Author Archives: Dana Pico

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They can’t handle the truth!

The Friday morning report from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page shows the city on the edge of another milestone: with 299 souls sent early to their eternal rewards, the 300th murder will almost certainly happen sometime today, but the PPD only updates the site on weekdays; we will (probably) not get the totals until Monday morning. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, the city was seeing 1.5255 homicides per day, on pace for 557 for 2021, a number which is actually down slightly.

We have previously noted how some residents in Philadelphia have, in effect, put themselves in jail, by barring up their row homes to protect themselves from the bad guys who roam their streets. The image to the right, which the reader can enlarge by clicking on it, shows four row homes, out of six, in which the residents have caged themselves in at night.

Now comes Jabari K. Jones, the President of the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative, telling us of the effect that “gun violence” is having upon black business owners in the City of Brotherly Love:

    West Philly business owners have lost faith in the City to keep them safe

    I have spoken to countless West Philadelphia business owners who would love to be open longer each day, but they choose to close at nightfall because they have no confidence they will be safe.

    by Jabari Jones | July 14, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT

    Visit one of our historic commercial corridors in West Philadelphia or any predominantly diverse community after sundown, and the sight is the same: silver shutter gates, dark storefronts, and empty businesses that have closed for the day.

    Now, on that same day, visit Center City after dark. Bars and restaurants are thriving, people of all ages stroll by storefronts, and everyone is open for business.

    The reason for the difference? Public safety.

    I have spoken to countless West Philadelphia business owners who would love to be open longer each day, but they choose to close at nightfall because they have no confidence in the City of Philadelphia to keep them or their patrons safe from the rising tide of gun violence.

    In the last two months, a Dunkin’ Donuts manager in North Philly was murdered as she was opening the store at dawn, and West Philadelphia fashion designer Sircarr Johnson, Jr. was shot and killed when his cookout was sprayed with over 100 rounds.

    According to the Pew Charitable Trust, only 2.5% of Philly businesses have Black owners, even though Black people represent nearly 44% of city residents. But data from the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative show that, on certain corridors in West Philly, Black people own a majority of businesses. A stroll through Center City, however, shows mostly larger corporate stores and white-owned businesses. For years, business and city officials have studied why the city’s racial demographics aren’t reflected in business ownership, and why BIPOC-owned businesses fail at higher rates.

There’s more at the original, and I’d really like to republish it all, but that would be plagiarism, and exceed Title 17 U.S.C., §107 “Fair use” standards. Briefly, Mr Jones tells the reader that “white-owned businesses” in Center City have several more hours per day in which they can be open, meaning several more hours per day in which they can sell their goods and services, and make money. I’d encourage people to follow the link and read the whole thing.

Nevertheless, Mr Jones still danced around the real issue. While pointing out that the economic damage was heavily skewed to black-owned businesses, in heavily black neighborhoods, he could not bring himself to point out that the city’s “gun violence” problem is a black “gun violence” problem. The black shooters aren’t just wounding and killing people, but black-owned businesses as well.

The next day came Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, with a similar sense of denial of reality:

    There’s nothing more progressive than stopping city kids from getting shot

    Progressives need to understand what’s behind rising city homicides and develop plans to reduce shootings — without yesterday’s police abuses.

    by Will Bunch | July 15, 2021

    The easiest part of writing this column was the beginning — finding the most up-to-date examples of the gun violence in Philadelphia that has steadily risen since the start of the pandemic and has lately spiked again, in the long hot summer of 2021.

    Just hours earlier — at 1 a.m. on an unseasonably muggy Thursday morning — a man bounded onto SEPTA’s Nite Owl bus on Broad Street near Chestnut, in the beating heart of Center City, and started shooting, critically wounding a 29-year-old man and utterly terrifying the 15 other passengers onboard. Just a few hours earlier, a car chase in the city’s Logan section had ended with a gunman from one car shooting and wounding two teenagers, aged 19 and just 14, from the other car after it had crashed into an SUV with four occupants. At roughly the same time in West Philadelphia, an unrelated shooting wounded a 15-year-old and 13-year-old.

    Go back to the night before, or the night before that, and you’ll find similarly grim stories: Philadelphia teenagers — their names, along with their stories and their humanity, rarely identified — wounded or even killed by the latest burst of gunfire. Of the more than 1,200 people shot so far in Philadelphia in a year that’s barely half over, more than 100 have been children. With 297 people murdered so far, there’s a more than decent chance that the so-called City of Brotherly Love will pass its all-time homicide record of 500 back in 1990. This is a human-rights crisis in America’s sixth-largest — and founding — city.

    And yet, as many conservatives and mainstream-media contrarian types have been so quick to point out, rising murder rates — occurring right now in most American big cities — haven’t been a front-burner for the political left in 2021. Indeed, there’s been a habit, at least on social media, of tsk-tsking the problem by pointing to “if it bleeds, it leads” media sensationalism (a real thing) or noting that overall crime rates, including the violent crime category, haven’t really spiked and remain near historical lows. This seems prompted by fears that making urban gun violence a top-tier issue will both hurt the movement against social injustices like police brutality and mass incarceration, and also distract from other issues on the progressive to-do list.

I have to give Mr Bunch credit here: whether he realized it or not, he told the truth: many credentialed media sources fear telling the truth, because the truth goes against the liberal narrative. We have previously noted, many times, that the Inquirer doesn’t bother to report on murders in Philadelphia unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like the 2,782 site search results for Rian Thal. For the Inquirer to actually tell the truth would be for that publisher-directed “anti-racist news organization” to undermine its political direction.

Mr Bunch called “mass incarceration” a “social injustice,” yet had Delaware Superior Court Judge Vivian L. Medinilla been perhaps a little less concerned with “mass incarceration,” Christine Lugo and several other people in Philly and New Castle County, Delaware would almost certainly still be alive today. Mr Jones, in his column, had noted Jovaun Patterson was given a sweetheart plea deal, dropping an attempted murder charge, for shooting and permanently crippling a West Philly shop owner, 3½ to 10 years,[1]Perhaps they should be satisfied with what they got, given that, in 8,500 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, suspects have been charged in 1 out of 5 cases and convicted in just 9%. by District Attorney Larry Krasner, whom the Inquirer incredibly endorsed for re-election. Mr Bunch, and in part Mr Jones, didn’t want to see the one program which actually does reduce shootings and killings: keeping the bad guys locked up, for as long as the law allows.

Let’s tell the truth here: in a city that is only 42.13% black, according to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, 75.53% of all shooting victims are black males, and another 6.72% are black females; 82.25% of all victims are black. Just 4.06% are white males, with 0.86% being white women.

If the problem is the availability of firearms, as the Inquirer so often tells us, why aren’t white people, 40.66% of the city’s population, shooting and killing each other at rates similar to blacks?

If you don’t tell the truth to yourself about the problem, you can never solve the problem! And the truth is that there is something in the urban black culture in the City of Brotherly Love — and let’s be honest here, in other large cities as well — which tells young black men that shooting each other is acceptable behavior.[2]The Inquirer has reported that, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.” There’s … Continue reading The killing of Sircarr Johnson, Jr, which the Inquirer did cover because he was a ‘somebody,’ had the shooters fire off more than 100 rounds toward a crowd at a cook-out, about as indiscriminate a killing action as one can imagine.

The Inquirer doesn’t report the truth because the #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 there can’t handle the truth.

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References
↑1 Perhaps they should be satisfied with what they got, given that, in 8,500 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, suspects have been charged in 1 out of 5 cases and convicted in just 9%.
↑2 The Inquirer has reported that, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.” There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.
↑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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Kathleen Sebelius advocates authoritarian controls; the credentialed media try to ignore it to death

Kathleen Sebelius was Secretary of Health and Human Services during the previous Democratic administration, but it seems that she has taken her lessons not from Barack Hussein Obama but Xi Jinping. First, from The Wall Street Journal:

    Get Vaxxed or Stay Home, Some Local Chinese Governments Say

    Some areas are planning to restrict people from public venues unless they get shots, sparking criticism

    By Chao Deng | Updated: July 15, 2021 | 7:17 AM ET

    Several local governments in China are planning to bar residents who haven’t been vaccinated against Covid-19 from accessing public venues, stirring controversy as the country makes a push for herd immunity.

    In recent days, a dozen counties and cities in the eastern provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Jiangxi set late-August deadlines for people 18 years or older to complete a two-shot vaccine regimen, according to similarly worded online statements. Many of them also set dates in late July by which unvaccinated people would be barred from entering schools, libraries, prisons, nursing homes and inpatient facilities at hospitals without a valid medical exemption.

    Some of the localities attributed their new policies to “national, provincial and municipal arrangements,” without explaining whether they received a decree from the central government.

    China is dealing with sporadic outbreaks of Covid-19 and authorities have been offering homegrown vaccines free of charge since last December.

    The government notices have sparked online pushback from some Chinese and triggered a debate—as in the U.S. and elsewhere—about whether people should be required to present proof of inoculation to travel, work or undertake other routine activities outside their home.

There’s more at the original.

Mrs Sebelius, previously the Governor of Kansas, apparently loves the way the Chinese Communists do things. From Breitbart, via The Pirate’s Cove:

Mrs Sebelius stated:

    Sebelius said, “We’re in a situation where we have a wildly effective vaccine, multiple choices, lots available, free of charge, and we have folks who are just saying I won’t do it. I think that it’s time to say to those folks, it’s fine if you don’t choose to get vaccinated. You may not come to work. You may not have access to a situation where you’re going to put my grandchildren in jeopardy. Where you might kill them, or you might put them in a situation where they’re going to carry the virus to someone in a high-risk position.”

    That’s, I think the point where we are, is freedom is one thing, but freedom when you harm others like secondhand smoke and issues that we’ve dealt with very clearly in the past you can’t drive drunk. You can drink, but you can’t drive drunk because you can injure other people. You can’t smoke inside of a public place where you can give cancer to someone else in spite of their never having been a smoker.

    So I think we’re reaching that point in the United States where those of us who are vaccinated, I want to take off my mask. I want to be able to live my life with vaccination, and right now, I’m being impinged on by people who say I don’t want to get vaccinated. It’s fine. I want them to maybe have a limitation on where they can go and who they can possibly infect.

You know what’s interesting? Breitbart is a definitely conservative site, and I like to cite liberal sources to prevent complaints by the left that my sources are biased, so I made a Google search for Mrs Sebelius’ first sentence. As you can see from the screen capture at the right, on which you can click to enlarge to make it more readable, all I found were conservative sources and individual blogs. Given that Breitbart had a video of the interview embedded, one which has two annoying commercials in it and one I cannot embed, the story is confirmed, but, oddly enough, the credentialed media seem loath to report it. Site searches for Sebelius on The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer yielded zero returns of this. Even a site search of CNN, where the interview was broadcast, yielded only one article, Young children will pay the price if enough US adults don’t get vaccinated against Covid-19, expert says, in which Mrs Sebelius’ statement is buried down in the 19th paragraph.

The credentialed media absotively, posilutely do not want such a totalitarian statement from a former Secretary of Health and Human Services to get much publicity, and so the story is being quietly buried, quietly ignored to death. Such is apparently not news that is fit to print! But we can be certain of one thing: if President Biden proposed such a thing, the left would certainly go along with it, because the left love them some totalitarian controls!

“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post has as its masthead tagline. Yet it seems that a former Democratic Secretary of Health and Human Services’ advocacy of authoritarian controls is news the editors of the Post want to keep in darkness.

It’s interesting that the Wikipedia biography for Mrs Sebelius states, “She is strongly pro-choice,” but it seems that, like so many others on the left, she is pro-choice on exactly one thing.

It should be noted that I am, and have previously stated, that I have been vaccinated against COVID-19. That was my personal choice, a choice I took freely, and my decision is the one I think others should take. But I also believe that people have the right to decide that for themselves, and that the government ought not to have any authority to penalize or punish them if they choose differently than I have.

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Overreact much? Justice Department wants to make sure Texas family never approves of anything Democrats ever do

I have been referring to the January 6th ‘insurrection’ by what I believe to be the proper term: the Capitol kerfuffle. But Attorney General Merrick Garland, his hatred for Republicans continually seething ever since then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) denied him a seat on the Supreme Court, and doubtlessly at the urging of President Joe Biden, has been pursuing the kerfufflers with as much savagery as he can muster. From The New York Times:

    A Texas family joins the list of more than 500 people arrested in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

    By Alan Feuer | July 13, 2021 | 4:10 PM EDT

    Among the more than 500 people arrested so far in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, there have been several married couples and any number of parent-and-children teams. There have even been sets of siblings charged.

    The Munn family. Photo by Department of Justice. Blacked out face is of uncharged minor member of the family. Click to enlarge.

    On Tuesday, however, in what seemed to be the first move of its kind, the Justice Department unsealed a complaint against almost the entire Munn family of Texas, accusing the father, the mother and three of their children of illegally breaching the Capitol through a broken window.

    Prosecutors say that Thomas Munn, the family’s patriarch, began writing about going to Washington for a pro-Trump rally in late December, posting an image on Facebook with a caption reading, “POTUS HAS REQUESTED YOUR ATTENDANCE WASHINGTON DC JANUARY 6TH 2021.”

    Then on Jan. 5, court papers say, Mr. Munn posted another Facebook image showing what appears to be the family’s car and trailer on the road from their home in Borger, Texas. A homemade sign is visible on the back of the trailer reading, “D.C. Bound We are Q,” in an apparent reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory.

    According to the complaint, the Munn parents and their children Dawn, Joshua and Kayli entered the Capitol through a broken window at around 2:25 p.m. on Jan. 6 and took what amounted to a brief tour of the building, breaking nothing and harming no one. Afterward, court papers say, they all posed for a photo with another family member — a minor child — who was not charged in the case. The exact ages of the children were not released.

    The charged family members were arrested in Borger on Tuesday and could not be immediately reached for comment. A lawyer had yet to file an appearance in their case .

    Prosecutors say that investigators tracked the family down with the help of a tipster and interviews with at least three of the Munn children’s teachers. The F.B.I. also obtained private Facebook conversations that some members of the family had with their friends.

Here is the government’s claim:

The Munn family are charged with four counts:

  • 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(1) – Knowingly Entering or Remaining in any Restricted Building or Grounds Without Lawful Authority. Since the Munns are not accused of harming anyone or carrying a deadly weapon, the maximum punishment under (b)(2) is a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, in any other case.
  • 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(2) – Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building or Grounds. Since the Munns are not accused of harming anyone or carrying a deadly weapon, the maximum punishment under (b)(2) is a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, in any other case.
  • 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(D) – Disorderly Conduct in a Capitol Building: utter loud, threatening, or abusive language, or engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct, at any place in the Grounds or in any of the Capitol Buildings with the intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of a session of Congress or either House of Congress, or the orderly conduct in that building of a hearing before, or any deliberations of, a committee of Congress or either House of Congress; The penalty for violating 40 U.S.C. §5104(e)(2) is a misdemeanor conviction punishable by a maximum fine of $5,000 fine or up to six months in prison, or both.
  • 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(G) – Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building; The penalty for violating 40 U.S.C. §5104(e)(2) is a misdemeanor conviction punishable by a maximum fine of $5,000 or up to six months in prison, or both.

So, let me get this straight: the feds spent half a year investigating the Munns, “tracked the family down with the help of a tipster and interviews with at least three of the Munn children’s teachers. The F.B.I. also obtained private Facebook conversations that some members of the family had with their friends,” all to get four misdemeanor charges, with no claim that any of them did anything violent, or destroyed any property?

So, what will the feds get out of this? The only person actually convicted and sentenced took a plea bargain, and received probation, with no jail time, though she was held in jail for two days before she made bail.

    Anna Morgan-Lloyd, a 49-year-old hair salon owner, pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol building, which carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. Washington, D.C., District Judge Royce Lamberth also ordered her to complete 40 hours of community service and pay $500 in restitution.

Basically, she got nothing. Her conviction is a misdemeanor, not a felony, so she will not lose her right to vote for Republicans or keep and bear arms. Mrs Morgan-Lloyd received a sentence commensurate with the seriousness of her offense, which was: not very.

It also set the standard: Mrs Morgan-Lloyd was made to apologize, in exchange for her plea bargain:

Prior to sentencing, prosecutors said they found the sentence “appropriate,” despite what they called Morgan-Lloyd’s initial “ill-considered and misguided commentary,” in part because there was no evidence that she preplanned her attack or incited others, and because she worked with investigators, admitted to her actions, and expressed contrition.

Before receiving her sentence, Morgan-Lloyd tearfully apologized to the court for participating in what she called a “disgraceful” day.

“I went there to show support for President Trump peacefully, and I’m ashamed that it became a savage display of violence that day,” Morgan-Lloyd said.

She did not face any major charges for her role. The day after her sentencing, Mrs Morgan-Lloyd pretty much walked back everything she said in her ‘tearful’ apology.

    Anna Morgan-Lloyd, the first defendant sentenced in the attack, told Fox News that she personally saw no violence on Jan. 6.

    “Where I was at, we see nobody damage anything. People were actually very polite,” Morgan-Lloyd told Fox host Laura Ingraham.

    The interview comes a day after Morgan-Lloyd said in court that she felt ashamed for the “savage display of violence” on Jan. 6. The Bloomfield woman traveled to D.C. that day with her friend Dona Sue Bissey for then-President Donald Trump’s rally before following the mob inside the Capitol for an estimated 10 minutes.

Essentially the same thing with which the Munn family are charged.

So, the Munn family will have to make ‘heartfelt apologies,’ which they will subsequently recant after sentencing. Yet the government will have spent more in manhours investigating this little bit of nothing. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the Biden Administration will get nothing but hatred and contempt from the Munn family and all of their friends.

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It’s being set up again! The Lexington Herald-Leader is trying to set up a scenario in which Governor Beshear reissues his mask mandate

As we have previously noted, a government and credentialed media which just love to restrict our constitutional rights, are once again setting up a scenario in which Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) will claim that he just has to issue mandatory mask orders and other restrictions, for our own good, don’t you know?

    Lexington COVID-19 cases jump. Variants, loosening of restrictions to blame.

    By Rayleigh Deaton | July 13, 2021 | 1:42 PM | Updated: 2:06 PM EDT

    The number of new COVID-19 cases jumped Tuesday in Lexington as a result of lifted restrictions and virus variants, according to the health department.

    On Tuesday, the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department said there were 53 new cases, and the “COVID-19 continues to spread.” The city’s previous rolling average of four new cases per day has risen to 22 since July 6, according to the department. As of June 13, there have been 35,726 total coronavirus cases and 324 deaths since the pandemic began early last year.

    Kevin Hall, spokesman for the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department, said, “Most of Lexington’s new cases are a form of a variant, with the Delta variant popping up among them.” The Delta variant has been more contagious.

The article writer, the editor who wrote the headline,[1]Headlines in newspapers are traditionally written by editors, not the article authors, but that might not be the case in this instance. and the Lexington Health Department spokesman all wanted to tell us the same thing: loosened restrictions on people are to blame. How long will it be before they start to advocate that Governor Beshear try to once again impose his illegal and unconstitutional restrictions on us?

    Hall said other guidelines include:

    • Avoiding close contact with people showing COVID symptoms.
    • Covering coughs and sneezes.
    • Avoiding touching your eyes, nose and mouth.
    • Washing hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds.
    • Wearing a face covering in crowded places.

There it is, of course: the setting up of fear, fear of other people in Mr Hall’s first point — after all, people who have been exposed to COVID-19 can pass on the virus before they show any symptoms themselves — and the need, in the last point, that we’re all doomed if we don’t wear face masks again.

At least so far, the Herald-Leader’s Opinion section does not show any editorials pushing the Governor to reimpose his COVID-19 restrictions, but it may well be only a matter of time.

References

References
↑1 Headlines in newspapers are traditionally written by editors, not the article authors, but that might not be the case in this instance.
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It isn’t the guns; it’s the culture

5439 Race Street, Philadelphia

Race Street in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia is not the worst neighborhood in the City of Brotherly Love, but it isn’t Society Hill, either. The photo is not specified as the crime scene, but is designed to show readers what the neighborhood looks like.

In doing my almost daily research on crime in the city, I happened upon a six-day-old story by Philadelphia Inquirer nighttime breaking news reporter Robert Moran. It says little, because his information was (probably) a sparse report from the Philadelphia Police, but it actually says a whole lot:

3 wounded in West Philly shooting

More than 50 shots were fired shortly before 10 p.m.

by Robert Moran | July 7, 2021

Also from the Inquirer: DA Larry Krasner aims to keep teen offenders out of criminal justice system with new restorative program. What a great idea to leave wannabe thugs on the street!

Two men and a woman were wounded in a shooting Wednesday in West Philadelphia, police said.

Shortly before 10 p.m., a barrage of shots were fired from 60 feet away at a group of people standing on the porch of a residence on the 5400 block of Race Street across from the Nichols Park playground, said Chief Inspector Scott Small.

A 22-year-old man was struck several times throughout his body. A 20-year-old man was shot in the leg and a 29-year-old woman was hit in the shoulder. All three were transported by police to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where they were reported in stable condition, Small said.

Someone on the porch returned fire at the one or more shooters, Small said.

Mr Moran’s report simply says that the crime scene was in the 5400 block of Race Street, across from the playground. The photo to the left, which may be enlarged by clicking on it, is more of a panorama of Race Street across from that park.

The police reported that they found “more than 50” shell casings at the crime scene, and that there were 10 to 15 people on the porch or inside the home.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain 64 Shots: Londre ‘KTS Dre’ Sylvester Gunned Down Outside Chicago Jail

The “one or more” shooters were aiming at a specific person, with whom he, or they, had a specific reason to kill. Someone on the porch was armed and returned fire. “More than 50” expended shell casings, and only three people were hit?

I can do something really radical here and tell the truth. The victims almost certainly knew who the shooters were, and that’s the case in the vast majority of Philadelphia shootings and killings, that’s the case in almost every such incident in big cities all over the country. Yet these crimes are being solved at a decreasing rate, because the residents won’t talk to the police. They’re too afraid of the gangs, they don’t like the police in the first place, and, let’s be honest again, they depend more on street justice than anything from law enforcement.

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The Biden Administration want to snoop into your private text messages, looking for COVID “misinformation”

President Biden and his Administration are planning to get tough on social media sources, including text messaging, and ‘conservative news shows’ which question the efficacy and safety of the various COVID-19 vaccines. Our good friend William Teach noted an article from Politico, a site I don’t normally check:

‘Potentially a death sentence’: White House goes off on vaccine fearmongers

The administration has shifted to a head-on strategy to dispel fear-mongering over its door-to-door efforts.

By Natasha Korecki and Eugene Daniels | July 12, 2021 | 1:22 PM EDT

The Biden administration is casting conservative opponents of its Covid-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and extreme, adopting a more aggressive political posture in an attempt to maneuver through the public health conundrum.

The White House has decided to hit back harder on misinformation and scare tactics after Republican lawmakers and conservative activists pledged to fight the administration’s stated plans to go “door-to-door” to increase vaccination rates. The pushback will include directly calling out social media platforms and conservative news shows that promote such tactics.

Well, at least the authors wrote a good lede paragraph, something vanishing from a lot of journalism these days!

“The big misinterpretation that Fox News or whomever else is saying is that they are essentially envisioning a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you’ve got to do something that you don’t want to do,” Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview on Sunday. “That’s absolutely not the case, it’s trusted messengers who are part of the community doing that — not government officials. So that’s where I think the disconnect is.”

What, the Administration don’t think that the “trusted messengers who are part of the community” haven’t already been talking to their friends? The displacements caused by COVID-19 and the federal, state and local governments’ overreactions to it have been topic number one among people, for five seasons now, whether over the phone, in people getting together — sometimes in violation of ‘gatherings’ limits[1]Petty dictator Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) issued orders that banned families from getting together during Thanksgiving and Christmas in groups of more than ten persons and from more than two … Continue reading — and people finally meeting people they had missed, people getting back to work, and people discussing the odious mask mandates. What the Administration want to do is to send not “trusted messengers who are part of the community” going door-to-door, but people who are not “trusted messengers who are part of the community,” because people have already been talking to the people they’ve known and trusted.

Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

Really? And just what is an SMS carrier?

An SMS gateway or MMS gateway allows a computer (also known as a Server) to send or receive text messages in the form of Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) transmissions between local and/or international telecommunications networks. In most cases, SMS and MMS are eventually routed to a mobile phone through a wireless carrier. SMS gateways are commonly used as a method for person-to-person to device-to-person (also known as application-to-person) communications. Many SMS gateways support content and media conversions from email, push, voice, and other formats.

It’s not quite the same thing as sending text messages from your phone to one of your friends, or a group of friends, but it’s along the same lines. Unlike a service like Facebook or Twitter, where anyone can access your messages, SMS systems are messages sent directly to individuals or small, specified groups.

Translation: the Biden Administration believe that they have the right to, without a warrant, look into your private messages. This is a 21st century form of wiretapping. How could the Biden Administration know what “misinformation” might be in private messages you might send, or receive, over your phone or computer, unless they look, or get your email or SMS service or wireless telephone carriers to snoop?

We have noted it before: the greatest death threat from COVID-19 has not been to individuals but to our constitutional rights. And the sheeple will go right along with it.

References

References
↑1 Petty dictator Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) issued orders that banned families from getting together during Thanksgiving and Christmas in groups of more than ten persons and from more than two households. My family did not obey that order.
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Why won’t The Philadelphia Inquirer report on neighborhood conditions?

I am shocked, shocked! I tell you, that The Philadelphia Inquirer covered the shootings in the City of Brotherly Love over the weekend.

First, the numbers. The Philadelphia Police Department reported that there have been 294 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 11th. Over 192 days in the year, that works out to 1.53125 per day, on pace for 559 murders for the entire year. That’s a 34.25% increase over the same day last year.

On the same day last year, the numbers worked out to a projected 415 killings, and we know that the city actually finished with 499. The record of 500 was set in 1990, during the height of the crack cocaine wars.

If the city continues on the same pace as established yesterday, it will tie the record of 500 on the 327th day of the year. That would be Tuesday, November 23rd, two days before Thanksgiving, with 5½ weeks left in the year.

15 people shot — one 14 times, another 11 — in a weekend of gun violence in Philly

Last week, the city’s total of those killed or wounded in shootings since 2015 surpassed a staggering 10,000 people, The Inquirer reported.

By Diane Mastrull | July 11, 2021

A sextuple shooting in North Philadelphia, during which one man was shot 14 times, was just one of eight episodes of gun violence from late Saturday night into early Sunday morning involving 15 victims, two of whom died, police said.

Killed were a man of unknown identity and age who was shot multiple times inside a business on the 1600 block of West Cumberland Street in North Philadelphia at 10 p.m. Saturday and a 23-year-old man shot 11 times in the back, chest, leg, arm and neck on the 100 block of Leverington Avenue in Manayunk at 12:54 a.m., according to police reports.

All shootings took place between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. Two were doubles, as Philadelphia continued on a trend seen in cities across the country. Last week, Philadelphia’s total of those killed or wounded in shootings since 2015 surpassed a staggering 10,000 people, The Inquirer reported. July was off to a violent start with 77 people struck by gunfire in the first eight days of the month, according to the report.

The one involving six victims was reported around 11:30 p.m. at West Butler and North Ninth Streets, in the city’s Hunting Park section. The victims were all males, ages 22, 23, 28, 31, 34 and 41. Four were in stable condition and two in critical condition Sunday at Temple University Hospital, police said. The 23-year-old was shot 14 times, they said.

According to police, a surveillance video shows two males walk up to a group gathered on the 900 block of West Butler Street and begin firing before fleeing in an unknown direction. A search for them continued Sunday evening.

901 West Butler Street. Screen capture from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

Well, at least the Inquirer didn’t tell us that two inanimate guns levitated and shot these people themselves. A photo in the Inquirer shows the scene, with two police evidence people working the scene, amidst dozens of evidence markers, and what appears to be three neighborhood loiterers. The photo to the left shows the address, a bodega at 901 West Butler Street, and it isn’t exactly a middle-class area.

This was a targeted hit: shooting one guy 14 times isn’t some sort of accident, and two “males” — note, not “white males” or “black males” or “Hispanic males”, describing either the shooters or their victims[1]Note that in one of the internally referenced stories in the Inquirer, it states, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. … Continue reading — walking up and opening fire isn’t just “gun violence,” but clearly attempted murder. The shooters knew who their targets were, and had a pretty good idea where to find them.

If the survivors decide to tell the police who shot them, and odds are very great that they know their assailants, we’ll eventually find out that the shooters have long rap sheets, and District Attorney Larry Krasner treated them leniently.

909 West Butler. Click to enlarge.

A photo just a couple of buildings away shows that this is an unsafe neighborhood, as the residents at 909 West Butler Street spent good money to completely bar in their front porch. 909 looks like someone has been trying to take care of his row house, but there are a lot of buildings in view with peeling paint and other signs of not being well maintained.

721 West Butler Street. Click to enlarge.

A couple blocks down the street, at 721 or 723 West Butler, the owners have completely barred in their property. Why, it’s almost as though they don’t feel safe in the neighborhood, as though they don’t trust the people there.

This is the part that the Inquirer doesn’t report. People are virtually locking themselves in jail to protect their families and themselves.

Use Google Maps for 3810 North Franklin Street, near 721 West Butler, and toggle up the street. The photos show a racially integrated neighborhood, but one in which several row homes, including three in a row, at 3846, 3848, and 3850 North Franklin, have barred in their front porches. Why doesn’t the Inquirer ever report on that? The paper loves to blame ‘systemic racism,’ but the photos from Google Maps show white people as well as black, show an integrated area.

These neighborhoods are overwhelmed not by inanimate guns, but by bad people living in a bad culture. They are relatively poor, but are trying to protect what little they have, not just from guns, but from theft, from assault, and from rape . . . but all that the “anti-racist news organization” reports on is “gun violence,” because the #woke staff are just deathly afraid of blaming bad people.

References

References
↑1 Note that in one of the internally referenced stories in the Inquirer, it states, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males,” but the Inquirer story won’t tell you that about the victims in the reported shootings. I wonder why that is. There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.
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The Washington Post will never get the right answers because they refuse to look at uncomfortable data

It’s always good when a credentialed media source catches up with The First Street Journal, but one thing is certain: it only happens reluctantly.

    If progressives don’t start taking rising crime seriously, they risk getting mugged by reality

    Opinion by Helaine Olen Roshkow | Washington Post Columnist | July 10, 2021 | 8:00 AM EDT

    Democrats, Republicans and independents all say there is a “major crisis” in violent crime, according to a poll released this week. This a serious matter. Crime is up throughout the United States. The murder rate surged nearly 20 percent in 2020, compared with 2019. Road-rage shootings have doubled nationally, claiming victims such as 6-year-old Aiden Leos in California in May.

    But many among the progressive community don’t want to admit this. They seem to believe that acknowledging a covid-era crime wave will jeopardize hard-won gains fighting for bail and sentencing reform, attempts to reform the nation’s police forces, and the fight to address racial injustice. MSNBC host Joy Reid, for example, recently accused the media of riling people up over the issue, tweeting: “I’ve seen more TV stories about crime than the actual anecdotes from friends in [New York City] or other big cities bear out.” Others point out the levels are rising from numbers significantly lower than during the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, so why worry?

It was 1999, and I was on the ‘management team’ with the company for which I then worked. A friend of mine named Ken, also on the management team, was responsible for our safety numbers, among other things. We were all under instructions from the corporate Vice President to have numerical goals for different things, and Ken was supposed to have a numerical goal for lost time accidents. He quipped, “So, if we’re below our target, does that mean we have to go out and deliberately hurt someone?”

Obviously, the goal for lost time accidents should be zero, but if it’s always zero, you’ll always fail. Mrs Roshkow at least seems to recognize this: going higher on a negative is always a failure, and no one is going to be satisfied with an “it’s not as bad as the 90s” answer.

Trouble is, she doesn’t recognize what happened in the 1990s, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the horror story that was then New York City by being a Republican who was tough on crime.

    The denial needs to stop. The failure to engage and take on the issue of growing violence and lawbreaking now — no matter how unpleasant, distasteful or uncomfortable — will only harm the progressive agenda and potentially cause swing voters to pull the lever for Republican candidates.

You mean Republicans who will actually get things done in reducing crime?

    Traditionally, voters view Democrats and progressives as softer on crime than “law and order” Republicans. That’s why even right-leaning Democrats are sometimes vulnerable to getting pinned as supporters of the far-left slogan “defund the police.” Rising crime rates provide an opening to grandstanding Republicans, who claim it is the result of Democrats not adequately supporting cops. As House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said this week: “Crime is soaring in cities managed by Democrats.”

    Ridiculous. But the politics of backlash is a real thing. As we’ve seen in both the distant and near past, fear can lead otherwise left-leaning people to vote in a more right-wing direction. The violent crime wave of the 1990s ultimately gave us the now-reviled federal anti-crime bill in 1994 and California’s “three strikes” law, which sent shoplifters to prison for decades. More recently, the “defund the police” slogan is widely suspected of costing Democrats votes in tight 2020 congressional elections while in June’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, Eric Adams, running on a “law and order” platform, decisively defeated more progressive challengers, such as Maya Wiley.

Mrs Roshkow said that Mr McCarthy’s claim was “Ridiculous,” but it’s the stone-cold truth. I’ve harped on foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia on this site, but the numbers don’t lie: the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page showed that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, 291 people had spilled their life’s blood out on the city’s mean streets. 291 ÷ 189 days so far in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. Philly’s record is an even 500, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990, while 2020 came in second with 499. If the rate continues as is, the City of Brotherly Love will not just break the unfortunate record, but leave it far behind in the rear view mirror. The current pace is so bad that, if maintained, the city will tie the 1990 record on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, with six weeks left in the year.

Naturally, instead of supporting the get tough on criminals policies which worked in the 1990s, she blames not actual criminals, but those inanimate guns that seem to levitate and shoot people all by themselves!

    Progressives, instead of denying rising crime, should stick the blame right where it belongs — on Republicans. Gun sales increased significantly last year. The one thing that links almost all gun violence? Easy access to firearms. But Republicans refuse to back even minor restrictions on guns ownership. Another thing that stops crime? Summer jobs programs for teens living in poverty. Fund more of them — and remind people which party often opposes doing that.

Thing is, it might not be those evil reich-wing Republicans buying all of those guns. Also from The Washington Post, on the same day:

    ‘Fear on top of fear’: Why anti-gun Americans joined the wave of new gun owners

    Pandemic, police violence, calls to ‘defund the police’ fuel surge of first-time buyers

    By Marc Fisher, Miranda Green, Kelly Glass and Andrea Eger | July 10, 2021

    All his life, Jabril Battle was anti-gun. Then came the pandemic, the lockdown, the shortages and a feeling that at any moment, things could blow. Battle bought a Beretta.

    Drawn to last summer’s protests against police violence, Savannah Grace found herself face-to-face with a camo-clad officer’s long gun. She’d always hated guns, but went out and got a Glock 45.

    In blue cities and red suburbs alike, firearms purchases soared last year — to the highest level in half a century, based on federal background checks. A striking portion of those sales went to first-time gun buyers — 40 percent, according to the firearms industry’s trade association. Other studies show first-timers accounting for more like a fifth of sales in 2020, but that’s still unusually high, retailers said.

    Overall gun ownership nationwide jumped from 32 percent of Americans to 39 percent last year, according to University of Chicago survey data — well under the 50 percent level of half a century ago, but the biggest jump in recent decades.

    From the downtown streets left empty by the pandemic’s shutdowns to the sharp spike in homicides and the nationwide conflict over the role and behavior of police officers, a disorienting and often frightening year drove many decisions to buy guns, according to dealers and buyers alike.

That doesn’t sound like the bad guys buying guns — not that most of them buy them legally anyway — but by ordinary people afraid of the bad guys, and of policies by the left that would reduce police protection.

    Sales to women and people of color rose in 2020. Firearms industry data shows sales jumping 50 percent among Black customers, 47 percent among Hispanics and 43 percent among Asian Americans, though gun ownership remains proportionately lower among those groups compared with Whites.

Actually, the linked data show that “The highest overall firearm sales increase comes from Black men and women who show a 58.2 percent increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period last year.” Maybe this from The Philadelphia Inquirer is why:

    Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot (in Philadelphia) since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.

There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.

This is the real reason “anti-gun Americans joined the wave of new gun owners”: because the incredible surge in homicides has occurred in their neighborhoods! The very people they politically support are the ones among whom the surge in violence has occurred.

A lot of the city statistics released do not include the race of victims and known killers, but St Louis, our highest homicide rate city, does. According to the report dated July 11th, out of 99 homicide victims thus far, 92 (74 males and 18 females) were black. In a city that is not quite half black, 46.41% black to be more precise, 92.9% of the homicide victims are black. More, of the 42 identified suspects of those 92 murders, 41 are black, and the other is listed as ‘unknown.’

So, how dangerous is it to live in St Louis? Using the figures from the St Louis Police Department, I created the chart above. Taking the population of St Louis, 294,890, adjusting it for race and sex by percentages of the population, dividing the number of homicides by 191, for the number of days so far in the year (up to July 10th), then multiplying that number by 365, I arrived at projected homicides for 2021. Taking those numbers, dividing by population, and then by 100,000, I got the anticipated homicide rate per 100,000 population, the way figures are normally reported. If you are a white male, you are facing a homicide rate of 8.26 per 100,000 population; white women are looking at a homicide rate of 5.73.

But if you are black? Black women are facing a homicide rate of 46.62 per 100,000, while black males have the number 204.25 per 100,000 population staring them dead in the eye!

If the problem were just that there are too many guns, why is there such a discrepancy between the murder rates between whites and blacks, in the same city? That’s the question which nobody will ask, because nobody is willing to look at the answer.

Yes, I know: some people say that math is racist, but math just is. And if you are unwilling to look at the facts, without excluding things because you don’t look at where certain evidence might lead, you will never get the right answers.

The answer is simple: there is something in the urban black culture which teaches too many of its children that it’s perfectly acceptable to go out and shoot other people. Maybe why that is ought to be the question people should ask.

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Another mugshot missed We publish what the Lexington Herald-Leader will not

Christopher Roberts. Photo by Three Forks Regional Jail, Lee County, via WKYT-TV

WKYT-TV, Channel 27, the CBS affiliate in Lexington, is the news partner with the Lexington Herald-Leader. So, when the Herald-Leader reports a story after WKYT, and WKYT has the mugshot available, we know the Herald-Leader did as well.

    Estill County man charged in connection with woman found dead on rural road

    By Beth Musgrave | July 10, 2021 | 12:24 PM | Updated: 12:42 PM EDT

    A 43-year-old Estill County man was arrested Saturday in connection with the death of a 50-year-old woman who was found on a rural Estill County Road on Wednesday.

    Kentucky State Police have charged Christopher Roberts of Irvine with murder and tampering with physical evidence. Roberts is being held at the Three Forks Regional Detention Center in Lee County.

    Police were called at 10 a.m. on Wednesday to Marbleyard Road after a woman was found lying in the road. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

    The woman was later identified as Cindy Donnela Stevens-Roberts, 50, of Irvine.

The story concluded by saying that there was no other information available, but, of course there was; there was the suspect’s mugshot, which WKYT-TV published at 9:58 AM, 2½ hours before the Herald-Leader story was written. But we all know that publishing the suspect’s mugshot would violate McClatchy Mugshot Policy.