Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Bidenflation If inflation was 'only' 7.5%, what items went up less than that to counterbalance those which increased more?

We recently reported on the price of a gallon of milk in the Bluegrass State, and how it had increased 121.21% since President Trump left office. Grocery prices in general have risen. We also noted that January inflation, year-over-year, rose 7.5%, which was higher than the average hourly wage increase of 5.7%. Two days ago, I tweeted that regular gasoline had jumped 20¢ per gallon.

Now comes The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Utility bills are soaring in the Philly region and so is customer outrage

Peco gas bills are up 38% from last year. PGW’s are up 17%. “I have never paid this much for heat in the winter.”

by Andrew Maykuth | Sunday, February 27, 2022

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

Byron Goldstein closely monitors the energy usage at his Glenside home. So when he got a $651 bill from Peco Energy for combined electric and gas usage in January, 37% more than the $477 he paid the previous January, he knew something was off.

Goldstein discovered that Peco’s gas supply charge skyrocketed since January 2021, accounting for most of the increase. Goldstein, 74, was unsatisfied by the company’s response to his phone calls, so he filed a formal complaint to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, urging the state regulator to roll back Peco’s “outrageous and irresponsible” price increase.

He was not alone. Across the Philadelphia area, thousands of utility customers opened their bills in recent weeks to learn that the cost of heating their homes had soared much more than the 7% inflation rate. Social media platforms lit up with posts from unhappy customers, directing their wrath at energy companies, regulators, and politicians.

“I have never paid this much for heat in the winter,” wrote a Philadelphia resident posting on Nextdoor.com, where several threads contained hundreds of comments venting about the price increase.

There’s more at the original, but it needs to be noted: these price increases came before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

According to charts in the Inquirer original, natural; gas prices are actually significantly lower now than they were in 2008, but they’ve jumped significantly this winter:

The price has indeed gone up: A typical Peco customer who used 150 hundred cubic feet (ccf) of gas was billed $171.25 in January, up 38% or $46.90 from January 2021, according to PUC data. A Philadelphia Gas Works customer who used the same amount of gas was billed $261.71 in January, up 17% or $37.91 from a year ago.

Electricity bills also went up in Pennsylvania on Dec. 1, though not as much as gas bills.

With price increases like these, just how real does that reported 7.5% inflation rate feel?

The Inquirer reported, last December, that cable television and internet service rates from Comcast have increased, as have prices from AT&T and SlingTV.

The Wall Street Journal reported that NBC had a 42% drop in viewership for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, compared to the 2018 games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, something I attribute to NBC’s ‘free’ coverage being dominated by curling and other lower-interest events, while the events people are most interested in, ice skating and Alpine skiing, were being shown more often on Peacock, an internet streaming service which, naturally, has a subscriber fee. That’s just more money out of people’s pockets, or they miss out, a form of inflation that goes unaccounted.

The obvious question, at least to me, is: if inflation was ‘only’ 7.5%, what items went up less than that to counterbalance those which increased more?

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NIMBY! Not in my back yard!

It seems that the left are much happier with liberal principles when they are applied to other people, on other neighborhoods!

Why does a wealthy California town say it opposes affordable housing? To save mountain lions

The town’s decision drew quick scorn as a brazen attempt to evade even minimally denser development in one of California’s most exclusive locales.

by Liam Dillon, Tribune News Service | Saturday, February 26, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

The well-heeled Silicon Valley suburb of Woodside, Calif., has come up with a novel way to block plans that would potentially bring in more affordable housing: Declare itself Cougar Town.

Earlier this month, officials in the enclave of 5,500 people announced that all of Woodside was exempt from a new state housing law that allows for duplex development on single-family home lots.

The reason? The entire town is a habitat for potentially endangered mountain lions.

Really? As in cougars — and I mean cougars, the animal, not the Urban Dictionary cougars — roam the streets of Woodside?

Woodside’s decision drew quick scorn as a brazen attempt to evade even minimally denser development in one of California’s most exclusive locales. The bucolic, woodsy town near Stanford University and the heart of Silicon Valley has a median home value of $4.5 million. Among its residents have been the founders of technology giants Intuit, Intel and Symantec as well as Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who reportedly spent $200 million to build a Japanese-style 16th-century imperial palace across 23 acres.

San Mateo County, where Woodside is located, gave Joe Biden 291,496, or 77.89%, of its votes, while just 75,584, 20.20%, to President Trump. That’s much higher than the statewide advantage Mr Biden enjoyed, 63.48% to 34.32%. While I couldn’t find the breakdown for Woodside individually, it’s safe to say it’s a pretty liberal area.

The mountain-lion card is not playing well with advocates, who note the jarring irony of enormous mansions inhabited by few juxtaposed against the housing needs of many.

“Right now, you could have five people in a 5,000-square-foot mansion sharing one kitchen, and it’s OK,” said Sonja Trauss, executive director of YIMBY Law, a San Francisco group that advocates for local governments to approve more housing. “But once you have two kitchens, it’s suddenly a problem for the mountain lions?”

Why am I thinking of Comrade Kaprugina in Dr Zhivago, saying, “There was living space for thirteen families in this one house!”

Yuri Andreievich Zhivago replies, “Yes. Yes, this is a better arrangement; more just.” Of course, Yuri Andreievich understands what happens if he doesn’t toe the Bolshevik line. The left might think that zoning for cheaper houses, more “affordable” housing, is “more just,” but it’s obvious that the folks who’ve driven the median home value to an insane $4.5 million aren’t very interested in having neighboring homes, and neighboring people, who will bring down the values of their own housing, their own community.

We see it all over, in the tony areas of Philadelphia like Society Hill and Rittenhouse Square, where the well-to-do white liberals are quite happy to vote for Democratic politicians and liberal policies, as long as the poorer, black and Hispanic residents of the City of Brotherly Love are kept down in Kensington and Strawberry Mansion. Philadelphia is highly ‘diverse’ as far as overall population figures are concerned, but far more internally segregated on a by-neighborhood basis.

Business Insider noted:

California remains the state with the highest poverty level in the US, according to a September 2021 report from the US Census Bureau.

In the report, three-year poverty level averages were calculated for each state and the District of Columbia using the supplemental poverty measure, which found that 15.4% of California residents lived in poverty from 2018 to 2020. Only the District of Columbia had a higher rate of poverty — 16.5%.

The supplemental poverty measure expands on the official poverty measure, which was developed by Social Security economist Mollie Orshansky in the 1960s, by accounting for cost of living, work and medical expenses, tax credits, and government programs designed to assist low-income families and individuals.

If the Pyrite State has the nation’s highest percentage of poverty, it also has some of our wealthiest citizens, a lot of whom live in Hollywood, in Bel Air, and in Woodside. Seth Rogen is a Canadian comedian, actor, screenwriter, film producer, and voice actor who, according to the site Celebrity Net Worth, has a net worth of $80 million, and was excoriated for a mindless tweet in which he said that living in a big city, one has to simply accept that leaving valuables in your car means that people will break in and rob it. When you’re worth $80 million, you can afford to replace stuff. Mr Rogen isn’t homeless. He lives on a 10-acre estate in the West Hollywood Hills, having sold, for $2.16 million, another West Hollywood home behind high hedges and a tall, metal fence. ‘Twould seem that, despite his seemingly cavalier attitude toward petty robbery, Mr Rogan, a self-described left-winger, does care about security for his property and himself.

One wonders how many “affordable” duplexes Mr Rogan has had built on his 10-acre estate, to help the less fortunate in Los Angeles County.

As I have previously noted, the hypocrisy of the left is astounding! They are great at telling other people what they should do, but not so great at putting their money where their mouths — or keyboards — are.

 

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What have the #ClimateAction activists done to reduce their own carbon emissions?

“I’ll believe ‘carbon pollution’ is dangerous when people like Biden stop putting out so darned much themselves,” William Teach said. Why, I have to ask, don’t the people telling us we must reduce our CO2 output ever do anything to reduce their own? Why wouldn’t someone from the Show Me State, such as Mr Teach’s frequent commenter Elwood P Dowd, want to show us just what and how much he has done, personally, to reduce his own carbon footprint?

What I have done isn’t much: we replaced our light bulbs with LEDs, not to reduce our energy consumption, but because when we bought the place, it had incandescent bulbs that were burning out anyway. In addition, as we remodeled the kitchen, we installed canister lights, and the much lower temperature LEDs are far safer in canister lights.

I installed a clothesline outside, which means that, in decent weather, our bedding and my clothes gets dried using solar and wind power. Admittedly, I did this because my darling bride (of 42 years, 9 months, and 7 days) likes the way the bedding smells after line drying, rather than any concern over global warming climate change, but it still saves on over an hour in the 220-volt, 30-amp electric dryer.

Of course, many of the urbanites who like to lecture us on reducing our CO2 output don’t have yards in which they could install a clothesline, or, if they did, are stuck with homeowners’ associations which won’t permit it. But it is amusing to me that none of them ever seem to even think about it or mention it.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

When I added windows, I added double-paned insulated ones; you can see the large windows I installed in our kitchen remodel to the left.

It replaced one much narrower double hung window. I added another window in our living room, along a wall which had only one, and the room needed more light. As I had walls open, I added insulation to exterior walls. When we put in new kitchen appliances, we were buying energy efficient ones.

Perhaps my motives weren’t pure enough for the warmunists — Mr Teach calls them ‘warmists’ in his long-term, daily ‘If All You See‘ posts — but, in the end, my wife and I still did these things, and we’ve spent a considerable amount of money doing so; that kitchen window was over $700 just by itself.

Oil lamp and candles on the kitchen counter. Photo by Dana R Pico, on January 16, 2022, when power was lost due to a snowstorm.

Of course, we also added propane, to a house which was previously all-electric, because when the sparktricity goes out in our end-of-the-line farmhouse, it can be out for several days. I’m sure that has us near the gates of Hell as far as the global warming climate activists are concerned, but, then again, we didn’t freeze when we lost power for 46 hours in the middle of January.

So, what has the man from Missouri done, what has the Hirsute One done, to reduce their carbon footprints (feetprint?) that they tell the rest of us we must do? We already know that Mr Teach’s frequent commenter ‘Hairy’ is keeping his current, fossil-fueled automobile, and has no plans to trade it in for a plug-in electric, but, then again, he has told us he’s in his 70s and doesn’t ever plan on buying another vehicle. Being less than two months from my 69th birthday, I can understand that!

I don’t expect our high-flying government officials like the ‘Climate Tsar’ John F Kerry — a very wealthy man who made his money the old-fashioned way; he married it! — to stop flying around the world in his private jet, a Gulfstream IV, registration number N57HJ. But maybe, just maybe, some of the otherwise regular people advocating all sorts of restrictions on other people could spend a little time telling us what sacrifices they have made, what things they have done, to put their money where their mouths — or keyboards — are.

But at some point, those global warming climate change activists need to do more than just lecture others; they need to lead by example. That so few of them do says a lot about how seriously they take global warming climate.

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Philly continues the tyranny

The heavily politicized Center for Disease Control have finally eased some of their masking guidelines, but, of course, the petty little dictators in the City of Brotherly Love want to keep Philadelphians wearing the symbols of authoritarian control.

CDC loosens COVID-19 masking guidance, but Philly is keeping its mask mandate for now

The city’s health department said it would review the CDC’s new guidance, but the safety restrictions in place in the city are based on local conditions and “months of data specific to Philadelphia.”

by Jason Laughlin and Kasturi Pananjady | Friday, February 25, 2033

A change in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance for mask-wearing Friday means federal authorities no longer recommend indoor masking as a COVID-19 precaution for much of Southeastern Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia.

Whether that will change masking policy set by the health department in Philadelphia, the only place in the region with an indoor mask mandate, is uncertain.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, which loves mandates and dictatorial control of the plebeians, illustrated their article with a photo of sheep “guests at the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall last December,” all dutifully masked up.

We have previously reported on the city’s Health Commissioner, Dr Cheryl Bettigole, saying, on Groundhog Day, that Philadelphia lifting COVID-19 restrictions was “probably several months away.”

“Our team is actively discussing what an off-ramp looks like,” Bettigole said when asked about easing restrictions. “If you think about where we are with this particular wave and case rates right now, we’re probably several months away from a place where we will have the kind of safety to drop all the current restrictions.”

The city did end its vaccine mandate for indoor dining on the 14th, but retained the mask mandate. To me, it’s obvious: the city was depending upon cute college coeds working as hostesses to enforce the vaccine mandate, and who can know how reliable that was, especially if confronted by a large, scary man. But masks? It’s obvious to anyone who can see whether someone is wearing one; they are the very visible symbols of submission.

The Philadelphia Department of Public Health said it would review the CDC’s new guidance, but the safety restrictions in place in the city are based on local conditions and “months of data specific to Philadelphia,” said Matt Rankin, a spokesperson for the department.

“At this time we plan to continue the implementation of these current response levels as the pandemic unfolds,” he said. . . . .

The CDC changed its guidelines for masking Friday because easy access to vaccines and testing, better treatments for COVID-19, and widespread immunity have “moved the pandemic to a new phase,” the agency said in a news release. The agency’s recommendations were also being widely disregarded, with states increasingly ending COVID precautions despite 95% of U.S. counties falling into the CDC’s old definition of substantial or high transmission. The new guidelines break COVID-19 risk levels into categories of high, medium, and low by county. Indoor masking is recommended only at the high risk level.

Very widely disregarded. I have previously noted the masks required sign at the entrance to the Kroger grocery store on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, and, shopping there just Friday morning, I saw what has been the case all along: significant disobedience to the sign. I certainly wasn’t wearing a mask, and neither were at least three-quarters of the other shoppers. Why should they? We already know that the face masks most people use just don’t stop Omicron, and the so-called experts recommend a N-95 mask. That recommendation was on January 10th, and now, just 46 days later, the CDC are relaxing their masking guidance? One wonders if they listen to each other?

Of course, elected politicians do listen to their constituents, and they know that the public are just plain tired of all of the authoritarian decrees, and those decrees were subject to widespread disobedience; that’s why so many places had weakened or dropped their mandates well before the CDC decided that they must find their people, so they could lead them.

Philadelphia? Completely controlled by the Democrats, to the point where the last Republican mayor left office while George VI was still King of England, so the Democrats running the city aren’t in the least bit worried about losing in the general elections; any real action comes in the Democratic primaries. In 2008, there were 57 entire precincts in which Republican presidential nominee John McCain didn’t get a single vote; in 2012, there were 59 entire precincts in which Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney didn’t get a single vote. In 2020, Joe Biden carried Philadelphia with 81.44% of the vote. You can see why Democrats in Philly aren’t concerned.

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Three more dead in Philly, and the Inquirer doesn’t care But Larry Krasner and the Inquirer sure do care about cops who are exonerated!

As both of our regular readers know, I check the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page on weekday mornings, and the news was pretty depressing. As we noted on Wednesday, the city had crept to one above the same-day homicide total for 2021. But as of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, February 23rd, the total had jumped by three to 79 homicides, vis a vis ‘just’ 75 on the same date last year, and 53 in 2020.

Make no mistake here: 2020 was a bloody year, finishing with 499 murders, just one short of the then-record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. But 2021 didn’t just surpass the old record; 562 homicides blew it out of the water.

Wednesday’s killings? There wasn’t a single story on any of them either on the main page or the crime page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, something which was no surprise at all. There were, however, a couple of related stories which caught my attention. In one, “The Inquirer’s look at itself ignores the paper’s history of exposing racial injustice: The sweeping claims in ‘Black City, White Paper’ are overly broad and shamelessly short-sighted, writes Huntly Collins, a reporter who spent 18 years at the newspaper,” a LaSalle University journalism professor and former Inquirer reported responded to the newspaper’s crying 21st century judgement about its 19th and 20th century history. Though he avoided the use of the term #woke[1]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, he was clearly referring to them as he made it clear that the paper’s history needed to be viewed through the lens of the circumstances of the times. He noted that perhaps the paper could have hired more minority staff, but also noted that newspapers in general had been shedding journalists’ positions for a couple of decades now, and union contracts specified that, in layoffs, the last hired were the first fired.

The Inquirer’s look at itself also glossed over the economic crisis facing local newspapers as they strive to hire more minority journalists at a time when newspaper jobs are in steep decline. Since 2004, some 1,800 newspapers have folded, including 60 dailies. Nationwide, newspaper employment of editorial staff has plummeted to just 30,000, down a whopping 57 percent from 2008. The Inquirer once employed some 680 reporters, editors and other editorial staff. Today, that number is down to about 200. Even the best laid plans to diversify the staff falter when confronted with economic forces that shrink the size of the pie rather than enlarging it.

Publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes has basically told readers that the newspaper she runs will not report on things which could lead to a negative image of minority populations, that the newspaper she runs will self-censor the truth in favor of “anti-racism” and social justice.[2]Commenter Lavern Merriweather stated that I must be racist for noting that the Inquirer hides the racial aspect of the news even in the stories that it covers, and that, not being black myself, I … Continue reading The plain truth, the unvarnished truth, is apparently a bad thing.

Then there was this gem:

DA Krasner denounces dismissal of charges against two officers charged with beating man with special needs

Krasner said he sees “a disturbing pattern” of judges dismissing charges against police officers.

by Mensah M Dean | Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner on Tuesday criticized the decision by a judge to dismiss charges against two police officer brothers whom he charged in April with chasing and beating a man with special needs after falsely accusing the man of tampering with cars in their far Northeast neighborhood.

Krasner, who pledged after taking office in 2018 to hold accountable officers who break the law, suggested that the decision by Municipal Court Judge William Austin Meehan Jr. during a preliminary hearing to clear the two brothers — former Police Inspector James Smith and former detective Patrick Smith — was part of a larger pattern of judges going easy on accused police.

“We are seeing a disturbing pattern of criminal cases against police officers getting charges against them thrown out by judges during the preliminary hearing phase, only to be reinstated on appeal. The law applies equally to everyone,” Krasner said. “Philadelphians should ask why some judges are finding no accountability at a preliminary hearing for police when they commit the same crimes that get everyone else held over for trial.”

Krasner, who has frequently clashed with the officers’ labor union, added: “My office will consider all possible avenues for seeking justice in this matter, and to hold accountable the individuals who chased, terrorized, and assaulted a young and innocent man with Asperger syndrome.”

There’s more at the original, but Judge Meehan heard the testimony of the alleged victim, and then dismissed the charges against the tweo former police officers.

“The court dismissed all charges…because the evidence presented by the prosecutor failed to prove that a crime was committed,” said defense attorney Fortunato Perri, who represented James Smith. “Inspector Smith and Detective Smith have dedicated decades of their lives proudly protecting and serving the citizens of Philadelphia. They look forward to continuing those efforts in the future.”

Of course, the District Attorney ought to be familiar with dismissed charges, because that’s what he does very frequently: since District Attorney Krasner took office, the percentage of firearms charges resulting in convictions has dramatically decreased. In Mr Krasner’s first year in office, 2018, 57% of Violations of Uniform Firearm Act only arrests resulted in convictions, with 35% having the charges dismissed. Those trend lines crossed the following year, with a larger percentage of charges dismissed, 47%, than resulting in convictions, 43%, and only got worse in 2020 and 2021, 49%/42%, and 62%/36% respectively. In their attempts to get illegal firearm possessions off the streets, the Philadelphia Police Department increased the number of VUFA arrests each year, and each year Mr Krasner’s office let the (alleged) malefactors off the hook in increasing numbers. Mr Krasner said:

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.

The alleged injuries that the officers’ alleged victim suffered included “a black eye and abrasions on the back of his head, elbows, and knees,” pretty much the type of crimes the District Attorney doesn’t care about prosecuting anyway . . . unless they are committed by a police officer.

So, we have seen 79 homicides in 54 days, 1.4630 per day, ahead of the pace set last year, and at least at the time of writing this article, 10:38 AM EST on Thursday, February 24th, the Inquirer hadn’t even noticed, but was still promoting the softer-than-soft on crime, George Soros-sponsored District Attorney’s story from two days earlier. I have said it before: to the “anti-racist” Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives — and if any of the victims had been white, the paper would have been all over the case — really don’t matter.

References

References
↑1 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 the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 Commenter Lavern Merriweather stated that I must be racist for noting that the Inquirer hides the racial aspect of the news even in the stories that it covers, and that, not being black myself, I have no right to comment on the black community in the City of Brotherly Love.
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Los gringos estan locos!

I had to take a screenshot of this tweet, in case Dana Houle deletes it, and I can only say that I am highly disappointed that someone named Dana could be so boneheadedly stupid. You can click on the image to get to the original tweet . . . if it still exists.

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Lost Kos, tweeted something similarly stupid.

The bombs are falling, people are trying to flee — at least as of this writing, the roads out of Kyiv are jammed — and the American snowflakes are worried about whether the Ukrainians are wearing masks. https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_wacko.gif Los gringos estan locos!

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Bidenflation! The price of a gallon of milk has increased 121.21% since Joe Biden became President

Photo by Dana R. Pico, © January 4, 2022. Free use is granted, with appropriate credit. Click to enlarge.

In 2020, back when Donald Trump was President of the United States, a gallon of milk at the Kroger on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, was 99¢ per gallon. In 2021, the price had increased to $1.29 per gallon, in the same store.

Then, on January 4, 2022, I took a photo of the increased price, to $1.79 per gallon, and posted it on Twitter. That was a pretty big jump, 38.76%, but I at least hoped that the price would remain stable.

Photo by Dana R. Pico, © February 23, 2022. Free use is granted, with appropriate credit. Click to enlarge.

Well, I might have hoped that, but my hopes have been quickly dashed; a gallon of 1% milk, at the same store, even in the same dairy case, is now $2.19 per gallon, a 22.35% increase in 50 days! Milk has risen, in the same store, 121.21% since the end of 2020, since the end of President Trump’s term, since Joe Biden has moved into the White House.

121.21%!

We had previously noted that the January year-over-year inflation rate was 7.5%, higher than economists’ guesstimates, the highest in 40 years, and higher than the average hourly wage increase of 5.7%.

It’s one thing to see that statistics printed in The Wall Street Journal, and something entirely different to see them, in yellow and red cardboard signs, as you are reaching in to buy a gallon of milk.

The average working stiff might not read The Washington Post, might not pay attention to the statistics as given on finger-blackening newsprint or a flickering monitor screen, but he’s likely to have noticed how everything has gotten more expensive.

On September 16, 2016, Heather Long, then with CNN, published “Problem: Most Americans don’t believe the unemployment rate is 5%,” noting that, despite the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate, people believed that unemployment was much higher, around 9% or more, which I pointed out was close to the U-6 unemployment rate at the time. And no matter what the official ‘numbers’ are, when a gallon of milk has gone up 121.21% in just over a year, inflation certainly feels higher than 5.7%

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Killadelphia Ho hum: the killing rate in Philly has crept higher than last year's

Jonathan Akubu, mugshot by Philadelphia Police Department, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

The good, anti-racist Philadelphia Inquirer would not, of course, publish the mugshot of an accused murderer with a long past criminal record, but Steve Keeley of Fox29 did.

The Inquirer did have the story on his arrest:

The suspected leader of a Philadelphia carjacking ring has been arrested for two murders

Jonathan Akubu, suspected of leading a carjacking operation, has also been charged with committing two shootings and may be connected to dozens of other incidents.

by Chris Palmer and Anna Orso | Tuesday, February 22, 2022

A 28-year-old man who police say led a loosely organized carjacking ring has been charged with committing two murders and two shootings as part of a weeks-long crime rampage — and investigators are probing whether his group is connected to dozens of other crimes.

Jonathan Akubu of Drexel Hill was arrested Saturday in connection with the fatal carjacking of a 60-year-old man killed Feb. 6 in Northeast Philadelphia. He is also charged with killing another man, a 28-year-old car locksmith, less than a week later in the city’s Eastwick section.

Detectives used ballistics and cell phone records to connect Akubu to at least five incidents in the last two months. He was arrested at an apartment in Lansdowne, where police found a stolen handgun and an AK-47-style rifle.

Akubu is so far the only defendant charged in each case. Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said Tuesday that investigators believe his carjacking operation targeted Toyota SUVs and involved at least three other people in their teens or early 20s who are at large.

There’s more at the original, including the fact that Mr Akubu is being held without bail on multiple counts of murder, aggravated assault, conspiracy, robbery, theft, and illegal possession of firearms.

The Inquirer article then gives us several paragraphs detailing Mr Akubu’s alleged crimes, before getting to this:

Akubu has several past arrests, records show, including in Chester County in 2020 for charges that included robbing a car. But nearly all counts were dismissed in municipal court, the records show. It was not immediately clear why. Akubu pleaded guilty to a summary charge of harassment, the records show.

Years before that, Akubu pleaded guilty to committing a 2013 aggravated assault in Southwest Philadelphia. According to charging documents, he fired shots at someone in a car using a gun he was barred from possessing. He was sentenced to 38 to 96 months in jail plus 17 years of probation, court records show, and in 2018 was sent back to jail for violating his probation.

Larry Krasner was the District Attorney in Philadelphia in 2018. Clearly, he shouldn’t have been released, and should have served out the rest of the seventeen year sentence. Unfortunately, the Inquirer doesn’t give us the details. How many of those 38 to 96 months in jail did he actually serve? Obviously not all eight years, or he wouldn’t have been on the street in 2018.

In 2015, Akubu filed a federal lawsuit against the city, saying that a prison guard beat him and bit him on the head while he was handcuffed, an incident that was captured on surveillance video. The city settled with Akubu for $99,999, which was paid in November 2015.

From the Inquirer’s embedded link:

Attorney Guy Sciolla says inmate Jonathan Akubu was being escorted through a common area, he was handcuffed, hands behind his back, when he was overpowered and punched repeatedly by correctional officer James Weisback.

According to prison documents, Officer Weisback claimed Akubu threatened and spit in his face, but Sciolla says there’s no evidence of that.

Sciolla and co-counsel in this case, Patrick Link, say they will also refer this case to the District Attorney for possible criminal action.

Akubu is in prison charged with a shooting. His attorneys say it was domestic in nature and no one was injured. A source says Akubu has accumulated nearly 20 disciplinary infractions while in custody.

Well, of course his attorney is going to minimize Mr Akubu’s actions; that’s what he’s paid to do. How Mr Akubu could afford sharks like Messrs Sciolla and Link was not indicated. “Nearly twenty” disciplinary problems while in prison seems like it would be a testament to Mr Akubu’s character.

District Attorney Krasner could have had Mr Akubu still behind bars when he (allegedly) killed George Briscella, but didn’t. Mr Krasner did not pull the trigger, three times, resulting in Mr Briscella’s death. But Mr Krasner might as well be named an accomplice, given that his actions allowed Mr Akubu to be out on the streets earlier this month, (allegedly) jacking cars shooting people.

In related news, with 76 homicides as of 11:59 PM EST on Tuesday, February 22nd, the City of Brotherly Love has moved one ahead of the killings pace set in 2021’s record-setting year. Nothing to see here, folks. Please, just move along.

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Tulsi goes to CPAC

While I like the concept of the Libertarian Party, supporting maximum freedom and individual rights, I will admit to not having much use for it. The primary function of a political party is to bring like-minded people together to win elections, to get their policies and principles into governing power; that’s the definition given to me by Dr Malcolm Jewell, one of my political science professors at the University of Kentucky, back in the horse-and-buggy days.

And that is where the Libertarian Party fails: whether people like its positions or not, the party fails in its most important function, getting people elected to office. On June 8, 2018, I went to the Libertarian Party’s website, to find their list of Libertarian Party candidates who were actually elected to public office. They claimed a total of 166 elected officials, with 52 of them holding partisan offices. Their highest, at the time, elected officials were three state representatives from New Hampshire, all of whom were elected as Republicans or Democrats, and none of whom were re-elected.

Representative Justin Amash (L-MI) switched to the Libertarian Party, due to his disagreements with President Trump, but he, too, was elected as a Republican. To date, there have been exactly zero candidates running as Libertarians who have been elected President, Senator, United States Representative, Governor, state Senator or state Representatives. For a party which has been around since 1971, that’s a pretty massive failure.

Former Representative Ron Paul, elected as a Republican, was the Libertarian Party candidate for President in 1988. Following that, he won the House seat again in 1996, and served in the House of Representatives until January of 2013. He twice ran for the Republican presidential nomination, in 2008 and 2012, failing both times.

His son, Rand Paul, was elected to represent Kentucky in the United States Senate in 2010, as a Republican, and re-elected in 2016; he is currently running for a third term, and is heavily favored. The Bluegrass State is home to two of the libertarian Republicans, with Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4), first elected in 2012. Dr Paul and Mr Massie used the TEA Party movement to help win election.

The electoral history has been simple: lower-case libertarians can win, if they run as Republicans, but running as upper-case Libertarians, the lose, and lose badly.

Now comes former Representative Tulsi Garrard Williams (D-HI 2). A Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination herself in 2020, but withdrew on March 19, and endorsed Joe Biden after doing poorly. The odious Hillary Clinton later floated rumors that Mrs Williams was going to run as a third-party candidate, to throw the 2020 election to President Trump. Mrs Williams is very much a liberal, but she’s also a libertarian, believing in people’s individual rights.

    Contrarian Dem Tulsi Gabbard To Headline CPAC

    by Paul Bedard, Washington Secrets Columnist | Monday, February 21, 2022 | 9:19 AM EST

    Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a 2020 presidential primary candidate who has been critical of President Joe Biden and liberal lawmakers, will be the headliner at the main CPAC dinner event this week, officials told Secrets Monday.

    Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman, will speak at the annual Ronald Reagan Dinner held by the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Glenn Beck is slated to be the keynote.

    Having a popular Democrat speak at the group’s main dinner, to be held Friday, is an “extraordinary event,” said a spokeswoman.

    Gabbard has recently roiled Democratic circles with her criticism of Biden’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine crisis and decision to only consider a black woman for the U.S. Supreme Court. She has also blasted Vice President Kamala Harris as a weak vice president.

    CPAC opens in Orlando Thursday and ends Sunday. Former President Donald Trump and virtually every conservative politician and pundit is expected to speak.

Again, Mrs Williams is no conservative, but her inclusion at CPAC tells us one thing: the GOP has completely co-opted libertarianism, and the future for the Libertarian Party is to stop being stupid, and become part of the Republican Party to which it naturally belongs.

Conservatives will never go along with everything for which the Libertarian Party stands, but there is much we can appreciate. And today’s Democratic Party, with its ‘progressive’ bent, is one which demands conformity over individuality, one which seeks to punish those who do not go along with its social demands and conformity policies. Mrs Williams may support universal health care, and even a guaranteed annual income, but she also supports our First Amendment rights, supports freedom of speech, and of the press, and or religion, of peaceable assembly, and due process of law. She has called out President Biden and his saber-rattling (sanctions-rattling?) against Russia, in a matter in which we cannot stop President Putin from taking. She has criticized his odious vaccine mandates. She was the best candidate the Democrats had, and while Republicans would have been upset that President Trump had lost, we wouldn’t be nearly as upset with Mrs Williams as President as we are with the dummkopf from Delaware and his ‘progressive’ filled administration.