Category Archives: Culture

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Helen Gym Flaherty and Broken Windows

I had started on this story ten days ago, but had dropped it. It sat in my ‘drafts’ queue for a bit, until I say this tweet from Helen Gym Flaherty,[1]Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect. formerly a Philadelphia city councilwoman, and now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Mayor:

But while the longtime activist who is typically aligned with the Democratic Party’s left wing said violence is “destroying our city and our people,” she was far from taking a tough-on-crime tone.

“I will not use this crisis to roll back the clock on civil rights,” she said. “While many people in this race will talk about public safety, let me be clear: Decades of systemic racism and disinvestment brought us to this place.”

Mrs Flaherty’s campaign website is full of the usual ‘progressive’ bromides, but, at least as of this writing, there’s no actual issues page, telling the city’s voters — of which I am not one — what she would actually do in office if elected.

But then, this self-described social justice warrior — or so I take it from this campaign website blurb — cites an article from The Philadelphia Inquirer. I’m sure that The Inquirer’s #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading columnists and staffers will be aghast that this was even published! Why, it absolutely reeks of Rudy Guiliani and “broken windows policing“.

Renovating abandoned houses reduces the rate of gun violence, Penn study finds

Gun crimes went up during the study, but they went up less near houses that got new doors and windows, at a cost of $5,900.

by Tom Avril | Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Hammers and screwdrivers might be effective tools in preventing gun violence.

That’s the conclusion of a new study by University of Pennsylvania researchers, who measured crime rates near clusters of abandoned Philadelphia homes that were outfitted with new doors, windows, and other improvements.

Previous research has found that crime goes down when vacant houses are fixed up, but it was unclear whether the connection between those two things was more than a coincidence. To nail down whether home repairs actually prevent crimes, the Penn team tackled the question with the same rigorous approach doctors use to study a new drug: with a randomized, controlled trial.

The results left little doubt, said lead author Eugenia C. South, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.

Gun crimes increased everywhere in the city during the study period, but there was less of an increase in the neighborhood blocks surrounding renovated homes, compared to those where abandoned homes were left alone, South and her coauthors reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The repairs likely helped in two ways, she said: by healing the social fabric of the neighborhood and by eliminating possible hiding places for guns.

There’s a lot more at the original, and while the original, and the study behind it, are more concerned with new windows, doors and façades on abandoned houses, it’s obvious that upgrading occupied units would be even better: fewer places to become drug shooting galleries, fewer places to stash weapons and stolen goods, and more responsible neighbors.

The left really didn’t like broken windows policing, because it involves more than just fixing up neighborhoods; it also involves seriously prosecuting ‘minor’ crimes, and giving the ‘entry-level’ criminals a small taste of life behind bars, giving them an early opportunity to decide that, hey, this life isn’t for me.

And Mrs Flaherty, a strong supporter of the police-hating defense attorney who, aided by George Soros’ money, became District Attorney in Philadelphia, certainly won’t like that part.

Cleaning up the city’s streets is certainly important, but cleaning up crime has to be part of it. Philadelphia has tolerated the open-air drug market around the Allegheny Street SEPTA train station, and discarded drug needles just wherever, and it’s little wonder that there’s no respect for the law when the law shows little indication of being actually enforced.

Mrs Flaherty won’t support something like that, and that means that, even with her (apparent) support of spending city money to redo windows and doors on abandoned rowhouses, there won’t be much of a positive impact on reducing crime. One fact is just too simple and too obvious to penetrate the progressive mindset: the criminal who is already behind bars isn’t out on the streets committing other crimes.

References

References
↑1 Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Killadelphia

We’ve pretty much reached the end point, at which any calculations of the final toll of blood in the City of Brotherly Love are down to the margin of error. With just five days left in the year, Philadelphia has seen 510 ‘official’ homicides, so the final toll is going to be somewhere in the 514 to 521 range.

It was just twenty days ago that I noted the margin of error possibility that the city could finish slightly under 500 homicides. I guess that the gang-bangers “cliques of young men”[1]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading took that as something of a personal challenge.

So, my congratulations to Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, on the fine job they’ve done.

In eight years under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, Philly never once cracked the 400 ‘barrier,’ and saw two years, 2013 and 2014, in which the homicide total was under 250! Homicides were under 300 during the trio’s final three years in office together.

New York City has seen 418 homicides through Christmas Day. Philly, with just 18.5% of the Big Apple’s population, just smiles and says, “Hold my beer!”

References

References
↑1 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups“
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As bitterly cold weather hits the United States, we’re not totally dependent upon electricity

As what the Weather Channel has been calling Winter Storm Elliot — and has any other media outlet picked up on the Channel’s naming of ‘winter storms? — is blasting through the lower 48, there are all sorts of interesting news items.

It’s 2º F at the farm right now, but the wind chill is around -19º. Mochi, our half-chocolate lab, half-Australian shepherd, keeps wanting to go out, but she doesn’t stay long.

Our home’s primary heat source is an electric heat pump, but when the air temperature is this low, it has difficulty extracting excess heat from the outside atmosphere. Even the emergency heat cycle doesn’t provide much more warmth than the heat pump.

But, of course, after 4½ days without power our first winter here, we installed the propane fireplace, and it does not depend on electricity to run. There is a circulating fan which does use regular power, but activating the fire itself depends on four AA batteries, so if the power goes out, the stove itself still works. Though thousands of people across the Confederacy have lost power, we have not. All of our utilities, electricity, water, satellite TV and internet are still operational!

Well, if the oh-so-serious global warming climate change activists want everything to be all-electric, no fossil fuels, this article from Barrons lets us know that not everybody seems to agree:

Ford Raises Prices for Electric F-150 Lightning Trucks Again. Investors Don’t Like It.

by Al Root | Friday, December 16, 2022 | 1:47 PM EST | Updated: 2:15 PM EST

Ford Motor has again raised the price of its popular electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, and investors don’t seem to approve.

The market response to the move shows how auto makers are stuck between a rock and a hard place.  Price cuts have triggered selloffs of EV makers’ stocks recently. Now a price increase is doing the same.

The cost of the electric version of Ford’s most popular pickup truck has climbed 40% in roughly eight months. The base price of a F-150 Lightning now stands at about $56,000, according to the company’s website, up from a base price of $52,000 set in October. The October price was an increase from a previous price of $47,000, and when the vehicle went was first delivered in May on sale, the base model cost about $40,000.

The Ford move stands out because, generally, prices for electric vehicles have been coming down. Tesla (TSLA), and others, cut prices in China in the fall, and their shares tumbled. Tesla is also offering U.S. car buyers $3,750 off to take delivery of a Tesla by the end of 2022; its stock has declined about 29% since the China price cuts in October, though CEO Elon Musk’s new role at the helm of Twitter (TWTR) has played a part as well. Car investors have feared weaker demand for EVs could lead to lower profit margins and earnings. But they apparently don’t like price increases, either. .  .  .  .

F-150 prices have been going up for a few reasons. Raw material prices are up, and demand for the vehicle has been strong. Ford says it has about two years of reservations for the electric truck in its backlog. A Ford spokesman confirmed the price increases Friday, citing normal business planning, rising costs, as well as strong demand.

It took awhile, but here we get to the money line:

Pricing can’t go up forever, and investors are clearly worried that higher prices will dent consumer demand for the truck. Demand in the broader EV market has been a concern for a while. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas, RBC analyst Joseph Spak, and Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney have warned investors that EV demand is softening.

Demand is softening. More, prices for electric vehicles have been coming down not because the automakers are generous, but because the demand for the things isn’t what they anticipated. With the federal government offering subsidies for the purchase of plug-in electric vehicles, a real, if somewhat delayed incentive, demand still isn’t there.

And that’s pretty much true of everything. Even the liberals in very blue New England seem to want fossil fuels for their own homes, and despite the attempts of the global warming climate change activists to ban gas ranges, we have previously noted that “it seems that everybody, including the cooking show stars, wants a gas range.”

But hey, when the activists get their way, we’ll just have to accept that some Americans will die when their electric only heat sources don’t work because snow and ice and bitterly cold temperatures have brought down power lines! After all, it’s for our own good!

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It is time for total truth between us

This article title comes from Lt Saavik, in Star Trek: The Search for Spock.” David Marcus, Admiral James Kirk’s bastard son is questioned by Lt Saavik, who says that this artificial planet you have created is not what he expected.

  • Saavik : It’s time for total truth between us. This planet is not what you intended or hoped for, is it?
  • David Marcus : Not exactly.
  • Saavik : Why?
  • David Marcus : I used protomatter in the Genesis matrix.
  • Saavik : Protomatter. An unstable substance which every ethical scientist in the galaxy has denounced as dangerously unpredictable.
  • David Marcus : It was the only way to solve certain problems.
  • Saavik : So, like your father, you changed the rules.
  • David Marcus : If I hadn’t, it might have been years or never.
  • Saavik : How many have paid the price for your impatience? How many have died? How much damage have you done? And what is yet to come?

Sometimes, the total truth must be told, even if the truth is unpleasant. I will admit it: I have been called an [insert slang term for the anus here], but sometimes you need an [insert slang term for the anus here] to get around political correctness or misapplied courtesy to just tell the truth.

We all knew it would happen sooner or later: those of us who are smart enough to reject the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls are being blamed for the death by suicide of “Henry” Berg-Brousseau. From what my, sadly now departed, best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal:

‘Lack of acceptance took a toll.’ KY senator says son, who pushed for trans rights, died

by Tessa Duvall | Tuesday, December 20, 2022 | 4:14 PM EST | Updated: 4:20 PM EST

Kentucky Sen. Karen Berg, D-Louisville, announced in a statement Tuesday that her son, who was transgender, died by suicide last week.

Henry Berg-Brousseau was 24.

Henry Berg-Brousseau is seen with his politician mother Karen, father Bob, a marketing director, and sister Rachael, a rabbi. Photo from the Daily Mail. Click to enlarge.

Note that the Herald-Leader uncritically wrote that Senator Berg’s daughter was her son. As is so often the case, the newspaper’s stylebook calls for referring to the ‘transgendered’ by the gender they claim to be, not the sex they actually are, and the use of the preferred ‘pronouns’ and faux name they chose. All of this is subtly designed to be courtesy, but also to normalize ‘transgenderism’ as something real.

Berg said her son spent his life “working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone, but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized.”

“As the mother of a transgender son, I gave my whole heart trying to protect my child from a world where some people and especially some politicians intentionally continued to believe that marginalizing my child was OK simply because of who he was,” Berg wrote. “This lack of acceptance took a toll on Henry. He long struggled with mental illness, not because he was trans but born from his difficulty finding acceptance.”

Yes, Miss Berg-Brousseau “long struggled with mental illness,” but Senator Berg, who is a physician, doesn’t think that her daughter thinking that she was really a boy had anything to do with it. Much further down:

“In one of our last conversations he wondered if he was safe walking down the street,” Berg wrote. “The vitriol against trans people is not happening in a vacuum. It is not just a way of scoring political points by exacerbating the culture wars. It has real-world implications for how transgender people view their place in the world and how they are treated as they just try to live their lives.”

I have included a photo of the Berg-Brousseau family. In it, “Harry” — I have been unable to find her real name — is shown, seemingly shorter than her mother and sister, and certainly shorter than her father, as well as significantly overweight. Were she an actual boy who grew up that way, “he’d” have been the last picked for a team in Phys Ed, and been dateless as high school girls, real girls, would have rejected “him” for more masculine guys. As an adult, she might somehow ‘pass’ as a male, if no one asked any questions, but she’d have been the least impressive of ‘guys’.

Dr Berg claimed that Miss Berg-Brousseau believed that she was at risk, I assume from violence, walking out in public, but, in the end, the person from whom she wasn’t safe was not evil tormenters, but from herself. Had she been an actual boy who grew up to look the way she looked, she’d have had to get used to the kinds of insults that all boys growing up not masculine enough hear. But Dr Berg wants to blame her daughter’s suicide on people who recognize that her “transgender son” was actually her daughter, and refused to lie about it.

This, you see, is what the left want, for sensible people to be guilted into accepting something that they know to be false, to accept the mental illness of gender dysphoria as somehow being not a delusion but normal. More, they want sensible people to lie out loud, to call the ‘transgendered’ by their preferred pronouns and names, when that would be lying to others and to themselves. To me, the proper response is to not get involved in any way with the ‘transgendered,’ to not have to choose between going along with their delusions or angering them in public, but simply to ignore them as much as we can, as long as it has no effect on ourselves and society.

That’s why this site has spent so much bandwidth on Will Thomas, the male swimmer who thought he was a woman, and competed on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team, utterly dominating women in the pool when he had been an average swimmer when competing as a male. That was actual harm, to the women he beat in the pool, and to society as a whole. Miss Berg-Brousseau? Obviously, the female-to-male ‘transition’ does not confer on someone biologically female the physical advantages of height, strength, quickness, and speed that actual males normally have, so there’s no threat to sports performance that Mr Thomas constituted, but it’s also obvious that, while there are short and obese males, the female-to-male ‘transgendered’ simply aren’t males.

Miss Berg-Brousseau? Other than her attempts to persuade the General Assembly not to pass legislation which would protect privacy of people from the opposite sex sharing their bathrooms and locker rooms — legislation which then failed, but failed during the last time in which Democrats controlled the state House of Representatives — she’s done little harm.

Perhaps Miss Berg-Brousseau would have found more acceptance among a smaller group of people, people who would go along with her claim that she was a man, but she tried to make herself an advocate, tried to push others to not only go along with her delusions, tried to get the law and the state to accept them; she put herself out in public, and putting yourself out in public invites those who disagree to state their disagreements, to make their positions clear and known.

Also see: Ronald Yates: How the Media are Brainwashing Us to Believe the “Woke New Normal”

This is what Dr Berg, and the Lexington Herald-Leader, as well as many other media sources, are trying to do, to stifle other people’s opinions, to try to blame other people for Miss Berg-Brousseau’s suicide, to try to guilt people into accepting other people’s lies and delusions.

Sorry, but no, just no.

Living out in the country in rural eastern Kentucky, I rarely see such individuals, only twice as a matter of fact: a male pretending to be female as a diner in Lexington’s Corta Lina restaurant, several tables away, and a male waiter pretending to be a waitress in the Applebee’s on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky. He wasn’t our waiter, so we had no interaction with him, but it’s notable that that Applebee’s closed down just a few weeks later.

As far as I am concerned, the ‘transgendered’ can have their own delusions, and I will ignore them when I can. But I will not lie for them. Does that make me an [insert slang term for the anus here]?

You know what? I will proudly accept that appellation, if it means telling the truth. We can have sympathy for Miss Berg-Brousseau, and her family, but sympathy should not extend to lying to other people, and to ourselves. Referring to Miss Berg-Brousseau as a male isn’t like answering your wife’s question, “Do these pants make me look fat?” Referring to Miss Berg-Brousseau as male is actively harmful to society, in that it goes right along with the normalization of mental illness and transgenderism. And referring to Miss Berg-Brousseau as male falls right along with her mother’s attempt to blame those of us who do tell the truth for her daughter’s death.
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Editor’s note: This article has been significantly expanded, including changing the title, from the original.
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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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If the Tridentine Mass brings more Catholics to Mass, why would the Church ever restrict it?

The First Page of the Book of Genesis in the 1611 printing of the KJV, from Wikipedia. Click to enlarge.

Technically, I’m a “cradle Catholic,” baptized the month after I was born, because my father was Catholic. My mother? I really don’t know, other than her mother was Episcopalian. I remember very little about my life in California, before my parents divorced, and if they took me to Mass, which would have been a Latin Mass in the 1950s, I do not remember a bit of it.

I do know that my mother never took us to church after we got to Kentucky. My religious conscience was left to develop for itself, but somehow, I knew that I was Catholic. I did know that I had been baptized in the Catholic Church, because my mother told me, but that really was it.

In small town Mt Sterling, Kentucky, I certainly knew about the Protestant churches, and, for a while, when we lived off Richmond Avenue, there was a Pentecostalist church very close by, a church that took to heart raising a joyful noise unto the Lord, Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. Google maps Streetscape tells me that it’s still there, though the white-painted concrete block walls have now been covered with white vinyl siding. But one of the things I also remember were that there were several Protestant churches which advertised themselves as King James Only, arguing that “the KJV needs no further improvements because it is the greatest English translation of the Bible which was ever published, and they also believe that all other English translations of the Bible which were published after the KJV was published are corrupt.” They have their reasons, which I will not argue here, and which you can read if you follow the link.

But, regardless of their arguments, one thing is certain: the Elizabethan English used in the King James Version is lofty in a way that modern English simply is not, and I have to wonder: does the grandeur of the language itself inspire some English-speaking people?

Old Latin Mass Finds New American Audience, Despite Pope’s Disapproval

An ancient form of Catholic worship is drawing in young traditionalists and conservatives. But it signals a divide within the church.

by Ruth Graham | Tuesday, November 15, 2022

I suppose that I have to laugh here, given that the form of the Tridentine, or Traditional Latin Mass, dates from the Missal of 1962. I’m not quite sure how that can be called, in the subtitle, “an ancient form.” 🙂 Continue reading →

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You can’t make poorer people wealthier by making wealthier people poorer

Though Philadelphia is, overall, quite “diverse,” a word that I mostly despise due to the way it has been co-opted, it is, internally, one of the most segregated large cities in America. As we previously noted, the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer were aghast that the “percentage of Black and Hispanic Philadelphians who feel unsafe in their neighborhood is double the percentage of white Philadelphians.”

Gun violence is both a disease and a symptom. It’s crucial that our city’s goal be twofold: ensuring that all Philadelphians feel safe, and that the ranks of those who do not isn’t determined by skin color. Only when that is the case can Philadelphia truly say it is facing its challenges together.

For what are the Board asking here? They have already let us know that they don’t like gentrification, wealthier white people moving into predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and fixing up distressed homes; that, they claimed, led to segregated white pockets in the city. Somehow, no one seems to see the increased values in gentrifying areas lifting the net worth of the homes of black and Hispanic people living in those areas, or the value of white residents who are completely accepting of living in an integrated neighborhood. The Board seem to want more black residents in Chestnut Hill — which, with zip code 19118, one of the examples the Board used, being 67% white, ought to be considered integrated because that means 33% are not white — and Rittenhouse Square, but unless those residents can afford to move there, either the city, or someone, will have to provide the same subprime mortgages that caused the crash of 2007-9, or build ‘affordable housing’ in places which would then see other people’s property values decline due to it.

There is, of course, a not-so-subtle undertone to the Board’s editorial, the theme that white people make places safer, while blacks and Hispanics make areas more dangerous. The members would deny that, of course, but it is right there, obvious to anyone who reads what they wrote.

Unless, of course, the Board are saying that white Philadelphians should feel as unsafe as black and Hispanic residents do? If Will Bunch is on the Board, that wouldn’t surprise me!

And now the Board want to financially depress white areas of the city:

Race should not determine where you live

A recent lawsuit shows that segregation remains high in Philadelphia and that significant obstacles remain for Black households to build wealth through real estate.

By The Editorial Board | Tuesday, December 20, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST

As demonstrated through The Inquirer’s “A More Perfect Union” series on the legacy of racism in Philadelphia, bias and discrimination have a long history in our city. It is a rot in the foundation of America that we must all continue to repair and rebuild.

A recent housing lawsuit may be the latest part of that effort.

A Philadelphia landlord is accused of steering federal housing voucher recipients into properties in majority-Black neighborhoods, but not in predominantly white areas. This closes even more doors for people already hemmed in by a growing shortage of available rental housing and perpetuates racial disparities.

It is also a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act and the city’s own prohibition against tenant discrimination, as detailed in the suit against ProManaged Inc., a Mount Laurel-based landlord with 77 rental properties throughout Philadelphia.

Housing choice vouchers were designed to give low-income households a choice in where they live. Rather than being forced into disinvested areas, these families would have options, with market-rate housing in middle-class neighborhoods finally on the table. At least it was supposed to be.

What are federal housing vouchers? From the Department of Housing and Urban Development:

A housing subsidy is paid to the landlord directly by the PHA on behalf of the participating family. The family then pays the difference between the actual rent charged by the landlord and the amount subsidized by the program.

Note that: unless the voucher is for 100% of the rent, the family with the voucher are responsible for part of the rent. While the property owners are guaranteed the voucher amount, since that money is sent directly to them, they remain dependent upon the family to pay the remainder. And if the family are poor enough to be eligible for the vouchers in the first place, that means that many of them will be poor enough to be shaky in their ability to pay even the reduced amount.

A 2018 Urban Institute study found that two-thirds of landlords in the city refused to even meet with voucher holders. Compared to municipalities around the country, Philadelphia also had one of the highest disparities between acceptance rates in high- and low-income neighborhoods, a difference of 26%.

There’s some irony that the Inquirer’s editorial was published the same morning that the City of Brotherly Love informed us that it’d hit an even 500 homicides for the year. Given the fact that Philadelphia is a very violent city, and that violence is heavily concentrated in the neighborhoods with higher black and Hispanic percentages of the population, is it any particular surprise that a property owner in a ‘better’ neighborhood would not be all that happy about renting to people from those neighborhoods? Yes, it’s something of a ‘profiling’ judgement, but if the ‘profiling’ is being done based on vouchers rather than race, even there’s a question as to whether that constitutes racial discrimination. After all, poorer whites would face the same problem.

Even the Board recognized the problem, albeit in a backhanded way:

It’s no accident that maps showing structural racism in housing and the current epidemic of gun violence are nearly identical, according to a study by the Office of the City Controller.

Though it’s probably outside of the Board’s paradigm, they have said, inter alia, that bringing more black families into wealthier, whiter neighborhoods means bringing in more of the culture of violence. The people living in Kensington or Strawberry Mansion might be attempting to escape the violence of those areas, but they have also been more culturally conditioned to accept violence as normal, to accept the open-air drug markets as normal.

The Editorial Board at least noted that accepting vouchers came with its own economic disincentive to property owners:

For their part, landlords complain that accepting vouchers is costly and cumbersome. Unlike a private rental license — which in Philadelphia does not require an inspection — apartments leased to voucher holders must be inspected, and are held to higher standards. The landlord must also become certified through the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

So, the rental property owners must have their properties inspected by the city, which exposes them to unanticipated costs if the inspector finds something out of compliance. While the certification courses are listed as being free, they also require two days of the owners’ time, and time is money.

Leasing to voucher holders also comes with significant delays to the move-in process, keeping tenants unhoused and landlords unpaid from anywhere between 45 and 90 additional days when compared to a nonsubsidized rental. With record-low vacancy rates in the city, keeping units empty is expensive.

It sure seems as though people with apartments or houses to rent would want to keep them rented, rather than up to three months of vacancy, and no rent coming in, along with the problems that having an unoccupied dwelling brings. The owners’ property taxes don’t get suspended just because the property is vacant!

Property owners are rightly concerned about their properties’ values, and there’s a cost to that in bringing in people who must rely on vouchers to pay all or part of their rent. When the neighborhood starts to have more poorer people in it, it’s not just the rent: it’s vehicles of lesser value parked on the streets or in the driveways, it’s property not kept quite as nicely as previously, and it’s a subtle, but nevertheless real, perception that the neighborhood is losing value. These are things which depress property values, not only for the landlords, but the other properties in the neighborhood.

What the Editorial Board want is not just for landlords to accept more vouchers and rent to more poorer people, but for the resident homeowners to see the value of their properties to go down. It might not be politically correct to say — and being politically correct has never been something I do — but poverty metastasizes, poverty spreads more widely than just the poor family itself.

It’s both humorous and ironic that the Editorial Board have previously weighed in against “gentrification,” the very thing that both increases racial integration and raises property values in currently heavily minority areas. It takes some research, and familiarity with the Inquirer and its editorial slant, but if you read all of their editorials, and consider them together, you might well come up with the same conclusion I have: the Editorial Board want to mostly keep whites out of existing heavily minority neighborhoods, but move black and Hispanic residents into the more heavily white areas. Just how that makes sense mystifies me!

Home ownership is the best path to the economic success of a working class family, and we should not try to deny it to black or Hispanic Americans. But it is also something which cannot be forced, and the Editorial Board just don’t realize this. Rather, they would make people poorer by reducing their existing home values by pushing an influx of poorer people into established and economically growing neighborhoods.

The problems in Philadelphia are the things that the Editorial Board simply do not want to hear: they are cultural, in the acceptance and normalization of violence, the acceptance and normalization of bastardy, and the acceptance and normalization of drug use. Those are the things which have to be addressed, and they have to be addressed not by Governors and Mayors and city Councilmen, but by parents and neighborhoods and churches. There is no reason that poor or black or Hispanic residents cannot have a moral and ethical structure which leads to decent and safe neighborhoods, but the Board just don’t like people saying radical things like Christian or Jewish or Islamic morality are important culturally, that some of the individual choices some people take are harmful to both themselves and the community around them.
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Killadelphia The gold medal remains out of reach

It was only yesterday that we noted that the City of Brotherly Love had won the bronze medal, tying for third place in annual homicides with 499.

It was, of course, no surprise that, just one day later, the city tied for the silver medal, given that second place was just one higher, the 500 killed during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page now puts the city as having had an even 500 ‘official’ homicides, as of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 19th, and twelve days remaining in the year.

500, the number of homicides, ÷ 353, the number of days elapsed in the year, = 1.4164 homicides per day, x 365 = 516.9972 anticipated murders for 2022. With 55 murders in the 49 days since Hallowe’en, a rate of 1.1224 per day, and 12 days remaining, yields 13.4694 more murders at that rate, or 513 to 514 murders total for 2022. And that will put the law enforcement team of Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw very solidly in second place, the silver medal to go along with the gold that they won last year.

The gold medal? That would require 62 more homicides this year, a number virtually impossibly out of reach unless someone shoots down an airliner over the city.

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Killadelphia: the city is tied for third place all time in murders, with 13 days left in the year

I had asked, just yesterday, if the City of Brotherly Love would hit 500 ‘official’ homicides when the Philadelphia Police Department released its official statistics this morning. Well, not quite: Philly is sitting at 499 homicides, which ties for third place in the all time records, matching 2020.

We had previously noted that Philadelphia actually cut back three from the 502 originally reported, but 499 was bad enough, and whatever accounting tricks might have been used to downgrade to 499 from 502 became pretty much irrelevant when there were 562 murders, plus apparently 190 ‘suspicious’ deaths not yet classified as homicides.

Being tied for third place shouldn’t last long, as second place is held by 500 homicides, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990; the odds are that the city will hit that with tomorrow’s report.

There’s virtually zero chance that the city will match last year’s record of 562; there are only 13 days left in the year. Even in blood-soaked 2021, there were ‘only’ 22 murders between December 18th and the end of the year. But the 514 to 519 range seems most probable given current statistics.

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Philadelphian Amanda Marcotte is very, very upset that 35 transgender people have been murdered this year, but doesn’t care about 496 killings in her home town

Unless she has moved again, and I missed it — something which is always possible — Salon’s senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte lives in Philadelphia. As of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 15th, the City of Brotherly Love had seen 496 homicides officially, and with 110 deaths listed as “suspicious,” the total is doubtlessly well above 500. At least one other homicide occurred on Friday, but the Police Department do not update the homicide statics until Monday morning, so it’s entirely possible that the city will top 500 by then.

Yet, to Miss Marcotte, the important thing is hate crimes!

Republicans want to blame Club Q shooting and other hate crimes, baselessly, on police defunding

During Wednesday’s House hearing, Republicans minimized the role bigotry plays in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes

by Amanda Marcotte | Thursday, December 15, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST

“To the politicians and activists who accuse LGBTQ people of grooming children and being abusers, shame on you.”

During Wednesday’s House Oversight committee hearing on anti-LGBTQ violence, Club Q bartender Michael Anderson was blunt, both about his experiences and whom he holds responsible for the horrific mass shooting he survived. A combination of “inaction on gun reform” and “hate speech,” he said, led to that terrible night last month in Colorado Springs, where he “saw my friend lying on the floor, bleeding out, knowing there was little to no chance of surviving the bullet wound.”

Matthew Haynes, the owner of Club Q, testified that there is a direct line from Republican leaders who reject LGBTQ rights to the five deaths and massive trauma suffered by his customers and staff. Noting that “169 members of Congress” voted against a recently-signed law protecting same-sex marriage, he asked, “Are LGBTQ people not part of your constituency? Do you not represent us? While we wait for you to answer, we are being slaughtered and dehumanized across this country, in communities you took oaths to protect.”

Well, perhaps some of them represent the great majority of their constituents, many of whom do not accept the notion of same-sex ‘marriage.’

There were, as Miss Marcotte cited, five deaths in the Club Q shooting; that’s only 491 fewer than her adopted hometown has seen through her publication date.

Republicans on the Oversight Committee, however, had a different villain in mind to blame — for not just the Club Q shooting, but for the fact that the past two years have seen record levels of fatal violence against trans and gender non-conforming people. They pointed fingers at Democrats, protests against police brutality, and mostly non-existent police defunding.

Well, I followed the link Miss Marcotte gave us, and found this:

Sadly, 2022 has already seen at least 35 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say “at least” because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported. In previous years, the majority of these people were Black and Latinx transgender women.

The 35 transgender people killed? There had been 35 Philadelphians killed by January 23rd — 37, actually — of this year, but their deaths weren’t worth the notice of the political left.

What was I writing about in January of 2022? I was writing about The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch, and his hatred not of crime, but of the police! I was writing about Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and his refusal to seriously enforce the gun control laws the city does have.

The left complain that so many ‘transgender women of color’ have been killed, without wanting to recognize that the majority of them were working as prostitutes, and tricking some frequently intoxicated johns into thinking they were real women.

Even beyond Colorado Springs, there’s little reason to think police “defunding” is shaping crime. As the Center for American Progress reported in July, “Democrat-run cities spend more money on policing than Republican-run cities” and of “the 25 largest cities, 20 saw increases in their police budgets from FY 2019 to FY 2022.” The slogan “defund the police” that was bandied about Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 never really took off with Democratic politicians and certainly hasn’t had much impact on actual police funding. For certain, some cities have attempted to reallocate police funding to prevention services, but in general, those efforts have been overstated in the media coverage given to the “defund the police” movement.

Miss Marcotte claimed that the failure of Colorado Springs to enforce the law against the Club Q shooter for his previous crimes, or use the so-called “red flag” law against him, wasn’t the result of defunding the police problems, without recognizing that while Philadelphia hasn’t defunded the police de jure, being around 600 officers short of authorized staffing levels has done so in a practical sense. Philadelphia is her (adopted) hometown; surely a political junkie like her can’t be unaware of that.

But she can be aware of the fact that she just doesn’t care about the crime which isn’t politically useful for the Democrats. She is appalled that Republicans in the state House of Representatives impeached District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), due to his let ’em loose attitude when it comes to criminals and the city’s homicide rate, blaming it instead on Pennsylvania’s not-terribly-strict gun control laws, but she never did anything really radical like look at the numbers behind those laws. It was about Mr Krasner and “his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime,” without looking at the fact that crime has gotten worse, not better. She whined about the National Rifle Association standing up for our Second Amendment rights, after eight people were murdered in Buffalo and another ten in Boulder, blaming it on, you guessed it, evil white men:

The grim reality is that the entire nation is in the thrall to a minority of extremely insecure mostly white men who, drunk on decades of NRA-fueled propaganda, have decided that having the ability to commit mass murder at a moment’s notice is a crucial component of maintaining their manhood against the ever-encroaching threats from de-gendered Potato Heads and lady video game players. Most of these men claim exoneration because they don’t personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school. Grotesquely, some even use these mass shootings to indulge in public fantasies about how they would totally stop an active shooter, though somehow they never seem to actually get around to doing it. But ultimately, they’ve become complacent in the face of mass murder from decades of being told by right-wing media that there’s a binary choice between preventing murder and watching Michelle Obama personally run off with their testicles in her handbag. Worse, the right has cultivated an overall suspicion of the very concept of concern for the lives of others at all.

On the day she published that, March 23, 2021, 111 Philadelphians had bled out their life’s blood so far that year in the city’s mean streets, the vast majority of them black, and the vast majority of their (too few) known killers also being black. Unless my math is very, very wrong, 111 killed in Philly, in her adopted hometown, is a larger number than the 18 victims she mentioned. While not in the daily homicide totals, the Philadelphia Shootings Victims Dashboard takes the information from the city’s Shootings Victims Database, and has noted that, from the beginning of 2015 through Thursday, December 15th, out of 2,779 fatal shootings in the city, 2,129, or 76.61%, were black males, with another 154, 5.54%, being black females.

Think about that: of 2,779 homicides by firearm in Philadelphia, blacks were the victims 2,283 times, 81.15%, in a city in which only 38.3% of the population are non-Hispanic black. And while Philly doesn’t make the statistics by race easy, St Louis does. Out of 191 recorded homicides reported on December 18, 2022, 170, or 89.01%, of the victims were black. Of the 141 identified suspects, 135, or 95.74%, are black.

According to the Census Bureau, only 44.8% of the city’s population are black.

What am I to think other than, when it comes to Miss Marcotte, and just as I have said about The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives just don’t matter, not unless they are somehow politically useful to the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading left.

Robert Stacy McCain just published an article on his site, Crime is not just a statistic, adapted from The American Spectator, No Safety in Chicago: A daylight robbery highlights danger in urban crime wave. Somehow, some way, we evil reich-wing white males are actually concerned with the huge crime rate in our major cities, about black people being killed in the virtually normalized gang, oops, sorry, cliques of young men[2]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading shootings, while for the oh-so-noble left, those things are normalized and ignored, because they just aren’t politically useful for the left.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so the last ‘official’ report was 496 homicides as of the end of Thursday. I’ve already heard of two more, and I’m wondering: will the city hit 500 when the statistics are published again on Monday?

The left don’t like conservatives using the crime statistics for political gain, but conservatives can use the crime statistics that way for one reason, and one reason only: what the left have been doing simply has not worked. But for the left to admit that they have not worked is to challenge their entire mindset, their entire political philosophy.

So, they do the only thing that they can: they hide their heads in the sand and deny reality. For the left, they’d rather keep their governing philosophy, and if that means ignoring over 500 homicides a year in Philly, well that’s just what they’ll do.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups.”