Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Why would anyone want to become a cop these days?

Following the unfortunate death of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl crazed drug addict and previously convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting a legitimate arrest in Minneapolis, the left went wild, and “Defund the Police“, as though the problem wasn’t crime, but people being arrested for committing crimes. This stupid notion was popular with the street agitators, and thus some Democratic politicians took up the call, but it wound up fading from sight reasonably quickly, as sensible people — meaning, in this case: those not out in antifa demonstrations — soundly defeated a police reorganization proposal in Minneapolis.

But, of course, attacks on the legitimacy of the police continue, from shakedown lawsuits in Detroit to the George Soros-sponsored, cop-hating defense lawyer serving as Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner trying to put police officers doing their duty in jail, Philadelphia didn’t actually defund the police, per se, but the effect of the city’s policies has been to do just that: as we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department is nearly 600 officers understrength from its authorized full strength of 6,380, with around 800 more expected to retire within the next four years. Police Academy classes have not kept up with officer attrition. And really, who’d want to become a Philly cop when the Police Commissioner won’t support you and the DA is trying to throw you in jail?

Well, it’s not just Philly! From The New York Times:

N.Y.P.D. Officers Leave in Droves for Better Pay in Smaller Towns

This year has seen the highest number of resignations in two decades.

By Chelsia Rose Marcius | Friday, December 9, 2022

Earlier this year, the chief of police in Aurora, Colo., needed to find a few dozen officers to join his force.

The chief, Dan Oates, was 50 officers short to patrol Aurora, a city of roughly 400,000 people just east of Denver. But he knew limiting his search to Colorado would not be enough: Like many other leaders in law enforcement, he has found that fewer people these days want to be cops.

So Chief Oates and his team began to seek recruits at agencies where they believed pay and morale were low. They settled on New York City, and in August, he flew about 1,800 miles to meet with New York Police Department officers. He convinced 14 of them to move out west.

“I feel bad raiding my home agency,” said Chief Oates, who once served as a deputy chief in New York City. “But frankly it’s a cutthroat environment right now among police chiefs to recruit talent, and we all desperately need it.”

The departure of those officers was no anomaly. The New York Police Department, with about 34,000 officers, has seen more resignations this year than at any time in the past two decades as other agencies have become more aggressive in recruiting from its ranks.

Through November, about 1,225 officers resigned before even reaching five years of service, according to New York City Police Pension Fund statistics obtained by The New York Times. Many left for other New York State agencies or police departments outside the state.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the numbers are pretty stark.

Chief Oates, who retired this week, said the officers he recruited from New York were partially lured by better pay. The starting salary at the Aurora Police Department is about $65,000 in an area where the average monthly rent is approximately $1,750 and the average home sale price is about $624,000, according to an August report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Incoming officers with four or more years on the job can earn a salary of around $100,000. Aurora also gives incentives to those who transfer from other departments, including a signing bonus of up to $10,000 and a $5,000 relocation bonus.

That is more money than officers make in New York City, where the median sales price for a home is $810,000 and the average monthly rent is about $4,500. The starting salary at the Police Department is $42,500, according to the most recent contract between the agency and the officer’s union. After three and a half years of service, officers can earn a salary of $47,000, and $85,292 after five and a half.

Even foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia pays its police officers more: $59,795 annual salary while a Recruit in the Academy, with a raise to $63,945 upon graduation and joining the PPD. Philly is a lot less expensive a city in which to live than New York: housing costs less, taxes are lower, and they can get Wawa coffee to drink as well!

But if the pay is higher, it also means putting up with open air drug markets in Kensington and having to patrol the Philadelphia Badlands.

As we noted on Thursday, when Philly had an official — whatever “official” means in Philadelphia — 499 homicides in 2020, neighboring Upper Darby Township had 10. With a population of 85,681 according to the 2020 census, that means that Upper Darby had a homicide rate of 11.67 per 100,000 population, while Philly’s that same year was 31.11 . . . and that paled before the 2021 homicide rate. Even directly adjacent to Philadelphia, smaller towns are safer.

Aurora, Colorado, which poached officers from the NYPD? With a population of 386,261 according to the 2020 census, the city saw 38 homicides that year, for as homicide rate of 9.84 per 100,000. Why wouldn’t a former NYPD cop, or Philadelphia Police officer, prefer to work there, where the pay is better and the crime rate a lot lower?

Yes, police pay is unacceptably low in New York City, and the left-leaning city council isn’t going raise it that much. But the real problem is that the big cities in the east — and not a few in the west — just plain hate cops! Why would anyone want to work in a place where the public spit on your shadow, if not your shoes?

The far left wanted to defund the police, and while they didn’t get it de jure, it has been achieved de facto: with major city police departments being hundreds of officers undermanned — Baltimore is 420 officers short staffed — what the left wanted has been achieved: fewer dedicated police officers to enforce the law.

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Let’s tell an obvious truth here: Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will be out of a job in a year. An appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney, the mayor elected in 2023 to replace Mr Kenney, who is term-limited, will want someone, anyone! other than Miss Outlaw in that job. Even if the next mayor likes Miss Outlaw, and agrees with every single thing the Commissioner has done, no one is going to want to be saddled her record. At this point, the Commissioner needs to just woman up, and reveal the whole truth:

Questions about the accuracy of Philadelphia’s homicide statistics

Philadelphia reports an eight-percent year-to-date decline in homicides, but police sources again raise concern over how some deaths are classified in the city’s federally required crime reporting statistics.

by Ben Mannes | Thursday, December 8, 2022

At the time of the writing of this article, the Philadelphia Police Department reports a year-to-date homicide total of 482, a decline of 41 murders from this date last year. Normally, a eight percent decline in murders would be great news in a city that desperately needs some. However, ranking police sources have sent Broad + Liberty a photo from inside Police Headquarters concerning “Other” or “O Job” classification — leading many to question whether the eight percent decline was valid.

You can click on the photo to enlarge it, but to simplify it for you, I’ll tell you: the photo is (allegedly) of a whiteboard in Police headquarters, supposedly the homicide unit, indicating that, at the point the photo was taken, there had been 465 murders, 101 ‘suspicious’ deaths, and 76 ‘other’ cases. In 2021, the numbers were the 562 homicides reported many times, plus 190 suspicious deaths. The ‘other’ is a new category, one which does not involve the finding of a dead body.

In contrast with the daily reporting and real-time tracking of reported crimes in television and social media, many are left to wonder if the questions of 2020, when the city ended the year with just one homicide short of their all-time record, was being repeated. Broad + Liberty reached out to the police department and talked with Capt. Jason Smith of the Homicide Unit to clarify these issues.

We have noted, several times, the change in the Philadelphia Police Department’s statistics, down from the 502 homicides initially reported for 2020, down to 499, one short of the then-all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under the ‘leadership’ of then-Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame. I made a totally rookie mistake, and failed to get a screen capture of that, but a Twitter fellow styling himself NDJinPhilly was apparently smarter than me that particular time, took the screen shot, and then tweeted it to me.

Capt. Smith confirmed that they are both things, but there are no deaths or “bodies” associated with O-jobs. He clarified that “M-jobs” are murder investigations while “S-jobs” are deaths that may not be classified murders. Smith estimated that of the 103 S-jobs so far this year, at least twenty may be deemed self-defense, and thus not result in a homicide charge. Numerous others, according to Smith, are awaiting toxicology and brain samples from the medical examiner to determine whether or not they are homicides, vs. overdoses or accidental deaths, which could take months to get back from them.

Smith said that “The Homicide unit would be conducting an audit of all S-jobs in the next week,” which should reconcile numbers by year-end. Smith said that his unit tries to conduct such an audit every two to three months, which could result in an increase in homicides by two to three cases as a result. More relevant to the questions presented by the 2020 year-end homicide total, says Smith, is the issue of “delayed death investigations”, in where a victim dies later from injuries first reported as an assault, or when S-jobs are later reported as murders due to delayed results from toxicologists and/or medical examiners.

That’s all well and good, but Mr Mannes did not follow up with the obvious question: if there were “S” cases at the end of 2020 and 2021, which hadn’t been resolved into homicides or not homicides when we were given the end-of-year homicide totals, why, when they were finally resolved — surely at least some of them have been — did the year-end homicide totals for 2020 and 2021 never change? Are we expected to believe that, out of 190 ‘suspicious’ deaths in 2021, not a single one was revised to be a homicide? The odds of such would seem vanishingly small!

Smith told Broad + Liberty that a detailed breakdown of S-job classifications would be available after the audit and would be available for further updates. However, popular podcast host and former judicial warrant squad Sergeant Mark Fusetti reports some of his sources showed “S-jobs” that are obvious homicides, but remain outside the homicide statistics for various reasons; “Last year had a guy shot in the head in a van, but because the weapon wasn’t found, they have it as an S job” said Fusetti. “Sometimes its a clear murder, but the Medical Examiner sends back questions so it gets an S Job” continues Fusetti. “It then sits on the desk while the Detective has to work newer cases, and it never gets reported on the homicide stats.”

Also see: The OK Corral: The PPD Has Been Lying To Its Officers

The city shouldn’t have to rely on a retired Police Sergeant, or on an anonymous officer who tweeted out that photo of the whiteboard, a photo that you can bet your last euro that the city did not want to see released. Right now, Philly needs a homicide detective to put this information together and leak it to media who will report on it.

Of course, it would be preferable that, rather than having it leaked, if Commissioner Outlaw would realize that her career in Philly has no more than 12½ months left to run, that her job performance in the City of Brotherly Love means that she’ll never get a top police job in any city with a six-figure number of residents, and just go ahead and tell the whole truth herself. The end is coming; she might as well be honest about things, and rat out Mayor Kenney if he ordered her to massage the numbers.

Going out still lying about things won’t help her reputation anywhere she searches for another job, because, now that this story has broken, people will keep hammering down and hammering down and hammering down on it; it will eventually become completely public.

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To the government, telling the whole truth will make you less likely to comply, so the whole truth will be hidden

When I saw this tweet from the New York Times Guild, asking me to not cross a “digital picket line” and read any material from The New York Times, I knew that I’d have to reference some story from the Grey Lady on my site today. And it actually turned out to be something good; someone who was doing something really radical like telling the truth about COVID-19:

Covid-19 Isn’t a Pandemic of the Unvaccinated Anymore

by David Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Americans received their first Covid-19 vaccine doses in December 2020, which means we are now approaching the beginning of the third year of the pandemic’s vaccine phase. And yet hundreds of Americans are still dying each day. Who are they? The data offers a straightforward answer: older adults.

Though it’s sometimes uncomfortable to say it, mortality risk has been dramatically skewed by age throughout the pandemic. The earliest reports of Covid deaths from China sketched a pattern quickly confirmed everywhere in the world: In an immunologically naïve population, the oldest were several thousand times more at risk of dying from infection than the youngest.

We reported, on November 24th, how The Washington Post used a similar headline, “Covid is no longer mainly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Here’s why.“, and even that was an editorial change from the original, “Vaccinated people now make up a majority of covid deaths”. It was that similarity which caught my eye on the Times website.

But the skew is actually more dramatic now — even amid mass vaccinations and reinfections — than it was at any previous point over the last three years. Since the beginning of the pandemic, people 65 and older accounted for 75 percent of all American Covid deaths. That dropped below 60 percent as recently as September 2021. But today Americans 65 and over account for 90 percent of new Covid deaths, an especially large share given that 94 percent of American seniors are vaccinated.

Yet these facts seem to contradict stories we’ve told about what drives vulnerability to Covid-19. In January, Joe Biden warned[1]Full disclosure: this reference hyperlink was not in the author’s original, but was added by me. that the illness and death threatened by the Omicron variant represented “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” But that month, in which nearly 85,000 Americans died, the unvaccinated accounted for 59 percent of those deaths, down from 77 percent the previous September, according to analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The share of deaths among older adults that January was nearly 74 percent.

There’s more at the original, but, Alas! it is available only to Times subscribers, so if you aren’t one, you’ll just have to take my word for it that what I’ve quoted is the real thing. Several paragraphs further down, after Mr Wallace-Wells goes through some statistics and caveats, we come to this:

That is a very good deal, of course. But it also means that, given the underlying age skew, a vaccinated person in their late 80s shares a similar risk of Covid death as a never-vaccinated 70-year-old. Which is to say, some real risk. If it was ever comfortable to say that the unconscionable levels of American deaths were a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” it is surely now accurate to describe the ongoing toll as a “pandemic of the old.”

So why aren’t we?

One answer is that as a country, we prefer just to not see those deaths at all, regarding a baseline of several hundred deaths a day as a sort of background noise or morbid but faded wallpaper. We don’t need to understand who is dying or why in part because we don’t want to reckon with the fact that around 300 Americans are now dying from Covid-19 every day, at a rough pace of about 100,000 per year, making it the country’s third leading cause of death. This is normalization at work, but it is also a familiar pattern: We don’t exactly track the ups and downs of cancer or heart disease either.

At 69½ years old, and having contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus myself, though not very ill at all and seemingly getting over it, I’m not particularly thrilled with it being a “pandemic of the old,” but let’s face it: the elderly are always at greater risks, from everything. Our immune systems are weaker, our reflexes slower. I’m perfectly able to admit that there are things I just can’t do as well as previously. But Mr Wallace-Wells continues to tell us why the government was shading the truth:

Another answer is that — partly to promote good behavior, partly to more easily blame others for our general predicament — the country spent a lot of time emphasizing what you could do to protect yourself, which left us without much of a vocabulary to describe what underlying vulnerability inevitably remained.

Translation: “to promote good behavior” means to try to push people to take a vaccine some were clearly reluctant to take by not telling the whole truth about it. The government were so worried that people might be less willing to take the decision to get vaccinated if they had the complete truth that they preferred to hide part of the truth.

And we’re still seeing that today. Think about the commercials for various prescription drugs that producers say you should “ask your doctor about” if you have a particular condition. They all have one thing in common: they all have a list of potential negative results or reactions that some patients have had.

But not the COVID vaccines! The government is pushing them, every day, through television commercials, but I have yet to see one in which the negative side effects, the documented negative side effects that some people have suffered, have been listed. The percentage of people who have suffered serious side effects is small, but it is not zero.

Then, of course, there was the truly Big Lie, a lie spread by many people:

  • Rachel Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control: “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick. And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.” Even some of her minions at the CDC pushed back against that.
  • Joe Biden: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die. “

We found out, of course, that the vaccines did not stop either contracting or transmitting the virus to others. Heck, I’m pretty much the poster boy for that one, in that my wife contracted it first, despite being fully vaccinated, twice ‘normally’ boosted, and having taken the additional, supposedly Omicron-specific booster, . . . and then I contracted it from her, despite being fully vaccinated and twice normally boosted.

By last January, this was known: acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, last January, that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” But the government have kept up the Big Lie, that if you get vaccinated and boosted, you wouldn’t get COVID.

What if the government had done something really radical and just told the truth? We can’t know whether developing a reputation for telling the truth would have led more or fewer people to choose to take the vaccines, though it surely seems probable that government efforts to force people to get vaccinated increased resistance. And maybe, just maybe, if the government had a reputation for telling the truth, people would trust them more on things other than COVID-19.

References

References
↑1 Full disclosure: this reference hyperlink was not in the author’s original, but was added by me.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer just trashed its own gun control arguments

We have previously noted the change from the 502 homicides originally reported for 2020, down to 499. Now, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas noted someone that many expected to be on the list of 499, but who wasn’t there. This one seems legitimate:

A 22-year-old was killed just over the city line in Upper Darby. That might have helped his family’s quest for answers.

A mere 100 yards might have made all the difference in an attempt to find a measure of justice.

by Helen Ubiñas | Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Amir Parks was a 22-year-old new father who was shot and killed near Cobbs Creek Park in August 2020. He was loved, friends and family told me. He was missed. He mattered.

But when it came to Parks’ death, answers were mostly hard to come by for those who knew him best. And there was this mystery: Why wasn’t Parks mentioned on the official list of Philadelphia’s 499 homicide victims in 2020?

Maybe the police had misidentified him or even misspelled his name, I thought, hardly an uncommon error in a city that averages more than a homicide a day.

After double and triple checking the list with the police, an answer. His loved ones were right; he had died around the woods along Cobbs Creek, in the 6500 block of North Church Lane not far from Marshall Road.

But that was about the length of a football field beyond the Philadelphia city line in Upper Darby Township, a section many misidentify as being part of Cobbs Creek.

What no one realized then was how crucial those 100 yards would be in his family’s quest for justice.

In 2020, when Philadelphia was just shy of 500 homicides, Upper Darby had 10.

As we have previously reported, the homicide rate, even adjusted for population, is several times higher in Philadelphia as in the rest of Pennsylvania. Those 499 homicides in 2020? They constituted 49.48% of all murders in the Keystone State, while the city has just 12.33% of the Commonwealth’s population.

It got worse last year, as the city’s 562 homicides were 54.72% of Pennsylvania’s total.

Of all the homicides in Philly in 2020, only 210 were solved, or about 42%‚ typical in a city where a majority of murders are unsolved.

By comparison, nine of the 10 homicides in Upper Darby that year have been solved, including last month when police arrested a 20-year-old man for killing Parks.

Now, I doubt that Mr Parks was included in the 502 number; the call was handled by the Upper Darby Police.

There followed several human interest story paragraphs concerning how nice a guy young Mr Parks was, and noting that, for the majority of homicides in Philadelphia itself, no one is arrested.

According to police, Parks was killed while illegally trying to sell guns to a potential buyer — a trade that (his cousin Shamiese) Parks–Gunagan said she believes her cousin took up in a desperate attempt to support his family.

And there it is: young Mr Parks was not the great guy in Miss Ubiñas story. Actually, it’s a bit of a surprise that the story was published at all, in that the Inquirer doesn’t usually tell us about the bad guys who get killed in the process of being bad guys.

I will admit to some doubts that a 22-year-old, in just “a desperate attempt to support his family,” would turn to gun-running. Such is not usually an entry-level crime. To be a gun-runner, you have to have money in advance, to buy the weapons you plan to sell at a profit. He could, I suppose, have just been a mule for the real gun-runner, but that would mean he’d have had to have known a pretty bad guy, and was trusted by that bad guy enough to make the sale.

Parks left a note on his phone shortly before he was killed: “Just in case something happens this is the person in the car.”

So, yeah, young Mr Parks knew that he was doing something bad, and that bad things could happen in the process. Miss Ubiñas’ first internal link was to Mr Park’s obituary in the Philadelphia Obituary Project, which tells us what a great and loving guy he was. But, if the Upper Darby Police are correct, he was still killed while he was committing a crime.

And it was more than just a simple, one-off crime. If Mr Parks was running guns, even as just somebody else’s mule, he was doing something which he had to know — and his obituary tells us that he was supposedly a smart guy — would enable other people to commit other crimes.

This is more than just a story about the killing of Mr Parks. It also points out the silliness of the arguments by Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) and District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), that the problem is that the state legislature in Harrisburg will not allow Philadelphia to pass its own, stricter gun control laws. Marshall Road in Upper Darby turns into Spruce Street in Philadelphia after you have crossed the bridge over Cobbs Creek as you pass the boundary between the two, but the Philadelphia Police are not sitting there, checking every border-crosser for contraband. If Philly had stricter gun control laws, the next thing about which the city, and the editors of the Inquirer, would whine is that those laws needed to be applied to Upper Darby and Haverford and Plymouth Meeting and Bensalem, because, as Mr Parks’ killing shows, the bad guys know how to drive to the next town.

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Killadelphia The bad guys are just as bad, but the good guys have gotten a bit better

I will admit it: I was a bit, a bit, mind you, more optimistic when I saw the article by Robert Stacy McCain screencaptured at the right yesterday evening. I’m something of a numbers geek, because numbers, at least accurate numbers, tell a truth not shaded by human lies.

Mr McCain’s article began with a screen capture of his own, of an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer — archived version here, to get around the newspaper’s paywall — noting yet another gruesome killing in the City of Brotherly Love. This story actually made the Inky because it was different from the usual gang “clique of young men” being shot by a “rival street group,”[1]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 so that is at least interesting.

Mr McCain’s article did something that what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[2]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. naturally did not: he included a mugshot of the suspect, Ahmad Shareef.

Ahmad Shareef, photo via The Other McCain. Click to enlarge.

Mr McCain wryly implied that, with a name like Ahmad Shareef, most readers would automatically think that the suspect was black. I asked the question more directly a few months ago: is the Inquirer actually perpetuating a stereotype it wishes to avoid? Is the newspaper, by censoring all mugshots, contributing not only to the stereotype that most criminals are black, but actually pushing a message, that all criminals are black?

Mr Shareef is not black. Rather, he is Syrian. The Inquirer would probably say that he is “brown” if the #woke[3]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 writers there were asked, but he’s clearly Caucasian.

When I said, at the beginning of this article, that I was actually a bit optimistic when I first read Mr McCain’s original, it was expressed in this comment on his article:

Surprisingly enough, Killadelphia’s murder pace has slacked a bit, with ‘just’ 478 homicides in 339 days, which puts the city on pace for ‘only’ 514.66 murders for the year.

However, since Hallowe’en, there have been just 33 killings, in 35 days. If that particular rate continued through the end of the year, there would be ‘just’ 23.57 more murders, which works out to ‘only’ 501.57. Just a couple off from that average, and the City of Brotherly Love could actually finish at 499 for the year!

Alas! it didn’t take but this morning’s check of the city’s homicide statistics to dampen that optimism. Two more homicides, which once again raises the numbers. 480 killed ÷ 340 days elapsed = 1.411764705882353 homicides per day x 365 days in the year = 515.2941176470588 projected murders for 2022.

Taking just the reduced homicide rate since Hallowe’en, 35 killings in 36 days yields 0.9722222222222222 homicides per day. With 25 days remaining in the year, that works out to 24.3055555555555556 more in December, or a total of 504 killed.

The chances of the city seeing fewer than 500 homicides starts to get beyond any margin of error.

Nevertheless, the numbers are fairly starkly different. In 2021, there were 41 killings between December 7th and the end of the year, a completely different pace than we are seeing now.

That different pace, however, isn’t indicative of what it might seem. According to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, there had been 2,187 shooting victims in the city through December 5th, compared to 2,183 on the same date in 2021. It’s not that the cliques of young men blasting away at rival street groups have slacked off; it’s just that they haven’t been quite as successful in killing rather than wounding their enemies. Much of that is due to the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of placing shooting victims in patrol cars and taking them directly to the emergency room rather than waiting on the ambulance, along with even more experience in dealing with gunshot wounds by emergency personnel.

In other words, the bad guys are just as bad, but the good guys have gotten a bit better.

References

References
↑1 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.” If you think you’ve read this footnote previously, you have: its mocking nature is such that I have it saved for frequent use.
↑2 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.
↑3 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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Watch out! The signs are there that the Biden Administration wants to reimpose mask mandates

As my good friend, and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach recently noted, the twenty leaders at the G20 ‘summit’ “signed a declaration to introduce vaccine passports for their respective jurisdictions, with the stated intention of creating a global verification system to facilitate safe international travel.”

I embedded my own tweet here:

I should have included Istanbul and Kuwait City, those being the airports at which SSG Pico stopped on her (too short) pass to meet me in Jerusalem.

While Representative Massie said that the American people had moved on, he was too restrictive: as nearly as any of us could see, much of the world have moved on as well.

But, of course, the Biden Administration wants to instill fear, because that’s better for government to control people. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

CDC Director Walensky is urging people to wear masks indoors and on public transit, raising alarms about the ‘tridemic’

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky will speak at a health summit in Philadelphia Tuesday.

by Jason Laughlin and Sarah Gantz | Tuesday, December 6, 2022 | 10:21 AM EST

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky is in Philadelphia today to speak about pressing public health threats as officials raise alarms about the so-called “tridemic” — a surge of influenza, RSV and COVID-19 cases straining the health system.

“The past several years have certainly not been easy, and now we face another surge of illness, another moment of overstretched capacity, and one of tragic and often preventable sadness,” Walensky said during a CDC press briefing Monday.

Would that be the same Dr Walensky who told us, “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus — they don’t get sick”?

She is expected to address a crowd of medical professionals and public health stakeholders today at the Bloomberg American Health Summit, taking place at Loews Hotel Philadelphia in Center City.

The CDC has recorded at least 8.7 million cases of flu, including 78,000 hospitalizations and 4,500 deaths since October, the Washington Post reported.

Children’s hospitals have been flooded with cases of RSV, a flu-like virus that can cause severe respiratory problems among very young children and those with underlying health conditions.

Flu season hits every year. And nurses, such as my wonderful wife, know that RSV season hits pediatric hospitals every year, the government wasn’t trying to push indoor and travel masking for the flu and RSV. They got away with doing so due to the COVID-19 panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; I spelled it exactly the way it should be spelled — so now they want to try it again.;

“Our hospital is filling up with young babies that are struggling to breathe,” James Reingold, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, told the Inquirer in early November.

COVID cases and hospitalizations are also rising in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but remain within the range the region has seen over the past two months.

In her remarks to reporters Monday, Walensky urged people to be proactive in protecting themselves and others by seeing a doctor if they have symptoms, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask indoors and on public transportation.

That last fits in with what Mr Massie stated, that the President “is still fighting in federal court to reinstate the airplane mask mandate.” The federal government sure loves them some arbitrary and authoritarian power!

I had said that masks weren’t much in evidence in my recent travels, but it’s also true that there were at least a few people who chose to wear them. And that’s the point: they chose to wear them. If someone feels either the need or desire to wear a mask, I have no way of knowing what his reasons and decision-taking processes were, and it’s really none of my business. But when the government tries to force people to wear them, then it becomes my business, and my answer is what it will always be: not just no, but Hell no!

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I got the Wuhan Flu

My darling bride — of 43 years, 6 months, and 16 days — has been full vaccinated against COVID-19, plus she got the two original boosters, plus she got the specific Omicron variant booster.

Guess what? She got sick — not seriously — took an at home COVID test, and was positive.

Me? I’m fully vaccinated, and yes, I took the two original boosters, though not the specific Omicron booster, and a couple of days after Mr Pico became ill, I did, too. We waited a couple of days, but yup, I took an at home test on Saturday, and yup, I’m positive for COVID.

According to the latest propaganda, even if you do get infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, you won’t get as sick if you’ve taken the vaccine-that-isn’t, but who can know that? We’ve already been told that the Omicron variant does not cause as severe symptoms as the previous ones, so the fact that Mrs Pico and I are only housebound ill and not hospitalized could just as well be due to the milder variant as the vaccine-that-isn’t.

The propaganda spouted by the ‘experts’ in the chart to the right? Let’s face it: they didn’t actually know what they claimed to know, and were only parroting what their minions told them, to justify all sorts of vaccine mandates and intrusions into people’s personal lives. As for their minions? They probably didn’t know, either, but were doing what the developers of the vaccines were doing all along: guessing!

But with their guessing, all sorts of restrictions on our individual liberties and rights were imposed.

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In which a ‘transgender’ supportive CNN piece proves the opposite 'Transgender man' proves that 'he' really isn't

The Russo-Ukrainian War has seen hundreds of thousands of casualties, according to The New York Times:

Russia’s war in Ukraine has left more than 100,000 of Moscow’s troops dead or wounded, and Ukraine has probably suffered a similar number of casualties, the United States’ most senior general said this week.

“You’re looking at well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in remarks at the Economic Club of New York on Wednesday. “Same thing probably on the Ukrainian side.”

General Milley said that Russia’s invasion had also killed about 40,000 Ukrainian civilians and displaced 15 million to 30 million.

That’s “a lot of human suffering,” he said.

He described the coming cold months, when many military experts expect a lull in the fighting, as an opportunity for both sides to consider peace talks. However, the prevailing U.S. opinion is that the two countries are far from such talks.

Well, leave it to CNN to find a much, much worse problem:

‘I wanted to resume my transition at all costs.’ Trans Ukrainians uprooted by war struggle to continue treatment

By Ivana Kottasová, CNN | Saturday, December 3, 2022 | 12:51 AM EST

Chisinau, Moldova and London — The best day of Eric’s life came just days before the worst.

After years of waiting, dozens of tests and a two-week stay on a psychiatric ward, Eric was finally getting his first testosterone shot. Eric is a 23-year-old transgender man from Ukraine. Assigned female at birth, he says starting hormone therapy was a major step in his quest to become his true self.

OK, let’s stop right there: “Eric” was not assigned female at birth, but recognized as being a girl when she was born. “Assignment” as being male or female is determined not by who looks at a newborn’s genitals, but by whether the sperm cell which fertilizes the egg is carrying an X or a Y chromosome, at conception. This is something our science has known for a hundred years now, but the ‘transgender’ activists word it as if there is actually a choice at birth.

“Eric”, as photographed by Ivana Kottasová, CNN. Click to enlarge.

“It was utter happiness. I was euphoric, it was the moment that I’ve been waiting for for so long,” Eric, who asked for his last name to not be used because he is concerned for his safety, told CNN in Chisinau, Moldova, in July.But just days after Eric had what should have been the first in a series of testosterone injections administered at a clinic in Kyiv, Russia invaded Ukraine. Everything changed.

“The clinic had closed because of the danger of airstrikes. I had the testosterone, but no way of getting [it administered]. I didn’t have the needles and there were huge shortages of everything in pharmacies, even the most basic stuff, because obviously, during the war, there’s a big need for things like syringes,” Eric said.

Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine has upended the lives of millions of Ukrainians. But for Eric and many other trans people, the war has also made it much more difficult to be who they are.

Hundreds of thousands of people killed or wounded, and 15 to 30 million people displaced from their homes, but “Eric” and others are suffering because they can’t try to change their sex?

Article author Ivana Kottasová took a picture of “Eric” for the article, and you know what I noticed? She was standing on a sidewalk, in a nice, urban street in Chisinau, Moldova, an independent country which borders Ukraine but is not part of Ukraine. Moldova is not at war with Russia. If “Eric” really, really thinks she’s a man, shouldn’t she be out doing the manly thing of defending her country against the invading Russians? But no, instead she fled her homeland, and is safe in Moldova.

In a Council of Europe article linked in the original, it is noted:

In the course of my recent visit to Ukraine, I was also informed that some transgender persons are experiencing difficulties in leaving the country. For example, this is the case for several transgender women who are blocked in Ukraine because they have not completed the legal gender recognition process and consequently the gender markers in their identity documents remain male at a time when all men between 18 and 60 are required by martial law to stay in Ukraine.

In other words, “Eric” disobeyed the martial law edict that all men between 18 and 60 stay in Ukraine, to fight the invaders. She claims that she’s a man, but sure used her female identity to get the heck out of the country! Time magazine reported that “scores of foreign women” have gone to Ukraine to help fight the Russians, including some in direct combat, but “Eric” used her female identity to flee that fight. Ukraine’s military was 16% female before the war, and many have been directly fighting the Russians, but “Eric” fled nevertheless.

Miss Kottasová’s article was meant to portray the ‘transgendered’ as a special class of victims in the war, but it had the unintentional effect of highlighting that ‘trangender man’ “Eric” is not a man, and does not think like a man. Perhaps, after the war is over, she’ll be lucky enough to get the hormones she wants, and maybe even a quack plastic surgeon to build her a fake penis, but in the part of her she already claims is male, she has proven that she isn’t.

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The racism of The Philadelphia Inquirer They really just can't help themselves!

Viruses are very much non-racist: they do not care what color or ethnicity the person they infect happens to be, but the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer seem to think otherwise.

Sunday morning’s main editorial — which has the look of something written specifically by Will Bunch, but I don’t know that — begins innocently enough:

Fighting the spread of viruses — and lies | Editorial

Health officials warn the flu could be worse this year, and roughly 300 Americans a day are still dying from COVID-19. Boosters and flu shots remain effective protection.

by the Editorial Board | Sunday, December 4, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST

Many have moved on from the pandemic, but it is not over. As Americans gather during the holidays, there remains a need to get booster shots, practice social distancing, and fight the spread of misinformation.

Roughly 300 Americans a day are still dying from COVID-19. That is an obvious improvement from the pandemic’s peak of more than 4,000 deaths a day early last year, but the country is still losing the equivalent of an airplane full of passengers each day. Most deaths involve those who are older, sicker, and poorer.

The trauma to families who have lost loved ones is incalculable, while the financial impact continues to roil the economy. At the same time, many students have fallen further behind in their education.

Oh, as in the effects of closing the schools has had devastating effects? Remember: The Philadelphia Inquirer fully supported the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers in their reluctance to reopen the city’s schools to in person learning.

Health officials remain optimistic this winter will not bring another surge in coronavirus cases like last year, when the omicron variant swept through the country. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracking a new subvariant known as XBB, which is showing up in a growing number of cases.

Anthony Fauci, who is retiring in December as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that XBB appeared adept at evading antibodies from prior vaccination or infection and urged everyone to get COVID boosters.

Why did I say that this has the look of a Will Bunch column? Whoever wrote this used a plethora of links, the way Mr Bunch normally does! But I will admit to not understanding the last quoted paragraph: if XBB “appeared adept at evading antibodies from prior vaccination or infection,” why would getting yet another booster make a difference?

The drop in the number of patients getting boosters has spilled over to fewer Americans getting their annual flu shot. More troubling, even fewer Black, Hispanic, and Native American adults have been getting flu shots in recent years.

While the viruses don’t care about the race or ethnicity of the people they infect, it seems that the Editorial Board do: why is it “more troubling” that fewer Hispanic, black or Indians have been getting the flu shots? Why do the Editorial Board take such a distinction here?

The editorial continues on to blame evil reich-wing Republicans for all of this, another sign of Mr Buch’s probable authorship, as well as Twitter — though not specifically Elon Musk — because all would be well if only those who disagree with the Inquirer would just shut their mouths .  .  . and keyboards.

Which brings me to this:

It’s not that just “the American people have moved on,” but foreigners have as well. I’m guessing that there aren’t a lot of Arabs, Turks, Brits, Dutch, Swiss, Israeli and Canadians who watch Tucker Carlson on Fox News, one of the people blamed by the Editorial Board, but they aren’t wearing masks with, at least to my eyes, any greater frequency than Americans. Of course, I can’t tell by looking whether a person has been vaccinated, but I can tell you that, along with masks not being much in evidence, we were never asked for our vaccination records, either.

William Tech noted a couple of weeks ago that at this year’s G20 ‘summit’ in Indonesia, “the twenty participating world leaders signed a declaration to introduce vaccine passports for their respective jurisdictions, with the stated intention of creating a global verification system to facilitate safe international travel.” Yet, among the G20 nations are Canada, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, nations our family visited, which did not ask to see our vaccination records.

The COVID-19 vaccines are ‘free,’ and, in some places, the flu vaccines are as well, with your insurance card. If someone wants to get a vaccine, he can get it, always free with the COVID shots, and frequently so for the influenza vaccine. People are taking their free decisions.