Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The pot calling the kettle black: Jenice Armstrong tells us that cable news networks are biased The Philadelphia Inquirer laughably tells us that they "delineate between opinion and straight news."

I have said it many times before: I prefer to read the news rather than listen to it on radio or watch it on television. Part of that is because I have very degraded hearing, and part of it is because newspapers have the capability, especially now that digital newspapers have taken some advantage of being able to ignore the printed space limitations of the dead trees editions. Reading the news enables me to go back and reread a section if I found it confusing or contradictory. There’s also the personal point that I delivered newspapers from the sixth through eleventh grades.

But I had to laugh, and I mean a loud, trying-not-to-spill-my-Rice-Chex guffaw, at Jenice Armstrong’s OpEd column in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

I don’t watch cable news much anymore. Here’s why.

Recently, I hosted a screening of “Trustworthy,” a new documentary that asked Americans what they think about the state of media in the U.S. No surprise: It isn’t good.

by Jenice Armstrong | Thursday, June 22, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

When I decided to pursue a career in journalism, it wasn’t that long after the glory days of the uncovering of the Watergate scandal that took down Richard Nixon. Back then, Americans viewed us as heroes, champions of the people.

I worked at newspapers all over because I admired reporters such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I sacrificed time I could have spent with my family — or even starting one of my own — because I wanted to do this work. I’ve watched my colleagues do the same, only to end up working for a shrinking industry that Americans rank not far above used car salespeople.

Today, Americans trust journalism less than ever. A recent poll by the Knight Foundation and Gallup discovered that only 34% of Americans trust the news media to be accurate and fair; more — 38% — said they have “no trust at all” in the media.

Recently, I hosted a screening of Trustworthy, a new documentary on the subject of media distrust, at the Fitler Club, which was followed by a panel discussion. Executive producer Stephany Zamora, a Silicon Valley tech executive, created it after watching Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She woke up the following morning determined to explore the media and democracy and whether it’s possible to find common ground.

Despite having zero filmmaking experience, Zamora set off on a 5,300-mile bus journey across the country interviewing academics, journalism experts (including Inquirer editor and senior vice president Gabriel Escobar), and ordinary Americans about what they think about the state of media in the U.S.

The blurb to the right is a screen capture from Miss Armstrong’s column, and it’s certainly true. But the columnist is about to miss the entire point.

All it takes to discredit news media are two words, Escobar notes in the documentary: “Fake news. When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”

Mr Escobar said that as though the “work that journalists do” is somehow beyond criticism, beyond question. But I am old enough to remember ‘Rathergate‘, in which CBS News used forged documents to try to sabotage the younger President George Bush’s re-election bid. More, I watched CBS News coverage on election night that year, as Dan Rather kept asking reported Ed Bradley, who was doing the numbers that night, for another scenario in which Senator John F Kerry (D-MA) could somehow pull out a win, despite the numbers going against him as the returns rolled in, and the hang-dog expressions on all of their faces as they realized that President Bush was going to be re-elected.

Miss Armstrong wrote that she blamed the problems that journalism is facing on “cable news,” at which point she commented on the failures of CNN to revitalize itself after the firing of Jeff Zucker and hiring of Chris Licht, an effort which failed, and Mr Licht was let go himself earlier this month, after barely a year on the job. Amusingly, the Associated Press reported:

A lengthy profile of Licht in Atlantic magazine that came out on Friday, (June 2, 2023), titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,”[1]Internal link added by me; not in cited article. proved embarrassing and likely sealed his fate. Author Tim Alberta discussed how Licht’s effort to reach viewers turned off by CNN’s hostility to Trump had failed and damaged his standing with CNN journalists.

Another belly laugh here. According to the report, CNN’s journalists were complaining that, in effect, Mr Licht was trying to go for less strident anti-Trump stuff and trying to engage in less unfair more unbiased reporting.

Naturally, there was the Inquirer’s standard denigration of Fox News as slanted — which it is — but I was amused when Miss Armstrong told us that she used to keep cable news on as a “backdrop,” and “fall asleep listening to MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.” If you listen to Miss Maddow’s show, you’ll never run out of biased news, as she is as hard left, on an admittedly leftist network, as you can find.

Miss Armstrong concluded:

In the meantime, I have another solution: Stick to newspapers, which delineate between opinion and straight news. Also, turn off 24-hour cable news, which too often blurs the line between fact and opinion and hypes events to boost ratings.

That’s what I do. I’m way less triggered that way. I sleep better, too.

“Stick to newspapers, which delineate between opinion and straight news”? How many times have I noted the journolism — 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 — of the Inquirer? There are 68 stories on this website alone in which a site search for Inquirer journalism returned. We have noted how the Inky deliberately censors the police reports they use, refused to publish a story on a pro-life clinic, in Philadelphia, being vandalized, and we have previously noted the killing of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, after he took a shot at the police, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s attempts to drum up sympathy for a wannabe gang-banger with parents who are criminals. We have pointed out that while the Philadelphia Police Department wanted to keep the name of the officer who shot young Mr Siderio confidential, for the officer’s safety, the Inquirer dug in, found out the officer’s name, and published it, in what I can only believe is an attempt to get the officer killed. The Inquirer’s Editorial Board had already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged.” I guess that outrage means that the Inquirer ought to put a target on the officer, to try to get him killed, because that’s exactly what they have done. What apparently didn’t outrage the Editorial Board was the fact that a wannabe gang banger was carrying a weapon and took a shot at the police.

Many of those stories were supposedly straight news stories, not specified opinion pieces.

But it’s hardly unexpected, because the Inquirer itself told us that, to meet publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ requirement that it become an “anti-racist news organization,” the newspaper would censor the news, saying that the newspaper would be:

  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.

In a city which has averaged over 500 murders a year for the past three years, and could be headed that way again in 2023, I’m not sure how the newspaper could possibly ‘overemphasize crime.’

  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.

So, the newspaper has publicly committed to an “antiracism” mission, and that, rather than simply presenting the facts, will guide how it publishes the news.

  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

Put plainly, Miss Hughes told us that the Inky would bend its coverage on “crime and criminal justice” with an organization which specifically labels itself activist, which wants reparations from media organizations, and which, despite Miss Hughes’ efforts, wants the newspaper to go even further to the left. The newspaper’s publisher wasn’t telling us about the Inky’s editorial and OpEd pages, she wasn’t “delineat(ing) between opinion and straight news,” but about everything that they publish!

Yes, Miss Armstrong is right: the cable news networks have biases, biases strong and obvious enough that News Nation has seen an opening for straight news programming, though I cannot comment on how successful they’ve been in avoiding bias.

But The Philadelphia Inquirer has a bias, too, and not just on the editorial and OpEd pages; they have already admitted it. It’s understandable that, as a newspaper employee and writer, she’d want people to get their news from newspapers, but to claim that newspapers, especially her own, “delineate between opinion and straight news,” is just laughably false.

References

References
↑1 Internal link added by me; not in cited article.
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The Dummkopf from Delaware strikes again! Nothing quite like insulting a leader when you are trying to negotiate with him

We have previously noted how Joe Biden has managed to insult Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and how that hasn’t produced the foreign policy results the President wanted.

So now, with the United States military weakened by having send war materiel to Ukraine, and abandoned more in Afghanistan, Mr Biden has sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China for negotiations with Xi Jinping, and one would think that it might not be a great time to insult the Chinese President, right? Well, if one did think that, one would be wrong!

China says Biden comments likening leader Xi to a dictator ‘extremely absurd and irresponsible’

Associated Press | Wednesday, June 21, 2023

China on Wednesday called comments by President Joe Biden referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping as a dictator “extremely absurd and irresponsible.”

The new clash of words comes just over a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded a visit to Beijing that sought to break the ice in a relationship that has hit a historical low.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Biden’s comments at a fundraiser in California “go totally against facts and seriously violate diplomatic protocol, and severely infringe on China’s political dignity.”

“It is a blatant political provocation. China expresses strong dissatisfaction and opposition,” Mao said at a daily briefing.

“The U.S. remarks are extremely absurd and irresponsible,” Mao said.

Blinken’s visit, during which he met with Xi, was aimed at easing tensions between the two superpowers but appeared not to have achieved any solid results.

The policy of the United States has long been that Taiwan is a part of China, but supports the separate government. However, Xi Jinping has long been annoyed at Taiwan’s separate government, and now that he has secured his position at home as President for life, and pretty much rooted out any real opponents, he has the opportunity to invade and conquer Taiwan.

Taiwan is only a couple hundred miles from the Chinese coastline, but over 6,000 miles from the continental United States. We are committed to defending Taiwan, but that begs the question: how can we defend Taiwan if China invades?

Add to that all of the war materiel we have sent to Ukraine, as well as just left behind in Afghanistan, and we are simply unprepared to do what it would take to defend Taiwan. China could invade and occupy before we could get any substantial forces there. At that point, the problem is no longer the defense of Taiwan, but the liberation of Taiwan.

The last time the United States and Chinese military were in direct conflict didn’t produce an American victory, but a bloody stalemate around the 38th parallel in Korea, and in that instance, American forces were already strongly in place in Korea before China sent its ‘volunteers’ across the Yalu River. The only good result of the Korean War was that my parents met in Tokyo!

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has over two million trained men and women on active duty. Ground troops make up the bulk of the army with 965,000 soldiers, while the navy has 260,000 members and the air force 395,000. There is also a strategic missile force of 120,000 and a paramilitary arm with 500,000 soldiers.

Our worldwide defense commitments were made when we were by far the world’s strongest nuclear power, but now both the Soviet Union Russia and China have nuclear forces capable of completely obliterating our country, and we have no way to stop them other than our own deterrent forces.

Biden, at the fundraiser on Tuesday night local time, said that Xi was embarrassed over the recent tensions surrounding a suspected Chinese spy balloon that had been shot down by the Air Force over the East Coast.

“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened,” Biden said.

LOL! It was a great embarrassment for the United States that we allowed the thing to cross the entire US before shooting it down. If anything, it showed President Xi that Mr Biden lacked decisiveness and resolve.

Will China invade Taiwan? We know neither if nor when such would happen, and, supposedly, China is building up its military even more before such action would be seriously contemplated, but it could also happen tomorrow. China has certainly been pushing the envelope with what appear to be deliberate provocations, but insulting the Chinese leader when you have your top diplomat in Beijing, trying to reach a less tense accommodation is pretty much what I’d expect from the dummkopf from Delaware.

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Karen wants to know if you have a gun

It was sometime in 2014, at a physician’s appointment when I still lived in Pennsylvania. The nurse came in to take my vital signs and ask the usual questions about my health. Then she asked me if we had any firearms in the house. I responded that such was none of the doctor’s or her business, and that I found the question offensive.

Now comes this from The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Before playdates, ask about guns at home | Expert Opinion

As a pediatrician and a parent, I approach the question of gun ownership by focusing on general safety. I ask about guns in the same breath as I ask about car seats, pools, and food allergies.

by Katie Lockwood, For The Inquirer | Tuesday, June 20, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Sending your kid on a playdate at a friend’s house? The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that you ask whether the family has guns at home.

And at this point, I recommend that the American Academy of Pediatrics take a long walk off a short pier.

One out of three homes with kids has guns, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Of those, only one out of five homes lock up their guns and store ammunition separately.

If you live in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, and Dr Lockwood, “a pediatrician with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and associate professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania,” must either live in Philly or at least reasonably close by, and ought to know that Philadelphians have sought concealed carry permits in huge numbers due to the terrible murder rate, and if you have a firearm for family or personal protection, the last thing you are going to do is “lock up (your) guns and store ammunition separately.” When some crazed junkie is trying to break in, or the gang-bangers are out shooting up the street and perhaps your home, when seconds count, the last thing you’ll find practical is having to unlock a safe for your weapons, or go to another room to get ammunition.

Yet the question often goes unasked because we don’t know how to broach a potentially awkward conversation. Others may assume their friends don’t own guns or, if they do, know how to store them safely.

So how do you ask the question? And what do you do if they have guns?

If people “don’t know how to broach a potentially awkward conversation,” could it possibly be because they realize that it’s none of their f(ornicating) business?

As a pediatrician and a parent, I approach the question of gun ownership by focusing on general safety. I ask about guns at the same time as I inquire about car seats, pools, and food allergies:

“Without judgment, wondering if you have any guns in your home? If so, I would ask that they are locked up and stored safely. Also, we don’t have any food or pet allergies. Looking forward to getting together!”

If I was a parent with a minor child in the City of Brotherly Love, I would not take my child to see Dr Lockwood. When a physician or his office inquires about firearms, they are entering the information into your medical records, and, with the HITECH Act of 2009, which mandates that medical records be digitized, ostensibly so that other physicians can access your records if needed, it also creates a record that the federal or state government could search, a backdoor way of instituting gun registration. Pennsylvania does not maintain a firearms registry, and under Pennsylvania 18 § 6111.4, neither the state, nor any local government, nor any law enforcement agency in the Commonwealth can maintain a firearms registry.

And if pediatricians are asking children about whether their parents have firearms, without their parents present, those pediatricians should be sued into penury.

Of course, you can’t trust the government when it comes to firearms. William Teach noted, on June 18th, that:

armed IRS agents rolled into Great Falls’ (Montana) Highwood Creek Outfitters Wednesday and seized dozens of boxes of ATF form 4473s, the background check form containing information on gun purchasers.

The agents hit the store prior to regular business hours, KRTV reported.

Store owner Tom Van Hoose said, “At 7:30, I came in and they pulled in behind me with 20 heavily armed agents.”

Van Hoose believes his store is targeted because he sells guns the White House opposes: “I can only assume that it’s because of the style of weapons that we have and the press that’s so against them. The current administration seems to be hell-bent on getting those guns out of the hands of average Americans.”

The ATF form 4473 has a gun purchaser’s name, address, birthdate, state/city of birth, gender, social security number, and the serial number of any guns purchased in the store. The information is perfectly suited for use in a registry or registry database.

Montana neither requires the registration of firearms nor a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

As for asking parents of your kids’ friends, it’s pretty laughable. “Without judgment, wondering if you have any guns in your home?” Of course she’s exercising judgment; her entire article is an exercise in judgment. The only surprising thing is that her first name isn’t Karen. When Dr Lockwood continues, if someone answers affirmatively that they have a firearm, “I would ask that they are locked up and stored safely,” she’s telling the person asked, ‘If your weapons are not locked away to where they are useless, my kid ain’t coming to your place!’

Before hosting a playdate, I volunteer this information, hoping to destigmatize and normalize asking:

“Hello! Just so you know, we are a smoke-free, gun-free home with a dog and two cats. We don’t have a pool, but bring some boots for muddy play in the creek with adult supervision. Looking forward to seeing you soon.”

I doubt many of the bad guys read the Inquirer, so Dr Lockwood is almost certainly safe, even after having told everybody that there are no firearms in her home. But her statement, if it’s spoken in person the way she wrote it in her OpEd piece, sounds just so darned pretentious.

Dr Lockwood is, of course, a free human being, with the same freedom of speech as anyone else, and if she wishes to stick her nose into other people’s business ask other people if they own firearms, she is perfectly within her rights. But I, too, am a free human being, with my own free speech rights, and it is my right to urge people to react negatively to the question she wants other to ask.

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Karma! The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend In a time when the left are all for 'diversity,' they have exactly zero diversity of thought or understanding.

How many times have conservatives noted that the Muslims, primarily the Palestinian Arabs, the liberals and homosexual lobbies supported because they opposed Israel, were not really their friends? Quietly and desperately they tried to ignore the fact that homosexuals were executed by hanging in Iran, and by being thrown off tall buildings by Da’ish. But this happened in the good, old United States!

‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags

Many liberals celebrated when Hamtramck, Michigan, elected a Muslim-majority council in 2015 but a vote to exclude LGBTQ+ flags from city property has soured relations

by Tom Perkins in Hamtramck, Michigan | Saturday, 17 June 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” as the ancient saying goes. But, as our friend, the Soviet Union, helped the West finish off our enemy, the Third Reich, the Soviets quickly proved that, without that common enemy, they were not our friends. For the liberals in Hamtramck, the Muslims were their friends; for the Muslims in Hamtramck, the liberals were their useful idiots.

Homosexual activity has been widely condemned under Islam, and even a pro-homosexuality site notes the problems. Some try to argue that the Quran is at least somewhat ambiguous on the subject, but it is clear that the Islamic nations of the world interpret their faith as being strenuously opposed to homosexuality, and homosexual activity is a criminal offense across much of the Islamic and African nations.

In a tense monologue before the vote, Councilmember Mohammed Hassan shouted his justification at LGBTQ+ supporters: “I’m working for the people, what the majority of the people like.”

While Hamtramck is still viewed as a bastion of multiculturalism, the difficulties of local governance and living among neighbors with different cultural values quickly set in following the 2015 election. Some leaders and residents are now bitter political enemies engaged in a series of often vicious battles over the city’s direction, and the Pride flag controversy represents a crescendo in tension.

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

Could none of the non-Muslim liberals in that town read? Did none of them even wonder if the hostility to homosexuality in the Islamic world might be part of the culture of the Muslims in Hamtramck?

But it’s not only the left in Hamtramck who have deluded themselves. From The Victory Girls:

Feminism: Why The West Is Silent On Iran

by Lisa Carr | Sunday, June 18, 2023

We will attempt, once again today, to illustrate how feminism in the West has lost its way. Today, we look back on this very day in 1983, where 10 women from the ages of 17 to 57 years old were hung in an Iranian prison.

Why were they given such a horrific death sentence? Because these women were members of The Bahai Faith. They were told to renounce their religion or die. The Washington Examiner‘s Joseph D’Souza, provided an interesting commentary on the silence this past weekend:

Iranian women face daily threats of violence. More than 50 girls schools across Iran have suffered from apparent poisonings. Just last week, Iran put on trial the brave female reporters who visited Mahsa Amini in prison and told the whole world what the regime had done to her.

Women in the West have rightly asserted their own dignity and rights for decades. Can those same women not raise their voices louder in support of Iranian women and their quest for the same rights and dignity?

They must forcefully call on their governments not only to speak up but to take action on behalf of Iranian women. Tweets are not enough. They don’t create justice, tolerance, harmony, and human rights.”-Joseph D’Souza, The Washington Examiner

Women are still protesting in Iran. The violence is still happening. According to this from PBS, The Iranian government has detained over 20,000 protesters and killed more than 500, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that has been tracking the movement. Since November, a string of suspected poisonings has taken place at more than 50 girls’ schools across the country. Iran has also since banned women who refuse to wear the hijab from health and education services.

But in our “educated” country, our Land of Opportunity, our brand of “feminism” looks different. The plight of Iranian women and women in other, oppressive cultures is largely ignored. Why? Because Western feminists are a bunch of narcissistic twits who can’t be bothered to face the inconvenient truths of what is happening in the world around them.

“(N)arcissistic twits,”? Perhaps, but I believe that ignorant twits, twits who cannot see outside of their Western civilization mindset, who simply cannot wrap their heads around the concept that not everybody in the world thinks as Westerners in general, and Americans specifically, think. Because the American and western European left have swallowed the concern for the plight of the Palestinian Arabs not just hook, line, and sinker, but the fishing rod as well, all the way down to the reel, because they are so wholly anti-Israel — though don’t you dare call them anti-Semitic! — they must support the Arabs, and the Muslims, even though a Western woman walking down the streets of Tehran or Riyadh in typical Western women’s garb would be snatched up by the police and hauled off to jail, to treatment which would be less gentle than an American jail. A Western woman outspoken about the freedom to be lesbian in those countries might well find herself facing decades in prison.

There’s a lot more at Lisa Carr’s original, and there’s no paywall on The Victory Girls, so you can check out the whole thing for free. But it just helps to illustrate that inward thinking of the left, how they just can’t understand how anyone could think or believe differently from them. In a time when the left are all for ‘diversity,’ they have exactly zero diversity of thought or understanding.

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What hath progressives wrought?

There is a cat food dish on the front porch of our house, because our two cats are both outside and indoor critters. A dozen feet in front of the porch is the fence line, which has plenty of foliage, from bushes all the way up to two walnut trees. It was November of 2018 when I noticed that a feral cat had made his home under those bushes, because he was living close to the food we put outside.

It took a few weeks before I could even approach the feral cat, but he eventually got used to me, and while he didn’t let me pet him, he would stop running away when I went out to fill the dish. Then, one very cold December morning, I went out with a scoop of food to fill the dish, and he was so hungry that he started eating even as I was putting the food in the dish. On impulse, I reached down, grabbed him, brought him inside immediately, and plopped him down in a chair in front of the fireplace.

“Ooooh, I like this,” the feral cat thought, and with that, Wild Thing just plain moved in. The moral of the story is simple: if you feed them, they will come!

Subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal are expensive, but many times you will find things in the Journal that the mostly liberal professional media will not publish, as Editorial Board member Allysia Finley does something really radical like tell readers the truth:

The Root Causes of San Francisco’s Disorder

Covid lockdowns hastened the city’s decline, but it won’t recover as long as it clings to progressive obsessions.

by Allysia Finley | Sunday, June 18, 2023 | 3:42 PM EDT

Author Shelby Steele and his son, Eli, were filming a documentary in San Francisco last week when someone broke into their rental car. “In the 10 minutes we were gone our SUV was broken into and nearly $15k of cameras stolen,” Eli tweeted. “Called 911 & they hung up twice.”

Welcome to another day ending in the letter Y in San Francisco.

For those of you stymied by the Journal’s paywall, you can read the article for free here, though the internal hyperlinks are not included.

“Many Twitter employees feel unsafe coming to work in downtown SF and have had their car windows smashed,” Elon Musk tweeted in response. “They also got such a null response from the police that they rarely even bother reporting crimes anymore, because nothing happens.”

It’s more accurate to say the police response depends on the identities of the victim and perpetrator. In January, Shannon Collier Gwin, a 71-year-old art-gallery owner, was arrested for spraying a hose at a homeless woman camped in front of his business. The woman often had been heard screaming in the middle of the night.

“I completely broke,” Mr. Gwin said in an apology. “I am not equipped or trained to deal with a citywide problem like this.”

There was a double episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Past Tense,” in which Captain Sisko, Lt Commander Jadzia Dax, and Dr Julian Bashir wound up time traveled back to San Francisco in 2024. Messrs Sisko and Bashir are found by a pair of police officers, who believe them to be vagrants and warn them to get off the streets. They are escorted to a “Sanctuary District”, a walled-off ghetto that is used to contain the poor, the sick, the mentally disabled, and anyone else who cannot support themselves. A Journal commenter named Brent Law suggested:

Take the empty buildings (hotels, offices, etc) and make SF one giant homeless shelter. Move all those crossing our border illegally as well as the country’s homeless into these makeshift homes. Fence the place in and then take a page from the Left’s playbook by declaring victory.

Not too far off from Deep Space Nine, huh?

Neither, it seems, are the city’s politicians. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Yet San Francisco’s leaders refuse to acknowledge how their own policies have caused the spiral of public disorder that’s driving away businesses and residents in droves.

And here is the lesson of Wild Thing: if a city makes it easier for the homeless and the junkies to survive, allowing them to camp out wherever they choose, providing food and shelter and other services, the derelicts will flock to that city. Because of the policies of the oh-so-compassionate left, rather than solving the problems of homelessness and drug abuse, they have enabled more of it, to the point at which they have grown and festered, and are driving decent people and good businesses — and the taxes they pay — out of what was once one of America’s greatest cities.

The political leaders of the City by the Bay recognize the problems, because they hit them in the face, every day. The part that they don’t get is that their policies are responsible. But that’s hardly surprising: we see the same thing from the liberal Democrat leaders in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, St Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles . . . and that list is not exclusive.

According to MediaFeed, Baltimore ranks 23rd and St Louis 14th — the only two US cities on the list — of the 25 highest murder rates in the world. Most of the other cities are in Venezuela, Brazil, and Mexico.

Add to this list the Westfield San Francisco Centre, whose owners last week handed their property to their lender. “A growing number of retailers and businesses are leaving the area due to the unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area,” the mall’s owner said last month after the center’s Nordstrom store announced it is closing.

Nearly half of the mall’s retailers have closed since 2020 as San Francisco has lost some 7.5% of its population—a larger share than any other major city. Those leaving are by and large affluent. According to Internal Revenue Service data, about 14,700 San Francisco taxpayers with an average adjusted gross income of $415,000 moved to other states in 2020 and 2021. Tens of thousands more flocked to Bay Area exurbs.

It ought to be so simple that even a liberal could understand it: law-abiding people, taxpaying people, mostly want to go to and from work safely, and live where the streets aren’t littered with derelicts and drug addicts, human poop and used needles. But because the progressive mindset is to not clean up the streets and remove the homeless and the junkies, because, well, just because.

The Journal article continues, to note that the COVID-19 lockdowns exacerbated the problems in an unexpected way: once the people who could work remotely, a population which included some of the city’s better-paid workers, they had little desire to return to, or if they had stayed in ‘Frisco, remain in that jungle of junkies.

The lockdowns remained in force until May of 2021, 14 months rather than the fifteen days to flatten the curve, and many people found out that they could make just as much money, progress in their careers, much further away from the city’s crime, ridiculous housing costs, and higher taxes.

The city has long been grungy, but the blight and crime worsened during the pandemic as city officials reduced the jail population by about 40% by releasing hundreds of inmates—never mind that they were far more likely to die of drug overdoses on the streets than of Covid in their cells. Meantime, the city encouraged the homeless to isolate in hotels by offering them free booze and marijuana. “They’re doing San Francisco a great service by staying inside,” one city official said. “We’re saying, ‘We’re doing what we can to support you staying inside and not have to go out and get these things.’”

Yet they still went out and got “things.” At least 18 homeless people died of drug overdoses in one hotel alone. Hotel damage from vagrants has cost the city roughly $44.5 million in settlement payments, which the city is asking the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse. Some hotels have fallen into such disrepair that even many of the city’s homeless are refusing offers to be put up there.

Let’s tell the truth here: everything they did, everything!, was the wrong thing to do. The Journal goes on to tell us that while other cities have mostly returned to pre-panicdemic hotel and other business levels, San Francisco has not . . . and some hotel and building owners have simply walked away from their mortgages, seeing little hope that things will ever recover.

Therein lies the root cause of San Francisco’s public disorder. The city won’t recover unless its leaders get over their neurotic obsession with eliminating wealth.

The author might have been a little bit hyperbolic with that one, because the political leaders aren’t trying, in their minds, to eliminate wealth, but are so deceived by their own biases that they think government largesse for the poor will make everyone wealthy, while ignoring the signs, all around them, that the wealthy will protect what they have rather than let the government make them poor, and that giving free stuff to the deliberately poor simply enables them to survive while destitute.

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There is a Faustian bargain out there, that the reasonably well-to-do left just don’t understand. Reasonably hard-working themselves, providing decent lifestyles for their families and themselves, it is simply outside their paradigm that some people could choose to remain destitute as long as they could still survive rather than get off their asses and work. The well-to-do liberals can be comfortable in saying that marijuana isn’t harmful, without being able to wrap their pumpkin heads around the concept that alcohol and drugs can be addictive, and can rob the addicts of any real free will.

So, many who could take their money and flee have done just that. As nice as California’s climate can be — another magnet for the derelicts, not too hot and not too cold — there are plenty of other nice places to live. California has actually lost population, with nearly 700,000 more people moving out than moved in to the Pyrite State, even though The Los Angeles Times doesn’t see that as a problem. Of course, California is the nation’s capital of self-delusion.

The Deep Space Nine episodes describing the city’s ‘Sanctuary District’ are set next year. I can understand that, in 1994, when the episodes were written and produced, thirty years into the future was unknowable. California was, at the time, nearing the end of Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s first term — he would be re-elected in 1994 — following eight years under Governor George Deukmejian, another Republican, and the state was perceived as somewhat liberal, but not wild-eyed whacko leftist.

Who knows? Perhaps the writers of the episodes, Ira Behr and Robert Wolfe, figured that it was evil Republican, conservative policies which would lead to a semi-concentration camp existence for the poor, but the state has suffered the ills it has not under evil reich-wingers, but a super-majority of ‘progressive’ elected officials. The Fool’s Gold State won’t establish a ‘sanctuary district’ to house the destitute and the junkies — the Deep Space Nine episodes did not mention drug addicts, which would have been horribly, horribly politically incorrect, just the poor and unemployed — but the city’s and state’s policies are slowly turning all of San Francisco into its own sanctuary district, not by walling in the destitute, but by pushing out the hard-working and productive people.

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The problem with journolism in one coffee mug

I have frequently used the word journolist to refer to some reporters, referencing JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity.

Then I saw a tweet from a relatively sane reporter of a supposedly humorous coffee mug, and it seemed particularly apt:

I’m a
Jernalist
Journolist
Jurnalist
I write the news

And that’s the problem: we don’t need people who write the news; we need people who report the news.

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Crime, like any other cancer, left untreated, metastasizes Philadelphians have no one else to blame; they've done this to themselves

I have previously said that the greatest loss I have suffered in moving away from the Keystone State was the loss of freshly baked, hot Philadelphia pretzels. Coming in as a close second is the loss of Wawa coffee. Yes, you can buy Wawa coffee in K-cups, but even though we use filtered water in our Keurig, it just isn’t the same.

Wawa in Philly’s Headhouse Square to close

Neighborhood groups had complained to Wawa about aggressive panhandling, crime, and drug use at the store.

by Mike Newall | Friday, June 16, 2023 | 11:15 AM EDT

The Headhouse Square Wawa will close July 16, a company official told The Inquirer. The move comes after neighborhood associations had complained to Wawa about aggressive panhandling, crime, and drug use at the store and outside on the sidewalk.

The site will become the sixth Center City Wawa to shutter since 2020.

“While closing a store is always a difficult decision to make, Wawa constantly conducts careful and extensive evaluations of business performance and operational challenges of all stores on an ongoing basis,” said Wawa spokesperson Lori Bruce in a statement Friday, confirming the pending closure of the Wawa at Second and Lombard. “We continue to invest in our home market of Philadelphia.”

Also see: Ben Mannes on Broad + Liberty: Can cities rebound from lawlessness to cultures of responsibility and compliance?

This isn’t exactly a poor neighborhood! A 585 ft² rear apartment is listed for $305,000, while a 4 bedroom, 5 bathroom, 2,516 ft² upscale row house, with basement parking, is listed for $1,270,000. Yet the area is suffering from street crime and junkies. Who wants to fork out well over a million bucks to be tripping over junkies laying out in the street?

Joe Dain, cofounder of the Delancey Square Town Watch, which was formed earlier this year, said his group and other neighborhood organizations had met with Wawa officials in April to discuss ongoing concerns at the Headhouse Square Wawa. By that time, the company, he said, had already taken measures to curb panhandlers and other public nuisance issues, including curtailing its hours, hiring private security and working with city police to provide patrols.

“There were certainly efforts being made,” Dain said. “What we were addressing was the fact that more needed to be done.”

Wawa notified the group that it would be instead closing the location, he said. The closure will be only the latest vacancy to hit the historic cobblestone district. A CVS across the street from the Wawa also closed its doors in recent years. The drugstore had been battling many of the same concerns, Dain said. In 2019, Giant Heirloom said it planned to open a supermarket at Abbotts Square at Second and South, around the corner, but that project has since fallen through. The property sits vacant.

Crime affects everybody, not just the immediate victims. Owners see the value of their properties decline, shoppers have fewer options, including the loss of Wawa coffee, and things just generally deteriorate. Trouble is, among the good Democrats of the 5th Ward, which includes Headhouse Square, sort-of progressive but not wild-eyed crazy Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff received 4,777, 47.1%, of the votes in the May primary, while police-hating, hard, hard left progressive Helen Gym Flaherty came in second at 2,908, 28.7%. Primary winner Cherelle Parker Mullin, who campaigned on fighting crime among other things, came in fourth, with 931 votes, 9.2%.

The adjacent 2nd, 8th, and 30th showed similar results.

Simply put, the liberal Democratic voters of the area voted for their own problems!

Wawa has been shrinking its Center City presence.

In October, when Wawa announced it was closing stores at 12th and Market Streets and 19th and Market Streets, the company cited “continued safety and security closures.

Then, even further down, we get to the part where the Inquirer amused me:

Dain, of the Delancey Square Town Watch, said the Headhouse Square store had become more of a problem for residents in recent years.

“We would have groups of kids coming in and ransacking the place at night,” he said. Some of the panhandlers that often congregated outside the store had become aggressive, he said. The store had also become a gathering spot for people in addiction, he said, who would then camp in the historic Shambles structure or by the Headhouse Square Fountain.

“(P)eople in addiction”? That isn’t listed as a direct quote, and I had to chuckle; is that the newspaper’s stylebook phrase for junkies?

This is what you get when you tolerate crime, even the ‘little’ crimes, in what have been mostly minority neighborhoods. Sure, junkies camping out on the streets at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues aren’t bothering anyone in Center City . . . until now, they do. Someone knocking over a bodega in North Philly doesn’t really concern the people in Headhouse Square, and doesn’t even make the news unless a Temple University student gets hurt, so they can safely vote for soft-on-crime, police hating politicians like Mrs Flaherty, or District Attorney Larry Krasner, but crime, like any other cancer left untreated, metastasizes.

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A SEPTA security guard is shot

It was just eight days ago that we noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story in which the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, admitted that they had “lost control of the train cars.”

Then, just Wednesday, we heard that the City Council was going to have hearings on the proposed, $3+ billion Roosevelt Boulevard subway extension, driven in part by the collapsed bridge on Interstate 95 in the city. A lot of people support that, though it seems to me that adding more subway lines when SEPTA has lost control would be premature, to say no more.

And now we get this!

A SEPTA security guard was shot on a train in Frankford, police say

The shooting happened just after 3:10 p.m. at the Arrott Transportation Center, which is located on Frankford Avenue at Margaret Street.

by Robert Moran | Thursday, June 15, 2023 | 6:35 PM EDT

A SEPTA security guard was shot on a Market-Frankford Line train Thursday afternoon in the city’s Frankford section, police said.

The shooting happened just after 3:10 p.m. at the Arrott Transportation Center, which is located on Frankford Avenue at Margaret Street.

The Arrott Transportation Center on the Market Street-Frankford line is just four stops away from the infamous Allegheny Station in the heart of Kensington.

The 27-year-old security guard was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition with a gunshot wound to his right leg.

The victim works for SEPTA through a contract the transit agency has with the security firm Scotlandyard, said SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch.

A person answering the phone at Scotlandyard said the company had no comment.

Police reported no arrests but said a gun was recovered.

There’s more at the original, and at least so far, it’s not a subscribers’ only protected story.

As we’ve noted previously, the global warming climate change activists want more people to move into densely-populated urban areas, where they can use privately-owned automobiles less frequently and take public transportation. But when even the security guards on SEPTA are getting shot, perhaps a lot of people won’t see using SEPTA as a good or wise idea.

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Molly McGhee and student loan forgiveness A clue: don't flash around how well you live and expect charity from others

Molly McGhee’s library, via this tweet. Click to enlarge.

Molly McGhee describes herself in her Twitter biography as:

200% class rage. Novelist. Debut out Oct 2023: Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind @astrahousebooks. I teach @columbia. prev: @torbooks @fsgbooks. rep: @gelrdrgz

Here’s another view.

That’s pretty awesome for a home library, wouldn’t you say? Miss McGhee certainly thought it awesome enough to put a photo of it on Twitter for her 14.4K followers, as well as an ‘in progress’ photo last September.

I’ve got to say, I have library envy here, especially since much of my library is now on my Kindle! When we moved to our retirement home, we downsized, a lot, because our current house is significantly smaller than the one in Jim Thorpe. One of the first things to go were all of the paperbacks, and some of the hardbacks as well. We have just two bookcases left, a fairly standard sized one, and a smaller one. That’s really all for which we have room!

But the seemingly well-to-do Miss McGhee thinks that it’s horrible that she has to do something really radical like pay off her student loans!

She tweeted:

student loan repayment is more than my rent and due starting in october. @POTUS how do you expect americans to pay this?

student loans and their interests are a class tax on people with working class heritage. It is antithetical to the American dream.

Of course, she does have a way to pay for this!

what if I told everyone I think student debt relief should come from defunding our police state 😙

LOL! Our “police state” seems pretty lawless as you get into a lot of neighborhoods in our major cities, including New York City, where Miss McGhee lives, all of which are governed by mostly liberal Democrats. But somehow, some way, our “police state” has enabled her to build a great looking personal library in her under $1,300 per month apartment in Flatbush — a neighborhood in Brooklyn — and to publish a book which is supposed to be released in October.

What Miss McGhee wants, as she tells us that she earns less than $35,000 a year as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, an Ivy League college, is for other people, working-class people, to pay off her student loans. Of course, she doesn’t particularly respect the working class people who’d have to pay their taxes to pay off her student loans, does she?

One would think that an Ivy League-educated New Yorker would have heard of the word introspection, “a reflective looking inward; an examination of one’s own thoughts and feelings”, and thought that maybe, just maybe, publishing photos of a seemingly great personal library, and trashing the working class people whose taxes would have to make up the difference for the student loans she wants forgiven, might not be great ideas to get the public support for student loan forgiveness.

Perhaps the woman working as a waitress because she couldn’t get a job in her field, sharing in a fifth-floor walkup on 94th Street with four other girls, or the guy in Morgantown, West Virginia, who somehow thought his degree in 17th Century French Literature would get him a job as a professor but missed out in the competition for those jobs, and now working the counter at AutoZone, might generate some sympathy for their ’cause.’ But they’ve forgotten about the people who didn’t get to go to college at all, who are still working as waitresses in diners, or greeters in WalMart, or loader operators at aggregate yards, who might wonder why they should have to pay higher taxes due to the deficits that student loan forgiveness would increase.

But one job that Miss McGhee could never do is sales, because she has proven that her salesmanship skills are not just zero, but less than zero, in flashing around the views of her personal library while begging for people to forgive her debts. And the left wonder why there’s so little support for their great idea.