Category Archives: Culture

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

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

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

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

Pamela Price, photo via The Washington Examiner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Grady, photo via Fox 29 News.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2020, the City of Brotherly Love had 499 ‘official’ homicides, though, as we have noted, several times, the change in the Philadelphia Police Department’s statistics, down from the 502 homicides initially reported for 2020, down to 499, one short of the then-all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under the ‘leadership’ of then-Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame. I made a totally rookie mistake, and failed to get a screen capture of that, but a Twitter fellow styling himself NDJinPhilly was apparently smarter than me that particular time, took the screen shot, and then tweeted it to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have previously noted that many of the credentialed media journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading have complained about Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News and his unsoftened coverage of crime in the city. Now, what I have previously referred to as The Philadelphia Enquirer[2]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. are combitching again, but they have been lying in their complaints.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But here comes the biggest lie of all:

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

We previously reported that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse in 2021: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

‘Sound of Freedom’ puts the adrenaline hormone to work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Rasheed Banks, Jr, via WVPI-TV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Death in Killadelphia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

References
↑1 My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year.
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How wealthy New Englanders fight #ClimateChange A family which showed some sense.

West Roxbury project house, before remodel. Photo by Meg Reinhardt. Click to enlarge.

We have previously noted how the wealthy New England homeowners featured in the Public Broadcasting System’s famous, long-running This Old House series, from areas which gave the large majority of their votes to the Democrats, still love them some fossil fuels. and if the previous sentence seems familiar, it should, because I used it just eight days ago.

Now, yet another house in that show has caught my attention, the 1894 Victorian in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts project, in which architect Derek Rubinoff, his wife Robyn Marder, and their two teenagers, Zach and Aria, went for a full remodel after a call to a painter revealed that the “decades-old cedar clapboards had started to rot,” meaning that the entire exterior would need to be stripped and redone.

While I couldn’t find the cost of the project, realtor.com informs us that, in June of 2023, the median home listing price was $727,000, while the median sales price was only slightly lower, at $720,000.

Noting as we have previously that the global warming climate change activists want to ban gas heating, gas ranges, gas water heaters, and all other gas appliances, to save Mother Gaia, when the series began to run on the Magnolia Network — which I like, but never should have been sold to Chip and Joanna Gaines — I paid close attention, to see if these wealthy New Englanders went along with the proposals for trashing gas appliances for electric.

And, at least in one respect, they tried a little bit. In Season 43, Episode 20 of This Old House, the show’s plumbing and heating expert Richard Trethewey showed us that the family added a heat pump for central air conditioning and heating when it wasn’t too cold outside, but they retained the original gas furnace for the depths of a Massachusetts winter. The kitchen tour, shown in Episode 25, appeared to show — the perspective I had was poor — that the family had opted for an electric, possibly induction, range top. The ovens, separate units on a different wall, could have been either gas or electric.

So, what did this family do? Well, they went at least half-way toward meeting the activists’ goals, by adding the heat pump to the system. But, like other New England families who could, they were smart enough to keep a newer, though still existing, natural gas furnace as at least a backup; they were not going suffer a too cold house during a New England winter!

Under Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat, there are proposals for a new statewide building code in which the use of natural gas systems could — not immediately would — be banned in new construction by municipalities, and includes the interesting, and I believe smart, provision that new home construction should be pre-wired for conversion from natural gas to electric appliances should future homeowners want to make a change, without the need for expensive rewiring. It also mandates wiring be put in place for electric automobile charging units, though it does not require that those units be installed.

Mandates? I don’t like them at all. But I do believe that these are simple and relatively inexpensive things a builder should do to increase the value of a new home

When we replaced our already-failing electric water heater with a propane one, I left the wiring in place, just in case it was ever needed in the future, though I disconnected it from the electric panel. I have also said that, were I building homes, I would include the wiring for electric car chargers, because that’s far cheaper to do during construction when the walls are open, than to retrofit such into an existing structure. I have long planned to include such wiring in my garage before I fully enclose the walls, simply to add resale value, because the breaker, wiring, and NEMA 14-50 receptacle just aren’t that expensive.

I can’t complain about the Rubinoff family and how they spent their money. They did add features to the home that would make sense for those worried about global warmingclimate change, but they also showed that they have some actual sense, in maintaining a gas hookup and heating system capable of keeping the place warm when it gets bitterly cold. Considering that they are heating their home the same way we do, a heat pump — which was already in place when we moved here, though the unit had to be replaced after being destroyed in the 2021 flood — but with a propane fireplace for backup when the power fails or it gets too cold outside for the heat pump to keep up, yeah, I believe they have acted wisely. But in wintry New England, the government should never mandate electric-only heating systems.

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More bullets fly in Philly!

We have have previously noted that for The Philadelphia Inquirer, unless a shooting or murder victim is an ‘innocent,’ someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news.

Well, another ‘innocent’ has been shot, though not killed, so the Inky is all over it.

11-year-old shot in West Philadelphia late Wednesday night

Police have yet to release a description of the shooter, who they believe fired 30 shoots along 52nd Street in West Philadelphia on Wednesday night.

by Beatrice Forman | Thursday, July 20, 2023 | 7:56 AM EDT

An 11-year-old girl and a man were struck during a shootout in West Philadelphia late Wednesday night.

Note that there were two victims in this case, an 11-year-old girl and a 32-year-old man, but only the child is mentioned in the headline.

Police said the shooting happened around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday and spans several intersections along 52nd Street, where they found a trail of shell casings, 6ABC reported. The girl was struck in the hip while shopping while shopping with her mother, according to police.

“We of course believe that since she’s only 11 years old, she was struck by stray gunfire,” Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters.

Map of 52nd and Market Streets.

To briefly summarize, the Philadelphia Police found about 30 ejected shell casings, in “clusters,” near the 52nd and Market Streets SEPTA elevated train station, as well as nearby Ludlow Street. The Police are unsure whether the injured man was the intended target, or another bystander.

There is no description of the shooter at this time. Police are checking city-operated real-time crime cameras for footage.

The Police will have to get lucky! With a high of 82ºF and low of 70ºF in Philly yesterday, odds will still be high that the shooters were wearing hooded sweatshirts and masks!

These cameras, which have been installed near recreation centers and schools among other places, were first meant to be a crime deterrent, but have since become an important part of shooting investigations.

A deterrent? Thirty or so shell casings would seem to indicate a gang, oops, sorry, ‘street group,’ shoot-out.

As we noted yesterday, the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating defense attorney now serving as Philadelphia’s chief prosecutor, is asking for “bipartisan, common-sense gun control legislation,” so I have to ask: just what would the legislation Larry Krasner wants have done to stop this gun battle? He wants Pennsylvania to pass a “red flag” law, under which a complaint that a firearms owner was agitated or under some stress could have his firearms confiscated, supposedly temporarily, without him ever being charged with or convicted of any crime, and to restrict private sales of firearms between individuals to require that they, too, be subject to background checks.

Is anyone here really naïve enough to believe that either of these laws, had they been in place, would have stopped a gang ‘street group’ gunfight? The probability that, if the gang ‘street groups’ members are identified, the shooters are under 18, and legally barred from owning or possessing handguns is pretty high. But whether they are legally minors or otherwise, the fact that they were willing to engage in a gunfight in the first place tells us that obeying the law is not particularly high on their list of priorities.

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Philly District Attorney who doesn’t enforce existing gun laws wants “bipartisan, common-sense gun control legislation” He wants gun laws that impact law-abiding citizens, not the criminals

I have seen the image at the left used many times, though a site search on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website for “We do not believe that arresting people” yielded zero returns. However we did document something very similar:

District Attorney Larry Krasner, who has reduced prosecutions for illegal firearms possession when the police have made the arrests, said[1]100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 30 of the document, page 32 of the .pdf file.:

The urgency of Philadelphia’s crisis of fatal and non-fatal shootings will not be met by looking away from shootings. As noted above, City Council has led a valuable “100 Shooter Review,” a title that makes clear what we already know: that shootings are the primary issue. Our efforts must be focused on preventing shootings and holding people who commit shootings accountable, and we should not accept arrests for gun possession as a substitute.

And:

This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society. We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.

And[2]100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 30-31 of the document, page 32-33 of the .pdf file.:

Gun possession arrests that involve no violent acts present a secondary and important frontier in curbing gun violence, but must be targeted to distinguish between drivers of gun violence who possess firearms illegally and otherwise law-abiding people who are not involved in gun violence. On the one hand, the cases of people charged with 6105[3]There are two main categories of illegal gun possession cases in Philadelphia: Possession of a firearm by a person who has been prohibited from carrying gun due to a past serious conviction or other … Continue reading (prohibited person in possession of a firearm) are carefully scrutinized to do individual justice, which will usually look like vigorous prosecution. On the other hand, another criminal charge that applies to people who have no felony conviction (carrying a gun in Philadelphia without having obtained a permit in Philadelphia) is only a felony in Philadelphia. The exact same offense in every other county in Pennsylvania (carrying a firearm without a permit to carry) is only a misdemeanor offense.

Why do I bring this up? The District Attorney was in Harrisburg today, shilling for “bipartisan, common-sense gun control legislation.” The obvious question arises: if Mr Krasner and the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office is not going to prosecute the gun control laws already on the books, when the malefactors are already in custody, just what good would “bipartisan, common-sense gun control legislation” do?

Fortunately, the state Senate is controlled by Republicans, and the state House of Representatives, which had a bare 102-101 Democratic majority, is now down to a 101-101 tie, after a Democratic Representative resigned. Under House rules, the Democrats will retain parliamentary control, but they can’t run roughshod over the GOP as long as Republicans stay united.

The state House has begun its summer break, and is not scheduled to reconvene until September.

As I write this, The Philadelphia Inquirer has not yet reported the story, so whatever Philly’s George Soros-sponsored, police-hating, former defense lawyer now serving as chief prosecutor means by “bipartisan, common-sense gun control legislation” is unclear, but these things usually boil down to one thing: making it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to buy firearms, while the criminals, who don’t obey the law in the first place, won’t be stymied by new legislation.

Mr Krasner and his office believe that the real problem isn’t bad people, but “systemic racism:”

shootings are far more associated with systemic racism and the disinvestment and poverty that it has caused in Philadelphia than they are any particular criminal profile of a person.[4]100 Shooting Review Committee Report, Appendix 7, page 137 of the document, page 139 of the .pdf file.

That, of course, is pure bovine feces: everybody knows, but no one will admit in public, what “particular criminal profile” the bad guys fit. But to admit that would mean, for the left, the complete invalidation of everything they’ve been pushing for the last several decades.

References

References
↑1 100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 30 of the document, page 32 of the .pdf file.
↑2 100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 30-31 of the document, page 32-33 of the .pdf file.
↑3 There are two main categories of illegal gun possession cases in Philadelphia: Possession of a firearm by a person who has been prohibited from carrying gun due to a past serious conviction or other prohibition (18 Pa.C.S. § 6105), and possession of a firearm without a license (18 Pa.C.S. § 6106). The former is generally viewed as the more serious illegal gun possession statute, while the latter is generally viewed as less serious than possession by a prohibited person. Both are non-violent offenses only related to illegal possession of a gun.
↑4 100 Shooting Review Committee Report, Appendix 7, page 137 of the document, page 139 of the .pdf file.