Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Criminals are stupid, or “You in a heap o’ trouble, boy!”

Can we tell the truth here? Criminals are just plain stupid!

Hunter Townsend. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Lexington detective: Men got into fight with woman, returned to scene and stabbed her

by Christopher Leach | Friday the 13th, January, 2023 | 1:31 PM EST

Two suspects accused of stabbing a 28-year-old woman first assaulted the victim and later returned to the scene to further assault her, according to court testimony given by a detective Friday.

Hunter Townsend, 25, and Keith Merritt, 52, are both facing charges of first degree assault in connection to the incident, according to court records. Both were booked into the Fayette County Detention Center the evening of Jan. 5.

According to testimony from Detective Christopher Ward with the Lexington Police Department, officers were dispatched to the Dollar Tree on Versailles Road just after 3 p.m. on Jan. 3 for a report of a subject down with blood on them. When officers arrived, paramedics were administering care to a woman suffering from multiple stab wounds.

There’s more at the original.

Keith Merritt. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Allegedly, an altercation happened in the Dollar Tree parking lot, Messrs Townsend and Merritt left, and then returned later to stab the woman multiple times. In other words, they had time to think about what they were going to do, and did it anyway!

Surveillance cameras picked up the truck Mr Townsend was driving, and were able to capture the license plate number. The victim claimed that both men stabbed her, though Mr Townsend allegedly stabbed her more often.

Under KRS §508.010 Assault in the First Degree is a Class B felony. Under KRS §532.060, the sentence for a Class B felony is not less than ten (10) years nor more than twenty (20) years imprisonment. We don’t know about what the argument was, but after driving away, thinking about it, these two fine gentlemen (allegedly) returned to the scene and tried to kill her. Though not charged with attempted murder — which is another Class B felony — it’s clear that these gentlemen were (allegedly) undertaking an act which could easily have resulted in the victim’s death.

Mr Townsend is 25 years old, at which time we’d hope he was showing some maturity, but apparently not. Mr Merritt, on the other hand, is 52 years old, and ought to have developed at least some wisdom, even if only from a hard life experience, and tried to stop his younger companion.

I would not be surprised if there were some things about which we have not yet been told, or that recreational pharmaceuticals were involved, but, you know what? I really don’t care. Try them, convict them, and sentence them to the maximum term allowable under the law. Men (allegedly) this stupid are not people we want to have walking around town.

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If this isn’t #grooming, then what is it?

As we have previously noted, the Central Bucks School Board required teachers, administrators and staff to use students’ proper names, references and pronouns as recorded in school records, unless the individual student’s parents approved a change, and is removing materials with sexualized content from school libraries. Of course, the homosexual lobby are just spittle-flecked with rage, claiming that this discriminates against homosexual, bisexual, and ‘transgender’ students, as though normalizing and promoting homosexuality and ‘transgenderism’ is some sort of civil right, and not an attempt at grooming.

So now, the Biden Administration is getting into the act, wanting to advance grooming of abnormal sexual orientations. From The Washington Post:

Are book bans discrimination? Biden administration to test new legal theory.

The federal government is investigating a Texas school district over its alleged removal of books featuring LGBTQ characters

by Hannah Natanson | Friday the 13th, January 2023 | 6:00 AM EST

The federal government has opened an investigation into a Texas school district over its alleged removal of books featuring LGBTQ characters — marking the first test of a new legal argument that failing to represent students in school books can constitute discrimination.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating the Granbury Independent School District, department spokesman Jim Bradshaw said this month. The probe is based on a complaint of discrimination lodged last summer by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said ACLU attorney Chloe Kempf. Continue reading →

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Central Bucks School District is doing the right thing

I am pretty sure that The Philadelphia Inquirer and Devontae Torriente, a student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School would approve of Central Bucks School Board’s Policy 321, on restricting “Partisan, Political, or Social Policy Advocacy Activities” if it was aimed at preventing teachers from hanging MAGA banners or wearing golf shirts with DeSantis for President on them. It goes without saying — though I’ll say it anyway — that the Inky and Mr Torriente would say that a teacher, staffer, or administrator posting Bible verses or flags or banners promoting a particular religion should not be allowed.

Central Bucks’ new policy is an ‘anti-LGBTQ crusade’

I was once a closeted queer student in high school. Everyone who believes in freedom, equality, and fairness must do all that we can to defeat these policies. Children’s lives depend on it.

by Devontae Torriente, For The Inquirer | Thursday, January 12, 2023 | 12:00 PM EST

Devontae Torriente, from his UPenn Law School biography. Click to enlarge.

As a queer person in America, I am deeply troubled by the attacks on the LGBTQ community happening across the country. The anti-LGBTQ crusade has made its way to Pennsylvania and is now on display in the Central Bucks School District — one of the largest in the state.

Since Mr Torriente self-identifies as “queer”, I trust that I am able to use the description as well?[1]Actually, I chose not to use the term.

On Tuesday, the Central Bucks school board passed Policy 321, which the board named the “Partisan, Political, or Social Policy Advocacy Activities” policy. In a 6-3 vote, the board decided to ban teachers from hanging Pride flags and other types of “advocacy.”

The policy serves to target and further marginalize LGBTQ students in the school district. Even though the proposed policy makes no explicit mention of LGBTQ status, there should be no confusion about who it targets.

I was once a closeted queer student in high school. I know firsthand the mental and emotional toll that being forced into the shadows can take. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. This is why everyone who believes in freedom, equality, and fairness must do all that we can to defeat these policies. Children’s lives depend on it.

In this, the author conflates his deciding to remain “closeted” in high school with teachers not being allowed to hang homosexual ‘pride’ flags or banners in their classrooms. He still had the choice to disclose his homosexuality, and, in the middle of the last decade that would hardly have been controversial. There might have been students who would cease associating with him, some who would mock or bully him, but that has nothing to do with Central Bucks teachers not being able to advocate for, or against, tolerance of homosexuals.

No, Mr Torriente wants the public schools to advocate for the normalization of homosexuality. But that is clearly a political position, and a position with which some people disagree.

The policy is dangerous because, as the Education Law Center argued in an October letter to the school board, the policy will have a “harmful and chilling effect” on classrooms in the school district.

An updated version of the proposal — posted last month by the Bucks County Courier Times — prohibits school district employees from advocating to students “any partisan, political, or social policy issue.” The proposal does not specify what this means, but prohibits “flag, banner, poster, sign, sticker, pin, button, insignia, paraphernalia, photograph, or other similar material” related to these partisan, political, or social policies. (The American and Pennsylvania flags are exempt.)

This ambiguity, however, is no accident; it is the point. Because it is unclear what type of speech or actions are prohibited — and because teachers’ jobs are on the line if they violate the policy — many teachers will err on the side of caution, and avoid discussing sexual orientation and gender identity altogether.

And that is exactly the way it should be! The public schools should not be discussing “sexual orientation and gender identity” at all; those are personal matters, which teachers and staff ought not to be engaging with young and impressionable students. As we have previously noted, the school board required teachers, administrators and staff to use students’ proper names, references and pronouns as recorded in school records, unless the individual student’s parents approved a change. This was done to avoid legal repercussions if a particular student wanted to claim he was the opposite sex, and his parents sued the school for ‘enabling’ gender transition.

The author takes the position — without saying it explicitly — that acceptance of “LGTBQ” status is somehow beyond the range of political or religious debate, but that is clearly wrong. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, in their various denominations, are all based on religious laws which state that homosexual activity is inherently sinful, and if not all priests, ministers, rabbis and imams of those religions are willing to go along with that, many are. Mr Torriente wants the public schools to take a position which contradicts the religious faiths of many families. That some people’s political positions, regardless of their religious faith, or lack thereof, do not accept homosexuality or transgenderism as reasonable or acceptable, is clearly and obviously known, and the author wants to use the public schools to fight that political position.

The public schools must, of course, enforce the law: students who assault or bully others over their sexual orientation are just as much in violation of school rules and state law as assault or bullying over anything else. We have seen the results of a school board which did not enforce the rules and report to law enforcement an in-school assault by Nikolas Cruz; I am absolutely in favor of serious and strict enforcement of those rules and laws. But the public schools, with their legally captive audiences, should not be in the business of pushing political or religious positions. The Central Bucks school board is doing the right thing.

References

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↑1 Actually, I chose not to use the term.
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Killadelphia’s Democratic mayoral candidates do not want the killing to stop They must want the killings to continue, because they keep advocating the policies which have enabled more crime

When #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 journolists[2]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 write the news, it tends to fall into the category of GI/GO: garbage in, garbage out. It was the subtitle of this article from what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[3]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. that told us that the leftward bias of the newspaper was going to force it into irrelevance.

Philly’s next mayor will inherit an unprecedented gun violence crisis. Here’s how it’s defining the race.

The Democrats running today must strike a balance that many of their predecessors did not: they must show they can fight crime while maintaining the criminal-justice reforms most of them supported.

by Anna Orso | Wednesday, January 11, 2022

Crime has been a top political issue in Philadelphia for as long as anyone can remember, but few recall a time when it was quite this salient.

The subtitle, the Democratic candidates “must show they can fight crime while maintaining the criminal-justice reforms most of them supported” tells us everything: it takes on the assumption that Philly’s terrible crime rate can be fought while continuing with those “criminal justice reforms” left in place. More, it assumes that those ‘progressive’ “criminal justice reforms” did not contribute to the increase in crime.

While I have previously criticized Anna Orso’s reporting, article headlines are traditionally written not by the reporter, but by an editor. In this case, the original headline was “Philadelphia mayor’s race: how gun violence crisis is defining campaigns”, as you can see if you hover your cursor over the tab in your browser. I cannot assign the responsibility for that subtitle to her, even though she could have been the one who wrote it.

Homicides climbed to all-time highs over the last two years, and thousands more people survived shootings. Carjackings and vehicle thefts have skyrocketed, and the Police Department has hundreds of vacancies. Residents of long-neglected neighborhoods report often feeling unsafe, and many say the city feels as if it’s at a crossroads.

And nine Democrats are vying to run it.

I’ll point out the history here: Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office while President Harry Truman was still in office. Those city mayors in the chart above? All Democrats! The chance that a Republican will be elected in November is almost vanishingly small.

As the Philadelphia mayor’s race takes shape ahead of the May primary election, all the candidates agree: Public safety is the No. 1 issue. What they’ll debate now is how to lead Philadelphia out of the shootings crisis — and they’ll do so in a city that just two years ago saw a mass protest movement challenge the role of law enforcement.

It means Democrats running for the nomination must strike a balance many of their predecessors did not. They must show they can fight the urgent gun violence problem, and also tackle the long-standing societal factors that drive it. They must set the agenda for the Police Department and also the city’s antiviolence programs.

That last embedded link? It’s not just a throwaway, but leads to a previous story, one in which Miss Orso is listed as a co-author, in which the Inquirer blames the existing problems not on the rotten behavior of the current residents and gang members cliques of young men,[4]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading but on real-estate “redlining”, community disinvestment, and poverty. There’s not a single word about children born to single mothers, about absent and frequently unknown fathers, or empty churches. Nothing was said about parents rearing children with no values or morals or ethics. In a Lord of the Flies culture among those “cliques of young men”, there isn’t a single word about children growing up with little or no parental supervision, the overarching theme of Lord of the Flies in the first place.

Former Councilmember Helen Gym, seen as the most progressive candidate in the race, centered her campaign announcement speech on public safety, saying violence is “destroying our city and our people.” She’s focused largely on expanding social programs and tailoring them to young people.

Mrs Flaherty,[5]Although Helen Gym Flaherty doesn’t have enough respect for her husband to have taken his name, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect. as Miss Orso told us, is the furthest left of the Democratic candidates, a supporter of the leftist defense attorney who is Philadelphia’s District Attorney “Let ’em Loose” Larry Krasner, and has supported both significant ‘decarceration,’ turning more criminals loose, and ‘defunding the police.’ That the ‘social programs’ she favors have done no good in the literally decades that Philadelphia individually, and the country as a whole, have been applying them, is not a question Miss Orso raised.

Joseph P. McLaughlin, an adviser to two former mayors, said he’d recommend a mayoral candidate running in 2023 avoid being dismissive of law enforcement and work to separate themselves from the “defund the police” movement. The slogan that refers to diverting law enforcement funding to social services was adopted by racial justice protesters in 2020, and local officials across the country — mostly Democrats — backed versions of the idea.

“Whatever you think of the particular policy,” McLaughlin said, “the headline on it was a disaster for Democrats.”

It has arguably been a ‘disaster for Democrats’ in competitive elections, but once a Democratic nominee is selected, it no longer matters, not in Philadelphia; if the Republicans nominated Jesus, and Satan was running as the Democrat, Satan would win in the City of Brotherly Love, and it wouldn’t even be close.

Still, tough-on-crime rhetoric or strategies that call for increasing funding to the Police Department may not sit well with the city’s growing and well-organized progressive movement, which has notched notable electoral wins over the last five years, including elevating District Attorney Larry Krasner to office.

“The message of ‘more police are going to solve this, more prisons will solve this’ is out of touch,” said Robert Saleem Holbrook, executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center. “Philadelphia has a very strong movement that is opposed to that and is not going to accept any kind of talk like that from these candidates.”

The Abolitionist Law Center, huh? They very honestly tell you what they are about, which is “abolishing class and race based mass incarceration”. As many criminals as Mr Krasner has sprung from prison — and shooting and homicides have both risen dramatically as the incarcerated population have dropped — many of whom have wound up committing new crimes, you would think that if ‘decarceration’ worked to reduce crime, crime would have come down.

I began this article by slamming Miss Orso, but in a way, it really wasn’t fair: she was reporting on the political positioning of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for Mayor, and it wasn’t really her job to point out that their common problem would be that their proposed policies are all terrible.

In the meantime, there was this:

16-year-old boy killed in North Philadelphia shooting

The killing on West Erie Avenue in North Philadelphia on Wednesday could have connections to a non-fatal shooting of another 16-year-old boy two days earlier, police said.

by Jason Laughlin | Wednesday, January 11, 2023 | 7:32 PM EST

A 16-year-old boy was shot to death in North Philadelphia Wednesday night, and police said the shooting could have ties to another shooting of a teenager in the neighborhood just two days earlier.

The 16-year-old, whom the Philadelphia Police Department did not identify, was found shot multiple times in an empty lot on the 1400 block of West Erie Avenue about 5:25 p.m. Wednesday. He was taken to Temple University Hospital and pronounced dead there about a half hour later.

Shell casings gathered at the scene suggested at least 11 shots were fired just half a block from Broad Street and Erie Avenue, a bustling commercial intersection in North Philadelphia. When the shots fired people scattered, said Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small, and the teenager, already shot, ran to the vacant lot where he collapsed. It was unclear how many shooters were involved, Scott said.

Police are investigating whether the killing Wednesday is related to a shooting nearby Monday night, Small said. In that shooting, another 16-year-old male was shot in the leg at 15th Street and Erie Avenue. He survived. That victim and the teenager killed Wednesday appeared to have known each other, Small said. Both lived in that neighborhood, he said.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is clear: decarceration, anti-violence initiatives, and social programs won’t do anything, not as long as 16-year-olds are out running in gangs “street groups”, and won’t mean a thing if parents aren’t rearing their children properly. It takes two parents to bring up children properly, a mother and a father, and it takes parents with a strong moral, ethical, and yes, religious foundation.

And there is one more thing. All of the Democrat politicians in Philly are fully supportive of abortion. But what is abortion other than teaching children that other children are disposable? Was the probably teenaged shooter who slew the 16-year-old really doing anything different from the pregnant women ‘terminating’ their pregnancies in the city’s abortion clinics? The shooter was just engaged in a sixteen-years-late abortion. As we see the supporters of prenatal infanticide telling us that abortion is a good thing, helping women to avoid a disruption in their lives, helping them to maintain their chosen career paths, don’t think that the children in Philly don’t see that as well, don’t get the message that a child can be simply gotten rid of because he might happen to be inconvenient.

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↑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.

↑2 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.
↑3 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑4 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups“. Even after the widespread mockery the Inquirer has received over this, they were still avoiding the word “gang” in preference for “street groups” and “groups.”
↑5 Although Helen Gym Flaherty doesn’t have enough respect for her husband to have taken his name, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect.
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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics! Even The Philadelphia Inquirer couldn't ignore these killings!

We have previously mentioned the questionable nature of Philadelphia’s homicide statistics. Following Ben Mannes report, the website Broad + Liberty has now undertaken to keep and report the numbers themselves, using data from several sources, including inside information:

With Philadelphia’s homicide total surpassing the 500 mark for two consecutive years, and with questions swirling about how the city tracks and tabulates that statistic, Broad + Liberty has launched an independent tracker to list homicides (what the city police call M-jobs) as well as special case/suspicious deaths (S-Jobs) in the city.

On any given day, the number of items (rows) entered in the tracker may not correlate precisely to the number of homicides in the city, which is, in part, why our outlet has embarked on this project.

In order to hold the city accountable for accurately reporting criminal deaths in the city, Broad + Liberty is also tracking cases that have traditionally been excluded from the Philadelphia Police website, which includes vehicular and suspicious deaths, in an effort to ensure that they are regularly and properly reconciled to Philadelphia’s own published homicide tally in the year that they occurred.

By carefully tracking each homicide, found body, and suspicious death, we hope to either provide greater confidence in Philadelphia’s published tally, or we hope to expose and correct flaws and to help give a voice to concerned citizens, victims, and survivors throughout our city.

One of the most important columns in the tracker is “Source of Information” which will transparently show you if the information was received directly from Philadelphia Police, or from some other source.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Broad + Liberty’s homicide tracker is higher than the city’s. The very first homicide listed, of a 31-year-old black male in the 3000 block of Clifford Street is not listed in the city’s shooting victims database, even though the wounding of a second person in the incident is listed. We reported on this earlier.

Triple homicide leaves three dead, one injured in Northeast Philadelphia

Officials said they believed the shooting was a targeted attack.

by Rob Tornoe and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, January 10, 2023 | 11:13 AM EST

Three young people are dead and a fourth is in critical condition after a shooting Monday night in Northeast Philadelphia, police said.

The shooting occurred near the intersection of Rowland Avenue and Guilford Street in the Mayfair Monday night around 10 p.m., Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters.

Actually, Rowland Avenue and Guilford Street do not intersect; Guilford Street has a roughly 45º intersection with Crabtree Street, which intersects with Rowland Avenue a short way down.

Two of the bodies were found near 50 spent shell casings at the intersection, Small said. A third victim was rushed to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital but later died, and a fourth person who was shot was hospitalized in critical condition.

The three men who died were ages 18, 19, and 24, police said. The fourth man, who was listed in critical condition as of Tuesday morning, is 28 years old, they said.

According to the city’s shooting victims database, which records only three victims, not four, and only two fatally shot, not three, as of 12:22 PM EST on Tuesday, January 10th, the victims were all Hispanic white males; what I have often called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. doesn’t want to tell you that part. As of this writing, the 18-year-old victim does not appear on the database.

As of the Inky’s report, the police believe that the four males were deliberately targeted, all knew each other, and were physically together. “Near” fifty spent shell casings makes it sound like a targeted drive-by, or perhaps a hidden ambush, but the police have no motive as of yet.

This is not a dilapidated rowhouse area, but one of neat and spacious duplexes. While Zillow does not show any homes currently for sale on Guilford Street, nearby properties such as this one are listed above $250,000. The Mayfair area is not considered part of the Philadelphia Badlands.

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↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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The left are pro-choice on exactly one thing It's just that Our Betters know better than you how to run your life

The Food Network’s Molly Yeh, the only TV cook I’ve seen who uses an electric range. Click to enlarge.

It was just yesterday that we noted how the global warming climate change emergency activists want to require new homes being built, and older homes to be retrofitted, with electric heat, primarily heat pump HVAC — heating, ventilation, and air conditioning — systems. That the power might fail in the middle of winter, well, that never seemed to be a serious concern to them, even though with home electricity being primarily delivered via overhead wires, our electric utilities are the ones most vulnerable to weather-related and other damage.

We have also previously noted that it “seems that almost everybody prefers a gas range,” even though the climate activists don’t want people to have that choice.

Well, now the Biden Administration is taking a different tack, not pushing global warming climate change emergency reasons, but your kids’ health. From the New York Post:

Biden administration weighs nationwide ban on gas stoves: report

By Mark Moore | Monday, January 9, 2023 | 4:39 PM EST | Updated: Tuesday, January 10, 2023 | 8:40 AM EST

Millions of Americans may soon be entering “not stove season.”

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

The Biden administration is considering a nationwide ban on gas stoves — citing the harmful pollutants released by the appliances, according to a report.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is mulling the action after recent studies showed emissions from the devices can cause health and respiratory problems, Bloomberg reported Monday.

“This is a hidden hazard,” CPSC Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. told the outlet. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”

Reports by groups including the American Chemical Society and New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity found gas stoves — which are used in about 40% of US homes while the remainder use various forms of electric cookers — emit pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, ca​rbon monoxide and fine matter at levels deemed unsafe by the Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization.

The studies also linked gas stoves to respiratory illness, cardiovascular problems, cancer​ and other health conditions.​

There’s more at the original, and, unlike so many newspapers, the Post’s stories are not hidden behind a paywall. And yeah, I’m proud of my craftsmanship, so I’m willing to use yet another excuse to show off the kitchen I remodeled. 🙂

But there’s more. Here’s a bit more detail from the linked Bloomberg article:

Natural gas stoves, which are used in about 40% of homes in the US, emit air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter at levels the EPA and World Health Organization have said are unsafe and linked to respiratory illness, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and other health conditions, according to reports by groups such as the Institute for Policy Integrity and the American Chemical Society. Consumer Reports, in October, urged consumers planning to buy a new range to consider going electric after tests conducted by the group found high levels of nitrogen oxide gases from gas stoves.

Further down:

The Bethesda, Maryland-based Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has a staff of roughly 500, plans to open public comment on hazards posed by gas stoves later this winter. Besides barring the manufacture or import of gas stoves, options include setting standards on emissions from the appliances, Trumka said.

Lawmakers have weighed in, asking the commission to consider requiring warning labels, range hoods and performance standards. In a letter to the agency in December, lawmakers including Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, both Democrats, urged action and called gas-stove emissions a “cumulative burden” on Black, Latino and low-income households that disproportionately experience air pollution.

Well, of course the Distinguished Gentleman from New Jersey is going to find a racial angle in all of this!

If you don’t have an electric range, and want to install one, you’ll need a special circuit and receptacle for an electric range. Normally this will require a NEMA-14 receptacle, and a 240-volt, 30-amphere circuit. Do you have the knowledge, tools, and skills to install such a circuit? You do? Great! You don’t? Open your wallet again, and call an electrician.

As always, there’s more. As I noted in yesterday’s article, during our remodel we installed not just a propane — there’s no natural gas service out in the boondocks — range, but a propane water heater and propane fireplace. That fireplace has really helped, when the weather gets brutally cold and the heat pump that is our primary heating source couldn’t quite keep up, and when the electricity has gone out before. Propane fireplaces are as clean burning as an electric range top, and do not require a flue, but if the logic of the Consumer Product Safety Commission is held valid by federal regulators for gas ranges, then the same logic would apply to gas fireplaces.

And remember: the Environmental Protection Agency has already put in new regulations for wood stoves. The federal government have absolutely no reservations about imposing regulations on people’s homes.

I am not naïve enough to think that the calls of the global warming climate change emergency activists have had no impact on how the Consumer Product Safety Commission does its business; claims that this is just for our health will be magnified by claims that banning gas ranges is an environmental necessity. But the American people prefer gas ranges; that’s why you see even the wealthy, very blue state New Englanders installing gas ranges during home remodels on This Old House.

The Patricians have absolutely no problem telling the plebeians how to live their lives. If it was only a matter of them telling us what we should do, that would be an exercise in their freedom of speech. But the problem is that the Patricians in government want to exercise governmental power, and force people to do as they say, and that must be resisted, that must be fought.

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The #ClimateChange activists really, really don’t understand how many Americans live They just blithely claim we can go out and spend $10,000 to $20,000 on things they insist we need

It was early Monday morning, March 12, 2018, when we received five inches of heavy, wet snow at our farm in Estill County, Kentucky, and we lost electricity, in our all-electric home, sometime before 4:30 AM. No, I’m not relying on memory; I’m actually kind of obsessive about recording things in my At-A-Glance Daily Diary, and I have a whole shelf of them, dating back to 1986, missing only 2001’s, which was lost somehow.

Fortunately, it was 42º F and sunny outside by afternoon, which helped some, but it still got down to 52º F inside the house. My wife, having to work the following day, drove to Lexington to stay at our daughter’s apartment, so she could do something really radical like take a shower in the morning. There was just enough sort-of warm water in the water heater for me to take a quick shower on Tuesday morning. While my wife could leave, I had to stay at home to care for the critters.

To make a long story short, we finally got sparktricity back at 4:54 PM on Thursday, March 15th. It had gotten as cool as 37º F inside the house, though warmer in my bedroom, which I heated with sunshine through the window and my own body heat. The high for that day was 58º F, so that helped some. I wonder how bad things would have gotten if we had lost power for 4½ days in mid-January.

Thus, it was with somewhat of a jaundiced eye that I noticed a series of tweets:

Dan Walters: These power outages have me even more appreciative of having a gas-fired stove, so we can at least have hot food. Something to ponder as officialdom tries to make homes all-electric

panama bartholomy: By now we recognize that burning gas in buildings is one of our leading air polluters, more than cars and power plants combined, part of the reason we have terrible air in CA. We can’t clean up our air and continue to burn gas. We also cannot run a gas system just for cooking (1)

panama bartholomy: If we replaced all of our furnaces with amazing 400% efficient heat pumps (http://bit.ly/3CuNhOU) and water heaters with heat pump water heaters we could cut over 90% of gas use to buildings and have dramatically better air. (2)

The embedded link led to this OpEd in The Washington Post:

Why everyone is going to need a heat pump

By Robert Gebelhoff, Assistant editor and Opinions contributor | January 4, 2023 | 2:43 PM EST

For anyone using fossil fuels to heat their homes, I have good and bad news.

The bad: You’re going to want to replace that system with heat pumps eventually, and it might be expensive. The good: The government can help you, and the change will have huge benefits for you and the world.

Oh, the government can help us? How will the government help us?

These heating and cooling systems, once considered useful only in warmer climates, have in the past few years become far more sophisticated. They are now the best chance we have to phase out fossil fuels as a means of heating and could set the stage for a climate policy revolution. . . . .

Americans are not yet as enthusiastic, but policymakers in many states recognize heat pumps’ potential. A New York commission recently approved a plan to require all new houses built in the state after 2025 to use electric systems rather than those running on natural gas, oil or propane. After 2030, it seeks to require homeowners to replace all fossil-fuel-burning systems with non-carbon-emitting ones once they give out.

New York’s approach is the most aggressive in the country, but it’s by no means alone. Fifteen states and more than 100 cities have plans to encourage heat pump installation. The federal government is in on the strategy, too. The Inflation Reduction Act provides generous rebates and tax incentives for those who install the devices, and the Energy Department has dedicated $250 million to increase their production.

Really? Generous rebates and tax incentives? In March of 2021, we had to replace our heat pump based HVAC — heating, ventilation and air conditioning — system due to the record-setting flooding on the Kentucky River. The rising waters destroyed the old system, but while they got into the crawl space, they did not get into our house itself. Replacing the old system was $6,100, $6,100 we didn’t want to spend. The price was lower for us in that the ductwork from the previous system was still in place and usable. Fortunately, we had the cash to do it, though I wonder just how many of my eastern Kentucky neighbors could say the same.

And if you are living paycheck-to-paycheck, $6,100 is a lot of money, money you have to pay up front to get your new HVAC system installed, months before you ever see those generous rebates and tax incentives. While the numbers fluctuate, surveys in May of 2022 showed that 49% of Americans didn’t have the cash available to handle an unexpected $400 expense.

Can people in such close financial straits get the credit to have a new HVAC system installed when they don’t have the cash?

These efforts are well worth the expense. Consider that buildings consume about 40 percent of all energy in the United States. Residential buildings alone contribute to about 20 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, with half heated by burning fossil fuels.

This is where Robert Gebelhoff, an Assistant editor and Opinions contributor for The Washington Post, tells us just how much he doesn’t understand much of America. “These efforts,” he wrote, “are well worth the expense.” Well, perhaps to someone who has a relatively high position for one of our nation’s most famous and important newspapers, (probably) earns a decent salary — and no, I couldn’t find Mr Gebelhoff’s salary or net worth — and could, I assume, afford that expense. And never forger: Mr Gebelhoff once blithely wrote, “NASA’s latest gamble might not pay out, but it’s worth the $2 billion anyway“. But both my wife and I grew up poor, and if we’re not poor now, having retired back to Our Old Kentucky Home, we can and do see plenty of poorer people living around us.

Heat pumps, in contrast, simply move heat from the outside air or ground inside — even during frigid winter months.

They do? Technically, yes, that’s how they operate. But taking heat from the outside air, when the outside air is 10º F, isn’t quite the same thing as doing so when it’s 45º F. That’s part of the reason why, as we have pointed out previously, wealthy New Englanders, when going through expensive home remodeling on Thie Old House, chose gas heating systems. We have also previously noted that it “seems that everybody wants a gas range,” even though the climate activists don’t want people to have that choice. Today’s left appear to be pro-choice on exactly one thing.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

Us? We remodeled our kitchen — the whole house was a livable but nevertheless fixer-upper home when we bought it — in 2018, after the power-outage but still planned before it, and we added what my wife wanted, a gas, propane actually, since there’s no natural gas service in our rural area, range, a propane water heater — our electric one was on its last legs anyway, so we needed to replace it — and a propane fireplace. When it got down to -5º F over the Christmas holiday, and our heat-pump based HVAC really couldn’t keep up, that fireplace kept it nice and warm at home. When the floods of 2021 destroyed the old heat-pump HVAC system, the propane fireplace kept us warm.

We had, of course, learned our lesson in our previous home in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. We got fourteen inches of heavy, wet snow on Christmas Day of 2002, and yes, the power failed there as well. We had a heating oil fired steam boiler for our heating system, but it still required a 110-voly, 20-amphere electric circuit to activate the boiler and run the pump. The power was restored at around 6:30 PM . . . on December 26th. We subsequently added a woodstove, which was easy enough, because the previous owner had installed a hearth and chimney for one.[1]If we had to replace that system with a heat-pump based HVAC one, it would have been very expensive. Not only would it need to be a system with 50% more capacity than the one we have here, because … Continue reading

A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe, December 18, 2016.

Would it be superstitious of me to note that we never had a subse-quent power failure of more than a few hours since we installed the alternate heating systems? 🙂

Naturally, I haven’t quoted every word of Mr Gebelhoff’s original, but, further down is this:

This is why heat pumps often save energy costs in the long term, even though they can be expensive to install, especially when replacing existing systems. Cost estimates vary widely depending on the size and age of a house, ranging from as low as $3,000 to upwards of $20,000.

How blithely he wrote that! Yes, heat pumps “often save energy costs in the long run,” but it’s that “expensive to install” part that one of the Washington elite just doesn’t get: you have to have the money to install them in the first place, and that “upwards of $20,000” part isn’t always easy for people. When 49% of Americans, hit hard by inflation in 2022, can’t handle an unexpected $400 expense, how does Mr Gebelhoff expect them to write a check for ten or twenty grand?

One last paragraph from Mr Gebelhoff:

Naturally, efforts to push consumers to embrace heat pumps have generated much anxiety on the right. Republicans in New York have panned their state’s plan as “radical” and claimed it will leave residents “in the dark and in the cold.” But policymakers must not flinch. Yes, retrofitting homes can be expensive. The answer is to offset the costs with subsidies, as many states are already doing.

With this, the Post’s columnist was right there on the cusp, right at the point of realizing that yes, the power can go out, but if he did realize it, he never mentioned it; there isn’t a single word in his column telling us what people who are completely committed to all-electric heat would do in sub-freezing weather — something fairly common in the winter in New York state, when the electricity failed. When Buffalo and Watertown and the other areas in upstate New York get hammered by three or four feet of lake-effect snow, power outages are frequent. If they happened to be dependent upon the type of fuel-oil burner that my family had in Pennsylvania, or the gas furnace my daughter had installed in her home in Lexington when her heat-pump powered HVAC system failed, a simple, gasoline-powered generator that can be bought at Home Despot or Lowe’s can provide the current the 110-volt, 20-amp circuit such systems use to keep their homes warm. A heat pump? The system I have here is on two separate — one for the exterior condenser and one for the crawl space unit — 220-volt, 50-amp circuits. That’s going to require a much larger, much more expensive generator.

Mr Gebelhoff isn’t stupid; you don’t get hired by The Washington Post if you’re an idiot. But, living in the liberal Washington bubble, he is seemingly ignorant about how many Americans live. Not to pick solely on him — his OpEd column is simply a catalyst for mine — but this is a common problem amongst the climate change activists: they simply do not understand the problems that so many Americans work, and can be completely airy-fairy about suggesting policies which will make Americans poorer.

References

References
↑1 If we had to replace that system with a heat-pump based HVAC one, it would have been very expensive. Not only would it need to be a system with 50% more capacity than the one we have here, because the house was 50% larger, but since the system in Pennsylvania was used steam radiators rather than forced air ducts, we’d have had to have those installed as well, in a house built in 1890.
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Not enforcing the law has not made Kensington wealthier

I will admit it: I’m pretty surprised that the we-hate-the-police Philadelphia Inquirer ran this story. It seems as though the poor people in Kensington, one of Philly’s worst neighborhoods, aren’t that opposed to law enforcement, not if it makes their lives better.

Announcement of how opioid settlement money will be spent in Kensington elicits mixed responses from community members

“We’re known as the Disney World for users. If you give free food and a free shower and free needles, why should you ever leave and return home?” asked Patrice Rogers, a resident and the director of Stop the Risk.

by Lynette Hazelton and Aubrey Whelan | Saturday, January 7, 2023

Kensington is in the midst of two crises.

One is the opioid addiction epidemic that resulted in a growing number of drug-related deaths in Philadelphia over the past years, including a record 1,276 fatalities in 2021, the latest statistics available.

When Mayor Jim Kenney unveiled the city’s plan Thursday to spend the first $20 million of the $200 million opioid settlement payment, much of it was directed to prevention services and reducing the harm of addiction.

The plan includes $7.5 million for Kensington Wellness Corridors Investments, a planning effort that will fund home repairs, help residents battle foreclosures, and improve parks and schools in the neighborhood. Bill McKinney, executive director of New Kensington CDC, and Casey O’Donnell, CEO of Impact Services Corporation, both advocates of participatory decision-making, are leading this effort and are committed to centering the views and needs of Kensington community.

“While it is often good for business to position ourselves as lone wolves in opposition to everything,” said McKinney, a longtime Kensington resident, “it is not good for actual solutions. Those of us who actually live here are aware that we are all interconnected and a comprehensive solution is necessary.”

It’s a long article, 1,027 words, and I really wish I could just reproduce the entire thing, for the benefit of those who would otherwise be stymied by the Inquirer’s paywall.

“The $7.5 million helps,” said O’Donnell, “but what is as important is people coming to the table.”

The plan calls for $3.1 million for overdose prevention and $400,000 to support the Kensington Community Resilience Fund, a public-private-community partnership addressing quality-of-life impacts of the opioid crisis in the Kensington, Harrowgate and Fairhill neighborhoods.

Meaning: the Philadelphia Badlands, a name for the area which led the Inky to wax wroth.

Kensington’s reputation is so bad that the government of Mexico used scenes from the area in a national anti-drug campaign.

There is also money set aside for outreach and engagement, housing, treatment initiatives, juvenile justice, and alternatives to incarceration.

But for community residents there is another more pressing crisis: public safety.

Kensington is home to one of the nation’s largest open-air narcotic markets, turning some blocks into shooting galleries — for both needles and guns. The first child shot this year was a 7-year-old Kensington girl hit by a stray bullet while resting in her great-grandmother’s house.

Guillermo García , 53, who has lived in Kensington since he was 4 years old and serves as the de facto block captain for his Swanson Street and Indiana Avenue community, believes the only way to improve the quality of life in Kensington is to eliminate drug sales, which he says are the source of all other issues — chronic homelessness, overdose fatalities, gun violence, and the lack of economic alternatives for juvenile drug dealers.

“The main thing is the drug sales, and that’s where all the homelessness comes in with addicts sleeping on your steps. It’s from the drugs,” said García.

And the only way to eliminate drug sales, he said, is to have a robust police presence in the neighborhoods.

There’s a lot more at the original, but it’s mostly the same thing: Kensington residents asking for, practically begging for, more police protection, and for the Philadelphia Police Department to clean up the open-air drug markets.

This shouldn’t be a surprise: in the 2021 Democratic primary for District Attorney, incumbent District Attorney Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner received 708 votes in the 45th ward in Kensington, while Carlos Vega, who wanted to do something really radical like actually prosecute criminals, got more than twice that, 1,511 votes. In one of the areas most seriously afflicted with crime, the residents were voting for law enforcement.

But the Philadelphia Police tolerate crime. The Inquirer actually endorsed Mr Krasner for re-election, because the well-heeled Editorial Board members don’t live in Kensington or the Badlands.

One of two bullet holes in the door of Helen Figeroa, whose 7-year-old great granddaughter was shot in the ankle after a bullet came through the door from outside. Photo by Jessica Griffin, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

And now, the Inky is reporting that the residents want law enforcement. It’s easy for the liberals in Society Hill to vote for ‘progressive’ politicians, because leniency in law enforcement doesn’t really affect them.

I don’t normally publish photos from the Inky, but this one really tells a tale. On the 2900 block of Rutledge Street, a couple of guys shooting it out sent a bullet which hit a 7-year-old inside her great-grandmother’s home. The open-air drug markets haven’t enriched the vast majority of Kensington residents, and the horrible condition of Helen Figeroa’s front door is a testament to that. A crack in the 88-year-old dried wood. There was, sometime in the past, some duct tape over part of the crack, I assume to keep the cold winter air from whistling through, though that mail slot would let wind through as well. It needs a good cleaning, and the interior paint touched up.

This is not a door that you’ll find in Chestnut Hill or Rittenhouse Square. Zillow doesn’t have much information on Rutledge Street, with houses similar to Mrs Figeroa’s guesstimated to be worth about $23,000.

But somehow, some way, the oh-so-sympathetic ‘progressives’ just can’t see what their policies, their leniency on crime, have done. Kensington used to be a working-class neighborhood, not wealthy but at least solid and responsible. Now it’s one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in one of America’s oldest cities, and the use of drugs and the open selling of them have only contributed to the area’s downward spiral. The city government may not be able to do much about the poverty in the area, but it does have the power to enforce the law, and that, by itself, will help the neighborhood.