Author Archives: Dana Pico

Posted on by

Killadelphia Things aren't as bad as last year, but they're sure not good

The weekend is over, and we’ve finally got the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page updated reliably. The news, though certainly bad enough, is a lot less bad than last year. Homicides are down 6.56% from the same date last year, and while a murder rate of 1.4199 per day (470 ÷ 331) works out to 518.2779 homicides for the year, that’s not only lower than last year by a significant amount, but lower than the 534.2928 the numbers at the end of October projected.

The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer noted the numbers, in a kind of weird way:

As of Tuesday, there have been 465 homicides in our city. All but 30 have been fatal shootings. The tally of the nonfatal kind, the kind that can leave physical and emotional scars that last a lifetime, stands at 1,688.

That includes four Overbrook High School students who were shot Wednesday morning after the West Philadelphia school let out early for Thanksgiving.

If we stay under last year’s record of 506 shooting deaths, it may be a victory of luck — an inch to the left, an inch to the right — or of the talented professionals at our overworked trauma centers. Either way, Philadelphians will be left holding their breath, wondering what next year will bring.

I notice that the police-hating Editorial Board gave no credit to the Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of loading shooting victims into the initial patrol car on the scene and rushing them directly to the hospital rather than waiting for an ambulance. I can’t say that I find that surprising at all.

Looking at those numbers, there were 506 out of 562 total homicides in Philly last year, meaning that 56 murders, 9.96%, were committed by other means. This year, according to the Inky’s statistics, only 30 homicides, 6.45%, were committed with something other than a gun.

The numbers work out to 1.3344 shooting deaths per day, 487.0399 for the year, so the “inch to the left” argument tells me that the Editorial Board didn’t bother to actually do the math, but that’s another thing I don’t find a surprise.

Of course, even with the reduction in total homicides anticipated, it still means that the law enforcement team of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will have supervised five of the six bloodiest years since 2007. The only years Mr Kenney had that weren’t at the top of the chart was when Mr Krasner was not District Attorney, but I’m certain, certain! that that has nothing, nothing at all, to do with it.

The Census Bureau guesstimated Philadelphia’s population, as of July 2021, to be 1,576,251, a drop from the 2020 census figure of 1,603,797. Using those numbers, Philly had a homicide rate of 31.11 per 100,000 population in 2020, and 35.65 in 2021. Using 2021’s population guesstimate, and a projected homicide total of 518, the 2022 numbers work out to 32.86 per 100,000, but that’s provisional. It’s an improvement over last year, but certainly nothing about which to brag.

Posted on by

Those who want to regulate speech aren’t really afraid of lies or misinformation; what they are afraid of is the truth.

The American left are aghast that Elon Musk’s somewhat delayed purchase of Twitter has meant that conservatives would be able to actually speak freely. As we have previously noted, Twitter added rules banning “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” “Misgendering” means referring to ‘transgendered’ individuals by their biological sex, either directly or through the use of the appropriate pronouns, while “deadnaming” means referring to such people by their birth names rather than the ones they have adopted which are more consistent with their imagined ‘gender.'[1]The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex … Continue reading The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[2]Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker.” to claim that such restrictions actually promoted freedom of speech.

To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur.

That their ‘identity’ might not be “an accepted fact” is not something Mr Malloy wanted to concede, but Twitter’s policy also meant that those who did not accept such claims still had to be careful with their language, or be suspended or permanently banned.

And yes, I have had to be careful in tweets, especially when it came to my reporting about Will Thomas, a male swimmer who claimed to be a woman named “Lia,” including calling him ‘Lia’ Thomas in a couple of article titles to get past Twitter’s rules.

Now comes Robert Stacy McCain, who had his own @rsmccain Twitter account, with “tens of thousands” of followers, permanently suspended noting that Twitter, under the previous regime also suspended credentialed media sites which did something really radical like tell the truth:

‘Blood On Your Hands’? Is Anyone Really Endangered by Twitter ‘Amnesty’?

by Robert Stacy McCain | Sunday, November 27, 2022

Hopewell Chin’ono is an award-winning journalist who has relentlessly exposed the evils of the lawless and corrupt regime in Zimbabwe:

In 2020, Hopewell reported on alleged Covid-19 procurement fraud within the health ministry, which led to the arrest and sacking of Health Minister Obadiah Moyo. It was President Emmerson Mnangagwa who fired Obadiah in July for “inappropriate conduct” over the $60 million medicines supply scandal. On July 20, 2020, Hopewell was arrested and charged with inciting public violence. The US embassy called Hopewell’s arrest “deeply concerning”, while his lawyer called it “an abduction” and Amnesty accused Zimbabwean authorities of “misusing the criminal justice system to persecute journalists and activists”. He was freed in September on bail, then he was arrested again in November 2020 and was charged with obstructing justice and contempt of court for a tweet about the court outcome of a gold smuggling scandal.

Hopewell Chin’ono was released on bail on January 27, 2021 after spending three weeks in prison. Chin’ono expressed concern about the COVID-19 pandemic in the overcrowded Chikurubi Prison and accuses the government of harassment for arresting him three times in five months.

Given such credentials, Chin’ono must be taken seriously when he warns of the risks of a general “amnesty” for banned accounts on Twitter. And certainly we should hope that Elon Musk will have his staff exercise caution when it comes to such cases as these, where repressive regimes are using “ghost accounts” to harass their critics. But the problem in the United States is almost the diametrical opposite situation, i.e., critics of the regime have been banned, because Twitter staff were working with the Democratic Party to effectively prohibit dissent.

The New York Post, America’s oldest continuously published newspaper,[3]There’s some dispute, but I believe that the Hartford Courant, founded in 1764, is the oldest, followed by the Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, as second, and The Philadelphia … Continue reading had its Twitter account suspended at the behest of intelligence officials who falsely declared the Hunter Biden laptop story to be “Russian disinformation.” (For the record, I do not think the Biden family is less corrupt than the rulers of Zimbabwe.) Comparing the problems in America to the problems in Zimbabwe is apples and oranges, of course, but that’s the point: If we don’t want to descend into a Third World nightmare, the voices of opponents of the Democratic Party must be heard. Maybe you think Zimbabwe can’t happen here, but you’re wrong. I mean, look what Democrats have done to Chicago and Philadelphia . . .

Of course, as it turned out, the Hunter Biden laptop story turned out to be true, but it was far, far, far more important to the #woke[4]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 nerds who ran Twitter previously that the story be stifled on October 14, 2020, three weeks before the presidential election, because Joe Biden just had to be protected so that he could win the election.

Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey was able to say that yeah, it had been a ‘total mistake’ to block the Post’s story . . . on March 25, 2021, after the election.

I’m old enough to remember when the left were free speech absolutists .  .  . when they weren’t really in control of much, when they were trying to get their messages out to the public in general. Now that they have power, not only in government but largely in the professional media, they really aren’t so enamored of freedom of speech, not for those with whom they disagree. To them, Twitter was great, when Twitter was suspending Mr McCain, when the platform was censoring the Post, when views contrary to theirs were stifled.

In one episode of Blue Bloods, fictitious New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan said that freedom of the press applies only to those who own a press, but that time has elapsed: with internet service (sort of) inexpensive, and the cost to have your own website cheap — heck, even I can afford it, and some platforms are free — almost anyone can own a ‘press.’

Well, social media like Facebook and Twitter and less popular sites like Parler are, in effect, publishers, and publishers do get to choose what they will and will not publish. But once Elon Musk bought Twitter leftists like The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch, whose newspaper rarely publishes any opinions which aren’t #woke, decided that Twitter “should exist more as a semi-public utility than as an entity that a man with a spare $44 billion can just light on fire,”[5]As we have previously noted, Mr Bunch’s newspaper has been begging for donations to help keep it afloat. while Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wants Twitter to be ‘socialized’:

Of course, there is one way Twitter could be saved: By actually making it the “digital town square” Musk says he wants it to be. Which is to say the government should buy and run Twitter, just as government owns and operates actual town squares. Yes, I’m talking about a “socialist” takeover of Twitter, just like we have “socialist” libraries, schools and museums.

I don’t think that they understand what they’ve advocated, because a public utility cannot deny service to anyone who will pay the bill! It doesn’t matter how odious someone might think my opinions to be: Jackson Energy Cooperative cannot deny me the electricity service I use to power my too-old computer as long as I pay my sparktricity bill. Verizon cannot deny me the cell phone service for which I’ve contracted as long as the bill is paid, even if they’re worried that I might say something unsavory over the phone. Mr Bunch and Miss Marcotte somehow seem to think that if Twitter were a public utility, the utility’s directors could ban people they don’t like. Perhaps they just don’t understand what a public utility actually is?

Well, I actually (kind of) agree: Twitter should be considered a public utility, not only because of the size of its reach, but because governments at all levels use Twitter and Facebook — but not Parler or Truth Social — to communicate with the public. Virtually every government in the United States, federal, state, and local, have a Twitter account that they use. Being a public utility does not mean that it cannot be privately owned, as most of our electric, water, telephone , and natural gas companies are.

As a private publisher, Twitter was able to censor information it didn’t want disseminated, information which turned out to be the truth, and the left liked that. Now that Twitter is owned by someone who actually favors freedom of speech, the left don’t like it, don’t like it at all. It wasn’t just the Hunter Biden laptop story; Twitter routinely throttled down messages that exposed the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines did not actually keep a person from contracting the SARS-CoV-2, something we now also know to be true, because the left just can’t handle the truth.

References

References
↑1 The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex and their original names.
↑2 Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker.”
↑3 There’s some dispute, but I believe that the Hartford Courant, founded in 1764, is the oldest, followed by the Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, as second, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, founded in 1829, third.
↑4 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.

↑5 As we have previously noted, Mr Bunch’s newspaper has been begging for donations to help keep it afloat.
Posted on by

What is he thinking right now? I’d bet he isn’t thinking, “Hey, I sure got around those gun control laws, didn’t I?”

Stephon Henderson. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Meet Stephon Henderson. Mr Henderson, 59, allegedly shot and killed Talina Henderson, 47, his wife, at a residence in the 2800 block of Bay Colony Lane. Mrs Henderson was shot “multiple times,” which tells us that this was no accident. This was Lexington’s record-breaking 41st murder of the year; the previous record of 37 was set in 2021.

According to the Lexington Herald-Leader and Fayette County Detention Center records, Mr Henderson was charged with murder (domestic violence), violation of an emergency protection order/domestic violence order, and possession of a handgun by a previously convicted felon.

Now, you would think that any person with an IQ above room temperature who was the subject of a domestic violence protection order would be smart enough to not have a handgun. You would think that any such person who is a previously convicted felon would be smart enough to realize that possession of a handgun, a violation of KRS §527.020 (2)(a), is a Class C felony, punishable by a minimum of five and maximum of ten years in the state penitentiary under KRS §532.060, even if he never uses it, and the existence of a protection order could easily result in the police searching his home.

Bay Colony Lane, near Masterson Station Park in Lexington is hardly a bad area. It’s something of a cookie-cutter development, of decent single-family homes with actual front and back yards. While Zillow shows no homes currently for sale on Bay Colony Lane itself, 2657 Wigginton Point, a couple of streets away in the same development, is a three bedroom, three bath, 2,056 ft², built in 2020, very similar home listed for $327,900. There is a lot of new development in that area off of Leestown Road. The neighborhood is neat, clean, racially integrated, and not run-down at all.  Simply put, there was no particular self-defense need for Mr Henderson to be packing.

This tells me of just how ridiculous it is for the left to tell us we need more gun control laws. Mr Henderson — assuming that he is guilty of the charges — was obviously able to obtain a handgun, despite being legally barred from buying one. More, he knew that it was illegal for him to own one, yet he chose to do so anyway. Then, after doing something — the newspaper does not tell us what it was — to cause his wife to seek an emergency protection order, he still kept the gun, even knowing that the police could come at any time and search his residence for a weapon, and knowing that simple possession of the weapon was enough to send him back to the big house for five to ten years. All of those reasons not to have a firearm, and he chose to have one anyway.

He was subject to a restraining order, but he was near his wife anyway. I guess that piece of paper didn’t do very much to defend her.

Mr Henderson is 59 years old, and the possible sentences for murder in the Bluegrass State include death, life in prison without the possibility of parole, 25 years to life, or a 20-to-50-year sentence. If convicted of murder, there is no way Mr Henderson would be out of jail until he’s 79 years old, and possibly not until he’s stone-cold graveyard dead. He threw the rest of his miserable life away.

And for what? Sometimes I fantasize about what other people can be thinking. As he sits in his cell, is he thinking, “Damn, I sure showed her!“, or is it more probable that he’s thinking, “Boy, did I f(ornicate) up this time”? I’d bet one thing though; I’d bet he isn’t thinking, “Hey, I sure got around those gun control laws, didn’t I?”

Posted on by

They thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.

Ever since Powerline and Little Green Footballs spotted the use of forged documents by CBS News 60 Minutes, in their attempt to swing the 2004 election away from President Bush and toward Senator John Kerry (D-MA), the credentialed media were, or at least should have been, put on alert that there were eyes on them, looking for the kind of bovine feces they had long been peddling. And so you’d think that the editors of The Washington Post would have learned that lesson by now, 18 years later.

So, when James Woods tweeted a screen capture from the Post, it was going to live forever, regardless of how the editors tried to soften the headline. It didn’t work.

Covid is no longer mainly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Here’s why.

Analysis by McKenzie Beard | Wednesday, November 23, 2022 | 7:46 AM EST

For the first time, a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.

Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted for The Health 202 by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

It’s a continuation of a troubling trend that has emerged over the past year. As vaccination rates have increased and new variants appeared, the share of deaths of people who were vaccinated has been steadily rising. In September 2021, vaccinated people made up just 23 percent of coronavirus fatalities. In January and February this year, it was up to 42 percent, per our colleagues Fenit Nirappil and Dan Keating.

If you hover your cursor on the Post’s article title, you’ll see the hyperlink for it, and see that it was originally https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinated-people-now-make-up-majority-covid-deaths/, “Vaccinated people now make up majority (of) covid deaths”. I am reminded of Tony Stark’s line in the first Avengers movie, “That man is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.”

You can read the rest at the link, and if the Post’s paywall stymies you, another site has copied it.

Also see: William Teach: Vaccinated Account For Majority Of Wuhan Flu Deaths

Let’s be clear about this: the original headline would grab far more attention than the revised one, and part of a headline writer’s job — articles in newspapers traditionally have an editor rather than the author compose it — is to write a headline which is accurate but will still grab the reader’s attention and make it more probable that he will read the article.

But the original title very much undercuts what William Teach noted yesterday, “World Leaders Sign Declaration to Introduce COVID Vaccine Passports“:

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. (snip)

In a statement, the leaders affirmed their respective countries’ support of the World Health Organization mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer hub, which aims to build capacity in low- and middle-income countries to produce mRNA vaccines.

The leaders said they welcome joint production and research of vaccines and acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods.

They also agreed to a globalised ‘vaccination passport’.

While the details are scant at this stage, the statement says this will be done under the framework of the International Health Regulations to “facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognizing digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations.”

Indonesia’s Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said that a Digital Health Certificate using World Health Organization standards would be introduced during the next World Health Assembly in Geneva, in May next year.

“If you have been vaccinated or tested properly, you can move around. So for the next pandemic, instead of stopping the movement of people 100%, you can still provide some movement of the people,” Mr Sadikin said.

So, it’s somewhat alarming that governments – and of those belonging to the G20, the majority represent democracies – would consider introducing a passport that, since it was first mooted by individual countries, been widely condemned as medical discrimination as well as a violation of privacy with serious ethical implications.

Of more concern are reports that the vaccine won’t just apply to Covid vaccinations, but also to any vaccination that WHO recommends is required for international travel.

But if the SARS-CoV-2 virus is simply bypassing the vaccinations, something we have known for a year now, there is really no purpose in requiring vaccine passports, at least no real medical purpose. There is, as always, a Control Of People purpose. The editors of the Post have no real objections to more government control over the public, at least not if that control is exercised in the direction they like.

Between my wife and I, we’ve been in the Netherlands, Scotland, Canada, Israel and Switzerland — three of them just airport layovers, but there was nothing stopping us from leaving the airport in those countries — in the past two months, and neither of us has ever been asked for our vaccination records. We did carry them with us, in case they were required, but I, for one, was very happy that the busybodies and Karens didn’t ask. We were not asked for such when we returned to the United States.

While we have the stupid COVID-19 vaccination records, being relatively recent, how many people have their childhood vaccination records? Sure, I had all of the childhood vaccinations when I was a child, but that stuff was sixty years ago. The physicians who administered them are all probably dead, their offices gone. The school I attended from third grade through high school closed after the 1976 school year; where would those vaccination records be?

The vaccines are available for free, and anybody who wants to take them can do so. What the government does not like is the fact that those who do not want to take them have the right not to take them, so our government, and other governments, want to add more coercive pressure on those who decline.

I am not opposed to the vaccines, and am vaccinated myself. But I am very much opposed to the government trying to coerce people, trying to use force to get people to comply. A nation which has individual liberty as its standard should never, ever do that, and should always be resisted.

Posted on by

Hold them accountable For all practical purposes, lenient prosecutors, judges and parole boards have been accomplices in the crimes of those not treated seriously

Five people were killed and another 18 wounded, some critically, allegedly by Anderson Lee Aldrich. As Robert Stacy McCain reported, Mr Aldrich, in June of 2021:

was in an armed standoff with police at his mother’s home in Colorado Springs. He was charged with multiple felonies, but for reasons as yet unknown, the charges were dropped and records in the case were sealed. Seventeen months later, Aldrich was wearing body armor when he stormed into a local gay bar with a rifle and a pistol, shooting multiple people, five of whom died in the shooting rampage before bar patrons — one of them a former Army officer — tackled and disarmed him.

You can read the rest at Mr McCain’s site, but it has to be asked: why was Mr Aldrich out on the streets? Why was he able to buy a rifle? Why were the charges dropped and records sealed. But, most importantly, who took the decisions which left a crazy person out on the streets, able to (allegedly) commit the crimes with which he has been charged?

The New York Post reported that:

A Connecticut felon with a lengthy rap sheet fatally stabbed his 11-month-old daughter and dismembered her — then got into an argument with her mom and fled, police said.

Police are on the hunt for Christopher Francisquini, 31, who is accused of murdering Camilla Francisquini on Friday morning at their Millville Avenue home in Naugatuck, the Hartford Courant reported.

After allegedly committing what Police Chief Colin McAllister described Monday as a “horrific and gruesome” crime, Francisquini got into a fight with Camilla’s mom, who was unaware the girl was already dead.

During the argument, Francisquini allegedly destroyed the mother’s cellphone, removed a GPS tracking device from his ankle and fled in a 2006 gray Chevy Impala.

I noted that the nation’s second oldest daily newspaper, the New York Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, cited the nation’s oldest surviving newspaper, the Hartford Courant. Inasmuch as I frequently cite The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, that part interested me. But I digress.

Further down:

Francisquini has been convicted of assault and drug charges — and also has various pending assault and theft-related cases.

He got out of prison in June and is on special parole until 2032, WFSB reported. He managed to remove his tracking device before going on the lam, police said.

The same questions which I asked concerning Mr Aldrich apply to Mr Francisquini: why was he granted a “special parole,” and why, iif his pending charges of assault and theft occurred after he was paroled, was he not taken back into custody? He was wearing an ankle monitor, so the police knew where he was! And again, most importantly, who took the decisions which left this guy out on the streets?

Now we have a “disgruntled employee” of a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, who murdered six other people before killing himself. The identity of the shooter and whatever interactions he may or may not have had with law enforcement have not yet been released. But when that information is made public, will we be asking the same questions?

On saving this story during the process of writing it, the system notified me that this will be, when published, my 32nd article entitled Hold Them Accountable. From Latif Williams, who (allegedly) killed Temple University student Samuel Collington but was out on the streets because District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office didn’t already have him locked up, to Cody Arnett, now sentenced to life in prison for raping a Georgetown College student, after having been paroled early despite having five prior violent felony convictions, to Benjamin Robert Williams, not charged despite being arrested as being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm, and with a twenty-year criminal history now charged with the murder of his girlfriend, to Brandon Dockery, sentenced in 2012 to 45 years in prison for arson but free in 2021 to go out and (allegedly) kill someone, to Nikolas Cruz, given every break possible by the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and the school district, thus free to buy a gun, and then murdered 17 people and wounded 17 other, to Hassan Elliot, given a lenient plea bargain arrangement by Mr Krasner’s office, released even earlier than that, violated parole more than once, but still not locked up, who then murdered a Philadelphia Police Officer.

So, what would happen if we started holding judges and prosecutors and parole boards accountable for the crimes committed by criminals they sentenced too lightly, prosecuted too leniently, or released too early? A Georgetown College Coed would not have been raped had the Kentucky State Parole Board not released Mr Arnett early; Police Corporal James O’Connor IV would still be alive, if the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office had had Mr Elliot locked up again on his parole violations, and Mr Collington would still be alive today.

Can you give me one good reason why Mr Krasner should not be standing trial, right along with Mr Elliot for the killing of Corporal O’Connor? Is there any reason that the members of the Kentucky State Parole Board shouldn’t be serving the same life sentence as Mr Arnett?

If we held these people accountable for the crimes committed by thugs who they could have had behind bars, we’d quickly find that prosecutors would seek maximum sentences, judges would sentence criminals to the maximum terms allowed under the law, and parole boards wouldn’t turn anyone loose before he had served his full term in prison. We would also have far lower crime rates, far fewer people murdered, far fewer women raped.

Our state legislatures are elected by the people, and do the people’s will. When they pass strict laws, when they set serious maximum sentences, they are responding to what the public and society need, and then we have lenient prosecutors and judges and parole boards undermining all of that. We need to start holding those people accountable for the damage to which their decisions have led!

Perhaps these people really do mean well, but meaning well is not enough; for all practical purposes they have been accomplices in the criminal acts committed by those already in custody, who were not fully punished for the crimes for which they had been previously arrested, and were let go early.

Posted on by

The useful dead

Five people were murdered, with another 18 wounded, in a mass shooting in a Colorado Springs nightclub which catered primarily to homosexuals, and it’s a crisis unlike any we’ve ever seen before! Horrors! A mass shooting! “LGBTQI+ people are under attack! They’re not safe!”

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is a homosexual male, so naturally this is on his radar, just like it is for all of the left who will never let a “crisis” go to waste.

In the meantime, as of 11:59 PL EST on Monday, November 21st, 464 people had poured out their life’s blood in the mean streets of the City of Brotherly Love, and nobody says a damned thing, because the vast majority of the victims, and of their killers, are black. According to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, out of 2,746 fatal shootings in the city from 2015 through November 18, 2022, 2,114, or 76.79%, of the victims were black males, with another 153 (5.56%) being black females. That’s 82.35% of all fatal shooting victims over an almost eight-year period being black, in a city which is only, when Hispanics are counted as a separate category, 38.3% non-Hispanic black.

Hispanic males were the victims in 282 fatal shootings (10.24%), while 31 (1.13%) Hispanic females were shot to death. Using the formulation so loved by The Philadelphia Inquirer, that means that “Black and brown” people were the victims in 93.72% of all fatal shootings, and, other than when an “innocent” is killed, nobody really cares.

And while to-date homicides are actually down 6.45% from 2021’s record-shattering numbers, shootings are up, 1.16%. The Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy, of getting shooting victims into patrol cars and rushing them to the hospital rather than waiting on an ambulance appears to have had a significant effect in reducing the percentage of those shot expiring.

I guess that I have to give Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw credit for something, anyway, though I don’t give her credit for much.

But I have to ask: why are the five people killed in Colorado Springs more important than the 464 slaughtered in Philly? For every person killed in that nightclub, 93 were murdered in Philly!

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Crazy People Are Dangerous: No Motive Yet in Colorado Springs Shooting

Of course, the nightclub gunman can be demonized as someone who hated homosexuals — despite the fact he had a previous criminal incident which had nothing to do with them — and will be charged with a “hate crime”, while the Philly killers are mostly indistinguishable from their victims as far as race or ethnic group is concerned; there are no political points to be gained by demonizing the people who killed them. For the left, the nightclub victims are somehow deader than the people slaughtered in Philadelphia.  At the very least, they are far more useful dead than ordinary people in Philly.

Posted on by

The Democrats sure love a fearful public

In 2020, Reichsstatthalter Andy Beshear (NSDAP-KY) tried to use the fear of COVID-19 to push through authoritarian orders, including a ban on groups of more than ten people, from more than two separate households, gathering together for Thanksgiving. I am proud to say that that our family violated that ban, and would do so again.

Fortunately, Kentuckians banded together in the voting booth in November of 2020, and elected a Republican super-majority in both chambers of the General Assembly, and the Republicans, once the legislative session began, quickly limited the Reichsstatthalter’s executive authority. Naturally, the Governor, with the help of his toady Democrat judge, Philip Shepherd, temporarily blocked the legislature’s actions, but, eventually — and far too long eventually — the state Supreme Court ruled that the laws passed were constitutional.

And now, here it is, two years later, and the Governor is trying to stoke fear again:

No KY counties are at high COVID levels but 10 are medium, CDC says. See the map

by Aaron Mudd | Sunday, November 20, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

During his weekly update Thursday covering the state of the coronavirus pandemic in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear underscored one dismal data point that he said, “I know we can do better than.”

Beshear was talking about the number of Kentuckians who still haven’t received their Omicron booster for the COVID-19 vaccine — even as seasonal flu and RSV cases spike and shutter schools or fill up beds in Kentucky’s children’s hospitals.

Beshear cited data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There’s more at the original.

One interesting thing about the article: if you look at the ‘tab’ at the top of the screen, the article isn’t entitled what I have noted, but “Where do I need a mask in KY? See latest CDC COVID-19 data”. That must have been the article title when reporter Aaron Horn submitted it, but either he or one of the Lexington Herald-Leader’s editors thought better of it.

“Current data from the CDC indicates only 8% of Kentuckians 5 and older have gotten the Omicron booster,” Beshear said.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader, November 20, 2022. Note that, even subdued, most counties are low transmission in the bordering states as well as Kentucky. Click to enlarge.

Yet, as we can see from the image to the right, almost all of Kentucky is experiencing low levels of COVID-19 transmission, as are the surrounding states.

That might be a bit deceiving, given that it reflects only those tests about which the government knows, while many people are using the at-home tests. But that also implies that, regardless of any home test results, people aren’t getting sick enough from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, regardless of variant, that they have been seeking professional medical attention.

The issue is compounded by the fact that the flu is making a roaring comeback after all but disappearing in the U.S. in 2020 to 2021. Additionally, fewer than half of Kentucky’s children got the flu shot during the 2021-22 flu season.

Uhhh, if “fewer than half” of the kids in the Bluegrass State got the flu shots last winter, and influenza “all but disappeared” in 2021, maybe, just maybe, the flu shots weren’t really needed last winter.

Of course, kids were still under health restrictions last winter, with schools either closed or operating under serious restrictions.

As Kentuckians enter the holiday season, Beshear said, “Get the (flu) shot. Get the booster, and … if you’re concerned about your health or other conditions, consider wearing a mask at indoor get-togethers right now. It’s not forever.”

At least the Governor isn’t trying to make it an order this time, but, then again, he can’t. It isn’t just that the 2020 elections resulted in 75-25 and 30-8 Republican majorities in the state House of Representatives and Senate, respectively, but the 2022 elections upped those to 80-20 and 31-7. 🙂 It’s hardly a surprise, though: the Democrats didn’t even contest 44 of the 100 House seats, or 10 of the 19 Senate seats up for election!

I might have ignored this story completely had I not noticed Mr Horn’s original article title. “Where do I need a mask in KY?” The answer is nowhere!

Kentuckians specifically, and Americans overall, are just plain done with masks. Oh, I still see a couple, now and then, but I’d guess that well over 90% of the public are not wearing them anymore.

That might be worldwide as well: I saw a few, but not many, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv last week, and only a few of the airline passengers were wearing the silly things either, despite us being crammed in a long aluminum tube for hours on end.

Yes, things could change, but at least right now, COVID-19 has changed into something of no more concern than the flu. Yes, it will be serious enough in some people to require hospitalization, and can even result in death, but the same is true of influenza, and we haven’t resorted to the idiocy that attended COVID-19 when it came to the flu.

It’s simply something with which we have to live, just as we have to live with the flu.

Posted on by

I suppose that it is much easier to be a ‘progressive’ when you don’t look at the facts

One would think that an actual Philadelphian, even if she’s lived there only a few years, would have a better grasp on the facts in the City of Brotherly Love, but when that Philadelphian is named Amanda Marcotte, you’d be very, very wrong.

Hours before it was announced that Democrats have won a majority in the state House for the first time in 17 years, the lame duck legislature in Pennsylvania made its last stand for MAGA by impeaching Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia. While understandably unknown to most people outside Pennsylvania, Krasner has become a favorite punching bag in right-wing media, for his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime. Republicans paint him as “soft on crime” and blame him for the rise in gun violence in Philadelphia, even though a likelier culprit is the lax statewide gun laws passed by Republicans.

As always, Miss Marcotte doesn’t look more deeply into the question. Pennsylvania law states is that no subordinate governmental unit may impose firearms control restrictions stronger than those under state law. Thus, while there might be a couple of tiny tweaks in there, the City of Brotherly Love is under the same firearms laws as the rest of the Commonwealth.

I lived in Jim Thorpe for 15 years, and during those 15 years we had two murders in Carbon County, one in 2004 and another in 2006. If there was another one, I never heard of it, and I did search through the data, which is, regrettably, by township and borough in the county, and found only the two mentioned. And, as I recall, neither involved a firearm!

So, if the problem is the Commonwealth’s firearms control laws, why are the homicide rates so very, very different in Philly?

I previously wrote that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse last year: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.

For some reason, a reason Miss Marcotte did not choose to explore, Philadelphia is simply different from the rest of Pennsylvania, at least in terms of its crime rate. Pennsylvanians in the rest of the Commonwealth are not shooting and killing each other at nearly the rate seen in Philly. Of course, to have investigated that more deeply would have been to ruin Miss Marcotte’s entire point.

As we noted on Friday, there’s more to the story. Under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, Philly’s tremendous homicide rate was brought down dramatically. Sorted by total homicides for the year, five of the six deadliest years from 2007 through this year were under the terms of Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Krasner. When Mr Kenney  had Mr Williams as his DA, murders were significantly lower.

Mr Krasner’s campaign website itself tells people what we already knew: he doesn’t like to lock up criminals:

When Philadelphia voters elected Larry Krasner as its District Attorney in 2017, he promised to end the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past, work to support victims and the community, and hold the powerful accountable. He has kept his promises. It hasn’t been easy. Larry inherited an office committed to incarceration regardless of the cost, even when this policy endangered and devastated our communities.

But in just three years, he has upended the office culture and implemented policies that put people first. Under Larry’s leadership:

  • The county jail population has decreased by 40% and this summer fell to its lowest level since 1985.
  • The amount of time people will spend in prison has dropped by over 18,000 years.
  • Years under probation or parole have decreased by 57% overall, 65% for drug offenses and 70% for property offenses in the most oversupervised big city, Philly, and the second most oversupervised state, Pennsylvania.

A rational observer might just wonder: have Mr Krasner’s ‘progressive’ policies actually worked to reduce violence and crime in the city?

Along with Chicago, New York and other racially diverse cities, Philadelphia has also become central to right-wing media efforts to blame crime on the Black Lives Matter movement. Even in his supposedly “serious” campaign announcement speech Tuesday, Trump made the grotesque claim that “The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crime.” In reality, the spike in crime in the past couple of years seems largely attributable to the pandemic. Gun sales rose during the lockdown and schools were closed, meaning the streets saw an influx of weapons and bored young people, an almost perfect prescription for rising crime. As the pandemic has begun to recede, homicides have also started to decline.

This is kind of laughable. Were people buying guns to shoot the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as one would expect if such was “largely attributable to the pandemic,” or was it because of the huge increase in the crime rate?

Now, it is true that the number of homicides is down, as I have previously mentioned, but, if the number of murders has decreased a bit, the number of attempted murders has increased: according to the city’s Shooting Victims Database, There were 2,107 shooting victims through November 16th of this year, compared to 2,069 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love through the same date last year. More people are surviving being shot, with much of the credit going to the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of quickly putting shooting victims into their patrol cars and taking them to the emergency room rather than waiting on an ambulance.

Again, had Miss Marcotte looked more deeply into the publicly available data, she’d have known that.

Krasner, for his part, is painting the impeachment as a direct attack on the right of Philadelphians to choose their own leaders. “History will harshly judge this anti-democratic, authoritarian effort to erase Philly’s votes — votes by Black, brown and broke people in Philadelphia,” he said in statement.

This impeachment of Krasner sews together two of the biggest and most racist themes that fuel the MAGA movement: A belief that anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates, and a belief that voters in racially diverse urban areas are “frauds” who are “stealing” elections from white conservatives.

While keeping in touch with my Pennsylvania conservative friends, I’ve yet to see any of them state that “anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates”. I’m the one who has been pointing out that, to the left, and especially The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives don’t matter, not when talking about them might upset progressive politics. And if the impulse to impeach Let ’em Loose Larry is an effort to reduce the tremendous violence rate in Philly, the primary beneficiaries of such efforts would be black Philadelphians!

Miss Marcotte called Philadelphia a “racially diverse cit(y),” which is true enough, but only if you look at the city as a whole. As even the “anti-racist news organization” that is the Inquirer has reported:

  • The eight-county region’s Black-white residential segregation is the fourth highest among the 20 biggest metropolitan areas, as defined by the Census Bureau. The region is the sixth-most segregated between Hispanic and white residents.

  • Among the 30 biggest cities, Philadelphia is second only to Chicago in its level of residential segregation between Black and white residents, according to data from Brown University. Between Hispanic and white residents, it’s the sixth-most segregated.

  • Considering every U.S. county that has at least 10,000 people and a Black population of at least 5%, Philadelphia is more segregated than 94% of them.

  • While residential segregation between Black and white residents has declined nationwide over the last several decades, it’s happened much slower in Philadelphia. The city’s position near the top of rankings of segregated places has stayed almost the same since 1980.

These are things that one would expect a savvy political commentator like Miss Marcotte, who told us in 2019 that her boyfriend and she had moved to South Philly, would actually know something about the city in which she lives. If she actually read what is now her hometown newspaper, she’d have known that Philly’s ‘diversity’ is actually pretty superficial, but, once again, she doesn’t seem to look at these things in any depth. But, then again, to look at the facts in depth would challenge her progressive worldview and politics, and nothing which would do that should be allowed.

Posted on by

Republicans take control of the House of Representatives; Vanity Fair writer waxes wroth If there's one thing the left despise, it's populism

The Democrats in the House of Representatives, the ones who created the silly Capitol Kerfuffle Committee, the one which almost all Republicans refused to join, are just terribly, terribly worried that, now that the GOP have regained the majority, they’ll, Horrors! investigate Democrats.

Remember Paul Ryan? He was House Speaker in 2018, the last time Republicans were in control. He left Congress quietly in the middle of the night. Well, not really, but sort of. Blaming “identity politics” and “polarization,” Ryan abruptly announced in April 2018 that he’d be exiting at the end of his term the following January, just as Democrats assumed power. Ryan went on to join the board overseeing the place that helped cause so much of that polarization in the first place, Fox News. Ryan may have reaped the benefits of Donald Trump moving into the White House—tax cuts!—but he didn’t have the stomach for MAGA. The same cannot be said for “my Kevin,” the little nickname the former president has given to Kevin McCarthy.

McCarthy helped rehabilitate Trump after the January 6 riots with a visit weeks later to Mar-a-Lago, where the two grinned side by side for a photo op. As fellow Republican Liz Cheney pointed out after McCarthy’s trip, “He’s not just a former president. He provoked an attack on the Capitol, an attack on our democracy. And so I can’t understand why you would want to go rehabilitate him.”

Here’s where Vanity Fair’s paywall begins, but, if you have only checked in for one of their articles in a month (?), you’ll still be able to access it for free. That’s how I did it; I would certainly never pay for it!

There is, of course, the amusing point of referring to Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY At Large) as Representative Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA 22) “fellow republican,” when Miss Cheney decided to abandon all party loyalty and accept Nancy Pelosi’s appointment to the January 6th committee.

Wyoming was President Trump’s strongest state in the 2020 elections, but Miss Cheney hated him. Despite having won re-election in 2020 with 66% of the vote, her participation in the Democrats’ witch hunt had her lose the 2022 Republican primary to Harriet Hageman by a landslide margin. Molly Jong-Fast Greenfield’s[1]Although the author does not respect her husband, Matthew Greenfield, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by … Continue reading article, which is based heavily on sources from not just the Democrats in the House, but the farthest left Democrats, is so ridiculously biased that her calling Miss Cheney Mr McCarthy’s “fellow Republican” is more of a mockery than an accurate description.

Maybe because McCarthy was desperate for the Speakership?

Now, with Republicans winning a slim majority in the midterms, that guy could be Speaker of the House—and honestly that’s the best-case scenario. McCarthy may be a cowardly sycophant, but he’s not full MAGA, something that MAGA-world is very much aware of. Though McCarthy won the Republican nomination for speaker on Tuesday, with 188 votes, dozens of members voted for Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Biggs—a signal that McCarthy might have to make major concessions to the party’s far-right flank in order to secure 218 votes before the full Congress in early January.

Yeah, referring to Mr McCarthy as a “cowardly sycophant” is going to help! 🙂

Meanwhile, the queen of MAGA, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is more than ready for Republicans to be in charge and apparently expects the likely next Speaker to appease the base. Regarding McCarthy, she told The New York Times that “to be the best Speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway.” She even predicted Monday that she’d be on committees investigating “traitors and criminals.” McCarthy has said he plans to put Greene back on committees, with some of her Trumpworld allies reportedly urging the likely Speaker to give her a plum seat on the House Oversight Committee. Imagine, from promoting QAnon conspiracies to possibly landing a key oversight post in Congress.

“We have to have the gavel,” Greene said Tuesday in discussing her support for McCarthy. “That is extremely important, because the gavel means subpoena power. And Republicans need subpoena power going over the next two years.”

Mrs Greenfield was in no way offended when Democrats had the subpoena power!

For Democrats, the outlook of a GOP-led House is grim. As Democratic representative Eric Swalwell texted me, “The GOP has laid a historic egg. Democrats ran on competence and contrasted it with chaos. And if Kevin McCarthy somehow holds on to become Speaker, he’s no Nancy Pelosi who can lead a narrow majority. McCarthy would be the leader of the land of misfit toys, a place that will exist exclusively as a vessel state of MAGA nation. A MAGA House majority will also operate as the largest law firm in Washington, DC, but serving just one client and his endless grievances. Functionally, without a Democratic votes it will spectacularly fail to execute its core functions: keep the government open, pay America’s bills, and fund the fight for freedom in Ukraine.”

I would imagine that the House under the GOP will keep the government open — though I would hope that they’d try to eliminate some of the stupid functions — but “fund the fight for freedom in Ukraine”? Try fund the struggle to make nuclear war more probable, because that’s how I see it. Sure, we all want Russia to somehow lose the Russo-Ukrainian War, but for some of us, including me, not at the expense of making a nuclear war more probable.

There’s more at the original, but what Mrs Greenfield tells us, almost as an aside, tells us a lot about her biases. Eric Swalwell, Ro Khanna, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all congressmen who know where to go for a sympathetic journolist[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, reached out to her via text. Richie Torres, “first openly gay Afro-Latino elected to Congress,” is cited as calling Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Tayor Greene as “lunatic likes”. I’m just surprised that Mus Greenfield failed to mention Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), but, then again, Mrs Boebert’s race had not been decided by last Wednesday, when she published the article. Mrs Boebert was re-elected, though by just a few hundred votes.

There are several more paragraphs but none of it is sensible reporting; it’s simply more Democratic propaganda masquerading — though not very well — as a measured and sensible opinion piece.

What Mrs Greenfield and the rest simply don’t understand is that the Republican electorate has moved on from the go-along-to-get-along politicians, and is now solidly populist in outlook. The attitudes of Representatives like Mrs Greene, Mrs Boebert, and Mr Gaetz are the attitudes of the majority of Republican voters. We saw this in 2010, with the emergence of the short-lived TEA Party, rebelling against President Obama’s stimulus and socialized medicine programs, but the TEA Party movement failed to last, dominated in Congress by the more polite Republicans.

Now the populists are the apparent majority of Republican voters, and that means that more populists are among the elected Republican office holders. And the left really, really, really don’t like that.

Donald Trump is mortal. More than just mortal, he’s very overweight and eats terrible food. The populist idea in the United States will outlive him.

References

References
↑1 Although the author does not respect her husband, Matthew Greenfield, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by their proper names.
↑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.