Author Archives: Dana Pico

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That thing that never happens has happened again At least ten high school varsity teams have chosen to forfeit games to protest presence of a boy on a girls' volleyball team

We noted, on September 26th, that six schools had forfeited games against the Jurupa Valley High School’s girls’ varsity volleyball team because a mentally ill male, A B Hernandez, plays on the girls’ team. Fox News has just reported how much the real girls are sacrificing:

California girls’ volleyball team with trans player sees 10th match forfeited amid controversy

The team can clinch first place in its league on Wednesday

By Jackson Thompson | Wednesday, October 15, 2025 | 3:45 PM EDT

Jurupa Valley High School’s girls’ volleyball team in California has now seen at least 10 games on its 2025 schedule forfeited amid a national controversy involving one of its players, who is transgender.

Los Osos High School forfeited a tournament game against Jurupa Valley on Saturday, while Patriot High School forfeited its Monday varsity match, marking its second forfeit to JVHS this season. Patriot High School previously forfeited a Sept. 26 match to Jurupa Valley.

Maribel Munoz, the mother of Jurupa Valley player Alyssa McPherson, provided Fox News Digital a copy of a message sent by JVHS head coach Liana Manu, announcing that the varsity match against Patriot was forfeited. The JV and freshman games were still played.

So, the schools are still playing the sub-varsity games, the games in which young Mr Hernandez is not participating.

It appears that by using a male player on the girls’ team, Jurupa Valley is in position to win the league title. However, JVHS is playing without Hadeel Hazameh and Alyssa McPherson, real girls who are refusing to play while Mr Hernandez is on the team.

Two of Jurupa Valley’s senior players, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, stepped away from the team this season in protest of trans teammate AB Hernandez.

McPherson and Hazameh have also filed a lawsuit against the Jurupa Unified School District citing their experience playing and sharing a locker room with Hernandez the previous three seasons. McPherson’s older sister and former JVHS girls’ volleyball player Madison McPherson is the third plaintiff in that lawsuit.

So, Misses McPherson and Hazameh, both of whom are minors according to the lawsuit filed — the age of sexual consent in the Pyrite State is 18 — wound up playing and sharing a locker room with young Mr Hernandez, though obviously uncomfortably, in previous seasons. Here we have to give credit to Riley Gaines Barker, who has been leading the effort against allowing males to compete on women’s athletic teams, and the several colleges which forfeited against San José State University last collegiate volleyball season, for showing the way. Because none of the actual adults would do the right thing and protect women’s sports, it has been left to teenagers and young twenty-something athletes to sacrifice willingly to make the point.

But I keep wondering what young Mr Hernandez is doing. I get it: he really, really, really thinks he’s a girl. Yet, a volleyball team is supposed to be a team, and even if he thinks that Misses McPherson and Hazameh are being ridiculous in not accepting him as a girl, he has also cost his team at least ten opportunities to play against competition. The forfeits are wins for the team, but they are not wins that the team has earned. Brayden “Blaire” Fleming did the same thing for San José State University.

If Mr Hernandez really wants to be seen and thought of as a girl, why is he doing things to draw ever more attention to the fact that he’s male? He recently competed in and won the girls’ triple jump track competition by eight feet! He won races by margins which left the other girls in the dust. At least Will “Lia” Thomas had enough sense to, after he won an NCAA championship in one event, to pull back and let real women win the others. Mr Fleming kept his ‘transgender’ status a secret, and, to be honest, he could actually ‘pass’ as a girl, where Mr Thomas could not.

Can someone explain this stuff to me, because I guess that I’m just not smart enough to figure it out on my own. If the ‘transgendered’ really want to be seen as the sex they claim to be, why do things to point out that they really are not?

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Well, how ’bout that? It seems that President Trump’s tariff ideas are starting to work.

Tariffs are generally disfavored by economists, and, of course, by every Democrat, since the use of tariffs to stimulate American industrial employment is President Trump’s policy. But, what if they actually work as Mr Trump says he wants them to work? From The New York Times:

G.M. to Stop Making Electric Vans in Canada, in Another Hit to a Key Industry

The announcement, which will eliminate about 1,200 jobs, came less than a week after the carmaker Stellantis said it would move production of a new vehicle to Illinois from a Toronto suburb.

by Ian Austen | Tuesday, October 21, 2025 | 3:13 PM EDT

General Motors said on Tuesday that it was ending production of its electric van in Ontario, a move that will mean the loss of about 1,200 jobs. It was the second major blow to Canada’s automobile industry in less than a week.

G.M. cited low demand for its BrightDrop delivery van, as well as the end of tax credits for electric vehicles in the United States.

But Unifor, the Canadian union that represents auto workers, blamed the company’s move on President Trump’s trade battle with Canada, which has made exporting cars to the United States more expensive.

While I don’t celebrate Canadians losing their jobs, if that’s what happens to create more jobs for Americans, I say, America First!

Last week, the automaker Stellantis announced that it would move production of a new Jeep model from an idle factory in the Toronto suburb of Brampton to a plant in Illinois. The company shut down the factory in 2023 and laid off its roughly 3,000 workers so that it could retool the facilities, but now the fate of those employees is unclear.

General Motors was the recipient of roughly CDN$1 billion, or roughly $714 million in real American money, to retool the factory, and now the government is up in arms, and threatening legal action. But GM ceased production of the total electric vans because few companies were buying the silly things. Without government mandates requiring X percentage of vehicles sold to be total electric, people are taking decisions based upon what is more practical for them.

There’s more at the Times original.

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The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer Our good friends on the left somehow believe the barbarians in our country can become good, civilized men.

I will admit it: I have not always been charitable when it comes to our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, The Philadelphia Inquirer and it’s journolism. No, that’s not a typo: 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.

In a story about Sherrilyn Hawkins, who pleaded guilty to starving her 21-year-old disabled son to death, reporter Vinny Vella chose to use terms like “allowing him to waste away to just 59 pounds,” rather than tell readers the direct truth. Mr Vella responded, “I’m sorry you’re having trouble with your reading comprehension, Dana. Keep trying; I know you’ll get it someday.”

We continued our Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — discussion a bit further, but it was the newspaper’s main editorial that really got to me:

Lessons must be learned after criminal justice system fails Kada Scott | Editorial

Hindsight is 20/20, but a series of prosecutorial and judicial miscues may have enabled the young woman’s death.

by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, October 21, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT

The killing of Kada Scott is tragic on many levels, but hopefully, some lessons can be learned to honor her life.

Scott’s death is all the more painful for her family and friends because it could have been prevented. That’s because it appears District Attorney Larry Krasner and the Philadelphia court system failed her.

The man accused of abducting Scott had been previously charged with assaulting an ex-girlfriend twice in the last year, but prosecutors withdrew the charges after the victim did not show up for court.

After Scott’s disappearance, Krasner’s office admitted its handling of the earlier cases was a mistake. If the district attorney’s office had instead prosecuted Keon King, 21, then perhaps Scott, 23, would still be alive.

Kada Scott, victim, and Keon King, alleged murderer. Photos via WPVI TV, because, naturally, the Inquirer would never publish them.

There’s much more at the original, the next few paragraphs detailing the “miscues” which led to Keon King being a free man when he, allegedly, murdered Kada Scott. Then we come to this:

But once again, the victim and her friend refused to cooperate with prosecutors, so the charges were withdrawn in May.

This is not unusual, as victims of domestic violence often live in fear of the perpetrators. Reviewing the period between 2010 and 2020, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that 70% of victims of domestic violence cases failed to appear in Philadelphia’s courts.

A big part of the problem is that the accused are often out on bail and still threatening the victims. In King’s case, after the second set of assault charges, prosecutors requested bail of $1 million, but the magistrate lowered it to $200,000.

The Eighth Amendment prohibits the setting of “excessive bail,” so the magistrate did have to set a bail that Mr King could reasonably meet, something the newspaper reported that he was able to post immediately. But if the magistrate required Mr King to be fitted with a GPS monitor, none of the Inquirer stories I could find on the case mentioned it. An ankle monitor might have at least deterred Mr King, if he actually is the assailant, or provided more evidence to convict him if he was not deterred. Ankle monitors might provide the victims with a little more of a sense of security when their (alleged) assailants are released.

If all of the allegations against Mr King can be proven, he needs to spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars, with no possibility of parole. He is clearly a menace to the decent people of the City of Brotherly Love, and will almost certainly never change.

The Editorial Board said that “Lessons must be learned” from Mr Krasner’s and his minions’ inept handling of this case, but it’s hardly the first time that the District Attorney and his lenient and lax treatment of criminals have been noted. Despite all of the evidence of his lenience, the Editorial Board endorsed him for re-nomination in both 2021 and this year. Though the newspaper has yet to make its endorsement for the general election, I would be stunned if they endorsed moderate Democrat turned Republican Pat Dugan, despite the Board’s knowledge of Mr Krasner’s failures. After all, the Board does love Mr Krasner’s attempts to prosecute and imprison police officers!

There is a lesson to be learned alright, but it isn’t the lesson the Editorial Board would like. The lesson should be that American civilization must be protected and defended, even from those Americans in our cities who choose savagery over civilization. In the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror,” in which Captain Kirk and three others from his crew were transported to a mirror universe in which savagery was the rule of the day, when the transport was finally undone, Mr Spock said that it was far easier for the Captain and crew, civilized people, to play savages than it was for the savages from the alternate universe to behave as civilized men. Our good friends on the left don’t quite seem to have taken that lesson, and somehow believe that the barbarians in our country can become good, civilized men.

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Democrisy! Nancy Pelosi, who has been in government for 38½ years, rips up a crown saying Donald Trump is no king

The very lovely Nancy Pelosi comes from what is as close to royalty as we have in the United States. Her father was Thomas D’Alesandro Jr, who spent a lifetime in political jobs. From 1926 to 1933, he was a member of the Maryland state House of Delegates, followed by two years as General Deputy Collector of Internal Revenue. Following that, he was elected to the Baltimore City Council, and then, in 1938, to the United States House of Representatives, where he served for eight years.

Following his service in Congress he was the Mayor of Baltimore for 12 years from May 1947 to May 1959. D’Alesandro served on the Federal Renegotiation Board from 1961 to 1969 after being appointed by President John F. Kennedy. On September 21, 1966, President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s assistant Mildred Stegall requested a routine FBI name check on D’Alesandro. FBI records released on January 6, 2021 showed D’Alesandro had been the subject of a Special Inquiry investigation in March and April 1961, revealing numerous allegations of association with criminals in Baltimore.

His son, Mrs Pelosi’s brother Thomas D’Alesandro III, continued the D’Alesandro political dynasty in Maryland, elected President of the Baltimore City Council in 1963, and, in 1967, he ran for and won the office of Mayor.

Mrs Pelosi, after serving in Democratic Party positions, was elected to the United States House of Representatives in a special election in 1987. Facing little opposition in subsequent re-election efforts, she has served in the House ever since. She filed papers to run for the House again in the 2026 election just two weeks after the November 2024 elections. Mrs Pelosi just turned 85 years old.

So, it is with some amusement that I saw that the Speaker Emerita, as she refers to herself, had herself filmed ripping up a paper crown in Saturday’s “No Kings” silliness. Video below the fold. Continue reading →

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There’s no threat quite like an empty threat!

A fine gentleman named Tim Hannan, whose Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — biography simply describes himself as “New Yorker, pro-Democracy”, threatened us all with this vicious threat:

From here on out Donald Trump enablers are put on notice. Democracy will survive. We are not scared of Tinfoil dictator Trump. He may never be held to account but you will.

When challenged in Twitter by some, including me, to tell us how he was going to hold us accountable, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the brave Mr Hannan chose not to respond.

What Mr Hannan wrote is not a legally specific threat, so it’s not something for which he could legally be held accountable, but we can certainly mock him, which many did.

The “No Kings” protests were on Saturday, but here it is, Monday morning, and I have yet to see anything in the news about Donald Trump no longer being President. It’s cool here, but the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and somehow I have yet to be held accountable for having cast one of the 77,302,580 votes which made Mr Trump our President today. 🙂

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The economics of moral choices How Only Fans affects economics and society downstream

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain — The Patriarch Tree on Twitter since his old rsmccain account got trashed by the pre-Elon Musk regime — wrote about, in less than flattering terms about a ‘sex worker’ styling herself “Aella”. It seems that she had a birthday gang bang, sexually taking on 37 men on her 32nd (?) birthday. Mr McCain concluded:

That’s my theory, anyway. It is difficult to find any logical explanation for why someone would deliberately seek notoriety as a whore, but that’s the best I can do, based on the available information. As for my use of the venerable English noun whore, it is always preferable to euphemisms like “sex worker.” If you don’t want to be called a whore, don’t be a whore.

The definition of whore Mr McCain linked is a “woman who prostitutes her body for hire,” and while he wrote about the morality and eventual social repercussions of prostitution, especially in the internet age, I had a slightly different take.

Rush Limbaugh used to say that feminism was created to give ugly unattractive women access to the workplace, but Only Fans has enabled pretty girls to make many thousands of dollars by doing whatever on the internet. Newsweek addressed that claim that there are about 1.4 million American girls with Only Fans accounts, concluding that the number is a reasonable guesstimate. The OF girls could be defined as prostituting their images, without having to prostitute their bodies.

Of course, the shelf life of the OF girls is pretty short, but perhaps tens of thousands of dollars a month for showing their tits or more compared to $15 an hour as a clerk at Seven/Eleven? And it’s a lot safer than being a topless dancer at a local strip club! Yes, some will choose the more moral path, but the economics of the situation are staggering, perhaps enough to explain 1.4 million women just in the United States, around 2% of American women between 18 and 45 who are (supposedly) posting content on Only Fans.

It should be noted that some of these ladies might not be posting sexual content, but the numbers are still staggering.

But OF girls wouldn’t exist without the men who are willing to fork over $10 or so a month to subscribe to watch. It’s safer for the men, too, and cheaper than buying overpriced drinks and stuffing $5 bills in the g-strings of girls who still have no intention of f(ornicating) them. The privacy and safety of their own lonely and lousy apartments while they ‘abuse themselves’ for the same end result of going to a strip club? Yeah, that’s an economic winner!

The economics of ‘sex work’ in the twenty-oneth — no, not a typo, but a Picoism! — century seem pretty compelling: safer for the pretty girls, and safer, easier, and cheaper for the incels — or sometimes even married men — who watch them.

But, as with all things, there are the unintended consequences. The 5s, the average girls, the ones who don’t have great bodies, the ones who get lost in the crowds, wind up wondering where all the good men are, while the average guys, the male 5s, think that they’re in the right league to expect the 8s and 9s, because they were paying $10 a month to sixteen different OF girls in their late teens or early twenties and the OF girls simpered just enough to make them think they had some chance. Mr McCain had noted, years ago, how the self-proclaimed “supreme gentleman,” Elliot Rodger, the incel who murdered six people and wounded fourteen others before killing himself because the pretty blonde sorority girls weren’t interested in him. Mr Rodger, who was born into privilege, could easily have found a girlfriend had he been willing to look at girls who were in his league might be an extreme example, but I have to ask: how many guys seduced over the internet by 8s and 9s are unwilling to look at women who might be reasonably be possible mates for them?

So then the real 5 girls are more likely to give it up to any man interested, and some get knocked up and have a kid. Now we have average looking girls with a kid, looking for a decent, husband-material boyfriend, and the results are just what you’d expect: fewer marriages, fewer good marriages, and more loneliness and poverty for both adult men and women.

The OF girls themselves? Well, they’re pretty, so they will have more options, more men looking at them in real life. Some will decline to get involved with a former OF girl, some will never find out that the girls they like did Only Fans, and some men simply won’t care. But we do know that marriage rates and households headed by married couples in this country have been dropping precipitously. That is an economic as well as social problem, because unmarried people are generally poorer than married couples. Single women with children have a tremendous poverty rate.

Economics and culture are invariably intertwined, regardless of whether people want to believe it; culture impacts how well people do economically, and cultural choices, including those taken at a young age, have downstream effects.

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The President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued that Louisiana voters, exercising their free choices, were not voting correctly She also argued against the foundational guarantees of our representative democracy.

In 1986, Robert Cortez “Bobby” Scott, then a state Senator in Virginia, ran for election to the Commonwealth’s First Congressional District seat against incumbent Representative Herb Bateman (R-VA), losing in a landslide, 56% to 44%. In the redistricting which followed the 1990 Census, the state legislature, at the direction of the federal Department of Justice, reapportioned the Third District into a “majority-minority,” meaning majority black, district, just for Mr Scott. The new Third District ran along the James River, from Newport News to Richmond, packing in heavily black areas. It worked: Mr Scott stomped Republican Dan Jenkins 79%-21%. Mr Scott is still in the United States House of Representatives, having served since January 3, 1993, 32 years, 9 months, and 13 days ago.

But, there was another election result in 1992. Mr Bateman barely won re-election in the reconfigured First District against newcomer Andy Fox, with barely over 50% of the vote. Mr Fox ran against Mr Bateman in 1992, but his time the Republican won in a landslide, because so many solidly Democratic voters had been peeled away from the First and placed into the Third District.

It’s simple: A Republican congressman who was at least subject to a strong Democratic challenger now had his seat in the “safe Republican” category, and Mr Bateman held that seat until his death on September 11, 2000. My family and I were living in Hampton, Virginia, in the First District, during all of this, which is why I remember it so well.

Now comes Louisiana v. Callais, a case before the United States Supreme Court concerning how much legislatures can use race in consideration of redistricting. The Louisiana state legislature, seeing the previous result in Allen v Milligan, 2023, believed that a second majority black district needed to be created to comply with the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 52 USC §10301. But, to do that, the state came up with a district shaped like a snake, wholly unlike any definition of being compact.

Naturally, some state residents sued. Allen v Milligan allowed this kind or racial gerrymandering, but Louisiana v Callais threatens to undo that. Naturally, the left are up in arms, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson went so far as to claim that black Americans are “disabled” when it comes to voting.

Jackson noted that the majority opinion in a 2023 Supreme Court ruling — which found Alabama unlawfully diluted the voting power of black people in the state — “used the word ‘disabled’” to describe voters subject to “processes [that] are not equally open.”

There is an interesting point that is being mostly ignored in all of the debates. Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argued before the Court:

(Associate Justice Samuel) Alito suggested that racially polarized voting could easily be identified through statistical analysis, and it could be seen whether White Democrats vote for Black Democrats at a lower rate, for instance.

At which point Miss Nelson stepped right into the trap.

Nelson told him that White Democrats were not voting for Black candidates — whether they were Democrats or not. She said there was no question that even if there is some correlation, that race was the driving factor.

In other words, Miss Nelson was arguing that Louisiana voters, exercising their free choices, were not voting correctly. In a partisan climate in which the Democrats have been arguing about racial ‘equity’ in terms which seem very much like a zero-sum game, the arguments for black empowerment seem to be made in terms in which gains for black Americans concomitantly entail losses for white Americans. But whatever their partisan and philosophical reasons, our system is predicated upon a secret ballot and the right of the voters to choose to vote however they wish.

There is another, even more pernicious assumption behind all of this. In a country which the equal protection of the laws is guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment, the arguments of Miss Nelson are, in effect, that black citizens cannot be represented by white congressmen, and that includes the notion that white citizens cannot be represented by black congressmen. Our system of representation, in our cities and states as well as in Congress, is that our representatives represent all of the people withing the bounds of their districts; the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued against the foundational guarantees of our representative democracy.

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Killadelphia: It’s a good thing that crime is down!

I saw this tweet earlier, but decided to wait to write about it, waiting for The Philadelphia Inquirer, for which I am paying to subscribe, to have more. Sadly, the Inky didn’t have all that much more:

Police are investigating the death of a Philadelphia firefighter as homicide

The 56-year-old man was found dead in the Holmesburg section early Wednesday morning.

by Nate File | Wednesday, October 15, 2025 | 10:43 AM EDT | Updated: 11:08 AM EDT

A Philadelphia firefighter was killed in the city’s Holmesburg section in the early hours of Wednesday morning, police said.

The 56-year-old man was found dead inside a home on the 4700 block of Shelmire Avenue at 4 a.m. after police were called.

A 27-year-old male suspect is in custody, and detectives are investigating the incident as a homicide. The suspect told police when they arrived that there had been a disturbance in the home, but the circumstances of the incident were unclear.

There’s one more paragraph in the story, but it tells us nothing.

But what interested me is something on which I’ve previously written. The homeowners of 4725 Shelmire Avenue were so afraid of thieves and street criminals that they literally put themselves in jail, adding bars to their front porch to keep them out. They aren’t the only ones on the block who’ve done that, as the row house at 4755 Shelmire has the same barred-in porch.

A look at the 4700 block of Shelmire Avenue via Google Maps Streetscapes shows not a run-down row home neighborhood, but a wide street, with homes at least visually decently kept. Many have been modified to close in their porches to create additional interior space. There’s no garbage strewn around — the images were taken just last July — and the Holmesberg section of Northeast Philadelphia is far from the worst section of the city, yet we can still see residents afraid of crime.

Zillow shows the interior details of 4725 Shelmire, so it was obviously on the market recently, and Zillow guesstimates the value of the three bedroom, two bath, 1,280 ft² home to be $211,800. An affordable home in a clean-looking neighborhood in Northeast Philly!

The newspaper reported, just two days ago, that an increasing percentage of Philadelphians are paying more than 35% of their income on rent, a percentage that the Department of Housing and Urban Development considers to be “cost-burdened.” Looks to me that they should be buying on Shelmire .  .  . if they are not too afraid of crime.

 

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I check Bluesky so you don’t have to!

Will Bunch, the “national opinion columnist” for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is as thoroughly eaten up with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome as anyone on earth, and his rant this morning on Bluesky — he’s mostly abandoned Twitter — is thoroughly amusing. Mr Bunch is bemoaning “the media’s anemic (or non-) coverage of the massive No Kings movement,” which led me to check his own newspaper’s website. As of 8:11 AM EDT this morning, there were no stories showing up on the website that mentioned or even hinted as coverage of the #NoKings protests.

Even the Inquirer’s Editorial Board had to give President Trump (grudging) credit for the ceasefire and return of the hostages, so perhaps, just perhaps, the No Kings protests, scheduled for this coming Saturday, are not proving to be particularly well-timed. That he’s scheduled to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday to discuss ways to end the 3½-years-long Russo-Ukrainian War means that, despite his earlier failure to get an agreement there — something the left widely mocked — President Trump is still trying to work on a peace agreement there as well.

Can you imagine the apoplexy on the left if he did manage to get such an agreement? Imagine that: the “literally Hitler” demon to the left forging agreements to end two major wars?  🙂

Of course, the No Kings protests last summer were mostly a dud, despite the hype the left gave them, but at least they mostly avoided turning into riots. Perhaps that’s what the organizers think they need to become, to get much attention. William Teach noted that the global warming climate change protesters who have moved beyond peaceable assembly into destroying art and gluing themselves to the road to block traffic are now facing real punishment, so there’s that issue.

3gunGorilla tweeted an exchange from the Dave Ramsey Show:

“So you’re having protests all over the country next weekend?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re calling them ‘No Kings’ protests?”
“Yes, Dave.”
“But the person who you claim is trying to act like a King isn’t stopping the protests?”
+“Well …”
“And you don’t see the irony?”

‘Nuff said!