Category Archives: Culture

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Killadelphia: Could Philly see ‘only’ 450 homicides in 2023?

I have not been posting nearly as many ‘math’ stories about the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love this year, because that math is so different.

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 165 total homicides through 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 24, while the website Broad + Liberty has the total at 168. The 24th was the 144th day of the year, which leads to a homicide rate, using the ‘official’ PPD number, of 1.1458 homicides per day, on pace for 418 murders for the entire year.

Of course, that ignores the normal increase in homicides during the long, hot summer!

The number of homicides is 12.23$ lower than the same day in 2022. If we multiply that over the course of the year, that would yield a total homicide number for the year of 452.87, certainly a vast improvement over 2022’s 516 killings. Doing the same math, using 2021’s record-setting pace, the math works out to 450.15 homicides.

But then I look at 2020’s official homicide total of 499 — though there’s reason to believe that 502 is the correct figure — and the math works out quite differently. The current numbers are 12.24% higher than 2020’s homicide pace, which works out to 560.10 murders for 2023.

So, why is this significant? Because today, May 25th, is the third anniversary of the unfortunate death of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl addled convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting arrest for passing counterfeit money in Minneapolis. With that, the American left went absolutely bonkers, and killings soared. The idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protests led to more black people being killed!

The death of Mr Floyd was hardly the only tragedy of 2020, as the COVID-19 panicdemic[1]No, that isn’t a typographical error: the spelling of ‘panicdemic’ reflects exactly how I see it as having been. hit, the economy was trashed, and our civil rights unconstitutionally restricted.

But life has returned to (mostly) normal now, and with the numbers working out as they do, I have to wonder: absent another monumental stupidity like we saw three years ago, could Philadelphia see well under 500 homicides this year? Is something around 450 a reasonable projection?

References

References
↑1 No, that isn’t a typographical error: the spelling of ‘panicdemic’ reflects exactly how I see it as having been.
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The good, #progressive and environmentalist Penn students leave the streets filled with garbage Why should I take their environmentalist statements seriously when they won't live up to them personally?

Do you see those dark blue areas, just to the left of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia? The dark blue areas are the wards in which far-left ‘progressive’ Helen Gym Flaherty received the plurality of the votes cast in the Democratic mayoral primary, and the bulge toward the east is University City, where the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University are located.

The University of Pennsylvania, more commonly referred to as UPenn or just Penn, is a private, Ivy League college, the total tuition and fees of which were $63,452 for the 2022-23 academic year, not including housing. Cha-ching!

Mrs Flaherty did not win the nomination, and finished in third place, with just 22.02% of the votes, but as we have previously noted, Mrs Flaherty had:

her biggest appeal wound up being with wealthier (white) voters in the city.

Gym won 29% of the vote in precincts where people made an average of $100,000 and more and just 11% in precincts where the average income was less than $50,000 a year, an Inquirer analysis shows.

That’s why this next story is so amusing. Her support was supposedly strongest among the progressives who wanted to fight against global warming climate change and were strong environmentalists, but there’s apparently a lot of do as we say, not do as we do there:

A non-exhaustive list of trash Penn students left on the streets of Philadelphia

As students move out for the year, it’s “Penn Christmas” — or trash apocalypse.

by Zoe Greenberg | Wednesday, May 24, 2023 | 7:05 AM EDT

When University of Pennsylvania students evacuate their off-campus houses each spring, looking forward to bright summers and brighter futures, one thing stays behind on the streets of Philadelphia: their junk. This season in West Philly is sometimes called “Penn Christmas” because of the potential hidden treasures buried in the trash; it’s seen by others as pure disaster.

In honor of this annual event, we compiled a non-exhaustive list of the detritus we observed on four city blocks surrounding Penn’s campus this year. (Penn commencement was May 15, so there were not many treasures left):

Rather than reprint author Zoe Greenberg’s non-exhaustive list, I chose to include her photo, as fair-use documentation. A picture, it has been said, is worth a thousand words, and another photo she took shows a discarded love seat, as well as some carpeting ripped up, cardboard, and other trash left on the curb. There are also other photos, taken by staff photographer Monica Herndon.

Miss Greenberg’s Inquirer bio tells us that she specializes in the city’s “youth culture, gender, sexuality, and how people make money and meaning.” So what, I have to ask, is the “meaning” behind wealthy and well-to-do students, students who, in the main, are progressive and environmentalist, leaving their junk on the city’s streets?

Well, the “meaning” I take is simple: why should I take seriously the global warming climate change and environmental activist statements of people who, again, overall, don’t seem to show any real concern for the environment themselves?

One wonders what the working-class Philadelphia Sanitation Department workers think about the good, privileged Ivy League students who made 42nd Street and Baltimore Avenue look like Kensington for a week, as those workers have to pick up the trash strewn around.

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In trying to avoid calling street gangs gangs, The Philadelphia Inquirer has again beclowned itself

We have expended some bandwidth mocking The Philadelphia Inquirer for its statement that there are no real gangs in the City of Brotherly Love:

In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.

We also mocked the George Soros-sponsored defense mouthpiece who is now the city’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, when his office decided to refer to them as rival street groups. And we pointed out, at the end of last year, that what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. was still using euphemisms to refer to gangs those cliques of young men, though the word “gang” in one article, apparently for prosaic reasons, since the term “street group” had been used previously in the same sentence.

Since then, we have noted the newspaper’s adoption of the term “street groups.”

And now? The Enquirer Inquirer is taking a silly effort to justify it!

North Philadelphia street group ‘BNG’ members have been charged in multiple shootings

Prosecutors say four men committed a string of shootings in 2021 that left two people dead and five others injured.

by Ellie Rushing | Tuesday, May 23, 2023

The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office on Tuesday announced charges against four young men affiliated with a North Philadelphia street group that investigators say committed a string of shootings in 2021 that left two people dead and five others injured.

Following a more than year-long investigation, prosecutors charged four men they say are affiliated with the group “BNG” or “Big Naddy Gang” — named after a 15-year-old boy known as “Naddy” who was fatally shot in April 2021.

So, the “street group” members call themselves a “gang,” but the Inky can’t? 🙂

After the teen was killed, prosecutors said, his friends — seeking retaliation and local notoriety — formed BNG and committed at least five shootings in the next six months, chronicling the violence along the way on social media, in rap songs, and in texts to one another.

District Attorney Larry Krasner said Tuesday that the young men wrote in one text that they “put the ‘h’ in homicide.”

“Today, we’re going to put the ‘j’ in jail,” the DA said.

One does wonder whether Mr Krasner had the opportunity to put the ‘j’ in jail for the accused previously, but declined to do so.

Mugshots via 6ABC News, because the Inquirer would never publish them.

The story went on to describe the crimes allegedly committed by the members of the gang, Dontae Sutton, then 17, Jamir Brunson-Gans, 18 at the time, Elijah Soto, then 16, and Khalil Henry, then 17.

Brunson-Gans and Soto have each been charged with murder, attempted murder, and related crimes.

Henry has been charged with murder, two counts of attempted murder, and related offenses.

Sutton has been charged with murder, four counts of attempted murder, and many additional crimes.

Since three of the four were under 18 at the times of their alleged offenses, the obvious question becomes: will Mr Krasner charge them as adults, or juveniles? Mr Soto has already had that break previously:

Soto was arrested in January 2022 and charged with conspiracy and simple assault after court records say he and three others attacked, kicked, and stabbed a juvenile. A court spokesperson said the adult charges against Soto were withdrawn and the case was transferred to juvenile court.

Here’s where the Inky gets funny:

This is the third sprawling indictment of a Philadelphia street group in just the last six months, as the District Attorney’s Office, in partnership with local and federal police, try to crack down on the numerous street groups across Philadelphia.

Those groups — which prosecutors call gangs, a label sometimes contested by community members given the groups’ small size and fluid structure and membership — are often made up of a small group of friends, mostly young men, largely from the same neighborhood. Many are involved in the drill rap scene, and their music and social media posts often chronicle — and fuel — shootings, authorities say.

So, even the District Attorney calls them gangs now, but The Philadelphia Inquirer will not? One wonders: what is the minimum size at which a “street group” becomes a “gang” as far as the Inky is concerned? Maybe when they call themselves Bloods or Crips?

At what point do the editors and the publisher of the Inquirer realize just how foolish they look? Everyone reading the Inky’s stories knows that they mean “gang” when they write “street group,” so it isn’t as though the newspaper is somehow fooling anybody.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Shockingly, our infrastructure is nowhere close to ready for government-mandated plug-in electric vehicles!

Should it really be any surprise that, as politics have pushed ending fossil fuel usage to fight global warming climate change emergency, not everything is proceeding in an orderly manner? From Popular Mechanics:

Giant Wind Turbines Keep Mysteriously Falling Over. This Shouldn’t Be Happening.

The taller the turbine, the more epic the tumble.

  • Turbine failures are on the uptick across the world, sometimes with blades falling off or even full turbine collapses.
  • A recent report says production issues may be to blame for the mysterious increase in failures.
  • Turbines are growing larger as quality control plans get smaller.

by Tim Newcomb | January 23, 2023

Oops! Via National Wind Watch. Click to enlarge.

The taller the wind turbine, the harder they fall. And they sure are falling.Wind turbine failures are on the uptick, from Oklahoma to Sweden and Colorado to Germany, with all three of the major manufacturers admitting that the race to create bigger turbines has invited manufacturing issues, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Multiple turbines that are taller than 750 feet are collapsing across the world, with the tallest—784 feet in stature—falling in Germany in September 2021. To put it in perspective, those turbines are taller than both the Space Needle in Seattle and the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. Even smaller turbines that recently took a tumble in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Wales, and Colorado were about the height of the Statue of Liberty.

The story continues to tell readers that the manufacturers of these ever-larger turbines — the larger the turbine blades, the more wind energy they can capture — are experiencing all sorts of quality control and manufacturing problems, as these things are being rushed to market, to meet politically ginned-up demand.

The illustration I used? I did a Google search for collapsed wind turbine, and got about 1,250,000 results. Examples abound.

Machinery fails. That’s just a fact of life, modern machinery requires routine maintenance, and things can fail. Structures like wind turbines, set atop tall, slender towers hundreds of feet into the air, catch a lot of kinetic energy, and the wind turbines are designed not just deflect that energy, but to absorb and capture it. That is a tremendous amount of physical stress, on every part: the tower, the blades, the mechanicals inside the turbine housing, and the foundation. Imperfections, cracks in concrete footings, several different things can lead to such failures.

There are other problems, as well:

America is on a fast road to adopting electric cars. Philly is already falling behind.

Charging stations in every cranny of the city will transform public thoroughfares as profoundly as street lights and underground sewers did a century ago.

by Inga Saffron | Saturday, May 20, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Ever since Henry Ford turned automobiles into a mass market commodity, the parking and fueling of cars have been seen as two distinct activities, carried out at different times, in different places. That’s about to change.

See? I subscribe to the Inquirer so that you don’t have to! I’m not certain why the newspaper would restrict a labeled Opinion article to subscribers only, but it did.

Last month, the Biden administration rolled out new regulations intended to dramatically ramp up the production of electric vehicles and reduce our reliance on the gasoline-powered variety, a major contributor to climate change. The new rules put America on a very fast road to an all-electric future: In just seven years time, 60% of all new cars sold in the United States will have to run on batteries.

And Philadelphia isn’t remotely ready to handle them.

It’s easy to think of electric cars as simply old wine in new bottles; all we have to do is just trade in our gas guzzlers for EVs and that will be that. But because EVs now take four to six hours to fully charge, Philadelphia will need tens of thousands of spots where car owners can park and plug in. Providing charging stations in every cranny of the city will transform our public thoroughfares as profoundly as streetlights and underground sewers did a century ago.

Let’s be clear about this: when Inga Saffron, who writes about buildings and design for The Philadelphia Inquirer, tells us that “EVs now take four to six hours to fully charge,” she is writing about 220-volt 40-or-50-amphere at-home chargers. 480-volt commercial charging stations can do so in around an hour, while 110-volt at home units can take longer than the night. Charging times naturally vary based on the charging unit, the age of the vehicle’s battery, and how much charge remained in them when charging began.

Since few Philadelphia car owners have garages or private parking spaces, it seems likely that the city’s future charging network will end up in that public nether land between the curb and sidewalk. Unless the city takes a strong hand in the design and placement of electric chargers, we could soon see a land rush as people claim curb space for ad hoc charger installations, resulting in the same kind of chaos we had with streeteries. And given the amount of street furniture already vying for curb space — traffic signs, mailboxes, bike racks, and Big Bellies — the visual clutter would be extreme.

The “public nether land between the curb and sidewalk”? In many Philly neighborhoods, there is no such thing: the sidewalks extend from the front of the rowhouse right up to the curb. Parking in many of Philadelphia’s cramped, working-class neighborhoods is challenging, with many cars parked on sidewalks, because there’s just nowhere else to park.

South Carlisle Street, Photo via Google Maps, click to enlarge.

According to Zillow, 2543 South Carlisle Street sold for a quarter of a million dollars, $247,000 to be precise, and it had no parking. The photo shows that cars are lined up on one side of South Carlisle, but half of the street has no parking place in front of it at all, and there is no alley parking behind the units. The people on the side of South Carlisle with parking could, I suppose, install charging ports on the fronts of their homes, or perhaps underneath the small sidewalks to right at the curb line, to avoid the trip hazard of a charging cord across the sidewalk, but if you live on the side, the odd-numbered side, without parking, you’re just s(omewhat) out of luck. You might snag a parking place across the street, if you’re lucky, but you won’t be able to install a car charger. And if you did, roving bands of junkies would snag the power cords while you were charging your car overnight, to sell the copper for their next fix.

The good news is that the Kenney administration is finally starting to think about the massive changes that will be necessary once electric cars go mainstream. The Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability hopes to hire an EV specialist before (Mayor Jim) Kenney’s term ends this year, its policy director, Christopher Puchalsky, told me. But that doesn’t mean transportation officials are committed to building a charging network.

“Electric vehicles are an industry problem,” not a city one, Puchalsky said. “We can’t be in a situation again where the city has to accommodate itself to the car.” This time, “we want to make transit a priority.”

Translation: the city will use this to force more people to use SEPTA buses and subways. That may not be a choice a lot of people would like.

The most wryly amusing part of all of this: plug-in electric vehicles are most useful in urban areas, where people have shorter trips, than for those of us out in rural areas, but people in rural areas usually have more garages and other areas in which they can park their cars and safely install chargers for them. 🙂

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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Sometimes, reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer don’t really pay attention to their sources. Dylan Purcell wrote:

Through midnight Friday there were 155 homicides citywide, a 14% decline from the same date last year.

Well, that’s what the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page said on Saturday, but, as the website states, the figures are only updated Monday through Friday during normal business hours. The 155 figure is actually from Thursday, May 18th, but Mr Purcell was apparently unaware of that. Since Mr Purcell describes himself as “a local investigative reporter specializing in data and documents that expose wrongdoing”, one would think that he’d understand his data sources better.

And I note that the template still states that the percentage change is compared to 2021, but it’s actually the change compared to 2022.

Multiple weekend shootings in Philly leave four dead, and a 17-year-old in critical condition

A 21-year-old man was killed in the triple shooting in which two teenagers were wounded

by Dylan Purcell | Saturday, May 20, 2023

Multiple shootings Friday night and early Saturday in Philadelphia left four people dead and five others hospitalized, including a 17-year-old who was in critical condition, police said.

A 21-year-old man died after suffering multiple gunshot wounds in a triple shooting on the 5600 block of Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia about 8:45 p.m. Friday, according to police. The victim was identified as Michael Goodwin, of the 1200 block of South Greylock Street.

The two other victims — a 17-year-old who is in “extremely critical condition” and a 16-year-old reported in stable condition, were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center.

Of course, Mr Purcell deleted what was actually reported, that a 21-year-old black man died, because reporting all of the news is against the Inquirer’s editorial guidelines.

Less than an hour earlier, a shooting inside a barbershop in the 2000 block of Kensington Avenue took the life of a 43-year-old man. The victim, Adinson Suarez-Marte, of the 3000 block of Hartville Street, was taken by police to Temple University Hospital for several gunshot wounds to his torso. He was pronounced shortly after arrival.

Police are seeking information on as many as eight men who they said were seen wearing dark clothing and masks. No arrests were made, or weapons recovered from the barbershop scene.

As many as eight men being sought? In other words, a gang shooting, not that the Inky uses the word “gang” anymore.

Mr Purcell also noted an apparent murder/suicide that was found shortly after midnight, which would place it under Saturday’s statistics.

The website Broad + Liberty maintains its own homicide tracker, because, quite frankly, a lot of people do not believe that the city’s statistics are completely reliable, and that site documents 160 homicides through Thursday, May 18th. B+L has a third homicide listed for the 19th, beyond the two the Inquirer reported, and does not, as of 12:40 PM EDT on Sunday, May 21st, include the reported murder/suicide.

Broad + Liberty is very careful in its collection of statistics, and includes links to its documentation of homicides; while a few of the reports are listed as media reports, the vast majority are from Philadelphia Police Department news releases or emails. This is a source Mr Purcell needs to consider, but if the Inquirer has ever questioned the PPD statistics, I’ve yet to see it.

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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

References
↑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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‘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.