Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The Patricians are just different from us! CNN's disgraced and fired President to get $10 million payoff to keep his mouth shut

The Patricians just aren’t like you and me. If you get canned for some reason — I’m retired now, so I’m beyond the ability of anyone to fire — you might, might! be able able to get a few hundred bucks a week in unemployment benefits. If you are terminated for cause, such as an inappropriate sexual relationship with a subordinate, something which could expose your company to a sexual harassment claim, you might not be able to get even unemployment compensation.

But life is different for the elites. From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

Former CNN Chief Jeff Zucker to Get $10 Million Settlement, Agrees Not to Sue

“if WarnerMedia keeps their side of the deal, in the next week to 10 days, Zucker will receive a one-time payment of around $10 million”

Posted by Mike LaChance | Thursday, March 10, 2022 | 1:00 PM EST

CNN’s former president Jeff Zucker is getting a major golden parachute from his former employer, with the agreement not to sue them.

It’s a pretty good deal for a man who basically destroyed the network’s ratings and brand.

FOX News reports:

Ex-CNN chief Jeff Zucker to receive roughly $10 million from WarnerMedia, won’t sue: report

Former CNN boss Jeff Zucker has reportedly agreed to a deal with CNN parent company WarnerMedia over his swift exit from the network that will award him roughly $10 million in exchange for not suing after being forced to resign last month.

“Details of the confidential package are obviously being kept close to the vest, but sources tell us Zucker made the decision several weeks ago to accept what had been put on the table by his old bosses at the time of his cable news exit. What we do know is that, if WarnerMedia keeps their side of the deal, in the next week to 10 days, Zucker will receive a one-time payment of around $10 million,” Deadline’s Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson wrote, citing “sources.”

It seems that Mr Zucker’s girlfriend, who was not initially fired forced to resign, but quit a couple of weeks later, is also getting a golden parachute of a cool million.

As we have noted previously, Mr Zucker had a net worth of $60 million, plus an annual base salary of $6.3 million, before any bonuses — and how he could ever qualify for a bonus the way CNN’s ratings tanked is beyond me, but he certainly did get them — and Miss Gollust wasn’t exactly living paycheck-to-paycheck herself, with an estimated net worth of $5 million.

It seems that CNN has some dirty laundry the network wants desperately to keep out of the public’s sight. Given that the relationship between the two has been reported, by multiple sources, as an “open secret,” it has to be asked why CNN forced them out over that, rather than the ratings disaster the network had become.

Remember: the excuse for the resignation given was that Mr Zucker and Miss Gollust, both of whom are divorced, failed to report the relationship. But the head of human resources for CNN, Lisa Greene, is also an Executive Vice President, as was Miss Gollust, and the idea that someone who hobnobs with the network’s top brass didn’t know the “open secret” everyone else did is pretty difficult to swallow.

So, what does Mr Zucker know that CNN is so desperate to keep quiet?

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I had no idea that Larry Krasner was Lou Anna Red Corn’s mentor!

It is a story reminiscent of something I’d find in The Philadelphia Inquirer: a lenient prosecutor letting a killer off easy.

    Xavier Hardin, mugshot from Fayette County Detention Center, dated June 15, 2021, and is a public record.

    Lexington man who committed deadly Fayette Mall shooting reaches plea deal. Here’s why

    by Jeremy Chisenhall | Friday, March 11, 2022 | 12:19 PM EST | Updated: 1:06 PM EST

    The man who shot and killed a 17 year old inside Fayette Mall in 2020 has reached an agreement with prosecutors to accept a conviction for manslaughter instead of murder, according to court records.

    Xavier Hardin, 21, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, assault and wanton endangerment charges in the killing of Kenneth Bottoms Jr., after reaching a plea agreement earlier this week, according to court records. Hardin, who was 19 at the time of the incident, also injured two bystanders when he fired shots inside the mall on Aug. 23, 2020.

    Fayette Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn said Hardin’s plea agreement was reached through mediation and Bottoms’ family was in agreement with the plea deal. The plea agreement accounted “for the facts of the case,” Red Corn said, which included that “both the defendant and Kenneth were carrying handguns that day at the mall.”

    “There were video recordings of their encounter, and the defendant raised a claim of self-protection,” Red Corn said. “Regardless of the defendant’s claim, he injured innocent persons and put others in harm’s way when (he) started shooting. This is another tragic example of why teens should not be carrying guns in the first place.”

There’s more at the original here.

Messrs Hardin and Bottoms had a long-standing dislike for each other, a “beef” as Lexington Herald-Leader reporter put it. In Fayette Mall, Mr Harin is shown on surveillance video looking over his shoulders, as though worried he was being followed. Eventually Mr Bottoms and three men with him confronted Mr Hardin, and an argument ensued. One of Mr Bottoms’ friends tried to pull him away from the confrontation, but failed.

    One witness testified to police that Bottoms spit on Hardin during the argument, according to court records. Another noted hearing expletives. Another said they heard Hardin ask, “You don’t think I’ll pull it out?”

    As the argument intensified, bystanders started to flee, according to the video. Hardin then pulled a gun out of his waistband and fired.

In other words, Mr Hardin was not defending himself from a deadly assault, but pulled out his weapon and fired. Though Mr Bottoms was also armed, there’s nothing in the story to indicate that Mr Bottoms pulled out his gun.

According to the Fayette County Detention Center, Mr Hardin’s charges are:

  • KRS §507.030: Manslaughter, First Degree, a Class B felony with a sentence of no less than ten years and no more than twenty.
  • KRS §508.060: Wanton Endangerment, First Degree: Class D felony, with a sentence of one to five years in prison
  • KRS §508.020: Assault, Second Degree, Class C felony, penalty at least five years to a maximum of ten years in prison
  • KRS §508.030: Assault, Fourth Degree, Class A Misdemeanor, penalty imprisonment for up to 12 months.
    Hardin is scheduled to be sentenced in May. He faces a maximum of 23 years in prison if his sentences are run consecutively, based on the sentencing recommendations made by prosecutors in the plea agreement. Prosecutors didn’t make a recommendation on whether or not Hardin’s sentences should run consecutively or at the same time.

    If a judge decides to run all his sentences at the same time, he would have to serve at least eight and a half years, based on the prosecutors’ recommendations. He’s required by to serve at least 85 percent of the sentence given to him for his manslaughter conviction because it is a violent offense.

Of course, since Mr Hardin has been locked up since at least May 15, 2021, he has already served 301 days. The jail records are not clear; he was also arrested on August 24, 2020, the day after the murder, and if he was locked up since then, that would be an additional 200 days. He could serve as little as 7 years and 8 months, if locked up since May 15, 2021, or 7 years and one month if he has credit since August 24, 2020. Mr Hardin, who is 21 years old, could get out of prison when he’s still in his twenties!

Had Miss Red Corn not accepted a plea bargain arrangement, had charged him with murder, taken it to trial and gotten him convicted, he could be locked up for the rest of his miserable life, which would protect the citizens of Fayette County. The most we can expect, if the judge decides to run the sentences consecutively, is that he’d get out of jail at age 44, a prison-hardened criminal, and while Mr Bottoms is still stone-cold graveyard dead.

Miss Red Corn has a history of giving killers lenient plea bargains. That’s great for murderers; it’s not so great for the citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

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Killadelphia! Perhaps some introspection on just the numbers. 100 people killed in the City of Brotherly Love.

It was in no way unexpected that the City of Brotherly Love would see its 100th homicide of the year this week; the only question was on which day that would happen. For a numbers geek like me, it has led to some introspection, but first, the report from The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philadelphia reaches 100 homicides for 2022, outpacing last year

More people have been killed in Philadelphia so far this year than by this time last year, which ended with a record 562 homicides.

by Robert Moran | Friday, March 11, 2022 | 7:00 PM EST

Philadelphia has topped 100 homicides so far in 2022, outpacing the number of killings this time last year, which ended as the deadliest in the city’s recorded history.

The 100th victim was a 28-year-old man who was shot multiple times shortly before 11 p.m. Thursday on the 100 block of North 53rd Street in West Philadelphia. The man was rushed by police to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 12:32 a.m. Friday.

As of Friday evening, the city had not yet named the victim. Fox 29 reported that his family had identified him as Bryheem Barr.

The reporter, Robert Moran, followed the Inquirer’s practice of deleting the victim’s race from the story, even though the Philadelphia Police Department provide it. Of course, the tweet Mr Moran embedded in the story told readers that Mr Barr was black. I wonder if, by disclosing that kind of information, whether Mr Moran will get in trouble!

By March 10 last year, Philadelphia had 92 homicides. The city had a total of 562 homicides in 2021, breaking the previous record of 500 killings reported in 1990.

For comparison, New York City had 488 homicides for all of last year. As of last weekend, the city reported 67 killings so far in 2022.

Chicago this week also reached 100 homicides for the year, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Mr Moran might have made a better comparison had he noted the populations of New York and Chicago, compared to Philly. The Big Apple had 8,804,190 residents, while the Windy City had a population of 2,746,388; the City of Brotherly Love had 1,603,797 souls in the 2020 census. Chicago is 71 percent larger than Philly, with the same number of killings, while New York City is 5¼ times Philly’s size, and has a third fewer total killings.

There had been ‘only’ 96 homicides on March 11, 2021, a jump from 92 the previous day, which means that Philly’s 100th murder is ‘only’ a 4.17% increase over last year; had the homicide been counted on Thursday, when Mr Barr was shot, it would have been an 8.70% increase.

How does this work out? There are different ways to do the statistics, the simplest being the number of homicides divided by the number of days in the year, 70, to come up with a homicide pace of 1.4286 per day, multiplied by 365, projecting to 521.42 homicides for the year. A more complicated way is to take the number of homicides on the 70th day of the year in 2021, and find that 17.08% of 2021 homicides had occurred by March 11, 2021, and, using that number, project that 2022 will see 585.48 killings.

Bryheem Barr, from Kelly Rule, Fox29. Click to enlarge.

I started this article Friday evening, but, as I was running the numbers through my head, I realized that I was doing what others have done: I had reduced Bryheem Barr to a number. Fox29 had a story on him:

‘He didn’t deserve this’: Man slain in Philadelphia’s 100th homicide was “hardworking” father, fiancé

Published March 11, 2022 | 6:30 PM EST

PHILADELPHIA – Authorities believe a Philadelphia father and soon-to-be husband was shot and killed during an attempted robbery Thursday night to become the city’s 100th homicide so far this year.

Family members say 28-year-old Bryheem Barr was walking to his car to go to work just before 11 p.m. near the intersection of North 53rd and Arch streets when the deadly shooting happened.

According to police, Barr was found shot multiple times and driven to Penn Presbyterian Hospital by officers where he died.

A police source told FOX 29’s Kelly Rule that they believe the deadly shooting happened during a robbery and the shooter took Barr’s legally-owned firearm.

One thing we know: if Mr Barr had a “legally-owned firearm,” he was not a convicted felon, and he had gone through the hassle of getting a permit in Philadelphia. This was not a case of one gang banger offing another, the way so many murders in the city happen.

Another is that he was going to work, obviously night shift somewhere.

Barr was a father of three and was soon to be married. His family said he was studying to become a nurse.

“Hardworking, bothers nobody, will give you the shirt off his back will do anything for his family, he wouldn’t hurt a soul,” Lorriane Barr, Bryheem’s aunt said.

There’s a bit more at the original, and that bit more is more than the Inquirer had on its website.

What did the Inquirer have? Yet another story on Thomas Siderio, Jr, the 12-year-old punk kid to took a shot at the Philadelphia Police, and paid the ultimate price for it. Even as sympathetic to young Mt Siderio as the Inquirer could be, the story couldn’t help but disclose that:

  • In 2021, police “were searching a house where he was living after receiving a tip that he’d pulled a gun during a large fight at Second and Porter Streets in South Philadelphia. They found clothes matching a photo taken at the scene, but no gun.”
  • “In recent Instagram posts, TJ could be seen in a ski mask, and there are several references to guns and drug use.”
  • “’He had a tendency to follow the wrong kind of kids,’ said Terry Elnicki-Varela, who works in special education and started helping TJ at school three years ago. ‘He was no angel. Far from it.’”
  • Young Mr Siderio had been failed by both parents. His father who is currently in prison, and “previously spent at least a year in prison in Philadelphia” on a prior conviction, while his mother, Desirae Frame, also has a criminal record, with two drug cases and other arrests for theft, forgery, contempt of court, and receiving stolen property. The son is noted, in the article, as primarily living with a grandmother, but also living with a great-aunt.

Yes, he had a rough life, and little chance of improving it, but he was still a punk.

Mr Barr? If the Inquirer is working on a story to humanize the victim of the city’s milestone homicide, at least as of 8:49 this morning, it hasn’t been published. Instead, the paper is trying their best to excoriate the Philadelphia Police Department, something which can only lead to more killings in the city.

Mr Barr, at least as far as we know — there’s always a risk in taking just the family’s word for things — was a working man, and a law-abiding Philadelphian. For the Inquirer, his story isn’t an important one, save that he hit a certain number in the liquidation lottery. No, the paper would rather spend time and money trying to make a martyr out of a young punk.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make a 12-year-old punk who shot at police some kind of martyr.

Thomas J Siderio Jr

I have previously noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t like reporting on the not good guys who get gunned down in the City of Brotherly Love, but when an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl gets killed, the paper is full of stories. I noted when the Inquirer and reporter Anna Orso tried to make an innocent victim out of young Marcus Stokes. In her story on the impact that the murder of Marcus Stokes had on E Washington Rhodes School, Miss Orso wrote, very specifically, that young Mr Stokes “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, but the evidence, as printed in the Inquirer, indicates that he was not actually on his way to school. He was sitting, with five other young people, in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, many blocks away, fifteen minutes after he was supposed to be in his homeroom at school.

Miss Orso knew those facts; she is listed as either the sole or one of two authors in each of the articles I have cited. Did no one, including she, ever ask themselves any questions about why these young people, “including other Rhodes students“, were sitting in that car, ask themselves what they were doing there?

Miss Orso isn’t a stupid woman. She was graduated from Pennsylvania State University, a highly selective college, that doesn’t accept dummies. She isn’t inexperienced, having worked in journalism for seven years now, including four with the Inquirer.

Now, the Inquirer is trying the same thing with Thomas Siderio, Jr, the 12-year-old shot by the police after Mr Siderio opened fire on them:

    South Philly community mourns TJ Siderio, 12-year-old fatally shot by Philadelphia police officer

    Friends and family mourned mourned TJ this week, holding each other up as the waves of grief often took them off their feet.

    by Rodrigo Torrejón | Thursday, March 10, 2022

    Some would call him Tommy. Others Tom Dog. But most in Thomas Siderio’s tight-knit constellation of friends and family just knew him as TJ.

    A name was important, Pastor Mandell Gross said Thursday morning at Lighthouse Baptist Church in South Philadelphia. It was important during TJ’s short life. And it was important as dozens of TJ’s loved ones gathered at his funeral to say their final goodbyes.

    One by one, Gross asked the young people there, TJ’s friends, to say their names. Though he lamented the reason the community had gathered, Gross told the young people there to mourn the loss that they must try to come together in brighter days too. In TJ’s name.

At that point, the paper included a photo of Mr Siderio, one obviously taken several years earlier.

Four plainclothes officers were in the area, due to the high crime rate in the neighborhood. When they spotted Mr Siderio, who was visibly armed, they illuminated their unmarked car, the boy then shot at the officers, and took off running. One officer was injured in both eyes from flying glass, one remained in the vehicle with him, and two others got out to pursue the perp.

    A lawyer for TJ’s father previously disputed the accusation that the child fired the gun, calling it “egregious speculation” that has not been confirmed by evidence. Video and audio recordings analyzed by The Inquirer show that the gun that police say TJ tossed after shooting into the police car was found five doors down — or roughly 60 feet — from where he was fatally shot.

Sixty feet equals twenty yards, a distance a physically fit 12-year-old boy, who was already at a dead run, could cover in two seconds, but the Inquirer does not mention that.

The sappy article concluded:

    Next to his casket was a sign with a final, loving message from his parents, Thomas Siderio and Desirae Frame.

The elder Mr Siderio, inmate number NS5455, is behind bars at the State Correctional Institute Coal Township, three years into a sentence with at least two more years to serve on gun charges stemming from a murder in 2017. He has prior convictions for resisting arrest, assault, and the attempted theft of a motorcycle. He wasn’t there to have kept his son from running with a bad crowd and carrying a weapon, but, then again, as a convicted felon, he might not have been the best role model.

    “Rest In Peace TJ my son. Love Daddy and Mommy always and forever.”

    After the short sermon finished Thursday morning, the pallbearers gathered to carry TJ to his final resting place at Fernwood Cemetery. Most of the pallbearers were young, just a few years older than TJ.

    They were the friends that became TJ’s family on the streets of South Philadelphia. And with TJ’s face on their chests, the friends gathered for one last picture together, holding the young boy’s memory in their hearts.

An alleged but unconfirmed photo of Thomas Siderio Jr.

Give me a break! Young Mr Siderio was armed, with a stolen laser-sight equipped 9mm Taurus semiautomatic handgun, and he responded to the police lights by raising the weapon and firing it at the cops. This is not the sweet little angel the Inquirer has tried to make him out to be!

What was 12-year-old Mr Siderio doing out on the street, armed and ready to kill? Where was his mother, that she allowed him to have a stolen firearm, that she allowed him to go out into the streets armed? The newspaper’s Editorial Board has already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged,” blaming the city for not having safer and saner recreational outlets for boys like Mr Siderio, and blaming the state government for not passing virtue-signaling gun control laws that infringe on the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens but do absolutely nothing to stop criminals, blaming everybody but his father, who provided such a poor role model, and his mother, who didn’t supervise her son, and the boy himself, who knew he was breaking the law, and who took a shot at the police.

Let me be plain about this: had young Mr Siderio gotten away, he’d still be out on the streets, still be carrying a firearm, and still be a menace to every law-abiding citizen in the city. In just two days, March 8th and 9th, 13 people were shot in the city, and three of them died, all of them black males, but the Inquirer didn’t care enough about any of them to have a single story on any of them. I guess there wasn’t anything there out of which the newspaper could portray the victims as somehow innocents or heroic.

Young Mr Siderio is no hero, and he is no martyr. He was a young punk who thought he was a big, tough man, and had he escaped, would almost certainly amassed a long and violent criminal record. It is unfortunate that the manner of his death will cost a good police officer his job, and possible criminal charges, but the odds are high that Philadelphia is better off with Mr Siderio having gone to his eternal reward.

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#Bidenomics! Inflation has tripled under Joe Biden Remember: the data used were prior to the latest surge in fuel prices

From Trading Economics:

Annual inflation rate in the US accelerated to 7.9% in February of 2022, the highest since January of 1982, matching market expectations. Energy remained the biggest contributor (25.6% vs 27% in January), with gasoline prices surging 38% (40% in January). Inflation accelerated for shelter (4.7% vs 4.4%); food (7.9% vs 7%, the largest since July of 1981), namely food at home (8.6% vs 7.4%); new vehicles (12.4% vs 12.2%); and used cars and trucks (41.2% vs 40.5%). Excluding volatile energy and food categories, the CPI rose 6.4%, the most in 40 years. Still, the biggest effects of the war in Ukraine and the consequent surge in energy costs are still to come and will worsen with the US ban on oil imports from Russia. The inflation was seen peaking in March but the recent developments in Europe coupled with the ongoing supply constraints, strong demand and labour shortages will likely maintain inflation elevated for longer. source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

It’s the “excluding volatile energy and food categories, the CPI rose 6.4%” part that gets me: it’s still winter — and my area is forecast to get 3 to 6 inches of snow on Saturday — so energy, volatile or otherwise, is a major concern for everybody, and we can’t live very long without food.


Chart source: tradingeconomics.com

You know what I note: the year-over-year inflation rate was 2.6% in February of 2021, Joe Biden’s first full month in office, and then BAM! up it jumps, more than doubling by June, and now it’s tripled.

Then there’s this, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 0.8 percent from January to February, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This result stems from essentially no change in average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 0.8 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U).

Real average weekly earnings decreased 0.5 percent over the month due to the change in real average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 0.3 percent in the average workweek.

Real average hourly earnings decreased 2.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, from February 2021 to February 2022. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 0.3 percent in the average workweek resulted in a 2.3-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.

Production and nonsupervisory employees means the working class:

Production and nonsupervisory employees

Real average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees decreased 0.6 percent from January to February, seasonally adjusted. This result stems from a 0.3-percent increase in average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 0.9 percent in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W).

Real average weekly earnings decreased 0.3 percent over the month due to the change in real average hourly earnings being combined with an increase of 0.3 percent in average weekly hours.

From February 2021 to February 2022, real average hourly earnings decreased 1.9 percent, seasonally adjusted. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with no change in the average workweek resulted in a 1.9-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.

Remember: this inflation has been going on since long before Vladimir Vladimirovich sent the tanks rolling into Ukraine! It has been going on since the dummkopf from Delaware took office. Here’s the five-year chart, also from Trading Economics:

Note that the year-over-year monthly inflation rate never reached even 3% during Donald Trump’s entire presidency, but reached 4.2% in April of 2021, and has been elevated ever since. It cratered during the COVID-19 lockouts, recovered several months later, but was still below 2.0% on Election Day, and below 2.0% when Mr Biden took office.

Then it skyrocketed!

What did we have? We had an economy which had made a significant recovery in the latter half of 2020, after the stupid lockdowns were (mostly) lifted, but before any of the COVID-19 vaccines were available to the general public. The vaccines became available to health care workers in December, and then in January and February were made available in the ‘tiers’ structure. By March, the vaccines became much more widely available, and COVID-19 cases were dropping. Everything good that could have helped President Biden — and I still shudder when I type that! — happened, yet people started to become poorer in real terms due to inflation.

Not everything economic is under the government’s control, but it certainly is interesting how real earnings have decreased under Mr Biden, and inflation skyrocketed almost immediately after he came into office. But it’s true: we aren’t suffering through any more of those mean tweets!

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The fruits of ‘Lia’ Thomas’ labors If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently?

Getty Images. Click to enlarge.

I have asked, many times, what Will Thomas, who now calls himself ‘Lia’, is getting from his record-breaking performances on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team. Yes, he’s piling up victories and records, but everyone will recognize that not only should those records have an asterisk on them, he is doing the one thing he really ought not to want to do, demonstrating the real differences between himself and real women.

Now we have this bill in the Kentucky General Assembly, and the obvious question becomes: would the impetus for this legislation, and similar legislation in other states, have been less were not Mr Thomas doing what he has been doing? I have asked before: If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently?

‘We’re going to get sued.’ KY bill banning transgender girls from girls sports moves forward

By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Wednesday, March 9, 2022 | 6:34 PM EST

With a Lexington Republican lawmaker among those in opposition, a Republican bill prohibiting transgender girls from competing in girls sports at the post-secondary, middle and high school levels moved ahead Wednesday.

Senate Bill 83, approved by the House Education Committee with a 15-5 vote, requires the Kentucky Board of Education and the Kentucky High School Athletic Association to establish that an athletic activity or sport designated as “girls” shall not be open to members of the male sex.

“Ninety-six percent chance we’re going to get sued when we pass this,” said state Rep. Killian Timoney, R-Lexington, who voted against the bill. “I’m not sure I feel like spending money on lawsuits.”

Under the bill, the sex of the student shall be determined by the biological sex indicated on the student’s certified birth certificate issued at the time of birth or adoption, Sen. Robby Mills, R-Henderson, the bill’s sponsor, said.

The proposed legislation does not prohibit girls who think they’re boys from participating in boys’ sports, because there are no unfair advantages there.

Further down:

Critics of the legislation have said they haven’t heard of examples of student-athletes harmed by the inclusion of transgender classmates.

There’s more at the original, but if critics say they haven’t heard examples of girls being harmed, then they haven’t been paying attention; the stories about Mr Thomas have been all over the news, and if Mr Thomas competes for an Ivy League school, and the girls who have been harmed have been in Pennsylvania and the northeast, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the Bluegrass State.

People have been cowed into silence, or anonymity, for the very reasonable fear of losing scholarships or future job opportunities:

Penn’s women’s team roster lists 41 members. The 16 teammates did not identify themselves in the letter, stating that they “have been told that if we spoke out against her inclusion into women’s competitions, that we would be removed from the team or that we would never get a job offer.”

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 is an extreme example: he’s 6’3″ tall, and was a competitive athlete on Penn’s men’s swimming team, and if not a consistent winner, he nevertheless scored a few victories in Ivy league competition. He went through male puberty, and was fully developed as a male before he succumbed to his mental illness began his testosterone suppression therapy. Mr Thomas went from being ranked “#462 as a male to #1 as a female”.

At least one women’s swim team member has complained that Mr Thomas is still a physically intact male and thinks little of parading around the locker room with his male genitalia exposed.

It is at least arguable that a boy who thought he was a girl and began ‘transitioning’ prior to puberty — something which qualifies as child abuse as far as I am concerned, and ought to be illegal — would have few physical advantages over real girls, and such shouldn’t make a difference on, say, a girls’ soccer team. In a case like that, there wouldn’t be too much opposition on the local level, and the local level is where such matters would be handled . . . were it not for Will Thomas and the legislation he has at least aided in getting passed, if not completely inspired it.

If someone suffers from “gender dysphoria,” it’s really none of my business. If Joe wants to call himself Jane, it’s no skin off my nose, until the point at which he wants to use the power of the state to require me to call him Jane. But Mr Thomas has forced the issue, forced his mental illness ‘transition’ on everybody — with the complicity of Penn, Ivy League, and NCAA officials — and thus he has accomplished what I would have thought the ‘transgender’ community would not have wanted, to point out that ‘transgender women’ really are not real women.

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The Patricians just don’t understand how the plebeians live! The elites push policies that will affect the working class in ways the policymakers just can't comprehend

As the patricians try to force the plebeians into plug-in electric vehicles, another thought came to me as I got our electric bills: it isn’t just gasoline prices which have increased, but electricity costs as well. From The Philadelphia Inquirer, not exactly an evil reich-wing propaganda site:

    Pa. electricity prices will be rising by as much as 50% this week. Here’s how you can save.

    Energy charges are set to increase on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity. There are ways to save. But beware the risks.

    by Andrew Maykuth | November 28, 2021

    Energy costs for electric customers are going up by as much as 50% across Pennsylvania next week, the latest manifestation of across-the-board energy price increases impacting gasoline, heating oil, propane, and natural gas.

    Eight Pennsylvania electric utilities are set to increase their energy prices on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity. Peco Energy, which serves Philadelphia and its suburbs, will boost its energy charge by 6.4% on Dec. 1, from 6.6 cents per kilowatt hour to about 7 cents per kWh. Energy charges account for about half of a residential bill.

    PPL Electric Utilities, the Allentown company that serves a large swath of Pennsylvania including parts of Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester Counties, will impose a 26% increase on residential energy costs on Dec. 1, from about 7.5 cents per kWh to 9.5 cents per kWh. That’s an increase of $40 a month for an electric heating customer who uses 2,000 kWh a month.

    Pike County Light & Power, which serves about 4,800 customers in Northeast Pennsylvania, will increase energy charges by 50%, according to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.

    “All electric distribution companies face the same market forces as PPL Electric Utilities,” PPL said in a statement. Each Pennsylvania utility follows a different PUC-regulated plan for procuring energy from power generators, which explains why some customers are absorbing the hit sooner rather than later, it said.

There’s more at the original.

2022 F-150 charging in a lot nicer garage than I have. It shows you just how much money you have to have to buy one of the fool things. Photo from a Ford sales site. Click to enlarge.

I just got my sparktricity bill, and with most, though not all, of our heating on it, it’s $325.73 for the house and $30.11 for the shop[1]The garage/shop is not heated.. Now, imagine if we were driving plug-in Chevy Dolts, or, for me, a plug-in Ford F-150 Lightning[2]My current vehicle is a 2010 Ford F-150, and it’s an actual work truck; I need a work truck around the farm.: all of the electric charging for the month would be coming in one monthly bill! It will be argued that that might still be a bit less than gasoline, but when a month’s worth of your driving costs comes all at once, that can be quite the shock. Yes, we have the money, and the discipline, to handle that, but when I see these ‘payday loan’ places — and they certainly seem to have metastasized in poor eastern Kentucky — you know that there are a whole lot of people who are not living just paycheck to paycheck, but from paycheck to not quite the next paycheck. Do these people have the money and discipline to save up for that next big electric bill?

We bought a house for my sister-in-law, and got her electric bill — from a different provider — which was $462.80. The house we bought for her is total electric, so that includes the range and water heater, which our bill does not.

Those bills were for February, a cold winter month, so they’ll decrease as spring springs, but I can imagine what it would be like if there were a couple hundred more bucks tacked on to charge electric vehicles. This is something the left, which tell us how wonderful it would be to go all-electric, never consider: Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg have plenty of money, and a big electric bill would, to them, be certainly manageable, but the Patricians just don’t understand the lives, the economics, and the struggles of the working class.

More, it is well known that cold weather decreases both range and charging speed in plug-in electric vehicles. You’ll have to leave your Tesla plugged in longer, and you won’t get as many miles out of it, meaning that it will cost you more in your electric bill to charge your EV in winter, the same time as your heating costs are high.

In 2019, before the panicdemic, the Federal Reserve reported that “Nearly 40 percent of Americans would struggle to cover an unexpected $400 expense, according to a new report by the Federal Reserve — a stark reminder of many people’s financial insecurity even amid solid economic growth.” Yet the people who could handle such an expense are trying to proscribe a ‘solution’ to global warming climate change that would drastically change how the working class would have to handle things . . . if they could at all.

How many Kentuckians, how many working class people, are going to get their electricity shut off because they don’t have the money, or money-management skills, to pay for the plug-in electric vehiclesinto which President Biden and the activists want to force people?

References

References
↑1 The garage/shop is not heated.
↑2 My current vehicle is a 2010 Ford F-150, and it’s an actual work truck; I need a work truck around the farm.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to get a police officer killed! If the officer is injured or killed, his blood will be on the hands of Gabriel Escobar and Elizabeth Hughes

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who has presided over an ever-increasing homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love, had promised an impartial investigation into the shooting death of 12-year-old Thomas “TJ” Siderio, who shot at police officers, then turned and fled, with a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol in his hand, when he was shot and killed. About the only thing not clear was whether young Mr Siderio had tried to ditch his weapon “moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back”.

The Commissioner has now announced that the officer will be fired.

The Philly police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy will be fired, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said

Outlaw declined to identify the officer, citing potential threats to the officer’s safety.

by Chris Palmer, Max Marin, and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, March 8, 2022

The Philadelphia police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy in the back last week will be fired, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said Tuesday.

Outlaw said the officer will be suspended for 30 days with intent to dismiss, the process by which officers are typically removed from the force.

So much for that fair and impartial investigation! Of course, the appropriately-named Commissioner Outlaw is really just Mayor Jim Kenney’s stooge, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that she was just following orders. If the police officers union decided on a job action over this, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

But here’s where The Philadelphia Inquirer really messes up!

She declined to identify the officer, citing potential threats to his safety. But police sources with direct knowledge of the investigation said the officer was Edsaul Mendoza, a five-year veteran assigned to a task force in South Philadelphia. Attempts to reach him for comment Tuesday were unsuccessful, and the police officers’ union representing him declined to comment.

So, the Commissioner at least attempted to keep the officer’s name private, due to threats to his safety, threats on his life, but the Inquirer investigates, determines who the officer is, and then publishes his name!

If Gabriel Escobar, Senior Vice President and Executive Editor of the Inquirer, and Elizabeth Hughes, the Publisher and Chief Executive Officer, wanted to get the officer targeted and killed, what would they have done differently? And does anybody believe that the article authors, Chris Palmer, Max Marin, and Rodrigo Torrejón, would have included his name if Mr Escobar had not approved?

Steve Keeley of Fox29 news reported on a triple murder in the West Oak Lane neighborhood, and included the press release from the Philadelphia Police Department. The press release identified the victims as three “black males.”

Yet, when the Inquirer reported on it, writer Jenn Ladd, though she took the descriptions of the victims’ injuries almost verbatim from the police report, eliminated the fact that the victims were black. The “anti-racist” Inquirer once again censored the news Miss Hughes and Mr Escobar don’t want the public to know!

The Inquirer enjoys absolute freedom of the press, as it should. Perhaps Miss Hughes and Mr Escobar believe that revealing the accused officer’s name falls under the notion of the public’s “right to know.” But given the newspaper’s nearly everyday censorship of crime stories — Miss Hughes stated, directly, that the paper 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,” — it would seem that the Inquirer is not nearly so concerned with the public’s “right to know” if it’s not information the publisher and executive editor want people to know.

Of course, a triple, clearly targeted fatal shooting in West Oak Lane? Everybody who knows anything about the city knew that the victims were black! By self-censoring that detail, the newspaper was inviting readers to guess, to speculate, and we all know what their guesses and speculations would be.

When it came to the officer’s name, however, most of the public couldn’t guess . . . and the Inquirer made sure that it wasn’t necessary to guess.

The Inquirer’s Editorial Board had already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged.” I guess that outrage means that the Inquirer ought to put a target on the officer, to try to get him killed, because that’s exactly what they have done.

If the officer named is assaulted, if he is shot and wounded or even killed, his blood will be on the hands of Gabriel Escobar and Elizabeth Hughes.

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The cause of death was stupidity

No, not that the victim was stupid — though he might have been — but that the man who (allegedly) killed him was stupid.

We noted, Saturday afternoon, Lexington’s sixth homicide of the year. Lexington Herald-Leader reporter updated her story at 4:02 PM on Monday, giving us more details:

    Juan Carlos Linares, Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record., Click to enlarge.

    An arrest citation says a verbal altercation with Linares and two other people led to a physical altercation with Linares’ family and two others. At the end of the fight, Linares shot one of the victims, who was laying defenseless on the ground, according to court records.

    Court records also say Humberto Saucedo-Salgado, who resides in Phoenix, Az., caused physical injuries to one of the victims with his hands and feet. That victim was taken to the emergency room and intubated due to his injuries.

You can read more here.

In other words, Juan Carlos Linares had won his fight, had beaten the still unidentified victim into defenselessness, and then decided, heck, why not, might as well just shoot the guy, right? That’s just plain stupidity.

The other two members of his ‘side’ of the fight, Oziel and Humberto Saucedo-Salgado, were charged with first degree assault, and released on $10,000 bail each. Mr Linares bond has been set at $750,000, and he’s still locked up. Even so, bail can be denied in Kentucky for persons charged with offenses for which capital punishment is possible.

Mr Linares’s record at the Fayette County Detention Center indicates that the only charge against him, as of 5:10, when I accessed the information, is murder, though it’s obvious the first-degree assault could be added.

Under KRS §508.010, Assault in the first degree is a Class B felony, punishable by no less than ten years and up to twenty years in the state penitentiary, along with a $1,000 to $10,000 fine. Under KRS §507.020, murder is a capital offense, though the penalty can be less than death. Under KRS §532.030, the penalty can be death, life without the possibility of parole, life with the possibility of parole after a minimum of 25 years in prison, or a twenty to fifty year sentence.

Mr Linares act of stupidity, (allegedly) murdering an already beaten foe, could, and should, have him locked behind bars for the rest of his miserable life. If he had just stopped with the beatdown, he’d have been looking at getting out of prison when he was 43 years old, at worst, certainly a long time behind bars. Now, he’s looking at spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Unless, of course, Fayette County’s Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Ann Red Corn decides to let him plead down to a lesser offense, as she has done so many times recently. Such would not surprise me in the slightest.