Author Archives: Dana Pico

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World War III Watch: The liberal newspapers are going all out neocon!

I have said it before: There has been a whole lot of World War II thinking applied to the Russo-Ukraine War — or perhaps I should call it Russo-Ukraine War 2.0, considering Russia’s seizure and annexation of part of Ukraine in 2014 — with the logic that pushed the United Kingdom and France to declare war on Nazi Germany two days after the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, but that is such superficial thinking that I am amazed no one has realized it. In that event, the UK and France could not and did not actually do anything to liberate Poland; the liberation of Poland came in 1944, when the Red Army pushed out the Germans, and ‘liberation’ by the Soviet Union hardly freed the Poles.

And there’s that biggest of differences: no one in Europe, or anywhere in the world, had in 1939 what Russia has now: a strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal. As he was losing the war, Adolf Hitler tried everything he could, used every weapon he had, but, other than the V-1 and V-2 terror rockets, and a short-range bomber force that could reach only parts of England, had no power to strike at his enemies. We do not and cannot know what Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin will do if, in the end, he sees Russia really losing RUW 2.0, but we do know that he could cross that nuclear threshold, and use tactical nukes against Ukrainian troop concentrations and other targets. And once that nuclear threshold is crossed, who can know when things will stop? And if the United States and NATO nations are supplying Ukraine from bases in Poland, how are those bases not legitimate targets if Russia has the weapons to reach them . . . and Russia does.

But that doesn’t really seem to concern a lot of “strategic thinkers” these days:

At the NATO summit in Vilnius: Will Biden seize or squander the chance to end Putin’s war on Ukraine?

Biden must offer Kyiv a clear path to NATO membership after the end of the fighting and ensure it has the weapons to win.

by Trudy Rubin | Sunday, July 9, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

Does Joe Biden want to be remembered as the president who lost Ukraine?

“(T)he president who lost Ukraine”? What, are we back in 1949, and the “who lost China” political idiocy? There was a lot of that around, as though the United States could have sent the Army into China to stop Mao Zedong and the Communists from routing Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, chasing them off the mainland and into Formosa?

That question must be asked as NATO allies prepare to meet at a historic summit in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on Tuesday and Wednesday, which will focus on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued aggression in Ukraine.

This is the moment when NATO members, led by Biden, should be laying out a clear path for Ukraine to join the alliance once the war ends. This is the moment, which, if seized, could plausibly lead to Ukrainian victory by year’s end.

“(P)lausibly,” huh? Nothing in this war has proceeded in anything like what the military “experts” predicted. Russia was not able to brush the Ukrainians aside, but the rosy projections that the Ukrainians could push the Russians back out have not materialized, either. The only things which have really advanced in this war are the mud, the blood, the devastation, and the death.

This is also the moment when Biden should be announcing that the United States will finally expedite the arrival of critical weapons systems — long-range missiles and F-16 fighter jets — that are vital to the success of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

As of this writing, though, all signs are that Biden will squander the moment, and none of the above will happen. As John Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said during a webinar last week, ”Very thin gruel is likely in Vilnius.” If so, Biden and NATO will be gifting Putin big time, even as he reels from a failed mutiny attempt by one of his closest allies.

There’s still a bit of time for Biden to shift gears and surprise us. Here are the vital steps he should take at the summit to help end Putin’s war.

Make clear that the United States and NATO support a Ukrainian “victory” according to Kyiv’s definition, which means regaining all territory seized by Russia, including Crimea. The White House keeps saying we are with Kyiv “as long as it takes,” but never clarifies “takes for what?” Why not say we are with the Ukrainians until they win?

President Putin had sent his troops into the eastern half of Ukraine back in 2014, seizing a large chunk of the territory, including Crimea, which Russia directly annexed. Mrs Rubin now wants the current war to continue until Ukraine not only holds off and then pushes out Russia from the parts of Ukraine that it tried to seize when she invaded in 2022, but also to expel Russia from land it has held for the last nine years, the seizure of which our NATO allies and we condemned in 2014, but which Presidents Obama, Trump, and, initially, Biden actually did nothing about.

Also see: William Teach: Ukraine Totally Vows Not To Use The Cluster Bombs Biden’s Giving Them In Russia

There’s a lot more of Mrs Rubin’s column, in which she advocates sending 300 KM range ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles to Ukraine, which has “promised” not to use them on targets inside Russia, but who can know, in advance, whether that promise would be kept if a desperate Ukraine identified targets inside Russia — or Byelorus — against which the weapons would be useful?

In what almost seems as though the Head Neoconservative sent a memo around to his minions, The Washington Post had several articles on the subject. A straight news piece noted that U.S. leaders insist war with Russia must end before Ukraine joins NATO, and even neoconservative Max Boot, very much a Ukraine supporter, realized that, as much as his “heart” says Ukraine should be admitted into NATO, his “head” says no.

Yet there is deep and understandable reluctance among Western European states and the United States to admit Ukraine to NATO, because it is at war with Russia and will be for the foreseeable future. This isn’t a stable stalemate like the division of East and West Germany or North and South Korea. This is a dynamic, ongoing conflict that, if NATO were to take in Ukraine, could draw other members into a shooting war with a nuclear-armed Russia.

It’s true, as Scheunemann and Farkas argue, that Article 5 — which holds “that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies” — “does not mandate a specific response by member states.” NATO members could say they are complying with Article 5 by doing what they are already doing: supplying Ukraine with weapons, training and intelligence and imposing sanctions on Russia. But there has always been an implicit assumption that an armed attack on a NATO member would result in military action by other NATO members. If that’s not the case, it would risk watering down Article 5 and reducing the overall effectiveness of the NATO alliance. Do we really want to send a message to Putin that he could invade, say, Lithuania and the West won’t fight to defend that embattled democracy?

If Mr Boot was uncommonly cautious, Marc A. Thiessen and Stephen E. Biegun were less so, arguing that only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine.

No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues. That would be tantamount to a declaration of war with Russia. But it is equally true that after a cease-fire, a durable peace cannot be achieved unless that peace is guaranteed by NATO membership.

Even Mrs Rubin said that NATO membership for Ukraine should only come after Ukraine wins its war, or a cease-fire is somehow declared.

But what would that mean? If declaring a cease-fire means that Ukraine would them be offered NATO membership, then any incentive President Putin has for agreeing to a cease-fire is greatly diminished. More, if a ‘path’ to membership is specified, President Putin would know what he needed to do, and when he needed to do it.

We do not know what a post-Putin Russia will look like, but there’s one point I do not see the neocons considering. With all of the comparisons to ‘we should have stopped Adolf Hitler in 1938’ that we see concerning Vladimir Putin, the Nazi leader was 49 years old in 1938, while Vladimir Vladimirovich will turn 71 in three months time. With a Russian military which will have to rebuild following the war with Ukraine, regardless of how that war ends, the argument that we have to deter future aggression from him seems short-sighted. Even if Russia finally wins in Ukraine, and Mr Putin manages to hang onto power for the rest of his miserable life, he could be approaching, or even over, 80 years old before Russia would be ready for another aggressive move, and Russian military leaders of tomorrow, who today are the field-grade officers mired in the Ukraine war, are going to have the experience to know that another such assault against another nation will not go according to plan.

When NATO was formed, there were ‘buffer states’ between NATO and the Soviet Union; today, NATO nations are directly on Russia’s borders, and that fact gets a lot more serious if Ukraine becomes one of them. Many Western analysts say that, since NATO is a wholly defensive alliance, that shouldn’t really be a concern of the Russians, but they are thinking in Western terms, and not with a Russian mindset. When an American ‘analyst’ tells us how the Russians should feel, should think, he’s talking out of his ass, because it’s not necessarily how the Russians will feel about things.

How did we react when the USSR prepared to install nuclear weapons in Cuba? President Kennedy risked a direct military conflict with Soviet naval forces, at a time when the Soviets’ nuclear forces existed, but were vastly inferior to our own.

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Killadelphia: What the Philly media won’t tell us

With the Kingsessing mass shooting being a Philadelphia story, it’s unsurprising that The Philadelphia Inquirer would have several follow-up stories on it.

As soon as the name of Kimbrady Carriker was released, his social media were investigated, and photos of Mr Carriker in female dress led to immediate speculation that he was, like Audrey Hale in Nashville, yet another transgender killer. Well, that led to Philly officials quickly denying it:

While he acknowledged the social media images that appear to show Carriker wearing women’s clothing and jewelry, Asa Khalif, a member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, condemned the “violent” language coming from the “conservative press” about Carriker’s gender identity and shared what the district attorney’s office knows firsthand about Carriker’s gender identity.

“Appear to show”? No, there’s no “appear to show” here, but actually show. Why would Mr Khalif, who supports the homosexual and transgender community, and must surely not be offended by, or see anything wrong, with cross-dressing, want to mealy-mouth things?

“The suspect has not identified themselves as trans. They have only identified themselves as male,” Khalif said at Wednesday’s news conference. “But the language spewed out by the conservative press is violent and is dangerous, and it’s targeting trans women of color. It’s rallying the community to be violent, and we’re better than that.”

I saw a video of Mr Khalif’s statement, and while he stated that Mr Carriker had not identified as transgender or anything other than male, I also noticed that he went out of his way to use “they/them” pronouns to refer to the suspect. Did Mr Carriker express a preference for such to be used? If so, it hasn’t made the credentialed press, but speaking with the District Attorney at his side, he might have been clued in to something the DA’s office knew but hasn’t been made public.

Khalif condemned those who label trans people as “killers.”

“They are the most vulnerable to violence,” he said. “They want to live their lives, and they have every right to do so, and we will not allow conservative bigots to use that type of language to attack trans people.”

District Attorney Larry Krasner expressed similar sentiments.

“There are some people for whom hate is a full-time job,” Krasner said. “And if they can stay away from the facts and talk about nonsense, that’s what they’re going to do.”

Mr Khalif, who tweeted on the Fourth of July, “So when i say Fuck The Police..don’t tell me that’s disrespectful..the violence against black people is beyond disrespectful!”, keeps telling us, through multiple tweets, and retweets that the alleged shooter isn’t transgender. The Philadelphia Inquirer also jumped on that bandwagon:

Conservative media outlets claimed Carriker was transgender based on Facebook photos of him dressed in feminine clothing. However, Carriker is identified as male on public records and district attorney officials said Wednesday that he identifies as male.

I actually avoided making such a claim, writing on Independence Day:

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

But, you know what I also haven’t seen in the Philly media? You know what Mr Khalif, a member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for District Attorney Larry Krasner, hasn’t yet told us? Mr Carriker’s grandmother said that he was homosexual:

Ms Carriker said her grandson was gay and would sometimes dress in women’s clothing, but had not undergone gender transition surgery or treatment.

She said she made it clear to Carriker that she disapproved of him wearing women’s clothes due to her Christian beliefs.

“I saw him one time in female clothes, and from the expression on my face, from that point on, he never came in female clothes around me because he knew how I felt about it,” she told The Independent.

“He was trying to find himself. He didn’t know where he belonged. I used to talk to him about it, but he didn’t like to converse with me about things like that.”

The Philadelphia media, so quick to tell us some of Mr Carriker’s political views, his support for the Second Amendment, admiration of Tucker Carlson, and hating of President Biden, but soft-peddling his support of #BlackLivesMatter and the riots in many cities in the wake of the unfortunate death during the arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd, and telling us that he wasn’t transgendered, never mentioned, at least as far as I could find, that he is homosexual. It took a report from a newspaper in London, England, for us to get that news.

It is not a surprise to anyone who pays attention to the Philly media that they would keep such under wraps.

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Remember you haters! Calling them ‘groomers’ and saying that ‘they’re coming after our kids’ is sexist, homophobic, transphobic and just plain false!

There are times I think that I’ve written on the subject of ‘transgenderism’ too frequently, but it keeps coming up in the news. I wouldn’t care if Jack wanted to call himself Jill, if the ‘transgendered’ weren’t trying to use the power of the state to force other people to go along with their delusions.

You will not find this story many places, and certainly not in the leftist part of the credentialed media. From the New York Post:

California school suspends 2 children for misgendering classmate

By Hannah Grossman , Fox News | Friday, July 7, 2023 | 3:31 PM EDT | Updated

A California school district suspended two children for five days after a misgendering incident took place, and then subjected them to a training called “restorative justice,” according to an email reviewed by Fox News Digital.

The email was sent by a recently departed principal of Herbert Hoover High School located in the Glendale Unified School District. It was first reported by GUSD Parents Voices.

The former principal, Jennifer Earl, described two students who misgendered a transgender student, and then ran away as the teacher attempted to correct them.

There’s some disagreement here. The Post story states that the students correctly referenced a student’s sex “misgendered a transgender student,” but the local Fox 11 report has the suspended student “misgendering” a teacher.

So, what is “restorative justice” in the Glendale United School District? The district has a handy graph of its system, as shown in a photo in the Post. It has “Control” on one axis, defined as “Pressure Limits (and?) Expectations”, which can only mean that the district believes that, in the case of “restorative justice”, high pressure is acceptable, as long as it is accompanied with high levels of “Support – Encouragement – Nurturing”.

Further down:

GUSD explained to Fox News Digital that they make determinations if a misgendering – generally defined as using the wrong pronouns – is considered bullying based on whether a student’s perceived intent.

“A student has never been punished, much less suspended, for accidentally using the wrong pronoun to refer to a peer or staff member. However, a student could be suspended if the action escalated to harassment or bullying,” a spokesperson said.

Translation: if we assume that the school district’s spokescritter is telling the truth, the district decided that the “action escalated to harassment or bullying”.

Now we get to the district’s definition of a re-education camp “restorative justice”

The district’s website explains restorative justice on its website.

Restorative justice is a re-education of students and gaining control over a situation based on the perceived wrongs they committed.

So, even the district uses the term “re-education”. Got it!

First the person making the restorative justice circle will ask “barrier breaking” questions, such as:

“What is the greatest value that guides your life?”

“What gives you the most security?”

“If you could smash one thing… what would you smash?”

If I could smash one thing, it would be the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

“Describe the ideal family.”

Simple: a mother and father, married to each other, living with and rearing their minor children. Anything else, anything else, is less than ideal. This is the system which successful human societies have had for as far back into the past as we have any real knowledge of human sociological structures.

The district’s website continues, “When there is harm or conflict within the established community, restorative responses help to repair the damage. This is done through processes that bring harmed and harmers together to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals. As a result, community is once again restored bringing back a sense of belonging to all.”

So, “restorative justice” exists when the “harmed and harmers” are brought together, but note the rest: “to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals.” Simply put, “restorative justice” cannot be achieved unless the two students who correctly recognized the ‘transgender’ person’s sex who “misgendered” someone agree that the Special Snowflake™ person they correctly referenced “misgendered” is actually the sex the transgender individual claims to be rather than the sex they actually are, and say that they are oh-so-sorry.

Simply put, the Glendale Unified School District is teaching that transgenderism is real, that a person actually can change his ‘gender,’ and if you decline to go along with that notion, you will be punished.

Remember how we have been told that the government may not establish a religion? Well, the Catholic Church, the majority of Protestant Christian denominations, Judaism, and Islam all agree that transgenderism is not something with which their faiths agree, yet the Glendale Unified School District, apparently as required by law in California, are teaching something major which is against the religious faiths of most Americans.

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Killadelphia: A Philadelphia councilcritter tells us the truth The problem isn't guns; the problem is her rotten constituents

Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier (D-Philadelphia). Photo from her city biography page and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

The Washington Post quoted Philadelphian City Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier, a Democrat who represents the area of southwest Philadelphia in which the mass murder occurred, though possibly in a way she might regret:

Philadelphia City Council member Jamie R. Gauthier (D), who represents areas where the shooting occurred, described her district as “under siege” by gun violence.

“It creates a situation where mostly Black and Brown people can’t be in their neighborhood enjoying summer weather. Kids — anyone — enjoying their block should not live in fear of being shot and killed,” she said Tuesday.

Now that Democrats control the state house for the first time in 12 years following last November’s election, Gauthier said some movement on gun control legislation has started. However, any house bills would still face opposition in the GOP-controlled state senate.

“In Pennsylvania, you have Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the cities and outside of that, you have a lot of rural areas that don’t look like us and don’t have the same issues with everyday gun violence — and don’t have the same motivation to really cut off access to these types of weapons,” she said. “We have a long way to go to get these kinds of weapons off the street.”

“(D)on’t look like us” means ‘are mostly white,’ or so I inferred, rather different from the Kingsessing neighborhood in southwest Philly. that’s fairly innocuous. But then we get to “don’t have the same issues with everyday gun violence,” and it raises the obvious question: why does Miss Gauthier’s district, why does her city, have “issues with everyday gun violence” when so much of Pennsylvania outside of Philly does not?

I previously wrote that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse in 2021: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.

Things got slightly better in the City of Brotherly Love in 2022, with 516 homicides officially reported in the Philadelphia, out of 1,015 total homicides for the Commonwealth. That’s still 50.84% of the killings in the Commonwealth!

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

The Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 population estimates for Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia specifically, were 12,972,008 and 1,567,258 respectively, meaning that Philly had just 12.08% of the state’s population. The homicide rate for the rest of the Keystone State was 4.38 per 100,000 population, while for Philly it works out to 32.92 per 100,000, 7½ times the rest of the Commonwealth.

Strip out the 138 homicides in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, and the 65 other counties in the Commonwealth had 361 homicides for 10,171,497 people, for a murder rate of 3.55 per 100,000.

Councilwoman Gauthier was born in Kingsessing; she more than represents the third councilmanic district, but this mass killing was in her home neighborhood. She knows it, and has told the truth about it, however inadvertently, so it has to be asked: why is her neighborhood, why is her city, so much worse than the rest of the Keystone State?

Carbon County, 2022 population of 65,460, where I lived before retirement, has had exactly zero murders this year, and a high, for them, number of killings in 2022, two. My former home county has plenty of woods, and there are a lot of hunters there. I remember stopping at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe on my way to work, when buck season began, and I’d see plenty of deer hunters, including some teenagers, in their camouflage gear, and with their weapons in their trucks and Jeeps, and never worried about it in the slightest. Everyone I knew in Jim Thorpe had a firearm of some type, but, shockingly enough, we weren’t killing people at anywhere close to the rate of the City of Brotherly Love.

The Democratic ‘leaders’ in Philly have long been whining that state law does not allow the city to pass and institute gun control laws which are stricter than those of the Commonwealth as a whole, but that begs the obvious question: if the homicide rate in Philly is the fault of the state’s gun control laws, why don’t we see homicide rates across Pennsylvania like are the case in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh?

Dear Councilwoman Gauthier: the problem isn’t the laws, but the rotten people in your neighborhood, the people you represent.
__________________________________
Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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The journolism of The Washington Post Why won't the professional media tell the whole truth?

No, I did not misspell journolism in the title of this article. 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, and boy, did The Washington Post demonstrate that today!

I normally use the headlines from articles in newspapers, with the hyperlink embedded in the headline, but today I am using a screen capture of the Post’s article, because I want to document for the reader the time it was published, at 12:28 PM EDT on Tuesday, July 4th, but updated at 7:03 PM. If you cannot see the image clearly enough, just click on it, and it will show up enlarged.

What we know about the mass shooting in Philadelphia

By Kim Bellware, Tamia Fowlkes, Kelsey Ables and María Luisa Paúl | Updated July 4, 2023 at 7:03 p.m. EDT | Published July 4, 2023 at 12:28 p.m. EDT

Five people were killed and two children were wounded in a Monday night mass killing in Philadelphia, authorities say. A man suspected of the shooting has been arrested after firing on victims “seemingly at random,” Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said during a Tuesday news conference.

“Let me crystal clear: What happened last night in our Kingsessing neighborhood was unimaginably disgusting and horrifying,” Outlaw said.

Here’s what we know about the shooting in the largely residential area in southwest Philadelphia.

The victims

The five who were killed are all male, Outlaw said Monday.

Police identified them as Daujan Brown, 15; Lashyd Merritt, 20; Dymir Stanton, 29; Joseph Wamah Jr., 31; and Ralph Moralis, 59. Brown’s address was unknown; the other victims all lived close to the scene of the shooting. The two wounded children, ages 2 and 13, were in stable condition late Monday, Outlaw said.

Two people were also injured by broken glass during the shooting, including the twin of the 2-year-old gunshot victim, Philadelphia Police staff inspector Ernest Ransom said Tuesday.

“The suspect fired at a vehicle being operated by a mother who was driving her set of twins home,” Ransom said. “One of the twins suffered a gunshot wound to the leg. Their sibling sustained injuries to the eyes from shattered glass.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

That’s all pretty unremarkable, standard journalism. But here’s where the Post veers off into the weeds:

Who’s the shooter?

Two people were in custody in connection with the shooting, authorities said: a 40-year-old man who is suspected in the killings, and one person who may have fired at the shooter.

The gunman was shooting as police pursued him on foot and was found wearing a bulletproof vest and magazines, police said. He had an AR-style rifle and a handgun, as well as a police scanner, according to Outlaw. Police found about 50 spent shell cases, Outlaw said.

Charges are pending for the 40-year-old man suspected in the killings, police said Tuesday afternoon.

“The suspect, while wearing body armor, a ski mask and holding a AR-15-style assault rifle was observed at several locations near 56th Street near Chester Avenue and Springfield Avenue,” Ransom said. He noted that the suspect began shooting “aimlessly at occupied vehicles and individuals on the street as they walked.”

There’s more at the original.

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

I’m waiting to find out if Mr Carriker left us a ‘manifesto,’ the way the ‘transgender’ Nashville murderer, Audrey Hale, did, a ‘manifesto’ that the authorities have thus far refused to release, and have managed to keep from being leaked.

At least The New York Times managed to include:

In initial reports, police described the suspect as a 40-year-old male, but authorities later clarified that they were unsure of the suspect’s gender identity and in a news conference on Tuesday used the pronouns “they/them.”

It wasn’t just the Post. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in an article time-stamped “an hour ago” when I opened it at 9:29 PM, said absolutely nothing about Mr Carriker being black, or anything about him being ‘transgender,’ a cross-dresser, or whatever.

The New York Post, our nation’s second-oldest newspaper, one which does not shy away from sensationalism, but one which is also unafraid of publishing the truth regardless of political correctness, did tell us about the alleged shooter.

The professional media love to tell us how special they are, because the First Amendment mentions the press specifically. Of course, the First Amendment is protecting the right to publish, and not somehow glorifying individual publishers, but the people at the Post and the Times and the Inquirer sure don’t like to see it that way. To me, the best way for an individual media company to glorify itself would be to simply tell the truth, and tell us the whole truth.

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Out-of-control ‘wilding’ teens run Wawa out of Center City, so Josh Kruger blames not the brats, but Wawa

I’ve said it before: Wawa coffee is the best you can buy! Better than Starbucks, better than Doughdaddy’s, better than Dunkin’ Donuts. And in Philadelphia, Wawa sponsors the Independence Day fireworks, as though the city can’t produce fireworks on its own. But Josh Kruger is mad at Wawa!

Hey Wawa, we’ll take Center City stores over fireworks, please

The way Wawa has treated us is hardly worth a parade or fireworks or title sponsor recognition.

by Josh Kruger | Independence Day, July 4, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

By now, you’ve seen the commercials and swirling, groovy banners for Wawa Hoagiefest. You might’ve even eaten one of the beloved local brand’s sandwiches at a discount as part of this year’s 15th anniversary of “Hoagie Love” — at least that’s what the convenience chain calls it. Or maybe you’re participating in any one of over 40 Wawa Welcome America community events celebrating America’s independence.

That’s all well and good — if you don’t mind fraternizing with a company that sees you as the enemy.

If you’re confused, that’s OK. I, too, was disconcerted when I came to the realization that Wawa is no good anymore.

Really, folks, if we have any respect for ourselves, we’ll stop this charade and simply speak the truth: It’s time that we as a city broke up with the idea that we are into Wawa because Wawa is definitely not into us. Not when it counts, at least.

Good heavens, what has Wawa done that has so upset Mr Kruger? After a paragraph in which he trashes Wawa’s quick foods, he continued:

Bad food is one thing. Bad manners exhibited by a company that scapegoats the community we live, work, and play in is another matter altogether. This, unlike the terrible food, is personal.

You might remember this dastardly move as Wawa announced the closure of some Center City locations, citing public safety concerns. Just recently, it announced the impending July 16 closure of the landmark Second and South Streets location, too, following neighborhood complaints of public disorder and crime.

After news of the first two closures, The Inquirer’s own Editorial Board somberly wept that the action was a “dire statement about public safety in Philadelphia.”

To me, it was more a dire statement about the ethics of the privately held corporation’s executive leadership.

One would hope that this alleged “dire statement about the ethics of the privately held corporation’s executive leadership” is a statement that the corporation’s executive leadership doesn’t want to see its employees assaulted, injured, or even killed. Such would seem to me to be a pretty positive statement about the leadership!

Mr Kruger combitched that, Heaven forfend!, Wawa was moving into more suburban areas, and starting to sell gasoline. As we have previously noted, at least some Wawas are also installing Tesla charging stations. Gosh, moving into areas with less crime, and meeting a potential customer demand? How evil is that!?!

But then the author complained that Wawa was moving into other dangerous areas:

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Democrats Kill Each Other in Baltimore; Mayor Blames … Texas, Florida, Alabama?

In 2019, Wawa cheerily announced it was expanding into Baltimore, despite Baltimore’s murder rate of 58 homicides per 100,000 residents. Philly’s rate was a comparatively less horrific 22 that year. Likewise, Wawa has moved aggressively into locations in Florida — such as Jacksonville, where the homicide rate is only slightly better than Philly’s. Other Florida cities like Miami Gardens — also home to multiple Wawas — have homicide rates that are nearly identical to Philly’s.

This is hugely oversimplistic. Yes, the homicide rate in ‘Charm City,’ as Baltimore has sometimes been called, is horrible, far, far worse than Philly’s, but it isn’t just the homicide rate. The editorial Mr Kruger cited pointed out:

The closings come just weeks after about 100 teens ransacked a Wawa in Mayfair. In February, a man was stabbed to death outside of a Wawa in South Philadelphia. On Thursday, a Wawa employee in University City was pepper sprayed during a robbery involving five suspects. In 2020, Wawa cited the pandemic as the reason to close its flagship store at Broad and Walnut Streets.

What foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia is seeing is not just a terrible homicide and shooting rate, but stores robbed and simply trashed, and a law enforcement system that just flat doesn’t care. Philadelphia’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, a police-hating former defense mouthpiece who believes in ‘restorative justice‘ rather than punishing criminals, has aided and abetted the crime, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is, put as charitably as possible, overworked and overwhelmed in Philly, though many would say that she’s just plain incompetent and marking time until she can get another job. The Philadelphia Police Department is seriously undermanned, and crimes like ransacking a Wawa just fall far down the ladder in police priorities.

Then there’s Mayor Jim Kenney, who has just plain checked out, marking time until he’s no longer in the job. Mr Kenney says stuff, but doesn’t actually do anything.

With all that money coming in, you’re telling me the company had no more resources to devote to safety in Philly? Was it even efficiently protecting Philly stores?

Can we tell the truth here? The out-of-control teens who have been trashing the Center City stores have been primarily out-of-control black teens, and any resources that Wawa put into “efficiently protecting (its) Philly stores” would quickly be characterized as racist attempts to keep black teens out of the stores, and the Inquirer, the Editorial Board of which so lamented the closing of Center City Wawas, would be among the first to point that out. A committed leftist — or so I judge from his Twitter feed — Mr Kruger probably would as well.

You know, I get it: Mr Kruger, who has admitted that he “used to do a lot of meth,” loves his Wawa coffee — I do, too, and was heartened by the news that Wawa is expanding into the Bluegrass State — but he’s blaming Wawa and its corporate executives for abandoning Center City, when the truth is that Philadelphians, the out-of-control teens and the rotten parents who reared them, have actually run Wawa off.

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Today’s left really, really, really hate Freedom of Speech, and normality

There has been all sorts of leftist angst and hollering and combitching about laws, passed in several states, which ban hormone and surgical ‘treatments’ for minors who believe themselves to have been born the wrong sex. It’s discriminatory, it’s wrong, it will hurt people, and lead to suicides, we are told.

Yet, oddly enough, I never read one thing about this, in a single sentence from Newsweek:

Last week, Michigan banned conversion therapy, the controversial practice trying to “cure” LGBTQ+ people of their sexual orientation and gender identity, for minors in the state.

Yet:

Research shows that lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) teens are at increased risk of suicide and mental health issues like depression and anxiety. One of the most startling statistics: LGBTQ teens consider suicide and make suicide attempts at about twice the national rate for all adolescents.

So, if the left are arguing that not allowing minors who believe themselves to be the opposite ‘gender’ from the sex they were born to receive ‘gender-affirming’ care increases suicide risk, why would they concomitantly want to ban homosexual minors from treatment for their homosexuality if being homosexual increases their risk of suicide?

The homosexual lobby contend that conversion therapy is both harmful and ineffective, and whether it is ineffective medically, those claims have certainly been effective politically. But the real issue is one of reproduction: since homosexuals cannot naturally reproduce without stepping into heterosexuality, ‘losing’ homosexuals to normal sex is an attack on all of them. They hate being called “groomers”, but what else is it when they try their hardest to keep every kid growing up sexually confused, and to reduce the societal stigma attached to homosexuality, what else can we call it?

And now we have this:

Michigan Pronouns Law Declared an ‘Abomination’ by Former Judge

by Giulia Carbonaro | Monday, July 3, 2023 | 9:00 AM EDT

Michigan’s recent bill making it a felony for people to harass or intimidate someone by misgendering them and using the wrong pronouns has sparked controversy in the state, with former judge and television personality Joe Brown calling the measure an “abomination.”

The new measure, House Bill 4474, is part of a package of legislation that would replace Michigan’s existing Ethnic Intimidation Act and would make it a hate crime to cause someone to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened” with words.

It expands the existing law to cover sex, sexual orientation, age, gender identity or expression, and physical or mental disability. Religion, ethnicity and race were already included in the previous legislation and will still be covered under the new law.

Michigan has recently been pushing reforms and new measures that would expand the protection of LGBTQ+ rights in the state, going against a nationwide trend that has seen other states moving to limit rights for transgender youth.

There’s more at the original.

Apparently the great state of Michigan, in which Governor Gretchen Whitless Whitmer, a Democrat of course, imposed illegal and draconian executive orders to fight the COVID-19 panicdemic, believes that the Freedom of Speech guaranteed to all of us under the Constitution of the United States can, should, and must be regulated to spare the precious feelings of the ‘transgendered.’ I wonder: while I do not live in Michigan, and have never set foot in that state, could I be punished because my website is available there?

Under the bill — which makes it a hate crime for a person to threaten another by deliberately using the wrong pronouns with an intimidating purpose — offenders would be guilty “of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or by a fine of not more than $10,000.”

This is what today’s left do: they elevate ‘group rights’ over those of the individual, to support the goals of the State — at least, as long as they control the State — above the individual rights protected by our Constitution. If the law passes, which has not yet happened, it will take someone actually charged and convicted of this ‘crime’, appealing the conviction through multiple layers of courts, to get it reversed, even though simply referring to Bruce Jenner as Bruce Jenner doesn’t hurt anyone. Such a person could wind up serving a sentence in prison before it could ever be reversed.

If someone wants to refer to Bradley Manning as ‘Chelsea,’ that’s perfectly up to them, and no skin of my nose, even if I see it as both silly and stupid; that’s within their free speech rights. But the lower house of the Michigan state legislature would make it a crime to refer to Mr Manning as Bradley, or as Mr Manning.

Bill Blankschaen and Erick Erickson coined the phrase, “You will be made to care“. An issue about which most sensible people would not care — it’s none of my business if Harry wants to become Sally — is becoming one in which the homosexual/transgender lobby are trying to use the power of the State to force people to go along with their kinks and delusions; that makes it other people’s business.

We have pointed it out previously: the left are smart enough to know that if they can control the language used, they can subtly, and perhaps not-so-subtly, direct your thinking. If you can get acclimated to calling someone like Richard Levine “Rachel,” and referring to him with the feminine pronouns, the job of the left is half-way done. That some of us stubbornly insist on calling the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names — if we can find them; sometimes I cannot — and using the pronouns and honorifics appropriate to their actual sex not only fights back against the left, but angers them so much that at least some of them want to make it illegal shows just how important they believe it to be.

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A great Mexican family

We are having to renovate the rectory at St Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, which was, to put it bluntly, somewhat neglected for almost twenty years; our previous pastor was an uncomplaining man, and even in very warm, humid Kentucky, never even wanted air conditioning, save for a single, 110-volt window unit.

Now, we are having to catch up, and our new priest, who is Mexican and very well-liked by the Hispanic communities in the surrounding counties — our county really has few Latinos — and a Mexican family who have their own construction and remodeling company volunteered, volunteered I stress, to help us do some major work. They are not even parishioners here, but at St Mark’s in Richmond, where our priest, Fr Enrico Montoya, has been saying the 1:00 PM Mass in Spanish One thing is certain: though I did a lot of work myself, two contractors in their forties can do more work than my 70-year-old body can do! 🙂

On Saturday, our project was to remove the old carpeting from the rectory. After twenty years of our previous pastor, a child of the Depression who hated spending money, things were just plain not clean.

The brothers, Casiano and Anesimo — I’m not going to use their last names here — showed up, with two sons, in their late teens or early twenties, and we started work. I will say one thing: these guys worked! We cut out the carpets, removed them, and removed the ancient padding under them, to expose the hardwood floors beneath them. Pulling the carpets wasn’t that bad; it was cleaning the floors underneath them! The old padding had stuck to the finish on the original floors, not in one piece, but in small pieces across the entire area. We — including me! — were on our hands and knees, scraping the floors, pulling up staples and the nailer strips that hold wall-to-wall carpets in place. I might have said darn or heck or even shoot a couple of times, had our priest not been there.

The doors of St Elizabeth’s Church, after I refinished them last Fall.

Around 11:30, the men’s wives and families showed up. They set up a long table on the covered front porch, and they had brought a ton of food, for everybody. This was real Mexican food, not what you get at Taco Bell or other Mexican restaurants in the United States, and it was great. I’d never pictured real Mexican food as being anything like this, and Anesimo — I wound up closer friends with him than any of the others — told me that they don’t really consider what we see served in Mexican restaurants around here to be Mexican; their families are from far south in Mexico, near the Guatemalan border, so the cuisine is probably different from closer to the United States.

The family are huge! Lots of kids and grandkids, and the older wives joined right in with their husbands in pulling staples from the floor. They all spoke English, though among themselves, Spanish. And my thoughts were simple: these are the kind of immigrants the United States needs!

I do not know, and certainly didn’t ask, if Anesimo and Casiano and their wives were here legally. Considering that they had built companies in Kentucky, the younger kids were almost certainly born in the United States, and are citizens.

But what we need is the kind of border security that allows families like this into our country, to become citizens, while keeping the riff-raff out. And if the family with which I worked Saturday are here illegally, why don’t we just keep them, and deport some lazy, good-for-nothing Americans sucking up welfare in their place?

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The ‘Wise Latina’ says the quiet part out loud.

At the annual Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at UC-Berkeley in 2001, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Those words were fished out after President Barack Hussein Obama nominated her to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. What can those words mean other than, as a jurist, Hudge Sotomayor would take her decisions, at least in part, based not on the law, but on her race, sex, and ethnicity.

She backed away from that statement in her confirmation hearings, “declaring it ‘a rhetorical flourish that fell flat’ and stating that ‘I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment,'” and she was ultimately confirmed, 68 to 31.

Well, today Associate Justice told us, once again, that it isn’t what is written in the law, or the Constitution, that is important, but people’s feelings! In her dissent in 303 Creative v Elenis, she wrote:

The meaning of our Constitution is not found in any law volume, but in the spirit of the people who live under it.[1]303 Creative v Elenis, , page 38 of dissent, page 70 of the .pdf file.

This is rather remarkable. The Justice, utterly horrified by the decision that a Colorado web designer could not be compelled to create a website for a same-sex ‘wedding,’ cited precedent after precedent telling us that the government could, and has, gotten away with both restricting and compelling various forms of commercial speech, along with dozens of citations of laws and court cases concerning equal access to commerce and commercial enterprises. Yet, after all of that long dissent, she broke down and told us that what was written in the law just flat didn’t matter. What mattered, according to our ‘wise Latina,’ is how the people who live in the United States feel about things.

This is a hugely dangerous position, but one which is hardly unexpected. Justice Sotomayor voted against religious freedom in the cases of Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Sisolak and South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, but railed against the decision, this time supporting the freedom of religion and assembly in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v Cuomo. The cases were all about the same thing: the states forcing churches to close, due to the COVID-19 penicdemic, and Justice Sotomayor believed that the virus trumped the Constitution of the United States.

The good Justice also saw nothing wrong with restricting our Second Amendment rights in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen and McDonald v City of Chicago, or upholding equal protection under the law in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The plain words of the Constitution meant nothing to Justice Sotomayor, or the other liberals on the Court, as they went through all sorts of contortions to say that somehow, some way, the rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution just didn’t matter when it came to liberal policies.

The liberals on the Court are hardly the only ones who want to massage the words of the Constitution to mean something other than what they say. The Editorial Board of The New York Times opined:

In striking down affirmative action in higher education on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said it had to do so because the Constitution forbids any form of racial distinction. With a single opinion, the justices overturned decades of precedents that upheld race-conscious admissions policies as consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and ignored the reality of modern America, where prejudice and racism endure.

The Editorial Board spend many words telling us why Affirmative Action is so desperately needed, yet never manage to give us a reason as to how it fits under the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Thursday’s ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all of the Republican-appointed justices, takes a long time to make a simple — and simplistic — point: There is no real difference between the centuries of racial discrimination against Black people and targeted race-conscious efforts to help Black people. Both are equally bad, in this view.

Left unaddressed was one of the Chief Justice’s points, that, in the context of university admissions, which are a zero-sum game, helping black applicants has another effect, hurting white and Asian applicants.

There is so much more that could be said, but, in the end, it boils down to this: the left have programs in mind which elevate the programs of the government over the rights of individuals, and today’s left are fine with that. And that is why sensible people must fight the left, fight for our rights, because the left won’t help us.

References

References
↑1 303 Creative v Elenis, , page 38 of dissent, page 70 of the .pdf file.