Category Archives: Culture

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Whenever there is a truth you cannot tell, that is a truth you must tell!

We have previously noted that the Most Rev Salvatore Cordileone has stated that the Archdiocese of San Francisco would probably have to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Well, the time has come. From The New York Times:

Archdiocese of San Francisco Becomes the Latest to File for Bankruptcy

About a dozen dioceses and archdioceses in the United States are currently in bankruptcy proceedings as a result of multiple lawsuits alleging sexual abuse of children.

by Ruth Graham | Monday, August 21, 2023

Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone, photo from Archdiocese of San Francisco.

The Archdiocese of San Francisco, known for its outspoken conservative leadership, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone announced on Monday. The filing is intended to protect the archdiocese from what Archbishop Cordileone described as more than 500 civil lawsuits filed against it under a state law passed in 2019 that extended the statute of limitations for civil claims in child sexual abuse cases.

“We believe the bankruptcy process is the best way to provide a compassionate and equitable solution for survivors of abuse while ensuring that we continue the vital ministries to the faithful and to the communities that rely on our services and charity,” Archbishop Cordileone said in a letter addressed to Catholics in San Francisco.

Archbishop Cordileone signaled the bankruptcy earlier this month, warning publicly that the filing was “very likely.”

The article author, Ruth Graham, “is a Dallas-based national correspondent covering religion, faith and values for The New York Times. She graduated from Wheaton College and previously worked as a writer and reporter at Slate.” Telling us that she used to write for Slate is telling us that she’s a liberal, but what else would you expect from the Times? While she was very good at telling readers that several other diocese and archdiocese have been forced to file for bankruptcy over the cover ups of sexual abuse claims, she managed to write 547 words, and never mention what everybody already knows, that this is a crisis of having homosexual priests. Continue reading →

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Killadelphia: We knew all along whom the Usual Suspects would blame!

500 block of North Creighton Street, via Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

We have previously noted the shooting in the 500 block of North Creighton Street in West Philadelphia. A semi-dilapidated neighborhood with a few rowhouses boarded up, it’s wholly unsurprising that City Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier would blame it not on bad guys or street gangs, but “massive blight and disinvestment.”

Police identified the 19-year-old man who was fatally shot at a West Philly block party

Kevin July, 19, was fatally shot early Saturday on the 500 block of North Creighton Street, police said. Another eight people were wounded in the incident at a late-night outdoor party.

by Chris Palmer and Rodrigo Torrejón | Monday, August 21, 2023

Philadelphia Police on Monday identified the man who was fatally shot at what officials are now calling an unpermitted block party over the weekend as 19-year-old Kevin July, saying he was one of nine people shot in the violent episode in West Philadelphia’s Mill Creek section. The eight other victims survived, police said.

Still, authorities have released few other new details about the crime as they continue to investigate, saying they were not yet sure of a motive, nor were they even certain how many people opened fire during the incident.

July’s relatives declined to comment when contacted by phone Monday.

The shooting happened on the 500 block of North Creighton Street around 1:30 a.m. Saturday, police said, when shooters fired at least 60 shots into a crowd of dozens of people who had gathered for a party or barbecue. The celebration took place at end of the rowhouse-lined street that dead ends in between Wyalusing and Westminster Avenues.

The article noted that the block party had not applied for or received a permit for such, and that permitted block parties must end at 8:30 PM. Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore told the media that shell casings from at least three different types of ammunition had been recovered, and that means only one thing: gangs!

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, who represents the area, said in an interview that she’d spoken to the captain of the 16th Police District and been told that the event was a private gathering that had attracted guests from elsewhere, and that some people who live on the block “didn’t even know people who engaged in the dispute.” . . . .

She also said Mill Creek, the neighborhood in which the shooting occurred, is burdened by “massive blight and disinvestment,” including city-owned properties that have grown dilapidated. And she said the city should focus on investing in housing, clearing vacant lots, and improving the nearby recreation center as ways to improve conditions that can lead to violence.

“The chronic disinvestment experienced in neighborhoods like West Mill Creek lends to the thought that nobody cares here, anything goes here,” she said.

Would you invest in an area like that? If I were going to invest my money in something, it would be something which showed an at least plausible return on investment. West Mill Creek is not a place in which that plausible return on investment exists.

I grew up poor, too, reared by a divorced mother, alone, with two younger sisters, but somehow, some way, I did get involved with street gangs, and I never shot anyone. Poverty is no excuse!

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Killadelphia: Just because 60 bullets flew doesn’t mean it was gang related!

Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Chris Palmer’s last paragraph contained an element of truth that Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw would like for you not to realize:

More than 1,100 people have been shot in the city as of Wednesday, according to police statistics, and 245 of those victims have died. The pace of gunfire was about 23% lower than last year, the statistics show, but still much higher than the years before 2020, when gun violence began hitting record heights.

The impetus for Mr Palmer’s story? Yet another gang-banger shooting in West Philadelphia!

Seven people were shot, one fatally, during possible shoot-out at West Philly block party, police say

Several gunmen sprayed at least 60 bullets through a crowd on the 500 block of North Creighton Street around 1:30 a.m., police said.

by Chris Palmer | Saturday, August 19, 2023 | 12:42 PM EDT

Seven people were shot, one fatally, when several gunmen sprayed at least 60 bullets through a crowd on a West Philadelphia street early Saturday morning, according to police.

The shooting happened about 1:30 a.m. on the 500 block of North Creighton Street, said Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore. The victims ranged in age from 19 to 51, he said.

The 500 block of North Creighton Street is a poor, mostly black, rowhouse street, but, as we have reported previously, the good people of West Philadelphia don’t want public projects to make the area nicer, because that might cause more white people to move there.

Some witnesses described the shooting as a “shoot-out” at a block party or barbecue on the rowhouse street, said Vanore, though he added that detectives were in the early stages of gathering information and evidence.

A woman who lives on the block said in an interview that at least 100 people had been outside for a birthday party before gunfire erupted. . . . .

“It was a nice party — they were dancing, drinking, having fun, and then these knuckleheads [opened fire],” said the woman, who declined to give her name due to fear of retribution.

One of the victims, a 19-year-old man, was pronounced dead early Saturday, said Vanore. He declined to identify the man pending family notification.

Creighton Avenue PPD report, via Steve Keeley.

The Philadelphia Police reported that the deceased was a 19-year-old black male, but naturally, the Inquirer scrubbed the victim’s race from the report, even though the Philadelphia Police Department provided it. However, anyone ever remotely familiar with the City of Brotherly Love simply assumed that the deceased was black, just from the area.

There’s a truth that the Inky simply won’t report. The deceased was “shot several times to the face”, which tells you all that you really need to know: this was a deliberately targeted gang hit. We were, of course, reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups,” something that the newspaper has now come to use as well. I suppose that the word “gang” is now racist somehow, as though there cannot be any white gangs out there.

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Californie ain’t the place you wanna be! "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." -- Albert Einstein

After Jed Clampett struck oil when he missed a shot at some game he wanted for the dinner table, and became an instant millionaire, his kinfolk said that he needed to get away from the hillbilly life, and that “Californie is the place you wanna be, so they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly.”

Hills, that is. Swimming pools, movie stars.

Well, these days, perhaps Californie ain’t the place you wanna be. Ballot Proposition 47, which passed 4,238,156 (59.61%) to 2,871,943 (40.39%) on November 4, 2014, reduced several (purportedly) non-violent offenses from felonies to misdemeanors:

  • Shoplifting, where the value of property stolen does not exceed $950
  • Grand theft, where the value of the stolen property does not exceed $950
  • Receiving stolen property, where the value of the property does not exceed $950
  • Forgery, where the value of forged check, bond or bill does not exceed $950
  • Fraud, where the value of the fraudulent check, draft or order does not exceed $950
  • Writing a bad check, where the value of the check does not exceed $950
  • Personal use of most illegal drugs (Below a certain threshold of weight)

Robert Stacy McCain has been calling California a kleptocracy for some time now, but, of course, he’s just another evil Right Wing Extremist, so his views don’t matter.

It has been said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, something certainly not entirely true, as I have not been mugged; whether Mr McCain has been, I do not know. But what happens when reporters for the liberal Cable News Network get robbed?

CNN reporter burglarized a third time while covering rampant crime in the Bay Area

Kyung Lah warns tourists visiting San Francisco and Oakland, ‘do not leave a single thing in your car’

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Wednesday, August 2, 2023 | 9:00 PM EDT

A CNN crew has been burglarized a third time while covering the rampant crime in the Bay Area of California.

CNN correspondent Kyung Lah took to Twitter on Wednesday and shared video of her crew’s car with a completely-shattered window.

“I’m #Oakland, shooting a story about crime. Got broken into again— but this time our car was completely empty. We were across the street— this happened in seconds,” Lah wrote. “Even tho the car is empty, the thieves break in and lower the seat so they can steal anything in the trunk. Our trunk was empty. If you come to San Francisco or Oakland, do not leave a single thing in your car. Ours was thankfully empty.”

The CNN reporter continued:

If you’re here keeping track, this is the 3rd time my CNN rented car has been broken into in the Bay Area in the last year. But I’ve finally learned to not leave even a candy bar in the car anymore (still doesn’t stop the car break in but at least we don’t lose anything)

“(A)t least we don’t lose anything,” she wrote, but, then again, it wasn’t really her car, was it?

At the rental car return lot, the employee tells us of the 250 cars returned yesterday, 27 had been broken into, just more than 10% of cars returned

Just how long will the rental car agency be able to stay in business if 10.8% of the vehicles it rents out come back damaged like that? The agency’s insurance rates will have to increase, along with the repair costs within the deductible, and that means the price to rent a car will get jacked up. At what point do businessmen simply say, “This [insert slang term for feces here] just isn’t worth it”?

Fox News had a story on Miss Lah’s previous encounter with crime.

We previously wrote, At some point, you’d think that even the most liberal of the liberals would realize that without some semblance of law and order, you no longer have civilization! Yes, after fifteen good years in the Keystone State before I retired, I tend to concentrate on crime, mostly violent crime, in Philadelphia.

Carjackers beat a man to death in Northern Liberties, police say

The incident occurred late Thursday night, according to police, when two men pulled a 60-year-old from his vehicle and beat him before fleeing the scene in his car.

by Beatrice Forman | Friday, August 18, 2023

A pair of carjackers assaulted a man before fleeing the scene and taking his vehicle, leaving him for dead in Northern Liberties Thursday night, Philadelphia police say.

The incident occurred just before 10 p.m. on Third and Cambridge Streets, when two masked men pulled up on what a witness told police was a dirt bike. Then, the pair pulled a 60-year-old man from the driver’s seat of a parked 2023 Toyota Highlander, according to the witness account that police relayed to reporters.

That would be a “small, frail, thin, lightweight” 60-year-old Asian man, according to the Philadelphia Police. They sure proved how manly they are!

An altercation ensued before one of the masked men took off in the Highlander and the other took off in the on the dirt bike, according to police.

When officers arrived on the scene, they found the 60-year-old laying in the street as witnesses attempted to render aid.

“He was bleeding from the head. He was semi-conscious,” Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters. “He was unable to stand up.”

The victim was transported to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, but was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

Officers tracked the location of the Highlander to Camden, where it was recovered unoccupied by Camden police. The dirt bike was last seen traveling north on Third toward Girard Avenue Thursday night.

So, whatever the thugs had planned — and remember: they didn’t know that the victim they beat had died — they simply dumped the car they stole on the far side of the Ben Franklin Bridge, and at least one of them was back in Philly, and while Northern Liberties isn’t that bad an area, heading north on Third takes you to some not so great parts of town. But the innocent man they beat lost his life over what turned out to be a joyride for the thugs, and the odds are pretty good that the carjackers, the killers, were teenagers, and juveniles.

Beatrice Forman, the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, cannot always choose the stories she is assigned; news comes in, and has to be written up. She is, after all, a “general assignments reporter.” But when I read her bio at the bottom of her article, where it said that she “enjoys covering Philly-specific tomfoolery,” I had to wonder how she felt about this specific bit of tomfoolery, because, the way it ended, at least on the part of the killers, was little more than tomfoolery as far as they were concerned.

We have previously noted Oakland/Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, yet another one of the ‘progressive’ civil rights defense lawyers funded by George Soros, like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, who are softer-than-Charmin on crime. These idiots good people believe that they are somehow doing something good and noble by keeping oh-so-misunderstood young men out of jail, but what they have created, and what the Pyrite State’s Proposition 47 has enabled, a situation in which crime has few consequences, a situation in which crime has been enabled, and the ‘tomfoolery’ of a joyride into Camden has left an innocent man stone-cold graveyard dead.

Civilization requires civility, and civilization requires law and order, to keep the people living in it safe. Perhaps CNN correspondent Kyung Lah didn’t really feel the full effects of the car break-ins while she was reporting on crime in the Bay Area, because, after all, it wasn’t her car. But other people are feeling it, the rental car agency which has to repair the vehicle her producer and she rented, and the extra costs which that imposes on the agency, and eventually, its next customers. The people of Ward 8 in the District of Columbia are feeling the effects of crime, as the only grocery supermarket there is at least looking at closing its doors due to rampant shoplifting, and the store’s employees might feel the effects of crime as they could lose their jobs if the store closes. Michael Salerno’s family are feeling the effects, as he was murdered during a carjacking attempt, allegedly by a 15-year-old. “The latest serial carjacker had all of his cases dismissed in juvenile court and slaughtered a 19yo while on ankle monitor GPS.”

I would like to believe that Miss Price and Mr Krasner and the rest of the ‘progressive’ prosecutors are genuinely good people, who actually believe that what they are doing will reduce crime and create a better society, rather than just evil, because good people can eventually learn from their mistakes, from the consequences of their actions and policies. I would like to believe that ‘progressives’ in general are seeing the consequences of the policies they support, and at least considering whether conservatives have been right all along, and that crime needs to be punished, and punished harshly. I would like to believe that good people could see that excusing lesser crimes, crimes which could put the malefactors in jail for five years, does the bad guys no favors, when, instead of being able to look forward to being released in a few years, they have been enabled to commit crimes which could get them locked up for the rest of their miserable lives.

Sadly, if that is going to happen, it hasn’t happened yet, as the good, white liberals who live in Society Hill and University City voted for the Larry Krasner-supporting Helen Gym Flaherty, because crime hasn’t come to their doorsteps yet. Perhaps, just perhaps, Miss Lah and her staff have learned the hard lesson the easy way, and might at least consider voting for conservatives, rather than the same old, same old who have enabled America’s large cities to turn into crime-ridden [insert slang term for feces here]holes. California is run almost completely by liberal Democrats, and Philly hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President.

Albert Einstein, usually considered a fairly smart fellow, once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” I keep hoping that our ‘progressives,’ who consider themselves to be very smart people indeed, eventually see that, despite their very good and noble intentions, that what they have been doing, how they have cast their votes, has led to only bad results.

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The Associated Press will happily tell you what their biases are . . . if you pay them!

We have frequently mocked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s very much unpublished stylebook, a manual and guide concerning how things should be expressed, in its use of “Black and brown” to refer to minority communities. While I cannot document this, it appears that the Inquirer use the Associated Press Stylebook, which was modified , in June of 2020,to capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not capitalize “white.”

After changing its usage rules last month to capitalize the word “Black” when used in the context of race and culture, The Associated Press on Monday said it would not do the same for “white.” The AP said white people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don’t have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color. Protests following the death of George Floyd, which led to discussions of policing and Confederate symbols, also prompted many news organizations to examine their own practices and staffing. The Associated Press, whose Stylebook is widely influential in the industry, announced June 19 it would make Black uppercase. In some ways, the decision over “white” has been more ticklish. The National Association of Black Journalists and some Black scholars have said white should be capitalized, too. “We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” Daniszewski said. “But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”

Translation: this was all political. Capitalizing ‘Black’ but not ‘white,’ or, in the Inquirer’s amusing permutation, ‘brown,’ is really kind of silly, and has caused some people to notice it, but it really shouldn’t lead to much overt bias.

But some of what is in the AP Stylebook is overtly biased. From National Review:

AP Stylebook Issues Guide for Transgender Coverage

by Abigail Anthony | July 22, 2022 | 7:23 PM EDT

The Associated Press Stylebook, which for decades has served as the default style manual for most news organizations, has issued a “Topical Guide” for transgender coverage that encourages writers to use “unbiased language” and to “avoid false balance [by] giving a platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.”

Yet the guidance appears to explicitly embrace the language and claims of transgender activists, a move likely to steer newsrooms away from objectively framing the issue.

The AP Stylebook has issued prior guidance related to gender and sexuality, and some of that is repackaged in the Topical Guide. But it does include some updates, together providing an extensive reference for journalists.

The Transgender Coverage Topical Guide explains: “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time.” The guide encourages writers to refer to subjects according to their preferred gender identity. The guide condemns “deadnaming,” or referring to a transgender person’s previous name, because that “can be akin to using a slur and can cause feelings of gender dysphoria to resurface.”

The guide explains that the word “identify” can be useful, but alternative phrasing “like ‘is a woman’ is more to the point than ‘identifies as a woman.’”

Translation: the Associated Press Stylebook carries the implicit assumption that a ‘transgender’ person is the sex he[1]In English grammar, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine, and thus, in cases in which the sex of the person to which a pronoun refers is not known, the masculine pronouns are … Continue reading claims to be, not his actual sex.

Deadline noted, on June 3, 2023:

The Associated Press style guide – which sets the agenda for how most major media uses its words and phrases in reporting, thus shaping society views – has come out with new guidelines on gender.

The AP now instructs journalists to respect LGBTQ subjects’ preferred pronouns and to avoid terms like “biological sex.”

The new guide also suggested avoiding phrases like “both sexes,” indicating there are more than two that people use. Journalists should also avoid referring to a trans person as being born a boy or girl, with “sex assigned at birth” the new preferred usage.

Think about that. Not only does Deadline note that the AP Stylebook is “shaping society views,” but has gone all in on attempting to push the cockamamie notions that there are more than two sexes, and that sex is somehow “assigned at birth.” We have known for a century that the sex of every mammal is determined by whether the male’s sperm cell which fertilizes the female’s egg is carrying either the X or the Y chromosome, and that the male has exactly zero biological role in procreation after sexual intercourse and fertilization of the egg. The sex of the offspring is determined at conception, and simply recognized at birth, but the AP Stylebook stresses something factually false.

Dawn Stacy Ennis of Forbes has more on this silliness, and she is writing from the perspective of someone who supports transgenderism.

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

What does all of this do? By controlling the language, the AP is attempting to control the discussion; by the broad acceptance of the AP Stylebook, most major media in the country are going along with it. The AP do not like, and advises against, “deadnaming,” which is referring to a transgender person by the name given at birth, which almost always corresponds to the person’s sex. Thus, virtually every credentialed media source referred to Lia Thomas rather than Will Thomas, because they were going along with the attempt to persuade people that Mr Thomas is actually Miss Thomas.

The Associated Press also do not want you to refer to a person being ‘transgender’ unless transgenderism is specifically the topic. Thus, according to the Stylebook, Dr Richard Levine, the United States Assistant Secretary for Health, is not only to be referred to as Rachel Levine, as he now claims to be a woman, but not to inform readers that Dr Levine is transgender; readers who do not actually know are expected to assume that Dr Levine really is a woman.

This has real consequences. How many people would simply trust Dr Levine’s medical judgement, because he is a physician, who would otherwise not if they knew that he really is a man male claiming to be a woman? This is a question the AP do not want asked!

So, why do I bring this up? Today, @APStylebook tweeted:

We don’t have a new print Stylebook this year, but there’s plenty that’s new on AP Stylebook Online.
Subscribe for our latest guidance. You can opt in to notifications when we update entries.

Translation: they will give you a guidebook of our journolistic[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 biases, if you will pay them for it!

The First Street Journal does not claim to be an unbiased news source, but what we have done is to create and publish our own Stylebook, which can easily be found on the menu bar below the site title. You may not agree with our point of view, but we do not hide anything.

Who knows, some of our readers may actually believe that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, but we very explicitly tell you if a person claims to be the opposite sex from what he was born, and if you disagree with our editorial position, you are at least able to take an informed decision. That’s something the Associated Press do not want you to be able to do.

References

References
↑1 In English grammar, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine, and thus, in cases in which the sex of the person to which a pronoun refers is not known, the masculine pronouns are properly used, while formulations such as “he or she” are evidence that the writer does not understand proper grammar.
↑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.
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At some point, you’d think that even the most liberal of the liberals would realize that without some semblance of law and order, you no longer have civilization! In the end, 'progressive' and 'civilized' are mutually exclusive terms

Perhaps, just perhaps, even the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating District Attorney of Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, is starting, if just barely, to realize the seriousness of crime, as the District Attorney’s Office has said that they will seek to try the suspect arrested, supposedly the 17-year-old son of attorney and former judicial candidate Qawi Abdul-Rahman, as an adult. But it is also true that the United States Attorney could charge the thus-far unnamed suspect as an adult, if Mr Krasner chose not to do so.

Democratic primary voters in the city rejected Helen Gym Flaherty in the mayoral primary, instead nominating Cherelle Parker Mullins, who has at least contemplated bringing back ‘stop, question, and frisk, with her voting strength coming from the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the City of Brotherly Love. However, Mrs Mullins was also the only black top-tier candidate in the race, and her strength among black voters could be attributed to that.

So, are the most liberal of the liberals realizing that some semblance of law and order are needed? Mrs Flaherty’s voting strength was primarily among the white liberal areas of the city, including the areas around the University of Pennsylvania, where people are generally safer than in the combat zones, and it is physically safer to vote for the harder left candidates.

My good friend, and occasional website pinch-hitter William Teach pointed out this article to me, and I think it’s an important one:

DC supermarket near closing after $500K in groceries walks out the door

Jamie Joseph | Monday, August 14, 2023 | 4:35 PM EDT

As cities across the U.S. grapple with a growing shoplifting problem, a Washington, D.C., grocery store may be on the verge of closure after rampant theft has depleted much of its resources, a D.C. councilman warned.

A popular Giant Food store reported $500,000 in product loss due to shoplifting, the store’s management told D.C. Councilman Trayon White recently, which equates to roughly 20% of sales after theft.

White called the news “disheartening” in a press conference last week, especially after the store recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire security guards and upgrade its equipment.

Despite its effort to crack down on shoplifters, thieves remained emboldened and continued to walk out of the store with their carts filled with stolen items, White said.

“We know it’s tough times, and we know the price of food has skyrocketed in the last three years,” White said. “Well, we cannot afford to hurt ourselves by constantly taking from the store, because I mean, everybody is going to be without a place to eat, and enough is enough.”

The store has had to stop suspects 135 times, “and they almost doubled that amount and didn’t get stopped,” White said.

If the store has to shut its doors, White warned the impact would be felt hard in the community, as the chain is the only major grocery outlet in Ward 8, serving more than 85,000 people.

There’s more at the original. Mr Teach pointed out:

Ward 8 is the section of D.C. that is south of the Anacostia River, and, overall, is probably the worst ward for crime. Should this really be happening in our nation’s capitol? This is embarrassing.

Embarrassing? Yes, but unexpected? No, not really, and if the Giant Food Mart closes, people in the area will be left with either having to travel further to buy groceries, or buy them at smaller bodegas or convenience stores, where prices are usually higher. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted, in a completely unrelated article:

Groceries typically operate with very low profit margins of about 1% to 2%. But stores in poor, urban neighborhoods often operate with a 4% loss, Brown said. In Philadelphia’s case, that resulted in supermarket chains largely pulling out of disadvantaged Black and brown neighborhoods by the 1990s.

I still chuckle at the Inky’s stylebook, coming from the Associated Press, of capitalizing ‘Black’ to refer to race, but leaving ‘brown’, which in this case usually means Hispanic, in lower case. We do not engage in such silliness at The First Street Journal, but also do not alter the direct quotes of others.

But I digress. Why would “stores in poor, urban neighborhoods often operate with a 4% loss,” if they were charging the same prices as ones in more affluent areas, unless retail theft is higher in stores in those depressed areas?

Robert Stacy McCain noted that the unprecedented wave of brazen retail theft can be directly attributed to the election of ‘progressive’ politicians and other leftist policies:

“Absolutely unacceptable,” says the mayor who was elected by these same criminals. That’s just it — California has become the world’s first mass kleptocracy. All the honest people have left the state, and the criminals have taken over. Everybody is stealing everything:

Proposition 47 . . . reduced penalties on property thefts less than $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor. This means no prison time. Charges for grand larceny (a felony) now require thefts of more than $950 – more than double the previous threshold of $400.

Now, not only will a thief steal more without facing a felony charge, they may steal again, and again, and again, without serious consequences. Each theft is counted as a single incident. The law allows for serial thefts. Thieves can repeat their criminal behavior as long as they don’t steal more than $950 in each larceny.

Proposition 47 passed with 60% of the vote in 2014, and opponents of the measure clearly warned that this would happen, so it’s not as if the people of California are victims — they inflicted this disaster on themselves.

‘Progressivism’ in the United States is a mindset that we just have to be understanding and kind to everyone — except, of course, those evil reich-wing MAGA Republicans! — and have sympathy for the poor and downtrodden. The result has been a serious relaxation of law enforcement, especially since the unfortunate death while resisting arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled previously convicted felon and career criminal George Floyd, and now the criminal culture has metastasized, with more and more of those poorer people realizing that they don’t have to obey the law, at least not for the more ‘minor’ offenses, because breaking the law brings no real consequences to them. And despite the great sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, that increase in crime has occurred in just those areas in which the poor and downtrodden live! Mr McCain said, “All the honest people have left the state,” but that’s hyperbole, and not true at all. Some of the honest people have left the Pyrite State, but, just as the well-to-do, honest people in Rittenhouse Square and University City haven’t been the victims of crime themselves, many have remained, safely able to vote for ‘progressive’ politicians and policies, because their personal philosophies haven’t been punched in the mouth by street crime.

The real victims? The people of Kensington have been made victims, not by wallowing in the open-air drug markets themselves, but by tolerating its existence, and voting for the politicians who won’t clean it up. The honest, working-class employees of the Giant Food Mart in Ward 8, and the Nordstrom in the Topanga Mall, have been made victims, because, if things keep going as they have been, when the store closes, they’ll lose their jobs.

This is the conundrum that the left just can’t seem to understand: in their great and noble sympathy for the poor, the downtrodden, and minority Americans, their policies have made things worse for those very same people. In their attempts to shield them from the realities of law, order, and civilization, they have subjected poorer and minority communities to lawlessness, disorder, and barbarians.

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The left want poorer, minority neighborhoods to have nicer things, but fret that them having nicer things will attract more white people to move in!

Gentrification can be defined as the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process. We have reported, many times, on how the left are really opposed to gentrification.

But the left have often complained about “disinvestment,” and how poorer neighborhoods suffer from it. Yeah, it’s not exactly a surprise that people would take their money out of the combat zone or open-air drug market neighborhoods.

How can Philly build green without displacing residents?

Some research suggests that green development causes gentrification. But experts and community advocates say it’s not inevitable.

by Nate File | Thursday, August 10, 2023

When Debbie Robinson steps out of her apartment, she loves looking at the trees. “We got all these beautiful trees. Red trees, all these different yellow trees, all these beautiful trees,” Robinson, 59, said of her apartment complex in Grays Ferry.

[Sigh] Sadly, today’s journalists have forgotten the old reporter’s maxim that the 5Ws + H needed to be at the beginning of the story, to get the most information to the readers quickly, before some of the readers dropped out, or, in newspapers, didn’t turn to the continuation of the story on page A-15, or “below the fold,” so I’m having to make a bug cut here to get to the meat of the article.

Last month in Philadelphia, it felt like 105 degrees in the shade. With cooler days ahead, it may be easy to forget that the effects of climate change go beyond the rising temperature; environmental pollutants are shortening people’s lives in Philadelphia and water is flooding their neighborhoods.

And as tends to be the case with many of the problems affecting the city, low-income communities of color often experience those affects most acutely. North and West Philly are measurably hotter than the rest of the city.

Well, of course there’s always a racial angle; it is, after all, that “anti-racist news organization,” The Philadelphia Inquirer!

But while climate change is a global problem that is mostly driven by large corporations and wealthy individuals, Philadelphia can still build climate-supporting improvements that make the environment more tolerable for its people.

And it’s all the fault of the Evil Rich and Wealthy Corporations, even though those Wealthy Corporations produce the goods that even poor and minority consumers buy. But here we get to the heart of the problem:

These projects can be both large and small, from the construction of sprawling parks like Philly’s proposed Rail Park, to a row of trees along a street, or the creation of new bike lanes.

Building new green infrastructure may seem like an entirely beneficial move for Philadelphians, especially those who live in the hottest and most flood-prone areas. But community advocates and academics alike are warning against a rush to build new parks and plant trees without seriously thinking about one potential consequence: displacement.

“Folks are absolutely thinking about gentrification. I think when community members … hear about any kind of development, they think it’s for someone else,” said Jerome Shabazz, the executive director of the Overbrook Environmental Education Center, and an original member of the city’s Environmental Justice Advisory Commission. “That is an apathy that is not ill placed. It’s the tradition.”

In a 2020 study of the city’s new public green spaces, Temple University’s Hamil Pearsall and Jillian K. Eller found that “public green spaces may anchor gentrification processes. Additionally, new spaces in wealthy neighborhoods were more publicly accessible than parks in gentrifying neighborhoods.”

Simply put, to get the greener, nicer spaces the “hottest and most flood-prone areas” deserve means to increase costs to live in those areas, and that means the poorer residents who currently live in those areas will see housing costs rise to levels that they cannot afford, pushing them out. We’ve seen this before:

In a plan for a safer, vibrant 52nd Street, worried West Philly neighbors see gentrification looming

Angst is roiling minority neighborhoods as they struggle to balance the opportunities and the threats created by gentrification. “West Philly is the new Africa,” one resident warned at a community meeting. “Everyone wants the property that’s in West Philadelphia.”

by Jason Laughlin | February 21, 2020

The topic of the community meeting — a plan to beautify 52nd Street, to make it safe, welcoming, and prosperous once again — was, on its face, nothing but good news for West Philadelphia’s long-declining business corridor.

Yet the audience of about 50 residents and retailers, mostly African American, grew increasingly agitated as urban designer Jonas Maciunas flipped through a PowerPoint presentation of proposed improvements. Many weren’t seeing a vision of a neighborhood revitalized from Market to Pine Streets. Instead, in the talk of redesigned intersections, leafy thoroughfares, and better bus shelters, they heard the ominous whisper of gentrification.

“It just seems that when white people decide to come back to a certain neighborhood, they want it a certain way,” said Carol Morris, 68, a retired elementary school teacher.

Morris’ declaration opened the floodgates of fear and anger that recent night at the Lucien E. Blackwell West Philadelphia Regional Library. Maciunas and Jesse Blitzstein, director of community and economic development for the nonprofit Enterprise Center, which is spearheading the project, were peppered with skeptical questions ranging from the validity of surveys showing community support for the improvements to the maintenance of trees that would be planted.

Let’s be blunt here: the black residents of West Philly don’t want nicer neighborhoods, because, Heaven forfend!, then more white people might move in! As we have previously noted, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer have told us that racial segregation is very much part of the problem in city residents feeling unsafe, and Philadelphia is one of the United States’ most internally segregated big cities. But, rather than the evil White Supremacists about which the left keep warning us, it’s not white Americans who want to keep neighborhoods racially segregated, but black Americans, or at least the black Americans in West Philly.

While Philadelphia and the Inquirer haven’t been so blatant as to say so directly, the liberal city of Lexington[1]Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. has. As we have previously noted, Lexington said, directly, that it was concerned about gentrification, and, “Most new owners being more affluent and differing from the traditional residents in terms of race or ethnicity.” The city was concerned about white people moving into heavily black neighborhoods.[2]Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger neighborhoods, though there is a “Little Mexico” area.

Philadelphia is not concerned about black residents moving in and integrating nearly all-white neighborhoods, and that is what the Inquirer’s Editorial Board said ought to happen. But somehow, liberal cities don’t seem to want that to happen in reverse, don’t seem to want white people moving into majority black neighborhoods.  Yet, as the Inquirer noted:

Neighborhoods like Graduate Hospital, Fishtown, and University City — where years of reinvestment have ushered in more wealth and opportunity — are just a few minutes’ drive from shooting hot spots. But they rarely experience gun violence.

Gentrification seems to reduce violence!

Gentrification ought to be something every city wants. Not only do revitalized properties raise property values around them, but when white ‘gentrifiers’ move into a majority black neighborhood, they are clearly white people who have no racist attitudes toward blacks, people perfectly willing to have black neighbors.

Is that not a good thing?

In the originally cited article, author Nate File cites some left-leaning academics and proposals for what amounts to welfare and price controls to prevent making neighborhoods nicer from making them more expensive, and attracting all of those evil white folks!

It’s a wryly humorous situation. We have the white liberals leading one of our more leftist newspapers, saying that poorer minority neighborhoods should have more assistance, to keep them cooler during the hot summer months — though there seems to be less concern about eliminating the ‘urban heat island effect’ that would keep them a bit warmer during a nasty, cold Philly winter — but fretting that making them nicer will lead to more racial integration, in a city in which the Editorial Board have already complained is too internally segregated! 🙂

Can things really get more stupid than that?

References

References
↑1 Fayette County was one of only two counties, out of 120 total in the Bluegrass State, to be carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
↑2 Lexington’s Hispanic population are not large enough to really dominate larger neighborhoods, though there is a “Little Mexico” area.
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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain An Anglican priest really, really doesn't want you to see Sound of Freedom

One thing is certain: the movie Sound of Freedom sure has the left tied up in knots! As we reported previously, the movie, which stars Jim Caviezel, who had played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, is about Tim Ballard, a former U.S. government agent who embarks on a mission to rescue children from sex traffickers in Colombia. It is produced by Eduardo Verástegui, who also plays a role in the film. The plot centers around Mr Ballard’s Operation Underground Railroad, an anti-sex trafficking organization. As we noted then, 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. Mrs Cleveland thought it important enough to stress Mr Caviezel’s role as Jesus, just to let readers know that, why, he must be a Christianist kook, so maybe don’t take the movie too seriously!

Now comes this, from Canada’s The Globe and Mail. The author, Michael Coren, is an Anglican priest.

The far right’s fixation on pedophilia is dangerous

by Michael Coren | Friday, August 11, 2023

I’ve just experienced another attack on social media. The harassment on X, as Twitter now calls itself, usually lasts around 36 hours, and while most of the nasties are trolls and bots, I can’t pretend that the hundreds of comments don’t have an effect. I’m a priest, progressive, outspoken. No point in complaining. But a disturbing new aspect of these bombardments are the repeated and constant false accusations of pedophilia – not a libellous dribble, but a flood.

Normally, I prefer not to copy and paste the photographs which come with articles, but this one is important. Online, it falls right between the headline and byline, and the first paragraph of the Rev Coren’s article, and the caption, long for a photograph, makes certain that you know that Mr Caviezel is connected to QAnon:

Actor, Jim Caviezel who currently stars in the film Sound of Freedom speaks during a Catholics for Catholics anti-abortion ‘rosary rally’ on Aug. 6, 2023, in Norwood, Ohio. Caviezel frequently endorses a QAnon-based conspiracy theory where abducted children are seen to be victims of ‘adrenochroming’, a fictional practice of extracting adrenochrome from adrenal glands in a living human.

Mrs Cleveland did the same thing; are you turned off about the film now?

Then there’s the “anti-abortion ‘rosary rally'”, a reference to reference to an article by Daniel Panneton in The Atlantic, originally entitled “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol“, about which I have previously written.

The Atlantic got plenty of pushback about it, and twice changed the article headline and subheading — the title “How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary: The AR-15 is a sacred object among Christian nationalists. Now “radical-traditional” Catholics are bringing a sacrament of their own to the movement” isn’t shown in the screen captures tweeted by Taylor Marshall — imaged to the left, but the internet is forever.

My good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met her, but people can become good friends over Twitter these days — Christine Flowers used to have in her Twitter biography, that she has an “open carry permit for (her) assault rosary.” 🙂

Back to the Rev Coren’s original:

It’s not really about me of course, and I’m in good company. Last month in Belleville, Ont., when Justin Trudeau was swarmed by a right-wing mob, one of the hysterical shouts clearly heard was that he was a child molester. It’s grotesque nonsense about the Prime Minister that swamps social media. In fact, there aren’t many politicians and activists on the left who haven’t been accused of this awful crime.

Well, it’s true enough that Mr Trudeau was mocked when he announced that his wife and he were separating, with some people speculating that both of them found new boyfriends. But the Rev Coren wrote that he was accused of pedophilia, though he didn’t state why the accusations were leveled; perhaps it’s just because he’s a priest.

And with a horribly convenient timing, a new movie, Sound of Freedom, is currently the talk of the far right. Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) stars as Tim Ballard, a former government agent who rescues children from sex traffickers. As the critic Sam Adams wrote perceptively for the online magazine Slate, it “arrived in theatres surrounded by a cloud of innuendo put forth by its star and its noisiest right-wing supporters – conspiratorial insinuations about who doesn’t want this story to be told and what real-world traffickers are really up to.”

Rescuing children is one thing, and entirely admirable, but this phenomenon goes much further than that. Mr. Caviezel himself has spoken of “the whole adrenochrome empire,” describing the substance as “an elite drug that they’ve used for many years” that is “10 times more potent than heroin” and “has some mystical qualities as far as making you look younger.”

Adrenochrome, zealots claim, can only be obtained from adrenal glands in a living human body, thus the need to abduct children. It’s obscene and dangerous quackery, but that doesn’t help convince the cult of the credulous. This rubbish has its origins in a QAnon belief that powerful, international figures intent on resetting the world, controlling people and destroying religious freedom are also kidnapping little boys and girls.

That was the lunacy behind Pizzagate in 2016, when thousands believed that a pedophilia ring led by those at the highest levels of the Democratic Party was operating out of a Washington pizza restaurant. More than a million messages were sent on Twitter supporting the fantasy, eventually leading to employees being harassed, followed by a shooting and then an arson.

Has the Rev Coren managed to turn you off of seeing the movie yet? Sure, he tells us that “Rescuing children is one thing, and entirely admirable,” but immediately continues to tell readers what a kook the actor is.

There’s always been a strong dose of homophobia involved, through the venomous old canard of gay men being groomers, in spite of all the facts and evidence. Facts and evidence, however, are the last things relevant in all this. The trans issue magnified the paranoia, and it’s been pushed into the mainstream by a new generation of right-wing politicians.

And here we go again! The left want so very much to tell us that homosexuality has nothing to do with “grooming” the young, saying that “all the facts and evidence” tell us otherwise.

But as an Anglican priest, one who, according to Wikipedia,

In an interview with the National Post on 1 May 2015, .  .  . cited the Catholic Church’s teachings on homosexuality and contraception as some of the reasons for his conversion to Anglicanism.

he has to know about the famous John Jay Report, concerning sexual abuse by Catholic priests and deacons, all of whom are male, which noted that rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Only willful, deliberate ignorance could contend that such numbers don’t indicate a problem with homosexuality among priests.

It isn’t just evil reich-wingers who are ignoring “facts and evidence”; the Rev Coren has just done so.

The Archdiocese of San Francisco is about to declare bankruptcy, as now we have this news:

Archbishop Cordileone: Chapter 11 bankruptcy for San Francisco ‘very likely’

by Daniel Payne | Washington, D.C. Newsroom | Saturday, August 5, 2023 | 12:22 PM EDT

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone on Friday revealed that it was “very likely” that the archdiocese would be filing for bankruptcy in the near future due to the hundreds of clerical abuse lawsuits that have been filed against it.

The prelate revealed the news in an announcement on the archdiocesan website Aug. 4 in which he noted that, following a 2019 California law that lifted the statute of limitations on certain sexual abuse claims, the archdiocese was ultimately served with “more than 500 civil lawsuits” related to clerical sexual abuse.

The “vast majority of the alleged abuse occurred in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and involved priests who are deceased or no longer in ministry,” Cordileone noted, while others involved “unnamed individuals or named individuals who are unknown to the archdiocese.” The archdiocese has been “investigating the best options for managing and resolving these cases,” Cordileone said.

“After much contemplation and prayer, I wish to inform you that a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization is very likely,” Cordileone said.

Don’t be fooled: the Archbishop is one of the good guys, who supported the Tridentine Mass, opposes homosexual ‘marriage’ and allowing Catholics in homosexual relationships to receive the Eucharist, and is strongly pro-life. But for decades and decades, our bishops swept accusations of sexual offenses by priests under the rug, paying off victims quietly and rather than reporting them to law enforcement just moved them around to other, unaware parishes. But in San Francisco, of all places, you know that the victims have mostly been boys.

We also recently noted that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia just settled, for $3.5 million, a sexual abuse case in which a now-deceased priest, who was shuffled from parish to parish to sweep his abuse under the rug, molested, you guessed it, a boy. And outside the Catholic Church, a Fayette County high school teacher, and “youth volunteer” at Faith Lutheran Church in Lexington, has just been charged with producing media of a 9-year-old boy in a sexual performance.

This was all in just the past week.

Scratch the surface of modern conspiracy theory and antisemitism often appears, but today the accused are usually singled out not by race but ideology, and that includes politicians and public figures considered to be left-of-centre, or even people who support vaccinations, abortion rights, LGBTQ equality, or climate justice policies. This might sound fanciful, but the evidence is sadly abundant.

Naturally, along with QAnon, the Rev Coren wants to link this concern about child trafficking to anti-Semitism, just another ploy to get people to not watch the movie. Heaven forfend, if you go to see it, you are literally Hitler!

It’s particularly tragic as children increasingly suffer under a culture of poverty, food insecurity and forced migration. Ironically, those roaring about pedophile rings tend to ignore all of this and are often downright opposed to legislation that may help children. As well, child abuse and human trafficking are genuine issues and have to be taken extremely seriously; baseless and hateful hyperbole only worsens the situation.

That’s nothing but a sop, to let you believe that yes, the Rev Coren really, really is worried about child trafficking, but he doesn’t want you to get too incensed about it, because what about other problems.

Even the National Institutes for Health, in 2021, under President Joe Biden, not the evil conservative Donald Trump, wrote:

Our meta-analysis results suggest that political conservatives are significantly more charitable than liberals at an overall level, but the relationship between political ideology and charitable giving varies under different scenarios.

Conservatives see private efforts to help the poor as preferable and are more opposed to government action to do so.

Don’t be fooled here. The Rev Coren, who has a wife and children of his own, so I assume that he is sexually normal, wants to defend homosexual males from accusations of “grooming”, to let people know that heterosexual males can be just as guilty. Jerry Sandusky, after all, was married to a woman, even though he liked 10-year-old boys’ butts. But the “facts and evidence,” to use the Anglican priest’s formulation, indicate an outsized number of boys being molested by adult men, when, if homosexuality were not a risk factor, we should see fewer than 5% of sexual abuse victims of adult males being boys.

I am not a psychologist, I am not a sociologist, I am not a behavioral expert of any kind. But what I do know and understand, and know and understand well, are numbers, and the numbers say that the last thing a priest, a priest of any Christian religion, should run his keyboard about is the notion that homosexuality has no relationship to child sexual abuse.
_______________________________________

That was the part I finished last night, but scheduled for publication at noon on Saturday. But the Rev Coren used Twitter to publicize his article, and soon got the negative responses you’d expect, and quickly started blocking people who questioned him . . . including me.

I am trying to figure out his thinking, and quite frankly failing at it. As a priest, even an Anglican one, he had to know that any article written by a priest which in any way tried to minimize the response to child sex trafficking and child sexual abuse would draw plenty of negative response. His Twitter handle reads “Reverend Michael Coren,” and not everyone who read his tweet clicked on the article — which is now paywalled, though perhaps not a first time Globe and Mail visitor — and saw that he is an Anglican priest, not a Catholic clergyman, and many mocked and dismissed his article as somehow justifying sexual abuse among Catholic priests. It doesn’t do that, and it does not somehow excuse child sex trafficking and sexual abuse, but it definitely shows that he sees those as lesser problems than children reared in poverty or opposition to the homosexual and transgender agendas.

Then there was this tweet by Frank Rizzo (@FrankRi68868220):

MAPs are a stigmatized community, thank you for taking a stand in support.

MAPs are “minor attracted persons”. Mr Rizzo — no, not the former Police Commissioner and later Mayor of Philadelphia, who has long since gone to his eternal reward — has no indication that he actually is a minor attracted person, and I assume that his tweet was meant sarcastically, but this is the kind of response that the Rev Coren should have expected.

There are some things about which a person should just keep his mouth, or keyboard in this case, closed, and the Rev Coren has just found his. You cannot defend, or even minimize, child sex trafficking as somehow not that serious, because no matter how nuanced your point, no matter how well you write, you will not truly make your point, and just draw criticism and scorn.

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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Chickenhawks in the Church

Pedophilia is defined as a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children, while hebephilia is that attraction to children in the early stages of puberty, approximately ages 11 to 14, and ephebophilia is the attraction to teenagers in the later stages of puberty, approximately 15 to 19.

Archdiocese of Philadelphia agrees to $3.5 million settlement in priest sexual assault lawsuit

The lawsuit alleged that Pastor John Close raped a boy at St. Katherine’s of Siena in Wayne in 2006.

by Nick Vadala | Wednesday, August 9, 2023

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia will pay $3.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that one of its priests sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy in Delaware County nearly two decades ago.

Filed in 2020, the lawsuit alleges that Pastor John Close raped the boy at St. Katherine’s of Siena in Wayne in 2006. The plaintiff, whose name was withheld in court filings, was attending a Confraternity of Christian Doctrine program there, and Close was the head of the parish.

During a class, the boy became upset, fearing eternal damnation. He was sent to Close’s office, the pastor took his confession, and then raped him, according to the lawsuit. Afterward, the lawsuit says, Close told the boy that he was absolved of his sins, but he would be eternally damned if he told anyone about the assault.

While the age of the victim at the time of the assault was not given, he is 31 years old today, and the rape was 17 years ago. That means the victim was 13-to-15 years old at the time. Was that hebephilia, or was it ephebophilia? You know what? It doesn’t really matter, because urban slang gives us a far better definition: a chickenhawk, older males who prefer younger boys as sex partners.

Close, who was ordained in 1969, worked at several parishes and Catholic schools in the region throughout his 42 years in the ministry, including Christ the King parish, Cardinal O’Hara High School, Archbishop Wood High School, and the Cathedral of Basilica Saints Peter and Paul. He was placed on administrative leave in 2011 in connection with the reinvestigation of another alleged case and retired the following year. He died in 2018. . . . .

Spokesperson Kenneth A. Gavin said in a statement that the archdiocese “acknowledges settlement in this matter and the resolution it brings.” He added that the organization had no knowledge of the allegations against Close until the plaintiff’s lawyers reported them in July 2019, after the pastor’s death.

“In accordance with policy, the archdiocese reported the allegation to law enforcement,” the archdiocese said.

Is that true? Not according to the plaintiff!

The lawsuit argued that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was notified of a pattern of behavior from Close that put children in danger as early as 1976. That year, a pastor at Blessed John Neumann parish in Bryn Mawr (now known as St. John Neumann parish) reported that Close had teenage boys in his room at the rectory at odd hours, including overnight. As a result, Close was transferred to another parish, and “the archdiocese did not warn that next parish of this past behavior,” according to court documents.

Another alleged victim came forward several times starting in the late 1990s, reporting that Close had sexually abused him in 1969 when he was an altar boy at Christ the King parish in Philadelphia. The Archdiocesan Review Board investigated but could not substantiate the allegation, and it was dismissed, court documents say.

In 2011, following the release of a second scathing grand jury report that accused the church hierarchy of harboring more than two dozen priests suspected of abuse, a third alleged victim of Close came forward. That person said Close sexually assaulted him while he was a student at Archbishop Wood High School in Warminster in the early 1990s, when Close was the principal. The Archdiocesan Review Board again found the accusations could not be substantiated.

According to court documents, the archdiocese learned of at least two additional allegations. A woman in 2011 reported that a friend had told her that Close “messed around” with him at Cardinal O’Hara High School in Springfield in the 1970s. The review board found this to be unsubstantiated. And in 2014, a boy alleged that Close sexually abused him at Christ the King in the 1970s, but archdiocesan investigators were unable to make contact with the boy, court documents said.

We know of over $80 million in Church settlements, and there are other cases in which settlements were reached, but the amounts were not disclosed, and the vast majority of it is due to the Church sheltering chickenhawks.

Homosexuality has been a huge problem within the Catholic priesthood, and that problem has spilled out in the form of predator priests. while it is wholly politically incorrect to say, the sexual abuse of minors in the Church has been a problem of homosexuality: the vast majority of sexual abuse by Catholic priests has been against boys rather than girls. The John Jay Report noted that, of the abuse cases it studied, between 1950 and 2002, stated:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Despite attempts by the politically correct, you cannot explain that huge disparity by saying that boys were simply more available to priests years ago. This isn’t a matter of random selection, but of chickenhawk priests deliberately choosing which victims to groom and then assault.

How many parishioners have we lost over this? How many previously devout, Mass-attending Catholics have left the Church over the thoroughly disgusting cases of bishops — some of them predators as well — simply moving the abusers to another parish, without informing the new parish that the priest had ‘problems’? How many parishes have we had to close because there were no longer enough parishioners to keep them open? How many priests could have been moved into positions in which there was almost no contact with minors? And how many could and should have been referred to law enforcement, but were not?

This is what happens when you sweep things under the rug: as you keep doing that, the lump of material under the rug becomes more noticeable, and the debris under the rug became so large that the Church started tripping over it.

It isn’t just the Catholic Church, of course. We reported on Wednesday morning how a 49-year-old Henry Clay High School English teacher and Lutheran Church ‘youth volunteer’ was arrested for sexual offenses with children, and noted over a year ago how a Philadelphia high school teacher had groomed and started sexually abusing a teenaged girl, and others in the school knew about it and did nothing. But if it isn’t just the Catholic Church, the Church has definitely gained a negative reputation for having let it happen, and is often the first ‘suspect’ in people’s minds when they turn to the subject.

Pope Benedict XVI, in 2005, had the subject addressed, and the Congregation for Catholic Education released an instruction stating that homosexual men should not be admitted to seminaries to study for the priesthood. Naturally, the left went bonkers, with one former priest asking Why Isn’t Celibacy Enough? The answer, of course, is that celibacy would be enough if the chickenhawk priests actually remained celibate! The sexual abuse scandals which have rocked the Church occurred because too many priest could not remain faithful to their vows of celibacy.

What Pope Benedict recognized, that the oh-so-politically-correct left couldn’t stand, is that homosexuality among priests was, while not the sole contributor to the sexual abuse scandals, certainly the largest part. What about 81% of the victims were boys, and the two most abused age groups were, in order, 11-to-14-year-old boys, followed by 15-to-17-year-old boys can’t they understand?

Pope Benedict was right: admitting those with “homosexual tendencies” to the priesthood is a recipe for disaster, and had already been a disaster.

There is only one real solution, and that is to admit heterosexual married men to the priesthood. Not only will they not be preying on young boys, but they will have a sanctified outlet for their sexual drives, and can have a normal family life. We already have married priests, both in the Eastern-Rite Catholic Churches, but a few hundred married former Anglican priests who converted to Catholicism, and it hasn’t somehow been a disaster for the Church.