Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The #ClimateChange activists want more people to move to large cities They are pushing 'walkable' neighborhoods and public transportation

A view from our farm; the river is just beyond the trees.

The activists wanting to fight global warming climate change have long said that increased urbanization is part of the solutions they seek:

Huge gains, in terms of reducing harmful gases, can be made by changing how we plan, build, manage and power our cities and towns. Well designed, compact, walkable cities with good public transport greatly reduce our per capita carbon footprint and are key to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals of which climate action is a key part.

Good public transportation, huh? We have already noted how a well-funded public transportation system, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Agency, SEPTA, has admitted that they have lost control of the train cars as the heavily Democratic city has lost any semblance of control over crime, drug abuse, and homelessness, and SEPTA’s ridership is still below that before the panicdemic. Having the homeless and the junkies using SEPTA trains and train and subway stations for shelter and shooting galleries will cause decent people to avoid the system.

But there’s another problem with promoting increased urbanization:

The Philly area doesn’t have enough homes available for low- and middle-income buyers

In the Philadelphia metro area, households making $50,000 faced the largest shortage of available, affordable homes for sale, according to the National Association of Realtors and Realtors.com.

by Michaelle Bond | Friday, June 9, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

More than one million homes nationwide were available for sale in late April. But high prices mean that what’s out there doesn’t match what people at various income levels can afford, according to a new report from the nation’s Realtors.

Basically, home listings affordable for middle- and lower-income households are missing. The country needs more homes that households at all income levels can buy to chip away at the problems of low affordability and low housing supply, according to a report that the National Association of Realtors and Realtor.com released Thursday.

“Ongoing high housing costs and the scarcity of available homes continues to present budget challenges for many prospective buyers, and it’s likely keeping some buyers in the rental market or on the sidelines and delaying their purchase until conditions improve,” Danielle Hale, Realtor.com’s chief economist, said in a statement.

The report breaks down the number of homes missing for each income level by comparing the number of listings available in April to the number that would need to be available to accommodate buyers. Realtors said they hope local and federal governments can use their analysis to ease the twin problems of affordability and housing supply.

According to the story, households with a $50,000 income level can afford homes that cost up to $163,440, but if the Philadelphia market is short 3,440 homes listed for sale at that or lower prices, there’s also the obvious question: what can someone buy at those prices? We previously noted the home at 4931 Hoopes Street, listed for $125,000 in April, but down to $75,000 now.

Kitchen at 1829 North Bucknell Street, via zillow.com

For just $69,750, you can buy this 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom 870 ft² fixer-upper at 1829 North Bucknell Street. That’s North Philadelphia, not exactly a great neighborhood!

Now, why did I pick that listing? In December of 2021, we bought a small, detached house, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, 1,344 ft², with a detached one-car garage, in a small town in Kentucky for $70,000. My nephew and I had to remodel the bathroom and redo the plumbing, but, doing the work ourselves, spent less than $2,000. The house is perfectly neat and clean and livable — and is rented out to my sister-in-law — yet was virtually the same price. What we spent in a small town for a decent, if not modern, house, will buy you an absolute dump in North Philly.

716 West Allegheny Avenue, photo via zillow,com.

$70,000 will buy you this boarded-up, barred-in porch, 1,260 ft² rowhome at 716 West Allegheny Avenue, in the Fairhill neighborhood in the Philadelphia Badlands. Sorry, no interior pictures in the listing. The realtor probably figures that interior photos will scare off more prospective buyers.

114 South Cecil Street, photo via zillow.com.

The story stated that a household with a $50,000 income could afford a home of up to $146,440. For $145,000, you can buy this home at 114 South Cecil Street, in West Philly.

And with all of that, the Philadelphia metropolitan area was one of only four major metropolitan areas — the others being Detroit, Houston, and Cleveland — in which buying a home was less expensive than renting.

The global warming climate change activists want more and more people to move into densely-populated urban areas, and to use public transportation, to reduce CO2 emissions, but one thing is very clear: doing so will make people, especially people at the lower end of the economic spectrum, poorer than ever. Housing prices for even modest homes are hugely inflated, and mortgage interest rates have increased significantly.

It’s really quite simple: the activists live in urban areas, and that is the life they see as their baseline good. Those of us who live out in the sticks are just a bunch of unedumacated rubes. But the activists also have money, and have been able to afford living in the cities, and living reasonably well. They have to be economically secure, simply to have the time to be activist. What they seem unable to grasp is that there are a lot of people living paycheck-to-paycheck, people who can’t afford the inflated urban housing costs.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer whines that not enough blacks are getting into the legal marijuana business.

The Garden State legalized pot, so now The Philadelphia Inquirer is lamenting that not enough of New Jersey’s drug dealers are black!

New Jersey has few Black-owned marijuana dispensaries. A banker-turned-budtender is about to open one.

Tahir Johnson is preparing to open Simply Pure Trenton in his hometown of Ewing Township.

by Nick Vadala | Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

As a college student at Howard University in 2005, Tahir Johnson decided to go to the beach. He put on his pink polo shirt, packed up his decked-out red Lexus, grabbed his youngest brother and little cousin, and set off for Ocean City, Md.

But rather than a day in the sand, Johnson got pulled over due to a broken taillight — one traffic stop of what he estimates to be about 100 in his life. The officer told Johnson, who is Black, that he looked like a drug dealer. Johnson told the officer he had weed in his trunk. The police found it, and arrested him. He was convicted on a possession charge, and would later be arrested two more times for marijuana.

Looks like the officer — assuming that Mr Johnson told his tale accurately, and that it’s not just a whiny ‘driving while black’ meme — got it right.

His marijuana-related arrests and conviction have since been expunged. But Johnson’s legal issues never scared him away from cannabis.

Now, Johnson, 39, is preparing to open Simply Pure Trenton in Ewing Township, N.J., his hometown. The shop will make Johnson one of the first Black recreational dispensary owners in New Jersey, and one of the state’s first operating owners with a cannabis-related conviction. Simply Pure Trenton is tentatively set to open in July.

Tahir Johnson, CEO of the soon-to-open recreational marijuana shop Simply Pure Trenton in Ewing, N.J., Friday, May 12, 2023. Johnson programs his robot receptionist named Pepper to greet guests.

So, not only did the Inquirer tell us about Mr Johnson’s new business, but even provided the hyperlink to it, helpfully aiding readers to get to his store to get high.

In Mercer County, which includes Trenton and Ewing, police arrested Black people for marijuana at a rate 4.1 times higher than white people between 2010 and 2018, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. And New Jersey’s prison population has the highest racial disparity in the country, with Black people being incarcerated at a rate 12.5 times higher than whites, a 2021 report from the Sentencing Project found.

As we have previously documented, at least when it comes to homicide, black Americans both commit and are victims of that crime at a hugely elevated rate compared to white Americans. Unlike most offenses, murder is a crime of evidence, not a crime of reporting, as it’s very difficult to simply dispose of a body without it being noticed; dead bodies get found, and that leads to mostly reliable statistics. Yet the left somehow, some way, cannot seem to grasp the concept that perhaps, just perhaps, black Americans might commit other crimes at ‘disproportionate’ rates. Perhaps, just perhaps, if black New Jersey residents are “being incarcerated at a rate 12.5 times higher than whites,” this is indicative not of racism, but black New Jerseyans committing crimes at a far greater rate than whites. Why is that not a possibility being considered?

Discrimination, especially in enforcing marijuana laws, was “egregious” in Trenton, Johnson said. “If you’re unlucky enough to have even a seed or a roach, your whole life is ruined.”

So, the way to not have your life ruined is to not have “even a seed or a roach”, right?

A common criticism of the legal marijuana industry is that while Black people have been disproportionately targeted for cannabis offenses, white business owners are benefiting from legalization. New Jersey’s marijuana legalization laws have attempted to address that impact: The state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission gives priority to applicants with cannabis-related convictions, as well as those who come from communities inordinately harmed by the war on drugs, such as Trenton and Ewing.

So, the Garden State is actually giving preferential treatment to convicted criminals rather than citizens with clean records. Wouldn’t the normal suspicion be that someone who has previously broken the law would be less likely to obey the law in the future? Isn’t that why we have the perfectly reasonable conditions that criminals released from prison have probation officers to whom they must report, and are legally barred from owning firearms?

There’s more at the original, a lot of it being laments about “underrepresented” racial and ethnic groups having difficulty raising money to get into that stinking business. I have to wonder: would the Inquirer have written it this way if the subject was liquor stores?

Let’s tell the truth here: marijuana use hurts black Americans at a ‘disproportionate’ rate, because it keeps more of them out of good jobs. If you are applying for a job which requires a commercial driver’s license, you will be subjected to pre-employment drug testing, and the company will be, under federal laws, required to maintain some form of random drug testing of covered personnel. Test hot for pot, and it’s off to the unemployment line you go! Many jobs which require personnel to handle money, along with other things, require pre-employment drug screens. And in the Inquirer’s hometown, where pot isn’t legal, rampant drug use of things other than marijuana has led to tremendous drug abuse problems; why wouldn’t the editors of the newspaper be taking a hard line against drug usage if they are so concerned about economic conditions for black Philadelphians?

Yet, in this article, the Inky is practically advocating more marijuana use by black citizens.

Using drugs, including alcohol, alters people’s sobriety, and being less than sober hurts people’s abilities to take good decisions and get and hold decent jobs. In America’s poorest large city, one would think that a sensible editorial position for our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper would be to want more residents, of all racial and ethnic groups, to be at their best and strongest economic and competitive conditions, to improve their lives individually and as part of the larger community, but that’s not what the Inky seems to do.

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He will not do well in prison

Earlier on Friday, I commented on a tweet from Steve Keeley, showing the mugshot of a Philadelphia man,35, charged with $300k take in spree of 24 robberies and burglaries in Philadelphia & 5 Montgomery & Bucks County suburbs in just 10 month span. I said, “Love the expression on his mug shot,” because he had a ‘what the heck have I done’ look on his face.

A 15-year-old Georgia boy thought that he was a big-time hood; he wound up crying for his mother.

‘Mama!’ teen screams in court, accused of killing Columbus woman while stealing gun

by Tim Chitwood | Friday, June 9, 2023 | 9:38 AM CDT

Screams erupted in a Columbus courtroom Thursday as a 15-year-old accused of fatally shooting a woman while stealing her brother’s gun fought deputies escorting him out after his hearing.

“Mama!” Jabori Baptiste yelled as he struggled to get back into the courtroom, where a woman screamed and wailed in response. Sheriff’s deputies wrestled with Bapiste while trying to restrain him, while other officers rushed his relatives out of the Recorder’s Court building on 10th Street.

Outside, the ruckus continued as Baptiste’s family saw the suspect was still fighting with deputies trying to get him into a patrol car. The shouting resumed, and it took several minutes for officers to get the teen securely into the cruiser. The car raced away toward the Aaron Cohn Regional Youth Detention Center, where Baptiste is being held.

Though he is being charged as an adult with felony murder and robbery, Recorder’s Court Judge David Ranieri allowed no news media to photograph or record the suspect in court because he is a juvenile.

Young Mr Baptiste was allegedly among a large group of similarly aged kids, and tried to steal a gun owned by Eugene Bell, out by the fuel pumps at a convenience store. As Mr Bell resisted, his sister, Natalie Bell intervened, the gun discharged, and Miss Bell was struck and killed. Young Mr Baptiste fled, with the weapon.

Like almost every other convenience store these days, the Mystic Mart at 645 Brown Avenue had surveillance cameras, which caught the whole incident on tape, and Mr Baptiste’s face was clearly recorded. The money line was near the end of the story:

Muscogee County School District Police, along with Baptiste’s probation officer, identified the youth from those images, he said.

So, he was 15-years-old, and already had a probation officer? Sounds like Big Time had already been busted and convicted before.

There is an old episode of NCIS, where Mark Harmon, as Leroy Jethro Gibbs is interrogating some young college students, and leans over one, saying, “Believe me, son, you will not do well in prison.” I’m guessing that a 15-year-old punk kid who cries for his mother will not do well behind bars.

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There are times when being courteous is harmful to society

Robert E Howard wrote, “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” But there are times where courteousness really is a bad thing.

President Joe Biden is both Catholic and a Democrat, and he seems to continually go out of his way to tell us just which of those two is more important to him.

Biden condemns wave of state legislation restricting LGBTQ+ rights, says ‘these are our kids’

The initiatives are designed to protect LGBTQ+ communities from attack, help young people with mental health issues and homelessness, and counter book bans, though the effects may be limited.

by Darlene Superville, Associated Press | Thursday, June 8, 2023 | 4:31 PM EDT

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Thursday condemned a wave of “cruel” and “callous” state laws curbing the rights, visibility and health care access of LGBTQ+ people, especially children, leaving them feeling under attack like never before and the White House with limited options to intervene.

“These are our kids. These are our neighbors. It’s cruel and it’s callous,” Biden said at a White House news conference with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “It matters a great deal how we treat everyone in this country.”

Biden commented hours after the White House postponed a large Pride Month celebration with thousands of guests Thursday night on the South Lawn because of poor air quality from hazardous air flowing in from Canadian wildfires.

The president noted steps he has taken to help protect the rights of non-heterosexual people, but said “our fight is far, far from over because we have some hysterical and, I would argue, prejudiced people who are engaged in all that you see going on around the country.”

I’m old enough to remember when calling someone “queer” was an insult!

He said what is happening in some states is an “unjustified and ugly” appeal to fear and called on lawmakers to pass legislation, which has been stalled in Congress, that would protect the civil rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals.

“Congress must pass, must pass the Equality Act and send it to my desk,” Biden said of a legislative measure he had named a top priority during his 2020 campaign.

So, to what legislation do the “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals” object? Basically, they fall into three categories:

  1. Legislation banning physical ‘treatments’ of purportedly ‘transgender’ children, requiring that puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and surgical interventions not be allowed on individuals under 18 years of age. We generally do not allow minors to buy cigarettes or alcohol, prohibit them from buying or owning firearms, to consent to sexual intercourse, to consent to medical care, and other things, but the activists seem to believe that children who have not even reached puberty can consent to having puberty delayed or stopped. The activists claim that the state has no business in such intrafamily health care discussions, but the state is very much involved in such, with laws specifying things which constitute child abuse, incestuous relationships, compulsory education, child care arrangements, child neglect, and custody of children in the event of divorce.
  2. Action to restrict the teaching of homosexuality as something good and normal in the public schools, including the restrictions on such material in public school libraries, where compulsory education laws make students, in effect, a captive audience. Such actions do nothing to prohibit such materials in private collections, bookstores, or Amazon.com.
  3. Regulations to prohibit sexually explicit shows in situations where children are present.

Why, I have to ask, would our (purportedly) Catholic President want to take actions against things to protect minors?

Well, the answer is actually pretty simple: the normalization of drag shows and homosexual men lowers the resistance of boys to homosexual ‘curiosity,’ which means that a greater percentage of them might just try to take a walk on the wild side. The left hate that sensible people have called them ‘groomers,’ but that’s exactly what they are doing, and exactly what they are.

Reproduction is a strong, innate drive among humans, and this is how homosexuals reproduce.

The Williams Institute, which has an internal bias which would like to see the percentage of the population who are homosexual as being higher, claims that 3.5% of the population are homosexual or bisexual, and another 0.3% are transgender. The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, when Barack Hussein Obama was still President, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond.

So, if 9% are ‘identifying’ themselves as sexually abnormal now, either homosexuality/ bisexuality/ transgenderism are communicable diseases, or some form of ‘grooming’ actually works. By making homosexuality more societally acceptable, more otherwise normal people might be enticed to at least try ‘it,’ especially if drugs or alcohol are involved.

Simply put, whatever the activists have been doing appears to be working.

We have reached the point, we have passed the point, at which the conservative belief in being polite, in common courtesy, has allowed abnormality to creep into acceptance, and acceptance has been hurting our children and our society. Being polite has moved things far from the live and let live and what people do in their bedrooms is nobody else’s business to you will accept and celebrate homosexuality, and we will tell you what we do in our bedrooms, and you will like it.

Sorry, but no, and not just no, but Hell no!

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The left really despise Freedom of Speech

The American Revolution was slowly being brewed by the resentments our colonial forebears felt for the really not that oppressive rule by King George III across the wide Atlantic Ocean, and Parliament’s desire that the colonists pay for the costs of their own defense in the French and Indian War. It was our freedom of speech and of the press, things His Majesty might not have liked all that much, but wasn’t in any real position to do much about them, which enabled disaffected colonists to come together in their opposition to rule by Great Britain.

Thus, you’d think that the staffers at the American Revolution Museum would have a great respect for freedom of speech. Well, if you thought that, you’d be wrong!

American Revolution Museum staffers are fighting to cancel a Moms for Liberty event

The Museum has sought to diversify the stories it tells about American history and staffers said that allowing such a group to rent its space undermines the progress the museum has made.

by Juliana Feliciano Reyes | Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Nearly 40 staffers at the Museum of the American Revolution are demanding that museum leadership cancel a scheduled event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a “parents’ rights” group recently classified as an “antigovernment extremist organization” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Can we tell the truth here? The SPLC sees every conservative organization as ‘extremist,’ and would undoubtedly list the American Free News Network as extremist if AFNN appeared on their radar. “Parents’ rights” would certainly qualify as “extremists” to them, because the apparently wholly radical idea that parents, whose children are subject to compulsory education laws, ought to have control of what public education teaches their children is just so, so, so wrong!

You can tell how Moms for Liberty work, from their statements on their website.

The Museum, located in Old City, has sought to diversify the stories it tells about American history — its current special exhibition, “Black Founders,” is a first-of-its-kind spotlight on James Forten, a prominent Black Revolutionary War-era abolitionist — and staffers said allowing such a group to rent its space undermines the progress the museum has made.

“We do not feel that any dollar amount is worth endangering the safety of the museum staff members in the building on the day of the event, serving as a host to a group that does not stand with our values, and damaging the museum’s reputation that we have all worked so hard to build,” a petition signed by 39 staffers reads. The museum employs 75 people full time and 37 part time.

“(E)ndangering the safety of the museum staff members”? Are they accusing the Moms of coming in armed, ready to shoot the staffers, or perhaps beat them with Louisville Slugger baseball bats?

They do hold some truly radical views, claiming that they do not ‘co-parent’ with the government, and they were early in on resistance to the forced masking of children due to the COVID panicdemic.

And horror of horrors, they fought against the long-term closures of the public schools, forcing students into the disastrous remote education policies. The public schools in Philadelphia stayed closed longer than many systems due to the resistance of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers union resistance to reopening fir in-person classes.

Moms for Liberty, an organization that sought control over public education by banning books and removing curriculum related to race, gender, and sexuality, is hosting its national summit in Philadelphia at the end of this month. Featured speakers are to include GOP presidential candidates Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The site of the summit — the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown — has already been protested by queer and trans-led groups.

Heaven forfend! The Moms wanted to stop the politicization of race in the public schools and the indoctrination of children into acceptance of homosexuality and ‘transgenderism.’ As William Teach noted, there has been a significant upsurge in younger people identifying as homosexual, bisexual, and/or ‘transgendered’ in the past few years, something that could only be caused by ‘grooming,’ by making those things seem acceptable. If individual parents wish to teach their children that such things are acceptable, that’s on them, but what the left and the teachers’ unions want to do is to indoctrinate everyone’s kids to accept that s(tuff).

Naturally, Juliana Feliciano Reyes, the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who wrote the cited article, said that the Moms were “banning books”, without the qualification that they wanted those books out of public school libraries, period, and not trying to, or able to, prevent private libraries, bookstores, or Amazon.com from having and selling them.

(CEO R. Scott Stephenson) said no employees were required to work that night if they didn’t feel safe.

But for some employees, the damage has already been done.

“I don’t feel appreciated nor safe anymore,” said assistant curator Trish Norman, who is nonbinary. “I don’t feel the museum necessarily has my back.”

Miss Norman doesn’t feel safe anymore? Unless she is alleging that the Moms and their guests are going to assault her in some fashion, she is telling us that her precious little feelings might get hurt.

In a photo published in the article, one protester is carrying a sign saying “Free to Learn.” That’s absolutely right: she is free to teach her kids whatever she wishes. But what she apparently doesn’t want is other parents not wanting their children taught the same things the protester wants.

Well, in the American Revolution that the museum is supposed to celebrate, some American men fought and died to gain our freedom to say and believe whatever we wished, fought and died to give all Americans, even the Moms for Liberty, the right to say and advocate whatever they wished.

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As cities lose control of crime, how can anyone view public transportation as a solution to anything?

The Philadelphia Inquirer likes to use Twitter to pimp its articles online, but hey, so do all of my blogging friends. Thing is, this article from the Inky is restricted to paid subscribers only. Fortunately, I do subscribe, so you don’t have to! [Update: Saturday, June 10: Robert Stacy McCain linked a free, archived version of the article, so you can read the whole thing.]

‘We lost control of the train cars’

With ridership down and antisocial behavior up, SEPTA is grappling with how to make Philly transit feel safer.

By Thomas Fitzgerald, Ryan W. Briggs, and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, June 6, 2023

The Market-Frankford Line has its own incense: a combination of cigarette, weed, or K2 smoke. People in the throes of opioid addiction are sometimes frozen in a forward lean in train cars and on platforms. People experiencing homelessness might use a couple of seats or a station to seek rest away from the cold and the heat.

One of the stops on the Market-Frankford line is Allegheny Station, at the infamous Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. The fastest way to clean up the Market-Frankford line? Eliminate the stop in Kensington!

Recent high-profile shootings in and around SEPTA stations in Philadelphia reflect an alarming increase in violence following 2022, when crime on the transit system was trending down. In May, two teens were killed on SEPTA in separate shootings.

However, the types of crime passengers are most likely to encounter on SEPTA are smoking, turnstile-jumping, public urination, and other unruly acts. SEPTA is struggling to manage the incidents.

I’ve got to ask: is ridership down because of “the types of crime passengers are most likely to encounter,” or the fact that people are getting shot and sometimes killed?

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain, ‘Other Unruly Acts in Killadelphia

SEPTA, the newspaper tells us, “is struggling to manage the incidents,” and, from the way the paragraph is structured, I believe that the “incidents” referred to are “the types of crime passengers are most likely to encounter.” That’s actually a good thing, a form of ‘broken windows policing,’ trying to stamp out the less important crimes in the belief that such will lead to the worse crimes dropping.

These are not violent crimes but antisocial behaviors that make many people feel unsafe on the subway and El lines, according to interviews with multiple riders. Some avoid the trains, a potential catastrophe for a transit agency that must grow ridership to financially survive.

“It’s filthier than I’ve ever seen it. More dangerous than I’ve ever seen it,” said David Corliss Jr., 40, as he waited for an El train at 34th Street Station on a recent afternoon. He said his family worries about his safety when he rides public transit.

SEPTA, like all of the other municipal organizations, is understaffed, and yes, that means that cleaning up after the junkies gets delayed.

There’s a lot more, but I want to point out five paragraphs from further down the Inquirer’ article:

While repeat offenders are being caught and banned, the court-diversion part of the program has not been carried out, Transit Police say.

“We were finding that most of our misdemeanor [trespassing] cases were being withdrawn,” Nestel said. “The folks we were putting into the criminal justice system weren’t going to diversionary courts and weren’t getting the help they needed.”

Michael Mellon, a lawyer from the Defenders Association of Philadelphia, attributed that to concern among public defenders that SEPTA was using the ban policy to track and arrest people experiencing homelessness.

“Regardless of what SEPTA claims about the purpose of the [citation] program, in reality it criminalized poverty, homelessness, and mental illness,” Mellon said. “Some of the people they targeted languished in jail because they did not have the means or the traditional support to get released.”

In 2020, the Defenders Association and attorneys from the Homeless Advocacy Project contacted the District Attorney’s Office to express their concerns. Trespassing arrests dwindled soon afterward, Mellon said.

The Defenders Association of Philadelphia is the group which provides legal assistance for indigent defendants. And they got what they wanted:

Arrests by SEPTA police plummeted after the agency downgraded penalties for the most minor offenses, but arrests for other, more serious crime also plummeted as the agency has grappled with officer shortages and other issues. Data from the District Attorney’s Office showed annual arrests by SEPTA police for any offense — including misdemeanor and felony crimes — fell by 85% from 2019 to 2022.

The oh-so-sympathetic claimed that it “criminalized poverty, homelessness, and mental illness,” but regardless of the reason for criminal behavior, it was still criminal behavior. In their zeal to defend the drug addicts poor and downtrodden, they are nevertheless defending the people who have caused a serious downturn in SEPTA ridership.

One picture, it has been said, is worth a thousand words, and this screen capture from the newspaper’s article illustrates it perfectly. SEPTA police officers Kevin Newton, left, Anthony Capaldi, center, and Martin Zitter, the caption tells us, ask a person with whom they are familiar — ever heard the description of a suspect as someone ‘known to the police’? — to not block the entrance to the 13th street El station. A man, very probably an addict, chose to lay down with his food and water bottle in a manner which blocked the station entrance, even though, if he just had to lay down in the sidewalk, there was obvious room just to the right of the stairs, against the metal bars, where he could have settled which did not block the entrance.

The Inquirer has published several articles on the proposed Roosevelt Boulevard subway, a $3+ billion for which SEPTA simply doesn’t have the money. A lot of people believe it would be a great idea, but the obvious question arises: if SEPTA can’t really handle and maintain the system it already has, how does it make any sense to add more system?

The left want to push more and more Americans into public transportation, to reduce CO2 emissions to fight global warming climate change, and that is something into which Philly’s political leadership has fully bought.

Ridership remains well below pre-pandemic levels, and SEPTA needs those passengers back, officials say. Federal pandemic aid will run out by April 2024, and the agency depends on rider fares to make enough money to operate.

As the Democrats in a very Democratic city want to push SEPTA ridership, the public have been far less willing to actually use the service; Philadelphians and residents in the collar counties have, in effect, voted with their wallets. Some of it may be attributable to an increase in the number of people able to work from home some days, but when even the transit agency admits that it has lost control of the system, when the stories of serious crime on the buses and trains increase — the lesser crimes are no longer a story — how can anyone seriously contemplate public transportation as a solution to anything?

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Killadelphia: Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas begins with the truth, but then has to tell a huge lie to fit the newspaper’s requirements

There is at least a slight possibility that Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas isn’t a totally Kool Aid drinking #woke progressive, as her Monday morning column told a very uncomfortable truth.

After a Philadelphia mother lost her son to gun violence, she blamed one person

This mother’s personal journey is part of the layered, complicated story of gun violence in our beleaguered city.

by Helen Ubiñas | Monday, June 5, 2023 | 6:01 AM EDT

Helen Ubiñas

Andrea Robinson is brutally honest about the person responsible for helping lead her son to the streets that eventually cost him his life: her.

When Robinson’s son, Jermaine, was gunned down in April 2021 at age 29, it was the bleak culmination of a life lived on the edge.

He got kicked out of school for assaulting a teacher. He stole his grandmother’s gun. He lied incessantly — moments all, Robinson recognizes now, that essentially followed in her footsteps.

“I planted all the seeds,” she said.

Further down:

Robinson grew up with her mom and older sister in North Philadelphia. She regularly attended school and church. But when she got pregnant with Jermaine at 15, she fell away from both and into a life in the streets with the father of her two oldest children.

Yup, 15-year-old, being reared by a single mother, becomes a single, underaged mother, and a high school dropout, herself. What could possibly go wrong?

She drove around in “johnnies” — stolen cars. She wore clothes and jewelry that had been shoplifted. All the while, she told her children, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Her life was a messy tangle of contradictions.

In other words, she became a criminal herself, and, surprisingly enough, her children followed the example she set.

His friends insist her son’s nickname — “Shooter” — referred to his rapping talents. But Robinson said she knows better, just as she knows that she must answer for her part in her son’s choices.

Miss Robinson is answering for her part in her son’s crimes by trying to tell her tale to others in North Philly, to try to get them to avoid the mistakes she made. And she’s answering for her part in her son’s crimes by having to live on while he’s stone-cold graveyard dead.

Then came the paragraph for District Attorney Larry Krasner:

After the age of 11, the longest Jermaine stayed out of the criminal justice system was the two years before his death. But he never served much time for drug and gun charges. After Jermaine could no longer convince his mother to believe his lies, he exploited a legal system that Robinson said often just “slapped him on the wrist.”

That’s darkly humorous: Mr Robinson was killed in April of 2021, so the two years before his death were while Mr Krasner and his social justice brand of prosecution infested the City of Brotherly Love, but if Mr Robinson received nothing but slaps on the wrist for his past crimes, those would have been primarily under District Attorneys Lynne Abraham Ford (in office 1991 through 2009) and Seth Williams (in office 2010 through mid 2017). Neither Mrs Ford, 82, nor Mr Williams, a now convicted felon, will ever be a prosecutor again, but perhaps, somehow, some way, Mr Krasner might be able to get it through his thick skull that cutting Mr Robinson didn’t, in the end, do him any favors. A guy with the street name ‘Shooter’ was shot himself, sent to his eternal reward by some other street punk.

Of course, Miss Ubiñas had to make sure we didn’t draw any politically incorrect conclusions from her story:

Whenever I write about gun violence, there are always those who insist on putting the blame on victims or the victims’ families. They trot out the myth of Black-on-Black criminality, despite white people committing crimes against other white people at about the same rate that Black people do against other Black people. The reality is that the vast majority of most crimes are committed by a person of the same race as the victim.

Bovine feces. Through June 1st in Philadelphia, there have been a total of 150 fatal and 600 non-fatal shootings in the city. Of those, 107 of the victims killed were black males, 71.33%, and 407 of the wounded but surviving victims, 67.83%, were black males. For white males, there were 6 killed, 4.00% of the total, and 20 wounded, 3.33%.

According to the Census Bureau, only 40.8% of the city’s population are black, while 38.5% are while. If “white people committing crimes against other white people at about the same rate that black people do against other black people,” shouldn’t we see the numbers of shootings by race being close to equal?

The St Louis Metropolitan Police Department is one of the few which breaks down the homicide statistics by race on a daily basis, something which would undoubtedly horrify Miss Ubiñas and her colleagues at the Inquirer, and in a city in which white residents outnumber blacks, 49.1% to 44.3%, 63 out of 72 murder victims, 97.5% were black, and 48 out of 51 identified murder suspects, 94.12%, are black.

Yeah, I know: math is racist!

Simply put, Miss Ubiñas was willing to tell the truth about Mr Robinson’s criminal life, and the responsibility that his mother took for rearing a very bad guy, but the Robinsons being black made her jump back and tell a big, fat, well-known, and obvious lie, because, horrors!, telling the truth alone would violate the newspaper’s mission to be an “anti-racist news organization.” That lying about the facts due to race might be racist in itself would just never occur to anyone in the Inky’s newsroom.

Philadelphia Inquirer circulation.

Could things like that have anything to do with the newspaper’s cratering circulation?

Maybe the newspaper could do something really radical like just tell the truth?

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What could possibly go wrong?

Who could ever have predicted this?

Pronouns Ruin Prospects: Research Proves Hiring Managers’ Bias Against Non-Binary and Gender Queer Pronoun Users

by Ananyaa Bhowmik | May 30, 2023

Pronouns may be nothing new, but the idea that people may claim their own is still somewhat astonishing to some. Many people still succumb to the siren call of referring to people using binary pronouns.

While struggling to get used to something relatively new is understandable, what is not fair is using it as an excuse to promote bias, especially when it can keep people from earning their livelihoods. Yet hiring managers all over the world seem to be doing just that.

Simply put, research into recent hiring trends shows that resumes with genderqueer and non-binary pronouns elicit less than enthusiastic responses from prospective employers. Some applications are skipped over entirely, while others never receive a callback. A worrying trend, to say the least.

Why wouldn’t a responsible human resources manager discard résumés in which the applicant is telling him that he’s a walking, talking hostile workplace lawsuit?

It isn’t difficult to see where the issue is. If someone goes to the extent of specifying “genderqueer and non-binary pronouns,” he is telling his prospective employer that he finds the issue serious, and wants to be referred to in ways that most normal English-speaking people would not normally use. Whether deliberately or otherwise, such a person may be referred to with references of which he disapproves, and too many such incidences could generate a lawsuit against the employer. The human resources manager’s job is to do more than find the best employees; it is also to protect the company from lawsuits. And one of the easiest ways to do that is not to hire people who could be seen as increasing the probability of a hostile workplace lawsuit.

Legislative guidance introduced by NYCHRL clearly states that the “use the name, pronouns, and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs./Mx.) 15 with which a person self-identifies, regardless of the person’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the person’s identification.” Despite that, recent research conducted by Business.com concluded that “More than 80 percent of nonbinary people believed that identifying as nonbinary would hurt their job search.”

I spent my career in an almost all-male industry, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how a significant number of the men with whom I worked would react to a “genderqueer or non-binary” employee. Such an employee would receive little respect and be the target of disparaging remarks. Why would I want to risk having to discipline, and perhaps even lose several trained and experience concrete mixer drivers because there was one employee who specified references which were out-of-the-norm?

I’m retired now, and hadn’t handled any hiring duties the last eleven years during my career, so I, fortunately, never had to face any such silliness in my decisions. But I do know one thing: the job of any employee in taking hiring decisions is to do the best job for the company, and not the applicants.

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There’s no threat quite like an empty threat!

That Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) checked out of his job a year ago is well known.

Frustrated and beaten down, Mayor Jim Kenney quit on the city of Philadelphia late Monday night.

After yet another shooting — this time involving two police officers shot during the July Fourth celebration on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway — Kenney, in a moment of candor, said: “I’ll be happy when I’m not here — when I’m not mayor, and I can enjoy some stuff.”

A reporter followed up, asking: “You’re looking forward to not being mayor?”

Kenney added: “Yeah, as a matter of fact.”

You’d think that with an estimated net worth of $18.6 million, he could have afforded to resign his job, and $240,000 salary, and let someone else take the reins of our nation’s sixth-largest city if he hated the job so much, but he hasn’t done that.

Saturday night was not a good night in the City of Brotherly Love:

Teen killed after street racing chaos, police-involved shooting in Philadelphia

At the scene, troopers found a large group of cars doing “burnouts” and “drifting.”

by 6ABC Digital Staff | Sunday, June 4, 2023 | 3:33 PM EDT

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — Overnight street racing chaos involving hundreds of drivers in Philadelphia led to a deadly police-involved shooting on Sunday.

Investigators say it began when over 300 cars gathered at Bustleton and Philmont avenues in the city’s Bustleton section around 1 a.m. Sunday.

One of the drivers struck a responding police vehicle.

Not long after, police responded to another incident involving the same group of drivers that shut down a portion of I-95 in Society Hill.

As of 4:05 PM EDT on Sunday, June 4th, there isn’t a single story on that on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page, or the newspaper’s specific crime page, though both contain several stories that are two and three days old. We have embedded the WPVI-TV report, in this article, below the fold. Continue reading →