Category Archives: Culture

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I make a confession

Robert Stacy McCain’s article Math Teacher Goes Berserk brought to mind some silliness in which I engaged as a seventh grader.

Just a typical day in a Wisconsin school:

Brenda Poulos remembers working in Kenosha last Friday when she received a series of texts from her son.

“I know he’s not supposed to use his phone in school, so the fact that he texted me was already, something’s up right,” Poulos said. “He said, ‘Mom, something’s going on at school. They fired our teacher and something bad is going on.”

Poulos’ son, Ethan, is a seventh-grade student at John Long Elementary. He told WISN 12 News he was in math class on Friday [May 12] when his teacher became upset and started making threats after discovering a swastika drawn in a notebook.

“Five seconds later, he went on this ramble about how this was a disgrace to his people and how he wanted to scorch Earth on us and how he was apparently going to cause pain on all our families,” Ethan said. “How he’d send his daughter to our house with a baseball bat and that he had 17 guns and he wasn’t afraid to use them.”

The teacher in question, David Schroeder, 46, of Grafton, Wisconsin, was charged with making terroristic threats. Under Wisconsin §947.019, if that is with what the distinguished Mr Schroeder has been charged, it is a Class I felony. Under §939.50, a Class I felony carries a penalty of a maximum $10,000 fine and up to 42 moths imprisonment.

If this is Mr Schroeder’s first offense, he would probably not get the maximum, but would be offered a plea deal: three years probation, and a $5,000 fine. The most important part of that would be that the felony conviction would mean the revocation of his teaching certificate, and the felony conviction would bar him from ever owning a firearm.

According to the complaint, Schroeder told the students that he was Jewish, that “all Jews have guns and that he had 17 guns in his basement and that he would ‘F’ them up.”

At that point, Mr McCain started talking about what middle school boys sometimes do:

(I)f drawing swastikas in your notebook was some kind of human-rights violation, basically every kid in my childhood schools would have been under investigation. Our fathers’ generation had fought World War II, which was a subject of lots of TV shows (e.g., Combat!) and movies (e.g., The Longest Day) that we watched as kids, so we were fairly saturated with that stuff about fighting the “Krauts” (as the Germans were habitually referred to in the G.I. slang dialogue of those old movies). Because a swastika is a simple thing to draw (as opposed to say, a Stuka dive bomber or a Tiger tank), basically every schoolboy drew them, in notebooks, on desks, etc. It had no deeper meaning in our minds. Certainly the boys who drew swastikas — and I mean, literally every boy did, back in the 1960s and ’70s — did not intend it as signifying support for totalitarianism, or sympathy toward Germany, least of all Jew-hating. It was like drawing Batman (another favorite schoolboy doodle) or hot rods, just stuff that boys did, without any political intent. But that was long ago, in what may now be viewed as a Golden Age of political incorrectness, when a popular comedy on TV was Hogan Heroes, with the Nazis played for laughs.

Swastika on apartment building at corner of Rose Street and Lyndhurst Place, in Lexington, Kentucky. This building predates the Nazis. Photo by DRP, click to enlarge.

As far as I can recall — and my memory is pretty good — I never drew swastikas in my notebooks or anywhere else; that just wasn’t my thing, and World War II really wasn’t my interest. But here is where I need to confess my very unintentional sin.

Between late August of 1965 and early June of 1967, I attended the seventh and eight grades at Mt Sterling, Kentucky, Junior High School, in what was then the Harrison Avenue Building. Built sometime around 1900, it was a two-story brick building with somewhere around 12-foot high ceilings and big, tall windows. With no air conditioning, Southern school buildings used the trick of tall windows, in which the upper sash could be lowered a bit, and the lower sash raised, to get natural air circulation, with the warmer air escaping through the upper opening and — hopefully! — cooler air entering.

I had Mrs McCarren for English, and Mr Hawkins for history back then. Mrs McCarren was forever assigning some of the other boys, and me, sentences, to write “I won’t talk” 200 times for talking out of turn in class, something I tried to amuse myself with by including an occasional “I’ll shut up” and, with a very sharp pencil, I could get all 200 of them in the blank area at the top of otherwise blue-ruled notebook paper.

But there was something else. Those very tall windows also had very tall, buff-colored roll-down shades, and as tall as the shades were, they also had very long thin, white draw cords. Being a typical 12-to-14-year-old boy, my hands did keep busy, and, seated next to the windows, I frequently made them into hangman’s nooses.

Today? OMG, it would be straight to the principal’s office, but, in the seventh and eights grades, nobody cared, or at least I didn’t think that anybody cared.

The Mt Sterling school system had recently integrated, during my sixth-grade year, after the segregated, black school, DuBois, mysteriously burned to the ground just before school started that year. An integration plan was already in the works, moving four, non-consecutive grades per year over three years, to the regular school system, but the fire forced immediate, total integration. Maybe some of it escaped me, but I really don’t recall any problems with integration. Then again, I wasn’t the most popular kid around, and maybe some other families did have more problems with it, but if so, I was unaware of them.

And there was one other thing of which I was unaware. To me, a hangman’s noose was just something I saw on television, in the Westerns which made up so much of the evening fare. I was unaware that a hangman’s noose might somehow symbolize lynchings.

Did Mr Hawkins, who was black, take offense at those nooses? He had come over from the DuBois school, where (I think) he had been the principal, but if anyone took offense, I never heard about it, nor did anyone ever mention to me what those nooses could mean. The nooses were frequently undone the following school day, but I do not know by whom.

Mr Schroeder, however, did get upset, over things done by kids mostly meaninglessly. Will the kids continue, as a form of rebellion, something junior high and high school boys do? I have no way of knowing, but I do know one thing: MR Schroeder’s overreaction has cost him his job, at the very least, and might well cost him his profession and his right to keep and bear arms.

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Killadelphia: The city is losing population, and not just to murder!

In news that should surprise exactly no one, Philadelphia is losing population, and it’s worse than every other city among the twenty most populous in the United States.

Most large U.S. cities reversed or slowed pandemic population drops. But not Philly.

New data released by the U.S. Census Bureau Thursday shows 19 of the 20 most populous American cities either gained residents or slowed pandemic-era population declines — Philly being the exception.

by Ximena Conde | Friday, May 19, 2023 | 5:24 AM EDT

Nineteen of the 20 most populous American cities reversed or slowed pandemic-era population declines — Philadelphia being the notable exception — data released by the U.S. Census Bureau Thursday shows.

Not to worry: the blurb means exclusive article for subscribers to The Philadelphia Inquirer, not The First Street Journal. As Robert Stacy McCain would put it, I read the Inquirer so that you don’t have to! 🙂

Does this spell a period of gloom for the city? Hard to say. Experts have consistently cautioned against reading too much into year-to-year population changes.

“One year of data is not a trend,” said Katie Martin, project director at Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia research and policy initiative.

What’s more, the census numbers only tell us the number of people arriving or leaving; they don’t tell us what’s driving the changes or if they’re permanent.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Americans to spend a lot more time at home and reevaluate their priorities, mulling whether it was better to live in cities or the suburbs. Trend stories emerged of Brooklynites moving to nearby cities like Philadelphia because of the bang for-your-buck housing prices. At the same time, other stories told of families retreating to the suburbs out of fear that packed city living brought about more risk of contagion and concerns over rising gun violence in major cities, including Philadelphia.

Let’s tell the truth here: the homicide numbers have been worse in Philadelphia than the other large cities, and Philly is the poorest city of over a million people in the US. And while reporter Ximena Conde said that there were 33,000 residents lost between July 2020 and July 2022, I’m a bit more of a numbers geek than she is, so I looked up the numbers from the Census Bureau’s website, and saw listed the official Census number from April 1, 2020, and population guesstimate for July 1, 2022: 1,603,799 and 1,567,258. That works out to a loss of 36,541 souls, or 2.28%.

And, Killadelphia being what it is, I also added up the homicides from April 1, 2020 through June 30, 2022. Between those dates, there were 403 of the total of 499 homicides in 2020, 562 in 2021, and 257 of the 516 in 2022. Of the 36,541 people lost in the city during those dates, 1,222, or 3.34%, were lost to being murdered.

Southern and Southwestern cities like Phoenix, San Antonio, and Jacksonville continued to experience population growth, which those regions were experiencing long before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago saw smaller population declines than the first pandemic year.

Does Miss Conde mean cities in mostly Republican governed states, with far fewer panicdemic[1]Panicdemic is not a typographical error, but reflects what is actually the case: governments and people reacting in mindless panic! restrictions? One point she did not mention is that foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia under Mayor Jim Kenney and Commissioner of Health Cheryl Bettigole kept COVID-19 restrictions, including indoor mask mandates, far longer than most cities, and the city’s teachers union — you know: the teachers who concealed a fellow teacher’s sexual abuse of a student for years — kept resisting reopening the public schools. Americans really don’t like authoritarian controls.

Of course, those Southern and Southwestern cities don’t have Pennsylvania winters, so I can’t blame Philly’s population loss solely on the city’s government and culture.

A lot of my Philadelphia friends are reacting positively to the Cherelle Parker Mullins having won the Democratic mayoral nomination: she’s at least somewhat moderate for a Democrat, and at least appears to be more active and energetic than outgoing Mr Kenney. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will almost certainly be not just toast, but toast which has fallen on the floor, buttered side down, once Mr Kenney’s term ends at the beginning of 2024, and that can only be good news for the seriously undermanned Philadelphia Police Department.  The city will still be afflicted with the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating defense lawyer now ensconced as District Attorney at least through 2025, but perhaps, just perhaps, Philly can become greater than what it has been.

Even the homicide rate, though far, far, far too high, appears to be coming down, though is still above the 2020 pace which resulted in 499 — or was it 502? — homicides.

There are a lot of reasons to appreciate Philly, for its architecture and its history. The restaurants are great, and nothing can top a hot, fresh Philadelphia pretzel. A lot of people like (ughhh!) Philly cheesesteaks, though I think that they’re vile. But the current culture of the city is terrible, and that has to be driving some people away. Yes, 1,222 of the people who ‘left’ the city did so because someone else killed them, but that still means that 35,319 souls left for other reasons.

References

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↑1 Panicdemic is not a typographical error, but reflects what is actually the case: governments and people reacting in mindless panic!
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The left just don’t understand economics If liberals really understood economics, they wouldn't be liberals anymore

The American left just love to argue that certain things are “basic human rights.” Not things like our freedom of speech or religion, things which the Constitution of the United States recognizes as something we have as part of ourselves, but things which the left believe that other people should be required to provide for us.

In an episode of Blue Bloods, fictitious New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan said that the freedom of the press applies to those who own one. I’ve been on this world for seventy years now, and I do not recall anyone ever saying that if I did not own a printing press, that my constitutional right to freedom of the press meant that someone — meaning: the government — should somehow be required to provide one for me, or that The New York Times or National Review were somehow obligated to provide publication space for me. My constitutional right to keep and bear arms has never been held to mean that the government should be required to furnish a 30.06 for me to defend my farm from the critters in the neighboring Daniel Boone National Forest.

This internet thingy that Al Gore invented has provided millions more Americans with a new form of the press and has been a blessing, but yeah, I still have to pay for the internet service to use it, and the web hosting for The First Street Journal. While I have also been invited to publish on the American Free News Network, and do not pay for that, other private individuals are paying for it, of their own free choice. Given the conservative nature of AFNN, I’m pretty sure that the left wouldn’t believe that the taxpayers should have to subsidize its publication!

But they sure love declaring other things as “basic human rights,” for which other people have to pay!

Water is a basic human right. So why is Philly resuming shutoffs May 24?

The amount of money collected by shutting off service to customers who can’t afford to pay is a drop in the bucket compared to the incredible damage that shutoffs cause.

by Christina A. Roberto, Laura A. Gibson, and Robert W. Ballenger, For The Inquirer | Tuesday, May 16, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

During the chemical spill last March that imperiled the city’s biggest water treatment plant, nearly one million Philadelphians feared losing access to safe drinking water. Most residents are not used to living with such a threat. But many of our fellow Philadelphians will experience that fear and uncertainty every year — not because of contamination, but because of poverty.

Water security — the ability to reliably access safe water — is recognized by the Pennsylvania Constitution as a basic human right, yet tens of thousands of Philly residents have their water turned off every year because they are unable to pay their bills.

So, what does the state Constitution actually say about this? From the link provided by the authors:

The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.

So, it states that it is the responsibility of the Commonwealth to insure that the air, water, and land resources should be kept clean; it does not say that it is the duty of the Commonwealth to provide water being pumped into everyone’s homes.

Imagine if it did. That would require the state of Pennsylvania to provide the plumbing infrastructure to every mountainside home in the most remote and rural parts of the state.

We understand that the city needs to collect money from residents to maintain its water infrastructure. But the amount of money collected by shutting off service to customers who can’t afford to pay is a drop in the bucket compared to the incredible damage that shutoffs cause.

Without running water, people can’t wash their hands or their dishes, or prepare their food. They have limited use of toilets and bathing. Something as critical as a baby’s infant formula becomes highly stressful to prepare. What’s worse, water shutoffs can destroy families — unaffordable utility bills and utility service terminations are the most common housing issues requiring children to be placed in foster care. As debt accumulates from water shutoffs, it can lead to financial ruin and a downward spiral to homelessness.

Do the authors really recognize what they say they do? From their brief bios at the end of the OpEd piece, we can see that they are all ‘elites,’ professors at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, and an attorney, and people who earn plenty of money.

More, their argument that “unaffordable utility bills and utility service terminations are the most common housing issues requiring children to be placed in foster care” isn’t something which would be confined to water service; the same would apply to natural gas service, which many Philadelphians, especially in older homes and rowhouse neighborhoods use for heat and cooking, and electricity, which is also used for heating and cooking. More, most non-electric heating systems — natural gas or heating oil — also require electricity for activation and some for pumps.

The Water Department is seeking approval to increase the typical residential customer’s bill by about 21% over a two-year period. Without access to assistance, this proposed increase will place more families at risk for shutoffs.

So, someone has to pay for water service, right? Even the authors recognize that, yet if service terminations for non-payment were to be ended, as they advocate, then those people who can and do pay their water bills will have to pay more, because water service costs money to maintain and operate. Perhaps that doesn’t mean that much to Ivy League professors and an attorney who is also an alumnus of that private school, with estimated annual costs of $89,028 per year for undergrads, or a mere $73,494 if a local resident who can live with their parents, but a lot of working Philadelphians are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and while the 21% increase certainly reflects the inflation this country has suffered under the Biden Administration, those bills would have to go up even more if some people were, in effect, granted water service without having to pay for it.

Water shutoffs for debt collection are set to resume on May 24, posing a serious threat. Based on data from the Water Department, we estimate tens of thousands of Philadelphians lost water in a typical year before COVID-19.

Translation: the city, which also prohibited other utility service shutoffs and evictions for non-payment during the three years of the panicdemic — not a typo; panic is absolutely the proper word to apply to the country’s response — had thousands upon thousands of Philadelphians living without paying for their housing and utilities. And that raises the obvious question: if utility shutoffs for non-payment are banned, as the authors want, why would those who could pay their water bills do so?

That these shutoffs will occur during the city’s ever-hotter summers is a recipe for disaster. A healthy adult would struggle during a 90 or 100-plus-degree day with no drinking water. Imagine how it will affect children, older residents, and the seriously ill. The city’s poor neighborhoods without trees can be 15 to 20 degrees warmer than leafy areas in Chestnut Hill. Do we really want to inflict this kind of suffering on our most vulnerable citizens?

And there you have it: “Do we really want to inflict this kind of suffering on our most vulnerable citizens?” In the original on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, that’s repeated as a ‘pullquote,’ roughly six inches across and two inches wide. But as someone who grew up in the South, who was graduated from a 1937 WPA/CCC high school without air conditioning, and who has lived more than half of my life in places without AC, I recognize that hot weather is simply a part of life, and if uncomfortable, is still part of the environment. We noted, just yesterday, that several of the city’s public swimming pools will not be opened this year as well, because, in one of our nation’s most heavily taxed cities, there simply isn’t the money to repair and open them all.

This is the part that so many on the left just don’t understand: everything costs money, and for one person to receive something he did not make himself for free, someone else has to pay for it.
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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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‘Progressives’ against common sense and reality

The Nation is a far-left, “progressive” opinion journal with a long history, and when you see an article from The Nation, you already know: it’s going to be almost Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crazy:

How Women’s Swimming Got So Transphobic

Almost no other sport is as hostile to trans athletes—and that’s because its culture created the perfect conditions for transphobia to take root.

By Frankie de la Cretaz | Friday, May 12, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

When Lia Thomas first entered the women’s NCAA swimming scene in 2021, her presence was immediately felt. National media outlets became obsessed with her. She got the kind of attention rarely given to swimming athletes outside of the Olympics.

Non-subscribers get just three articles per month before the paywall descends. To read this article without paywall issues, you can also find it here.

Thomas was good, but she wasn’t the next Simone Biles of her field. So what explained such a frenzy? Simple: Thomas was a transgender woman having success in the women’s division.

Will Thomas, who competed all through high school and his first three years at the University of Pennsylvania, as the 6’3″ tall male he was, did not have much success in the men’s division. He won a couple of events, but was ranked 554th in the nation, 200 meter freestyle, all divisions, 65th in the 500 freestyle and 32nd in the 1650 freestyle.

Yet, when he decided that he was really a woman, which coincided with the shutdowns due to the COVID-19 panicdemic, he had a full season off before joining Penn’s women’s swim team and calling himself “Lia.” Mr Thomas did more than just “hav(e) success in the women’s division”; he dominated.

From December 7, 2021, to February 22, 2022, CNN spent nearly 15 minutes criticizing Thomas’s participation in the women’s division but less than two minutes discussing the dozens of anti-trans sports bills being introduced across the country. Meanwhile, from December 3, 2021, through January 12, 2022, Fox News aired 32 segments that attacked Thomas, according to Media Matters for America. That pace didn’t slow down for months. “That level of coverage of women’s swimming, specifically, has not come close to being matched in the year after the end of [Thomas’s] swimming career,” says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director at Media Matters. “They like to say that this is coming from a place of caring about women’s sports, but it’s hard not to notice that they don’t really cover women’s sports unless trans women are competing in them.”

Well, one thing is certainly true: Mr Thomas did generate far more coverage competing on the women’s team as a woman than was common. But let’s tell the truth here: men’s swimming races don’t generate that much coverage, either.

Women’s sports? Yeah, there’s coverage on ESPN and its related networks . . . of figure skating, volleyball (especially beach volleyball), and gymnastics, sports where we get to see mostly white women in top shape in skimpy outfits. There is some coverage of women’s basketball, which features mostly black women in top shape, though the uniforms are not as skimpy or tight-fitting.

But it’s also true that Mr Thomas’ participation drove the coverage of women’s swimming, because he was a fully-developed man male beating up on girls beating women in sports.

Frankie de la Cretaz, from her Tweet saying that she is “Summer ready.”

So, who is Frankie de la Cretaz, the author of The Nation article? Her biography page on the Hatchette Book Group lists her as Frankie, but the underlying url shows that, at some point, she was calling herself Britni. I found nothing which indicates that she is a transgender woman, but her biographies, through several sources, including Twitter and The Nation,, all use “they/their/them” pronouns. Her only two articles listed in her The Nation biography are on transgender issues. She is, to put it plainly, a special pleader. As The First Street Journal does not go along with the pronoun silliness, I shall refer to her using the feminine forms, though I am not certain that such are correct.

The intensity of the critical media coverage helped fuel an equally intense backlash against Thomas. Sixteen of her University of Pennsylvania teammates signed a letter midway through the season saying that she had an unfair advantage. That letter was organized by former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who, along with fellow Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona, is a founding member of the Women’s Sport Policy Working Group, which has been leading the movement to ban trans women and girls from competing in the women’s division in sports across the board. (The Human Rights Campaign has called the WSPWG “a hate group.”) And World Aquatics, the international federation that governs the sport of swimming, released a new transgender participation policy in July 2022 that essentially bans trans women from competing by creating incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion. (As I have written previously, there is no real evidence that trans athletes have an inherent advantage over their cisgender counterparts.)

This is utter rubbish. Mr Thomas certainly had an inherent advantage over the real women against whom he competed. He was bigger, taller, stronger, and had more endurance than the women against whom he was racing. We have previously noted his times in the Zippy Invitational.

I have noted Mr Thomas and his swimming records, competing against biological women, proving that “trans women” are very different from real women. On Sunday, December 5, 2021, Mr Thomas, won the 1,650 yard freestyle with a time of 15:59:71; the second-place finisher was his teammate Anna Sofia Kalandaze, who touched at 16:37:44 in the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio. The difference between Mr Thomas’ and Miss Kalandaze’s times is 37.73 seconds, nearly the length of the pool.

Competitive swimming at the collegiate level involves races which are often won by fractions of a second. A victory of 37.73 seconds is extraordinary.

In the 500-yard freestyle final, Mr Thomas again defeated his teammate, Miss Kalandaze, who finished second, 4:34.06 to 4:48.99, a 14.93 second margin; Miss Kalandaze defeated the seventh-place finisher by 7.42 seconds, just half of the time she was behind Mr Thomas.

Mr Thomas time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500 yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Miss Kalandaze’s second-place time. His year of taking testosterone suppressants — Mr Thomas had not undergone ‘sex reassignment surgery’ by the time of the NCAA championships — have obviously not done what the NCAA believe it would. Mr Thomas ranking in the 500 freestyle, 65th, went to number one in the women’s category.

When it came to the NCAA championships, Mr Thomas went ahead and won one title, and then, apparently, backed off in his other races, so as not to increase the political backlash. No, I can’t prove that’s what he did, but it seems pretty blatantly obvious. Riley Gaines Barker, who tied for fifth with Mr Thomas in the 200-yard NCAA women’s championships, and was one of the few who had the ovaries to speak out, reported that Mr Thomas was an intact male in the women’s locker room at those championships.

Human beings have known about sex, and the differences between males and females for as long as we have any evidence of human social structure and thinking. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal can tell the difference between males and females of their own species, and, from my anecdotal observations, it appears that dogs and cats can tell human males and females apart.

The ‘transgender’ advocates have been mounting a full-court press on this stuff. In just Friday’s Philadelphia Inquirer’s website home page are the stories Trans and queer-led groups are protesting the Marriott for hosting Moms for Liberty conference this summer, The Pennridge board has passed a bathroom policy that advocates say discriminates against transgender students, and Central Bucks orders removal of ‘Gender Queer,’ ‘This Book is Gay’ from school library shelves. As a cycling fan, my feed has Cycling race director agonizes over UCI’s transgender participation policy: ‘This could kill the sport’, and Cycling team parts ways with Olympian Inga Thompson after call to protest UCI’s transgender athlete policy.

Miss de la Cretaz’s article went a lot longer than I have quoted, but most of the remainder of it isn’t some sort of pseudo-scientific claim that there are no real advantages in sports to males claiming to be female over real women, but political arguments, that swimming has been an almost exclusively white sport, and that opposition to Mr Thomas’ claim that he’s a real woman is actually white supremacy.

Mr Thomas is white. And several of the women on Penn’s women’s swim team are Asian rather than white. But no, I don’t expect much in the way of rationality from someone like Miss de la Cretaz.

In the end, it boils down to one simple question: can people actually change their sex? The notion that sex is somehow “assigned” at birth is silly; sex is recognized at birth, but the actual determination of sex occurs at conception, by whether the sperm cell fertilizing the egg carries the X or the Y chromosome. This has been known scientifically for a hundred years now.

We know of no process by which a person whose body was developed with XY chromosomes can be transitioned into someone having XX chromosomes, or vice versa. Some with ‘gender dysphoria’ want to allow children to take puberty blockers, to prevent them from developing into adult males when they believe they are girls, or adult females if they think that they are really boys. But that doesn’t transform them into the opposite sex; it simply leaves them as underdeveloped as children.

Someone as focused on ‘transgender’ issues as Miss de la Cretaz cannot possibly have missed the horror stories of Jaron Bloshinsky, more commonly known by the fake name Jazz Jennings, and his attempts to surgically transition in adulthood after being on puberty blockers since he was young. The dedicated author cannot possibly be unaware that medical and surgical treatments do not really turn male bodies into female ones, or female bodies into male ones, but, at best, a simulacrum of what the victims want to be.

I can understand that the ‘transgendered,’ the delusional people who really, really, really believe that they were born into the wrong body — and hey, I think that I should have been born into Bo Jackson’s body! — believe that there is some way, perhaps just over the horizon, but close and eventually attainable in which they can really become the members of the sex that they want to be, but the percentage of people really suffering from gender dysphoria is very, very low. What I don’t understand is the number of normal people who support this silliness.

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Killadelphia: How do you define a “mass shooting?”

On May 7th, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas suggested that our definition of what constitutes a “mass shooting” needs to be changed.

The Inquirer defines a mass shooting as one that occurs in public and kills three or more people.

The FBI classifies mass shootings as four or more deaths in a single incident.

Meanwhile, Congress has used the definition of three or more, and the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks mass shootings, defines them as any incident in which four or more people are injured or killed, a classification also used by some national media outlets. (I often wonder why any shooting with more than one victim isn’t considered a mass shooting, but that may be a column for another day.)

Well, this isn’t a mass shooting under the Inquirer’s definition, bit I’m pretty sure that, if it was, there’d be a mass shooting in Philly almost every day of the year.

Quadruple shooting in East Germantown kills 17-year-old boy, wounds 2 other teens and a 7-year-old

Three people were injured and one was killed in the shooting.

by Jason Laughlin and Beatrice Forman | Thursday, May 11, 2023 |7:49 PM EDT

A shooting in East Germantown killed one teenager and injured three other youths, including a 7-year-old child, on Thursday night, the Philadelphia Police Department said.

Police said they received a report of the shooting on the 5900 block of North 21st Street shortly before 6 p.m. A 17-year-old boy who was shot in the face was transported to Einstein Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

The other three victims — ages 7, 15, and 16 — were also transported there, where police said they are all in stable condition.

The 7-year-old was shot once in the upper thigh. The 15-year-old boy was shot twice in the head and twice in the back. The 16-year-old boy was also shot once, in the right shoulder.

NBC Channel 10 stated that the 7-year-old was not part of the group, but struck by a stray bullet.

That’s all the Inquirer had, one boy killed, and three others, at least two of whom were male, wounded.

In the meantime, Philly Crime Update tweeted, at 7:59 PM EDT, “🚨TRIPLE SHOOTING at 4800 Tackawanna St. possibly a 4th victim at Einstein stand by”.

The 4800 block of Tackawanna Street, in the Frankford section of Philadelphia, is a mix of older rowhomes and some housing project looking multi-family buildings. The 5900 block of North 21st Street consists of older rowhomes, some of which have been updated and flipped.

Now why aren’t these mass shootings? They aren’t not mass killings, but seven, and possibly eight, people were shot, and I have to wonder: how many of the victims were deliberately targeted? According to the Philadelphia Shootings Victims Dashboard, there have been 603 shootings in the City of Brotherly Love through May 8th, 118 of them fatal. May 8th was the 128th day of the year, and if fewer people have been killed this year than last, that’s still 4.71 people shot per day in Philly.

At least the way I would count it, that’s a mass shooting every day, but let’s tell the truth here: since the vast majority of the victims are black, and the vast majority of the shooters are also black, it’s way, way, way too politically incorrect to call that carnage a mass shooting.

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“Progressive” campaign workers, both packing heat, get into a shootout in Philly Nope, they weren't evil, reich-wing Republicans.

Screen capture from OnePA website, taken at 10:20 AM EDT on May 9, 2023. Click to enlarge.

When people tell you who they are, believe them!

What does OnePA support? They support depriving property owners of their rights by opposing eviction for non-payment of rent. They are, simply put, socialists and a group opposed to law enforcement. And naturally, they support Helen Gym Flaherty!

A Philly campaign worker for a progressive political group fatally shot another canvasser in East Germantown, police say

Both men were canvassing for the city’s upcoming primary election on behalf of OnePA. Police said it was not immediately clear what sparked the shooting.

by Sean Collins Walsh, Chris Palmer, and Ellie Rushing | Monday, May 8, 2023 | 9:44 PM EDT

A 46-year-old man was fatally shot on Monday afternoon in East Germantown while canvassing for the city’s upcoming mayoral primary, police said, in an incident that stemmed from a dispute with a 22-year-old man, who was also canvassing on behalf of OnePA, a progressive-leaning political group.

It was not immediately clear what prompted the 22-year-old to shoot the older man, and police declined to identify either of them.

The tragedy on the campaign trail came one week before high-stakes mayoral and City Council elections that have been defined by debates about public-safety issues amid the city’s ongoing gun violence crisis.

OnePA Executive Director Steve Paul said members of the group were “heartbroken, and our condolences and sympathy are with their family.”

At this point in the article, an advertisement appears, something that stops a lot of readers.

“Today, a One PA team member tragically lost their life,” Paul said in a statement. “We are mourning this senseless loss and continuing to gather the facts and investigate what happened.”

Paul previously worked in the Council office of Helen Gym, who is now a mayoral candidate running in the May 16 primary with the backing of OnePA and other progressive organizations. The group is also canvassing on behalf of Council candidates Seth Oberman-Anderson, Rue Landau, Amanda McIllmurray, Isaiah Thomas, and Erika Almirón.

So, it took Inquirer reporters Sean Collins Walsh, Chris Palmer, and Ellie Rushing six paragraphs to let readers know that the canvassers were canvassing for Helen Gym Flaherty. If a reader’s only news source was the Inky — mine isn’t — wouldn’t he wonder for whom OnePA was canvassing? I sure hope his attention span was long enough to get past the first advertisement!

The 22-year-old — who was in legal possession of his handgun — remained on the scene afterward the shooting and was taken to the homicide unit to be questioned by detectives, according to Chief Inspector Scott Small. The 22-year-old’s car was also still on the street after the crime, Small said, and OnePA pamphlets could be seen in its passenger seat.

Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore said the victim and the man accused of shooting him knew each other and began arguing after they “happened upon each other” on the 2000 block of Church Lane[1]At or near the intersection with Lambert Street, near the Church Lane Food Market, a bodega. around 4 p.m. Vanore was not certain what the argument was about, but said detectives were investigating the possibility that it related to an existing dispute.

Staff Inspector Ernest Ransom, the head of the Police Department’s homicide unit, said that the two men “had always had a beef,” and that when they crossed paths on the street, the 46-year-old pulled out a gun — which was not registered to him — and the 22-year-old then pulled his firearm, shooting the older man once in the armpit.

The shooter claimed that he was acting in self-defense, but the important part to note is that both men were packing heat, one of them illegally, while canvassing, in broad daylight, for Mrs Flaherty. No wonder the guy carrying illegally was part of OnePA, ’cause he certainly seems to support the voting ‘rights’ of felons.

The candidate, of course, prefers sending “non-police mental health mobile crisis units” to reduce the city’s “gun violence” crisis, but perhaps there were no social workers in the canvassing crews.

Mrs Flaherty expressed sorrow, but made it clear that the shooter and his victim were not part of her official campaign.

In a statement issued Monday night, Gym said she was “devastated to hear about the tragic death of a canvasser today.”

“My thoughts are with the family of the victim, the One PA community, and everyone impacted by this irrevocable loss,” Gym said. “Though the canvasser was not part of our campaign, this loss is deeply felt by all of us.”

If Mrs Flaherty, who promises to “Get illegal guns off our streets,” and to “Provide interventions to stop those in the path of violence,” had anything to say about people canvassing for her carrying guns, the Inquirer never mentioned it.

References

References
↑1 At or near the intersection with Lambert Street, near the Church Lane Food Market, a bodega.
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Hold them accountable! The good old boys’ network strikes again

I have frequently called out The Philadelphia Inquirer for poor reporting, so it is only fair when I note when they do good journalism.

The quiet handling of rape allegations at two Philly health institutions

How Jefferson and Rothman dealt with an alleged sexual assault involving an orthopedic surgeon and a medical resident.

by Wendy Ruderman | Monday, May 8, 2023

It was almost midnight and Jessica Phillips, a doctor training in orthopedic surgery, was one of the few guests remaining at a pool party that surgeon John Abraham hosted each summer for Thomas Jefferson University medical residents at his nine-bedroom Main Line home.

Phillips sat in an Adirondack-style chair by a stone fire pit with Abraham, a (Thomas) Jefferson (University) professor and division chief at the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, a private practice whose physicians work at the university’s hospitals.

The band had packed up, and caterers had cleared the wine glasses and plates smeared with cocktail sauce. Abraham handed her a lit Cuban cigar. She later remembered being so drunk she dropped it on her pants.

The medical resident remembered little else afterward. In flashes, while in and out of consciousness, she recalled Abraham on top of her on the ornate rug in his library. She awoke in his bedroom naked and bruised, she later told multiple investigators.

In Abraham’s recollection, Phillips pulled him on top of her on the library floor, court records show, while his judgment was impaired by alcohol. Nonetheless, in a text message sent to his boss after the party, Abraham acknowledged it was “unethical” to have sex with a medical resident.

It’s a very long story, and there’s a lot of he said/she said in it. Both physicians were intoxicated, both married, though Dr Abraham, then 43-years-old, was going through a divorce, and neither was really capable of consent. As her supervisor, Dr Abraham was contractually barred from a sexual relationship with a subordinate. An investigation resulted in no criminal charges. This is being made public because both Dr Abraham and Dr Phillips are suing.

The events of the June 2018 party spurred three separate investigations and three lawsuits – all now rolling back the confidentiality that usually cloaks how major institutions handle sexual misconduct claims. The cases chronicle sex, power and money in the male-dominated world of orthopedic surgery.

Both Phillips and Abraham say they were victims. They blame Jefferson and Rothman for protecting their institutional interests despite federal regulations that are supposed to ensure sexual assault cases are dealt with fairly.

Ahhh, yes, “protecting their institutional interests”. That’s what “institutions” do!

Jefferson used the threat of federal reporting requirements to force Abraham out of its hospitals while evading formal reports that would let other institutions know what happened.

Then Jefferson’s and Rothman’s leadership brokered a deal that avoided a sexual misconduct hearing and ultimately closed an investigation opened under the federal Title IX law prohibiting sex-based discrimination.

Rothman’s all-male board of directors decided not to fire Abraham. Instead, they restricted him from working in Jefferson’s hospitals or interacting with Jefferson residents. Eventually, they moved him to a hospital network not affiliated with Jefferson in New Jersey.

I remember when then-District Attorney Seth Williams went hard after Monsignor William Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s supervisor of priest assignments, who was convicted on one of two counts of child endangerment for “knowingly placing minors in danger when he reassigned troubled priests to parishes where they would have access to children.” Msgr Lynn wound up serving almost three years of his three-to-six year sentence, when his conviction was overturned, twice actually, for Mr Williams and Judge Teresa Sarmina misapplying the law.

So, with all of this, why isn’t current Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner going after Thomas Jefferson University and the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute for doing what is a very similar thing? According to the Inquirer, Rothman basically moved Dr Abraham to someplace where his conduct wasn’t widely known, and to a hospital network outside of their control . . . and their liability.

Amid investigations by the university and Rothman, Abraham said, a Jefferson top doctor offered him a deal in a private conversation: Take a voluntary leave, and we won’t report the alleged sexual misconduct.

Congress generally expects health institutions employing doctors accused of wrongdoing to file a report into the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), a federal tracking system.

Hospitals must query the data bank before credentialing a newly hired doctor to ensure that the person hasn’t gotten into trouble elsewhere. Data bank reports also go to state licensing boards.

In court depositions, Abraham recalled getting a phone call from Edmund Pribitkin, chief physician and executive vice president of Jefferson Health, telling him that he had to take an immediate leave of absence from Jefferson.

If he didn’t do as told, Pribitkin said, the sexual assault allegations would go before the hospital’s medical executive committee and they’d likely have to report him to the NPDB, according to Abraham.

So, Rothman essentially blackmailed Dr Abraham into taking an immediate leave, by saying that the Institute would commit a crime by not reporting the sexual assault allegations. Perhaps it’s not just the District Attorney who needs to look into this, but the United States Attorney as well, given that this is an allegation of violation of federal law.

There’s a lot more information at the Inky’s original, and it’s not limited to subscribers, though if you access more than a few articles a month, the paywall does come down.

As a Mass-every-Sunday Catholic, I was very disappointed with the allegations against Msgr Lynn. At most, I saw what he was alleged to have done as a crime by Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, but when this became a criminal case, the Cardinal, by then retired, 88-years-old, and suffering from cancer and dementia, couldn’t be tried. Early in the trial, Judge Sarmina ruled that Cardinal Bevilacqua was able and competent to give testimony as a witness in the case, but just two days after her ruling, the Cardinal died in his sleep. But while Mr Williams and Judge Sarmina misapplied the law as it stood, which resulted in an unfair, and eventually reversed, conviction, the point that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia shuffled around offending priests to keep them from being defrocked or, worse, charged, tried, and convicted in sexual abuse cases was a valid one. Supervisory officials such as then Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, who was responsible for oversight of the campus police department, were all held accountable for covering up former Assistant Football Coach Jerry Sandusky’s rape of a young boy, though they were incarcerated for just a couple of months each.

The Inquirer’s story is the first step, and now law enforcement needs to look into this case. Yeah, there are some wealthy and powerful interests involved here, people able to pay for major league legal help, but the potential prosecution has plenty of money as well. Hold them accountable, and maybe some other good old boys network will think twice before covering up things.

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Danielle Outlaw will probably fire another good cop

To be a Philly cop, you must be politically correct and like totally #woke!

A Philly detective who handles sex crimes is under investigation for allegedly posting crude tweets about women, police say

Ron Kahlan’s account often tweeted vulgar sexual innuendo and used boorish language. Internal Affairs is investigating, police said.

by Chris Palmer and Ellie Rushing | Sunday, May 7, 2023 | 4:21 _PM EDT

A detective in the Philadelphia Police Department’s special victims unit who is assigned to investigate sex crimes is under internal investigation for a series of offensive tweets posted on his account over the years, including a number of crude sexual remarks about women.

“The only reason [I’m] watching the Phils now is because [of] the hot chick behind the on-deck circle!!!” read a tweet posted on Ron Kahlan’s Twitter page in 2012. That post was among the tamest of the tweets Kahlan allegedly wrote that were shared Saturday by an Instagram account called WatchOutPhilly.

In 2012? Holy calculator, Batman, that was 11 years ago! More, it was the latest of the tweets shown in the links; all of the rest pictured are dated in 2011.

In others, Kahlan’s account replied to pages such as “@ILikeGirlsDaily” with vulgar sexual innuendo and boorish language.

Many of the tweets in question were from 2011 or 2012, according to an Inquirer review. In more recent years, Kahlan’s account — which used the handle “@rkppd” — tended to comment instead on politics, often by making disparaging remarks about Democrats, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs.

If you read the entire article, you will note that nowhere in it is any contention that he wrote in any way differently about male Democrats. And the Inky’s story does not indicate any of the social media activities “with vulgar sexual innuendo and boorish language” occurred later than 2012.

In February, his account re-tweeted a post from another account asking if Christine Blasey Ford — the woman who accused then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault — should be arrested.

So, he didn’t write it himself, but retweeted someone else. And a lot people have thought that Dr Ford’s completely unsubstantiated allegations, in an attempt to deny Justice Kavanaugh confirmation, should entail some consequences for her, especially given that Mr Kavanaugh had actually kept detailed engagement calendars from the time, and none indicated that he ever attended the event Dr Ford alleged that he did. Why shouldn’t Dr Ford’s false allegations subject her to some negative consequences?

The Inquirer continues to note that the case has been turned over to Internal Affairs.

Many of the tweets on Kahlan’s page were crude, including comments about woman’s appearances and vulgar descriptions of sex acts.

Shockingly, it appears that Detective Kahlan is a normal male, attracted to women. No wonder the left are appalled!

You know what else isn’t in there? There are no allegations that the Detective unjustifiably threw any cases.

Kahlan, a 24-year veteran of the force, is not the first Philadelphia officer to come under scrutiny for his social media presence. In 2019, advocates with the Plain View Project published a database of racist or offensive Facebook posts or comments made by hundreds of city cops.

The Police Department went on to fire 15 officers and discipline dozens of others for what they wrote, an unprecedented undertaking. Still, some officers have since won their jobs back in arbitration proceedings mandated under the city’s contract with the police union.

So, the city engaged in a rush to judgement, and had to reinstate some of the officers.

Clearly, the standard is that a Philadelphia police officer must have zero social media presence, unless all of his postings are either innocuous things about birthdays and puppies and kittens, or politically support Democrats. I’m pretty sure that if Detective Kahlan had tweeted “Helen Gym is very attractive,” it would have been acceptable.

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‘Decarceration’ is deadly to black Americans The problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time.

It was two months ago that Congress, which is normally hands off but does have jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, rejected the city’s attempt to overhaul its criminal law, an attempt which would have reduced or eliminated mandatory minimums.

Crime has increased in our nation’s capital, increased dramatically this year. The chart at the right is from the city’s Metropolitan Police Department, and was current as of 12:00 AM EDT on Friday, May 5th. You’d think that the residents of the District would want safer streets, but the far-left leadership apparently do not.

Well, the city’s retiring police chief has spoken out:

In D.C., many killers were previously jailed. We deserve better.

by Colbert I King, Washington Post Columnist | Friday, May 5, 2023 | 3:24 PM EDT

The average person arrested for homicide has been arrested 11 times previously, said D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III during a March news conference on D.C. crime with Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). Contee’s widely publicized statement drew a comment from Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga.), an outspoken opponent of the D.C. Council criminal code reform bill that Congress recently rejected. Carter said the chief’s statement “means that before someone commits the horrible act of ending an innocent life, they’ve already left — at least — 11 other victims in their wake.”

D.C. police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck told me this week that Contee’s statement was based on data in the department’s records management system. Asked for clarification on the meaning of the number, Sternbeck said, “The 11 prior arrests include various crimes, and not just homicide offenses.” Contee, who is retiring in June, added another dimension to the arrest data. He said during the news conference that “the average homicide victim … also has been arrested 10 or 11 times prior to them being a homicide victim.”

Is anyone really surprised by that? While the numbers may vary from city-to-city — and many of my reports deal with Philadelphia — the trend is the same, bad guys killing other bad guys.

A December 2021 analysis of shootings and homicides in the District, conducted by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, sheds some light on both the scope of gun violence and Contee’s observations regarding D.C. arrest histories.

The NICJR report aggregates what is anecdotally known or suspected. It found that across homicides and shootings, victims and suspects are demographically similar — about 96 percent of those in both categories in homicides and nonfatal shootings were Black, while about 65 percent were between the ages of 18 and 34. Roughly 90 percent were male.

In addition, and to underscore Contee’s statements, approximately 86 percent of homicide victims and suspects were previously known to the criminal justice system. About 46 percent had been incarcerated, according to the report.

So, if both killers and victims are very likely to have been, to use the euphemism, “previously known to the criminal justice system,” wouldn’t one very powerful way to reduce homicides be to prosecute them seriously, and incarcerate them to the maximum allowed under the law, because criminals, and apparently their victims as well, aren’t out on the streets and able to kill or be killed.

If you decide to do a Google search for mass incarceration, you’ll get “About 24,400,000 results”, and at least the first one shown are all lathered up about the horrors of mass incarceration. The Sentencing Project tell us:

Fifty years ago, the United States embarked on a path of mass incarceration that has led to a staggering increase in the prison population. Today, almost 2 million individuals – disproportionately Black Americans – are incarcerated in our nation’s prisons and jails. The prison population has grown 500% since 1973, the year America began to sharply increase its prison population.

But when the statistics given above noted that 96% of the murders and shootings in Washington, DC, had both perpetrator and victim being black, in a city where only 43% of the population are black, the notion that incarcerated prisoners are “disproportionately black Americans” seems kind of silly; incarceration depends on who actually commits crimes, not on their percentage of the population.

Nor is Washington somehow different. While few police departments report racial breakdowns on a daily basis, the St Louis Metropolitan Police Department does, and in a city in which 44.8% of the population are black, 87.8% of murder victims so far this year have been black, and 35 out of 38 identified suspects, 92.1%, were also black.

Yet the ‘decarceration‘ movement is all about the fact that so many black Americans are in jail, ‘disproportionately’ to their percentage of the population, but seemingly far less disproportionately to the who are committing crimes.

Simply put, the decarceration movement is all about getting more black Americans murdered! Oh, the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter activists might not realize it — or admit it if they do — but that’s what the statistics show.

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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