose positions will be eliminated, this will be a difficult time.”

There’s more at the original.

In this, I think of my favorite reporter, the Post’s Heather Long. I became familiar with her work when she was an economics reporter for CNN, and appreciated it for one simple reason: I could not tell, from her reporting, whether she was conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. And if I couldn’t tell, that meant she wasn’t pushing an agenda in her reporting; that’s the kind of thing that, for me, distinguishes between a journalist and a journolist.[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading

I’m not too worried about Miss Long’s job: she has, in a fairly brief time, worked her way up from being an economics reporter to one of the Post’s columnists and Editorial Board members. But she left CNN, and CNN later experienced layoffs, and now she’s with the Post, and they, too, are seeing layoffs.

So, what’s up? Miss Long, along with data analyst Andrew Van Dam, reported in June of last year that a lot of different types of businesses had responded to the panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; I spelled it exactly the way I believe it should be spelled — by offering subscription services, for all sorts of things:

Subscriptions boomed during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans largely stuck in shutdown mode flocked to digital entertainment and signed up for regular home delivery of boxes of items such as clothes and chocolate. But what really set the past year apart was the increase in subscriptions in the hard-hit services sector. Owners of restaurants, hotels, home-repair companies and others upended their traditional business models to try subscriptions and often found more interest — and revenue — than they anticipated.

“This was really about flipping the business model for restaurants: paying before eating instead of eating before paying,” said Vinay Gupta, a winemaker who spearheaded the Summerlong Supper Club in Washington and New York City.

Upon reading that, my first thought was: if people are paying restaurants before eating, how are the restaurant employees who depend on tips going to survive? But, further down:

The typical U.S. consumer now has two to three subscriptions, according to user data from budget app Mint and research by Tien Tzuo, author of “Subscribed” and chief executive of subscriptions platform Zuora.

There’s a growing trend of “power subscribers” with 10 or more recurring payments, according to budgeting app Truebill. The app’s users average 17 subscriptions and typically spend $145 a month, according to an analysis Truebill did for The Washington Post. Last spring during the shutdowns, Truebill users averaged 21 subscriptions, as people tried different entertainment, home workout and delivery services.

Perhaps, just perhaps, with inflation having spiked, and even with it coming down recently, has outpaced the average weekly earnings of Americans, some Americans are starting to dump some of those subscriptions? The Post had more than three million digital subscribers at the end of 2020, but were down to 2.7 million by October of 2021, and around 2.5 million now. Maybe the Post needs to find a way to make it more valuable to customers than Hulu?

Me? Miss Long turned me on to a $99.00 per year subscription in 2017, which increased to $104.94 in 2020, a 6.00% increase, and I’m now scheduled to be billed $120.00 next August, a 14.35% bump. Yeah, I’m still going to pay it; it’s still a lot cheaper than my subscription to The New York Times, at $17.00 every four weeks, or $221.00 a year, $5.49 a week, or $285.48 a year to The Philadelphia Inquirer, — which also wants federal government subsidies to support the newspaper industry — or the utterly hideous amount I pay for The Wall Street Journal.

Still, a question has to be asked: why is The Washington Post, one our nation’s premier newspapers, and one of the four listed ‘newspapers of record,’ starting to lose subscribers, and money? What must the Post differently to attract more readers, more paying readers, so that the newspaper starts to make money again? John Nolte blamed it on the liberal bias he sees in the Post, and their continued bias against Republicans and supporters of former President Trump. The New York Times said, “As the breakneck news pace of the Trump administration faded away, readers have turned elsewhere, and the paper’s push to expand beyond Beltway coverage hasn’t compensated for the loss.” Nevertheless, the Times also noted, “two of The Post’s top competitors — The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — have added subscriptions since Mr. Trump left office.”

There are real differences between the two New York newspapers and the Post. A city of 8½ million people is a heck of a lot bigger market from which to draw, and The Wall Street Journal is a specialty publication which meets different needs, and appeals to a different customer base. But when the Post, supposedly the number one newspaper for reporting on our federal government, returns zero relevant returns on a site search for Sam Brinton, the ‘gender fluid, non-binary’ former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy who was fired for stealing suitcases from airports, it starts to look as though the newspaper either has a truly pathetic search engine, or is covering up for the utter embarrassment that Mr Brinton has brought upon the Biden Administration.

CNN’s online content is free, as is content from Fox News and MSNBC. Print newspapers, as they transition to a digital subscription medium, have to find ways to compete with free. The New York Times seems to be doing so, even if few other newspapers are, so the Post should be able to as well.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Killadelphia With over 100 "suspicious" deaths recorded, the real numbers could be much higher than the official ones

We had previously noted that, despite the occurrence of a documented murder, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page numbers hadn’t moved.

Now we are informed that it had been a computer glitch, which has now been fixed, and the update is a big one: eight new homicides reported. The First Street Journal had reported, on December 7th, that there was a statistical possibility, at the margin of error, that Philadelphia had an outside chance of finishing the year with fewer than 500 homicides. That didn’t last long, and by the 12th, it had vanished, as the city was on a clear path to between 509 and 516 homicides.

We’re so far into the year now, December 15th having been the 349th day of the year, that one or two homicides don’t move the statistics much, but eight homicides in four days? That has moved the average daily killings number up to 1.4212, which puts the city on pace for 519 killings, 518.7393 to be more precise.

There’s more. There had been a seeming downturn after Hallowe’en, and that was what had made me hopeful that the city might, just might, finish under 500. But now there have been 51 homicides in the 45 days since October 31st, 1.3333 per day, and that works out to 18.13333 for the sixteen days remaining in the year, or a total of 514.

Two ways of calculating the trends, and the projected numbers are drawing ever closer. However, the Christmas holidays always seem to be big ones for killings — Peace on Earth, and all of that — and during the last 16 days of 2021, there had been 27 homicides. If the City of Brotherly Love hit that pace again, Philly would finish with 523 murders.

Retired Philadelphia Police Sergeant Mark Fusetti reported that, according to his sources, there have also been 110 “suspicious” and 76 “other” deaths recorded by the Philly Police Department. While there are supposedly no bodies attached to the 76 “other” cases, there are to the 110 “suspicious” ones. Some of the suspicious may be self-defense claims that have not yet been assigned that status, and would not be part of the homicide numbers, but others could be actual murders, but ones which the police have not yet developed sufficient evidence to call them such. Now that Ben Mannes of Broad + Liberty has broken the story of the large number of suspicious deaths — a story that our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper has thus far ignored — one wonders if, as those suspicious deaths get reclassified, will they be added to the ‘official’ homicide totals?

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More public school failure in Kentucky

Linda Blackford is a long-time columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader, and, despite being a long-time Kentuckian, she’s liberal to her core. We have previously noted the newspaper’s endorsements, and they are all to the left:

The voters of the Sixth District, and of Kentucky as a whole, rejected every one of the newspaper’s endorsements.

Come 2023, they’ll endorse Governor Andy Beshear, he who unconstitutionally suspended the free exercise of religion and freedom of peaceable assembly in 2020, for re-election, and in 2024, whichever Democrat runs for the Sixth District seat, assuming he’s not a kook like this year.

So I’ll admit it: even though I am subscribing to what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal, I don’t usually pay much attention to Mrs Blackford’s columns. I did, however read this one, in which she pushed for the Fayette County School Board to select “a person of color who understands what many of our students face in school”, as the replacement for Christy Morris, who resigned her position. The usual race-based drivel followed, and was mostly unremarkable and unimportant. There was, however, one very important statistic given:

Students of color make up about 53 percent of students, while about 48.5 percent of all students are considered low income.

Really? The Fayette County Public Schools are 53% “students of color”? According to the Census Bureau, a full 70.0% of Fayette County’s population are non-Hispanic white, with another 2.8% being white, but Hispanic as well. Perhaps they are being counted as “students of color”, “brown” perhaps, the way the left do these days. But it has to be asked: if Fayette County’s population are 70% non-Hispanic white, why are the public schools majority “students of color”?

Let’s face it: private schools are expensive! I know, as we put our girls in parochial schools for part of the time. Sayre School is the hoitiest and toitiest of the private schools in Lexington, with the high school tuition being $26,625 per year. That’s more than tuition at the University of Kentucky’s College of Law!

Lexington Catholic High School’s tuition is significantly lower, at $11,170 for one student, if the family are Catholic parishioners, and $13,690 for non-Catholics. That’s a significant chunk of change that people have been willing to pay rather than send their kids to the Fayette County public schools. In very liberal Lexington — Fayette Countians gave 59.25% of their votes to Joe Biden in 2020, in a year when Kentuckians as a whole voted to re-elect President Trump, 62.09% to 36.15% — much of the white population have rejected the public schools.

And today, the state Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a Republican plan to assist poorer families to afford private schools.

Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of the bill was overridden with a slim 51-member majority in the House.

In his veto message, Beshear said the bill would “harm public education in Kentucky by taking money away from public schools.” In a post to Twitter on Thursday, the governor took his message a step further. He compared the EOA law to the newly passed law funding charter schools in Kentucky.

“Today’s ruling by the Kentucky Supreme Court couldn’t be more clear: state funding for private or charter schools is unconstitutional – period. It’s time for the General Assembly to invest in our public schools, our teachers and our children,” Beshear wrote.

Fayette County Public Schools argued against the law, saying that it stripped resources away from its schools and students.

The Kentucky Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, celebrated the ruling.

“This decision protects the power of the people to decide important questions of public education policy and holds the legislature to account to uphold their oath to support and defend the Kentucky Constitution… We simply can’t afford to support two different education systems — one private and one public — on the taxpayers’ dime, and this ruling supports that concern. This decision is proof that the courts continue to serve as an important check against legislative overreach,” KEA President Eddie Campbell wrote.

So, what do we have? The state Supreme Court’s ruling that the law was unconstitutional may well be fundamentally correct based on the state constitution, but the fact remains that, in the Commonwealth’s wealthiest county, about as many families who can afford to send their children someplace other than the Fayette County public schools are choosing to do so. Even before the law was passed — it never took effect because Franklin County Judge Phil Shepherd, a Democrat and stooge of Governor Beshear, issued an injunction against it — parents in Lexington who could afford it were voting against the public schools with their private school choices. They were still being taxed to support the public schools, but sure didn’t want to send their own kids there.

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#Climapocracy! Pete Buttigieg wants us all to reduce our carbon emissions, but he takes a jet every 3½ days

I’m pretty sure that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg would want to reconsider his tweet, but, not to worry, I’ve got the screen capture!

The math is simple: December 14th, when he tweeted his original, is the 348th day of the year, and the Secretary told us that this was his 99th flight of the year. 348 ÷ 99 = 3.5151 repeating, 3.52 a close enough approximation. Every 3½ days the Secretary of Transportation has been flying off to somewhere!

From The Washington Post:

“Inevitably, every transportation decision is a climate decision, whether we acknowledge it or not,” Buttigieg said in an interview with The Climate 202. “So I think that’s absolutely part of our mandate and part of our set of responsibilities as a department.”

It would seem that, in Mr Buttigieg’s 99 decisions to go leaving on a jet plane, he has taken 99 decisions to spew more CO2 into the atmosphere! Were all of those 99 trips necessary? Has he never asked himself, “Could I do this by videoconference?”

Mr Buttigieg said, at the COP26 conference:

Well, thank you very much and thanks to the U.K. for hosting us. Let me also note, with this audience, how much pleasure I take in the knowledge that the aircraft that brought me to the U.K. returned back to the States full of international travelers, and we’re delighted at that news.

We’re honored to be here with our fellow founding members of the International Aviation Climate Coalition demonstrating that we hear the voices of our citizens, especially our courageous young citizens, who are demanding similar courage on our part, knowing that their lives will be defined by our decisions. And that means not only hearing them but acting, especially on the hard things. And aviation is a sector that is famously considered hard to abate which I think in a less urgent moment, as with maritime, might have meant that it would be on down the list of priorities. But at a moment like this, it also equates to have to abate – and that’s what we’re doing.

Aviation is so central to the fabric of our global economy and our global community. And of course, it’s how so many of us got here this week. And I can tell you as a former mayor of a mid-sized Midwestern city in the U.S., it’s not only important for our global metro centers, but for communities in every part of every country.

And as we know it’s a significant contributor to climate change and without dramatic, urgent action, there will be substantial additional growth in emissions over the next 30 years.

So, it falls to us to find ways to limit those emissions urgently. And the question has become: will we act quickly enough to protect our countries and to seize the economic potential that sustainable aviation represents?

The reality is that the timelines are not being dictated by conferences or by congresses; they’re being set by the laws of physics. And the other timeline that is so important is the engineering that it takes to design, test, produce, and deploy lower carbon aircraft.

But we can control our response, and with that we can shape our collective future.

Yeah, I get it: Mr Buttigieg is a very high-ranking American government official, and there will be some required travel, travel to places he can’t get on his bicycle or an Elon Musk produced Tesla.

But 99 plane rides in less than a year?

Perhaps, just perhaps, we plebeians might take the Patricians more seriously when they tell us we must reduce our CO2 emissions if they showed us, by deeds, that they take their own words seriously.

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Bidenflation How many of those 81,283,501 people who voted for Joe Biden would have done so if they'd known they'd be five percent poorer in two years?

You may have heard the supposedly good news: the year-over-year inflation rate declined to 7.1%:

Consumer prices rose last month at the slowest 12-month pace since December 2021, closing out a year in which inflation hit the highest level in four decades and challenged the Federal Reserve’s ability to keep the U.S. economy on track.

The Labor Department on Tuesday said that its consumer-price index, a measurement of what consumers pay for goods and services, climbed 7.1% in November from a year ago, down sharply from 7.7% in October. The pace built on a trend of moderating price increases since June’s 9.1% peak, but it remained well above the 2.1% average rate in the three years before the pandemic.

There’s a lot more in The Wall Street Journal’s original.

Of course, the inflation rate only makes sense when compared to earnings. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table B-3, average private sector hourly earnings increased from $31.23 in November of 2021 to $32.64, a 5.09% increase, while average weekly earnings moved from $1,086.80 to $1,129.01, which was only a 3.88% increase. Compared to hourly wages, the average American worker is 2.01% poorer, in real terms, than he was in November of 2021; compared to average weekly earnings, he’s 3.22% poorer.

That isn’t the whole story. From November of 2020 to November of 2021, Table B-3 Historical Tables, average wages increased from $29.95 to $31.23, a 4.27% increase, while average weekly earnings went from $1,031.82 to $1,086.80, a 5.33% rise. Remember: this was moving from a COVID-19 restricted economy to one where almost all of the restrictions had been removed. But the November 2021 year-over-year inflation rate was 6.8%.

So, not only was the average American worker 3.22% poorer in November of 2022 than he was a year earlier, that’s on top of being 1.47% poorer, in real terms, the previous year. Due to the compounding effect of the math, average consumer prices were 14.38% higher in November of 2022 than in November of 2020,[1]1.068 x 1.071 = 1.1438 while average weekly earnings were 9.42% higher. That’s a loss of real earning power of 4.96%.

I wonder how many of those 81,283,501 people who voted for Joe Biden in November of 2020 would have done so if they’d known they’d be five percent poorer in two years.

And it’s going to get worse:

The figures leave the Fed on track to lift interest rates by 0.5 percentage point on Wednesday, following larger increases of 0.75 point at their past four meetings.

So, while economists anticipate home prices to start to fall, as demand is lowered due to higher interest rates, that does not mean that rent prices will fall. If the demand for buying homes declines, the demand for rental property necessarily increases, and that means higher rents. Rent increases for existing tenants normally occur just once a year, but rental increases for people moving during the year can and do occur at any time.

In 1849, Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle called economics the dismal science, and in a lot of ways, he was right. Economic reduces things to numbers, and a lot of people don’t like that, but it doesn’t mean that the numbers aren’t true.

The numbers I gave were averages, and I’m sure that many of the 81,283,501 Biden voters have managed to weather the inflation of the past two years reasonably well. But for every Biden voter who hasn’t had a problem with inflation, there’s another who has had Bidenflation eat up more of his earnings than the average. For every Biden voter who hasn’t seen any appreciable loss of economic well-being, there’s another who is worse off than the already-depressing averages.

References

References
↑1 1.068 x 1.071 = 1.1438
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Killadelphia What, did somebody recover from being dead?

We have already noted that there are questions concerning the homicide numbers in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported that there had been 488 murders as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11th.

At 9:21 AM EST on Monday, December 12th, Stevee Keeley of Fox 29 News tweeted:

Identity & age of Philadelphia’s 489th homicide victim in 2022 still not known yet to @phillypolice A 16 year old was shot twice in same shooting incident in Northeast Philadelphia 3:46am @FOX29philly.

Mr Keeley’s tweet included an image of the police press release.

So, a male of unknown age was pronounced dead at the scene, and another person was shot there, yet no weapon was recovered, nor was anyone arrested. Obviously a firearm was used, and just as obviously, someone fled the scene.

So, when I checked the Current Crime Statistics page this morning, I expected to see at least 489 homicides. Maybe I’m not the greatest mathematician around, but 488 + 1 = 489, right?

Well, apparently not, because the Philadelphia Police Department are now reporting that there were 488 homicides through 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 12th. What, did somebody recover from being dead?

Is it any wonder that some people have no confidence at all in the city’s statistics?

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is on her way out. A political appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), following stints in Oakland, California, and as Chief of Police in Portland, Oregon, and supposedly once considered to have become Police Commissioner of New York City, when Mr Kenney’s term is over at the end of next year, Miss Outlaw is almost certainly out as well. With 499 murders in the city in 2020, her first year — and remember: 502 was the number first reported, and then scaled back — followed by 562 in 2021, and almost certainly between 509 and 516, good for second place all-time this year, it’s difficult to see any of Philly’s mayoral candidates wanting to keep her around. Former Councilwoman Helen Gym Flaherty, the furthest left, and therefore most probable winner of the Democratic primary, is an ally of District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Mr Krasner and Miss Outlaw do not exactly get along. Even if another Democrat wins the primary — and no Republican has ever won a direct mayoral election in Philadelphia — they are all looking at how Let ’em Loose Larry has won by a landslide in his election.

In other words, Miss Outlaw’s got to go.

This is the time, with only a year left in office, for the Commissioner to do something really radical and tell the truth. If she’s going to have to leave anyway, she could at least do so honestly.

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Killadelphia Is The Philadelphia Inquirer trying to keep the truth hushed up to protect Democrats?

I noted, just five days ago, that I saw a mathematical possibility, at the margin of error, that the City of Brotherly Love could finish very slightly below 500 homicides in 2022. That was based upon the decrease in the rate of killings since Hallowe’en.

Alas! while the rate of killings still isn’t in the 2021 range, it has picked up once again, and the math makes it seem impossible now. With 488 killings as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11, 2022, Philly is now seeing 1.4145 murders per day; that works out to 516.29 murders for the year. And with at least six homicides over the last three days, the city has seen 43 murders in the 41 days since Hallowe’en. At that rate, 1.0488 per day, times thee 20 days left in the year, yields 20.98 homicides in these last three weeks. If there are 21 homicides in the last 20 days, that would end the year with 509 murders.

But that is working with the official homicide numbers, and Broad + Liberty, along with other outlets, broke the story of the uncounted deaths in the city, showing at least 101 “suspicious” deaths, in a photo taken just before Thanksgiving. That the credentialed media didn’t want to report that is evidenced by the fact that, since the story broke, The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, and the supposed newspaper of record for the area, and one which believes it is so important that the federal government should subsidize it, has nothing on that story, even though it was published four days ago, on a subject that would seem pretty serious and significant. Checking the Inquirer’s website main page, specific crime page, and doing a site search for suspicious deaths, as of 9:45 AM EST today showed no stories on the subject at all. Did the Inky investigate at all? Did Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tell them that it was nothing, don’t worry about it? Did the top officers clam up?

You’d think that a leak like this, from someone inside the Philadelphia Police Department, would have piqued the interest of real journalists, especially the police-hating #woke of the Inquirer, but if you actually thought that, you’d be wrong, wrong, wrong!

Who knows, perhaps the unauthorized leak from someone in the Police Department was a fake, a political attack. If so, wouldn’t the journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading want to expose that? After all, it’s a serious accusation, one which attacks the political leadership of the Police Department and the city as a whole . . . and Philadelphia hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President.

Oh, wait, that’s it: the editors of the Inky don’t want anything which could hurt the Democrats made public.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Have we learned nothing?

At what point do we ask: why are we doing this?

Perhaps you haven’t heard of this, because it only rarely makes the credentialed media, but The Wall Street Journal finally covered it.

U.S. Builds New Firewall to Stop Spread of Militant Islamists

Hundreds of American troops join Western allies in Niger to block al Qaeda and Islamic State from advancing violence and influence in West Africa

by Michael M Phillips | Sunday, December 11, 2022 | 10:15 AM EST

OUALLAM, Niger—The front lines in the war between the West and militant Islamists have shifted to Africa, from Somalia on the continent’s eastern tip to the West African Sahel, a semidesert strip south of the Sahara.

In the Sahel, the U.S. and its allies are betting that Niger, the worst-off country in the world by a U.N. measure, offers the best hope of stopping the seemingly inexorable spread of al Qaeda and Islamic State.

Here’s where the Journal’s paywall begins. I’d say that I subscribe so that you don’t have to, but really, it’s the best newspaper in the world, and you should subscribe!

In the heart of the region, the nations of Mali and Burkina Faso are losing ground, roiled by militant attacks and military coups. In contrast, the elected civilian government in neighboring Niger is making slow headway against insurgents with the help of Western forces, U.S. and Nigerien officials said. Mali’s ruling junta has hired Kremlin-linked mercenaries to provide security, while Niger has shunned Russian intervention and welcomed U.S. and French forces.

“We’ve invested a lot with the Nigeriens, and we’re seeing a payoff from that,” said Lt. Col. Chris Couch, commander of U.S. special-operations troops in West Africa. Niger, he said, is emerging as a cornerstone of regional security.

The next few paragraphs describe how Nigerien — as opposed to Nigerian, which would mean troops from Nigeria, not from Niger — troops have been trained by United States Army Special Forces troops, are deployed from French aircraft, but our troops monitor from a “safe distance”.

U.S. commandos accompanied Nigerien forces on combat missions until a 2017 Islamic State ambush killed four American soldiers from the Special Forces outpost in Ouallam. The Green Berets now supervise from a safe distance, while local commandos they train carry out the raids.

I will admit it: it was after reading the previous paragraph that I decided to write about this. Am I the only one who has a difficult time believing that our most highly trained soldiers would actually stand by, monitoring, but not getting involved in the fighting?

Niger is proving a test ground for the U.S. strategy of deploying relatively small numbers of American troops—there are around 800 now in the country—to train local forces.

Historically, the strategy has yielded uneven results. U.S.-trained militaries in Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea overthrew civilian governments. After U.S. troops left Afghanistan in 2020, local forces collapsed under Taliban offensives, despite U.S.-supplied weapons and two decades of training.

“Uneven results,” huh?

Who knows, perhaps the US wanted those civilian governments overthrown. It’s not like we wouldn’t have ever supported military coup d’etat’s before.

But at some point, it has to be asked why we are doing this. Rule by Islamic State is a pretty horrible thing, but is it really any of our business if the Muslim fundamentalists rule in resource-starved Niger?

The Nigeriens will wind up like every other client state we’ve supported: doing things their own way, in accordance with their own culture. They won’t be somehow transformed into Americans or Westerners; they will develop their own society and culture based on how they think, not how we think.

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Why would anyone want to become a cop these days?

Following the unfortunate death of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl crazed drug addict and previously convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting a legitimate arrest in Minneapolis, the left went wild, and “Defund the Police“, as though the problem wasn’t crime, but people being arrested for committing crimes. This stupid notion was popular with the street agitators, and thus some Democratic politicians took up the call, but it wound up fading from sight reasonably quickly, as sensible people — meaning, in this case: those not out in antifa demonstrations — soundly defeated a police reorganization proposal in Minneapolis.

But, of course, attacks on the legitimacy of the police continue, from shakedown lawsuits in Detroit to the George Soros-sponsored, cop-hating defense lawyer serving as Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner trying to put police officers doing their duty in jail, Philadelphia didn’t actually defund the police, per se, but the effect of the city’s policies has been to do just that: as we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department is nearly 600 officers understrength from its authorized full strength of 6,380, with around 800 more expected to retire within the next four years. Police Academy classes have not kept up with officer attrition. And really, who’d want to become a Philly cop when the Police Commissioner won’t support you and the DA is trying to throw you in jail?

Well, it’s not just Philly! From The New York Times:

N.Y.P.D. Officers Leave in Droves for Better Pay in Smaller Towns

This year has seen the highest number of resignations in two decades.

By Chelsia Rose Marcius | Friday, December 9, 2022

Earlier this year, the chief of police in Aurora, Colo., needed to find a few dozen officers to join his force.

The chief, Dan Oates, was 50 officers short to patrol Aurora, a city of roughly 400,000 people just east of Denver. But he knew limiting his search to Colorado would not be enough: Like many other leaders in law enforcement, he has found that fewer people these days want to be cops.

So Chief Oates and his team began to seek recruits at agencies where they believed pay and morale were low. They settled on New York City, and in August, he flew about 1,800 miles to meet with New York Police Department officers. He convinced 14 of them to move out west.

“I feel bad raiding my home agency,” said Chief Oates, who once served as a deputy chief in New York City. “But frankly it’s a cutthroat environment right now among police chiefs to recruit talent, and we all desperately need it.”

The departure of those officers was no anomaly. The New York Police Department, with about 34,000 officers, has seen more resignations this year than at any time in the past two decades as other agencies have become more aggressive in recruiting from its ranks.

Through November, about 1,225 officers resigned before even reaching five years of service, according to New York City Police Pension Fund statistics obtained by The New York Times. Many left for other New York State agencies or police departments outside the state.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the numbers are pretty stark.

Chief Oates, who retired this week, said the officers he recruited from New York were partially lured by better pay. The starting salary at the Aurora Police Department is about $65,000 in an area where the average monthly rent is approximately $1,750 and the average home sale price is about $624,000, according to an August report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Incoming officers with four or more years on the job can earn a salary of around $100,000. Aurora also gives incentives to those who transfer from other departments, including a signing bonus of up to $10,000 and a $5,000 relocation bonus.

That is more money than officers make in New York City, where the median sales price for a home is $810,000 and the average monthly rent is about $4,500. The starting salary at the Police Department is $42,500, according to the most recent contract between the agency and the officer’s union. After three and a half years of service, officers can earn a salary of $47,000, and $85,292 after five and a half.

Even foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia pays its police officers more: $59,795 annual salary while a Recruit in the Academy, with a raise to $63,945 upon graduation and joining the PPD. Philly is a lot less expensive a city in which to live than New York: housing costs less, taxes are lower, and they can get Wawa coffee to drink as well!

But if the pay is higher, it also means putting up with open air drug markets in Kensington and having to patrol the Philadelphia Badlands.

As we noted on Thursday, when Philly had an official — whatever “official” means in Philadelphia — 499 homicides in 2020, neighboring Upper Darby Township had 10. With a population of 85,681 according to the 2020 census, that means that Upper Darby had a homicide rate of 11.67 per 100,000 population, while Philly’s that same year was 31.11 . . . and that paled before the 2021 homicide rate. Even directly adjacent to Philadelphia, smaller towns are safer.

Aurora, Colorado, which poached officers from the NYPD? With a population of 386,261 according to the 2020 census, the city saw 38 homicides that year, for as homicide rate of 9.84 per 100,000. Why wouldn’t a former NYPD cop, or Philadelphia Police officer, prefer to work there, where the pay is better and the crime rate a lot lower?

Yes, police pay is unacceptably low in New York City, and the left-leaning city council isn’t going raise it that much. But the real problem is that the big cities in the east — and not a few in the west — just plain hate cops! Why would anyone want to work in a place where the public spit on your shadow, if not your shoes?

The far left wanted to defund the police, and while they didn’t get it de jure, it has been achieved de facto: with major city police departments being hundreds of officers undermanned — Baltimore is 420 officers short staffed — what the left wanted has been achieved: fewer dedicated police officers to enforce the law.