Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The Philadelphia Police solve one murder

The killing, the 33rd of the year in the City of Brotherly Love, was, as most are, totally senseless.

    A man accused of beating a woman to death with pipes inside an Old City office was charged with murder

    Jeffrey Stepien, 48, is accused of killing Samantha Maag, 31. He is being held without bail after being charged with murder.

    by Chris Palmer | Thursday, January 20, 2022 | 2:39 PM EST

    Jeffrey Stepien, photo from 6ABC in Philadelphia. Click to enlarge.

    A 48-year-old man has been charged with murder for beating a woman to death inside an Old City office building on Wednesday, according to police.

    Jeffery Stepien was being held without bail and has also been charged with possessing an instrument of crime, according to court records.

    He is accused of attacking Samantha Maag, 31, of Gloucester Township, Camden County, who police said was seated at a reception desk on the eighth floor of an office building on the 300 block of Chestnut Street around 2:15 p.m. when Stepien attacked her from behind, striking her in the head with a pipe.

    Maag was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 3:16 p.m. Attempts to reach her relatives Thursday were not immediately successful.

Of course, The Philadelphia Inquirer did not publish Mr Stepien’s mugshot, even though it was freely available, and published by both WPVI-TV, Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated Philadelphia station, and KYT-TV, Channel 3, the CBS owned-and-operated affiliate.

Samantha Magg, photo from KYT-TV. Click to enlarge.

Mr Stepien has a prior criminal record, for simple assault (18 § 2701 §§ A(1)), “attempts to cause or intentionally, knowingly or recklessly causes bodily injury to another”, and recklessly endangering another person (18 § 2705), both of which are second degree misdemeanors, to which he was sentenced to the maximum, one to two years in the penitentiary. He pleaded guilty to the offenses, and the case was disposed of on May 5, 2011, so this was not an instance of a criminal who could have still been behind bars.

Police stated that Mr Stepien had rented space in the Old City office building, and may have been living there at the time, and may have been angered about being asked to move out of a non-residential space, but the crime remains under investigation. It was captured on surveillance video.

This makes two stories in the Inquirer, and I have to wonder: will there be more? After all, the victim was not just another gang-banger, but an innocent, and a cute white woman, both of whom tend to generate Inquirer stories.

Mr Stepien is being represented by the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which had no comment at press time. They will, of course, try to get him off with as little jail time as possible, but, if Mr Stepien is convicted of this, he should spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars at SCI Phoenix maximum security prison.

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The Karening of the left

The media were all atwitter — pun very much intended — about a story by National Public Radio’s Nina Reines[1]The wife of Dr H David Reines goes by Nina Totenberg, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar … Continue reading which claimed that Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch was refusing to wear a facemask around Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is a Type I diabetic, and thus at greater risk of serious symptoms if she contracts COVID-19, and that Chief Justice John Roberts had asked Mr Gorsuch to mask up.

The Justices themselves refuted the story, first with a joint message from Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch, and then from the Chief Justice. The much nicer Dana has more on this in Patterico’s Pontifications.

Despite the fact that the lovely Mrs Reines’ report has been discredited, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Helen Dunne[2]The wife of Michael Dunne goes by Helen Ubiñas, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar … Continue reading has run with it anyway.

    After NPR’s longtime Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg highlighted his behavior in a story this week, there was a lot of righteous outrage directed at Gorsuch.

    On social media, people called him all kinds of names: selfish, childish, petty. No argument here, and I suspect the pointed backlash spoke more to the sheer exhaustion from people tired of vaccine opponents and anti-maskers as the pandemic stretches into a third year.

So, it’s that the left are tired of people who don’t fall into line with their views. Got it!

Mrs Dunne continued to tell us about the denials of Mrs Reines’ story by Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch, and the Chief Justice, which is confirmation that she knew about those denials when she wrote her story, and then proceeded to tell her readers that she just didn’t believe them, saying “the statements read like textbook damage control”.

    Plus, “warm colleagues and friends” don’t need to be asked, by anyone, to do what needs to be done to protect one another. And they sure don’t need clarifying statements.

If someone has lied about them, they most certainly do.

    In an opinion piece for CNN, Kara Alaimo wrote that Gorsuch’s behavior was a shocking display of male entitlement.

    Agreed, and let’s take that a step further: It’s white male entitlement, because as it happens, Sotomayor, a fellow Puerto Rican, is the only woman of color on the bench. And, whew, the optics!

What a bunch of bovine feces! Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch are equals on the Court.[3]Justice Sotomayor, appointed by President Barack Obama, is senior to Justice Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump, but that seniority does not confer any difference in rank. The Chief Justice … Continue reading

    But while all eyes and ire seemed to land on Gorsuch, mine lingered longer on the other justices, because from the hallowed grounds of the White House to the more common spaces of our everyday workplaces, bad behavior can’t exist without enablers, not easily anyway. Even when — perhaps especially when — the enabling comes in the form of silence or inaction.

At which point, Mrs Dunne then includes the obligatory slam on President Trump.

    That problematic colleague at your office couldn’t continue to be a problem if the enablers didn’t dismiss or downplay their behavior.

    And as such, Gorsuch wouldn’t be able to act so coldheartedly without the implied or explicit consent of his fellow justices, including Sotomayor apparently, who — if that statement is any indication — gave him a pass to keep the peace. (But then the burdened are often expected to set aside their own comfort and safety.)

Yes, the ‘burdened’ are expected to take care of themselves! Mrs Dunne, and the left in general to a large extent, seem to believe that such ‘burdens’ can be shifted onto other people. Using her logic, even if COVID-19 somehow disappeared, every American ought to wear a face mask, all the time, during flu season, because who can know which passerby or office colleague is immunocompromised? Every adult ought to have to wear a facemask around children during RSV season, in the RSV can be a hospitalization-serious event.

Heck, why wait until flu and RSV seasons; viral and bacterial infections can occur at any time during the year, so, according to Mrs Dunne’s reasoning, we ought to all wear masks, all the time, because someone more susceptible to whatever might come along.

    But then, from supermarkets to the Supreme Court, we now live in a world where we continue to make adjustments and accommodations for people who have no regard for the greater good, who have to be asked and begged and cajoled to do the right thing because we value the appearance of harmony over the intentional practice of collective humanity.

What is the “greater good” of which the author writes? To me, individual rights and the preservation of such are the greater good, while Mrs Dunne seems to be rather opposed to anyone who has ideas of which she disapproves. She didn’t like it when Kyle Rittenhouse was not sent to jail for refusing to let armed thugs chase him down and beat him to death.

According to Mrs Dunne, it’s not just the guy who refuses to wear a diaper on his face who’s boorish, but everyone else who fails to wag their fingers and scold him is complicit, is enabling, as well. That some of us might support his right, and our rights, to not wear a mask in public seems not to have occurred to her. Mrs Dunne’s first name really ought to be Karen.

References

References
↑1 The wife of Dr H David Reines goes by Nina Totenberg, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar disrespect to him.
↑2 The wife of Michael Dunne goes by Helen Ubiñas, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar disrespect to him.
↑3 Justice Sotomayor, appointed by President Barack Obama, is senior to Justice Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump, but that seniority does not confer any difference in rank. The Chief Justice outranks the Associate Justices, which gives him some executive authority over the Court and its functions, but he is not the supervisor of the other Justices.
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A sad update A man shoots and kills a criminal in the act, and now he's facing firearms charges

We noted the story of a Philadelphia car owner shooting and killing the man who was trying to steal the catalytic converter from his automobile. The initial report was that the owner had a license for his firearm; that report was erroneous:

    A Philly man shot someone who was trying to steal his car. Now he’s charged with gun violations.

    Police arrest car owner who fatally shot a would-be car thief Tuesday morning.

    by Mensah M Dean | Wednesday, January 19, 2022 | 6:03 PM EST

    The Cobbs Creek car owner who fatally shot a man who was trying to steal his car or its catalytic converter on Tuesday morning has been charged with carrying a gun without a license, Philadelphia police said Wednesday.

    Steven Thompson, 54, who shot and killed one of three men who were tampering with his Acura as it was parked in front of his home in the 5800 block of Cobbs Creek Parkway, was charged with two counts of firearms violations.

    On Tuesday, police incorrectly said Thompson had a permit to carry the gun he used to shoot the would-be car thief, Satario Natividad, 51, just after 8:15 a.m.

Further down:

    Sherell Natividad welcomed news of an arrest in the death of her husband, a father of eight children and stepchildren.

    “I’m getting a little bit of justice,” she said. “That’s good news to hear. You just can’t go shooting people and not expect there’s going to be consequences behind that.”

    But she said murder charges were in order.

    “He took my children’s father away from them. He took my husband away from me,” she said. “I want more. He murdered my husband. Even though he was doing wrong, he still murdered him. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t do nothing.”

Sorry, Mrs Natividad, but your husband, the father of your children, was out breaking the law, was out stealing from people, and people defending their property might just do so violently. Replacement catalytic converters can cost over $1,000, so it’s not as though your husband stole a newspaper off someone’s porch. The Inquirer article noted that “Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said police found catalytic converters, tools and a handgun inside the Honda Accord.” That’s catalytic converters plural, so Mr Natividad and his fled-on-foot partners-in-crime had robbed at least two other car owners, had the tools to do so — which means that this was thought-out, and not a spur-of-the-moment thing — and had a firearm to boot. One assumes that the bad guys were prepared to meet any resistance with deadly force.

It’s not just that Mr Natividad “was doing wrong,” it was that he was a bad guy, a criminal.

Was this Mr Natividad’s first venture into crime? He was 51-years-old, not normally the age at which someone starts out on a felony theft career.

There is, of course, the obvious question: was Mrs Natividad aware of her husband’s criminal activities? Was she tolerating a criminal as her husband?

The only justice in this case would be dropping all of the charges against Mr Thompson: he took a criminal off of the streets of Philadelphia.

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Killadelphia! 2022 begins where 2021 left off in the City of Brotherly Love!

Nineteen days into the new year might be a touch early to draw conclusions from the numbers, so this can be taken with a large grain of coarse kosher salt.[1]This is what we use in the Pico household, which is why I put it that way. There is no additional meaning implied by that.

As of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, January 18th, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there have been 32 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love so far in 2022. That compares to ‘just’ 27 on the same date in 2021, a year which saw a record-shattering 562 murders in the city.

As both of my regular readers know, I’m kind of a numbers geek, so I did the math: 32 killings in 18 days works out to 1.7778 per day.

There was a bit of a lull in city murders in late July and August of 2021, but the killing rate picked up after Labor Day. Beginning the Tuesday after Labor day, September 7, 2021, there were 199 killings in the city, in 116 days, which works out to 1.7155 per day. The homicide rate in the city has actually picked up slightly this year. We can only hope that this year’s current murder rate is an early aberration, because it projects out to 649 homicides in the city!

I noted, just a few days ago, that The Philadelphia Inquirer had a positive story on Oliver Neal, the retired postman, who defended himself against a carjacker using his legally licensed firearm. I noted that I expected an Inquirer OpEd piece, or even a main editorial, telling us that Mr Neal’s actions, though legal, were unwise, but at least thus far, such hasn’t been posted on the newspaper’s website.

Now comes another story:

    Police: Southwest Philly homeowner fatally shot a man trying to steal his car or parts from it

    Police say a homeowner fatally shot a thief who was tampering with his car in the 5800 block of Cobbs Creek Parkway Tuesday morning.

    by Mensah M Dean | Wednesday, January 18, 2022

    For the second time in as many weeks, a Philadelphia citizen licensed to carry a gun shot a would-be thief, police said Tuesday.

    The 8:15 a.m. shooting in the 5800 block of Cobbs Creek Parkway happened when a neighborhood resident discovered three men trying to steal his car or its catalytic converter, police said.

    The owner stepped out of his front door and fired at least one shot at the three men, who tried to flee in a gray Honda Accord but ended up crashing into the side of a yellow Radnor Township school bus. Medics transported the wounded man to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead just after 9 a.m.

    Relatives who gathered at the crime scene, crying and embracing one another, said the shooting victim’s name was Satario Natividad, 51. The two other men who were with him fled on foot and remained at large.

    Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said that homicide detectives are heading up the investigation and that it is too early to make a decision on if the shooting was justified or not. They did not identify the car owner.

This is the kind of case in which I could see social justice District Attorney Larry Krasner wanting to charge the owner with something. We’ll probably find out — if the media report it — that Mr Natividad already had a criminal record; people don’t normally enter a life of crime at age 51.

Of course, the relatives of the dead criminal demand justice!

    “He did not have to come out and shoot him,” she said. “It was a car! All he had to do is call the police. Once someone turns their back, they are no longer a threat. He still has his car, but we do not have [Natividad]. It’s a material thing. They need to charge him. He’s in his doorway. You don’t shoot someone out in the street over a car.”

Actually, in a city like Philadelphia, where the police have no control over crime, and the District Attorney doesn’t like to prosecute the criminals who do get caught, yeah, you do shoot someone out in the street over a car. Inspector Vanore said, “Just from vision you could see catalytic converters, some tools, and what appears to be a firearm.” Robert Stacy McCain would say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” and Mr Natividad played a stupid game. Naturally, Mr Natividad’s relatives have been defending him, but the simple fact is that he was a criminal, caught in the act, and he won’t be stealing any more catalytic converters.

In my attempt to see if the Inquirer had written something to criticize Mr Neal’s actions, I found this main editorial:

    A new year requires a better plan to tackle gun violence crisis

    One of this board’s resolutions for the new year is to remain vigilant in our coverage to ensure that city efforts to reduce gun violence are working.

    by The Editorial Board | Monday, January 3, 2022

    It took about 90 minutes for Philadelphia to experience its first homicide of 2022.

    By 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 1, a 33-year-old had been fatally shot in Feltonville. Less than 20 minutes later, four miles away near Temple University, a 16-year-old was shot and killed. The first two homicide victims of 2022 were among 14 people who were shot on the first day of the new year.

    The grim statistics hardly do justice to the mounting toll of gun violence in our city: 562 lives lost last year and another roughly 1,800 people who were shot and survived.

    In 2021, the city reached a bleak milestone in notching a record number of homicides. Now, the question city officials should be asking themselves is: How do we keep it from happening again in 2022?

Of course, the Editorial Board blame all sorts of things: the coronavirus pandemic, burned out streetlights, not enough public libraries, no new gun control legislation by the state government, really on everything but the criminals themselves.

    One of this board’s resolutions for the new year is to remain vigilant in our coverage to ensure that the city’s efforts to reduce gun violence are working. We propose a new year’s resolution for every entity in city government: Before every action, decision, or new program, ask how it contributes to reducing gun violence — and communicate the answer. That’s the kind of commitment a crisis of this magnitude requires.

No, what a crisis of this magnitude requires is correctly identifying the problem, requires telling the truth about what the problem really is, and this an “anti racist news organization” like the Inquirer will not do. The Editorial Board want to blame everything but the criminals themselves, because to blame the criminals is to say aloud the part everyone knows: the homicide problem in Philadelphia, and in all of our major cities, is a black homicide problem!

Of course, it’s raaaaacist to point that out, but until that is pointed out, until that is addressed, the problem can never be solved.

References

References
↑1 This is what we use in the Pico household, which is why I put it that way. There is no additional meaning implied by that.
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The climate activists don’t want you to have a choice! The truth is simple: the American left are pro-choice on exactly one thing

I found this story on my Google reader feed on my iPad on Monday morning, and of course it caught my eye . . . because, due to what the Weather Channel called ‘Winter Storm Izzy,’ ice and heavy wet snow weighed down power lines and tree limbs, and we lost electricity at 8:04 PM EST on Sunday.

The campaign to ban gas stoves is heating up

Mike Bebernes · Senior Editor · Saturday, January 15, 2022 · 4:56 PM

Over the past three years, dozens of cities across the country have banned natural gas hookups in newly constructed buildings as part of a growing campaign to reduce carbon emissions from homes. The movement scored a major victory last month, when New York City’s outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law a ban on gas hookups in new buildings.

Though new laws apply to the entire home, the policy debate often focuses on one room in particular: the kitchen. Gas stoves account for a relatively small share of the emissions released by a typical household, but they’ve become a proxy for a larger fight over how far efforts to curb at-home natural gas consumption in the name of fighting climate change should go.

Natural gas consumption accounts for 80 percent of fossil fuel emissions from residential and commercial buildings, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. One study estimated that New York’s ban on its own would create an emissions reduction comparable to taking 450,000 cars off the road. But the movement has met significant pushback. About 35 percent of U.S. homes use gas for cooking, and surveys show that many people are resistant to switching to an electric or induction range. The gas industry has also launched a massive lobbying campaign that has helped convince 19 Republican-led states to preemptively bar local governments from imposing bans on natural gas.

There’s more at the original.

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

I have previously noted that “it seems that everybody wants a gas range.”

We did, too. So when we remodeled our kitchen in 2018, we installed what Mrs Pico wanted, a gas — propane in our case, being out in the country beyond natural gas lines — range, replacing the old electric one that came with the house when we bought it.

We had other reasons, as well. Our house was all electric, and our first winter here was miserable. It got colder than usual for a winter in central/eastern Kentucky, and the electric heat pump just wouldn’t keep up very well. Then, when we lost electricity for 4½ days in an ice storm, it was decided: we would not depend just on sparktricity for heat, cooking and hot water. We added a propane fireplace and water heater as well, so if we lose electricity again — and we’re pretty much at the end of the service line, last ones to get service restored out here — we’ll still have heat and hot water and can cook.

Yes, my wife and I remodeled that kitchen all by ourselves, with help from my sisters and, occasionally, a nephew, but no ‘professionals’ were involved. The plumbing, the electrical, the drywall, the floor and backsplash time, the cabinet installation, the wallpaper, the window installation, everything you see — and you can click on the image to enlarge it — with the exception of the red quartz countertop installation was done by us.

Last March we had the floods, and while the flooding did not damage our house, it did trash the HVAC system. It was in the mid-forties in March, and, after a day getting the propane tank back in position — it had floated, but since I had tied it to a tree, didn’t float away — we had heat from our propane fireplace.

And the past few days? The electricity went out at 8:04 PM on Sunday, and wasn’t restored until 5:45 PM on Tuesday. While it got up to around 40º Tuesday afternoon, it was below freezing on Sunday, and on Sunday and Monday nights.

So, what did we have? We had heat, from the propane stove, and we had hot water, from the propane hot water heater, and we even had French toast for breakfast this morning, cooked on the propane stove.

Were it up to the climate activists, we’d have been cold, dirty, and hungry.

Climate change activists see gas bans as a powerful way to reduce the greenhouse gases created by buildings, which account for about 13 percent of total U.S. emissions. They argue that — unlike burgeoning technologies like a green power grid and electric vehicles — clean alternatives to gas heaters, appliances and stoves are readily available to most consumers. Critics of the bans, on the other hand, are skeptical of how much they’ll really reduce emissions, worry about increasing costs for homeowners and argue that market-based solutions will be most effective at promoting a transition to electrified homes.

Range from the Generation Next house, Newton, MA. Click to enlarge.

Thing is, that’s not what people want! In it’s 2018 season, This Old House worked on it’s ‘Generation Next‘ house in Newton, Massachusetts, and the obviously well-to-do homeowners in very, very liberal Massachusetts, in Middlesex County, which gave 71.00% of its votes to Joe Biden, chose natural gas for heating, hot water, and cooking.

Perhaps the homeowners were among the 26.11% of Middlesex County voters who cast their ballots for President Trump!

Also see: William Teach, Your Fridge Is An Agent Of Climate Catastrophe Or Something

For my family, gas was the logical choice. We live way out in the country, and when the power goes out, it can be out for a long time. For my older daughter, who bought a 1924 bungalow in Lexington, when her heating system had to be replaced — which was when she bought the place, and we knew it — the choice was also gas, though she didn’t update to a gas range. In the middle of the city, if the power goes out, it’s unlikely to be out for days at a time. A gas furnace can keep a home nice and warm even on the coldest of days, something heat-pump based HVAC systems have trouble achieving.

But if these choices were the logical ones for my family, they were choices the climate activists not only didn’t want us to take, but don’t even want us to have. They want their choices to be our choices, our only choices, because, well because they’re just better than us.

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Let the punishment fit the crime

Brandon Combs, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Brandon Lee Combs, who must be presumed innocent of all charges until proven guilty, is currently lodged in the Fayette County Detention Center, charged with “TORTURE DOG/CAT W/SERIAL PHYS INJ OR DEATH”

KRS § 525.135 Torture of dog or cat:

  1. As used in this section, unless the context otherwise requires, “torture” means the intentional infliction of or subjection to extreme physical pain or injury, motivated by an intent to increase or prolong the pain of the animal.
  2. A person is guilty of torture of a dog or cat when he or she without legal justification intentionally tortures a domestic dog or cat.
  3. Torture of a dog or cat is a Class A misdemeanor for the first offense and a Class D felony for each subsequent offense if the dog or cat suffers physical injury as a result of the torture, and a Class D felony if the dog or cat suffers serious physical injury or death as a result of the torture.

It would seem that being charged with “serial” physical injury puts this as a Class D felony. The punishment for a Class D felony is imprisonment for “not less than one (1) year nor more than five (5) years.”

I wonder: will the Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney, Lou Ann Red Corn, show Mr Combs, if he is in fact the person who tortured Lillah, the same lenience she showed James Edward Ragland, when she allowed Mr Ragland to plead down from murder to manslaughter, setting a total sentence of ten years for fatelly shooting a woman in the back in a fight outside a strip club? If Iesha Edwards’ life didn’t matter more than that to Miss Red Corn, why should the physical pain and injuries to a dog merit five years in the clink?

If Mr Combs is convicted, I know to what punishment I would sentence him, but, of course, I’m not a judge.

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A good guy in Philadelphia

Screen capture of tweet from Danielle Outlaw.

I will admit to being stunned. We noted, on Thursday, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw’s tweet telling the people of the city what they should do if accosted by a carjacker, which was surrender:

  • If you are confronted by a carjacker, give up your car & leave the scene
  • Avoid verbal and physical confrontations
  • Make a mental note of suspect and their vehicle’s description
  • If there is a child in the vehicle, let the carjacker know “my child is in the car”

The Commissioner’s advice was simple: your car can be replaced, but you can’t be.

On Friday, we reported that some Philadelphians are not going so quietly, and are fighting back, and that a 60-year-old man in Mt Airy refused to be a victim, and shot the punk who tried to jack his car.

So, why am I stunned? Because The Philadelphia Inquirer published a very positive story about the victim who refused to be a victim!

    Grandfather recounts how he survived a shootout with a teen carjacker

    “I thought I got shot. That’s how close the bullet came to my head,” said Oliver Neal, 60, a retired U.S. Postal Service employee from Northeast Philly.

    by Mensah M Dean | Friday, January 14, 2022 | 6:00 PM EST

    As Oliver Neal stood on the sidewalk watching his white Pontiac being loaded onto a AAA flatbed truck Friday afternoon, he was still having trouble hearing in his left ear, he said.

    “I thought I got shot. That’s how close the bullet came to my head,” Neal, 60, said less than 24 hours after surviving an attempted carjacking in West Mount Airy. The 16-year-old gunman was shot in both legs and is hospitalized, according to police. They have not released his name.

    Neal, who has a license to carry a gun, was not charged with a crime.

    Other than the ringing in his ear and a small mark under his left eye, possibly caused by gunshot residue, he believes, Neal was uninjured despite being just several feet from the gunman during multiple exchanges of gunfire.

There’s more at the original, and I really wish I could relate more of it here, but that starts to become copyright infringement. All I can do is suggest that you should follow the embedded link to the original and read it yourself.

Mr Neal doesn’t believe that he is a hero, but to many people, he is now. He not only protected himself and his property, but he took a 16-year-old delinquent off the streets, albeit not permanently. ‘Social Justice’ District Attorney Larry Krasner will probably not allow the punk to be charged with anything serious, so unless his leg wounds wind up to be crippling, he’ll be back sticking guns in people’s faces to steal their stuff.

There is a bigger picture here, however. The 16-year-old might just learn his lesson, and straighten up and try to fly right. Trouble is, in Philly, he’s more likely to learn the lesson to just shoot first, and not give a future victim time to defend himself. Othe potential carjackers might hear of this, and take that same lesson.

The Inquirer? I expected an OpEd, or perhaps even a main editorial, telling readers just how unwise Mr Neal’s actions were. He could have died, we will (probably) be told, he could have killed that misguided young man, some pundit might say — as if that’s a bad thing! — and someone will probably rail about how this situation wouldn’t have escalated into violence if Mr Neal hadn’t been allowed a concealed carry permit, as though the fact that the assailant was carrying a weapon he wasn’t legally allowed to have was meaningless. Had the carjacker been killed, we’d soon be treated to stories from his wailing mother and aunts about how he was such a good boy and he shouldn’t have been killed over a simple, teenaged mistake.

But, at least so far, the pundits have been silent.
‘

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Philadelphians are fighting back!

On Thursday morning, we noted Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw’s tweet about what Philadelphians should do if someone attempts to steal their car. Well, on Thursday night, a brave man acted against the Commissioner’s advice. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    Man, 60, shoots suspected carjacker, 16, in West Mount Airy

    Philadelphia has experienced a dramatic surge in carjackings with 757 in 2021 compared to 404 in 2020.

    by Robert Moran | Friday, January 14, 2022

    Intersection of Sharpnack and Cherokee Streets, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

    A 60-year-old man shot and wounded an armed teen during a carjacking Thursday night in the city’s West Mount Airy section, police said.

    The incident occurred around 7:45 p.m. at Sharpnack and Cherokee Streets, where the 16-year-old boy attempted to take the man’s white Pontiac at gunpoint, police said.

    A gun battle ensued and the suspect was shot once in each leg and grazed in the chest. The teen was later apprehended in the area of Germantown Avenue and Slocum Street and taken to Einstein Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition.

    At the crime scene, police found two firearms — one belonging to the driver on the hood of the Pontiac and the other on the ground in front of the car, as well as 13 spent shell casings.

Fortunately, the teenaged punk was a lousy shot; the car owner was not injured. Also fortunately, the owner had a license to carry a concealed firearm. And the Inquirer story also tells us why Commissioner Outlaw made her ‘don’t resist’ tweet: Philadelphians have been fighting back!

I had not seen those stories previously, and it’s not a surprise: the last three links were not to Inquirer stories, but to stories from the local television stations. Why, it’s almost as though the Inquirer doesn’t want people to know about carjacking victims fighting back. And the Police Commissioner certainly doesn’t want fighting back encouraged.

But law-abiding Philadelphians, people who go through the channels and have obtained permits to carry firearms, are fighting back, because the city and its law enforcement agencies, the Police Department and the District Attorney’s office, have not been fighting against crime very successfully. Commissioner Outlaw wrote:

    Last year, there were 757 reported carjackings in Philadelphia, an increase of 34% over 2020. Out of those 757 reported carjackings, police arrested 150 individuals, clearing 93 investigations through those arrests.

93 ÷ 757 = 0.1228533685601057. The Commissioner has just told people that the Philadelphia Police Department cleared by arrest a whopping 12.29% of carjackings in the city. How many of those 150 people arrested were actually convicted of anything under the George Soros funded District Attorney, Larry Krasner, was not told to us.

Crudely put, if you want to jack a car in the city, you have nine chances out of ten of getting away with it.

The City of Brotherly Love is one of the oldest in America. Founded in 1682 by William Penn, to be the capital of Pennsylvania Colony, if any city in America ought to be civilized, it should be Philly. Instead, it has become Dodge City, because under decades of Democratic rule, under a District Attorney more interested in exonerating criminals and going after police officers, and a Police Commissioner brought up in the soft-on-crime cities of Oakland, California and Portland, Oregon, the city is fighting for “social justice” rather than actual justice.

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The left love them some authoritarian government . . . when they are in power

A few days ago, William Teach noted an article from The Business Standard:

    What if democracy and climate mitigation are incompatible?

    The COP framework is ill-matched to solving climate change in a timely fashion because it does not solve the international governance dilemma at its heart

    by Cameron Abadi | Sunday, January 9, 2022 | 11:05 AM

    In the past 14 months, the United States and Germany both held national elections that placed climate change policy squarely at the center of national debate. The fact that two of the world’s five largest economies committed to addressing the world’s most pressing crisis through public discourse followed by public voting was an unprecedented democratic experiment.

    It did not work out as optimists hoped. On the one hand, the victorious parties in both countries vowed to achieve what was necessary to prevent the worst effects of climate change from occurring, in accordance with the international climate agreement unanimously approved in Paris in 2015.

    But on the other hand, in neither country can the resulting policies be described as fulfilling that promise.

There’s a lot more at the original. But the two money paragraphs are further down:

    Representatives from the US and German governments say their policies are the result of the necessary compromises demanded by the democratic process. But it is fair to wonder whether that is just another way of restating the problem. . . . .

    Democracy works by compromise, but climate change is precisely the type of problem that seems not to allow for it. As the clock on those climate timelines continues to tick, this structural mismatch is becoming increasingly exposed.

Now comes Talking Points Memo:

    This Supreme Court Case Could Make Or Break The Biden Presidency (And The Planet)

    by Kate Riga | Thursday, January 13, 2022 | 10:29 AM EST

    The Supreme Court will hear a case in February that could decide the future of the Biden presidency — and gut its ability to mitigate climate change in the face of congressional inaction.

    The case, West Virginia v. EPA, centers on the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Should the Court move to limit what the EPA can do, that, alone, would be incredibly significant.

    But the Court, with its heavily conservative slant, could take the opportunity to go further, slashing the power of federal agencies across the board, a move that would hobble the Biden administration’s ability to enact its climate agenda as well as a long list of other priorities.

    “There is a significant likelihood that how the Court handles this case will affect how much leeway agencies have to interpret authority statutes going forward,” Jonathan Adler, founding director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told TPM.

    On environmental policy in particular, Congress has been unable or unwilling to pass major legislation for about 30 years, a stasis that has continued even as the dire threat of climate change has become evident. That leaves agencies like the EPA as the only entities available to take up the slack, slowing climate change through their regulatory and rule-making abilities. If the Court limits the EPA’s power to regulate, there are no strong, dependable avenues left on the federal level to make environmental policy.

Here is the fundamental error that the left assume: that because Congress has not passed the legislation they want, Congress has somehow failed to act. No, by not changing the law, Congress have said, in effect, we are happy enough with the laws already on the books.

    Fear of the Court’s potential for aggression here is not mere speculation. Last week’s arguments over a couple of Biden administration vaccine mandates gave the justices ample time to air their skepticism over the exercise of agency power, even in a case concerning health-care facilities where the agency’s congressionally-given authority is fairly explicit.

One thing is abundantly clear: Congress have given up far too much of their power to the executive branch, and mid-level bureaucrats who write ‘regulations’ which Congress would never pass if the members had to do something really radical like actually vote on them. If the President — any President — sometimes seems like a tinpot dictator, it’s because Congress have ceded to the executive too much authority in the first place.

    But the Court could go further, using this case in its quest to limit agency power. One of the tools the conservative justices could use to achieve that is the major questions doctrine, which holds that some issues are of such economic and political significance that the Court will assume that Congress did not intend to delegate that power to the agency unless the statute is specific.

    It’s squishy, and gives the justices significant power to smack down regulations: how do you determine levels of economic and political significance? How do you decide what statutory language is specific enough to count?

    The conservative justices also showed a willingness to approach cases through the lens of this doctrine in the vaccine mandate case last week, many suggesting in their questioning that Congress needed to be much more specific in its conveyance of authority.

Heaven forfend! that the Supreme Court say that it should take an act of Congress, rather than a decree from OSHA, that people would have to accept an injection into their bodies, or lose their jobs!

Do we really want to give to bureaucrats the authority to require the acceptance of a vaccine the long-term effects of which have yet to be tested? Do we really want to give to bureaucrats the authority to completely alter our entire energy production and transportation systems? That’s what Talking Points Memo seems to want, for one simple reason: what they want government to do are things which 535 individual Representatives and Senators would never pass, because they are, in the end, responsible to their constituents, to the actual voters.

If the public don’t want it, it should not be forced on us by government.