Category Archives: Culture

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Why was ‘Peanut’ out on the streets in the first place?

My good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never met him in person, but with the internet, I have a lot of good friends I’ve never physically met! — Robert Stacy McCain, in his continuing series Crazy People Are Dangerous, tells us about the suicide-by-cop of Ryant ‘Peanut’ Bluford of San Francisco.

The police video of the shooting was released Friday, showing that Bluford had a pistol in his waistband, which he later aimed at police before he was shot. Despite all this, however, some people continued to ask why police couldn’t “de-escalate” the situation. The obvious answer is that Ryant Bluford didn’t want it to be “de-escalated.” Ryant Bluford was crazy and wanted to die in the proverbial hail of police gunfire.

The police have yet to confirm whether Mr Bluford actually fired a shot at the police, though Mission Local reported:

Bluford’s friends and family also said he had a gun, and fired once at the officers; they pointed on Thursday to a chalk circle on the street, where they said the casing from Bluford’s bullet had landed.

In reality, it doesn’t matter: you aim a gun at the police, and they do not have to, nor should they have to, hold their fire until first fired upon.

Mr McCain’s theme is that Mr Bluford was crazy, which he was, but that’s not the part of the story I find most important:

Bayview neighbors lament police shooting death of Ryant ‘Peanut’ Bluford

Friends, family say slain man feared, detested police after more than decade behind bars

by Gilare Zada, Griffin Jones, and Joe Rivano Barros | Thursday, July 27, 2023

Peanut, before getting shelled. Photo via R S McCain.

The Bayview man shot and killed yesterday afternoon by San Francisco police officers, 41-year-old Ryant Bluford of San Francisco, was known as “Peanut” to friends and family. They recalled him as a loving father, brother, cousin and friend — while acknowledging the violent crime in his past.Neighbors interviewed Wednesday night and Thursday morning said Bluford struggled with mental illness and had a disdain for the police, the result of more than a decade spent in prison for various serious offenses.

Bluford was convicted in the 2006 gang rape of a 16-year-old girl in San Francisco, and spent more than a decade in prison as a result. He was again charged, in 2022, for domestic violence and sexual assault.

Oh, Heaven forfend! Mr Bluford “has a disdain for the police,” he “feared (and) detested police,” because he was locked up for the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl? Apparently the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the mission of which is, “building what will become the “California Model” – building safer communities through rehabilitation, education, restorative justice and reentry,” didn’t do much correcting or “rehabilitation, education, restorative justice and reentry” when it came to Mr Bluford. After spending “more than a decade” of a 14-year sentence behind bars for the 2006 gang rape, Mr Bluford was later accused with domestic violence and sexual assault. That means at least one more person was assaulted and raped by a man who was supposed to be corrected and rehabilitated for the same crime.

The details of the gang rape, and the fact that Mr Bluford orally, vaginally, and anally raped the victim, identified only by her initials, can be found here. Mr Bluford and his codefendants were sentenced to just 14 years in a plea deal. And that makes me wonder: why were Ryant Bluford, Eddie Perkins, Vincent Timmons, and Allen Releford offered a 14-year sentence, rather than taking this to trial and getting them locked up for the rest of their miserable lives. The plea deal was:

one count each of forcible kidnapping (count 1; Pen. Code, § 207, subd. (a)) with an admitted gang enhancement (§ 186.22, subd. (b)(1)(c)), and aggravated assault (count 12; § 245, subd. (a)(1)), for fixed aggregate prison terms of 14 years.

The dropped charges were:

forcible rape in concert (count 2; §§ 261, 264.1), forcible vaginal insertion of a gun in concert (count 3; §§ 289, 264.1), forcible anal and vaginal insertions of a bottle in concert (counts 4-5; §§ 264.1, 289), forcible oral copulation in concert (count 6; §§ 264.1, 288a, subd. (d)(1)), forcible sodomy in concert (count 7; § 286, subd. (d)), gang participation (count 8; § 186.22, subd. (a)), carrying a concealed gun in a vehicle (count 9; § 12025, subd. (a)(1)), firearm identity tampering (count 10; § 12090), and possessing cocaine base for sale (count 11; Health & Saf. Code, § 11351.5). Most dismissed counts carried multiple enhancements ranging from handgun arming and use, increased risk from moving a kidnap victim, to gang furtherance. An amendment of count 1 to forcible kidnapping (§ 207, subd. (a)) from kidnapping in concert for purposes of rape eliminated sentence exposure to a life term (§ 209, subd. (b)(1)).

One thing we do not know is how willing the victim was to testifying against Messrs Bluford, Perkins, Timmons, and Releford. It has to be conceded that the plea bargain might have been reached to keep the victim from having to testify to such a traumatic assault. But the notion that Mr Bluford was ever let out of prison is repugnant; the gang rape of a 16-year-old, of anyone, should result in life in prison without the possibility of parole!

Back to Mission Local:

Neighbors described the shooting as a tragedy.

“He had four kids and a wife, two were twins. He did the best he could,” said a friend of Bluford’s, who gave his name as Tyke, saying Bluford’s mental health worsened after time in prison. “He was in the pen for 12 years; he had some mental issues from that.”

I don’t know about you, but, to me, the tragedy is that Mr Bluford got out two years early.

At the Bayview intersection, Bluford’s family lit candles. They described Peanut as a man who had been through the wringer, and criminal records show past convictions for rape and other violent crimes.

When journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading start using the subject’s nickname in an article, in other than a direct quote, you know that they are trying to raise sympathy for him!

He had a fearful association with police, neighbors said, one borne from a lifetime of negative experiences dealing with law enforcement: According to criminal records, Bluford was charged with kidnapping, rape, assault with a deadly weapon, and various other crimes in 2006; he was incarcerated in 2008, according to criminal records, and friends and family said he spent more than a decade in prison.

Then in 2022, he was charged again, with domestic violence, sexual assault, and criminal threats. It was not immediately clear if he was convicted and imprisoned for these alleged crimes.

“You have to think about the kind of trauma someone has experienced with the police,” said one neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous. “He looked done, driven to suicide by cop.”

Oh, so Mr Bluford experienced “trauma” because of the police? Some people might be more concerned with the trauma the girl he and three other thugs raped suffered.

“He had a lot of mental health issues,” said another anonymous neighbor. “He had a family. He loved his kids. A lot of people around here have mental issues.”

As Mr McCain pointed out, Joe Biden got 85.26% of the vote in San Francisco, so yeah, a lot of people there must have mental health issues! 🙂

That neighbor, for her part, wished there had been a non-violent response initially to de-escalate the situation — or at least a less-lethal one.

“It’s like there’s no logic. They don’t ask what’s going on, they don’t even think to just ask. They need more training with people with mental health issues,” she said. “When it comes to African Americans, they use force and think later. Even if they felt he was a threat, they could have Tased him or shot him in the leg.”

Well of course the locals were upset that Mr Bluford was sent to his eternal reward. But at least Mission Local added important information:

San Francisco police, however, do not carry Tasers. And are not trained to shoot-to-wound.

Shooting someone is the use of deadly force, and if you are legally justified in shooting someone, you are legally justified in killing him. Shooting to wound is neither legally required nor very smart.

Naturally, the news source had to throw in a racial angle:

Since 2000, 19 of the 61 people shot and killed by SFPD were Black — 31 percent; 18 of them were Black men. That rate is disproportionate to the city’s population: Black people make up about five percent of San Francisco.

The odd notion that perhaps, just perhaps, black men males might engage in activities, activities such as Mr Bluford aiming at and apparently firing upon the police, which get them shot at a greater percentage of the time seems not to have entered the minds of the reporters.

At some point, people have to drop their sympathy for criminals. Who knows, perhaps the bad guys can eventually mentally reform, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be treated responsibly for the criminal acts that they have committed.

Releasing Mr Bluford, which seems to have occurred in 2020, which would have put it in the same timeline with the releases of prisoners due to COVID-19, was the release of a violent criminal, and it was one which led him to be able to be charged with a subsequent sexual assault crime. Someone else, at least one someone, became Mr Bluford’s victim at a time when he could have been still behind bars.

I’ll put it bluntly: releasing violent criminals early, releasing them even one day before the maximum time that they can be kept locked up legally, increases the danger to the community.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

In the Bard’s play, Henry VI (Part 2), Dick the Butcher is cast as a large and powerful man, second-in-command to the anarchist Jack Cade, in the rebellion against His Majesty the King. Dick’s most famous line is, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” I am no anarchist, but one thing is certainly true: lawyers f(ornicate) up just about everything!

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ought to be easy to understand:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

But, of course, there are always those, including those who are themselves guarded by armed men, who do not want Other People to be allowed to keep and bear arms. And thus we’ve had the Second Amendment violated for more than 200 hundred years, as various states passed laws to restrict Americans from owning firearms. In United States v Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment only prohibited the federal government from banning private ownership of firearms:

The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendment means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government.

Under the Cruikshank decision, states, counties, and municipalities could ban the private ownership of firearms. It took until District of Columbia v Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), for the Court to hold that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, and McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010) incorporated the Heller decision to apply to the states. A full 219 years passed between the ratification of the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court finally applying it to the states.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Why America’s Gun Laws Are in Chaos

Judges clash over history a year after Supreme Court upended how courts decide Second Amendment cases—‘the whole thing puzzles me’

by David Gershman | Tuesday, August 1, 2023 | 5:30 AM EDT

The Supreme Court last summer sought to clarify its expansive reading of the Second Amendment. Instead, it set off chaos.

The decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decreed that gun-control laws of today must have a clear forerunner in weapons regulations around the time of the nation’s infancy, regardless of the modern public-safety rationale behind them.

The Journal’s paywall begins to fad out te text at this point, but you can read the entire thing for free here.

The result: Hundreds of gun cases litigated in recent months have become a free-for-all, with lower courts conflicted or confounded about how and where to draw limits on gun rights.

“There’s all this picking and choosing of historical evidence. ‘This is too early. This is too late. Too small, too big,’” Judge Gerard Lynch of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said during a recent argument about a new law in New York that prohibits guns in sensitive places like parks, museums and bars. “The whole thing puzzles me.”

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is a brilliant jurist, but somehow, some way, he couldn’t just leave the Second Amendment where it was: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Instead, he created a standard under which the right of the people to keep and bear arms could be infringed, if only we had started infringing upon them early enough. This is what happens when lawyers are involved!

Of course, other lawyers, our federal, state, county, and municipal lawmakers were just never satisfied with a simple statement of rights!

In that case, the right of licensed handgun owners to carry weapons into bars and theaters could hinge on 19th-century statutes that barred drunks from carrying firearms, and outlawed guns and butcher knives in social parties attended by ladies. A case decided last fall held that the federal ban on guns with obliterated serial numbers was unconstitutional because unmarked guns were perfectly legal in the 18th century.

The Bruen case launched the upheaval. In that decision, the Supreme Court said New York couldn’t require concealed-carry applicants to prove a dire need for self-protection. The 6-3 opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas and endorsed by five fellow conservatives, said the restrictive licensing rules violated the Second Amendment right of ordinary, law-abiding citizens to carry handguns for self-defense.

The opinion rejected the practice of lower courts considering the public-safety intentions of gun laws being challenged. The courts often found that the government’s goal of curbing gun crimes and mass shootings outweighed the liberty interests of gun owners.

That practice watered down gun rights, the opinion said. Instead, Thomas wrote, to pass constitutional muster, gun restrictions within the scope of the Second Amendment must be deeply rooted in historical precedent. Governments defending them bear the burden of showing that their laws are similar, or at least analogous, to firearm regulations widely enforced around the time of Second Amendment’s ratification in 1791.

Dion Green spoke to other gun-violence survivors at the Supreme Court ahead of the Bruen case oral arguments in 2021. PHOTO: LEIGH VOGEL/GETTY IMAGES

It was at that point that the Journal included a photo. The speaker shown, Dion Green, has a placard that claims, “Gun laws save lives.” That’s certainly what the left claim, but is it actually true?

As we have previously noted, gun laws are almost uniform across Pennsylvania, because state law does not allow local governments to impose legislation on firearms which is stricter than the state law. Yet Philadelphia, with just over 12% of the Keystone State’s population, has suffered slightly over half of the murders in the Commonwealth. If “gun laws save lives,” as the left claim, shouldn’t we see homicide rates relatively even across the state?

There is a lot more at the Journal original, much of it dealing with older laws being contemplated by today’s lawyers and judges, in their attempts to see if yet another gun control law passes constitutional muster. And this is the problem with Justice Thomas’ opinion: he added a standard, one very loosely defined and giving lower courts very little guidance, when the simplest standard is the words of the Second Amendment, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Near the end of the article comes the point I found most important. U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn of East St. Louis, Ill., ruling against the state’s assault-weapons ban, said:

Can the senseless crimes of a relative few be so despicable to justify the infringement of the constitutional rights of law-abiding individuals in hopes that such crimes will then abate or, at least, not be as horrific? Likely no.

That’s the point the gun-grabbers can never seem to address: why would taking away the right of law-abiding Americans disarm criminals, who by definition, don’t obey the law?

Who knows? Perhaps Justice Thomas just could not get the rest of the majority to agree that the Second Amendment simply means what it says, that the right of the people to keep and bear arms should not, shall not, be infringed. In the end, a simple and clear statement of a basic constitutional right has been messed up by lawyers!

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What the Social Engineering of the 1960s Got Wrong

My good friend William Teach wrote:

Oh, good grief. There are three races, as called originally: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, with a small classification of Dravidians through the India region. Is this biology? Some will argue that it is, some will argue that it isn’t. Especially with all the inter-breeding over time.

Naturally, that got me on a rant!

We use race as a kind of shorthand for describing different concentrations of characterizations in the human gene pool, but in a lot of ways, it is misused for many things. The lovely Rachel Dolezal decided that she was black, perhaps as a scam, or perhaps she felt ‘culturally’ black. There really is a ‘black culture’ in the United States, something heavily concentrated in our larger cities, but that culture is not dependent upon the members of it being black; under other circumstances, it could have been adopted by whites or Asians. Just as easily, our American ‘white’ culture could have been generated among black people, had circumstances been different.

But here’s more to it than that. The entire, if never stated, purpose behind integration was to homogenize the American culture among all Americans, white and black alike. The assumption, by the white liberals who pushed it, was that that homogenized culture would have been the white American culture, with either no or very little ‘contamination’ by the black culture. Integration would eventually result in some very dark-skinned white Americans, with race being an insignificant concept socially. The apparently odd notion that homogenization results in all of the parts being combined and mixed together seems not to have occurred to them; they knew what they knew, which was the predominant, adult, white liberal culture of the 1960s.

Brookings published an article entitled “Are Asian Americans people of color or the next in line to become white?“, discussing the term “white adjacent”, and a Google search for “white adjacent” returned roughly 43,800 returns. Americans of Asian descent are ‘white adjacent’ because so many of them have been successful in our American culture and economy, in ways that black Americans have not, and every bit of that can be explained by the greater — not total — adoption of white American culture by Asian immigrants.

It’s actually pretty simple, but it is simple in a way that the left are loathe to accept: certain behaviors and cultural norms are just more economically efficient than others. Working hard and staying in school, trying to get the best grades and win the best collegiate admissions is a way to get ahead, and Asians — as well as American Jews, who are predominantly white — not only do this well, but they have been doing it even better than whites as a whole. Jews were doing this so much better than other white Americans that Harvard actually imposed a ‘Jewish quota‘ in the mid 1920s.

But black Americans, as a group, have not. Obeying the law, to not wind up in jail, and not devastating your neighborhood, is an economically efficient behavior, and black Americans have not adopted this behavior to as large an extent as Americans of Asian or European descent.

The result? A significantly larger percentage of black Americans with felony convictions, and spending time behind bars. And a felony conviction, something far more probable at a young age, late teens or early twenties, is a mostly unrecoverable-from error.

Naturally, several cities, including Philadelphia, have tried to help, not by stressing that people need to obey the law, but by banning police stops for minor traffic violations, which they said was criminalizing “driving while black.” The message was simple: black Philadelphians simply couldn’t be expected to be responsible enough to have their vehicles inspected — Pennsylvania state law requires annual inspections of vehicles at a state-certified garage — their head, tail, and signal lights working, or stop at stop signs.

There has even been active resistance in some predominantly black areas when it comes to assimilating ‘white’ culture, though, quite naturally, some on the left have pushed against the notion that internal culture can have positive or negative impacts on economic and social success. And waiting until full adulthood before realizing these things ignores the fact that getting behind as a child normally results in never catching up as an adult.

There is no particular reason to believe that black Americans can’t be as successful as whites or Asians in the larger economy, if they engage in behavior which is socially and economically useful and productive, and, in fact, many black Americans do just that. But racial statistics take in the aggregate, and a larger percentage of the black community have resisted assimilation, which results in the aggregate numbers showing less black success in the economy.

The integrationists of the 1960s actually had it right: if integration in the public schools, starting from the very beginning, socialized black children into the more successful white economy, black Americans would soon become just as successful as white Americans in the United States. But what they never foresaw was that black and white Americans would simply not have the kind of homogenized culture for which they had hoped, and that Asian and Hispanic immigrants — of which there were far fewer at that time — would wind up demonstrating that as those groups came far closer than black Americans to assimilating into the more successful parts of the economy.

Let’s forget about ‘social engineering’: it just hasn’t worked! White Americans can never somehow fix the problems of the black community. Rather, the social and cultural problems which plague black Americans can only be changed by black Americans, and we ought to recognize that.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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The problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time

Yes, I’ve spent a rather significant amount of bandwidth reporting on the unchecked crime in Philadelphia, the growth of which many, including me, have attributed to the lax-on-crime policies of the George Soros sponsored, police-hating and criminal loving defense lawyer now ‘serving’ as the city’s chief prosecutor, but it isn’t just the City of Brotherly Love that has been so afflicted. It has also happened in the city in which I was born:

DA Pamela Price and ultra-woke Oakland leaders blasted by NAACP over rise in violence, crime

By Marjorie Hernandez | Friday, July 28, 2023 | 5:51 PM EDT | Updated: 7:55 PM EDT

Pamela Price, photo via The Washington Examiner.

The Oakland, California, NAACP civil rights organization blasted woke city leaders for their soft-on-crime policies which they say have led to skyrocketing numbers of shootouts and violent armed robberies, forcing residents to leave the area for good.

The group issued the statement Thursday as dozens of Oakland residents packed a public safety meeting and demanded progressive Alameda County DA Pamela Price to address the alarming uptick of violent crime in the city.

In the letter, the local NAACP chapter said residents are “sick and tired” of the shootings, car-break-ins and highway shootouts and implored city leaders to declare a state of emergency.

“There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety,” the group wrote.

“It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.”

Let’s be clear here: Alameda County voters knew what they were getting when they elected Miss Price! As The Mercury News pointed out, she is a “longtime civil rights attorney, (who) was elected on a platform denouncing tough sentencing”. To anyone who has been paying attention, it will come as no surprise that, like so many other far-left prosecutors, Miss Price was the recipient of largesse from George Soros.

The group, along with Bishop Bob Jackson of the Acts Full Gospel Church, said Price’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute serious criminals, as reported by The Post, has created “the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric and created a heyday for Oakland criminals.”

The city’s 911 system also is failing its residents, while criminals know police response is usually slow since the city is suffering from a shortage of 500 officers, Oakland NAACP officials said in the letter.

As of July 16, robberies in Oakland have increased by 22% with 1,880 reports, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Crime overall was up 15% citywide and up 42% in total since the first half of 2021.

Let’s tell the truth here: everyplace that there has been a Soros-sponsored prosecutor elected, the results have been the same: significant increases in crime. What is also true is that the primary victims of the increases in crime have been the same minority communities that the left are supposedly trying to help. Miss Price

brokered a plea deal earlier this year that had many critics alarmed. The deal would have reduced sentencing in a triple murder case from 75 years to life in prison down to 15 years.

That deal would have allowed 31-year-old Delonzo Logwood out of prison by age 46 — if he wasn’t released even earlier under the Pyrite State’s lenient laws — an age at which he would still be quite physically active and likely to kill again. Fortunately the judge rejected the deal.

It’s actually pretty simple for the left: Mr Krasner, Miss Price, and the other Soros-sponsored prosecutors believe that “mass incarceration” has devastated black neighborhoods. What they can’t seem to get through their heads is that not locking up criminals has led to a different sort of devastation in black neighborhoods, the devastation wrought by increased murders, increased non-fatal shootings, assaults, robberies, and rapes. Zachary Faria wrote:

You do not need to look hard to find proof that the criminal justice reform movement is less about creating a more just legal system and more about fighting “mass incarceration” with pro-criminal policies. You simply need to look at how “reform” prosecutors treat murderers.

The latest example of this comes from Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, one of the many liberal prosecutors funded by Democratic megadonor and “reform” advocate George Soros . Price has previously announced that she was trying to seek non-prison punishments for gang members who shot and killed a toddler and dropped special circumstances against a convicted murderer, which removed the possibility of him serving a life sentence without parole.

Her latest entry in pro-criminal “prosecutions” comes in the case of Sergio Morales-Jacquez, who was 17 years old when he shot and killed newlywed Rienhart Asuncion in a road rage incident. Not even two weeks later, Morales-Jacquez and two other teenagers opened fire at a party in Oakland, resulting in the deaths of two teenagers.

That’s three murders that Morales-Jacquez directly participated in. But, because he was 17 and the criminal justice reform movement demands little to no accountability for juvenile offenders regardless of how heinous or violent their crime, Price refused to try him as an adult. Instead, she secured the now-18-year-old just a seven-year sentence in a juvenile facility, with the possibility of probation.

He’ll be out of prison juvie — and how wise is it to have an offender in his twenties in a juvenile facility? — by the time he’s 26, if not sooner, prime crime-committing years.

What Miss Price and the others have missed is that the people who have been convicted of felonies and imprisoned are almost all genuinely bad people. Sergio Morales-Jacquez is a genuinely bad person, and the odds are high that when he does get out, he will kill again. Will Miss Price be held accountable for any murders he commits when he gets out, when he could have been locked up for the rest of his miserable life?

We are finally seeing the minority communities begin to fight back. In Philadelphia, the more ‘progressive’ mayoral candidates, Helen Gym Flaherty and Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, lost to Cherelle Parker Mullin in the Democratic primary, as Mrs Mullin campaigned on a tougher-on-crime platform. And now, the residents in the minority neighborhoods in Oakland are protesting Miss Price’s idiocy.

A lot of people in those neighborhoods don’t like the idea of ‘mass incarceration,’ but they are learning, the hard way, that being soft-on-crime has led to more crime. Bad guys who are in prison are not out on the streets, committing more crimes. The problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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Killadelphia: Another story I didn’t find in The Philadelphia Inquirer How can a newspaper be called a newspaper when it doesn't report the news?

Yes, I’m paying good money to subscribe to The Philadelphia Inquirer, $5.49 per week, or $285.48 a year, so you’d think that that august journal, our nation’s third-oldest surviving daily newspaper, the winner of 20 Pulitzer Prizes, would do something really, really radical like report the news!

Well, I didn’t find this story in the Inquirer, but due to a tweet from Fox 29 News

Man charged in deadly ambush shooting of mother near crowded Philadelphia park, police say

Published July 27, 2023 11:00AM |Updated 12:04PM | Crime & Public Safety | FOX 29 Philadelphia

Alexander Grady, photo via Fox 29 News.

PHILADELPHIA – Homicide detectives have made an arrest in the deadly shooting of a local mother gunned down in a parked car in Philadelphia earlier this week, police say.

Note the date of the Fox 29 News article: it was initially reported at 11:00 AM on Thursday. That means that the Inquirer has had plenty of time to write its own story. But, as of 9:29 AM EDT on Friday, July 28th, there is absolutely nothing on this on either the Inky’s website main page or specific crime page.

Tina Arroyo, 32, was gunned down on Monday evening while sitting in the driver’s seat of a Honda Civic parked on the 500 block of East Louden Street, according to police.

“She pulled up on this scene and within moments another vehicle pulls up and shoots her,” Sgt. Eric Gripp said. “How quickly it happened and the callousness of all of it is deeply troubling.”

The shooting took place across the street from a crowded park, officials say.

On Thursday, police announced the arrest of 26-year-old Alexander Grady.

Grady has been charged with murder, criminal conspiracy, VUFA and related charges.

How can the newspaper be called a newspaper when it doesn’t report the news?

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Killadelphia: How many extra have died? The statistics require a lot of assumptions, but I see an entire 'extra year' of killings in Philly due to the left

It was on May 25th that I noted the somewhat unusual statistical trend, and ask the headline question, Could Philly see ‘only’ 450 homicides in 2023?

In 2020, the City of Brotherly Love had 499 ‘official’ homicides, though, as 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.

The trend of the numbers was such that it looked as though the total homicide numbers would be higher than 2022’s 516, but also lower than 499. As of Wednesday, July 26th, the total homicide numbers year to date have dropped below the level in 2020.

How do the numbers work out? Wednesday was the 207th day of the year, meaning that, if the 242 homicides number is correct, Philly has been seeing ‘only’ 1.169 murders per day, an average which works out to 426.71 for the year. However, the first half of the year contains more colder months than the latter half, and homicides normally increase with warmer weather. In 2022, which saw 516 killings, 59.88% of the year’s murders were committed by July 26th. At that rate, we would expect a total of 404.14 killings for all of 2023, a number which is close enough to 399 to leave the city with fewer than 400 murders.

May 25, 2020, saw the unfortunate death of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl addled convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting arrest for passing counterfeit money in Minneapolis. With that, the American left went absolutely bonkers, and killings soared. May 24, 2020 had seen 147 murders in Philly, 1.021 per day, on a path toward 373.625 for the year, a bit above the 356 homicides for the previous year, but not monstrously so.

My conclusion is simple: the lawless reaction of Antifa and the idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protesters led to the killings of an additional 125 people in Philadelphia in 2020!

There are some assumptions that I have to take here, assumptions which may not play out. But if I plot out a graph from 374 ‘should have been’ homicides in 2020, to a ‘projected’ 427 for this year, assume that rise to have been steady, there should have been 391 murders in 2021, 409 in 2022, and the projected 427 for this year. That means that the left-wing riots led to 125 more murders in 2020, 171 in 2021, and 107 in 2022. Yeah, there are entirely too many assumptions that I’ve had to take, but I’m seeing 403 more people murdered, in Philadelphia alone, due to the lawlessness of attitude spawned by the riots, and most of those murder victims have been black males.

Yes, this is way too simplistic a calculation. The inaction of District Attorney Larry Krasner when it comes to locking up criminals before they are graduated to murder, as well as the strongly pro-abortion status of the city’s politicians have a lot to do with it, but there has been a cheapening of life, a callousness in the city, a callousness which doesn’t see killing other people as all that bad a thing. Yes, I see an entire ‘extra year’ of killing in Philly due to Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and #woke progressives.

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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer gets the numbers wrong; are they trying to mislead readers?

We have previously noted that many of the credentialed media journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading have complained about Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News and his unsoftened coverage of crime in the city. Now, what I have previously referred to as 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. are combitching again, but they have been lying in their complaints.

In a main editorial supposedly written by the Inquirer’s Editorial Board, but reads like something composed by hard-left columnist Will Bunch, the newspaper complained:

Of course, no place is perfect. The record gun violence in Philadelphia is beyond distressing. But mainly Republican state and federal lawmakers — many of whom represent suburban districts — share responsibility for enabling and glorifying gun culture.

That, of course, is not what “mainly Republican state and federal lawmakers” did. Rather, they recognized that gun control laws do not and have not stopped criminals from obtaining firearms, and removed some impediments on law-abiding citizens from purchasing weapons. As we have previously reported, Philadelphians themselves have been seeking concealed carry permits in unprecedented numbers because of the chaos in the city.

Local TV news shares some blame as well for disproportionately covering gun crimes in the city. That negative narrative shapes the views of many who act as if bullets are flying everywhere in Philadelphia when nearly all of the more than 1.5 million residents manage to go about their routines each day.

Really? Let’s check that! The hyperlink embedded in the newspaper’s own editorial does not say what the Editorial Board claimed!

Kaufman and her fellow researchers drew on police reports and information kept by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit research group, to monitor media reporting during 2017 in three different cities: Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Rochester, NY. Of the 1,801 victims of intentional shootings (outside of self-inflicted shootings), the researchers saw that almost exactly half, 900, were covered in the news.

Of these victims, roughly 83 percent were Black, but just 49 percent of them made the news. Moreover, if the victim was a man, he was about 40 percent less likely to be covered on the news than a woman.

How many times have we reported that for The Philadelphia Inquirer, unless a shooting or murder victim is an ‘innocent,’ someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is simply not news. We have often noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, doesn’t like to tell its readers the unvarnished truth, likes to censor what its readers see. The Inquirer only rarely reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. The paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?

The Editorial Board are complaining about disproportionate coverage, when that is exactly what their newspaper has given us!

Disparities in news coverage continued when the deadliness of the shootings was examined. Although 16 percent of the victims from the analyzed shootings died, these fatal shootings accounted for 83 percent of the cases covered by the news.

So, both the cited research and the Editorial Board are complaining that non-fatal shootings get less news coverage than fatal ones? Is that somehow a surprise? As Mark Fusetti just pointed out, the City of Brotherly Love passed the 1,000 mark for fatal and non-fatal shootings this year. On how many has the Inky reported?

“A vast majority of the victims of gun violence survive, but I don’t think the public knows much about people whose lives have been disrupted in so many ways by their injuries, and who need all our support to recover,” Kaufman said. “I like to think that more public awareness of the impact of gun violence on survivors would lead to broader support for the services and programs that they need.”

The Inquirer actually has reported on shooting victims who have survived, but I cannot recall such a story on a surviving gang-banger; the newspaper seems to tell us only about the innocent victims of shootings. Then again, as we have previously reported, the newspaper tried to make an innocent victim out of a homicide victim who was clearly not so innocent a victim.

And, of course, we have noted the apparent editorial decision to stop using the word “gang”, and replace it with “street group”

Statistics have shown that one in four Americans perceive mass shootings to be the greatest gun violence threat facing their communities, but the study showed that shootings with multiple victims occurred just 22 percent of the time. However, mass shootings were almost six times as likely to make the news.

Could that be because the Inquirer itself plays up the ‘mass shootings,’ especially when the victims are not black, and downplays the killings of black ‘street group’ members?

But here comes the biggest lie of all:

In fact, rural counties have a higher rate of gun deaths than cities — contrary to country singer Jason Aldean’s recent paean to small town life. Not to mention, most mass shootings occur in small towns, studies show, while a separate report found Center City, at least, remained “remarkably safe.”

We previously reported 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 in 2021: 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.

Things got slightly better in the City of Brotherly Love in 2022, with 516 homicides officially reported in the Philadelphia, out of 1,015 total homicides for the Commonwealth. That’s still 50.84% of the killings in the Commonwealth!

The Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 population estimates for Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia specifically, were 12,972,008 and 1,567,258 respectively, meaning that Philly had just 12.08% of the state’s population. The homicide rate for the rest of the Keystone State was 4.38 per 100,000 population, while for Philly it works out to 32.92 per 100,000, 7½ times the rest of the Commonwealth.

Strip out the 138 homicides in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, and the 65 other counties in the Commonwealth had 361 homicides for 10,171,497 people, for a murder rate of 3.55 per 100,000.

The same source lists 418 murders and non-negligent homicides so far in 2023; the Philadelphia Police Department reported that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 23rd, 239 of those murders occurred in Philadelphia. That’s 57.18% of the total, in a city with 12.08% of the Commonwealth’s population, and that’s in a year in which homicides are down!

How did the Editorial Board’s citation get it so wrong?

The findings are based on an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The authors attributed the trend to a rise in gun suicides, which outnumbered gun homicides in 2021 by more than 5,300 and are more likely to occur in rural counties.

The Editorial Board conflated suicides with murders. News flash: people haven’t been arming themselves in tremendous numbers to protect themselves from suicides!

I do not claim to be a super-genius like Wile E Coyote, but am pretty good with numbers. Being good with numbers, it’s pretty easy for me to spot bovine feces when people misuse statistics and references as citations, as I did in this article. Who knows? Perhaps the Editorial Board simply assume that they are smarter than their readers, or believe that readers won’t check their source citations. Well, perhaps most won’t, but out of all of the newspaper’s subscribers, surely they ought to guess that a few people will.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑2 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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I point at the moon; they stare at my finger How The Washington Post misdirects your attention on an important subject

It’s always amusing when today’s left try to minimize an important point, brought up by conservatives, one with which they cannot disagree, but also one with which they don’t want conservatives to gain any credit. Kathleen Parker Cleveland[1]Though the columnist is married to Sherwood M. “Woody” Cleveland, she hasn’t shown him enough respect to have taken his name. While she may not have shown him such respect, The … Continue reading, of The Washington Post, knows that no decent person can support child sexual abuse and trafficking, but, gosh darn it, the movie Sound of Freedom just has too many supporters on the wrong side of the political divide.

‘Sound of Freedom’ puts the adrenaline hormone to work

By Kathleen Parker, Columnist | Friday, July 21, 2023 | 6:12 PM EDT

Leave it to gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson to drop an obscure theory about oxidized adrenaline’s alleged psychedelic properties that, 52 years later, is being connected by QAnon conspiracists to a blockbuster movie about child sex trafficking. Deep breath.

Thompson, who died in 2005 and arranged for his ashes to be shot into the sky from a tower at his Colorado home, doubtless would delight in these developments, which even his fertile, drug-enhanced imagination could not have foreseen. That said, based on my decades-ago reading of his 1971 masterpiece, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” he was surprised by nothing, especially regarding the human capacity for self-delusion and mass confusion.

So, we are told, in the first two paragraphs, that Hunter Thompson, a self-described gonzo journalist, who abused alcohol and narcotics, would have loved this stuff, two paragraphs which introduce a subject on which Mrs Cleveland somehow believed she had to write, but on which she wanted her readers to have something of a jaundiced eye.

The breakout indie movie “Sound of Freedom” is itself a curiosity. A low-budget film made five years ago, it sat on a shelf until it was recently picked up by Angel Studios. Since its release on July 4, this tale of child sex trafficking starring Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ,” has earned $100 million. Its crowdfunded popularity is based in part on a unique marketing campaign and on its embrace by QAnon and high-profile conspiracy theorists, including Stephen K. Bannon and former president Donald Trump.

Did you spot it? By mentioning that lead actor, Jim Caviezel, had played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, Mrs Cleveland lets non-Christian readers that hey, the lead actor is a right-wing Christianist nutball, so make of that what you will. Add to that QAnon, Steve Bannon, and, horrors!, Donald Trump.

At this point, the online version of the story has an ad, followed by a paragraph telling us about QAnon:

QAnon, a virtual “organization” with an extremist ideology led by the anonymous “Q” (purportedly a government agent who shares “scoops” for credulous followers), has advanced the idea that Hollywood and political elites traffic children so they can consume the children’s blood along with adrenochrome (oxidized adrenaline) for its “anti-aging properties.” Check.

Then a blurb for checking the rest of Mrs Cleveland’s columns, two more paragraphs telling us how nutsy QAnon is, including noting that Mr Caviezel has spoken before QAnon audiences, and yet another ad, before the author gets down to actually discussing the film, and noting that child sex trafficking was a huge business.

Even at that point, Mrs Cleveland starts telling us that the villains have been “extreme(ly) typecast” to “the point of caricature.” Yes, they’re really bad guys, but the author is telling us, in her own way, that they are like Snidely Whiplash, tying Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks, awaiting only Dudley DoRight to ride in to her rescue.

At that point, she went ahead and painted us a word picture of the audience, in terms which would not really appeal to most Washington Post readers:

It’s a hard movie to watch and is not for children. In the North Carolina cineplex where I saw it — midday and midweek — the audience was decidedly gray-haired. This might be generally true of the time slot, but most also seemed like folks who might own a MAGA hat, if I may indulge in a bit of typecasting of my own. I decided against interviewing any of my fellow moviegoers as I had intended. As they slowly left the theater, their drawn faces and hollow eyes told me this was not the time. I felt the same way.

“(F)olks who might own a MAGA hat,” huh? Has there ever been a paragraph more obviously aimed at telling liberals, “Don’t see this movie!”?

Mrs Cleveland does tell us that the movie has an important message, but she spent seven out of twelve paragraphs telling us how horrid the people who produced and supported the movie are.

More, as Farhad Manjoo noted on Slate, most online readers don’t make it much past the 50% point of an article on which they’ve clicked . . . and the 50% mark in Mrs Cleveland’s column, as measured by the first six paragraphs — and really, into the seventh — out of twelve, are all about QAnon and the horrible people who are involved in the movie.

Mrs Cleveland almost certainly knew that most people wouldn’t finish her column; students will be taught that in journalism school, and it’s simply common knowledge in newsrooms. Yet she frontloaded it with the stuff about QAnon, and that’s also something taught in journalism school: get the most important parts at the beginning, “above the fold,” in newspaper speak, so that readers who do not finish will get the most important parts read. And what she apparently wanted, to judge from her structure, most readers to see is QAnon, QAnon, QAnon . . . with a bit of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon thrown in for good measure.

Child sexual abuse and sex trafficking are important, horrible things, and even the left cannot deny that, but unless I assume that the columnist was completely ignorant of article structure in a journalistic setting, all I can conclude is that she understood that it was an important movie, but she really didn’t want readers to see it. Conservatives, horribly enough, just might be right when they focus on child sex trafficking, and we just can’t have that!

References

References
↑1 Though the columnist is married to Sherwood M. “Woody” Cleveland, she hasn’t shown him enough respect to have taken his name. While she may not have shown him such respect, The First Street Journal does not similarly show such disrespect.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer tells us all about Barbie and gluten-free meals at the shore. Criminals on the streets? Not so much.

Rasheed Banks, Jr, via WVPI-TV.

The Philadelphia Inquirer was more than willing to tell readers about how heroic Michael Salerno intervened to try to stop a carjacking, and was killed for his efforts:

Police identify man killed in South Philly trying to stop a carjacking

Michael Salerno was trying to prevent three young men from stealing his car while a woman was still inside, police said.

by Rob Tornoe | Thursday, July 13, 2023 | 2:22 PM EDT

A Philadelphia man is dead after police say he tried to stop three young men from stealing his car Wednesday night.

Police said the victim, identified as Michael Salerno, 50, was attempting to prevent his car from being carjacked around 10:45 p.m. in South Philadelphia. A woman was in the car, but officials declined to identify her, citing the ongoing investigation.

“Preliminary information appears that the motive for this homicide began with a carjacking of a female, and when the owner intervened, he was shot and killed,” Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters Wednesday night.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Death in Killadelphia

The episode occurred on Porter Street near South 12th Street. Salerno had just arrived at the location but wasn’t in the car when the attempted carjacking occurred, according to police, who declined to say whether it was near his home.

There’s more at the original, but at the time, all that we were told was that the suspects were to be three “young men, appearing to be between the ages of 15 and early 20s, dressed in dark clothing.”

WPVI-TV, known locally as Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia, had more on Friday, as the Philadelphia Police Department identified one of the suspects, 15-year-old Rasheed Banks, Jr., and published his photograph. Young Mr Banks is still on the loose as I write this, but if WPVI is trying to help, showing Philadelphians for whom to be on the lookout, as of 9:12 PM, The Philadelphia Inquirer has nothing about this.

Then there was this from Fox 29 News. The Philadelphia Police Department released surveillance photos of the suspects in the shootings on which we have previously reported. The editors of the Inquirer were naturally horrified at the fact an 11-year-old girl, almost certainly simply an innocent struck by a stray bullet — out of around 30 fired in what may have been a gunfight between gangs — but, when the Police released photos of the suspects, in the hopes that someone would recognize them and give information to the police, the Inquirer has chosen not to publish either the story or the photos of the suspects.

Given that two of the suspects are shown wearing hooded sweatshirts, with the hoods pulled up, on a Philadelphia evening where it was above 70º F, it would seem obvious that this wasn’t a snap decision, but gang members, oops, sorry, ‘street group’ members out with intentions that were less than kindly.

That the Inquirer chose not to inform its readers, readers who are paying for the privilege[1]My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year. of reading our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, because publisher Elizabeth Hughes forthrightly told us that the newspaper would censor the news if it was too politically incorrect.

Not that the Inquirer didn’t give us important news!

But warning readers about killers and gang bangers still on the city’s streets, and perhaps, just perhaps, getting them picked up a bit earlier? Nope, not the Inky!

References

References
↑1 My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year.