Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Killadelphia

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated Monday through Friday,[1]With Monday, October 11th being a government holiday, Columbus Day, it is possible that the website will not be updated until Tuesday. during “normal business hours,” so it still states that ‘just’ 427 people have been murdered in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, but The Philadelphia Inquirer has the story of the killing of at least the 428th:

    A 13-year-old boy was fatally shot on his way to school in North Philly, police say

    The victim, whom police did not immediately identify, was shot once in the chest on the 3100 block of Judson Street just after 9 a.m., police said.

    by Chris Palmer and Anna Orso | Friday, October 8, 2021

    A 13-year-old boy was fatally shot on his way to school Friday morning in North Philadelphia, according to police and School District officials — another bleak example of how the city’s ongoing gun violence crisis is leaving a record number of young people dead or wounded.

    The victim, whom authorities declined to identify, was shot once in the chest on the 3100 block of Judson Street just after 9 a.m., police said. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about 20 minutes later.

    Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said detectives believe the boy and several other young people had been sitting in a car parked on the block when at least one gunman walked up and fired shots into it.

    Lunette Ray, 86, heard the shots — at least 10 — right outside her house. She peered out the window and saw several boys jump out of a vehicle and run away. One was severely bleeding and fell in the street. She called 911.

There’s more at the Inquirer’s original. A photo in the article shows a maroon PT Cruiser sitting parked on North Judson Street at the intersection with West Clearfield Street, with bullet holes in the windshield. However, the Inquirer’s headline, that the victim was “on his way to school” appears to be misleading:

    Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.

If the victim was shot “just after” 9:00 AM, it would seem that he wasn’t actually on his way to school. The Rhodes Elementary School website states that “All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.”

This was a targeted killing, though it is entirely possible, and perhaps probable, that the murdered boy wasn’t the intended target, that someone else in the vehicle was.

We have frequently noted that the inquirer only covers homicides when the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl. At least someone in that vehicle wasn’t exactly an innocent, but I have to ask: just what were “several” young people doing sitting in a parked car, at 9:00 AM on a school day? Many things could be speculated, which I will leave up to the reader.

Chris Palmer and Anna Orso, the article authors, perhaps accidentally, stepped away from the Inquirer’s position that it’s all about guns:

    Carl Day, an antiviolence advocate and pastor whose church is two blocks from where the shooting took place, said, “We should be stirred up right now, all of us.” The killing is a mandate for adults in the community, he said, to reach out to more children and teenagers and provide alternatives to violence.

    “We in this community and in this zip code need to put all hands on deck,” he said. “We have to let our youth know this doesn’t have to be life. This world is so much bigger than what they think they see in front of them.”

Pastor Day spoke a truth that the #woke of the Inquirer’s newsroom don’t want to hear, that the problem of homicide in the City of Brotherly Love isn’t about guns, but about bad people, about people who think that killing others is perfectly OK, that killing other people is a reasonable and logical thing to do, for whatever reasons they have. The current generation of kids in Philly have already been lost; it’s going to be up to the next group of parents to start bringing up their children in a manner in which they don’t see killing as a reasonable thing to do, and don’t see drugs as a smart thing to take.

It’s a pretty sad thing to note that murder and death are common risks for 13-year-olds like the victim in this story, but the reality is that they are, and they are due to the aggregate behavior of other teenagers in neighborhoods like North Judson and West Clearfield Streets. The victim in this story may or may not have been doing anything wrong, but enough of his peers have been, and are, that the danger is created for all of them.

References

References
↑1 With Monday, October 11th being a government holiday, Columbus Day, it is possible that the website will not be updated until Tuesday.
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#Transgender activism and #FreedomOfSpeech

I start to worry when I agree with both Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, both in the same week! Heck, I’ve even been listening to Glenn Greenwald.

Dave Chappelle Is Right, Isn’t He?

The comedian defends reality. Which is currently under siege.

by Andrew Sullivan | 2:21 PM EDT

There’s an understandable tendency to view the debate about transgender ideology today as a marginal issue, affecting a minuscule number of people, and at most, a trivial matter in the larger culture wars. And I can see why. It does seem on the surface to be about maybe 0.2 percent of humanity. And if you venture an opinion on it, the consequences are intense — so why bother?

And, overwhelmingly, the elite media in the United States prevents readers from knowing that a debate is even happening, let alone what it is really about. If the argument about gender theory is mentioned at all, it is dismissed as a bunch of “anti-trans” bigots — aka “TERFs” — hurting a beleaguered and tiny minority, for some inconceivable, but surely awful, reason.

And so when the greatest living comedian, Dave Chappelle, bases almost an entire Netflix special on the subject — alternately hilarious and humane, brutal and true — and wades into the debate with wellies on, the exact same piece about the special will be written in much of elite media.

You could write it yourself, couldn’t you? 1. He’s a bigot. “The phobic jokes keep coming — and Chappelle’s efforts to ironise them, to dance around rather than wallow in the boorishness, are derisory,” says the Guardian review. 2. He’s out of date: “All that’s left is the same tired observations delivered behind a bizarre form of commiseration, this time with an added dash of JK Rowling solidarity and using someone else’s death to validate his half-decade of public stubbornness,” according to IndieWire. NPR adds a “multi-racial whiteness” edge: “Too often in The Closer, it just sounds like Chappelle is using white privilege to excuse his own homophobia and transphobia.”

Both the “stubbornness” and the “bigot” theme are reiterated in Vulture: Chappelle is full of “outdated excuses masking a refusal to update a worldview … his head is up his ass. He needs new ideas.” And, with respect to the marginalized: “He’s just asking for you to take up less space, to usher in progress by giving other people time to come around to you.”

There’s much more at the original, but it has to be asked: why would a conservative Catholic like me be agreeing with three famously liberal homosexuals?[1]Miss Weiss is actually bisexual, though she eschews that label. Shockingly enough, all three of these famous commentators believe in some very, very radical things like freedom of speech and individual liberty.

In his recent column on substack, Mr Sullivan notes the rather objective truth: despite what today’s left and the ‘transgender’ activists want you to believe, only females can carry a child through gestation and give birth. We noted, last Monday, The Washington Post’s stylebook change to reference “pregnant individuals” rather than “pregnant women”, due to the left’s cockamamie notion that men can be pregnant.

A transwoman cannot give birth as a woman gives birth. She does not ovulate. Her vagina, if it exists, is a simulacrum of one, created by a multiple array of surgeries. Sex in humans is binary, with those few exceptions at the margins — mixtures of the two — proving rather than disproving the rule. Until five minutes ago, this was too obvious to be stated. Now, this objective fact is actually deemed a form of “hate.” Hate.

This means that the debate is no longer about 0.2 percent of humanity. It’s about imposing an anti-scientific falsehood on 99.8 percent of humanity. It means that we have to strip all women of their unique biological experience, to deny any physical differences between men and women in sports, to tell all boys and girls that they can choose their sex, to erase any places reserved exclusively for biological women, like shelters for those who have been abused by men, and to come up with terms like “pregnant people” to describe mothers. Yes — mothers. The misogyny buried in this is gob-smacking. Is Mothers’ Day next for the trans chopping block?

The struggle is one of language, because language is the formative basis for thought. If the term “woman” can encompass both females and biological males who claim to be female, it has become meaningless. That the terms “cisgender” and “sex assigned at birth“[2]Wikipedia defines “sex assigned at birth” as: Sex assignment (sometimes known as gender assignment) is the discernment of an infant’s sex at birth. Assignment may be done prior to … Continue reading ever came into existence demonstrates the idiocy of modern life.

Mr Sullivan has no problems with homosexual or transgendered persons, but he is mocking the idea that current political correctness requires not only acceptance of transgenderism as something real and normal, rather than a mental illness, but that everyone must publicly conform to the demands of the transgendered for recognition of their claims.

Chappelle’s final Netflix special, “The Closer,” is a classic. Far from being outdated, it’s slightly ahead of its time, as the pushback against wokeness gains traction. It is extremely funny, a bit meta, monumentally mischievous, and I sat with another homo through the whole thing, stoned, laughing our asses off — especially when he made fun of us. The way the elite media portrays us, you’d think every member of the BLT community is so fragile we cannot laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t occur to them that, for many of us, Chappelle is a breath of honest air, doing what every comic should do: take aim at every suffocating piety of the powers that be — including the increasingly weird 2SLGBTQQIA+ mafia — and detonating them all.

I will admit it: I had to follow the link in the New York Post’s mocking article about Justin Trudeau to find out that 2SLGBTQQIA+ stands for “Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual”. As people keep adding letters to “LGBT” it kept getting sillier and sillier, to the point at which mockery is the natural response.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being mocked on social media after he published two posts that mention the latest woke iteration of an acronym for people with different sexual identities — 2SLGBTQQIA+ — which some likened to an encrypted password or “headbutting the keyboard.”

“People across the country are lighting candles to honour Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people who are missing or have been murdered. We must continue to work together, raise awareness, and advocate to end this ongoing national tragedy. #SistersinSpirit,” the prime minister posted to Facebook and Twitter on Monday, referencing the Sisters in Spirit vigil, which honors women of specific racial or sexual identities who are missing or have been murdered.

The number and letter ‘2S’ in 2SLGBTQQIA+ includes people who identify as “Two-spirit,” ​referring to someone who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit. It is used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe their sexual identity.

The acronym, which used to be most commonly known as “LGBTQ,” sparked confusion among social media users.

I guess that some people just aren’t #woke[3]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading enough to keep up with the silly acronyms.

I suspect that Messrs Greenwald and Sullivan, and Miss Weiss, despite the fact that they would not approve of my stance on transgenderism and homosexuality, would very strongly support my right to say and publish my beliefs. Fortunately, I’m retired, so I can’t be ‘cancelled’ from my job, but it’s pretty sad that I have to depend upon that protection.

Mr Sullivan’s subtitle claims that reality “is currently under siege,” which is certainly true, because reality and transgenderism are diametrically opposed. No one really thinks that Bruce Jenner[4]Mr Jenner has legally changed his name to “Caitlyn”, and I suppose that is what has to be used on legal documents now, but my website is not a legal document, and it is The First Street … Continue reading is actually a woman, but political correctness and the #woke left and the credentialed media all pretend that he is, because it’s practically required now.

At some point, the left, who were the champions of unrestricted freedom of speech not all that long ago, will have to recognize people’s freedom of speech. Miss Weiss and Messrs Sullivan and Greenwald have done so, but they are too far and in between these days.

References

References
↑1 Miss Weiss is actually bisexual, though she eschews that label.
↑2 Wikipedia defines “sex assigned at birth” as:

Sex assignment (sometimes known as gender assignment) is the discernment of an infant’s sex at birth. Assignment may be done prior to birth through prenatal sex discernment. In the majority of births, a relative, midwife, nurse or physician inspects the genitalia when the baby is delivered and sex is assigned without ambiguity.

But look at the interchanged terms: discernment is defined as assignment, but assign means, among other things, “to appoint to a post, duty or task,” something which is designated by the authority in question, as though it is that authority’s decision.

↑3 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from 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.

↑4 Mr Jenner has legally changed his name to “Caitlyn”, and I suppose that is what has to be used on legal documents now, but my website is not a legal document, and it is The First Street Journal’s editorial policy to refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their given names and biological sex.
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Oh, it sends a message, alright!

Another of the Capitol kerfufflers has been sentenced, and Federal Judge Thomas Hogan said that he hoped the sentence would send a message:

    Judge: Sentence in Capitol riot case should send message

    By Lindsay Whitehurst, Associated Press | Friday, October 8, 2021

    A federal judge said Friday he hopes a three-month sentence behind bars in a U.S. Capitol insurrection case will send a message to other defendants who don’t seem to be “truly accepting responsibility.”

    U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan spoke as he sentenced Robert Reeder, a Maryland man who had originally described himself as an “accidental tourist” before video emerged of him grabbing a police officer.

    “It’s become evident to me that many of the defendants pleading guilty do not truly accept responsibility. They seem, to me, to be trying to get this out of the way as quickly as possible, stating whatever they have to say … but not changing their attitude,” Hogan said.

    He said he believed Reeder is sorry now and sentenced him to half of the six months prosecutors had wanted, but the judge said some of Reeder’s previous statements had been “disingenuous and self-serving.” Hogan said he hopes the sentence sends a signal that people convicted in the riot will face jail time.

    “This was an attack on the operations of Congress and the Capitol of the United States, a really sacrosanct building,” he said.

There’s more at the original, but Mr Reeder’s sentence does send a message: it sends the message that what I have long called the Capitol kerfuffle was not nearly as serious as the left have made it out to be. President Biden called it “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” forgetting such things as the September 11th attacks, Pearl Harbor, and the assassination of President Kennedy.

If by some miracle I ever became President, I would pardon every last one of the Capitol demonstrators!

It was the functional equivalent of an out-of-control fraternity keg party, leaderless, directionless, shouldn’t have happened, but nowhere near as bad as a whole summer of urban rioting in 2020, with people killed, businesses looted, buildings burned, innocent lives disrupted and, on one case, several blocks of a major city seized and held as an ‘autonomous zone”.

It wasn’t as bad as President Biden, through his minion Attorney General Merrick Garland, trying to sic the FBI and United States Marshalls on sensible people protesting at school board meetings.

Apparently “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” has drawn almost entirely single misdemeanor plea deals, because that’s all the Department of Injustice can muster up against the kerfufflers.

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This guy must like jail! His first adult mugshot taken just 39 minutes after he turned 18!

Adrun Bennett, Fayette County Detention Center, October 6, 2021, 10:14:53 PM EDT.

Adrun Demetrius Bennett, born February 19, 1998, has managed, in his short life, to become rather familiar with the Fayette County Detention Center. The mugshot to the right was taken on Wednesday, October 6, 2021, after he was captured following a standoff with police:

After an approximately three-hour standoff Wednesday, Lexington police captured a man accused of robbing a Fifth Third bank, police said.

According to police, a first-degree robbery warrant was issued for Adrun Bennett, 23, after an investigation identified Bennett as the suspect in the Aug. 9 Fifth Third Bank robbery on Walden Drive, near the intersection of Tates Creek and Armstrong Mill roads. During the robbery, Bennett allegedly handed an employee a note threatening he had a gun and demanded money. The employee complied and Bennett fled the scene.

Officers found Bennett inside an apartment on Spangler Drive Wednesday morning, police said. Bennett barricaded himself inside the unit for approximately three hours, but Bennett was ultimately arrested without further incident, police said.

There’s more at the original, but the jail records also include three other mugshots of Mr Bennett, taken on January 11, 2021 at 11:37:02 AM; August 30, 2018 at 2:45:34 AM; and February 19, 2016 at 12:39:20 AM, which just happens to be thirty-nine whole minutes after he turned 18. Would it be wrong of me to suspect that he has a sealed juvenile record as well?

Well, he managed to rack up some adult charges:

Two teens charged in connection with robbery of Central Bank on Versailles Road

By Greg Kocher | June 3, 2016 | 2:17 PM EDT

A 16-year-old and an 18-year-old have been arrested in connection with the Thursday-afternoon robbery of the Central Bank and Trust branch, 2347 Versailles Road, Lexington police said. . . . .

Police said they found the juvenile, whose name is not being released because of his age, and the 18-year-old, Adrun D. Bennett, in an apartment on Cambridge Drive.

The juvenile is charged with first-degree robbery. Bennett is charged with tampering with physical evidence for trying to conceal stolen money, police said. Bennett is also charged with two counts of wanton endangerment in connection with shots fired on Appian Way on May 29; the shooting is unrelated to the robbery, police said.

Also see Robert Stacy McCain: Milwaukee Teen Killed by System Racism and High-Speed Head-On Collision, But . . .

If this fine gentleman was firing shots, then charged with aiding and abetting a bank robbery, the obvious question is: why wasn’t he already in jail? This is not a good dude!

The Lexington Herald-Leader, of course, did not publish Mr Bennett’s mugshot, even though the reporter for the first cited news story, Christopher Leach, noted that he checked “jail records” to ascertain the charges Mr Bennett faced, and had to have seen the same four mugshots that I saw. His article was originally published at 7:21 AM on Thursday, October 7th, and updated at 4:20 PM the same day, so he had plenty of time to ask permission of Editor Peter Baniak to use the mugshot. Whether he did or not, I do not know, but at some point even the McClatchy Mugshot Policy ought to give way when a multiple-time repeat offender is involved.

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Philly vaccine mandate delayed, but not ended Get vaccinated or starve, city health commissioner says

We have previously reported on Acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole and Philadelphia’s vaccine mandate:

    Cheryl Bettigole, MD, from her Twitter biography.

    Many Philadelphia health workers remain unvaccinated two months before shots will be required

    by Laura McCrystal | Wednesday, August 18, 2021

    Acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said many institutions have applauded Philadelphia’s new vaccine mandate for health care workers, but noted that many employees remain unvaccinated.

    More than a dozen long-term care facilities in Philadelphia have less than 50% of their staff vaccinated, she said.

    ”If you’re more committed to not getting the vaccine than to the safety of your patients, it’s time to do something else,” she said at a Wednesday news briefing. “Health care is not for you.”

Let’s tell the truth here: health care employees at all levels have been exposed to constant, continuous education and pleas to get vaccinated. If they actually wanted to get vaccinated, they would have by now. One might ask why, in a city which gave 81.44% of its votes has so many unvaccinated people.

Like so many on the left,[1]Given this tweet of hers, I think there’s sufficient evidence to associate Dr Bettigole with the political left. Dr Bettigole not only knows what’s best for other people, but insists that it’s her way of the highway. The problem with that is that many, who have already resisted the months’ long pressure to take the vaccines, are going to continue to refuse. What will happen to health care facilities in our nation’s sixth largest city if, say, 25% or 35% of the workforce has to be discharged because they have refused to be vaccinated?

We noted the difficulty in hiring people, and that trained and licensed or certified people, such as nurses, nursing assistants and other hospital technicians, can’t just be replaced by people off the street.

And now, reality has bitten:

    Philadelphia extends vaccine mandate deadline for health-care and higher-education workers

    The change came after many employers requested more time to get their workers fully vaccinated.

    by Laura McCrystal and Erin McCarthy | Wednesday, October 6, 2021

    Philadelphia is extending its deadline for health-care workers and higher-education students and employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole announced Wednesday, citing concern from employers that they would be unable to meet next week’s deadline.

    “My goal is to get everyone vaccinated and not leave our health-care and higher-education systems shorthanded,” Bettigole said.

    Instead of being fully vaccinated by the end of next week, staff of hospitals and long-term care facilities, along with higher-education students, faculty, and staff now must receive at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by Oct. 15 and a second dose a month later.

    Bettigole announced an even longer extension for all other health-care workers, including those who work as home health aides and in behavioral health settings — which she said have the lowest vaccination rates. Those workers now must receive at least one dose of the vaccine by Oct. 22 and a second dose by Nov. 22.

So much for her statement, “If you’re more committed to not getting the vaccine than to the safety of your patients, it’s time to do something else. Health care is not for you.” Now her concern is having enough people in health care!

But, notice the timeline here. Instead of “being fully vaccinated” by Friday, October 15th, which would mean that a person would have had to have received his last dose by Friday, October 1st, Dr Bettigole and the city are saying that nurses, nursing assistants, radiology technicians, etc, must take their first dose by next Friday.

This can mean only one thing: not only did a lot of such students and workers not begin to comply with the city’s demands back in August, but a lot didn’t try to comply later, either.

The extension requires that the employees receive the first dose by October 15th, and the second a month later. Does this mean that, after next Friday, an employee who does not present proof of having gotten the first shout will be suspended or discharged? Work schedules for hospitals and nursing homes, which are open 24/7, are, in most cases, already completed for well after mid-October; next Friday could be scramble time!

Getting vaccinated takes only a few minutes per dose, most of that dedicated to filling out the paperwork. Hospitals could have set up vaccination rooms in which staff could have walked down during a mid-morning or mid-afternoon break to get the jab, and return straight to work, without missing any time. With the vaccines now in plentiful supply, and a lot of medically trained personnel in the workplace who could administer the shots, anyone who was willing to take the shots could have gotten the shots.

Under the city’s mandate, exemptions were possible. Exempt personnel would be required to wear masks — something to which hospital personnel are already accustomed — and be tested twice a week. Given that even those fully vaccinated can contract, and spread, the virus, one would think that they would have to be tested as well, right?

As we have previously reported, the Philadelphia School District tests everybody once a week, and will now test the unvaccinated twice a week. The ‘incentive’ to get vaccinated is simply to halve the number of tests to which employees must submit. The original, August mandate, issued appropriately enough on Friday the 13th, required the unvaccinated to be tested at least once a week. The city is doubling up on that, using the punishment of physical discomfort, in an attempt to force compliance.

Have you ever had a COVID test? It involves a nurse sticking a cotton swab on a long stick far up your nose, to collect material from within your sinuses. It’s hardly fatal, and leaves no (known) lasting damage, but, then again, neither does waterboarding prisoners at Guantanamo. If that comparison seems strained, remember, the purpose is the same: to force compliance from someone who does not wish to go along with your demands.

Dr Bettigole stated that she does not intend to extend the deadline again:

    We’ve seen from other places that have implemented vaccine mandates that they work, that workers do step up and get their vaccines despite lots of anxiety before the deadlines.

Well, it didn’t work last time, to the extent that the deadlines had to be extended, or too many personnel would be lost. Considering that the first deadline didn’t work, if we assume that those who didn’t comply were the most strongly opposed to vaccination, might this extension have even less success?

Dr Bettigole’s phraseology is repugnant. She stated that, with the mandates, “workers do step up and get their vaccines despite lots of anxiety.” Translation: they had to choose between taking something in their bodies that they did not want, or losing their jobs. How is that different from a supervisor saying that you have to have sex with him or get fired? But Dr Bettigole sees knuckling under to coercion as “step(ping) up.” Utterly vile and repugnant, but authoritarians rarely see their dictates as being for anything other than the betterment of society.

References

References
↑1 Given this tweet of hers, I think there’s sufficient evidence to associate Dr Bettigole with the political left.
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Self-cleaning oven

When last we reported on it, Lexington had seen 28 homicides in 2021, the last on September 3rd. Lexington’s 29th murder happened early this morning:

    Update: Man dies after shooting at Lexington apartment complex

    By Christopher Leach | Updated: October 5, 2021 | 4:37 PM EDT

    A 23-year-old man died shortly after he was found shot at a Lexington apartment complex early Tuesday, according to police.

    Jayontai McCann of Lexington died at the University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital at 5:17 a.m., according to the Fayette County coroner.

Jayontai McCann.

The report doesn’t have much information in it. Just before 4:00 AM, the Lexington Police Department received a call about a man being assaulted behind the Liberty Heights Apartments. When officers arrived, they found the victim, who had been shot multiple times. It’s almost a sick joke to note that the police stated that they were investigating the case of a victim shot “multiple times” as a homicide.

Also see: Paul Mirengoff on Powerline, Wokeness kills.

Twenty-nine homicides in 278 days equals one every 9½ days. Due to fractions, the exact number works out to 38 homicides for the year. With 29 murders, Lexington is just one behind the then record of 30, set in 2019, but, of course, the record was broken again, with 34 in 2020. With a population of 324,604 according to the 2020 census, the city’s homicide rate in 2020 worked out to 10.474 per 100,000 population. If Lexington hits 38 homicides, the way the numbers work out, that would be a jump to 11.707 per 100,000, hardly on a par with Chicago or Philadelphia, but bad enough.

However, let’s tell the whole truth here.

    Suspect arrested for shooting that injured EKU player

    By Echo Gamel | July 24, 2019

    LEXINGTON, KY. (WTVQ) – Police announce an arrest in a shooting last month in Lexington that left an Eastern Kentucky Football player injured.

    The Lexington Police Department says 21-year-old Jayontai McCann is facing charges for the shooting on June 23 near Two Keys Tavern.

    According to officers, two men got into a fight then one went to his car to get a gun and shot the other man.

    The victim was later identified as Cameron Catron, a player on the EKU football team.

    McCann is charged with assault, possession of a handgun by convicted felon, and tampering with physical evidence.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported[1]The Herald-Leader actually printed Mr McCann’s mugshot in that story, but it was before the silly McClatchy Mugshot Policy was written.:

    According to court records, McCann was on probation at the time of the shooting after pleading guilty in August. He was charged with cocaine possession and attempted evidence tampering. His prison sentence and jail sentence on the two charges were suspended and he was given probation for two years.

    He had previously been charged with other drug and gun crimes and pleaded guilty in some instances.

The obvious question is: why was Mr McCann out on the streets Tuesday morning? He had been a previously convicted felon, and had a suspended sentence hanging over his head. He should have been locked up for the two years of his suspended sentence, even before facing charges for shooting Mr Cameron.

Did law enforcement do Mr McCann any favors by treating him leniently? If he had been in prison, where he should have been, he would (probably) be alive today. By letting him loose, loose to return to whatever life he led before, law enforcement left him out to become stone-cold graveyard dead.

The odds are pretty good that, if and when the Lexington Police figure out who murdered Mr McCann, we’ll discover that he, too, had a rap sheet and could, and should, have been in jail himself early Tuesday morning.

The Urban Dictionary defines a “self-cleaning oven” as:

    when a criminal becomes the victim of a crime because he victimized someone at an earlier time; in other words, karma comes back on the criminal, the problem takes care of itself without the need for police or legal intervention. In theory, eventually all crime should diminish because of this theory, the oven should clean itself.

    “Man, that banger got shot because he jacked those same dudes last week…it’s okay because now his crew will roll back on them…they don’t want to make a police report, it’s a self-cleaning oven.”

On one of my favorite television shows, Blue Bloods, it’s called a public service homicide.

It is, however, possible that Mr McCann was turning his life around, and whatever his past crimes, he didn’t deserve to die. But bad lives can lead to bad ends, whether he was turning his life around or not.

References

References
↑1 The Herald-Leader actually printed Mr McCann’s mugshot in that story, but it was before the silly McClatchy Mugshot Policy was written.
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Kroger and masks Local Kroger didn't require masks during worst of the Δ outbreak, so why now?

This sign was posted beside the outer doors at the Kroger on the Eastern Bypass in Richmond, Kentucky, on October 5, 2021.

We reported, on August 10th, that the Kroger Company KR: (%) had updated its mask policy:

    Our current mask guidance requires unvaccinated associates to wear masks and requests that unvaccinated customers wear masks when in our stores and facilities. In light of the Delta variant and updated CDC recommendations, we strongly encourage all individuals, including those who are vaccinated, to wear a mask when in our stores and facilities. We will continue to abide by all state and local mandates and encourage all Americans to get vaccinated, including our associates.

According to the sign, Kroger had gone from “request(ing)” that unvaccinated customers wear masks to “requiring” unvaccinated visitors to wear masks, while still saying, “Masks strongly encouraged for fully vaccinated individuals.

But there was another sign, on the inner doorway, maybe twenty feet from the outer doors:

    Achtung! Attention! Mask required! To stop the spread of the virus, Kroger requires all customers and associates to wear a mask while in our stores.

    Thank you for shopping with us today.

I chose to obey the outer sign, and, being fully vaccinated, I declined their ‘strong encouragement’ to wear a mask. As a guesstimate, about 20% of the shoppers I saw inside were not wearing masks.

So, why did this particular branch of Kroger put up these signs? New COVID-19 cases have been declining in the Bluegrass State, and, thanks to the Republican-controlled General Assembly, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) cannot impose one. This particular branch hadn’t had any signs like this up for months, including during the worst of the ‘Delta’ variant cases. Perhaps the manager got her hand smacked by the corporate office?

At least the store was not attempting to enforce this stupid requirement. It is their private property, so they can impose any restrictions they wish. But I am a free individual, and if they start enforcing this policy, I am free to take my business elsewhere, and I will.

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They can’t handle the truth! Philly Inquirer won't tell you that city's murder rate is higher than Chicago's!

This site has been hard on The Philadelphia Inquirer and how that august newspaper pretty much ignores the homicides in its hometown unless the victim is an innocent, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl. In a city in which the vast majority of murder victims are black, you wouldn’t expect that “anti-racist news organization” to have that kind of skewed coverage, would you?

Screen capture of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, at 8:15 AM EDT on Tuesday, October 5, 2021. Click to enlarge.

Well, another innocent person was killed, and the Inquirer is all over it, as we noted on Monday.

    Nursing assistant gunned down by coworker at Jefferson Hospital left behind three children

    The Elkins Park homeowner was also a part-time barber whose “legacy was his kids.”

    by Marina Affo and Juliana Feliciano Reyes | Monday, October 4, 2021

    Anrae James used to tell his younger brother Armond, “If you treat people nice, you’ll always be blessed.” Armond looked up to his brother always and knew he could count on him being present, no matter the endeavor, he said.

    Now the phrase will serve as part of James’ legacy and a bittersweet reminder for all who loved him.

    The 43-year-old nursing assistant and part-time barber, whom many called Rae, was identified by his family on Monday as the victim in an early morning shooting at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. Those who knew him described him as a “family man” who worked two jobs to support his three kids and a jokester with a talent for bringing people together around his barber’s chair.

    “One of the best [barbers] in Uptown,” said his friend Lyndell Mason. “That’s what we called him.”

There’s much more at the original, most of it telling readers what a great guy Mr James was; it was at least as much a human interest story as a crime report. The importance that the Inquirer gave to this story is contained in a footnote to it:

    Staff writers Barbara Laker, Chris Palmer, Anna Orso, and Rob Tornoe contributed to this article.

That’s six reporters covering the story, and two more, Jason Laughlin and Erin McCarthy, wrote and contributed to another article, Jefferson shooting is the latest example of workplace violence in health care: Health-care workers said the threat of violence is a too common part of their professional lives.

But Mr James was not the only person murdered on Monday. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page noted, as of 8:35 AM on Tuesday, October 5th, that 420 souls had been sent early to their eternal rewards, two more than the previous report, but I could find nothing at all in the inquirer about it.

Over the last 28 days, which excludes the Labor Day holiday weekend, 57 people have been murdered in Philly, 57 people in four weeks, or 2.0357 per day, and the Inquirer paid almost no attention to it. The city is up to 1.516 homicides per day for the year, meaning that, if that rate continues, 553 or 554 — the actual calculation is 553.430 — people will spill out their blood in the city’s mean streets.

If the last four weeks’ average was maintained, that would mean 179 more homicides, for a total of 599, but surely, surely! that rate won’t be maintained!

Will it?

On Friday, December 11, 2020, Helen Ubiñas published an article in the Inquirer entitled “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.”

    The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city.

    Just weeks before the end of 2020, that number doubled. More than 400 people gunned down.

    By the time you read this, there will only be more.

    Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.

    At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:

    “A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”

    That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.

Of course, Miss Ubiñas got it slightly wrong: the Inquirer no longer specifies the race of victims. I have inferred that this was the result of a deliberate editorial decision, but it could just as easily be that the Philadelphia Police no longer report that information to the paper.

Perhaps I should be kinder to the Inquirer. After all, with 420 homicides so far, tied for the 13th bloodiest year in history, even with 88 days remaining in 2021, if the newspaper covered every murder, it might be my-eyes-glazed-over boring.

But it is also misleading journalism. Yeah, everybody knows that Philadelphia is a bloody town, but if the Inquirer’s coverage is the measure, that carnage seems to be just, well, unimportant. The Inquirer likes to concentrate on “gun violence,” as though those inanimate objects somehow levitate and shoot people completely independently of some bad person pulling the trigger. When publisher Elizabeth Hughes told us that her newspaper 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,” she was telling us, inter alia, that the Inquirer would not report something really radical like, oh, the truth.

And the truth needs to be told. Due to news coverage, we often see Chicago as our most murderous city, and in the sheer body count, it’s pretty awful. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, 624 people have been murdered in the Windy City so far this year.

But homicide rates are calculated correcting for population, and Chicago’s population of 2,746,388is more than a million people more than Philly’s 1,603,797. Chicago’s annualized homicide rate[1]The annualized homicide rate was calculated by taking the number of current homicides, dividing by the number of days elapsed in the year, 277, and multiplying by 365, to get the projected number of … Continue reading is 29.930 per 100,000 population, while Philadelphia’s is 34.481 per 100,000! Philadelphia is worse than Chicago, but you won’t find that reported in the nation’s third oldest newspaper!

It was absolutely reasonable for the Inquirer to report on the murder of Anrae James. But the newspaper failing to cover, other than in the briefest of ways, if at all, of the vast majority of the other 419 people who spilled their blood in the city’s streets, is journolism[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading, not journalism, because it obscures the truth, for political reasons.

References

References
↑1 The annualized homicide rate was calculated by taking the number of current homicides, dividing by the number of days elapsed in the year, 277, and multiplying by 365, to get the projected number of murders at the current daily rate, then dividing that number by the population in hundreds of thousands.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity.
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Many states have ‘decriminalized’ marijuana; now Trevor Burrus wants to legalize smack No slippery slope there, huh?

When I comment on Patterico’s Pontifications, I use the ‘handle’ “The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana,” because one of the site authors is named Dana and I have to distinguish myself from her, but recreational pharmaceuticals is where I depart from libertarianism, for one reason, and one reason only. My darling bride — of 42 years, 4 months, and 15 days — was a pediatric nurse, and she has told me, many times, that she has never seen a case of child abuse — and they have to be hospitalization-serious enough for her to have seen them — in which drug and/or, usually and, alcohol abuse was not a factor. Since the vast majority of adults wind up, at some point, responsible for the care of children, legalizing drugs is a huge risk factor.

    Legalize heroin to save lives

    Our infatuation with prohibition, and our unease with drug use, is killing tens of thousands every year.

    by Trevor Burrus[1]Trevor Burrus is a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor‐in‐chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. | Monday, October 4, 2021

    With 93,000 dead last year, America’s overdose crisis has reached new heights. Deaths were up 29% over 2019, which exceeded the expectations of many who anticipated a significant increase. More Americans die each year of overdoses than died in any war except the Civil War and World War II. Tragically, prohibition is the primary cause of these deaths, and we could save tens of thousands of lives next year if we legalized drugs, especially opiates.

    Over the past decade, fentanyl has been the primary cause of overdoses, and prohibition is the main reason it has become so common in our drug supply. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is around 100 times more potent than heroin. Although it varies between users, the lethal dose of fentanyl is about three milligrams, which is just a few dozen grains. Users are increasingly unknowingly consuming drugs tainted with fentanyl, and their normal dose suddenly becomes lethal.

    Prohibition caused this fentanyl-overdose epidemic for the same reason that those who smuggle alcohol into a sporting event prefer flasks to a 12-pack. When a substance has to be smuggled, the smuggler prefers the highest potency, smallest version. During alcohol prohibition, beer and wine almost disappeared from the market. And while spirits accounted for about 40% of alcohol sales before prohibition, that jumped to 90% after. The price of beer also rose an estimated 700%.

    This is called the iron law of prohibition, and it works against the most optimistic goals of prohibitionists. Crack down on smuggling at the border and you won’t decrease the number of users, you’ll just increase the potency of the drug. Compulsive drug users aren’t suddenly “cured” by a lack of supply because prohibition primarily changes the nature of the drug supply, not whether the drug is available.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the basis of Mr Burrus’ article is that making the supply of heroin illegal doesn’t make the availability of illegal drugs non-existent, but simply that it channels them into criminal ventures, and that making heroin illegal has simply encouraged the abuse of fentanyl, which is 100 times more potent than heroin, and fentanyl is so potent that even a slight miscalculation can be lethal. Drug smugglers only have to bring in one percent of the previous mass, which makes things much easier for them.

But it isn’t just heroin he wants to legalize:

    Whatever system we choose, legalizing heroin and fentanyl will immediately save lives. Street opiates are tainted and of uncertain potency, but pharmaceutical-grade opiates are perfectly safe to take in the proper amount. Doctors and nurses inject dangerous opiates into patients thousands of times per day, and they do it with confidence because they know what drug they are administering and how much to give. Recreational heroin users are capable of doing the same thing. After all, it’s their life.

Sorry, but I don’t equate the precision with which doctors and nurses can measure and administer prescribed pharmaceuticals with the capabilities of junkies. Mr Burrus himself noted, as quoted above, just how small a miscalculation would be lethal when it comes to fentanyl. There is no such thing as a responsible drug addict. The author undermined his own argument.

Mr Burrus’ concerns are not mine: he wants to make the world safer for junkies, make life easier for them; if he has any concern for the children for whom they are ultimately responsible, he didn’t include it in his OpEd.

Over the past couple of decades, we have seen several states ‘decriminalize’ the use of marijuana. ‘It’s not as bad as alcohol,’ they say, as though that’s somehow a point in their favor. I’ve seen, we’ve all seen, too many stoners to think it’s a wise idea, and now that that one drug is being decriminalized, we’re seeing calls for others to be decriminalized — and in Mr Burrus’ argument, completely legalized — as well. But the stoners can’t hold jobs, any more than alcoholics can, because it eventually gets to them. In my career in the ready-mixed concrete industry, I couldn’t even tell you how many drivers we lost because they used drugs. Given that there is no test for current intoxication for any of the recreational drugs other than alcohol, a driver can have an accident, have to take the whizz quiz, and show up ‘hot’ for marijuana or something else, even if he isn’t currently under the influence. The last thing we need is employees using legal drugs who are going to test positive for their use even when not under the influence, because if a driver rams another vehicle or runs over a worker or pedestrian, and he tests positive, the company will be sued into penury for allowing a driver who used such drugs behind the wheel of 36 tons of rolling death.

My home state of Kentucky leads the nation in one unfortunate category: we have the highest percentage of children being reared not by their parents but their grandparents, and drug addiction is almost always the reason for this. My nephew, who used to be an EMT in Lee County, Kentucky, has told me that the majority of his calls were for drug overdoses or other drug related problems. Legal or illegal, drug addicts cannot responsibly care for children, or be relied on to use contraception responsibly. Anything that encourages the use of recreational drugs encourages more poverty.

Were God to tap me on the shoulder and say, “OK, Dana, you get my power to change one thing,” I wouldn’t hesitate in my action: I would change the human brain to be immune to the effects of recreational drugs and alcohol.

We need to not only not legalize recreational drugs, not only keep the laws against them in place, but treat drug users and drug dealers far more harshly. Selling drugs should never be pled down to misdemeanors, but prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the sentences should be life in prison without the possibility of parole. Drug use has to be punished as well, seriously enough that it’s a serious deterrent, and seriously enough that people know that the one strike they might get will be the last leniency they get.

References

References
↑1 Trevor Burrus is a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor‐in‐chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review.