Author Archives: Dana Pico

Posted on by

Law enforcement in the City of Brotherly Love

Screen capture of tweet from Danielle Outlaw. Click on image to go to original.

The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website was rather amusing on Thursday morning. The Inquirer referred to an article from just before the end of last year, on a date when the city recorded its 555th homicide, on its way to the record of 562 for 2021,[1]It’s early in the year, but things haven’t gotten any better. As of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, January 12th, there had been 20 homicides reported by the Philadelphia Police Department, up … Continue reading which told us, “Philly ranks No. 3 on a list of trendy and affordable cities: The Realtor.com report cited Philadelphia’s culture, history, and “quaint” neighborhoods.” I suppose that, based on median home prices and major urban amenities, it is. We’ve noted how aging hipster — can you really be a hipster at age 44? — Amanda Marcotte sang the praises of her new South Philadelphia neighborhood, saying that “Philly’s food scene is the hotness,” but if she’s ever written more about her new hometown, I’ve missed it. The Inquirer article touted the city’s “world-class food scene, and its many small businesses, shops and nightlife, walkability, and something-for-everyone offerings as reasons the city deserves its ‘trendy’ title.”

Yet, on Wednesday evening, the seemingly-appropriately named Police Commissioner for the City of Philadelphia, Danielle Outlaw, has tweeted out her advice to victims of carjackings. While there are some reasonable safety tips, one, “Make it a habit to start your car and drive away immediately,” is horrible: your engine needs a few seconds to pump the motor oil from the oil pan through the engine, so starting the engine and driving away immediately increases the wear-and-tear on it. But the Commissioner’s main advice was simply that, if someone attempts to steal your car, let him.

“Your vehicle can be replaced. You are irreplaceable!” the Commissioner tells Philadelphians, which is true enough, in the abstract sense, but for the people who live in the city’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods, their insurance might not replace that vehicle; having their car stolen means having no car, not just the inconvenience of having to get Flo from Progressive buy you a new one. Philadelphia has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, but so many of the city’s liberals are wholly insulated from it.

Of course, many of the comments on the Commissioner’s tweet were along the lines of this one, “Buy a legal firearm, get you concealed carry permit. When these thugs attempt to ‘jack you, introduce them to your two friends, Smith & Wesson,” but let’s tell the truth here: if you had a legally-possessed weapon, and you used it against a carjacker in Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner would charge you for defending your property with deadly force. If you did the city a favor and insured that yours was the last vehicle that the carjacker attempted to steal, Mr Krasner would charge you with murder.

However, the two points I’ve mentioned, Philly’s trendiness and its awful homicide rate, are easily explained by one simple fact: as the Inquirer itself reported, less than three months ago, “Philly remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America: People from different racial and ethnic groups live in different neighborhoods, and the pace of desegregation has slowed.” Miss Marcotte and her ‘partner,’ Marc Faletti, can walk around South Philly in reasonable safety and security, and enjoy the food scene:

Our South Philly neighborhood, on the other hand, is a blast for those who spend way too much of their income on dining out. Local breweries are abundant, as well as experimental restaurants like Bing Bing, which serves a modern American spin on dim sum. And unlike New York, where you often have to travel an hour by subway to find good places to find more traditional Mexican or Asian cuisines, we’re in walking distance of one of the best taquerias on the East Coast and a tiny but magnificent Indonesian place.

For vegetarians like myself, Philadelphia’s restaurant scene is particularly amazing. It’s not just the nearly limitless number of excellent vegan restaurants, either. Nearly every place you eat out at here has a substantial number of vegetarian or vegan dishes, in contrast to New York, where some restaurants don’t even bother.

It’s no skin off her nose, but not that far away, in West Philadelphia,[2]West Philadelpha and South Philadelphia are not separate cities, but simply the names of neighborhoods and areas. Philadelphia has a lot of named neighborhoods. trying that is an attempt at avoiding darker corners, the open ends of alleys, and where some black residents are opposing physical improvements to sidewalks and streets because that might bring more white people into the neighborhood.

Miss Marcotte, and Inquirer urbanism writer Michaelle Bond can write about the trendiness of Philadelphia, because they have insulated themselves from the grittier neighborhoods, they have segregated themselves away from most of the city’s crime.

Commissioner Outlaw needn’t have bothered with her tweet: the areas in which carjackings are more likely to occur already know what they need to do, and the less crime ridden neighborhoods, which are, to be brutally frank about it, the whiter neighborhoods, where the liberals and the #woke don’t see the crime close up, can close their eyes to the things happening in Kensington and Strawberry Mansion.

References

References
↑1 It’s early in the year, but things haven’t gotten any better. As of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, January 12th, there had been 20 homicides reported by the Philadelphia Police Department, up from ‘just’ 13 on the same day in 2021’s record-setting year.
↑2 West Philadelpha and South Philadelphia are not separate cities, but simply the names of neighborhoods and areas. Philadelphia has a lot of named neighborhoods.
Posted on by

Black lives don’t really matter in Lexington

James Edward Ragland, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, public record.

Meet James Edward Ragland II, 31, from Detroit, Michigan. Mr Ragland was in Lexington, Kentucky, in Jaunary of 2019, at what Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Linda Blackford euphemistically called a “gentlemen’s club” — quotation marks in the original — when, in what the Lexington Police referred to as a “large disorder”, “a fight between several men and women broke out inside the club and moved outside the building just before the shooting.” In that melee, Mr Ragland shot and killed Iesha Edwards.

Mr Ragland fled the scene, but was arrested a month later in Detroit.

    On Jan. 31, Gaige Phillips, 29, was arrested in Detroit by U.S. Marshals on a charge of criminal facilitation to commit murder in the case, according to Lexington police. Phillips is accused of helping Ragland escape after the shooting.

Iesha Edwards, from her Facebook page. Click to enlarge.

Returned to Lexington, Mr Ragland faced a long list of charges, including murder, being a persistent felony offender, and two wanton endangerment, first degree, charges. But, because black lives really don’t matter, Mr Ragland was allowed to plead down! Fayette County Judge Julie Goodman sentenced Mr Ragland to ten years in prison after he accepted a plea bargain deal:

    Ragland had previously been charged with murder in the case but accepted a plea deal, reducing his charges and his sentence. He also pleaded guilty to two counts of wanton endangerment and one count of assault. He was sentenced to five years for each wanton endangerment charge, but Goodman decided to run those sentences at the same time as his manslaughter sentence.

    His fourth-degree assault conviction carried a sentence of 30 days, but because Ragland already had more than 2.5 years of custody credit while waiting for his case to be resolved, he won’t have to serve any additional time for that charge.

Mr Ragland was transferred to the Bluegrass State from Michigan, and booked into the Fayette County Detention Center on May 22, 2019. That means that he has been locked up in Kentucky for 964 days. With a sentence of 3652 days — 10 years, assuming two leap years — and 964 days already served, Mr Ragland has 2,688 days remaining on his sentence, if he’s not credited for three months in Michigan. That would put him completing his sentence on May 22, 2029, just a hair over seven years from now . . . . when Miss Edwards will still be stone-cold graveyard dead.

Supporting domestic violence survivor at the 2021 DV vigil. Photo from Commonwealth’s Attorney website. Click to enlarge.

So, I have to ask: did the Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney, Lou Ann Red Corn, believe that the evidence against Mr Ragland was shaky enough that he might be acquitted if he went to trial? Or did the life of Miss Edwards, the mother of two, just not matter all that much? Did Judge Goodman have no choice, via the plea deal, but to allow Mr Ragland’s multiple sentences to run concurrently, or did she have the option to have them run consecutively?

Miss Red Corn’s website has a couple of photos streaming through, one of them about domestic violence survivors, and another about helping victims, dominated by smiling white women, but, when the victim, when a murder victim, is a black woman killed outside a “gentlemen’s club,”[1]The natural assumption is that Miss Edwards was an employee of the Fox Club, and a stripper, but I have been unable to locate any confirmation of that, and do not take that assumption myself. well, we haven’t really been given enough information as to why Mr Ragland was offered a sweetheart plea deal which gets him out of jail while he’s still in his thirties, but the optics here aren’t very good.

Let’s face it: I’m a white man, one who has been very unimpressed with the #BlackLivesMatter movement. To me, much of it has been used as a way to excuse crime! But when I look at the attitude of the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Lexington Herald-Leader, and at the prosecutors in Philadelphia and Fayette County, and examine what they actually do, rather than what they say, my conclusion is that #BlackLivesMatter is, to them, nothing more than lip service.

We know one thing: while there is a possibility that Miss Red Corn’s evidence was weaker than that in which she felt confident, in the end, Iesha Edwards’ black life didn’t matter very much.

References

References
↑1 The natural assumption is that Miss Edwards was an employee of the Fox Club, and a stripper, but I have been unable to locate any confirmation of that, and do not take that assumption myself.
Posted on by

The Philadelphia Inquirer can’t handle the truth!

Might as well queue up Jack Nicholson and “You can’t handle the truth!” from A Few Good Men.

Screen capture of comments section, Sunday, January 10, 2022, at 7:32 PM EST. Click to enlarge.

On Sunday, we noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a sports section piece on the University of Pennsylvania’s male-to-female transgender swimmer Will Thomas, who goes by the name “Lia” these days. The first paragraph of our article stated:

    I was surprised to see that The Philadelphia Inquirer allowed reader comments on this article. Since it is, supposedly, a sports article, and the Inquirer didn’t close sports articles to comments when they did so on everything else, maybe an editor hasn’t figured it out yet. As I start this article, at 9:10 AM, there are ten comments up, including two of mine; I wonder how long that will last.

The answer was: they didn’t last long!

I ran across a photo if the masthead of The Philadelphia Inquirer from February 25, 1953, and noticed the ‘taglines’ that it used: “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. By Public ledger, the Inquirer was setting itself up as Philadelphia’s newspaper of record, which Wikipedia defines as “a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative.” That Wikipedia article named four newspapers of record for the United States: The New York Times (Founded 1851), The Washington Post (1877), The Los Angeles Times (1881) and The Wall Street Journal (1889). First printed on Monday, Jun1 1, 1829, the then Pennsylvania Inquirer is older than any of them, and is the third oldest continuously published newspaper in America, behind only the Hartford Courant (1764) and the New York Post (1801). “An editorial in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Inquirer promised that the paper would be devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion and ‘the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the people, equally against the abuses as the usurpation of power.’”

Boy has that changed! As has happened to other great newspapers, the newsroom of the Inquirer was captured by the young #woke, who forced the firing resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski over the headline Buildings Matter, Too.

“Devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion”? Yeah, that failed, too, as the Inquirer closed comments on the majority of its articles, stating that:

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

Screen capture of comments at 5:35 AM EST on January 10, 2022. Click to enlarge.

Really? How do they know? How can they be sure that these views do not represent more than a “tiny fraction” of their audience? Have they really done the research, or was it just that the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading didn’t like the idea that the riff-raff could express their opinions? Empirically, the research had been done for them: ten comments — at least on Sunday morning — and not one of them supported the idea that Mr Thomas was actually a woman, or that him competing against biological women athletically was in any way fair. Are we to presume that only a “tiny fraction” of Inquirer readers oppose the idea that ‘trans women’ should compete athletically against ‘cis women’, yet only that ‘tiny fraction’ bothered to comment?

As of 5:35 AM — yes, I’m up early because I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep — there are five new comments, none of which support the idea that ‘trans women’ should compete equally against biological women, and it’s my guess that all of them will disappear as soon as the editors begin day shift and get to work. Of course, I screen captured them, because it wouldn’t be long before the Inquirer tried to hide the evidence.

The newspaper’s reasoning for eliminating comments on most articles was:

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

    It’s not just Inquirer staff who are disaffected by the comments on many stories. We routinely hear from members of our community that the comments are alienating and detract from the journalism we publish.

    Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.

If such a small percentage read the comments, how is it that they “routinely hear from members of our community that the comments are alienating”?

The truth that the #woke of the Inquirer can’t handle is that most people, people with some actual common sense, do not agree with the notion that someone like Mr Thomas, who was born male, who grew up male, who went through puberty as a male, and who competed, successfully, though not overwhelmingly so, as a male, can just decide that he’s a woman, take testosterone suppressants for a year, and is now indistinguishable from a biological female? For the journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading at the Inquirer, the notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls is ‘settled science,’ and must not be questioned.

This photo, from the Inquirer article, tells you all you need to know, but, who are you going to believe: the #woke, or your lying eyes?

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
Posted on by

I missed one Two murders in Lexington in the first week of the year

On Saturday, I reported on Lexington’s first homicide of the year. The mistake I made was that it wasn’t the first!

    Lexington police investigating city’s first homicide of 2022, coroner confirms identity

    by Christopher Leach | Tuesday, January 4, 2022 | 7:23 AM EST | Updated: 1:49 PM EST

    Lexington police are investigating its first homicide of 2022 after a shooting near Deep Springs Elementary School left one person dead, according to police.

    Police said they responded to the area of Anniston Drive at 8:51 p.m. Monday. A 24-year-old male was found shot inside his residence.

    The Lexington Fire Department responded and advised the victim had died, per police. The Fayette County Coroner confirmed the victim’s identity as D’Andre Green.

There are a couple more paragraphs, but they basically say that the police have released no other information about the crime or suspects, and give contact information for the police for anyone who has information for them.

In an update to yesterday’s story, the Fayette County Coroner identified the victim in Friday’s homicide as Kobby Lee Martin, a 26-year-old man living in Lexington.

In a surprise to absolutely no one, the Lexington Police have not kept their homicide investigations page up to date, and neither killing has been listed. But the 2021 homicide investigation page shows that the first two murders in the city occurred on January 9th and January 21st, so 2022 has seen two killings earlier in the year than the first one in Lexington’s record-setting 2021.

Out of last year’s 37 homicides, the investigations page lists 13 as having been solved. That’s 35.14%.

Only nine days into the New Year, with ‘just’ two homicides, there is not enough information on which to justify any conclusions, but I will point out here that January of last year saw six murders, although one victim lingered on until early February and another late February before he expired.

Posted on by

The Philadelphia Inquirer props up transgender swimmer Will Thomas

I was surprised to see that The Philadelphia Inquirer allowed reader comments on this article. Since it is, supposedly, a sports article, and the Inquirer didn’t close sports articles to comments when they did so on everything else, maybe an editor hasn’t figured it out yet. As I start this article, at 9:10 AM, there are ten comments up, including two of mine; I wonder how long that will last.

    Lia Thomas swims on for Penn amid controversy

    Lia Thomas competed at home for last time in her Penn swimming career.

    by Scott Lauber | Saturday, January 8, 2022

    Penn swimmer Lia Thomas waits before competing in the 500m free race during a meet at UPenn’s Sheerr Pool in Philadelphia on Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022. Thomas is a transgender athlete who is among the nation’s top swimmers in her events. Photo by Heather Khalifa, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

    In the final home meet of her college career Saturday, Penn swimmer Lia Thomas won two freestyle races and continued along a path to the NCAA championships in March.

    And that would have been the end of the story except for this: Thomas is a transgender woman who is defeating most of her competition.

    So, as Thomas swung her right arm and touched the wall 1.47 seconds before Penn teammate Anna Kalandadze to win the 500-yard freestyle in a tri-meet against Yale and Dartmouth (Yale won the team competition), two female protesters held a “Stand Up 4 Women” sign on the sidewalk on Walnut Street and shouted about an unfair competitive advantage and a tilted playing field – or in this case, Sheerr Pool.

I do not normally like to include photos from the Inquirer, over plagiarism and copyright points, but this one falls under obvious Fair Use guidelines, in that it illustrates the point: does this swimmer look like a woman to you?

There are three other photos of the swimmer in the Inquirer article. The first is mostly unrevealing, but the second and the third show Will Thomas — The First Street Journal always refers to the transgendered by their real names and biologically appropriate pronouns — next to the women in the UPenn swim team, and the differences are obvious; Stevie Wonder could see that he isn’t a woman.

I did have to craft my two comments to not refer to Mr Thomas by his real first name or use the real gender pronoun to escape probable deletion. I asked:

    Did Thomas purposely drag out times to win, but not by so much? In the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio, the one which attracted the greatest attention due to the staggering difference in times, Thomas won the 500- yard freestyle event in 4:34.06 to 4:48.99 for second-place finisher Anna Kalandaze, a 14.93 second margin. Thomas’ time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500-yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Kalandaze’s second-place time.

For someone used to writing in a more formal style, that paragraph is painful, as is my second comment:

    Several articles have noted that Thomas’ wins have been met with crowd silence, while the second-place touches of cis-women swimmers have been greeted with loud cheers. It may be politically correct to assert that the transgendered are the sex they claim to be, but, at least in the natatorium, the crowds appear to see it differently.

    I note that Scott Lauber, the article author, was very consistent in using the name “Lia” and the feminine pronouns to refer to Thomas. I know, I know: that’s the Associated Press’, and the Inquirer’s, stylebook, but it’s a subtle attempt to slant the debate in the politically correct direction.

Doing such is the telling of a deliberate lie — and Mr Lauber knows full well that Mr Thomas isn’t a real woman, but in a newsroom full of the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading he can’t say anything unless he has another job lined up — to push the politically correct notion of gender transition. Every bird, every mammal, and every reptile, can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but somehow, today’s left have educated that ability right out of themselves.

I am shocked that the Inquirer is even allowing such a discussion; none of the readers comments that exist as of the time of this writing accept the notion that Mr Thomas is a woman, and everyone sees the basic unfairness of allowing someone who went completely through puberty, and was fully developed as a male, to just decide he’s female and compete against female athletes in sex-segregated sports.

That’s just basic common sense, but common sense is in very short supply when it comes to the left and their acceptance that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
Posted on by

Well, wahhh! Outgoing Governor Ralph Northam is upset because people are blaming him!

As soon as the Virginia highway shutdown became news, the left were out blaming Glenn Youngkin, who won the election last November.

But, oops! Mr Youngkin won’t take office until January 15th. That’s amusing enough in itself, but now Governor Northam is upset that people are criticizing him!

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam says he’s ‘sick and tired’ of his government being criticized for the I-95 traffic pileup that left hundreds stranded for hours

by John L Dorman | Saturday, January 8, 2022

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said Wednesday he was “sick and tired” of hearing criticism of “what went wrong” during the recent snowstorm that left hundreds of people stranded for hours on Interstate 95, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch.

During an interview on WRVA, a Richmond-area radio station, reporter Matt Demlein asked Northam about any updates in assessing how the huge transportation backlog transpired, especially as many were stuck in their vehicles with limited heat, minimal food options, and frigid outdoor temperatures.

The Democratic governor — who is term-limited and will leave office on January 15 — forcefully rejected the line of questioning about the incident, which made nationwide headlines.

“I don’t know why you’re sitting there saying, ‘what went wrong?'” Northam said. “This was a storm that we haven’t seen for a long time. It started with rain, and then turned into a slushy snow of eight to ten inches … more than what was predicted. And then after midnight, turned into essentially an ice rink.” . . . .
“We knew that the storm was coming. We put warnings out. Why don’t you start asking some of these individuals that were out on the highway for hours, one, did you know about the storm? Two, why did you feel it was so important to drive through such a snowstorm?” Northam said. “And three, in hindsight, do you think maybe you should have stayed home or wherever you were, rather than getting out on Interstate 95?

All of those tractor-trailers? They didn’t have a choice: it’s their job to deliver their loads, on time. The other people? Some of them doubtlessly had little choice. But Mr Northam is going to blame them.

You know, in some ways, he’s right: the Commonwealth was not prepared for the type of storm which hits the Old Dominion once in a blue moon, and it’s not really reasonable for the state to spend the money to prepare for something that rare.

But the reality is that he’s Governor of Virginia now because he asked for the job, told people he could do the job, and said that he was the man they should make responsible for running the Commonwealth. Someone who once held higher office once said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” The chief executives love to take credit for things when they go right, even if they weren’t actually the ones making things go right. They also get the blame when things go wrong, and things have gone wrong enough in Virginia that not only did Mr Youngkin defeat Democrat Terry McAuliffe, but Virginia voters flipped the state House of Delegates from Democrat to Republican control.

Time for him to get out of the kitchen.

Posted on by

Happy New Year! Lexington picks up where the city left off last year!

On December 30, 2021, Lexington recorded its 37th murder of the year, as 14-year-old Larry Perez-Morales was gunned down on Betsy Lane near the Lexington Cemetery. The 37 killings set a new annual record, topping the old number of 34 in 2020, which was, itself, a then-new record, topping the old record of 30 in 2019.

With 37 homicides in 365 days, Lexington was seeing one killing every ten days.

    Shooting victim found in Lexington street dies at scene Friday night

    by Karla Ward | Saturday, January 8, 2022 | 12:25 AM EST

    Lexington police were investigating after a person with a gunshot wound died after being found lying in the street Friday night.

    Police and the Lexington Fire Department were dispatched to a report of a person down on the 1700 block of Cantrill Drive, off Eastland Parkway, at 9:09 p.m., said Lexington police Lt. Brian Martin.

    When they arrived, (they) found the victim, who was suffering from a gunshot wound, in the street.

    The person, whose identity has not been released, was pronounced dead at the scene, Martin said. He said the shooting happened within “a short time frame” of when police were called.

The city’s first murder of 2021 was on January 9th, so a killing on January 7th of this year is pretty much right on schedule.

Friday was bitterly cold in the area, and temperatures Friday night in the city were around 10º and 15º Fahrenheit. Following Thursday’s 9.9 inches of snow,[1]My younger daughter measured 6½ inches on the backyard table, and claims that is the Official Snow Measurement Station for Lexington. the streets and sidewalks had snow and ice on them, but such did not keep the victim, and his killer, off the streets.

We have to realize something: we treat crime as an event, but it really isn’t. Rather, crime is a culture, one we measure, grossly, through events. Whether it’s Philadelphia, and its 562 homicides last year, or Chicago and the 797 murders there in 2021, or much smaller Lexington, and its 37, crime exists because the culture which accepts it and enables it exists.

References

References
↑1 My younger daughter measured 6½ inches on the backyard table, and claims that is the Official Snow Measurement Station for Lexington.
Posted on by

Dear Helen Ubiñas: if you want to see the reason why, look to your own newspaper

I have previously noted Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas, several times, based primarily on column from December of 2020, “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.” She wrote:

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

    By the end of 2020, that number more than doubled: 447 people gunned down.

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

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

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

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

That was thirteen months ago. What brings it to my attention again? Her column on Friday, and its subtitle:

    For two mothers touched by gun violence: ‘Pray, pray, and pray some more.’

    Numbers tend to attract attention around here; the people behind them, not always so much.

    by Helen Ubiñas | Friday, January 7, 2022

    At 12:55 p.m., on the eve of the new year, a 17-year-old died from a gunshot wound he suffered a day earlier.

    He was the 562nd person to be killed in Philadelphia in 2021.

    And, as it would turn out, the last homicide victim of the year.

    His name was Nasheem Choice, and three days later, on Jan. 3, he would have celebrated his 18th birthday.

There’s much more at the original, a good column which you should read.

But it’s that subtitle, noting that “around here” it’s the numbers which get attention, not the individuals who were killed. What do I see in the Inquirer, a newspaper which publisher Elizabeth Hughes vowed to make “an antiracist news organization”? I see that the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s five separate stories, a whole lot more than the two or three paragraphs most victims get.

Then there was the murder of Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly murdered by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. The Inquirer then published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy.

The Inquirer even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.

Compared to the coverage the Inquirer gives concerning black victims, that’s some real white privilege there!

Oh, it’s not as though the Inquirer doesn’t publish stories about black victims, at least when it comes to black victims who are ‘innocents’. The murder of Samir Jefferson merited two stories, and four stories about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes.[1]I did note my suspicion that young Mr Stokes might not have been quite the innocent the Inquirer, and writer Anna Orso, made him out to be. A story is merited if the victim was a local high school basketball star, and cute little white girls killed get tremendous coverage: a search of the newspaper’s website for Rian Thal returned 4855 results! But for the vast majority of black victims, Inquirer coverage is a couple paragraphs, mostly in the late evening, and which have disappeared from the main page of the newspaper’s website by morning.

Did the newspaper’s editors think that no one would notice this? Or is it that the editors have so internalized their own biases that they didn’t realize it themselves?

I’ve said it dozens of times: black lives don’t matter to the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, regardless of what they say, because their actions, their editorial decisions, speak far more loudly, and clearly, than their words.

Can Miss Ubiñas change that? Can she bring it to the editors’ attention? I have tried, but I’m just a nobody, and the editors seem to need a Somebody to point out what the readership can clearly see.

References

Posted on by

Charlotte ex-patriot aghast to find “Let’s go, Brandon” bumper sticker in North Carolina

My good friend William Teach alerted me to this article via a tweet:

From The Charlotte Observer, yet another McClatchy newspaper:

    There’s a real danger behind the juvenile ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ meme

    by Peter Horn | Friday, January 7, 2022 | 4:30 AM EST

    Back in Charlotte for the holidays, I was out on a walk when I noticed my parents’ neighbor’s truck. It’s a big truck. White, newish, plastered with bumper stickers in dense but ordered rows — mostly political, some football-related. Among many others was “Mean Tweets 2024” and “Let’s Go Brandon.”

    This, from a purportedly serious man. A grown-up by most senses of the word, likely born in the 1950s. A man with grown children of his own, a respectable career, two bowls of water by his mailbox for passing dogs and a nativity set in the front yard.

    I stopped and stared for a moment, wondering, how did we get here?

Much of the author’s dismay can be found in his bio at the bottom of the article:

    Peter Horn is a Charlotte native and a southern ex-pat for the greater part of the last decade. He currently lives in San Francisco and works as an investor and freelance writer.

Oh, he’s a native of Charlotte, but lives in ‘Frisco!

Also see: William Teach in The Pirate’s Cove: There’s A Real Danger In #LetsGoBrandon Or Something

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden carried the Pyrite State by a huge margin, 11,110,250 (63.48%) to President trump’s 6,006,429 (34.32%), but it was even worse in San Francisco, where Mr Biden won 378,156 (85.26%) to 56,417 (12.72%). Mr Horn was apparently never so triggered[1]In this, I am using the Urban Dictionary’s definition: “1.) *popular and well known definition* triggered is when someone gets offended or gets their feelings hurt, often used in memes to … Continue reading as he was when visiting his parents, because there probably aren’t a lot of “Let’s go, Brandon!” stickers seen around the feces-covered sidewalks and streets of the City by the Bay. While Mr Biden carried Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located, by a wide margin, 378,107 (66.68%) to 179,221 (31.60%), Mr Trump carried the Tarheel State as a whole, 2,758,775 (49.93%) to 2,684,292 (48.59%). Hey, you go to Carolina, and you’re likely to see Trump stickers and signs!

    I don’t mean the polarization. How did we reach this level of absurdity, where ”serious people” are comfortable putting thinly veiled ”F— Joe Biden bumper stickers on their trucks, like a group of 12-year-old boys snickering over walkie-talkies because surely Mom and Dad don’t know that word really means penis.

Well, it’s certainly one way to express one’s feelings about the current President without resorting to actual profanity. But if Mr Horn has been triggered, maybe it’s because he left his safe space on the left coast.

    For those unfamiliar with “Let’s Go Brandon,” it’s a viral slogan that’s coded criticism of President Joe Biden. It started when an NBC Sports reporter suggested fans at an Oct. 2 Talladega race were chanting “Let’s Go Brandon” during an interview with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown. They weren’t. They were actually chanting “F— Joe Biden.”

    It’s all just so juvenile. So pathetic.

One wonders: was Mr Horn similarly appalled at this, from his adopted home state?

    Hundreds of Artists Have Come Together to Say ‘Fuck Trump’
    Los Angeles gallery iam8bit launched the ongoing virtual exhibit on the President’s birthday

    By Liz Ohanesian -June 17, 2020

    On Sunday, June 14, the Echo Park-based creative production studio and art gallery iam8bit launched fucktrump.art, a hybrid virtual exhibition and protest where all of the works read “Fuck Trump” and are available to download for free as web and print resolution files so that anyone can share the message online or IRL.

    The date of the launch was significant—it was Donald Trump’s birthday and Flag Day, as well as a day often used to celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride—and the message was strong. Jon M. Gibson and Amanda White, co-founders of iam8bit, describe it as a “primal scream.”

    “It’s like punctuation for us at this point,” says White of the phrase “Fuck Trump,” adding that their hope is for “everyone who disagrees with the administration to be comfortable screaming it at the top of their lungs.”

Google search for “Fuck Trump signs” and you’ll get hundreds of images. But, perhaps for Mr Horn, that’s different somehow.

    But as I found myself thinking more about it, trying to find an historical parallel for this intersection of creeping illiberalism and giant oversized red shoes, it struck me how dangerous this moment in time really is.

    Because every minute spent shaking one’s head at the latest display of self-debasement by the GOP is a minute not spent on the insidious machinations behind the veil. Save for a few notable exceptions — who are currently being driven out of the party with pitchforks and tiki torches — in 2022 Republicanism is Trumpism.

You can follow the embedded link to read the rest, but it boils down to one thing: Mr Horn was using his sight of a “Let’s go, Brandon” bumper sticker primarily as the supposedly snappy beginning for his complaint that evil reich wing Republicans are trying to prevent legal voters from voting. No, we want legal voters to vote, but we want to restrict the ability of the left for cast fraudulent votes. I may have mocked him for his supposed triggering, but I doubt he actually was triggered; he just needed a starting hook for what he wanted to write.

Mr Horn suffers from a kind of denialism: he really can’t believe that other people would think differently from him, that other people might take different choices than he would. That’s not an uncommon problem for much of the American left.

References

References
↑1 In this, I am using the Urban Dictionary’s definition: “1.) *popular and well known definition* triggered is when someone gets offended or gets their feelings hurt, often used in memes to describe feminist, or people with strong victimization.”