Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Who would want to be a landlord these days?

I’d like to say that I am not a landlord, but that wouldn’t be technically true. My wife and I own one two bedroom house that we rent out, but it is rented within the family. The tenant, my wife’s sister, pays us rent, which we use to pay the mortgage.

More, when we bought our current property, meant as our retirement home, we were both still working, and not planning to retire for a few more years. We couldn’t just let the house sit empty, so we rented it out for three years, and while the tenant paid his rent, on time, being a landlord was not fun. We made very little money, as there were always things going wrong, things needing to be done. Being a landlord is not an occupation I would suggest for anyone.

Landlord-tenant officer shoots woman in head during eviction, police say

Landlord-tenant officers are not sworn law enforcement personnel.

by Jesse Bunch, Max Marin, and Ryan W. Briggs | Wednesday, March 29, 2023 | 5:23 PM EST

A Philadelphia deputy landlord-tenant officer shot a woman in the head while trying to enforce an eviction Wednesday morning, drawing a rebuke from housing advocates and raising alarm over the court system’s use of a deputized security force to eject renters.

The incident took place inside the Girard Court Apartments in Sharswood shortly after 9 a.m. Lt. Jason Hendershot, of the Police Department’s officer-involved-shooting unit, said the woman was at home with her husband in their first-floor apartment when the landlord-tenant deputy arrived in plain clothes to serve a court-ordered eviction.

A struggle ensued in the hallway, allegedly involving a knife, he said. The deputy discharged a weapon and struck the 35-year-old woman, who was taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in critical condition. It was not immediately clear if the woman, whose name has not been released by authorities, was holding the knife.

Hendershot said the deputy appeared to have a head injury, though it was unclear if he required medical treatment.

Court records show the landlord alleged more than $8,000 in unpaid rent, but ultimately reached an agreement with the tenants last May that no money was owed, the tenants would move out by January, and the landlord would make necessary repairs. The tenants sought to postpone their eviction in October, alleging the landlord had failed to fix the property as promised. A judge denied their petition last month.

Officials have not released the name of the deputy landlord-tenant officer and details on the timeline leading up to the shooting remained hazy.

Unlike other jurisdictions, Philadelphia courts rely on a private attorney, appointed by Municipal Court’s president judge and known as a landlord-tenant officer, to execute evictions. This attorney deputizes private security contractors to perform on-site lockouts in exchange for the right to collect millions in related eviction fees.

Of course, it didn’t take the furthest left Democratic mayoral candidate, Helen Gym Flaherty, to politicize it. She tweeted:

While details are still coming to light, I’m appalled by today’s shooting at Girard Court Apartments and my heart is with the impacted families.

I’ve raised alarm bells for years about our city’s terrible eviction practices and worked to reform them.

So, what did we have? The family were more than $8,000 in arrears on their rent, which was apparently forgiven by the owner, in lieu of an agreement that they’d move out by the end of 2022. But the family wanted to stay, and petitioned the court to extend, for an unspecified period of time, a petition which was denied. If the eviction was being carried out on March 29th, the tenants had stayed three months beyond their agreed evacuation date.

Mrs Flaherty, of course, always takes the side of the tenants facing eviction, but never seems to consider the property owners. If my sister-in-law stopped paying her rent, we would still owe the mortgage payments on the place, and mortgage companies don’t just give property owners a break because the rent that was due wasn’t paid. The county expects the property taxes to be paid, and the tenants not paying their rent won’t stop the county from seizing the property if the property owner doesn’t pay the taxes!

It’s a good thing that Philadelphia evictions are privately handled! If Mrs Flaherty was elected Mayor, she would be pressing Sheriff Rochelle Bilal — who is independently elected — to refuse to evict anyone.

That’s todays left: they pander to the tenants, and are perfectly willing to f(ornicate) over property owners.

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What could possibly go wrong?

In October of 2021, the very #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Philadelphia City Council was swayed by the notion that law enforcement had created a class of offenses which fell under the heading of “driving while black”, and they were determined to end that in the City of Brotherly Love:

Philly has become the first big city to ban minor traffic stops said to criminalize ‘driving while Black’

Philadelphia is the first large U.S. city to enact legislation aimed at curtailing the use of pretextual stops for low-level infractions, which disproportionately have targeted Black drivers.

by Sean Collins Walsh | October 14, 2021 | 6:42 PM EDT

Philadelphia on Thursday approved groundbreaking legislation that will bar its police officers from pulling over drivers for low-level motor vehicle offenses like broken taillights, a long-standing law enforcement tool that critics said led to Black motorists being stopped at disproportionate rates.

With a 14-2 vote, City Council passed the Driving Equality Bill, which details seven offenses — including improperly displayed registration or emission stickers — as “secondary violations” that cannot be the sole reason for police to pull over a driver. Instead, officers can issue citations for those infractions that will be mailed to drivers. The legislation will take effect 120 days after Mayor Jim Kenney signs it, which he is expected to do in the coming days.

In doing so, Philadelphia became the first large U.S. city to ban the use of so-called pretextual stops for low-level infractions, a practice that police departments have not only permitted, but encouraged for years to enable officers to potentially search the cars of drivers they suspected of carrying illegal drugs or weapons. Instead, critics say, it led to motorists being unfairly stopped and searched for what’s become known as driving while Black.

If that sounds like bovine feces to you, well that’s because it is. The Philadelphia City Council was saying, in effect, that black motorists are less capable than white drivers of keeping their cars registered and in proper working condition.

The new law is likely to have a significant impact on the nature of policing in Philadelphia. About 97% of police vehicle stops are for low-level violations, according to the Defender Association. Eliminating those could lead to as many as 300,000 fewer police encounters each year, it projected.

Ahhh, the Defender Association. When you hear the words on a police show, “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you,” the Defender Association of Philadelphia is what you get in our nation’s sixth largest city, and they truly love them some criminal defendants.

The actual text of the Driving Equity Bill does not mean the police cannot stop you if you don’t have a license plate on the back of your car, but that’s pretty much how it has worked out. And so I saw this in Tuesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Cars with missing or covered plates are foiling speed cameras on Roosevelt Blvd.

In the 26 months since speed-enforcement cameras were installed on Roosevelt Boulevard, average speeds and violations have dropped.

by Thomas Fitzgerald | Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Over the last year, 30,630 vehicles caught speeding on Roosevelt Boulevard dodged tickets because the drivers were traveling without a license plate, according to the Philadelphia Parking Authority.

As a result, automated speed-enforcement cameras watching over one of the region’s most dangerous roads did not capture the data needed to send a ticket to the registered owner. PPA staff and city police officers who review potential violations had to reject them.

That’s kind of funny, actually, that the Roosevelt Boulevard Robocop couldn’t send tickets to guys eleven miles an hour over the speed limit, right?

And 240 vehicles with no plates were clocked at 100 mph or more, the report said.

Oops!

What is Roosevelt Boulevard like?

Roosevelt Boulevard has 12 lanes and long stretches without traffic signals. Though built like a highway, it runs through densely packed commercial and residential neighborhoods. Posted speed limits are 40 mph and 45 mph along the route. It’s often at or near the top of the list of most dangerous roads in the city and is especially perilous for crossing pedestrians.

The speed enforcement cameras have contributed to reduced speeds, as the robocop just sends tickets to drivers. But it seems that 30,630 drivers have taken advantage of Philly’s non-enforcement of non-hazardous vehicle violations; the peopple who scoff the law the most, by not having license plates visible, are the ones getting away with speeding on the Boulevard.

The 100+ MPH violators? Almost certainly street racers, and you’ve got to admit: if you’re going to drag race in the city, the Boulevard sure looks like an ideal place to do it! Maybe, just maybe, the “driving while black” laws have something to do with people not having license plates, or having them deliberately obscured. Hit-and-run fatalities are not exactly unheard of on Roosevelt Boulevard.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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The laughable contortions taken by the professional media when a school shooter is #transgender Isn't simply reporting the truth much, much simpler?

It did not take long for the crazy person who shot up The Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a woman who killed three children and three adults, to be identified as transgender, a woman who decided that she was a man. Yet that news was primarily confined to Twitter and conservative sites; the professional media seemed reticent to acknowledge that part.

Finally, there was this, at 1:39 AM EDT this morning, in The New York Times:

There was confusion about the gender identity of the assailant in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Chief Drake said the shooter identified as transgender. Officials used “she” and “her” to refer to the shooter, but, according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, the shooter appeared to identify as male in recent months.

This was the sixth paragraph down. In what is even more amusing is that the article used some stilted prose, to refer to Miss Hale as “the shooter” or “the assailant,” and managed to not once refer to her with a gendered pronoun.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Nashville Shooter Left ‘Manifesto,’ Was ‘High-Functioning’ Autistic

A second Times story also managed to avoid using gendered pronouns or honorifics — like The First Street Journal, the Times uses honorifics, unlike the vast majority of publications — and had this paragraph:

In the aftermath of the shooting, there was confusion about the shooter’s gender identity. Chief Drake said the shooter identified as transgender, and officials used “she” and “her” to refer to the attacker. But according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, the shooter appeared to identify as male in recent months.

Not quite identical, but very close. The author of the second article, Adeel Hassan, was not one of the four listed authors, Emily Cochrane, Ben Shpigel, Michael Levenson and Jesus Jiménez, of the first one. The second article was time stamped at 6:57 AM EDT this morning.

The Washington Post, which does not use honorifics, gave slightly more information:

(John)Drake (chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department) said Hale was transgender. Asked if that had played a role in what he described as a “targeted attack,” Drake said it was part of the police investigation.

“There is some theory to that,” Drake said. But, he added, “We’re investigating all the leads, and once we know exactly, we will let you know.”

Don Aaron, a police spokesman, later clarified the chief’s remarks. “Audrey Hale is a biological woman who, on a social media profile, used male pronouns,” Aaron said in an email.

Not restrained by editorial policy specifying honorifics, the Post story frequently referred to the killer as “Hale”, so there were fewer references to “the shooter” or “the assailant.” Neither the Times nor the Post referred to “the killer.” But there was this highly amusing sentence as a stand-alone paragraph:

Police initially described Hale as appearing to be a teenager before revising the age upward to 28.

In any normal composition in English, that would be “revising her age” or “revising his age”. “(R)evising the age” is incredibly stilted.

The Philadelphia Inquirer simply had an Associated Press story by John Matisse, time stamped 2:34 PM EDT on Monday, which, starting on the fifth paragraph down, included:

Police gave unclear information on the gender of the shooter. For hours, police identified the shooter as a 28-year-old woman and eventually identified the person as Audrey Hale. Then at a late afternoon press conference, the police chief said that Hale was transgender. After the news conference, police spokesperson Don Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale currently identified.

Drake did not give a specific motive when asked by reporters but gave chilling examples of the shooter’s prior planning for the targeted attack.

“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” he said. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”

He said in an interview with NBC News that investigators believe Hale had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”

Like the other stories listed, the AP avoided any gendered pronouns in reference to Miss Hale. An updated version, this one in the Lexington Herald-Leader, time stamped at 7:19 AM on Tuesday, had the same paragraphs, and did the same as the Times, referring to “the shooter.”

The Wall Street Journal, which does use honorifics, had a somewhat briefer story, noted that the killer was transgender, but avoided any language which required honorifics or gendered pronouns, referring to “the shooter” and “the suspect.” The suspect? She’s stone-cold graveyard dead now, so unless there’s some chance that the police shot the wrong person, I believe we can avoid calling her “the suspect.”

These are the hoops through which the credentialed media are jumping to avoid “misgendering” someone. Our Stylebook, which specifies that, “Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the honorific and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth,” avoids that kind of confusion or stupid prose. Isn’t simply telling the truth much, much simpler?

Finally, my compliments to the police! Unlike the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, where the School Resource Officer, Scot Peterson, earned the epithet the “Coward of Broward“, by hiding outside while Nikolas Cruz was inside killing people, or the Uvalde school shooting, where armed responders waited for an hour while the carnage continued, because they were scared [insert vulgarity for feces here]less, Nashville Metropolitan Police received the call of an active shooter at 10:13 AM CST, and by 10:27 AM Miss Hale was dead.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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How stupid can they be? "Satire is rapidly becoming impossible because reality has gotten so weird."

There comes a point at which there is so much silliness, so much absolute stupidity, that my mind has to question just how much of this is real and how much is deliberate parody. As Robert Stacy McCain put it, “satire is rapidly becoming impossible because reality has gotten so weird.” When a ‘transgender woman’ claims that a Transportation Safety Administration agent yelled at ‘her’ for having a penis, “punched her in the testicles” at John F Kennedy Airport, and whined that “that her ‘balls still hurt so bad’,” what can you do but laugh?

“We apologize again for your experience,” the airport tweeted in response, according to the Daily Mail. “Your comments have been noted and shared.”

Well, that part isn’t laughable: the TSA is accepting the unnamed passenger’s complaints at face value, and accepting the notion that a woman can have a penis and testicles.

Then there’s Dylan Mulvaney, an (allegedly) ‘transgender woman,’ and his “Days of Girlhood,” in which Mr Mulvaney acts out his ‘transition.’ I say “acts out,” because it’s such a parody of actual girls that it’s difficult to take it as anything serious about how real girls behave, or even that a ‘transgender’ girl would think real girls behave. But President Biden was apparently taken in, as he met with Mr Mulvaney and “said that states had no right to restrict gender-affirming health care, including sex-change surgery and the prescription of hormone blockers.”

Of course, the states blocking “sex-change surgery and the prescription of hormone blockers” are only doing so for minors; adults can still do whatever silliness they want to their bodies, and some minors have been pushed into ‘sex changes’ well before they were of any reasonable age to have informed consent.

The amazing part is that much of the left have swallowed this, not just hook, line, and sinker, but past the rod-and-reel and up the arms of the ‘transgender’ fisherperson. It’s as though registering ‘Democrat’ has entailed swallowing a stupid pill which causes some people to lose that innate ability of every bird, every reptile, and every mammal, to be able to distinguish between males and females of their own species.

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28½ hours without power The patricians propose and enact, and the plebeians have to work and pay for it

The propane fireplace that is our secondary heat source.

With some serious windstorms, but no tornadoes, we lost sparktricity at about 3:30 PM on Saturday; it was finally restored at 7:59 PM Sunday. It was dry, sunny and warm enough, about 70º F during the day, but down to 42º F Sunday morning. Because we prepared for this during our 2018 kitchen remodel, we had a propane range, water heater, and fireplace. While the range required electricity to use the oven, the stove-top still worked, albeit we had to use a match to ignite the burners. The water heater and fireplace do not require electricity, though the blower, to better circulate the fireplace’s heat does.

It’s the end of March, and spring, not winter. But losing electricity for thousands of rural customers in what was a windstorm, not snow, not ice, and not a tornado, points out once again that electricity service is our nation’s most vulnerable-to-the-weather utility. Imagine not eastern Kentucky and our relatively mild weather, but upstate New York in the winter:

Fact or fiction: Here’s what NY Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to do with gas stoves

by Jon Campbell | January 26, 2023

By now, you’ve probably seen the headlines, the cable news segments, the social media posts — all about the latest culture war to engulf New York and the nation: the future of gas stoves.

“Out-of-touch politicians and bureaucrats in Albany are moving forward with a BAN on gas cooking stoves,” read a petition from state Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt, a Republican.

Or on Fox News: “Gov. [Kathy] Hochul, Democrats, if you mess with my gas stove, you’ll get burned.”

The national debate was ignited earlier this month by comments from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which raised — and later walked back — the possibility of a ban on gas stoves amid growing concerns over research connecting them to childhood asthma. A day later, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled a plan of her own to crack down on fossil fuels, including a ban on gas hookups in new buildings.

There’s more at the original, and it’s not behind a paywall.

Under Governor Hochul’s proposals, existing buildings with gas ranges and water heaters could keep them, and even replace them with gas appliances when they go bad. But here’s the real kicker:

The second proposal does not apply to gas stoves, according to the governor’s office. Hochul wants to phase in a ban on the sale of new fossil fuel-powered heating equipment in New York, beginning with smaller buildings in 2030 and larger buildings in 2035.

So, while the Governor would allow people to replace the smaller gas appliances with newer gas appliances, the heating equipment, the part which keeps New Yorkers alive during the Empire State’s brutal winters, could not be replaced with heating oil or gas furnaces. I’ve got a big mental picture of people using their gas ranges to keep from freezing, not exactly the wisest thing to do, but in extremis, people will do what they have to do.

When we lived in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, where winters can be tough, if not as bad as in New York, our heating system was a heating-oil powered steam boiler for radiators. Radiators meant pipes for the steam, as you can see when I was tiling our kitchen floor during a remodel, in the left corner, but the 1890 house did not have forced air heating ducts. If you have to replace your heating system with a heat pump based one, that means the installation of forced air heating ducts, not a fun thing, not an inexpensive thing, and not a nice thing at all in an older, Victorian home such as we had.

But that apparently doesn’t matter to the Governor; she has money and she’ll always be nice and toasty warm, but if you’re one of the working-class, paycheck-to-paycheck plebeians, it’s a big, big deal. Then, when the power fails during a heavy snowstorm in January, as happens with some frequency, well, too bad, so sad, must suck to be you!

Of course, your gas or heating oil furnace also requires electricity, but not as much as an electric heating system. Our heating oil boiler used a single 110-volt, 20 ampere circuit for the ignition and oil pump; a gas forced air system would have a similar demand for the blower motor and ignition. Those could be easily powered by a basic, gasoline-powered generator you can buy from Home Despot.

Our heat-pump based system in our new Kentucky home? It uses two 220-volt, 50 amp circuits, and if you need a backup generator to run that, it’s not going to be a smaller, home-owner type generator!

This is the difference between the patricians and the plebeians: the patricians propose and enact, and then the plebeians have to work and pay for it, and live with the added burdens Our Betters place on us.

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When you don’t tell the truth at first, don’t be surprised if fewer people believe you later When it comes to COVID-19, if we had been told the truth all along, people wouldn’t be doubting the government’s word!

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove noted that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, sitting in full on an appeal of a ruling by a three-judge panel, blocked President Biden’s mandate that all federal employees must be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Mr Teach’s money line:

And, even with the mandate, people who got vaxxed were still getting COVID and still dying.

And this was the entire problem. If the ‘vaccines’ had actually been vaccines, had actually prevented the vaccinated from contracting COVID-19, vaccine resistance would have vanished. But it wasn’t long after the ‘vaccines’ became available to everyone that we started to hear reports of ‘breakthrough’ cases, of people who had been fully vaccinated — defined at the time as 14 days past their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines — contracting the Peking pox. Continue reading →

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The truth will set you free In the end, the truth will always assert itself

I asked the question previously: If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently? I was referring to the University of Pennsylvania’s ‘transgender woman’ swimmer Will Thomas, the male swimmer who ‘transitioned’ to female, goes by the name “Lia,” and joined UPenn’s women’s swimming team, and won several Ivy League events. All of Mr Thomas’ victories against real women carry with them the unwritten asterisk: a guy was beating up on girls. Now, we have another example:

‘Tiffany’ Thomas won a bike race. Photo via Daily Mail. Click to enlarge.

Controversial trans athlete, 46, wins women’s NYC cycling race and says she feels like a ‘superhero’ – as critics warn ‘women’s rights in America are being destroyed’

  • Tiffany Thomas, 46, dominated the field in an NYC cycling race at the weekend

  • She took up the sport aged 40 before quickly finding success

  • Her success has been criticized amid claims trans athletes hold an unfair advantage in women’s sports

by Will Potter | Wednesday, March 22, 2023 | 9:24 PM EDT | Updated: Thursday, March 23, 2023 | 8:10 AM EDT

A transgender cyclist won first place at a female race in New York City amid ongoing debates over the inclusion of trans athletes in female competitions.

Tiffany Thomas, 46, who was born male, ended the Randall’s Island Crit cycling race atop the podium, blowing the competition out of the water to snatch first place.

Despite only taking up cycling in 2018, Tiffany quickly found success and has dominated competitions in the years since. She recently landed a place on top cycling team LA Sweat, where her oldest teammate is just 32.

There’s more at the original, and it is not hidden behind a paywall, so you can read it anytime. While The First Street Journal always uses the pronouns which refer to a person’s biological sex, and proper name at birth if we can fine it, when it comes to the ‘transgendered,’ I do not change the direct quotes of other sources.

Also read: William Teach, Groomer Groups Sue To Stop Florida’s Ban On Child Mutilation Medical Procedures

The Pico family love watching European bicycle races, at least as much for the scenery as the races themselves; they’re like vicarious vacations, and the recently completed men’s and women’s road races starting and also ending in Siena, Italy were certainly special, as we saw places we’ve personally been.

While the number of ‘trangender women’ participating in women’s sports has been small, and make a mockery of them trying to actually fit in as the women they claim to be, what about those who don’t take actions which differentiate themselves from real women? Jaron Bloshinsky, now known by the fake name Jazz Jennings, tried being a girl from well before puberty, with the assistance of his parents. Through the use of ‘puberty blocking’ medications, young Mr Bloshinsky never went through male puberty, as Will and ‘Tiffany’ Thomas did, trying, with the guidance of his ‘parents,’ to avoid the differentiation from girls that male puberty would have made much more obvious. Thanks to a tip from Robert Stacy McCain, I found this article, one definitely not in the credentialed media, since they have swallowed transgenderism hook, line, and sinker:

‘I Just Want to Feel Like Myself,’ Tearfully Admits America’s Most Famous ‘Trans Kid’ Jazz Jennings

By Megan Fox | Tuesday, March 21, 2023 | 9:45 AM EDT

There are a lot of deeply disturbing and unlikeable members of the trans cult. Jazz Jennings is not one of them. He was transitioned by his mother at the tender age of five. By the age of eleven, Jazz was on puberty blockers. At 17, even though a minor, Jazz underwent multiple genital surgeries to remove his penis and have it inverted. This process was botched and several attempts were made to remedy it, but the reduced size of Jazz’s penis due to years on puberty blockers made an already brutal surgery even worse. Continue reading →

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Killadelphia: Everyone wants to talk around the problem, without ever telling the truth

There are dozens and dozens of suggestions on how to reduce crime, but there is one way which actually does work: locking up the criminals that are caught for as long as the law allows, because the criminal who is behind bars is not out on the streets able to commit more crimes. But somehow, some way, that very simple logic has escaped the good citizens of the City of Brotherly Love. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Gun violence can affect every part of Philly life. Here’s how residents suggest solving it.

Philadelphians are “tired of looking over their shoulder.” Some want to leave the city altogether.

by Ellie Rushing and Nate File | Monday, March 20, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Joshua Sanchez was leaving his bank one day in North Philly when a group of men with guns swarmed him. They robbed him, he said, then shot him once in the back before fleeing.

“It’s still there,” Sanchez, 38, said of the bullet, which is lodged too deep and close to his spine for doctors to remove.

Three years later, he’s tried to move his life forward, but gun violence remains a looming threat. Sanchez hears shots at home and at job sites, where he works in property maintenance. The danger often feels overwhelming, the lifelong Philadelphian said. He worries that if he stays much longer, he or his son may not survive.

“I just put my house up for sale,” he said. “I’m getting out of Philadelphia.”

He wouldn’t be the first. The 2020 Census put the population of Philadelphia at 1,603,797, but just a year later, the Census Bureau was guesstimating the city’s population as down to 1,576,251, a 1.72% population loss. More than a year later, the Census Bureau has still not updated its website to reflect its guesstimate for 2022 population.

Nearly 50% of Philadelphians in recent poll said that gun violence has had a major negative impact on their quality of life, per the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and research firm SSRS, and 64% of respondents said they have heard gunshots in their neighborhood in the last year.

This is the second time in a week in which I have seen the Leftist Lenfest Institute referenced in an Inquirer story, yet in neither the previous one, nor this, does the newspaper article point out that the Lenfest Institute owns the Inquirer. To cite something as though it is an outside source without that disclosure violates every standard of journalism of which I can think. The Lenfest Institute’s website doesn’t even mention that it owns the Inky on its main page, and you have to go down to a second section on its “About” page to see that acknowledged.

In interviews with nearly a dozen residents, people conveyed an ever-present fear of life in the city. Many said they’ve changed their habits in recent years as shootings have spiked, and now limit their time spent outdoors, especially at night. Mothers said they worry about their children anytime they leave home. Others, such as Sanchez, said they’d move out of Philadelphia if they had the resources.

“People are tired of looking over their shoulder,” said Jacob Green, 69, a poll respondent who’s saving up money to move from Mount Airy to North Carolina.

Then there was this tweet from WCAU-TV, Channel 10, the NBC owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia. District Attorney Larry Krasner apparently wants to give them their severe slaps on the wrist, and released a series of mugshots of homicide suspects. Given that many of the credentialed media journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading have complained about Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News and his unsoftened coverage of crime in the city, they will doubtlessly be aghast that NBC10 put together this montage of the mugshots of the ten murder suspects, because nine of them are black, and one appears to be Hispanic, or “brown” as The Philadelphia Inquirer would call him. That the District Attorney had the police mugshots of nine of the ten suspects tells us that all but one had been previously arrested, which raises the obvious question: how many, if any, of these suspects could and should have been behind bars when they committed the murders of which they are accused?

More than that, in the linked story from NBC10, the mugshots of the ten suspects are all separate, but, for the tweet, the station put them all together, a montage of minority suspects.

As I guessed without looking first, the Inky didn’t have any of that on their website main page or specific crime page.[2]As of 10;10 AM EDT. The newspaper would much rather not show mugshots like that than help the police apprehend murder suspects.

Back to the original Inquirer article:

The poll also quantified a long-known fact of the crisis: Communities of color largely bear the brunt of it.

Black respondents were more than twice as likely to say that gun violence has seriously affected their quality of life, compared with white respondents. And across income levels, Black and Latino residents were more likely than white residents to report that they had heard gunshots in the last year.

So, while the Inky is willing to tell us that “(c)ommunities of color” are the primary victims of shootings and killings in Philly, the newspaper is unwilling to do anything to get identified and sought-after killers off the city’s streets. Got it!

The survey indicates that while 86% want improved relationships between the police and local communities, only 55% support increased funding for the Philadelphia Police Department. And the people of Philadelphia voted, by landslide margins in both the primary and general elections, in Philly’s most murderous year, 2021, to keep Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner as District Attorney.

Meanwhile, Margie Harkins, 63, a former X-ray technician who frequently worked with gun violence victims, said she wants to see stricter gun laws but knows that action must come from state leaders, not the city. But first, she said, the city must address the mindset of the people using guns.

“Why is everything settled by pulling a gun?” asked Harkins, a poll respondent from Southwest Philly.

Why? Because parents aren’t rearing their children properly, that’s why. With fathers absent or never known, and mothers trying to rear children on their own when there simply are not enough hours in the day to work and try to be both mother and father to their kids, with drugs rampant and a city that’s trying not to stamp out drugs but create ‘safe injection centers’, how can anyone expect anything other than savagery?

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑2 As of 10;10 AM EDT.
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‘Progressive’ San Francisco defense attorney who wants to be District Attorney thinks people should just suck it up and accept crime to live in the city

Every once in a while, I come upon something which leaves me shaking my head. This is from John Hamasaki on Twitter. Mr Hamasaki is saying, basically, that in order to live in an urban environment, you must simply accept being a crime victim!

Mr Hamasaki is saying that a loss of “thousands of dollars” is pretty much just something you have to expect, and living in the suburbs, living somewhere more reasonably safe, shelters people so very much that they just aren’t tough enough for “city life.”

Of course, it is hardly just a “property crime” problem, as though the loss of property for which people worked hard to obtain — something else that’s part of “city life” — is mostly a nothingburger. Car break-ins have surged dramatically in Mr Hamasaki’s home town, but he doesn’t care. Catalytic converter theft is becoming more and more common, especially in states where emissions testing is required as part of an annual inspection, and they can cost up to $3,500 to replace. If you live in Philadelphia, where the median household income is $52,649, that’s a big chunk of change, though as a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco, perhaps it’s not quite as big a chunk of change for him. As a candidate to replace ousted San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, he had the support of the same ‘progressive’ allies — translation: soft on crime — as the recalled Mr Boudin.

Car thefts have increasingly become carjackings, because newer vehicles require a separate key fob for the vehicle to start, and the easiest way to get that is to hijack the car while the owner is present with the fob. Of course, carjackings are robberies by force, most frequently armed carjackings in which owners are confronted with a gun in their faces.

The bad guys don’t always stick with simple larceny. The crime wave which really got started in 2020 is a huge murder rate as well. Mr Hamasaki believes that you’ve got to be tough to live in the city? Well, in Pennsylvania, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which did not include Philadelphia and Pittsburgh increased by 1.18% between 2018 and 2021, while in Allegheny County — Pittsburgh — it jumped 33.77%, and in Philly, a whopping 59.21%. 54.72% of all murders in Pennsylvania occurred in Philadelphia, which has just 12.37% of the commonwealth’s population. With 78.11% of the state’s population, the counties outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh saw only 33.30% of the killings.

Mr Hamasaki complained that those of us who complain about unchecked crime simply hate cities. No, it’s what our major cities have become that people hate. But when kids get gunned down near their schools in targeted gang hits, and city parents refuse to send their kids to those schools, it’s people in the cities themselves who are concerned and scared. When applications for concealed carry permits more than sextupled in Philly, it’s not because people aren’t ‘tough enough’ for ‘city life,’ but because they’re just plain scared.

Robert E Howard, the 1930s author of the Conan stories, wrote in the Tower of the Elephant, “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” Mr Hamasaki appears to be sanctioning the new savagery in our cities, without realizing that it can get your skull split, in the more modern form of getting your brains blown out by a Glock 9mm.