Would anyone have expected anything different from Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong? She knows that she has to condemn the riots, but she tries to understand the rioters and looters, and wants to say that she can’t really blame them. Continue reading
Category Archives: Culture
The natural result of black anger at a white police officer having charges against him dropped is to destroy black community businesses!
This really isn’t much of a surprise, because when the #BlackLivesMatter marchers rioted through 2020’s Summer of Hate, they mostly burned stuff in heavily black neighborhoods. Continue reading
Even in liberal Philadelphia, decent people don’t want the junkies next door!
On September 14th, the Philadelphia City Council passed an ordinance to prohibit supervised drug consumption sites across most of the city. Outgoing Mayor Jim Kenney is appalled!
Mayor Jim Kenney is vetoing a bill that prohibits supervised injection sites in most of the city
Kenney’s move sends the bill back to City Council, which is poised to override his veto this week and make the legislation law.
by Aubrey Whelan and Anna Orso | Wednesday, September 27, 2023 | 8:00 AM EDT | Updated: 10:42 AM EDT
Mayor Jim Kenney plans to veto legislation that prohibits supervised drug consumption sites across most of Philadelphia, writing in a letter to City Council that the bill is “troublingly anti-science and misleading.” Continue reading
Charges against police officer dismissed, so the Usual Suspects riot
Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, “restorative justice” District Attorney, Larry Krasner, and his army of inept minions, in their eagerness to prosecute city police officers, nevertheless failed in court on Tuesday:
A Philadelphia judge on Tuesday dismissed all charges against former city Police Officer Mark Dial, ruling that prosecutors had not presented enough evidence to show that his fatal shooting of Eddie Irizarry while on-duty last month was a crime.
The result? The Usual Suspects decided that a riot was in order! Continue reading
Killadelphia: Turn on, tune in, get dead!
We have said, many times, that black lives don’t matter, at least not to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which only reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love in which the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl is the victim. However, as we have also noted, the newspaper sometimes tries to make ‘innocents’ out of some younger homicide victims, as reporter Anna Orso did with 13-year-old Marcus Stokes, shot while allegedly on his way to school, even though he was sitting in a possibly disabled car which had been sitting on a corner for weeks, not on his way to school, and in the car several minutes after he would have been late for school.
Well, this time it’s reporter Ellie Rushing’s turn! Continue reading
Was Deep Space Nine prescient?
It was a single paragraph in The New York Times which caught my attention:
About 171,000 people living in California are homeless, a total that, stunningly, accounts for nearly one-third of all the homeless people in the United States.
According to the Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 guesstimates of population, California had 39,029,342 residents, out of a total of 333,287,557 people in the United States. 39,029,342 ÷ 333,287,557 = 0.11710410779, or the Pyrite State having 11.71% of our total population. Why, then, does California have “nearly one-third of all the homeless people in the United States”? Continue reading
Are the teachers’ unions writing purportedly straight news pieces for The Washington Post?
The Washington Post got the headline wrong. The editors make it sound as though the students were the ones in the wrong for reporting a teacher who broke the law!
Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again?
Mary Wood’s school reprimanded her for teaching a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now she hopes her bond with students can survive South Carolina’s politics.
by Hannah Natanson | Monday, September 18, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT
CHAPIN, S.C. — As gold sunlight filtered into her kitchen, English teacher Mary Wood shouldered a worn leather bag packed with first-day-of-school items: Three lesson-planning notebooks. Two peanut butter granola bars. An extra pair of socks, just in case.
Everything was ready, but Wood didn’t leave. For the first time since she started teaching 14 years ago, she was scared to go back to school.
Six months earlier, two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.
The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.
The story was originally entitled “South Carolina students reported their teacher’s lesson on Ta-Nehisa Coates,” or so I judge from the blurb that appears on the article tab using Microsoft Edge. Someone changed it to the headline you see above, which includes “Can she trust them again?” But what Mrs Satterwhite[1]While the teacher did not respect her husband, Ryan Satterwhite, enough to have taken his last name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect to him, and always refers to married … Continue reading did was in blatant defiance of the law in the Palmetto State. Do the editors of the Post support teachers breaking the law?
Reading Coates’s book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people,” one student wrote.
Let’s be clear here: Mr Coates, who has had material published previously in the Post, something the Post article does not mention, which is a violation of standard journalistic ethics, strongly concentrates on race relations in the United States. Wikipedia’s section on Mr Coates’ views on race in the US states:
In an interview with Ezra Klein, Coates outlined his analysis that the extent of white identity expression in the United States serves as a critical factor in threat perceptions of certain European Americans and their response to political paradigm shifts related to African Americans, such as the presidency of Barack Obama.
I note here that Ezra Klein was the creator of JournoList, so the above statement concerned a left-wing “journalist” reporting about a left-wing subject. While I was obviously not present during Mrs Satterwhite’s lessons, I don’t find the student’s complaint that the book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people” to be improbable.
At least two parents complained, too. Within days, school administrators ordered Wood to stop teaching the lesson. They placed a formal letter of reprimand in her file. It instructed her to keep teaching “without discussing this issue with your students.”
Wood finished out the spring semester feeling defeated and betrayed — not only by her students, but by the school system that raised her. The high school Wood teaches at is the same one she attended.
Oh, she felt “defeated and betrayed” because students reported her to teaching a lesson which broke the law? People might genuinely disagree about the merits of the law in question, but it is still the law.
Here is the crux of the teacher’s problem:
Wood believes trust is fundamental to the classroom. She has to trust her students. They and their parents have to trust her. But trust, she believes, is impossible without authenticity. And for Wood, teaching authentically means assigning writers like Coates — voices unfamiliar, even disconcerting, to students in her lakeside town. Because of what happened last year, though, Wood now worried anything, from the most provocative essay to the least interesting comment about her weekend, might be resisted, recorded and reported by the children she was supposed to be teaching.
And if she couldn’t trust them, how was she supposed to make them trust her?
That trust was broken when Mrs Satterwhite began teaching her students something prohibited by law, yet she somehow sees the trust as having been broken by the students reporting her, not her teaching of a prohibited lesson. If the lessons she taught made some students feel “ashamed to be white,” how does that not violate “a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students ‘feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress’ on account of their race”?
Mrs Satterwhite was not discharged. She had a letter of reprimand placed in her file, and was admonished not to teach inappropriate lessons. Yet she has returned to the classroom this school year.
How can she trust her students? She can record her lessons herself, to prove that she has remained within the state’s and the school board’s guidelines.
And Wood believed the school district had come to accept her — respecting her students’ 80-plus percent AP exam passage rates year after year, above the national average — even if not everyone liked her methods. Chapin was her hometown. Chapin High School had been her school, the place she began to question the conservative, Christian views espoused by her classmates, friends and family.
No teacher ever assigned her someone like Coates, Wood said, but her father Mike Satterfield, a teacher and later principal at Chapin, encouraged her to pursue whatever outside reading she found interesting. That led her to left-leaning authors. By the time she graduated from University of North Carolina Wilmington, she was a self-professed liberal.
The Post reporter tried to put that innocuously, but the meaning is clear: Mrs Satterwhite is not just “a self-professed liberal,” but she was choosing to teach that liberalism to the students in a mostly conservative area. Lexington County, in which Chapin is located, gave 92,817 votes, 64.20% of the total, to President Trump in 2020, versus 49,301 votes, 34.10%, to the dummkopf from Delaware.
But amid a red sea, Chapin’s English department was a blue island. And Wood was known as the bluest of the bunch — conspicuous for decorating her classroom with posters of Malcolm X, Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes and LGBTQ pride stickers.
Though the Post didn’t want to say it directly, the above paragraph tells us all that we need to know: Mrs Satterwhite was bringing her politics into the classroom.
As one would expect, Mrs Satterwhite attempted to use an “I know better because I am a professional” argument, the type of thing the liberal teachers’ unions try, but it didn’t work: parents have, and should have, the ultimate authority over what their children are taught.
The Post article is a very long one, and it is a left-leaning editorial, slanted to make Mrs Satterwhite a martyr, attempting to masquerade as a news piece.
References
| ↑1 | While the teacher did not respect her husband, Ryan Satterwhite, enough to have taken his last name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect to him, and always refers to married women by their proper names, though we do not change the direct quotes of others. |
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The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend
The Soviet Union was one of the worst things ever foisted on human beings, but when it came to World War II, the United States and United Kingdom saw the Communists as being less of a threat than Nazi Germany. Thus, in order to defeat Adolf Hitler and Germany, we sent all sorts of military aid to Josef Stalin and the USSR to defeat the Nazis.
And it worked! Though Americans frequently don’t understand this, the greater part of the defeat of Germany came from the land power advance of the Soviets, a thousand-mile march which cost Germany entire armies. British and American bombing helped to reduce Germany’s warmaking industries, but the real defeat of the Nazis came from soldiers of the Allies, primarily the Soviets, killing soldiers of Germany.
Of course, many Americans were shocked, shocked! that Comrade Stalin was not a good and noble Democrat after the war, and that the Soviets imposed their communist system on the eastern European nations they ‘liberated’ from the Third Reich. I’d note here New York Times sycophantic reporter Walter Duranty and his glowing reports about the Communists in the 1930s.
The Soviets following World War II are probably the greatest reminder that the phrase “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is pure bovine feces. The enemy of your enemy may at times be a useful ally, but that’s about it.
A Pride flag ban sparks accusations of betrayal in tiny Michigan city
By Allan Lengel | Saturday, September 16, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT
HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — This city of 28,000 was once so Polish it was dubbed “Little Warsaw.” But in recent decades, an influx of immigrants gave Hamtramck new character. Bengali and Arabic joined English on signs at City Hall. Yemeni and Bangladeshi mosques, restaurants and shops proliferated.
And last year, a Muslim who emigrated from Yemen as a teenager became mayor — the city’s first leader in nearly a century with no Polish roots — alongside what is believed to be the nation’s only all-Muslim city council.
Many residents in this tiny enclave just north of downtown Detroit saw these changes as a sign of the Hamtramck’s progressiveness. The Muslim community that had previously experienced discrimination, including voter intimidation and resistance to mosques’ public call to prayer, had finally taken its seats at the table.
Yet the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity that made Hamtramck something of a model is being put severely to the test. In June, after divisive debate, the six-member council blocked the display of Pride flags on city property — action that has angered allies and members of the LGBTQ+ community, who feel that the support they provided the immigrant groups has been reciprocated with betrayal.
“We welcomed you,” former council member Catrina Stackpoole, a retired social worker who identifies as gay, recalls telling the council this summer. “We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”
There’s more at the original.
As I have written previously, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev once said that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope by which the communists would hang them; in today’s left, “LGBT” groups support the Islamic groups which would, were they living under Islamic rule, throw them in jail, at the very least.
Today’s American and European left really, really hate Israel, as the Jewish state defends itself against the Muslim Arabs who have sworn to push the Jews into the sea. The left see the plight of the poor, poor Palestinians as an oppressed people, nobly fighting for their freedom, but it’s all delusional thinking. Israel is the only functioning democracy on the Middle East. Human rights? The left almost unanimously support homosexual and transgender rights, but try being homosexual in the Muslim-ruled nations: if you get caught, Da’ish will throw you to your death off a tall building, Iran will hang you, and other Islamic countries have their own punishments. Ten countries, all majority Muslim, can and sometimes have imposed the death penalty for consensual same-sex sexual acts.
Why, then, did the liberals in Hamtramck believe that the Muslims in their small town would be their allies back once they had helped them gain political power? “We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?” Catrina Stackpoole whined. Had she been a bit more self-aware, she might have asked, “and this is how you repay us, by throwing us off a rooftop?”
As much as they’d never admit it, there’s a distinctly American bias in the thinking of the left. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom stated:
Under international human rights law, religion is not a legitimate justification for egregiously violating fundamental rights of individuals. As explained by the HRCttee in General Comment 22, the existence of a state or majority religion cannot result in the impairment of the rights of individuals under the ICCPR. General Comment 22 also explains that “the concept of morals derives from many social, philosophical, and religious traditions; consequently limitations … for the purpose of protecting morals must be based on principles not deriving exclusively from a single tradition.”
A great and noble statement of Western classical liberal values. Now, who here believes that this means diddly to Muslim and Arabic immigrants of the last twenty years?
The good progressives of Hamtramck were apparently unable to comprehend that the Arabic and Muslim immigrants had their own culture, and their beliefs and cultures did not get left behind in the Old Country.
The Muslim immigrants into Hamtramck saw the good, kind progressives of their city as just what they were: useful idiots.
Democrats really, really hate our constitutional rights!
Vacations are wonderful, but for a blogger, they do have a downside. When I heard about the executive order by Governor Michelle Cordova[1]While the Governor of New Mexico does not respect her husband enough to have taken his last name, as per The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, we do not show such disrespect to him, and always … Continue reading (D-NM) to ban the open or concealed carrying of firearms in the city of Albuquerque and its surrounding county, Bernalillo, including by residents who have gone through the process and obtained concealed carry permits, I really, really, really wanted to write about it, but, alas!, I didn’t have my computer with me.[2]I use a desktop, not a laptop, because I hate laptops, I despise laptops, I abominate laptops.
Mrs Cordova said, from the very beginning, that she expected legal challenges, but she waxed wroth when Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen, stated that his department would not enforce her order, because it was unconstitutional.
New Mexico governor’s gun ban draws bipartisan backlash
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s suspension of concealed and open carry gun rights in the Albuquerque area ignited opposition from Democrats and Republicans alike.
By Zoë Richards | Monday, September 11, 2023 | 7:28 PM EDT
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is facing harsh criticism from both sides of the aisle over her recently issued order suspending certain gun rights in Albuquerque and its surrounding county.
Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, on Friday announced a 30-day ban on the right to carry open or concealed firearms in public in an effort to curb gun violence and illegal drug use in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. State police were tasked with enforcing the order, which carried fines for violations.
The announcement prompted a string of lawsuits and ignited opposition from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen, a Democrat, said Monday he would not enforce the ban, which he called “unconstitutional.”
This order will not do anything to curb gun violence other than punish law-abiding citizens from their constitutional right to self-defense,” Allen said at a news conference.
It’s unconstitutional. So there’s no way we could enforce that order,” he added.
It wasn’t just the Sheriff who saw the Governor’s order as unconstitutional; as reported by William Teach, both here and on his website, Federal District Court Judge David Urias issued a temporary restraining order:
blocking key parts of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s executive order suspending open and concealed carry across Albuquerque and the surrounding Bernalillo County for at least 30 days.
U.S. District Court Judge David Urias issued the order on Wednesday, blocking the portion of the order that prohibits lawful gun owners from carrying their guns in public for 30 days, ruling that it’s not enforceable.
“The violation of a constitutional right, even for minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury,” Urias said during the hearing.
State Attorney General Raul Torrez, also a Democrat, informed Governor Cordova that his office and he would not defend her order in court, saying that it was both unconstitutional, and wouldn’t have any meaningful impact on public safety. Plainly put, the Attorney General said what everyone ought to understand: the people shooting up Albuquerque aren’t the ones who go through the legal process to obtain concealed carry permits in the first place. Criminals are criminals precisely because they don’t obey the laws!
Naturally, the Governor was highly, highly upset that Sheriff Allen dared to defy her Führerbefehle:
“I don’t need a lecture on constitutionality from Sheriff Allen: what I need is action,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement in response to a request for comment.
Translation: the Governor doesn’t care if her diktat is actually constitutional, she expects the Sheriff to carry out her orders!
“We’ve passed common-sense gun legislation, including red flag laws, domestic violence protections, a ban on straw purchases, and safe storage laws; dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to a fund specifically to help law enforcement hire and retain officers; increased penalties for violent offenders and provided massive support to intervention programs,” she added. “We’ve given you the tools, Sheriff Allen — now stop being squeamish about using them. I will not back down from doing what’s right and I will always put the safety of the people of New Mexico first.”
Translation: the Governor believes that what she claims will increase the safety of the people of the Land of Enchantment trumps their constitutional rights!
Is Mrs Cordova saying that Sheriff Allen is not enforcing the “red flag laws, domestic violence protections, a ban on straw purchases, and safe storage laws,” as violations come to his attention? Have there been ‘red flag’ warnings in which law enforcement did not investigate and take action is warranted under that law? Have ‘domestic violence’ violations not led to arrests or prosecutions?
If there’s one thing the Democrats really hate, it’s the Constitution of the United States, and the enumeration of our rights. Benjamin Franklin, a man who dared to sign his name to our Declaration of Independence, said, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately,” had something to say about people giving up their rights for a little bit of temporary safety, but, in reality, what Governor Cordova and many other Democratic politicians want to do, to Do Something about crime, will do virtually nothing about crime. Governor Cordova stated that New Mexico had “passed common-sense gun legislation, including red flag laws, domestic violence protections, a ban on straw purchases, and safe storage laws”, yet she also claimed that those things had simply not done enough. I have previously noted how a Lexington man didn’t care about an “emergency protection order/domestic violence order, and possession of a handgun by a previously convicted felon,” obtained one anyway, and wound up shooting and killing his estranged wife. The gang bangers in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, about whom I’ve expended a significant amount of bandwidth, haven’t been stopped from getting guns and shooting people by laws banning minors and previously convicted felons from having firearms, or people without permits from carrying them on the city’s mean streets.
Safe storage laws? When people buy firearms because they fear for their own safety, the last thing that they want is to have to unlock their firearms when bad guys are breaking into their homes!
But the Democrats don’t care about any of that! They want to be seen as Doing Something, even if it is unreasonable. When even the left-wing e-zine Slate says that she’s doing it wholly wrong, you know it’s bad:
Last week, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham declared a public health emergency over gun violence in her state and imposed a 30-day ban on public carry in Albuquerque. Lujan Grisham’s diagnosis of the problem is surely correct; her proposed solution, however, is astoundingly misguided. The governor has leveraged an emergency health law to suspend a right protected by state statute, the state constitution, and Supreme Court precedent. Whether that right should exist is beside the point; it does exist in New Mexico today, pursuant not only to court decisions but also democratically enacted laws. By suspending it unilaterally, Lujan Grisham has claimed an alarming new power to revoke well-established individual rights by executive order. And she has done so in the most blundering way possible, ensuring a backlash that will only empower citizens, activists, and politicians who view all firearm restrictions as an existential threat to personal liberty.
The population of Albuquerque, according to the Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 guesstimate, is 561,008, of whom 49.8% are Hispanic, of all races, 37.4% are non-Hispanic white, 14.1% are biracial, 4.8% are American Indians, and 3.2% are black. Yet, when the Albuquerque Police Department released their 2023 homicide statistics as of July 2nd, they showed 54% of identified suspects as being Hispanic, 23% being black, 7% being Indians, and 16% as being white. If the problem is the gun laws, shouldn’t the problem affect every demographic group at least roughly equally?
The problem in Albuquerque is the culture in Albuquerque, just like it is in Philly, in St Louis, in Chicago, and everywhere else in the United States, but the Democrats can’s say that, now can they? Governor Cordova certainly seems unwilling to say that, so she goes after the people who are not the problem, the law-abiding citizens of the city. She’s rather attack people’s constitutional rights than actually identify and address the problems.
References
| ↑1 | While the Governor of New Mexico does not respect her husband enough to have taken his last name, as per The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, we do not show such disrespect to him, and always refer to married women by their proper names. |
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| ↑2 | I use a desktop, not a laptop, because I hate laptops, I despise laptops, I abominate laptops. |