Starting the bathroom renovation.
We knew we’d have to do a bit of renovation in the bathroom, but the more my nephew Nate and I dug into it, the more s(tuff) we found. Photos below the fold. Continue reading
We bought a house!
Author Archives: Dana Pico
Girls can’t be boys and boys can’t be girls
Will Thomas, from his University of Pennsylvania biography page.
Will 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.” The 2019-20 roster lists him as Lia Thomas, and states that he “Competed in four of Penn’s eight regular season events (as a male, and) won the 500 free against Villanova (Nov. 15).” The 2017-18 roster notes that he was “Ivy League Championships qualifier in 500 free (A final), 1000 free (A final), 1650 free (A final).”
Will Thomas, prior to ‘transitioning,’ from the Daily Mail.
Penn, an Ivy League school, erased Mr Thomas portrait from those rosters. For the 2021-22 season, he is now listed as Lia Thomas on the roster, complete with his portrait after ‘transitioning’. His individual biography page no longer lists his top times, or his past accomplishments on the men’s team, and simply notes that “All 2020-21 Ivy League winter sports were canceled on November 12 due to a nationwide outbreak of coronavirus COVID-19.”
To no one’s surprise, Mr Thomas, now claiming to be a female and competing against women, is setting the pool on fire. From the London Daily Mail:
‘It’s bringing people to tears’: SECOND UPenn swimmer speaks out against trans Lia Thomas competing for the women’s team and says the crowd was silent when she won most recent meet
- An second anonymous female swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania has spoken out to say she and her teammates are upset by transgender teammate
- Lia Thomas, 22, smashed three US swimming records at an Akron, Ohio contest last weekend
- Thomas also gave an interview to SwimSwam touting the fairness of inclusive but controversial IOC guidelines allowing transgender athletes to compete
- Thomas previously competed for the school’s men’s team for three years before joining the women’s team with her last men’s competition in November 2019
By James Gordon | Published: 18:29 EST, 10 December 2021 | Updated: 21:33 EST, 10 December 2021
A second female swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania has aired her frustrations and fury as her transgender teammate Lia Thomas continues to smash records.
The entire team has been ‘strongly advised’ not to speak to the media and the second swimmer has been granted anonymity.
Nevertheless, the teammate stepped forward to tell how UPenn swimmers are ‘angry’ over what has been perceived as a ‘lack of fairness’ as Thomas smashes record after record in the pool.
On Sunday, December 5th, Mr Thomas, won the 1,650 meter freestyle with a time of 15:59:71; the second-place finisher was his teammate Anna Sofia Kalandaze, who touched at 16:37:44 in the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio.
The difference between Mr Thomas’ and Miss Kalandaze’s times is 37.73 seconds.
‘Usually everyone claps, everyone is yelling and cheering when someone wins a race. Lia touched the wall and it was just silent in there. When fellow Penn swimmer Anna Kalandadze finished second, the crowd erupted in applause.’
Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Waking up from wokeness. People can tell when leftism has degenerated into idiocy.
What stings the swimmers the most is that the records are being set by a swimmer who didn’t even make the first-team when she was competing as a man in the All-Ivy league during the 2018-19 season.
However, as a woman, Thomas broke 500-yard freestyle with a time of 4:34:06 last Friday at the Zippy meet. She raced to victory 14 seconds ahead of Kalandaze – the swimmer she beat by 38 seconds on Sunday.
And then on Saturday, she won the 200-yard freestyle in 1:41:93 – seven seconds ahead of her nearest rival, giving her the fastest female US time ever for that race too.
As per our Stylebook, The First Street Journal refers to those who claim to be transgender with the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth, but we do not change the direct quotes of others.
The Daily Mail article refers to a second anonymous female athlete on the team speaking out; the first was quoted in this from Fox News:
“Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this. Our coach [Mike Schnur] just really likes winning. He’s like most coaches. I think secretly everyone just knows it’s the wrong thing to do,” the female Penn swimmer said during a phone interview.
“When the whole team is together, we have to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, go Lia, that’s great, you’re amazing.’ It’s very fake,” she added.
Why anonymity? The first swimmer to speak out said that she feared for her ability to find employment after being graduated from college for sharing her opinion about a transgender teammate. I’m retired; I can say what I wish without having to worry about getting fired for it.
There’s a Twitter hashtag, #TransWomenAreWomen, but when I hear about and read about people like Mr Thomas, a man male who went through puberty as a male, who competed athletically as a male, all of whose experiences growing up were as a male, I am hearing about someone who wants so desperately to be female that he has gone through all sorts of medical, and I assume, surgical, treatments to try to become female, yet who is doing everything he can to prove to us that he isn’t female.
The crowd at the Zippy Invitational Event knew what was happening right in front of their eyes; they could see the differences between someone born male, competing against real women. Whatever the political beliefs of the spectators, of the coaches, and the other athletes are, common sense was smacking them right in the face.
We can feel sorry for those who are consumed with the idea that they are really the opposite sex from what their genes and their bodies say they are. But having sympathy for them does not and should not overcome reality. Will Thomas was conceived as male, he was born as male, he grew up as male, and he will always be a male.
Lexington breaks the record!
In 2019, Lexington, where I lived from 1971 through 1984, and, since my return to the Bluegrass State in 2017 is the closest ‘major’ city to me, set a new city homicide record of 30. In 2020, it broke that record, with 34 murders.
Well, that didn’t last long, as the city has now seen 35 homicides, with the murder of Ramon Pennie on December 7th. 35 killings in 341 days works out to one every ten days, and projecting the current homicide rate further, the city could see 37.4633 murders by the end of the year. Unlike Philadelphia, city leaders have at least touched on the reasons for the increased homicide numbers:
‘It’s a community problem.’ Lexington police chief addresses record homicide numbers.
by Christopher Leach | Wednesday, December 8, 2021 | 5:03 PM EST | Updated: 5:10 PM EST
The city of Lexington broke its annual homicide record after a 51-year-old man was shot and killed on Tuesday evening.
Ramon Pennie was shot and killed on Hill Street Tuesday night, marking the 35th homicide in Lexington in 2021. That surpassed the record number of 34 in 2020. With a few weeks until the calendar flips to 2022, it’s possible the new-record homicide count could rise.
Lexington Chief of Police Lawrence Weathers hosted a press conference Tuesday afternoon to address the high number of homicides. He said a number of factors play into the disturbing trend, but the root of the problem starts within the community.
“What I know for a fact is that this is not just a police problem, it’s not a city, government problem, it’s a community problem,” Weathers said. “Where we can do things immediately on the front end, I think all of us working together in the community, with the community’s help, can do things not just to alleviate and reduce criminal activity, especially homicides in the short long, but in the long run.”
Read more at: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/crime/article256427956.html#storylink=cpy
The Lexington Police Department’s Homicide Investigations page is somewhat in arrears in its data: only 33 homicides are listed, the last on November 20th. In only 12 of the 33 listed killings is there an indication that a suspect has been apprehended.
One thing that the homicide page does not include in its public data is the race and sex of the deceased, but the non-fatal Shootings Investigations page does. Out of 127 non-fatal shootings, 20 of the victims are listed as white, and 12 are listed as Hispanic, which means that 95 of the victims are listed as being black. That’s 74.80%, in a city in which only 14.61% of the population are listed as black.
Out of those 127 non-fatal shootings, the police list 11 as solved. That’s a whopping 8.66% of cases. 🙁
Chief Weathers was right: it is a community problem. He just couldn’t bring himself to say which community.
The powers that be in Philadelphia continue to blame each other for a problem about which they cannot tell the truth
There are times when I worry about being a bit of a broken record on the homicide rate in Philadelphia, and I skipped some recent stories, but the blame game in the City of Brotherly Love has gotten both hysterically funny and monumentally tragic.
Mayor Kenney acknowledges Philadelphia has ‘a gun crisis’ but sidesteps questions about DA Larry Krasner’s crime comments
District Attorney Larry Krasner drew criticism Monday when he said: “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.”
By Anna Orso | Wednesday, December 8, 2021 | 5:26 PM EST
Two days after District Attorney Larry Krasner stirred outrage by insisting the city isn’t in the midst of a crime or violence crisis, Mayor Jim Kenny and the city’s police commissioner sought Wednesday to gingerly wade into — or away from — the issue.
During their scheduled biweekly news conference, one that began this year in direct response to the rising number of shootings, Kenney and Commissioner Danielle Outlaw both said they do believe the city has a gun violence problem.
Both also declined to say more about Krasner’s comments or the ensuing pushback, including a blistering statement from Kenney’s predecessor, former Mayor Michael Nutter, who called Krasner’s remarks “some of the worst, most ignorant, and most insulting comments I have ever heard spoken by an elected official.”
Kenney on Wednesday said while he agrees “we’re in a gun crisis,” he would not “get involved in a back-and-forth between a former mayor and the DA.”
There’s more at the original.
Michael Nutter wasn’t the best mayor Philadelphia ever had, but, during his eight years in office, his Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey, and he presided over a significant decrease in killings in the city. The city saw 391 homicides in Mayor John Street’s last year of 2007; that number was down 60, to 331, in Mayor Nutter’s first year in office, and though tied again in 2012, the numbers were generally down. In their last three years, 2013, 2014, and 2015, the city saw fewer than 300 murders, 246, 248, and 280, respectively.
Though that number dropped slightly, to 277 in Mayor Kenney’s first year, by the following year the numbers were above 300 again, at 315, 353, 356, and then last year’s whopping 499.
District Attorney Krasner, one of the George Soros-funded stooges who took office in some of our major cities with the explicit promise to reduce prosecutions, tried to tell people that yes, crimes with firearms had increased, but other crimes were down. That, of course, was bovine feces.
This is where the Inquirer truthfully reports the statistics, but never questions them. Murder is not normally an entry-level crime.
There are two different types of crime, crimes of evidence, and crimes of reporting. Murder is a crime of evidence, because it leaves a dead body, and dead bodies get found. It’s hard to dispose of 100 to 300 pounds of dead and decaying flesh and bone and muscle and fat unless someone has carefully planned how to do it.
But assaults, or robberies, or rapes? Assaults and rapes can be crimes of evidence, if the victim goes to the hospital for treatment. But if the victims is not seriously enough injured to seek medical care, or if the rape victim chooses not to report it, then those crimes become crimes of reporting, and if they are not reported to the police, then as far as the police are concerned, as far as the statistics measure, the crimes never happened. Yet, while the statistics vary, it seems that fewer than half of all “violent victimization” are reported to the police, and rape appears to be the least reported crime. According to the survey, only 32.5% or rapes or sexual assaults were reported in 2015, and that dropped to 23.2% the following year.[1]See Table 4. In a city, in communities, in which the vast majority of crimes which are known about go unsolved, why would people who are already distrustful of the police, people who have low expectations that the crimes will actually be solved, even bother reporting the crimes? Why would residential burglaries be down 22% but non-residential burglaries up 15%? Same crime, just different targets, but different conditions for the owners. Commercial owners who find their businesses burgled[2]Though “burglarize” is apparently a real word now, I refuse to use it. have a far greater possibility of getting an insurance recovery, while residents do not, so of course the victims of commercial burglaries are more likely to report the crimes. Residential burglaries? With so many unsolved crimes, and distrust of the police high, reporting such a crime must seem mostly useless to people.
And in the City of Brotherly Love, both Mr Krasner, and the nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, have been working as hard as they can to undermine the police!
Of course, all of the politicians, all of the politically correct, want to talk about “gun violence,” as though those inanimate objects somehow levitate and shoot people all by themselves, all to push stricter gun control laws. In their own stories, the Inquirer noted that Latif Williams, the (alleged) killer of Samuel Collington, was a juvenile, with a criminal record, and could not be legally carrying a gun . . . but he was. They reported that Donavan Crawford, charged with the murder of Sykea Patton, was “charged overnight with murder and multiple counts of illegally carrying a gun.” Somehow, some way, the highly educated and experienced editors and reporters for the Inquirer never noticed that the people committing crimes with guns are almost never holders of firearms permits, almost never carrying firearms legally, and, shockingly enough, aren’t that interested in obeying the law in the first place.
This is the problem that the left simply cannot see, because they are unwilling to see it. It is not a matter of guns, but the people using the guns. Since the people using guns to kill others are disproportionately black, to admit that it’s the people who are the problem is to recognize that homicide in our major cities is primarily a black problem, and that the #woke[3]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 just cannot do.
But if you cannot admit what the problem is, you can never hope to solve the problem. And the left, including Mayor Kenney, including Commissioner Outlaw, would rather ignore the truth than deal with the truth.
References
| ↑1 | See Table 4. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Though “burglarize” is apparently a real word now, I refuse to use it. |
| ↑3 | From Wikipedia:
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. |
The left have internalized the ‘new normal’
As most people just want to get over COVID-19 and the ridiculous restrictions under which governments have put people, some have so internalized the messages of fear that they’ll never get over it.
The image to the right is a screenshot of a tweet by blue-checked Nicole F Carr. You can click on either the link in the previous sentence, or the image itself, to get to the original.
The obvious answer to her question is: producers want to be able to show their Christmas movies in more than just this year, and Christmas movies aren’t supposed to be downers. They’d like to show this in 2022, 2023, and so on.
But Mrs Carr, whose Twitter biography states that she’s “@ProPublica South covering criminal justice,racial inequity,COVID. @Morehouse journalism professor. 4x Emmy, #WSSU #Newhouse nicole.carr@propublica.org”, is obviously heavily invested in reporting on the virus.
Well, perhaps Mrs Carr really does believe that we’ll all be wearing masks for the rest of our lives, but let’s face facts: mask mandates are being honored in the breach almost every place they can be.
- Christmas movies aren’t meant just for one year; the producers want to be able to use it again in 2022, 2023, and so on. And let’s face it: Christmas movies aren’t supposed to be downers, and the restrictions are real buzzkills.
We’d like to get back to our normal lives.
Well, while it’s still there, apparently Mrs Carr didn’t like it, because now there’s this, which wasn’t there previously:
Like so many other lefties on Twitter, Mrs Carr can dish it out, but she just can’t take criticism! I am not surprised.
Some (mostly) good news
We have mentioned the case of Cody Allen Arnett before. Mr Arnett was treated leniently by the Kentucky Parole Board, and released well before his previous sentences were up. Despite having five prior violent felony convictions on his record, the parole board recommended him for early release. On June 26, 2018, he was granted parole, and scheduled for release on August 1, 2018, for a conviction on August 7, 2015 for robbery, for which he was sentenced to consecutive five-year sentences.
On September 23, 2018, he broke into the dorm apartment of Georgetown College student Ava Stokes[1]Though the media normally do not disclose rape victims’ identities, Miss Stokes has gone public with her story. and raped her, repeatedly, at knife point. He eventually got careless, and Miss Stokes was able to seize the knife from him, and she stabbed him several times. Fleeing the scene, he was quickly apprehended.
In July of this year, he was finally convicted, and the jury recommended six consecutive life sentences.
Man sentenced to life in prison in 2018 rape of a Georgetown College student
by Jeremy Chisenhall | Tuesday, December 7, 2021 | 11:00 AM EST
A man convicted of raping a Georgetown College student was sentenced Monday to life in prison, according to prosecutors.
Cody A. Arnett, 36, was sentenced after a jury convicted him of rape, sodomy, burglary, evidence tampering and being a persistent felony offender earlier this year, according to court records. Arnett was accused of sexually assaulting a woman inside a Georgetown College residence hall on Sept. 23, 2018. He threatened her with a knife during the assault, according to court records.
The jury recommended that Arnett be sentenced to six consecutive life sentences for his crimes, according to court records. But state law doesn’t allow for judges to impose life sentences consecutively. Commonwealth’s Attorney Sharon Muse Johnson said the jury’s recommendation of six life sentences should indicate to the parole board that Arnett shouldn’t be released.
“The day Arnett’s sentence ends Ava’s begins,” Muse Johnson told the jury, according to a news release. “The day he is released her life is over.” Muse Johnson said Arnett was a danger to the community and “has more than earned a life sentence.”
There’s more at the original.
Sadly, Kentucky state law is such that Mr Arnett will be eligible for parole after serving twenty years. His most recent parole showed just how well he had been rehabilitated! Prosecutors are saying that they believe the jury’s recommendation for a sentence, even though it was outside of state law, will persuade a future Parole Board never to grant him a release. Mr Arnett is 36 years old; he could, in theory, be released when he is just 56.
What does the state Parole Board say about itself, its members, and its mission:
Welcome to the Kentucky Parole Board
The Kentucky Parole Board consists of diverse, experienced, and committed professionals who are honored to serve the citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Public safety is paramount to the parole board.
The mission of the Kentucky Parole Board is to make decisions that maintain a delicate balance between public safety, victim rights, reintegration of the offender and recidivism. We will achieve this important balance by application of our core values of knowledge, experience and integrity.
If “public safety is paramount to the parole board,” why are they trying to “maintain a delicate balance between public safety, victim rights, reintegration of the offender and recidivism”? Their own self-description is internally contradictory.
If you look at the brief biographies of the Parole Board members, you will see that all have advanced degrees and multiple years of experience in law enforcement, yet somehow, some way, the Parole Board could not figure out that releasing a man with five prior violent felony convictions was not a very good idea.[2]Most of the current members were not on the Parole Board when Mr Arnett was approved for release in May of 2018. But it doesn’t take a law degree, or a masters, or even a baccalaureate degree to figure out that Mr Arnett should not have been released even a day earlier than his maximum sentence.
- All board members as well as additional support staff are members of the Association of Paroling Authorities International (APAI) and continuously utilize resources through APAI as well as the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) to enhance knowledge and expertise with regards to criminal justice and the parole process. The goal is to utilize research and evidence based practices in order to keep Kentucky on the cutting edge with advances in the field.
The best “evidence based practices” would be to keep the bad guys locked up! Our problem is not ‘mass incarceration,’ but that not enough people have been locked up, for not a long enough time. And we need to start holding parole board members accountable for the crimes and damages caused by criminals they have released early.
Killadelphia It's not just that the raw number of homicides is increasing; the rate of killings has increased as well
The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated Monday through Friday, during normal business hours, so when last I saw it, the police had indicated that there had been 513 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 2nd. This morning, that number had jumped to 521 killings as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 6th.
That’s eight homicides in three days!
Forget the “long, hot summer” when it comes to murder in Philly. As of the end of Labor Day, September 6th, the 249th day of the year, Philly had seen 363 homicides. 363 ÷ 249 = 1.4578 homicides per day × 365 days in the year = 532.1084 homicides projected for the year.
Well, that was then, and this is now. 521 homicides ÷ 339th day of the year = 1.5369 killings per day, × 365 = 560.9587 projected murders.
But it gets worse. Labor Day is the ‘traditional end of summer’, even if it’s not autumn astronomically. Since the end of Labor Day, there have been 158 killings, in just 90 days. That works out to 1.7556 murders per day. If that rate is maintained through the end of the year, that’s another 45.6444 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards, for a projected 567 dead bodies littering the city’s mean streets.
Yeah, I’m something of a number’s geek on this subject, but I’m also a writer, and there have been so many murders in Philadelphia that I’ve been struggling to come up with different words to use, to avoid redundancy in my prose. Perhaps that explains why The Philadelphia Inquirer has nothing on their website main page, at least as of 10:15 AM EST, not a single thing, on the eight killings over the past three days.
In reality, the editors of the Inquirer don’t want to hear about homicide in the city, not in any nitty-gritty way. I submitted the article Being taught about white privilege, by The Philadelphia Inquirer, to the newspaper as a prospective OpEd piece on Friday, December 3rd, and though I did not really expect them to print it, I did hope that maybe, just maybe, upon reading it, the editors would realize just how biased they’ve been on the reporting of the carnage in the city’s streets.[1]At least as of 10:15 AM this morning, I have neither been contacted nor received a rejection email from the Inquirer.
The American Free News Network did print it.
Of course, the Inquirer is concerned about homicide, in macro terms:
- ‘I’m still here’: John Paul III was shot 10 times last year and now navigates immense physical challenges. It wasn’t the first time gun violence turned his family upside down. December 6, 2021
- Wolf vetoes permitless gun bill pushed by Pa. Republicans, calls it ‘dangerous’: The governor called the bill “dangerous.” His veto comes amid rising gun violence in Pennsylvania’s cities, particularly Philadelphia, and political finger-pointing over blame. December 2, 2021
- 3 words America forgot that explain gun insanity, vaccine denial, student debt, and more, by Will Bunch. December 5, 2021
- Are any of Philly’s anti-violence tactics working? Without better tracking, we’ll never know. | Editorial: By failing to evaluate its anti-violence programs, city officials are missing an opportunity to determine which strategies are working and — more importantly — which aren’t. November 30, 2021
- In Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal, a lesson about laws that allow more guns to be carried in public | Editorial: Advocating for more people to be armed in more situations does nothing to make Pennsylvania safer. November 22, 2021
- How Pa. can protect abortion rights no matter what the Supreme Court decides | Editorial: As the justices weigh a Mississippi case and the possible erosion of Roe v. Wade, the outcome of two statewide political races in 2022 may ultimately shape abortion rights in the commonwealth. December 2, 2021
In that last one, the Editorial Board noted just how concerned they are that #BlackLivesMatter, because pregnant black women are five times more likely than white women to terminate their pregnancies. Nothing quite says black lives matter than wanting to see them being snuffed out before birth!
But none of it makes sense. In their own stories, the Inquirer noted that Latif Williams, the (alleged) killer of Samuel Collington, was a juvenile, with a criminal record, and could not be legally carrying a gun . . . but he was. They reported that Donavan Crawford, charged with the murder of Sykea Patton, was “charged overnight with murder and multiple counts of illegally carrying a gun.” Somehow, some way, the highly educated and experience editors and reporters for our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper never noticed that the people committing crimes with guns are almost never holders of firearms permits, almost never carrying firearms legally, and, shocking, I know, aren’t that interested in obeying the law in the first place.
This is the problem that the left simply cannot see, because they are unwilling to see it. It is not a matter of guns, but the people using the guns. Since the people using guns to kill others are disproportionately black, to admit that it’s the people who are the problem is to recognize that homicide in our major cities is primarily a black problem, and that the #woke[2]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 just cannot do.
But if you cannot admit what the problem is, you can never hope to solve the problem. And the left would rather ignore the truth than deal with the truth.
References
| ↑1 | At least as of 10:15 AM this morning, I have neither been contacted nor received a rejection email from the Inquirer. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | From Wikipedia:
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. |
The Patriot Front marches
Twitter was full of stuff on this march held by the Patriot Front.
I see @ProjectLincoln had a field trip this weekend pic.twitter.com/TlWSJAdvjf
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 5, 2021
Much was made of the marchers being masked, masked to conceal their identities rather than any submission to COVID-19 masking requirements, and it looked so staged that many though it had to be a joke, a set-up by the Lincoln Project or some other silliness group. The group marched in quasi military order, and they were carrying American flags. To the left, carrying the flag is apparently a hate symbol. That the marchers were masked led to cries of outrage by the left, the same left which thought nothing about antifa marching masked throughout 2020’s summer of riots.
The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment.
And that’s the point: the Patriot Front exercised their constitutional rights of freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. Unlike the left’s Mostly Peaceful Protests™ of last year, the Patriot Front was peaceful. They assaulted no one, and they set no buildings on fire.
The masks? Given how the feds were using facial recognition software to identify and prosecute people who took part in the January 6th Capitol kerfuffle, and have held some of the charged without bail, despite not having charged them with any violent offences, who can blame them? Antifa have largely gotten away with violence, mayhem, looting and arson by going masked, so why shouldn’t the Patriot Front use the same tactic during a peaceful protest. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the patriot Front as a white supremacist group, and tries to get members fired from their jobs, so yeah, it’s important to the members.
You don’t have to agree with the group’s message to support their right to speak and assemble as they please.
For The New York Times, some news is just not fit to print!
From the Encyclopedia Britannica:
- On August 18, 1896, (Adolph Simon) Ochs acquired control of the financially faltering New York Times, again with borrowed money ($75,000). To set his paper apart from its more sensational competitors, Ochs adopted the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” (first used October 25, 1896) and insisted on reportage that lived up to that promise. Despite an early shortage of capital, he refused advertisements that he considered dishonest or in poor taste. In 1898, when sales were low and expenses unusually high, he probably saved The New York Times by cutting its price from three cents to one cent. He thereby attracted many readers who previously had bought the more sensational penny papers, especially the New York World and the Journal. By 1900 Ochs was able to purchase a controlling interest in The New York Times.
In its long and august history, the Times, through many editors and publishers, was our newspaper of record, printing many things that the government opposed, and winning its right to publish the so-called Pentagon Papers, despite the attempt by the Nixon Administration to prohibit such.
But now? The Times reported on the stabbing murder of Columbia University graduate student Davide Giri, but left out a lot of detail.
Columbia University Student Dies in Stabbing Near Campus
The graduate student, Davide Giri, was fatally stabbed near the Manhattan campus on Thursday night. A man has been arrested and charged with murder, the police said.
By Troy Closson and Lola Fadulu | Friday, December 3, 2021
A graduate student at Columbia University died and another man was wounded after the two were stabbed in Upper Manhattan on Thursday night, the police and college officials said.
The student, Davide Giri, was traveling home from soccer practice just before 11 p.m. when he was stabbed in the abdomen about two blocks from his apartment building, the police and friends said. He was taken to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The police arrested Vincent Pinkney, 25, of Manhattan, in the attacks and charged him on Friday with murder, attempted murder, assault, attempted assault and three counts of criminal possession of a weapon. He had been found in Central Park, and the police said that he had been menacing a third man with a knife.
In a campuswide letter sent on Friday morning, Lee C. Bollinger, the university’s president, identified Mr. Giri, 30, as a student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and expressed sadness over his death.
There’s more at the original, telling us about the victim, and noting that a similar killing had occurred just a few blocks away, when Tessa Majors, a student at Bernard College, was killed during a robbery.
What you won’t find in the original are any details about the (alleged) assailant, Vincent Pinkney. For those, you have to go across the pond, to London’s Daily Mail:
- Alleged killer Vincent Pinkney, 25, has a lengthy rap sheet and 11 arrests on robbery, assault and other charges
- He is accused of stabbing a Columbia grad student to death and wounding tourist in mad crime spree
- Davide Giri, 30, a PhD candidate in computer science at Columbia University, was stabbed to death
- Italian tourist, Robert Malastina, 27, was wounded in Central Park just 15 minutes after the murder
- Pinkney was arrested after threatening another man, 29, who was walking in the park with his girlfriend
- Police said Pinkney, who was out on parole, had 11 prior arrests dating back to 2012
- The fatal stabbing took place just a block from where Bernard College student Tessa Majors was killed in 2019
- NYC murders have shot up by 42 per cent since 2019, and overall crime this year is up by more than 3 per cent
Gang member, 25, charged in fatal Manhattan stabbing spree that killed Columbia student and wounded Italian tourist has been arrested 11 times since 2012 and was on parole for gang attack
By Keith Griffith and Ronny Reyes | Published: 1:00 EST, 4 December 2021 | Updated: 01:29 EST, 4 December 2021
The suspect accused of killing a Columbia University grad student and stabbing an Italian tourist in a demented Manhattan crime spree is a career criminal who was out on parole for a gang attack, it has been revealed.
Vincent Pinkney, 25, was escorted into NPYD Central Booking on Friday night, as hundreds gathered on the South Lawn of Columbia in a vigil for Davide Giri, a PhD candidate in computer science.
Giri, 30, died around 11pm on Thursday after police say he was stabbed in the stomach by Pinkney, who allegedly went on to wound an Italian tourist, Robert Malastina, 27, outside Central Park before ‘menacing’ another man, 29, with a large kitchen knife as the victim strolled the park with his girlfriend.
Pinkney is a member of Bloods gang off-shoot, Everybody Killas, who has at least 11 prior arrests dating back to 2012 and was out on parole for a 2015 gang assault, police said.
He was released from prison in June 2018 after serving a four-year sentence for a brutal attack in which he and three accomplices slashed, punched and kicked a victim in an assault that was caught on camera, according to the New York Post.
On Friday night, Pinkney was transferred from the 26 Precinct to Central Booking, wearing a white Tyvek jumpsuit.
The five-foot-five, 140-pound suspect was escorted in handcuffs by two burly NYPD detectives.
Meanwhile, shocked Columbia students gathered on the school’s central quad for a candlelight vigil honoring Giri a sixth-year doctoral student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
That video of Mr Pinkney’s arrest tells you all that you need to know about why The New York Times found the details about the (alleged) killer not to be news which is fit to print. For 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 in the Times’ newsroom, the ones who forced out liberal columnist Bari Weiss because she just wasn’t #woke enough, the fact that a young, black gang member (allegedly) stabbed to death a white PhD candidate in computer science at an Ivy League college just does not fit Teh Narrative. The leftists who decry ‘mass incarceration’ just can’t deal with the fact that Mr Pinkney should not have been able to stab Mr Giri, because he should have still been behind bars on Thursday night.
I’ve said it before: the problem isn’t mass incarceration, but that not enough people have been incarcerated, for not enough time.
As far as Mr Pinkney is concerned, a 5’5″, 140 lb pipsqueak punk, who (allegedly) proved what a big man he is, he’s looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison. If he had been treated more strictly by the state of New York for his past offenses, if he had been given longer sentences for past crimes and still been behind bars last Thursday night, he would still be looking forward to getting out of prison at some point in the future. Yeah, he was stupid Thursday night, almost surely is congenitally stupid, and it would not surprise me if we found out that he was drunk or stoned, but I come around to the fact that those who treated him so leniently in the past — remember: he has eleven previous arrests on his rap sheet — did him no favors.
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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