Bad causes attract bad people

Stephen Ireland, photo by Surrey Police.

Stephen Ireland came to my attention due to his harassment of British author J K Rowling, she of the Harry Potter series fame. Miss Rowling is very much a leftist, and a supporter of homosexuals. She even declared Albus Dumbledore, the fictitious headmaster of the fictitious Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in her series to be homosexual, even though that had never been written or implied in the actual series.

Yes, I’ve read all of the Harry Potter series!

But that wasn’t good enough for some on the left, because she also realized that, while she thoroughly supported homosexuals, the idea that people could actually change their sex was too cockamamie for even an author writing about magic spells to be believed. She was labeled a TERF, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, a term which was originally a politically neutral description, but which has become enough of a pejorative that the Associated Press Stylebook notified writers on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — that TERF, along with “gender-critical” should not be used.

As we have noted previously, bad causes attract bad people, which naturally includes Mr Iraland. From The British Broadcasting Company:

Pride group founder jailed for rape of boy, 12

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Irreconcilable differences

We have previously reported on Will Thomas, the male swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania, who decided that he was really a woman, started calling himself “Lia”, and went on to compete on Penn’s women’s swim team. A 6’3″ tall man male, ranked 462nd, he quickly became number one in women’s swimming. Why, it’s almost as though there are real physical differences between males and females, differences which make a difference in sports and physical activities.

There are many, many things which made something of a difference in the campaign between former President Donald Trump and then-Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff, and one of the issues hammered on by our then-former President was the far-left’s insistence that ‘transgender’ women, like Mr Thomas, really are women. Mr Trump won the election, and has been putting his policies into place.

Penn strikes agreement with Trump administration over trans athletes

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy!

The New York Post, our nation’s second oldest continuously published daily newspaper, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801, reported:

As a member of WaPo’s video department, (Thomas LeGro) was part of a team of reporters that won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for coverage of former Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Moore threatened to sue the Washington Post that year after the outlet published allegations that he romantically pursued a 14-year-old girl when he was in his 30s, which he vehemently denied.

As someone who managed to trash Mr Moore’s Senate candidacy with allegations that he used to date underaged girls, one would thing that Thomas LeGro would understand the dangers of child pornography, but apparently he (allegedly) did not. From The Washington Post:

Washington Post editor charged with possessing child pornography

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Philadelphia and the culture of lawlessness

For a Democrat, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s chief editorial board writer Daniel Pearson is one of the not-so-bad guys. He’s actually a (mostly) moderate guy who wants to see the laws enforced, though perhaps less so when it comes to our immigration laws and serious criminal laws in general; you can’t endorse the George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police hating District Attorney Larry Krasner and be too serious about law enforcement!

But, a commuter using the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, himself, he sure wants to see a crackdown on the turnstile jumpers and fare evaders! I guess that’s something.

SEPTA’s fare evasion crackdown is no joke. Ask the more than 3,200 people criminally charged this year.

SEPTA says far too many Philadelphians aren’t paying to ride the transit system. It costs the agency about $50 million yearly in lost revenue.

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Mustn’t ‘peace’ mean more than just the absence of war?

People have been crying for peace, peace, more loudly in the civilized West since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas. We good Westerners have tended to ignore conflicts in other parts of the world.

In our religion studies after Mass on Sunday, we were going over the meaning of the word “peace.” The Gospel reading for next Sunday is Luke 10:1-12, which includes:

3 Go; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. 4 Carry no money belt, no bag, no shoes; and greet no one on the way. 5 Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house.’ 6 If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you. 7 Stay in that house, eating and drinking what they give you; for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Do not keep moving from house to house. 8 Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is set before you; 9 and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

The commentary in the study guides brought up the definition of shalom as it is used in Hebrew.

The ancient Hebrew meaning of shalam was “to make something whole”. Not just regarding practical restoration of things that were lost or stolen. But with an overall sense of fulness and completeness in mind, body and estate.

Too often in English, we see the word ‘peace’ as meaning the absence of direct violence or war. Thus, when people call for peace between Russia and Ukraine, or between Israel and the Arabs, they too often mean just a ceasefire. A ceasefire in itself is a very basic good, but mustn’t peace actually mean more than that? Mustn’t peace mean more than “I am not trying to kill anyone, and no one is trying to kill me”, but also mean “I don’t want to kill anyone, and no one wants to kill me”? Continue reading

Why do the left always root for the bad guys?

Have you noticed? The ‘heroes’ of the American left, like Michael Brown, George Floyd, Freddie Gray, and Trayvon Martin were all bad guys? Mr Floyd was a convicted felon and drug addict, caught in the act of passing counterfeit money, Mr Brown had just roughed up a shopkeeper half his size, and then attempted to assault a police officer. Mr Martin had assaulted George Zimmerman. Mr Gray had a criminal record with 18 prior arrests, on drug charges, three separate assault charges, and minor crimes and had spent time in jail.

You’d think that at least a few of the ‘heroes’ chosen by the left to condemn the police and the law would actually be decent people, but that never, ever seems to be the case. Even 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing around with a toy gun, which had the bright orange tip that indicated it was a toy removed, and after being reported to the police, appeared to be drawing the weapon on officers. Young Mr Rice probably wasn’t a bad kid, but he did a very stupid thing, one that got him killed.

And so we come, yet again, to one of my favorite whipping boys, Will Bunch, the far-left columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. In his Friday morning column, championing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Mr Bunch admitted: Continue reading

Is Jake Tapper really this dumb?

Is this actually real? Did the distinguished Jake Tapper actually say, “Asking questions is literally our job. Demanding facts and answers, instead of just taking a President’s word for it”? After over four years of the credentialed media covering for Joe Biden’s descent into dementia, now Mr Tapper is saying that the media’s job is to demand facts and answers? Click on the image and you can see the video for yourself.

There’s a faked video of the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunninghan trashing Jacy Sheldon of the Connecticut Sun that’s making the rounds on Facebook that’s pretty funny. In it, Miss Cunningham said that Miss Sheldon fell into the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, after the kerfuffle over Miss Cunningham’s hard foul on Miss Sheldon to stop a layup at the end of the game, a foul that was completely unnecessary, since the Fever were too far ahead of the Sun for the basket to have made a difference. It’s a good enough fake that it makes me wonder just how many artificial intelligence fakes there are in the world. Continue reading

The urban heat island effect drives climate change

Stephanie Abrams explains urban heat island effect on The Weather Channel. Screen capture by D R Pico on June 26, 2025.

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove snarked this morning that it was “Your Fault: ‘Climate Change’ Made Current Raleigh Heat Wave More Likely,” which amused me greatly. I know, I know, it’s just shocking, shocking! that it got hot in a major urban area in the South, in the summer, but Mr Teach mocked WRAL telling people how horrible the heat was, and that it was all the fault of global warming climate change.

As it happens, I have my own weather station, and I’m OCD enough to keep an eye on it. And what I’ve noticed is that while yes, it got into the nineties at the farm, it was still a few degrees less than the forecasts.

It was 69.4º F at 7:00 this morning, lower than the forecast of 72º for that time. Continue reading

He threw his life away

Miles Pfeffer after being apprehended, with a “What the f(ornicate) did I do?” look on his face.

Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead
Mama, life had just begun
But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away. — Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen/

Young Miles Pfeffer, a privileged punk kid and previously adjudicated delinquent who had been ‘sentenced’ to a whopping one month of probation, decided to go into Philadelphia for some harmless fun, jacking cars and petty theft. No big deal, right, just some harmless teenaged fun, right? After all, he was still a senior in high school, and what high school kid hasn’t gotten into a little trouble, right?

Miles Pfeffer, the Bucks County man who killed a Temple police officer, found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison

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