Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Lexington “manslaughterer” will be out of prison by age 39, if not earlier Fayette County's Commonwealth's Attorney Lou Ann Red Corn allowed him to plead down from murder

Jemel Barber. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

We have twice previously reported on Jemel Barber, 23, who shot and killed 40-year-old Tyrese Clark.

    2 died in a robbery, gunfight spree in Lexington. Shooter pleads in 1 case

    by Jeremy Chisenhall | November 16, 2021 | 7:44 AM EST | Updated: 4:16 PM EST

    A Central Kentucky man has pleaded guilty in one of two fatal shootings during a string of robberies and gunfights in Lexington.

    Jemel Barber, 22, pleaded guilty last week to manslaughter and second-degree robbery more than four years after he shot and killed 40-year-old Tyrece Clark, according to court records. He was initially charged with murder and first-degree robbery, but his charges were amended down after a plea agreement was reached.

    Barber told police after the deadly shooting on July 23, 2017, that he showed up at a Lexington motel with a rifle, intending to rob Clark of narcotics and/or money, according to court records.

    But Clark started shooting after Barber knocked on his door, Barber told police, so he shot back. The plea agreement was reached after attorneys disputed whether or not Barber could claim self-defense. Barber maintained that Clark was the aggressor and his attorneys continued to blame Clark as the court case played out.

Mr Barber was sentenced today:

Interesting article title, that. If you follow the link, and hover on the article tab, you’ll see that the original working title was “Jemel Barber sentenced to prison for manslaughter and robbery.” The current title is far less specific; a “Central KY man” could be from Georgetown or Paris or Mt Sterling or Richmond. Why not “Lexington man”? Why go from the specific to the general? Could it be that almost everyone reading the name “Jemel Barber” would assume that Mr Barber is black?

The Lexington Herald-Leader, which had access to Mr Barber’s mugshot, once again chose not to publish it. The McClatchy Mugshot Policy states that it is concerned that mugshots of people accused of crimes follow them forever, even if they are acquitted, but Mr Barber pleaded guilty.

    Jemel Barber, 23, was sentenced to 20 years in prison Friday morning by judge Thomas Travis on charges of manslaughter and second-degree robbery. Barber shot and killed 40-year-old Tyrece Clark during an attempted robbery at a Lexington motel in 2017, per court records.

    Barber told police after the deadly shooting on July 23, 2017, that he showed up to the motel with a rifle, intending to rob Clark of narcotics and/or money, according to court records.

    But Clark started shooting after Barber knocked on his door, Barber told police, so he shot back, killing Clark. . . . .

    Prosecutors recommended a 15-year sentence for the manslaughter charge and a 10-year sentence for the robbery charge. Barber’s attorney asked Travis for concurrent sentences, citing how a string of events in his young life have affected him dramatically and concurrent sentences could give him a chance to get back on track.

    Travis partially obliged, making five years of the 10-year sentence for the robbery charge concurrent with the 15-year sentence for the manslaughter charge.

Mr Barber was arrested on May 2, 2018, which means he has already served 3 years and 9 months of his 20-year sentence. Assuming he serves the full 20 years, he’ll be out on May 2, 2038, when he’ll be just 39 years old. Tyrese Clark, on the other hand, will still be stone-cold graveyard dead.

So, why did the Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney, Lou Ann Red Corn, allow such a lenient plea bargain? The Bluegrass State still has the death penalty, though it is rarely carried out. Other than a capital sentence, punishments for capital offenses can include life without parole, 25 years to life in prison, or 20 to 50 years of imprisonment. Commonwealth’s Attorney Red Corn could have put Mr Barber away for the rest of his miserable life, but instead chose to cut him a break, and give him a chance to get out of jail while still a relatively young man.

Why give him the plea bargain? Mr Barber had already admitted killing Mr Clark, so try him for murder. Include the manslaughter charge, to give the jury the option if they have sympathy for his self-defense claim, but keep the option of sparing the rest of society from seeing Mr Barber back on the streets.

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Larry Krasner won’t put criminals in jail, so Philadelphians lock themselves up for protection

The George Soros-funded District Attorney for Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, doesn’t believe in putting criminals in jail to make the rest of the community safer. He won’t enforce the gun laws unless someone is shot, and he doesn’t want to pursue less important crimes:

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

He’s so lenient on criminals that state Attorney General Josh Shapiro ran a sting in Philly, with the cooperation of Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and the Philadelphia Police Department that cut Mr Krasner out of the loop.

From Friday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

    Family of 6 stabbed in Kensington

    One of the victims, a 46-year-old woman, had sustained wounds to her head and neck and was in critical condition

    by Rodrigo Torrejón | Friday, February 11, 2022

    A family of six were stabbed in a Kensington home early Friday morning, with the suspect in custody soon after the violent attacks, according to a report.

    Shortly after 4 a.m. Friday, police received a call of a stabbing on the 3000 block of North Front Street, 6ABC reported. When officers arrived, they found six members of a family suffering from stab wounds. The victims ranged in age from 26 to 46.

Normally, the Inquirer does not specify the specific house in which the crime occurred, but a photo with the article clearly shows the address as being 3027 North Front Street.

    One of the victims, a 46-year-old woman, had sustained wounds to her head and neck and was in critical condition. Police said she was the mother of some of the other family members, 6ABC reported.

    Police arrested a 29-year-old man a few blocks away from the house, covered in blood and with cuts on the inside of his hands, according to the report. Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small said some of the family members identified the man as the suspect.

North Front Street, via Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

The WPVI-TV report specified that the ‘suspect’ is a family member who lived in the home, something the Inquirer story did not include.

With all of the murders in the City of Brotherly Love, a crime in which six people were stabbed, but none fatally — though, with one victim in critical condition, a fatality is possible — seems almost pedestrian. But, as is my wont, I checked Google Maps street scenes to check out the neighborhood.

What did I find? Three of the first four rowhouses on the ‘odd’ side of the street had barricades in their front porches with metal bars. Across the street, four out of the first seven row houses show metal bars. Further up the ‘odd’ side, nine houses in a row, beginning with 3033, have barred in their front porches. Since the Google Maps survey was done 2¼ years ago, more residents may have added physical barriers since then. District Attorney Krasner might not believe that putting criminals behind bars makes Philadelphia safer, but the embattled residents of the 3000 block of North Front Street, in the crime-ridden Kensington area, are so afraid of crime that they’ve put themselves behind bars, for their own protection.

Just what does it say when people have to put themselves in jail, to protect themselves from the criminals who aren’t behind bars?

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Joe Biden, Philadelphia, and the enabling of drug addiction

President Joe Biden’s ‘plan’ to provide free crack pipes to addicts fell apart:

But on the same day, The Philadelphia Inquirer published this gem:

    Philly’s journey to a supervised injection site spans years as overdose rates soar

    Five years since officials announced their support for a site, efforts to open one have been mired in controversy and legal battles.

    by Aubrey Whelan and Jeremy Roebuck | Thursday, February 10, 2022

    In 2017, Philadelphia was on track to see a record-breaking overdose death toll. Calls were growing to open a supervised injection site, where people can use drugs under medical supervision and be revived if they overdose. By the end of the year, 1,217 people had died of an overdose, and city officials made the decision to sanction a site but not pay for it.

    Five years later, the city still has no site, and the deaths go on. Still, advocates see renewed hope in the fact that the Justice Department under President Joe Biden signaled this week it is reconsidering the Trump administration’s long-held opposition to such efforts. Here’s a timeline of key moments in the process:

The article continues to list 18 specific dates and events in the timeline, the most important being the last:

    February 7, 2022: In a statement first obtained by the Associated Press, Justice Department officials say they are “evaluating” supervised injection sites and discussing “appropriate guardrails” with stakeholders — signifying a shift in thinking on the sites. Goldfein, Safehouse’s vice president, says the organization is in productive talks with the federal government.

United States Attorney Bill McSwain had filed a lawsuit in 2019 to block a supervised injection site, “citing a 1986 federal law colloquially known as the “crackhouse statute.” That law makes it a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison to knowingly open or maintain any place for the purpose of using controlled substances.”

The “crack house statute,” 21 US §856, is pretty specific:

  • a) Except as authorized by this subchapter, it shall be unlawful to—
    • (1) knowingly open or maintain any place for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance;
    • (2) manage or control any building, room, or enclosure, either as an owner, lessee, agent, employee, or mortgagee, and knowingly and intentionally rent, lease, or make available for use, with or without compensation, the building, room, or enclosure for the purpose of unlawfully manufacturing, storing, distributing, or using a controlled substance.
  • (b) Any person who violates subsection (a) of this section shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of not more than 20 years or a fine of not more than $500,000, or both, or a fine of $2,000,000 for a person other than an individual.

Screenshot of chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.

Translation: the Department of Justice, under President Bidden and Thank-God-and-Mitch-McConnell-he’s-not-on-the-Supreme-Court Attorney General Merrick Garland, are considering not enforcing the law, a law that isn’t being enforced in some other cities, including New York. Perhaps, just perhaps, people should be asking why deaths due to drug overdoses have skyrocketed under Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner. In 2016, Mr Kenney’s first year in office, fatal opioid overdoses jumped from 561 to 752, a 34.05% increase. Just a year later, and they had jumped to 1,075, 91.62% higher than in Mayor Michael Nutter’s (D-Philadelphia) final year in office.

And now the city wants to enable further drug use by making it safer to shoot up! What a great plan!

Drug users are not somehow ‘not criminals’, no matter what District Attorney Krasner likes to think. To obtain their recreational pharmaceuticals, they have to buy them from a drug dealer, and Philadelphia’s record-setting 562 murders in 2021 were largely fueled by gang warfare, mostly drug gang warfare. Junkies buying heroin and fentanyl are a captive market which keeps the dealers in operation, and that endangers all Philadelphians.

Being the [insert slang term for the rectum here] that I am, I’ll ask the question a lot of people will not: why would we want to keep junkies alive? They are almost wholly non-productive, they frequently resort to petty crimes to finance their habits, they enable violent drug dealers, and they are a burden on our welfare systems and society in general. While one assumes that their families will mourn the deaths of individual junkies, society as a whole is better off when they go to their eternal rewards. Having ‘safe injection sites’ simply keeps alive the drags on our society, the petty, and perhaps not-so-petty, criminals who prey on other people to support their drug addictions.

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Bidenomics: Inflation is at a 40-year high, and wages are growing far more slowly than prices

I am old enough to remember the late 1970s and early 1980s. The United States was stuck in what some called ‘stagflation,’ with stagnant economic growth coupled with high inflation. Former Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA) used what he called the ‘misery index,’ the total of the inflation and unemployment rates to hammer President Jimmy Carter right out of office in the 1980 election.

Christopher Rugaber of the Associated Press wrote an article entitled,[1]Article titles in newspapers are more commonly written by the papers’ editors than the authors, so Mr Rugaber may not have written the article title. in The Philadelphia Inquirer, U.S. inflation might have hit a 40-year high in January: Economists have forecast that when the Labor Department reports January’s inflation figures Thursday, it will show that consumer prices jumped 7.3% compared with 12 months ago, saying:

    Economists have forecast that when the Labor Department reports January’s inflation figures Thursday, it will show that consumer prices jumped 7.3% compared with 12 months ago, according to data provider FactSet. That would be up from a 7.1% year-over-year pace in December and would mark the biggest such increase since February 1982.

Well, the unnamed economists got it wrong: it was 7.5%!

    Prices climbed 7.5% in January compared with last year, continuing inflation’s fastest pace in 40 years

    High inflation is undermining a robust recovery, testing policymakers at the Federal Reserve and White House

    By Rachel Siegel and Andrew Van Dam | Thursday, February 10, 2022 | 8:32 AM EST

    Photo at closest gas station to my house, taken on February 2, 2022.

    Prices continued their upward march in January, rising by 7.5 percent compared with the same period a year ago, the fastest pace in 40 years.

    Inflation was expected to climb relative to last January, when the economy reeled from a winter coronavirus surge with no widespread vaccines. Today’s new high inflation rate reflects all the accumulated price gains, in gasoline and other categories, built up in a tumultuous 2021.

    In the shorter term, data released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also showed prices rose 0.6 percent in January compared with December, same as the November to December inflation rate, which officials revised upward slightly.

    As with previous months, higher prices reached into just about every sector of the economy, leaving households to feel the strain at the deli counter, shopping mall and just about everywhere else.

There’s more at the original.

That photo, taken by me on Groundhog Day? On Tuesday, February 8th, 87 Octane regular gasoline was up to $3.259 per gallon locally.

President Reagan, who defeated President Carter by a large margin, saw the Republican Party lose a significant number of seats in the 1982 elections as inflation remained high and recession struck.

    Sharp inflation has undermined an otherwise robust recovery. The economy has rebounded remarkably since plunging into recession almost two years ago. Over the past 12 months, the U.S. economy has added nearly 7 million jobs and average hourly earnings have climbed 5.7 percent. The overall economy has shown relative resilience to new waves of the coronavirus, and stocks have bounced back from their volatile start to 2022.

If wages have risen 5.7%, but inflation is at 7.5%, it’s pretty simple: American workers are falling behind, are becoming poorer in relative terms.

    High inflation has left an indelible mark on the economy, including the highest price increases for housing, food and energy that many workers have ever seen. And questions loom about how or whether policymakers will be able to rein prices back in without slowing the recovery or even causing another recession. The answers will have enormous implications for policymakers at the Federal Reserve and in the Biden administration.

That has always been the problem, and was a large part of the problem that faced Presidents Carter and Reagan; the halting of inflation meant a recession.

The timing is different this year: we are not in a recession, but if there is one, after the elections, and it persists into 2023 and 2024, it could encourage the voters to throw the Democrats out of the White House. The Republicans will point out that the economy was strong, with very low inflation, during President Trump’s term, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and the government’s draconian response to it, much of it ordered by state governors rather than the President.

The President doesn’t really control the economy — no one does — but he normally gets either the credit for a good economy or the blame for a bad one. Come election day, I will be very happy to see Joe Biden get the blame for a bad economy!

References

References
↑1 Article titles in newspapers are more commonly written by the papers’ editors than the authors, so Mr Rugaber may not have written the article title.
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Voting with their faces The peasants are revolting

Philip Bump, a national correspondent for The Washington Post, made an observation which he really didn’t think through:

    Dealt a bad hand, Democrats are poised to make it worse

    The collapse of containment

    by Philip Bump | Wednesday, February 9, 2022 | 4:27 PM EST

    Before my wife popped into a convenience store on Monday to grab a soda, she put on a mask. That is the rule in New York state, after all: masks to be worn indoors even when vaccinated. She’d probably have worn a mask anyway, with an unvaccinated kid at home, cases in our area still high and test positivity at 10 percent.

    As she put it on, a man leaving the store mocked her. “Gotta get that mask on!” he said — while not wearing a mask, of course. There was a brief, condescending exchange that culminated with my wife responding using language that the editors of The Post would ask I not include in this article.

    It’s a useful incident to consider when reflecting on how the debate over containing the coronavirus has progressed. The man was not adhering to the state mandate, but, as of Thursday, there will be no mandate to which he needs to adhere. New York, like a number of other blue states, is rescinding its state-level mask guidance. Here, the mandate was implemented at the outset of the omicron variant surge. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy (D) went further, announcing an end to masking in schools at the end of the month.

There’s more at the original. You can get around the Post’s paywall and read it here as well.

What did Mr Bump miss? He wrote, “The man was not adhering to the state mandate, but, as of Thursday, there will be no mandate to which he needs to adhere.” It’s pretty clear that there was no mask mandate to which he needed to adhere on Monday, either, in that he didn’t adhere to it, and there were no consequences to his declining to wear a mask other than Mrs Bump apparently using language toward him that the editors of the Post would prefer not to print.

There is no statewide mask mandate in Kentucky, though there surely would have been had the General Assembly not curtailed Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) executive authority under KRS 39A. Yet the Kroger company KR: (%), which operates grocery stores throughout the Commonwealth, had issued its own mask mandate for its stores, and the Kroger our family uses, on Bypass Road in Richmond, still has a mandatory mask requirement sign beside the doors.

While I have not taken a precise count, observationally fewer than half of the customers in the store wear masks; I certainly do not.

    Murphy and fellow Democrats like Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (N.Y.) are linking the shifts to the decline in cases after the spike that accompanied the emergence of the omicron variant. But they’re also acknowledging in the news media that the changes in policy are driven by the broad, bipartisan exhaustion with the pandemic. The New York Times reported that Murphy conducted focus groups measuring that frustration and that his decision to rescind mask mandates for schools was linked to that frustration.

    This is politics, of course, and the will of the voters is important to track. But allowing the impression to set that politics is the central driver for the change — an impression that’s hard to avoid at this point — Democratic leaders are both undercutting their ability to respond to the pandemic moving forward and undercutting two years of rhetoric.

Also see: William Teach: With Midterms Coming, Democrat Governors Break From Biden On Mandates

What? An elected politician, paying attention to the will of the voters? Heaven forfend! But, as the shoppers in Kroger here, and as the man who mocked Mrs Bump, did, people are voting with their faces, people are disobeying the mask mandates wherever they can, and they are able to do so because no one is enforcing them. Certainly no one at Kroger is doing so, and even some of their employees are wearing the masks below their noses. The convenience store into which Mrs Bump walked didn’t enforce the mask mandate on the customer who mocked Mrs Bump. With 2022 being an election year, it is not much of a surprise that elected officials have taken notice.

Mr Bump wrote that the Democratic leaders who are ending mask mandates are undercutting their ability to respond to the panicdemic pandemic going forward, but the truth is different: their ability to respond has already been undercut by public fatigue and public non-compliance. The peasants, Mr Bump fears, are revolting.

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If everyone is going to be exposed to #COVID19 anyway, why are we bothering with restrictions?

As we noted on February 3rd, while other places, including entire countries, are reducing or eliminating COVID-19 restrictions, Philadelphia’s tinpot dictators want to keep restrictions in place for months. Even worse, when school districts in Pennsylvania, but outside of Philadelphia, were so graciously granted permission to make masking optional, some overly worried parents sued the schools, trying to require that the mask mandates be kept in place, and federal Judge Wendy Beetlestone ordered the Perkiomen Valley School District to keep masking in place, granting a preliminary injunction sought by parents of children with disabilities that put them at higher risk of serious complications from COVID-19.

If masks work, why wouldn’t such masks worn by the children with health issues protect them? Why must other people, hundreds of other people, be required to wear masks to protect these three children? Why must the whole school wear masks, rather than only the children and staff in the individual rooms in which the vulnerable students are seated?

It was one line in this article, from National Public Radio — not exactly an evil reich wing site — which puts things in perspective: “eventually, every one of us will get infected.”

    The future of the pandemic is looking clearer as we learn more about infection

    by Michaeleen Doucleff | February 7, 2022 | 5:00 AM ET

    During the early days of the pandemic, scientists and doctors were concerned that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 might not trigger a strong immune response in many people – thus an infection might not provide long-term protection.

    “Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests,” a headline from The Guardian alerted back in July 2020. “King’s College London team found steep drops in patients’ antibody levels three months after infection,” the story warned.

    But that idea was based on preliminary data from the laboratory — and on a faulty understanding of how the immune system works. Now about a year and a half later, better data is painting a more optimistic picture about immunity after a bout of COVID-19. In fact, a symptomatic infection triggers a remarkable immune response in the general population, likely offering protection against severe disease and death for a few years.

    And if you’re vaccinated on top of it, your protection is likely even better, studies are consistently showing.

    Here are several key questions people have been asking throughout the pandemic – and ones that researchers are beginning to answer.

    If I just had COVID, am I protected against getting a severe course of COVID in the future ?

    With SARS-CoV-2, your immune system generates two types of protection: protection against reinfection and protection against severe illness upon that second infection. Let’s start with the latter.

    If you’re under age 50 and healthy, then a bout of COVID-19 offers good protection against severe disease if you were to be infected again in a future surge, says epidemiologist Laith Abu-Raddad, at Weill-Cornell Medical-Qatar. “That’s really important because eventually, every one of us will get infected,” he says. “But if reinfections prove to be more mild, in general, it will allow us to live with this pandemic in a much easier way.”

Also see: William Teach: Surprise: Natural Immunity To COVID Is Rather Real

“Eventually, every one of us will get infected.” Dr abu-Raddad isn’t the only one to tell us this, as Dr Anthony Fauci, the attention whore who has driven so much of US policy, has admitted, as has Dr Janet Woodcock, the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, and others.

With the current Xi Omicron variant generally leading to milder forms of the coronavirus, the obvious question becomes: if everyone will become infected, and infection helps protect people from subsequent infections and disease, isn’t it better to go ahead and get that done now, rather than when a more serious variant emerges?

The three kids in Perkiomen Valley with chronic health problems? Yeah, they’re going to contract the virus, too. Even if a federal judge forces the hundreds of other people in the school to wear masks all day long, they’ll contract the virus anyway, as life continues and the virus evades virtually all measures to stop its spread. It may be more serious for them, it may even be fatal for them, but if everybody is going to be exposed to the virus, they are part of everybody.

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Where is our privacy?

Lexington Herald-Leader health and social services reporter Alex Acquisto wrote, “A little over 55% of the state population is fully vaccinated and 23% of residents have received a booster, according to the Kentucky Department for Public Health.” One wonders: would more Kentuckians consider the vaccines if there were no Kentucky Immunization Registry (KYIR) and the Vaccine Tracking System (VTrckS)? Why must my personal medical information become part of the state’s database?

    Kentucky’s omicron surge is now ‘significantly if not rapidly declining’

    by Alex Acquisto | Monday, February 7, 2022 | 4:59 PM EST | Updated: 5:17 PM EST

    The number of new COVID-19 cases and the statewide rate of people testing positive are now solidly declining in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said on Monday.

    “Cases are significantly if not rapidly declining,” the governor said in a news conference from the Capitol.

    As it has played out in other states, the longevity of the current omicron surge — from beginning, to peak, and now decline — is significantly truncated compared with the delta surge last year, largely because omicron is much more transmissible. It took the delta variant roughly nine weeks to peak at 30,680 cases a week; omicron reached its weekly caseload peak of 81,473 in four weeks.

Further down:

    Hospitalizations, Beshear said, are also showing a “real downward trend,” though the decline is not as sharp as cases. Over the last seven days, coronavirus hospitalizations dropped by 7%, he said, adding that 2,124 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Monday (down 221 people from Friday), 414 people were in an intensive care unit (40 fewer than a week ago), and 207 are on a ventilator.

    Meanwhile, the number of people seeking vaccinations is “definitely slowing,” Beshear said; at the height of the delta and omicron surges, upwards of 7,000 people would get a dose in any given weekend, and on weekdays, typically more than 3,000 people. Weekends now bring closer to 5,000 people getting doses, and weekdays, 1,000 or less.

There’s more available here.

Kentuckians are independent cusses, and we don’t like people sticking their noses in our business, yet every time the Herald-Leader publishes these stories and shows us these statistics, it tells us what we already really knew: the state government is tracking these things.

The real question is: does the Commonwealth have simply aggregate data, or is the state maintaining information on which specific individuals have been vaccinated?

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And the fearful shall control the rest of us

The American people have become just plain tired of all of the COVID-19 restrictions, and even Democratic Governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware have ended their statewide mask mandates for the schools. Naturally, the petit dictators in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia have not only kept their mask mandates, but even strengthened it:

    Philadelphia students and staff continue to be required to wear masks. On Monday, those rules became stricter — students and employees must now either wear a well-fitted mask (such as a N95, KN94, or KN95) or a three-ply disposable masks. Cloth masks on their own are no longer allowed across the Philadelphia School District.

As we have previously noted, many, and perhaps even most, men now wear beards, and the Centers for Disease Control issued a chart for which facial hair styles will and will not allow an N-95 mask to properly seal! Will Philadelphia now issue facial hair regulations based on the notion that the required masks won’t seal otherwise?

But in the school districts outside of Philadelphia, where local school boards have opted to end the mask mandates, the fearful have gone to court to force those schools to keep them in place:

    Judge orders Perkiomen Valley School District to continue masking to protect disabled students

    The decision is likely to be reviewed by other area school districts revisiting masking requirements as COVID-19 cases decline.

    by Maddie Hanna | Monday, February 7, 2022

    Also see: William Teach: Majority Of Americans Say It’s Time To Accept Chinese Coronavirus And Get On With Our Lives

    A federal judge on Monday ordered the Perkiomen Valley School District to keep masking in place, granting a preliminary injunction sought by parents of children with disabilities that put them at higher risk of serious complications from COVID-19.

    The decision effectively extends a prior order for masking during the school day that Judge Wendy Beetlestone had previously issued against the Montgomery County district, but without any end date.

    In her opinion, Beetlestone agreed with lawyers for the plaintiffs — three children with medical conditions ranging from asthma to chronic bronchitis and pneumonia, that in some cases require taking immunosuppressant drugs — that the children were at heightened risk of severe illness or death if they contracted the virus, and that “universal masking meaningfully reduces the transmission of COVID-19 in schools.” As a result, she said, optional masking prevents the students from “meaningfully accessing” in-person education, a valid claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

There’s more at the original, but if masks work, why wouldn’t such masks worn by the children with health issues protect them? Why must other people, hundreds of other people, be required to wear masks to protect these three children? Why must the whole school wear masks, rather than only the children and staff in the individual rooms in which the vulnerable students are seated?

Of course, the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn’t apply just to schools; it applies to almost every institution, public and private. Under the rationale of this decision, which does not set a precedent but can be used by other lawyers as evidence in other cases, any fearful Karen in any company can claim highten vulnerability to COVID-19 and try to get a court order requiring the company to maintain a mask mandate. A few thousand Karens across the country, and we could see federal judges basically ordering every workplace and every school and every business to maintain a mask mandate for months or even years. The American people will not stand for that!

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Carjackadelphia

District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), 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.

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.

Aggravated assault? The total number of aggravated assaults increased 14.58%, using the city’s own numbers; it’s simply that the tools used were more heavily included firearms than before.

And now we have this, from Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

    Police arrest Philly teens wanted in carjackings and Wawa robberies

    The arrests come amid an unprecedented surge in carjackings. The rate of such attacks doubled in 2020 and again in 2021 — and 2022 is off to an even more dangerous start.

    by Samantha Melamed | Sunday, February 6, 2022

    Philadelphia police on Saturday night arrested two teens, aged 14 and 18, who they said had been wanted in a series of armed carjackings in the city, as well as the robberies of two Wawa stores in Upper Darby.

    Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Man killed in Philadelphia carjacking.

    Officers on patrol around 8 p.m. near Broad and Wallace Streets in the city’s Spring Garden neighborhood recognized the suspects during a vehicle stop, police said. Both teens were armed and attempted to flee on foot, according to police. The 14-year-old was quickly apprehended, while the older suspect fled into a house on the 1200 block of Wallace Street, causing police to report a barricade situation. SWAT was called in and he, too, was arrested. Police recovered two loaded handguns, one from the car and the other from the house.

    “These two arrests are a result of cooperation between the Philadelphia Police Department and also neighboring agencies,” Inspector D.F. Pace told 6ABC, which reported that authorities are investigating whether the two may be implicated in additional crimes. Charges were still pending as of Sunday morning, police said.

And here’s the money line:

    The arrests come as Philadelphia is grappling with an alarming spike in carjackings: The rate nearly quadrupled from 2019 to 2021, when there were 840 such attacks. This year, there have already been 140 carjackings, putting the city on an even more perilous pace.

Carjackings are a pretty serious, violent crime, and while people might just throw up their hands and say, “Forget it,” when their home is burgled, because they think it fruitless, cars are big, important and cost a lot of money; when someone’s car is stolen, he loses a lot of capacity, to get to work or school, to carry home groceries, really to do much in society that involves travel.

Yet we are supposed to believe that crime, overall, has decreased in the City of Brotherly Love. well, no, I don’t believe it, don’t believe it at all.

Now, happily enough, one crime has decreased: murder. As of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, February 6th, there had been 50 homicides reported by the Philadelphia Police Department, compared to 54 on the same date last year, and 39 in 2020. Homicides are running behind 2021’s record 562 killings, but ahead of 2020’s 499, which is the city’s third worst year, with the 500 killings during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

So, is it an improvement that the city might see fewer murders than in 2021, but is still ahead of 2020’s pace? I guess that Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw would call it an improvement if there are ‘only’ 543 homicides, but that would be pretty much damning with faint praise.

    “This is like the new way of stealing a car, and it’s become very dangerous,” Chief Inspector Frank Vanore, told The Inquirer last week.

Of course, the Inquirer tried to blame guns:

No, the great rise in gun sales have been to law-abiding people, people who have to go through a background check, to defend themselves from crime! The law-abiding aren’t the ones out there jacking cars. As we have previously noted, a couple of good citizens took out the thieves, though sadly one of the good guys didn’t have his weapon properly registered.

The real reason for the increase in carjackings? It’s because the perps simply aren’t very afraid of being caught, or, if they’re caught, being seriously punished, not with a ‘social justice’ District Attorney in charge of prosecutions. And it’s because so many of the kids in Philadelphia simply aren’t being reared properly. I’ve said it before: you show me a rotten kid, and I’ll show you a lousy parent.

 

References

References
↑1 See Table 4.
↑2 Though “burglarize” is apparently a real word now, I refuse to use it.