Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Killadelphia passes the 400 mark In the past 20 days, 41 people have been killed in Philadelphia's mean streets

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated “during normal business hours, Monday through Friday,” so it still shows 397 homicides for the City of Brotherly Love. The next ‘milestone,’ so to speak, would be 400, and The Philadelphia Inquirer actually noticed:

    Philly surpasses 400 homicides this year

    “I am heartbroken and outraged that we’ve lost over 400 Philadelphians to preventable violence already this year,” Mayor Jim Kenney said Sunday.

    by Marie McCullough and Chris Palmer | Sunday, September 26, 2021

    Two fatal shootings Saturday night brought Philadelphia’s total number of homicides this year to beyond 400, a tragic milestone reached only twice in the past two decades.

    Last year the city recorded 499 homicides, and in 2006 the total reached 406. Philadelphia has not had back-to-back years with that grisly tally since 1996.

    “I am heartbroken and outraged that we’ve lost over 400 Philadelphians to preventable violence already this year,” Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement issued Sunday morning. “I want all residents to know that our administration takes this crisis very seriously and we’re acting with urgency to reduce violence and save lives.”

    Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner echoed that sentiment in a statement Sunday: “We should all be outraged that senseless, preventable violence continues to claim and break lives here in Philadelphia and in communities across the country that are also experiencing alarming increases in gun violence.”

Sorry, but when I see softer-than-soft-on-crime District Attorney Krasner, who is more interested in keeping criminals out of prison and putting down the police, complaining about the homicide rate, indeed saying anything at all, I know it’s bovine feces. Mary McCarthy once said, concerning Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” The same is true of Mr Krasner; if he told me that 2+2=4, I’d have to check his math.

The Inquirer reported that there have been no arrests in the latest killings.

Two men, 35 and 28, were found shot multiple times in the 2300 block of Jackson Street in South Philly around 9:30 PM, were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where the younger man died and the older man is in critical condition.

Another fatal shooting was reported, at 11:20 PM at North 26th and West Silver Streets in Strawberry Mansion. The police had not given the paper any further details when the article was published.

    Only 29% of homicides and 15% of nonfatal shootings have resulted in arrests by police so far in 2021, according to an analysis by Krasner’s office.

    If both fatal and nonfatal shootings are included, 1,696 people had been shot through Wednesday, according to police statistics. That is the second-highest total in any year since 2007, the year police began recording “shooting victims” as a separate statistic from the broader category of “aggravated assault with a gun.”

    Experts and officials point to many reasons for the surge in violence, which has been concentrated in neighborhoods with intractable disadvantages, including higher poverty levels, higher blight levels, and lower life expectancies. The reasons include stressors made worse by the pandemic; closures of schools, workplaces, courts, and other institutions that kept people away from feuds; increasing gun sales; and impaired trust in law enforcement after the George Floyd killing and protests.

This is, of course, the usual bovine feces that I expect from the Inquirer. The #woke there all want to blame everything but the culture and the people who live in those neighborhoods. When two men are shot “multiple times,” it was a targeted killing, a planned assassination, something people had time to consider before taking action. When four men were shot during a drive-by shooting in Mantua, “when three people hopped out of a gold or tan SUV at 38th and Aspen Streets at 10:57 a.m. and began firing,” that’s a planned attempt at murder. This photo shows “a detective and an officer looking at evidence under and around a blue SUV” in that shooting, and there are at least 19 evidence markers, normally used to mark the location of expended shell casings, visible.

When the Inquirer blames “impaired trust in law enforcement after the George Floyd killing and protests,” it has to be remembered that the editors of the newspapers deliberately fanned the flames of those protests.

So, what will I find when the police update their Current Crime Statistics page on Monday? The Inquirer article stated that there were “over 400,” which could mean 401 or 403 or 405. The city had been on a two-killings-per-day tear over the past week, so I could easily guess 403, covering Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Former Mayor Michael Nutter published a list of city homicides, noting just who was running the city at the time, and the city has exceeded 400 murders per year only 17 times previously; the record is 500, in 1990, the heart of the crack cocaine wars. With “over 400” murders so far in Philadelphia, this year makes the eighteenth time this has happened . . . but with 97 days, more than three months, more than entire season, left in the year!
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Update: Monday, September 27, 2021:

The Current Crime Statistics page shows that there have been 404 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, September 26, 2021, the 269th day of the year. The math is simple, if ugly: 404 ÷ 269 = 1.5019 homicides per day. With 96 days left in the year, that works out to 144 more killings, if that rate remains the same, for a projected total of 548 murders for the year.

We noted, on July 17th, when Philly hit its 300th homicide of the year, that the then-current rate of 1.5306 homicides per day led to a projected 559 murders. That was actually down from eight days earlier, when an average of 1.5379 worked out to a projected 562 homicides for the year.

Then, for some unknown reason, the homicide rate dropped. We reported, on September 7th, that despite a subtitle from The Philadelphia Inquirer stating that “The unofficial end of summer didn’t slow a record year of gun violence. Between Friday and Sunday, at least 13 people were shot in Philadelphia, two fatally,” the murder rate actually did slow down a bit, down to 1.4578 killings per day, with a projected 532 for the year.

    But there’s more. Over the last 1½ months, the murder rate has really dropped. There had been 314 homicides as of July 22nd, the 203rd day of the year. Since that time, 46 days ago, there have been ‘just’ 49 murders, a rate of 1.0652 per day. With 116 days left in 2021, if that rate were maintained, there would be ‘just’ 124 more killings, for a total of 487 for the year, 12 fewer than last year, and 13 fewer than 1990’s all time record of 500. If that number was the final one, it would be 75 fewer homicides than the math had projected just two months ago.

Now, for the first time since the late July through August ‘lull,’ if you can call it that, the rate is above 1.5 again. Since Monday, September 6th, and its reported 363 homicides, there have been 41 murders in Philly, in just 20 days, 2.050 per day!

Are the gang bangers trying to make up for lost time, or something?

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AOC reveals the anti-Semitism of the Squadristi

What is the “Iron Dome“?

Iron Dome (Hebrew: כִּפַּת בַּרְזֶל‎, romanized: Kippat Barzel) is a mobile all-weather air defense system developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries. The system is designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells fired from distances of 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) to 70 kilometres (43 mi) away and whose trajectory would take them to an Israeli populated area.

Iron Dome was declared operational and initially deployed on 27 March 2011 near Beersheba. On 7 April 2011, the system successfully intercepted a BM-21 Grad launched from Gaza for the first time. On 10 March 2012, The Jerusalem Post reported that the system shot down 90% of rockets launched from Gaza that would have landed in populated areas. In late 2012 Israel said that it hoped to increase the range of Iron Dome’s interceptions, from a maximum of 70 kilometres (43 mi) to 250 kilometres (160 mi) and make it more versatile so that it could intercept rockets coming from two directions simultaneously.

In November 2012, official statements indicated that it had intercepted over 400 rockets. By late October 2014, the Iron Dome systems had intercepted over 1,200 rockets.

In addition to their land-based deployment, it was reported in 2017 that Iron Dome batteries would in future be deployed at sea on Sa’ar 6-class corvettes, to protect off-shore gas platforms in conjunction with Israel’s Barak 8 missile system.

Simply put, the Kippat Barzel is a system which does not have an offensive capacity; it is entirely defensive. So, why would the Squadristi[1]The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the … Continue reading be so opposed to the system?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez apologizes after tearful ‘present’ vote on Israel Iron Dome funding bill

Adela Suliman | Saturday, September 25, 2021

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) penned a lengthy and emotional open letter apologizing to her constituents on Friday for effectively abstaining in a vote over funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, which overwhelmingly passed in the House a day earlier.

Ocasio-Cortez, who could be seen weeping in the House after the vote, used her letter to criticize both the substance of the bill and what she described as the “reckless” and “rushed” process to pass it. She opposed the “unconditional aid to the Israeli government,” she added in her letter, but ultimately switched her vote from “no” to “present,” meaning a member takes no position in favor or against but records their presence.

The House voted for the measure 420 to 9.

However, Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to effectively abstain attracted ire from some liberal supporters.

“Normally I find AOC a person with moral values … This time though, as a few other times, I must say she should’ve stuck with other “Squad” members,” wrote one person on Twitter. Another said, “AOC primes people to believe she will never compromise, then does.” Meanwhile, an opinion piece accused her vote of being “a tactical mess” and a “worst-of-both-worlds solution,” and suggested that it indicated she could have higher political ambitions.

Describing her actions in her letter, Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Yes, I wept. I wept at the complete lack of care for the human beings that are impacted by these decisions, I wept at an institution choosing a path of maximum volatility and minimum consideration for its own political convenience.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez glamour photo for her 2018 campaign.

There’s more at the original. You can also read it here, and avoid The Washington Post’s paywall.

How, I have to ask, was voting to support the system a “complete lack of care for the human beings that are impacted by these decisions”? The Kippat Barzel is designed to protect people, primarily innocent civilians, and, in this case, innocent Jewish civilians, from mortar, artillery and rocket fire launched by the Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Lebanon. What are we to conclude other than the lovely Miss Ocasio-Cortez wants the Palestinians to have a way to shoot rain death and destruction upon an innocent, civilian population?

Miss Ocasio-Cortez is the most infamous of the squadristi for one simple reason: she’s the only one who isn’t, to be blunt about it, ugly. They all share one characteristic: they’re all full-blown anti-Semites.[2]I first typed “raging anti-Semites,” but they make half-hearted attempts to hide it. Even with today’s #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 credentialed media, looks matter, and pretty women matter most of all.

But anti-Semitism is ugly, bone-deep ugly, and that’s what the squadristi are. Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s pretty face can’t hide an ugly philosophy, an ugly soul. To be pro-Palestinian, as the squadristi are, is to be in favor of the destruction of Israel, and everybody knows it.

One could be opposed to providing offensive weaponry, that the Israelis could use to attack the Palestinians, and claim that they just want to save lives, but to be opposed to a shield to protect innocent Israeli citizens from being killed is to want innocent Israeli citizens to be killed, because killing innocent Israeli civilians is what Hamas and Hezbollah want to do.

Democratic tensions over Israel erupt again as House backs funds for Iron Dome system

By Donna Cassata | September 23, 2021 | 6:07 PM EDT

The House overwhelmingly approved $1 billion for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system Thursday after a blowup among Democrats as Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) called the Mideast ally an “apartheid state” guilty of war crimes and Rep. Ted Deutch (Fla.) accused her of antisemitism.

The debate again exposed the political and religious fault lines in the party caucus over Israel, pitting members of the so-called Squad, some of them Muslim, against Israel’s longtime Jewish supporters.

Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, said Palestinians are living under a “violent apartheid system” in opposing the money for the Iron Dome program.

“I will not support an effort to enable and support war crimes, human rights abuses and violence,” she said, calling the Israeli government an “apartheid regime.”

Mr Deutch is right, of course: Mrs Tlaib is an anti-Semite, and favors a ‘one-state’ solution for the Middle East, which is to say that she wants the Palestinians and Israelis to share one nation, hoping that the high birthrate of the Palestinians will allow them to eventually outnumber and outvote the Jews. Of course, I supported a one-state solution as well, but I favored the Israelis expelling all of the Arabs from the land, pushing them into Jordan and Syria, and annexing all of the territory they control, but, alas!, the time for that was 1967 and 1968, right after the Six Day War, and it would no longer work.

The tensions among Democrats over Israel flared earlier this week when leaders included the funding for the Iron Dome in a stopgap spending bill to keep the government funded into the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

A handful of progressives threatened to vote against the bill, which would have sunk the spending package. House Democratic leaders pulled the missile defense funding and put it into the stand-alone bill passed Thursday.

Translation: the Democrats’ margin in the House is so small that the squadristi could have stopped the spending bill completely. What a shame that it wasn’t stopped!

Jewish Americans are the Democrats’ second most loyal voting demographic, but the non-Jewish Democrats pretty much hate their guts. Americans of Jewish descent need to realize that their real friends are conservatives, and stop voting for people who would gladly see the one Jewish nation in the world pushed into the sea.

References

References
↑1 The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, his paramilitary/thug force in fascist Italy. I think referring to the ‘Squad’ as Squadristi is completely appropriate.
↑2 I first typed “raging anti-Semites,” but they make half-hearted attempts to hide it.
↑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.
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Aren’t reporters supposed to ask relevant question?

I had previously thought that reporters, at least good reporters, weren’t supposed to simply accept what they have been told by government, but to ask questions. Apparently, I was wrong about that.

Only a third of Philly city employees and half of Pa. state health workers have reported being vaccinated

City officials believe the number vaccinated is “far higher” than reported, citing difficulty with getting workers who don’t routinely use computers at work to upload their vaccination cards.

by Justine McDaniel and Erin McCarthy | Friday, September 24, 2021 | 5:41 PM EDT

Most city and state employees who were asked to get vaccinated against the coronavirus have not yet reported doing so, according to numbers released this week.

Only 31% of Philadelphia city employees have provided proof of vaccination as of this week, according to the city, though all were told to be immunized against the coronavirus by Sept. 1 or begin double-masking at work.

Translation: the rules aren’t being enforced. If people had to start double-masking, starting over three weeks ago, if they were not vaccinated, those who were already vaccinated would have taken the effort to get their vaccine cards entered into the system, to keep from having to wear that repugnant face diaper!

And just under 50% of Pennsylvania’s 23,000 workers in health and congregate care facilities had provided proof of vaccination as of Friday, said a Wolf administration spokesperson. The state mandated that state health and congregate care workers be fully vaccinated by Sept. 7 or undergo weekly testing.

Odd how the Inquirer didn’t mention that all health care workers in the city had to be fully vaccinated by October 15th. While there were potential exemptions for medical or religious reasons, there was no ‘get tested’ option.

Philadelphia officials believe the number of city workers vaccinated is “far higher” than reported, citing difficulty with getting employees who don’t routinely use computers at work to upload their vaccination cards. In Philadelphia, 69% of all adults are fully vaccinated, which would indicate the rate among the city’s more than 25,000 workers is likely higher than reported.

Is this a reasonable belief? Since city workers face greater and more annoying restrictions — double-masking and weekly testing — wouldn’t those who were vaccinated but hadn’t filed their cards have done so, to avoid those odious restrictions?  I suppose it could be true .  .  . if supervisors were not enforcing the masking/testing requirements.

As for Philadelphia workers, those who aren’t vaccinated are required to wear a cloth face mask over a surgical mask while working. The city has lists identifying all such employees; Garrow said supervisors are notified and required to ensure employees are double-masking.

There was much more to the article than I quoted, but nowhere in the article did the reporters raise the question I asked: why would already vaccinated workers not report that, to rid themselves of the doubled masks? Nor did I see any questioning of how strictly supervisors were enforcing the orders; would unvaccinated supervisors have been willing to ignore the requirements for their subordinates, so that they could get away with it as well?

Good reporters would have taken the information they were given, and then head out onto the streets, to check out city work crews and see for themselves. As far as I can tell, that did not happen, or, if it did, such was never mentioned in the article.

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Killadelphia

There are times I begin to feel like a broken record. I noted that the City of Brotherly Love was up to 393 homicides as of 11:59 PM on Wednesday, September 22nd. This morning, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there have been 397 murders as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, the 23rd. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on three of the killings, but, as usual, I had to dig to find the article; it was not on the Inquirer’s website main page.

    Three men killed in separate Philly shootings in a one-hour span

    Two shootings happened in North Philadelphia and the third in Frankford.

    By Robert Moran | Thursday, September 23, 2021

    Three men were killed in separate shootings Thursday night in Philadelphia, police said.

    Shortly after 7:30 p.m. a 29-year-old man was sitting inside a silver Toyota Camry on the 3500 block of North 21st Street in North Philadelphia when he was shot twice, police said. The man, whose name was not released, was taken by medics to Temple University Hospital and pronounced dead at 8:07. Police reported no arrests.

    2800 block of North Orkney Street, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

    Just before 7:45 p.m., two men were outside on the 2800 block of North Orkney Street in North Philadelphia when they were shot. One of the victims, a 31-year-old whose name was withheld, was shot multiple times in the chest. Police took him to Temple, where he was pronounced dead at 8:09.

    The second victim, a 52-year-old man, was shot in the left leg and buttocks. Police took him to Temple, where he was listed in stable condition. Police reported no arrests.

    Around 8:30 p.m., an unidentified young man was outside on the 1300 block of Wakeling Street in Frankford when he was shot several times in the head. He was pronounced dead at the scene by medics. Police reported no arrests.

1300 block of Wakeling Street, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

Wakeling Street appears, at least on the Google Maps view, to be a reasonably nice neighborhood.

As usual, Mr Moran’s stories are off of the Inquirer’s website main page by the time the morning rolls around. The newspaper is great on decrying “gun violence,” but, as Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas noted last December, even her paper doesn’t really care:

    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.

Actually, the paper would never say, “A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head,” but just a 21-year-old male. To identify the victims as black or white or Hispanic would, over time, report what everybody already knows: in a city that’s only 38.3% non-Hispanic black, black victims, primarily black male victims, will make up the vast majority of homicide victims in the city. Given that publisher Elizabeth Hughes has vowed to make the paper “an anti-racist news organization,” well, they can’t have the paper, as the Sacramento Bee once put it, “perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

As always, I run the numbers: 397 homicides ÷ 266 days elapsed in the year = 1.492 homicides per day, x 365 = 544.76 murders projected for the year.

We had previously reported that the homicide rate in Philly had slowed down, from mid-July through August, but it seems to have picked right back up again.

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The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is something the credentialed media don’t seem to like

We have already noted that some hospitals have been firing nurses for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccines, and we had hardly covered them all. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that some Kentucky hospitals have begun firing staff who refused a COVID vaccine.

    Though the vaccine mandate announcement was made in a unified voice alongside Gov. Andy Beshear, each hospitals’ enforcement of the requirement varies. The Herald-Leader surveyed each hospital, and though it was couched as a requirement, only some have made it a condition of employment.

    The initially agreed-upon deadline for many was September 15, but some have extended it and few have yet to disclose what percentage of their staff fulfilled the requirement, or what will happen to staff who didn’t. Some have confirmed they will offer weekly testing as an alternative, while others are moving more swiftly to write-ups and, in some cases, immediate firings.

    By the end of the day Wednesday, for instance, 23 staff had refused vaccination and were fired at St. Claire Regional Medical Center, one of the hospitals hardest hit by the most recent and severe surge in coronavirus cases. Fifteen personnel were approved for a religious or medical exemption. At the time the mandate was announced in early August, 30% of staff were unvaccinated, CEO and President Donald H. Lloyd said in a statement.

In yet another example of what I have frequently referred to as The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. shows just how great their 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 is.

    ‘I see someone quit every day’: Nurses share horror stories from hospital staff shortage, in their own words

    Nurses, already physically and emotionally drained from a year and a half on the front lines of a pandemic, are being asked to care for more patients than is safe for either the patient or the nurse.

    by Maureen May[3]Maureen May, R.N., is a longtime Temple University Hospital nurse and president of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, which represents 9,500 nurses and health-care … Continue reading | Thursday, September 23, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT

    Nurses quite literally have their fingers on the pulse of patient care — and we’re sounding the alarm: There are not nearly enough of us at the bedside. What this means in ERs and on hospital floors in our area, throughout the state and even across the nation, is that nurses, already physically and emotionally drained from a year and a half on the front lines of a pandemic, are being asked to care for more patients than is safe for either the patient or the nurse.

Full disclosure: My wife is a registered nurse, working in a hospital.

    When this happens — when nurses are routinely required to care for more patients than is safe — it’s called chronic nurse short-staffing, and care suffers. Nurses suffer, too. These are our stories.

      I see someone quit every day

      by Peg Lawson[4]Peg Lawson, R.N., has worked as an ER nurse at Einstein Hospital for 30 years. She is co-president of Einstein Nurses United.

      We are experiencing a turnover rate now that I’ve never seen in the 30 years I’ve been at Einstein. Every day, someone leaves. Nurses used to be here for three or four years before moving on; now, it’s three or four months. It’s scary on so many levels.

      Nurses who are brand-new, just coming out of school, are being thrust into assignments with high acuity even as they’re forced to handle more patients because the units are short-staffed. Experienced resource nurses are just not available to help, and these new nurses are getting burned out very quickly due to the lack of support and great demand put on their shoulders.

There’s much more at the original. The author collected the stories of five different RNs on the front lines of fighting COVID-19 right now, and I recommend reading it. And while it’s a bit of a stretch to accuse the author of journolism, because she isn’t a professional journalist, the article, which shows the difficulty today’s RNs are having with understaffing, cannot be considered complete without noting that part of the understaffing has been artificially created by vaccine mandates, and the firing of, or quitting by, nurses who decline to be vaccinated. If the Maureen May didn’t include that point, an editor of the Enquirer Inquirer should have.

Media bias does not normally take the form of publishing falsehoods; there are few deliberate lies in the credentialed media. Rather, media bias usually takes the form of lies of omission, of not telling the whole truth in a way that distorts the entire story. We have previously noted that Philadelphia’s Acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole has a vaccine mandate in place for the city’s health care workers, and said, dismissively, “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.”

The editorial position of the Inquirer is to support vaccine mandates. But such mandates have consequences, one being that some people will refuse to be assimilated comply, and choose to either resign or be fired over their refusal. Not reporting that, not reporting that in an already short-staffed state, nurses are leaving or being dismissed for a refusal to take a vaccine which has not been out long enough for us to have complete information about its long term effects.

Though some doctors have pooh-poohed the idea that it’s harmful, researchers have collected over 140,000 reports by adult women who have seen significant changes in their menstrual cycles after getting vaccinated. Could this affect future fertility, or produce children with birth defects? Nobody knows yet; further research is needed.

    Thalidomide was first marketed in 1957 in West Germany, where it was available over the counter. When first released, thalidomide was promoted for anxiety, trouble sleeping, “tension”, and morning sickness. While it was initially thought to be safe in pregnancy, concerns regarding birth defects arose until in 1961 the medication was removed from the market in Europe. The total number of embryos affected by use during pregnancy is estimated at 10,000, of which about 40% died around the time of birth. Those who survived had limb, eye, urinary tract, and heart problems. Its initial entry into the US market was prevented by Frances Kelsey at the FDA. The birth defects caused by thalidomide led to the development of greater drug regulation and monitoring in many countries.

The COVID-19 vaccines were hurriedly developed and rushed to market due to the tremendous economic and social disruptions caused by federal and state governments’ reaction to, overreaction to, the spread of COVID-19; there are no long-term studies on the vaccines’ effects because it hasn’t even existed for very long. The New York Times reported:[5]Hat tip to William Teach for the story.

    Roughly 221 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have been dispensed thus far in the United States, compared with about 150 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine. In a half-dozen studies published over the past few weeks, Moderna’s vaccine appeared to be more protective than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the months after immunization.

    The latest such study, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, evaluated the real-world effectiveness of the vaccines at preventing symptomatic illness in about 5,000 health care workers in 25 states. The study found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had an effectiveness of 88.8 percent, compared with Moderna’s 96.3 percent.

    Research published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against hospitalization fell from 91 percent to 77 percent after a four-month period following the second shot. The Moderna vaccine showed no decline over the same period.

The vaccines are at least somewhat effective in preventing contracting the virus in the first place, and in reducing the impact of the disease for those who contract it despite being vaccinated. But it has become clear that the Pfizer vaccine, at least, came with exaggerated promises; in the real world, it does not seem to have matched the hype.

Overall, it appears to be a net good, despite some reports of serious side effects. But it isn’t perfect, and it is reasonable for people to have concerns. Too bad that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t want you to know that.

If you are sworn in for a criminal trial, you will be asked to swear that what you are about to say will be “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Journalism, responsible journalism, requires the whole truth, and that’s what the Inquirer doesn’t want you to know.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 Maureen May, R.N., is a longtime Temple University Hospital nurse and president of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, which represents 9,500 nurses and health-care professionals across the commonwealth. She has worked at the bedside for more than 35 years.
↑4 Peg Lawson, R.N., has worked as an ER nurse at Einstein Hospital for 30 years. She is co-president of Einstein Nurses United.
↑5 Hat tip to William Teach for the story.
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Killadelphia Black lives don't matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

As we noted Monday, the homicide rate in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia had picked up a bit. At the end of the weekend, 384 homicides had plagued the City of Brotherly Love, moving the death rate to 1.466 per day, for a projected 535 for the year.

Then the city recorded two more homicides on Monday, on one of which The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. I pointed out that the next ‘milestone’ will be 391 homicides, which is the full year’s total for 2007. The city will probably pass that next weekend. Continue reading →

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I’ve said it before: when it comes to murder, The Philadelphia Inquirer is much more concerned about cute little white girls

I have previously noted what I called the racism of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and have noted, many times, that unless a murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl,[1]When accessed in September 21, 2021, at 2:05 PM EDT, the search returned 4,548 results. the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news.

My point about the “cute little white girl” was in reference to Rian Thal, “a party promoter well-known in the city’s nightclub scene” and drug dealer, who was murdered on June 27, 2009. The city was captured by Miss Thal’s killing, and the local media were full of stories about it. The Inquirer and its sister publication, the Philadelphia Daily News, just loved splashing Miss Thal’s killing across their pages. After all, cute white girls sell newspapers!

But, as many times as I’ve used that, it was still twelve years ago, and since then, this year in fact, Inquirer publisher Elizabeth Hughes stated that her goal was to make the newspaper and its associated website “an anti-racist news organization.” So, wouldn’t the obvious result of that to be not concentrating on cute white girls as the victims of crimes?

Gabby Petito.

A site search for “Gabby Petito” returned 16 articles, the latest at 2:10 PM EDT today, just ten minutes before I made the search. Miss Petito is yet another cute little white girl, one whose disappearance has attracted a lot of social media, and credentialed media, interest.

Sixteen articles, though, to be fair, most were written by other than Inquirer reporters.

A photo taken during a block party last year of Dunkin’ Donuts manager Christine Lugo.

What about Christine Lugo? Miss Lugo was a 40-year-old Hispanic woman, the manager of a Dunkin’ Donuts on Lehigh Avenue in the city’s Fairhill neighborhood. The senseless murder was actually well covered by the city’s media, including the Inquirer, but a site search for “Christine Lugo” at 2:30 PM yielded only four returns, and two of them weren’t about her at all.

A cute little white girl, with no connection to Philadelphia, had sixteen mentions, while Philadelphia’s own Miss Lugo resulted in two.

Boy, it’s a good thing that Miss Hughes was determined to make the Inquirer “an anti-racist news organization,” or Miss Petito would have a hundred mentions, and Miss Lugo still two.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Joy Reid is . . . right?

So, while my previous links to the Inquirer’s coverage of Miss Thal, as evidence of the newspaper’s racism, remain, her death twelve years ago, which I remembered from reading the print edition that I used to pick up before work, can be characterized as old news. But the disappearance, and probable death, of Miss Petito is today’s news, and it remains as evidence of what I have said all along: when it comes to their priorities and integrity, cute little white girls are still much, much more important to the very #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading journolists[3]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 of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

References

References
↑1 When accessed in September 21, 2021, at 2:05 PM EDT, the search returned 4,548 results.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

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

↑3 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Journolism: The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make a political argument for the city getting a WNBA team I might believe that the editors are concerned about women's sports if they actually covered women's sports

Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement, 2011 Knight Arts Challenge Winners - Flickr - Knight Foundation (cropped)Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer held a ‘debate’ over the question, “Should Philly get a WNBA team?” Denice Frohman, a former professional, but not WNBA, player, and a “Philly-based award-winning poet, performer, and educator who has featured on national stages from The White House to The Apollo,” wrote in support of the idea.

    With the WNBA celebrating its 25th season and playoffs on the horizon, I’m reminded why Philly needs our own team in the most progressive league in major sports.

That isn’t a great start; she is already telling you that her interest is primarily in ‘progressive’ politics more than sports. Miss Frohman’s Wikipedia biography, from which her picture has been taken, doesn’t mention her basketball career at all, but says this about her:

    Denice Frohman is a poet, writer, performer and educator, whose work explores the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Frohman uses her experience as a queer woman from a multi-cultural (Puerto Rican and Jewish) background in her writing. By addressing identity, her work encourages communities to challenge the dominant social constructs and oppressive narratives in place that are currently working against concepts of unity and equity. Her message is about claiming the power to be who you are. She was born and raised in New York City, and earned her master’s degree in education from Drexel University.

Miss Frohman is all about the politics, and any basketball she played is simply incidental. After seven paragraphs, including the one quoted above, she gets into this:

    Beyond the metrics, when I think of what it would mean for Philly to have a WNBA team. I think about how players have championed social justice in a league comprised of nearly 70% Black women athletes, and how that would resonate in a city undeniably shaped by Black women’s leadership.

    I think about the night Philly voters helped turn Pennsylvania blue in the last presidential election, coinciding with Atlanta Dream players’ successful campaign to elect Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock—the first Black senator in Georgia’s history—ousting former Dream owner and incumbent Kelly Loeffler. I think about WNBA player Angel McCoughtry spearheading the idea for players to wear social justice messages on their uniforms last year (an idea the NBA borrowed).

    Philly needs no introduction to the national stage, but having a WNBA team can say something powerful about who we are and who we believe in. It can speak to the women and girls from Norris Square to Southwest about what is possible when you dream out loud.

Screen capture, Philadelphia Inquirer website sports section, September 21, 2021, 9:10 AM EDT.

I suppose that this is typical for the oh so #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 Philadelphia Inquirer, the notion that basketball is primarily a political thing. I am reminded of Pavel (Pasha) Pavlovich Antipov’s, Strelnikov’s, statement in Dr Zhivago, “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.” Perhaps the editors ought to ask the question of who would actually attend WNBA games?

Miss Frohman wants a WNBA team in Philadelphia for political reasons, in her case, left-wing political reasons. I doubt that many people reading the sports section of the Inquirer, which is where I found it, are going to find those reasons good ones for putting a WNBA team in the City of Brotherly Love.

Kerith Gabriel, “a former Daily News sports writer and currently a digital editor at the Inquirer“, was assigned the task of writing the opposing view, and in his first paragraph, he apologized for being a man writing it:

    I already knew writing as a cisgender man to say that a WNBA franchise won’t work may subject me to cancellation, or at least dismissal that I’m just some guy who doesn’t like women’s sports.

LOL! But, after his initial apology, Mr Gabriel does that most horrid, horrid! of things, he writes about the economics, the capitalist concerns of a Women’s National Basketball Association team.

    Let’s start with the numbers. According to an online survey conducted by national statistics firm Statista, interest in the WNBA is around 28% for men and just 18% for women. Further segmented, only 9% of men surveyed and just 4% of women considered themselves avid fans.

    The WNBA has always focused on appealing to a younger generation, attempting to capture the horde of young hoopers who could look at legendary basketball players like Sue Bird and Tamika Catchings as idols. It’s a smart strategy considering that the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) pipeline, in which young kids are trained for serious basketball (and other sports), is big business. Even in the Philadelphia area, there are well over 100+ AAU teams, many of them girls-only leagues.

    But again, according to 2021 numbers from Statista, the WNBA is the ninth most popular sport among Gen Zers. In terms of live games? The WNBA ranked 13th in a survey of American favorite sports Americans enjoy watching live before the pandemic. That means more young adults would rather watch cars go around an endless circle for two hours (NASCAR, 26%), than watch a women’s professional basketball game.

Heaven forfend! Mr Gabriel isn’t talking about the politics of having a WNBA franchise, but on how such a team would do something really radical like support itself. He concluded with:

If you look at the viewer guides for ESPN and the NBA Network, you’ll see that, even in the summer, even in the off-season for the NBA, those sports networks would rather show reruns of old NBA and other men’s sports games than live WNBA games. Those network executives aren’t doing so because they hate women’s sports, but because they believe they will earn more advertising revenue from those choices.

Me being very politically incorrect, I’ll note the women’s sports the sports networks do show: NCAA volleyball, beach volleyball, gymnastics and ice skating. Why? Because those are the province of pretty white women, while women’s basketball, as Miss Frohman noted concerning the WNBA, is nearly 70% black. Even The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the rest of the city’s media, do the same thing, as I have frequently noted in mentioning that the Inquirer only cares about murder victims when they are cute little white girls like Rian Thal.

You think I’m exaggerating? The Inquirer’s website lists 15 articles about the disappearance of Gabby Petito, a cute little white girl, but one with no connection to the city, yet only two about Christine Lugo, a 40-year-old Hispanic woman who was murdered in a widely-talked-about robbery in Philadelphia.

If the Inquirer editors are so concerned about women’s basketball, maybe they ought to increase their coverage of NCAA women’s basketball, in a city which boasts several collegiate basketball teams.

The media know their audience.

The Inquirer article was listed in the sports section of the newspaper’s website. As I noted previously, the Inquirer eliminated reader comments on articles, saying:

    Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

The one place they do still allow comments? In the sports section! But for this “Pro/Con” opinion piece in the sports section, reader comments were not allowed, because the editors knew that this was far more of a political debate than a sports question. This isn’t journalism, but 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 the embedding of a political argument in the sports section. Of course, that means a lot of Inquirer readers will never see it, because a lot don’t bother with the sports section.

Me? I don’t care one way or the other whether the WNBA puts a franchise in Philly. I don’t live there, so the chances I would ever attend a WNBA game in that city are virtually nil. I don’t attend NBA games, either; the only one I ever attended was on October 8, 1971, when the Kentucky Colonels of the old American basketball Association lured — with money — the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played for them, to Louisville’s Freedom Hall for an exhibition game. I am far more likely to watch a college basketball game on television than a professional game. But the Inquirer’s ‘debate’ isn’t about basketball at all; it’s about liberal politics, and basketball was merely their platform.

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 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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The homicide rate ticks up a bit in Killadelphia

We had previously reported on the slowing down of the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love, but things may be going back in the wrong direction again. The Philadelphia Police Department reported 378 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, September 16th, but their next report, for 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, September 19th, showed 384 people killed.[1]The Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page states that the homicide “statistics reflect the accurate count during normal business hours, Monday through Friday”, so we … Continue reading That’s six people murdered in three days, and twelve people killed over the past week.

    Man killed and 5 others wounded in Fern Rock drive-by shooting

    The shooting happened near the intersection of Broad Street and West Chew Avenue.

    by Robert Moran, Chris Palmer, and Ellie Rushing | Monday, September 20, 2021 | Updated: 6:43 PM EDT

    A 26-year-old man was killed and five other adults were wounded in a drive-by shooting Monday afternoon in the city’s Fern Rock section, police said.

    The shooting happened just before 2:20 p.m. on the 1300 block of West Chew Avenue near Broad Street.

    Five victims were taken by private vehicle to Einstein Medical Center, police said. The man who was fatally wounded was transported by police to the hospital, which is just a few blocks away. He was pronounced dead at 2:55 p.m.

    The five surviving victims, including a 28-year-old woman, were listed in stable condition. No arrests were immediately reported.

There’s more at the original. The story noted that the six victims were just standing on the street when a silver Chrysler 300 pulled up, and someone in the back seat started shooting; a photo in the Inquirer shows the Philadelphia Police putting down evidence markers, normally where shell casings were found, showing evidence marker 19.

We reported, just two weeks ago, that over the last 1½ months, the murder rate has really dropped. There had been 314 homicides as of July 22nd, the 203rd day of the year. Since that time, 46 days ago, there have been ‘just’ 49 murders, a rate of 1.0652 per day. With 116 days left in 2021, if that rate were maintained, there would be ‘just’ 124 more killings, for a total of 487 for the year, 12 fewer than last year, and 13 fewer than 1990’s all time record of 500. If that number was the final one, it would be 75 fewer homicides than the math had projected just two months ago.

Now, the city has seen 12 homicides in 14 days, ticking the homicide rate up from 1.458 per day to 1.466, and a projected 535 for the year.

The next ‘milestone’ will be 391 homicides, which is the full year’s total for 2007. The city will probably pass that next weekend.
———————-
Update: Tuesday, September 21, 2021 @ 8:30 AM EDT

The Philadelphia Police Department reported 386 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT yesterday.

References

References
↑1 The Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page states that the homicide “statistics reflect the accurate count during normal business hours, Monday through Friday”, so we don’t get the totals for Friday, Saturday and Sunday until Monday morning.